Author: Rev. Wells

LAKEWOOD UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST
2601 54th Avenue South  St. Petersburg, FL  33712
On land originally inhabited by the Tocabaga
727-867-7961

lakewooducc.org
lakewooducc@gmail.com

Date: April 23, 2023   Earth Sunday
Scripture Lessons: Job 12:7-10 and John 15:1-8
Sermon: Connected!
Pastor:  Rev. Kim P. Wells

This past week, I had to have a tire patched on our car.  So the tire people asked about when and where the tires had been purchased.  Were they under warranty?  I looked in the glove box for some kind of receipt.  Well.

Out came the map of Pinellas County.  And the map of Tampa.  And the map of Greater Orlando.  And the map of Miami/Fort Lauderdale.  And another map of Pinellas County.  And the map of Florida.  And the map of Bradenton.  And another map of Tampa.  And the map of Sarasota.  And finally another map of the state of Florida. The young man with tire expertise was watching these maps spew from the glove box with amusement; like treasure from a chest in a video game.  

As someone who tries to avoid using my phone when I can, even I haven’t looked at those maps for years because now we have map apps.  

And I haven’t looked at a phone book in years.  Because now I look up a phone number online.  

And if I want to know what is going on in St. Pete over the weekend, I no longer look at the weekender in the St. Pete Times or Creative Loafing, I look online.  

And if I want to tell you something or ask you a question, I might call you from the church landline or from my cell phone.  But more likely, I will text or email you.  

And to find out about an organization I am interested in, do I look at the last paper newsletter that was sent to me?  No.  I look at the last email I got.  Or I look at their Facebook page, or Twitter, or Instagram even though I myself do not have any of these social media accounts.    

And when I was all the way over in Spain for two months this past fall, in the sticks, supposedly getting away from it all on sabbatical, I was tracking that hurricane Ian every day.  

If I want to find out about something, I am going to probably start by looking on the internet then go to other sources as needed.

You see, for all the problems there are with the internet and social media, we are more connected now than at maybe at any other time in history.  We are truly part of a world wide web.  We can communicate instantly with anyone in the world any time.  We can watch important events unfolding in real time.  We can record crimes as they occur to see who really did what.  We can listen to all kinds of music, from any where in the world, at any time.  We can watch countless movies and shows and documentaries any time and almost anywhere.   We are connected to unlimited information constantly.  

Try living without the internet.  It isn’t easy even for me as one who tries not to become dependent on devices.  We experienced this when we were in Spain.  Our devices are not set up for the way the Internet works in Europe, so reception is spotty at best.  Where we were, most of the internet was 3G when it was available.  That was a problem.  Everything very slow.  And at one point on the Camino, the home button on my phone stopped working.  And there was no Apple store nearby with an English speaking staff to either fix or replace it.  These experiences make you realize how connected we are – to our phones, to the internet, to each other, and to the world.  

Connection is important.  And technology enables us to make many connections that are significant and important both to information and to people and groups.  But well into the ancient past, our human cultural heritage has emphasized the importance of our connection to nature; our direct involvement and relationship to the environment around us.  We cannot be fully human without an awareness of the actual world around us and how we are part of the web of life.  

Being connected to nature grounds us in our dependency on the Earth itself and on all the life forms that inhabit the Earth.  It reminds us of our need for one another to live, thrive, and survive.  Our connection to nature connects us to what gives us life and what sustains us.  Contemporary author, Michael Pollan tells us,  “Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants.  Not only do plants nourish us bodily — they nourish us psychologically.”  We need to be connected to nature.  It is who we are.    

Our connection to nature is our lifeline to what we need to know not only to live but to live with purpose and meaning and understanding.  Over and over in the Bible, there are references to nature and how it illuminates our human experience.  We are incomplete, not fully functioning, without that knowledge.  Our connection to nature helps us to know that we are part of something greater than ourselves.  We are not the center of the universe.  A Jewish sacred writing from the 3-5th centuries reminds the reader:  “Even though you may think them superfluous in this world, creatures such as flies, bugs, and gnats have their allotted task in the scheme of creation.”  Nature helps us to maintain our proper perspective on our place in a larger whole.  

Connection to nature also connects us to the past and to the future.  The trees and the land around us have a far longer history than we do.  They remind us of the past that we are inheriting.  And connection to nature connects us to the future.  What we do today has implications for the people and the planet for a future far beyond our years on this Earth.  Nature connects us to a far larger reality in terms of time.  And then there is the awareness of time from a cosmic perspective – light years, space time. Connection to nature shows us that we are privileged, blessed to exist in this amazing reality!

