On Sunday in church, I talked about the Berlin Wall. It was built in 1961 to keep the people of East Germany from crossing over to West Germany. The wall separated the German people from one another. In some instances, parents could not see their children and grandparents could not see their grandchildren. Brothers and sisters lived a few hundred yards apart but had no direct contact for over a quarter of a century. When the East German government finally allowed people to pass through the wall in 1989, people from both sides climbed on top of the wall in a spirit of celebration and began dismantling it.

People have been erecting walls for as long as we have been able to build. In the first century, many Jews divided the earth’s population in two: the Jewish people and everyone else. When the Christian Church was first forming, some of the early followers of Jesus (who were Jewish) insisted that any Gentiles who wanted to join them had to first become Jewish and agree to follow the Jewish customs and practices. In Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, he described this separation as a wall. After Paul described people on the other side of the wall as aliens, strangers, hopeless, without God and far away, he went on to say that Jesus tore down that wall and proclaimed peace to people on both sides. Paul then wrote that Jesus created one new humanity. As Mary Susan Gast writes in her book, That We May all (Finally!) Be One, “Those who were ‘them’ yesterday are ‘us’ today, and ‘we’ are changed forever.”

Let us recognize and acknowledge the walls in our world which keep people from one another, especially the walls that are built by people who consider themselves to be superior to those whom they wish to keep on the other side of the wall. And let us join with Jesus in tearing down the walls by seeing others as valuable and equal in God’s eyes and in our own.

Aloha nui!

Aloha nui!

On Sunday, we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the United Church of Christ. I shared with the congregation how I came to the UCC during a time of searching, disappointment with my former denomination, and self-reflection. In the denomination in which I was originally ordained, certain individuals were not welcome…or, shall I say, their welcome was limited. LGBTQ people were told, “You are welcome to worship with us, but you may not hold office or be ordained.” People who held theological viewpoints and opinions that were different from those of the denomination were not allowed in certain positions.

When I first began attending a UCC worship service in Salt Lake City, I heard the words, “No matter who you are or where you have been on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” The people of this church not only said these words, but they meant them. They lived them in their extravagant hospitality and language. I later attended a very large UCC church in Dallas and saw those same words being lived out by the pastors and people who attended. Within a year, I was working as an associate pastor at that church and began the process of transferring my standing (ordination) into the UCC.

Our denomination’s motto is: “That they may all be one.” The idea is that we can be united in our love for God, each other and the world, even amidst our vast differences in lifestyles, beliefs and ways of seeing the world. I shared on Sunday that we may not always do this perfectly, and sometimes we do not feel very united. However, the motto comes from Jesus’ final prayer for his disciples when he was with them at the last supper. In her book, That They May All (Finally!) Be One, Mary Susan Gast (my former Conference Minister), writes, “Jesus’ prayer is an expression of yearning for the continuation…of the community that is one in the love of the Holy.” What she is saying is that Jesus is stating his deepest longing for his disciples and the disciples that would follow, that we would all be united in our love for God and for all that God loves, which includes every person and expands to include all of creation. This too can be our longing and, in fact, is our longing if we are truly followers of Jesus.

May we all long for a world where all are loved and invited to share their love with others!

Aloha nui!

On Sunday, I shared several stories about the chaos that we sometimes encounter in our lives. We’ve all been there, and probably not for the last time. We look within us and all around us, and things that once made sense no longer do; these times are often accompanied by darkness, confusion, uncertainty about how to move forward; and we might even wonder, “What good can come out of this?” And yet, there are often amazing gifts that rise from chaos. This is a theme throughout the entire Bible, beginning with the very first chapter where God created the gift of the universe out of chaos.

One of the stories I shared was about a very special gift given to a girl named Anne on her 13th birthday, exactly 75 years ago (June 12, 1942). It was a diary, in which she began writing almost immediately. For the next two years, her family hid from the Nazis in a secret annex above her father’s place of business in Amsterdam. Those two years were extremely difficult, but nothing compared to what happened to Anne, her family and the others who were hiding in the annex: they were all taken to concentration camps. Anne, her sister and mother all died in the camps. Miraculously, her father survived and later came across her diary. That book, The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, has become one of the most beloved pieces of literature of all time. What a gift it was to the world, not only to see inside a young girl’s heart, but to see the effects of human cruelty and to learn from them.

Another story I shared was about one of Elie Wiesel’s final nights in a Nazi concentration camp. The war was coming to an end as Russian troops were gaining ground and Nazi guards began piling Jewish bodies, dead and alive, on top of each other. Elie was on top of his young friend Juliek. Somehow, Juliek slipped out from underneath Elie and began playing a moving piece by Beethoven on his violin. When Elie awoke in the morning, he saw that Juliek had been killed and his violin crushed to pieces. However, many years later, he wrote of the special gift of that song on a very dark and scary night.

Although the chaos we experience might seem mild or even insignificant compared to the chaos of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel, the very important lesson I learn from these stories is that there is always the possibility that an amazing gift can rise out of even the deepest and darkest chaos of our human experiences. I encourage you to look for the gift when you are in the midst of chaos…and to be the gift-bearer and even the gift for others in their times of chaos.

Aloha nui!

On Sunday, I talked about Jonathan Franzen’s novel, The Corrections, which is about a very dysfunctional fictional family by the last name of Lambert. There’s the elderly Dad Alfred, who is retired, very ill and suffering from dementia. His wife is Enid, who becomes more obsessive, manipulative and nagging as time goes on. Alfred and Enid’s three grown children are all coming home for Christmas to the tiny house where they grew up…in a little midwestern town called St. Jude. And they are pretty sure that this will be the last chance to spend Christmas with their father. Denise is the girl of the family, who is quite a bit younger than her two brothers, and she once was very happy.

In the final pages of the book, something transformational happens to Denise. Although she had been the adored baby of the family, throughout her entire adulthood she never believed that her father–or anyone else, for that matter–would truly love her if he knew some of the things she had done. But on Christmas Eve Alfred let Denise know that he had known her deepest and darkest secret, and he had loved her anyway. It hit Denise like a bolt of lightening: her father had known about the most shameful thing of her past—and he had loved her and adored her even with all of her faults and shortcomings. She always thought that her father loved his idea of her…but not the real her that she truly was…the Denise who had an affair with a married man when she was just a teenager…the Denise who made some bad choices in her life…the Denise who carried shame around with her like a ball and chain. It was on Christmas Eve…the last Christmas Eve her dad would be alive…that she realized that he truly loved her for who she was. And at that moment, her life began to change for the better.

In the book of Romans, we read that “God’s love has been poured into our hearts.” God, who knows everything about us still loves us like crazy. I wonder how many of us go through life like Denise wondering if God or anyone else would love us if they really knew all about us. The good news is that God does know all about us—and still loves us. And God invites us to accept that love and to share it with others. I am pretty confident that there is someone each one of us will encounter this week who really needs to know and feel that kind of love. I invite you to be the one to show them that love.