Scripture: Luke 16:19-31

There have been several noteworthy moments in my life when I have heard the voice of vocation calling — moments when God, or divine fate, or the events put into motion at the time of creation that shape the conditions of our lives and our living has offered me an opportunity to become more fully myself.1

The first time I felt compelled and convicted to become a minister as a vocational calling was in 2018 when, while serving as a college chaplain — a student I knew asked me if I would baptize them. Not being able to take part in the sacramental act of baptism, yet experiencing a feeling that something in me wanted to become partner to the Spirit in sacramental ministry — it set me on a journey toward paying attention to that part of me.

The call of vocation in our lives is not always so profound. Some people talk about reading a book or going to a museum and then seeing the world in a whole new way that changes everything, or finding a passion or a service project that actualizes something they hadn’t known in themself before.

It’s possible for a person to go through life and not hear the voice of vocation inviting them to become more fully themselves. I don’t think it happens often. But perhaps it happened to the Rich Man of Jesus’s parable this week — perhaps he never heard the voice of vocation, the pursuit of possibility, the attraction of actualization, or the call to character until after his mortal life had ended. The desire to become something more is hiding at the heart of our parable today.

I have thoroughly enjoyed our five-week voyage through some of the lesser-known parables of Jesus during the month of August.

Folks have been mentioning to me things like, I’m still thinking about that “parable of the pearl,” and that “parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector” is a good story for our own time.

We’ve learned that the Gospels include about thirty-five parables of Jesus from his ministry. The most famous of which have shaped our culture. Many people know what you mean if you call someone a Good Samaritan, or a Prodigal Son. People may even know something about the “power of a mustard seed,” or what happens to lost sheep when they have a good shepherd. The author Octavia Butler wrote bestselling books called “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talents” drawing on the power of Jesus’s parables for our own time.2

[On that point, I used to teach a course on these two Octavia Butler books — if anyone wants to do an Octavia Butler book group together, let me know.]

The parables we have studied so for this month—the Parables of Leaven, Pearl, Pharisee and Tax Collector, and the Woman Seeking justice—do not have the same name-brand cache. And I was ready to include “the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus” into this category of hidden parables. After all, it features a less-famous Lazarus — not the well-known Lazarus who Jesus raises from the dead, but a different Lazarus who a Rich Man asks to be sent back to life to warn his brothers about perils that await them.

But I read and reread this parable this week, and it struck me that this parable about the poor man and Lazarus has a surprising amount in common with a very famous story — none other than Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

For those who are familiar with A Christmas Carol, who may have read it in a class like Mrs. Armstrong’s English class like I did — the Rich man of Jesus’ Parable is a clear Jacob Marley, a deceased man who asks that perhaps word could be sent back to people to warn them to change their selfish and closed-off ways.

In the Parable, we hear Abraham reply to this request to ask people to change their ways, “Have they not Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them” — we can almost hear a Scroogian echo: “Are there no prisons; are there not work houses; those who are badly off must go there.”

So perhaps a parable has snuck into our list of lesser-known parables that is not so-lesser known. Perhaps today’s parable has had more cultural importance than we know.

Charles Dickens published a book of eight parables of Jesus,3 so there is a strong likelihood that Dickens knew and was inspired by the parables of the rich man and Lazarus — and some of the power of A Christmas Carol comes from the fact that there is one major difference between the stories:

In Jesus’s parable, the story ends with the Rich Man suffering, and no opportunity to send word back to his family. There is no repair of his situation. Dickens on the other hand gives Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge a second chance — a chance to repair with Scrooge’s nephew and their employee, Bob Cratchet . . . and of course, Scrooge makes good on the chance to keep Tiny Tim alive.

Historians say that Charles Dickens’s story had a tangible impact on his society: charity increased — especially toward children, benevolent giving skyrocketed, even the annual celebration of Christmas was reinvigorated with new energy.

There’s something about redemption and second chances, that is very on-brand for Jesus, that makes Dickens’s story powerful.

Why does Jesus not offer the same second chances in his parable? Why does his parable end where it begins, without transformation; just regret?

I would suggest that Jesus knows that one story is not enough to achieve the beloved community. It’s why he has many dozen parables, and sermons, and actions, and illustrations.

We can look to the teachings of Jesus in their totality to fill in what individual stories are lacking.

For example, the parable of the pearl we read several weeks ago had an economic focus — a rich merchant sells everything he owns and buys a single pearl of great worth. Jesus invites us to reassess our relationship to items and wealth through this story. And we can read the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus with the Pearl parable in mind.

To the Rich Man, Abraham says, “between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”

This seems to be a message for our time. The chasms keeping us apart from people who think different, or act different, or look different is vast — but they’re not impossible to transcend.

A great chasm has been fixed between God’s people, so that we cannot travel freely. But the parables offer us a roadmap for how to live in this time of growing division and hostility.

Be smart; be unexpected; be radically kind; take the powers that are applied to you and turn them back where they came from; lead with love.

Lead always with love.

Live always with love.

And God will go with you.

God’s love will go with you always. —Amen.

1. Inspired by Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak (Jossey-Bass, 1999). ︎
2. Octavia Butler, “The Parable Series,” https://www.octaviabutler.com/parableseries ︎
3. Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord (1846-1849). ︎

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Scripture: Luke 18:1-8

This summer, living in Rhode Island again for the first time in many years, I’ve enjoyed regularly going to the beach again.

As a kid growing up in East Providence, for whatever reason, I only ever went to East Bay beaches and Newport beaches, with the infrequent trip out to Westerly beaches every few years.

My own discovery of Narragansett and Matunuck and Charlestown beaches has been its own kind of revelation, of places that I must have known existed, in theory, but getting to go to these places and explore and enjoy them in reality has been a wonderful experience.

The ocean is an aspect of creation that is full of meaning and symbol. In the place where water meets land and land meets water there is an ever-changing ebb and flow of waves and sand that is both beautiful and powerful at the same time — especially this week with Hurricane Erin intensifying surf and riptides.

Horseshoe crabs clop their way across the sand; jellyfish wash ashore and wait for the next high tide to pick them back up; ospreys dive at the surface of the water and fly away carrying a fish; opportunistic seagulls bide their time.

You can go to the beach and enjoy letting the world wash over you without being mindful of every miracle of creation in your midst, knowing that you are in the presence of special and sacred things.

The parables of Jesus work the same way.

Knowledge of the Kingdom of God lives inside of all of us, or so Jesus tells us. It’s always there, but we are not always directly aware of it. Our aspiration is to increase our awareness of the sacred imprint of God inside and around us so that we can help others see it and live in it as well.