As Bishop Desmond Tutu put it:  “The first law of our being is that we are set in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation.”

We are connected not only to each other but to the actual environment that we inhabit; that hosts our lives.  We need to be plugged in to relationships and community and the world within us and the world around us.  So often all we see is our need for other people.  But scripture and human cultural history remind us of our need to be connected to the natural world.  We need the land and sea and sky to sustain our living; to bring us beauty.  And we need the plants and animals of the natural world to make our lives possible – with food, relationships, and a sense of something greater than ourselves.  We need the seasons to teach us about ourselves and about life.  We need nature to help mitigate our greatest fear as human beings, the fear of death.  Nature teaches us of the circle of life so that we need not fear death. 

As we look at the environmental problems we are facing today, the climate crisis especially, we see that this is largely a result of our disconnect from nature.  As our species has become more industrial and technological, we have been neglecting our appropriate connection to nature.   That disconnect has been created by greed and it fosters greed which leaves destruction in its wake.  

Poet John Donne of the 16-17th century was aware of the disconnect that was emerging, and observed:  “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe, everyman is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine.”   No person is an island.  We live in an amazing reality, a seamless whole, a web of connections.  Pull a thread, and much unravels.  And we see much unraveling around us each and every day.  

And friends, here we circle back to technology.  Because of technology, we can know more about nature, the environment, the world around us, than ever before.  We can see what is happening anywhere on the planet.  The beauties of space are being shown to us in ways that are stunning and brain bending.  We can learn about animals and life forms in ways that are magnificent.  My sister in law, also not technologically inclined, is following the nesting of birds around the world thanks to webcams set up for that purpose.   She is connected to a particular bird building a nest and raising a family on another continent that she has never been to.  Talk about connected!

It is also our connection to technology that is showing us all the damage that humanity is doing to Earth.  We can access data about temperature, and weather, and water levels.  We have pictures and images showing us what we are doing.  And it is not pretty.

Our connection through technology also teaches us about gains in renewable energy, new commitments to carbon neutrality, the possibilities and products and initiatives that are available for recreating a future that is sustainable.  We can be connected to the many positive steps that are being taken and we can join forces with people who are taking positive action.  We can provide mutual support and encouragement.  We can share each other’s grief and sorrow over the condition of Mother Earth.   We can be connected.  

Like that beautiful image of the vine and the branches from the gospel of John, may we stay connected, rooted in the soil of our planet, provided for us by Divine Love.  May we prune the GREED and entitlement that have led to abuse of our Mother Earth.  And with our incredible ability to connect, may we bear fruit – creating a world that protects the land and water and provides for all people to have what they need to flourish. 

Our faith tradition gives us a map to a beautiful future, if we will but follow it.  

Amen. 

A reasonable effort has been made to appropriately cite materials referenced in this sermon. For additional information, please contact Lakewood United Church of Christ.

LAKEWOOD UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST
2601 54th Avenue South  St. Petersburg, FL  33712
On land originally inhabited by the Tocabaga
727-867-7961

lakewooducc.org
lakewooducc@gmail.com

Date: April 16, 2023
Scripture Lesson: John 20:19-31
Sermon: Rising
Pastor: Rev. Kim P. Wells

Every year during Lent and Holy Week, there are articles and posts about crucifixion.  That is, about the actual process of crucifixion from an anatomical, biological, physiological perspective.  What was done and what actually happened to the body.   Churches have adult ed classes about this.  I remember many years ago, a charter member of LUCC, Virginia Bodendorfer, gave me a long article, very detailed, written by a doctor, explaining the whole process and the effects on the body.  So, we seem to have some kind of maybe gory or voyeuristic fascination with the physicality of the crucifixion.  There may be many reasons for this.  The worse the pain, the greater the love?  I don’t know.  I think the article from Virginia is one of the few things you won’t find among the volumes of papers in my office!

But as an historian by training, I have always found it interesting that the crucifixion of Jesus is one of the few things in the gospels that seems to be historically authenticated by an outside party, Josephus, a Jewish historian.  

So, we seem to know quite a bit about the crucifixion.  But what about the resurrection?  What about the particularities of, well, the resurrection?  

