A Sermon for Jesse Lynes
for celebration Sunday on the occasion of his baptism
by the Rev. Robin Bartlett
preached at the First Church in Sterling, MA
​June 16, 2019

Dear Jesse,

You were born to one of my dearest friends on my 43rd birthday. In addition, we share the same “godfather.” I know we have only met twice. We have been letting your mom get to know you before we do. But, you’ll soon realize you’re stuck with me and all of us. We loved you before you were born, just like God did.

On your baptism day, we do what must be a strange and confusing ritual to your baby eyes and senses, though I’m sure everything that happens in your world right now is strange and confusing:

We poured sacred waters on your head to remind you that you are connected to All That Is, and we touched you with a rose that you might live your life as a beautiful unfolding.

Speaking of roses, ever since I found out your name, every time I hear it, I break out into the Christmas carol “Lo How a rose e’er blooming, from tender stem hath sprung. Of Jesse’s lineage coming as men of old have sung.” (You’ll notice since you’re going to hang out with me a lot that I break into song all the time because I believe my life to be a musical.)

Your name, Jesse, came to your mother in a dream. She thought it was strange to dream a name, but it makes sense to me since we all know that you were your mother’s best dream. We also know now that you were a part of God’s dream. 

Did you know that Jesse was the father of a very famous King named David, who is important to both Jews and Christians? Of course you didn’t know, you’re a baby. Well, Jesus is said to be a part of Jesse’s family, too. 

I love that your name is already God’s family name. I love that everyone you’ll ever meet is a part of that same family. A stranger is just a piece of us we do not yet know. The water we blessed you with is just an outward sign of that inward grace.

Jesse, your name and your baptism is simply our way of telling you who you are:

a precious, dreamt for, worthy and beloved part of God’s family you were welcome in all along. 

Jesse, I want you to know that you were not born just to watch TV, eat, and consume products sold to you by people peddling fear.

The task of your living is growing wise. 

The reading we heard this morning says two things that I want you to know about Wisdom: 

we grow wise through joy, and 
we don’t grow wise alone.

Our book says that God created wisdom before God created anything else. 

Wisdom is like your Mama Megan. Wisdom is a Woman who plays with God.

Mama Wisdom has been there since the very beginning beside God, like a master worker. Mama Wisdom has been dancing in the ocean. Mama Wisdom has been lying in the grass staring up at the sky. Mama Wisdom has held a cedar waxwing in her hand. Mama Wisdom leads children in parachute games on the common. Mama Wisdom has been counting the stars before falling asleep at night, just like you will be on Star Island this summer as you are rocked to sleep on a rocking chair. 

Mama wisdom delights in the beauty of creation, just as we are meant to. Louise Glick says, “we see the world once, in childhood.” She’s right. You get to see a world we don’t see, and so you are already wise.

The common English Bible translates verse 30 this way: “I was having fun, smiling before him all the time, frolicking with this inhabited earth and delighting in the human race.”

Jesse, as you grow please remember that having fun is an expression of wisdom. Smile before God.

Delighting in your play; learning to laugh at what’s sublime and ridiculous…this is all part of becoming wise.

This group of people that surround you now…they will go way out of their way to have fun and make you laugh.

Once they created a bobblehead doll of me, kept it a secret, and flew it all over the world to take pictures of bobble headed me in strange and wonderful places like a crocodile’s mouth and the Dominican Republic. I broke it and Jon drilled it back together. These folks fix what is broken with joy. 

They have bouncy houses, face painters, and karaoke dj’s, throw galas and Caribbean dinners and friendship Sundays, and they just laugh a lot.

Please don’t ever think that fun and laughter is not spiritual or religious. 

Life is not all joy, dear Jesse. Life has just as much sorrow. Human pain is sometimes physical, sometimes emotional, sometimes spiritual and sometimes existential. 

Sometimes its all of those things at once. We get sick. People and institutions fail us. Things break. We struggle with meaninglessness. Someone we love dies. 

Sometimes we get hard and mean because we are in pain. 

The world can be as brutal as it is beautiful; as terrifying as it is exhilarating. 

That’s why we go to places like this. We wouldn’t survive were it not for joy, beauty, each other, and creation itself.

And we come because we can’t get wise on our own.

The vision of Mama Wisdom in Proverbs suggests that God does not create alone. No one ever does. Your mama did not create you alone, and she will not raise you alone. 

