Sabbath as Sacred Wisdom

Sabbath as Sacred Wisdom

August 16, 2026

Minister: Rev. JT Smiedendorf

Text: Third of three in Sabbath series, related to Exodus 3:1-5

Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.

CENTRAL FOCUS:

Central Focus: The Sabbath soul lives most fully in the simple and kinship ways of humility, sufficiency and trust (faith).

“Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Mount Horeb,[a] the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

These are the words of our ancient tradition.
May the Living Word of God in Scripture be alive within us, among us, and beyond us.

 

I’ve been talking of Sabbath in recent weeks as an important spiritual principle and practice. First, we were offered the image of Sabbath as God’s exhale. Then we were invited to see Sabbath as kairos time, God’s time, a time of seasons and flow beyond the measure of money and accomplishment.

In whatever forms, Sabbath is a deepening into certain qualities that might not get enough time or attention from us or our culture. Nurturing and deepening that field of qualities or values or energies, opens us to the sacred wisdom, the sacred perspective, that enriches what the ancient rabbis called our Sabbath soul and, in so doing, enriches the blessing and re-creating rejuvenation of Sabbath.

In this morning’s story, Moses is drawn away from his work of shepherding. He encounters a mystical sight—a Divine Presence like fire that burns, yet does not consume the bush. God calls to Moses and Moses answers, “Here I am.” Then the Divine Voice says, “Come no closer and remove the sandals from your feet for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” There is a Rabbinic tradition that says this is not so much a warning to Moses about the particular ground on which he is standing, but an instruction to remove that which is blocking his direct connection to the sacred power of God in the ground. Removing his sandals and putting his bare feet on the ground opens his connection to the Divine Presence that comes through the earth.

Sabbath practice is like that, holding an intention of removing that which is in the way of us receiving the simple blessing of being, like simply being with the earth barefoot. It is interesting that the root of the word humility is related to humus, another word for soil. Humility is not putting ourselves down, it is staying Divinely grounded, close to the sacred earth. You can take your shoes off right now if you like.

Many spiritual traditions look at the ego as a central block to God.

Building the ego self is an important task of the first part of life. The ego self figures things out, makes plans and choices, helps us act in the world and work things out in the everyday. Gotta have one.

But if we are only or most often living from the ego self it can become a kind of barrier to Divine connection by keeping us too busy (or paralyzed), too anxious (or care-less), too preoccupied (or thoughtless), too self-centered (or self-forgetting), too scattered (or in tunnel vision), too much in our own story to open ourselves to God’s story and to the way in which we are held in that story.

Moses was called into the God story to liberate the people from slavery, to be an actor with God. His appropriate response was “Who, me? Are you kidding? Who am I to do such a thing? Why would an empire listen to me?” God’s next response amounts to something like, “You won’t be doing it, I will. It is the Divine Presence and your connection to it that will make this great and difficult thing happen.”

When our ego thinks we are doing it alone, we are no longer close to the sacred earth, no longer in a place of humility. We have put on our ego shoes and lost contact with the sacred ground of the GodMystery. Sabbath practice instead takes off our ego shoes, asking of us a trust and a letting go—a trust in forces greater than ourselves and a letting go of always having to act or to control or be attached to having to know the outcome of the story.

There is an ancient Taoist story of a young man whose horse ran away. People came to console him, but the father said, “What makes you so sure this is not a blessing?” Months later the horse returned bringing with her a magnificent stallion. Everyone came to congratulate the son on his good fortune. And the father said, “What makes you so sure this is not a disaster?” Things went well until one day the son fell off the stallion and broke his hip. Again, people came to console them, but the father said, “What makes you so sure this is not a blessing?” A year later the country was invaded, and all able-bodied men were called into a war in which most died. But the son could not fight and both son and father survived to care for one another.

You just never know with life.

Sabbath practice asks us to let go of knowing it all, to accept the amount of inevitable unknowing that goes with life and to let go of the anxiety and worry and desire to control all the outcomes. We are asked to take on what is called in some spiritual traditions, beginner’s mind, a kind of “less judgment and more curiosity” approach to each moment. There is a humility in this mindset and a necessary trusting or faith that somehow the Divine Mystery is holding it all and that this holding is sufficient and trustworthy.

Humility, sufficiency, trust.
This is Sabbath as sacred wisdom.
Our mass culture generally doesn’t support these values as much as their counterparts.

Instead of humility and nearness to earth, there is soaring individual elevation and conquering of the earth. Being famous seems to be important to many, but Zen Buddhist teacher Suzuki Roshi said that true freedom comes from becoming “nobody special” and knowing our greatness as coming from our connection to the Greater. Our Sabbath soul knows this. Jesus warning about praying in public is essentially not about the public-ness, but about the inner motivation of wanting to be seen by others in a particular way and feel puffed up about it and forgetting that praying is about connecting with God.

Instead of feeling the sufficiency of what is and what we have now, the culture tends to support dissatisfaction and the drive for more and the idealizing of our worry about tomorrow or some other place we could be. When Moses led the people out of slavery, it wasn’t directly to the Promised Land, the Land of Milk and Honey. It was a journey into the wilderness, a place of limited physical resources, ripe for dissatisfaction. Yet, even in the wilderness, God provided those on the journey with manna, a food that couldn’t be stored, but was collected each day. One could not reduce worry or create security by hoarding it for the future. Sabbath practice asks us to trust in the moment that what we have is sufficient and we can exhale for now, trusting that tomorrow will have its own sufficiency, even in challenging times.

Has anyone here experienced times of spiritual wilderness like me?

Here’s an ancient poem by the Middle Eastern poet Hafiz that reminds us we might even be blessed by those wilderness times …

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
as few human
or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft
my voice
so tender
my need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

What if we had a Sabbath practice of naming and celebrating how we received manna each day or each week or named and celebrated how our lives as they are in the moment are sufficient?

Instead of trust and faith in something Greater than Ourselves, our culture has the security state and the fear-based seeking of a guarantee of safety through violence, money, and border walls. What if we had Sabbath practices that helped us let go of the need for this kind of security, for seeking security in anything but the Divine Mystery? Maybe one could place symbols on a home altar—symbols of enduring, healing values like nonviolence, shared resources, and love. Maybe one could take on the yoga pose of Savasana (corpse pose) where you lay as flat and still and relaxed as possible on the earth as a gesture of trusting God and God’s Creation as the only thing that really holds you, or take on Child’s Pose where one bows on both knees in surrender to the Greater Mystery.

We at Plymouth are a church with a history and concern for social ACTION and for making efforts in the world for change. Blessings to that faithfulness. And, I hope this sermon series on Sabbath as a practice of exhale, of effortless time and being, and of wisdom will find a life-giving way to integrate with and deepen our faithful acting in the world.

Perhaps this Wendell Berry poem titled simply X will help hold both work and rest, effort and non-effort together.

X
by Wendell Berry

Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat. 

And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep. 

When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good. 

May we find our life-giving practice of Sabbath and allow its blessing of sacred exhale, sacred time, and sacred wisdom to wash over us, refresh us, and re-create us.

AMEN.

Sabbath as Sacred Time

Sabbath as Sacred Time

August 2, 2026

Minister: Rev. JT Smiedendorf

Text: Luke 12:13-27 (Common English Bible)

Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.

CENTRAL FOCUS:

Sabbath time is different in its awareness and valuing of time, the blessing of now, the focus on non-commercial relationship, and an appreciation of kairos.

Someone from the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”
 Jesus said to him, “Man, who appointed me as judge or referee between you and your brother?”
Then Jesus said to them, “Watch out! Guard yourself against all kinds of greed. After all, one’s life isn’t determined by one’s possessions, even when someone is very wealthy.”

Then Jesus told them a parable: “A certain rich man’s land produced a bountiful crop. He said to himself, What will I do? I have no place to store my harvest! Then he thought, Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. That’s where I’ll store all my grain and goods. I’ll say to myself, You have stored up plenty of goods, enough for several years. Take it easy! Eat, drink, and enjoy yourself. But God said to him, ‘Fool, tonight you will die. Now who will get the things you have prepared for yourself?’ This is the way it will be for those who hoard things for themselves and aren’t rich toward God.”

These are the words of our ancient tradition.
May the Living Word of God in Scripture be alive within us, among us, and beyond us.

 

Fill in the blank: Time is _____. [money]

Not if you were W.K. Kellogg in 1930. It was then that he decided his cereal factory would move from three 8-hour shifts to four 6-hour shifts. Amidst the Great Depression, immediately, there were 30% more jobs available at Kellogg. Kellogg paid his six-hour shift workers for a 7-hour shift the first year, and for an 8-hour shift the second. Productivity rose significantly, not just from new technology, but from new work incentives and these new hours. When the US Dept of Labor surveyed the workers after a couple of years of these shorter shifts, the workers overwhelmingly preferred the time more than the money they might have made. Nothing could replace the time with family, for taking care of the home, and for leisure and civic activities. Relationships and the freedom of time were more important than money. After the Depression was over, Kellogg workers consistently voted to stay with the six-hour shifts for the freedom it provided them.

Time is NOT money.

In this morning’s Scripture story from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is confronted by a man wanting money from an inheritance. As he so often does, Jesus does not respond with a simple answer or even agree to be in the role he is asked to be in. He chooses instead to tell a parable about a rich man who was having a good economic year. This man says to himself, “I will tear down my barns and get bigger barns to hold it all! I’ll never have to worry or be anxious.”

