Christmas Service Schedule

This Christmas Season, you are invited to join us at Memorial to Celebrate the Birth of our Savior. Memorial is an open, inclusive and affirming community and we hope to see you this season.

We have two services Christmas Eve (5:00 and 10:30 pm) and a Christmas Day Service at 10:30 am.

In addition, on December 22nd at 6:30 pm we will have a ‘Blue Mass’ to assist those who are grieving or otherwise blue this Holiday Season in processing their losses and finding a path towards peace and joy this Christmas Season. This is open to all people of faith, and we hope you find rest here if that is what your heart needs this season.

The View from Bolton St.

This week, Memorial hosted our fourth Vigil for Trans Lives in conjunction with the Maryland Institute Queer Alliance (MIQA). Every fall, students from MICA take time out of their busy semester schedules to gather and remember members of the Trans community that have died by violence in the last year. We gather, we pray, light candles, read names and stories, and remember. It is a remarkably religious event for a group of students and a campus that is famously almost proudly non-religious.

For me it is a sacred honor to gather with a group of Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer and Gender Non-Conforming students as they seek to remember the dead and to ask for a better life for them in the world to come. A holy moment that always comes at a busy time but that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

Every year we have a guest speaker. I try and use this as an opportunity to disrupt our ideas of what ‘trans’ means - we have had military veterans and seminarians, and this year we had Brother Merrick Moses, who is a member of Holy Nativity and a Brother in the Independent Catholic Church, who spoke about the importance of remembering not the deaths, but the lives of the people we have lost. That it is only in remembering them as fully human that we can ever get to a world where we no longer kill people because of who they are or who they love. A world where we all are just ‘human’.

Now you may be asking, where does The Church stand on trans lives? For many Christians and Christian traditions this is a challenging, and complicated question. Perhaps it is a question you yourself have struggled with. Perhaps you yourself are wondering what ‘trans’ means?

To be trans, or transgender means that your Gender Identity differs from your biological sex. That is you may have been born biologically male or female in terms of your physical body, but you understand yourself to be the opposite or neither. Medically this is called Gender Dysphoria, and is a diagnosable medical condition where one experiences stress when their physical body does not match their mental understanding of themselves.

While not all Religious traditions understand this theologically the same way, even some of the most conservative traditions begin the appropriate response with compassion. Andrew Walker is a prominent Southern Baptist author and in his book “God and the Transgender Debate” he reminds all of us that when a Trans person reveals themselves to their parents and family “These few seconds are perhaps some of the most consequential of your child’s life. And Yours...A child who rejects your faith...will never cease to be your child.” Even extreme conservative Christians would agree that the first response should be one of compassion, understanding and support.

There are of course, also many Trans Christians, including clergy, crating a much more positive outlook on the Church and Trans people. In his book TRANSforming Austen Harke writes “There are two ways to interpret what Paul says in Galatians 3:28 about our being one in Christ: either it means that we are all whitewashed and homogenized and our differences are erased... or it means that we are called to find a way to make our different identities fit together, like the bright shards in assorted colors that make up the stained glass windows of a cathedral. Are we called to sameness, or are we called to oneness?”

In the Episcopal Tradition, we are canonically much more accepting of Trans people, in that we do not put any limitations on their participation in the life of the Church and we understand them to be, like all the rest of us, ‘Made on the image and with the likeness of God.’ Trans people can and do serve on the altar, as clergy, on vestries and in Diocesan leadership. But as Episcopalian and Duke Divinity Student Vivian Taylor frequently points out, the numbers don’t lie. Representation in churches and in leadership is very small. Partly because the Trans community itself is very small, and partly because we as Christians still don’t quite know how to respond. For example, it is still common for people to confuse ‘Drag Queens’ (who are performance artists that may or may not identify as Transgender) with trans people, or to use derogatory terms like ‘tranny’ to refer to them.

