HOMILY: "A Delightful Burden"

A Meditation on the Parable of the Persisting Widow (Luke 18:1-8)

Sunday, March 23, 2025

A Poem: "Because of Us" (Em Berry)

This morning I learned
the English word gauze

(finely woven medical cloth)
comes from the Arabic word […] Ghazza
because Gazans have been skilled weavers for centuries

I wondered then
how many of our wounds
have been dressed
because of them

and how many of theirs
have been left open
because of us

1.

So Luke tells us--even before a word's out of Jesus' mouth--that this particular parable's about "the necessity of praying always and not losing heart."  As if that's any help at all.  As if any of us have the slightest clue as to what "praying always" could possibly mean.  And then, and then, instead of a story about a great mystic or a devout believer or a cloistered master, Jesus tells this one about a relentless widow who wears out, who flat-out wears out an unjust judge. And, as always, we’re left to wrestle with what prayer really means in our lives, in our communities, in our particular moment. What kind of persistence, what kind of relentlessness is Jesus talking about here? Is it simply a story about personal prayer and piety? Or is it also, somehow, a story about discipleship, public life and resistance?

I have a hunch that Jesus’ point is that it’s all one and the same. While prayer certainly is personal—it has to be personal—it’s not insulated from the suffering of our neighbors or the injustice so many face every day. Prayer isn’t the passive practice of a docile people; and God isn’t a disinterested if benevolent force who has everything figured out long before we get around to caring. God insists instead on partnership, engagement, a deeply personal and sometimes even contentious relationship. Sometimes we have to get up in God’s face. As God gets up in ours.  Prayer is all of that.

But that’s hard for us. We’ve grown up with stories and images that resist confrontation, defy disbelief and aim for spiritual simplicity. For example, we preachers are prone to pithy reassurances, like: “God knows what you really need before you even ask.” Or, “God always wants what’s best for you.” Or, “God is closer to you than your very breathing.” Sweet and comforting, perhaps. But how do you square these comforting one-liners with a parable which seems to suggest that there are occasions when God needs to be pressured to move on something important; there are issues where God needs to be cajoled for justice’s sake; there are seasons in our lives in which we must go back to God, over and over and over again, to insist on our passion for the protection of the vulnerable and the healing of the planet? It’s a little unsettling, this story. And I think that’s just as Jesus would have it.

I think that Jesus imagines prayer as partnership, restless and creative and loving, no doubt fashioned in grace—but less interested in pithy reassurances than God’s own disarming passion for justice and renewal. Such a life will lead us in strange and unsteadying directions. Crooked lines.

2.

Years ago, in a Palestinian refugee camp, I met a woman who (that night and ever since) has reminded me of the relentless widow in Jesus’ parable. And her unyielding faithfulness. I was traveling in Palestine that spring with a delegation of Quaker activists, visiting Palestinian and Israeli peacemakers, hearing first-hand their stories of displacement and exile, hope and heartbreak.

And that night, in the Dheisheh camp, just outside of Bethlehem, we were to visit with a Palestinian couple who had grown up, and then married, and then raised their own family in that camp. I never did catch their names; and she was more than an hour late to supper and our appointed time together. And this meant that our delegation had eaten our hosts’ marvelous homecooked meal—shawarma, falafel, the works—while waiting for her and worrying about her whereabouts.

When she did finally arrive and collapsed into a chair at our table, she explained (over a cold plate of food) that she’d been stopped at a military checkpoint outside the city. Stopped, questioned and harassed by 20-year-old Israeli soldiers, wielding (she noted angrily) US-made weapons, who pressed her for information she didn’t have about terrorists she didn’t know. She noted that this happened at least two or three times a week, as she returned home from work. Hassled by soldiers with automatic weapons. Laughing as they poked around in her handbag and mocked her for her frustration.

I remember that Palestinian woman as I think of the widow in the parable because she was angry and relentless. Once she finished her cold plate of food, she didn’t let her husband get a word in edgewise. She fumed at the expanding system of checkpoints that made traveling to and from work maddeningly complicated. She raged in recalling a pregnant neighbor who died at one of those checkpoints, as she pleaded with soldiers to let her get through to the hospital she needed for a complicated delivery. And she insisted that as long as she had breath in her body, she would organize protests and boycotts and anything else that offered any hope at all—to bring that system of apartheid and fear down, and offer her children a future of freedom. All the while, her husband nodded knowingly at her side. As if to say she wasn’t kidding around.