We have the stories in the gospels which are faith based, not necessarily fact based.  And what are we told about the resurrection?  We are told of the body of Jesus being placed in a tomb.  And we have accounts several days later in the gospels of women close to Jesus finding the tomb empty of Jesus’ dead body.  And some stories around that.

Then we have accounts of encounters between Jesus and those who knew him.  Like the one we heard this morning.  Jesus appearing to the disciples in the locked room.  And the story of the conversation with Thomas.  

But we seem to have no account of, well, how the body came back to life, or was restored, or resurrected.  We have no explanations about what occurred between Jesus being put in the tomb and the tomb being found empty.  There is no story about, say, the stone being moved, the body being unwrapped, life being breathed into the body, clothes being provided for the resurrected Jesus.  There is a gap in the story.  No description or details or explanations of the process involved.  We are told of the grave clothes being at the tomb.  And angels appearing and saying he is not there.  That he has gone ahead to Galilee.  But there is no ‘how’ provided.  

Now, many of you may be thinking, who cares?  We don’t need to know.  It’s symbolic or metaphorical, or it’s a miracle and you can’t explain a miracle, that’s why it’s called a miracle.  

But stay with me a moment.

I find this lack of detail about the resurrection interesting in part because there are many other stories in the gospels that have a lot of details and explanations.  We are told what happened and who was there and what occurred.  Let’s just stay with the gospel of John which we heard from this morning and look at a few examples.

The first miracle or sign in the gospel is the story of water being turned into wine at the wedding in Cana.  We are told of 6 large stone water jars.  We are told of Jesus, his mother, and servants being present.  We are told of the servants filling the 6 stone jars with water.  Then we are told that the chief steward draws a sample from a stone jar.  And it is wine.  Good wine.  In the story, there are people involved who see and participate in what happens.  There is lots of detail in the story.  

There is the story of the healing of an invalid near the 5 porticos of the Temple during the festival.  There were many invalids and onlookers.  There is a conversation in the story.  Jesus tells the invalid to take up his mat and walk.  And he does.  

There is the story of the feeding of the 5,000.  Not 2,500 or 7,000 but 5,000.  There were many witnesses.  The disciples are involved.  We are told that 5 barley loaves and 2 fish are collected.  Jesus gives thanks.  The food is distributed.  And there are 12 baskets of leftovers.  Not 11.  Not 15.  But 12.  [A significant number in Judaism.]  There are many participants and details in this story.

In the story of the man born blind, again there are people around.  We are told of Jesus spitting on the ground and making mud with the saliva and dirt and putting it on the man’s eyes and then telling him to go wash in the pool of Siloam.  There is an involved description of what goes on in the story.

And there is the story of the raising of Lazarus.  Martha, maybe Mary, and other mourners are present.  The stone is moved from the grave.  There is a smell.  We are told Jesus looks upward and prays.  He cries out in a aloud voice, “Lazarus, come out.”  Lazarus emerges, bound in strips of cloth, even his face is wrapped, we are told.  And Jesus instructs the on lookers to unbind Lazarus.  Again, a story told with great attention to detail. 

Then there is the story of the resurrection.  Jesus is buried.  Three days later, the stone has been moved from the entrance to the grave.  We are not told how.  The linen wrappings are there.  Angels are there.  The body is gone.  But we are not told what happened, how the stone was moved, how Jesus was resurrected.  There is no detail, no explanation of the actual resurrection process. 

So we have a story of suffering and sacrifice that leads to new life.  We have a story of transformation.  We have a story that conveys that love is stronger than death.  That redemption, restoration, reconciliation is always possible.  No matter the circumstances.  There is a path from death to new life.

But we can’t just open our maps app and be shown the route.  Here’s how you get from death to life.  Here’s how you get from horrible violence to peace.  Here’s the route from devastation to restoration.  No.  We aren’t just handed a user manual that tells us how this all works.  

There’s death.  And there is new life.  And I think we are not told of the intricacies of the resurrection because it is left to us, in our time, in our context, with our challenges, to create the process.  To make the path.  To map our the route.  As we go.  Our faith tradition tells us this is possible.  It assures us that it can happen.  We are given the power of Divine Love to overcome even death.  But is up to us to lean on our faith and on each other and make the way.  We are to figure out how fill in the gap.  What process is needed.  In a way that leads to the triumph of life and love over death and defeat.  

