Memorial Congregational Church, United Church of Christ

06/12/2026

ATTENTION. THERE IS NO CHURCH SERVICE THIS SUNDAY, JUNE 14TH. WE WILL HAVE A SUPPLY MINISTER ON SUNDAY, JUNE 21ST.

06/07/2026

Hi everyone:

Sorry this email is a little late today. A few snags. As usual, I have copied the text of my sermon below, and the link to click on to watch the worship service video is: https://youtu.be/0DoSVNC79Ec.

This was my last time preaching at MCC. I have loved this congregation, and the privilege of being able to bring the Sunday sermons.

Many blessings to all, Mike

Notes in the Margin: The Bottom Line June 7, 2026 1 John 4:7-8, 19-21 Romans 8:35-39
It’s hard to know where to begin an ending. But, one thing I’m sure about: as I stand in this pulpit for the last time, I know that it matters most to me that I not talk around the edges of things. As they say in the corporate world, let’s cut to the chase. I want to give you the bottom line.
Today, in this "margin time" of our life together, I found myself discovering a couple of notes written in the margins of my study Bible. The first one is next to the passage you heard from Paul’s letter to the Romans, and it's one that I have used in just about every funeral service I have conducted. It goes like this:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Next to this passage in my study Bible I have written: “The bottom line.” The bottom line is this: As the great theologian Karl Barth is said to have responded when asked to boil down his entire theology to a simple answer, “Jesus loves me; this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
I remember warm summer Iowa days, marching around the block with a hundred other children in vacation Bible school. We carried a banner and sang, “Jesus Loves Me.” I wasn’t sure how Jesus could love me, or why, but I felt a certain confidence about that love just as surely as I felt the warmth of that summer sun. It was a child’s kind of faith, not very sophisticated, untried, unacquainted with what Hamlet called the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” I stopped singing “Jesus loves me” by the time I was twelve. My guess is that most of you did too.
We outgrew such childish things when we caught on that love is not the order of things in the world. We distanced ourselves from such simplistic “Jesus loves me” notions when we discovered that people could die by the score from fires and landslides, as well as from su***de bombers and machine guns. When I was a teenager, “Jesus loves me” faded from my vocabulary when I discovered that the President of the United States lived only at the mercy of whoever wanted to put a bullet through his head. And the eternal love of Christ seems even harder to reconcile with a universe which we discovered to be subject to random chaos, whether from a hidden genetic bullet buried in someone’s DNA, or from a stray asteroid or a thickening atmosphere of carbon that could extinguish human life on our planet. Could it be that the created order reflects the same sort of careless indifference on behalf of the Creator that one might experience from a largely absent parent? “Jesus loves me” is nice to hear children sing, but something deep within us has come to question it.
The hurts mount. And when we lie in our beds hoping for sleep, and staring into the darkness, the worst terror, the dread that lies beneath the anxiety of living, is the unspoken but growing suspicion that what God there is, is unavailable, and maybe coldly indifferent. And an indifferent God is even more horrible than no God at all.
But I wonder if perhaps most of us have grown up enough to cast off the simplistic world-view of our childhood, but not grown up enough yet to appreciate the wisdom of that simplicity. We can be so sophisticated and wise in the ways of the world, and yet so oblivious to the deepest truths about our existence.
That reality was poignantly illustrated to me at the very beginning of Dadgie’s and my ministries. We were in classes where seminary students engaged in evaluating one another’s preaching (something most of us preachers are happy not to relive). In one session I remember one of the students took his turn in the pulpit and preached a very simple sermon on God’s love. The class tore it apart. “Frankly, I found it theologically naive,” said one student during the feed-back session.
“Yes,” said another, “why didn’t he deal with the question of theodicy – of the irreconcilable nature of divine love and power?”
“What about God’s judgment against the forces of injustice and oppression in the world?” asked another.
“It seems to me,” another student said, “that to simply say ‘God loves you’ without dealing with the impact of existentialism on the modern mind is to skirt the real issue.” . . . and on it went. By the time it was over, the student who had preached this simple “God loves you” message had been thoroughly and eloquently put in his place. At the end of the class session, the professor, who had been increasingly silent and darkened in spirit, finally spoke. With the hint of a tear in the corner of his eye, he looked over this collection of theological students and said, “It is so hard for us to simply allow ourselves to be loved by God.” With that, the class was dismissed in silence. And none of us students forgot what had happened there.