Three of the parables that we’ve talked about so far this summer have been about this Kingdom of God. But the parable that we’re working on today is a lesson about how to pray.

In Luke’s Gospel, the parables of Jesus are all invitations to see a different reality, one where marginalized people are main characters and bearers of Good News. And so this parable about a vulnerable woman and an unjust judge is intended to help us think about a different reality.

Let’s take stock of what we know:

In a certain city there is a judge who wasn’t in relationship with God and who didn’t care about people — so this is a judge who is disconnected and not beholden to the commitments that typically undergird concepts of justice and righteousness in our world.

And in this city, there is also a woman who has lost members of her family who comes to the judge asking for some intervention against an unnamed someone whom she is in conflict with. But we aren’t given any details — it’s such a basic description that we’re not really able to empathize with this woman, except to the degree that we see someone who has less social power appealing to someone with more social power.

The judge initially refuses to intercede for her in any way. But after a time the judge, with humorous self-awareness says, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this woman keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice so that she will not wear me out by continually coming to me.”

The judge’s ruling feels off to me. There seems to be nothing noble or thoughtful or inspiring about the judge’s action. There is no appeal to a higher power or an impartial standard of righteousness; rather, it appears to be a simple act of self-preservation. The judge is tired and feels threatened and so makes a ruling for the woman so that she will go away and not wear him down anymore.

Is justice that is arbitrary still justice?

And where does this parable leave us as students of the Gospel and followers of Jesus, the one who is using this story to teach his followers about prayer?

One biblical commentator says, “I consider this one of the more difficult parables . . . the parable itself is brief (only four verses), and without its explanation [in the final two verses] there is little indication of its intent.”

The explanation Jesus offers for his story is this: “will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will God delay long in helping them? I tell you, God will quickly grant justice to them.”

Is Jesus telling us all to become squeaky wheels or prayer and to pour forth our petitions to God at all hours of the day and night so that we might be given attention at some point? That doesn’t ring true to the rest of the gospel message.

In our own time we have known arbitrary justice, where one judge or court will make a ruling that another judge or court will reject or overturn. We feel the injustice when the application of law feels dictated by powerful interests, personal whim, or personal preference. And yet there is no easy alternative to the system of trying to keep people safe from the evil and vengeance that reverberates down the halls of history in our world.

We are all caught up in this imperfect search for justice, and perhaps this parable of unjust judge and woman with an undefined petition is meant to draw our attention to how hard and perhaps impossible this pursuit for justice is.

As Amy Jill Levine says, there is no easy closure to this parable; there is no closure at all. We cannot root for the woman or the judge, and we do not have enough information to speak about the woman’s accuser or adversary. Since we cannot find justice in this story, we need to look elsewhere.

Jesus was invested in fairness, reconciliation, and compassion — three things that we don’t find in this story. Perhaps we are meant to learn about them through their absence. The justice that the unjust judge offers is not the justice of God — we have to find a different moral compass, and perhaps that realization is what will lead us in the directions of prayer unceasing to God.

Maybe that’s why our summer trips to the beach are such helpful reminders. Day to day we might not be mindful of the horizon and the vastness of creation. But like a parable that gives us the long view, at the ocean we look off into the horizon and know that it extends even further than we can see, and we trust that there is more to this creation just outside of our perception — that God who dwells within us is also extending beyond us and holding creation together in relationship, reminding us all of our connection with all that is and encouraging us to stay engaged, imperfect though it is, with the pursuit of compassion and reconciliation.

May it be so. Amen.

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This seems like a silly time to be talking about doing small things well.

The news this week has focused on global affairs:

And today we come to worship not to discuss the fate of nations, but to discuss the lives of two people who Jesus called the Pharisee and the tax collector, who both went to pray at the temple in Jerusalem thousands of years ago. They may feel removed from us this morning, but as with all the parables, they connect to us in meaningful and beautiful ways.

We’re at the midpoint of our parables sermon series, and what we have learned from the parable of the leven and the parable of the pearl is that the parables of Jesus resist singular interpretations.

They create space for God to enter into our thinking and interpretations and work through questions and issues that are most important to us. And this is Good News—because creating space for God’s grace to enter into our thoughts, words, and deeds is a real source of strength for us.

God gives us the courage to get up in the morning, especially when we don’t know how the day ahead is going to go.

God helps us find our voice for public speaking; find our strength for justice and witness; and find our community through which we can pursue acts of love and kindness.

This morning, God’s Good News gospel brings us to the temple where these two figures have gathered to pray.

For the gospel writer Luke, and others, the Pharisee is a recurring symbol — a religious leader who for Jesus and the gospel writers symbolizes the religious establishment of their time, resistant to change, and eager to preserve certain established forms of morality and piety.

For Luke, tax collectors are also symbolic figures — they are imperfect people, doing the work of powerful people, who are on their way to becoming righteous and finding God amidst the struggle of life.

Given this, one might think that the tax collectors have further to go in their personal journeys to enter the proverbial Kingdom of God. And the common interpretations play into this trope — the parable indicates that the pious one is actually acting terribly, and the sinner is acting in a transparent way about how they need God’s help to become better.

But I’d like to put in a good word for this Pharisee. Their problem is not that they are acting poorly — the Pharisee fasts twice a week and gives a tenth of all their income. For many people in this world, their works are a real and admirable method by which one knows themselves to be living in connection with God. The world needs people to live out the best values that we put forward for ourselves.

The problem for the Pharisee comes because of his passing judgement on other people, saying “thank goodness I am not a thief, or a rogue, or an adulterer, or a tax collector.”

It is a bridge too far to say that we can judge the hearts or convictions of others. The Pharisee has lost the capacity for humility.

I heard a story recently about two of the first people to hike the entire Appalachian Trail: Earl Shaffer and Emma “Grandma” Gatewood — Shaffer in 1947 and Grandma Gatewood in 1953 (at the age of 67).1

While each accomplished something great in their two-thousand-one-hundred-and-sixty-eight mile hikes, it was suggested that one of Shaffer’s motivations was to gain notoriety in order to publish a book of his poetry. In Grandma Gatewood’s case, her hike motivation was completely humble, as seen in the fact that she didn’t tell anyone she had started hiking, not even her kids, until she had gone from Georgia well up the trail. She only told her kids she had been hiking for a month when local newspapers started finding her on the trail to interview her. She didn’t want her kids to first learn about her hike in the paper.

At first she wouldn’t even give real interviews to the journalists, answering their with cryptic words like, “I just like to walk,” or “my kids were raised and I needed something new in my life.”

