Holding onto hope

The other day, I listened to a public radio report on research into suicide notes.

Yes, it's a sobering topic but an instructive one.

A researcher, a linguist, has developed a complex computer program that reads through all the notes, sorts and sifts them, and then identifies certain key words and phrases common to the notes.

When the research is complete and published one day, medical personnel, educators, clergy will have further help in identifying people with suicidal thoughts and will be better able to intervene and save lives.

What did you learn  from the notes?  the radio interviewer asked the researcher.

He said that beyond mundane concerns like instructing a friend or loved one left behind to pay the mortgage or get the dog to the vet for its shots, nearly every note mentioned the loss of hope.

Without hope, there is only despair, which can lead some people to suicide. It did for the people who wrote those tragic notes.

Despair is cumulative. Crisis after crisis. Stress upon stress. Pain added to pain. It all builds up. The weight of suffering, especially when carried alone, becomes too much. And too often, the person so afflicted sees only one way out and, sadly, that is by taking his or her own life.

But might hope also be cumulative? Can hope be planted in the soul, tended and then allowed to flower like roses in the garden?

I think so. And the time to start is now. And the way to start is through prayer. Daily prayer, the constant turning of one's attention to God, is the beginning of hope.

Despair takes root and blossoms into darkness and death when one thinks that one knows more than God, that there is no solution, that there cannot possibly be resurrection from the grave on the third day.

But the gospel declares that God has conquered death--that Jesus Christ is risen from the grave and is alive. The God of all-powerful love is the only reliable ground of hope.

 As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said, "God makes a way where there is no way."

Sometimes, our mortal eyes can't see the way, but God can always see it.

So, hold onto hope, for hope is God holding onto you in the darkness until the light of dawn comes.

Loving as Jesus loves: indiscriminately.

The News-Leader reports today on a local ordinance that would prohibit discrimination locally against people who are gay, bisexual or transgender.

A group of local pastors--I was one of them-- signed a letter to the paper expressing our concerns about  another pastor's use of four Scripture passages, which have been used historically to justify discrimination--and worse--against God's gay, bisexual and transgendered children.

In the same letter, we called for support of the anti-discrimination ordinance.

This last Sunday, I preached about God's indiscriminate love in Jesus Christ. Christ's love embraces all people. And Jesus calls his followers to extend his love--his love being our willing and working for the flourishing of everyone.

Here is the text of my Sunday sermon. As always I welcome your comments.


Easter Five/c
The Rev. Kenneth L. Chumbley
April 28, 2013
Acts 11.1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21.1-6; John 13.31-35

I love this time of the year. The gloom of winter gives way to the glories of spring—cardinals singing, flowers blooming, trees bursting into green blossoms.  And—sniffle and cough—allergies!

Still, spring is my favorite of nature’s seasons for so many reasons and for so many reminders of God’s life-giving love.

Here’s an analogy: God’s love is like the sun that shines onto the earth, into our world, and life flourishes in the sun’s light. Today in the gospel, Jesus talks with us about the importance of God’s love. He gives us the love commandment.

He’s given it to us before. I guess we need reminders that love is what the Christian faith is about, fundamentally. It’s not about doctrines, dogmas, creeds, tomes of theology, as important as they are.

Love alone is of ultimate importance.

Love one another, Jesus says, as I have loved you. By this—this love—people will know that you are my disciples, followers of the way, the truth, the life.

He urges us to live according to this commandment. To love in the way God loves. Love…indiscriminately. Love the way the sun’s light shines upon everything.

In today’s gospel from John, Jesus is at supper with his disciples, his last meal with them, and he commands them to love people who are part of that immediate and intimate fellowship. To love one another indiscriminately.

Jesus loves even his disciple Judas, who even now plots his betrayal and death. He wants Judas to flourish, but perhaps knows that Judas will choose the way of death, not of life.

Love one another, my little ones, Jesus says to his disciples. Love the one who gossips about you. Love the one who has hurt you.;  Love the one who is impossible to get alone with. Love the one you don’t understand. Love the one in the dirty clothes. Love the one who makes more money that you do. Love the one who makes much less than you.

Love one another the way, I love you Jesus says, and so show yourselves to be Christians, followers of mine.

Don’t just speak love. Act it. Love as I do, Jesus says, indiscriminately. Working actively for the flourishing of others. Whoever they are. Love as intensively as the sun, whose rays fall on the earth in equal measure, bringing forth life in its fullness.

But don’t stop there in your loving, little ones.

Jesus does not mean that we are to love just one another—just the people in the pew with us. Just other Christians. Just Episcopalians. But he intends that we love everyone: Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, and people who just don't care.

