2022-03-14
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text
Scripture PSALM 27 AND LUKE 13:31-35
It was two years ago this week. We had been hearing about this strange new disease slowly, or maybe not so slowly, encroaching on our world. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and suddenly everything in our midst began to close down. Church leaders decided that day not to have an in-person worship service on the following Sunday, March 15. And the day after that, Friday, March 13, I recorded an audio meditation that we placed on our website.
We had no idea what was to come, of course. I remember thinking we’d probably be out of in-person worship for four to six weeks. And clearly, time made a mockery of my guess. The isolation and uncertainty went on and on, and we didn’t gather again in person for another fifteen months. So today brings back memories of anxiety and dis-ease.
And what I realize today is that many of us have two simultaneous, but quite different, reactions to this anniversary. The first reaction is the relief we feel that perhaps we are now moving into a new state of relative normalcy. And the second reaction is that the anxiety and discomfort never really go away, do they. They linger at the edges of everything we do. We have suffered from loneliness and worry that seep into every dimension of life. Shards of unease have, in many ways, rubbed us raw.
All of this has only been exacerbated by the monstrous war of aggression being carried out by the Russian military against the people of Ukraine. The senseless brutality of the Russian invasion not only makes us weep for a Ukrainian people under assault, but it makes us fear, as well, a wider war and the use of unconscionably demonic weapons. Add to that the racism and transphobia and environmental disregard that seem endlessly to run rampant in this culture and beyond, as well as a tumbling stock market and rising inflation and our own personal challenges and concerns, and we have a perfect stew of unsettling and worrisome conditions.
Both the psalmist and the writer of Luke’s gospel were acutely aware of the terror of their own respective times. The psalm is full of images of panic and threat—“evildoers assail me to devour my flesh—my adversaries and foes”; “an army [is] encamp[ed] against me”; “war rise[s] up against me”; “day of trouble”; “enemies” (Psalm 27:2, 3, 5, 6). This is someone who knows what it is to be beset by dread.
And Jesus? He’s being hounded by Herod. Even the Pharisees, who usually oppose Jesus at every turn, say, ‘You better get out of here—Herod is after you.’ And Jesus acknowledges that he’s eventually going to be killed for being who he is. He knows he’s headed to Jerusalem, where he will be executed because of what’s seen as his seditious behavior. Both the psalmist and Jesus know trouble and torment.
And because of that, these scripture passages speak our language. They know our reality. Anna Hall, the research director at Convergence, with whom Federated worked on our new Visionary Action Plan, quotes a study done by the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, that says, “People are experiencing a profound sense of loss of reality and control, leaving them dizzied, disoriented, and feeling helpless . . . everybody seems to be struggling nowadays” (email, March 10, 2022). Or, in the biblical parlance: evildoers assail us; Herod is after us.
Strikingly, though, the Harwood Institute diagnoses the societal issue somewhat differently from the way it is often framed for us. We tend to think that, beneath the external factors causing us to lose sleep—beneath the pandemic and the war and the racism that haunt us—we tend to think that one of the primary deeper causes of our frayed life together is that we are so extremely polarized as a country. We know the drill: red or blue, masks or no, vaccinations or no, Critical Race Theory or no, Baker Mayfield or no. The commonly accepted wisdom is that one of the root causes of our anxiety is these two wildly divergent ways of looking at the world.
And that division is certainly real and palpable. We see its effects in nearly every direction. The analysis of the Harwood Institute, though, comes down in a different place and suggests an alternative cause for our uneasiness. From their vantage point, the issue isn’t so much division as it is a conspicuous lack of a sense of belonging. In their eyes, “the center cannot hold” (W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”) because many of us, maybe most of us, have nowhere near the same sense of belonging that people did just a generation ago. Some of you may remember Robert Putnam’s well-known article, and then book, called “Bowling Alone,” from the mid-90s, in which he made popular the notion put forth by his sub-title: “America’s Declining Social Capital.”
The Harwood Institute picks up on that theme and says that “At the heart of what people seek is acceptance and belonging.” When people feel they are accepted and that they belong somewhere, our common life is so much richer and fuller. When people sense their connection to each other, and act as though they matter to each other, life is immeasurably enriched. Acceptance and belonging, the study suggests, are the antidotes to the anxiety and loneliness that stalk us.
The Harwood report frames the whole societal breakdown differently enough that it has a strange kind of hopefulness about it. If we’re just irreparably divided because we all believe things so differently, then it’s hard to see how things can ever get much better. You and I probably think, “Well, I’m certainly not going to change my beliefs to fit in with what seems like lunacy, so I guess we’re just going to stay lightyears apart.” We’re not going to convince each other of viewpoints that seem reprehensible to so many, so, if irreparable polarization is the underlying issue, we’re just stuck in this interminable vortex of division.
If acceptance and belonging are the issue, though, then the whole way we think about solving it has a noticeably different hue. We’re no longer divided by belief. Now we have opportunities for solutions. Now it’s about welcoming people into a space where they’ll be embraced and seen as special. Now it’s about opening a door and saying, “Come inside.” Now it’s about remembering that we are one people, under God—not just in the United States, but all across the world. And in making that welcoming and acceptance our byword, then the sacred and holy task in front of us becomes so much clearer.
When Jesus is warned by the Pharisees to hide from Herod’s wrath, after he acknowledges that he’s going to die in Jerusalem, he says a curious thing: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, . . . How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings” (13:34). It’s this tender maternal image for God, an image of warmth and comfort and protection and care. The shielding mother holds her brood close. There’s no talk about “only the good chicks get to be under the wing.” There’s no indication that being tucked under God’s protective wing is a reward for acceptable behavior. No, every chick is welcomed into the fold.
