@EUCC Sermons

Caiaphas was the High Priest, the leader of the Jerusalem Temple and the leader of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish law court. According to John, Caiaphas wanted something done about Jesus, because he contradicted the teachings and practices of the Jewish priests, but neither the priests nor the Sanhedrin had the authority to do away with Jesus. So Caiaphas turned Jesus over to Pilate.

According to John, Pilate saw Jesus as more of a religious heretic than a political threat, so he was reluctant to condemn Jesus to death. He knew that dabbling in religious matters could be tricky. Instead of making a definite decision about his fate, Pilate placed Jesus’ fate in the hands of the mob, who ultimately called for his crucifixion.

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Today we observe All Saints Sunday, and the culmination of a week of remembering and giving thanks for the life and witness of those who have gone to God. The original celebration of All Saints Day in the Christian tradition was established by Pope Urban IV in the mid 13th century.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the first two hundred years that All Saints Day was celebrated, Christians observed the anniversary of the martyrs’ deaths at the place of their martyrdom. Because groups of martyrs frequently suffered and died on the same day, joint commemorations of the saints emerged. Eventually, other saints, not just martyrs, were remembered on All Saints Day.

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All Saints Day (always on Nov 1) and All Saints Sunday (which we’ll celebrate on Nov 7 this year) are occasions when we pause with Christians around the world to remember and give thanks for those who have gone to God.

As we celebrate these occasions, we also have an opportunity to reflect on our individual and collective experiences of grief and loss, how we cope, and who and how we show up for others in times like these.

My sense as a pastor is that our individual experiences of loss are as unique as our fingerprints; and yet, there are also similar patterns in how we experience and respond to death.

For example, the death of a loved one may teach us something about ourselves. We may discover strengths that we didn’t know we had, or develop strengths that weren’t evident earlier in our lives.

Likewise, we may learn new things about our families and friends as we move through the process. Some families pull together and function in very healthy ways through grief, while others unravel.

Our “best friends” may not know how to support us and we may have trouble articulating our needs. Meanwhile, friends, and even acquaintances, may draw closer, and become very dear to us.

Consider for a moment your own experience of a loved one’s death. What have you learned about yourself through that process? What have you learned about others? Were there surprises? If you are like most people, the answer is probably “yes.”

These types of ruminations are echoed in the story of Ruth and Naomi, which is the primary text for today’s message.

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Figure out how your behavior is contributing to the suffering of others, and stop it. Just stop it! And, what if we acknowledged the errors of our ways? What if we learned from our mistakes, and behaved differently? Then what?

I suspect that blind beggars and others who hover at the margins and the bottom of our society would say that we were healed of our blindness.

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Some years ago I enrolled in and completed a certificate program in organizational development offered by the Business School at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois.

The program was interesting and helpful for the work I was engaged in at the national offices, where I worked on executive recruitment and leadership development for our 475 UCC-related health and human service agencies. Many of the lessons that I learned in that program and during that job have been helpful to me in serving as your pastor.

That said, as I read and studied today’s gospel lesson, I could not help but notice how different Jesus’ approach to leadership development was and is compared with the best-practices approaches to leadership development that are taught in today’s most revered business schools.

Jesus' approach to leadership development was not only out of step with modern business approaches, it was contrary to the normative approaches subscribed to in the first century.

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The First-Century Jewish Pharisees and Nero’s loyal legion were eager to trap Jesus in a debate that would divide his followers and conquer his reform movement, but they were never successful in doing so; because Jesus knew their laws better than they did, and he understood and offered divine grace, which the world couldn’t give or take away.

Most importantly, Jesus taught that the key to salvation was not by way of judgy doctrine, but through a spiritual disposition that was humble, and vulnerable enough to receive God’s grace and blessings.

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News flash everyone: Jesus did not define his “in crowd” by how long they had followed him around or claimed that he was the Christ. No, instead, Jesus demonstrated with his words and his deeds that his people were those who affiliated with the least, the last, and the lost.