God’s love is indiscriminate. So love that way, Jesus says. The way he himself lives. The light that that shines from the Father into the Son and from the Son into us and through us onto others through the power of love, the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ love is to shine out of us, with its full intensity. To blaze like the sun at noontime.

God’s love for everyone is the message of the Acts reading this morning. Today’s text expands on the implications of the gospel—the words of Jesus himself. Acts is the church’s interpretation of the love commandment for a new situation.

Peter has this vision of a huge pice of cloth dropping down from heaven, and it’s full of unclean creatures, which Jews have been warned to stay away from, or God will stay away from them.

And yet, Peter hears God’s new word to him. The Spirit says, “Take up and eat.” God tells Peter to consume that which he had thought unclean. To take to himself that from which he'd religiously separated himself.

God’s love, Peter says, based on this new revelation, is for the Gentiles, too—not just the Jews, but for those non-Jews- THOSE people over there.

In God’s community, there’s so segregation. There’s no discrimination. But only equal love for all equally.

And in St. John’s revelation this morning, we see a new vision of what God intends for the human community—what God was doing in Jesus more than two millennia ago and what God is doing now in him and through him. God is creating a new heaven and earth, the new Jerusalem.

It will be a new creation in which the light of God’s love in Jesus brings forth the flourishing of everyone and everything.

It is springtime. Birds are singing for all. Flowers are springing up for all. Trees are bursting into green bud for all. And there are no more tears. and, let's hope, no more pollen and allergies!

God is working for this new human community of love as we participate in his work, loving with God’s indiscriminate love.

In the words of that children’s Sunday school song, Jesus wants us to be his sunbeams.

To let God’s light of love shine through us and onto one another right here; through us and onto everyone beyond this church through our giving and serving.

Through us, sunbeams of God’s love can shine on Haiti at the clinic of Les Timoun, where fragile, vulnerable babies need food and medicines to flourish.

Through us, sunbeams of God’s love can shine on the needy children at Bissett Elementary who need new shoes.

Through us, sunbeams of God’s love can shine on hungry people through our canned good offerings on Sundays, our cash gifts, and our volunteer hours to Crosslines. And please remember: our Crosslines gifts will be matched this month by a foundation.

And through us, sunbeams of God’s indiscriminate love can fall on God’s gay, bisexual, transgender children who are denied equal access in Springfield to housing, employment, medical care because of who they are.

Little children, Love, Jesus says today. Let the light of the Father and the Son’s love shine in you and through you in the power of God the Holy Spirit. Love as God loves in Jesus--indiscriminately--for the flourishing of life for all God’s children.

Love for that new community of earth—the new Jerusalem.

Christ Church, we are Jesus’ sunbeams of love. So shine. Shine on all. Amen

Hail Mary

In the Roman Catholic Church, May is the month of Mary--the Blessed Virgin, the mother of our Lord, the Theotokos or God bearer of Orthodox Christianity.

How well I remember May 1 from my Roman Catholic days. We, the faithful, focused our attention on Mary. We attended a special Mass in Mary's honor. In our classrooms, we listened to the nuns lecture on her significance.

Growing up in the church, I was frightened of God the Father--that exalted, almost Zeus-like dweller in heaven with the flowing white beard (Much later, on a visit to Rome, I saw the Father so depicted in  Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and realized where that image had originated). I felt at home with Jesus, the Son of the Father; Jesus was my friend and companion, my comfort. I was puzzled by the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost.

But Mary? Ah, Mary, she was pure goodness--the ideal mother. She was the first disciple of Jesus, who was both her son and her Lord.  She was the examplar of faithful living.

In the Roman Catholic tradition of my birth and early years, Mary was revered, even adored because of her place in salvation history. She said yes to God, declaring to that angelic messenger: "Let it be to me according to Thy will."

And she bore the Savior, nurtured him over the years, and watched him, through anguished eyes, suffer in his passion and die on the cross. Mary wept and wailed as her child suffered and died, the way mothers have wept and wailed since the beginning of time as they have watched their children perish in war, from hunger, thirst, privation of all kinds, in storms and floods. Alas, mothers will go on weeping for their lost children.

Today, thanks be to God, Mary is honored not just by Roman Catholics, but also by many Protestants. As an Episcopalian now, I go on honoring her.

Devotion to Mary is a part of my rule of life as an associate of the Society of St. Margaret, an order of women religious in the Episcopal Church. (Yes, we have nuns and monks in the Episcopal Church.).
And so I remember the Blessed Mother today, in May, and on feasts dedicated to her.

