Open Table United Church of Christ

09/12/2026

For there is a boundary to looking.
And the world that is looked at so deeply
wants to flourish in love.

Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work

on all the images imprisoned within you.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, "Turning Point"

When you die, someone will write your obituary. It will tell readers when and where you were born and what kind of work you did. It may name where you went to school and celebrate some of your achievements and personal qualities. It will identify those who survive you and perhaps say something about what you meant to them.

And yet even the longest, most detailed and most expressive obituaries always omit the essence of a life: the history of a person's heart. How many of us wish that we had asked more questions of someone we loved, not about what happened and when but about the inner experience of being that person? About hopes and fulfillments, failures and regrets? About moments of despair and moments of meaning? Even as that wish moves through us, we know it is well-nigh impossible for a person to tell us the history of his or her heart. After all, we can barely articulate our own.

The heart of the world itself has an unwritten history. Historians write about visible movements: the movement of populations, cultural artifacts, and technologies; natural resources and money; armed forces and political power. But as the poet Rilke reminds us, "there is a boundary to looking." The deeper movements that shape our world are impulses of the heart invisible to the eye: the hopes and greeds that move markets; the loves and hates that rouse armies; the desires to create or control that galvanize political power.

What if we, individually and collectively, took a clue from the poet Rilke and see what happens when we "go and do heart-work / on all the images imprisoned within" us?

This is the inner work that all successful movements for social change have done, not the least the movement called American democracy. They have done it in spite of the challenges of unearthing and telling the heart's story---challenges that become especially daunting when the story to be told is one that powerful forces in the world do not want to hear. ~ Parker Palmer

Join us for the conclusion of our study of Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit at 9:30 am on Sunday, September 13 in the parlor at All Saints Episcopal, corner of Government and Ann St.

All are welcome!

09/12/2026

09/12/2026

Moses said to God, “Suppose the people don’t believe me?” God said, “Take the staff in your hand, and throw it on the ground.” So Moses threw the staff on the ground, and it became a snake. Moses recoiled. Then God instructed, “Reach out and seize the snake by its tail.” Moses grabbed it, and the snake became a staff again. - Exodus 4:1-4 (adapted)

I would’ve walked away from God’s calling the moment that staff turned into a snake.

Nope, no, no thank you, not happening, hard pass. I’m out, God. No snake signs for me.

I’d prefer a purring cat sign. A windy whisper through the trees sign. An open window, closed door sign.

Maybe there’s no heavenly reason for God to exclude snakes from the potential list of divine signs, but to my mind, there’s no earthly reason for them to be included, either. Plenty of other options!

Jesus was often troubled by people’s preoccupation with signs: The false prophets who made a showy spectacle of signs. The disciples who anxiously asked how to recognize the right signs. The crowds that followed him for the thrill of gawking at signs. The doubters who demanded on-the-spot performative signs.

They all wanted signs to be answers. Undeniable answers. Preferably, undeniable answers they already knew.

Instead, Jesus pointed to signs that raised questions. Signs that challenged assumptions. Signs that interrupted routines.

Like a snake on the ground, stopping you in your tracks.

Like a loud clap of thunder, overwhelming you with awe.

Like the return of sunshine after a storm, revealing plainly the damage all around you.

The question is not whether we recognize a divine sign, but whether we accept its divine interruption.

Prayer
Grant me a receptive spirit, O God.

~ Rachel Hackenberg for UCC Stillspeaking Daily Devotional

Jesus was often troubled by people’s preoccupation with signs. They all wanted signs to be answers. Undeniable answers. Preferably, undeniable answers they already knew.

09/11/2026

“Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth.” — Swami Vivekananda, World’s Parliament of Religions, September 11, 1893

Most people around the world remember what happened on September 11, 2001. But not many know about September 11, 1893.

On that day, a thirty-year-old Hindu monk named Swami Vivekananda spoke to thousands at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. People from many faiths—Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Zoroastrians, and others—gathered for one of the first major meetings between Eastern and Western religions.¹

Vivekananda stepped up to the podium and began with five words: “Sisters and Brothers of America.” The crowd broke into applause.

That greeting held a deep meaning. Vivekananda was not there just to tolerate others. He saw them as family. He told the crowd that his Hindu tradition taught “both tolerance and universal acceptance.” He also warned what happens when religion loses that spirit. “Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism,” he said, had filled the Earth with violence and blood.