Schafer would cast doubts on Gatewood’s hike, questioning whether she had really hiked the whole trail — somewhat like our Pharisee character who questions the morality of the people around him, even though he himself has accomplished amazing things. Earl Schafer would go on to hike the trail twice in his life. Gatewood would hike it three times. Both are amazing accomplishments, but the humility of the latter hiker drew public curiosity and attention to her.

We know that in our world today, humility doesn’t often win headlines. Humility is not modeled in the public square. It actually seems like we’re being forced into bravado arms races where fighting one extreme situation with another extreme response is the best solution to division that we have yet devised. We have to go looking for humility of substance, and perhaps churches are a good place to start. Perhaps there is more humility to be found, if only we can attune ourselves to the quiet helpers who are all around, and to the people who are selflessly serving to help us wrap our heads around intractable problems.

Perhaps the tax collector is one of these unlikely humble people.

Perhaps the tax collector has been sent to us this morning to encourage us not to give up hope — that a simple prayer acknowledging that we are imperfect beings is enough, and the fact that there is much that we have done poorly or left undone is the natural way of things, in our humanity. But that we also have the power to give some of what we are carrying up to God in prayer, with hope that God will help us carry our big packs with us from Springer Mountain to Mt. Kathadin to all the sites of worry and conflict in our world, and beyond.

Thank God for this unlikely Good News.

May it be so. Amen.

1. “The Trailblazing Grandma Gatewood,” Common Land: The Wild Lens Collective, 6 August 2025, https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/appalachian-trail-episode-6-the-trailblazing-grandma/id1494525381?i=1000720901280. ︎

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This summer a new sign has gone up across the street from the church at the entrance to the Newman Cemetery. It’s a sign welcoming visitors to the historic cemetery and inviting them to learn about the people who are memorialized there.

Humans are storytellers. Through stories we learn, and through stories we pass on values, norms, and warnings to future generations, and this cemetery sign represents this fact.

For example, the cemetery sign leads you to learn about William Carpenter, who died in 1658 and whose gravestone is the oldest recorded stone in the area of Newman Church. In 1638, Abigail and William Carpenter had sailed on a ship called the Bevis from their home near Southampton, England to Weymouth in Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were each thirty-three years old, had been married for thirteen years, and had their four children and William’s father with them on board. Their voyage with 61 other passengers on the Bevis lasted from May to July.1

Imagine all of us in the sanctuary today getting on a boat this afternoon and not getting off until early October.

Notably, of the 61 passengers on the Bevis with the Carpenters, only five of them were older than thirty-five.

Almost all of the ship’s passengers were Puritans, religious devotees in search of unencumbered settings for simple worship focused on preaching, prayer, and scripture. Our plain, simple sanctuary is a legacy of their vision.2

When the Carpenters landed in Weymouth, one of the first people they would have met was Rev. Samuel Newman, then one of the ministers at the church in Weymouth. In 1643 when Samuel Newman decided to leave Weymouth and take anyone from that congregation who was willing to go with him to the farthest reaches of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to start a new church, the whole Carpenter family (now including seven children) went with him to Rehoboth to start a new church. Our church.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a distant descendent of Abigail and William’s fourth son would become the fourth human to go to outer space and the second person to orbit the Earth.

Abigail and William would have been pivotal members of this church community in the first fifteen years of its existence. William Carpenter is identified on the Bevis ship log as having the occupation of . . . you guessed it . . . a carpenter.3

It’s notable that occupations have been a standard field in most census documents throughout time. But we didn’t come here today to talk about carpenters . . . we came here to talk about merchants.

Jesus knew that we are captivated love stories, and so he taught his followers through the telling of stories called parables. The parable we are learning from today is a parable of a merchant and a pearl.

Here it is again:

The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it4.

That’s really it.

The kingdom of heaven is the aspiration of Jesus — the world that is possible through the love of God should the people of God seek to create the conditions for this heaven on earth, where all know God’s love and there is enough of life’s necessities for all people.

It is sometimes common for interpreters to see this story of the pearl as a parable of discipleship: Jesus is the merchant and the pearl is the Gospel. This means Jesus is saying everything in our lives should be directed toward the embrace of God’s Good News, which is the most important of human possessions.

Done and done.

But . . . let’s just accept that discipleship interpretation as our starting point, and keep going. Because the closer we look at the particularities of this parables, the stranger and more interesting it becomes.

A merchant is a person who buys and sells goods and services, seeking to make a profit through exchanges. And while profit making seems to be at the heart of a merchant’s identity, there is the potential for more than the accumulation of capital in their line of work — we might expect a good merchant in the image of Jesus to perhaps sell to people who others would not, might not mark up the cost of their goods too high, or might model other ethical practices in their business.

The merchant of today’s parable does something else though — the merchant takes everything they have, all wealth, all possessions, all means . . . and directs their value toward the singular purpose of buying a pearl. One result of this action is that the merchant is no longer a merchant. They have given up the merchant’s ability to buy and sell by transforming their business into one treasured possession. Who is this merchant when they are not a merchant anymore?

Who are we when we are no longer the things that we were?

Who is the author Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead when Demon leaves the foster care system?

Who are Jesus’s disciples when they are no longer fishermen?

Who were the Carpenters and the other young passengers of the Bevis when they were no longer part of the Church of England?

In these moments of loss and uncertainty, the possibility of redefinition becomes possible. Identity is changeable; we are changeable, and perhaps Jesus through his parable about the merchant becoming no longer a merchant is intended to give us courage to initiate our own change, and to allow the kingdom of heaven to be part of our lives no matter what our external identities may appear to the world. God knows who we are and invites us to be a part of this bounty.

And we should talk about the pearl.

The merchant could have sold everything they owned and used it to buy any number of things . . . a golden chariot, or a collection of signed, first edition scrolls, or a Bethlehem villa and olive grove.

But they buy a pearl; they have converted their wealth into an object that cannot nourish them, shelter them, transport them, or protect them. The person in Jesus’s parable immediately preceding the pearl buys a field which could presumably nourish them. This merchant, however, has obtained something incredibly small, beautiful, and completely impractical.

The economy of the kingdom of God does not relate to the economies of our world, where a few people own excessively at the expense of billions of people who lack the basics of living. Is Jesus highlighting the absurdity our inequality by highlighting someone who acts in a way we might consider absurd or impractical?

Is the merchant risky or wise? Is the merchant foolhardy or dedicated to God? It’s all a matter of how you look at it, and Jesus is destabilizing our expectations through this merchant-who-is-no-longer-a-merchant putting all of their life into one enterprise that cannot help sustain their life. It puts a lot of pressure on the rest of the community to help keep this effectively-penniless ex-merchant alive. Will the community rise to the challenge?