And I pray the Hail Mary, that prayer my own beloved mother taught me when I was a toddler and that I have prayed regularly ever since.

Please pray with me...

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen."

Remembering Boston

I was horrified by the explosions of evil at the Boston Marathon just one week ago today.

Today, I remember the three people who were killed in that attack and the more than 170 others who were wounded. I also remember the police officer who was murdered in the line of duty.

How could such evil be perpetrated against innocent people?

The alleged bombers' motives are unknown, although one of the suspects is reportedly communicating with officials from his hospital bed. We might learn more about what drove these two alleged bombers to wage their slaughter at the marathon and then to kill a police officer and grievously wound another.

Did the violence in Chechnya, a country to which the suspects were connected by family, or elsewhere, somehow contribute to their alleged murderous rampage? Was the brothers' separation from family a reason?

Had the suspects become insensitive to the deadly consequences of bombs and bullets because they'd watched too many terror videos and because they were immersed in America's culture of violence?

Why did the older brother turn to violent forms of his religion, according to media reporting? Where were more moderate forms of his religion, and why didn't representatives of the same reach out to him?  It's ironic that the older brother's boxing gym was a less violent community for him than his own online religious community.

Whatever the reasons for these cruel, calculated and deadly attacks, there can never be any legitimacy for them. Nothing can ever justify the murder of three people at the marathon, one an eight-year old boy, and a police officer in his squad car. There is no justification for the wounding of so many others. Nothing can excuse the terrorizing of Boston and the nation.

And, also ironically, these two suspects, one dead and the other in hospital now, were allowed refuge in this country, educated in American schools and received scholarships to American colleges. The younger brother had become a U.S. citizen. The older one had married an American woman and had a child with her. What had America ever done to harm these two men? Why did they hate us so much?

Yesterday was Good Shepherd Sunday. Someone asked me, "If you had preached yesterday, what would you have said, especially in the context of the Boston Marathon bombings?" Actually, I'd been thinking about that question all last week.

Thinking about Jesus, the Good Shepherd, I'd have said we should not live in fear but should go on running our marathons, sending our children to school, living our lives as normally as possible in a culture of bomb and gun violence; I remember how those brave Londoners kept calm and carried on while Hitler's Luftwaffe bombed them nightly.

I'd have said that the Good Shepherd was there with the Boston victims at their deaths, holding them and comforting them as they were being born anew into everlasting life. And the Shepherd was--and is, even now--with the injured, working for their restoration.

I'd have said that I was not afraid. I believe that, no matter what happens to me, I am alive always  in the Living God; and that nothing--not a terrorist's bomb or bullet--will ever separate me from the love of God for me in Christ Jesus. It is the same for all those who belong to God in Christ Jesus.

And, inspired by the New Testament reading from Revelation yesterday, I'd have said that I saw the innocent--the four victims of Boston's week of horror--standing before the throne of the Lamb of God, robed in the white of the resurrection, rejoicing because they had come out of the "great ordeal....

"And the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

A sacred moment at Starbucks

It was early morning right after my workout. I was enjoying my daily routine of coffee at Starbucks and reading The New York Times. I looked up and saw a young couple standing in front of me at the table. He was smiling. She was smiling, with a hint of anxiety in her eyes.

I knew them as one of our many young couples and families from church. We shook hands and exchanged some pleasantries.

"We're on our way to the hospital," she said, "to be induced. And we hoped you might say a prayer for us."

This was no random meeting. They knew where to find me at that early hour, because I have had occasional conversations with her husband at Starbucks when he picks up his coffee on his way to the office.

And I believe the Spirit led them to me that morning.

I thought, There is no better way to undertake some consequential event--like the birth of a child--than by prayer and with God's blessing.

I rejoiced that this young couple felt such a deep desire for God at this moment in their life together. They wanted God with them, and prayer would bring them into the awareness of his presence.

We joined hands there, with a table full of workmen looking on, and I prayed for the two of them--for their unborn baby and for a safe delivery. And then I made the sign of the cross on their foreheads--the same sign of the cross that one day I will mark on the forehead of their baby--and we hugged.

"I'll be by the hospital to see you this afternoon, " I said, adding, "This has been a week of births."

Just two days earlier, when I found out about the birth of a child to church members, I visited the baby and the family in the hospital and said prayers of thanksgiving and blessed the baby. (I would have held and kissed the baby, but the grandmother was not going to let him go.)

Preparing for new life to come into the world and welcoming that new life--resurrection moments--are among the blessings I receive as a priest of the church.

As such I am in a unique position. I am sharing with people in hard times and in happy ones, expressing, I hope and pray, something of Christ's loving presence.

