Service of the Word
10:00am 12 October 2025
Luke 17:11-19
SERMON Present Moment
If you heard me describe the absence of interfaith awareness in my childhood, you might think I grew up in Frog Holler, Alabama or some such place.
In fact, I grew up in the Tidewater area of Virginia, and while not exactly multi-cultural Chicago, it was a populated and diverse metro, even back in the era before the globalized Neo-liberal economy.
We were far from Native American populations and the rich cultural mix of the border regions, but the huge military presence brought people to Norfolk and Virginia Beach. I knew where there was a Jewish congregation, was part of a Boy Scout troop sponsored by a Catholic Church, marveled at the Chinese newspapers of the longtime immigrant who bought the house behind us, but knew nothing about those other religions. The closest I came to a multicultural experience was the religions and cultures of Middle Earth, for like any little nerdy boy of my era, I was into all things Tolkien, and before long, all things Dungeons and Dragons.
It would only be as an adult that I would learn about variations in Christianity, and eventually non-Christian religions. The first that really caught my attention was Buddhism. A friend encouraged me to read “Seven Years in Tibet” by Heinrich Harrer, opening the door to Tibetan Buddhism and the cause of the Tibetan people: the nation swallowed by Communist China, the culture slowly erased by Han Chinese. While Harrer’s story turned out to be problematic, and by problematic I mean Nazi, I went on to learn about other forms of Buddhism, at the moment Zen and Japanese culture became a fad in business thinking.
One of the first books on Buddhist practice that I read was “The Miracle of Mindfulness” by Thich Nhat Hanh, already a classic by the 1990’s, having first appeared in 1975. Those first audiences would have known him in his original cultural context. Though he had spent time studying and teaching in the United States, at Princeton Theological, Columbia, and Cornell, he returned to Vietnam in 1963, and was a peace activist throughout the war years, though he was forced to flee to France in 1966, as the United States-backed regime equated “peace” with “communism.”
Some things never change.
Though I would not know it until many years later, Nhat Hanh was connected to two other important members of my Twentieth Century Ordo, visiting the Trappist monk and contemplative teacher Thomas Merton at the Gethsemani Abbey, and meeting with the Rev. Dr. King, who Nhat Hanh urged to condemn the Vietnam War, something King would do the following year at a historic United Church of Christ congregation in Manhattan. Funny how it is all connected.
It was from Nhat Hanh, and especially his 1997 teaching and book “The Heart of Understanding,” that I came to understand inter-being, sometimes labeled “emptiness” in the English language, and from all of his works, going right back to “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” I came to understand the power of the present moment.
This afternoon, I’ll once again chase after Micah 6:8, though again use Nhat Hanh as a touchstone. This morning, it is Nhat Hanh that I turn, or maybe that other great school of philosophy I admire, Pearl Jam, with Eddie Vedder singing “It makes more sense to live in the present tense.”
Nhat Hanh might say something like this: When you wash the dishes, only wash the dishes. When you peel an orange, only peel the orange.
This is mindfulness, and pretty much the opposite of the way we live, completely the opposite of end-stage Neo-liberal capitalism, which must always tell us we are less so that we will buy more.
We drag around a long bag of regrets and mistakes and resentments, replaying the past again and again. We obsess over the terrible things that might happen or the fantastic things we want to happen, the former more than the latter, for as our brains got bigger, so did our creativity in imagining and sometimes creating disaster. We long for the ineffective anesthesia of a new car or the right cologne that will make us feel like we matter, forgetting that we always did.
Nhat Hanh, who died in 2022 at the age of 95, wanted us to still our minds, to just peel the orange, and folding the Heart Sutra back onto our mindful moment, to understand that the orange is the universe, is miracle, as is our mind.
This is not an insight restricted to Buddhism. The Medieval Christian mystic we call Julian of Norwich wrote that Jesus “shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.”
That orange is a miracle, an improbability in an improbable universe. The smell, the taste, the texture, the hand that peels, the technology that transports it.
And it is my firm belief that if we are in the present moment, and by are I really mean are, fully present through the magic of contemplative practice or a perfect cup of coffee on the back deck as a Pentecost of finches flutters around the feeder, if we are fully in that moment, I believe we can experience inter-being or what the groundbreaking German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher called utter dependence and an epiphany of gratitude.
Being sick sucked. But this orange is lovely. And I have done nothing to earn this next breath. It is pure grace, as ephemeral as seeing that breath on that first frosty morning.
The present moment might sort of suck, but it is a moment, this moment, filled with God’s maybe if we can just let go of our nope.
And maybe, as Siddhartha discovered, as Thich Nhat Hanh taught, mindfulness of the present moment can change the world. As our great sage of spiritual messiness Anne Lamott wrote in her 2012 bestseller “Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayer,”
“Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.”
