HOMILY: "This Land Is Made for You and Me"

A Meditation on Matthew 11
And the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution (Part Two)

Sunday, July 5, 2026

1.

This quote in your bulletin this morning, words of the indominable Gangulu and Aboriginal organizer Lilla Watson, seems to me a potent reminder of what’s a stake in every democratic project. Every one. “If you have come to help me,” she says, “you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” If you have come because your liberation, your freedom, even your salvation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the teachers, friends, mentors who’ve shaped my ministry and nurtured my faith, really, over many years. And every one of them has fused in their own spirit these two things: Christian discipleship and democratic commitment. Wherever it is they live and serve. Christian discipleship and democratic commitment. Or to put it in a different way: obedience to Jesus and servant leadership.

I’m thinking about my friend Zoughbi Zoughbi in Bethlehem, Palestine; and the bright light in his soul that has outlasted imprisonment and violence and now shines in a land of shadows. I’m thinking about my friend Taj Smith, black and beautiful and trans; and the faith in his eyes that continues to find friends, allies, beloved community in a world that can seem organized against his very survival. And I’m thinking about my friend John Thomas, once the President and General Minister of our United Church of Christ; and how it is that John spends his 80s now organizing labor unions and undocumented immigrants in some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.

Every one of these friends chooses every day to follow Jesus. Not a smug, triumphalist Jesus. Not a festishized, European superhero. But a storyteller who invites moral and spiritual imagination. And a teacher who offers a practice of risky nonviolence and lovingkindness. And, yes, Jesus, a savior, whose mercy is not to be claimed by victors at the end of battle, but to be shared in reconciled and reconciling communities. By peoples of all genders and orientations. By children of all nations and faiths. For Zoughbi, for Taj, for John, and now, for me too, Christian discipleship has everything to do mutual liberation. Following Jesus, loving Jesus, means taking Lilla Watson seriously, and recognizing in the vulnerability of queer kids my own fragile future, and living my life in solidarity with Palestinian resisters and Jewish prophets of peace, and peoples across this continent striving for justice together. On a radically decolonized Turtle Island.

So let’s talk democracy for a moment, on this July 5, this day after the semiquincentennial. Because we’ve missed the mark, I think, if we imagine and then defend democracy as a system of protections designed only to make possible individual achievement and family, generational wealth. It’s not that. And don’t we see a bizarre manifestation of this capitalist sin in the White House itself these days?

And we miss the mark, I think, if we engage democratic traditions only insofar as they safeguard our tribe’s traditions, our people’s power, our nation’s control over economies and landscapes. To be clear, this is the crisis of white supremacy and Christian nationalism in this land. And in others too. And it’s a betrayal of both religious tradition and democratic values as well.

And indeed we miss the mark, I think, if we interpret democracy itself as a cut-throat battle for riches, as a pull-no-punches fight for survival. Mine against yours. The city against the heartland. Democrats against Republicans. Left against Right. Where salvation is nothing other than a bulked-up bank account, a stake in the hottest tech market, and a plan for a Mars get-a-way. When the planet falters.

2.

With Tarek Zoughbi, 2025

Instead, and this is where Lilla Watson and other indigenous teachers come in, we can and we must reclaim the dynamic (and let’s be honest, almost theological) vision of democracy itself. That on this planet, on this continent, and within every imaginable watershed, our liberation, our freedom, even our salvation is bound up with one another’s. And that, I’d suggest this morning, on the day after our semiquincentennial, that is the most compelling democratic insight of them all. And one we would do well to embrace anew. And teach to our children. And make the core curriculum of every church, synagogue, mosque, university and public school.

In the 60s Martin Luther King said: “Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” And it seems to me now, sixty years later, that we either believe in this as a democratic nation, or we don’t. We either commit to this vision of shared responsibility in a common future, or we don’t. And if we don’t, we should expect the democratic experiment itself to die.

And to this point, Dr. King said: “As long as there is poverty in this world, no [one] can be totally rich even if [they have] a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no [one] can be totally healthy, even if they just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America.” In other words, my friends, our liberation is always mutual liberation. And our youth saw this up close in the desert, at the border, last month. And those of who visit and advocate at the jail, in detention centers every week—you see it there. As along as racism poisons the blood of our politics, we are all sick. As long as capitalism drives the rich to abandon the poor, we are a house divided.

But democracy is, democracy should be a thick matrix of practices, in an interconnected web of communities, that make us whole. That imagines mutual liberation. That invites and insists on sacrifices of the heart for the common good. And again, we can and we must embrace these practices anew. We can and we must teach them to our children. And we can and we must make them the core curriculum of every church, synagogue, mosque, university and public school.