There are so many reasons, I suppose, why we find it hard to be loved by the Eternal "Ground of All Being." Perhaps chief among them is that we often find it hard to be loved by ourselves, and therefore, by anyone else. One of the more valuable emphases in psychotherapy has to do with “patterning” – that mechanism whereby we repeat throughout our lives the patterns of relationship, self-image, and views of others that we internalized at an early age. In my own spiritual and emotional journey, I have learned that one of the “bottom line” issues of life has to do with not only how we project these patterns onto ourselves and others, but how we project them onto the very Heart of Being that lies at the core of existence. The world can be a frightening and dangerous place indeed if it seems to be inhabited by a God who is little more than an omnipresent version of those who have failed us in the past. It’s hard to be loved by the Almighty when we haven’t learned to be loved.
Another reason that we find love so hard to receive is that we tend to regard the world in general as undeserving. We often see divine judgment as more appropriate than love. This is surely the case for progressive American Protestants over the past many decades. The operative word in our tradition has been “justice.” We demand justice for the oppressed people of the world and look to eradicate any vestiges of our own complicity in injustice. All in all, it seems most fitting for the Almighty to be righteously indignant in the face of our human tendency toward evil. Those, like myself, who stand in the tradition of Christian liberalism are reluctant to let ourselves or anyone else off the hook long enough to allow room for love. If our perceptions and inclinations were all there were, this would be a cold universe indeed; one in which mercy drowns in a sea of judgment, and hope is obliterated by divine indifference.
All this talk of Divine Love can begin to seem like so much preacherly Pablum. Most of us haven’t a clue about God – what to think of whatever we mean by that word. But there’s great help for us in the first letter of John. He writes: “. . . everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” In the margin next to this verse I have written, “Best definition of God: Love.”
The bottom line is: whether you understand it or not, God loves you because God is Love. The undeniable and consistent theme that runs through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is that, whoever, whatever God is, that Divine Heart of Creation truly loves every little speck of creation – every unimpressive and stumbling one of us! God loves this tired old world – in fact, so much so that a man who was the greatest embodiment of this divine Love the world has ever known would give up his own life so that you and I could know what Love is. And if you know what Love is, you know what God is.
Don’t ask me how all this works. All I know is this: Love is never wasted. The Divine love made real in the person of Jesus was not wasted. That Divine Love made real in the unique individual creation that you are is not wasted. That Love made real in our relationships here over the past many years is not wasted. And that Love made real in your efforts to brighten one little corner of the world, the labor you put into growing in love, the years of your life and the toils of your journey are not wasted. Love holds you close, and will not let you go. The Heart of the Universe cherishes you and will not allow your living and your loving to be in vain.
Too many people manage to go through their entire lives without ever having felt truly loved. Sonia Weitz was one of the fortunate ones who have known at least a moment of the rarest and most beautiful kind of love, even in the very depths of humanity’s darkest hour. Sonia was a survivor of the holocaust. She told a story from her days in the Plaschow concentration camp. One night in the barracks, a little boy began playing the harmonica. He was either a very brave or very foolish youngster, because playing the harmonica was a crime punishable by death. In fact, another boy had been hung the day before for singing a Russian song. Sonia went over to her father’s bunk. In that magic moment, her father looked at her and said, “You and I never had a chance to dance together.” He took her hand, and, in the middle of that death camp, beneath the very hand of the executioner, to the tune of an illegal harmonica, they danced. Shortly after this her father was taken away to Mauthausen where he was killed. She may have learned as a little girl that the world can throw more evil at you than is imaginable, but she also learned what it is to be loved, gently and courageously. And somehow, that love was even stronger than all the death around her. Such love, such a life, is not wasted.
So here we are; I'm about to leave you all. That’s painful for many of you, and it is for me as well. But it’s also part of the truth about living that we have all learned: people come and go. Friends move on; beloved relatives die; the sea of life keeps rolling and folding one generation after another under its waves. The pattern of beginnings and endings is pervasive. In the vast reaches of the universe, stars are born and then grow cold. Nothing seems to abide. But something does. Know this: in God’s economy, love is never wasted.
And so today no Red Sox analogies, no West Wing stories, no Frederick Buechner quotes. Just this: for those sleepless nights when the ocean of the universe seems too large, and your own boat too small – when the futility of life seems too real, and God too distant – when your own world seems too lonely, and love too impossible – I leave you with this, the bottom line:
God loves you, and so do I.
Thanks be to God, “most of all that love has found us.”
Let’s sing it together.

