Welcome again to our Christmas season of Light in the Darkness. As our own winter days get darker and colder, and Christmas approaches, we get to dig into some of the story behind the season and look for the hope and light we can find there. This year our team has particularly been intrigued by the dreams we find in the Christmas story and how those dreams of what Jesus might be able to do can inspire us in our own times, whether life feels dreamy to us or whether the world looks more to us like a nightmare.

I was lucky in my teenage years and early 20s to have a lot of mentors in that time of life, and one of them reached out to me again recently with a surprising message. He’d remembered something I said something like 25 years ago and how it had stuck with him.

I remember the conversation well because it’s not often that a mentor opens up to you about their own life’s disappointments. Especially when you’re young. But one day this guy was telling me, essentially, that he thought he was a failure. He had dropped out of graduate school when he was younger and never really put the professional life together that he’d always hoped he would. I think that he was trying to warn me that life can easily become a big disappointment. Wow, that was heavy to hear.

And so maybe just to lighten the mood, I’m not sure, I asked him—what about all this other stuff in your life? What you’ve done as a father, how your kids have turned out? I mean look at them, and look at the stuff you do outside of your work? Can you feel good about that? I don’t remember him answering me, just looking at me kind of wistfully with a forced smile, maybe saying thanks for saying that.

But here we are, some 25 years later, and he’s telling me thanks for trying to help me see myself as something other than a disappointment. To be honest, I couldn’t tell if it had worked—if it was one of those thanks for the help comments, or more like thanks for trying.

Because disappointment is powerful, isn’t it?

My sense is a lot of us greet this Christmas season with some degree of disappointment in our lives. Disappointment in ourselves, and where our life is in one area or another? Disappointment in the way things are going in the world? Maybe we pin that disappointment on someone else? Maybe on God? Maybe we blame it on ourselves? Regardless, it’s a heavy weight.

And today we’ll meet a character central to the Christmas story, wrestling with how to understand his life and times, and whether to see himself or his times or his circumstances as one big disappointment he’s got to extricate himself from?

Or whether there’s something bigger and deeper going on, whether in the middle of what might feel like disappointment, he’s living in a bigger dream he can lean into.

This guy is named Joseph of Nazareth, and it’s his story that begins the New Testament in our Bibles.

Matthew 1:16-25 (CEB)

16Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary—of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Christ.

17So there were fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen generations from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen generations from the exile to Babylon to the Christ.

So already, there are two different angles on Joseph’s life here.

I picked things up a few paragraphs into the story because the opening bit, what the editors called verses 1 to 15 in a genealogy. So and so is the father of so and so, this person was born of this or that mother. It’s boring to most readers, but if you know the whole cast of characters, it’s actually kind of gripping. Because it’s telling us that Joseph is in the lineage of some very important people. His family history includes great kings and legendary patriarchs. His life is the stuff of legend, his lineage royal.

This month we’ve tried to share some of our best content on pursuing a life of faith and having that go well for us, and the people around us. Last week Ivy invited you all to a year-end reflection on just what is or isn’t going well in your experience of faith, as well as how your experience connecting with a faith community at Reservoir is going. That reflection booklet is available on our info kiosk in the lobby and if you’re around with us on the last Sunday of the year, just before New Year’s Day, we’ll touch base on it during that service as well. I really hope that many of us will take an hour or two with that reflection - you’ll see there’s a tear off sheet at the back to turn in and have a conversation with one of our staff or one of our trained leaders about what you learned as well. The point of those conversations isn’t to gather feedback on the church and it certainly isn’t to check up on you or anything! It’s to give everybody here a chance to have someone listen well to how your life of faith is going, and to pray for you. So I hope that many of you will take us up on that offer.

The other thing we’ve done this month is try to make it easy for you to become a member of Reservoir, if you’d like, to not just attend services or make friends here, but to make this your church as well.

People Hate Institutions

I was talking this fall with a guy who runs a program called Faith and Leadership at Duke University, and he was telling me that the funders of his program wanted to call it the Institute for Christian Institutions, or something like that. And he told them: please, don’t. If you want to kill this program, call it anything to do with institutions. Because people hate institutions.