This past week on Wednesday I went to the vigil at 49th Street and Ulmerton Road during the execution of Louis Gaskin.  We held signs and made a witness to the many drivers traversing that intersection.  There were many honks in support of our witness.  And then we heard from Herman Lindsey, a person who was wrongly convicted, spent 3 years on death row, and was finally exonerated in 2009.  He is the 135th exoneree in the US, and the 23rd exoneree in the state of Florida which has the highest rate of exonerations in the US.   Though exonerated, Lindsey still does not have his full civil rights reinstated.  

But Herman Lindsey told us a part of his story, a story of making that path from death to life, in a way that he never could have anticipated.  When Lindsey was finally released from death row, he wanted to get back to his family and friends, make money, go back to a normal life.  The last thing he wanted was to think about or talk about his harrowing experience with the criminal injustice system which had consumed his life for years.  He wanted to put all that behind him.  But the executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty contacted him and asked him to speak to a group about his experience.  He was not interested.  He didn’t want to talk to any audience.  He didn’t want to relive his experience on death row.  He didn’t want to worry about any body else on death row.  He just wanted his life back.  But Mark Elliott, the director, persisted.  And then he offered to pay Lindsey to speak.  Lindsey told us, “I wanted a new pair of Nikes, so I said yes.”  And this is what Lindsey has been doing ever since.  One group.  Then another.  Then another.  Talking to people about how the death penalty is wrong.  And how it creates victims, not just the ones who are killed, but all those who have to carry out the killing are traumatized by it.  And about how the death penalty is against our deepest religious and moral convictions.  And we compromise ourselves when we try to justify it and certainly when we implement it.  So, Lindsey never got his normal life back.  Instead he got a new life.  As an advocate for the eradication of the death penalty.  He is the executive director of Witness to Innocence the only national organization in the US composed of and led by exonerated death row survivors and their family members.  A life he never anticipated or imagined.

To me, we aren’t told about the details of the resurrection because we are supposed to use our imaginations.  As renowned scientist Albert Einstein observed, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”  We are supposed to be creative.  We are supposed to imagine.  We are supposed to discern and devise the way from death to life in our time and in our context, our situation.  Whatever we are facing, as an individual, as a society, as a culture, as a species, we have been given the capacity to navigate the way from death to life.  From terror to justice.  From abuse to affirmation.  From deprivation to abundance.  From destruction to construction.

There is so much pain, woundedness, violence, and injustice around us, within us, and among us.  There is so much need for the transforming power of love.  This means there are countless ways for us to witness to the resurrection.  To make the way from death to life.   To create our story.

When we feel the wounds and heal the wounds, our doubt becomes belief.  And we are raised to new life.  Amen.

A reasonable effort has been made to appropriately cite materials referenced in this sermon. For additional information, please contact Lakewood United Church of Christ.

LAKEWOOD UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST
2601 54th Avenue South  St. Petersburg, FL  33712
On land originally inhabited by the Tocabaga
727-867-7961

lakewooducc.org
lakewooducc@gmail.com

Date:  March 19, 2023
Scripture Lessons:  I Samuel 16:1-13 and John 9: 1-41
Sermon:  Now I See!
Pastor:  Rev. Kim P. Wells

Perhaps the most well-known blind person of my life time is Helen Keller.  Maybe she is the most famous of the modern era.  Yes, there are Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, but Helen Keller, maybe because she was blind and deaf, certainly is known to many.  Her infirmity occurred as the result of an illness when she was 19 months old.  Perhaps she is also well known because of the beautiful book about her and Anne Sullivan, The Miracle Worker, and the movie made from the book. 

In her autobiography written when she was a student at Radcliffe College, Keller describes her unfolding understanding of language.  Many may remember the scene in which Keller finally begins to understand how words and language and communication work.  It involved water, at a well – an echo of last week’s gospel story of the Samaritan woman at the well.  This happened when Keller was 6 years old.

“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered.  Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout.  As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly.  I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers.  Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.  I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.  That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!  There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

“I left the well-house eager to learn.  Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought.  As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life.  That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. . . . I learned a great many new words that day.  I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them — words that were to make the world blossom for me, ‘like Aaron’s rod, with flowers.’  It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come.”  [From Helen Keller, The Story of My life, 1903.]

