Category: Sermons

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, December 24, 2021, at 7:00 p.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

It’s Always About the Light

 “O God, you have caused this holy night to shine with the brightness of the true Light: Grant that we, who have known the mystery of that Light on earth, may also enjoy him perfectly in heaven.”
(Collect for Christmas Eve)

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shine.” (Isaiah 9:2)

“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.” (Titus 2:11)

“And the glory of the Lord shone around them” (Luke 2:9)

 [Play song of the blackbird]

Blackbird singing in the dead of night.
Take these broken wings and learn to fly.

All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

It’s always about the light.

The COVID-19 pandemic still rages, in part because of the random and irritating course of nature, in part because of our social reluctance to work in solidarity to end it. We miss proximity to one another. Enough is enough, we complain; yet Coved and Delta and Omicron rage on. Our world climates worsen in terrifyingly unpredictable ways, creating anxiety about our future on this planet. Our political divides are so deep that we back away from civil discussion and hiss and lob curses at one another.

Light indeed? World affairs, human affairs seem so fouled up that we are apt to lapse into pessimism and despair and wonder if the Christmas proclamation is just so much tinsel town and unfulfilled promises.

But the Christmas message—whether proclaimed loudly by a chorus from Handel’s “Messiah” or quietly as the verse from “O Little Town of Bethlehem” has it—continues to sound. Light will prevail. Happiness will spring forth. Love will triumph. It’s always about the light.

  Blackbird fly, blackbird fly
  Into the light of the of the dark black night. (John Lennon and Paul McCartney)

            Advent has been preparing us by asking us to watch and to pay attention to our world and our lives closely and patiently enough to see that there are tons of good in it. Not to despair. To keep looking to see all the people reaching out, smiling, touching one another. So, now, on this most solemn night, we welcome the one who will make all the difference, who will proclaim what we have suspected all along, that life is good, that human beings are good, and grace and love prevail.

          So all the jingles and doggerel of the season are worth it. When I see tacky decorations in storefront windows or on my neighbors’ lawns, I rejoice. Better tacky that dreary, better cheer than gloom.

When calm is the night and the stars shine bright,

The sleigh glides smooth and cheerily;

And mirth and jest abound,

While all is still around,

Save the horses trampling sound,

And the horse-bells tinkling merrily.

But when the drifting snow in the traveler’s face shall blow,
And hail is driving drearily,
And the wind is shrill and loud,
Then no sleigh shall stir abroad,
Nor along the beaten road
Shall the horse-bells tinkle merrily.

But to-night the skies are clear, and we have not to fear
That the time should linger wearily;
For good-humor has a charm
Even winter to disarm,
And our cloaks shall wrap us warm,
And the bells shall tinkle merrily.

          It’s always and everywhere and completely and forever about the light! Light: not just the magical, mysterious thing that illuminates us all, but the new perspective, the new vistas, the new understanding that light gives when it is turned on. Poof, out of darkness and incomprehension—and then light, insight, clarity, and amazement.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free

This is what Christmas does. It turns on the light. It helps us see, perhaps as we have never seen before. Our old, sometimes dreary world takes on a color and a sparkle unseen by our cynical eyes but staring us square in the face by our open hearts.

          I repeat a story first heard at a Christmas Eve service some years ago:

One Christmas Day, a woman, her husband, and their year-old son had driven a long way before they found an open diner by the side of the road. It was quiet and almost empty, and they were waiting gratefully for their food when the little boy began waving from his high chair and calling, “Hi there!” to someone behind them. To the mother’s surprise, it was a wreck of a man, unshaven and unwashed, obviously a homeless drunk. Now he was waving back at her little boy and calling, “Hi there, baby, hi there, big boy . . . I see ya, buster.”

The woman and her husband looked at each other, and the other customers in the diner were throwing disapproving glances their way.

And the old guy went on, even after their food came. “Do you know patty-cake? Attaboy . . . Do you know peekaboo? Hey, look, he knows peekaboo.”

