faith – A Believer's Journal

Chastened, humbled, wiser, better

March 26, 2020 Tim Comments 2 comments

There is nothing good about this global coronavirus pandemic. There is nothing good about people dying. There is nothing good about people losing their jobs. There is nothing good about cherished cultural institutions being put in jeopardy.

And yet, I pray that good may come out of it, that when the disease has run its course, when social distancing is no longer required, when we return to offices and schools and theaters and restaurants and sporting arenas and concert halls, we will not be the same, we will not simply return to business as usual.

I pray we may be changed: chastened, humbled, wiser, better.

May we be chastened, newly conscious of our vulnerability, recognizing that we cannot bend this world to suit our own purpose and pleasure no matter how smart or powerful or wealthy we fancy ourselves.

May we be humbled, acknowledging the limitations of our capacity to take care of ourselves, the frailty of our most prized institutions, whether governmental, economic, technological, or medical. May we be simply and profoundly grateful for life at all, for each moment, for each breath.

May we be wiser, cognizant of the frivolity of so many of our passions and pursuits, not abandoning ambition or aspiration, but keeping all these in perspective, remembering what it is that does matter: faith and hope and love.

May we be better, fully comprehending, not merely in our minds, but in our hearts and bodies, too, that we and our fellow human beings, near and far, are not competitors in a zero-sum game, but colleagues, companions, housemates, siblings, we and they children of God alike, we in need of them, they in need of us.

As we face this ordeal together, may we be patient, kind and generous, hopeful, faithful, grateful, and eager … eager for the dawning of the day when this pandemic will be a threat no more, but eager too for the dawning of a new goodness, in us and among us.

Dancing to the music

December 15, 2019 Tim Comments 1 comment

From Steven Hayward’s sermon this morning at St. Francis by the Sea Episcopal Church, quoting a friend and colleague …

Hope is like hearing the music of the future … and faith is dancing to the music.

Signs and wonders

May 12, 2019 Tim Comments 2 comments

Sermon preached May 12 at the Deer Isle/Sunset Congregational Church, UCC …

Oh, my! That’s what I said to myself when I saw that this was the lectionary text for this Sunday. Oh, my!

Peter said, “Get up,” to the dead woman … and she did.

Oh, my! What are we going to do with this?

There are two rather easy things to do with this, two things that a lot of us do with this. For some Christians, this story and others like it are proof positive that we too should have, and actually do have, the power to work miracles if we would only use it. The only reason, they suggest, that we do not see more miracles ourselves is that we do not ask. Whatever we ask, whatever we command, in Jesus’ name, shall be done. If we had enough faith, we too could heal the sick and raise the dead.

If we had enough faith. If I had enough faith.

So does that mean that if I pray for my sick friend and she only gets worse, or if I pray for God to heal my dying neighbor and then he dies, does that mean that I didn’t have enough faith? That I didn’t pray in the right way? That I am somehow spiritually deficient?

No! Absolutely not! That’s the problem with this all too simplistic reading of the story. It puts the focus on me — my adequacy, my strength, my spiritual acumen — instead of on God, on God’s goodness and God’s grace. It becomes more about manipulating God to do what I want than about trusting myself and those I love to God’s powerful love and God’s gracious intent.

And the tragedy is, rather than bringing comfort to a grieving spouse or child or friend, putting this unrealistic expectation onto them only adds guilt and shame on top of the unbearable pain that is already there. Now not only is the one they love dying, but it is somehow their own fault because if they had enough faith, they could save them.

People get sick and people die, not because either they or we failed, not because either they or we lacked faith, but because it is a fact of our existence. God is not cruelly waiting and watching to see if we will say the right words in the right way with enough belief, but instead God is sharing our grief, bearing our pain, coming to where we are, coming to be with us in the valley of the shadow of death.

The second all too easy response to this story is simply to dismiss it altogether as an elaboration, an embellishment, a fable told to bolster the apostles’ reputations. It just didn’t happen, because it can’t happen.