Keller’s life is transformed by being able to understand and experience reality in a new way.  This new reality especially informs how she was able to relate to others.  In fact, she became a capable writer and public speaker despite being deaf.  She traveled the world.  She advocated for rights for blind people and for pacifism and birth control and women’s suffrage and socialism and anti racism, especially impressive since her family had owned slaves in Alabama.   Keller’s commitments and concerns came from her ability to see/understand the condition and the experience of the people around her.  Blind since she was a toddler, she learned to really see the world as it is.  

In the story we heard from the gospel of Luke what does the blind man see?  He was born blind.  He did not request this healing.  There was no conversation before the healing.  How does the man see this experience?  First the man sees Jesus as a prophet.  Then as a miracle worker from God.  Finally, he affirms the very presence of God in Jesus.  As he examines his experience, that is how he is led to see Jesus.  Ironically, it is the pressure of the interrogation by the religious leaders that pushes the man born blind into seeing the presence of God in Jesus.   He was blind.  Now he can see.  Such a thing must be of God.  Where else would such power come from?  Only God has that kind of power.  So the man born blind eventually comes to see that Jesus is of God.

But the religious leaders do not see the same thing.  They see something different.  What the religious leaders see is someone who has violated the sabbath by doing work on the sabbath.  Healing and certainly mixing dirt and spittle were considered violations of the sabbath.  So Jesus has broken the sabbath law.  A law given by God.  Since he has broken this law of God, he himself cannot be of God.  Period.    

So one thing we can see in this story is that faith is not defined by following certain rules or religious dictates.  It has to do with recognizing the power of God, Divine Love, at work in the world and in our lives.  Do we see the power and presence of Love at work in our lives and the world?  That is the heart of faith.  That is what faith enables us to see.  If we cannot see that, we are blind.  This Lenten season is a time to reflect on what we are seeing.  Are we looking for goodness and the power of Love in our lives and in the world around us?  

What are we looking for?  What do we see?  John Donohue, poet and writer, really delves into this in a section of his book Anam Cara.  He tells us:

“Many of us have made our world so familiar that we do not see it any more.  It is an interesting question to ask yourself at night: what did I really see this day?  You could be surprised at what you did not see.  Maybe your eyes were unconditioned reflexes operating automatically all day without any real mindfulness or recognition; while you looked out from yourself, you never gazed or really attended to anything. . . The human eye is always selecting what it wants to see and also evading what it does not want to see.  The crucial question then is, what criteria do we use to decide what we like to see and to avoid seeing what we do not want to see?  Many limited and negative lives issue directly from this narrowness of vision.”  [p. 87.]

We see what we look for.  We are in the reality we create for ourselves.  The religious leaders in the story of the blind man want to stay focussed on rules and laws.  Authority and control is important to them.  So they see the world through that lens.  They see the power displayed by Jesus and they feel threatened.  So they want to see Jesus as not of God so that they can discredit him.

The man born blind can see.  What does he see?  Someone healed him.  That is his experience.  He sees power in the healing.  Power that he associates with God.  So he sees God in the person who healed him, in Jesus.   

So we can ask ourselves, What are we looking for?  Because that is what we will see.  If we are looking for love, we will see it.  If we look for good, that is what we will see.   As Judy Cannatto puts it, “If we are to be the new human, we must begin by embracing love, which always seeks to incarnate itself. Love is enfleshed everywhere. Everywhere the Holy One is shouting and whispering, ‘Let me love you.’” [citation missing]

Following Jesus invites us to see in a new way.  It’s like Helen Keller figuring out what w-a-t-e-r meant when written in her hand.  A whole new world opened up for her.  When we truly seek to follow Jesus, we learn to see a different reality.  A reality of giving, serving, helping, loving, forgiving, and caring.  We see compassion as the glue that holds the community together.   There is so much good, abundance, life, beauty, love, and grace in the world.  When we follow Jesus, we can see it.

When we see with the eyes of Jesus, we see the beauty, the worth, the inherent value of every life.  This makes it harder to take advantage of people.  To abuse their labor.  To inhibit people from getting medical help.   When we see God in every person as Jesus does, it is much harder to treat others in a hurtful, degrading way.  

When we see with the eyes of Jesus, can we pollute the water our neighbors near and far will need to drink?  Can we poison the air which will lead to untold deaths from respiratory problems?  Can we consume and produce and discard in a way that endangers the planet that supports the life of the millions of people created in the image of God and creatures manifesting the love of God?  

