While God speaks to us through the scriptures about abundance, the stories this week demonstrate that sometimes abundance is hard to believe. Many of us are raised to understand what is fair and what is not, often developing a strong “justice-muscle” that reacts when we perceive injustice. The young child part of ourselves that screams “that’s not fair!” develops over our lifetime as we learn to advocate for our wants and needs and the wants and needs of others. God’s message to us through these stories, the story of Job and the story of the workers and their supervisor, is similar to the story of the Prodigal Son. What appears to us—the worker, the person doing the right thing the whole time, and the older son—as an injustice, is actually God demonstrating abundance and generosity. These stories are also a reminder that our perception of injustice is often limited in scope. We react to a specific system and the injustices we feel, but we often forget about other systems at play.

The theme of this week's scriptures is forgiveness. It's a rich and tricky subject that warrants great exploration and internal wrestling. There is forgiving others with its hard and humbling process and there is forgiving ourselves. After another restless sleep with my 10 month old, as I try to write out this sermon, I am finding that I need some grace, God's unconditional forgiveness, as my exhausted mind and spirit meet a blank page. So instead of a message this week, I offer you several links to other Friends (and non-Friends) who have wrestled with forgiveness. May their messages and the Spirit through them be of some insight, some comfort, and some challenge to you. 

It has been another week where the events that keep on coming and coming feel like the end times. People all over the continent are evacuating their homes and their lands because of fires, floods, and storms. Wildfires rage across the western coast of North America and smoke can been seen for hundreds of miles. Hurricane Harvey left Houston underwater and Hurricane Irene threatens the Caribbean and the southeastern part of the United Sates. While we wait, watching the news in every public place that has a TV for updates about wind speeds and storm paths, the U.S. government is in the process of ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. This means that thousands upon thousands of families are not only at risk of losing their homes and their lives from the weather, but are also facing the possible deportation of even their youngest of children. Lord have mercy!

I’m writing this in the darkness of the night. My teething son did not want to go to bed tonight. After many attempts and some creative experiments, we are back to the old tried and true technique. I’m wearing him in the front carrier while I type on the computer. The computer is set on our high kitchen counter and we are swaying as I type. The only light around me comes from the dimmed computer screen and the not yet full moon that is streaming through the skylight. It’s a quiet darkness. It’s a peaceful darkness. It’s a welcomed darkness. And I have chocolate.

Paul’s message in Romans 12 is for us to surrender to the transformation. It’s a message of resistance, to resist the patterns of this world and be renewed by the Inner Light. It is not a comfortable experience and it is often hard and messy work, but like receiving a message to share in worship, we can’t not do it.

This past week the events of Charlottesville, Virginia, have dominated my prayers, my thoughts, and my attention. I admit to feelings of anger, rage, sadness, depression, apathy, immobility and hopelessness. At the same time, I’ve been caring for my 9 month old son who is mobile now and seeing the world for the first time. So my emotional life has been exhausting, watching terrifying videos about the Alt-lite/Alt-right group and then a moment later laughing while saving our cat from my squealing son who just sat on her in delight.This week isn’t the first time that I’ve thought about how to raise my son in this country; how to raise my white, middle-class son to be conscious, awake, compassionate, and aware. This week, though, I’ve spent hours reading to him from books that are about black people, talking to him about white supremacy and racism and playing with his multi-racial dolls while teaching him to be kind. He’s nine months and not verbal yet so these conversations are more for me and they are of course a drop in the bucket of what I could be doing, but I’m hopeful that over time our family can learn to create a culture that is pushing back on white supremacy.

I am writing this week from the Annual Sessions of New England Yearly Meeting. The theme for this gathering has been Living into Transformation, which references Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good, and acceptable and perfect.” (NIV)It has been a week of wrestling with angels. Often last week’s scripture, the story of Jacob and the angel, has come to mind as the New England Yearly Meeting body of Friends have revisited last year’s minutes on climate change and on white supremacy and we have wrestled with our humanity, we have wrestled with our sins, and we have wrestled with God.

The miracle of Jesus feeding the 5000 is a story about limits and possibilities being blown open. It is a story where the planning and expectations of the disciples does not equal the vast resources of people’s hearts and of God. It is a stone soup story, where it seems like there is a limited amount of food and that there just isn’t enough for everyone, but then there is. Something amazing happens when we put our faith in other people and we put our faith in God. It’s a kind of divine multiplication.

It’s been a hard week for our country. We’ve been hit hard by everything around both the health care bill and Trump’s announcement discharging trans people from the U.S. military. More and more people I know are sick and hurting. Even the Red Sox are doing poorly. It seems that another wave of mourning is occurring; one of many now since last November. Wave after wave has come over the past many months now, waves of fear, disappointment, pain, and grief have left many of us without faith. What do we pray for? Is God listening? Is God punishing us?

Reading Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds, I was reminded of my own garden. I peer through the tomato plants and peppers that I planted and find all sorts of other things popping up and growing. Are they weeds? Are they some plant that the most recent owner planted that came back after the long winter? Are they medicinal wild food that I should nurture and harvest? I don’t know yet.

