A sermon preached on July 8, 2018
on the Sterling, MA Town Common
by Rev. Robin Bartlett

POEM     "I Feel Sorry for Jesus" by Naomi Shihab Nye        
People won’t leave Him alone.
I know He said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name…
But I bet some days He regrets it.
Cozily they tell you what he wants
and doesn’t want
as if they just got an e-mail.
Remember “Telephone,” that pass-it-on game
where the message changed dramatically
by the time it rounded the circle?
Well.
People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.
They want to be his special pet.
Jesus deserves better.
I think He’s been exhausted
for a very long time.
He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into
the golden chandeliers
and say, the truth tastes better here.
See? I’m talking like I know.
It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.
I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.
And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again.

“Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks. I’ve made a living trying to answer that question out loud so others can hear. It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.

You and I both know that there is too much noise right now. Too much talking and not enough listening. Too much posturing; too much declarative pomposity, not enough curious not-knowing. People have so much toxic certainty about issues that are far too complex for anyone to have any certainty at all about. And we all have just so much to say. The lack of collective humility takes my breath away. There is so little silence.

Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?”
And people are all too quick with an answer. “You are a permissible friend, a judge-y foe. You are a liberal. You are a conservative. You are not real; you are a fairy sky God. You’d vote for the person I voted for. You love America the most of all the countries. You’d judge this war just. You wouldn’t want gay people to have cake. You’d approve of this immigration policy. You hate the people I hate. You love the people I love.”

Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?”

And people fill a vacuum with words. They say so many things that we wish they wouldn’t say in answer to that question. 

And yet, it matters how we answer that question. It matters what we tell the children.

Who do you say Jesus is?
...............................................(pause for answers).........................................................

"Who do you say that I am?" I’ve preached this text several times with answers to that question that point back to Love. Who do you say that I am? I try to answer that question every day of my life. 

But the part of the Gospel that stood out to me this week as I meditated on the text was not the question, and not the answer, but the silence that followed.: 

Jesus asks the question. Who do you say that I am? Simon Peter answers him the “right” way: “you are the Messiah, Son of the Living God.” 

Jesus says, “Yes! Now build my church.” 'cause he knows Peter gets it, you know?

And then he says something curious: he sternly warns the disciples not to tell anyone. Who do you say that I am? Maybe sometimes the correct answer to Jesus’ question is silence.

“It’s dangerous talking for Jesus,” our poet says. “You get carried away almost immediately.”

I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.
And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening.

The Via dolorosa is the path that Jesus walked to his death in Jerusalem, bloodied and beaten, carrying a heavy cross. Via dolorosa means way of grief, way of sorrow, way of suffering, the painful way. You and I may never have traveled to Jerusalem, but we have walked the way of sorrow if we have known suffering. The way of sorrow is written on our skin. 

It makes me feel like being silent for Jesus. It makes me feel like being silent for all of us.

At the end of the via dolorosa, Jesus stood before Pilate. Who do you say that you are? Pilate demanded at his trial. 

Jesus himself didn’t answer that question.

Frederich Buechner, in his book Telling the Truth, writes:

A particular truth can be stated in words – that life is better than death and love than hate, that there is a god or not, that light travels faster than sound and cancer can sometimes be cured if you discover it in time. But truth itself is another matter, the truth that Pilate asked for, tired and bored and depressed by his long day. Truth itself cannot be stated. Truth simply is… And in answer to Pilate’s question, Jesus keeps silent, even with his hands tied behind him manages somehow to hold silence out like a terrible gift.
 
We, all of us, are Pilate in our asking after truth, and when we come to church to ask it, the preacher would do well to answer us also with silence, because the truth and the Gospel are one, and before the Gospel is a word it too like truth is silence – not an ordinary silence, silence as nothing to hear, but silence that makes itself heard, if you listen to it the way Pilate listens to the silence of the man with the split lip.

We’d do better listening more in silence—the kind of silence that makes itself heard.

This week on the 5th of July, I got a phone call early in the morning from our beloved Judy Conway. I could barely make out what she was saying to me through her sobs. Her 16 month old baby granddaughter, our Becky’s daughter, our Charlotte, was rushed to the hospital early that morning, unresponsive. She had gone limp, had labored breathing and was paralyzed from the neck down, and no one knew why. (The family still sits vigil by her hospital bed as we speak, she was diagnosed with swelling of the spinal chord and brain, and she continues to make small improvements with steroids.) 

When I talked to her, Judy was speeding home from her vacation in New York to go to UMass University Hospital. Judy said she and Jim drove like bats out of hell in utter silence, held out like a terrible gift. She used that time to pray.

I was in New Hampshire at the time, and told her I would be at the hospital as soon as I could get there. 

Those of you who are parents probably know what its like to parent young children under stress. I drove all three kids by myself in the car for three hours, mostly in silence, keeping vigil in my head for that baby girl, as if my mind could cure her if I was quiet enough. Meanwhile, my youngest is yelling, “Mommy! She won’t stop touching me!” My oldest is belting Broadway tunes. And I was growing more and more angry that their lives were going on as if there wasn’t tragedy in the world—a completely unfair maternal reaction, of course, so I stayed quiet, turning down the radio as I drove.

My response to the chaos in my car was silence, held out like a terrible gift.

I prayed, too. But if I’m being honest, half of my prayers were for myself, to show up the “right” way. Like so many similar via dolorosas I have traveled, I rehearsed over and over again what I might say, and pray. I practiced what words I might use on behalf of Jesus in the hospital. I feared my insufficient offering; my utter helplessness.

And I remembered my chaplain supervisor’s words to me years ago when I was absolutely panicking about going to the Pediatric ICU because I was a young mother and I thought I couldn’t possibly “handle it.” “This isn’t about you. That’s not your child in the hospital bed, Robin.” she said. “It could be someday, but it isn’t today. So with all due respect, suck it up and go.” 

When I finally arrived at the UMass PICU, I still didn’t know what to say. But I did know what to do. I held Judy’s hand. I gave hugs to the family. I listened. When it was time to pray over Charlotte—attached to a ventilator and sleeping peacefully— I stroked her warm forehead. We sang “You are my sunshine” and I prayed, “God, sometimes there are no words.” I was silent for a long time before finding something else to say.

So much of life is just about showing up; it’s not about knowing what to say.

After I left the hospital, I drove in silence to visit with Rollie, who had just lost his wife of 58 years, Mary Ann. Again, I prayed: “What will I say? What does one say to someone who is grieving the death of the only life and love he has known for 58 years?” I imagine the stream of mourners from First Church driving to the funeral home to hug Rollie, to look him in the eye. Praying the same thing: “What do I say when I see him?” The words ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ seem so insufficient because they are. 

We didn’t know what to say, but we did know what to do. We showed up. Rollie was so appreciative. It meant so much. You showed up.

So much of life is just about showing up; it’s not about knowing what to say.

Because so much gospel truth simply can’t be spoken. 

But it can always be enacted.

“Do this in remembrance of me,” Jesus says at the communion meal. “Go and do likewise” Jesus says of the Good Samaritan. Do this. Go and do. 

Saint Francis said: “Go and preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” 

There are lots of scholarly reasons I have been given in New Testament classes about why Jesus is always telling people not to tell anyone about who he is, based on the communities these texts were written for. But today I want to imagine this: Jesus telling us with silence that it is better to live the Gospel than it is to try and speak for him. As if we can have any idea about what he would say about gay people eating cake, or capitalism, or a natural disaster. Maybe Jesus wants us to just shut up about who he is so that we can listen more. Maybe Jesus wants us to show up more on the via dolorosa, and say a whole lot less. See? I’m talking like I know.

Once people start talking like they know, think hard. Stop, be silent, and listen. Who do you say that I am? Jesus asks. Answer that question with a silence that makes itself heard. Answer that question with your actions, not just your words. Answer that question with presence. Answer that question with humility. Answer that question with service. Answer that question with Love.

Amen.

​

Sermon delivered at the UU Christian Fellowship's Communion Service
by Rev. Robin Bartlett
at the Kansas City Convention Center, Kansas City, MO​
​June 23, 2018

The problem with having faith is, most of us humans need to see to believe.
 
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” That’s what a group of Greeks say to Philip in our scripture from John’s Gospel today, having traveled to the festival for worship. That’s what a group of Gentiles we wouldn’t expect to see participating in a Jewish festival say to Phillip. “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Perhaps they needed to see to believe.

The desire to see Jesus, it turns out, is a rather lucrative business. In March of 2017, a man in Windham, Maine discovered the image of Jesus in his buttered toast. He preserved the toast in the freezer and put it on eBay with the starting bid of $25,000. 

As far as eBay auctions go, this theme is played out. Sellers have auctioned off "miraculous" images of religious figures like Jesus and the Virgin Mary embedded in everything from toast to a fish stick. A woman named Diane Duyser sold her 10 year old grilled cheese sandwich that bore the image of the Virgin Mary for $28,000 on eBay.

Duyser said she took a bite after making the sandwich 10 years ago and saw a face staring back at her. She put the sandwich in a clear plastic box with cotton balls and kept it on her night stand. She said the sandwich "has never sprouted a spore of mold."

The marketplace responded by making “Grilled Cheesus”, a sandwich maker that toasts the image of Jesus into your sandwich.

One of my congregants gifted me recently with a Jesus stamp for my own toast which was so sweet of her. (“What to give to the pastor who has everything?”)

We long to see Jesus. We long to taste and see that the Lord is good.