It is so much easier, I think, to think of faith as enforcing rules: don’t have an affair, don’t have an abortion, don’t change gender.  Much easier to avoid these so-called evils, than to create a reality in which we are expected to do the good;  to be people of compassion and hope and forgiveness taking care of each other.  You can’t measure that.  And you can’t punish someone for not measuring up.  That is not a satisfying system to many, and certainly it is not a system that makes it easy to control people. 

Seeing as Jesus sees is about love.  Imbued in everything and everyone.  Everything of God.  Can we see that?  

In her book, Becoming Wise, journalist Krista Tippett, talks about seeing the goodness and love in the world around us.  She writes:

“Our world is abundant with quiet, hidden lives of beauty and courage and goodness.  There are millions of people at any given moment, young and old, giving themselves over to service, risking hope, and all the while ennobling us all.  To take such goodness in and let it matter — to let it define our take on reality as much as headlines of violence — is a choice we can make to live by the light in the darkness, to be brave and free. . . . Taking in the good, whenever and wherever we find it, gives us new eyes for seeing and living.”  [From Becoming Wise, Krista Tippett, quoted in Boundless Compassion: Creating a Way of Life, by Joyce Rupp, p. 187.]

Yes, there is so much good in the world around us.  And in us.  To me, our sin is choosing not to see the goodness and the love in ourselves and others.  And that blindness has deadly consequences.  What does the man born blind see?  The power of God’s love made manifest right before his very eyes.  And that is what we are invited to focus on in ourselves, our lives and in the world around us.  

When Helen Keller was young, she was introduced to Christianity.  She famously responded by saying: “I always knew He was there, but I didn’t know His name!”

Her spiritual autobiography, Keller described the core of her belief in these words:  “Since His [God’s] Life cannot be less in one being than another, or His [God’s] Love manifested less fully in one thing than another, His [God’s] Providence must needs be universal … He [God] has provided religion of some kind everywhere, and it does not matter to what race or creed anyone belongs if he [they] is [are] faithful to his [their] ideals of right living.”  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller]  That is what Keller learned to see through the eyes of faith.  Divine Love imbuing her entire reality.  

May we look for the power of love and see the reality of God within us, among us, and around us.  Amen.  

A reasonable effort has been made to appropriately cite materials referenced in this sermon. For additional information, please contact Lakewood United Church of Christ.

LAKEWOOD UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST
2601 54th Avenue South  St. Petersburg, FL  33712
On land originally inhabited by the Tocabaga
727-867-7961

lakewooducc.org
lakewooducc@gmail.com

Date:  March 26, 2023
Scripture Lessons: Ezekiel 37:1-14 and John 11:1-45
Sermon:  Out of Control
Pastor:  Rev. Kim P. Wells

The fabulous novel, Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver, a sequel to The Bean Trees, features a Cherokee lawyer named Annawake Fourkiller, who represents the Cherokee nation.  At one point in the novel, Annawake describes some of the horrors of the Trail of Tears to a Euro-American character in the story who didn’t learn much about that episode in American history when she was in school. Here’s the conversation between Annawake and Alice:

“Have you ever heard about the Trail of Tears?”

“I heard of it.  I don’t know the story, though.”

“It happened in 1838.  We were forced out of our homelands in the southern Appalachians.  North Carolina, Tennessee, around there.  All our stories are set in those mountains, because we’d lived there since the beginning, until European immigrants decided our prior claim to the land was interfering with their farming.  So the army knocked on our doors one morning, stole the crockery and the food supplies and then burned down the houses and took everybody into detention camps.  Families were split up, nobody knew what was going on.  The idea was to march everybody west to a worthless piece of land nobody else would ever want.”

“They walked?” Alice asks.  “I’d have thought at least they would take them on the train.”

Annawake laughs through her nose. “No, they walked.  Old people, babies, everybody.  It was just a wall of people walking and dying.  The camps had filthy blankets and slit trenches for bathrooms, covered with flies.  The diet was nothing that forest people had ever eaten before, maggoty meal and salted pork, so everybody had diarrhea, and malaria from the mosquitoes along the river, because it was summer.  The tribal elders begged the government to wait a few months until fall, so more people might survive the trip, but they wouldn’t wait.  There was smallpox, and just exhaustion.  The old people and the nursing babies died first.  Mothers would go on carrying dead children for days, out of delirium and loneliness, and because of the wolves following behind. . . . 

Alice uncrosses and crosses her arms over her chest, understanding more than she wants to.   She know she is hearing the story Annawake has carried around her whole life long.  . . . 