It can’t? The God in whom I put my trust and my hope raised Jesus Christ from death! The God in whom I put my trust and my hope spoke the worlds into existence and gave me life! All that we are and all we have and all that we will be is gift, God’s gift. Would you want to put your faith in a God incapable of bringing life out of death, a God incapable of bringing anything to life, a God powerless to do or change anything?

No, it’s not about magic or spiritual prestidigitation, but it is about miracle, about the miracle of life that is and life that will be, the miracle that there is life at all, that there is a world at all, the miracle that you and I are here today living and breathing, capable of knowing and loving each other, capable of knowing and loving the God who made us, capable of living in this world with purpose and with faithfulness and with hope.

No, I don’t like either of these two easy answers. But what if, rather than rushing to judge this story with our own preconceived assumptions and biases, we let the story speak for itself? What is its meaning, its purpose, in its own context? Why is it included as part of the gospel record?

The story of raising Dorcas is intended to be a sign, a sign that Peter’s message about Jesus — Jesus the healer, Jesus our resurrected savior — is real. It is a sign that what Peter is saying and doing comes from God, just as what Jesus said and did came from God.

You may know that Acts is actually part II of a longer book. Part I is the gospel of Luke. Part I, Luke’s gospel, tells Jesus’ story, the story of the one sent by God to “proclaim good news to the poor” and to announce “that the time has come for God to save his people.” Luke’s Jesus tells stories of God seeking out lost ones, ones overlooked and discounted by everybody else, and Luke’s Jesus himself seeks out such ones, welcoming them and healing them and saving them.

Part II of the book, Acts, tells the stories of Jesus’ followers as they continue his mission of welcoming and healing and forgiving and saving. Jesus is still alive, still at work, in them.

The story in Acts of Peter raising Dorcas echoes the story in Luke of Jesus raising the son of a widow. When people saw Jesus raise the widow’s son, they exclaimed: “A great prophet has appeared among us! God has come to save his people!” The miracle is a sign, a sign to them that God has come near, a sign that God is on the move. In the same way, raising Dorcas is a sign, not just to those who witnessed it, but to the readers of Acts and now also to us, a sign that God has come near, that God is still on the move in and among us.

But it’s more than that. Raising Dorcas is not just about Peter, not just a sign that God is with him. It’s about Dorcas, a sign that her life matters. Her life, this life, matters. The ministry of Peter and the other apostles, just like the ministry of Jesus, reveals God’s investment in our lives as they, in we human beings as we are, made in God’s image, but also made of earth, of dust, of ground.

This life matters! This body matters! Why else would Jesus give sight to blind people or heal lame people or feed hungry people? Just to show off? It’s about bringing life, fullness of life, to all God’s creatures, to all God’s dear ones. God desires shalom for us, for all of us: wholeness of life, fullness of life, goodness of life, here and now.

Peter is a sign of what God is up to, but so is Dorcas. Dorcas is a sign! Dorcas is a wonder! “She spent all her time doing good and helping the poor.” She was busy, all the time, doing God’s work, making shalom, loving widows by clothing their bodies, making the lives of people at risk better. She didn’t urge them to wait and pray for the life to come; she did all she could to make their lives better here and now.

Peter saw that. He saw the widows’ grief, saw the shirts and coats Dorcas had made for them, and he felt pity, pity for their loss of the one who cared for them, just as Jesus felt pity for the widow who lost her sole means of support when her son died. Raising Dorcas is a sign that her life and her ministry matter to God. Raising Dorcas is a sign that the lives of the widows who depended on her matter to God. And raising Dorcas is a sign that the power of resurrection is at work here and now among us.

The power of resurrection is at work. Do you see it? Resurrection is not some guarantee of a future life some day somewhere else. Resurrection is a sign of God’s investment in this life, here and now, of God working to heal, redeem, reconcile, lift up, make right, make better, bring life here and now.

I don’t get excited about heaven. I get excited about resurrection, about believing that God can bring dead things to life, that God can bring the dead things in me to life, that God can bring to life the dead things in this world — people and nations divided against each other, people without food, people without purpose, people without love.

This is our hope: that one day God will make all things new. And this is our hope, too: that that work has already begun.

