The Lord said to Moses: 2Tell the Israelites to take for me an offering; from all whose hearts prompt them to give you shall receive the offering for me. 3This is the offering that you shall receive from them: gold, silver, and bronze, 4blue, purple, and crimson yarns and fine linen, goats’ hair, 5tanned rams’ skins, fine leather,* acacia wood, 6oil for the lamps, spices for the anointing-oil and for the fragrant incense, 7onyx stones and gems to be set in the ephod and for the breastpiece. 8And have them make me a sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them.
Exodus 25:1-8
Of the blue, purple, and crimson yarns they made finely worked vestments, for ministering in the holy place; they made the sacred vestments for Aaron; as the Lord had commanded Moses. 2He made the ephod of gold, of blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and of fine twisted linen. 3Gold leaf was hammered out and cut into threads to work into the blue, purple, and crimson yarns and into the fine twisted linen, in skilled design. 4They made for the ephod shoulder-pieces, joined to it at its two edges. 5The decorated band on it was of the same materials and workmanship, of gold, of blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and of fine twisted linen; as the Lord had commanded Moses.
Exodus 39:1-5
But we appeal to you, brothers and sisters, to respect those who labor among you, and have charge of you in the Lord and admonish you; 13esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. 14And we urge you, beloved, to admonish the idlers, encourage the faint hearted, help the weak, be patient with all of them.
1 Thessalonians 5:12
The conference minister told me he wanted to come down and hear me preach this morning. Of course I was shaking in my shoes – I don’t know why – I already have my church! – but I was nervous. So I thought I would do this old sermon. That’s what I was planning to do. Then he called and said he couldn’t be here this morning, and he would be here later this afternoon. So I said, “Whew! Okay. Now, what do I really want to preach about?”
So I decided I wanted to preach 1 Thessalonians because that will be a part of our New Testament reading in our installation service – about how to become a beloved community – about how to make the sacred promise of loving one another and living in peace and love and justice. So I thought, “Well, that’s a natural. I’ll pick that for my New Testament reading.”
And I thought, “Hmmm … What shall I pick for my Old Testament reading?”
This has never happened to me before, but this is what happened: I opened my Bible – have you heard these stories before? – this has never happened to me before – I opened my Bible, and it was opened to Exodus 39, and my eyes fell down the page, and – you heard what she just read? This is what God told Moses – remember what I preached last Sunday? The slaves came out of Egypt, and they’re there camping in their big tents right in front of Mt. Sinai, and God tells Moses, “You’ve got to start a new sanctuary to worship me.” And guess what colors God told Moses the vestments of the minister of the church should be? Red, blue, and purple!
I about fell off my chair! I said, “I think the Holy Spirit is really working here!” We are connecting, as we covenant this afternoon, to our roots. We come from a long tradition, thousands of years old, that has upheld a dream of being the beloved community. Of living in sacred promise of love together. Of worshipping God in sanctuaries where we bring the red states and the blue states together in harmony and unity to become a purple vision, a purple dream of love and justice.
Forgive me; I just had to share that with you.
We have been talking about wearing purple today and using this metaphor of having red states and blue states. For those of you who haven’t heard this, remember in the election? On television they had red states and blue states. And we have an opportunity now, with a new ministry, a new millennium, a new hope, new leadership, new knowledge in the world from our mistakes. We are called into redemption and reconciliation to become a purple church. A purple nation. A purple world.
Remembering MLK
Martin Luther King Day corresponds so synergistically – as if the Holy Spirit were at work – with our week of inaugurating our president-elect, an African-American man who is a United Church of Christ beloved community member.
Martin Luther King stated that the purpose of the Montgomery bus boycott “is reconciliation, redemption, and the creation of beloved community.” This was his dream that we are going to make manifest in our church, in our country and in our world. He wrote, “It is this type of … love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men” (and women).
In 1957, in the newsletter of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King wrote: “The ultimate aim of Southern Christian Leadership Conference is to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood [and I will add, sisterhood] is a reality. . . . SCLC works for integration. Our ultimate goal is genuine intergroup and interpersonal living – integration.”
He wrote, “Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, our nation . . .” He’s talking about our beloved community being the interconnected web of life. That this is the oneness that we all need to hold in our hearts and our spirits and our souls as our dream. For we can make it manifest.