My Palestinian friends tell me that they have a word in Arabic for this kind of faithfulness, this kind of relentlessness. And it’s ‘SUMUD.’ ‘Sumud’ is the steadfastness of the widow in Jesus’ story, determined to make her case, unphased by the judge’s disinterest in her condition. ‘Sumud’ is the steadfastness of that refugee in the camp—mocked day after day by teenagers, unwavering in her commitment to a better world for her children. ‘Sumud’ is courage reinforced by friendship and faith; and sometimes it sounds like anger (as it did that night in Dheisheh). But always it manifests in prayer and perseverance.  For a world redeemed.

There’s a picture you can find online—I believe I saw it first in the New York Times—of a single table stretching for half a mile, through mounds of rubble in southern Gaza, earlier this month. A long, long table brightly covered in red cloth.  And seated on both sides, block after block after devastated block, are Gazans of all ages, gathered to break their fast on the first day of Ramadan. Organizers set up loudspeakers and played traditional music; they hung lights and flags between busted concrete pilings. And there, in the rubble, they had their feast. Though they grieve unimaginable losses, though justice seems a distant dream, though mad men rule the world of weapons and checkpoints: they had their feast. And that’s ‘sumud.’ It’s easy to imagine the widow in Jesus’ parable sitting at that table, telling a story to a friend, dipping a piece of pita into a bowl. Planning her next move.

3.

When I arrive in the West Bank in early May, I’ll have the extraordinary privilege of spending six weeks in the company of two men, two friends—whose friendship has become something of a delightful burden in my life. And I know that’s a strange way to describe any relationship; so I want to tell you just what I mean. By a delightful burden. You’ve met these two friends over the past few years—Ghassan Manasra (a Palestinian Muslim) has visited us here in Durham twice and Zoughbi Zoughbi (a Palestinian Christian) preached two months ago, on Zoom, from his family’s home in Bethlehem. Each is a leader in his own community; each is a generous practitioner of nonviolence and peace; and each has suffered physical violence and years of injustice alongside his people.

Because our United Church of Christ is so profoundly committed to the human rights of all Palestinian and all Israeli people, and because that commitment requires partnership with particular people in particular places, I’ve been blessed over many years to spend time with Ghassan and his family, and Zoughbi and his, in their cities and among their faith communities. In many ways these two men have shaped not only my faith, but the human being I am today.  In their company, religion isn't mere speculation; it's the air that I breathe.

SUMUD: "Ramadan in Gaza"

RESISTANCE: "Apartheid-Free Communities"

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PROTEST: "Violence Begets..."

HOMILY: "This Jericho Road"

A Meditation on the Parable of the Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)
Sunday, March 16, 2025

1.

Samaritan and Christ

Four Sundays from now we’ll be waving fronds, with a hundred and one “Hosannas,” and watching Jesus fallumping into Jerusalem on a donkey, or an ass. Brilliant street theater. Friends, disciples, the poor and marginalized—waving palms as he passes, tossing branches into the street, celebrating his particularly Jewish and decidedly nonviolent commitment to the kingdom of God. Or more accurately, perhaps, and more prophetically: the kin-dom of God’s children. The kin-dom of God’s children. Palm Sunday will be no military march, no victory parade. The Romans have that business covered. Buffed up generals and state-of-the-art weapons.

Jesus and his friends, though, they have a very different world in mind, a very different kind of faith. The confrontation of this new world and the old one will begin on that road to Jerusalem, with Jesus fallumping on a donkey. And a ragtag band of lovers lining the way with fronds and songs.

In a lot of ways, Lent is a season of practice, forty days of rehearsal, for the street theater of Palm Sunday. For the confrontation in the streets between the new world and the old one. We prepare ourselves—and our communities—through prayerful discernment, soulful reflection, honest confession. And we invite Jesus to take us, to mold us like clay; and then the kiln of the Spirit to fire us for service and witness. Lent is hardly a season of passivity or spiritual groveling. It is instead six weeks of disciplined partnership: in which God reminds us of our place in that kin-dom, and Jesus trains us for love-in-action, world-flipping creativity and sacrifice.

And if Lent is forty days of rehearsal, what we’re doing in worship every Sunday is something like workshopping the show. Puzzling through the themes and storylines. Embracing our roles. Blocking the scenes. It’s not the journey of the solitary soul, Lent; a way of winning ourselves back into the graces of a skeptical God. It’s a shared practice of mutual care, discernment, collaborative worship and compassion. Will we risk the kind of spiritual intimacy that breaks open our hearts to God and one another?

Will we weave into the fabric of our lives, into the heart of our churches, a life of such neighborliness that we meet Jesus face to face in one another? This kind of faith, this kind of practice, this kind of prayer isn’t just episodic—but the very substance of our lives. “Thy will be done.” “Thy will be done.”

2.

