Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52                                                                                      

Dance, dance, wherever you may be / I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be / and I’ll lead you all in the dance, said he.

         Have you ever had one of those nights when you just could not go back to sleep? When you wake up in the middle of the night - whether it’s to turn off your smart device, so it stops making noise when someone sends you a text message; or it’s to use the bathroom; or some other reason - how easy is it for you to close your eyes and dream a little dream again? What do you do when you’re having a sleepless night?

         When I woke up Thursday morning for a middle-of-the-night trip down the hall, I did not go back to sleep. The coming day held a couple of significant calendar items, including an important Board meeting via Zoom. I really could have used a good night’s sleep. But I did not go back to bed and rest. Sometimes, there is no rest for the weary.

         Instead, I picked up my smartphone and read something another Episcopal priest had posted. Mike Kinman serves as the rector of a church in California, a congregation known for social justice. I’ll say more about what he wrote later on. For now, I want to tell you how his words led me, in the wee hours before sunrise, to that song’s refrain:

Dance, dance, wherever you may be / I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be / and I’ll lead you all in the dance, said he.

         You may recognize the tune more easily, when you hear these words:

I danced for the scribe and Pharisee

but they would not dance, and they wouldn’t follow me

I danced for the fisherfolk, for James and John

They came with me, and the Dance went on.

         The tune, named “Simple Gifts,” is #554 in our 1982 Hymnal. ‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free, ‘tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.... Over the years I’ve learned that, even in the middle of the night, especially then, God may have a gift for me. God may be saying: Tom, come down, where you ought to be.

         This time, God seemed to be saying: Tom, come sit down - and start writing that sermon that’s been bugging you. Come now, sit down now, in the place where you write your sermons, the place you ought to be. My wife Eyleen, another writer and preacher of sermons, puts it this way: “Butt. In. Chair.” So, that’s what I did. I sat down in my favorite chair, and I began to write. Suddenly, that song came to me.

         Dance, dance...

         Right now, you may be asking yourself: Where is he going? What in heaven’s name does dancing have to do with our Gospel text today? What do all those little parables - six of them, but who’s counting? - have to do with the Lord of the Dance? For me, it all starts with what one professor of theology calls the subversion of Jesus.

         The first four parables are about subversion. The ones about a mustard seed, some yeast, hidden treasure, and a pearl of great price - they each create, on the surface, a lovely image. But the theology professor made me dig deeper:

         “Mustard is a weed a farmer would pull from his field....Yeast (or leaven)...is what a woman cleans from her house in preparation for Passover....” As for the pearl, he says, “What was the man doing digging around in someone else’s field in the first place? His action is a theft.” And “merchants were held in the public esteem about as highly as our culture values used-car salespersons. Their motives and scruples were suspect.”

         Weeds do need to be pulled up, right? But wait a minute: didn’t we hear Jesus say something about weeds and wheat LAST Sunday, how they should “grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:30)? And today, Jesus is saying a mustard seed, the smallest of all, can grow into the greatest of trees. God seems to have a heavenly plan for weeds.

         Yeast is something we do not need to make the kind of unleavened bread we say becomes the body of Christ in Holy Communion. Today, Jesus says that yeast - mixed by a woman into flour to make leavened bread, which would spoil it for the purposes of worship - that yeast also ferments, stirring things up in God’s larger kingdom of heaven.

         Even though that man takes treasure from someone else’s field without telling the owner about it, he is essentially putting himself out of business, by selling everything he has to make an ultimate purchase. So is the merchant searching for pearls. Once these men sacrifice everything, Jesus says, they step into a new dimension, a heavenly realm.

         The professor concludes, “These parables elevate the convention-subverting people in them....Whatever else they mean, these parables hint that God’s empire - and therefore good citizenship in God’s realm - is fundamentally different from Rome’s....” He even dares suggest that the church’s work needs to be subversive, so we can “form disciples who value the contemporary equivalents of weeds, yeast, thieves, and (used-car salespeople)” (Gary Peluso-Verdend, Feasting on the Word, pp. 282-286).

