It is great to see you again! The last two Sundays I was with my son John and seven other Reservoir friends in India. I’ve spent the last two weeks jet-lagged, and my memory of our trip is something like third part on the plane, third part eating, and third part sitting in traffic! It was exhausting, but a really beautiful time too. Our team from Reservoir was with our partners in Asha, who work for community empowerment and transformation in the slums of the great city of Delhi.

I am so grateful for this you all’s support in making the trip happen. Even though we go to Asha as learners for all they can give us, I was also really proud of all that the Reservoir community has to offer in this partnership. We brought an audiologist from our community, Daniel Hendrix, who hearing tested dozens of people and fitted a number of them with hearing aids. We had a psychiatrist, Dr. John Peteet, and a social worker, Amanda Proctor, meet with many slum residents so they could advise Asha on building out their community mental health resources. We had one of our physical therapists Dr. Jean Peteet developing a train the trainer model for pushing much-needed women’s health exercise into Delhi’s slums. So many doctors - Drs. Lucas and Justina Oliveira brought soccer balls and music and wise mentoring to Asha’s children’s groups and college students. And Cate Nelson - with her joy and presence - led many children’s group sessions that my son John and the rest of the team helped facilitate as well.

You are a really talented congregation, and it’s a joy to see those talents shared with the developing world’s urban poor. When I wasn’t sleepy, I was beaming with pride the whole week!

I mentioned, though, that we partner with Asha not so much for what we have to give them, but for what they have to teach us. One memory that captures this is a home visit some of us had in a slum called Mayapuri. Mayapuri is sandwiched between India’s largest scrap metal junkyard and a busy set of freight train tracks. It’s dirty and crowded and a hard place to live, but Asha is present not with pity but with empowerment. We had just met a woman who ran two small business from her home where she sat on a mat, because she’d lost her legs in an accident on the rail line. With loans she’d earned through Asha’s financial inclusion program, she’d set up a tea shop and a clothes-mending business, both of which were making her money.

And then we visited the home of a thirty-year old mother named Largee. She lived with her family in one room tucked against the railway tracks and told us that with the noise and the lack of sanitation or cooking, and the water that got in all the time, it was a really hard place to raise a family. But as we spent time with her, her courage and will to survive inspired us. One of our team members, a fellow mom, asked if it would be alright to pray for her, and she welcomed that. Another bent down and touched her foot, an Indian symbol of honor and respect, and said how moved we were by her courage. She was shocked by that but she smiled.

And I thought, in moments like this again and again, this is why we’re here. We’re seeing the face of God and the presence of Jesus in Largee, the empowered mom with the will to survive; in Suman, the joyful young woman who’s working to become a social worker and participate in the uplift of her community; in Sonab, the student who despite all the ways she’s been diminished has hope and determination for what her life will become, in Shiv, the leader who takes pride in organizing the slum neighborhood he himself grew up in.

I bring teams from Reservoir to be with Asha in Delhi’s slums because it is hard and disruptive - it profoundly breaks my rhythms of life, and helps me stop and notice where I’ve been going. And I go because I see God afresh there and am reminded of the spiritually rich,

Good morning, My name is Lydia. We’ve been in a series called “Training in the studio of LOVE” in the past 7 weeks, talking about love of neighbor, unselfish love of self, love of our world, and we’re wrapping up with love of God today. Training because we think even a simple thing like love, takes practice, we can get better at it, so we’ve been training, working it out, in this studio, so let’s go, on how to love God. Let me read this story from the Bible, I’ll pray and get us started.

Luke 7:36-50 (NIV)

36 When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. 37 A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. 38 As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.

39 When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”

40 Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to tell you.”

“Tell me, teacher,” he said.

41 “Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii,[a] and the other fifty. 42 Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?”

43 Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.”

“You have judged correctly,” Jesus said.