Will we rise to the challenge?

Abigail and William Carpenter probably left behind almost all their worldly goods in order to start a life transformed within a few hundred yards of this very place.

Was their new life in the congregation of Samuel Newman the pearl they hoped it would be?

It’s impossible to say.

But perhaps that’s not the point of the parable. There is no expectation that the pearl will be good for its owner . . . but the transformation that it takes to get it opens the door for God to come in and work.

May we be so opened to God’s love and work in the days ahead.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

1. “The Bevis (ship),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevis_(ship) ︎
2. “Sanctuary View from Balcony,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newman_Congregational_Church#/media/File:Newman_Church_sanctuary_from_balcony.jpg ︎
3. “The passenger list portion of the archive papers regarding the Bevis from May 1638,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevis_(ship)#/media/File:Bevis_Passengers_1638.jpg ︎
4. Matthew 13:44–46, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2013%3A44-46&version=NIV ︎

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Scripture: Matthew 13:33

Easter passes unto to Pentecost, moving onward into ordinary time . . .

June jumps to July and August arrives . . .

This is the natural course of “business-as-usual”: seasons and months passing unto seasons and months.

We call this business-as-usual and we feel it deep in our humanness, this experience of living in these circles and cycles.

But we know that from time to time (and sometimes too often), there are moments that disrupt our experience of business as usual. The paradigm shifts of life — a major setback, the birth of a child, or the loss of a loved one, a long-awaited breakthrough . . . These are moments that take us out of business-as-usual and from which we do not return to the familiar circles and cycles right away.

In these moments we take time to recognize the power of life and death, and the overwhelming sacredness of these very thick human experiences — they are sacred because God is with us.

It is a common belief that Jesus’s parables — his teachings about life and death and the kingdom of God — are meant to break us free from business as usual and startle us into a sacred realm — a sacred mindset — and a transformed living. His parables are intended to startle listeners into seeing life from new angles.

The Bible tells us about 40-ish such lessons from Jesus, with gospelers Luke and Matthew reporting the majority of them.

Our parable of focus this morning is told in both Luke and Matthew. We read Matthew’s version just a moment ago.

In just a sentence: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

That’s it . . . Did anyone feel transformed by this reading?

Did anyone feel themselves shaking free from their business-as-usual?

Over the next five weeks we’ll study five parables of Jesus; I wanted to start with this Parable of the Leaven, on one level, because it’s short . . . and because it’s sneaky in the ways that Jesus’s teachings can sneak up on us and shake us into another way of being and living.

To appreciate the fullness of the parable, we start with the yeast. The yeast of this parable is not a neat powder — this yeast of biblical fame instead is what we would call a sourdough starter — a pungent natural fermentation that comes from a mixture of flour and water interacting with bacteria and transforming into something live that will create chain reactions.

In 2020, when more-people-than-usual were experimenting with making sourdough bread, I tried my hand at making kombucha, which relies on the same messy process of fermentation. I received a SCOBY (a lump of bacteria and yeast) from colleague, put the yeast mixture in a glass jar and tucked it away in a cabinet for a few days to do its work. When I came back, the jar had overflowed and the sweet moldy smell had taken over the whole cabinet (and then, by extension, the whole house). I came to appreciate the smelly power of a yeast reaction.

This power of yeast helps us remember that Jesus’s audience may have thought of yeast as a bad or uncontrollable thing; they may have associated yeast with the corrupting power of empire. Yeast is also unnecessary for bread, as the tradition of making unleavened bread at Passover can attest to. But Jesus is clearly talking about yeast as something good in this parable — it is the key to the Kingdom of God.

Another yeasty story to help us along the way — this past week I read a book about baseball called Bottom of the 33rd by journalist Dan Barry.1 Baseball fans and non-baseball fans alike will tilt their heads in confusion at this book title and say that baseball only has nine innings, unless they are familiar with Pawtucket and the story of the longest professional baseball game in history.

In 1981, the Rhode Island minor league affiliate of the Boston Red Sox played a baseball game in Pawtucket on the night before Easter against a team from Rochester New York.

Dan Barry writes about the intense yearning and longing of all the minor league players, who all felt they were a few good plays or homeruns away from punching their ticket to a big league team. Cal Ripken Jr. who played in this game was quoted as saying that when he was in the minor leagues, every pitch felt like it was a full count in the bottom of the ninth in game seven of the World Series.

This yearning is why none of the players let up the intensity of their playing as this game extended from 8pm to after 4am on a cold April morning; it is why when the away team scored a run in the top of the 21st inning, Wade Boggs drove in a game-tying run when he could have just struck out and ended the game.

The yearning of these players to show their best selves meant that they were able to accomplish something extraordinary when other players would have called it a night. (For the record, the Paw Sox ended up winning this game).

This is the spirit of the Leaven parable; the woman has added a little bit of leaven, a little bit of longing, to a huge amount of flour, and the whole normal mixture has been transformed into something wonderful by the effort of the few.

There is abundance in this parable. There is flour enough to make bread for dozens of people. Forty to sixty pounds of flour have been unlocked and transformed by a little yeast.

“The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

The Greek word for “mix” in this passage is enkrypto. The woman of the Kingdom of God is mixing yeast into flour in a way that we would call “encrypted” — her work is hidden. Her baking is being done in secret, though the result of her work will be unmissable and undeniable to all.

Friends, we too are doing encrypted baking. We are creating the world of the future by remembering that Jesus is bread to the world, and remembering him at the table when we take communion, and remembering that another way of living is possible.

But right now, the world’s bakery is a contested space. It can feel like we’ve lost the recipe for how to make bread and there is an argument going on about how to do it. Add this ingredient, scrap that ingredient.

The stakes feel very high for who wins this argument. People need to be fed; we need to turn down the heat of the oven. But remember that there is a natural process of fermentation at the heart rising bread. It is an out-of-control process that is out of human control — the heart of the kingdom of heaven is a process we cannot complete — we can only learn to channel it. It happens naturally. We channel the kingdom vision of Jesus when we stay engaged; stay hopeful; when we keep playing even if the game is stuck in extra innings; the true nature of our work is hidden like the yeast, the longings of our love; the bread at the heart of creation. May we keep transforming.

May is be so.

Amen.

1. Dan Barry, Bottom of the 33rd (Harper, 2011), https://bookshop.org/p/books/bottom-of-the-33rd-hope-redemption-and-baseball-s-longest-game-dan-barry/9071412. ︎

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Everyone knows about food.