Sunday Worship Service.

05/31/2026

Hello again, everyone:

As usual, the text of my sermon is printed below. The link to clink on to watch the worship service video is: https://youtu.be/_0Gcgheiank.

Blessings, Mike

On Creation and Evolution May 31, 2026 Psalm 8 Genesis 1:1-2:4a
There is, in Petersburg, Kentucky, something called a "Creation Museum." It is a twenty seven million dollar facility with “high-tech exhibits designed by a theme-park artist.” It includes animatronic dinosaurs and a wooden ark at least two stories tall, plus a special effects theater and planetarium. Some exhibits show dinosaurs aboard Noah's Ark and assert that all animals were vegetarians until Adam committed the first sin in the Garden of Eden. The central message of this theme park is that science has got it all wrong and that if one truly believes the Bible, one has to conclude that the earth and human beings were created in a one-week period just six thousand years ago. Apparently, the Associated Press agrees that this is the only way to read the text of Genesis. I saw an AP article that says this “museum . . . tells the Bible's version of Earth's history.”
Since this Genesis story is in our lectionary readings for this morning, and I find myself so exercised by this foolishness I simply had to take a dive into this whole business of creation and evolution.
First, I have to confess that, in the year 2026, I find it hard to believe that this is still an issue. Personally, I thought it was pretty much settled fifty or more years ago. I am amazed that in these modern times, we have seen school boards putting evolutionary theory back on “trial,” and trying to put warning stickers on science textbooks to remind children and their parents that “evolution is only a theory.” I am appalled that polls conducted by news and polling organizations over the past several years continue to show that a declining but still significant percentage of Americans simply do not believe in evolution,1 as if evolution were some speculative notion that one could simply choose to believe or not.
If I’m going to jump into this fray, I might as well do it with both feet. Folks, let’s get something straight. Evolution is about as much of a dead-bang fact as you get in science. That genes mutate and recombine in ways that pass on new characteristics to future generations, and some of these characteristics give individuals a survival advantage, and these characteristics tend to increase in frequency in the population, while those that are less advantageous decrease in frequency – in other words, “natural selection” works – is virtually unchallenged by any reputable scientist. This process has been demonstrated and observed over and over in laboratory experiments and reflected in the fossil record of life on the planet earth to a stunning degree of certainty. Evolution is called a “theory,” not because it’s basic tenets are in any kind of question, but because that’s the name we give to general principles in science.
Other examples of scientific “theory” are Albert Einstein’s special and general relativity, on the basis of which we are able (among other things) to understand how light from distant stars shifts in the spectrum and gives us a measurement of distance; the notion that Earth orbits around the sun is a theory; continental drift is a theory; the existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms comprise atomic theory – based on that theory, we are able to develop a theoretical construct called “electricity,” but I doubt that UL laboratories is likely soon to put disclaimer labels on our extension cords and light switches warning us that “electricity is only a theory.”
In science, a theory is a statement of general principles that explains observable, recorded phenomena, and is subject to rigorous and repeated tests. Members of actual school boards – people who are responsible for seeing that children are educated – instead interpret the word “theory” to mean a whim that is largely unproven and subject to conjecture. That, my friends, is a sad indictment of the state of education in our society.
Fundamentalist Christians all across America are perpetrating a hoax. They are spending gazillions of dollars trying to convince you and your children and grandchildren that one has to choose between science and religion, between their textbooks and the Bible. They are trying to portray science as pure atheism. And they are organizing in election districts and school districts all across this land to press that message.
The most sense I can make of their message is that there is not one reality, but two. There is a reality that we are somehow tricked into observing in the world around us, and then there is the reality of God’s “supernatural” realm. I have to confess, I have never understood the word “supernatural.” It seems to imply that there exists something that is not “natural” – in other words, not “of or pertaining to the nature of things.” Folks, if God truly exists, then by definition God is “natural” not “supernatural.” If there is a life beyond this one, then by definition the afterlife is “natural” not “supernatural.” There is only one reality, and that reality must encompass everything that is, and everything that has been. It encompasses only that which is and has been in fact, and does not encompass that which is not or has not been. One would think that this is a priori, but apparently there are a lot of folks out there who simply can’t get their minds around it.