This year we remember 27 trans people who died by violence in the United States. Almost all of them are black trans women. Two were trans women who died in detention by Homeland Security/ICE. It is an extremely small, extremely vulnerable population whose life expectancy is a fraction of what it should be. I am not asking everyone who reads this to agree on whether we are born male or female, if gender is fluid, if gender dysphoria is real, or at what age or who gets to make these kinds of decisions - I expect even in a community like Memorial there are a wide range of feelings and emotions on this issue, and one brief reflection won’t move the needle much.

But I do hope you will take a moment to consider what you will do when someone you care about comes to you with a very scary, very sacred, very fragile secret about their own identity. Will you look at them like an oddity? A side-show? Or as a beloved Child of God. Made in God’s image, with God’s likeness, with all the possibility the divine has given them and the promise to fulfill it. I pray it is the latter, and that you will honor that sacred trust that has been given to you, and share it back with them.

I can’t answer all the questions about God and Trans lives and salvation. But I do know that God has crafted us in God’s image, and Jesus desperately seeks to draw us closer to God through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And our role as Christians is to make that path for others as smooth as possible so they can see God’s love in this place so that one day they may experience it every place. Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image,    in the image of God he created them.

The View from Bolton St.

Gratitude 

For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer.

1 Timothy 4:4-5

It is always good to be thankful, but this is a particularly good time of year to express gratitude, so let me start.

I am grateful for the paid and volunteer staff of Memorial Church. Not many churches have the kind of dedicated volunteers, Like Becky Clark, Paul Seaton, John Seeley, Bill Roberts, and Pam Fleming who are here more often than most of the paid staff (Sometimes the Rector!) and make this place run.  

I am grateful for our clergy - for Natalie, Jill, Ken and Bradley, and for our clergy in training Carolyn who make Sunday Mornings more fun. 

I am grateful for our staff, For Kathy, Justine, Hannah, Pierre, Nirina, Valerie, and Barry who work hard to keep an old building going, the programs printed, the budget on track, and kids learning and growing, coffee hour flowing and your Rector from not falling apart. 

And I am grateful for all of our volunteers - the vestry, choir, altar guild, acolytes, welcomers, greeters, vergers, flower guild, Lectors, Eucharistic ministers, committee chairs, Samaritan Community volunteers, and for each and every one of you who sponsors a child at Christmas, volunteers at a community event, supports your local school, works for justice and equality, or just smiles at strangers on the street. You are part of the ever expanding bounty of Jesus’ love for the world that comes out of Memorial every day.  

Baltimore is a tough city sometimes. It can be hard to be thankful here.  But there are hundreds, thousands of people who work every day to make this city a better place.  From kids who spend their summers working with youth works, to the teachers in our schools, to the countless non profit staff and leaders filling gaps in social services and networks across the city, to doctors and nurses and counselors and city employees who just try and keep lights on, streets clear and people moving around the city. Lisa Snowden, Editor of ‘The Baltimore Beat’ collected a list of ‘People making Baltimore Better’ on Twitter this week (https://twitter.com/lisamccray/status/1199322653229797378?s=21) and it was really inspiring and hopeful to see so many people lifting up friends and colleagues and neighbors who do their little part to make this city a wonderful place to to live, to work, to serve, to worship and to call home. 

I hope that you feel the same way about Memorial.  That it is a place to call home. Whether you live in Ellicott City, Bolton Hill, Dundalk, Lauraville, Patterson Park, Catonsville, Columbia, Upton, TV Hill, Stone Hill, or any other hill you can find — I hope that you are grateful to call Memorial home, and that in this place you find a community that helps you deepen your relationship with Christ, with the Church and with the World. 

I am thankful for this place, and I hope you are too. 

The View from Bolton St.

A Reflection on Christ the King

When Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice

THE IMPEACHMENT HEARINGS ARE ON!

for sins, ‘he sat down at the right hand of God’, and since then has been

SONDLAND SAID THERE WAS A QUID PRO QUO!

waiting ‘until his enemies would be made a footstool for his feet.’

CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT SHE SAID!

For by a single offering he has perfected

HEALTHY HOLLY!

for all time those who are sanctified. And the Holy Spirit also testifies to us, for after saying,

CHIK-FIL-A!

