I.Ten years ago this summer, Josh, Liam, Annabelle, and I loaded up our cars and headed southeast to plant our lives with you, right here in Winston-Salem. But before that, when I preached right here in this pulpit on March 25, 2015 in view of a call to serve as your pastor, you might remember that I was rather pregnant. (Nine months pregnant, to be exact, and praying fervently that I didn’t go into labor while bringing a word from the Lord!) Calling a young woman to serve as your Baptist pastor was already unusual enough, but calling one who was great with child really did take the cake. And yet, foreshadowing the creative, supportive ministry that was and is and continues to be your hallmark as a congregation – even after a long interim and a long search! – you encouraged our family to take the time we needed to welcome our girl, to bless our old Kentucky home as we departed, and to make our way to you.
In the period between the call weekend in late March and my first Sunday in early July, we wrote letters to each other. Remember that? I still have a box full of the notes, emails, and cards you sent to me upon Annabelle’s birth and our move. And this week, inspired by the thoughtful sermons of my wonderful colleagues, Lena and Mary, over these past two weeks, I thought it would be meaningful to return to the letters I wrote to you during that season.
“Dear beloved community, it’s a few days later, and I am still reliving moment after moment of our past weekend together and an invitation to serve you as your pastor that I will never forget.”
“Dear beloved community, I write to you today with a sleeping bundle of preciousness just to my right, nine days after welcoming Annabelle into the world and our family.”
“Dear beloved community, standing with one foot here and another moving toward there has awakened me, time and time again, to the God who is always at work doing a new thing among us.”
“Dear beloved community, hello again – this time from a lovely, spacious spot on 501 West Fifth Street!”
II.Thus began the habit I’ve continued, now shared amongst our pastors, of writing a letter to you each week. What started as a way to communicate our growing love for each other across distance continued as we began God’s work of Love together.
I imagine when Paul began his letter to the Colossians, he had the beloved community in mind. As we’ve heard these past weeks, his letter to them wasn’t one about a conflict they were having, or a warning about a problem he saw ahead, but rather this love letter to the church was about Jesus. Who Jesus was and is. What Jesus’s life means for ours. How to be beloved community with a deliberate, shared identity from Jesus. How to remember where we came from. How to live fully alive. “Dear beloved community,” Paul seems to say. “Remember Jesus! Live like Jesus to live fully alive.”
III.Living fully alive is what the quotes on the cover of your worship guide are speaking to. Howard Thurman advises us, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Now I do love that quote, but I must say, pressed up against the Year of our Lord 2025, Rev. Thurman’s words seem a bit distant to my ears. Asking what makes us come alive in this economy? Finding what makes us fully alive when schools aren’t being funded, and unhoused neighbors are being overlooked, and people are being taken away, and Gazans are being starved, and queer folks fear for their lives?
Or if we stretch back some 18 centuries in time to hear St. Irenaeus say that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.” I find myself wondering, “Perhaps God hasn’t thought this out fully. Doesn’t God hear the birds? Doesn’t God see the precise pinky-orange of the sunset that drenches the horizon or a field of grasses waving in the afternoon breeze? Doesn’t God catch the scent of a fresh baked peach pie or a picture-perfect rose? Doesn’t God have a dog to love so unconditionally?” I don’t know about you, but on the days when I’m feeling rather … well, ordinary – tired or distracted or grumpy or sad or still in my PJs scrolling through Instagram, I think to myself, “this? This is the glory of God?”
There are days when you and I feel quite down on humans, and this human experience we’re part of. You’ve told me. I get it. Humans exploit the earth, and drive too fast, and don’t tip well, and turn power into tyranny. Humans take advantage of each other, and jockey for the best place at the table, and perpetuate unspeakable evils, and casually ignore suffering right in front of us. Humans can be deeply cruel to each other and to themselves. Humans are messy, and needy, and crippled by loss, and so very, very afraid.
This isn’t just a human condition, it’s a Christian human condition too. We’re not exempt. Like Paul who wrote to the church of Colossians indicates, Christians can, as he says, be “taken captive through philosophy and empty deceipt… but not according to Christ.” One doesn’t have to look far to see this threat successfully at work. Our politics take us captive. Leaders take us captive. Jobs take us captive. Pursuit of wealth or status or youth or influence takes us captive. Distraction and loneliness and isolation and fear takes us captive.
Sometimes we walk willingly toward that different way of living, making conscious choices to prioritize our lives differently in a way we see so freely around us. But oftentimes, we don’t even realize it’s happening! Work appointments just start crowding out time for play, for relationships, for quiet. What started as a skincare hobby grows into an obsession over every wrinkle, every pound, every spot. What once was just a budget spreadsheet has become every third thought rolling through your mind, the scarcity and anxiety about how to have more. One political podcast, one video, one click turns into several, then many, then before even realizing it, you’re walking around mad all day at people you don’t even talk to and leaders who will never listen. One day of choosing convenience and comfort and solitude turns into several, and then weeks pile on top of weeks, and now you’re lonely and disconnected but aren’t sure how to even begin finding your way back into community. “Watch out that no one takes you captive,” Paul says. No one, not even yourselves.
