Year C, Epiphany 3
Sunday, January 17, 2010

Preached at Bethesda Presbyterian

www.bethesdapresbyterian.org

Scripture John 2:1-11

The Power of Intimacy

There’s a certain volatility to the supposed intimacies of our visual age.

Fred Allen discovered this. One of the last of the great American radio comedians “(Allen) had loved radio precisely because it depended on the listeners’ imagination to create a whole world out of words.”1 And inflections. And … pauses …

A true and lasting sense of intimacy, radio. So much so that in 1950, there were 108 different series that had been airing for a decade or more. Twelve for two decades or more.

But then another medium came along. Television. And Fred Allen could not make the transition well. His humor was too dry … too droll.

But some did make the transition. Milton Berle. Lucille Ball. Theirs was a manic humor, full of sight gags. What you saw was what you got.

For with the arrival of television, the task of using one’s imagination to create a world out of words began to dissipate. Now, the world was determined by budgets … scenic designers … carpenters ... all too soon, by special effects. The felt intimacy between performer and audience intensified. Geometrically, it intensified.

But it was – and is – a volatile intimacy. The highs are higher – and because they are, audiences prove fickle. A star – a politician – could descend just as quickly as she or he arises. Shows and success come, and shows and success go, far more quickly.2

There’s a certain volatility to the supposed intimacies of our visual age.


Enter as antidote: the intimacy conveyed in today’s gospel passage – Jesus’ changing of water into wine at the Cana wedding feast.

Isn’t it interesting that in John’s narrative, unlike in the other three gospels, Jesus does not lead off his newly-baptized ministry with a flashy healing. No crowds to oooh and aaah at the spectacle. Only the water-drawing servants seem to take notice of what he has done.

It’s an intimate first miracle, this. And for one of the most raucous yet intimate of celebrations: a first century Jewish wedding.

For the little town of Cana, it may have been the biggest event of the year. That nice Rabinowitz boy and that sweet Goldberg girl – betrothed, promised to one another for quite some time – finally getting hitched! The party would last a full week. Everybody who was anybody would be there.3

And I do mean “anybody”! The hospitality was such that not only was Jesus and his mother invited, so it was with even these new disciple “friends” of his – that rabble, who after all he had just met.

Soon, his mother – who must have known the hosts, if not the caterer, pretty well – learned from the circulating whispers that the good stuff was nearly tapped out. As biblical storytellers Phyllis Williams Provost and Barbara McBride-Smith relate, “Now there are some things you just don’t want to do. You don’t want to insult a three-hundred-pound-biker named Tank. You don’t want to leave the house wearing dirty underwear … And you don’t want to run out of liquid refreshment at a (first century) Jewish wedding.”4

And so leave it to Mary to intervene. “They have no wine,” she kvetches to her son. Jesus to his mother: “Woman, what concern is (this) to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” Mary to the servants – brushing Jesus off while tugging at his arm: “Do whatever he tells you.”

Ahhh, intimacy: the ability to struggle with one another … and not run away.

And so, Jesus performs his first “miracle”. And so, the good stuff continues to flow. And so, the unwitting wine steward applauds the equally unwitting bridegroom, saying, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine when folks get sloshed. But you have saved the best for last.”

But the real applause comes from the kitchen. The ones who knew who was really responsible.


There’s a certain volatility to the supposed intimacies of our visual age. Everybody seems to know everybody’s business. Or – like the wine steward to the bridegroom – we think we know.

And yet, authentic intimacy tends to runneth over from the coldest and dirtiest and what may appear to be the emptiest stone jars of our lives. Where the least of these among and in us all – the kitchen workers in our midst and in our souls – are more apt to detect, in their own quiet way, God’s miraculous movements, and are more apt then to pour forth praise.

For John’s gospel shapes this water-into-wine miracle as a powerful precursor not only to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection – God’s new intimacy with God’s world. John’s gospel shapes this miracle as a precursor to how we are called to live: out of the heat of our kitchens, and into the light of God’s kingdom!

God’s kingdom – read, God kin-dom – as sisters and brothers in the faith. In other words: as intimates! Disagreeing, struggling with one another at times – and yet, steadfastly refusing to run away.