According to a new study published in the journal Cortex, this phenomenon of seeing religious figures in our food is “perfectly normal” because of a phenomenon called “face pareidolia, the illusory perception of non-existent faces.” We have a tendency to see faces that aren’t there because of the way our brain functions. Our religious beliefs strongly correlate with what we see in the ordinary things like grilled cheese sandwiches. (Read more here.)

It turns out our brains are pre-programmed with the longing to experience what is ultimate in the form of another human face. 

We long to see Jesus.

And it makes sense that some of us see Jesus in our food. We are hungry. We are starving on the steady diet consumer culture feeds us: more and bigger; new and IMPROVED, flashy and fast-paced. And so we buy and buy, and spend and spend, but we are never satiated. We are hungry for something more than the thin gruel of empty consumerism, TV and movies, shopping and home improvement, politics and cliched inspirational memes shared on instagram. 

We long to see Jesus. To experience God in the form of another human face. We experience the world through our bodies, so we want to EXPERIENCE God with all five senses. We desire to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch God.

That’s why we gather around this table. To touch and smell the bread of life, to taste the cup of salvation, to hear the word of Love. Most of all, we gather to see the people of God: all ages, races, classes, abilities, sexualities, gender expressions: all a part of the Body of Christ, all gathered at the same scandalous meal TOGETHER. 

We long to have a sensual experience of our God.

I think the disciples are surprised at Jesus’ response when they come to tell him that the Greeks would like to see him. Instead of saying, “oh hey, yeah, bring ‘em on over,” Jesus gives a speech instead, his last sermon. And his sermon points only to the cross. He says, “the hour has come for me to die. If you want to see me, look no further than the cross where I will be raised up out of the ground. I will draw all people to myself.”

The last line of the scripture is “then he departed and hid from them, so that he could no longer be seen.” They wished to see Jesus, and he points to the cross on the way to his hiding spot.

What a disappointing response. When I wish to see God, I picture in my mind’s eye sunsets over Star Island, or my babies’ tiny munchable toes when they were newborn, or the yearning look on my congregation’s faces when I offer them the bread of life and the cup of salvation gathered around a table like this one. 

Jesus doesn’t point to beautiful things like that, though. Jesus says if you wish to see him, you should look no further than the cross lifted from the earth. And then he hides.

In the Roman empire--crucifixion was a warning. Usually only slaves and bandits were crucified. Crucifixion was “a public service message” to other oppressed peoples. It was a body hanging on a cross: a gruesome sign that said "Don't do this, or you'll be next.”

When you wish to see Jesus, look to the children separated from their parents in detention at the border; to the families held indefinitely in detention as they await asylum hearings not sure if they will see each other again. The administration says that they are using this separation as a punishment and a deterrent, so that families will see these images of children separated from their parents and think twice about coming to the border.  This is a crucifixion. Don’t do this or you will be next.

Jesus is locked in those cages, in the shelter for children of tender ages, crying for his mother’s milk. Jesus is begging to see his sisters and brothers, calling for his Papi.

When you wish to see Jesus, look to the black and brown folks murdered by police on our city streets. That is Jesus lying in a pool of blood, saying “I can’t breathe.” Say his name.

When you wish to see Jesus, look to the Muslim women getting their hijab pulled off and the swastikas painted on the doors of the synagogue and the gender non-conforming folks confronted in bathrooms.

When you are looking for God when God is hidden, look to the cross. 

But when you are looking for Jesus, don’t forget the rising. Don’t forget that our God deals life from death.

Don’t forget to look for the signs of resurrection and proclaim them. Find the rubble, the death, the ugliest things. And then look for little signs of redemption. Look to the helpers, as Fred Rogers says. Find the grass piercing the concrete. 

I just went to see my dear friend Geno Carr in his Broadway musical debut a couple of weeks ago, in Come From Away. Have you seen it? “Come From Away” is the remarkable true story of a small town that welcomed the whole world. Gander, New Foundland is a town about the size of my small town in Sterling, Massachusetts—9,000 people— where 38 planes were diverted on September 11, 2001 when the United States closed its airspace for the first time in history. 

The people of Gander saved the whole world that day. The size of the population of the town nearly doubled when the planes landed. 7,000 confused, angry, terrified “plane people” from all over the world— were put up in people’s homes and schools and community centers. Stores in the town stripped their shelves to bring the “plane people” toiletries, diapers, sanitary products for women, and snacks. 

The citizens of Gander made three meals a day for the plane people for four days, gave them air mattresses and hand-me-down clothing and showers, tried to communicate in languages not their own, kept the animals stowed in the bottom of the planes alive including a pregnant Bonobo, got the passengers phones so that they could desperately call home, comforted the bereaved and terrified once the plane people realized what was happening back in the United States, distracted them with jokes, sang karaoke and danced with them in the town bar, found places for Jews and Muslims and Christians to pray together, found translators for the multiple languages spoken, and generally just opened their homes and hearts to strangers from all over the world. One of the cast members said, the show “is not about the sadness of September 11th, it’s about the goodness that came out of it.” 

This was my favorite scene: a frightened man from Africa on a bus with his wife in rural Newfoundland, being taken to who-knows-where from a plane that landed far from its destination. They come to a camp full of people from Gander in Salvation Army uniforms, which looks to the frightened man simply like a sea of soldiers in the darkness. 

The bus driver stops, and motions for the passengers to get off the bus. The frightened man doesn’t move. He does not understand the bus driver’s language. He does not trust him. The bus driver thinks quick, and points to the Bible that the man’s wife is clutching. She hands it to him nervously. The bus driver doesn’t know the language the Bible is written in, but he figures the chapters and verses are the same. He flips to Philippians and points at chapter 4, verse 6. “Be anxious for nothing,” it says. Now they speak the same language. Pentecost. Relieved, the frightened man gets off the bus.

Like the people of Gander on September 11th, if we wish to see God, sometimes we need to look to the cross, and then be the rising.

Maybe our rising won’t look as dramatic as rolling away the stone and seeing grave cloths where a body once was. Maybe it doesn’t look as dramatic as saving the whole world on September 11th. Sometimes resurrection comes slowly.

The rising may look like having coffee with a political opponent and listening for understanding instead of for your next argument. The rising may just look like getting out of bed despite a broken heart and doing what needs to be done for the children. It may just look like one more day of not drinking, or one more hour digging our nails into our palm to keep from losing it. It may look like shopping for a pretty head scarf to cover our bald head even though we are weak and tired from chemo. It may look like going on that first awkward OK Cupid date after the divorce papers are filed. It may look like continuing to take the anti-depressants, hoping some day they’ll kick in. It may look like showing up in public every once in awhile even though we don’t want to; even though we are still mourning all that we have lost. It may simply be stopping to notice that a broken heart can go on beating. 

If we want others to see God when God is most hidden: we are going to have to get up out of our tombs of despair, anger, self-doubt, self-hate, illness, fear, addiction, death, mourning, sin, separation, loneliness and isolation, broken relationships, and depression…

We are going to have to get up out of our graves,

Roll away the stone and be the rising!

God still has more to do with us, so be the rising. 

Our current predicaments don’t exempt us from our purpose, so be the rising. 

A broken heart still beats, so be the rising.

We are not alone, so be the rising. 

This country is a HOT MESS right now so please be the rising! 

The people united in God’s love can never be defeated, so be the rising. 

We can do hard things, so be the rising!

Hell is here on this earth, and every last person deserves to be pulled out of it, so reach out your hand and be the rising!

Heaven is here on this earth too, so don’t just sit there waiting for it to manifest itself, be the rising!

The power of Love will overcome the love of power, so be the rising!

Beloved, if you wish to see Jesus, look to the cross. Especially when God seems most hidden, proclaim the resurrection. There is no time but now, and no people but us, and no way forward without turning toward each other. Be the rising! Amen.

A Sermon by Rev. Robin Bartlett
preached on Sunday, June 10, 2018
at First Church in Sterling, MA
​Sermons are better seen.

Following Jesus means being maladjusted to the world as it is.

I struggled with what to say today to all of you. I ditched my sermon topic, in fact. I know that celebrity deaths are not the focus of the Church, but I also know this week has been triggering for many of us.

For those of us who have lost loved ones to suicide, the death of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain brings it all back. For those of us who struggle with depression and have been on the brink ourselves, the death of high profile celebrities can make it all seem so much more real and possible.

If you are feeling particularly thrown this week because that’s you—I just want you to know that I’m here. My cell number is 617-717-4011. Write that down. I have cards in the back of the church on the way out the door. 

If you are not someone who has depression right now and you know someone is suffering, CALL THEM. Do not hesitate. 

Your life matters. To me, to God. To many. To this beautiful and broken world.

I found a chilling quote from Anthony Bourdain yesterday that said, “I have the best job in the world. If I’m unhappy, it’s a failure of imagination.”

That sounds like a trap to me. If I’m unhappy, it’s because I failed. Well, that’s a lie. If Satan, the accuser, sits on your shoulder and whispers that in your ear often, CAST THAT DEMON OUT.

We know that depression is not simply unhappiness. It’s not “fixed” by a good job, or the right relationship, or a great family, or world travel or lots of money. It’s a hole that some people occasionally can’t climb their way out of. It is like quicksand. 

Depression certainly isn’t helped by the people who come along and tell you to put a smile on your face. It’s not fixed by others pointing out all the things that you should be happy about. And worse, shaming yourself for failing to be appreciative of what you have is even more poisonous and punishing. 

Suicide is not a failure on an individual’s part. But sometimes it is the result of a collective failure.

While our violent crime and murder rates have dropped to all time lows, our suicide rates in the United States have risen sharply, by at least 30% since 1999. So much that it has been declared a public health crisis. As a country, we are becoming more of a danger to ourselves than others.