3.

What Jesus brings to the table this morning is both provocative in a sense, and reassuring in another. And these two modes in his teaching, in his gospel, come together powerfully in the text this morning, as well as in John Thomas’s “Confession” for the semiquincentennial, a confession we’ll read together in just a few moments. Jesus provokes and he reassures. Jesus unsettles and defies our expectations, and then comforts and uplifts. And this, my friends, is Jesus at his best.

The Prodigal, Hoffman

He’s provocative as he insists that communities of faith are easily fooled, that we can too quickly dismiss the call to discipleship, the sacrifice required of the faithful. He asks: “To what will I compare this generation? It’s like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you didn’t dance; we wailed, and you didn’t mourn.’” In other words, you got so tangled up in the machinations of the marketplace, or the angst of having it all, that you missed the whole point: which is committing your energies and prayers to the kin-dom of God, to the great feast of creation’s abundance and glory. “‘We played the flute for you, and you didn’t dance; we wailed, and you didn’t mourn.’” Tangled up in the machinations of the marketplace.

Lilla Watson and Martin King might put it this way: that we too often settle for a version of faith that conforms too easily to the status quo, that settles for capitalism as Truth, and fear and loathing as necessary protections. In a world where the market is God and violence sacramental. And in so settling, we miss the consequential and costly call to discipleship, community and (most importantly) mutual liberation. “We played the flute for you, and you didn’t dance; we wailed, and you didn’t mourn.” And Jesus gets at just this this morning, urging his generation, and ours, to listen carefully, take the gospel deeply into our hearts, and respond generously and bravely. To his voice, his call. “Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens…”

Now the clue to this particular text, to its meaning and its purpose in Matthew’s gospel at least, is in those three precious, familiar, even intimate words. “Come to me.” “Come to me.” It’s the call to discipleship, my friends. With Jesus, it’s always the call to discipleship.

This is the same Jesus who says, “Come to me,” and then teaches his friends to turn the other cheek when struck, bear witness in that moment to a better world, and love their enemies. This is the same Jesus who says, “Come to me,” and then insists we find him not in temples and sanctuaries, but in prisons, detention centers, field hospitals and nursing homes. This is the same Jesus who says, “Come to me,” when his friends are overwhelmed by the hunger of the poor, by their misery far from home, and then teaches his friends to break bread, and bless it all gladly, and then to feed the many with holy human hands and bread that satisfies. “Come to me.”

So here, in the eleventh chapter of the gospel, very close to the fulcrum of the whole story, Jesus again calls you and me, and new friends too, to follow him on a perilous road in a bewildering world. The Roman Empire then. American Nationalism. Israeli Apartheid. Homophobic Fundamentalism. Now. Wherever frightened, anxious souls in frightened, anxious systems scapegoat this group or that one in the name of security or Making Someplace Great Again.

HOMILY: "The Arc is a Long One"

A Meditation on Proverbs 29:18
And the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution (Part One)

Sunday, June 28, 2026

1.

“Where there is no vision,” we read this morning, “the people perish.”  “Where there is no vision, the people perish.  But happy are those who keep torah…”  That’s the familiar verse out of today’s reading from Proverbs.  Or, the very contemporary translation of Eugene Peterson goes like this: “If people can’t see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves…”  “If people can’t see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves; but when they attend to what [God] reveals, they are most blessed…”  

The particular vision around which our United Church of Christ gathered years ago did not insist on or even hope for a Christian nation on this continent.  Instead, our forebearers imagined a wildly pluralistic democracy.  And the church as a partner in that project.  They anticipated conversation, dialogue, even civil disagreement with a thousand other religions, traditions and communities.  And they trusted—as we still do—that an educated and committed democracy would champion freedom and human rights, collaborative wisdom, and the kind of justice that involves and honors us all.  “Attending to what God reveals” is so much more than cherry picking biblical texts.  For our United Church of Christ, it’s always meant meeting other traditions, seeking common ground, discerning the Spirit’s wisdom together.  And listening for the still, small voice that says: ‘You are one people.  All of you.  And you share one planet.  All of it.  So build a better future together.”

This past week, we in the UCC celebrated our 69th birthday.  Did you all see that?  In 1957, this denomination, our denomination, was born in a season of ecumenical spirit and hope.  Indeed, there was a movement in the 50s to name our denomination the “Uniting” Church of Christ—so passionately did our founders believe in the project of pluralism and unity and mutual liberation as God’s own dream for the church.