When God called me to the priesthood, he had this sacred work in mind for me. Thanks be to God.

Priest or layperson, may you find sacred work to do every day.

An Easter story

You are free

One day in April 1945, Captain Hershel Schacter of the U.S. Third Army drove his jeep into Buchenwald, the Nazi death camp in Germany that American soldiers had just liberated.

He saw hell on earth: corpses everywhere; chimneys belching black smoke and the ashes of hundreds of prisoners who had been incinerated; and many hundreds of survivors--hollow-eyed and emaciated with starvation and disease, just a breath or two from death.

Captain Schacter, a Jewish chaplain, shouted, "Jews of Buchenwald: You are free!"

As he walked through the camp, he detected something stirring behind a mound of corpses. He found a survivor, a boy of seven. The child shook with terror, believing this uniformed man would kill him.

The chaplain coaxed him from the corpses, and he and the boy talked. He told him he was safe now, free.

Chaplain Schater and another Jewish chaplain helped take care of the Buchenwald survivors, ministering to their physical and spiritual needs for sometime to come, eventually resettling many of them in Palestine, now Israel.

There, the survivors began new lives.

(Among them was Elie Wiesel, author, humanitarian, activist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner.  About 15 years ago, I met and talked with Wiesel at length after a lecture at Missouri State University. I found him to be a gentle, loving, and Godly man. I felt as it I were in the presence of saint.)

That seven-year old from Buchenwald grew up in Israel and became a rabbi himself, Yisrael Meir Lau.  He went on to become the chief Orthodox rabbi of Israel and to write a wartime memoir, Out of the Depths, in which he tells of his meeting Rabbi Schacter.

At an event in Israel honoring Holocaust survivors, Rabbi Lau told President Barack Obama about Rabbi Schacter and thanked America for saving him and so many others.

In Holy Week, I first read about Rabbi Schacter in his obituary in The New York Times.  He had died at age 90 after a long and faithful ministry as an Orthodox rabbi in New York City.

In Buchenwald, Rabbi Schacter had seen the horrendous evil that humans can inflict upon one another--the cruely, violence, suffering and death. After the war, he continued to devote himself to serving God and humankind.

His story, and especially that of the orphan Leluk who became Rabbi Lau, is one of resurrection--of life coming out of death, of freedom coming from slavery.

As Rabbi Schacter said to the Jews of Buchenwald, "You are free!" so Jesus says in his resurrection on the third day, "You are free."

God is the victor. For the millions of people who perished in the Holocaust, to quote Isaiah, "suffering and sighing" are no more, for they are now with the God of life.

And one day we shall be with God, too, as one people sharing in our common Creator's eternal love.



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Fathers and Sons

“You’re not so different from me,” the father said to the son.

The son furrowed his brow, looking puzzled.

“Not so different from you?” he said. “You don’t know that.”

The father looked down, studying his calloused hands. He patted his son’s knee—his pant leg caked with mud—and scooted closer. They were sitting on the front step of the house’s wraparound porch.

A spring breeze rustled the maple trees. A cloud of dust kicked up on the gravel road, which wound from the highway down a lane to the farmhouse.

The father turned to his son and smiled, slightly, shaking his head in a knowing way, the way fathers do sometimes.

A year earlier, the father had said goodbye to his son. In that time, he hadn’t heard from him, didn’t know what had happened to him, whether he were alive or dead. That was the hardest thing—the not knowing.

Now, the father sat with him, looking out onto the road. His boy was a man now.

“I’ll tell you a little story, Son,” he said to him. They sat in the breeze, which carried the smell of fresh-tilled earth. Soon, it would be planting time.

“If you’re granddaddy Pete was here he’d tell you himself.”

The father told the story of a boy who didn’t like the words, “No, “You can’t,” “You shouldn’t,” “You mustn’t.” “That boy,” his father said, “was like a horse without bit or bridle. Just wanting to run free.”

He told how the boy’s parents had done everything to try “to rein him in,” to keep him from hurting himself or others, but the boy just wouldn’t listen.

All other options exhausted, the father decided to send his “wild” son off to a special boarding school, which promised in its glossy brochure “to turn a reckless young man into a responsible one.” The father believed it. He didn’t have another option.

So, off the boy went to the school. He spent a year there.

What a year that had been, the father told his son. One of Fs in the boy’s subjects, of bad conduct reports, of long-distance phone calls to and from the headmaster—until the boy reached his year of “emancipation.”

At seventeen, as he frequently had told his father, he would be free. The father almost looked forward to it. He was weary of the conflicts, the uncertainties. The father, usually on edge, wondered what the boy would do next.