Having come to know, as we were reminded last Sunday, that we are be-loved by God through our baptisms, our primary call now is to imagine and to live such true intimacy into being. Like listening to a good radio show or reading a good story or hearing an amazing symphony on a CD, sometimes it takes all the creative powers we can muster to celebrate the matrimonial closeness of life abundant – married or no. All the while keeping a respectful distance from the cacophony of choices that would shape and even determine our lives. Choices that would find expression in an all-too-human desire to possess rather than to steward … to abuse rather than to enjoy … to numb through excitement than delight through awareness. Choices that would drive us to exploit external sources of God’s created pleasures in a futile attempt to alleviate our internal fears.


How, then, are we to drink from the good and intimate wine of God’s abundance, without getting drunk from the wine of the world that always runs out?

It begins – of all places – with our thirst to be recognized. In one of his most famous sermons, Martin Luther King called this thirst “the drum major instinct.” Like all instincts, King said, the drum major instinct is God-given. It is not for us to smother with our guilt, much less submerge even further into our shame. If we use the drum major instinct rightly – to be servant leaders, “drum majors for justice”, as he put it – we will be recognized. For our ways of servant leadership will make God known through our lives. But only if we know God’s love for us, first.

For knowing God’s love for us first means we will know what the servants in the wedding kitchen are getting so excited about. Knowing God’s love for us first means we will know and return in praise to the source of the best – even and perhaps especially when the best shows up last. Knowing God’s love for us first means we can trace God’s hand over the bumpy roads of our lives – past, present, glimpsing into the future – trusting, as Dr. King pronounced at the end of the 1965 Selma-to-Birmingham march, that “the long arc of history bends toward justice.”

Authentic intimacy. Taking the time – from time to time – to trace our spiritual biographies. Sensing, awakening, for the first time perhaps, to God at work in our back kitchens – waiting, watching, and imagining in wonder what is to come. And celebrating, when it always does.

Authentic intimacy. Not only knowing we are be-loved by God – that priceless sense of knowing that we are known. But consequently coming to know others as God has already known them: visualizing for ourselves others’ deepest longings through their own eyes!


It was difficult to believe that Jane could imagine or celebrate much of anything. At her memorial service, a packed tall-steeple church in Michigan listened to one of her daughters eulogize a mother with hardly a memory – a woman who had just succumbed following a lengthy bout with Alzheimer’s.

According to Jane’s daughter – a member of my church in Ann Arbor – her mother, a joyful and much-beloved woman in her community, refused to sing her entire adult life – in church or out. It seems she had been told as a child that she could not sing. And so, being the decent and orderly and at least in this case obedient Presbyterian she was, Jane did not sing.

Until her last year on this earth. With her memory gone – perhaps including even that earliest of childhood memories where she was told, “Jane: You cannot sing” – she burst out in song. And it was then – and only then – that her family realized that she seemingly knew every stanza of every hymn she’d ever heard. And while she could hardly carry a tune, Jane at least could sing!

As Maya Angelou might put it: Jane knew why the caged bird sang. Her songs were laying around in the supposed emptiness of her stone cold jars, all along. Waiting to be “outted”. Waiting to be transformed. Wine waiting to be poured out, in celebration, and in love. For out of the heart of Jane’s disease, she grew intimate with God.


Our God, who is known to save the best for last. Or so “last” may seem to us mere mortals.

For as St. Augustine once said: “For behold, the end – and there is no end!”

Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.


1David Halberstam, The Fifties (NYC: Villard Books, 1993), pp. 183-84.

2Ibid., pp. 184-87.

3Phyllis Williams Provost and Barbara McBride Smith, “The Wedding Feast at Cana”, in Dennis E. Smith and Michael E. Williams (eds.), The Storyteller’s Companion to the Bible, Volume Ten: John (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), p. 44.

4Ibid.


Prayers of the People …

Coaxing, Beckoning, Insistent and Persistent God –

There’s a certain volatility to the supposed intimacies of our visual age.