He spoke those words on September 11.

Thirteen years later, on September 11, 1906, about 3,000 Indians met in Johannesburg to protest a discriminatory registration law from the Transvaal government. The law would force Indians to register, give fingerprints, and carry ID documents or face punishment. Mohandas Gandhi was there.²

The people who gathered that day promised to resist. They would not follow an unjust law and would accept the consequences, but they refused to fight oppression with violence. Gandhi later saw that meeting as the start of satyagraha, holding firmly to truth, a way to resist injustice without losing the humanity of either the oppressed or the oppressor.

Another September 11.

Then came September 11, 2001.

Nineteen terrorists hijacked four planes and killed 2,977 people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. They took the lives of people who boarded flights, went to work, served breakfast, answered phones, and started what they thought would be a normal Tuesday. Firefighters, police officers, and other first responders ran toward the collapsing buildings while thousands ran away.³ Tomorrow marks twenty-five years since then.

For those who lost loved ones, twenty-five years does not make the loss part of history. Some children grew up without parents, and some parents have spent a quarter century without their children. Survivors still feel the effects of that morning. Many first responders and recovery workers became sick and died years later because they rushed to help when they were needed most.

But remembering is not just about the past. Our memories shape us. What we remember, how we remember, and the stories we tell about what happened become part of who we are.

After September 11, 2001, grief and fear spread across the country. Some of that fear led to war, torture, and surveillance. Muslim Americans and people thought to be Muslim faced suspicion, harassment, and violence. The deaths of nearly 3,000 innocent people became linked to the deaths of many more innocent people far away.

This is why those other September 11s feel so haunting. One hundred eight years before the attacks, Vivekananda stood before people whose religions often viewed each other with suspicion and called them sisters and brothers. Ninety-five years before the attacks, people facing racial oppression chose to resist without hatred. Then, in 2001, religious fanaticism turned strangers into enemies and planes into weapons.

These three September 11s show three very different ways we might respond to difference, fear, and power.

We cannot choose the history we inherit, but we can choose what we carry forward from it. Twenty-five years later, fear still tempts us to see strangers as enemies. Political and religious leaders still find it easier to control people who are afraid. Violence still offers the tempting idea that if we defeat the right people, we will finally be safe.

Vivekananda and Gandhi offer us different visions forward. Neither taught people to be passive. Gandhi resisted injustice with great discipline. Vivekananda urged religious traditions to let go of claims of superiority. Both knew we can face what is wrong without letting hatred shape who we become.

Today, bells will ring and names will be read. Families will gather around photos of people they still miss. May we remember with them. And as the bells ring, maybe we can hear another voice from another September 11, speaking across 133 years:

“Sisters and Brothers of America.”

Those words were an invitation back then.

They are still an invitation now.
~ Rev. Cameron Trimble

A Meditation by Rev. Cameron Trimble

09/11/2026

Brian McLaren explains how he found support in the Bible to welcome uncertainty and expand his faith:

To my surprise, I discovered that … in the Bible I had been reading my whole life, and especially in the life and teachings of Jesus, Mary, Paul, James, and John, the fresh understanding of faith my heart was thirsty for had been waiting like a hidden spring all along….

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus doesn’t teach a list of beliefs to be memorized and recited. Instead, he teaches a way of life that culminates in a call to revolutionary love. This revolutionary love goes far beyond conventional love, the love that distinguishes between us and them, brother and other, or friend and enemy (Matthew 5:43). Instead, we need to love as God loves, with non-­discriminatory love that includes even the enemy.

If that weren’t revolutionary enough, we could turn to Paul…. When he tries to summarize what God requires and desires, Paul does not say: “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall have the correct beliefs.’” Rather, he declares, “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Galatians 5:14)….

We find the same in the Epistles of John. In 1 John 4:7 ff., John doesn’t say:

Beloved, let us hold to correct beliefs, because correctness is from God; everyone who believes the required statements is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not confess the right beliefs does not know God, for God is correctness.

Rather, John says this:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love….

Are you a believer who puts your distinct beliefs first, or are you a person of faith who puts love first?...

That phrase I just used, person of faith, in one sense makes a simple generalization. It serves as a description that makes room for Christians, Muslims, Jews, and so on. But I am coming to see that person of faith is not just a generalization. It is also a differentiation, in contrast to a person of beliefs. It reflects a shared desire among people in all these diverse traditions to be identified not by lists of beliefs that exclude one another but by something deeper, by faith in a universal, non-­discriminatory love that calls us all together.