44 Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. 46 You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. 47 Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”

48 Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”

49 The other guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”

50 Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Let’s pray. Loving God, we come to you this morning, longing to experience something bigger than ourselves, curious of what you might have to offer us today. We come into this place, for some of us with great shame and distress, unsure of how we could possibly find love. Or for some of us, things have been so mundane and steady that we’ve become numb and uninspired to the holiness around us. Or for some of us, we’ve been so busy and distracted, it’s nice to just have a moment of quiet. Wherever we are this morning, would you remind us, that you created us in your image, and called it good. That no matter how far you might seem in this moment, that you mean to pursue us with abundant enduring love, and you run toward us to restore us wholly and completely. Would you convict us of that today, perhaps through this story, we pray, Amen.

So, we read this story in a Women’s Bible Study Group I lead last year. It was through a practice called Lectio Divina. Where you read, sit in silence, and reflect. At this particular meeting, after we read, we sat in silence together, waiting for someone to share—holy zoning out I call it. I think I might have said something like, “touching feet, that’s pretty weird.” Cause you know I like being awkward—just saying, it is weird! But then a woman started sharing, that her grandfather had just passed away. She shared how they sat around him in the room in the last few moment before his death.

I’m so glad that Kaiti and Steph were able to share this morning about Soccer Nights. I’ve got to say that Soccer Nights is one of my all time favorite weeks of the year, and for a lot of the reasons we’ve been exploring in this series of love. It's such a picture of God's love, which we will get to a lot more of in just  a minute!br /

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But first I’d love to welcome you here in this space right now.br /

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I’m not sure how your weeks have gone.br /

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I’m not sure if they were pleasing, or nondescript, or particularly bad.  Or a mixture of all.br /

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I’m not sure how much you want to release, or let go of as you sit here today, or how important it is for you to hold tightly to things that you are cherishing, or that you need.br /

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And I’m not sure why you are here.br /

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Maybe for some of you, you can quickly detail the reasons you are here: the music, the kids' team, the prayer, community, the amazing sermons ;).br /

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Maybe you are here out of obligation, whether internal or externalbr /

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Maybe you are here and you don't know why—God, and faith, have been lost on you for quite some time.br /

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Maybe you are here because there are bagels and coffee. Not a bad angle.br /

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Maybe you are here because the love of God is felt and is easy here, and you need easy, because you are tired.br /

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Maybe the best you can say this is morning is— ya know what? I’m just here, let’s just leave it at that.br /

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And in all that I want to welcome you here and now.br /

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We are in our 7th week of our sermon series, called Training in the Studio of Love. Next week is our last week in this series, and our pastor, Lydia, will be up to round out the series! Our series was inspired by Brian McLaren, a long-time friend and writer and pastor. He has encouraged churches to take a fresh look at perhaps one of the greatest “calls” for us—not only as followers of Jesus, but a call for us as human beings who walk this earth—the call to love.  The fact that he suggests we might need a curriculum of sorts for “love”—might in some ways feel a little elemental and also pretty redundant, right?  “Yes - yes - life of love, posture of love, lead with love, etc... I get it, of course. But I think he’s hitting at something in there, and it’s also something Jesus kept showing us, too, throughout scripture. We can read that he talked and taught a LOT about love— so many of his stories and parables, and also his endless actions, demonstrated this very powerful thru-line of love. He loves the eunuch, the prostitute, the woman at the well, Zaccheus, to love himself, his prosecutors, the vile, the dirty, the cast away,  right up until death.br /

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Jesus bombards us with these pictures of love. And in some ways, I can think that we are meant to be taught something new in each setting—some new content. This is likely true to some extent, but I also think that he’s giving us that abundant picture to remind us, to invite us to see just how many opportunities we have to love in our days—reminding us that we have all the content we need, as many stories, and as much parable potential through people and earth, here and now, (as Jesus did), to love.br /

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And yet we have the tendency to compress the greatest commandment to, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. AND love your neighbor as yourself,  down into bite-sized chunks. We are inclined to gather the content in our life that we deem “loveable” and strain out the that which we don’t.br /

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I think I’ve done this unconsciously as much as consciously, as I’ve run up against rifts and division and hate that vie for my attention and heart, as much as our opportunities to love.  As I do this, I succeed in augmenting where I see the image of God.br /

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No longer is the image of God as readily found in my neighbor for exa...