But what money and goods can’t buy him is time. His time for death comes and all the money in the world will not give him more time. Jesus follows up this parable in Luke by telling people not to worry about their material security, and that worrying does nothing to make it happen. Jesus says that the birds and the flowers do not worry, and they seem to do just beautifully.

We are exploring Sabbath for a few Sundays. Last week, we reflected on how Sabbath is a sacred exhale, an essential rest and renewal, imaged in the exhale of God on the seventh day of Creation. This week, we explore Sabbath as sacred time, for unlike the time that can be seen as money, sacred Sabbath time is not money. The keeping of Sabbath time, whatever day or time one does that, brings one into a different kind of time experience than that on a watch or a clock or on a timecard at a workplace. Our soul’s vitality comes in part from the perspective that Sabbath time brings. After the sacred exhale, a different quality of time can open up to us.

The Gospels and letters we have in Christian Scriptures—what we have often called the New Testament—were written in Greek. While the English translation can come out the same as simply “time,” Greek language can talk of both chronos, measured chronological time on a watch or calendar, and of kairos, or God’s time or sacred time. Unlike chronos, kairos doesn’t go in a straight line or at an even pace or move of its own accord. Kairos is a time like the seasons, moving in cycles, dependent upon the relation of things, waiting until the time is fulfilled, until its own conditions have come to be, until it is the ripe and right time. You can sense kairos time by the way something feels or by the way it is or is not in alignment, by the length of shadows, or by color and shade, or by how soft or firm a fruit is in one’s hand. Kairos certainly doesn’t respond to our schedules or wishes. It certainly cannot be bought.

In the Scripture passage, Jesus says to not hoard things, or, in the next passage in Luke, to not worry or be anxious. Allowing ourselves to be in kairos time of Sabbath means we have faith amidst the present unfolding of things. We rest in God. We remember our relationship to life and each other, grateful and humble. We let go of production time and getting more done or making it happen. We get out of social media and the news cycle and repetitive cycles of anxiety. Instead, we rest underneath the fruit tree and trust that things will ripen in time. We let go of obsessing about tomorrow’s outcome and let ourselves be held by God in the eternal now, releasing anxiety and worry of tomorrow. In this Sabbath “kairos” perspective, we remember and live not in chronos and as consumer and commodity, but as image of God, part of the earth and human community.

During World War II, the British wanted to know how they were doing in producing enough stuff to fight the war. They decided to measure the sum of all goods and services produced. They called this the… Gross Domestic Product. The U.N. and the rest of the so-called developed world adopted this standard. Whenever we hear on the news that the economy grew by 2% or shrunk, it is this measurement to which they are referring. And we all seem to cheer when it goes up as if this is good for us all. But the GDP doesn’t discriminate between social activities. Indeed, you could make more bombs or build and staff more prisons or clean up after disasters, and the GDP would go up. There could be more income inequality, yet the GDP goes up. More is better as far the GDP is concerned, and it is only more if it can be measured in money, or ‘bigger barns’ as our Scripture story describes it.

But what about the things that money can’t buy?

What about the effort of any volunteer or family member who takes the time and energy to care for family and the home, to parent, to help a neighbor, or serve the community? The GDP won’t recognize this, let alone value it.

Wayne Muller’s book, Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest, references those who bemoan the lost values of our society. Muller notes “All these ‘lost’ values are human qualities that require time. Honesty, courage, kindness, civility, wisdom, compassion—these can only be nourished in the soil of time and attention, and need experience and practice to come to harvest.”

Keeping Sabbath time means taking the time to honor and nurture these kinds of values, values that a GDP or a ‘time is money’ perspective cannot do. Money and chronological time have their place, but it is keeping Sabbath time that can keep us from neglecting the other kinds of value and time and rhythm that are not as valued by the culture at large. These are the values that live in keeping with kairos, with sacred time.

As our Scripture story suggests, one of the great interrupters of chronos and business as usual is mortality, death. And, just as those humans nearing death will say, those moments with death near put things in perspective. Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Ware writes of phenomenal clarity that people gain at the end of their lives.

Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard (such that they missed their children’s youth or their partner’s companionship).
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  5. I wish I had let myself be happier. (They did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. Old patterns and habits got in the way.)

I invite us all to look at our lives and see if we are experiencing time that regularly connects us to what is deeply valuable so we don’t have these regrets. Jesus called that connection being rich toward God.

Recently, I was reading an article about adapting a Western approach to a substance abuse intervention to the Indigenous Maori community of New Zealand. One of the major adjustments that had to be made was time. The Western approach did not allow enough time for human relationships to develop enough trust, enough familiarity, and enough consensus in the process to generate the necessary social conditions for the adaptation to happen. The article used a phrase, striking to me, “time-poor environments.” Perhaps, we are so accustomed to thinking of our country as a rich country, we have forgotten that we are often poor in the realm of time—the time that matters, the Sabbath time that opens us to the sacred.

Practicing Sabbath as sacred time means exhaling deeply and making time for what truly matters, those things that mortality makes clear, those things that can’t be measured by the GDP, those things that put us in touch with the eternal now where we are held by the Mystery we name God.

AMEN.

Sabbath as Sacred Exhale

Sabbath as Sacred Exhale

July 26, 2026

Minister: Rev. JT Smiedendorf

Text: Genesis 2:1-3

Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.

CENTRAL FOCUS:

Sabbath practice is a core practice of the soul; rest, quiet, slowing, appreciating, blessing, enjoying, celebrating, intentional remembering and focusing, valuing, re-creating

“Thus, the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that God had done, and God rested on the seventh day from all the work that God had done.

So, God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it, God rested from all the work that God had done in creation.”

These are the words of our ancient tradition.
May the Living Word of God in Scripture be alive within us, among us, and beyond us.

Breathe. That’s all.
Let’s all take a breath together: inhale…….exhale.
Two more: inhale………exhale……… inhale……… exhale.
It’s a cycle, isn’t it? Both parts are important.

On the seventh day, God rested, says the first Creation story. At least that’s what it says in English in the NRSV translation. What you didn’t hear was that the Hebrew word for rest (refreshed) vaiynafesh literally means exhaled. The Hebrew text is saying that on the seventh day God exhaled.

Our culture seems better at inhaling: Do more, want more, acquire more, be more. Being busy can even be seen as a sign of importance.

But are our lives busy or full?
Did you know that the Chinese pictograph for ‘busy’ combines heart and killing. The Christian mystic Thomas Merton actually went so far as to equate activism and overwork with violence.

Are our lives structured not just to inhale, but to exhale?
Do we know how to exhale?
Do we know how to exhale and rest in the arms of God, in the cradle of Creation?

A big part of the first Creation story in Genesis is the teaching of the importance of Sabbath to the Jewish community. It was a characteristic practice to stop all work, even for animals, on Friday at sundown when the traditional Jewish day ends and enter into Sabbath time until the next sundown.

There is a story told of Jesus walking with his disciples on the Sabbath. They plucked some heads of grain to eat. The Pharisees, who tried to protect the people’s piety and to respect Torah law through lots of rules, accused them of sinfully breaking the Sabbath. Jesus’ wise response was that the Sabbath was made for the people, not the people for the Sabbath.

So how can Sabbath be for us?

How might we learn from and be served by this teaching?

Go ahead, inhale fully again and don’t exhale. Try that and see how it goes. Exhale, and feel the relief. That sense of relief is Sabbath. Sabbath completes the energy cycle of life, re-balances it, and provides relief and renewal. So I’m not talking about a return to dour restrictive rules of Sabbath that drain life; no dancing or card playing or visiting with people or frolicking and such. I’m talking about the wisdom and the necessity of sacred exhaling in service of fulfilling the cycle of life, of experiencing the vitality of life.

In that first Creation story, we are given an image of the earth as void and without form. It is a kind of emptiness. Creation happens out of emptiness. We have to exhale in order to make room for the next incoming of life. The womb has first to be an emptiness in order to be filled with the growing creation of a new life. This emptiness is not so much a denial of life as it is a letting go and a balancing. The first Creation story begins in emptiness and ends in another kind of emptiness, a sacred exhale, a resting, and a stillness, a pause, a Sabbath.

Like a hibernating animal, like a planted bulb or seed in winter, there is an appropriate and necessary time to rest, to lie fallow, to not do.

I was trained as an exercise physiologist after college. It is a basic principle of exercise training that the process of becoming more fit and healthy requires rest after we challenge the body in activity. What is often forgotten is that it is during the rest time that the rebuilding to a better state happens. Activity and rest are a life-giving cycle.

How many of us trust that cycle?

How many of us here are practicing Sabbath rest?

I’m not talking about just laying down on the couch, although that could help. I’m not talking about kicking back and watching TV, although some quality viewing occasionally is renewing. What I am talking about is a Sabbath space and time that has a sacred intention, a certain quality of delightful exhale that puts us back into the blessedness of Creation, that ending part of the first Creation story when God exhales and says, “It is very good.”

In his book, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives, Wayne Muller suggests we embrace, “Sabbath as a way of being in time where we remember who we are, remember what we know, and taste the gifts of spirit and eternity.”

Our worship celebration here could be a Sabbath practice if it helps us remember who we truly are…
as images of God made of the dust of the stars,
as humble mortal beings made of mud,
as a people called to Grace and to justice,
as part of a wondrous Creation with other wondrous Creatures and features.

Our Sunday worship celebration or any practice that we have can be a Sabbath practice if it slows us down enough—focuses us enough toward Spirit—that we remember and feel again in our bodies and souls the Grace of God and the wondrous gift of life. Any practice could be a Sabbath practice if it truly re-creates in us a sense of rest, renewal, gratitude and connection to the GodMystery. It doesn’t have to be Saturday or Sunday, or a particular ritual or prayer, though those things might help.

