NAMES: "Hannah Rose"

BOOKS: "Here Where We Live is Our Country"

 

I've just finished Molly Crabapple's remarkable history of the Jewish Bund, and I can honestly say that it is the most difficult book, the most affecting history I've read in a long, long time.  It's the story of Jewish resistance in tsarist Russia, and then Poland and beyond, as the Bund faces rising tides of bigotry, racism, fascism and genocide...and resists through courageous networks of workers, artists, activists and visionaries.  And all the way through, there runs a thread: that our one hope is one another, solidarity, building movements beyond borders and differences.

Here's what Molly says about her project:

"So why did I write thie book about the Bund--who lost, who were failed--and not about victorious killers? Because I am sick of monsters--whether they belong to my group of any other or any other.  Because I know that we all have the capacity to be victims and tormenters, as well as bystanders, staring blanklyat a burning wall.  Because I want off the samara wheel of atrocity, and the Bund's demand of solidarity across difference is the only way to get there.

"Such solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed, but it is all we have.  It is the only thing that can save us..."

For my many friends working so bravely to protect human rights, strenghten democracy and end the occupation that has decimated Palestinian communities in Gaza and the West Bank...I recommend this book as a challenging, indispensable and inspiring reflection on where we've been, and where we might still go.

See more about Molly Crabapple here.

SIGN ON: "No Partnering with ICE!"

CONCERT FOR PEACE: "With Sheikh Abed and Stu"

A chance to experience the creative, peacemaking spirit of Sheikh Abed Manasra; the soulful genius of Stu Dias; and the heartfelt voice of Brennan Whaley!  An intimate concert Saturday night, with no tickets or charge!  Come to be inspired!

Who is Abed Manasra?

Sheikh Abed Alsalam Manasra is from Nazareth in the Galilee region of Israel/Palestine. He represents the third generation of spiritual masters in his family within the Sufi Qadiri Tariqa As-Salaam, described as a branch of Sufism/Islam dedicated strictly to the study and promotion of peace.  His father Ghassan has been to Durham twice these past several years, sharing the family's commitment to reconciliation in this heartbreaking season of war and genocide.

In addition to his speaking work, Sheikh Abed is also an oud player. The oud is a traditional Middle Eastern short-necked lute. He uses music as a core mechanism for reconciliation in times of division and uses the instrument to engage young people through his Young Peacebuilders Training Program.

Abed says that he committed his life to grassroots diplomacy in high school while working in a region marked by long-standing conflict and oppression. He serves as the interfaith dialogue expert for Rising Tide International and the Israel programs manager for the Abrahamic Reunion, a nonprofit organization focused on building sustainable peace among the diverse faith communities of the Holy Land.

"Given the difficult circumstances we are facing today in the world, and especially in the Holy Land," he says, "our great responsibility compels us to work hard for a better future for all of us — a future in which we live in safety, peace, and love, and reject hatred, aggression, wars, and extremism."

MUSIC: "Can't Find My Way Home"

MUSIC: "With a Little Help..."

MUSIC: "Up Where..."

HOMILY: "What 'If'?"

Isaiah 58
Sunday, July 12, 2026
On the Semiquincentennial of U.S.A. (Part 3)

1.

Watching from afar, or at least the next state over, we have of course witnessed this week the dissolution of what was a promising Senate campaign in Maine. One that had for many months inspired a movement of Mainers—with visions of universal health care, a fair and just economy, and a national commitment to international law, human rights, rather than perpetual and genocidal war. The political tide seemed to be literally turning in Maine. And change seemed be even within their shared and collective grasp.

Like so many of you, I have friends north of the border, and a good many are devasted this weekend. And there are questions, so many questions this weekend, that pertain, I think, to our summer conversation about democracy itself and what we in the church bring—spiritually, theologically—to that project.

Was Graham Platner a fatally flawed candidate with a compelling message? Was he set up for failure by hasty operatives in his own party or maybe taken down by frightened powerbrokers in the other party? And then this one: Do you have to be a perfect human being to participate in democratic decision-making, in community leadership, in public life? How imperfect or even broken can you be and still contribute? And perhaps just as urgently, maybe most urgently: What are we to say and do about the pervasive crisis of sexual violence in our country, and in our world? Because sexual violence continues to destroy communities and traumatize, devastate the lives of sisters and brothers, siblings, we love.

2.

To this last point, let us remember that the fundamental commitment of the gospel is inclusion, and the core practice of Christianity is healing. Healing of bodies. Healing of spirits. Healing of communities. Over and over again, Jesus engages meaningfully and bravely with women, and a few men, who have been brutalized. Brutalized by systems of cruelty and privilege. Betrayed by family and even religious leaders they trusted. And over and over again, Jesus makes space for their truth, for the sharing of hard stories, for their grief and rage, and then for compassion, for inclusion, and the healing of their bodies and spirits. And, indeed, that’s the calling, the vocation of beloved community itself. Ours and so many others. If you’ve been violated in any way, there is a privileged place for you at this table. We can heal together. So we bring to this work—just as Jesus does—our most humble hearts and most courageous loving. There is simply no other way.