         Now, this is not “subversion” in the way you and I likely think of it. Like when a government is violently overthrown. Or like parts of Europe during World War II, when guerilla warfare, escape networks, and newspapers emerged from the underground.   It’s more like a non-violent protest, a “turning under” (that’s what “sub-vert” literally means). More like a turning under, over, upside down, so a con-version might happen.  

         We’ve seen all kinds of protests and even some conversions since George Floyd was killed, just two months ago. Jesus was all about conversion, and often, subversion.   It would be helpful if we could ask him just how far subversion can go and still lead to conversion. Here’s one way I think about what Jesus might say. I think he might say that nothing is more authentically subversive and leading to conversion than the arts - like painting three words on the surface of a street or renaming it: “Black Lives Matter.”

         Which brings me back to what I read in the middle of that sleepless night and how it led me to the kind of arts we call music, to that song. Here’s what Mike Kinman wrote about some very subversive behavior, acted out by a very famous follower of Jesus:

         When troops lined the inside of Desmond Tutu's church in Capetown, he said to them: "You are powerful. You are very powerful, but you are not gods. I serve a God who cannot be mocked.” And then that wonderful, mischievous smile began to creep across his face, and he said to those troops: “So, since you have already lost, since you have already lost, I invite you today to come and join the winning side.”

         And then, he began to dance. And the whole congregation began to dance. And the troops could do nothing in the face of such love and joy.

     After twenty-seven years of imprisonment, Nelson Mandela was released in 1990. Here’s what Desmond Tutu and his fellow South Africans did about that:

         https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/desmond-tutu-and-others-dance-and-celebrate-nelson-news-footage/456487343

~   ~   ~

           At age 88, I’ll bet the Archbishop still has a bit of dance left in him. And you?

Dance, dance, wherever you may be / I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be / and I’ll lead you all in the dance, said he.

~ The Rev. Thomas A. Momberg

Vicar, Holy Trinity Episcopal Church

3745 Kimball Ave.

Memphis, TN 38111

holytrinityec.org

fathermom1949@gmail.com

         Thanks be to God. And thanks be to Ty Legge for choosing that hymn (#424)! As I grow older, I give thanks to God for many of the simpler things in life. A delicious meal. A good night’s sleep. A moment of real connection with another human being.

     I’m also grateful for things that are not so simple, the more difficult things I have learned along the way. I wonder: In your life, what would you say are the most important lessons you have learned? Who are the teachers for whom you are truly grateful, the ones who have taught you life’s most important lessons?

         Today, I want to say thanks be to God for the life and work of Parker Palmer. A respected writer, teacher, activist and spiritual guide, Parker is the founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal. I believe his work speaks deeply to people in all walks of life, including education, law, medicine, politics, and religion. Author of ten books, recipient of more than a dozen honorary doctorates, Parker Palmer is best known for a little book about vocation, called Let Your Life Speak.

         Parker’s first book, however, is the one I want to quote from today. It’s called The Promise of Paradox: A Celebration of Contradictions in the Christian Life. In a way, he’s been writing about celebrating contradictions ever since The Promise of Paradox was first published forty years ago. With Parker’s help, there is one life lesson I have learned and keep learning, over and over again. In his words:

         The promise of paradox is the promise that apparent opposites - like order and disorder - can cohere in our lives, the promise that if we replace either-or with both-and, our lives will become larger and more filled with light. It is a promise at the heart of every wisdom tradition...not least the Christian faith.

         He goes on to quote Neils Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who once said, “The opposite of a correct (or true) statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.” Parker concludes, “The capacity to embrace true paradox is more than an intellectual skill for holding complex thoughts. It is a life skill for holding complex experiences” (pp. xxix-xxx).

         A life skill for holding complex experiences. Considering the triple pandemics we are all facing these days - the complex challenges of biological, social, and economic upheaval - we need all the life skills we can muster.

         Today we’ve been given two New Testament passages that describe paradox. The Gospel account is about weeds and wheat, which Jesus uses to represent good and evil. He says, “Let both of them grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:30). Really? Any gardeners want to weigh in on that paradox? And yet, we know the truth, hidden in plain sight: weeds exist, as does wheat. No matter what, both do grow together.

         I want to focus today on the second paradox, the one in the Epistle from Romans. Full disclosure: in seminary, one of my professors had us write a paper on this passage. Romans 8:12-25 still speaks to me. As person and priest, the paradox in the last eight verses of this passage still provoke me profoundly.