We have a crisis of meaning on our hands.

The majority of Americans live in suburbs dominated by garages, and not front porches. We socialize mostly from behind a screen. We are so fearful of each other that we don’t let our kids go outside to play with the neighbors.

There was an article in USA Today by Kirsten Powers yesterday called “Americans are depressed and suicidal because of our culture.” She says: We are convinced of the false premise that “If only we get that big raise, or new house or have children we will finally be happy. But we won’t. In fact…….in many ways achieving all your goals provides the opposite of fulfillment: it lays bare the truth that there is nothing you can purchase, possess or achieve that will make you feel fulfilled over the long term.

Rather than pathologizing the despair and emotional suffering that is a rational response to a culture that values people based on ever escalating financial and personal achievements, we should acknowledge that something is very wrong. We should stop telling people who yearn for a deeper meaning in life that they have an illness or need therapy. Instead, we need to help people craft lives that are more meaningful and built on a firmer foundation than personal success.”

Man, that preached to me yesterday. I struggle with depression, and no amount of personal achievement has made it go away. 

We call it a mental illness, but depression seems to me to be a completely rational response to just being alive in a brutal world. We’ve pathologized depression as if those of us who have it are somehow maladjusted. 

Well, we should be maladjusted.

We should be maladjusted to a world in which people are starving, for food and for meaning. 

We should be maladjusted to a world in which traumatized children are taken from their asylum-seeking parents as young as four and put in cages in warehouse detention centers, terrified and alone. 

We should be maladjusted to a world where women are sexually harassed and assaulted, who die every day at the hands of partners. 

We should be maladjusted to a world where mass shootings are a daily occurrence.

We should be maladjusted to a world in which black and brown bodies and lives are laid waste—where God imaged people are continually treated as though their lives don’t matter. 

We should be maladjusted to the truth that the future of human life on our warming planet is uncertain. 

We should be maladjusted to our profound disconnection from each other.

Don’t let people gaslight you into distrusting your own sanity because you feel awash in despair over the world as it is now.

Our reading from Mark today features the powerful religious leaders of his time attempting to gaslight Jesus.

We’re only in the third chapter of Mark now so Jesus’ ministry is only just beginning. And people are beginning to question whether Jesus is unhinged. First of all, his preaching is getting more urgent, and he increasingly seems a little manic to the gathered crowd.   

And second, he isn’t fitting in to social norms and expectations. Sure, he’s healing people and casting out demons, and that’s great. But he’s been performing these miracles on the Sabbath. He’s breaking laws, and that feels dangerous to those who have been coming to see him.

The crowd begins to wonder about him.

“He’s gone out of his mind,” the people start to say. Even his own family tries to silence him. They run to the scene to restrain him.

The crowds aren’t the only ones who are worried about this Jesus. What he’s doing has implications for the world as it is becoming more like the world as it should be. People in power know that it is dangerous when the hopeless start hoping; when the people pushed to the margins start to believe their lives matter. People get uppity when they are given the gift of dignity and worth.

So the religious leaders figure they should use their skills, and their knowledge of the law to undermine Jesus’ ministry before it gets out of hand. In this scene, they call in the “big guns” to do it. They call in the scribes—the highly trusted biblical scholars.

The scribes deliver their verdict: Jesus is possessed by Satan. “As a ruler of demons he casts out demons!” They say.

Jesus refuses to be gaslit. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he says. “How can Satan cast out Satan? A house divided against itself cannot stand."

It is not demonic to be maladjusted to empire. 
It is not demonic to be maladjusted to suffering. 
It is not demonic to provide hope and healing to the hopeless. 
It is not demonic to tell people that their lives matter. 
It is not demonic to be maladjusted to false piety. 
It is not demonic to be maladjusted to profound disconnection from each other. 
It is not demonic to be maladjusted to the way things are in a world ruled by Satan’s power.

Satan’s end has come, and our job is to prepare for God’s coming reign. The Love Revolution is coming. Jesus might sound crazy to others when he proclaims this, and you may, too, but better to be a fool for Love than an agent of empire’s evil.

Amen?

Well, we’re saying amen now.

But if Jesus came back today as a street preacher, we would probably all think he was nuts. And if he got too out of hand, we would likely lock him up in a facility rather than listen to a word he said. Since this country is not apt to pay for mental health treatment anymore, he’d likely end up dying in a for-profit jail rather than in a state-run psychiatric ward. 

Westboro Baptist Church will almost certainly picket Jesus’ funeral.

Because Jesus is maladjusted to false teachings about who is in and who is out of God’s circle of kinship. Jesus proclaims a holy covenant between God and ALL people. His family is all who do the will of God, he says. 

The coming reign of God will be defined by this sort of offensive inclusivity, where all are inextricably connected, where all are treated as beloved by God, where all have purpose, where all are connected, and no one is alone. 

A house divided cannot stand. 

My UCC colleague Rev. Kelle J. Brown writes:

"This is a call to radical community, where we are so connected to each other, we will journey with each other through every circumstance.  This is the moment that we must admit individualism, violence and disconnection is the author of much of our suicidal ideations.  We are called to love people for who they are as long and as best we can, while understanding that every person has a universe of thought to which we may not be privy. 

If we want to produce an atmosphere where suicide is reduced, then do justice. Love mercy.  Create safe and courageous spaces.  Love people. Stop oppressing.  Cease warring. Resist selfishness.  Live as though Black lives matter.  Support the unhoused, the ostracized.  Honor people's pain without one-ups-personship, or undoing their story to fit a more comforting frame.  Accept and honor your children when they come out. Stop overworking people for pennies. Apologize when you are wrong, and do better.  Heal from your racism, sexism, classism, and do no harm.  Be held accountable.  Listen with curiosity.  Stop "ghosting" people, walking out of folk's lives without explanation.  Your children, your spouse, your friends are still wondering why you left without a word, and if you are well.  Trust and believe in people.  Balance competition with cooperation.  Love the ones God sends to you, instead of discarding them like trash.”

Fight the despair that comes from disconnection with radical connection. Love the ones God sends to you. Be maladjusted to empire, and oriented toward Jesus’ family values instead. Those values say that all children are our children. All people are our people. 

You can save lives. All you have to do is answer the call, and show up. Our salvation is completely bound up in one another’s. 

I love you. God loves you. Your life matters. We like having you around. So stay put.

Amen.

A sermon preached on Sunday, June 3, 2018         
by Rev. Robin Bartlett 
at First Church in Sterling, MA
​Sermons are better seen.

Jesus’ unpopularity cost him his life. 

I don’t know about you all, but I have wasted so much of my energy trying to be popular so as not to be destroyed. In elementary school, I got picked last for teams in gym because I was terrible at sports, so I tried softball. In middle school, I tried my hardest just to blend in by getting the right Benetton polo shirt and wearing it every day. In high school, I tried to pretend that my not being popular was on purpose. I was too cool to be popular. 

My mom told me that this desire to be popular would go away when I left high school, but she was wrong. Life is like one big middle school cafeteria. There is pressure to have the “right” friends, the “right clothes”, the “right” job, the “right” kids. 

And leadership involves forever balancing the need to do what is right with the overwhelming desire to be liked. It may one day be the death of me, to be honest. When you try to make everyone happy, ain’t no one happy. 

Today we honor our high school seniors who are about to be blessedly freed from the social expectations of high school in the coming week. I wrote you a letter to impart my last pieces of wisdom to you.

Dear Sam, Sofie, Sophia, Caitlin, David, Brian and Emily,

You are about to graduate from high school, and you are all slated to venture on to new places in the coming months. Famous for being particularly hard on Sunday School teachers in your childhood because of your special kind of exuberance, you have made this church yours’. Your steadfast presence here has been felt and known, many of you for your entire lives on this earth. Some of you have barely missed a Sunday since I met you. You have served on leadership teams and taught our Sunday School classes and lived our mission out in the world in La Romana and Saturday lunches and Worcester Fellowship and Christian Youth Conference, and marches for justice and more. A large piece of our congregation’s heart and soul goes with you as you leave.

The psalm we read this morning is my favorite, psalm 139. It is the psalm of the inescapable God. The “he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake” God. Instead of a creepy surveillance system, I see this song of praise as a constant reminder that we cannot flee from God’s love. 

And this is especially true as you prepare to say goodbye to an old life, and embark on a new one:

Your path is set before you, and Love’s promise never leaves you.

We tried our human best to teach you about this inescapable Love, and so this morning, we are simply praying that your roots hold you close, even as we pray that your wings set you free.

On your confirmation day two years ago, you promised to do some things that you probably now forget. I want to remind you of these promises today. 

1. The first promise was to seek the truth in freedom. (In other words, be unpopular.) 

Seeking the truth in freedom starts by telling the truth about who you are.

We live in what various social commentators refer to as a “selfie culture.” By which they mean a culture that promotes a widespread obsession with self-expression, self-esteem, and self-promotion, evidenced by the proliferation of self-portraits on social media. Don’t let your elders try to suggest that this is a product of your generation that you are responsible for, or that you are uniquely narcissistic and self-promoting. First of all, its not true, and second of all, they are on social media just as much as you are.

Social media is giving us the perfect virtual vehicle to create a false self; to curate perfect lives for the titillation and jealousy of our so-called friends and followers.  But make no mistake, this cultivated image of perfection is no different from the manicured lawns and white picket fences that hid the truth of violence and addiction and depression and ugly racism and misogyny that went on behind the closed doors of suburban white families’ homes of the 1950s. 

We have always tried to hide who we are.

Our projected images and protected selves are not new, but they continue to make us lonelier and more disconnected from each other and God.

