On this day fifty years ago, September 21, 1975, I was ordained into the Christian Ministry of Word and Sacrament at the Newton Highlands Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts. I was 26.
I had had my ecclesiastical council weeks before and waited for a call for a church before I could be ordained. Late in the summer it came. I was called to be the pastor of the Congregational Churches of Limerick and West Newfield, a “Two-point charge” serving two small congregations nine miles apart in the Northwest corner of York County, Maine. I had preached my neutral pulpit sermon in nearby Fryeburg, and a candidating sermon in each of the two churches.
I remember my ordination vividly. The church secretary, Irene Fultz, had designed. printed and mailed out the invitations. My family was there. My Associate Conference Minister, Oliver Powell, was there. The Reverend Joanne Hartunian, represented the Metropolitan Boston Association. The Reverend Meredith (Jerry) B. Handspicker, presided over the Laying on of Hands, and gave the Prayer of Ordination (after the ordained ministers were assembled he invited the whole congregation to participate, the first time I had seen this. It is commonplace now in the UCC.) The Reverend Walter Telfer, Director of Field Education, gave a Charge to the Congregation. The Reverend Michael J. Maguire led the congregation in a prayer of Confession. I presided at Holy Communion and gave the Benediction for the first time. The Reverend Dudne M. Breeze, our pastor, gave the sermon. He admonished me to be a Minister of the Word of God. I now know how wise that counsel was and how hard it would be.
I served those two little churches for four years and have never been happier. I married Martha while there and those churches threw us a big party. I trained as an EMT and became a firefighter.
Next, we went to Bangor, where I was Chaplain at Bangor Theological Seminary and Associate Pastor of the Hammond Street Church, United Church of Christ. There I ministered to students and congregants. I was a founder of Maine Clergy and Laity Concerned (CALC) a national anti-war organization. I chaired the Social Justice Committee of the Maine Council of Churches.
Finally, I came to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1982 to be the Pastor of the First Church of Christ in Pittsfield. I had three sabbaticals from there: Oxford (1989), St Andrews (1995) and Cambridge (2000). I studied and wrote articles and books while on those wonderful respites from active ministry.
I stayed in Pittsfield for twenty-two years and would have stayed longer if I hadn’t sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in a bicycle accident and had to retire early on disability. That crash was exactly 25 years ago and equally divides my ministry into before and after my disability.
I eventually discovered a new chapter in my life. I started writing. I wrote hymns. I started this blog, I wrote devotions for the United Church of Christ’s Daily Devotional, and I found a new ministry of the Word in my words. I became active in the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge.
So, there you have it. Here I am 50 years later. I once kept count of how many weddings I officiated at, but I have lost count well into several hundred. The same for baptisms, confirmations. I can’t count the hospital visits, the funerals and graveside committals I was part of. I’ve held people’s hands in Rehab Facilities and Psychiatric Wards. I’ve put my arms around people in overwhelming grief. I’ve been humbled by theses encounters.
I have heard numerous confessions. I have listened to more kinds of human consternation and misery than you can imagine. I have also been privileged to be part of people’s lives at some of their more poignant moments. I have shared many joys and sorrows. I have “wept with those who weep, and rejoiced with those who have rejoiced.” (Romans 12:15)
I have led countless Bible Studies and other courses for adults. I have authored “A Course in Basic Christianity” for adults. I think of it as a course to teach you “everything you should have learned in Confirmation Class, but probably didn’t because you had your mind on other things.”
I’ve valued the relationships of my clergy friends and colleagues in the United Church of Christ and other Christian denominations. I served the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ as their representative to the Massachusetts Commission on Christian Unity for twelve years. There, I made many friends and came to appreciate the richness of the “Great Church” of Jesus Christ.
I have also treasured the relationships I have had with my Jewish brothers and sisters in the clergy. We have become trusted friends and interlocators, and in that safe space of friendship have had rich and deep conversations about both what unites and divides us. It was a great honor that the family of my dear friend Rabbi Harold Salzmann asked me to speak at his funeral at Temple Anshe Amunin in Pittsfield.
I’ve witnessed people’s lives changed by their confrontation with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And I, myself, have been profoundly changed by a life-long engagement with Jesus and his Gospel of freedom and grace. Jesus is still the most interesting and engaging part of our faith, and after fifty years he is still the one with whom I have to deal in thought and deed and prayer.