‘This is the covenant that I will make with them

BLACK FRIDAY!

after those days, says the Lord:

BURISMA! UKRAINE!

I will put my laws in their hearts,

CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS ALREADY!

and I will write them on their minds’

Hebrews 10:12-16 (Interrupted)

The Feast of Christ the King is celebrated the last Sunday of the Church Year. It is the last Sunday of the season of Pentecost, right before Advent 1 and the turning over of the Church Calendar back to the beginning. In the Western (Protestant and Catholic Churches) the celebration of ‘Christ the King’ is a recent innovation, put forward by Pope Pius XI in 1925. This was done for two reasons, 1) to strengthen the faith of Catholics in a time of rising anti-Catholic sentiment around the world, and 2) to combat rising nationalism around the world, to remind us that for Christians we have no King but Jesus, and the only nation we belong to is the Kingdom of God. It makes the celebration of Christ the King this week particularly poignant because we again are experiencing a rising tide of nationalism around the world, and also because many of us are so distracted by the impeachment proceedings, among many other things, that we scarcely have time for anything else, including even our prayers. Which words have come out of your mouth more this week? Jesus, God, Faith, the Church? Or Burisma, Ukraine, Sondland and Trump?

The challenge of the Christian faith, and our particular Episcopal/Anglican branch of it, is to keep a feet in both worlds. We are not Anabaptists, content to disconnect entirely from the human world around us; and yet we are also not secular do-gooders, with no connection to the divine. We are Children of God, citizens of God’s Kingdom who also have been given stewardship over life here on earth. But it is hard to maintain that balance when life in one world is exciting and life in the other may seem... dull by comparison. Our call is to stay engaged with those issues that matter most in this world, including yes of course impeachment proceedings and criminal investigations into city leadership, but to keep enough distance to remember that our loyalty is to God in heaven an not to any political leadership here. So let us celebrate Christ the King fully this week!

As our national political sphere continues to meltdown, we should celebrate that we have a King who will not fail us, a Lord who do not disappoint and a savior whose love does not depend on what you say at the press conference. We should celebrate a 2000 year tradition of speaking truth to power, and of creating communities that defy the cultural norms and expectations around us. And above all we should celebrate a risen savior who remembers us, forgives us, and restores us - in this life and in the life to come. No matter how many quid pro quos we’ve done.

The View from Bolton St.

"Study war no more”

Baltimore is rapidly approaching 300 murders this year. By the time you read this we may already be there. As I type this, I’m staring out an airplane window towards the Gaza Strip, where more than 200 rockets have been launched towards Israel in the last 24 hours. On Capitol Hill impeachment proceedings are beginning and everywhere people are getting heated about the 2020 election.

The bad news is that it is unlikely there will be a neat resolution to any of these conflicts, and even less likely that outcome will be something you personally see as “good”.

Somewhere around two thousand years ago, not far from where I am, a man called Jesus was hung on a cross and died. When he did a lot of people were mad. His naysayers of course were angry and wanted him crucified. But many of his supporters were angry too. Because they thought he would overturn the Roman Empire, shed blood for blood, and bring about the kind of new world order THEY knew was righteous.

But as he went to trial Jesus reminded us that His Kingdom is not of this world. And the only blood shed was his.

And three days later, at his Resurrection, Jesus began a permanent process of insurrection that continues today and will continue until he comes again.

An insurrection that challenges a world view of winners and losers

An insurrection that requires we abandon our “teams” - families, friends, political parties and join his team.

An insurrection that puts us at odds with the dominant culture around us but in relationship with God and each other.

And an insurrection that disrupts our hearts, minds and souls and re-Orients them to the Divine.

As conflict continues to rage all around us, I invite you to be disrupted. To let Jesus disrupt you and to challenge yourself to align with the God of peace, the God of hope, and the God of resurrection - so that you may find new life in this world and in the world to come.

The View from Bolton St.

“For All The Saints...”