Because we desire to be loved for all of who we are, not just for the carefully curated images we see fit for public consumption. God searches and knows us, even the ugly parts of us. We are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Be brave enough to tell the truth about who you are, and seek the truth about others. Even the darkness is not dark to God. Bring what you hide into the light. It gives other people around you permission to do the same. Your relationships will be far richer for it. 

2. The second promise you made was to walk in the spirit of Jesus. In other words, be unpopular.

Walking in the spirit of Jesus is not easy. Jesus made people angry. He broke all the rules, and surrounded himself with all the wrong people. Jesus moved into the neighborhood and embraced the losers. Jesus welcomed the alien; the immigrant; the brown; the black; the refugee; the stranger; the leper; the outcast. Jesus embraced the poor. Jesus healed the sick, touched the untouchables, set the captives free. Jesus showed us with his flesh how to treat each stranger as a piece of ourselves we do not yet know. 

Don’t strive to be a good Christian, strive to be a follower of Jesus. Be agents of God’s love and Justice, not agents of social expectations. It takes no special bravery to be a polite church-going Christian in this Christian-centric culture, but walking in the spirit of Jesus means risking it all.

3. The third promise you made was to grow in your faith. In other words, be unpopular.

Joining a spiritual community is not cool. Join one anyway. Some of you may think church, if you’re being honest, is a little boring, or irrelevant. You are wrong. Places like this save lives and mend hearts. So find a place like it. Not because your parents want you to. Find a place like this wherever you go for the sake of your own survival. And not the survival of your mortal soul. Please. A God that would send you to some firey pit to suffer because you don’t worship the right way is no God I would worship. 

Find a church like this one because there are very few places that will move you to awe despite your anger, confusion and depression over the state of the world and God's seeming refusal to fix it. Find a church because of the people who show up. These will be the people you can count on to show you what God’s face looks like. These will be the people who will show up with casseroles and cards and macabre humor when you need reminders that you will survive because they did, too. They will wipe your tears. They will celebrate your marriage and your babies. They will be there when there’s an illness or an addiction or a divorce and a death. They will offer forgiveness. They will keep you alive.

4. You promised to witness to the needed work in the world. In other words, be unpopular.

Look around you. This world is a hot, hot mess. The needed work is healing. You have a part in that. Sometimes the world’s healing will require your discomfort. It might even involve breaking the law.

In our scripture reading from today, Jesus breaks the law. He offers bread to those who aren’t supposed to eat it because people are hungry. He heals a man even though the law says not to because the man is dying. He witnesses in anger the hardened hearts of those in authority. “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” They are silent.

Your job is to be loud when others are silent.

Too often we are told that baby Jesus, meek and mild, is the one we should worship, instead of Rabbi Jesus, rebellious and righteous. Choose the latter. 

The retired soccer star Abby Wambach said in a graduation speech at Barnard College last month:

Like all little girls, I was taught to be grateful. I was taught to keep my head down, stay on the path, and get my job done. I was (freaking) Little Red Riding Hood.

You know the fairy tale: It’s just one iteration of the warning stories girls are told the world over. Little Red Riding Hood heads off through the woods and is given strict instructions: Stay on the path. Don’t talk to anybody. Keep your head down hidden underneath your Handmaid’s Tale cape.

And she does… at first. But then she dares to get a little curious and she ventures off the path. That’s of course when she encounters the Big Bad Wolf and all hell breaks loose. The message is clear: Don’t be curious, don’t make trouble, don’t say too much or BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN.

I stayed on the path out of fear, not of being eaten by a wolf, but of being cut, being benched, losing my paycheck.

If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing it would be this:

“Abby, you were never Little Red Riding Hood; you were always the wolf.”

…. I decided that the most important thing for me to say to you is this:

……WE. ARE. THE. WOLVES.

In 1995, wolves were re-introduced into Yellowstone National Park after being absent for seventy years.

In those years, the number of deer had skyrocketed because they were unchallenged, alone at the top of the food chain. They grazed away and reduced the vegetation, so much that the river banks were eroding.

Once the wolves arrived, they thinned out the deer through hunting. But more significantly, their presence changed the behavior of the deer. Wisely, the deer started avoiding the valleys, and the vegetation in those places regenerated. Trees quintupled in just six years. Birds and beavers started moving in. The river dams the beavers built provided habitats for otters and ducks and fish. The animal ecosystem regenerated. But that wasn’t all. The rivers actually changed as well. The plant regeneration stabilized the river banks so they stopped collapsing. The rivers steadied—all because of the wolves’ presence.

See what happened here?

The wolves, who were feared as a threat to the system, turned out to be its salvation.

My beloved First Church youth: Be the wolves. Threaten the system, and you will be its salvation. You cannot escape from the power of Love no matter what you do or say, so be unpopular on God’s behalf. Risk telling the truth about who you are so you can uncover the truth about others. Don’t settle for being a “good Christian”…follow The Way of Jesus instead. Go to church, not because it’s expected of you, but because it will save your life. Do not let the hardness of other people’s hearts harden your’s. Break the rules, stretch out your hands and heal. 

You can help save the whole world.

Finally, some people say you can never come home again. That’s a lie. Your home is always here in this place.  I love you. God loves you. God loves everyone else, too. If you need a reminder of these truths, you can always come home again.

Pastor Robin.

​

Preached on May 27, 2018
Memorial Day Sunday 
by Rev. Robin Bartlett
at First Church in Sterling, MA
Sermons are better seen.

What the world needs is more “Born from Above Love.”

I was in New York City yesterday! I brought Cecilia there to celebrate her turning 12. I got to watch a dear friend of mine from my high school in New Hampshire, Geno, in his Broadway debut. He and I sang my first duet in a medley from Les Mis at Rundlett Junior High School. So, I’m just saying, my big break may be next. I won’t forget you.

“Come From Away” is the remarkable true story of a small town that welcomed the whole world. Gander, New Foundland is a town the size of Sterling where 38 planes were diverted on September 11, 2001 when the United States closed its airspace for the first time in history. 

The people of Gander saved the whole world that day. The size of the population of the town nearly doubled when the planes landed. 7,000 confused, angry, terrified “plane people” from all over the world were put up in people’s homes and schools and community centers. Stores in the town stripped their shelves to bring the “plane people” toiletries, diapers, sanitary products for women, and snacks. 

The citizens of Gander made three meals a day for the plane people for four days, gave them air mattresses and hand-me-down clothing and showers, tried to communicate in languages not their own, kept the animals stowed in the bottom of the planes alive including a pregnant Bonobo, got the passengers phones so that they could desperately call home, comforted the bereaved and terrified once the plane people realized what was happening back in the United States, distracted them with jokes, sang karaoke and danced with them in the town bar, found places for Jews and Muslims and Christians to pray together, found translators for the multiple languages spoken, and generally just opened their homes and hearts to strangers from all over the world. One of the cast members said, the show “is not about the sadness of September 11th, it’s about the goodness that came out of it.” 

Look to the helpers.

This was my favorite scene: a frightened man from Africa on a bus with his wife in rural Newfoundland, being taken to who-knows-where from a plane that landed far from its destination. They come to a camp full of people from Gander in Salvation Army uniforms, which looks to the frightened man simply like a sea of soldiers in the darkness. 

The bus driver stops, and motions for the passengers to get off the bus. The frightened man doesn’t move. He does not understand the bus driver’s language. He does not trust him. The bus driver thinks quick, and points to the Bible that the man’s wife is clutching. She hands it to him nervously. The bus driver doesn’t know the language the Bible is written in, but he figures the chapters and verses are the same. He flips to Philippians and points at chapter 4, verse 6. “Be anxious for nothing,” it says. Now they speak the same language. Pentecost. Relieved, the frightened man gets off the bus.

The people of Gander, New Foundland saved the whole world on September 11th. Like the fire fighters who rushed to the burning remains of the world trade center to pull bodies out of the rubble with their bare hands, the people of Gander, New Foundland heard God calling in the night saying “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And the people of Gander answered “Here am I. Send me.” 

When Jesus talks about heavenly things, I think this is what he means. You and I have a big part to play in the world’s salvation. When there is tragedy, you and I need to be the good. We need not just “look for the helpers”, but BE the helpers. 

Most of us are just far too comfortable. We are distracted. We are too concerned with our own safety. We are mostly disconnected from the very real tragedy of the mass dehumanization of God-imaged people that is playing out before our eyes right now in our own country. 

We make Facebook posts demanding players stand for the flag at a Football game, and call that patriotism. We go to church occasionally on a Sunday and call that Christianity. 

Just because we’re sitting in a garage doesn’t make us a car.

Wilber Rees writes this poem called “Three Dollars’ Worth of God”:
I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please. 
Not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. 
I don’t want enough of God to make me love my enemy or pick beets with a migrant. 
I want ecstasy, not transformation. 
I want warmth of the womb, not a new birth. 
I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. 
I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.

I think Nicodemus, our Pharisee in the Gospel text, is maybe hoping for $3 worth of God when he probes Jesus with these questions:

How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born again?

Nicodemus doesn’t get the bargain basement God as an answer, he gets the expensive one.

Jesus tells him that you can’t see the kingdom of God without being “born from above.” You need to be born, he says, of the water and the spirit. Born again.

Now I know that when some of us hear the term “born again,” we get itchy. I know I do. We think of the person we all know who won’t stop talking about getting saved by Jesus; who makes us uncomfortable at parties.

But being “born from above” simply means waking up, again and again, to the reality that we are all connected. Being born from above means behaving as though we are descendants of heaven…the place where all are welcome and that all means all…where everyone has enough, where we speak the same language to call on the name of the Beloved. 