I am honored to be with you on this Sunday morning. Over the last 14 years, beginning with the wake up call of what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, God has helped me to see the crucial connection between our lives and the life of the planet. And in the past few years I have become so deeply aware that the liberation of all people cannot happen without restoring the delicate balance of creation. Furthermore, we will not be able to stop the degradation of our planet without addressing the systems of injustice that not only lack respect for the sanctity of water, of plants—but of human beings. I want to thank the leadership of this house who have created the space for me to share what God is speaking to me.br /

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The reality is that this sermon is the beginning of a sermon series which, God-willing, will someday become a book. The series looks at the first 20 chapters of Exodus as a way of understanding the times in which we find ourselves. I promise that I will not try to fit all 6 sermons into this one sermon, but I hope it will give you an overview of how I have come to see God anew in these chapters in Exodus. If our goal is to facilitate the kindom of God on Earth, I would like to suggest that we need to examine the text anew and see what it can say to us for this time.br /

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I also want to issue a disclaimer. This sermon started with my looking at the plagues in Exodus to think about how they connected to our current environmental crisis. I started this sermon, as I do all sermons, with a deep dive into the socio-political context of that time. I did not seek to add or subtract anything from the text. However, if you see any uncanny correlations between their context and ours, well...br /

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I grew up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In our tradition we don’t see any separation between our daily lives and what some people might label to be “political.” As the descendants of slaves, we know that the “political” sphere impacts every part of our lives including our freedom to worship God and to be acknowledged as children of God. br /

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Every Biblical prophet speaks about the politics of their time as does Jesus. I say this because, while the message I am going to deliver is completely in line with the Black church tradition I grew up in, I have had the opportunity to talk to many white pastor colleagues and learned that what is considered normal in my tradition is more controversial in some Caucasian church communities. I was taught in my AME preaching class that the job of the prophet is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. So if folks feel uncomfortable please don’t blame Pastor Steve. br /

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I know that you all have been focusing on the topic of Training in the Studio of Love. This is also Black History Month and so I have chosen a passage for this morning which is one of the central passages in the Black Christian tradition - the book of Exodus. In exploring this text I approach it from the perspective of Cornel West who says that justice is what love looks like in public. I will say that again: Justice is what love looks like in public.br /

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This morning I invite you to meditate on the topic, Liberation in the Land: A Reading of Exodus for the Ecological Crisis.  br /

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Please turn with me to Exodus 1:8-14br /

Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt. “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.” So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelitesbr /

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We are half way through our winter series about the centrality of love the teaching of Jesus. We’re following this sequence that the author Brian McLaren has recommended – moving from neighbor to self to whole world to God. This being our second week on unselfish love of self. We follow this sequence because when we jump right in to Jesus’ first commandment to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, it’s easy for that to be abstract or disembodied. Love of God can be reduced to believing a statement of faith, or to ideas we have in our head about the divine, or to like a really small number of loyalty tests — like if love God, here are the short list of things we do or don’t do.

The scope of this series is meant to ground us in what love really looks and feels like — kindness, generosity, respect, justice, freedom, a holy yearning for the highest good. And it’s meant to ground us in our real communities and lives and settings because, as I like to say, reality is the friend of God. Our present lives and circumstances are the only place we can experience the goodness and love of God, and they are the only laboratory in which we can learn to love. Our present lives and circumstances are the only studio in which we can train in God’s ways of love for us and through us.

Our reality is God’s friend, but it’s not always our friend. Or we don’t think it is. Sometimes the real us that God loves is not the person we’re trying to be.