We honor Martin Luther King today, born January 15, 1929, and killed April 4, 1968.
His grandfather began the long family tradition of being a Baptist minister. His grandfather served the Ebenezer Baptist Church from 1914 to 1931. In Boston, Martin Luther King married Coretta Scott. He went to seminary. He also received a Ph.D. He had two sons and two daughters.
In 1954, Martin Luther King had an installation, and he made a sacred promise to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He had always been a strong worker for civil rights, and by this time he was a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was then the leading organization of its kind. In December 1955 – the year before I was born – he led the first great black nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, blacks and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse and unspeakable horrors for him and his family.
In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that was providing new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. Martin Luther King was a Christian Minister and his ideas of community, his courage of being able to face racism and name it, and try to have the dream of a more just society came from his Christian roots. He also was learning from Gandhi about nonviolence. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action. He wrote many books, and in fact was the inspiration for the world in Alabama, when he began registering African Americans as voters, and I’m sure all of you remember on television watching the peaceful march on Washington where 250,000 people gathered to hear his address, “l Have a Dream.” He was the youngest man to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, at age 35. And it was on the evening of April 4 of 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, that he was assassinated.
His spirit is with us today. The spirit of the dream is with our country.
Today our church will install the first woman to be the minister of this church and similarly, the spirits of Mary Magdalene, of Antoinette Brown Blackwell, and all those women who have been the first leaders in the Christian church. Their spirits are with us. Their spirit of exuberant gladness of a new age is with us.
Our Own Beloved Community
This church community and our nation are now beginning a new chapter. Our dream of a Beloved Community is more inclusive of men and women and people of all color. There is no more urgent work we can do on this planet than what we do in this church – to create beloved community. Don’t for a minute think that every way we connect with one another, we learn to love one another, we learn to love ourselves and God in this sacred community we are not doing the work of Martin Luther King’s dream and of Jesus Christ’s dream for all of us.
In 1 Thessalonians Paul urges us to become a beloved community thousands of years ago. He writes good advice for all of us: “Be at peace within yourselves and we urge you, beloved community, to admonish the idlers, encourage the faint-hearted, help the weak, be patient with all. See that none of you repay evil for evil but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God … Do not squelch the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets but test everything, hold fast to what is good, abstain from every form of evil. And may the God of peace sanctify you entirely and may your spirit and soul and body be sound.”
In our church today, we are invited to hear these words of advice. We are invited and celebrated as we sign up to become a more conscious and loving beloved community.
For if we dream it, we can create it!
We are called in this new ministry in this time of great social crisis for our country and for our world. And we are called to bring all aspects of red and blue and invite everyone to join in the dance of togetherness and beloved community. We covenant this afternoon and make a sacred promise as a church to let it be a dance we do in good times and in bad times. May all of us be followers and leaders and may we feel the rhythm and the need.
We become purple, don’t we? …in the swirl of the dance, as we join together all in different shades of red and blue. We will retain our redness and our blueness but this royal dance of beloved community gives us this gorgeous purple.
Barbara gave me a cassette tape this last week of “The King and I,” which is a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and very lovingly, Rebecca, a beautiful soprano, will be singing for us “Shall We Dance?” from that musical at the installation. There is another wonderful song in there about getting to know you. Do you remember that song? And the teacher, Anna, reflects something in the lyrics of the song that is very true: that the teacher usually learns more than the students. She expresses a great wisdom of the task at hand in any new relationship.
“It’s a very ancient saying,” she sings…
But a true and honest thought
That if you become a teacher
By your pupils you’ll be taught.
As a teacher I’ve been learning
– you’ll forgive me if I boast –
but I have now become an expert
on the subject I like the most: Getting to know you!
And getting to know you these last few months has been one of the richest, greatest joys of my life. And I thank you. I have, indeed, fallen in love with you individually and collectively as a church. I am continuously more in love with our denomination, which was the very first Christian church to ordain a woman, to ordain an African-American, to ordain gays and lesbians. We are a social justice movement that is true to the dream of Jesus Christ.