I have struggled to be faithful to the truth as I have known it. My reach has exceeded my grasp. I have pondered the deep things of the faith and have written countless articles, papers, and three and a half books. I have spent years trying to reform my denomination and restore its historic theological and ecumenical vision through leadership in such activities as the Confessing Christ movement, the Mercersburg Society, and the Craigville Colloquies.
I have also, to be quite honest, been a leader throughout my fifty year ministry, in an enterprise that is in decline in institutional vigor and societal esteem. The schools where I received my masters and my doctorate are no longer there. The mainline church in whose rocky vineyard I have labored is smaller, poorer, and less respected than it was before I began. My last church, where I served for 22 years, sold its grand gothic meeting house to another congregation, and merged with a nearby UCC church.
But I do not despair about this. God will not be left without witnesses. The church of the future, I believe, will be smaller, leaner, and more faithful. People won’t go because it’s “the thing to do” as it once was.
They’ll go because they have found something of great value to which they are committed. Or they will go because they are searching for something important that seems missing in their lives, something more durable, something deeper than the shallow seductions and distractions of our consumer culture that values having more than being.
And society needs the church to model a community that welcomes and values all of God’s children. A space where love is stronger than hate, faith stronger than fear, and kindness and compassion are shown to the vulnerable among us, which is all of us.
So, while I have regrets about my failings and limitations as a minister, I have none about choosing this calling and living it out for five decades. My daughter has chosen to be a pastor, and I watch with awe at how gifted and faithful she is. It is young clergy such as she who give me much hope for the church of the future. I thank God for sustaining me through this long calling, and for calling me in the first place despite my manifold frailties and failures. To God be the glory.
“Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.” Amen. —Ephesians 3:20-21.
(This morning in worship, The First Congregational Church of Stockbridge blessed me by prayer and the laying on of hands. A livestream of the service is available on the church’s website.)
“For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.” (Galatians 5:1, 13-25)
Prayer: May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
”There’s a sweet, sweet Spirit in this place, and I know that it’s the Spirit of the Lord.“ I want to thank Sean for picking that good old hymn and getting us started on our Spirit-filled worship. We had quite a Spirit-filled Pentecost three weeks ago, didn’t we? with streamers floating above our heads and everyone dressed in red. But it’s still Pentecost, which is a season and not just a day, a season to explore with some of the implications of being a Spirit-filled people. More particularly I want to explore with you the idea of being guided by the Spirit in our lives. Continue reading
“After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. A centurion there had a slave whom he valued highly and who was ill and close to death. When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave. When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly, saying, “He is worthy to have you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.” And Jesus went with them, but when he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to say to him, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore, I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed. For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me, and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and the slave does it.” When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him, and, turning to the crowd following him, he said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” When those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the slave in good health.
Soon afterward he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow, and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he was moved with compassion for her and said to her, “Do not cry.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stopped. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them, and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has visited his people!” This word about him spread throughout the whole of Judea and all the surrounding region. (Luke 7: 1-17)
What makes you cry? What moves you? I may have been an emotional person before I suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury 25 years ago, but I certainly am one now. I get choked up, sometimes even when I’m preaching. If that happens this morning, don’t be concerned. It won’t bother me and it shouldn’t bother you. My TBI makes me “emotionally labile,” but you needn’t have a head injury to be moved to tears. I’m just an extreme case, a literal “head case.” There’s even a word for it: “Tearful or given to weeping.” It is called “lachrymose” from the Latin for “weeping.” Lachrymose: isn’t that a cool word?
There are certain texts or songs that move me to tears. Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech gets me every time. I weep through John 1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
Some of the music that chokes me up is about weeping itself, as in the St. Matthew’s Passion. When Peter weeps after betraying Jesus: “Just then the cock crew. Then Peter remembered the words of Jesus, when he said to him: “Before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.” And Peter went out and wept bitterly. It’s even more poignant in the German: “bitterlich.”
Or the aptly named “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem. “Full of tears will be that day; When from the ashes shall arise. The guilty man to be judged.” I’ve sung that twice now with Berkshire Lyric at Ozawa Hall and I had to really bear down to get through it both times. Also, the music is really beautiful. Which doesn’t help.
So, I’ve always believed one should pay close attention to these choked-up moments in your life because they mean something important. They mean that something authentic has moved you deeply in your soul.
That is what is going on in our stories today. We have two stories from Luke where Jesus is deeply moved by the suffering of others. He is moved by the centurion’s faith, and he is moved by the grieving widow in Nain, whose only son has died.
