Salt

 Yesterday, the Lectionary had us thinking on Salt.  “You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus said. 

The Apostle Paul said our conversation is always to be “full of grace, seasoned with salt”.  

Salt is the antidote to both bitterness and also syrupy-sweetness. 

So, likewise, our words neither artificially sweeten, nor embitter. 

Our words are full of grace and truth. The taste they leave in our mouths after we speak them may be strong — very strong, but it’s never bad.

New Years — Feast of the Holy Name

 New Year’s Day always coincides with the Feast of the Holy Name in Christendom. On the 8th day Jesus was circumcised and given his name as is the custom and commandment in Judaism. 

Why Jews are commanded to circumcise their children on the eighth day is a mystery and matter of debate. Though I prefer the idea that it was given that the eighth day be chosen so all infants could know they joy of the blessed sabbath day in one of the first seven days of their lives to be one without suffering. 

The eighth day is also the day of new creation. There were eight members of Noah’s family in the ark. The Feast of Pentecost occurs on the 8th day after the 7 weeks of the spring harvest. Jesus was raised on the eighth day. 

New creation cannot happen without the struggle and suffering of the old. Suffering is necessary. Blood, sweat, and tears are a part of the journey and the faith. 

It is a new year. 2023 is a new creation. We can be a part of the new creation.  But something old must also always die and/or be left behind. There can be no new without the dying of the old. 

We welcome this new year. We embrace all the new it will bring. We will have to accept the struggle and suffering it will also demand. We accept the dying. 

As one of my favorite spiritual guides Frederick Buechner — who died last year — once wrote, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

More on Hope

 More on Hope this morning. 

St. Paul said, “Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”

What I take from this is that Hope is not simply optimism or a favorable forecast. It’s not that with which we begin. It’s what we end up with.

Hope is what’s left of us after a long, hard struggle. 

That means, if there’s even a feint glimmer of Hope in you, you know you’ve survived something.

On Hope

Yesterday we lit the candle of Hope, the first light of the Advent. Afterward, we shared in our Service of Comfort and Healing in the beautiful Fleming Chapel. 

In the intimate gathering with fellow strugglers, I tried to express the important point that the light of hope does not drive out the darkness. It accompanies the darkness. It warms the darkness. 

The darkness remains. The darkness belongs. The darkness is a companion with a spirit and a voice also. 

Fellow strugglers, in these days of diminished light, may we let the darkness speak and also be loved.

 In a powerful scene in one of the Gospels the disciples return jubilant from a tremendously successful campaign in which the demons surrendered and Jesus says he “saw Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lighting.”  Yet, Jesus told the disciples they should rejoice not in the surrender of the demonic, but rather in the fact that their “names are written in heaven.”

Not all campaigns are successful. Victory is never guaranteed. And, in fact, victory is not why we fight. We fight the good fight because there are good things worth fighting for, regardless of whether we win or we lose. 

Let’s hold onto ourselves today, beloved, and to the things that are both good and true on earth as they are in heaven. 

World Communion Sunday

 Tomorrow is World Communion Sunday and I’m remembering three courageous women — Bettye Poole and Ida Hannah, two blacks students at Mississippi’s Tougaloo College, and Julie Zaugg, a white student from Oberlin College who was studying at the Tougaloo — who together tried to integrate Capitol Street Methodist Church in Jackson, Mississippi on World Communion Sunday in October 1963. 

The women were denied entrance by the ushers. Women they then moved to try to pray together on the front steps of the church they were arrested on grounds of disturbance and private property trespassing. 

At the jail, Julie Zaugg was confronted by a police officer who pulled a church offering envelope from his pocket and told her, cynically, that if she really wanted to worship at Capitol Street she ought to be willing to send it some money. 

Zaugg looked down to see that on the envelope taken from the Capitol Street at the time of the arrests there was a picture of a communion table, displaying the elements of the Lord’s Supper, surrounded by — curiously, and apparently unnoticed by the police officer — several hands reaching for the wine. “The hands were of different colors: black, pink, and white.”

This, too, is the word of the Lord.

Forgive Us Our Debts

 Forgiveness of something important is always difficult and oftentimes morally complex. Certainly this is true for the forgiveness of monetary debt.

Who has the right to decide who can have their debts forgiven and how much are economic, moral, and also political questions. It is understandable that there is unease in today's announcement of large-scale forgiveness of student loans.

One Scripture I've seen going around is the story of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20). This is a story about unmerited financial gain. Yet it is also a story about unemployment. We might ask ourselves if its a story about grace or about justice? Or is it both?

One difference between this story and today's announcement is the fact that the vineyard owner had sole claim to his own land and money. What was forgiven today, on the other hand, was public money. And so in order for the story to track closer to what happened today, we'd have to have it that the laborers had some financial stake in not only the money that they received, but also in the money that was given away. This difference makes this parable not an altogether neat parallel for today's pronouncment.

Yet still, there is the inherently unjust, dehumanizing, and economically paralyzing conditions shared by both the workers in the parable and the debtors of today. And in both cases, there is a monetary remedy which in one way can be seen as grace (somebody getting something for nothing) or, alternatively, as justice (a community getting reset from exploitation). And there are the still-relevant-today words spoken by the land owner in the parable, "Is your eye evil because I am good?" And there is also the question, can anybody or system be good that holds so much power over others?

These are difficult questions without easy answers. Let us be generous with one another as we wrestle with them.

And a final point: I know where I believe Jesus would be tonight -- celebrating somewhere with his still-generationally poor friends the end to their $300 monthly payment which helped by rich kids in the classes behind them a lazy river and new indoor practice field in the arms race now ruling higher education.

With them he would celebrate, splurging maybe for a bottle of wine, some tapas, and praying over it all these words:

"Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."

This, and the even more morally complex idea he came preaching at the beginning of his ministry -- the year of absolute Jubilee.