I stayed up too late last night. Perhaps not the kind of admission you were expecting from your priest in their weekly reflection. But it’s true. I stayed up well past my bed time, past midnight even, in a week where there is a lot going on and I could really use some rest.

Why? Baseball. The World Series.

Now, I could have gone to bed and watched highlights in the morning.  I could have carved out time later when things slow down to watch the game in its entirety. I could have gotten up and read some of the fine prose put together by writers who have spent their lives telling the stories of America’s past time.  But that wouldn’t have been the same.

And its not because the production is perfect. The announcers seem to always say the wrong thing, the production value leaves you frustrated when you want to see the replay they won’t show or miss the emotional reaction from the player. 

But there is something about the collective emotion of thousands, millions of people engaging in the unexpected together.  No one predicted an umpires call might swing the whole series, no one predicted that the batter who had barely hit all playoffs would come up with the clutch 2 run home run. And no one can really say when, but at some point the spirit moves and it stops being ‘just a game’ and starts being a moment, a spiritual encounter, a story you will tell your kids.

So I stayed up too late. And I’m glad I did.

Now Baseball might not be that thing for you. It might be another sport, or music, a concerto or a jazz quintet. It might be a book, a poetry reading. It might be a walk in the woods.  These things aren’t always exceptional, sometimes they are just ordinary; but sometimes they become divine.

Church is like that.  There is a desire right now to have every experience be a highly emotional, over charged moment. Everything needs to be highly curated and instagrammable. And some churches cater to this - creating a very emotional, exuberant (but extremely predictable) experience for those show up.  But all that does is create a false sense of who God is and a false sense of who we are as a people.

God is not predictable.  And Worshiping God is not always something that fits nicely in an Instagram post or greeting card. Worshiping God requires being in relationship with God.  We say our prayers every day. We try and read scripture at least a few times a week. We come together on a Sunday to break bread, pray, study and commune with each other.  It is a practice that gets better and richer with time.

The act of worshiping God is a lifetime spent practicing.  Sometimes we yell at God - like I yelled at the TV when the umpire made that call. Sometimes we thank God - like when Strasburg struck out Altuve with runners on. Sometimes we rise up in righteous anger - like when Dave Martinez got ejected for arguing with the Umpires.  And sometimes we shout out in joy - like I did when Rendon hit that ball out of the park.

But we only do these things; We only know to do these things; We only feel comfortable doing these things; if we are in real relationship with God. If we have practiced. And the joy of practicing is that when a big day comes, like the World Series, or All Saints Sunday, we are ready for the moment.

All Saints Day, November 1st, is a day when the Church celebrates all the saints who have come before us in the faith, those who have inspired us personally and who have collectively lifted up the Church in times of trial and in moments of joy. This is a GREAT day for the church, and a moment of joy for those who have been ‘practicing’ for some time.

But is also a moment of great evangelism. Because it is Church at its best. We all come a little more attuned to Jesus’ presence and newcomers can feel that excitement, they can sense the tension as the atoms in the old walls start to shake with the memory of our forebearers and with the anticipation of what is to come. 

So join us this Sunday. Stay too long. Forget the other things. Ruin your plans. And come practice worshiping God.  Remember the Saints who have come before you and remember that God does indeed want you to be one too. 

The View from Bolton St.

“I tried hard to have a father, but instead I had a Dad.” Nirvana, Serve the Servants

One of my most ridiculous memories from childhood is, after a big argument with my parents, I stormed up to my room. I cranked up my Dad’s old boom box he let me use, with the CD he gave me money for, in the room he never made me clean, and blasted the second verse of Nirvana’s ‘Serve the Servants’ where Kurt Cobain yells “I Tried hard to have a father but instead I had a Dad.”

I sure showed him.

Fortunately my dad and I were able to repair our relationship (or at least that little spat) in short order, but that memory came to mind recently because I was reminded again that I am ‘A Father+ and a Dad’ and that the parent role should always come first.

