Sermons from Park Hill Congregational UCC Denver, Colorado Rev. Dr. David Bahr [email protected] April 7, 2019 “It’s a Joy to Be Home” Psalm 126 – New Revised Standard Version When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. 2 Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things for them.” 3 The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced. 4 Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses in the Negeb. 5 May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy. 6 Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves First of all, I am thrilled to be back home and see all of you. I am filled to overflowing with gratitude for the experiences I have had in the past three months and overwhelmed with appreciation for everyone who served in my absence, foremost to Terri who clearly demonstrated she is already a gifted pastor. Amen? When she finishes seminary and gets her master’s degree, watch out! I want to thank all the exceptional preachers who took turns sharing the gospel. To Tammy who kept everything running smoothly and the rest of the staff. Members of the Governance Team and Rob who stepped up for extra duties as Moderator. To Bill McCarron, I was so excited to see this lighting project was completed. And the boilers fixed! Thank you all. The danger of naming any one person is the likelihood of leaving some person out, so when I say thank you to everyone, know that I mean YOU and all your contributions to and participation in the mission and ministry of our church. As far as I can tell, it was a positive sabbatical experience for the whole congregation which makes us stronger today than we were before. And me too. I’m not sure what adjective can best describe my sabbatical experiences. Fantastic. Phenomenal. Incredible. Amazing on steroids. Words make it sound too puny. I’ve been in ministry long enough that this was my fourth sabbatical. This was extra-ordinary. I remember how burned out I was before my first one in 1999. I spent a quiet two months in a monastery outside Santa Fe healing, being fed, and renewing my spiritual life. My second sabbatical in 2005 was very different. I had just completed all the research for my doctoral program so I used the sabbatical to compile and write my dissertation. My sabbatical in 2013 was part of a larger healing journey not from burn out but from some painful experiences. I didn’t know I was on a healing journey until the end when I was getting ready to leave Bangkok and found myself plopped up against a tree crying. Like, really crying. But after that, the whole rest of my sabbatical made sense. And it was indeed healing. So this time, when I found myself crying again, I was sitting on a plane leaving Sri Lanka on my way back to Bangkok. I had to ask, “What’s going on now?!” But I quickly realized I wasn’t sad that I was leaving Sri Lanka. I was simply so full of joy that I couldn’t keep it all inside and it was leaking out. I just felt complete and total joy for having been there, for three weeks of one joyful experience after another. When I thought more about how to describe the feeling, I felt clean; like I had had a bath to wash off all the toxic residue of living in America today. All that joy continued through the rest of my travels up to and including last weekend when Art and I went on our last hike. We were in Estes Park. It had been gray and snowy for two days. On Sunday morning, though, we awoke to a bright sky. We went back into Rocky Mountain National Park and the snow off the mountains was blindingly breathtaking against the pure blue sky. We kept stopping to take pictures. One more. As we drove back to Denver, I told him I was really excited to be returning. So, as I thought about my sermon for today, I didn’t want it to be a travelogue, “Here’s what I did,” but rather a sermon. I waited to read the lectionary texts to guide me and then marveled at the synchronicity. I had just spent months experiencing joy in one way after another, cleansed from the toxic soup of our country for a moment, and the first text I read was Psalm 126: When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, We were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, And our tongue with shouts of joy; The Lord has done great things for them. The Lord has done great things for us And we rejoiced. The last few verses abbreviated: May those who sow in tears, Reap with shouts of joy Those who go out weeping, Shall return home with shouts of joy. The prominence of the word joy in the text and the predominance of joyful experiences during my sabbatical made me feel like God was saying, welcome home. As I compiled all my Facebook posts and pictures into a sort of “book,” I created a top ten list of experiences. I want to tell you about three of them. The first one was terrifying. The second was all about enduring. And the third was gruesome. First, terror. I was very excited to enter my first Hindu kovil, their place of worship. So far on my trip, I had been in beautiful mosques, especially the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, as