The mother tried turning the high chair around, but the boy shrieked and twisted to face his new buddy. Finally, giving up on their meal, her husband got up to pay the

bill, and the mother took the baby in her arms, praying that she could quickly get past the old drunk, who was seated by the door. But as they approached, her son reached out with both arms—his pick-me-up signal—and propelled himself into the man’s open arms.

But now the mother could see tears in the man’s eyes as her son laid his head on his shoulder. He gently held and rocked the boy, and then he looked straight into her eyes.

“You take care of this baby,” he said firmly. And as he slowly handed him back, “God bless you, ma’am. You’ve given me my Christmas gift.”

She must have mumbled something in return, but as she rushed to the car, tears streaming down her face, she could only think, “My God, my God, forgive me.”    

          Let us not this season ask God to forgive us for the love we withhold, but to be grateful to God for the love we can give. For there is an awful lot of it to be given.

Let us pray:

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

By The Rev. Deacon Virginia Jenkins-Whatley

In the name of the Father,Son and Holy Spirit
A Visitation” (Sermon on Luke 1:39-45)
Our gospel today tells the story of the meeting of
the two moms –the visitation of Mary to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was the older woman; Mary, the younger.
Elizabeth was in her sixth month; Mary’s pregnancy
had just started. And we’ll get to why neither one
should have been pregnant in a moment. But it was
at this time that Mary goes to visit her older relative
Elizabeth, traveling from her home in Nazareth.

“The Visitation” is the term that is commonly used
when referring to this meeting of these two most
uncommon mothers, Mary and Elizabeth. There is
even a day in the church year set aside for
observing the Visitation. This year it was listed in
the Lectionary on May 31.
But the key to this story is that it is not just a
meeting of the two moms. It is also the first
meeting of the two baby boys they are carrying
inside of them. In particular, it is the baby boy that
Mary is carrying that will make this–both for the
people involved in this story and for us as well–that
will make this “A Blessed Visitation.”

Now there is a back story to each of these
pregnancies. Elizabeth was an older woman, well
beyond her childbearing years. And what’s more,
she had never been able to have children. This was
a great disappointment to Elizabeth and her
husband Zechariah. Zechariah was a priest who
served in the temple in Jerusalem. One day he was
there, in the Holy Place, ministering at the altar of
incense, when all of a sudden an angel appeared. It
was the angel Gabriel, who told Zechariah that he
and his wife Elizabeth were finally going to be able
to have a child. It will be a boy, and they are to
name him John. And the angel said that God would
have a special calling on John’s life: that John would
be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s
womb; that he would be a great prophet like Elijah;
and that John would go before the Lord to prepare
his way. This sounds like Gabriel is saying John will
be the last great prophet immediately before the
coming of the Messiah–which indeed he was. So
after hearing this news, Zechariah goes home,

Elizabeth becomes pregnant, and she is six months
along with baby John when Mary comes for a visit.
The angel Gabriel made another surprise
announcement, this time telling Mary that she also
would be expecting a child she didn’t expect. What
made this pregnancy unusual was that Mary was
not married. Yes, there was a time when that sort of
thing was considered unusual. But what takes it
from the unusual to the unique was that Mary
became pregnant while remaining a virgin. That just
does not happen. And this is the only time it ever
would happen. But it was fitting that it should
happen in this way, for the child Mary would bear
would be totally unique.

The angel Gabriel said many wonderful things about
this boy to be born. He told Mary: “And behold, you
will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you
shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be
called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God
will give to him the throne of his father David, and
he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of
his kingdom there will be no end.” And then Gabriel

added: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the
power of the Most High will overshadow you;
therefore the child to be born will be called
holy–the Son of God.” Conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the virgin Mary. True God and true man, in
the one person of Christ. This baby Jesus will be the
Son of God come in the flesh. He will be the great
Messiah prophesied so long ago.

Gabriel also told Mary: “And behold, your relative
Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son,
and this is the sixth month with her who was called
barren.” And that is how Mary comes to visit
Elizabeth. They’ve both got these miracle
pregnancies in common.