Jesus teaches through parables about fruit trees, and mustard seeds, and wheat fields, and grape vines, and other food and agriculture references — because everyone has a meaningful connection to food and food production. And in our world, despite God’s bounty and abundance being evident in the growing all around us, there has always been inequality when it comes to food access.

Karen Armstrong, the prolific English scholar of world religions suggests that the earliest creative cultures of artists and writers sprung up in places where small groups of people gained surplus time for creative work that they otherwise would have spent acquiring food because they controlled fields or other means of food production that the majority of people continued to toil to produce.1

The idea of a starving artist would come later, because the first creatives were the people who had the time and the assurance of basic needs enough to write the first sacred scriptures and epic poetry that we still read and rely upon to this day.

Inequality of access is at the heart of our history with food.

During his life, Jesus preaches that ministering to the hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick, and imprisoned is the same as if one were to ministering to him directly.

When thousands of people gathered near him, Jesus rejects the idea that the people should be sent away to find food for themselves individually, and instead feeds the multitudes together despite the fact that all they have at the start of the meal is a few loaves of bread and fishes.2

Jesus also teaches his followers to remember him by a specific ritual of sharing a meal, and praying to God about the kingdom to come and the will to be done.

And so, it is no surprise that when Jesus has died and ascended away from his followers, one of the first things they do as a community, recorded in today’s reading in the Acts of the Apostles reading, is to try and overcome the inequality of food access in their Christ-following community.

It is said that “they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer . . . All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people.”

The opportunity for everyone to eat bread together seems to be at the heart of this early movement.

This past Friday, a group of high school youth group members and chaperones traveled to Boston to learn from a variety of faith and civic non-profit leaders about what they are doing to help support access to healthy food for those in the community who need it.3

The youth group will hopefully lead worship on the second Sunday of September when the church school program for the year will launch, but I wanted to take a little time today while it is still fresh in our minds to share a little about what we have learned.

Given the prevalence of Jesus’s food references that we just talked about, it’s not surprising that many churches in Boston and around the world are the sites and leaders in community-food-access efforts. But there are many others from all walks of life as well.

We met Danielle Andrews of The Food Project who is the Boston Farms manager of this urban farming non-profit, who told us about the 120 teenagers who grow 100,000 pounds of food each year in and around Boston, selling some of it at farmers markets and donating tens of thousands of fresh produce servings to hunger relief organizations across Massachusetts.4

The Food Project’s origin story is connected to a fire in Boston burning down houses in Dorcehester, and several years later leafy greens being planted in the area to help extract lead from the soil, which turned into a full-blown farming effort in open fields and greenhouses tucked between residential houses.

Talk about loaves and fishes.

Our high schoolers had the opportunity to help trim garlic stalks, and clean potatoes for the market, and plant little lettuce seeds.

We learned at from Allegra Marra at the Women’s Lunch Place on Newbury Street that many people who are working to support hungry people are doing much more than just providing food. The Women’s Lunch Place started in the 1980s as a mid-day soup kitchen, and has evolved into a holistic-assistance shelter for 250 women a day providing healthy meals (in the morning, afternoon, and evening), essential items, one-on-one advocacy, showers, washing machines, and access to employment and long-term housing opportunities.5

These organizations are embodying the spirit of the apostles in Acts, breaking bread together and sharing everything they have in common with each other, making sure that everyone has enough to eat. The leaders of these organizations also shared with us that they spend a lot of time at City Hall, and the State House, and advocating to their federal representatives to make sure that their helping the most vulnerable in our communities continues to be a policy priority at every level of government.

Food is also a central part of Christian worship. For much of Christian history, many worshippers only celebrated Holy Communion only once, twice, or a handful of times per year.

Protestant Reformer John Calvin advocated for monthly or weekly Communion in worship; John Wesley practiced an almost daily Communion.

This emphasis on food and faith, for me, is a reminder that our bodily selves and our spiritual selves are so very meaningfully connected. Each one of us has a spiritual life, a soul, a sacred essence, that is uniquely ours, and is connected to parts of creation beyond our awareness, rooted in the ground of our being which is God. In this way we are never apart from God’s love. And yet to know and be mindful of this spiritual grounding, Jesus says we are to give, and serve, and protect so that all creation might all be able to receive, and know God, and take part in the abundance of creation.

As King said, we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; we are tied in a single garment of destiny. All of our physical selves and spiritual selves are tied up in one network of mutuality . . . in one destiny, which is God.

To know God is to know each other, and to know and serve each other is to know God. This is reassuring, and this is hard. Because it can be struggle to know and serve each other. It takes work and practice to overcome the forces that keep us apart from each other.

As Karen Armstrong teaches us, food inequality is as old as humanity. And yet Jesus asks us to overcome this — to overcome the forces that would separate us and send us searching for sustenance and salvation on our own.

Because the catch is that we need each other for our sustenance and salvation.

Which is why coming together for a church cookout today is so wonderful.

Which is why our work though Good Neighbors Food Pantry and OneEgg Haiti and Church World Service and Dorcas International is an important witness.

Which is why we need to step into our mutual garment of destiny and continue to know, and love, and serve each other in all the ways that we are able.

May it be so, with the help of each other.

Amen.

© 2025 Newman Church. All Rights Reserved.

Questions or comments? Contact us:

1. Karen Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts (Deckle Edge, 2019). ︎
2. Matthew 14:13–21; Mark 6:31–44; Luke 9:12–17; John 6:1–14. ︎
3. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1A3xGLvXDH/ ︎
4. The Food Project, https://thefoodproject.org/ ︎
5. Women’s Lunch Place, https://womenslunchplace.org/ ︎

Scripture: Luke 10:38-42

Recently a colleague in ministry posed a question to me.

There are certain questions among ministers that are common and not unexpected, such as:

The unexpected question I received was, would you have interest in doing an adventure race in Maine? I said yes to the question.

An adventure race is a multi-sport endurance event that includes hiking, mountain biking, paddling, and navigation, and many adventure races include traveling through the night, navigating to checkpoints and having a ton of fun.

So this is where I was this past Sunday with two teammates, enjoying navigating through the Maine wilderness.

I bring it up today because within an adventure race team there are certain roles that connect to Mary and Martha who we meet in the scripture reading this morning — each adventure team has a navigator, who, like Martha, works hard with the maps to keep the whole group moving in the right direction. Without the Martha-navigator, the adventure race team will be lost in the woods and nothing will get done. And then there is a Mary — someone who keeps their eyes up and is present in the moment, looking for turns and checkpoints and making sure the team doesn’t lose sight of their surroundings.