well as churches, and lots of Buddhist temples, but this would be my first time in a kovil. My knowledge of Hinduism was, and still is, woefully lacking and completely absent about what happens during their regular religious ceremonies. My guide and companion through Sri Lanka, Naswar, who is Muslim, took me to the largest kovil in Jaffna just in time for the 10 am Friday “service.” Despite the heat, I wore long pants and carried a shirt with sleeves just in case. To enter many Buddhist sites, shoulders and knees must be covered. A few days before, I had walked around a temple with my shorts halfway down my hips in order to cover my knees, so this time I was prepared. But I wasn’t prepared when I discovered that to enter a kovil, men must remove their shirts. When Naswar went to ask if we could enter, he came back with the terrifying news – at least to me. If I wanted to go in, I would have to be half-naked and barefoot. I don’t even take my shirt off at home so the idea that I would have to do this in front of hundreds of strangers was…. Flashbacks to locker rooms in junior high. But, to experience this literally once in a lifetime opportunity, I had to get over myself. Now. It was 10 o’clock and the service/ceremony was starting. Naswar was totally up for it. He loves to take his shirt off. His other job is as a model. In fact, a few weeks ago he won another “top model” trophy in a world competition in Indonesia. So, I placed my hope that people would look at him instead of me. But the truth is, in the end, no one looked at either of us. They were there to worship. We all had our shirts off and it wasn’t all pretty. We went in and I got to experience what Hindus do when they gather weekly. I felt honored to be there, but even more so, out of my terror, I left absolutely consumed with joy. I even took my shirt off again later that afternoon to get into the Indian Ocean. So, endurance. One of the things you may have heard me talk about before my trip was climbing Adam’s Peak, the tallest mountain in Sri Lanka. But it’s not just a hike. It’s a religious pilgrimage in the middle of the night in order to arrive in time for sunrise. There is a Buddhist temple at the top, but it’s a journey taken by all religions. I knew it would be hard. I knew it could be very crowded. That the weather at the top might not cooperate. I read all about it. Seven-mile round trip, 3,000-foot elevation gain, and all of it on concrete steps, 5,000 of them. Six hours on steps. Art and I trained at Red Rocks, going up and down from the stage to the plaza. To match it would be to do it 38 times. Or imagine climbing the steps to the top of the cash register building downtown five times. And then walking back down those steps five times. Except that would be far too easy. Those steps are all the same size and there are handrails to lean on all the way. On the journey up and down Adam’s Peak, however, no two steps are the same height, varying from 2 to 18 inches, or depth, varying from a few inches to a few feet. But for most of those seven miles, there’s no stretch of flat ground longer than maybe 12 to 15 feet. And there is nothing to hold on to for most of the journey. It wasn’t hot, in fact it was chilly nearing the top, but it was humid. I walked with rain falling from my head, but it wasn’t raining. I was just that soaked in perspiration. About 4:30 in the morning, I was ready to call it quits. Even though I couldn’t imagine having to come home and say that I hadn’t made it, I had nothing left. I sent a picture of the steps to Art and then the words, “this is killing me.” Except the picture didn’t go through. Not enough signal. And if the text went through, all he would have known is that something was killing me – perhaps an animal, or a picture snapped as I was plunging off a cliff. It was four hours until I could check back in with him to say that I was still alive. Other people were struggling too, so we kind of cheered each other on as we passed back and forth. A man handed me some kind of homemade food and insisted I eat it. We didn’t speak each other’s languages, so I wasn’t sure if what he gave me might make me high or maybe give me diarrhea, but that’s the kind of thing you risk. So I shared half a Clif bar with him too. His tasted better. Among the climbers were people of all ages. It was the grandmothers with gray hair climbing barefoot in long white dresses that gave me the most inspiration; that is, when I wasn’t feeling embarrassed that I couldn’t keep up with them. I was told that the more times someone climbed to the top, the better “upgrade in heaven” they would receive, which is why this was so popular among the elderly. I just kept grinding it out. Resting and climbing. Resting longer and climbing a little less until I finally saw the top. I thought. I used the altimeter on my phone to check that this was it. But it was a false summit. Another 1,000 feet up. The last part was even steeper than the rest. But, in the end, I did it. I arrived on the last final step at 5:45. I turned around and saw the