Why should you care about any of this? There are two big reasons. First of all, precisely because you and your children and grandchildren are under assault by those who would try to fool them into not believing their eyes or using their minds. Someone has to stand up and wave their arms and say, “Whoa!”
And secondly, this matters because I’m convinced that most of us wander through our lives held back from a deeper experience of the reality of Divinity within us, among us, and beyond us by half formed religious notions and constructs in our heads that don’t really jibe with the world as we see it. We learned in Sunday School that the Bible says God created the world in seven days by dividing waters and hanging lights in the sky, and in one quick act stuck completely formed human beings in that world. And now, the evidence of science seems to be telling us something entirely different. Here’s why this matters: because no matter how sophisticated and clever you are, I don’t think you can deal with that truth without some degree of internal struggle – and if you don’t face that struggle, and sift through all the information and feelings and insights with care and perseverance, I don’t think you’ll ever be totally free to embrace the reality of that Divinity within us, among us, and beyond us.
So, here’s a good starting point. The Bible is not a science textbook, and the biblical creation story is not science. It is not an accurate record of how the earth and human beings came to be, it is an affirmation that the Divinity of which I spoke is at the heart of the reality of people and planets, and that, because this is true, then we are best defined by our goodness. That’s what Genesis means when it says, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” And do you have any idea what a powerful counter-cultural statement that is to make?
When you see extremists working feverishly to find a way to destroy as many innocent men, women, and children as humanly possible, it’s hard to believe humanity is defined by our goodness. When you see the steady march over generations of human folly acted out in war (and after a weekend when we have honored all those who have fallen in combat, we have to acknowledge that for every just and worthy war in the record of human history, there are a dozen foolish, prideful wastes of human life) – when you see our proclivity to senseless violence, it’s hard to believe we are defined by our goodness.
But that’s what Genesis unabashedly proclaims. And it does so artfully and eloquently. We have to give the authors of this brilliant piece of theology a lot of credit. They described our origins in wondrously poetic and ingenious ways. They spoke of a cosmology that was the best of which their society was capable. They believed that because rain fell from the sky, there had to be a great sea of water above the heavens, so they envisioned a giant dome, like an upside-down bowl placed over the flat earth to keep all that water away from us. And that’s what Genesis describes. God placed a “firmament in the heavens” actually, the word translated “firmament” is the Hebrew word “raqiah” which means “a hammered-out bowl.” God placed an upside-down bowl in the heavens to separate the waters that were above the bowl, from the waters that were below – that is: under the earth. It was in this bowl that God was said to hang the two great lights, the sun and the moon. I’m not making this up – it’s all right there in black and white. Read it for yourself. Anyone with a sixth-grade education knows that this is not science, and it’s not factually correct. I’ll tell you what it is: it’s truth. And truth is a far more penetrating and enduring thing than mere facts. The truth about our origins is that we are created in the image of the Creator – in other words, no matter how tremendous is our fall from grace, how pervasive is our capacity for evil, the truth about our origins is that we carry somewhere within us the inextinguishable spark of divine goodness – and that means not only the good-hearted, loving, self-sacrificing, noble ones among us. It means all the deluded, psychopathic, hate-filled people we consider enemies or criminals. And it also means you, whether you want to believe it or not.
What does all this do to the authority of scripture? In my view it reinforces Biblical authority in a way that literalists can’t even begin to. When we stop tying our brains in knots trying to defend as facts the stories in the Bible, and accept its truths as a book of theology, then the Bible is freed to speak with profound relevance and incontestable authority.
So, here’s my appeal: we should spend time with the creation story in Genesis, and spend time looking at the evidence of decades of scientific inquiry, and then spend time coming to grips with the one reality that includes them both – the reality of the world we live in, a reality that includes a creative and very pervasive Creator. And then, whenever we have the opportunity, talk to our children and our grandchildren, telling them not to settle for mindless dogma, telling them that faith means opening your eyes, not closing them, telling them that Love and Grace live within them, that they are one of the precious things that has been created in this world, and that the truth is that “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”

1 https://ncse.ngo/vast-majority-americans-accept-human-evolution-new-survey-finds

Eight in 10 Americans accept human evolution, according (PDF, pp. 203-204) to the latest (2023-2024) iteration of Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Survey.