Dorcas was a sign, a sign of the power of resurrection at work, and my mother was a sign. I am remembering my mother on this Mother’s Day. She died not quite a year ago, on May 21, in Iowa. Last July, we held a memorial service at St. Francis by the Sea Episcopal Church in Blue Hill, her church, and afterwards my sister and brother and I along with members of our families spread her ashes on Blue Hill Bay just as we had my father’s ashes seventeen years before.

My mother was a wonder. She didn’t make clothes, she made music. For many years, she served as a church choir director. I sang for her, in a high school youth choir, and later as a young adult.

She was a competent, well-trained musician, but for her, and for us because of her, music was about passion, about connecting both singers and congregation to the meaning and emotion of the music. Music was a means of proclaiming the gospel and a means of embodying the gospel, embodying (quite literally expressing with our bodies!) the joy and hope and wonder of the gospel. We sang for her, not just with our voices, but with our whole selves, because we understood from her that we were not singing for her, but for God.

My mother was a wonder and a sign. She was raised in a very conservative Christian and Missionary Alliance church, taught a faith focussed mostly on don’t’s: don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t gamble, don’t dance, don’t go to movies, don’t play cards … you get the drift! She married my father, himself raised in a family of non-church-goers, but whose faith in Jesus was birthed through the campus ministry of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship while he was an undergraduate at Michigan State University. During their life together, they were members of a whole variety of churches — Presbyterian and Baptist, independent and Congregational, finally settling down in the Episcopal Church.

They moved from what would be commonly labeled an “evangelical” expression of faith to a more “progressive” expression of faith, but labels do not tell their story, cannot tell their story. Their faith didn’t change, rather it grew. They never abandoned the fire of their first love, the evangelical fire of love for God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength,. They simply came to understand in new ways, deeper ways, wider ways, the implications of that love and of God’s call to love their neighbors as God loves their neighbors, all of them, each of them. Faith for my mother and my father was always about righteousness and justice and love, but as their faith grew, it became more and more and more about grace.

Mom was raised a Nixon/Goldwater Republican, but her faith and what she saw through the eyes of her faith changed her. She saw prejudice and discrimination and white privilege. She saw abuse of power and disregard for the “other” and disregard for the earth and she became a civil rights activist and an environmental activist and a strong defender of her lesbian daughter.

My mother was a wonder and a sign, a sign that the power of resurrection is at work among us, changing our minds, changing our hearts, bringing to life the dead things in us, leading us from a life of “don’t’s” to a life of “do’s,” calling us into a life that brings life, a life not of judgment, but of blessing.

Dorcas was a wonder. My mother was a wonder. And you are a wonder.

You are! You are a wonder — God’s breath, God’s spirit, is manifested in you as in no other. You are a wonder and you are called to be a sign, a sign that the power of resurrection is at work among us. Your words can heal. Your touch can heal. Your service can heal. You are called to sing and to dance, to love and to serve, to feed and to clothe, to make justice and to make peace, and by all of it to show that God is near, that God is up to something, that God is still in the business of bringing things, bringing people, to life …

Film Review: “First Reformed”

February 17, 2019 Tim Comments 1 comment

I watched “First Reformed” last evening, the 2017 film written and directed by Paul Schrader. Actually I only watched about an hour of the movie, then turned it off and returned it to its Netflix envelope. So I don’t know what becomes of Rev. Toller or what transpires at the celebration of the 250th anniversary of First Reformed, but I can guess.

I turned it off because the film disturbed me, and not in a good way. I like movies that disturb me, in a good way, movies that provoke a struggle of thought and emotion, movies that challenge or reframe my way of thinking about the world and myself.

I was eager to see “First Reformed” because I expected it to be that kind of movie. I expected to see a nuanced portrait of a minister in crisis, struggling with the relevance and efficacy and authenticity of the faith, of the God, to which and to whom he was called to witness.