In that light, the word doubt can mean two very different things. When it is applied to faith that expresses itself in beliefs, it means one thing. When it is applied to faith that expresses itself in revolutionary love, it means something very different. Sometimes, it is only by doubting a religion that expresses itself in beliefs that we can discover a faith that expresses itself in revolutionary love.

Brian McLaren explains how he found support in the Bible to welcome uncertainty and expand his faith:   To my surprise, I discovered that … in

09/10/2026

The issue in prayer is not to pray because we are certain, but to pray because we are uncertain.
—Renita Weems, Listening for God

The Methodist minister Renita Weems was questioned about prayer by a woman no longer practicing her Christian faith:
“What sense is there in praying if you don’t believe in God?”… She sounded pensive.
“You pray in order to believe,” I answered.

Whatever spirituality is, it is not something to be discovered. It is something to be recovered—something you misplace and recover a thousand times in a lifetime. Nor is belief in God, mystery, or prayer something one either possesses or doesn’t. Rather, belief is something one tries continually to keep oneself open to, accessible to, or something one continually refuses to open oneself up to. The only difference between … [the two of us] was that I still wanted to remain open. Open to what? Open to the possibility that there was something more to life than my vanity, something more than what I could manipulate or grasp…. As inadequate as I felt that day … I wanted to remain open to the possibility that there was something nobler in life than what I could see or touch.

Sometimes we awaken to it through nature. Sometimes it comes to us through art, music, dance, or silence. Sometimes we are reminded of it by interacting with or observing children. Sometimes we happen upon it through chance encounters with strangers. And for a moment, we are smitten with the sublime. And then we lose it. We lose its scent, we can’t make out its sound. Sometimes we stumble around for what feels like days, months, perhaps years, trying to recapture it—trying to pick back up the scent, trying to make out the sounds. But even though we find ourselves stumbling, we’re onto something.

The issue in prayer is not to pray because we are certain, but to pray because we are uncertain. —Renita Weems, Listening for God  The Methodist

09/09/2026

Open Table Update 09/09/2026 - https://mailchi.mp/fd07874f5116/open-table-update-8353015
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
― Wendell Berry

09/08/2026

When grounded in an experience of Love, doubt does not represent a step backwards but is a necessary condition for any movement forward.
—Richard Rohr

CAC core faculty member Brian McLaren speaks of doubt as an essential part of his growth in faith, from a focus on “orthodoxy” or right belief to “orthopraxy” or right living.

Before doubt, I thought that faith was a matter of correct beliefs. My religious teachers taught me so: that if I didn’t hold the right beliefs, or at least say that I held them, I would be excommunicated from my community, and perhaps, after death, from God’s presence. They taught me this not to be cruel but because they themselves had been taught the same thing, and they were working hard, sometimes desperately, to be faithful to the rules as they understood them. I tried to do the same, and I would still be doing so today if not for doubt.

Doubt chipped away at those beliefs, one agonizing blow at a time, revealing that what actually mattered wasn’t the point of beliefs but the clear window of faith, faith as a life orientation, faith as a framework of values and spirituality, faith as a commitment to live into a deep vision of what life can be, faith as a way of life, faith expressing itself in love.

For all those years, when I said, “I believe,” I thought I understood what I was doing. But more was going on, so much more….
Looking back, I now see that underneath arguments about what I believed to be true factually, something deeper and truer was happening actually.

For example, whether or not the creation story happened factually as described in Genesis, I was committing myself to live in the world as if it actually were a precious, beautiful, meaningful creation, and as if I were too….

What mattered most was not that I believed the stories in a factual sense, but that I believed in the meaning they carried so I could act upon that meaning and embody it in my life, to let that meaning breathe in me, animate me, fill me…. Whether I considered the stories factually accurate was never the point; what actually mattered all along was whether I lived a life pregnant with the meaning those stories contained. To my surprise, when I was given permission to doubt the factuality of my beliefs, I discovered their actual life-giving purpose….

Doubt need not be the death of faith. It can be, instead, the birth of a new kind of faith, a faith beyond beliefs, a faith that expresses itself in love, a deepening and expanding faith that can save your life and save the world.