Being born again means acting as though we are residents of God’s kingdom of equals where justice rolls down like waters, and peace like an ever flowing stream. 

Being born from above means knowing ourselves as tenants of the place where the meek are blessed, the poor are lifted up on the thrones of the almighty, the religiously persecuted are given a safe place to pray, the sick are healed, and the outsiders are brought in, where all are fed….where all are forgiven.

Being “born from above” simply means knowing one another by God’s name for us ALL, which is “Beloved.”

I remember reading a blog post years ago by Glennon Doyle that said something like, “The first time you’re born, you look around the room and identify the people in it as your family. The second time you’re born, the whole world is your family. Christianity isn’t about joining a club, it’s about recognizing that we are all in the same club. Every last one of us.”

We need to be born again EVERY DAY. We can never be born enough, e.e. cummings says.

The Gospel of John reminds us that God so loves the world that God shows us The Way to save it. God sends us peace and hope and faith and Love, in the form of a human person. God sends The Way to salvation, and tells us it’s LOVE. We know from watching Jesus that The Way involves our bodies. If we want to save ourselves and the whole world with us, we have to put some serious skin in the game. If we’re not making Love tangible and real, it’s not Love. It’s just $3 worth of God.

It is Memorial day weekend. And today we honor those who died to save.

Like the prophet Isaiah, our military hear a call to serve. “Whom shall I send?” The Lord asks, and “who will go for us?” 

“Here am I,” they all answered. “Send me.”

Our veterans know about agape love: which is not a feeling, but a sacred duty to keep one another alive, regardless of rank or status, culture or creed. That is what it means to be a citizen of heaven. There is no greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. That is sacrificial love. That is born from above love.

Our veterans are here today, honoring the sacrifice of their friends. 

Our Sterling firefighters are also here today.

Chief Hurlbut makes sure our firefighters are here every year on memorial day in their dress uniforms, sitting in the front row with characteristic stoicism and reverence. Last year on memorial day, I asked who in the room believed in the power of love to make my point in the CLIMAX of the sermon, and everyone in the whole church raised their hands high except the firefighters. They were simply maintaining their dignity. But I said, teasing: “Look around, everyone here believes in love! Except the firefighters! They aren’t raising their hands!”

But the truth is, these guys hear the call to Love every single day. And every day they answer, “here I am. Send me.” They don’t just believe in the power of Love, they ARE the power of love. They rush to the scenes of accidents and fires and drug overdoses and medical emergencies. They run to the scenes most people are running away from. 

They hold precious lives in their hands not stopping to inquire whether or not the victim is worthy. Our firefighters know about agape love: which is not a feeling, but a sacred duty to keep one another alive, regardless of rank or status, culture or creed. That is what it means to be a citizen of heaven. That’s born from above love.

Many of us say that we would die for our children. But some among us volunteer to die for other people’s children. Our military; our firefighters; our police; our first responders…they know on a visceral level that the whole world is our family. That’s born from above Love.

So, just this past Saturday, I was talking to Chief Hurlbut. We were at a First Church funeral together, as we often are. We were making fun of each other, as we often do. He told me he watches my sermons on line. I told him that he should come to my church. He told me that he can’t because he’s Catholic and needs to go to heaven. He asked me if I was gonna make them sing “Kum Ba Yah” and hold hands today while they squirmed. (The jury’s still out on that one.)

Then I asked him what a girl has to do around here to become a chaplain for the Sterling Fire Department. A fire chaplain is a minister who works with the fire department in times of crisis. I said I was interested. He said he would “put me on the list.” 

He may have just been humoring me.

But I got really excited. My eyes widened at the prospect of a walkie talkie and a reflective vest. ("cccchhhhhhhhhhh…this is Chaplain Bartlett to Chief Hurlbut, do you copy?”) 

(I’m pretty sure I don’t get to have either one of those things.)

“What does the job entail?” I asked.

“All you have to do,” the chief said, ‘is answer the phone. That’s it. Even if I call you in the middle of the night. Just answer the phone. And then you just need to show up and keep the people calm while we take care of putting out the fires.”

That’s it. Answer the call and show up.

Beloved, some of us are not the kind of people that run into burning buildings, or out onto a battlefield. I know I’m not. But there are so many ways to lay down our lives.

Sometimes all you have to do is answer the call and show up. So if you want to risk transformation. If you want a new birth. If you want enough God to disturb your sleep: Answer Love’s call in the night, whatever that looks like for you. Say “Here I am, Lord. Send me.” And then show up. Bring snacks if you think of it. That’s all there is to it.

The world is on fire, so please don’t wait.

Be brave. Be kind. Act as though you are already citizens of heaven. That’s what saves the whole world.

Amen.

Sermon preached on Sunday, May 13, 2018
at First Church in Sterling, MA
by Rev. Robin Bartlett
with help from the "Aging Gracefully" Group and Al Long, who won the auction sermon topic.

It is Treasures of the Community auction weekend, So I thought today would be a good day to preach the Treasures of the Community auction winning sermon from last year. This sermon is worth a lot of money. I don’t know exactly how much Al Long paid for this, but probably somewhere in the vicinity of one million dollars.

Al has been a participant for a long time in the “aging gracefully” group here at the church that meets twice a month on Thursday mornings and is led by Barb Dumont. He wanted me to preach on the collected wisdom of the group, because he thinks we all have something to learn from this group of elders aged sixty something to 101.

Please won’t you pray with me…

Mother’s day is a hard day for many. 

Amid all of the new moms with cherubic babies just born or just baptized, and soccer moms, and moms of teenagers godblessyouall, and proud grandmas who get to return the kids to their parents whenever they want, and mothers getting ready to plaster on lipstick and a smile and shove their small rambunctious children into a booth at brunch even though some of them would probably rather be on a massage table on a beach in Fiji (which you all richly deserve, of course):

In this room sits mothers who worry every day that they are failing at motherhood.

In this room sits mothers whose children have died, and mothers who have been separated from their children.

And mothers who have ambivalent relationships with their children.

And children and adults whose mothers have died.

In this room sits single parents and widowed parents.

And people taking care of aging mothers and adult children at the same time.

Women who have miscarried or aborted pregnancies.

Folks who were raised by emotionally unavailable and abusive mothers. Folks who were raised without a mother.

People who desperately wish to be mothers and aren’t yet.

And women who never got to fulfill that wish.

And on and on.

“My main gripe about Mother’s Day,” Ann Lamott says, “is that it feels incomplete and imprecise. The main thing that ever helped mothers was other people mothering them; a chain of mothering that keeps the whole shebang afloat. I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, my own best friends’ mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing. And we are all mothers.

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother’s Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture’s bad people and behavior. You want to give me chocolate and flowers? Great. I love them both. I just don’t want them out of guilt, and I don’t want them if you’re not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children. But if you are going to include everyone, then make mine something like M&M’s, and maybe flowers you picked yourself, even from my own garden, the cut stems wrapped in wet paper towels, then tin foil and a waxed-paper bag from my kitchen drawers. I don’t want something special. I want something beautifully plain. Like everything else, it can fill me only if it is ordinary and available to all.”

This place and these people right here is part of the chain of mothering that keeps the whole shebang afloat.  Valarie Kaur says “we are birthing a future where love is a public ethic.” That’s our definition of motherhood.

Jesus teaches us that we are one in the family of God. Jesus teaches us that because we belong to God, we belong to each other. Jesus radically reconstitutes the human family to include all of humanity. And then Jesus demands that we love one another as we are loved by God. Meister Eckhart says that like Mary, we are all called to be mothers of God, for God is always waiting to be born. If we are doing it right, we are all mothers birthing more love into the world.

M&Ms for EVERYONE!!

This is the last day of the Easter season, the Sunday before Pentecost. Ascension was Thursday…the day in which Jesus ascends to heaven to sit at the right hand of the father.
 
It is significant that on ascension day Jesus officially leaves us alone to fend for ourselves down here, leaving us with the tools we need, if only we would remember what they are. This is the day we are supposed to remember who we are: protectors of one another, nurturers of the Way of Love, birthers of a new heaven and a new earth.

The reading from the Gospel of John we heard today is in the lectionary every ascension Sunday. In it, we get to overhear Jesus praying before his arrest. 

Jesus doesn’t pray very often in scripture. He prays with action, with his body—he heals and feeds and serves. So when Jesus prays with words, we sit up and take notice. In fact, we take it so seriously the few times that he prays in scripture that we pray his prayer every Sunday: the Lord’s prayer.

This prayer is different. In it, Jesus isn’t teaching us to pray, he’s praying for his disciples. Jesus prays at table so that the disciples can hear him, which is so tender. “The words that you gave to me I have given to them,” he says to God.” “I pray that they are one as we are one.”

(I picture the bedsides I have sat next to as a parent lay dying, praying that the holy words of Love they have passed down to their children abide. “God, the words that you gave me I have given to them. I pray they will take care of each other when I’m gone.”)

We also read a different ascension story this morning from 2nd Kings in the Hebrew Bible. Elisha is a follower of the prophet Elijah. Elisha knows that Elijah is about to be taken up to heaven in a whirlwind. Over and over again, Elijah assures Elisha that though he is ascending, he will be with him always. “As the Lord lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” 

(I picture the bedsides I have sat next to as a loved one lay dying, adult children saying to parents, “it is OK to go, as long as I live, you will always be with me. I was listening.”)