But there was no nuance here, no faith, and no God. Rev. Toller is an empty man, empty of any meaningful relationships, empty of meaning in his ministry, and empty of faith. He does not pray, but journals, substituting that as a kind of prayer, since he cannot pray. But his journaling is narrow in scope, little more than a diary, focussed entirely on himself. He does not invite God in or open his life up for examination as another soul searching for the place of God in this world did: “Examine me, O God, and know my mind; test me, and discover my thoughts. Find out if there is any evil in me and guide me in the everlasting way.”

But what disturbed me most about the film, as a minister, was its caricatured portrayal of ministry. At every point, the possibility of the presence of authentic faith, of genuine seeking after God, was undercut. The teenaged singer rehearsing a praise song with the Abundant Life choir tries to “feel up” the girl standing in front of him. The female director has slept with Rev. Toller and now is crazy to have him. The pastor of the “big box” Abundant Life church jokes that Martin Luther wrote “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” while pooping. And his televised devotional is canned, cliched, overproduced.

Ministry itself is assumed to be inauthentic, self-serving, a sham, a scam. Nobody really believes in what they are doing. That is not to say that much of what pretends to be ministry today is not inauthentic, self-serving, a sham, a scam, because much is. But it can only be shown as such in contrast to a kind of ministry that is authentic, humble, sincere in its desire to help and to serve … and to be faithful and accountable to God.

But here there is no contrast. Ministry itself is no more than showmanship and the church either a soundstage (Abundant Life) or a museum (First Reformed). And the only way to find meaning is to escape (or destroy) the church and to abandon even any attempt at faith.

I can imagine a film beginning in the same place with the same people in the same circumstances as this film and telling an entirely different story. I wish “First Reformed” had been that film …

You are Job

October 21, 2018 Tim Comments 2 comments

The sermon I preached this morning at the Deer Isle/Sunset Congregational Church, UCC …

You are Job.

You are Job, living in a world filled with suffering and mystery, with bewildering grief and distressing uncertainty, a world you can never fully understand and a world that often breaks your heart.

You are Job, living in a world that doesn’t follow the rules, where the righteous are not always rewarded, a world where doing the right thing is no guarantee of success or praise or love. In fact, choosing to do the right thing can sometimes earn you scorn and make you enemies and leave you at a disadvantage.

You are Job, living in a world where those you love suffer and where you suffer too for seemingly no good reason. No, not seemingly! You live in a world where you and those you love and those who are most vulnerable, those who are most undeserving, do suffer … for no good reason.

You are Job. How do you live in a world like this? How do you reconcile your faith in God with a world like this? What answer can you make to the terrible reality of undeserved suffering? Or, more to the point, how do you live when there are no answers?

Some people have answers. Job’s wife had an answer: “Curse God and die.” Yes, that’s an option. You can curse God and wait to die, but that is despair, giving up on God and giving up on yourself and giving up on life. Giving up is all too easy, it takes no courage, it’s all too selfish.

Job’s friends had answers, too, lots of answers. Oh, Job, dear Job, let’s talk. Think carefully, look closely, there has to be something you’ve overlooked, some sin, some offense to God, some crime against humanity, you’ve done. God doesn’t punish anyone without reason.

That’s their answer. That’s their assumption. Suffering must be punishment. They claim to be defending God’s good honor, but in fact, they are defending the system, or rather, defending their dependence on the system, the system of rules and rewards, of actions and consequences, that allows them to make sense of their lives and allows them to believe they are in control of their own destiny. If they acknowledge the truth of Job’s undeserved suffering, the system falls apart, and then what do they have left to depend on?

There are lots of Job’s friends around still. You may remember some of them blaming the suffering of the people of New Orleans at the hands of hurricane Katrina on the city’s welcome of gay pride events. Or blaming the Haiti earthquake on voodoo or some supposed pact with the devil. Or blaming 9/11 on the secularization of America.

I’ve been to New Orleans and felt the vibe of that city, the life-affirming, fun-loving, welcoming vibe of the city, and I’ve been to Haiti and seen the extraordinary faith and powerful joy of people who have very little material wealth, but much spiritual wealth, more than me, more than most of us. To blame them, to blame the people of New Orleans or New York for their own suffering? How vile. How cruel. How utterly hypocritical. Because what will you have to say, friends of Job, when suffering comes to you and to your city? Because it will.