It’s not that Sabbath time is superior to work time.

It’s that our work time is served by the wisdom and energy of balance and wholeness, which means having the balancing effect of Sabbath rest and its intention to ‘be’ in a different way. The spiritual paradox of Sabbath rest and not doing is that it does create, in its own way. The Rabbinic tradition says that on the seventh day God created menuha: tranquility, serenity, peace, and repose. The Jewish tradition also says that on the Sabbath we are given an extra soul, Neshemah Yeterah, a Sabbath soul, which more fully appreciates the blessings of life and the fruits of our labor.

How are we nurturing our Sabbath soul?

I watched my Dad for years come home from work, empty his pockets and often change his clothes. It was a simple ritual of shifting from work to home. Now, I love the moment I get home and empty my pockets of keys, cell phone, and all the things I use in the outside world of work and marketplace. I empty my pockets and exhale. This can be a Sabbath moment on any day if I use it to really slow down, breathe, and pause to appreciate the gift of the day, of life, of the whole Mystery.

That’s because Sabbath is not just a time or even space that we reserve. It is also a quality of presence or consciousness. It is effortless, nourishing rest. It is stillness that can produce a unique kind of renewal and insight. It is an awareness, a return to perspective, a sacred perspective that is about depth and delight, about re-balancing and re-creating, about remembering and feeling that we belong to God, to the Mystery, and that we are to love each other and all Creation.

There is a poem by Jane Kenyon that may help us feel into Sabbath time and space. The poem is related to the traditional Jewish day beginning in the darkness right after sundown.

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

In these extraordinary times, when King Herod has been and is still on the move, as the earth and the peoples have ongoing struggles, there is no shortage of faithful things to do, worthy actions to be taken; volunteering, advocating, parenting, organizing, relationship building. There is an urgency to these times, a present call for response. Yet, this only increases the importance of our vitality and resiliency, of our needing to be resourced and renewed to meet these moments.

That’s why I invite us to remember that there are rhythms and cycles that renew life and make possible our resilient return to acting for compassion and justice, to acting in service and offering a helping hand. No matter our age or stage, in our lives and in our culture, we can distort those life-giving rhythms and cycles and then compromise the life force that sustains us and Creation, not allowing ourselves or the Earth to exhale, to rest, to renew.

God exhaled, says the ancient story, resting and savoring the blessing that is Life. Today, the sacred invitation is simple: Remember Sabbath and exhale. AMEN

Scar Tissue

Scar Tissue

July 19, 2026

Minister: Karen Barstad, guest speaker

Text: John 20:24-29

Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.

24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

 

These are the words of our ancient tradition.

May the Living Word of God in Scripture be alive within us, among us, and beyond us.

 

Scars are tattoos with better stories.

Now, some of my inked friends may differ on that point, but unplanned marks on our bodies can say a lot about who we are, what we’ve done, and where we’ve been. And those can be some pretty interesting stories.

When I was very little, I was playing in our yard, and I fell down, splitting the palm of my right hand from the wrist to the base of my ring finder. My father rescued me and raced me to the doctor’s office. While I remember almost nothing about that event, the resulting scar was a lifelong reminder of how my father, who was often not able to be there for me, was there for me that day. The scar is a story of his care for me.

About 10 years ago I climbed to the top of a mountain in western Montana, an elevation increase of 3,000 feet. Imagine if you will, walking up a staircase for three miles. That’s what it felt like. I’m amazed I made it. What’s even more amazing is… I made it back down. On the descent, my left knee connected with a granite boulder. The scar is small, but the story of unexpected resilience on my part (with great assistance from my companion) is one I treasure.

Most of us have physical scars—from appendectomies, Caesarean sections, open-heart surgeries, joint replacements, broken bones, sports injuries—each telling a story about significant visits to hospitals or emergency rooms. I once worked with an avid fisherman who called his lung transplant scar his “Leech Lake shark bite.” His scar’s story had chapters.

There are some scars we don’t see but that are just as significant: scars from addiction, physical or emotional abuse, trauma, or heartbreaking losses. The stories of those scars can remain untold, resulting in behaviors that disrupt our lives and the lives of those we love. And the stories behind those scars can manifest as the worst scar of all: shame.

Our planet has been scarred—by oil pipelines that poison fragile wetlands, strip mining that destroys foliage, deforestation that eliminates habitat, and industrial toxins that pollute the air and water. These are scars that point to stories of greed and unbridled capitalism.

Whole cultures bear scars. Our Indigenous neighbors and those descended from enslaved people carry stories of racism and brutal oppression in their bodies and souls in ways that most of us will never comprehend.

I have the sacred privilege of being able to participate in restorative justice conversations with people whose stories and scars have led them to break laws and, often, descend into drug addiction. As I listen to their stories, the scars they carry and the histories they share illuminate their humanity. If they have committed a crime, they have taught me that they are not criminals. If they have been charged with a felony, they have taught me that they are not felons. They are not what they did. Yes, what they did was bad, but they are not bad people. They are the kind of people for whom Jesus showed only kindness. They, like us, are wounded souls beloved of a loving God.

In our scripture story, Thomas gets kind of a bad rap. We call him Doubting Thomas. We’re critical of his disbelief that Jesus had triumphed over his crucifixion, as if coming back from a brutal execution was not unusual. But maybe Thomas was onto something. Maybe he was acknowledging that unless he understood, really understood, the source of Jesus’ scars—that source being the greed, oppression, and racism of the empire—and that Jesus welcomed those most rejected by society, he, Thomas, would never be able to follow the path of justice, love, and peace that Jesus had laid out before him. Perhaps Thomas recognized that he needed to see what hurt God’s people most so that he could authentically respond with compassion.

During Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota this past winter, many in our cities began to truly see their neighbors. They recognized that people who dressed differently, spoke differently, or had a different skin tone were a valuable part of our communities, and community members responded with their hands, their voices, their driving skills, and their dollars. They saw the scars that come with fleeing a foreign country and the wounds inflicted by isolation and anxiety. They valued the stories of these neighbors and honored the scars those stories produced.

In the scripture, Jesus responds to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” This isn’t necessarily an admonishment. One translation of the Greek word for “blessed” is “fortunate.” Perhaps Jesus is saying it’s fortunate when we can believe our neighbors have painful stories and scars without requiring them to divulge every detail or provide first-hand evidence. Maybe we’re fortunate when we can respond with compassion to the person on the corner with the cardboard sign, the person sleeping in a tent during the winter, the person sitting in a jail cell, the person who has been sexually trafficked, or the person in shackles at the southern border—without them having to prove their pain.

Plymouth Church has created a taskforce, the Taskforce on Reparative Action, or TORA. This taskforce was inspired by a bold aspiration of the Racial Justice Initiative that our church would surrender 15% of our assets for the benefit of our Indigenous neighbors and the descendants of enslaved Americans. It’s a breathtaking goal, especially when we worry about the financial stability of the church and the needs of its physical structure.

But reparative action is possible. It will be possible when we truly see the scars that generations of our Black and Brown neighbors have borne. They have endured decades of trauma, with some stories buried so deeply in their psyches that even they can’t excise them, and which for some have manifested in poverty, ill health, and discrimination in housing and employment.

We have all heard and read the statistics about racial disparities when comparing white Americans to Black and Brown Americans. That’s not new information. But here’s the really hard part that we tend to overlook: Unless we come to grips with our role in these disparities, any surrender of assets will simply be charity. We need to acknowledge our role in the story.

Who lost out by Plymouth Church being located on this block? Who was harmed as we grew to be a predominantly white congregation? Who has suffered because of how we have spent our church’s fortune? How have donors to the church accumulated their wealth, and who has been deprived of wealth along the way? When have we appropriated Black and Indigenous culture without compensation or respect? Answering these questions will not shame or blame us; it will illuminate the reality that the stories of oppressed people are ours as well. We will come to see that their stories are intertwined with ours, their healing will facilitate our own, and reparative action by us will bring us into beloved community with them. We say that Black lives matter and Indigenous lives matter. Let us add that their stories and their scars matter.

And your scars matter. Whatever the story is behind your scars, they are welcome in this place. No story is too painful to be wrapped in the loving embrace of this open-hearted community. Church is at its best when it tenderly holds what feels like our worst.

Several years ago, I realized that the upper portion of the scar on the palm of my hand was disappearing. And that bothered me. The scar ties me to my father. It represents a bond with him that was fragile during the intersection of his life with mine. So, I wrote this poem, titled, simply, “Scar Tissue.”

The scar begins at the southern border of her palm
Meandering northward
Disappearing into the tender flesh
At the base of her ring finger
And the base of her memory
 
It’s a keepsake from that day long ago
When he whisked her sobbing little body
Off to the doctor’s office
For gentle cleansing and repair of the torn flesh
A reminder of how
Later that day
He combed the lawn for the
Offending stick or rock or shard of glass
That wounded his little girl
 
He is long gone now
The scar remains
Along with other scars from the intersection
Of his life with hers
Invisible yet just as enduring
Ugly, painful, shameful scars
 
But today
Today
She focuses on this scar
The one she holds in her hand
The one she never wants to lose

May the scars and stories of all whose lives are linked to this faith community find a loving home here. May they link us together in the enduring love of God.
May this be so.

Stewardship

Stewardship

July 12, 2026

Minister: Rev. Mary Kay Sauter, guest minister

Text: Matthew 22:34-40

Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.

CENTRAL FOCUS:

With God’s love for our world, and our call to love God and our neighbors, what does Stewardship look like—what does it mean?