I remember, for instance, the day I decided that if I was going to be a leader, I was going to have to become guarded and humorless. It happened like this. I was a new principal of a school, and I’d been encouraging more hands-on, discovery-based learning. Kids were bored in class, the work was too often meaningless, and I was inviting teachers to consider how they could connect their teaching with more real-world discovery and connection. So I was thrilled when I learned over email that the whole middle and high school social studies department had introduced a new kind of summer project. Rather than required readings, they were asking all students to visit a monument and to notice and do certain things. Well, I thought that was the greatest, and I wanted to encourage them. So I chimed in on this email thread where I had been included. And I said: How great is this. Who knows what amazing monuments our kids will discover and visit? Maybe one of them will even go here:

And I included a link I found. It was a picture of a monument constructed in Russia in 2008, a monument to the enema. I kid you not — this is a real thing. As you may imagine, one of a kind as well. Yeah, these three cherubs are holding an 800-pound bronze syringe bulb.

I thought this was hysterical and just the kind of thing a clever high school kid would try to visit in a monument project. So I sent the picture with my congratulations, and got a couple of cool, Gee, thanks, Steve, emails came back. But then the next day, at the end of the school day, my boss, the city’s superintendent, called me into her office. And her assistant superintendent was there as well, and they said — Steve, we need to talk. And they gave me this dressing down about how leaders have to watch what they say and email. I guess one of the middle school faculty who didn’t know me thought I was mocking their work and that the whole enema monument picture was in poor taste, which — fair enough — maybe it was. But I still hold, it was funny.

Anyway, there was something for me to learn, I’m sure, about being careful with my communications, particularly with people that didn’t know me. But the way that meeting went, I left ashamed of myself, and determined to never get in trouble like that again. I remember saying out loud, I guess if I want to do this work, I need to kill off my sense of humor, or at least bury it for a while, and I need to be on my guard.

So, a couple weeks back, we highlighted this church’s community groups and invited everybody who likes to be part of one. They’re our church’s best way to connect people and to help us all make a new friend or two. I love our community groups—all of them. But one of the groups I’m especially delighted by—one that I had a chance to visit last year—is our Women of Color group. There’s so much that’s special about this group, including how they’ve done some beautiful things for others together, particularly for youth.

One of those things was when they raised money for 100 local youth of color to watch a private screening of Black Panther together, which went awesome. Turns out they were on to a trend: this happened in many places last year—around the country, there were groups of Black Americans renting out theaters to watch Black Panther together.

I found out about this trend through a podcast called Freedom Road. The host, Lisa Sharon Harper was talking with a scholar Dr. Reggie Williams, about the identity formation of Black men. And early in the podcast, Dr. Williams said that he’d seen Black Panther in a rented theater along with about 1000 other people from his very large, historically Black church in Chicago. Dr. Williams was part of that thousand along with the students from the graduate school class he was teaching. And ever since then, Reggie Williams mentioned on the podcast, he’d been watching parts of Black Panther as a spiritual practice - daily.

They talked about what an amazing movie Black Panther was, how it’s a beautiful Afrocentric work of art, how it celebrates Africa’s rich history and resources, with interesting touch points to African American history as well. All that is reason enough to like the movie, or watch it a couple extra times.

But Reggie Williams said, the reason he was watching it daily as a spiritual practice, is because it helped remind him of who he is. It speaks truth to his identity.

We’re going to watch just a little clip, not the most exciting one, but the last couple of minutes at the end. The film begins and ends in Oakland, once home to America’s own Black Panther party. And if you haven’t seen it, this is when the King of Wakanda – the great African civilization of the movie – has decided to end his nation’s isolationism and offer their great gifts to the world, and particularly to marginalized Black people. He brings his little sister to Oakland to share the big news.

This is what happens when you play show and tell with your spaceship. People stop and look, and this kid asks T’Challa, “Who are you?”

It’s a question that animates the whole film, from near the beginning, when T’Challa ascends to the throne and his mother cries out, “Show them who you are!” Through the center of the film in so many ways, right up to the final moment you just saw.

Who are you? Who are you? the film asks.

Reggie Williams says this question is worthy of daily meditation for him because as a Black man in America, he’s been given so many stories of who he is. Many of them shaped historically by White men, who have created constructions of Blackness to separate and elevate our own status.

But Reggie Williams won’t keep accepting that story. He says, I’m not the pet or the threat I’ve been told I am. I am not a possession to be used or commodified, just as I’m not a danger to be feared.

