Sermon: Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

The Prophet writes, "No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in the city or the cry of distress." Just for a minute, try to envision that world. I don't know that I can. And I actually have spent a good amount of my time trying to hear the cries of distress in the world, trying to be less afraid of them, less certain that they would drown me and more confident that going in the name of the church and of my sisters and brothers in faith, we could there, in that place of distress, make a difference.

And all these years later, I'm here to tell you we can and we are and we do. But I'd be lying to tell you that I am not afraid of some of the depth of the need that calls us. "No more shall there be an infant that lives but a few days or an old person who doesn't live out a lifetime." I know for those of you who serve in medicine where I teach, we all the time struggle against stories that are just not good enough in terms of the health care we can deliver, in care of the interventions that we can teach and it pushes us forward. We strive to do better, but we strive to do better often carrying in our hearts a loss, a failure. "They shall not build and another inhabit. They shall not plant and another eat."

Palestinian olive groves have had little water in the last three years. The harvest there is not plentiful, but it often comes with the threat of guns from so many directions, even though those olive trees belong to the people trying to harvest. How do we make that right? What is the strife that tears even a grove of olives apart? They shall not labor in vain or bear children for calamity. What has it been for you, for me to stare at folks from Gaza, folks from Sudan, folks from Kyiv holding their children in their arms saying, "Can they stop? Can this madness stop?" I know better than to think. We are the first generation to pray for that.

And maybe we could even say we're making a little headway, but I'll just say personally, sometimes I'm not so sure. And that's when being together to sing, to pray, to find again in your faith or your view, something that picks up my spirit and makes me think, "Okay, let's try it again." José Andrés has figured out yet another way to get food into Gaza or to Lahaina or to some other place where no one could imagine sandwiches could make it, let alone restaurant food. I hope you know his work with World Central Kitchen. So many are doing holy sacred work, not just the church and together in coalition so much can be accomplished.

But when I think of all the places where prayers might be offered this morning, perhaps in your family circle, surely for all the neighborhoods I've mentioned, but can we add Jamaica? Can we add all those in the Caribbean at the moment, fearing a whole list of storms? How about that thing in Los Angeles they call the Atmospheric River? For those of you who know California better than me, it looks like a source of endless mudslides, endless threat to the 101. And the fires only made it worse. Near and far, just up the street, just across Cambridge, certainly in Providence, certainly in the Harvard community, certainly at Brown, people are carrying such worry.

And Isaiah asks us, "Can you not see? I am doing a new thing," and Jesus asked for signs and a surety and a calendar. When will this happen? He says, "Well, let me tell you. If you think it's bad now, it'll get worse. Lots of things that you just take for granted. Well, they're going to fall down and fail, and the end's not yet. And trust me, I am with you to the end of the age, not a hair on your head will be lost." I've lost a few. I worry. But if Jesus has them, I guess I'll stop worrying.

So my prayers, like the ones that Alanna just beautifully offered, often start quite close to home. They start with the circle I know the best. And then I try to be guided outward to places that sometimes all I can do in my prayer is risk seeing there what I see and what I can learn more deeply. And I realize that this is a word at the heart of the life of the church. It is the word "witness." So what do I witness? What do you witness? I'm going to take a flyer at this and I promise I'm not going to sing. When I was a little kid, my parents had a record player. They're coming back into vogue, I understand. My dad loved music, and he especially loved the music that was sacred, but that bordered on jazz spirituals. I listened over and over and over again to an amazing black baritone, William Warfield. "Sing, my Lord, what a morning." Perhaps you know that. The words are really simple. "My Lord, what a morning. My Lord, what a morning. My Lord, what a morning, when the stars begin to fall."

I was raised with enough Christian guilt and I wasn't reading, I was listening, that I thought that word was M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G, as in uh-oh, God's coming and you are in trouble. The stars are falling. The end of the age has come and you're going to be held to count. I was probably eight. Only into my teenage years when choral singing got to be a favorite did I walk into a rehearsal space and get handed a piece of sheet music, that very spiritual. Imagine my surprise to see, no, you. Oh, morning. That thing that dawns every day, that moment when hope arises. Today, what if our witness is to have one foot where mine was as a kid, with the courage and the willingness to mourn, to truly mourn what is being lost, what is aching while with our other foot, our other sight, to see the dawning of what God is doing and what God has promised, including the fact that not one hair on your head will be lost.

It's quite a posture. You might be sitting there thinking, "God, it sounds like a cartoon Janet, the one where the boat slips away from the dock and we end up in the drink." I do think there's risk, but I have to say that being with those in grief in the 45 years of my ministry has taught me more than anything I learned at HDS and most of the other things that I've learned along the way, too. It is in grief that people find their foundations. It's in walking together in grief and loss when we can speak honestly with one another that real dawning and real hope can be found.

So if you can picture it, I am recommending a posture for your morning Christian yoga, right foot in mourning with you, left foot poised, ready to step toward, that new and bright place of promise that God has given to the church to bear witness to and to testify to in the bleakest of times, not Pollyanna, not pie in the sky, but really with deep knowledge of loss and fear and with specific honoring of all that people grieve and yet hope that is ours to give because it's God's gift to us.

I want to close with the words of a colleague, a new one for me. His name is Nizar Halloun. He's the program director for the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem. Perhaps some of you have visited. I hope to someday. Last week he wrote, "Climbing the grounds of Tantur reveals an olive tree terrace that descends toward a desert beyond the eastern wall. Among nearby holy places such as the cave of Jesus' birth and the garden where he sweated blood and the roads where he shook the dust from his feet, Tantur feels like a sanctuary in its own right." This is my favorite sentence. "It stands on the seam between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. In the midst of ongoing bloodshed, its mission as an oasis for encountering sacred people, places, and traditions is more necessary than ever. Now with a ceasefire in place, there is a measure of relief, but it's mingled with sadness and a deep uncertainty about what comes next."

"The current reality," writes Nizar, "didn't begin two years ago, and it's not simply a dispute between opposing narratives, nor is it merely a complicated problem. It's the outcome of choices made by those in power, choices that you often avoid solutions. Palestinians' daily lives, whether Muslim or Christian, both in the territories and among Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, Israelis have not been immune either, history seems to loop without learning. Fear and uncertainty are instrumentalized and yet," says Nizar, "And yet, morning, morning, and yet, Tantur's housekeepers and cooks wake early to come to work, leaving their homes in Bethlehem and the neighboring towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala, they cross checkpoints without knowing whether they'll be granted passage.

Yet they remain hopeful that the day will somehow work out, that despite intensified closures and restrictions, territories and the near daily appearance of new barriers on roads leading to Palestinian towns and villages now hemmed in by settlements in the expansion of older ones. Even when our hands can do nothing, we can still bear faithful witness, and we can pray. And in doing so, turning toward God, we choose not to lean into fear, not to succumb to it, but to stand in hope that steadies us in God's presence and keeps us from collapsing until mercy has the final word."

I leave you with his prayer. Join me. Oh, God, grant us hearts that guard our common humanity. Open our eyes to see your image in each person, even amid conflict and harm. Give us wisdom and courage when brutality confronts us and when we cannot act, keep us faithful in prayer and steadfast in witness, standing alongside all who suffer. Amen.

In mourning and on this bright morning, may we hold this prayer in our hearts and know that the God of all mysteries and all hope is ever and always our companion in this life and in the life to come. Bless each of you. Amen.