 

These are interesting times. Not easy times. However, this community of faith—all of you—make it as good as it can be for me and for all of us. And the staff—clergy, support, security, programming—all amazing, gifted, committed, loving, smart people.

Last Sunday Kate Taber led a great discussion about being a Christian and American in these uneasy times. What we ended up with was the word responsible—no matter how hard it gets as part of our faith we are all still responsible for change for helping make things better. Then JT’s sermon—using the first nine first verses of Joshua, chapter 1. Quoting the weekly-E news, “As part of God’s faith-seeking people, we seek to be citizens of God’s realm—uplifting and critiquing our national story. Joshua 1:9 “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid, do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you.”

And then on Tuesday there were 8 of us at the 12:00 vigil—all are welcome to join us—we have relevant readings and in silence we stand on Franklin Avenue to honor George Floyd and all others who have died because of injustice. On the first Tuesday of the month, we have lunch together, and during it I was challenged by Peter Eichten to take Stewardship out of the financial world—the capitalist world—and make it spiritual, theological. So, I learned this week to be responsible, be strong and courageous, and seek deeper spiritual meanings to words like stewardship. This is a great place, a great community of faith.

I’d like to share with you, my theology. Then hopefully what I preach will make more sense. I know some of you have heard me say this many times, but maybe some not at all. It’s called Process Theology. In every milli-second God knows what every person’s choice should be for there to be true peace and harmony throughout the world. Can you imagine that world?—everyone has enough of everything they need—food, housing, medical care, education—and because greed doesn’t dominate, there are no wars, all children are safe. In God’s world there is no need for dominators. Unfortunately, we are also influenced by everything around us—people who are family, friends, enemies, how we were raised, where we went to school, the news, books, tv, politics, all the religions of the world—all influence us. Our calling is to be open to God—open to God so God can influence us to make choices to help create peace and harmony throughout God’s world—this whole planet. And open to God—all the time—not just during a prayer time, but all the time. I call this stewardship. I also looked the definition up on my phone. “At its core it is about accountability and making decisions that respect the needs of others and the limits of available resources.” That fits loving God and our neighbors as ourselves.

So, let’s look at our scripture. When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he didn’t quote one of the ten commandments. He said—as we’ve heard in Sunday School, confirmation, in worship over and over again—love the Lord your God with all you heart, soul, and mind and your neighbor as yourself. This is the answer to all the world’s problems. If everyone believed this, lived this, the world would be transformed into a place that’s safe for all the children, which would mean for all of us. It sounds kind of easy—just love each other. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy—or we wouldn’t have wars, poverty, ecological crises, political divides, etc. We should all want peace and for everyone to be safe. We should forge partnership across political divides rather than some have the need for domination. It should be easy, but after centuries we still haven’t figured it out.

If we love God and love our neighbor and love ourselves, then won’t that automatically make us great stewards of God’s creation? If we love God, won’t we be driven—out of that love, out of our thankfulness for this creation and for God’s love—won’t we be driven to be great stewards of God’s creation to show that love—to share that love with everyone? How come then it’s so much easier to be influenced by family, friends, society, the media, and politics rather than by God and God’s word, such as today’s text?

Richard Weis, who was a dean at United Theological Seminary, taught a stewardship workshop I attended. He said that our purpose in life, according to the Bible, is the stewardship of the planet for the sake of all—which is all about loving God, our neighbors, and ourselves. We have been entrusted with God’s creation— with full responsibility—so what happens to the planet is in our hands. According to Dean Weis, God created the world and all that lives in it for “shalom” which means wholeness. God gave creation, the world, a structure, which is justice for all people, which maintains this wholeness or shalom. God created the world with the ability to sustain all of its inhabitants and provide them with “enough.” One’s surplus should not come at the expense of another’s “not enough.” Rather, we want justice. Then Dr. Weis goes on to say that the Church is the community of those who have been restored to this identity and made for this purpose. The Church is to be both the agent and the place of experiencing the emerging restoration of creation to God’s intended shalom or wholeness. This wholeness is about sharing God’s love with the whole of God’ creation. The who? Everyone?

So, what’s the problem? For the answer, Dr. Weis returns to our identity issues. He compares what our culture says it means to be fully human and what the Bible says. For example, the “Bible says we are to be stewards of creation, while society says we are consumers. The Bible promotes interdependence, partnerships—we need each other and others need us—versus society valuing self-sufficiency, standing alone, being protective of what’s ours. The Bible is collaborative society/world versus competitive society/world. The Bible: Share the surplus so each has enough versus acquiring and accumulating as much as you can. The Bible: In order for all to live, each must limit their accumulation versus there is no limit to the satisfaction of our own desires, I can have whatever I want. The Bible: Money is just another resource to be allocated to ensure shalom versus if you pay money you should get something. The Bible: Our spirit is nurtured by living up to who God made us to be; our worth is given by God versus our spirit is nourished and our worth is measured by what we possess.”

As individuals, we should all love the whole of God’s creation—all of it including people we don’t like. However, no one individual, no one congregation, denomination, religion, is expected to fix the world. Individually we are to be open to God’s calling—God’s wisdom—God’s grace and love. Individually we are to answer that call—recognizing the resources—the skills, the money, the time, the heart, soul and mind that we bring to the effort. But God’s work must be done collectively—we as individuals form a community of faith that wrestles with our use of what we have available to us for this purpose and what other organizations we can work with. Whether we are doing the activities with others from the church or another organization, whether we work or donate money, we are not doing it alone; we are doing the work of God with other people. None of us can do this alone.

As we look to the future and ask how can we be good stewards, Dr. Wies suggested that we look at three different areas: 1.“the resources—buildings and grounds, money, location, relationships, knowledge, experience; 2. our opportunities—local/regional, national/global; and 3. our people: skills knowledge, experience, roles, relationships, time, energy, personal resources and finally local and global relationships—all God-given—all given in our calling to serve creation.” As you know, these areas are ones we look at throughout the life and ministry of a church, but particularly in the times we are in now, this interim time. May it be a very productive and challenging and exciting time for us. I believe it is. And foremost, be open to God’s wisdom as individuals, as committees and boards, as families. It will make a difference.

God’s love and influence surround all the people—every moment of every day. If we were all totally open to God, we would love God with all our heart, mind and soul and our neighbors as ourselves. And ourselves—yes ourselves—because some find it very hard to love themselves. If we did so, our world would be very different. Alas, that is not the way of the world, and we are influenced every moment of every day by the whole world around us—everything we have heard, seen, read, experienced. So, let us become more interested in our quality of life than in our standard of living. More interested in our relationships with others than politics. More interested in learning more than in being right. More interested in kindness than in power. More interested in our differences, which are gifts, than seeking those we are like. More interested in God and God’s creation than ourselves.

Love who? God. We are to love God with our whole being—heart, soul, mind, spirit. And our neighbors as ourselves—they are who?—everyone on this planet. Even those we don’t like—even those we hate. And remember, God loves everyone—even those we don’t like. That love means we don’t hurt anyone, we care for everyone, and we work with God’s help to make the world a better place for all.

This is a great congregation. We do share God’s love. Let us continue to be open to God’s love. Be open to God’s guidance to make the world a better place for all people. Be open to God’s wisdom just as much as we can. It will make a difference in our world. That’s good stewardship—good spiritual stewardship.

Disciples in the Kingdom of Heaven

Disciples in the Kingdom of Heaven

June 28, 2026

Minister: Rev. Dr. Malcolm Himschoot

Text: Matthew 11:16 & Matthew 13:57

Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.

 “To what shall I compare this generation?”

“Every scribe who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven brings out of their treasure what is new and what is old.”

Jesus the Healer has become a historian! Let us pray.

God, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in your sight – and may your Spirit use this moment to stir us in the direction of your hope. Amen.

 

Good morning! Hello and greetings. Thank you, Plymouth Church, for inviting me here. I was last at this pulpit just before my twin babies were born (whom I have just graduated from high school).

I’ve been getting really into time capsules. Here is one for you. 20 years ago, I remember Minneapolis Pride, more and more of downtown getting involved. Marriage equality wasn’t yet, but queer people were finding ways to make families. This congregation became formally Open and Affirming at that time. I remember talent shows among the congregation, proving even straight people could dance! Do you still do a talent show? I remember the mental health drop-in center, affordable and managed housing, artists of all ages, theatre and literary events by Plymouth. I remember aspects of social justice and outreach ministries. I remember taking my turn preaching in a rotation led by Jim Gertmenian. Jim never doubted that a transgender person like me could be in ordained ministry—though at that time, almost no one was doing that.

I live now in Maine. Still trans, happily. Still in ministry.

You’ve heard about my book Reading Secrets – A Queer Inheritance of Life and Scripture because it fits with this weekend’s Pride celebration. You could say it’s my memoir-manifesto as a trans man. My book also fits with next weekend’s struggle for the soul of a nation, because it is written in a theological and prophetic Christian tradition that doesn’t just honor queer lives, but commends a path of liberation/ repentance/discipleship to all who read the Good Book.

——

This is a terrible time for anti-trans antipathy! And by anti-trans, I don’t know what they think they mean. Anti-gender variety, anti-woman, anti-children. Anti-drag. Anti-art. Anti-public toilets. Federal impositions and invasions, violations and discriminations too many to name: not just affecting veterans, but also inmates under state control, and trans people in the poverty system who need housing but find it denied. Over 700 state bills across this land aim to define gender in a way which subjects some people to other people’s scrutiny and control. I cannot remember in which states it’s legal or illegal for me to use the bathroom! Adults are now involved in body-policing for young people in sports. In Nebraska, driver’s licenses belonging to trans people were revoked one day, until the marker on the license got changed, and not by the bearer’s own choosing. In Tennessee there is now a public registry listing medical trans patients. In Texas, parents of trans kids may face criminal charges. Hospitals are being stripped of funds for offering care to the gender-expansive community, even if it’s the same care they offer to the gender-normative community.