When I met with the Aging Gracefully group on Thursday, I asked them to mother us on this day: to pass down holy words of love to the family of God. I asked them to pray an extended prayer for us as Jesus prayed. I asked that I be allowed to overhear just as the disciples overheard Jesus. It was a surprisingly hard task, as they don’t yet think of themselves as “wise ones.”

Barb and I asked them a series of questions. 

First, we asked what the significant adults in their lives passed down to them. They talked about the morality they “caught” not through words, but through their parents’ and grandparents’ actions: the value of hard work, honesty and integrity. 

They learned from their parents to keep their noses clean, to be on time or early, the importance of religion, the importance of family, the importance of saving money and giving it away.

And the group also talked about the prejudices that they learned from parents and grandparents: hatred for Catholics and Italians and French Catholics, Jews and black folks. These lessons were passed down both subtly and explicitly, and they were toxic, and scaffolded by the culture around them.

“The churches never preached against racial and religious hatred and separation,” one of our elders said. “In fact, the churches exacerbated it.”

Our job in every generation is to sift for gold: love amidst the grains of sand of prejudice and hate.

I asked our Aging Gracefully group what holy words of wisdom they had to pass down to younger generations:

One of our elders feels overwhelmed with sadness by the racism that causes immigrants to be treated like dirt, that causes black people to be arrested at Starbucks or shot by police. She says, “We know from science that every single one of us on earth shares the same genes. We are family. We need to step up to the task of making the world better, and making it true that we are all God’s people, answerable to each other.” 

Another said: “Stories matter. We pass on stories. Tell your stories. Stuff happens in your life that you have no control over. You still have choices. Pick a community that you feel a part of: where you know the police man and the fire fighter. Stay close to your family.”

And another said: “I value this place so much. What I want to say to my great grandchildren and grandchildren and to all the children is to ‘pay attention to what is going on at First Church in Sterling because something very important is going on right here that I am a part of. Keep going, keep listening, keep acting.’”

Another said: “Seek out community. Seek out a place where you feel valued and loved and can give love. Be in a small group that talks about significant things, personal things, worries, priorities, how you live. Show up. Be present. Be fully present to the person standing in front of you. Listen well, ask questions. Don’t talk so much. Do things that are outside your comfort zone. Be with people who are different from how you see yourself. Try new things. There is so much energy in having made the effort.”

Another said:  “The best time to have conversations with your grandkids is in the car. Tell them that when things seem terrible, ‘time will tell you more. Give it time. Time lets you see things in a different way. Keep your confidences. Be trustworthy. Nurture your spirit. Find what comforts you, and what helps you cope spiritually.”

I got the best answers of all when I asked our aging gracefully group what they wished people had told them when they were younger.

Here’s what they said:
Get counseling
Be more planful vs. reactive/reactionary
Be flexible
Buy your own home. Don’t rent. 
Put down roots. Find a community you can feel part of. Make connections. Value the connections you have.
“I wished early on that I was told it was valuable to fail. I am a perfectionist raised by a perfectionist. Life is easier if failure is part of your repertoire,” 
One elder who will remain nameless said: “Yes. I tell the folks at water color group I am a better artist than you because I have failed more than you have failed.”

Finally I asked, what do you still have to learn? Here were the answers:

“I am always learning. Life has taught me I am not as smart as I think I am.”
“I have to talk less and listen more.”
“I have to learn to ask better questions.”
“I have to learn love for self, STILL.”
“I have to learn from folks younger than me to take more risks; to be more spontaneous; to live in the moment.”
“I need to learn to stop planning ahead and stop living in the past.”
“I still wish I knew how to care for others better.”

We are birthing a future where love is a public effort with the help of our elders.

I am going to close with a poem that Don Wilson wrote about Aging Gracefully.

Straight-back Chairs by Don Wilson
Let us sit on straight back chairs,
not too comfortable, not comfy so--
let us sit, spine erect,
feet flat, knees bent
elbows resting lightly by our sides.

Let us talk of cabbages and kings
or other things
that matter more to us,
we thinkers.

Let us wonder, ponder and explore
what living means and
what we do
that matters 
in the great scheme of things.

And lets turn our senses on,
look sharp and hear,
not just to listen,
but hear the intention,
the thought behind the words.

Let us be heard 
when we, too,
have things to say,
yet stumble when we convey 
our inner selves
out loud.

Proud, we hold heads high,
chin up, dry-eyed,
unless a cry escapes
and one tear
rolls down our cheek

so someone gets a peek inside
to what we hide.

​Amen.

​

Preached on April 29, 2018, New Member Sunday
at First Church in Sterling, MA
by Rev. Robin Bartlett
​Sermons are better heard.

“Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. 21The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”

Our worship of God is limited only by our inability to embrace the people we are least inclined to love.

This is a poem called Accident, Mass. Ave. by Jill McDonough. I have edited out the swear words because I never swear.

I stopped at a red light on Mass. Ave.
in Boston, a couple blocks away
from the bridge, and a woman in a beat-up
old Buick backed into me. Like, cranked her wheel,
rammed right into my side. I drove a Chevy
pickup truck. It being Boston, I got out
of the car yelling, swearing at this woman,
a little woman, whose first language was not English.
But she lived and drove in Boston, too, so she knew,
we both knew, that the thing to do
is get out of the car, slam the door
as hard as you (bleeping) can and yell things like What the (bleep)
were you thinking? You (bleepin’) blind? What (the bleep)
is going on? Jesus Christ! So we swore
at each other with perfect posture, unnaturally angled
chins. I threw my arms around, sudden
jerking motions with my whole arms, the backs
of my hands toward where she had hit my truck.
But she hadn’t hit my truck. She hit
the tire; no damage done. Her car
was fine, too. We saw this while
we were yelling, and then we were stuck.
The next line in our little drama should have been
Look at this (bleepin’) dent! I’m not paying for this!
I’m calling the cops, lady. Maybe we’d throw in a
You’re in big trouble, sister, or I just hope for your sake
there’s nothing wrong with my (bleepin’) suspension, that
sort of thing. But there was no (bleepin’) dent. There
was nothing else for us to do. So I
stopped yelling, and she looked at the tire she’d
backed into, her little eyebrows pursed
and worried. She was clearly in the wrong, I was enormous,
and I’d been acting as if I’d like to hit her. So I said
Well, there’s nothing wrong with my car, nothing wrong
with your car … are you OK? She nodded, and started
to cry, so I put my arms around her and I held her, middle
of the street, Mass. Ave., Boston, a couple blocks from the bridge.
I hugged her, and I said We were scared, weren’t we?
and she nodded and we laughed.

This is revolutionary love. The fear overcome by wonder (“are you OK?”), the embrace, the recognition of each other’s wound, the desire to tend it, the hilarity that followed (if the love revolution is joyless drudgery, I want no part of it). 

If we are going to learn how to love as God loves, we need to be bold enough to flip the script we were given, especially when we’re scared.

Our scripture, as usual, beckons us to be fearless. “There is no fear in love,” it says. To love as God loves, we must cultivate what Sister Simone Campbell calls a “holy curiosity” for the people we most fear.

When John the evangelist, who writes our letter from 1st John, urges us to love, he means the kind of love that flips the fear script. The kind that calls us to use our bodies not to harm, but to embrace. The kind of love that demands that we see every human we encounter as God with skin on. 

“Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” his letter to the early Christian community says. Love one another. Every single other. Each is an opportunity know God better than we could ever know God on our own.

Remember from last week that John’s letter was written around 990-110 AD, and aims to explain to the early Christian community in Ephesus why it is significant that Jesus came in the actual flesh. That Jesus came as God with skin on to SHOW US that Love is not something we feel, but something we do with our bodies. God put skin in the game because we just weren’t getting it.

We thought following God meant following the rules. We thought following God meant surrounding ourselves with people just like us so we could keep each other honest and pure. 

And then God blew our minds by sending us Jesus. Jesus, who broke all the rules, and surrounded himself with all the wrong people. Jesus, who moved into the neighborhood and used his BODY to embrace the people we most fear. Jesus, who went to the borders and welcomed the alien; the refugee; the stranger; the outcast. Jesus, who embraced the poor. Jesus, who healed the sick, who touched the untouchables, who set the captives free. Jesus who showed us with his flesh how to treat each stranger as a piece of ourselves we do not yet know. The word made flesh.

And so it is a great honor to welcome 38 more opportunities to know God in the flesh. Katy, Walt, Larry, Liza, Cate, Matt, Madelyn, Vinnie, Rachael, Matt, Piper, Kit in utero, Betsey, Kathy, Susan, Alan, Pat, Sarah, Cecilia, Liam, Amanda, Dan, Andy, Nathaniel, David, Susan, Peter, Shana, Delaney, Lilian, Adeline, Nancy, Claudia, Bob, Dave, Betty, Ron, and Shawn:

WE ARE SO HUMBLED YOU HAVE CHOSEN TO CALL US HOME. Getting to know you will be our most important spiritual practice as a congregation. You contain a piece of God we do not yet know, and so we want to know you. 

We bless you. Joining a church is a profoundly risky thing to do. You are flipping the fear script, and we honor your bravery.

First of all, it’s counter-cultural these days to join a church. You are joining a church in the middle of the great American mass exodus from organized religion. Every statistic says you shouldn’t be here today, especially if you are under, well, 60. So congratulations for being a rebel, and joining up with an organized religion NOT BEFORE it was cool, but AFTER it was cool. There must be extra hipster points for that. If you want, I will give you things to say when your friends and family question your life choices. Like, “yes, it’s a church, but it’s not that kind of church.”

Second, joining a church is an emotionally and spiritually risky thing to do. It is terrifying to trust a flawed human institution with your tender hearts. Many of you are joining us after being irreparably harmed by other religious institutions, or because you feel lost at sea and need an anchor, or because you are deep in mourning. 