“They figure about two thousand died in the detention camps.”  Annawake says quietly.  “And a lot more than that on the trail.  Nobody knows.” .  .  . 

“When I was a kid, I read every account ever written about the Trail of Tears.  It was my permanent project.  In high school Civics I read the class what President Van Buren said to Congress about the removal, and asked our teacher why he didn’t have us memorize that, instead of the Gettysburg Address.  He said I was jaded and sarcastic. . . .

“Well.  What did President Van Buren say?”

“He said: ‘It affords me sincere pleasure to be able to apprise you of the removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi.  The measures have had the happiest effect, and they have emigrated without any apparent resistance.’” [Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven, pp. 358-359]

As a side bar, let me point out that we can share this quote from this book because we are a church and the state can’t tell us what we can and can’t read or teach.  We still have some semblance of separation of church and state.

So, when I heard this description of the Trail of Tears, I had to turn off the audio book for a while just to let it sink in.  I had to recover from the recounting of such trauma; to process the horrors that we have the capacity to inflict upon one another as human beings.  And then I had to find out some more about the Trail of Tears.  In fact, it is thought that some 60,000 people died.  Wilma Mankiller, the first woman chief of the Cherokee, reflects, “Although it is so crucial for us to focus on the good things — our tenacity, our language and culture, the revitalization of tribal communities — it is also important that we never forget what happened to our people on the Trail of Tears.  It was indeed our holocaust.”  [Essential Native Wisdom, edited by Carol Kelly-Gangi, p. 95.]     

When I was younger, I used to be able to just pass over something like Kingsolver’s description of the Trail of Tears, slightly disturbed but also feeling a remove from such a story because in 1838 all of my relatives were in Europe.  We were not here in this country, so I would reason, it wasn’t our fault.  We had nothing to do with it.  But now, thanks to things like critical race theory, I know that I, as a person defined by my culture as white, have benefitted from what was done to the Cherokee and other tribes.  And from slavery and its legacy, which, again, I used to see as something that did not involve me because our people were in Germany and Italy, thank you very much.  

But now I see that as a human being, the Cherokee and those who were forced to walk the Trail of Tears, are my people because we are all one people, one race.  And the people who forced the Trail of Tears to proceed are also my people.  So, I had to stop when I heard that part of the book.

And, yes, the Trail of Tears is horrific.  And so is the Holocaust. And that did involve my relatives. And slavery and the Middle Passage and its continuing aftermath – these are also horrific.  And there are many other terrible things that we have done to each other, and are still doing to each other, as a human family.  

But a message of the Bible, and certainly of the two stories that we heard this morning, is that God is more powerful than all of the havoc and evil we can dish out.  There is a power, Divine Love, present in the world working for life, for justice, for healing, and for good, that is stronger than the worst we can imagine.  It is the power of love and life.  And it cannot ultimately be thwarted.  

Now, if there are 30 people in this sanctuary, then there are probably many more than 30 images and metaphors for God among us.  There are many ways of thinking about and describing that which is eternal and fundamental and inviolable.  Maybe we associate the letters g-o-d with a divine spirit somewhere working for our good.  Maybe we think of God as a benevolent dictator somewhere.  Maybe we think of God as a light within us; a light of love.  Maybe we associate God with the life force.  Maybe we think of God as a genie waiting to help us.  Maybe we think of God as a human construct created to give us a way of talking about things that are ultimate and universal.  However we may think about God and envision and imagine God, the stories we heard today remind us that God is about the perpetuation of a primary reality of life and love and goodness.  

In Ezekiel, we hear of the prophet speaking words of hope to a people who, like the bones,  are devastated, torn apart, separated – from one another, from their purpose, and from their God.  But the story tells of God’s plan for the community to be restored to life, a re-creation of the people who will bless all the people of the world as they embody the justice and compassion of their God.  

And the story of Lazarus tells us that the reality of God embodied in the life of Jesus, a reality of justice and compassion, is stronger than death.  The reality of God is a story of life and wholeness, and it cannot be eliminated or eradicated.  Hard as we may try.