Jesus didn’t just make this claim with his words. He gave the disciples an object lesson. He spotted a child in their vicinity, he walked up to her, and wrapped his arms around her, saying: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

St. Francis of Assisi (whose feast day is Oct 4, 2021) famously said, “Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.”

This is what Jesus was doing in Mark 9:36 when he took the child into his arms. He was providing his disciples with an object lesson. He was showing them--not just telling them--that if they wanted to be greatest in God’s kindom, they had to welcome the least, the last, and the lost.

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God is not glorified by our silence. People outside this nation will never know that Christianity is not aligned with US imperialism if we do not open our mouths and counter that message.

People outside of our faith tradition will never know that there are Christians who follow Jesus, and who know that he is not the only way. As the Chinese proverb goes, “There are many paths up the same mountain.”

Our own children will not know that Jesus’ life and ministry mattered, and what it was all about unless we show and we TELL them.

To do that, we will have to come out Christian closets and dare to follow Christ’s example--no matter how queer we look to the larger culture--we will have to work through our anxiety and our religious baggages, because the alternative is not an option. Here that: the closet is not an option for us if we want this pandemic to end, the gap between rich and poor to narrow, and global climate change to reverse. It’s just that simple, and it’s just that hard.

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Wisdom has built her school house. She has prepared her banquet. She has gone into the highways and hedges to invite you and everyone else to her table, and she is serving up more than a middle eastern wedding banquet. Wisdom was, and is, serving up a banquet for the brain, and a smorgasbord for the soul.

She was, and is, striving to entice students of all ages to come to her banquet. Wisdom wants everyone to feast on her words--not just words in a grade school primer, but more importantly, she offers us wisdom for life.

The Divine Femine, Sophia, the Holy Spirit--she has many names here in the Wisdom Literature of the Hebrew Bible--teaches us that God wants us to not only be book smart, but world wise. She’s encouraging us to learn our lessons well, and to remember that we can get all A’s in school and still flunk life. Because life requires the application of theory to practice, and life circumstances extract moral decisions from us whether we like it or not. So it’s good to hit the books, it’s helpful to earn good grades, but it’s even more important to develop a strong moral compass and to use it wisely.

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Remember too, how Jesus routinely broke bread with the disciples, how he celebrated the Last Supper with his followers and gave them a New Commandment--that they love one another, and how all of these stories are integral to our holy history.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of bread (and other starches) as an essential element of the human diet, or the centrality of bread to the holy histories of Jews and Christians. But that is not all there is to say about bread and the Christian faith--at least not for John.

John takes one step further in the fourth gospel in that John invites us into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. John invites us to encounter and embrace--not simply the historical Jesus--but the spiritual essence of Jesus that transcends time and place--and that can nourish and satisfy our hunger in this life--in a way that no earthly mixture of water and wheat, and leven and lard can ever provide.

No wonder Jesus’ disciples said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” (John 6: 34) Amen.

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Jesus compelled his followers to trust that there would be enough for them and everyone else, by daylighting the child’s generosity, and inspiring the grownups to share what they had with others, rather than squirreling away the food that they had brought for themselves.

Notice how when the disciples ask Jesus to work a miracle, he did not pull out a wand and say, abra cadabra. Instead, he said: “You give them something to eat.”

The disciples replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and a couple of fish.”

The child might have said, “Liars, liars, pants on fire!” But he didn’t. Instead, the child offered all the food he had brought to share with others.

That child’s act of generosity, reminded everyone in the crowd that they had something to bring to the table, and they were moved to share what they had with others. And they did, everyone in attendance ate their fill and there were 12 baskets of food leftover.

So then, the miracle that occurred that day at the shores of the Sea of Galilee, wasn’t the result of some first-century side show, but rather the miracle of generosity that Jesus inspired in the boy with five loaves and two fishes, and the cast of thousands who had come to taste and see what God was doing in the world…

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