Arguably it is easier to be Mary out there in the woods, present in the moment; without a Martha, making a way forward through the woods, there is no hope of making progress. But each team needs both.

And yet, in the scripture, Jesus elevates the role of Mary, who is present with him, watching, and living in the moment.

Through this scripture, God invites us into a season of holy presence and holy rest. How are we supposed to embrace this season of being present?

This question reminded me of a time, several summers ago, before I began seminary, I moved from Washington DC to Boston. Over the course of that summer I drove up and down the East Coast, moving belongings and seeing friends before starting school. Throughout the course of those drives I listened to a lot of podcasts, among them the On Being podcast in which host Krista Tippett asks guests great questions about how their faith affects the work they do.1

Somewhere along my summer of car trips, inspired by Krista Tippett, I decided to start knocking on the doors and visiting the UCC churches that I passed. I was curious about how other people were living out their faith in different parts of the country. 

Were the churches reclining in the presence of Jesus like Mary, or were they working like Martha?

I can tell you that walking into a church on a weekday morning or afternoon in the middle of the summer, unannounced, is not the easiest social situation to navigate. For one thing, it’s quite possible that no one will be there when you knock on the door. If someone is there, you have to explain that you are there for no other reason than to ask questions and to learn about what’s going on.

It would usually go something like this. Hi I’m Sam. I’m on a road trip and I’m stopping in at the UCC Churches I’m passing. I’m starting a Master of Divinity degree this fall and taking the summer to learn something about the churches, their work, and their communities. 

The conversations that spun out of these introductions were fascinating. “So what’s going on here this summer?,” I might ask open-endedly.

“Not much,” Might be the answer. “This church almost closes down in the summer months. Cultural life takes over. Everyone leaves home and there’s just so much else to do all the time.” 

Or 

The answer might be, “I’d love to stop and talk with you but I’m setting up for a community breakfast, or a food pantry, or a prayer service, or a summer camp. Come and see. Come and see for yourself.” 

From a janitor who was the longest-serving member of his church staff, and the default keeper of institutional memory, to the group of grandparents running an unofficial community center in the church basement, I was moved by the people I met. Also, standing in empty sanctuaries, some historic and some contemporary, I began to get a similar feeling in each one: that the weekday calm and quiet was not the default setting of this place and that soon the worshiping congregation would be back and the rushing wind of the Holy Spirit would be among them.

One pastor told me that her church was the default institutional church in town, located as it was on the center of the main green. She said, “It’s been here longer than anything else in this town. It takes care of its own membership but also twice that again in other families in the town because of all the mission work we do in the community.”

Today, many churches try to use the centrality bestowed by history to try to be the community convener; the host and the calming influence.

One pastor said, “We try to be a neutral ground when there is division in the town. Whether it is teachers and school committees. We try to be a neutral place where they can come and talk out their issues. The church doesn’t really want to have groups get to the point where they are so antagonistic with each other that they can’t come together. That’s disastrous in a town like this. So we try to avoid that at all cost.” I wonder how the past ten years has been for this church.

Another said, “We try to welcome groups that can’t afford to pay rent and don’t have anywhere else to meet. We have a big function hall and a big kitchen and we try to put that to use. We want to be a place where people can come together.”  

One church opened its sanctuary to two congregations of other denominations to meet and worship on Sundays. But the pastor said, “our people weren’t good about adjusting their schedules or stewarding the space with the other communities.” It seemed easier for churches to work with secular groups than other faith groups.

One pastor in Pittsfield, MA reminded me that one of the requirements to settle a town in colonial America was to have a church and a settled minister. In Pittsfield, Thomas Allen was their first pastor.2 He is popularly believed to have fired the first shot at the Revolutionary War Battle of Bennington. “He was a hell raiser,” said the current pastor.

Another pastor reflected to me, “I feel like I’m trying to create a movement here but I have no idea what the movement is going to be or where it’s going.” 

This sense of excitement for mission and religious possibility was everywhere, but connected to uncertainty.

In short, it seemed like the churched were full of the spirit of Martha. Which left me with the thought:

Perhaps a church can be busy working like Martha as an institution, so that individually we may each be a little more like Mary, soaking up the presence of Jesus, resting at his feet. 

Because we need both Martha the navigator and Mary the watcher on the adventure race of life, perhaps we are called to cultivate the skills of both in community.

So, I invite you deeper into this season of holy presence and holy rest, assured that as we contribute a little of what we have to the common good, that the overall impact will keep our good efforts going.

May you have rest. May you have peace. May you have the presence of Jesus.

May it be so. Amen.

1. The On Being Podcast: https://onbeing.org/series/podcast/ ︎
2. Thomas Allen (chaplain), Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Allen_(chaplain) ︎

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This weekend as a country, we set time aside to remember our founding, dated to coincide with the publication of our Declaration of Independence.

We tell the story of July 4, 1776, but we remember, too, that that revolutionary generation has not been the only one to declare itself independent from tyrannical forces.

Today’s scripture shows Jesus setting the pattern for his own declaration that some Americans have followed through the centuries.

Jesus told his followers to go out to declare the kingdom of God. They were to go out in pairs, speaking peace to every town and place, like lambs among the wolves. He said, “Do not take a purse or bag or sandals,” and “stay there, [healing the sick,] eating and drinking whatever they give you.”

Jesus sent them into:

In 1821, Harriet Livermore, a child of New England, in her own way, felt that Jesus was sending her out into dangerous situations to declare that the Kingdom of God was near.

I can almost picture her, an itinerant preacher: days on horseback under the open sky and walking along dirt paths. Body worn from bouncing around on the back of a carriage. Unprotected from the sun and rain and snow. Saddle bags packed with a few books and notebooks. Taking rest wherever she can find it. Showing up in a small town to preach the Good News, before continuing her journey.

Her life is an excellent example of independence, yet one that is devoted ultimately to her own divine calling.

Harriet Livermore was born a few years after the Declaration of Independence to an upper-class New England Congregationalist family. Her early years were typical for young women of her generation. Her grandfather was part of that founding generation and served as a United States Senator. Which made it all the more surprising when in her 20s, their daughter Harriet left the Congregational Church to worship with the new Freewill Baptists and the Christian Connection.

At 30, she asked for the icy waters of a New Hampshire river to be peeled back for a full-immersion baptism. She had developed a religious zeal and felt compelled by God to share a public testimony of her faith. And so, in January 1823, she took the plunge, insisting later that by descending below the waters she had been “buried with Christ in baptism.”