You are heroic just for dipping a toe in the water, much less diving right in. You are taking a huge leap of faith, into a future yet unwritten.

I am blessed to have gotten to know each and every one of you in different ways. And I know this: you are all here for profound reasons that some of you have trouble even putting into words. The tears you so often shed tell more of the story than words ever could. 

I suspect you are all here for the same reason the rest of us are: because of our heart’s deepest longing to be known, and to be loved exactly as we are. A longing to belong. Thank you, new members, for trusting us with such a tender job. Congregation, let’s do our best to not screw it up.

I want to say two things to all of you about what a church is. But I’m going to start by telling you what a church is not.

Our newest members often tell me that they came to church for the first time because of our outreach and educational programs for children and adults. We’re so glad we have so many entrance points for engagement. But a church is not the programs. 

Some of you walked in for the first time because of the beauty of the historic New England church on the green. This building is no doubt beautiful. But if it burned down tomorrow, we would still be Church. A church is not the building.

A lot of our newest members tell me they came to this church after reading or watching my sermons on line, and they continue to come every week “for me.” Thank you. I am clearly charming and hilarious and very humble. Megan is even more so. But the church is definitely not the pastors.

Some of you come because you love the worship service. We sing your favorite hymns, we are liberal enough in our theology to embrace you and your doubts, but we still wear robes and have a little bit of tasteful stained glass, and we don’t have screens and rock bands. But the church is not its “style,” or even its beliefs. 

The church is the people. These people. All of these people, the people we serve in the community, and most especially the people who have yet to come through these doors. I want to invite you today to get to know and love these people, and let them get to know and love you. “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” God has given us one another as a gift. Don’t squander that gift. 

If you came for me, for the music, for pub theology, for the coffee, that’s great…but make the reason you stay the people.

Also, a word of caution: these people may disappoint you sometimes because they are people. I will certainly disappoint you, especially if you have me up on a higher pedestal than the rest. Stick around when that happens to see how God redeems the mess. Here we believe in LOVE, even when we fail to act like it. If love hasn’t won yet, it’s not the end.

Another word of caution: lots of people join churches that they perceive to be full of like-minded people, so they can be around people who agree with them. That is so comforting and safe. We are not a group of like minded people. Even better than that: we are a group of like-hearted people. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. John Wesley reminds us that we need not think alike to love alike. We share the same heart, which is so much better and more edifying than sharing the same mind. Make no mistake about it: this kind of loving, ideologically and theologically diverse community is what will save the world.

Perhaps most importantly of all, the church is the mission. You’ve joined these people on a mission to love the hell out of this world. Show up for it. Who was it that said that 90% of life was just showing up? Show up as often as you can, with your full self, blessed and broken. You will be better equipped to lead the love revolution with food for the spirit, with hands to hold, and with a whole lot of practice.

So beloved, take risks. Fear not. Wonder more. Recognize and tend the wound in others and in yourselves. Remember that we can do hard things together. Trust in the character and generosity of people, because often they rise to the occasion. Use this church as a training ground for God’s reign of Love on earth, and then go out and enact it in the world.

Love the way God loves you: which always means putting some serious skin in the game. 

Welcome. We knew you as Beloved before you even arrived.

Amen.

​

a sermon preached by Rev. Robin Bartlett
on Good Shepherd Sunday
April 22, 2018
at First Church in Sterling
sermons are meant to be seen/heard.

Please won’t you pray with me.

We know love by this: that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. (1 John 3: 16)

Valarie Kaur says that revolutionary love is defined by “seeing no stranger.” Jesus taught us to love in just that way. He defined love for us by boundary crossing—eating with the leper and the tax collector, giving the shunned and marginalized woman at the well something to drink, touching the untouchable, healing the sick, healing separation across religious difference, healing our separation from God. And finally by laying down his life: going to the cross to die, and forgiving the enemies who killed him with his last breaths.

So here’s how we can practice revolutionary love as Jesus taught us:

See no stranger, and lay down your life for one another. Every single other. 

Easier said then done, right? We teach our kids “stranger danger”! And of course we want to safeguard our community from people who might wish us and our children harm. So we do CORI checks, and we make plans for vigilant door locking and disruptive persons policies. We are terrified to lay down our lives….even sometimes for the people we love, much less for people we don’t know. 

Love as Jesus taught is simply not safe or easy. And, man, that stinks because we so desperately want to be safe and easy. Sometimes, revolutionary Love is uncomfortable at best, and dangerous at worst.

But Love also makes us brave.

On Wednesday, we gathered at Eat Pray Learn with 70 other people from inside and outside the church, led by our own beloved and brilliant Peder Pedersen on the moral crisis of climate-change. 

There was one man at the gathering from outside the church community who kind of caught your pastors off guard, because he was proudly and vocally against the premise of the presentation. He may have come just to be a gadfly. As a result, it was one of the more contentious discussions we have had at Eat Pray Learn in polite New England. I mean, we had less contentious discussions on Islam and race and being gay and Christian! Seriously! 

So Megan and I were kind of anxious.

Valarie Kaur said at the Revolutionary love conference we went to two weeks ago that you and I need to learn how to orient ourselves to the stranger as “a piece of me I do not yet know.” 

That’s exactly how a group of our folks oriented themselves to this man who was disagreeing with the content of the presentation. In essence, a group of our church members walked right up to him at the end and said, “Hi! You must be a piece of me I do not yet know!”

And then they invited the man to church. When he looked surprised and skeptical and said he was “agnostic”, they said, “GREAT!” 

Charlie Gray told him a story that he has told us before:

“This congregation has conservatives and liberals in it, believers and non-believers, people who believe climate change is real and those who don’t, and it’s great! We love each other! Last year, when I was still deciding whether to become a member of this church even though I’m an atheist, I realized that the church had changed me. And then I hugged a Republican, and I liked it!”

The man visiting us just looked confused. But we all beamed with pride, and nodded at each other vigorously. (We are kind of weird, let’s be honest.)

But, we know love by this.

I have a confession to make before you and God. I have been a bad liberal, and I humbly repent. 

I watched the Roseanne Show on Friday. For those of you who don’t know, there was a lot of left-y backlash and calls for boycotts—particularly by my clergy colleagues—of the new Roseanne show because Roseanne Barr supports Trump. Also people just plain hate Roseanne universally, across the political spectrum. She’s a divisive character, to be sure.

All that backlash made me want to watch it! 

I found the show purely heartwarming. Partly because I absolutely ADORED the original Roseanne. But also because it reminds me of us, the people who give me hope when hope is hard to find. The people who I now call home. The people here in Sterling who in so many ways remind me of my childhood home in New Hampshire. The people here in this congregation who remind me of my home in God. 

On the show re-boot, Roseanne and her sister are fighting each other. Roseanne voted for Trump because of the economy and because he “tells it like it is.” Her sister Jackie voted for Jill Stein and feels bad about it, so she walks around wearing a pink hat and a “nasty woman” t-shirt.

The two stopped talking to each other for a year after the election. They come back together in the first episode because of their shared love of Roseanne’s children and grandchildren, who have just come home to live with Roseanne and her husband Dan, trying to scrape together money to pay the bills. The grandchildren include a surly teenager, a gender-non-conforming 9 year old boy, and a black girl, all beloved. 

The first episode features all of them around the table, the sisters finally reunited. Roseanne says grace, thanking God that her son DJ came home safe from the war in Syria, and that they are all together, and for God’s love. They all bow their heads more deeply in reverent agreement, tears in all of their eyes. And then Roseanne looks at her sister Jackie pointedly and thanks God for MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, amen, and the fight starts all over again. 

It’s what Thanksgiving 2016 looked like at every dining room table in America!

Perhaps most poignant to me was the grandfather, Dan, obviously failing to understand his gender non-conforming grandson’s desire to wear sparkly dresses and make up, but giving him a knife for protection because he loves him so much he wants him to survive at his new rural school.

I laughed and wept, because I see US. I see us: our people who share a love of our collective children. Our people who don’t necessarily understand each other yet, but listen so that we might one day not just accept but AFFIRM one another. We who do the hard work of trying to see one another as a piece of ourselves. 

I see us: our folks wearing pink hats and nasty woman t-shirts on our way to the women's march and high-fiving our Trump voters on the way out the door. 

“Did you do some rabble-rousing, or what?“ one of our conservatives asked me when I came back “home” after that march was over, wearing a pink hat made for me by another one of our beloved congregants. He even looked somewhat proud, because he and I both know we are one. I know he is a piece of me. He knows I’m a piece of him. He thinks I’m misguided, but loves me anyway. I KNOW he is misguided, but I love him anyway. We share the same children, and we love the same community.

We know love by this.

John the Evangelist says in his first letter: we know love by this: that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 

John asks: How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

This epistle was written probably in Ephesus, around AD 95-110. The work was written to counter docetism, which is the belief that Jesus did not come “in the flesh”, but only as a spirit. 

The letters detail how Christians are to discern true teachers: by their ethics, and their LOVE, not just by their beliefs. In other words, if the word doesn’t become flesh, its not God’s word. If a teacher doesn’t ENACT love, they are a false prophet. They are not the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd doesn’t just talk about Love, he lays down his life for his flock.

The story of God is the story of what we say becoming WHAT WE DO. The story of God is the story of God’s WORD wearing skin and moving into the neighborhood to teach us something about what revolutionary love LOOKS LIKE FEELS LIKE SOUNDS LIKE SMELLS LIKE TASTES LIKE. Love with skin on. The One who saw no stranger taught us with his real human body what it meant to recognize one another as a piece of ourselves.