first orange sliver in the sky. I made it at exactly sunrise. The sky was perfect. Enough clouds to give it some drama. I endured and saw the most glorious sunrise of my life, with hundreds of people packed on top of each other outside the gates of a Buddhist temple, with whom we would now have to walk down those 5,000 steps. My legs hurt like hell. But I was so happy and full of joy, it was… well, not any easier. The third among my top ten experiences was not joyful but terrible and gruesome and grim. A pastor friend and I went to Montgomery, Alabama, to see the new memorial to victims of lynching. The memorial itself is oddly beautiful even though represents some of the ugliest parts of our American story. There are 800 large rectangles the size and shape of coffins. As you walk, the floor descends and the boxes hang higher and higher over you, like you can imagine someone hanging from a tree. Each coffin-shaped-object represents one county with a documented lynching. Some counties had one name, others had dozens of names. There were other signs along the wall too. There was a plaque for Calvin Kimblern who was lynched in Pueblo in 1900, in front of a cheering mob of 3,000 men, women, and children who had been let out of school for the day. Like I said, the memorial is hauntingly beautiful, masterfully done, and as emotionally engaging as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. There is also an accompanying Legacy Museum. All of it the brainchild of Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative. The museum was built in what was an actual slave market. The museum takes visitors through an emotionally brutal experience, from holograms of slaves crying out from behind bars, asking where are my children? And then, when slavery was outlawed, images of lynching, and when lynching was no longer in fashion, the emergence of Jim Crow laws. But the story didn’t end there. As Jim Crow laws were declared unconstitutional, still new forms of deadly racism continued to develop in their place, including drug wars that led to descriptions of children as super-predators and their mass incarceration, and overcrowded prisons for profit, and a vast increase in the death penalty ordered by judges over the objections of juries. And the killing of unarmed black men, always presumed guilty first, by police. Among the exhibits, you can sit behind glass and listen on a phone as though you are talking with an inmate, including Anthony Ray Hinton who was on death row for 30 years for a crime he didn’t, nor could he have, committed, except that he was framed for being a poor black man in Alabama without real representation. Nobody would care. Just another means of lynching. I read, and recommend, his gripping autobiography.[1] Just this week a black man and his nephew were released after 43 years on death row.[2] Exonerated. Who, of course, shouldn’t have been on trial in the first place if they weren’t black and presumed guilty first. After 2 or 3 hours in the museum I told Chris I needed to go to church. I couldn’t imagine any other way of putting everything into perspective to help me process it. I needed church. We went to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. But first we visited the parsonage where Dr. King and Coretta lived when he was their pastor during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The house had their actual furnishings. We saw the couch where he sat with his children. We saw the dining room table where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was born and the punch set that Coretta used to provide refreshments. The phone in the kitchen on which Dr. King received so many death threats and the hole in the porch where a bomb was thrown. And the study where Dr. King wrote his speeches and sermons. Then we went to his church. The tour guide bubbled over with joy. She loved what she was doing. The tour ended in the sanctuary in the late afternoon. The sun started to wash the colors of the stained glass windows over the pews. Like it does in here. At that point I was about a week away and not quite ready to return from sabbatical. But this felt like a sign that brought everything full circle. In that moment, I was ready to come back. It was a gruesome and terrible day that ended with anticipation that I was ready to get back to the mission of our congregation to proclaim that God is love and Black Lives Matter. I didn’t really want my first sermon back to be a travelogue, but after reading a scripture so infused with joy, I didn’t know what else to do but speak of the joy that arises out of terror. Joy that appears in the sunrise when we endure. And the joy that comes after weeping. Perhaps you can remember your own experiences of joy rooted in pain. And perhaps you can hear hope in my story that joy waits in the morning for you too. It’s good to back. It’s a joy to be home. [1] The Sun Does Shine [2] https://eji.org/news/florida-man-exonerated-and-released-43-years-after-wrongful-conviction-and-death-sentence
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