And so your baptism, Jesse, was not just a welcome into the whole world’s family, but into the family of this specific congregation, in this wonderful small town full of character and characters.

Today, on this most auspicious of all days, I want to tell you what all of us have helped God to create before you arrived; to prepare a place for you.

First, it’s important to know that this place and this collection of people didn’t start with the people in this room, and it won’t end with us either. That’s how life is…we are always the dream of the people who came before us.

This congregation has been becoming wise together in this spot since 1742. It recreated itself in 1949, when all three of the Protestant churches in Sterling decided they were better together than they were apart. They were becoming more wise: they knew they were children of the same God. They also knew that together they could do hard things: like disagree, and love one another all at the same time.

Just five years ago, I came here after the very very long and beautiful ministry of a man named Pastor Jonathan. I was really lucky to be in a place where it is OK to be exactly who you are, because these people accepted me and loved me right from the start even though I was a whackadoo liberal and some of the congregation really wasn’t. 

This group of people is not always like-minded, but they are like-hearted. 

And still, together, we expanded our welcome enough that your mama felt like she could have a place here, too. 

One day in 2017 we said out loud together FINALLY and with one voice that “love is love is love is love.” Without that declaration and affirmation, we might not have gotten to know and love you. I shudder at the thought, dear Jesse. Co-creation with God creates expansive welcome. We are getting more wise.

Jesse, I know sometimes we can only learn by seeing, so I want to show you what co-creation with like-hearted people looks like. I’m going to ask the congregation to rise in body or in spirit when I ask them to.

Please rise if you are on the

Governance Board
Ministry Leadership Teams
Diaconate
Stewardship
Nominating team

Please rise if you are the 
Clerk
Treasurer or
Moderator

Please rise if you are on the staff, or are one of the pastors at this church
Please rise if you sing in the choir

Rise if you taught or assisted in Sunday School
Helped out, cared for kids in kinderwatch
Provided childcare for events
Taught OWL
worked with our high school youth
Stand if you were a student in a Sunday School class
OWL class
homework and hang out.

Please rise if you are on the Called to Care team
Eat, Pray, Learn team
 
Saturday meals team
La Romana Mission Team
Treasures of the Community auction team
Green transformation team

Stand if you 
volunteered for IHN 
for Habitat critical home repair
Walked in the Palm Sunday promenade
Served at a community lunch
Performed in a SCT performance
Serve on the Village Green Preschool board
Helped make pies for Thanksgiving
Volunteered at Worcester fellowship
Helped with the Holly Berry brunch
Caroled on the common
 
Helped out with Eat Pray Learn or presented there
Came to Eat Pray Learn
Led the book group, participated in book group
Planned the co-ed adult retreat or women’s retreat
Went on retreat
Did yoga with Lindsay
Participated in aging gracefully
went to pub theology

Rise if you hosted a coffee hour
If you prayed for people on the prayer list or on Facebook 
Participated in meal givers
Helped bake for a collation
Brought flowers to shut ins
Made a prayer shawl
 
Stand if you are a head usher or if you ushered this year
Offered your musical gifts in worship
lay read in worship
assisted with communion
Delivered a testimonial
Had an animal or a backpack blessed
Served on the welcome team
Counted the offering
Provided flowers for the chancel table

Rise if you are here for the first time.
Now rise if you have been here your whole life.
 
Rise if you attended worship at least once this year. Now stay standing.

Look around this room, Jesse. That’s what I mean by co-creation with God.

There is a translation of a poem by Sufi mystic Rumi that says:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Jesse,
I pray you become wise. I pray you co-create something beautiful with other people and God.

I pray you learn to make good coffee, good friends, and a good and kind community. 

I do not require you to pray in a certain way. There are so many ways to kneel and kiss the ground. 

But I do pray that you find a collection of faith-filled, grace oriented people who will Love you; who will co-create with you in the spirit of Jesus, which simply means Love. 

Let the beauty you love be what you do. 

You are a part of the beauty God has dreamed for the world.

Delight in it, as we delight in you.