           Parker Palmer is right. The power of paradox prevails throughout our Christian lives. Both darkness and light. Both death and resurrection.   The perpetual paradox in Romans 8? Both suffering and glory. “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us” (8:18). Present suffering and future glory. For those who seek to follow Jesus, both are profoundly true.

         The sufferings of this present time. What are those present sufferings? Historic levels of unemployment, with businesses failing right and left. Continued outbreaks of state-sanctioned violence against and murder of black and brown bodies. And a 21st century version of infection and disease that historians and journalists are comparing to the 14th century pandemic called the Bubonic Plague, the Black Death.

       All this suffering, heaped on top of our pre-COVID-19 realities - scandalous abuse, pervasive chronic illness, real loneliness and despair - it all gives us more than enough reason to “groan inwardly,” borrowing St. Paul’s phrase (8:23). The primary paradox Paul lays out in the book of Romans is Jesus’ death and resurrection, the dying and rising of Christ. We who claim faith in Jesus will inherit the kingdom of God - “if, in fact,” Paul says in our passage today, “we suffer with (Christ) so that we may also be glorified by him” (8:17). Weeds and wheat coexist. Paradoxically, so do suffering and glory - in the life story of Jesus, a story that changed the world, and in our own story.

         But how is that? How is it that, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, the history of the world took a new direction? Is that still true? Is the world still changing? Where, then, is that fabled glory in all the suffering of this, our own, present time?

         There is a way in which only time will tell how our current story, the story that ushered in the year 2020, actually ends. Will it become a story of glory like the one Paul promises in our lesson today? We don’t know, because we cannot yet read to the story’s end. Our story is still being written. Here, however, is what we do know.

         We know the Black Death marked the end of the Middle Ages and sparked the beginning of something new, called the Renaissance, a worldwide rebirth. “After the Black Death, nothing was the same,” says Gianna Pomata, a professor of medicine now retired from Johns Hopkins. What she expects is that “something (just) as dramatic is going to happen, not so much in medicine,” she says, “but in economy and culture.” In so much danger, Professor Pomata says, “there’s this wonderful human response...to think in a new way” (Lawrence Wright, “Crossroads,” The New Yorker, 7/20/20).

         To use a medical image, our present plural pandemic suffering offers us an x-ray of our society. We have a new picture of all the broken places in our world. This picture can allow us us to see, and then, to think in new ways - if we choose to do so. And that new way of seeing and thinking and ultimately doing will probably be...paradoxical.

         The new way of thinking and seeing our world is actually an old way for women. It is the paradox of giving birth. It is like a woman in labor pains, to borrow Paul’s image, who cannot wait for the pain to be over, but, even more, cannot wait to meet the long-awaited child about to be born. In that most human experience, suffering and glory are not contradictory. They are like the threads of a beautiful quilt, interwoven, inseparable.

     In my sermon two Sundays ago I told a story about Valerie Kaur, the founder of the Revolutionary Love Project. The introduction of her new book See No Stranger begins with a story that has made Valerie famous. The talk she gave in this story was recorded and has been viewed more than 40 million times. Here’s what she says about that talk:

         It was New Year’s Eve 2016. My friends Rev. William Barber II (you may know him as one of the founders of the new Poor People’s Campaign) had invited me to speak at the Metropolitan AME Church...in Washington D.C. Like millions of Americans, I was still in shock over the results of our Presidential election. I looked out at that crowded church and saw grief and anticipation in people’s eyes.

         “The future is dark,” I said. “But what if - what if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind us now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, detentions and political assault (and, she would probably now add, the great Flu Epidemic of a century ago)?

         What if, says Valerie Kaur, a young, 21st century teacher of life experience, what if (our ancestors) are whispering in our ear, ‘You are brave’? What if this is our nation’s greatest transition? Valerie, of course, had no idea how prophetic, how true her words could and would be, now, three years later.

