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!"

HOMILY: "On Pentecost, A Counter Narrative"

For Pentecost and Acts 2
Sunday, May 24, 2026

1.

Early this year, a committed coalition of Granite Staters activated by a committed team of organizers pressured first the Governor of our state and then the administration in Washington to give up on plans for a massive ICE-controlled detention center in Merrimack. It would have been a warehouse really, like others across the country, a warehouse for human beings, detained immigrants, hundreds and hundreds of neighbors we cherish. But that coalition—motivated by a moral clarity you, my friends, have helped to generate and define—forced the Governor and then the administration itself to think twice. And then to give up on that particular plan. No warehouse in Merrimack. Not now.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, yet another immigrant friend was required by ICE to appear in Manchester for a scheduled ‘check-in,’ knowing fully that others have appeared at that same office and immediately been detained and deported. Never to be seen again by family and friends. Most of us cannot begin to understand the fear in a human heart on a day like that. But on that particular morning, a committed coalition of Granite Staters—including (praise God!) several of you—accompanied that dear man to the federal building in Manchester. And then you made sure that ICE recognized your commitment and your resolve and your numbers. And it’s widely understood today that the group’s presence, that coalition’s commitment, your resolve in showing up for that one brother and so many others—that this was a critical factor in ICE’s decision not to detain him that day, and to release him to the community he loves, to fight for his freedom another day.

I remind you of these two stories—of these two victories in the movement for justice in New Hampshire, justice in America; I remind you of these stories this Memorial Day Weekend because they remind us of the promise of democracy itself. And it’s a promise worth defending and sacrificing for, a promise cherished by the hundreds of thousands who have given their lives that we might yet become one people united: one people of many dreams, traditions, languages and faiths. Some of these dear ones died in war, others in hard-fought campaigns for social change and human rights. Some died serving and protecting our communities as firefighters and emergency responders; others died after a lifetime of devotion, a lifetime of civic commitment and sacrificial choices.

And this weekend, this Memorial Day Weekend, we remember them all with gratitude, because they invested their dreams and their days in an imperfect nation that can only be perfected by love, justice and civic spirit. They gave their lives so that coalitions like those I’ve described just now might stand up boldly to ICE in Merrimack and reject warehousing of human beings. They have their lives so that diverse networks—Jew and Christian, agnostic and unaffiliated—might stand as one in Manchester and demand justice and protection for neighbors who’ve come to these shores seeking safety, opportunity and friendship. So, yes, we praise God this weekend for every one of our these friends who have made extraordinary sacrifices for a country where justice, equity, diversity and community are not just a promise, but our shared responsibility, our common task, our democratic purpose.

Will you join me, then, in a moment of silent prayer, in thanksgiving for them all…

2.

At last weekend’s event on the National Mall in Washington, House Speaker Mike Johnson celebrated an entirely different vision of our democracy. And in the spirit of Christian nationalism, an idea that’s both toxic and blasphemous, he invoked a sadly distorted reading of American history. And it’s a reading that almost literally white-washes that history to promote a monochromatic (or let’s be honest, racist) picture of our past, present and future. “Since Christopher Columbus set sail in the New World,” the Speaker said from the dais, “since the settlers at Jamestown planted the cross at Cape Henry, and since the pilgrims at Plymouth made a covenant to give you [O God] the glory, in all that time, you have guided us at every pivotal moment. And when our forefathers,” he continued, “took up the great cause of American independence, they turned to you [O God] in steadfast prayer.”

It sounds innocuous, maybe even familiar to us; but it discloses nonetheless the Christian nationalist project itself. America, in other words, has always been privileged by God, even above other peoples, nations and tribes. And that privilege cannot ever be repealed or even questioned. So it is that the violent displacement of indigenous peoples by European Christians was (from the start) blessed, ordained, even mandated by God. So it is that slavery was just a step (maybe a misstep, but a step) along the way to providential glory on a continent waiting to be conquered by enlightened Christians, well-meaning white Europeans, true believers. We have no regrets. We have made no mistakes. We’ve simply done what God required and taken what God promised. And American salvation depends on this very orthodoxy and unanimous consent.

And then, same speech, the Speaker even more explicitly rejected a more accurate account of our history and blamed champions of inclusion and activists for justice for the country’s 21st century decline. “In recent years,” he said, “we’ve seen sinister ideologies sow confusion and discord among our people.” And let’s be clear: when Mike Johnson and JD Vance talk about ‘sinister ideologies,’ they’re talking about diversity, equity and inclusion; they’re talking about open and affirming churches; they’re talking about a full national accounting for white racism and racial injustice and police brutality. They’re talking, in other words, about you and me and our mission, and almost every sermon that’s preached from this pulpit.

They’re interested, these Christian nationalists, in a Christianity that is compliant in celebrating American exceptionalism and resourcing American power—but fearful of challenging injustice and opening doors for marginalized peoples and confessing our generational sins. In fact, confession is itself an enemy of their project. Repentance is anathema to their kind of nationalism. We confess nothing. We have nothing to repent. God’s glory is ours. Forever and ever. Amen.

So again, the Speaker said, referring to folks like you and me, “We’ve witnessed attacks on our history, on our heroes, and on the cherished moral and spiritual identity of this great nation. These voices insist to the young and impressionable that our story — the American story — is one of oppression and hypocrisy and failure, and that this story can only be understood through the lens of our sins.” Again, no confession. No repentance. No sins. God is on our side. Full stop.

To be clear, Christian nationalism—and I think we want to say, ‘White Christian nationalism’: White Christian nationalism denies racism as an American reality; rejects a full accounting for slavery and the middle passage; denies the foundational sin of genocide and indigenous displacement; and seeks in effect to criminalize diversity, equity and inclusion as a curse on the godly (read: white Christian) project entrusted to God’s people on this continent. So Mike Johnson and Donald Trump aim to white-wash American history. In the name of God. And God’s glory.

So that’s that.

3.

But let’s set Christian nationalism aside, shall we, and let’s talk instead about Christian theology, about our life together in the Spirit of Pentecost. Because: if nationalism is a spiritual and political temptation—and I believe it is—Christian theology has to meet that temptation with prayerful humility, Christ-like love and (perhaps most importantly) a commitment to discipleship. Jesus is pretty clear: “If any would take me seriously,” he says, more than once, “if any would take me seriously, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” You might remember that Peter among others was quick to anoint Jesus as Messiah and claim for Jesus the very authority of heaven and earth. It was kind of a “Mike Johnson moment” for Peter in the eighth chapter of Mark. Remember that? “I got you, Jesus. You’re the Messiah, Jesus. King of Kings, Jesus. There’s no one like you, Jesus.”

But Jesus rejects Peter’s triumphalism, and insists without hesitating a heartbeat that he’s not about exerting authority, and he’s not about enforcing a set of beliefs, and he’s not about religious nationalism, or biblical legalism, or ecclesial control. “If any would take me seriously,” he says on the way to Jerusalem, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” In other words: “Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.”