My guess is that even if you don’t personally hate institutions, you at least don’t trust them very much. For fifty years, Americans have trusted political institutions less and less. And for good reason. We’ve discovered that our presidents break laws they think don’t apply to them, have bombs dropped in places they aren’t telling us about, send money places they shouldn’t for agendas they wouldn’t admit to. We don’t trust particular politicians, sure - that’s probably been true forever. But most of us don’t trust the political institutions they work in either.

The same has been happening in our lifetime with churches as institutions. I mean, how many scandals in the life of a religious leader are revealed until nothing surprises you anymore? I’m past that point. How many times does a religious community talk one way about its mission and act another way entirely, before people write them off for good?

I was reading some polls last week about Americans’ trust in various institutions, and the polls just happened to run annually from 2018 back to the year of my birth. And in turns out that trust in Congress, in the presidency, in Supreme Court, in religious institutions, in the press, in banks, in public schools are all at or near all-time lows, or at least lows in my lifetime.

We don’t trust institutions and more and more, we don’t join them either. We’re spending more time alone, less time in public gatherings, and committing less of our time and money and hope to organizations and institutions our collective life depends upon.

Because institutions ruin the world.

Which is why the man at Duke wanted nothing to do with that word. And he won, and his program that helps Christian institutions do good in the world is called something else entirely.

But what I want to share today is a conviction that this gentleman at Duke and I both share, which is that institutions will also save the world. Now I’m being a little tongue in cheek. We start our annual Christmas season called Light in the Darkness next week, where we ask how Jesus is saving the world. And I put my hope for the future good of the world...

It’s great to see you again this week. It’s rare for me to have the honor of being up here two weeks in a row - and what a joy it is!  Steve, our Senior Pastor, is getting the chance to watch his daughter run at her Cross Country States competition out in Western Massachusetts today. And later today I’ll get to watch my daughter swim at her high school States swimming competition at Harvard, so think of our strong, powerful girls today if it crosses your mind!

Steve, though, will be back up next week with a powerful talk to round out this sermon series. I got a little preview and it’s about both the destructive and saving power of institutions; it’s a good one! As a reminder: one service at 10:30am next Sunday and kids are with us!

Today, I’d love to continue with insights we’ve been sharing in this series called Your Faith Journey at Reservoir. We’ve been highlighting strands of Reservoir’s DNA that ensure an open, Jesus-centered approach to your faith journey. And we are taking a few weeks to talk about this to make sure the ethos of Reservoir—who we are and why we think about faith the way we do —really does shine through.

We’ve realized that it’s valuable to communicate this in a way that doesn’t leave anyone wondering if there is some “catch” attached or trade-off that’s required to feel like you belong in this community (if you want to!)

We hope to communicate that at the baseline, life with Jesus at the center is really, really good news, and it is full of personal invitations and ways to experience that goodness, like spiritual practices.  And, as a bonus, your faith journey doesn’t have to be one that you forge alone, but one that you get to share with others in community!

We administered a church-wide survey a few months ago on a Sunday morning with the hopes that we’d get some constructive feedback around where there might be gaps between your desired “needs” and what we were providing, either in services, classes, or other offerings. The survey results revealed some of that—although, certainly not enough voices in that direction to say it was a big theme—but it did reveal that you are mostly a really happy bunch, and that you primarily really value and like each other. You really like being part of this community.

This, too, has been my experience.  16 years or so ago, when we first started coming to services, we orbited around this place pretty hard.  Everyone was so kind! And I was so suspicious of this KINDNESS—suspicious that there would be an agenda attached to said niceness, suspicious that there would be a list of “do’s and don’ts" to adhere to, suspicious of the Nutella that was offered at the bagel table in the morning (that was definitely a suspicious , red flag).  I was concerned that there was going to be a prescribed way to make sure my own holiness could be formed—a prescriptive way to really belong. Each week I was a little on edge, waiting for the conditions for me to really be welcomed to drop in my seat.

But what we found instead was that the people that make up this community of Reservoir are genuine, don’t put up much of any false front, and are indeed incredibly, suspiciously kind.  And so we dared enough to stop orbiting for a second, and land long enough to inspect this kindness at a ground-level, face-to-face. And what we found through so many of you was that we got to meet Jesus face to face.