           If we can take the long view, for the long haul, I think Valerie’s wisdom can also be a paradox. This is BOTH the darkness of the tomb AND the darkness of the womb.   And this darkness is not about you OR about me. It’s about BOTH you AND me AND the human race, BOTH present tense AND in the future. Parker Palmer described that life lesson, the paradox of present and future, more than a decade ago, in this way:

       “To live in this world, we must learn how to stand in the tragic gap...the gap between what is and what could and should be, the gap between the reality of a given situation and an alternative reality we know to be possible, because we have experienced it” (“The Broken-Open Heart,” Weavings, March/April 2009, p. 13).

         Today and tomorrow, may we learn the lessons life wants to teach us. May we step out in faith, into the darkness, trusting in our own experiences of suffering and glory. May we trust in God, incarnate in Jesus Christ, who lived and died and keeps on rising.

So… three of our readings mention the earth – soil, sowing, grain, growth. It shows how God is active in our world in a language grounded in earthiness that is not particularly theological or sacred.

Earlier this week Fr. Tom sent me an essay written by Debie Thomas on today’s Revised Common Lectionary readings. What caught my eye was “JOY!”. She says and I quote, “Thank God! These texts are bursting with Joy!” end quote. I was thinking like she was – I sure could use some joy, what with the rising numbers of our local COVID cases, not to mention the national cases, the increase in deaths, being isolated from loved ones, and the disease of racism and hatred that is way too prevalent. I, we could use some Joy! And then I re-read the scriptures: Isaiah gives us rain and snow… and in v 12 “You shall go out in joy and be led back in peace;”. The Psalmist gives us water, grain, blessings of growth…. “they shout and sing together for joy.” These all speak of hope, life and joy.

In Matthew we get the first of Jesus’s parables – The Sower and the Seed. I think we are all familiar with this parable. It is about the different kinds of ground. The sower sets out to sow and some fell on the path. Imagine a well-worn path where the earth is packed down and seeds lie on top and the birds come to eat. Next we are told some seeds fall on the rocky ground, imagine ground with a shallow layer of dirt and some seeds sprouted but without deep roots perished in the sun. Still other seed fell among thorns. If you have ever gardened, even a little, you know the tenacity of weeds and thorns and they will choke out whatever is planted. Then finally, seeds fall on the good soil and bring grain, “some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen.!” According to William Barclay in And Jesus Said, there are two main interpretations of this parable. One he calls the traditional interpretation which is what I have always tended to gravitate to. This focuses on the different types of ground and how it is representative of us. We may be the hard-packed ground where we are closed off to God and Jesus’s teachings. We can’t be bothered, or we think we know it all already and have nothing to learn or heaven forbid, we just don’t care. Then there is the rocky, shallow ground which represents our shallow faithfulness. We want to follow Jesus and if all is well, we are content to follow Christ – it’s easy. But once we are faced with the difficulties that will inevitably come our way, our faith is likely to wither. Matthew chapter 10 lets us know the challenges of discipleship. Third there is the thorny ground. This can be a life so busy we crowd out Jesus. I know I can get so caught up in the everyday business of life that my prayer life suffers. There are many things that can and do command our attention, and these are not inherently bad. But if we neglect prayer and devotional time, how can we be bearers of God’s love and faithfulness?

Finally, if we become like the good soil and are open and receptive to receive God’s love and not only hear and accept Christ and his teachings, but to put them into action; our lives can bear wonderful fruit.

The other interpretation that Barclay mentions is a more modern interpretation (even though his book was published in 1970). He suggests it hinges on one verse, Matthew 13: 8; “Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” A farmer will sow knowing not all seed will bear fruit.

It doesn’t really matter the final amount, God will provide, whether a hundredfold or thirty. Sometimes we may not even know what the fruit of our labor will bear. But we must not be afraid to take risks and sow anyway.

Debi Thomas, who I mentioned earlier, takes a similar approach. She describes the sower as sowing seeds everywhere, not being too concerned where they may fall. An extravagant sower she says. And she questions her own stinginess. I can relate to that. What if there isn’t enough? Enough Good News to go around she says. Enough joy, love, generosity to go around I wonder. But there is and I know it. Jesus Christ IS the extravagant love of God. Jesus is evidence God’s extravagant love.