In these perilous and uncertain days, where the televised suffering of our Haitian neighbors less than 1500 miles away stir within us a connection with them that is both miraculous and illusory …

In these perilous and uncertain days, where miracle would barge into our living rooms as political theater – more shock, less awe …

In these perilous and uncertain days, where wedding epiphanies to servant leaders are eclipsed by megachurch spectacles of self-serving leaders …

In these perilous and uncertain days, it takes our imagination – sometimes, every ounce of it – to realize that the stone cold jars of our souls can be filled anew with the Good News.

The Good News: that you, O God, prefer to use the least of these in and among us all to say to us, hey: I may be saving the best for what only seems to be last.

What seems to be last, perhaps, in our personal lives. What seems to be last, perhaps, in our church lives …


Benediction …

In the winter of our discontent, the prophet Isaiah – in a lectionary passage today we did not hear – perceives with remarkable vision how God has saved the best for what seems to be last in bringing us all home from our exiled ways: “You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the Lord delights in you …”

That’s true intimacy. And you know what? Like I said last Sunday in a similar vein: There’s not a thing we can do about it!

Go out into the world in peace, to love and serve our servant Lord.

Baptism of the Lord Sunday

January 10, 2010

Celebration of Worship, Bethesda (MD) Presbyterian Church

www.bethesdapresbyterian.org

Isaiah 43:1-7

Luke 3:15-22

Our Calling: Be-Loved

Prayer: God of all gifts, and Lord of all love,

With the Spirit-wind of our call to dream last Sunday at our backs, with your call next Sunday to three Session elders, and with your call to eight new members the Sunday following that, we pause today to acknowledge and celebrate your original, seminal call to us.

A call not to do or to become anything.

Simply, a call to hear and to be.

To be beloved – whether we like it, or not!

Dare we know – and dare we claim – that we are beloved of you?


Without my knowledge at the time, yet with my bemused if bewildered love, my lovely, longsuffering wife of ten wonderful years of marriage – we’ve been married sixteen – greeted many of you to Worship on November 22 with an invitation to celebrate my upcoming birthday. On the reverse of the invitation, she included a few words regarding the reason for my absence that weekend.

With her words about my time away, I know that Amy was simply sharing the Good News that day as she felt called to do so – a prior briefing from me or no. Guilelessness may defy yet it never demands an explanation. And, I love her for that.

After learning of her leafleting that morning, I have since sought the proper time and place to share with you a bit about that unusual witness I once made. A witness I made certain your Pastor Nominating Committee knew from the very beginning – a witness many of you may have heard about through the rumor mill – and a witness I mentioned in passing to the nine who snowshoed it here for Worship on December 20, in this transept.

As a lead-in, let me state that on that November weekend when you were greeted with the reason for my absence, I joined, as I do every year at that time, twenty thousand from around the country and dozens from the national Presbyterian Peace Fellowship at an annual rally and vigil in Georgia to close what remains known among millions of our Latin American neighbors as the School of Assassins: the U.S. Army School of the Americas.

I will save for a more propitious day and time the sordid chronicle and legacy of this school that demeans our Armed Forces by promoting the training of terrorism on our own soil. And I will save for a later date the generation-long resistance to close this school, led by countless faith communions such as our own denomination.

What I will share with you today is but a glimpse of my own faith role in the resistance, and the basis for it – as controversial as it may prove to some who hear this.

From 1989 to 1993, I worked with and even lived among countless Central American refugees seeking sanctuary in California and Arizona. During that time, I served as an intern for two years in a Presbyterian church in a Tucson barrio, where 12,000 refugees in one decade slept on and ate off the floor of a sanctuary about the size of our two transepts combined. I listened to their daytime stories, and then I overheard their nighttime screams thanks to the trauma School of America’s graduates wrought on them and their families.

Based on these life-altering experiences, and with the support of Amy, the congregation I pastored, my presbytery, and our denomination, I took a risk of faith I had never dreamed of taking. In 2001, I became one of literally thousands of witnesses to-date who committed nonviolent civil disobedience by taking part in a funeral procession that crossed onto the military reservation that still houses this school. And for the misdemeanor crime of trespassing onto that base, I eventually joined over 200 to-date who have served time in a federal prison camp. (Why only 200-plus of the thousands who have committed civil disobedience over the years have been incarcerated, perhaps no one shall never know. I suppose that because I wore a clergy collar, I posed more of a danger than most.)