More recently, as a nation and as a denomination, we are beginning to engage in a whole new consciousness raising, about our sexuality, celebrating our sexuality, becoming an Open and Affirming church. It was one of the things you did in this church that made me love you before I came. And similarly, I fell in love with you when you were interested in me, a woman! You were interested in interviewing me and calling me as a woman! An elegant, beautiful, intelligent, loving congregation was interesting in calling me, a woman. I will always love you for that.
I love you for many reasons. You really have loved your past ministers. Many of you have shared the deep love you have for Charles Bush, for Jim Jones, and for Dickey, and I hope so much to be able to be in that dance of love between minister and congregation that you have so beautifully created in your beloved community, in your history.
A woman recently told me on the phone, “Oh! You’re from the Congregational Church?” She works at the hospital here. She said, “Your church does many good works.” I’m in love with you for all of the good works that you do. I’m proud to be here in this community, where so many people have been touched by all of the good works of this church.
I love you, of course, because of the beautiful music you create every Sunday. I can’t tell you how it feeds my very soul and how I love each and every note of it.
I love this new building! It is so magnificent. I’m so proud when I have visitors here to show them this magnificent sanctuary and this magnificent complex, and I thank Dave and Margaret Juenke and all of those who have worked to create this incredibly beautiful place of worship – a place where we can be proud to be the beloved community.
I love you for all of the programs you have. That you have created Siletz House for men in need. That you have created this beautiful backpack program for children here in Lincoln City. That we unanimously had a vote here in our annual meeting to turn out Dickey Center – the parsonage I had moved out of – into a transitional home in order to help those in need here in our city.
I love you because of the best membership program I have ever been in, where I learned more about your church and the denomination and the workings of all of you individually when I became a new member.
And I love all of you – each and every one of you. I’m called to love you; it is my honor to love you. And I will this afternoon ritualize that in a sacred covenant, and I will promise to continue to love you.
I’d like you all to find these sheets and take just a few moments if you can just do a little brainstorming. This is not anything that you put your name to. This is only for your own benefit. Some of us like to think while we are writing. So if you’d like to spend just few a moments. And before you begin, I’d just like to share with you that I have begun one, and I’ve thought of it as my new “stimulus package” for our church and community. And I want you to think about if you had a stimulus package like Obama does, what would it mean for our church? Mine is “including one hundred million acts of kindness for all of us to give to one another.” I’ve also decided to allocate a hundred million in my new stimulus package for dreams, visions, new hopes, and may each of those dreams and visions and hopes for creating beloved community be honored.
How about a hundred million in our new stimulus package for not tolerating but celebrating and exploring all the unique differences that we have, each of us, individually in this church.
How about another hundred million in this new stimulus package for every time we see the Christ or the sacredness in one another, or in all of creation.
Another hundred million for every act of kindness and charity and good works.
Think of whatever you can write, and before you do, let me just share:
I promise to do unto the least of these, and make every red and blue person in this town and in this community feel welcome at this church.
I promise to set and sustain positive, loving, and productive tone in all the work in creating beloved community together.
I promise to be patient with you, collectively and individually
I promise and to be generous to you when you are in need.
I promise to rejoice in our differences and unique gifts.
I promise to keep my sense of humor regardless of the complexity and heaviness of our work, and as Anna, the teacher in “The King and I” says, I promise to whistle a happy tune whenever I am afraid.
I promise to keep all of you here in our beloved community in my daily prayers.
I promise to take care of myself, body mind and spirit.
I promise to take responsibility for my own feelings and thoughts and I promise that if I have conflict with any of you, I will try to work it out with you, and we can’t solve it, I promise to seek reconciliation.
I promise to be honest and share my experience with you.
I promise not to gossip or engage in judgment of any of you.
I promise to honor the sacred within myself and the unique and untraditional gifts of ministry that may be emotional, feminine, artistic, and creative that I have within me.
I promise to heal and honor the sacred in you and celebrate the ways that you are different and unique and encourage you to explore your spiritual selves fully.
I promise to honor and see all the ways we are all interconnected and that we can do the cosmic spiritual dance that God has called us to do in Christian ministry.
In short I promise to love you with compassion for you and to be kind to you.
And as Anna says in “The King and I” …
By now I think I know
What it’s like to be loved by you.
I will love being loved by you too