You see last week was busier than usual, and after spending the entire day working at Festival on the Hill I still had a fair amount of work to get my sermon where I wanted it to be for Sunday morning. I started working on it after we got the kids to bed and then suddenly one of our kids came down in tears because they were so stuffed up they couldn’t sleep, and only needed ‘Daddy’.  

I could take care either of the sermon or my kid.  So,I took care of our kid and let God take care of the sermon.  I was not happy with the sermon, but I was glad I spent most of the night cuddling a sick child.*

Why, you might ask? One of the Anglican Church Fathers, Jeremy Taylor writes in his “Guide to Holy Living”:

“For it is great folly to heap up much wealth for our children, and not to take care concerning the children for whom we get it: it is as if a man should take more care about his shoe than about his foot.”

That between work and family, family should always come first.  Which means, and this is no surprise to anyone who been responsible for someone else’s care no matter the age or relation that your work can suffer.  That people will think less of you professionally when you make the right choices personally and spiritually. I am grateful to be part of a congregation here that tries to understand this, and I hope that I can continue to internalize it and continue to make it true for myself.

But Taylor’s words are not just for parents or caregivers!

Here is his advice for how to handle our free time:

”Let all the intervals or void spaces of time be employed in prayers, reading, meditating, works of nature, recreation, charity, friendliness and neighborhood,...to begin and end the day with God.”   

Sometimes the most significant and holy act we can engage in is to stop what we are doing and be a friend to someone.  To say that ‘our relationship is more important than what I’m doing.’  That to care for your neighbor, through time, conversation, companionship,  is a kind of prayer, it is how we can spend the day with God. Even more so when a friend is in need.  In the book of Job, when Job is at his lowest his three friends show up and the first thing they do is just sit in silence with him for seven days. SEVEN DAYS. Just sitting there. Could you imagine all the things you’d miss?!?

But what scripture reminds us is that those things you would miss, maybe don’t really matter. Because what matters most is deepening our connection to God and to each other.  And especially in an increasingly disconnected world - where we would rather re-watch a TV show than read the Bible, or text on our phone than visit a friend, relationships with God and with each other matter a whole lot.

Life is busy right now for many of us.  And life at the parish is busy too. But Church work is still ‘work’ and sometimes other things, be they health, family or spirituality, get in the way. And that is okay.  We would do well to remember Jesus’ words to Mary and Martha ‘Mary has chosen the better part’ and it will not be taken from her.

This week I hope you too will choose the better part.

*You may be, of course, tempted to ask ‘where was Monica?’ She was sleeping, having been up with sick children the night before.  But really the question shouldn’t be asked. We are both parents, both share in the responsibilities of raising our kids and both have careers and passions that pull us in the opposite direction sometimes.  I’m grateful to have a partner in life that supports what God calls me to do and that reminds me that God also calls me home. 

The View from Bolton St.

Love Your Enemies: No Really, Love your Enemies.

Jesus is famous for a lot of things, but his message of ‘Love Your Enemies’ maybe one of his most quoted.

And his most ignored. Let’s face it, Christians are pretty good a loving our neighbors most of the time. We are good at loving the poor, the outcast. Most of us are pretty good about loving the foreigner, and even the prisoner. We might struggle with loving the sinner but even that we do a good portion of the time.

But loving our enemies? NOT a strong suit. In fact this is when most Mainline Christians turn evangelical and start saying things like ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin’ because we just can’t accept this most simple and yet most radical of Jesus’ commandments: Love your enemies.

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:43-45)

Christians in the public square were challenged again by Jesus’ commandment this past week when Comedian and Talk Show host Ellen DeGeneres was seen laughing and having fun with former President George W. Bush (see background story here). There were, of course, many political criticisms of Ellen, especially the weekend before the Supreme Court was to take up multiple cases on the rights of LGBT People here in the United States. This is a challenging and painful moment, and the hurt and fear are very real.

But I was most disappointed in the responses from fellow Christians who were just as harsh if not harsher. There should be no quarter for this former President.

And I remember how quickly we are to forget Jesus’ most difficult commandment.