What they do, what Job’s friends do in our day, is to find somebody else to blame for their troubles: immigrants or leftists or the government or some hidden and sinister conspiracy. Because there has to be somebody to blame! Job’s friends cannot live with uncertainty. They cannot tolerate any mystery or any loss of control. They cannot live without the system, the system that explains everything and leaves nothing to …….

Leaves nothing to what? To chance? To God?

Job’s friends do not love God. They love the system. They cannot live without the system, but ironically, they can live without God, they do live without God, because they have put their faith in the system, in an idol, not in God.

So they have no answers for Job and he knows it. And you know it, too, because you are Job. You will not blame yourself for your troubles when you have done nothing wrong, and you will not blame somebody else, because that is not fair, that is not right.

You do what Job does. You go to God and you ask “Why?” You pray. You protest. You complain. You ask for a hearing. You ask God for an answer.

But there is no answer, only silence …

So much of the life of faith is about dealing with the silence. Job complains, his friends offer him their cold comfort, and God remains absent. God remains silent. Until the storm. Until God answers Job out of the storm …

Then out of the storm the Lord spoke to Job.

Who are you to question my wisdom
with your ignorant, empty words?
Now stand up straight
and answer the questions I ask you.
Were you there when I made the world?
If you know so much, tell me about it.
Who decided how large it would be?
Who stretched the measuring line over it?
Do you know all the answers?
What holds up the pillars that support the earth?
Who laid the cornerstone of the world?
In the dawn of that day the stars sang together,
and the heavenly beings shouted for joy.

Who closed the gates to hold back the sea
when it burst from the womb of the earth?
It was I who covered the sea with clouds
and wrapped it in darkness.
I marked a boundary for the sea
and kept it behind bolted gates.
I told it, “So far and no farther!
Here your powerful waves must stop.”
Job, have you ever in all your life
commanded a day to dawn?
Have you ordered the dawn to seize the earth
and shake the wicked from their hiding places?
Daylight makes the hills and valleys stand out
like the folds of a garment,
clear as the imprint of a seal on clay.
The light of day is too bright for the wicked
and restrains them from doing violence.

Have you been to the springs in the depths of the sea?
Have you walked on the floor of the ocean?
Has anyone ever shown you the gates
that guard the dark world of the dead?
Have you any idea how big the world is?
Answer me if you know.

Do you know where the light comes from
or what the source of darkness is?
Can you show them how far to go,
or send them back again?
I am sure you can, because you’re so old
and were there when the world was made!

Have you ever visited the storerooms,
where I keep the snow and the hail?
I keep them ready for times of trouble,
for days of battle and war.
Have you been to the place where the sun comes up,
or the place from which the east wind blows?

Who dug a channel for the pouring rain
and cleared the way for the thunderstorm?
Who makes rain fall where no one lives?
Who waters the dry and thirsty land,
so that grass springs up?
Does either the rain or the dew have a father?
Who is the mother of the ice and the frost,
which turn the waters to stone
and freeze the face of the sea?

Can you tie the Pleiades together
or loosen the bonds that hold Orion?
Can you guide the stars season by season
and direct the Big and the Little Dipper?
Do you know the laws that govern the skies,
and can you make them apply to the earth?

Can you shout orders to the clouds
and make them drench you with rain?
And if you command the lightning to flash,
will it come to you and say, “At your service”?
Who tells the ibis when the Nile will flood,
or who tells the rooster that rain will fall?
Who is wise enough to count the clouds
and tilt them over to pour out the rain,
rain that hardens the dust into lumps?

Do you find food for lions to eat,
and satisfy hungry young lions
when they hide in their caves,
or lie in wait in their dens?
Who is it that feeds the ravens
when they wander about hungry,
when their young cry to me for food?

Were you paying attention? What did you hear? Did you know God had a such a sense of humor? Or, at least, that the author of the book of Job thinks God has a great sense of humor? Does humor matter? In the midst of suffering and mystery and grief and uncertainty, does humor matter?

Absolutely! Because humor keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously. Humor puts things in perspective. Humor reminds us of who and what we are, and who and what we are not.

