Click here to watch the sermon by Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel
God, make us instruments of your peace… where there is hatred, may we sow love… in our words, in our prayers, in our lives. Amen.
Anton was a Jewish baker, once the owner of one of Germany’s most beloved bakeries. When people asked how he had managed to survive the Holocaust, he would share a story that revealed both courage and compassion. It began on a train bound for Auschwitz, where he and countless others were packed into freezing wagons without food, water, or coats. Snow fell outside, and death loomed in the bitter cold.
Among the prisoners was an elderly man who trembled uncontrollably in the night. Anton, though frozen himself, used his hands to rub warmth into the man’s arms, face, and legs. He spoke to him, encouraged him, and held him close until morning. When daylight broke, Anton made a heartbreaking discovery: everyone else in the wagon had perished in the cold. Only he and the old man were still alive—kept alive by the warmth they had shared.
Reflecting on this moment, Anton would explain the lesson he carried all his life: “The secret of survival is to warm the hearts of others. When you give warmth, you receive warmth. When you help someone live, you too will live.” It was a truth forged in the darkest of times, a reminder that humanity’s strength lies in compassion.
There are weeks when it takes a lot of study, reading, and discernment to get clarity about what the Scripture is teaching us. It is often complex and nuanced. This is not one of those weeks. As our benediction from the writers at enfleshed say, “sometimes the gospel is startingly clear.”
This week, the writer of Luke’s gospel says that you can’t serve both God and wealth. Other translations say we can’t serve both God and the bank. It says that trying to serve both will engender hatred of one and love of the other.
This is both very simple and haunting to me. If we are serving wealth or the bank or the economic logics of capitalism, we will end up hating God. Whew… that is stark. And the opposite is true. If we love God, we will end up hating wealth and the bank and the logics of capitalism.
So what does loving God and not wealth look like?
This week, we received a thousand paper cranes sent in the spirit of Sadako, the Japanese girl who experienced radiation poisoning in the Hiroshima blast when she was 2 years old. When she was 12, she became ill with leukemia. As she was in the hospital, her father told her the Japanese folk story that a crane can live for a thousand years, and a person who folds an origami crane for each year of a crane’s life will have their wish granted. Sadako began folding the paper cranes and praying for healing. When she died, her story became a symbol of seeking healing and peace in the face of nuclear war and all kinds of violence.
In the spirit of Sadako and prayers for peace, Pilgrim Christian Church, a UCC and Disciples congregation in Chardon, Ohio sent us 1000 paper cranes and this letter.
In Adult Ed, we are reading Jennifer Butler’s book, Who Stole My Bible: Reclaiming Scripture as a Handbook for Resisting Tyranny.
She would argue that from the very beginning, the Bible sets out a contrast between Tyranny and God’s dream for the world. In the creation story and the Exodus story—Genesis and Exodus—stories she argues are deeply intertwined, she says we learn not really about who we are and how we were created, but about who God is. And, unlike all of the other creation stories from the time—in which the gods are cruel and violence loving—creating humans from the blood of other gods they’ve slaughtered and demanding obedience, the God of the Hebrew story is a God who creates and calls it good. God is a God whose image and likeness is imbued into all of creation. God is a God who seeks relationship. And further, God desires liberation—from slavery and oppression.
Butler says that, while deeply complicated to actually live that way, serving God is fairly straightforward: love one another; seek mutual interdependance; desire what is best for all; work for human dignity and the blessing of all life; don’t do violence; live with compassion.
She argues serving God vs. serving wealth is about two completely different worldviews: conquest, violence, control, power-over vs. interconnectedness, love, shared thriving.
Mary Oliver says it this way:
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
We are living in a time when the logic of tyranny and violence is screaming all around us. Serving wealth and oppression seeks to lure us in hundreds of times a day.
But in the big and the small things, we are invited to serve the God who calls us to hearken to that of God in every person we meet. We’re invited to serve the God who invites us to fold paper cranes as an act of deep empathy. We’re invited to serve a God who leads us to hold and warm one another to life. We are invited to serve a God who asks us to love what is mortal and fleeting and fragile— holding it close to our hearts—even though we know it will one day die. We serve a God who invites us to move away from control and, instead, let go and grieve because that is the posture of connection.
May it be so. Amen.
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