My own sentence was three months – plus a $500 fine, paid immediately by my congregation. Of this prison witness, I am not ashamed. Of this prison witness – a surprise calling, really, once you hear the whole story – I give thanks to God and to the gospel giants who more than showed me the way: the apostle Paul and the John the Baptist of today’s scripture, among them.


I share this with you today not only because I think you eventually should know this about your pastor. I share this with you today as a backdrop to the following amazing story.

Anytime a person is incarcerated in a federal facility, the dehumanization process commences once they walk in the door. You are photographed and assigned a number; meet Mr. 90961-020. Everything on your person when you enter – everything – you place into a box. You are then ordered by the guard strip-searching you to expose every bodily cavity – every cavity – for possible possession of drugs or weapons.

After adorning standard prison garb, you are then grilled by law enforcement officers and medical personnel. Finally, you are escorted, at least in the case of this prison, to a place called “the bubble”: a kind of quarantine for new inmates, a highly public pen where they may observe you for a few days among several other inmates placed there because of some security infraction they have committed.

While still in the bubble, I began to receive a trickle of the correspondence that soon came to average six pieces of mail a day, most of them encouragements from former strangers. Correspondence that remains cataloged to this day in two cardboard boxes in my church study.

Friends in Christ, what I am about to share with you I fabricate not.

The very first piece of mail I received was from a woman I had not seen or heard from since the year of my baptism – the same time I was confirmed, in 1974. (I had not seen her since then because, as with all-too-many who are baptized – especially those like me entering adolescence – I was rarely seen or heard from by the church again!) This woman – a Presbyterian pastor, and my confirmation teacher – somehow had discovered where I was and mailed me a postcard. The card contained five simple words:

Dear Chuck,

Remember your baptism.

The Rev. Judy Sutherland remembered my baptism. And largely because she heard the song God had given me one day nearly 30 years before, and sang it back to me while my memory of it was fading, I was able to carry on in the most dehumanizing environment I have ever known or wish to know. I was able to carry on as the only misdemeanor inmate in a prison with over 300 felons for the next three months 360 miles from home.


“Remember your baptism.” Not literally – but seriously. Especially for the many of us who grew up Presbyterian or part of some other Christian communion that honors the tradition of infant baptism.

Infant baptism. A tradition that honors God’s claim of grace on us before we can claim God. A tradition where, as the infant is being baptized, his or her congregation makes a covenant claim to support and edify that child as he or she grows into a faith that can respond to God’s claim.

Have you listened for your covenant claim lately? If you were once baptized as an infant or even like me when I could literally remember the event, have you listened lately for the lingering, spiritual presence among you of those who were there – whether they be breathing today or not? Have you listened for this cloud of witnesses to whisper your God-marked identity back to you when your memory fades?

Have you listened for God’s grace saying to you through them, “This is my Child, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased”?


In his famous 1948 sermon “You Are Accepted”, the great theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich proclaimed,

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley … when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual … when year after year the longed for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.

Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”1

Presbyterian affirm baptism and the Lord’s Supper as the two sacraments of the Church. As we were called last Sunday to remember Jesus through holy Communion, we are called today to remember God’s call of us through our baptismal covenant. God’s call of us by name, as Isaiah shares with us today. And to remember this call, time and time again, throughout our lives – seriously, if not literally.

We have been called to remember that we – you – are accepted.


The heavenly voice poured forth these words to Jesus on the day of his baptismal call: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

“The Beloved.” He’s not the only one, you know. He was simply the first. The one who calls us as well to lay claim to being beloved by God, with two simple words: “Follow me.”

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

1Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (NYC: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948),
p. 162.


Benediction …

Next weekend, we celebrate the birthday of the great civil rights leader who nonviolently resisted what has been called America’s original sin: racism.

As tradition has it, when Dr. King’s namesake, the great Reformer Martin Luther, felt his energy flagging – his doubt growing –his fear strengthening – he would cry out, “I am baptized!”

