Text: Isaiah 58:1-12; Mathew 5:13-20

Speaker: Joel Miller

In Isaiah chapter 58, the prophet is in full prophet mode, dialed up to 10.  It begins as if the Lord is giving Isaiah a bit of a pep talk, a locker room huddle of sorts before the prophet steps out and does his prophetic thing.  “Shout out loud, do not hold back!  Lift your voice life a shofar!  Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.”

And this is what Isaiah does.

As the prophets before and after him did, Isaiah directs his outcry not against those outside the community – enemy armies, foreigners, immigrants, but on the moral and spiritual condition of those inside the community – his own people.

Walter Brueggemann has taught that the role of the prophet is to criticize the status quo, and then energize toward a new, life affirming future.  Criticize and energize.  We can imagine those as the final words of every pep talk every prophet ever got from the Lord.

Isaiah focuses his shout-like-a-shofar message on the practice of fasting.  How the people were abusing this religious practice – abusing each other while engaging in this practice.  How they were approaching it as some kind of quid pro quo arrangement for divine favor.  I do this for you – carry out this rigorous act of fasting – and you, God, do a little something for me.

But God isn’t playing along, and the people are upset.

Isaiah is upset.

He points out that these fasters who are lying around in sackcloth and ashes might want to start by paying their workers a fair wage — and this is where he starts to turn the corner toward the energize part….true fasting, he declares, is loosening the bonds of injustice, letting the oppressed go free, making sure the hungry…

Text: Genesis 11:1-9

Speaker: Joel Miller

We humans have a long history of migration and settlement.  If you want to go way back, there’s evidence human species have been wandering across continents and over waters for at least two million years.  More recently, a mere 70,000 years ago or thereabouts, migration out of Africa eventually led to a dispersal of modern humans just about everywhere we can survive.  As groups migrated, settled, and migrated again, they formed unique cultures and languages, sometimes developing in isolation, sometimes intermingling with near and even far away peoples.  Then, about 500 years ago, as anthropologist Adam Kuper writes, “the history of human population began to come together again into a single process, for the first time since the origin of modern humans.” (1) We have called this “globalization.”

That’s a rough outline of how we currently tell the story of how the world got to be the way it is today.  It’s now an interconnected world where you can eat McDonalds in Egypt, where Japanese cars are made in central Ohio, where you can click a button and have an item made by Chinese workers delivered to your doorstep the next day.  A world where humans have had such a massive influence that even the wind and the weather bear our footprint.  This is the world in which the six of you – Carolina, Zac, Gabe, Lydia, Mario, Nina are coming of age.

There are other ways of telling this story, and Genesis chapter 11 is one of them.  It’s the final chapter of the opening section in Genesis scholars sometimes call “primordial history.”  The stories are best understood as myth and parable.  And if you think myth makes something less real, consider for a bit how profound an impact even a short phrase still has on our…

Texts: Matthew 4:1-11; 5:13-14

Speaker: Amy Huser: Sustainability and Outdoor Education Director at Camp Friedenswald

About a year or so ago I was sitting in the Electric Brew, a coffee shop in Goshen, with Doug Kaufman, the Director of Pastoral Ecology for the Mennonite organization – Center for Sustainable Climate Solutions – talking about climate change – and he brought up the topic of lament as it relates to our work in this area,  “It is very important to lament what is happening to the earth, and lament is a place that the church and pastors can really provide support for people – they know how to handle grief.”  I paused, and then replied, “Pastors are really into lament, aren’t they?  I’d rather talk about hope and action.”  Luckily Doug didn’t get up and leave in offence at my almost impolite comment, although he may have wondered if I am a true Mennonite – speaking in such a blunt manner!

The truth is – at that point I’d developed a pretty strong aversion to the words lament and grief. 

This was partially due to a pretty intense season of grief I went through a number of years before – around 2014 – grief over the lack of will or action in our social and political institutions to solve climate change – and along with that, the full realization that individual lifestyle changes could not come close to creating the conditions necessary for a sustainable world.  We needed a complete transformation of our social and economic systems at a global scale.  This realization hit me hard. 

Mennonites (along with lots of other folks) like to work hard to make the world a better place.  We highly value our sense of agency.  One of the major faults of the sustainability movement is the…

https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/20200119sermon.mp3

The first half of the audio is a historical reading of Mennonite Central Committee, and three members briefly telling of the MCC service experiences.  The sermon begins around the 17 minute mark.

Text: 2 Corinthians 5:18-20

Back in 2004, I had the opportunity to attend the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions in Barcelona, Spain.  Along with being happy to just be there, I was especially interested in how these different philosophies and religions would find common ground.  I attended seminars with titles like: “Middle East stories: The significance of the Holy Land in our Sacred Texts,” “A Buddhist-Christian dialogue on responses to environmental violence,” “Interreligious dialogue and non-negotiable dogmas.”  In between seminars there was plenty of time for random conversations with whoever I found sitting or walking next to me, most of them not Christian or American.

One of the things I remember most, now 16 years later, had nothing to do with theological dialogue.  It related to something we all had in common: We all had to eat.  There were plenty of options.  One of them was in a large tent by the conference center.  Every day of the Parliament members of the Sikh religion prepared, cooked, served and cleaned up a free lunch for everyone who wanted to eat with them.  Being a poor seminary student, I went every day.  So did many others.

As we learned, this meal had a name: Langar.  A langar is, by definition, a vegetarian meal Sikhs serve out of a community kitchen that is open to everyone, regardless of religion, race, economic status, etc.

At a large conference about religious cooperation and understanding, the langar enacted what those seminars with fascinating names, and pretty fascinating content, spoke of.

I must say, it’s eye opening to be on the receiving end of hospitality, to experience…

https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/20200119sermon.mp3

The first half of the audio is a historical reading of Mennonite Central Committee, and three members briefly telling of the MCC service experiences.  The sermon begins around the 17 minute mark.

Text: 2 Corinthians 5:18-20

Speaker: Joel Miller

Back in 2004, I had the opportunity to attend the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions in Barcelona, Spain.  Along with being happy to just be there, I was especially interested in how these different philosophies and religions would find common ground.  I attended seminars with titles like: “Middle East stories: The significance of the Holy Land in our Sacred Texts,” “A Buddhist-Christian dialogue on responses to environmental violence,” “Interreligious dialogue and non-negotiable dogmas.”  In between seminars there was plenty of time for random conversations with whoever I found sitting or walking next to me, most of them not Christian or American.

One of the things I remember most, now 16 years later, had nothing to do with theological dialogue.  It related to something we all had in common: We all had to eat.  There were plenty of options.  One of them was in a large tent by the conference center.  Every day of the Parliament members of the Sikh religion prepared, cooked, served and cleaned up a free lunch for everyone who wanted to eat with them.  Being a poor seminary student, I went every day.  So did many others.

As we learned, this meal had a name: Langar.  A langar is, by definition, a vegetarian meal Sikhs serve out of a community kitchen that is open to everyone, regardless of religion, race, economic status, etc.

At a large conference about religious cooperation and understanding, the langar enacted what those seminars with fascinating names, and pretty fascinating content, spoke of.

I must say, it’s eye opening to be on the receiving end of hospitality,…