And what we have in today’s parable—one of Jesus’ most familiar—is a compelling reminder that spiritual intimacy is not to be downloaded from the internet, and certainly not to be decoded in a set of religious fundamentals. Lent is no retreat from the bewildering pain and angst of our time. Spiritual intimacy—for Jesus, at least—has something to do, maybe everything to do, with the nearness of broken bodies and the vulnerability of our neighbors. The temple is—for Jesus and for us—the human body, frail, mortal, bound by time and space. Which is to say, that we cultivate our awareness of the divine, our practice of reverence and awe, in our capacity to be broken together. To be vulnerable together. To be shaken and wounded and hopeful together. We do our best theology on the Jericho Road. We pray with our hands and feet on the Jericho Road.

The Levite and priest are no doubt well-intentioned, but so preoccupied with rules and ritual that each keeps his distance, crosses the road, avoids the badly beaten brother in the street. Could be that rules of engagement forbid one or the other from coming into contact with blood on a holy day. Could be that there’s a prayer service starting in an hour and no time to lose. Or it could be that there has been so much violence on the Jericho Road, there have been so many beaten and robbed—that it hardly makes sense to intervene in one life, when it surely changes nothing at all.

Then, however.

Then a despised Samaritan journeys by. And when he sees the bloodied brother in the street, he feels compassion for him. Why is he despised, this Samaritan? Probably because he worships in an odd way. Probably because he assigns different meanings to different texts. Probably because he lives across the tracks, in another world, and no one in their right mind dares going there.

But the Samaritan, he goes to the bloodied brother, and he stanches his wound, perhaps using his own shirt. And then he lifts the man onto his own donkey, walks them both to an inn nearby, and cares for him through the night. If the Levite and priest keep their distance, the Samaritan blurs every boundary and transgresses all the rules. This is a core lesson in our Lenten curriculum, as we prepare for Palm Sunday, Holy Week and Easter. Spiritual intimacy has something to do with the nearness of broken bodies and the vulnerability of our neighbors. To touch God’s face is to stanch his wounds. To hear God’s voice is to get close enough to hear her breath, her fear, even her gratitude. As you bandage her broken body. And get her the help she needs.

I’m remembering a rabbi who reminds me that in the Talmud—the great rabbinical commentaries of the first millennium--the rabbis of old insisted that the biblical injunction to “love your neighbor as you love yourself” is even more boldly understood this way. “Love your neighbor who IS yourself.” How about that? “Love your neighbor who IS yourself.” What the Samaritan sees in the street is not some random creature, some unfortunate traveler who wandered into a trap, the wrong fellow in the wrong place at the wrong time. What he finds in the street is his own spiritual kin, a brother, a sister, who reveals in all that vulnerability and madness the Samaritan’s own truth. “Love your neighbor who IS yourself.” When he stanches that wound with his shirt, he falls even more deeply into the boundless love of God. When he lifts the man onto his donkey, he senses in his arms the density of divine being, the nearness of grace, the fullness of his own humanity.

3.

I was so moved this week to see videos of hundreds of Jewish friends, protesting the arrest and detention of a Palestinian student at Columbia University. There they were—Jewish elders, rabbis, descendants of Holocaust survivors, students, whole families—taking over the lobby at Trump Tower in Manhattan; singing, praying, submitting defiantly to their own arrest. Because they know that Mahmoud Khalil’s life is bound up with theirs. Because they know that Palestinian freedom is of a single piece with Jewish freedom. Because the heart and soul of their ethic, of their faith, is this: “Love your neighbor who IS yourself.” I dare say that Jesus would have been right at home, right at home, in that lobby and in that action, this week. When I love my neighbor, when I cross the road to tend to his wounds, I discover the kingdom—the kin-dom of God—that dissolves corrosive enmity and transcends tribal loyalties and offers us both our true selves.

PROTEST: "First They Came for Mahmoud"

COURAGE: "The World that Will Be"

HOMILY: "For Such a Time as This"

A Meditation on Matthew 13:1-9

For the First Sunday in Lent

Sunday, March 9, 2025

1.

So, what are we to make of the Parable of the Sower? There are at least two interpretations of the Parable of the Sower that just don’t work and have (over time) done more harm than good. The first is this: that the parable celebrates a spirituality of frenzied accomplishment, hyper-productivity; and that it suggests that if you’re doing things right, if your soil’s rich and loamy, if you’re faithful, you’ll achieve great things, and lots and lots of great things as a matter of course. “The harvest will be immense!”

Let’s kick that one to the curb, right off the bat. That frenzied accomplishment is the point of Jesus’ call to discipleship, that hyper-productivity is any kind of a sign of the kingdom of God. Remember the mustard seed? The grace of God will not and cannot be quantified by gross income, or by net worth, or by billable hours. It resists measurement in a CV or even an obituary. Jesus is talking about a completely different kind of harvest. Seriously.