Oh, so this is how violence and persecution work to create an atmosphere of political intimidation!

Have we heard this story somewhere before?

Somebody go down to the storeroom and bring up that time capsule from history.

—–

You know how miners tunneling down into rock used to know how deep not to go? They went walking down down down, into an airless lightless chamber that they hoped would not be their grave. They carried with them a little bird. When the bird died from low oxygen, the humans would know they were next. If the canary died, they could still turn around and get out while there was time.

In an era of rising fascism, are trans people the canaries in the coal mine?

Well. But lots of canaries have died, for generations and generations.

Canaries that are Black, Brown and Indigenous have been dying for some time. Palestinian Muslims in Gaza. Now Palestinian Christians in the West Bank! Which canaries will the rest of us canaries pay attention to?

I’m white and trans and there are some days I wake up scared. But there are no days I wake up Black in America.

We must ask: What will protect all of us? Build us up, fortify us, see us have long lives? We can’t all move from Missouri to Minnesota, or from Maine to Madrid.

Traumatic news this week was that Pete and Chasten, as a gay couple, were just threatened with losing their children. Where have we heard this trauma before? Families separated. Parents under a default assumption of criminalization. We know about the welfare system from Native and Indigenous children. We’ve heard about the carceral system from Black families. We’ve seen it with our own eyes at the border, at the detention center, outside the preschool during the ICE surge. Now from the Supreme Court, ending [temporary protected] status for Haitian families.

White supremacy keeps stripping families away from each other and taking away the means of well-being we all need to live!

White supremacy will happily use religion to do its dirty work, mask atrocity beneath palliative interpretations of theology—or worse, appropriate sacred tradition for cruel authoritarianism, disguised as masculinity, foisted on us as patriarchy and patriotism.

——–

To what shall we compare this generation?? When we face history, when we face ourselves, we can turn toward God’s invitation for wise action, learning lessons of discipleship. We can go into our storeroom, and draw out treasures both new and old. We don’t have to buy into whatever in the present comes to us and preys upon our fickle fevers of frenzied furor, consumption and possession and avoidance. We have more perspective than that.

Thank God for historians doing crucial work these days. Some of my favorite historians are Rob Shetterly, the artist behind Americans Who Tell the Truth, Heather Cox Richardson, and Colin Woodard. There’s a time capsule for you – from Maine!

Now a time capsule for you, that I received from Minnesota.

Since January, when I came to be part of the national moral witness during the ICE onslaught here, I read Sinclair Lewis, satirical novelist from last century. On an astounding level, early for his time and ours, Sinclair Lewis grasped that fascism and state violence go back to settler colonialism and the criminalization of race. American history is replete with violent suppression and force called out against the defenseless. Many people know Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here, written in the 1930s depicting Nazi-type fascism in the US. It’s never been out of print! Not as many people know Sinclair Lewis’ historical novel The God-Seeker.

—–

In The God-Seeker, the main character sets out from northern New England and gets to Minnesota before it was a US state. This is a time of moral combustion. Between the struggle for abolition in the eastern states, and western Anishinaabe and Dakota dispossession, big questions of faith and conscience were raised, at a time when a white young boy simply had a love of scripture and wanted to learn to read the Bible.

So the reader meets Aaron Gadd, devout son of a racist but abolitionist Yankee. He attends a revival in Massachusetts and gets recruited into going west as a missionary. There he keeps waiting for the promise of learning Hebrew and Greek in order to understand the Divine Word! But no. They have him growing potatoes and doing carpentry. He meets local people, and makes friends with Black Wolf, a next-generation Dakota man trained at Oberlin College, whose decolonial view of scripture presses the essence of the 21st century Palestinian question! Anyway, in the pages of the novel, Aaron Gadd the character resists publishing Black Wolf’s account of the Bible.

Black Wolf is murdered anyway, for resisting white settler power. So is the white friend closest to him. Murdered.

Fast forward. Aaron lives and becomes an adult man in the wake of the genocide, and makes a family in St. Paul with Selene Lanark, a bi-cultural Dakota woman. The Gadds go into the lumber business as the city develops. They prosper.

Aaron, erst-while “God-seeker,” only ever gives one sermon in the end!, in the closing pages of the novel. Coached by his wife, he gives a speech to his own unionized workers, a plea to accept into their multi-cultural white ranks one Henry Oldham, southern Black fugitive from enslavement. In Aaron’s apogee of a sermon, he mentions his life’s memorization of all the right words!: “righteousness” and “heavenly light.” It fails.

The men don’t just vote down integration, they laugh it down. As though the kingdom of heaven come on earth, is the furthest thing from what they want!

But then! Into this ordinary and quotidian scene of oppression, enter: slave patrol. A self-superior, unjust, conniving man with a weapon at his side struts into the room and expects the people to do his bidding. They will not. The workers are not deceived. He who would enslave a Black man would not hesitate to bind all of them, and put down their Labor alliances to do so! In this historical era of Fugitive Slave Laws which criminalized whites, they used their power. Rather than turn over the fugitive man, rather than submit to invasive overreach and corrupt collusion with the so-called Law, these unionized northerners together protect the one persecuted and show their antagonist the door. Then they promptly move to vote to admit the quote “foreigner” into their union after all!

It’s a devastating ending, because this moral victory is so thoroughly compromised. But there we are.

—–

Thank you for coming to my book talk today on Sinclair Lewis. I suppose I should get back to a sermon.

Discipleship in the kingdom of heaven asks something more than bearing the branding of the age. Every generation gets a chance to change our loyalty! Yet changing where we stand, shifting white supremacy to solidarity, is discouraged, disincentivized constantly, and punished by the powers that be.

Interpreting Scripture is at the heart of this historical struggle in America. Because it has to do with what our heart is set on. Where we keep our treasure—and where we hide our lies.

Me and my dad—we read the Bible in different ways. That’s what Reading Secrets is about. For my dad, me being trans was something bad enough—but on top of that, I went into ministry! He really thought I had some demons then! He had been taught to read scripture in authoritarian ways. I sought ways to look for healing and humanity in scripture, not control and fear.

We never reconciled, my dad and I. But after he died, I surveyed the words of this ancient library in both our lives. I had to publish something, to leave behind my part of an inter-generational spiritual legacy in this American landscape. May the next generation’s scribes find more to glean, in ongoing interpretive struggle, a process itself held in the light of God’s Love.

—–

Jesus said, when he was weary of disputes, “Wisdom will be proved right by her actions.”

Today we face a moment of moral and spiritual combustion. All that seemed solid is showing its brokenness. The SAVE Act is again in play, to disenfranchise voters. That’s authoritarianism. Meanwhile, new forms of belonging and solidarity are being grasped, precisely because everything and everyone is at risk! In our time, there is a Black Wolf, a Henry Oldham, a Selene Lanark who are leading the way. Economic justice is now part of conversations in the Senate—and at the Vatican.

In the wake of decades of decay and centuries of assault, these are tumultuous and excruciating, but important and exciting years. As history will show!

Someday, someone will open the time capsule of Open and Affirming work in our American churches, and they will look back and see the unsteadying of the bedrock of white supremacy.

May it be so. Amen.

Transformed for Dignity & Freedom

Transformed for Dignity & Freedom

June 21, 2026

Minister: Rev. JT Smiedendorf

A sermon related to Romans 12:1-2 and Juneteenth

Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.

CENTRAL FOCUS:

That we must affirm human dignity and freedom in order to answer God’s call to the love that is justice.

“So, brothers and sisters, because of God’s mercies, I encourage you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice that is holy and pleasing to God. This is your appropriate worship. 2 Don’t be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can discern what God’s will is—what is good and pleasing and mature.”

These are the words of our ancient tradition.
May the Living Word of God in Scripture be alive within us, among us, and beyond us.

Every June 19th, they jubilantly march from the old Galveston, Texas courthouse to Reedy Chapel AME Church, ringing bells and passing out flyers saying, “All slaves are free!” and singing, “Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave!”

They hold hands. They praise God.

Reedy Chapel was founded in 1848 and became a place for enslaved Africans to worship in dignity. On June 19, 1865, when federal troops came to Galveston to enforce emancipation, Reedy Chapel was one of the first places that announcement of freedom was made. The Juneteenth holiday was born.

Plymouth Congregational Church was closed this last Friday for The Juneteenth holiday in celebration of the end of slavery in 1865 and to honor the survival and resilience of Black people in our nation. Many say that Juneteenth marks our country’s second Independence Day. Although it has long been celebrated in the African American community, this monumental event remains largely unknown to many white Americans.

Indeed, I didn’t know anything about Juneteenth growing up. That’s a sign of a social system where racism suppresses the full dignity and freedom of citizens of color. They are left out of the national story. Such a lack of full dignity and freedom has led to significant disparities of outcome between racial groups in our country in education, healthcare, job opportunities, and law enforcement among others.

Rev. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University who titled his book of a few years ago, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, says in regard to this disparity,

The most radical action a white person can take is to acknowledge this denied privilege, to say, “Yes, you’re right. In our institutional structures, and in deep psychological structures, our underlying assumption is that our lives are worth more than yours.”