But very few of us get the chance to sit down with former presidents. And while we may be blustery on line, the likelihood is we would all fall in line because that’s what social norms dictate when you are in those situations.

But how do we act around our actual enemies? While I recognize that Memorial’s congregation is diverse politically, the fact of the matter is most of the people reading this would consider the current President of the United States an Enemy. And they would consider most people who voted for him enemies as well.

And it’s also true that we live in a city where drugs and violence will kill more than 1000 people this year. That is the biggest, omnipresent enemy in our life right now.

And we have wisely Understood that the enemy is not drug dealers, or users, or neighbors afraid to call the police - but that the enemy is the drug trade itself. A bigger than us poorer and principality, a larger than life demon that is destroying lives, families and communities.

And we do what we can to fight THAT enemy while loving as best we can those harmed by it.

So why can’t we do the same in our current political moment? Why can’t we see nationalism and authoritarianism for the drug that it is? Why can’t we see White supremacy for the evil it is and fight THAT while loving as best we can those caught up in it?

I do not much care how you feel about Ellen and W. It’s a 30 second sound byte. A blip on the radar.

But I do care how you think about those people who think and act and vote differently than you do, and how seriously you and I and all of us take the challenge seriously to love them, even as we fight against the hate and division we feel those political leaders represent.

Love your enemies. No really. Love. Your. Enemies.

The View from Bolton St.

How lonely sits the city
that once was full of people! 

How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations! 

She that was a princess among the provinces
has become a vassal. 

She weeps bitterly in the night,
with tears on her cheeks.

These words from the book of Lamentations are in reference to Jerusalem 2,500 years ago, but just as soon be about Baltimore today.  With a population almost half of what it was a few decades ago, with increasing numbers of vacant homes, schools with declining enrollment and employers and investors threatening to move out of the city, we find ourselves more and more like a ‘vassal state’ - seemingly dependent on outside influences, outside donors, outside founders to get anything done. 

In the current debate about ‘Squeege kids’ this is front and center. The primary concern of our political leaders is not ‘whats best for Baltimore’ or ‘whats best for our kids’ or even ‘what’s best for our communities?’ But rather ‘How can we keep county commenters happy? County shoppers and diners happy?’ This ‘politics of scarcity’ is terrible and infectious. 

By infectious I mean we can similarly find ourselves feeling like we ‘aren’t enough’, that we can’t do it on our own, that we have been abandoned by God.  We find ourselves waiting. Sitting. Immobile. Unable or unwilling to do anything for ourselves until ‘someone else’ comes with a solution. 

In the Gospel this week we are promised that if we have ‘faith the size of a mustard seed’ anything is possible.  This seems unbelievable of course. Personally I’ve never tried to move a mountain or cast a mulberry tree into the sea, mostly because I’m afraid what it would say about me! 

But I have seen amazing things happen in unlikely places, with unlikely people.  The Samaritan Community grew out of two people saying ‘we’ve got to be able to help these folks coming to the church for food.’  And 40 years later they are a vital part of this community. 

Perhaps it is time for another vision? What if Memorial were to say ‘we’ve got to do something to employ these kids on the corner?’ Or ‘we’ve got to do something to reduce violence in our community?’ What if some local churches joined together to confront these efforts... and DIDN’T WAIT FOR A SAVIOR OR A FUNDER FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE TO DO IT FOR US. 

We are reminded by Saints ancient and modern that we are Jesus’ hands and feet in the world.  We have all we need right in front of us.  We need to get rid of the politics of scarcity and embrace a theology of abundance, and trust that with faith in God, and embracing God’s vision for our community that those things we need will fall in place just in time.

This is true for our city, our community, our parish, and ourselves — Put yourself out there and see what happens. 

The View from Bolton St.

“Yesterday was a very busy month” - Someone on Twitter

For those who are politically or socially engaged, the last few years have been exhausting. And there are particular days that feel like they take weeks or years of our lives.  With yesterday’s announcement of the beginning of impeachment inquiries, the next few months are likely to feel like a very long decade.  And the ranges of responses to yesterdays news bear that out - from jubilation to speculation to wariness to weariness to frustration to anger. We are extremely divided. And those divisions are creating deeper fissures among people who usually can, should and do work together and support each other.  If you’ve noticed organizations, advocates, and leaders who used to work together suddenly attacking each other, you know this is true.