05/24/2026

Good afternoon, everyone:

We had a warm and joyful time together on this rainy Sunday morning. As usual, the text of my sermon is printed below,, and the link to click on to watch the worship service video is: https://youtu.be/vILKq-zCpm0.

Blessings to all, Mike

“Jabberwocky” May 24, 2026 Genesis 11:1-9 Acts 2:1-18
“Beresh*t, bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et-ha'aretz. Veha'aretz hayatah tohu vevohu, vehosheck al p'nai tahom. Veruah Elohim mirahefetz al-p'nai hamayim,”
“En arche ein halogos, kai halogos ein pros ton theon, kai theos ein halogos.”
Speaking in tongues?. . . or jabberwocky?
“Twas brillig and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
all mimsy were the borogoves,
and the mome raths outgrabe.
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the jubjub bird, and shun
the frumios bandersnatch!”
Lewis Carroll’s poem, “Jabberwocky,” from “Through the Looking-Glass” sounds like nonsense – almost as incomprehensible as those earlier words I read. They’re simply Bible verses read in their original languages, Hebrew and Greek.
Foreign languages sound a little like Jabberwocky at times. We’ve all had the experience of standing in the check-out line at the supermarket and overhearing a couple from some other country speaking “who knows what language.” It sounds like gibberish. And they speak it so quickly. You wonder how they can possibly understand each other. Of course, two people speaking English also sound, to foreign ears, like they are spitting machine-gun-fire gibberish at each other. Language separates us, and makes other people seem strange.
Some people believe that on Pentecost, as you heard in this morning’s scripture, when the Holy Spirit rested on the apostles, and they spoke in foreign “tongues,” that it was an experience of some strange, other-worldly mumbo-jumbo – jabberwocky. If that had been the case, we wouldn’t be celebrating Pentecost today, because nothing out of the ordinary would have happened. The whole incident would have been quite unremarkable. Some of the folks standing around would have given each other knowing glances, as if to say, “Foreigners!”
With jabberwocky, non-communication is the norm. It has been the norm as far back as humanity can remember. It all started (so the story goes) when a bunch of folks living on the plain of Shinar decided to make a name for themselves and build a tower into the heavens. God became terribly concerned that they were getting too big for their britches, so God came down to earth and “confused” their language. We all know how the story comes out: they were scattered over the face of the earth and the great tower remained incomplete.
The legend of the tower of Babel is the story of the status quo. It’s the familiar story of how non-communication – jabberwocky – leads to alienation and defeat. It’s the usual pattern, a pattern that was overturned at Pentecost. Pentecost is the flip-side of Babel.
Pentecost doesn’t have anything to do with incomprehensible gibberish – no strange sounds coming out of people’s mouths that required some specially gifted linguist to translate. The account in Acts, Chapter 2, says that “each one (among those who were gathered from many nations) heard them speaking in their own language.” The point of Pentecost was clear communication! And if the church was founded at Pentecost, it was founded on clear communication.
The familiar story of Babel was entirely rewritten. At Babel the operative principle was ascendancy of self, the characteristic phenomenon was "jabberwocky," the relational force was disorganization and chaos, and the end result was powerlessness.
At Pentecost the operative principle was the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the characteristic phenomenon was clear communication, the relational force was unity, and the end result was power – the power of devotion, the power to become the Church of Jesus Christ.
It is power that was discovered at Pentecost, a power we have long needed. Because so many of our days are lived in the midst of jabberwocky.
Men and women seem always to be speaking jabberwocky to each other. I don’t know if it’s our genetics or our upbringing, but we seem to be stuck speaking different languages. Men are likely to say things like, “You want to know what I'm feeling? I feel fine. That’s how I feel.” Women, on the other hand, say things like, “So, what I’m saying doesn’t make sense to you? And I suppose if it doesn’t make sense to you then it wouldn't make sense to anyone, right?” A lot of the time in marriages, one of us is speaking tigalic, and the other one is speaking Swahili, I suspect.
We are also separated from each other by our theological languages. I’ll never forget the time I was traveling through the South with my family, and a man came up to my father and said, “Brother, have you found Jesus?” My dad said, “I didn't know he was lost.”