And so this is where we pick up the story today.
Mary goes to the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth,
she enters the house, and she greets Elizabeth. And
when she does, the sound of her greeting is picked
up by baby John, in the womb, and he does a joyful
little leap! Remember, the angel had said that John

would be filled with the Spirit even in his mother’s
womb. And so when Mary greets Elizabeth, the
Spirit causes John to recognize that Jesus was there,
too.
So John leaps, and Elizabeth too is filled with the
Holy Spirit and starts to get excited. She tells Mary:
“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the
fruit of your womb!” Mary, you have been given a
great honor, to bear the Savior of the world. I mean,
I am honored to bear the forerunner of the Lord,
but you get to give birth to the Lord himself! What a
wonderful blessing!
Elizabeth continues: “And why is this granted to me
that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”
She realizes that she is not worthy of such a
visitation. And at the same time, she realizes that
her Lord is coming to her, bringing great blessing.
Such humble faith is truly the work of the Holy
Spirit.

Do we have the humility and the faith of an
Elizabeth? Yes, I believe we do. We recognize that

we are not worthy to have God grace us with his
presence. We know we are sinners–we confessed
that earlier in the service. We don’t deserve to have
our Lord come to us with his blessing. It is purely by
his grace and his mercy that he does.
As with Elizabeth, the Holy Spirit has worked in our
hearts, through the gospel, so that we trust in Jesus
as our Lord and Savior. We know that the little child
came as our brother, in the flesh, so that he could
do the only job that would save us. He came to do
the Father’s will, to keep God’s law perfectly on our
behalf. Christ came to offer the one perfect sacrifice
that atones for all our sins, to suffer and die a
sinner’s death on the cross, taking the punishment
that the law requires and that we deserve. He came
to be our peace and our life, shown when he rose
victorious over sin and death, granting us blessing
and joy in their place.
Yes, when Jesus enters the house, we get all of
these blessings with him. This is enough to make
someone leap for joy, as Elizabeth tells Mary: “For
behold, when the sound of your greeting came to
my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.”

Then Elizabeth has one more word for Mary: “And
blessed is she who believed that there would be a
fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the
Lord.” Faith–that is what we’re seeing here. The
faith that Elizabeth had to know was that this was
no ordinary child Mary was bringing into the world –
-it was the Lord himself. And the faith of Mary in
which she believed the great things the angel had
told her about the son she would bear.

Dear friends, the meeting of the moms is a meeting
of two great women of faith. Both Mary and
Elizabeth stand out as wonderful examples for us.
They believe the Lord’s words, and they receive his
gifts. The Holy Spirit will work such a Mary-and-
Elizabeth faith in us, too.

You see, there’s a whole bunch of miracles that we
see in our text today. The miraculous pregnancies of
both Elizabeth and Mary . The way that they both
believed and rejoiced in the good news of their Lord
and Savior Jesus Christ–that too is a miracle. Any

time anyone is given the gift of faith and joy in the
Lord–that is a miracle of God. It is the work of the
Holy Spirit, working through the Word, working in
our hearts, creating a saving faith and a blessed joy.
And the great thing is, you and I have the same
good news and the same Holy Spirit at work in our
hearts today.
Today we have heard the story of the visitation of
Mary to Elizabeth. It was a meeting of the moms,
yes. But don’t forget those boys! They meet, too,
Jesus and John do. And wherever Mary’s baby boy
goes, he brings blessing with him. Even in the
womb, he brought blessing and joy to the home of
Elizabeth and Zechariah. And Jesus brings blessing
and joy into our homes, too. When we gather with
our family for Christmas–when the Christ of
Christmas is the reason for our merriment–Jesus
brings the joy with him. When we gather here with
our church family, here in God’s house, Christ is
surely present to bless us with his gifts. Christ is
here, visiting us with his grace and favor. And that
makes this a most blessed visitation.

Wishing you all many blessings this Christmas
..AMEN

 December 5, 2020
By The Deacon Rev. Virginia Jenkins Whatley
Luke 3 1-6

 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene,   during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert.

 John went throughout the whole region of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,   as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah: A voice of one crying out in the desert: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.

 Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth,  and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

The gospel reading above mentions very important people (VIP) yet it is to a man in the wilderness that the Word of God was revealed. A great lesson to be learned here. John the Baptist lived in the desert seeking only the presence of God while the great men of his time lived in their palaces seeking the adulation of people.