I think I could shrug at the church survey results and say meh—great.  We created this big survey to try to identify our pain points, and instead found out that—surprise—we are all really kind human beings who love and follow Jesus as best we can, and we like each other.

I could look at these survey results and say “Holy Cats!” We are all really nice, kind human beings who love and follow Jesus as best we can, and we love being around each other.

Last week we started this mini- four-week series, called Your Faith Journey at Reservoir, which I’m really excited about!  Because Pastor Steve and I get to offer some insights—some things about Reservoir—we cherish and think you might too!  And whether you feel new, or stuck, disinterested, or like a wise old traveler along this faith journey, we think these thoughts will be helpful in the expanse in all of your life—far beyond even this community at Reservoir.

The hope is to highlight today how Reservoir can provide options for you to experience our good God that is at the center of all of our lives, and put on display a little bit how you are not only welcomed by Jesus, but actively invited again and again into a life that He hopes for you—a life that would feel abundant, flourishing and whole, and totally do-able.

[Community moment here]

Today we’ll talk a bit about what these good invitations from God look like, and how finding ways to intentionally practice opening these invitations—to experience, trust and know the love of God as an anchor deep within ourselves—can be very impactful.  I’m going to talk about “spiritual practices”—these many, many personal pathways that I feel like God outlays for us in our lives—and how so many have been built in to the deep well of Christian traditions—the Bible, prayer, fasting—and  also how so many of these practices can be found in the non-traditional pathways that are present in our lives at every turn—all of them holding the distinct promise that you will experience God’s love as you become more aware and bold to accept these invitations.

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;

   his mercies never come to an end;

23they are new every morning;

   great is your faithfulness.

God your mercies are new every morning”.

My Story:

This phrase, this language of “spiritual practice” seemed to greet me  long before I could utter my own language with much clarity.  

And I realized this, as I’ve mentioned before, through a year-long transformational listening class that we did as a staff facilitated by a spiritual director.  As part of that class every person was to form and share their spiritual autobiography.

This is a spiritual practice of looking at the story of God’s interaction in your life—It’s your own spiritual story line.

I succeeded at punting my time of sharing for the full 9 months of the class.

I like to use the excuse that I’m an “internal processor”, but 9 months is a bit of a stretch to say, “I’m still processing", so the greater part honestly is sheer procrastination, which is also a really great skill of mine.

But each time that we would meet—listening to others share their own spiritual autobiographies—I realized HOW HARD it was to look back and delineate what in my life was a “spiritual moment/where God was interacting”, and which of them weren’t. SO MUCH as I look back over my life now feels like God was always interacting in some capacity.

So as a result, as I listened to people share, I would be simultaneously writing my own spiritual autobiography in my mind. And each time it was very different, because so many different memories would pop up, along my life spectrum, as being infused with God.

However, one memory that didn’t shift in each iteration of my spiritual story line was this memory, again, long before I had robust vocabulary, and certainly long before any spiritual language—and it was this memory of swinging on a swing in my front yard.

And it stands out as oddly not just a singular memory, but kind of the sense that this was a repeated moment in my childhood—that I did this a lot: a stockpile of similar memories, all in that one picture.

Well, I’d like to tell you about an invitation I got this year that started with my own road trip. In my case, it wasn’t anything particularly adventurous. It was more that near the end of this summer, our family found ourselves stuck in the car more than normal — all five of us driving around Massachusetts on various errands and little trips. And you know if you have kids or if you were a kid, the end of the summer is the cranky time, when your family’s seen too much of each other to be spending all this time driving around. And if you know our family in particular, you’ll know we have two teenagers and one pre-teen, and two kind of stubborn, opinionated grownups too, so that’s a lot to keep stuck in a car together, and the end of the summer, and not get on each other’s nerves.

But my wife Grace had another one of her brilliant plans that I didn’t buy at first. Her awesome parenting hack to keep our kids peaceful and engage them with some useful life skills was this. To play them these audio-recordings of long lectures by an academic researcher. That’ll do it. That was her plan. Now, it wasn’t just any academic researcher. These were lectures by Brené Brown - she’s a great storyteller, her talks are really popular. But still, lectures.