I can vividly remember moving to Chagrin Falls when I started my ministry here. And as soon as we arrived, there were people on our doorstep bringing us meals and telling us how to get to the grocery store and the South Chagrin Reservation of the Metroparks. and asking what they could do to help. I arrived here sick, as some of you remember, and an a cappella singing group from the church came to our house and sang soft, healing songs of faith to me. You couldn’t be more warmly welcomed than Mary and I were when we arrived here. And it made a huge difference to us.
I wonder in what ways we could be making all our church people and neighbors and family members, and indeed people all over the world, feel as though they really belong. The psalmist, who knows terrible tribulation, comes back to a ringing affirmation of what it is to live life in the presence of God. The stunningly simple affirmation is that “God is my light and my salvation,” that “God is the stronghold of my life,” that “God will shelter me in the day of trouble” (27:1, 5). And it comes with a final affirmation: “I believe that I shall see the goodness of God in the land of the living. Wait for God; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for God” (27:13-14). In a word, this is the first part of our Lenten theme this year: Breathe in. Take in God’s blessing of, and welcome to, you. God embraces you and me in the sanctuary of that protective wing. This is the very core of life: you and I belong to the heart of the universe. God will shelter us. God will be good to us. Our role is to breathe in that restorative goodness, to let our whole bodies be saturated with God’s beauty and love. We belong to God. Breathe that adoration in.
And then—we know what’s next, don’t we—into this world of tension and anxiety and pain, we breathe that beauty and embrace out. We find ways to show to others the love we know from God and, by grace, from each other.
Sometimes we’re so overwhelmed by the apparently paralyzing split in this country that we fail to take in what may be the deeper issue, which is that so many people don’t feel as though they belong anywhere. And we don’t see what we can do to be part of welcoming into our embrace even people very different from ourselves. We don’t see how we might breathe out in love.
Anna Hall from Convergence talks about the need for us to develop doable and achievable actions we can take to make the world a more welcoming place. What might we here at Federated do together to foster a deep sense in everyone that they are sheltered under the protective wing of God’s love?
We may wonder this especially with regard to the atrocities being committed in Ukraine. The evils there are on such an enormous scale—what can we possibly do? And what’s striking is that, even in the face of such vicious evil, we see acts of breathing out that transform a little corner of the world, acts that we can all practice in one way or another, to welcome others into the fold of God’s care. As we mentioned in our invitation to generosity a few moments ago, for example, we’re invited to contribute money that will provide food and shelter and supplies to people in Ukraine. This ability to help crosses all party lines. Or this: a tweet the other day mentioned that, on Etsy, a number of Americans have been buying items from Ukrainian vendors, and that others have been paying for time in Ukrainian Airbnbs and Vrbos, even knowing that they were never going to actually spend any time in those rentals. They were doing this just to show our besieged friends in Ukraine that they cared about them, and that they matter.
The columnist Monica Hesse wrote a poignant piece this week about the brutal invasion of Ukraine. “I’ve never liked my daughter’s stroller,” she says. “But over the weekend I saw a photograph of this stroller—the same style and color—sitting on the platform of a Polish train station, and this was the thing that finally obliterated what was left of my journalistic steel and made me sob about Ukraine. More than a million Ukrainian refugees have now poured into neighboring Poland, most of them women and children. When Polish mothers learned of this, it seems, they went to the railway stations and border crossings where the refugees were arriving, and they began dropping off baby strollers.” While the war was raging, “women in Poland were leaving their houses pushing strollers.” They were thinking not about what sort of guns and bombs were needed, but “about the way that a baby can make a bed out of a stroller. They were thinking about the way that the whirring motion of a moving stroller can make a baby stop crying, and make her head tilt heavy against the waterproof nylon until she falls asleep and her breath comes out whisper-soft. They were thinking about the mothers of Ukraine. The fact that they have traveled so far, and their children are so heavy, and their arms are so tired” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/03/09/ukrainie-refugee-mother-strollers/). These Polish mothers, offering their strollers, are breathing out a profound and sacred love. Simple acts that may be part of the butterfly’s wings changing the proverbial weather one little flap at a time.
All breathing-out gestures come with a cost, of course. They ask something of us. They ask us to give something up—maybe something small, maybe something big. The photograph that “has become a worldwide symbol of Russia’s brutality toward Ukrainian civilians” is of three members of the Perebyinis family, who were slaughtered as they tried to escape the Kyiv suburb of Irpin. Tetiana and her two children, Mykyta and Alisa, were killed as they sought refuge to the west. Tetiana had refused to leave until she had helped her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease, to find safety, because, as do all people, her mother needed to belong. And as disciples of Jesus, maybe you were struck, as was I, by an added detail. The Perebyinis family was accompanied in their attempted escape by Anatoly Berezhnyi, a church volunteer who had helped his own family to safety, but then “returned . . . to Irpin to help others evacuate,” and was killed along with the Perebyinis family (New York Times email, “The Morning,” March 10, 2022). In the manner and spirit of a sacrificing Jesus, Berezhnyi gave up his life for others.
And in all these ways, we see what breathing out and including people and sheltering people can look like. It looks like contributing some of our resources to organizations, such as the church, that are seeking to provide comfort and blessing. It looks like buying crafts from Ukrainian Etsy vendors, and purchasing never-to-be-used weeks in vacation rentals. It looks like Polish women delivering strollers to countless Ukrainian women arriving in a strange land without anything to their name. It looks like risking life to help others to safety.
On this second anniversary of the changes brought on by COVID-19, and as we live with whatever discomfort and anxiety stalk us, this is what it is to breathe out. It’s what it is to show people everywhere that they belong. It’s what it is to shelter others under a welcoming wing. It’s what it is to be the church of Jesus Christ. May it always be so.