 The desert is a desolate place away from the bustle and hustle of city life where the voice of God is drown out by noises from every direction. John the Baptist could not have chosen a better place to prepare him for his ministry. Indeed, modern life is not only hectic but noisy and full of distractions. That is why it is always best to go for a walk in a desolate place, perhaps in a forest, where we can focus all our attention on God alone. If it is not possible, we can just shut the door of our room (Matthew 6:6), switch off the television and stuck away our mobile phone in a drawer so we can concentrate on listening to the voice of God. The point is we need complete silence because common sense dictates that it is in quietness that we hear God’s voice.

 John proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Repentance is a condition for salvation. God loves us as to send His only begotten Son to deliver us from death and eternal damnation yet we need to accept first that we are sinners, then repent and change our ways.

 The cry of John the Baptist was and still is to prepare a way for the Lord and to make straight His path. When a special visitor comes to our residence, we will make sure that everything is in order. We will spend a day or even a week to clean, maybe repaint and fix everything to show the very best impression and to give our visitor a comfortable stay in our house. Don’t we do that to Jesus our savior? The season of advent is the best time to do it. Let us fix our life, clean our mind and heart, and put on the garment of faith, hope, and love to welcome Him.

Sunday, November 21, 2021
Sermon
John 18: 33-37

By The Deacon Rev. Virginia Jenkins-Whatley

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit

Amen

Throughout history empires come and go. The century with Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini saw dictators seeking to build empires with ruthless barbarity, and for all their might, they too have gone the way of Pharoah and his kingdom. The British Empire and the other empires of the nineteenth century have also long since been broken up. There is no earthly kingdom that will endure for ever and no earthly power that will not one day fade away.

In our gospel reading Jesus stands on trial before Pilate. The Jewish leaders know that Pilate isn’t interested in charges of blasphemy, so they present Jesus as a threat to the power of the Roman empire who Pilate represents.

When Pilate asks Jesus about his claims to kingship, Jesus does speak about having a kingdom, but the kingdom of which he speaks is not of this world – it is hugely different from the might of Rome and the power of Caesar.  Jesus’ kingdom is of a different order and gets its authority from a higher throne. His Kingdom is no less than God’s Kingdom.

God’s Kingdom is not established through violence and control like the many kingdoms of this world. It does not exploit or suppress those in its power. Jesus will not fight against those who arrest him, because his kingdom is inaugurated through sacrifice and its power is the power of selfless love. Jesus’ Kingdom is truly not of this world.

Jesus is the King who comes not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. Jesus is a king who humbles himself and becomes poor, taking the lowest place, such that we might be made rich in him and exalted to the highest place.

This Kingdom, unlike the kingdoms of this world, will endure forever because its foundations are eternal and its authority flows from the very throne of God.

This is our Kingdom and this Jesus is our King.

On this feast of Christ the King, the Church reminds us of these great truths. We are encouraged to reflect on the nature of King Jesus and to consider the values of his Kingdom.

We’re called not to succumb to the lure of power and wealth. We are encouraged to see the promises of this world’s treasures as empty and fleeting, and instead to pin our hopes on Jesus and to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.

We are reminded not to store up treasure on earth, where moth and rust corrupt and thieves break in and steal, but to store up treasure in heaven.

We’re challenged to stop building our own little kingdoms and to stop seeking power over others, and instead to take the place of servants after the pattern of our crucified king.

Today we are called to set our minds on the things of heaven and to live in this world as those who belong to another. Our ways of thinking and being are to be shaped by Jesus and his ways, and our dealings with others are to be marked by the same kind of humble love with which God comes to us.

Christ is our King and we are his people. He is our truth, let us listen to his voice, and may his Kingdom come and his will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Amen.

By Deacon Rev. Virginia Jenkins-Whatley

Sermon: Mark 13: 1-8
We can turn on our television sets or radios
in our cars on any given day and there will
be an event that was just described
happening somewhere in our world today.
We hear about these things so much we are
almost immune to them until they happen
close to home.