And so I am. And so, I trust, many of us are.

If you are: Remember your call. Remember your baptism.

But whether you are or not: The discernment of our calling as a church begins with God’s words to Jesus today – this, and only this:

“You are my Child, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

You … are accepted.

And there’s not a thing you can do about it!

Go out into the world in peace – to love and serve our servant Lord.

Epiphany Sunday

January 3, 2010

preached at Bethesda (MD) Presbyterian Church

http://www.bethesdapresbyterian.org/

Matthew 2:1-23

Warned in a Dream

“And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod,” we are told, “(the magi) left for their own country by another road.” Back to a safe and familiar place, after being guided by a dream-like heavenly light to pay homage to an unknown king in an unknown place.

Based on his dreams, Joseph would soon strike out with Mary and baby Jesus for an unfamiliar place as refugees. And his dreams brought them safely home, as well.

For the magi, for Joseph, for Mary and for God incarnate: Their dreams led them both out of and into danger, before eventually leading them – and this is key – safely home.

If only we could learn from their examples of trust!


If those bejeweled magi or that rustic carpenter Joseph possessed any of the literary flair of the medieval genius Dante Alighieri, they may have initially uttered these words: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”2

And lost they were. Could it get any worse? It could have. They could have remained in Herod’s Judea.

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” John Lennon may have said it. And yet the magi, followed by Joseph, Mary, and the child Jesus, certainly lived it.

All because of their dreams – five in all, four coming to Joseph. At least three of them dreams of warning, that they might avoid Herod and his son Archelaus and their status quo traps.


Who remembers their dreams? The dreams we have when we – like our protagonists today – are fast asleep? Given relatively recent phenomena such as the electric light and the increasingly stress-filled lives we lead, we sleep-deprived souls simply don’t recall our dreams most of the time. Nor are many of us post-Enlightenment folk wont to care – addicted as we are to the juiceless jargon of truth-as-fact. Who bothers with these nocturnal messages anymore?

Who remembers their dreams? Even, the dreams that we have when we are awake? As we enter the dead of another Maryland winter, Langston Hughes fetches us up: “Hold fast to dreams/For when dreams go/Life is a barren field/Frozen with snow.”3

Certainly: We can hold fast. But why? Who cares to dream anymore, when ambition’s call would closet them till we eventually dust them off, turn to the next generation, and say, “Here, kids: play with these!”? Who dares to dream anymore?

Every year – two weekends from now, in fact – we hear from the man whose birthday we have made into a welcome mid-winter holiday. “I have a dream,” we hear him intone. And our hearts are pulled and our imaginations are fired and we say, yes, yes: I have that dream, too! Yes, yes: It’s good to dream that way!

And then what happens? Chances are, very little. For all too often, we fail to connect Martin Luther King’s dreams for our society – in the face of imperial powers that would manipulate them – with our new year’s resolve. And once again, the mournful groan of Langston Hughes is heard throughout the land:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load?

Or does it explode?5

Perhaps, to connect with our conscious dreams again, we need to begin – like the magi and Joseph of old – with the root of them all: those dreams we have while we sleep. We need to begin our exploration there.

They are not all that different from our conscious dreams, really.

Over twenty years ago – as a troubled and depressed and eventually an addicted young man – I had the good fortune to find myself a patient of a psychiatrist who happened to be one the finest hypnotherapists in the country. Barely in my twenties, I was still blessed with a highly suggestible mind – an ideal candidate for hypnosis. So the good doctor would suggest, while I was under hypnosis, that I would dream in my sleep. And that I would awake when I dreamt in my sleep. And that I would recall everything about the dream I had just had. And that I would not be able to fall back asleep until I jotted down every last detail of what I had just dreamt.

Friends: It worked. Somewhere in our attic lies a sizeable folder full of those recorded dreams – four pages long, some of them, and single-spaced. It frustrated me no end that I could not fall back asleep until I wrote everything down!