Anyway, Grace starts to play them. And turns out, of course, she’s absolutely right. Brilliant. These lectures are riveting. To everybody. Ride after ride, this or that kid asks us to turn them back on. We start hearing our kids pepper their conversations with comments about vulnerability and shame and courage. Brené says this or that. Wow - go, Momma - I did not see this coming.

So this lecture series we were listening to is called Rising Strong as a Spiritual Practice. And Brené is talking a lot about the qualities that help people live wholeheartedly.

We use other verbs for this around Reservoir. Our vision statement is that as many people as possible in Cambridge and Greater Boston and beyond would connect with Jesus and with our community and thrive as a result. Thriving is one of the key words there — a life that’s full of life, deeper, truer, richer. I usually use a different word for this — so much so I’ve been teased for it  I like the verb from the natural world flourishing. We had a whole series on this word a couple summers ago — this desire that our lives will grow and prosper regardless of our circumstances, that we’ll choose into deep vulnerability and at the same time deep agency that help us blossom into our best self for the world - a self of joy and love, purpose and power and peace.

Well, I think Brene Brown’s word for thriving or flourishing is "wholehearted" — this internally free and robust approach to life.

So Brené’s talking about the different qualities of wholehearted people, according to her research. And she’s telling stories, and kind of sideways inviting us all into more wholehearted living, and she says this line that stops me in my tracks.

You know that experience where you hear something or you read something and it’s like it’s spoken exactly to you, in this exact moment. It was like that. We’re driving home from some too-long errand, all five of us, using Brené Brown’s so-deep words to keep us from arguing, and she has this segment and when it ends, I pause the recording while I’m driving. And everyone’s like — come on, Dad, we want to hear more of the lectures. And I’m like — whoa, I need a break, because that was so deep it’s blowing my mind. Can we pause for a bit?

She’s been talking about forgiveness as one of the qualities of wholehearted people, how it’s hard to be resilient and grateful and calm and all these other good things when we’re gripped by our pain, or when that pain settles into resentment or bitterness. And she says, here’s the hard thing she’s learned about forgiveness, why we practically never really do it,

Today is the last week in our early fall series we called An Embodied Faith. The goal of these eight weeks of teaching and worship was to explore how a Jesus-centered faith can speak to us as whole people. After all, whatever you want to call all the parts of the human experience – body, mind, soul, spirit, whatever – we’re all in the end just one thing. You can’t split us into parts and still have us. And the really cool thing about a Jesus-centered faith is that it tells us God gets that at every level. God, after all, has joined the human experience incarnate, God in a body, which is what our tradition says Jesus was.

 

Clearly there are toxic forms of Christianity that only care about the afterlife and some part of us you’d call soul or spirit. And there are unhealthy forms of religion and ethics that shame our bodies or ignore our minds, or dismiss our deepest aspirations. But embodied faith connects the God who made us all with the whole of our experience.

 

And I thought: we can’t talk about embodied faith without talking about how to make meaning out of what are bodies actually are. Glorious as they are, they’re also awful. They get sick and fall apart. Our bodies remind us in big and small ways that we’re dying. We’re all made of dust.

 

You hear this phrase sometimes at funerals - ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It’s poetry that references a feature of the Jewish and Christian origin story. These faiths assert a special dignity and beauty of the human experience that is fairly unique in the pantheon of world philosophy and religion. But they also assert what is common really to all faith and science - an understanding that we are made of dust.

 

The Bible has this bit of existential poetry in a book called Ecclesiastes; that’s one of the places this is stated. It goes like this:

 

Ecclesiastes 3:19-20 (NRSV)

19 For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. 20 All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

 

Every year, our church makes a big deal of this six week season before Easter. We call it 40 Days of Faith. Traditionally, it’s been called Lent and begins with this holiday called Ash Wednesday, when pastors or priests smudge ashes on your forehead and remind you of your mortality. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We’re all going to die.

 

The first year I did that, I thought - this is somehow very intimate and very creepy and very sobering all at once. But I’ve also found that being reminded of this dust to dust nature of our bodies takes us to some good places, grounds us, uplifts.

 

So today, I’m going to share some meditations on the good that can come when we remember that our dying bodies are made of dust. In particular, I think we can grow connection and compassion, take away some really helpful thoughts about criticism along these lines, and move into profound hope as well.