Our Scripture lesson for today is guaranteed to
raise the pulse a bit. In it Jesus begins to tell the
disciples of signs of the end of the age. The
entire chapter has been called Mark’s mini-
apocalypse. It’s reminiscent of the style and
theme of the Book of Revelation which is the
classic Christian example of apocalyptic writing.
Apocalyptic literature was a special kind of
writing that was very popular at the time of
Jesus. It dealt with looking at the end of the
world using very clever and meaningful symbols.
Imagery—often powerful and wild imagery, was
used to paint word pictures.
In our lesson, Jesus responded to a comment on
how magnificent the Temple was. He looked past
the building to a time when it would be
destroyed. Indeed the Temple was to be
destroyed within a generation of Jesus speaking
these words. Jesus then took the disciples on a
verbal journey to the end times. All of the chapter
focuses on symbols and events that will show

that the end time is about to happen. But the
reason Jesus told the disciples these things
wasn’t so they could pinpoint a date. It wasn’t to
give them a heads up so they could get their
affairs in order. It wasn’t to let them gloat when
things happened and they could say “I told you
so.”
Actually, with the exception of the destruction of
the Temple, none of the disciples saw the things
Jesus said would usher in the end of the world.
We haven’t seen them yet, 2000 years later. The
point Jesus was making was to watch out—be
prepared— persevere in the midst of the
struggles to come. Soon, there were going to be
times when Christians truly believed that the end
was near. Within a decade or two, nearly all the
12 disciples would be dead- –mostly as martyrs.
Within a generation, persecution would seek to
destroy the Church, even as the Temple was
destroyed. The end of the world didn’t come but
threats to bring about the end of faith and the end
of the Church were certainly on the horizon. The
key was to be alert—be prepared and persevere.
Believers would have to dig deep to continue to
be enthusiastic and energetic about a faith that
could cost them their lives. Things wouldn’t be
easy for anyone who followed Jesus. Their own
end could come at any time. In effect Jesus was
telling the disciples that they would have to live
on the edge. Danger would lend an edginess to
their lives. Their faith would have to persevere in

the times when it would be a lot easier to give up
and give in to the pressures that opposed God.
After the resurrection and after the Church was
up and running, many in the first generation
Church did actually believe that Christ would
return before they died. They lived in expectation.
They lived with energy and enthusiasm because
they fully anticipated they would live to see the
Second Coming. I doubt that their adrenaline and
heart rate stayed locked in a high-octane mode.
But they lived on the edge. They lived with an
edge. They lived with an attitude that remained
focused on the Lord, day in and day out.
Remember, late in 1999, when some people
thought that the New Year would bring about the
end of the world? The year 2000 was anticipated
with a curious mix of excitement and foreboding.
Of course, as our calendars flipped over from
1999 to 2000, nothing special happened. Even the
computers seemed to take it all in stride. I
remember reading, though, that Church
attendance spiked in the last few months of

1999. People wanted to make sure their
      connections were in place, just in case. There
      certainly was an energy– -an edge to living in the
      last few days of 1999. But nothing happened.
      Things quickly returned to normal.
      911 real thoughts to the end of the world were
      real. The terrorist attacks of 911 occurred almost
      in our back yards. I was driving to work on 911

and saw all the planes hovering in the sky over
Newark airport on the turnpike and thought
something was happening at the airport. I turned
up my Cd and kept rocking out all the way to
work not realizing life changing events were
happening. The giant walls of the world trade
center were crumbling. Destruction and death of
innocent souls was occurring and all we could do
was watch the morning news cast in horror until
we lost all communication.
Did we receive forewarning to prepare ourselves?
Did the powers that be have information and
didn’t respond responsively?
All we could think about at that time was if the
end was near. Where will the enemy strike next?
Where do we go what do we do? We all became
panic stricken. We lost our sense of comfort and
were literally on the edge . Thousands of people
in the streets of NYC running in the dust and
debris for their lives, heart pounding, pulses
racing, adrenaline rushing.
Since 911 the world has experienced
devastating fires, floods, earthquakes,
tornadoes etc which can be perceived as signs
of the end of time. Sidewalk evangelist will
stop you on the street with their predictions of
the end.
I wonder if living on the edge might not be an
important lesson for us, as Christians? The edge

I’m talking about is what the first generation
Christians had. The edge that came from
listening to Jesus’ words to watch out—be alert—
be sure to persevere in faith.