I love you, God loves you,

Pastor Robin

“Can these bones live?”
A sermon for Pentecost Sunday
by Rev. Robin Bartlett
preached at First Church in Sterling
June 6, 2019
​
I parked outside this morning behind a car that had a Church of the Flying Spaghetti monster sticker on it, made to look like a Christian fish. That’s a tongue in cheek symbol for atheists to poke fun of believers who worship a supernatural God. And I thought, how awesome. A church of the flying spaghetti monster parked outside the Christian church. It’s gonna take all of us to make it. And so we better learn one another’s language. Church of the flying spaghetti monster adherents need to hang out in Christian churches so we can learn each other’s language. Believers need to learn the language of non-believers. Muslims need to learn the language of Jews. Jews need to learn the language of Buddhists. White people need to learn the language of black people. Elders need to learn to speak the language of teenagers. Americans need to learn languages other than English that are already spoken here. Powerful folks need to learn the language of marginalized folks.

Did you notice what happened when we read the scripture? 

Last time I did that a few years ago on Pentecost, everyone got mad at Helen Hill, our office manager. They thought she messed up the bulletin. So I just wanted you to know that I did that on purpose, so leave Helen alone.

Last week was ascension, when we overheard Jesus praying that we all may be one. Then he left, officially, to sit at the right hand of the father, and left us down here to our own devices. He promised us that he would send us the Holy Spirit to help, but we didn’t know exactly what that would look like.

In our scripture from Acts, the day of Pentecost comes, and just like Jesus said it would, the Holy Spirit fills all the people. When the Holy Spirit enters, a transformation occurs. It’s scarier than the disciples imagined.

It involves a roaring windstorm, and a STRANGE FIRE. 

And all of a sudden, all people of the world have the presence of God inside of them, and can actually SPEAK TO ONE ANOTHER and understand one another, even though they are speaking different languages. They were speaking in tongues.

This looked and sounded just as crazy to them as it sounds to all of us.

The text says they are “perplexed.”

They look for an explanation: “maybe they are filled with new wines,” which is Bible speak for “maybe they are trashed or on something.” 

And Peter says: “That’s not possible, it’s nine in the morning.”

Peter says “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” 

It’s supposed to look like this: seeing visions. Speaking a new language so that this messed up world can become more like God’s dream for it.

It is notable that the people gathered around the disciples don’t learn to speak the disciples’ language. Instead, it’s the other way around. The Holy Spirit gives the disciples the ability to speak in the language of the international crowd who have gathered around them. 

All of a sudden, differences are stripped away and the Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, residents of Rutland, Holden, Sterling, West Boylston, Leominster, and Worcester, France, England, Syria, India, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Iraq, and the United States of America, are no longer strangers who speak strangely, they are all simply children of God. 

All of a sudden black people and brown people, transgender and cisgender people, MAGA hat wearers, and co-exist bumper sticker owners, immigrants and natives, poor people and rich people, CEOs and farmers, young people and old people…They all share the same language: 

God’s word of Love is all they know to say.

PENTECOST. The day we found our voices.

Pentecost. The birthday of the church.

God has placed us in the valley of the bones to show us why we need a re-birthday of the church TODAY.

God has placed us here
in the valley of rising health care costs and crushing student loan debt
the valley of irreversible climate change
the valley of white nationalism and ‘straight pride’ rallies 
the valley of mass shootings
the valley of poverty
the valley of meaninglessness
the valley of despair
the valley of violence
the valley of over-consumption
the valley of addiction
the valley of racism and ethnocentrism
the valley of division
the valley of hatred
the valley of demonization and dehumanization 

God asks, “mortal, can these bones live?”

We don’t know what to say to that because we think we are alone here in death valley.

We think we can pull ourselves up by our own boot straps. 
We think we are meant to be self-made and self-taught and self-righteous. 
We think we can find salvation by having a personal relationship with Jesus, 
or a personal relationship with the beach,
No need to show up for one another.
We think that we should concentrate
on self-care 
and self-actualization 
and selfies. 

We think we are meant to go it alone in the valley of the bones.

No wonder we are shouting:

“Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely!”

We are shouting into our echo chambers on a dying planet, the Good news of the Gospel choked out by the fake news on our news feeds; the language we use getting smaller and meaner. 

“Mortal, can these bones live?” God is asking.

We reply, “we just don’t know.”

And so God says: “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord….”

Speak, CHURCH, God says.

Speak the word of Love and God’s breath will enter your lungs. And you shall live. COME UP out of your GRAVES.

CHURCH: “Can these bones live?”

YES YES YES.

But only if we speak. PROPHESY TO THE BONES.

I saw one of the greatest prophetic leaders of our time at the festival of homiletics in May, Rev. William Barber.