Juneteenth reminds us to stay focused on the continued need to say Yes to full human dignity and freedom wherever it is lacking, for that lack is not God’s intention for any of God’s children. Any such lack is a spiritual sickness and an injustice no matter the lens of such discrimination. Racial discrimination, of course, is one of the worst forms. Our faith calls us to respond to such deficits by seeking healing and justice so that all have dignity and freedom.

This inequity and oppression are born of a distortion in culture. And culture was the issue that Paul was speaking to in our morning’s Scripture from the letter to the ancient church in Rome. That is, culture as “the patterns of this world,”—those culture patterns of empire that Paul says we must not conform to. Paul writes to remind his listeners who are seeking to follow the Way of Love of the Risen Christ that the conventions in the culture of the empire are not loving and not mature in the Spirit.

Instead, Paul calls the faithful to “be transformed by the renewing of our minds,” which is about seeking an alternative consciousness, another way of being and seeing that is different and more aligned with Divine Love. In our day, my friends, that includes not conforming to any belief or system in which one group is less than. It means that we as a whole can thrive only if we stay out of the business of ‘other’-ing people. It means that we each who are seeking a spiritual path must draw the circle of human solidarity wide and level.

How many here have heard of Paul Revere? How many have heard of Wentworth Cheswell? On December 13, 1774, Cheswell rode with Paul Revere to warn Portsmouth citizens of the approach of two British warships. Cheswell was listed in the census as white, but was considered what was known in his day as “mulatto” because his father, Hopestill Cheswell, was a bi-racial, free-born black man, and his mother Catherine (Keniston) was white. The Cheswell family name and all descendants are linked to Richard Cheswell, a former enslaved person.

I never heard of Wentworth Cheswell growing up. This is an example of the frequent incompleteness of ‘other’ awareness when one is a member of the group that is culturally centered, like me. It is a subtle yet powerful example of white supremacy being lived out at the systemic level of education where other racial histories and people are muted and hidden. As more diverse voices and histories are included, the distortions of white- and male-centeredness are lessened. We all get more human as the mural of humanity is painted more fully. Most importantly, human dignity and freedom can be shared more fully in our world.

 

Michelle Alexander is a well-known author, lawyer, and activist who wrote a bestselling book called The New Jim Crow, where she detailed the way in which the legal system often incarcerates people of color in disproportionate numbers, disenfranchising them and again benefiting from their free labor. Her book came out just about the time that Barack Obama was being elected President. She spoke to packed crowds and received much appreciation. Some people even talked of a “post-racial America.” And yet, she says, when walking off the stage to enthusiastic applause, she would hear a voice in her head that said, “…all sound and fury, signifying nothing.” She found herself depressed, having trouble getting up in the mornings and, at first, brushed it off as the exhaustion of her work and of mothering 3 small children.

Just at that time she was called by Dr. Vincent Harding to come speak at my alma mater in Denver, the Iliff School of Theology. Dr. Harding, who had written Reverend Dr. King’s April 1967 Beyond Vietnam speech and was a longtime activist in the black freedom struggle, was a professor emeritus at Iliff. Alexander, after she again received much applause after her presentation at Iliff, walked off the stage with that same sinking feeling.

Later, as people were leaving, the elder Dr. Harding pulled her aside and said, “Thank you, daughter, sister, niece Michelle for your work and your research and for indicting this system. But I think there is a deeper message here that you are struggling to name and claim, perhaps even for yourself. And I think that deeper message is what Jesus was trying to say when he said, “What you do unto the least of these you do unto me.”  Alexander, who had grown up in a family that eschewed organized religion, came to realize the truth of what Dr. Harding had spoken, that her effort was related to more than building political movements, but was about awakening to the spiritual truth of who we are and who we are to one another—the truth that we are One.

Dr. Harding then became a mentor to Alexander in the last years of his life. When Alexander would talk to him on the phone, she would want to talk to him about the old stories of the black freedom movement and about current strategies. In response, Dr. Harding would ask her, “Have you been quiet today? Have you cultivated stillness? Have you learned to listen to the sound of the Genuine within you?” Dr. Harding continued to call her back not only to the spiritual nature of the movement, but to the spiritual practice necessary to pursue a movement seeking human dignity and freedom.

This is where the Apostle Paul’s words come back again, “…be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can discern what God’s will is—what is good and pleasing and mature.”  The transforming is a spiritual process that helps us to know deeply our own and our fellow humans’ full dignity. That spiritual connection to the One Divine Mystery and the oneness of humanity is what it will take to overcome cultural patterns that limit the human dignity and freedom of some. We cannot use the tactics and tools of the culture of empire to accomplish our own or another’s freedom. Our consciousness is transformed and renewed in the Spirit of Christ. Out of that Spirit we can see and act for the dignity and freedom of all humanity.

This coming week, the Violins of Hope project will visit Plymouth church on Wednesday. There will be a display of violins during the day and then a talk at 6:30 and a free Minnesota Sinfonia concert at 7:30. The Violins of Hope is a project of concerts using a collection of violins, violas and cellos collected since the end of World War II. Many of the instruments belonged to Jews before and during the war. Many were donated by or bought from survivors; some arrived through family members.

In the words of the Violins of Hope website, “Our violins represent the victory of the human spirit over evil and hatred… All the Instruments have a common denominator as symbols of hope and a way to say: Remember me, remember us.  Life is good, celebrate it for those who perished, for those who survived.  For all people.”

That is a statement to uphold human dignity and freedom.

And such a statement of human dignity and freedom was also made as Minnesotans stood in solidarity and service for their neighbors during Operation Metro Surge this past winter, which clearly and belligerently targeted people of color and those whose first language was not English, regardless of their legal status.

“…Be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can discern what God’s will is.”

This is our invitation of faith. For when we do, we can uphold human dignity and freedom even in the face of the forces that would deny it to some because of race or religion or ethnicity or sex or gender or whatever category and label.

For beyond such limitations is a transformed consciousness and a transformed world. There we will find a great and wide and level circle of human dignity and freedom that “is good and pleasing and mature.”

AMEN

We’re In This Together

We’re In This Together

June 14, 2026

Minister: Rev. JT Smiedendorf

A sermon related to Exodus 5:6-11 and Luke 10:25-28

Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.

CENTRAL FOCUS:

That the life of Gospel faith is inextricably a life of connection, community, and of concern for the commonwealth.

Exodus 5:6-11: “That same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, as well as their supervisors, 7 “You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as before; let them go and gather straw for themselves. 8 But you shall require of them the same quantity of bricks as they have made previously; do not diminish it, for they are lazy; that is why they cry, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to our God.’ 9 Let heavier work be laid on them; then they will pay attention to[a] it and not to deceptive words.”

10 So the taskmasters and the supervisors of the people went out and said to the people, “Thus says Pharaoh: I will not give you straw. 11 Go and get straw yourselves, wherever you can find it, but your work will not be lessened in the least.” 12 So the people scattered throughout the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw. 13 The taskmasters urged them on, saying, “Complete your work, the same daily assignment as when you were given straw.”[b] 14 And the Israelite supervisors whom Pharaoh’s taskmasters had set over them were beaten and were asked, “Why did you not finish the required quantity of bricks yesterday and today, as you did before?”

Luke 10:25-28: 25 An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus.[a] “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 27 He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” 28 And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

These are the words of our ancient tradition.
May the Living Word of God in Scripture be alive within us, among us, and beyond us.

One day a man said to God, “God, I would like to know what Heaven and Hell are like.”

God showed the man two doors. Inside the first one, in the middle of the room, was a large round table with a large pot of stew. It smelled delicious and made the man’s mouth water, but the people sitting around the table were thin and sickly. They appeared to be famished. They were holding spoons with very long handles, and each found it possible to reach into the pot of stew and take a spoonful, but because the handle was longer than their arms, they could not get the spoons back into their mouths.

The man shuddered at the sight of their misery and suffering. God said, “You have seen Hell.”

Behind the second door, the room looked exactly the same. There was the large round table with the large pot of wonderful stew that made the man’s mouth water. The people had the same long-handled spoons, but they were well nourished and plump, laughing and talking.

The man said, “I don’t understand.”

God smiled and said, “It is simple. Love only requires one skill. These people learned early on to feed one another.”

Some of you may have heard that story before. It shares an important truth, an essential truth, that there is a primal dimension of life that is relational, communal, collective. We’re in this together.

Just this last week, new regulations came in from the federal government regarding the SNAP food assistance program that will likely increase the number of eligible recipients who fall off the rolls or who are unable to get on. Such measures of this administration have already accounted for 3.5 million people being pushed off the rolls and now many more are likely to lose that support.

Eight or nine years ago some federal healthcare reform proposals prompted one Huffington Post writer to write a post titled “I Don’t Know How to Explain to You That You Should Care About Other People.” The author was exasperated from conversations with others who did not seem to understand what it might mean to cut Medicaid and to exclude another 24 million people from health insurance.

A White House spokesperson of the time said that all those who are able bodied who might lose Medicaid can just go get jobs where there is health insurance “like you and me.”  What this spokesperson didn’t seem to know is that most able-bodied people on Medicaid do have jobs, but, like my oldest stepson who was on Medicaid at the time and who had just started a new full-time job, those jobs don’t offer health insurance.

Professor and essayist Henry Giroux called it a culture of cruelty—the increasing rhetoric and policies of punishment for those who are poor or different. These kinds of proposals move us even more from a welfare state to a police state.  Implicit here is a vision of culture where individualism and inequality are extreme to the point of exclusion, and where fear trumps our social bonds of solidarity to the point of attacking anything that tries to increase inclusion and care for the commonwealth.