I want to suggest too, and this is hard to say; but I want to suggest that it may well be that Graham Platner too is a victim of systemic, organized, generational violence. And it may well be that his choices, his treatment of women, his violence (if that’s what it is)—that his life has been scarred by unholy wars, and toxic masculinity, and the trauma of American violence perpetuated by governments going back decades and decades in this country. Which is not for a second to rationalize or dismiss the price paid by the abused and scarred among us. It is simply to say that violence, war: it is all too often ingested, embodied and transmitted—generation to generation; soldiers to their families; partners to their partners. And in the cacophony of this week’s news, in the flurry of activity to oust him from the race in Maine, I fear that this point is too easily lost on us. The kind of violence of which Graham Platner is accused is mapped out in war rooms, paid for by Congress, and rationalized by presidents who all too often lie to make it happen.

Graham Platner served three tours, we know, in Iraq and Afghanistan: three tours in countries we had brutally occupied, three tours in communities of families ripped to shreds, three tours in conflicts where unimaginable terror traumatized the young people sent to do our government’s dirty work. And that kind of violence, coupled with toxic masculinity and crippled self-esteem, does awful, awful things to men, and to the women they love.

And if we’re committed to the difficult tasks of supporting those who’ve been abused and violated, and healing those who’ve ingested war, and violence, and abusive notions of power and sex; if we’re committed to this, we must address the patterns of violence, even the political economy of war and violence, that betrays democratic traditions of collaboration, negotiation and neighborliness.

Rape is not just Graham Platner’s issue, or his fatal flaw. It is an American issue, a public health issue, a spiritual crisis; and we are all responsible for healing this body politic. This country. Our country. Who will we choose to be?

3.

Both readings this morning are lyrical, almost musical in the ways they land in our hearts and here in our pews. And in two very different ways, perhaps, they set before us—and before our country—a choice.

Down in Massachusetts, Regie Gibson says:

“Any path this nation takes, it’s because we helped to choose it. Any tyranny that eventually triumphs, it’s because we helped excuse it. Any freedom this nation loses is because Massachusetts helped to lose it…” And Isaiah’s ancient text is, too, about a choice, a choice in every generation, a choice that involves particular commitments, shared among us, expressed in personal piety and public policy. The choice is consequential; and so too the blessing on the other side: “The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong…” Isn’t this the blessing we ache for in our generation? That our bones, that our democratic bones might be made strong again?

And this extraordinary word, this poetry, is indeed a stunning call to a particular practice, and it’s a shared and communal practice. With implications, profound implications of course, for personal piety. For the patterns of our own families and households.

You heard the text. God’s promises are sweet. God’s blessing is indeed on offer. But this practice (says the prophet) is our obligation, our collective responsibility. To betray that responsibility is to dismiss the promises themselves. What Isaiah conjures for us is a practice that meets violence with justice, a practice that meets the abuse of power with the rebuilding of trust. And this has profound implications, I think, for our American democracy. Listen.

“If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.”

There is a conditionality to God’s blessing. That’s the troubling, but essential prophetic tradition in a nutshell. There is a conditionality to God’s blessing. Isaiah’s speaking to an entire people, to a people he obviously loves, but chooses here to challenge and even cajole. “If you remove the yoke from among you, then your light shall rise in the darkness…If you satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then you shall be like a watered garden…” This, my friends, is the word of the Lord. The blessing of a people, of a nation, comes with conditions. The promise of God’s spirit, of God’s repairing, of God’s healing: these too come with conditions.

A democracy will hold up in the sweep of history, amidst the storms of history, only insofar as we act together, as we collaborate in communities, to remove so many yokes of oppression. A democracy will thrive and mature among us only insofar as we satisfy the needs of the afflicted, of the children, of the refugees and vulnerable in our midst. There is a conditionality to God’s blessing. And it sounds through both these texts like an anthem today, like Woody Guthrie singing “This Land” or Bob Dylan singing “The Times They are a Changin’” or Nina Simone singing “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.”

And so I offer these texts to you this morning, to the church, and maybe to our friends in Maine, and maybe even to Graham Platner and his team. I offer them as anthems of hope, as clarifying words, and (yes) as sharpening tools, in a democratic moment that requires clarity and discernment among us all. We have obligations, responsibilities. And God has indeed set conditions on every nation. But the promise, the blessing, and the hope is extraordinary:

"Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.”

MUSIC: "Golden Slumbers"

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 70s 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.