I am a free man, liberated, loved, holding within myself and my history gifts to give that will enrich and bless the world. That’s who I am.

I thought – so good, isn’t that true of us all? Many of us of course don’t share the specific identity formation experiences of a Black man, and I don’t want to take away from that particularity, but I also think there’s something for us all here. We are all - some of us more than others - but we a...

Last week, we started a new, 8 week series called Training in the Studio of Love. It feels so great to kick this new year off looking at love.  It’s a word we hear about, talk about and orient around a lot as people who think about faith—and who try our best to live out a life of faith with Jesus at the center—but maybe less often, consider it something to train for. Our series is inspired by an old friend of our church, Brian McLaren (author, and in the pastorate), who has spent a lot of time thinking about just how we are called to lead a life of love, and he has come up with a curriculum of sorts to help us also think about it!

So last week and this week we will look at what love of neighbor looks like. Steve over the next two weeks will talk about the unselfish love of self, and then we’ll follow with love of the world, and wrap up our series with 2 weeks on the love of God.

If I think back to the first time I remember hearing the word “God”. I also remember hearing the word "love." “God is love,” “God loves,” “God is loving.” “God loves you.”

And it did indeed feel like God was wrapping me in this "great banner of His love.”  This direct association, that I picked up on at an early age suggested to m, that if I were to become interested in following God, that I, too, might just want to lead a life full of love and loving others. It was so compelling.  And at this young age, it seemed easy enough to do—love seemed like something God gave “freely,” “without an agenda,” “for everyone”—a love that made me feel warm and special (an experience of love).

And this stayed true, until I turned, like... 5. And the unfolding of just how quickly the words “God” and “Love” could become intertwined with structures and systems started to occur in family, organizations and churches—it augmented my original association of "God" and "love," to something much more complex.     

It seemed to me that that  “His banner over me" as love, became graffiti’d with extra words - extra bullet points of what “love and God” could mean.

At different points along my faith journeyI became entrapped in some of these meanings—but also at points, I ushered the meaning out as gospel:

Love meant I should be passive.

Love meant I should take on a certain set of political and social views.

Love meant following very specific religious beliefs.

Love was meant to be wielded as a weapon.

Love meant truth at the cost of exclusion.

And I learned how quickly words can take on all our human flaws and frailties!

And how quickly the free-floating banner around us as "love" comes crashing down to become a wall—a barrier between just who Jesus calls us to love: our neighbors, ourselves, and even God.

This is why I’m incredibly excited about this series.  Because I’m more and more convinced that we, indeed, are helped by practice and training in this radical love that Jesus professes as the most central meaning and source of life:  to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our being, with all our strength, and with all our mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

It is not a platitude to hide behind, but our most powerful way to live.

Training in this studio of love may just help us resurrect, His banner over us as Love.

We love stories

I have this deep inkling that many of us really like stories. Is that true? Do some of you like stories?  I think we do. We love to tell stories. We love to hear stories. We love to watch stories (insta-stories on Instagram).  For years now this has been the marketing strategy of most advertising firms—put more stories out there for people to connect with a product.  We at Reservoir are not excluded from this with our own “stories” section of our website!

A couple of things happened late this fall. One of my boys was interested in checking out the sport of rowing. And then we found out that a rowing studio had opened up not far from where we live. Turns out it’s owned by a guy that went to the same small town high school as me, and he gave us a good deal on a starter membership. So, two or three times a week, I’ve been training with my two sons on rowing machines.

Something about trying a new sport and working on it in a training studio has been really interesting. I watch my boys working with a physical intensity I’m not used to seeing in them. We hear the trainer telling us over and over that rowing uses 86 percent of the muscles in our body, so the training is asking a lot of us, and it’s strengthening us. There are benchmarks for success in this activity - these feel motivating to me too. Just last week, I set a new personal record on one of these times.

Which I can do because I wasn’t very good when I started and I haven’t been doing this for long. But still, it’s energizing to be laying some new grooves in my fitness. So instead of just getting progressively weaker and creakier as the years go by, which at some level is just inevitable - I get that. But maybe I can also find new sources of energy and strength. Through training.