Maybe in some ways we never had that deep sense of the collective and commonality as a nation, never included everybody really because of race or ethnicity or sex or any number of categories outside a limited norm. Certainly, we are not there yet as a nation in terms of common equality of opportunities and inclusion for education and healthcare, nor income and wealth.

This is not only in this country and is nothing new for humanity—the exclusion, the othering, the blaming, and the neglecting, oppressing, and punishing of another group or groups. The Scripture passage read from the ancient story of the Exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt shows Pharoah, not unlike the White House spokesperson I mentioned, claiming that those who are suffering are just lazy and that they just need to complain less and work harder.

Whatever happened to “we’re in this together”? A clue to how we lose this truth lies in our readings.  Remember that the 2nd half of Genesis is composed of family stories, lineage stories; Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Rachel, and Jacob’s 12 sons including Joseph. Now Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers by the end of Genesis, ends up in Egypt where he rose to power by interpreting dreams for Pharoah. But the beginning of next book, Exodus, says that a new pharaoh arose who did not know Joseph. Here’s when things go badly for Joseph and the Hebrews. The new Pharoah no longer knows them, no longer sees the Hebrews as Joseph’s kin, no longer recognizes them as part of the ‘we’ of Egypt.

Things always go badly when we really don’t know each other, when we are not connected enough in relationships as community to really believe that we are in this together.

This all-together dynamic is so important that Jesus tells the lawyer who asked how to inherit eternal life, that is, what is the ultimate in life, to love neighbor as self. Jesus then, to illustrate the point, tells the story of the Samaritan, the despised one who should be excluded, who acts as the true neighbor to the injured man.  Jesus tells a radical story of compassion and community that crosses borders and boundaries.  Jesus draws upon the Golden Rule from Deuteronomy earlier in Luke, ‘do unto others.’ In the Good Samaritan story in Luke, he also draws upon the spirit of Deuteronomy where the theological heart of Judaic prayer and confession is expressed in the Shema, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” God’s Oneness is the spiritual bedrock for our human oneness, our togetherness. As Dr. King said in the Letter from a Birmingham Jail,

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be… This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

This interrelated structure of reality extends to so many levels, even including those whom we might see as isolated individuals competing against one another, those beautiful life partners on earth we call trees. University of British Columbia professor Suzanne Simard is one of many researchers who have discovered that trees are communal and communicating. She says,

“Actually, it doesn’t make evolutionary sense for trees to behave like resource-grabbing individualists. They live longest and reproduce most often in a healthy stable forest. That’s why they’ve evolved to help their neighbors.”

This realization and perception of communal connection is a proclamation that we as church must again make and live now. In the midst of such cruelty and divisiveness in federal policy proposals, in the midst of the decades-long drift toward increased individual isolation and survivalism, we as church are called to embody and uplift community and communion. Indeed, the very first thing that the early Christian community did after the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2) was to share all things in common and to meet everyone’s need.

And that is only possible when we see ourselves in others, when we realize our commonality, and the built-in nature of our mutuality. When we say with Rev. Dr. King that I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be, we have brought together individual value and dignity with the essential value and reality of the communal. We’re in this together.

At Plymouth, we said it in our Campus Task Force reports.  We said it in the streets of The Cities during Operation Metro Surge. We are saying it every time we gather in a congregational meeting like we will in a few moments. We’re in this together.

Our witness as a community of faith is as important now as it has ever been when we uplift and live out the simple sacred truth that we are in this together.

May today’s meeting as a congregation and our living in the days to come grow from the deep truth of life that we are in this together.

AMEN

Tasting God

Tasting God

June 7, 2026

Minister: Rev. JT Smiedendorf

A Communion sermon related to Psalm 34:1-10

Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.

CENTRAL FOCUS:

Incarnated faith is embodied faith; felt and experiential, awake, active and walking in the world, sensuous

in amazement and abundant in wonder. 

“I bless God every chance I get;

my lungs expand with Divine praise.

2 I live and breathe God;

if things aren’t going well, hear this and be happy:

3 Join me in spreading the news;

together let’s get the word out.

4 God met me more than halfway,

God freed me from my anxious fears.

5 Look at God; give the Divine your warmest smile.

Never hide your feelings from God.

6 When I was desperate, I called out,

and God got me out of a tight spot.

7 God’s angel sets up a circle

of protection around us while we pray.

8 Open your mouth and taste, open your eyes and see—

    how good God is.

Blessed are you who run to the Holy One.

9 Worship God if you want the best;

worship opens doors to all Divine goodness.

10 Young lions on the prowl get hungry,

but God-seekers are full of God.”

These are the words of our ancient tradition.
May the Living Word of God in Scripture be alive within us, among us, and beyond us.

A long time ago, an Aboriginal man was out on the hunt. He had performed a ritual of preparation for the hunt and had done what was required to prepare for the hunt. As he is on the hunt, walking, waiting, watching, he knows that it is not just he who is hunting now, but that he has become First Hunter, that he is like—and maybe even the same as—that first human who hunted in this way.

By becoming First Hunter in the ritual dance, he will know how to hunt properly.  He will hunt successfully, finding and killing game for the people to eat.

He will hunt in proper relationship to the animal’s Spirit and to the Great Spirit so that the sacred covenant of exchange is maintained and there will be future game.

He honors the sacrifice of life of the animal and the gift it has brought his people.

I’ve used the drum to help us experience some of the ancient stories. It is a way of trying to enter a sacred space, to change our consciousness to appreciate and experience a sacred story differently, more deeply, more with our whole selves… and to try to enter into an ‘EveryWhen’ space.

Ancient peoples may have had an easier time imagining their participation and connection with their sacred stories, their myths. They were not limited to the literal as so many of us are in this scientific age.  Through sacred stories and their accompanying rituals, Aboriginal and Indigenous peoples let the boundaries of linear time dissolve. They entered an “every-when” space. They let themselves experience the sacred story as happening again, feeling its power and learning its lessons for themselves.

Today, we are offering the ritual of communion. We will be tasting bread and grape juice, but we are invited to more than that. We are telling an ancient story of faith and invited to participate in an experience of Christ Presence, to really let it in and become part of us.

Theologian Matthew Fox comments on Psalm 34, our Scripture reading this morning:

“Wisdom is always taste—in both Latin and Hebrew, the word for wisdom comes from the word for taste—so it’s something to taste, not something to theorize about. ‘Taste and see that God is good,’ the psalm says; and that’s wisdom: tasting life. No one can do it for us. The mystical tradition is very much a Sophia tradition. It is about tasting and trusting experience, before institution or dogma.”

And so many other Scripture examples like this one can be named:

Psalm 119:103 How sweet are Your words to my taste! Yes, sweeter than honey to my mouth!

Hebrews 6:5 ….and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come…

1 Peter 2:3 …if you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.

You could imagine right now a favorite food. Imagine its smell, the feel of it in your mouth and its taste. Our imaginations can help us to be in the experience, to know that food in our bodies.

I like imagining faith as embodied faith.

Embodied faith is incarnated faith; felt and experiential, awake, active and walking in the world, sensuous in amazement and abundant in wonder. Rituals, like communion, are one place to embody our faith in a way that leads to more embodiment of our Christ Path in the world. They are among the many ways to taste God.

Tasting God is true to the tradition of Hebrew understanding, which is by nature earthy and in the body.  It is true to the witness of the early followers of Jesus who said that God in Christ is with us in human life, tasting life, alive and intimate. These are the same early followers who experienced the coming of an embodied Spirit at Pentecost.

Because of that embodied experience, their community was changed. And so it is with us. Those experiences that we can feel in the body change us. Feeling is the whole body’s way of tasting.

If we are really with such an experience fully in the moment, the barriers between then and now dissolve.  Often that means that the barrier between us and the ancestors dissolves. We connect with the reality of being not just us, being JT or Birdie or Philip or whoever, but with being human like so many before us.  As we ingest the communion elements, we can remember and join with those many ancestors of many ages who have participated in the communion ritual. The ritual can connect us to the ancient flow of Spirit that continues still, the deep river of divinity and humanity.

Even as the everywhen space comes to be, it does not imply escape from our lives, but deepening into life. Myths and their rituals are there to help us meet life as it is. They are not really about history or science.  They are stories of the inner and outer Mystery that are meant to help us live our lives, together. These sacred stories and their rituals offer us a chance to taste God, to experience Divine presence and Divine wisdom. A myth is true if it works, if it helps us live well, to cope with the realities of life and the passages of life. It guides us amidst the ambiguity of life to make life-affirming choices, to discern what is valuable and enduring and life-giving from what is illusory and shallow and life-draining or even death-dealing.

Like Communion, the ancient sacred stories were not just told for amusement nor at any ordinary time or place. They were told within a sacred space, within a ritual space, in a special way as song or chant or dance, often with the sound of a drum.

We are called in our sacred Communion story and ritual to open ourselves like those at the first Pentecost to a meaning-full and power-full meeting with Spirit, where we each know in our own way the love and wisdom and power of Christ. We are called to experience it, to taste it, to know it in our bones. And in this meeting and eating we are nurtured and inspired to respond in the world with the same compassion and the same passion for justice as Jesus exemplified.

Perhaps it is a good thing to have grape juice instead of wine, but perhaps we lose something of the potency, complexity, and bitter sweetness of the message about life when we just have the sweet juice. Life isn’t all sweet, is it? Both the sweet and the bitter are welcome here.

So, when the time for our ritual of communion comes, bring your soul’s questions and longings to the Table.

Bring your griefs and burdens.

Bring your hopes or your lack of hope.

Bring your joy or your lack of joy.