Wisdom comes with dreadlock and a sponsor. Many of us read her as a struggling single mother in recovery, out there on the frontiers of faith, and here she is, a granny, and still sharing wisdom in this present moment.
Only peel the orange. Look at that thing! Really look! This is the present moment the Lord has made, and She is amazing. Amen.
Service of Celebration and Rededication
150th Anniversary of the Dedication of The Park Church Sacntuary
2:00pm 12 October 2025
Micah 6:6-8
HOMILY Verbs
Jesus was a man of action. He healed people, fed people, taught people, and on at least one occasion, flipped some tables that most certainly needed to be flipped.
Paul, who did not know Jesus, created a religion that was more about belief than it was about action. The situation only got worse in the centuries that followed, as Christians tried to figure out what the life and ministry of Jesus had meant, and as empire coopted the religion, for empire does not like independent thought or action. Better to have monks and priests bitterly debating how Jesus was both divine and human than to have them focused on the people that were starving. The same is still true today. Empire would have you focus on things that do not matter.
But a funny thing happened during the period we call the Enlightenment. Human knowledge reached a tipping point. Incremental change gave way to discontinuous change in ways that were often unsettling, the sort of thing we all experienced around the turn of our century. Stories that made meaning for pre-scientific cultures lost their interpretive power during the Enlightenment. Heaven can’t be “up” on a spherical planet orbiting a star in a massive galaxy that is one among many. Some responded by giving up the faith entirely, unable to separate myth from morals. Others dug in. It is no surprise that Christian Fundamentalism originates in the decades after Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” which challenged human exceptionalism.
Fundamentalist Christians were and are the loudest, with Fundamentalist Atheists not far behind. But there has always been a “third way” in the Christian tradition. Darwin was not yet a teenager when the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher’s masterpiece, a systematic theology titled “The Christian faith according to the principles of the evangelical church,” was published, offering an approach to Christianity that did not depend on checking the boxes of ancient dogma and creed.
Other innovative thinkers would follow, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who delivered his seismic Harvard Divinity School Address four years after Schleiermacher died. At North Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut, Horace Bushnell was preaching a progressive Christianity. And in 1854, a man influenced by Bushnell’s work, and man raised in a family of enlightened and engaged Christians, was called as the pastor of the Independent Congregational Church in Elmira, New York.
This congregation was not formed in some theological schism over transubstantiation or infant baptism or the Trinitarian nature of the godhead. This congregation was formed because there was something real and evil happening, humans held in brutal chattel slavery, murder with impunity, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 required that good Christians in Elmira be not just indirectly involved in an economy built on stolen labor and stolen lives, but directly involved in returning escaped slaves. By the time the Reverend Thomas K. Beecher arrived in Elmira, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had doubled down on evil, making the founders of this church criminals in their work of liberation.
We know how that struggle ended, with over a million combatants and non-combatants dead and no reparations, establishing an inequality that haunts us to this day.
Slavery having been mostly abolished, the Rev. Beecher and the congregation searched for a new identity. They found it in what the pastor called “practical Christianity,” an idea already embedded in the Congregational tradition, in the new post-Enlightenment theology. One expression of that “practical” faith was the construction of this building, always meant to serve all of the people of Elmira.
The Park Church, congregation and building, was never a monument to the ego of one man, not meant to be a monument to the ego of some co-dependent divine monstrosity in the sky. It was and is about people. It was and is about community and learning and fitness and all things practical and real.
Our faith is not checking abstract boxes. We follow a faith of action. This is our locker room, where we come together to learn, to strategize, and to prepare to serve the world.
We draw inspiration from the faith of Jesus, from the Book of the Prophet Micah in the Tanakh.
Do justice. Embrace faithful love. Walk humbly with your God.
These are verbs.
Jesus himself, in the powerful teaching recorded in the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew, tells us that what we have done to the least among us, we have done also to the Master, an ancient analog for our Creator.
What you have done! Done! What you have done to the least among you, you have done unto me.
Verbs.
I am not going to pretend that we always know what to do these days, but we do our best to do, to be practical Christians in the way of Thomas K. Beecher, and to make this a house not to God’s ego, but for God’s people.
A house where addicts support one another, where people sing and form community, where teens learn discipline through boxing and where poets can be co-creators of the holy. It is a place where skaters with more tattoos than me can strategize and plan, where queer folk can laugh and can dance in a time when they no longer feel safe.
I could go on, for I believe this “House of God” is indeed a “House of the People of God,” and that as so many churches decline, sit empty day after day, we continue to live into that original vision, even as we confess that the evils that inspired this church never truly went away, that humankind, in unholy creativity, has invented all new evils. We have not yet reached the finish line.
May we rededicate this Sanctuary today as a safe space for those wounded by the world, as a place of healing and respite. And then, recharged, may we go out into the world, just, loving, and humble.
Amen.