I was never more powerfully reminded of the linguistic chasms between people of different faith backgrounds than by an experience I had with the other clergy in a town where I once pastored. There had been a few incidents of anti-Semitic graffiti and fights in the schools, and we all decided to draft a pastoral letter to the community, calling for unity in the midst of discord. I was given the task of errand boy, shuttling revisions of the letter to all of our Catholic, Unitarian, Jewish, and various Protestant brethren and sistren. There were revisions of the initial draft; there were theological difficulties; there were linguistic and stylistic problems; there were revisions of revisions; and revisions of revisions of revisions. So one day, in the midst of all this, I was lamenting the arduousness of the task to the local Rabbi. I said, “Man, this has been painful duty, trying to get this letter together,” he said, “But what a worthwhile pain – for all of us.” And I saw his point. What we had been agonizing over, as clergy from many different faith backgrounds, was nothing less than translation! We were straining to hear one another’s language of faith, and to cut through the jabberwocky that divides us in order to find the true common ground. God bless Rabbi Fertig for opening my eyes; I, for one, had absolutely no idea that I was engaged in such a noble purpose.
Words have power. Language shapes the way we think and view the world. Folks from Gallup Mills, Vermont, from New York, New York, from Selma, Alabama, Coffeyville, Kansas, Berkley, California, and the South Side of Chicago all speak different “languages” – if you will. Those languages reflect the different worlds in which they live. To some degree, they reflect different values, different priorities, different cultural standards and behaviors. But it all comes down to language. If we could truly hear each other’s language, we would hear each other’s culture, we would hear the neighborhoods, and the country roads, the bowling teams and the street-corner gangs.
Instead, we are frightened by the jabberwocky and gibberish we hear in the grocery store or on the nightly news. Fear leads to suspicion. Suspicion ultimately leads finally to that which we are also remembering this weekend: rows and rows of uniform white grave markers.
This morning, I would like for us to pray for a miracle – that, somehow, by the grace of the Almighty, people will learn to hear each other – to hear not only the words, but the context. You never quite master a language until you master the context. We never truly hear each other until we learn one another’s cultures – histories.
This is not a trivial undertaking. It’s essential! This is not a nicety, a luxury, or a sidelight. This is the dead center of the gospel.
Many of us get nervous when we hear talk of Pentecostalism. The Pentecostals are assumed by a lot of folks in our quiet, well-ordered, New England churches to be a kind of lunatic fringe. But what strikes me about Pentecostalism is that it’s, first and foremost, a multi-cultural, multi-racial phenomenon. That’s not just coincidence. These people all claim, with us, the day of Pentecost as their defining moment. And that moment of Spirit and power was shared by people from many different nations and languages. The Bible says that “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs” were all together in one place, and all received together this astounding gift of being able to hear and comprehend one another.
The Church of Jesus Christ was born as a multinational, multi-cultural, multi-racial movement. It is our heritage, our birthright, our identity. So, we'd better be about the business of learning other cultures, other ways of thinking, speaking, relating. We'd better be about the business of building bridges, sticking our necks out to make new friends, learn about other cultures. We’d better be staying the course when the pleasantries give way to disagreement and misunderstanding.
If we fail in small ways, then the larger opportunities may be missed as well. Families have been torn apart, churches have been split, wars have been fought over great differences that began as nothing more momentous than jabberwocky.
We are Pentecost people. We have received a powerful gift. It is nothing less than the possibility of actually hearing and comprehending one another. And at times, by that power, it can almost be as though we were speaking each other’s languages. And miracle of miracles, among Pentecost people sometimes even those who speak the language of middle class, middle-America, can understand those who speak the jive-talk of the South Side of Chicago. Sometimes even those who speak the language of adolescence and rebellion can comprehend the words of parental concern. Sometimes the language of regular people is comprehensible to theologians, and sometimes, even, visa-versa.
We are Pentecost people – no longer under the reign of Babel. We need not be rendered powerless by miscommunication and divisiveness. We must not be peddlers of Jabberwocky, imprisoned by smallness of vision.
We are Pentecost people – those who are the very hope for a world divided against itself. May we live up to our calling.

Rev. Michael Scott preaches on "Jabberwocky" PODCAST / ...