~ from CAC daily meditations

Labor Day (U.S.) When grounded in an experience of Love, doubt does not represent a step backwards but is a necessary condition for any movement

09/07/2026

Empathy has become a battleground in the culture wars. At least two books have helped fuel the fight: Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, which argues that empathy has become a destructive force in Western society, and Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, which makes a similar case from within the Christian right. Now Bishop Barron, a Catholic bishop who has become increasingly prominent in Online Culture-War Catholicism, has weighed in — and, spoilers: not on the side of empathy.

In his recent podcast and then also in a video homily posted for September 6th, Baron spoke favorably about Saad’s conclusions in Suicidal Empathy: a book built around the rather extraordinary premise that our desire to understand and alleviate the suffering of others can become so morally dangerous that it threatens the society doing the empathizing. Barron adopts this basic framework, warning that empathy can detach us from reason and objective truth and lead us, in the name of compassion, toward the deeply harmful conclusions of extreme post-modernist critical theorists. Further, Barron argues that contemporary “wokeism” has replaced Christian love with empathy, suggesting that Christianity has lost its cultural centrality (a claim he makes largely based on vibes, without providing evidence), and a postmodern ideology has moved into its place.

In his telling, this new ideology denies objective moral and epistemic truth, leaving us with little more than competing subjective perspectives. What remains, then, is empathy: an imperative to understand one another and a primacy on the need to “avoid hurting one another’s feelings.” Barron’s solution is to recover what he calls in the homily the “hard-edged language of love”, (surely a somewhat ominous response to empathy), and to state that Jesus and St. John would certainly have never said “God is empathy” in place of “God is love.” The semantics he articulates here would make a more compelling point if the word “empathy” had actually existed prior to the 1900s.

Of course, Christian love is certainly more demanding than mere sentimentality. The Gospel does not tell us simply to make one another feel good, and love cannot be reduced to emotional identification with another person — in part because this can be imagined. We can imagine that we understand how another person feels without ever actually talking to them. This error occurs without the actual encounter that is central to the life of Jesus and his statements about what love actually means. Barron’s argument implies that listening to the experiences of marginalized people is somehow a competing moral framework, imported into Christianity from the outside by “wokeism.”

Actually, the Catholic Church already possesses a deeply developed tradition for what it means to encounter the other and to hold firm moral principles about how we ought to live and treat each other. It is called Catholic Social Teaching, and at its center is not empathy, sentimentality, or even Barron’s preferred fortress-style description of love, but the inherent dignity of the human person.

Barron seems to have allowed the culture war to convince him that listening to marginalized people is a waste of time when he already knows how best to love them. Catholic Social Teaching makes room for the process of discernment and encounter that actually leads to love. Human dignity belongs to every person and the church’s task is to recognize, promote, and defend that dignity in the concrete circumstances of human life. Pope Leo XIV has made precisely this point in his first major social encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, where he describes Catholic Social Teaching not as a static handbook of principles to be imposed upon history, but precisely as that process of discernment that is directly born from encountering the other.

Conclusion

Barron’s “wokeism” framework risks turning people into political issues: immigrants become immigration, Black people become racial politics, poor people become economic policy, and transgender people become gender ideology. Catholic Social Teaching calls us to do the opposite—to see the person behind the issue and take seriously the conditions in which they live. That does not mean treating every personal experience as an infallible moral argument or abandoning the church’s belief in objective truth. If we believe that every human being bears the image of God, then we have a moral obligation to encounter human beings as more than abstractions or categories and to take seriously what they tell us about the conditions in which they live.

We cannot determine what it means to will the good of another person while refusing to encounter that person as a concrete human being. Love that never listens can become remarkably paternalistic. It can become the declaration that I already know what is good for you before I have bothered to understand who you are, what you have experienced, or even what you have to say.

We have another alternative, and it is older than America’s culture war. The bible itself tells us that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. Every human being possesses a dignity that cannot be earned, surrendered, or taken away. Our responsibility is not to bestow that dignity upon anyone, but to recognize it, protect it, and defend it. And when the people whose dignity is most vulnerable to being ignored tell us that something is wrong, the Catholic response should not be to accuse them of importing a rival ideology. Our response should be to listen. To encounter. To love.

~ Max Kuzma
https://maxwellkuzma.substack.com/p/empathy-is-not-the-enemy-of-love?r=xm6ze&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email