I will not close my eyes to the pain and injustices of this world. But I invite you to join me and look for the joy. One example is Jason Zgonc, a 12-year-old trumpet player. Every evening for more than two months, he stands outside the Emory Decatur Hospital in Georgia performing songs for the staff during shift change. He was inspired by a New York Philharmonic trumpeter who stands on his balcony and plays in honor of healthcare workers. The first time nurse Natalie Schmidts heard the sounds of Zgonc’s trumpet, she was coming off a rough shift, and he helped change her perspective. “It gives you a sense of community,” she said.

As I said earlier, the language regarding our readings – those of earthiness – may not necessarily be theological or sacred. But we are scared, each one of us. Our world is sacred and our place in it. A place where everyone belongs, Black, Brown, Asian, White. We are community.

My closing prayer for humankind: May we tend our soul, remove the rocky, hard places and not let the thorns take hold. May Love, not fear, be sown on the fertile soil of our souls.

Amen.

Deut. 10:17-21, Hebrews 11:8-16, Matthew 5:43-48                                                      

         The strangest exam I ever took in seminary came to mind this week. Our professor of Christian Ethics did not ask us to reflect on a passage from Holy Scripture. Instead, he gave us the title of a Beatles’ song, with a single question. Here’s the song title and the question: “All You Need Is Love. True or false?” What would your answer be?

         If I had not been a lowly seminarian; if I had not been a young man (i.e., under the age of forty); if I had only known way back then what I know today...well, maybe I would have gotten a better grade! What I really want to say is this: If, before that final exam, I had looked at today’s lessons, appointed for Independence Day, my answer would have been better informed. I would have been able to say, without a shadow of a doubt...YES: All we need is love, love / Love is all we need.

         In our lessons from Deuteronomy and Hebrews, we hear about an ancient kind of love: loving the stranger, the foreigner. This ancient, Biblical kind of love is challenging. For some, it seems impossible, heretical, un-American. Yet when we dare love strangers and foreigners, Scripture says, they can become neighbors. And then, somewhere along the way, we come to see, to realize that, we, too, have been strangers. We, too, have been strangers in a strange land, where people, places, and things seemed foreign to us.

         Allow me state the obvious. While feeling like a stranger can be true for all people, it is especially true for people of color. Valerie Kaur is a civil rights activist, lawyer, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project. In her new book See No Stranger, she writes, “It is easy to wonder about the...life of the people closest to us. It is harder to wonder about people who seem like strangers...But when we choose to wonder about people we don’t know, when we imagine their lives and listen for their stories, we begin to expand the circle...We prepare ourselves to love...” (pp. 10-11)

         When we stop wondering about someone who is different from us, that expanding circle is broken. Valerie Kaur tells the story of her eighth-grade evangelical friend, Lisa, who discovered that Valerie was a member of the Sikh faith and not a Christian. (Sikhism was founded in India during the 16th century.) White-skinned Lisa told brown-skinned Valerie that, unless she accepted Jesus as her personal Lord and Savior, she was going to hell. Their friendship ended. Lisa could no longer love Valerie the way she had. Valerie writes, “Wonder is an admission that you don’t know everything about another person. Lisa stopped wondering about me” (ibid., p. 19).

         Once upon a time, we were strangers in a strange land. Once upon a time, we, too, looked for a homeland. We, too, once sought - or perhaps we are still seeking - a city, a community, a church, a family to call home. For some, once-upon-a-time is today. I know people who, in their retirement years, still do not know exactly where they want to live out their final days, still don’t know where they will finally find home. Looking back now, I believe that serving churches in more than a dozen cities was, in some ways, my own searching for and seeking out a place to call home.

         When we are foreigners, when we are strangers, we especially need to be loved.   And once we are loved, once we become not just strangers, but someone’s neighbor, even someone’s friend, it is usually easier to reciprocate. Once we know we are loved, we can more easily begin to love the previous stranger, the former foreigner, the new neighbor - because we ourselves have walked that kind of walk.

         In our Gospel lesson from Matthew, we hear what is the last of six antitheses. An antithesis - anti-thesis - is the opposite of a thesis. We might say Jesus was “into” antitheses, at least in Matthew’s telling. Toward the end of Matthew’s fifth chapter, Jesus begins each teaching with, “You have heard it said...” adding, “but I say....”.