 

So that’s the outline of this talk, if it helps you to follow along - connection, compassion, criticism, and hope. You ready?

 

Connection.

 

The other week, I found myself facing down a conference table’s worth of lawyers in our attorney general’s office, trying to represent a national network of faith-based organizers on immigration concerns.

 

When I realized I’d be playing an important role in these negotiations, I felt my shoulders tense a little. My mouth started to go dry. Like I used to feel when I was younger before track races,

Before I was a pastor, I was a public school educator. And I’m embarrassed to admit that early in my career, I wasn’t that knowledgeable or sensitive around the education of youth with disabilities. I think I wondered how many people kids really had learning disabilities. I mean maybe they weren’t working very hard, or maybe they hadn’t had great teachers or parents.

Now there were a lot of reasons I thought this way – like most teachers, I hadn’t had enough training on disabilities. There were some biases I had from my own childhood too. But deeper than that, I guess I just thought that people are tough and strong and can do whatever they need to, or at least they should be able to. I thought: I’m scrappy, I’m a hustler, a fighter. And everyone else can be too.

I can’t point you to the exact moment this changed. It was more of a process, but I can point out some milestones in the journey.

I remember when I was training to be a principal, I was learning how to manage programs for students with learning disabilities, and we were talking about technology that helps students access curriculum and learning experiences, and someone pointed out my glasses as an example of this assistive technology. And I thought – really? I don’t have a disability, and this isn’t assistive technology. But then I considered, you know it’s true. I can’t read things more than two feet from my face, I can’t make out faces as people approach, I can’t drive safely. Unless I’m wearing my assistive technology, my glasses, that compensate for my physical disability. There you go.

Later I remember also being diagnosed with hearing loss. For whatever reason, this was embarrassing to me. I first failed a hearing test in my early 30s, but I didn’t like the idea that there was something wrong with me. It made me feel like I was getting old before my time too. So I did nothing. I put off getting hearing aids. I didn’t get tested again for years.

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But then I had this group interview, in a room of nearly 20 people, and I mentioned in advance that it was hard for me to hear in a room full of people… and the HR manager running the show told me a “reasonable accommodation” would be to give me a printed copy of all the interview questions, which he did. And it actually helped me interview well enough to get the job. And I realized I’m being treated like I have a physical disability, because in fact, I do. I can’t hear high pitches without help, and most consonants in English are high pitches. Hey, I’m not perfect, I’m not strong in the sense of totally self-sufficient. I need things.  

And then eventually I get these hearing aids I’ve been wearing every day for the past six years. And suddenly, I can pick up on all the conversations going on around me. I’m a little more socially engaged again. I rediscover the beautiful sound of rushing water. Help, grace, strength for me in my weakness.

And then there was my experience I shared about at the start of this series, when

This past year, I was diagnosed with ADHD… and again, there was this mix of really… I have that? That can’t be so. And oh, wow, that explains so much… And in the ADHD world you realize, oh, this is a pain… There are some difficulties to yourself and others when you have ADHD. But this is also like a superpower too. There’s good that comes with this. I wouldn’t want to not have ADHD. I wouldn’t be the same person. Maybe it’s cliché, but I’ve learned I’m not disabled, I’m differently-abled. This so-called disability is part of the good of who I am, even in the ways it makes me need help.

Here’s where I’m going with this.

We’re in the seventh and second to last week in our fall series, An Embodied Faith. We’ve tried to dispel this notion that faith is only concerned with our souls or our spirits.

Early this year I got an airplane to go visit a friend of mine. I took the trip afraid I’d lose that friend, but I ended up seeing the face of God.

I was nervous because there were a few things my friend and I hadn’t spoken of in years, a couple of important topics, which I knew we had come to see differently. We’re like most friends - after ten, twenty, in this case nearly twenty-five years, both of us have been learning and growing and changing. We’ve been alive, which is great, but what happens when all that life and change ruins the friendship? What if we drift apart? What happens when a friendships collapses under the weight of difference?

I didn’t think this particular friendship was at risk. I was going to see the guy who’d been best man in my wedding. We’re godfathers to some of each other’s children. We’d logged dozens of hours of phone calls in the many years we’d lived in different cities.