He says “we must not speak from the left or from the right but with the voice God calls us to speak from. Because it’s not about right and left, it’s about right and wrong. And some things are just WRONG.” 

Speak, Church. God’s language has been placed in our mouths.

He says: “We can no longer use the language of Caesar. It’s too puny to challenge the extremism we are facing now, things that are wrong and just plain mean. We must claim the deep moral language of faith, and silence is not an option.”

Speak, Church. God’s language has been placed in our mouths.

Have you heard about 16 year old Greta Thunberg yet?  She explained in a speech at the COP24 climate talks in 2018 that while the world consumes an estimated 100 million barrels of oil each day, "there are no politics to change that. There are no politics to keep that oil in the ground. So we can no longer save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.”

"So we have not come here to beg the world leaders to care for our future," she declared. "They have ignored us in the past and they will ignore us again. We have come here to let them know that change is coming whether they like it or not. The people will rise to the challenge.”
That is the message of Pentecost: the people will rise to the challenge. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.

Speak, church, God’s language has been placed in our mouths.

The Chinese character for crisis, we are told, is a combination of danger and opportunity. Right now, the world has reached a dangerous crisis point for humanity. And those of us who are called to be the Church have a unique opportunity to lead us through it by teaching a common moral language.

Leading climate change scientists reported to the UN this year that we have twelve years by conservative estimates to stop irreversible damage from climate change. Those of us who have been paying attention know that we can’t recycle our way out of this, buy the right electric car, or take the air conditioners out of our windows and solve the problem.

Our friend Katy was just telling me that she read a study that said that the more people believe they can effect climate change by doing individual things like recycling, the less likely they are to push for legislation that would stop climate change on a large scale. 

In other words, the more that we are under the illusion we can do this on our own, the less likely we are to work together. 

We are in the Valley of the bones together. Together, we must learn to prophesy.

On Monday night, 25 or so of us gathered at the Mill in West Boylston to talk about Green Transformation. Led by our fearless leader, Katy Fazio, we had a deep, at times hopeful, at times despairing conversation about the Christian Church’s role in the midst of the climate crisis.

Here’s what we determined:
The church is in the unique position.
We have the skills, and the depth of ritual to help one other grieve: 
an uncertain future for our children, 
the loss of ways of life we love, 
the parts of the planet that may become inhabitable, 
the species that have gone extinct.

But we need to turn our grief into action.
We need to start focusing less on self-care and more on community care.
We need to build up communities of resilience.
And we need to use our voices loudly and publicly, filled up with the breath of God.
We need to be voices of urgency, and voices of hope.
We need to teach a shared moral language, one that doesn’t come from the left or the right, but from our God who is Love.

Today, my friends, is the RE-birthday of the church. Some say that the church is dying, but we know a different story.

The Church was made for such a time as this:
Because we believe.
We believe these bones can live.
We believe our lungs are filled up with the breath of God.
We believe God’s spirit is poured out upon ALL flesh.
We believe that Love’s language has the power to reach all nations, all abilities, all genders, all sexualities, all races, all ages, all believers, questioning believers and non-believers, all of HUMANITY. 
We believe in the power of Love to put us back together, bone to bone, sinews and flesh,
We believe in the power of God to breathe life back into us mortals so that we might live, stand on our feet, as a VAST MULTITUDE and PREACH THE GOOD NEWS.

SPEAK, CHURCH
And we will rise again up out of our graves: 
to build bridges, not walls; 
to give us a new heart for each other and the world; 
to teach God’s language not of right and left, but right and wrong;
to LEAD a MOVEMENT of REVOLUTIONARY LOVE.

Speak, church. God’s breath is in your lungs.

Amen.

A sermon by Rev. Robin Bartlett
preached at First Church in Sterling
May 26, 2019

In the scriptures we read this morning, paradise is located in two places: the garden, and the city.

The verdant, fruitful garden and the bejeweled city with streets paved with gold seems like two pretty easy places to find paradise.

But you and I need to seek after the home of God where its hardest to find, so I wanted to look elsewhere.

Paradise, California, the northern California town nestled in a pine cloaked ridge in the Sierra Foothills, had a population of about 25,000 until it was almost entirely wiped out by the Camp Fire this winter. It was the deadliest, most destructive wildfire in the U.S. in more than a century. Now, despite a massive effort to clean up, restore power and make plans to rebuild, the town remains largely uninhabitable.