It's that time again, ordinary time by the liturgical calendar, but anything but ordinary with high summer temperatures, clear sunny skies, and the occasional steamy thunderstorm. It's almost mid July and the corn is past our knees, strawberry season has come and gone and now the blueberries have started ripening. While mornings here in Vermont are still cool and crisp, are gardens are bearing fruit and their neighbors the weeds are alive and thriving.

The story of the mustard seed comes to us during this time of agricultural business. Perhaps it is some Western Hemisphere liturgical leftover from bygone days of everyday farming. Or perhaps the story is placed in our scriptural cycle to help us pause and take notice of the miracles all around us; miracles of seeds growing into plants, bearing our food, connecting us back to the earth and back to the presence of God all around us.

Lectio Divina is a contemplative practice of reading scripture and noticing what stands out to you. A traditionally Benedictine practice, Lectio Divina invites the reader into a living relationship with the scripture. This living relationship reminds me of the Quaker belief in continuing revelation: God is continually reveling to us truth and light through our experiences of scripture, our experiences of worship, and our experiences of each other.

New to me was one of these practices: the practice of praying with icons. While Quakers don’t use icons in their worship, I’ve been fascinated by Greek, Russian and Byzantine icons for quite some time. I have seen them in churches and museums around the world and sensed a depth in them, a mystery.

I didn’t grow up with the language of sin. My parents raised me with healthy moral constructs of right and wrong, but sin, as most commonly understood through the Catholic tradition, was not part of my vernacular. Sure, I had heard the term. My grandparents were Catholic and so were many of my classmates. I saw people going into confessionals in movies and asked questions about it. Generally what I was told was that sin was something bad that someone did; something so bad that if God didn’t forgive that person, then that person would go to hell.

This week I’ve been carrying the scriptures around with me with a heavy heart. I have a friend going in for major surgery today and another friend whose son is suffering from the effects of childhood cancer treatment. A family friend has a very young nephew who is undergoing the same treatment for cancer and my social networks feel like they are full of people who are hurting. I’ve struggled with what to bring in this message this week because the reality around me feels so dissonant with the scriptural message. The scriptures this week talk about bodies.

This scripture prompts us to consider that of God in ourselves and in each other and the relationship there-in. Martin Buber, a prominent Jewish theologian is famous for his I-Thou theology. He writes that for us to know God better we must know each other better; that our relationships with other people and other parts of creation inform and enrich our understanding of our relationship with God. Most of us walk around engaging in an I-It relationship with the world. This is a contractional relationship; we seek what we want from others and refrain from deep intimacy, vulnerability, and transformation. God calls us into I-Thou relationships with others where we bring the kind of reverence, respect and deepness that we bring to and seek from our relationship with God into our relationships with others.This scripture prompts us to consider that of God in ourselves and in each other and the relationship there-in. Martin Buber, a prominent Jewish theologian is famous for his I-Thou theology. He writes that for us to know God better we must know each other better; that our relationships with other people and other parts of creation inform and enrich our understanding of our relationship with God. Most of us walk around engaging in an I-It relationship with the world. This is a contractional relationship; we seek what we want from others and refrain from deep intimacy, vulnerability, and transformation. God calls us into I-Thou relationships with others where we bring the kind of reverence, respect and deepness that we bring to and seek from our relationship with God into our relationships with others.

In the Religious Society of Friends there exists the belief of the ministry of all believers. We believe that each person has gifts of the Spirit, that each person is a minister, and that each person has the responsibility to steward those gifts in their own lives. We are also deeply conflicted about whether recognizing those gifts in each other is a good idea.

It may come as no surprise to many of you reading this, but most of the messages that we are inundated with daily don’t want us to be happy. That’s right—the world doesn’t want us to be happy. Millions upon millions of dollars are invested daily on advertisements and product placements that depend on us being (among other things) unsatisfied, depressed, self-deprecating, angry, and lonely. Capitalism itself is a system built on the belief that we don’t have enough and that we aren’t enough. And while this is good for business, good for job creation and stability, and good for the way the world runs, it ultimately feeds on our experiences and feelings of scarcity. On top of that, social media helps us feel inadequate and the poisons in our environment (social and physical) leave us ill, alone, and hurting.

So then, what is counter-cultural, what is surprising and unexpected, what is subversive is this: be happy.

Friday evening as a group we watched a documentary, called The Sultan and the Saint, named after a book by Paul Moses. It will be coming out on PBS later this year—we received special permission to watch it while we were together in Assisi. The film tells the story of Francis of Assisi and his call to love the world. The story follows him as he travels to appeal to the Christian leaders of the Crusades, pleading with them to preach the message of love and salvation to the Muslim opposition rather than to kill in the name of Christ. While the Christian leaders scoff at Francis’ plea, they do let him try to cross enemy lines to preach to the Sultan of Egypt directly. Francis succeeds in reaching the Sultan and is known to have developed a friendship with the Sultan, exchanging knowledge of each others’ religions, breaking bread together, and even preaching in the Sultan’s court. 

Being in Assisi, Italy, is an experience of stone roads, beautiful churches, and a deep sense of layers upon layers of history. Reading the scripture for this week I was reminded of St. Francis’ experience of God talking to him while Francis was kneeling at the foot of the San Damiano Cross. “Rebuild my church,” God told him, and so he did. Francis took this command very literally and spent years working to rebuild the church of San Damiano brick by brick, stone by stone.