In the early decades of the American experiment, there was a whole generation of preachers who traveled the country as itinerants. Their method of traveling-preaching was a product of the conditions of a new nation, and served to shape the new nation as well.

After her baptism, Livermore assumed the name of “pilgrim stranger” and traveled the country as one of more than one-hundred female itinerant preachers who flourished during the revival enthusiasm of the “Second Great Awakening.” She spoke in churches, homes, schools, prisons, and fields – wherever people gathered.

She preached often in Christian Connection churches – a radically independent movement that later became reconnected with the Congregationalists through the founding of the United Church of Christ. The “Christian movement,” as it was called, encouraged women’s leadership in worship, but did not ordain women. Some people rejected women’s leadership and labeled Livermore an “enthusiast” or “eccentric” for her preaching. But she responded by writing a book entitled Scriptural Evidence in Favor of Female Testimony in Meetings for the Worship of God — a title which a modern book editor may have dissuaded her from using — defending her right, and the right of all women who feel called by God, to preach.

As scholars have pointed out, many women in the early American Republic had fewer rights and protections than they had before the revolution.1 As British colonists, both men and women had both been subjects of the king. After the revolution, men suddenly became not subjects, but citizens, and women were not.

For Harriet and others, going to the gospel was a way to assert one’s self, using a long-standing tradition of Christianity with lots of social recognition and its own revolutionary teachings and history.

Harriet captivated audiences with sermons on the urgency of faith and the impending return of Christ. She considered herself an instrument of God. On four occasions, she preached in the U.S. Congress to legislators, and to overflow crowds of curious Washingtonians. Remarkably, in her eighty years of life, she also traveled to the Holy Land four times at a time when crossing oceans was still not an easy achievement.

On this Independence Day weekend, perhaps we can consider, in light of Harriet Livermore, where are we being sent? Where are you being sent in this season of life? What does the itinerant traveling that Jesus taught, and Harriet Livermore lived out, look like for us? Who do we need to meet? Who do we need to serve?

Our world if very different from the Harriet’s or Jesus’s. And yet the need for encountering others and declaring independence from the powers that would constrain us is the same.

Harriet Livermore, never gave up her traveling, remaining a passionate promoter of women in church leadership to the end of her days.

May we do likewise in response to the needs of our time.

Amen.

© 2025 Newman Church. All Rights Reserved.

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1. “Interview: Catherine Brekus,” PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/godinamerica-interview-brekus/ ︎

Friends, it’s June 29, and it is solidly the summer.

The heat last Monday and Tuesday, the beach traffic, the Del’s lemonade carts out and about, all attest to the season of the year which is upon us.

And there seems to be a rule of thumb that gets talked about in the church this time of year, that a preacher should keep things simple in church—that we should keep things simple in worship.

Well, I’ve been a college and high school chaplain for the past ten years which means almost all of my preaching has happened during the school year, between September and May. So I’ve never really preached in the summer before.

I’m in uncharted territory a little bit here in late June.

But it shouldn’t be too hard keeping things simple, right? We can lean into the saying made recently popular by Brené Brown, and others, “clear is kind.”

When we are clear with each other, we avoid misunderstandings, we can have hard conversations, and we can do hard things well.

The problem that I’m having with simple worship and clear is kind this morning, is that our friend and teacher, Jesus, in the Gospels is anything but clear.

Someone says, “Jesus, I will follow you wherever you go,” and Jesus replies by describing the habitats of foxes and birds. Well, at first blush, that’s not exactly clear. We can imagine, the man standing there awkwardly, wondering, uhhh, does Jesus want me to come with him or not?

But perhaps Jesus is kind without being clear, because Jesus is telling the man is that if he stays at home, he could live like a fox or a bird and have a certain level of stability and security, but if he follows Jesus, he won’t have any of that. He is unclear . . . but certainly kind.

The scripture reading from Second Kings about Elijah and Elisha is also not exactly straightforward either.

Last week we talked about Elijah . . . a prophet of Israel in chaotic times; his period is one of civil war, division, and political turmoil. And one of his achievements is taking the young prophet Elisha under his wing — a protégé, a mentee, a student — to carry on the prophetic work of speaking truth to a world in need of more truth to protect it and cover it.

The scripture reading today is the story of Elijah, at the end of his earthly life, passing his mantle to Elisha.

In the Bible, garments that provide protection and cover are called mantles. We wrap ourselves in our mantles to protect ourselves from the sun, cold, rain, etc.. But a mantle is also the name for God’s anointing. God’s prophets carry with them mantle of God’s call and protection. 

Throughout scripture, when leaders act with cruelty, there are prophetic voices that come up with God’s mantle to counterbalance the cruelty. God calls Miriam, Aaron, and Moses to balance Pharaoh. Nathan balances David. Huldah balances Josiah. Isaiah balances Hezekiah. The prophets have God’s mantle; their work is uncomfortable, but they have God’s protection; their work is dangerous, but they are at home in God’s cover.

On Friday night here in this sanctuary we were visited by a speaker from Taybeh, Palestine: Father Bashar Fadwaleh. Fr. Bashar is the parish priest of Christ the Redeemer church in a Christian village of some thirteen-hundred people located to the northeast of Jerusalem. The village Taybeh is mentioned in the New Testament under the name Ephraim, where Jesus goes after raising Lazarus. There have been Christians living in this area of Taybeh for almost as long as there have been Christians anywhere. 

Fr. Bashar was making a short trip to New England to see some of his friends and parishioners who have moved away, or fled, from Taybeh to the United States. He is visiting the diaspora of his community — diaspora meaning the people who are living away from the place or main community where they were originally connected. Some diasporic people feel homeless because they cannot get back to the place where they are from. They are more like Jesus than the birds in their nests and the foxes in their dens.

In between visits, Fr. Bashar was also doing a public speaking tour to tell stories about the struggle of his Taybeh community. Newman Church was one of six stops that he made.

Taybeh is Fr. Bashar’s home, but his home is not a mantle for him. There are people with the backing of the Israeli state who are moving into the area to occupy the space around him in the West Bank, or who are otherwise making it so painful or dangerous to live there that they flee for other parts of the world. For example, he told us about the checkpoints in Palestine—the temporary, arbitrary roadblocks set up unexpectedly by Israeli military or border police that turn fifteen-minute trips to pick up kids or go to work or get food into three-hour trips.

Fr. Bashar finds much strength and inspiration from Jesus, who when someone asks him “where do you live,” responds “come and see.”

Friends, we worship a God who is not usually simple. Jesus asks more questions and suggests than he gives answers.

We are part of a faith that is not always clear.