         Let’s practice some antithesizing. First, let’s say together, “We have heard it said...” We will be the “you” in Matthew. I’ll respond, paraphrasing Jesus’ words. Ready?

“We have heard it said...”

     You shall not murder (5:21)...but I say love shows no hostility.

“We have heard it said...”

     You shall not commit adultery (5:27)...but I say love is not predatory.

“We have heard it said...”

     You shall not divorce (5:31)...but I say love is found in marriage.

“We have heard it said...”

     You shall not swear falsely (5:33)...I say love is unconditionally truthful.

“We have heard it said...”

     An eye for an eye (5:38)...but I say love does not retaliate.

“We have heard it said...”

     You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy (5:43).

         The last “But I say” is the hardest to hear of all: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (5:43).   Jesus’ context is the Roman Empire, the national enemy of the Jewish people. Of course, any other religious groups or individuals were eligible to be enemies. The community Jesus walked with and ministered to were a persecuted people. They had some real, honest-to-God enemies. Do we?

         When Jesus, like Moses, went up a mountain and exhorted his disciples and the crowds to sit down and listen, he wasn’t about to give a speech on human rights. Jesus was preaching and teaching about the nature of love, the love of God, the God who loves all people, foreigners and friends, neighbors and strangers, without distinction, without fail. Do not love just the neighbor, ancient texts teach, but also the stranger. Jesus teaches, even commands: Do not love just the friend, but also the enemy.

         Which brings us back to the Beatles. Love, love, love. Love is all you need. Love the stranger...love your enemy...and love yourself. “Be perfect,” Jesus says. The word translated “perfect” - in Greek teleios - is about a lifelong journey toward a goal. We are called by Jesus to strive to be more and more like God, to be more and more like love. And we are to love our neighbors, Jesus also says, keeping with Biblical teaching, as if we were loving ourselves. For how can we love others, if we do not first love ourselves?

       And yet, how do we love ourselves? How’s that working for us? Sometimes we love ourselves without any help at all. But it’s the other times, times when we just do not feel like loving ourselves - not to mention our neighbors or people who feel like strangers, let alone enemies. Sometimes - and maybe “sometime” is right now - sometimes, we are in such a tough, even terrible place, we realize our love can only really, truly come from a power that is greater than ourselves - from a higher power we call God, who loves us first, last and always. The God in whom we trust, say “we the people,” we Americans.

         Of all the political writers I read these days, I always try to make time for my favorite conservative: David Brooks. This week he published these words: “In the days leading up to this July 4th weekend, I’ve been thinking about a scene in (the movie) ‘Good Will Hunting.’ Will performs all those mathematical feats and flights of verbal brilliance, but the Robin Williams character sits him down on a park bench and confronts him (at)...the core of his character. (He says,) ‘I look at you, I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared’ kid.

         Brooks concludes with these words: “The last three years have been like that Robin Williams speech, for (our) whole nation — an intervention, a truth-telling. I had hopes the crisis would bring us together, but it’s made everything harder and worse....What’s lurking, I hope, somewhere deep down inside is our shared ferocious love for our...country and a vision for the role America could play as the great pluralist beacon of the 21st century” (“The National Humiliation We Need,” New York Times, 7/2/20).

       The poet Langston Hughes described the vision in a speech he gave during this Fourth of July holiday weekend in 1952: “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed -/ Let it be that great strong land of love / Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme / That any(one) be crushed by one above.”

         Amidst what is the hardest final exam of our lives; amidst what one journalist (Marc Fisher, “America on its 244th Birthday,” Washington Post, 6/4/20) calls “a triple whammy of deadly disease, wholesale economic paralysis, and a searing reckoning with racial inequality (which...) largely canceled the nation’s birthday bash”; amidst all our inabilities to love as God loves us, as Jesus calls us to love - my prayer is this:

         May we remember and never forget: God loves us - first, last, and always - with a love that is so strong, so ferocious, we just might sing about it. All you need is love / all you need is love / all you need is love, love / (God’s) love is all you need.

~ The Rev. Thomas A. Momberg

Vicar, Holy Trinity Episcopal Church

3745 Kimball Avenue, Memphis, TN 38111

fathermom1949@gmail.com