The second illegitimate interpretation, then, is this: that the parable pronounces judgment on all of us who struggle to make sense of our faith; and that it glorifies confidence, certainty and even aggression. If you’re secure in your faith, if trust Jesus enough, you’ll bring many to true belief, turn little efforts into huge successes and tiny congregations into mega-churches. But wasn’t it Shakespeare who said, in “All’s Well That Ends Well”: “Who knows himself a braggart, let him fear this, for it will come to pass that every braggart shall be found an ass.” You might tuck that away when you’re watching the evening news this week: “Every braggart shall be found an ass.” So this one, too, we can kick to the curb! That true faith is marked by unquestioning devotion and absolute certainty. That pure belief, unsullied belief is the ground from which mighty things spring to life. To be conflicted is to be compromised. To be unsure is to be unworthy. Another interpretation that’s done more harm than good!

Instead, then, we want to look at the context in which Jesus tells this story, the placement of this particular parable in Matthew’s gospel. In Matthew’s gospel, and you can almost map this out, there’s a pattern to Jesus’ teaching, and his disciples’ movement, out, into the world of pain and possibility. Jesus will teach a little, lay out some ideas, and tell a few parables; and then, almost immediately, he’ll send the disciples out into the world—to proclaim a message of Love in demoralized communities; to gather up the blamed, the maimed and the shamed in circles of celebration; to challenge ideas of scarcity with abundance and grace; to speak truth to power, whatever the cost. And he’ll be honest about what he’s asking. He’ll say to them, early on, that he’s sending them out like sheep into the midst of wolves. No easy thing, this witness to Love in a world of suspicion and distrust.

Before long, then, Jesus calls them back, insists on their return, gathers them close for still more classroom time—more conversation, more stories, and reflection on all that they’ve done and left undone. Always, a teacher, Jesus: building a movement, training up its leaders. The Parable of the Sower, then, seems to be a particular way of encouraging disciples (disciples like you and me) for the challenging ministries of lovingkindness and truth-telling that await, for the tender opportunities that inevitably test our hearts in a world of bewildering beauty and mind-bending cruelty. It’s Jesus building a movement.

2.

Parable of the Sower / Mika de Goodaboom

You see, whatever your faith means to you now, there is no question that it requires something of you, as it requires something of me and every other soul in this room. I’m talking about 2025 now. The gospel of Jesus Christ—the good news of God’s love—compels us to bear that love in whatever ways we can, in whatever settings we move, in the ways we engage neighbors and friends, in the courage with which we stand up for democracy, decency and human rights. There’s no back door now. Whatever Christianity might mean theologically, there’s no question that it makes a claim on our hearts, on our choices and on our time. In 2025. We live in a moment that insists on witness, embodied witness, and proclamation. Much like, exactly like, those very first friends of Jesus. His first disciples. Who learn and listen. And go to serve.

I know an old man in Boston who used to teach Russian literature to undergraduates, a brilliant scholar and teacher of young people, who can no longer remember the names of his children or the books he taught. But every morning, his nephew walks him five blocks down the street to a familiar café for a cup of piping hot coffee. And the old man stops along the way—at least once or twice a block, this great academic—to bend over, sometimes kneel to the ground and retrieve a piece of garbage tossed from a passing car or a careless reveler the night before. Every piece he tucks inside a canvas bag—which he faithfully lugs block after block, to the café and back home, where he separates the garbage from the recycling and sends it on its way.

In 2025, this is his witness. This is his proclamation. This is his particular and even urgent offering—in service to the kind of faith that insists on beauty in the shared spaces of our lives, in service to the kind of faith that defies carelessness and callousness and invests each moment with reverence and joy. That’s the kind of harvest Jesus is describing.

So, we’re all disciples now. We all have work to do now. No gift is too small, no moment insignificant. Jesus says, Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Jesus says, Blessed are the merciful and the meek and every soul that hungers for justice. We’re all disciples now. We all have work to do. The old man snagging a beer can from a snow drift on Boylston Street. The teacher standing bravely beside a transgender teen in the lunchroom—while a bully curses her up and down and classmates root for violence. We’re all disciples now. We all have work to do. The allies who keep vigil, week after week, outside congressional offices, rejecting war and militarism. The brave hearts who step into the Dover jail every Wednesday and to offer counsel to immigrants detained.

Or your witness might be resisting the cynicism that runs rampant across our screens and tablets—and singing a happy song as you shop for groceries before lunch. Or your particular proclamation might be pulling off the road to praise God for a sunset that takes your breath away. Or your service to God might be picking up the phone after dinner and asking a friend if she needs a prayer, or a laugh, or both.

SUMUD: "Steadfastness"

See "No Other Land"--which has one a 2025 Oscar for Best Documentary!

BECAUSE MUSIC: "If It Be Your Will"