But there is a kindness that creates a way forward at the heart of it. It is a deep kindness, rooted in the earth like a tree; it is an earthy kindness, rooted in creation at the heart of everything. It is a part of us.

The complex kindness of Christ sustains Fr. Bashar in the community of Taybeh; and it sustains us too.

It sustains Fr. Bashar because like Elisha, he has picked up the mantel of his tradition and is wearing it well in uncertain times.

Can we do the same? Can we keep picking up the mantle of those who have come before us?

Yesterday in the Rumford Cemetery across the street, at the memorial service of Helen and Paul Nelson, who were members at Hope Congregational Church, we saw their whole family picking up the mantle of Helen and Paul.

Picking up a mantle is a choice, and it can be heavy, but it can be done.

I’ll close with this: in the scripture reading this morning, Elijah tells Elisha several times that he is about to leave him. He asks what Elisha needs from him, and then in a flash, perhaps before they are even ready, Elijah is swept away by the chariots of heaven and flown beyond Elisha’s vision. 

We do not know the time of the passing of a mantle.

But what does Elisha do? He bends over and picks up Elijah’s mantle, the cloak that has fallen to the ground. In that moment he has Elijah’s old mantle, and a new mantle from God.

We are shaped by the old and the new; we are active in the world in ways that no one before us has been, but we face old challenges too. With the help of God we can face it all.

Perhaps it is this simple; perhaps it is this clear; and at its heart, in our loss and chaos, perhaps God is kind because God is our home.

It’s summer, they say, keep it simple.

May it be so. Amen.

© 2025 Newman Church. All Rights Reserved.

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In my three months at Newman Church, we have spent most of our time together in worship traversing the Gospels with Jesus  — which is fitting because most of our time together since early March has been the seasons of Lent and Easter, and the story at the heart of these season is the story of Jesus in the wilderness, going to Jerusalem with his friends, washing their feet and feeding their souls, and teaching them what to do once he is gone; his death and resurrection and ascension, and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost round out our story.

And so it makes sense that we have spent our time in the narrative of the Gospel where we find familiar stories, and comfort, and wisdom, and often much to delight in.

But Lent and Easter are over, and we are in something called ordinary time — it’s time that doesn’t fall into a major Christian season. Ordinary comes from the word ordinal, meaning you can count it in numbers.

Some people use ordinary time to study the Acts of the Apostles and see what the first and second generation of people who were inspired by the life and teachings of Jesus did with their lives. This makes sense if your aim is to move on a chronologic arc forward after Easter. But it can also be helpful to use ordinary time to dive backwards and walk around in the scripture tradition that shaped Jesus.

In that spirit, today we followed the lectionary — which is a calendar of readings followed by many churches — into the book of Kings — which is basically the opposite of learning about the apostles.

Kings brings us back a thousand years before Jesus, into the early years of a Kingdom that saw itself as the chosen Kingdom of God, led by Kings Saul, David, and Solomon.

It’s part of the Old Testament Hebrew Bible that comes after the Torah. It’s called the Ne’vim, meaning Prophets. One of the first prophets is Samuel, and after Samuel comes Nathan (this is a fact I’ll underscore for my brother Nathan if he’s worshiping online this morning!).

A few generations after Nathan comes the prophet Elijah who we read about this morning.

It’s important to know that Elijah is a prophet in a time of chaos.

Samuel and Nathan were prophets in a supposed golden age of a new nation when a small shepherd boy like David could slay a giant, Goliath, and become king. The prophets established kings with the help of God.

Elijah on the other hand lives in an era when his nation has fractured, and kings claim power through force of might.

This is a crude analogy, but if Samuel and Nathan were idealistic founders of a new nation, like Alexander Hamiltons in the United States, Elijah was like a Frederick Douglass, a pragmatic reformer of the Civil-War era trying to help a fractured and damaged nation survive and live up to its potential.

Elijah’s nation of Israel has divided into two, and the rulers of his country — King Ahab and Queen Jezebel — hold a completely different worldview from Elijah; in fact, the nature of their difference is that they believe in different gods. The King and Queen support the god Baal, and Elijah supports YHWH, and they are all willing to resort to violence over this difference.

That’s where the scripture reading this morning picks up. Elijah has just taken part in the assassination of all the prophets of Baal, and in his trauma, remorse, and anger, he flees into the wilderness — it’s worth noting that time in the wilderness is a recurring theme in the Bible: Cain, Hagar, Jacob, Miriam, Moses, Ruth, and on and on. They all spend time disconnected from their societies.

It’s no accident that the scripture says Elijah is in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights, like Jesus. Jesus is an echo of all history and tradition that has come before him — just as we too are each an echo, in our own way, of the history and traditions that have come before us.

Many of us have spent time in the metaphorical wilderness. There is much to learn there.

I believe this is why making retreats in the church is so powerful. Writing retreats, silent retreats, prayer retreats, confirmation retreats, sewing retreats. Even church summer camp a places like at Silver Lake, or the Horton Center, or Irons Homestead falls into this category — they’re impactful because they activate the biblical lessons of wilderness.

We might say the Elijah is making a peace retreat.

To be clear, Elijah is hiding in the desert, perhaps feeling broken and shaking after being part of a traumatic, yet godly experience.

On the first day of his retreat seeking peace, Elijah says, “I have had enough, Lord,” it is too much, “take my life.”

But then an angel provides a fresh loaf of bread and a jar of fresh water, and Elijah can sleep. Elijah can make it a little longer.

God then starts asking questions of Elijah; in fact God asks him the same question again and again, and Elijah gives the same answer again and again — but we can start to see a change after each question. Over time, Elijah becomes attuned and attentive to the movements of God.

Perhaps this is the goal for us too: to be bread and water for others, and to seek bread and water ourselves, that we might create the conditions to know God in God’s fullness.

Elijah finds God as the gentle whisper at his side that keeps him going, that sends him onward, that abides with him and sends him to safety and a future.

I’ll leave us with this:

Elijah in the wilderness teaches us something about Jesus that we can use.

Elijah doesn’t enter the wilderness knowing what he will find there; and he doesn’t come away with clean answers.

He slowed down and found a silence in which God could speak and be heard. He regained his strength after a struggle. And now he’s going where God has sent him, to develop a new friendship with someone named Elisha who shares his vision, and the two can help each other and fill in gaps for the other.

Jesus does the same in the wilderness; and then he comes looking for disciples; he comes looking for us — we are called to help each other, and to do for each other what we cannot do alone.

There is much power in this. There is much power in you, the unordinary Christians of ordinary time.

May it be so. Amen.

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