Did Job get an answer from God? Yes, and no. No, and yes. The crucial question in the book of Job is not the question of undeserved suffering, but the question of faith. In what, in whom, will you put your faith? In the system? In your own ability to make sense of the world and make sense of your life? Or will you put your faith in God?

The book of Job removes all the props, exposing the limits, and consequently, the ultimate failure, of the system. By the end of the book, Job has absolutely nothing …… except God. And that is enough. That is enough.

You are Job. You live in a world where God is. What does it mean to live in a world where God is? What does it mean to you to live in a world where God is? And what will your faith in the God who is look like?

It will not look like passive acceptance — what will be will be. That’s not faith! Job’s faith, the faith for which he was commended, is not passivity.

Faith is believing God, trusting God, depending on God, expecting God to be God, expecting God to be good. And when faith is confronted with agony and terror and grief and injustice, faith cries out to God, the only one that matters, the only one that hears. Faith prays. Faith protests. Faith complains. Faith cries out for justice. Faith cries out for God to make things right. And faith believes that God will answer. Faith believes God will make things right.

Faith prays, “Thy will be done,” and faith waits for God’s will to be done and God’s kingdom to come. And faith works to do God’s will and to bring in God’s kingdom today and tomorrow and for as long as faith has breath.

Because God is …

God is the one who measures the world. God is the one who commands the day to dawn. God is the one who makes the lightning flash. God is the one who feeds the ravens. God is the one who feeds you …

Revolutionary faith

April 5, 2018 Tim Comments 2 comments

In June 1966, less than two years before he was killed, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached from his Atlanta pulpit of the dynamic dance between Good Friday and Easter, between death and resurrection, between despair and hope.

“The church must tell [people] that Good Friday is as much a fact of life as Easter; failure is as much a fact of life as success; disappointment is as much a fact of life as fulfillment,” he said. Dr. King added that God didn’t promise us that we would avoid “trials and tribulations” but that “if you have faith in God, that God has the power to give you a kind of inner equilibrium through your pain.”

These are the first two paragraphs of an article by Michael Eric Dyson, We Forgot What Dr. King Believed In, published March 31 in the New York Times and shared with me by my friend, “Meach” Meacham.

We can do our best to avoid disappointment and failure and pain. Jesus could have … by not going to Jerusalem, by not following the path of obedience, by not putting the kingdom of God first, by not caring about people, all the people.

For Jesus, Good Friday was a choice, a choice to be where God called him to be and to do what God called him to do. And we too have a choice: to follow Jesus, or not.

“The great tragedy is that Christianity failed to see that it had the revolutionary edge,” Dr. King said, two months before he was killed.

If Christianity is not revolutionary, then what good is it? To keep us mollified, while the world and our neighbors go to hell? Jesus was revolutionary, preaching and enacting a kingdom of God that was and is turning the world upside down — not to upset it, but to make it right!

If we choose to follow Jesus, if our faith is genuine not merely a pacifier, then we cannot remain complacent. The church of Jesus Christ cannot stand by watching as people suffer, as whole peoples are marginalized, as whole classes of humanity are deprived of life and liberty and happiness whether by malice or by apathy.

Dyson’s article is good and timely reading …

As America in its present incarnation, with its present leadership, teeters toward an arrogance, isolationism and self-importance that are the portals of moral decline and political self-destruction, the nation must recall the faith of Martin Luther King Jr. He saw faith as a tool for change, a constant source of inspiration to remake the world in the just and redemptive image of God. On this holy day, instead of shrinking into the safety of faith, we should, as Dr. King did, bear the burdens of the less fortunate and rise again to serve humanity.

going to new orleans

May 15, 2008 Tim Comments 0 Comment

Even three years after hurricane Katrina, there is much rebuilding work yet to do in New Orleans as this video from the Center for American Progress indicates …

Tomorrow I leave with a mission team of twelve adults from our congregation for a week’s work in New Orleans. We will be one team among many taking part in the ongoing efforts of the United Church of Christ to help the people of New Orleans rebuild their homes and their lives. Ours is a good team — six men and six women — and we go with strong support from our church family. I have high expectations, both for the blessings we will bestow by our work and the blessings we will receive from the people we meet.