But then, not long before my trip, I’d heard a story from another friend of mine, of a life-long best friendship she had lost because of how their views had changed on a single controversial issue. And I thought, uh-oh, what if I’m next? What if one of my best friends will no longer trust or respect me?

So I get on the plane, I land, my friend picks me up from the airport, and we stop at a park to take a walk and catch up a bit on the way back to his house. I think his youngest kid was taking a nap or something and we had a bit of time to kill. So I said, hey, can we clear the air a bit. I’ve got something important to talk about. And I was far more nervous than I expected to be. I’m a grown man with an old friend of mine, but my hands are in my pockets and I’m having a hard time finding the words, and I think, wow, the stakes are high for me.

Eventually, though, I bring up the stuff I knew we didn’t see eye to eye on any more. And I tell him, I need to bring this up, because I’m not sure what I’d do if we lost our friendship over this.

And he says to me, well, there’s a long answer, let’s talk more about this. But the short answer is my God, no. We’re friends, right? We can handle being different.

So obvious, and yet, woah, it was like the air went back into my lungs. I was so relieved. I thought: this is a taste of some of the best in life. Loyalty, acceptance, peace that can handle time and difference. So good. I looked at my friend and thought, To see your face is like to see the face of God.

These words aren’t mine. They come from an old, old story in our scriptures – when one man sees the face of his brother and in a space of trust and reconciliation also comes to see embodied in his face the very presence of God.

This moment is from the third quarter of the Bible’s first book of Genesis. Genesis is four long stories woven into one. Each story centers around a person chosen by God. All four stories deal with loss and death. The family at the center of the story, sometimes all of humanity as well, is threatened. And the stories ask how God can be faithful to advance goodness amidst all of this mess. They ask where God can be faithful too, often with surprising answers. Each of these four sections in Genesis also includes a vivid sibling rivalry. And the rivalry at the center of the third section is between the twin brothers Jacob and Esau.

Jacob and Esau are competitors since birth. Younger brother Jacob has consistently had the upper hand. And with the help of his mother, he’s managed to steal the favored son and favored inheritance status from Esau. And then from that event until the moment when we’ll meet them today, about fifteen years have passed. Fifteen years of no contact between these brothers, fifteen years of Jacob thinking his brother Esau wishes him dead.

And now Jacob, along with his very large family, is preparing for a reunion,

Good morning!  What a gorgeous day, thanks for popping in here today, I’m thankful to be together … And I”m thankful that  get this unique perspective up here - to look out at all of you and see this fully gorgeous array of bodies.  A representation of what I could imagine as the closest thing to the kin-dom of God here on earth. A myriad of races, of  identities, of able bodied and disabled bodies, of gay, straight, trans and queer bodies, old and young, bodies of all sizes, hairy - not-hairy, strong and just toddling…  

And my heart skips a beat at this sight.

And what makes the kin-dom of God a powerful reality - not just a lovely sentiment,  - is the attention to taking in the fullness of what this beautiful tapestries of bodies in the room bring with them….    Your bodies tell a story of WHO YOU ARE, of where you’ve been - your life…..

We’ve all  traversed this life, encountering joys and traumas and pain and shame and fears and love.   And yet - we are slow to speak on the terms of these experiences beginning with our physical bodies… our bodies are the nexus of every experience, of every feeling, struggle and triumph.  We are quick to mention our bodies - when we feel good about our bodies… when we’ve realized our passions are birthed out of our bodies..- where we have the opportunity to love with our whole selves the world and the people around us with fullness of relationship and love…   and yet  it’s harder to speak of the reality of how our bodies are regarded in our everyday spaces - where we work, study, in our families.  That often in these spaces our bodies are a battleground, that tell a story of a quest for acceptance, for value and for wholeness in this world.

To build the kin-dom, IS WORK.  What makes the kin-dom so rich, is not just a push for all of us to do a really good job at this faith “thing”, individually …   it’s to come together and hold space for one another -from all our different vantage points, with our lens of living in unique bodies..   and this takes work - and it’s the work of the holy - because it’s exhausting and uncomfortable.    To talk of our bodies - to share with each other vulnerably, to imagine that someone on the other end is truly hearing us and “believing us”... is WORK. It is the work of our day, and it is the work that I think Jesus  - who came in human form, in flesh and bone - calls us to… andhe teaches just how to do that, how to be fully in our bodies - as human beings.