There are still burned out cars, pickups and school buses lining its roads. Neighborhoods remain unrecognizable to even longtime residents.

There's ash and toxic debris everywhere. The beautiful trees that made it so pleasant to the sight have burned to the ground, making the town unrecognizable to its residents. I bet the firefighters who are here today are glad they live in Sterling and not California. There is just so much to save for those who lay down their lives to save.

Yet, there are people who saved and are saving Paradise as we speak. The firefighters there heroically led hundreds of people to escape in water during the days of the fire, helping them swim to safety.

And the city is promising to rebuild. The monumental task of removing the debris is a job that could take well over a year. Disaster response officials say it's on a scale not seen in this country since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Even after that, rebuilding is no guarantee for a lot of people.

Perhaps it all sounds futile to you, this task of raising up Paradise again.

But the saving of Paradise is always an act of faith: the labor itself is worth it because of the love it represents.

Rebecca Baggett says that anyone who notices the world must want to save it. As the church, we must be trained noticers of, and witnesses to, the exquisite beauty of the intricate web of creation of which we are apart.

The salvation of paradise is in our hands. We must raise it up out of the ashes.

Some of us are looking for paradise far off, somewhere other than here. Maybe at the Cape this weekend. Maybe in Hawaii or Fiji, or in the next life.

What if I told you you are already here?

In Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock’s book, Saving Paradise, they set off on a quest to learn about the early church through it’s art.

Through art, they discovered that “early Christian paradise was something other than “heaven” or the afterlife. Our modern views of heaven and paradise think of them as a world after death. However, in the early church, paradise—first and foremost—was this world, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God. It was on the earth. Images of it in Rome and Ravenna captured the craggy, scruffy pastoral landscape, the orchards, the clear night skies, and teeming waters of the Mediterranean world, as if they were lit by a power from within. Sparkling mosaics in vivid colors captured the world’s luminosity. The images filled the walls of spaces in which liturgies fostered aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual experiences of life in the present, in a world created as good and delightful.”

We desperately need eye-fulls of beauty, because we will not save what we do not love. Our work as the church is to cultivate lovers of this world and this beauty in the present. THIS world is made by God and called Good. We pray every week God’s kingdom come on EARTH as it is in heaven for a reason.

Our scriptures this morning come from the first book of the Hebrew Bible, and the last book of the Christian Bible. The Bible begins in a Garden and ends in the city.

In the beginning, God planted a Garden in Eden, in the east, and that is where God put the first humans. God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. God formed Adam and Eve, out of dust from the ground. The humans were eventually exiled from paradise for eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

After they were banished from God’s home, humans had to figure out a new way to take God with them. So they built a tabernacle. A tabernacle is a moveable habitation—a tented place for Israel’s divine king.  

Various details of the tabernacle suggest it is built to be a mini, moveable Eden. The tabernacle, like the garden of Eden, is where God’s people believed God lived. They put God’s word: the ten commandments in the inner sanctuary of the Tabernacle, in the holy of holies, and locked God’s presence away.

In those early years, the tabernacle moved, and then they built a building to put it in: a permanent residence. The first and then the second Temple.

But God’s people soon learned that buildings cannot contain God, no matter how ornate, no matter how old, no matter how much lightning protection is purchased for the steeple.

God broke out.

God sent Jesus as a human home for God’s word. A living, breathing, healing, tabernacle.

In the midst of Roman occupation, God makes God’s new home inside a brown-skinned, middle Eastern, Jewish refugee. Paradise is contained in a body on the move. 

Paradise was now a movement for justice and peace and healing, and not a place at all.

If you read the scriptures, you’ll notice Jesus hardly preached in the Temple. He preached on the MOVE. He preached on mountains and on the countryside, and on the road….wherever he could find the people of God.

God moves out of the building to become a love revolution.

Jesus shows us how to practice the ethics of paradise:

He heals the sick, he walks beside the suffering, he feeds the hungry, he touches the untouchables, he forgives enemies, he blesses the meek and the humble, he cries for his friend, he stands up for the least, the last and the lost, he even dies to show us what God’s love is like.

And then he rises up out of the grave.

With his resurrection and ascension, he sends us the holy spirit to teach us that our bodies, too, contain the home for God.

We are not the temple, but the tabernacle. We are ON THE MOVE. The moving body of God.

Paradise is unleashed in US. It’s in our hands.