Our theme for this morning is compassion, which Jesus both practices and embodies. In telling the story of Jesus, a generation or more after Jesus’s death, Luke is trying to teach the church what God is like, and therefore, what God’s people should be like, a community of compassion.
Remember how Luke describes Jesus reading the Isaiah scroll in his home synagogue in Nazareth. He read:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.”
That was Jesus’s calling: To bring good news to the poor. So, who are the poor? The poor are those who suffer. They may be wealthy or impoverished, but in their suffering they are poor.
In our first story the Roman centurion fears for the life of a favorite slave. In Luke’s view of the Gospel’s inclusivity, even a hated Roman enemy is not outside the scope of Jesus’s love and attention. The centurion is not literally poor, for he is a powerful soldier with authority over a hundred men, but he is poor in his need. His slave is dying and he heard about Jesus and believes Jesus can heal him. Jesus is “amazed” by his faith and heals the slave.
I want to say something about the Greek word translated here as compassion. Compassion literally means “suffering with.” The Greek word here translated as “compassion,” is splagchnizomai (that’s easy for me to say!) It comes from splagchna, which means “intestines; guts.” Jesus’s reaction to the widow’s plight is literally visceral, gut wrenching, brought on by empathy for a mother who lost her child, one of the most difficult of all human experiences.
Jesus also knows that having lost her only son as well as her husband, she is now doubly vulnerable. For in the patriarchal world of the first-century Roman Empire, widows were solely dependent on their male relatives for sustenance and safety. Here is compassion, suffering with the sufferer.
Now Luke’s Gospel describes many acts of compassion by Jesus, but he only uses this particular long hard-to-pronounce word for compassion three times, and the other two are some of your favorite stories that are found only in Luke. Can you guess what they might be? What comes to mind?
First, there is the story of the good Samaritan, who had compassion on the man beaten by brigands and left by the side of the road to die. We see Luke’s universality there, too, since the Samaritan is a hated enemy, who shows mercy after the official representatives of the religious establishment passed by on the other side of the road.
The other example is the story of the waiting father and his two sons. The father sees the lost prodigal from far off and has compassion for him.
So, likewise, Jesus is moved to compassion for the widow. Picture with me these two processions that meet outside the city gate in the village of Nain. One is a procession of death, with the dead son on a stretcher, his bereaved mother, and a great crowd of mourners headed to the graveyard.
The other is a procession of life, with Jesus, his disciples, and a great crowd of exuberant followers. The two processions collide, and the procession of life wins. Jesus raises the dead son from death to life, the first time he does this.
Why does Luke place this here in his story? Soon, in Luke 7:22, Jesus will tell John the Baptist’s disciples to report back to John that they have seen and heard miraculous signs and wonders, including the raising of the dead
The Good News that Jesus brings means the leveling of established positions and privilege. My teacher and friend, Max Stackhouse, went to India for a year with his family, where Max was a guest professor at United Theological Seminary in Bangalore. It was a life-changing experience for Max, who came to view the Indian caste system as a great systemic evil.
He told me how the Good News of Jesus was powerfully attractive to the lowest castes in India. Christians make up only 2.3% of the population, and many of them had been Dalits, whom we once labeled “Untouchables.”
Jesus comes with good news for the poor, the last, the least and the lost of society. He touches the Untouchables. And he comes with good news for us, the privileged, who are also poor in our own ways.
Henri Nouwen once described Jesus’ life of compassion as the “path of downward mobility.” Jesus chooses suffering, rejection, and death rather than the path of “upward mobility” toward privilege and power.
Jesus didn’t reach down and lift the poor up from above. He became poor “he suffered with” and according to Luke, it was this very suffering that led him to the cross, “for us and all people.” Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection are what enables redemption, atonement, indeed, relief from suffering for all humanity.
Jesus’ “path of downward mobility” differs from the idea today that compassion means helping “those less fortunate than we are.”
One of the things I truly love about the Cathedral of the Beloved is the way the leaders erase the distinction between the helpers and the help-ees. Sure, we prepare a meal to serve, but we all eat it together in a community. The Food Program at United Church of Christ, Pittsfield, does the same thing; you can’t tell whose is there for food or there to volunteer. Sometimes those groups overlap. And this gives everyone dignity and erases the stigma.
In Jesus we see this important distinction between compassion and pity. Jesus knows you can’t love down, from a place above or apart. Even some of the terms we use, such as “the underprivileged,” or the “less fortunate” keep us above those we serve, who like us, are beloved children of God.