Come to God’s Table where even amidst the presence of loss and betrayal, there is an offering of life and hope.

Come to God’s Table where even amidst occupation and injustice, there is an offering of compassion and a witness for justice.

Come to God’s Table where even amidst prejudice and exclusion, there is an offering of a place for all where social status, income, cultural background, skin color, sexual orientation, gender expression, age, athletic or intellectual abilities do not rank or separate.

Come with awe and wonder at the Creation and at the Creator who brings the world into Being and who can bring life out of death.

The Communion Table is our timeless story. It is a doorway into the mystery of the divine and human that is happening right now and has always been happening.

Let us tell the ancient story and live it again.

AMEN

Mary the Tower

Mary the Tower

May 31, 2026

Minister: Rev. JT Smiedendorf

A sermon related to The Gospel of Mary Magdalene 4:10 – 5:9

Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.

CENTRAL FOCUS:

It is time to know the full import of Mary Magdalene’s presence and ministry as Apostle to the Apostles and that it reshapes Christian image and practice.

“Having said all this, the Risen One departed. The disciples were in sorrow shedding many tears and saying: “How are we to go among the unbelievers and announce the gospel of the Kingdom of the Son of Man? They did not spare his life so why should they spare ours?”

Then Mary arose, embraced them all, and began to speak to her brothers: “Do not remain in sorrow and doubt, for his Grace will guide you and comfort you. Instead, let us praise his greatness, for he has prepared us for this. He is calling upon us to become fully human. Thus, Mary turned their hearts toward the good, and they began to discuss the meaning of the Teacher’s words.”

These are the words of our ancient tradition.
May the Living Word of God in Scripture be alive within us, among us, and beyond us.

Libbie sat in the library, thunderstruck. The realization had just landed: Sometime in the fourth century, someone had altered the oldest text of John’s Gospel.

Elizabeth Schrader, still just a doctoral student of New Testament at Duke, had gone through the whole of John 11 and John 12 in the most ancient manuscript, finding that a 4th century editor had gone in and changed every place we now read “Mary and Martha” in chapters 11 and 12 of John. It had originally said only “Mary.” Mary became Mary and Martha. The editor changed it so that the story about Lazarus and the resurrection involves two sisters, Mary and Martha of Bethany.

Do you remember Mary and Martha? There is a story about two women with those names in the last part of Chapter 10 of Luke’s Gospel, something about the one sister being busy fixing dinner and the other just sitting and listening to Jesus. If you like that story, you can keep it. That passage is not related to this story from John’s Gospel.

This story in John is different, and this emerging research has profound implications for our faith, for the Mary we are talking about being edited is likely Mary Magdalene and the likely intended effect is to dilute her status.

Let me explain:

There are two stories of confessions from Jesus’ followers in the canonical Gospels about him being an anointed one, a Messiah, a Christ-ed. (They are called Christological confessions.) Since the Gospels’ purpose is to communicate the presence and purpose and teaching of Jesus as Christ, these statements and who makes them are critical in the Gospel story. One such statement is uttered by Peter to which Jesus responds in Matthew, “You are Peter the Rock and upon this Rock I will build my church.”

But in the Gospel of John, Martha makes this critical confession in Chapter 11…. or so we thought. Now known as Dr. Elizabeth Schrader Polczer and teaching at Villanova, Libbie discovered that Mary originally had said this. And this Mary in the Gospel of John has long been suspected to be Mary Magdalene.

Wait you say, “Mary is from Magdala, not Bethany, as the story in John says.”

Ahh, but historical research has shown that at the time of Jesus there was no village of Magdala. The village where tourists go today to visit Magdalene shrines wasn’t known as Magdala at that time, and nobody knows where there would have been any such village in that first century period.

There is another possibility.

In Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke, magdala means tower.

Mary Magdalene is not a name of birthplace origin, it is a title: Mary the Tower.

It appears my friends that Christological confession and its place of honor in the Gospel of John was taken away from Mary Magdalene and given to another character, likely to dilute Mary’s place and influence as a Tower of faith.

This effort to dilute Mary Magdalene’s influence fits into a larger historical and theological pattern. Scholarly work of the last 50 years has been so important in helping us see how significant the influence of culture and empire was in re-shaping and domesticating the radical reform and potent message of Jesus, especially in relation to women and to Mary Magdalene. According to biblical and historical scholarship by Karen King, Ann Brock Thomas, Elaine Pagels, and others, it seems that there was amongst the early Christian factions and leaders, a contest for eminence. That contest was eventually won by Peter and Paul and fixed into place by the Roman Empire who took over the church in the 4th century. That outcome and empire influence would not have been friendly to women’s leadership in the church.

As a Protestant church youth, I heard very little about Magdalene, only passing references in Scripture that were never explored or expanded or uplifted. Moreover, the only thing that did stick was the storyline mentioned by somebody that she was a reformed prostitute, or, at best, a really needy person that Jesus helped out. This official church storyline may be the apex of the misinformation about her. But I dare anyone to find any description of her as a prostitute or even a so-called sinner in Scripture. It doesn’t exist. Anywhere.

Indeed, the prostitute characterization was an invention of Pope Gregory in the late 6th century and, if it were possible, Magdalene could have taken him to court and won a defamation lawsuit. (Only in 1969 did the Roman Catholic church rescind the teaching that she was a prostitute.) In fact, there is nothing in Scripture to even suggest she was a troubled woman of deficit.

There is only one reference to her as someone from whom Jesus cast out seven demons. But remember, in mythic and symbolic language seven is a number of wholeness—like the seven chakras in Hindu images or the seven directions of many First Nations or even the seven deadly sins in some Christian traditions. To have seven demons cast out is like saying that this woman has done her inner work fully and is truly whole and empowered.

Moreover, hiding in plain sight right in front of us is her critical importance in the Gospel story. Mary Magdalene is the only figure who was present at the crucifixion and first at the resurrection according to all four canonical gospels. There are only a few stories and details that all four canonical gospels share. That broad commonality is a sign of the importance of a story and in these very important stories of faith Magdalene is there, front and center.

Indeed, it is Magdalene who is the first witness to the Resurrection and the one to share this news with the others. Yet instead of being honored and uplifted over the centuries as the first apostle, the Apostle to the Apostles, she was defamed and her influence, perspectives, and teachings were obscured and diminished.

All of Elizabeth’s Schrader Polczer’s research, published by the Harvard Theological Review, is consistent with this historical pattern of diluting Mary Magdalene’s place and influence. And her research is so significant that the group of scholars who ensure translations like the one we most often use here, The New Revised Standard Version, is engaged with this research.

And perhaps this same group should consider adding another book to the Christian Scriptures, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene from which I read a few moments ago. It was discovered in 1896 in Cairo and authenticated as being of the time of the early church. Sadly, many pages are missing, and it took decades and decades for it to be translated and circulated widely. And what we do have of Magdalene’s Gospel shows what me might expect, resistance to her leadership as a woman, and that she had a special relationship with Jesus. This is in keeping with the Spirit of the canonical Gospels who show her as first witness and first apostle. It seems she was the one who really stayed close to Jesus and who deeply understood and could embody the Way of Love he was talking about. It seems Magdalene was at the head of the class.

It’s a beautiful passage to me that we heard from her Gospel. Distraught by the leaving of the Resurrected Christ, fearful of what may happen to them, the disciples are comforted by Mary who speaks words of strength and encouragement and “turns their hearts to the Good.” I feel strengthened and encouraged when I hear it. Moreover, she summarizes the intent of the Way of Love of Jesus as calling upon us to become fully human (Anthropos is the Greek manuscript word), to be in the process of becoming, of transforming.

So what does this mean for us, my friends?

It means to me that God is still speaking, even enough perhaps to change the Biblical library!

It means to me that we continue to learn from the God who blows the doors off gender limitations.

And that we have been gifted by Magdalene and the many women who have pointed us back to her life-giving presence.

And, most importantly, it means that we might begin to wonder with church historian and author Diana Butler Bass who said,

What if we’d known about Mary the Tower all along? What kind of Christianity would we have if the faith hadn’t only been based upon, “Peter, you are the Rock and upon this Rock I will build my church”? But what if we’d always known, “Mary, you are the Tower, and by this Tower we shall all stand?”

I suspect if we’d known Mary the Tower our faith journey over the centuries would have had more to do with the embodiment and experience of love, and less to do with beliefs and doctrines—more with the integration of heart, body and soul, and less with mistrust and persecution of others who seem different.

I am indebted to Diana Butler Bass for this message this morning and for her sharing of the story of her friend Libbie whose biblical work is an important part of a larger quest to rediscover and renew our relationship to Mary, the Tower of faith.

I have heard over recent years from many who are hearing from Mary Magdalene in their prayer life. She has been heard in our household so much so that Allison and I have led prayer pilgrimages to the south of France where Mary is said to have gone after the Resurrection to continue her ministry and where a movement existed that followed her. I’m pleased to say that The Board of Spiritual Formation is arranging for Allison to come here and lead a Plymouth retreat with me in early November to discuss Jesus and Magdalene as Wisdom Teachers. More info coming soon.

As a church that received the Spirit at Pentecost, and in this Age of the Spirit, where the experience of Spirit in community and service and prayer is paramount, I invite us to discover the treasure of spiritual teaching and embodiment that Magdalene represents. May we continue to seek what Mary the Tower is saying to us about becoming whole human beings and about what it takes to turn our hearts to the Good even in a time of trial.

It’s time for us all to recognize, to make room for, and to move with Mary the Tower to strengthen and enliven our faith.

 

AMEN