Now it doesn’t matter to anyone but me if I lower my rowing machine times or boost my power. It’s training in a rowing studio.

But we train in other areas of our life that matter to us as well, or we don’t, and we feel the cost of that. The professor who taught me developmental psychology when I was training to be a teacher was also a middle school science and health teacher. God bless him. Teaching middle school health is the work of the angels.

He told us how he taught sex ed to middle schoolers, and particularly about the kinds of relationships in which they’d start to experience romance or sexuality. And he would talk to them about the grooves we lay, whether we want to or not. Like skis make tracks in the snow, or sleds make a path down the hill that gets more and more fixed, harder to deviate from over time.

Or if you are my age or older, or if you’re hip and take your music on vinyl, you’ll know about record grooves, the spot where the needle sits as the record spins, so that it takes some kind of jolt to get it out of the groove. Human behavior and thinking are patterns like this. The more we do something a certain way, the more we are training our mind and our body to keep doing it that way. So he’d tell his 7th graders, think about the kind of romantic or sexual relationships you want to have later and start out in that same kind of pattern. If you want a series of shallow, unintimate, uncommitted, unloving partners later in life, then casual romantic contact without deep relationship—hook-up culture—will set the grooves to get you there. But if you want a committed, intimate, loving partner later in life, then practice commitment, practice self-control, practice emotional vulnerability and love and affection earlier too. That will set different grooves.

I thought this was a great way my professor was teaching about relational habits and grooves in the context of sex ed.

We do this kind of training, this habit-making, this groove-setting in all the parts of life. We do it intentionally and unintentionally. At Reservoir, we try to make this kind of practice of the inner life—of spirituality, of relationships, of character - as explicit as possible, so we can make choices about the kind of spiritual and relational and moral life we each want to develop. This is why we end just about all our teachings on Sundays commending a spiritual practice—a type of training for a deeper, more joyful, more resilient inner life and connection to God.

At the start of this new year,

How many of you have been to Yume Wo Katare? It’s the ramen shop of dreams over in Porter Square. If you go there, you can eat a big bowl of ramen and announce to everyone else the big dream of your life. I know for some folks, homemade ramen is the best. It’s not my favorite food ever, but I was thinking this week that I really wanted to go over to lunch at Yume Wo Katare, because talking about our dreams was on my mind.

I’ve been working a theory of mine that after we grow up, it’s easy to dream poorly, if at all, and hard to keep dreaming well. (I know - poorly/well, bad/good - sounds a little judgey maybe, but I’ll get back to that.) Anyway, I’ve been thinking about how we do or don’t dream for the future, and I thought this week, it’s about time I think about this over a big bowl of ramen.

I had plans to take someone out to lunch, but then I found out that the ramen shop was closed for lunch most of this week. So I had to go somewhere else and figured I’d go back by myself for lunch on Friday, when I had the day off.

But Friday came along and my day started with this really irritating fail of a customer service experience. And then you know those days when one bad thing happens, and then it’s like somehow the thread starts to unravel. Well, it was turning into one of those kind of days. Plus, we had this fall monsoon going on, and I thought: you know, the last thing I want to do right now is bike over to Porter Square in the wind and rain to put down money for a little field experiment on dreams.

So instead, I do what we all do when we don’t the energy to show up for real life. I just went on the internet.

I started searching “what is your dream” and after wading through a lot of self-help advice about accomplishing anything in the world you might want to do, I found some interesting video projects where people are asked just this question - what is your dream?

Unsurprisingly, the kids are great at this. They talk about that amazing careers they want to have, the good they want to do in the world, the puppies they’re going to own. My favorite was the kid,  maybe 5 years old, who said: My dream is to be a babysitter.

The adults have it tougher - a lot of adults when asked the question pause, they laugh sometimes because it’s a hard question. What do you dream? A lot of us can only think of having a little more time off, maybe a little more money, or a job we like a little more.