But there is another emotion that seems to be bubbling up, and on which there is universal agreement.  Inevitability.

No matter where one is on the political spectrum this moment has seemed inevitable.  The President was always going to be impeached. If you were a democrat, it was only a matter of time before he did something so egregious there was no other option. If you were a Trump supporting republican the democrats have just been waiting for this since day one. If you are a centrist, a middle of the road liberal or a ‘never-Trump’ Republican; this was the only outcome with a President who eschewed any notions of tradition or standards and an establishment that thrived on them. We all knew this was coming.

And here we are. Divided. Conflicted. Apart. Exactly where we thought we would be.

This is exactly the kind of moment that Jesus enters into; the kind of moment where Jesus thrives.

Somewhere around 30 AD, Jesus walked into a divided and conflicted Palestine. A Roman territory with political ‘leadership’ that didn’t want to be there, religious leaders trying to hold on to legitimacy, and rising inequality and discontent.  The division, discord and disunion was getting worse and worse. conflict seemed inevitable.

But encounters with the divine have a funny way of changing us. And Jesus was able to bring together tax collectors and fishermen, Saints and sinners, prophets and rich men, Pharisees and Sadducees and sex workers and highway robbers... who all came together and saw themselves not as a divided society but as a unified body of Christ. The 12 and the 70 and the hundreds sent out into the world to preach and teach, to cast out demons, to bring hope to the hopeless and to give voice to the voiceless.

Of course there were those who didn’t like this.  Loud, angry voices who trafficked in division. Who celebrated discord. Who thrived on disunion.  These powers and principalities, these voices of the dark kept sowing hate and distrust. And they did it until it got Jesus killed.

The consequences of course were drastic. Shortly after the region was engulfed in war. And by the year 70 the temple was destroyed, the Jewish people were forced into exile, and it would be a few hundred years before remnant Jewish and Christian communities could come back together to rebuild their own identities and to begin again building a Kingdom of God here on Earth. 

I write this morning to remind us all that those powers are still alive and well. Those principalities that seek to keep us alone and scared and divided are still active and powerful. 

Don’t let them kill Jesus again.

Don’t let them kill your spirit.

Here in Baltimore City we have diverse coalitions working to make our city better. Here in Maryland we have diverse people across the political spectrum committed to adequately funding education and repairing and restoring our environment, and we are privileged to have two leaders in that effort - David Hornbeck and Dick Williams, here at Memorial.  And we can also dream of similar coalitions across our country — of black and white, rich and poor, democrat and republican and other, of hispanic and Asian, of immigrant and citizen, of First Nations and everyone else, looking past that which divides us to restore dignity, respect and above all hope to the office of President and to our national politics in general.

“So what can I do?” You might ask?

First, don’t assume everyone is against you.  That Trump voting gun hugging cousin of yours may also be tired on the never-ending conflict and discord and wishes there was a better way forward.

Second, don’t demand repentance. The people you might be most frustrated with are not likely to ever say ‘hey I’m sorry I said that terrible thing about your favorite candidate’ - but they are liable to seek out relationship with you, and maybe reconciliation is better than repentance anyway? After all don’t we as Christians believe we are all unworthy of forgiveness? And yet God forgives us anyway.

Finally, put the news down. Call your friends. Have a coffee. A drink. Talk about the weather. The Pastor’s terrible sermon. The Ravens. Strengthen those intimate connections so that you too don’t become divided. Widen your circle and make new friends. And let your friends know that your love and care is not dependent on adherence to any particular ideology.

To get through this moment, to get through most moments, we need Jesus coalitions. Tax collectors and sinners. Pharisees and Zealots. Slave and Free. Jew and Gentile. Black and White. You and Me.

Let’s be the Jesus Movement.