So yes, we resist the dangerous clamoring for a Christian nation, or an American theocracy.  And yet, we in the United Church very much believe and have always believed that faith requires public action, community involvement and passionate participation in multicultural, multiracial, multifaith movements for justice, kindness and peace.  And, it kind of goes without saying, that that kind of participation is a hallmark of this very congregation in Durham.

So over these next three weeks, I’d like to explore with you our unique religious tradition and how it meets the moment of the nation’s 250th anniversary.  What do we bring to the table?  How might our particular tradition offer both insight and motivation to a nation that has, in many ways, squandered its vision and settled for a politics of stumbling instead?

2.

Let’s begin with a 19th century preacher, whose commitments seem right at home here, among us, in Durham.

Maybe you caught some of the dedication events as the Obama Presidential Center was opened in Chicago last week.  In his own remarks, the former president recalled the ministry of Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister in the 1850s, who first articulated the line that Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister in the 1960s, would make famous.  “I do not pretend,” Theodore Parker said in his West Roxbury pulpit, “to understand the moral universe.  The arc is a long one.  My eye reaches but a little ways.  I cannot calculate the curve…I can however divine it by conscience.  And from what I see,” he said, “I am sure that it bends toward justice.”  A century later, Dr. King would thunder from a hundred American pulpits: “The arc of history is long indeed, but it bends, it bends toward justice.”

Right off the bat, a question that begs asking in 2026 is this one: “Do we still believe it?”  Can you and I still divine the long arc of the moral universe?  Can we still say—with Dr. King and so many of our heroes—that it bends toward justice?  I want to suggest this morning that it is the vocation of the United Church of Christ to insist that we can.  It is our calling not only to insist that we can, but to be about the work of bending that arc together, building wonderfully diverse coalitions of Americans to bend and pull and believe and heal and move together on the arc that bends toward justice.  We’ve got a long history of doing just that—imperfectly at times, but doing just that.

What makes Theodore Parker’s 1853 sermon all the more meaningful is its context: its context in the ministry of a man and a church committed to the idea of protection, of safe passage, of sanctuary.  Because that’s what was going on in his congregation in the 1850s—when he first spoke of the arc being long.  In more than a few ways, you see, you and I are standing on Theodore Parker’s shoulders.  In 1850, he had welcomed, he and his West Roxbury church, in his own parsonage, the fugitive Ellen Craft, a former slave and a member of his congregation.  Together, at great cost to their reputations, they had protected her there.  In his parsonage.  In that same year, as you may know, the Fugitive Slave Act was debated fiercely (and eventually passed) by Congress in the ‘Compromise of 1850.’  

And under that law, as you’ll recall, Northerners were required to round up and turn over men and women (like Ellen Craft) who had managed to escape slavery, so that they be inhumanely returned to their Southern “owners.” The abolition of slavery and the demise of the Fugitive Slave Act was Theodore Parker’s fervent cause, deeply planted in his religious and moral convictions.  Because the liberty of one’s body and mind were divinely given, inalienable rights, he saw slavery as the greatest abomination there could be against God and nature, and the most corrupting force in democratic society in these United States.  

What would Theodore Parker be preaching today?

Now interestingly, most Boston clergy in the 1850s refused to oppose that legislation.  Some even supported it as a constitutional obligation, arguing that it was the only way to "save the Union." Others argued that catching fugitive slaves was somehow sanctioned by scripture. (Show me where they found that one.)  But Theodore Parker proclaimed that the Compromise of 1850 violated Christian ideals and threatened all free institutions and governments. He preached and rallied against it, calling for churches and church folk to defy and break the law once passed. 

And in time, he helped Ellen Craft to escape to Canada. 

And then, in 1854, Theodore Parker and other members of the Vigilance Committee he had founded agitated on behalf of another captured fugitive named Anthony Burns.  And yes, that was the young fugitive’s name: Anthony.  Anthony.  This time, for his organizing, Theodore Parker was arrested and indicted by a grand jury for obstructing the duties of a federal marshal.  And sadly, that same federal marshal with hundreds of others soon seized, tried and marched Anthony Burns to Boston harbor.  Where he was put on a ship and set back to Viriginia in chains.  As many, many in Boston watched. 

3.

And that was the moment.  That was the context for the sermon.  That was the troubling, bewildering, heartbreaking provocation for Theodore Parker’s gospel.  It wasn’t a moment of triumph, or wildly satisfying victory.  It was a moment of darkness, sadness and loss.

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe,” he preached in Boston that Sunday. “The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but a little ways. I cannot calculate the curve...”  And then, my friends, this: “I can divine it by conscience,” Theodore Parker said.  “And from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.”