Mariama White-Hammond spoke last week so powerfully  - of Jesus our Savior. Jesus, - THE ONE who is a powerful , transformative force of love -  and His prime location for that work, it seems is in OUR very bodies.  And Jesus  saves us from the threat of any messages about our bodies that would come against this powerful force of love in us.

 

This is why it’s important to keep talking about our bodies today, because it keeps a/live the message of Jesus.

 

We are in a series that I’ve been particularly helped by and thankful for these last few weeks, called “Embodied Faith”.   Sometimes we plan our sermon series months in advance - I think we batted around this idea of “what would it look like to talk about our bodies?” 2-3 months ago. And I’m thankful for how the Spirit moves - even when those initial ideas aren’t fully framed… how the Spirit fills out our ideas and makes them impactful, nonetheless.

 

So, I want to talk today a bit more about how we honor and value our own bodies impacts how we value and honor the bodies of others.

 

In Genesis we see the origins of our bodies - our cells, and our muscles and our  bones - in the 2nd chapter it says that “GOD fashioned an earth creature out of the clay of the earth, and blew into its nostrils the breath of life.  And the earth creature became a living being”...

As I watched the sunrise this morning I was reminded of the song that says,

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. God’s mercies never come to an end

They are new every morning, new every morning,

Great is thy faithfulness, oh Lord, Great is that faithfulness

I don’t know about you, but the last few days have been really challenging. The pain and sadness has been palpable – the tears in my eyes, the churning in my stomach the lethargy that has made me more tired that usual. Maybe if I can just go to sleep, I will wake up from this bad déjà vu dream.

I started Thursday morning in a challenge and ultimately futile exchange with an ICE agent that yielded no relief for the person for whom I was advocating. Then I drove back to Boston for a meeting of the Massachusetts Energy Efficiency Advisory Council. It is a statewide body with 15 members only one of whom is a person of color. I knew that was the case, I knew I would be walking into a room full of predominantly wonky folks who have the ability to come to the meetings because their job allows them or requires them to. Before I got there I was well aware that for the last 10 years this group has overseen the MassSave program and even though everybody pays into the fund, every single person who has an electricity bill has a little italicized line at the bottom of their bill that tells them how much they are paying into energy efficiency – even though everyone pays in – moderate income people, renters, people who don’t speak strong English, small mom & pop business - these folks pay in and then don’t get the service.  They have been under-served for 10 years and when I stand up on their behalf I am well aware on the uniqueness of my presence, but even more I am aware of their physical absence from these spaces of power and decision-making. I was not shocked when a group that includes 6 women who attend the meetings regularly and a few men who tend to be less regular attendees ended up being represented in their presentation by the two men. None of this is abnormal in my life. I am a Black woman in the mostly white world of energy policy, I am a person of faith in a space dominated by scientific calculations, I am the embodiment on values and visions that rarely get honored when people are trying to drive for efficiency.

My heightened sense of awareness and sensitivity was no doubt driven by the fact that on the way to the meeting I had been listening to the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford. In 1991 I was a twelve year old Black girl attending an predominantly white all girls private school in Boston. Anita Hill’s testimony and the subsequent attacks she endured left a deep impression on me and many of my peers. Most of my classmates had feelings and opinions as women, but few of them were connected to some of the racial subtexts that caused many black women like me to question some of the way that the real injustices of racism could lead us to protect Black men and even support their patriarchal attitudes in ways which caused deep harm to our own psyches. This week, all the feelings of the Anita Hill testimony, all of the memories of my own experiences with sexual harassment and coercion, all of the love I feel for women and men in my life who have suffered sexual assault, sexual abuse and rape – especially my own mother who is not only a survivor, but a committed advocate and healer – all of these things were walking with me – not in some ethereal realm, but I felt them and relived them in my body.

Then I heard the testimony of Brett Kanavaugh. His indignation reminded me of the sentiment I hear from many white men who are angered by how the world is changing. As women, people of color, LGBTQIA folks, disabled people, low-income folks and other marginalized people are demanding to be seen, heard and included - it shifts that balance of power for those who have had more than their fa...