We will be hosted by St. Matthew/Central United Church of Christ. We will worship with them on Sunday, make their church our home for six days, share a red beans and rice supper with them on Wednesday evening … and see their city up close, both through their eyes and our own. So we go not only to help, but also to be helped, to be helped to see our neighbors as Jesus does.

Our 400 man-hours of work will make only a small contribution to the larger needs of the city, but, we pray, a contribution that will make a great difference for the two families in whose homes we will work. It is good to be able to do something … to take our faith beyond mere words, to live our compassion beyond mere feelings.

more on jeremiah wright

April 11, 2008 Tim Comments 3 comments

Here are some of my reflections on the widespread condemnation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright based on video clips of a few of his sermons. I will share this with our church this Sunday as a part of my sermon based on Jesus’ parable of the two sons (Matthew 21:28-32) …

Actions speak louder than words. It is so important for us to remember that, because we live in a time when our words may be used as weapons against us, when just a few words may be used to judge or dismiss or denounce an entire career, an entire life.

That is just what has happened to one of my colleagues, a member of our church, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, recently retired pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

You have undoubtedly heard the news stories or seen some of the video clips: Jeremiah Wright standing in the pulpit saying, “God damn America!” For those few words and for a few others that have been excerpted from thirty-six years worth of sermons, he has been judged and vilified and denounced as unpatriotic and a hatemonger.

It is surely unfair to lift a single phrase or a few short paragraphs from their broader context. If you were to listen to the entire sermon from which those words came, you might better appreciate what Rev. Wright was trying to say about our country and what he was not trying to say. You might not, but you might.

And it is surely uncharitable to ignore the cultural context from which and to which he speaks, a context very different from our own. We don’t know what life looks like from the underside. We who are white cannot begin to understand what it is like to be a person of color in America. And the style and substance and heritage of African-American worship is probably like a foreign language to most of us.

But even taking his words at face value, out of context, we have to remember: actions speak louder.

The man we deem unpatriotic heard John Kennedy’s famous words in 1961: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” … and he did. He gave up his student deferment and joined the Marines where he completed a two-year tour of duty. At the end of the two years, he became a Navy corpsman, serving his country another four years, while earning numerous distinctions and commendations.

Jeremiah Wright then completed his college and seminary education and went on to assume pastoral duties at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a church then of eighty-seven members.

That same church now has over 8,000 members. It is a most wealthy and most successful church, but has intentionally remained rooted in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. Its website lists fifty-nine different ministries of the church, including support for cancer survivors, career development, counseling ministries, dance ministries, ministry for victims of domestic violence, drug and alcohol recovery programs, grief ministry, girl scouts, work with individuals and familes impacted by HIV/AIDS, support for married couples seeking to build and maintain Christian homes, tutoring programs in math and reading, a elementary school mentoring program, a prison ministry, and forty-six more ministries!

Actions speak louder!

The congregation holds education in high esteem and has sixty members currently enrolled in seminaries, earning masters degrees and preparing for Christian ministry, while their tuition costs are fully paid by the church.

John Thomas, president and general minister of the United Church of Christ says of the church:

While the worship is always inspiring, the welcome extravagant, and the preaching biblically based and prophetically challenging, I have been especially moved by the way Trinity ministers to its young people, nurturing them to claim their Christian faith, to celebrate their African-American heritage, and to pursue higher education to prepare themselves for leadership in church and society.

I was able to witness that for myself three years ago when I attended the Festival of Homiletics held that year in Chicago. On Thursday night, Rev. Wright preached to the nine hundred ministers attending the conference, while a choir of probably sixty to eighty voices provided worship music and two dozen young dancers added a stunning visual layer to our worship.

It was for me a most moving worship experience. The passion and energy and joy and hope and faith of these young folk were palpably visible and highly contagious! I thought to myself: here is a ministry that really does reach young people and give them something to believe in and live for and take pride in, a ministry that crowns them with dignity and honor and purpose.