He couldn't see it. Not all of it, but he believed it anyway. And then he kept fighting.  Creating sanctuary for fugitives.  Advocating, organizing for an end to slavery.  Insisting on a vision of pluralism and justice for all.

As President Obama put it this week, Theodore Parker's words were “a declaration of faith, a defiant call, not to abandon hope or give way to fear, but to stay true to our better selves, and true to one another, and to keep fighting...even in the face of cruelty and bitter disappointment, even in the face of impossible odds.”

HOMILY: "On Earth as in Heaven"

A Communion Meditation

On John 21
Sunday, June 14, 2026

Welcome, friends of God:

Come as you are; come, beloved and blessed, to the crowded Table!

You know, the version of Christianity we’re leaning into, here, is not that tired version that claims salvation for some at the expense of the many. And it’s not that preachy version that promises easy answers if you play by the bully’s rules.

No, this Christianity, this Gospel – like the Teacher himself – invites vulnerability and collaboration. This Gospel insists on wild mercy and justice, and partnerships with friends from a thousand faiths and all walks of life and every possible way of looking at the world.

So come, beloved and blessed, to the crowded Table –

where many become one,

songs become prayers,

and everyday bread, the promise of a whole new world,

which is the world beneath our feet!

1.

It’s possible, in the playful world of this fourth gospel, that Jesus has been watching from the shore, standing at the edge where the slurpy waves lap the beach, all night long. It’s possible. The disciples don’t see him, of course, because it’s dark, really dark; and because they’re lost, really lost, in their own frustration--fishing all night long, working all the angles, saying all the prayers. And catching nothing at all.

I’ve always imagined that Jesus shows up (even magically) at daybreak, as the sun’s just sneaking out of the hills. But John’s story’s ambivalent on this. And it seems quite possible that Jesus has kept this vigil through the long night, that he’s pulled his cloak close against the darkness; because we know that love does just that when the beloved are grieving, when pain exhausts their efforts, and everything comes up empty. Love shows up. Love keeps a vigil. So I imagine Jesus in the gloaming keeping vigil, and then into the darkest hours of the night keeping vigil, and I imagine him waiting, waiting, waiting for daybreak. And watching, all the while, from the shore.

And their futility may seem familiar to us. The collapse of their movement in the days after his crucifixion. The unnerving reality that empire so often crushes dissent, that violence so often overwhelms compassion, that fear seems to win every time. So they fish and they fish and they fish, deep into the night, even all through the night, and the crushing reality of those very dark days sinks into their hearts, and then their hands, and even their feet. They catch nothing. Not a single fish. All night long. Scarcity demoralizes them. Cruelty wins again. Empire rules the world. And they can do exactly nothing to stop it.

Except. Except God’s mercy keeps watch. Except Jesus has kept his fearless vigil all through the night. And when he calls out from shore, begging them to cast their nets on the other side, challenging the soul-crushing logic of scarcity itself, there are suddenly so many fish now, that they can’t possibly haul the net in. (And in case anybody’s keeping score, there are 153 of them.)

My friends, and this I think is the good news, the gospel itself, God’s mercy keeps watch. All night long. Jesus keeps his fearless vigil for you, for me, for us, for the world, all through the night. Even when the pain is breaking us. Even when scarcity breeds fear, and dictators preach xenophobia and genocide. Jesus keeps his fearless vigil with that Palestinian family living under twisted rebar in the rubble of Gaza. All night long. Jesus keeps his fearless vigil with the young man I met in a Georgia prison years ago, serving a life sentence, scratching years off an old calendar. All night long. Jesus keeps his fearless vigil with an old man I know with Alzheimer’s, who can’t remember his own name, let alone the faces of his family. All night long. And you all know, you really do know that Jesus keeps his fearless vigil with Antony, with our dear brother Antony, roaming the church late at night, stopping to pray in this sanctuary for his family and every one of yours. Hoping beyond hope for a revolution of kindness in America. God’s mercy keeps watch. All night long.

And this is the power, my friends, it’s the only power resilient and resolute and strong enough to transform hearts of steel into spirits of grace; it’s the only power resilient and determined and strong enough to transform frightened fisherfolk into daring ministers of grace and peace. The power is love. And it’s always been so. The power is love. Jesus is love.

And on the beach, around the fire, the warm bread and fresh fish seal the deal. Weeping may endure for a long night, but joy, joy, joy comes again in the morning.

MUSIC: "Sounds of Wonder and Peace"

NO TO GENOCIDE AND TERROR: "Sign the Petition Today!"

DETERMINED: "We Rise"

LULLABY: "Honak/There"

MUSIC: "Olakatuna"

INVOCATION: "I Love Everybody"

INVOCATION: "Kingdom Come!"