Dreams such as, in the middle of the 1984 presidential primary race, Democratic front-runner Walter Mondale racing down Capitol Hill in a wheelchair, with his ex-astronaut challenger John Glenn in a wheelchair behind him, harping about “the right stuff.” Seems my subconscious, childlike as always, was communicating my fear of growing old – with the fear of commitment (racing from the Capitol building!) and possibly ending up in a wheelchair that growing old would entail. While all along my conscience lurked in the background, whispering: Do you have the right stuff?

Our dreams can warn us quite clearly about our anxieties – as well lead us into our deepest longings. As with my “right stuff” dream, they may warn us of our fears of growing old. Warn us that our particular church as an institution could die, as you may know and remember this church to be. And that the kingdom of God as we imagine it just may not come if it does go – as we know it and house it – despite all our mightiest efforts!

We must be willing to be led by dreams that warn us that we must die in order to live! That we must not continue lock-step with our comfortable Christendom notions of old; Herod’s subjects, after all, were all about being controlled. But that we must die in order to live that we might follow the example of the magi and Joseph: the example of being led.

Which are we, then: Controlled … or led? As individuals? As a nation? As a church?

“But Chuck,” I have heard several say – or at least imply – “We are old. And certainly, too old to dream.” Our scriptures beg to differ. “Where you going, Abraham?” his puzzled neighbors must have asked him. Can’t you just see him: on his walker, puzzled as the rest, responding, “I don’t know! I don’t know!” All he knew was that he had a dream – a call from God. And that call was leading him to a place he did not necessarily want to go.

A similar thing transpired the Day of Pentecost. As the Spirit caught fire among thousands of former strangers, Peter proclaimed the prophet Joel’s visionary words – among others, “your old men shall dream dreams.”

We can dream! We can! But let us be careful: Our dreams will often warn us before they will lead us.

They warn us not to return on the road that our dominant society would have us be led down – that “God-and-country” is no longer one word. They warn us that church is no longer a voluntary civic association of being around good people – at least as our world would define “good”. They warn us that we are called to follow a different road: a covenant community of creating disciples. Uncertain about where our dreams will take us, but relying on the immense wisdom God has planted among us to see us along the journey. Not comparing the purity of the “respectables” with the impurity of the “unrespectables”. But engaging in spiritual practices beyond Sunday morning worship: practices that teach us and lead us to trust – actually trust – in God’s dreams for us, rather than struggle to preserve present arrangements or micromanage to control grandiose outcomes.


“Chuck, we are old. Too old to embrace new life. And certainly, too old to dream”. Too old to whom? To God?

Do you believe we as a church can dream again? And will then know what to do with these dreams, once God leads us into them?

Our dreams are God-sent, and hence they are good – warnings or no! They are good because they lead us into kingdom resolutions.

Each of us has a dream – that is: Each of us has a call. A call as a church your Session will explore at its retreat next weekend, callings we will explore next week, during the Baptism of the Lord Sunday, and callings we will explore during Jesus on Tap in upcoming months.

Our callings – individual, or church – may not come to us as clear as Joseph’s. And angels of the Lord may not appear to us in high definition.

And yet, we can always be led in prayer by the promise today of a prophet named Isaiah. Speaking of a once-exiled people, Isaiah speaks of their exodus and their promised land … and ours, as well:

It was no messenger or angel
but (God’s) presence that saved them;
in love and in mercy redeemed them;
and lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.6

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

* * *

1Adapted from “Collect for the First Sunday After Christmas,” in A New Zealand Prayer Book: He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand: William Collins Publishers, 1989), p. 557.

2From Dante’s “The Inferno”, as quoted (with “pass” for “way”) by Roger Kahn in The Head Game: Baseball Seen from the Pitcher’s Mound (NYC: Harcourt, 2000), p. 240.

3From the poem “Dreams” by Langston Hughes. Found in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (NYC: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). Also found at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dreams-2/.

4Metaphors borrowed from William Sloane Coffin, in A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), pp. 76-77.

5“Harlem: A Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes. From Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). Found at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dream-deferred/, et. al.

6Isaiah 63:9.


Charge and Blessing

CHRISTMAS BEGINS

“When the song of the angel is still,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among peoples,
To make music in the heart.” (Howard Thurman)

Go out into the world in peace, to make music in God’s heart.