It’s hard to dream. It’s hard to dream that our lives can get better, that things can change, that the world can get better and change for the good.

This is why in this season of Light in the Darkness, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, we’ve been looking at the dreams of the Christmas story. How the hope and the news of Jesus’ birth interrupts the dreary status quo and the challenges of Jesus’ father Joseph, his mother Mary, our own disappointments, and dreariness, and even out nightmares as well.  

And today, we’re going to come alongside the grown-up Jesus himself, and listen to Jesus’ dreams, and see if we can dream with him his big dreams for us all.

Listen to the words of Jesus:

Mark 4:26-32 (CEB)

26 Then Jesus said, “This is what God’s kingdom is like. It’s as though someone scatters seed on the ground, 27  then sleeps and wakes night and day. The seed sprouts and grows, but the farmer doesn’t know how. 28  The earth produces crops all by itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full head of grain. 29  Whenever the crop is ready, the farmer goes out to cut the grain because it’s harvesttime.”

30 He continued, “What’s a good image for God’s kingdom? What parable can I use to explain it? 31  Consider a mustard seed. When scattered on the ground, it’s the smallest of all the seeds on the earth; 32  but when it’s planted,

One of my I can’t believe this is happening in my life experiences is that somehow Grace and I have a child who is old enough to be looking at colleges and wondering where to apply next year. She’s an amazing kid, and she’ll end up somewhere great we know, but it’s kind of a scary process for a teenager to begin to imagine life out in the big world. And it’s kind of a scary process for a parent to be releasing your child into the big world, hoping things go well for them, hoping they are met with kindness and generosity and support, dreaming of mercy for them.

Getting a child ready for college also brings back for me the many years I helped other people’s teenage children prepare to leave secondary school and leave home. They too were dreaming of a good launch into a kind and just world, but it wasn’t always easy. One student I taught for multiple years had strong grades, a great track record of character and resilience and leadership, had a whole team of mentors like me ready to sing their praises, and had overcome almost impossible odds on a variety of fronts for all that to be so. But they had really, really low standardized test scores.

And when it came time for this young person to apply for higher education, college after college sent their rejections. I tried calling a few schools’ admissions officers, and one of those schools this remarkable kid applied to - just one - took my call. They asked me: what are we supposed to make of these test scores? How will this person make it in college? And I explained some things from an educator’s perspective - about time and tests and ability and disability - that I thought made a strong case for this applicant. But in the end, I remember thinking, I might have said this too. Do you want to live in a world where a young person this extraordinary can’t go to college because of a single set of exams? Is that the kind of world you want make today? Or do you want to make a more just and merciful world than that? I remember dreaming, longing for mercy for this young person. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Last week, we had an extraordinary service together, didn’t we? It was our annual participatory liturgy in this Advent season of Light in the Darkness. Our pastor Ivy and friends created and led an extraordinary time of worship where we could respond to the dreams and the nightmares of the Christmas story, the dreams and the nightmares of our age, even the dreams and the nightmares of our own lives.

Our question of the day on our welcome cards we asked early in the service was What are you longing for? A lot of you wrote something down, more than normal. And as I read through them on Tuesday, and prayed for them, my heart broke with your longings.

Longings for companionship and friendship and acceptance and partnership.

Longings for the people who are closest to you to be kinder or gentler with you.

Longings for the world to be kinder and fairer to the people you care about.

Longings for healing, longings for restored relationship, longings for opportunity.

There was some comic relief here and there. One of you last week about this time was longing to be playing FIFA soccer on a PS4 video game console. I feel that longing.

But a lot of longing for justice and kindness in your worlds. So much dreaming of mercy.

This Advent, this season of Light in the Darkness, we’re looking at the dreams of Christmas. The week before last, I talked about Joseph’s dream of God with us. Next week, we’ll talk about Jesus’ big dream of the Kingdom of God. And today, we’ll look at Mary’s experience in the Christmas story, Mary’s calling to be the teenage mother of God, and Mary’s leading us in dreaming of mercy.

We’ll take her story in two parts. Here’s the first part, from Luke’s account of Jesus’ life,