Emancipated, the boy would be on his own. “I can’t wait,” the father told himself.



“Wait, Daddy,” the son said, turning to his father on that front porch. “This isn’t just a story, is it?”

The father shook his head. “No, it’s not just a story. That day I came home from boarding school was some day. Granddaddy Pete was madder than a swarm of wasps.”

“The way you can get mad, Daddy?” the son said.

“Worse. My daddy told he how disappointed he was in me, how he’d tried everything, done everything for me, and he just didn’t know what to do anymore. He’d run out of ideas.

“But I didn’t care. I was tired of being told that, ‘He was just looking out for my own good.’ I’d had years of that—of him nagging me, ‘Get an education. Make something of yourself.’

He said his father didn’t understand that he just wanted to be his own man.

There had been a lot of shouting that day, his father said. He told how his father had grabbed him by the collar of his flannel shirt. He shook him with his big hands.

“I thought he’d shake my head right off my shoulders. ’Let me go,’ I yelled. I tried to break away.

“’Let you go,” he said to me.”’I’ll let you go. I’ve tried to hang onto you too long. Go, if you want. I can’t stop you. Just go.’”

He went to his little room and packed his hand-me-down suitcase—scratched and scuffed by the years, fastened shut by straps, the lock broken long ago.

“I needed to travel light. I’d be hitching highways, hopping freight trains, until I got to the city. Then, I’d be free. I’d live.”

He went downstairs with his suitcase in hand. His mother sat on the couch in the front room. Her lap held a mound of crumbled tissues. She was crying. He’d never seen her so upset.

His father hulked before the front door. He thought his father would use his giant hands to try to stop him from going.

The father thrust a brown paper bag toward him. “’Take it. It’s yours,’ he said to me. ‘It’s what you’ve wanted. Asked for. It’s yours now.’

“My daddy gave me a bag of money. He’d been saving for me since I was a baby. For college. For my future.’

“I took it,” the father said. “I hugged Mama and said goodbye to Daddy, and off I went. I didn’t walk down that road there. I ran to the highway. Caught a ride from a trucker. My first ride to freedom. I thought.”

The father paused, remembering those days.

He went on, telling his son that he’d traveled highways and rails until he finally got to the city. What a great time he had. He ate steak and lobster, not the ham and potatoes of the farm; drank with his new-found friends, played poker, frequented the jazz clubs.

“I’d drink myself drunk,” the father said, “and then pass out. I’d wake up beside a different girl every morning. It was the same thing day to day, month to month. Until, one day, Son, that bag of cash was empty—and so was I.

“I’d spent everything and didn’t have anything to show for it. The friends I thought I had? The minute my money ran out, so did they.

“I begged food. Couldn’t afford a room, a bath, to wash my clothes. And the things I did just to survive? Waiting on the street corners ‘til somebody took pity on me. Or picked me up. Shameful things.”

The father shook his head in disbelief. He still felt regret, even shame. But that was in the past, he reminded himself.

As he told his son the story, he began to tremble. He took out a red-and-white checked hanky from his overalls. He dried his eyes, blew his nose.

What a sound he made—like the honk of a duck as it leaped from the lake into the air just before the hunter fired.

Father and son smiled at one another and, at the same time, remembered the good times and how they used to sit in that freezing duck blind, waiting, whispering, drinking black coffee out of an old thermos.

As they sat together on the porch, the father reached his arm around the son’s thin waist—he’d lost weight, the father thought—and pulled him closer, just the way he had as a child.

Quiet now, the two of them stared up the gravel road. They could hear the rumble of the big trucks on the highway as they hauled coal from the mountains of eastern Kentucky up to the railroad in Ashland.

“We’re not so different, Son,” the father said again.

The son shook his head in agreement.

They were silent for awhile on the front porch, sitting side by side, letting the sunlight fall upon their faces, the breeze play in their hair, the father’s just a few gray wisps now, the son’s thick brown hair tied back in a ponytail.

They both breathed deeply, as if drawing the moment deep inside themselves to keep forever.

The father spoke first. “So, when I saw you walking down that road right there—filthy, stinking, that suitcase of mine in your hand—I did what your granddaddy Pete did when he saw me on that road there. 

“I ran to you, threw my arms around you, and kissed you like you were a newborn. I couldn’t help myself. You'd come back to your Mama and me. This was the moment we'd prayed for."

“Oh, Daddy. You know. You understand."

“We’re not so different, Son," the father said, shaking his head. 'Yep, I do. We both were lost, but now we’re found. Dead, but now we’re alive.”