Real compassion, as embodied by Jesus, runs counter to our culture’s constant call for success, achievement and wealth. Real compassion is a call to suffer with the powerless.
A Christian faith true to the life and teachings of Jesus should never seek to be powerful and rise above others. That is why I have condemned Christian Nationalism, and the popular and rich preachers of the Prosperity Gospel as being false to what Jesus stood for.
We are not in a society that honors or displays much compassion. This very week the richest man in the world cut aid, food, and medicine, to the poorest people on earth, some of whom will now die. We daily see new polices that are the opposite of compassion, they are cruel and mean and go to the heart of who we are as a country. And in my opinion, the cruelty is not a bug, but a feature. It’s the point. The obscene worship of wealth and power is directly opposite of what Jesus taught and who he was.
There has been some push-back from the Christian Church. We’ve seen a brave Episcopal bishop, Marianne Budde, gently entreat the President to have mercy on the scared and vulnerable. The Roman Catholic church has declared the war on immigrants to be incompatible with Catholic Social Teaching. The Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Elizabeth Eaton, has spoken out about misinformation on social media about her church’s funding when General Flynn tweeted that the Lutheran Church was “a money-laundering scheme.” Our own United Church of Christ has spoken out, and there is an Immigration Support Meeting today at 2:30.
So, what can we do? I have two suggestions. First, I suggest we partner with any groups on the ground who are working to implement compassion for those who are suffering. Our UCC Conference has lists of organizations that are helping immigrants.
Secondly, let us continue to be a laboratory of the compassionate community. Let us continue to live out the radical inclusivity that Jesus taught and embodied. Let is continue to be faithful to our covenant, and to being “Open and Affirming” to all people. Let us pray with and for each other and support each other. Let us tell the truth in love, and not give in to our fears. Let us reach out to those in our communities that are being harmed.
Finally, let us be faithful followers of Jesus Christ, our Risen Lord and Savior. We may not be the powerful of society, but we are not powerless. There is a different kind of power available to us through him who loved us. For I am convinced that nothing will separate us from the love of God, not life or death, not oligarchs and autocrats. Nothing will separate us from the of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. And the truth of that moves me deeply and chokes me up! Amen.
(I preached this sermon on February 9, 2025 at the First Congregational Church at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. A YouTube video of the service is here:)
My granddaughter celebrated her eighth birthday right before Christmas, and we asked her if she had any requests for her birthday dinner. She said, “I want Bompas’ (that’s me) pork tenderloin!” Somewhere she was served a memorable one with raspberry sauce, and I’ve tried to reproduce it for her several times with varying critical responses. She deemed this one pretty good, so I will share it with you. Continue reading
It has been my custom to share my top ten most viewed posts of the year, but since I only posted seven times in 2024, I’ve decided to share my top ten posts of all time. I started this blog in 2009 and this is the fewest posts I’ve done in a year. Ironically, 2024 had the most views of any year. Here they are with the number of times they have been viewed: Continue reading
I’m a choral singer, so much of my seasonal listening is sacred music. I had sabbaticals in Oxford and Cambridge and haunted the college chapels to hear the choristers, although I was never there for Christmas. Continue reading
I’ve been making various versions of this dish since my children were little. They loved it and would request it. I had a good vegetarian tofu dish as well, but that was a hard sell. I think of it as Chinese comfort food. The original recipe came from the superb The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irene Kao, but I’ve tweaked it over the years. Some of the ingredients are probably not in your pantry, but they’re worth seeking out at an Asian market. You can substitute ground beef for the pork, but it will be heavier. Make sure you have everything ready before you start cooking as the actual cooking takes very little time. Continue reading
Prayer: May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Happy All Saints Sunday! I contemplated calling this sermon “The Saints Preserve Us!” but I thought that might be too alarming just two days before a fraught election.
But I do want to talk about the saints, both those “here below” as the Doxology says, and those among “the heavenly host.”
We have a great farm stand around the corner from us, and this time of year we revel in fresh sweet corn and ripe tomatoes. They also always have the best peaches which they import from various places. The ones they have right now are from Pennsylvania, and they are juicy and ripe. I love peaches, but have stopped buying them in the grocery store, because they are either hard as a rock or mealy in texture. If you have good peaches available, I recommend making peach ice cream. This recipe is easy. No eggs, you don’t have to make a custard, and you don’t have to peel the peaches. The ice cream tastes like summer. You will need an ice cream machine. Continue reading
When I Survey . . . 