In describing the aftermath of the Trail of Tears, William Hensley, a Cherokee of the 20th century tells of the challenges of creating a new society:  “For Cherokee families moved helter-skelter by government edict in the 1830s from their original homelands east of the Mississippi to the raw, wooded rolling hills and grass-covered plains of Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), it was a scramble for survival.  Everyone had been forced to start over from scratch, accumulating enough tools and equipment for clearing the lands to construct new homes, start subsistence gardens, acquire and raise food for family and animals.  But more difficult was the re-establishment of a sense of community, the restructuring of a shattered culture, and the invention of new ways of being — social, economic, and spiritual.”  [Essential Native Wisdom, edited by Carol Kelly-Gangi, p. 23.]

New beginnings are daunting but they also hold promise.  And the Bible conveys that promise:  The possibility of a new reality that is a more true reflection of the nature of a God of universal, unconditional, eternal love.   

But we must also see that life in God, the reality of God which cannot be vanquished, is always a threat to those who covet their human power and authority.  To those who are benefitting from the way things are.  To those who think they have some say so in defining reality.  The wild, unpredictable, uncontrollable love of God can be threatening to those who prize their human power and control like the religious authorities in the story of Lazarus.  

Now some of us are utterly disgusted and discouraged by what we see going on around us today.  I attended an event this weekend where I had the opportunity to talk with a recently retired psychiatrist.  And he said, life is more distressing now than it has been, certainly in our life times.   Well, we see our values and our assumptions and our rights not just dying but being outright killed.   And we are seeing hope dry up as alienation inundates us.  

But we know that the power of Divine Love, the love we see in the images offered by Ezekiel and the legacy of Jesus, the power of that love is ultimate and infinite.  That love can overcome the worst horrors humanity can concoct.  Love will prevail.  Not religious authority.  Not theological tenets.  Not a creed.  Not the economy.  Not the culture.  Not the ‘enemy,’ however defined.  Not political dogma.  Those things will not prevail.  They are fleeting.  The reality of God, the eternal manifestation of Divine Love, that is what will prevail.  That reality is stronger than greed, selfishness, violence, vengeance, hatred, and even death.  

Notice in Ezekiel, we are told that the bones were very dry.  Scattered on the battlefield.  Then we are told of the presence of the spirit of God.  And there is a rattling.  And the skeletons come together.  Then the sinews connect the bones.  Then flesh clothes the bones.  And finally breath, ruah, the divine spirit, blows life into the nostrils and lungs of the reconstructed earthlings.  It is a process.  It takes time.  From the horror of devastation to the re-creation of sustainable life.  But life prevails.  And it is beyond our control.  And, yes,  it takes time, and transformation, and change, and we don’t like to be patient.  It can be so much easier to sit in self pity and blame.  And to be victims of those who think they have the power of life and death over us.  Those who are benefiting from power arrangements that damage and degrade and harm others.  But our faith story tells of love that frees new life.  Where we are no longer held in bondage to fear or the tyranny of the self.  Where we are no longer captive to hopelessness, greed, hunger, poverty, and degradation.  

Lisa Pivec, Director of Public Health for the Cherokee Nation, explained the outlook of the Cherokee nation which it has sought to maintain in its new configurations since the Trail of Tears.  This description of the nature of the Cherokee was offered in 2020 as the Cherokee faced the threat of covid:  “We have to come together as one people.  We have to think about others.  And that’s something that Cherokees do.  And that’s how we live is collectively and understanding that what we do and how we live impacts others.  Don’t ask, what are my rights? Ask, what are my responsibilities?” [Essential Native Wisdom, edited by Carol Kelly-Gangi, p. 110.]  How beautiful that the Cherokee are able to try to maintain that fundamental core underpinning in this society of extreme individualism and self absorption.  It is another testimony to the power of Divine Love:  New life is possible.  And life and love will prevail.  

Our faith is about life, full and free.  A life of joy and abundance and community.  Compassion and commitment to the common good.  Despite what we do to each other, the problems we make for ourselves, and the way we may treat each other, our God is a God of life and love with power greater than the worst we can dish up.  And the image of that God is indelibly imprinted within each one of us.   We need to be reminded of this as we come to the ending of the Lenten season and approach Holy Week where we remember the stories of the end of Jesus’ earthly life.  

We close with a Cherokee prayer particularly fitting for Lent as we seek to re-turn our lives to God:  

“O Great Spirit, who made all races, look kindly upon the whole human family and take away the arrogance and hatred which separates us from our brothers [and sisters].” 

 [Essential Native Wisdom, edited by Carol Kelly-Gangi, p. 60.]

Amen.

A reasonable effort has been made to appropriately cite materials referenced in this sermon. For additional information, please contact Lakewood United Church of Christ.