We know love by this.

There are people here that preach this scripture every day with their LIVES so much better than I ever could with my words.

Today we celebrate our congregation’s caring ministries. Today we celebrate how God’s love abides in this church. Love with skin on.

Today we celebrate the good work of the called to care team: people who see their brothers and sisters’ need, who shut up and listen, who show up and hold a hand. Love with skin on.

Today we lift up the good work of the diaconate and the caregivers. We honor the simple act of looking into the eyes of hungry people coming to a table of hope and saying each person’s name: “Jon, this is the bread of life for YOU. This is the cup of salvation, poured out for YOU.” Love with skin on.

Today we lift up the good work of the diaconate who see brothers and sisters in need in our community and write checks for rent and food and gas and oil, and don’t ask questions. Love with skin on.

Today we celebrate our meal givers: people who see a brother and a sister in need and help them to taste and see that the Lord is good. Love with skin on.

Today we lift up the people of our church who hear about a hospital stay or a special birthday or a new baby or a death, and send a card so that we can feel how seen and known and loved we are. Love with skin on.

We know love by this.

Valarie Kaur taught us at the revolutionary love conference that the birthplace of empathy is wonder.

She acknowledged that we are programmed evolutionarily to fear one another and to keep ourselves safe. We can’t help it. We’re only human, and our brains our made this way. 

When we see someone walking down the street that looks different or strange, we can’t stop ourselves from the immediate unease that comes when we encounter difference. We can’t rewire our brains to remove the fight or flight response.

But we can choose what our next thought is. We can practice asking ourselves, “I wonder if they have children. I wonder what they are having for dinner tonight. I wonder why he looks like a boy and he wants to wear a sparkly skirt. I wonder what his religion teaches him about love. I wonder what keeps her awake at night.” 

Just by wondering about those we have not yet wondered about, we are able to see the wound that needs tending, Kaur says. 

So my dear friends if you seek to follow the One who teaches us to see no stranger, wonder more. 

Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God;  and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.

And this is his commandment, that we should believe in REVOLUTIONARY LOVE and love one another, just as he has commanded us. 

Bless all of you who tend to the wound in yourselves and the wound in others, who love one another just as God has commanded us. Thank you for showing us the way to be brave; the way to wonder; the way to be God with skin on. 

We know love by this. 

Amen.

A Sermon preached on Easter Sunday, April 1, 2018
by Rev. Robin Bartlett
at First Church in Sterling, MA
Sermons are better heard.

I know what some of you are thinking. “Oh boy. It’s Easter Sunday and this well-meaning and extremely charming preacher is about to tell me a complete fabrication of unlikely events; an ancient fairy tale. She can’t possibly believe something that defies science and logic. Besides, I only came this morning because my mom made me come and I wanted an excuse to wear this beautiful pastel dress before I binge on Cadbury mini eggs and wine. No matter what this obviously wicked smart and humble preacher has to say, I know this is true: the dead don’t rise.” 

Well, you’re right. I’m here to disabuse you of that notion. The dead do indeed rise.

And you, too, will rise again.

What if I told you that the Easter story is as much about Mary Magdalene’s rising as it is about Jesus’? Mary, whose dream for the world just died inside of her when her savior was crucified; Mary, whose darkest night ended with her getting up again?

Jesus’ disciples had spent the night before in the upper room hiding and grieving; the dream they had inside of them crushed. They mourned with the keening wails of a mother crying for her dead son at the foot of the cross: the wailing of a mother who watched her son suffer, and knows she cannot live in this cruel world without her baby boy in it. “I died the day she died,” someone said to me once about losing her child. The disciples died that day with Jesus.

They were also scared. That week they saw how Jesus’ ministry attracted attention. They saw how the power of love threatened those who love power. Jesus gave poor people reason to believe they had as much worth as everyone else. People who know their value aren’t easily controlled. People who see themselves as worthy of love and justice are a threat to “politics as usual.” People like that can unite to overthrow the reign of kings and tyrannical rich autocrats and congress and religious leaders. 

The message the disciples heard loud and clear from the empire on Friday was: the Love of God is not as powerful as you think it is. They saw their savior mocked and laughed at and spit on and tortured and killed by those who wished to quell the insurrection that gave the hopeless reason to hope. They watched him beg for God’s mercy, cry out in thirst, forgive them, and breathe his last gasping breath. They watched the oppressors hide his radiance in the cold dark tomb. And with that, the empire managed to crush the spirits of his followers. Their hope was locked in the tomb with him.

And so their mourning the night before wasn’t just mourning for a friend. It was the deep mourning that occurs when faith, hope and love dies. It was the mourning of people who believe they will no longer be saved; the mourning of people who believe that our brokenness will never heal. He was supposed to wipe away all tears from their faces and swallow up death forever. Instead, he, died and left them alone.

Yet, the women knew that they had no choice but to rise again that morning anyway. After all, someone had to make the casserole to bring to the wake! The men certainly weren’t going to!

In the words of Orion Mountain Dreamer’s poem, 

“It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.”

Mary Magdalene got up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and did what needed to be done. She brought Mary the mother of James and Salome along with her to the tomb. Her heart was shattered, and yet she picked up the broken pieces and rose.

They didn’t go there to witness a miracle. Quite the opposite. They went to do the ordinary stuff we do when someone dies, even in the midst of impossible, breath-stealing grief. We gather the documents, we call the social security office, identify the body at the morgue, go to the funeral home to purchase a headstone, we figure out the tax information and the life insurance policy, pay bills. We rise and we do what needs to be done.

Likewise, these women traveled to their friend’s tomb to anoint the body with spices, so it wouldn’t smell. “Who will roll away the stone?” They sighed, because no one wants that job, and still someone would have to do it. 

But when they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away.

And they peered inside, expecting to see a dead body. After all, the dead don’t rise! The dead just lie there, rotting from the inside: until the finality of death begins to fill up our noses with decay. 

What they saw instead was an empty tomb.

“He is raised, he is not here,” a young man dressed in white sitting on the right side said to them. The women were “alarmed,” the text says. The women were “terrified” and “amazed.” Of course they were. The dead don’t rise.

But he wasn’t there. The body was gone, and the man said that he had risen.
God’s ultimate April Fool’s joke: Ha! Why are you looking for the living God among the dead? I have risen!

That wasn’t the punchline the women were expecting. 

The women didn’t know when they got up that morning that even though they tried to bury him, his Love was a seed. He taunted his oppressors as his last act of defiance, by rising victorious from the grave, planting his Love in the disciples and watching it grow.

You see, this isn’t just the story of God’s rising. It is the story of our rising.

I’m going to be honest: our text from Mark isn’t my favorite story about the resurrection. It is the most anti-climactic of all of the Gospel accounts. It’s the shortest. It doesn’t have as much of a plot. There are two women, not three. Yes, the stone is rolled away, Jesus is not there, and some sort of angel talks to them.

But Jesus doesn’t appear to them, dirt under his fingernails, gardening like he does in the Gospel of John. And in this account, both women leave almost as soon as they get there, too scared to even tell anyone. They don’t run to tell the others, breathless; the first preachers of the good news. The women simply bear witness, get scared, and in their terror, don’t know what to do next. 

Our rising is like that too, sometimes. It is not always ecstatic, dramatic and triumphant. Our rising is often confusing, anti-climactic, terrifying, and hidden.

Our rising may just look like getting out of bed despite a broken heart and doing what needs to be done for the children. It may just look like one more day of not drinking, or one more hour digging our nails into our palm to keep from losing it. It may look like shopping for a pretty head scarf to cover our bald head even though we are weak and tired from chemo. It may look like going on that first awkward OK Cupid date after the divorce papers are filed. It may look like continuing to take the anti-depressants, hoping some day they’ll kick in. It may look like showing up in public every once in awhile even though we don’t want to; even though we are still mourning all that we have lost. It may simply be stopping to notice that a broken heart can go on beating.

In the apocryphal gnostic gospel of Mary Magdalene, thought to be written in the fifth century, it says this:
His students grieved and mourned greatly saying:

How are we to go into the rest of the world proclaiming the Good News about the Son of Humanity’s Realm? If they did not spare him, how will they ever leave us alone?

Mary arose, then, embracing them all and began to address them as her brothers and sisters saying:

Do not weep and grieve nor let your hearts remain in doubt, for his grace will be with all of you, sustaining and protecting you. Rather, let us give praise to his greatness which has prepared us so that we might become fully human.

Mary arose. And do not let your hearts remain in doubt:
We too will rise again. We are the resurrection.

So beloved, get up out of your graves.

Get up out of the tomb of despair, anger, self-doubt, self-hate, illness, fear, addiction, death, mourning, sin, separation, loneliness and isolation, broken relationships, and depression…
Roll away the stone and rise again!

We are becoming fully human by his greatness, so rise again.
God still has more to do with us, so rise again. 
Our current predicaments don’t exempt us from our purpose, so rise again. 
A broken heart still beats, so rise again.
We’re not alone, so rise again. 
This country is a HOT MESS right now so please rise again! 
The people united in God’s love can never be defeated, so rise again. 
We can do hard things, so rise again!
Hell is here on this earth, and every last person deserves to be pulled out of it, so reach out your hand and rise again!
Heaven is here on this earth too, so don’t just sit there waiting for it to manifest itself, rise again!
The power of Love will overcome the love of power, so rise again!
Healed people heal people, so rise again! 
When hopeless people start hoping, empire is destroyed, so rise again!
There is no time but now, no people but us, and no way of changing the world without turning toward each other, so rise again! 

Happy Easter, and amen.