In our scripture from revelation, paradise is a city, coming down out of heaven from God. Ronald Allen says, John sees high walls with gates open on each side. Walls are traditional symbols of community and security. Real security comes from authentic community in which all people feel mutually supported. Gates typically control entrance and exit, but these gates -- four on a side -- are always open. Security is only possible when all are extravagantly welcome, when the doors are flung open.

The breath of paradise wafts its way into this broken and battered world of domination, separation, cruelty and division, reminding us that it is here where heaven makes it’s place. That we have the keys to the city already.

For some of us it is easier to find God in a garden, and maybe harder to find God in the city. There are too many people in the concrete jungle, too much ugly, and not enough quiet to listen to the still small voice of God.

I watched a video on the internet the other day that contained the life-breath of the garden wafting into the city; a saving remedy sent to heal. The filming took place on a New York subway train at rush hour, which is not always where one encounters beauty.

But one day, Greg Wong captured heaven on earth on video.

Wong and some 850 fellow commuters were caught in underground limbo for a full two hours as their train was stalled between stations in Manhattan due to a mechanical failure. It was a subway rider’s nightmare come to life. Eventually, they boarded a “rescue train” that took them, slowly, back to Queens, where they’d started.

But as Wong records in the video, the stranded passengers bonded during the ordeal. They are crowded in a small space. They are black and white, Asian and Latino. They are Christian and Muslim, businessmen and women, construction workers and restaurant dishwashers. They are young and old, male and female, gay and straight.

Together, they had abundance. At one point they share that most precious resource—backup battery charges for their phones.

“We were grumpy at first, but what can you do?” says one laughing young woman as people eagerly plug into the chargers being passed around.

It all culminates in an epic singalong that moves from the latest hits (“Hotline Bling”) to timeless classics (“One Love”).

By the end, after a round of “Watch me whip, watch me nae nae,” everyone is in high spirits. They have survived together, and they have done it with style and grace.

“Anyone who has lived in New York and ridden the trains will recognize the hard-won camaraderie they share. It’s a tough city, and sometimes things get crazy, but we’re all in this thing together, and we are going to make it no matter what,” Sarah Goodyear writes.

As one of the captive riders says at the video’s end, with a smile, “I’m glad I was stuck with all you guys.”

This is the leaves of the tree; the healing of the nations revelation prophesies. This is what it means to be residents of the city of God: glad to be stuck together in paradise. The captive riders embody the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. The glory of God is their light. They are going to make it together no matter what.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Magalia Pines Baptist Church in Paradise, California did not burn. After the fire, the pastor’s family transformed the facility into an aid station, a lifeline for up to 600 people per day. They come for free meals, to pick up donated clothes and shoes. They give out so much bottled water they have trouble keeping it in stock.

Paradise is raised up out of the ashes by the church being the church. Seven months later, the church is still serving two free hot meals a day including breakfast and lunch to survivors of the Camp Fire.

On their website, they thank generous donors to the church for
    •    Over 70,000 Meals Served to survivors
    •    Over $1 Million Bottles of Water Provided (donated by Sacramento area construction companies)
    •    Over 150 Kitchen Setups
    •    20 Motor homes and RV’s
    •    12 Vehicles

"Magalia is a hopeful place….Magalia is a place where people are looking to the future," said Doug Crowder, the Senior Pastor at Magalia Pines Baptist Church. "It's just people coming together and finding a way and a place to connect because that's really the important thing in all of this.”

Beloved, First Church in Sterling is a hopeful place where people are looking to the future. The saving of Paradise is always an act of faith: the labor itself is worth it because of the love it represents.

This church is a people gathered together to notice beauty wherever we can find it. This Church is an ethic, not a place. It is a movement to raise up paradise from the ashes.

We are the living, breathing, moving home of God. We can choose to live in paradise because paradise lives in us.

Amen.

​QUESTIONS DEEPEN OUR FAITH
 
I invited your questions about God and the church. I asked not because I have all the answers (I don't) but because a church that doesn't invite questions in favor of shallow answers is more interested in maintaining the institution than deepening faith. Here they are, broken into categories. I will attempt to respond to them in sermons, in newsletters, in Facebook live videos...whatever way I can. I was in tears reading them. May you know that you are not alone in your questioning, beloved. We are so lucky to be fellow travelers on the journey.
 