This becoming captive without even realizing it reminds me of the story from the 2009 film Get Low. Inspired by the true story of Felix Breazeale of Tennessee – played by Robert Duvall, Get Low tells of Felix who, in 1938, arranged a “living funeral” for himself so that he could hear what people would say about him after his death while he was still very much alive. You see, Felix is a hermit who has lived alone in the woods for some 40 years. He is almost entirely cut off from the rest of the world. The sign posted at the entrance to his property reads “No Dang Trespassing.” “I built my own jail,” he says at one point, “and I put myself in it and I stayed there for 40 [dang] years.” (Of course he said these more colorfully than I just did.) When Felix feels his life coming to an end, he decides it is time to “get low,” that is, to get down to business and arrange for that living funeral. As many as 12,000 people are said to have attended Breazeale’s funeral, which attracted nationwide attention.1
IV.“I built my own jail,” Felix says. “I built my own jail,” we say. Humans say. “But in Christ,” Paul says, “the whole fullness of God dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him.” You have fullness – fullness! – in Christ! Not in an ideology. Not in a task list. Not in a human relationship, however fulfilling and meaningful. Not in your work. Not in your money. Not in a precious tradition. Not in a stalwart institution. Not in AI or AA or ADHD. You come into the fullest reach of your human existence in this life in Jesus, the fullest picture of God this world has ever known.
You see, when God came near in Jesus, human life had new meaning. God dignified the human by taking human form. In this first century, brown, poor Palestinian Jewish carpenter, the fullness of God came to dwell – from cradle to cross and tomb, and every miracle, interaction, healing, table-turning, lesson-teaching, wound-pressing, water-turning, mystery-holding, new life-giving moment in between. So to lose connection to Jesus for us as Christians is to lose connection to the fullness of life. “You have received Christ Jesus,” Paul says, “so live your lives in Christ Jesus!” Root them in Jesus. Build them up in Jesus. Establish your faith in Jesus. Be abundant in thanksgiving for Jesus. Be together, be beloved community, be fully alive in Jesus!
Now, humans have a model for living, an example for how to be in relationship, someone to look to when wondering how to live. And Christians have a life to pattern our humanity on, a way of living to follow, a person that saves us from ourselves and from the ways that lead to death. So in the church, when we smudge ashes on our brow, we remember Jesus’s human frailty and our own. When we give ourselves over to immersion in the waters of baptism, we remember Jesus’s transformation in baptism and our own. When we feed the hungry, and look out for the lonely, and care for the orphaned, and see the imprisoned up close; when we teach the kids, and volunteer with the youth, and pack the food bags for our neighbors, and sing in the choir; when we call a friend, and forgive an offender, and give a little money away, and choose to extend grace when we didn’t have to, we practice Jesus’s way of life in our own living, and find that we’re living fully alive too, and the glory of God might just be revealed through our imperfect human selves.
You might think that living fully alive happens with bangs and flashes and fireworks and big decisions and life-altering moments. But no. Living like Jesus starts small, like pressing seeds into the soil, watering and tending and cultivating them over time, and trusting that the seeds will bear fruit. Living like Jesus saves us. No longer will we be dead humans walking. No longer will we be held captive to a duller, dimmer way of living. No longer will we wait until this life becomes terminal to discover how to be fully alive. “I came that they may have life,” Jesus said, “and have it to the full.” “Why do you look for the living among the dead?,” the angels asked Jesus’s disciples at the tomb. “He is not here but has risen!” Life abundant! Life eternal! Life that never ends. Being fully alive in Jesus, dear beloved community, is such very good news.
V.“Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made,” the poem begins. “Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something, they will call you. When they want you to die for profit, they will let you know.”2 Farmer-prophet-poet Wendell Berry and his Manifesto seems to take his cue from Colossians. He might as well also include “see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit.”
But here the poem makes the turn: “so, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. … Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years…. Practice resurrection.”3
Wendell Berry’s telling us how to live, isn’t he? How to be fully alive. How to refuse the deceits of this world. How to hold fast to the source. How to be rooted and grounded and established and built up in something deeper, truer, and more beautiful than what we know.
When listening carefully to what word I might bring for us to consider on that March 22 call Sunday some 10 years ago, Wendell Berry was my inspiration, and “Planting Sequoias” was my sermon title. In my novice preacher voice not yet used to weekly proclamation, quavering with nerves and emotion and anticipation and Annabelle sitting on my lungs so I couldn’t breathe very well, I said to you, dear beloved community, that day, “Friends, there will be days that we grow weary from the task of ministry. There will be days that we’re not sure if we have the capacity to change or the courage to lead. There will be days when the hard task of listening to God to discern a vision for our future ahead is just too great a weight to bear. There will be days when we just want the race to get easier or those sequoias we’ve planted to start producing fruit and giving us shade in which to rest. And on those days, we simply must consider Jesus who pioneered a life lived so fully in God’s Love and perfected it, so that we might be strengthened for the living of our days.”4
And so I say to you, dear beloved community, remember Jesus. Live like Jesus! Plant sequoias, and practice resurrection, in order to live fully alive. Amen!