Questions about how hard it is to love human beings:

1. Afraid to ask: how am I to love my neighbor as myself when there are people I cannot forgive for their actions; a pedophile; a murderer of people of other religions besides their own; haters of LGBT folks, etc.
2. Why is there so much hate in the hearts of those who call themselves Christians especially?
3. Why can’t people stop hurting each other?
4. How do we better love people who hate?
5. How can “good people” support amoral/immoral leaders?
6. God reveals Him/Herself in many ways: why do some believe their faith is the only faith, and all other faiths are damned? And faith leads us/allows/encourages this?
7. If Jesus is love and the church is love then WHY are so many people who claim to be of faith so negative toward others?

 
Questions for the Pastor/Questions about our church:

1. On a scale from 1-10, what’s your favorite color in the alphabet?
2. How much can a member do?
3. We are open and affirming but most of our congregation is “mainstream.” How do we get better at bringing those who are on the fringes into our family (ie. LGBTQ, brown and black folks, disenfranchised…)
4. Why did you decide to become a Pastor?
5. Who and why did they change the name of the parish hall to the Sterling auditorium?
6. Why can we have a sermon focus on happiness rather than sadness?
7. What’s the difference between denomination and faith?
8. What denomination built the First Church structure and when did the church/congregation become multi-denominational?
9. How does one say to another that some spaces are best left to those who really need it?
10. Why can we have more silence during communion meditation?

 
Questions about the role of Church and the Bible in people’s lives:

1. What does church help?
2. What would the church look like if it had followed Jesus’ theology? Would it have been a version of Judaism? What would it look like?
3. Did Jesus have any siblings?
4. Are we in church today as sincere, or worthy, as those who were here before us?
5. Why are some unable to believe in spite of opportunity?
6. How do we instill and foster God’s love and presence in the lives of children and young parents with so much to fear and violence in daily exposure to the world and news?
7. Why does the Catholic Church Bible have four more books/chapters than we do?
8. How can the church help veterans reconcile the peace in their hearts with what we have experienced in wars against non-Christians?
9. What do you have to do to be accepted by a church that doesn’t require a lot of time and money?
10. What do you think will happen to the Methodist Church?
11. How do I interpret the passage about the women who have oil in their lamps and those who do not and are left outside. As a person who came to Christ than left the faith, it feels I am now “lukewarm” and left outside.
12. Where in the Bible is the part on how churches shall be run? (rhetorical question)
13. Why isn’t there an understanding that evolution can exist in the theory that it is God’s recipe for development?

 
The “Big Questions”/Ultimacy questions:

1. Is God real?
2. If God is real, why do so many bad things happen?
3. Why?
4. Why? –my dad
5. What does salvation really mean?
6. How do I reach God when struggling with relationships, death, others suffering. I pray but am not sure if there’s a response, as the issues go on and on.
7. How do we know if there is a heaven?
8. What does Jesus do to help the homeless?
9. Where is God?
10. Is evil an active force, or is it just the absence of love and an excess of fear?
11. Is there a common thread among all religions that will help us better understand God?
12. If we believe God chooses how we live, does he not also choose how we die? Whatever form it takes?
13. How do we put our faith in God when things go wrong?
14. Why does God allow terrible things to happen?
15. Why does Jesus allow children to be crippled by illness?
16. Why do good people get hurt so badly?
17. For Jesus: why is love the most important thing we can do?
18. Question for God: Why are we all here (on earth?) What is the point? Are there other beings somewhere? Is this (are we) “just” a great experiment? Is what occurs or exists in heaven really worth all of the suffering that occurs on earth?

 
Questions about God’s gender:

1. Why do you refer to God as a woman when we pray the “Our Father”?
2. Is God a boy or a girl?
3. God to me is non-gender, more spiritual than female or male. How could we cover up “…and Father” on the carving above the altar creatively and inexpensively with a Gereda altarscape so it says “One God of ALL”?

 
Personal questions for God:

1. Will I ever feel OK?
2. What if my faith never comes back?
3. Why do we allow distractions to both fill us up with stress and cover up our ability to reflect and answer/ponder answers that came into our mind?
4. Is my dad without cancer and comfortable in heaven?
5. Why does God leave people in nursing homes for months and years when they are no longer able to care for themselves or even be aware of who they are or who their loved ones are? They have already lived an active full life so why do they need to go on like this? Where is the purpose? What is the reason?
6. Lord, why do I feel so empty when I have everything?
7. Why does it have to be so hard?