Our hope is in Christ’s return, which will be the
main event of the end times. We must be
careful not to be deceived by world events.
Instead we must look forward to the greatest
event in history-Christ’s return for his church
AMEN

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, October 31, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

Compassion IV:
It’s All Love

 “Hallelujah!
    O my soul, praise God!
All my life long I’ll praise God,
    singing songs to my God as long as I live.” (Psalm 146:1)

“Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart..” (Deuteronomy 6:1-9)

“[These love commandment[s] that I give you [are] much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” (Mark 12:28-34)

          The Old Testament reading and the Gospel this morning are completely pertinent to the theme of our meditations this month, on the subject of compassion. Both testaments of our Bible proclaim the same thing, namely, that love is the name of the game of lifeand, in fact, supersedes everything else. Hence I have argued that we all have one need and one wish and that is to be loved and to love, and I have said further that to be loved and to love is all that we need and all that we want.

          We have noticed some of the inherent barriers to this life of joy, freedom and peace. One is our reluctance to understand, to get to know someone more than superficially. Without understanding, our love remains behind a half-open curtain and we can proceed only hesitantly. Of course, love should be unconditionally given, but it is a challenge we often fail to meet when we do not adequately understand where someone is coming from.

          And along with understanding, another vital component of compassion is honesty, for honesty opens the floodgates of both understanding and love. The more honest I am with you and you with me, the more we can meet one another on the same playing field. This playing field is necessarily a playing field of suffering. For compassion means suffering. Our Lord Jesus Christ meets our suffering with his suffering. Hence understanding. Hence love. No cross, no crown. And the crown of thorns is a crown of love.

          Where compassion reigns, differences melt away. And the differences that remain often become enchantments, things we long to know and absorb into our own lives.

          Let’s look at a third impediment to fully engaging in love, both receiving it (despite needing and wanting it) and giving it, because, as we have seen, we are blocked in fully loving others to the extent that we do not love ourselves or have been reluctant to receive love ourselves.

          And that is the big, big “no” we throw out at God, either for an idea or ideas we may have about this God, or about experiences we have that seem to belie any evidence that God loves us.

          I must agree with those who turn their back on God or religion or church because they have gotten the notion that God is a God of wrath and severe judgment. Where they get such ideas really doesn’t matter, but let’s admit that the Bible—both the Old and the New testaments—have some pretty harsh things to say about God and what God is.

          Take this morning’s beautiful readings about commandments. The commandments to love God and our neighbor are beautiful all right, but the very word “commandment” can rankle in our sensitive ears. Why do we have to call these commanments by that name? Isn’t “loving suggestions,” “prescriptions for a happy and rich life,” or just about any way of calling them better than the word “commandment.” After all, we aren’t in the army. I can never recall either of my parents using the word “command” in any advice or warnings they gave me. Maybe it’s just me, but there is enough defiance left in me that I am inclined to turn a deaf ear when I hear talk of commands. On the other hand, perhaps this word points to the absolute essential nature of love. Without it, the world would fall apart, perhaps existence itself would cease to be. So, command does make us sit up straight: “get with the program of loving.” It’s the way of life itself.

          And again, we can turn our back on the God thing when we hear a phrase like that of the Confession in Rite One of Communion in our Book of Common Prayer:

          We confess together, in beautiful Elizabethan English, the following: “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed, against thy divine majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.”

          Now, wrath and indignation are pretty strong words, and to think that God is a God of wrath might be just what it takes for us to forsake this God. We might even recommend that such a God go and sign up for anger management classes. But as was wisely pointed out to me at coffee hour, when I was ranting about this phrase, this anger from God arises in the context of caring. God cares for us like a parent and has only our best interest in mind. And, as another friend suggested, God is hurt and angry but he doesn’t necessarily lash out in vengeance. He’s not like a child or an abusive parent. In fact, he more than likely doesn’t act from wrath at all. I just don’t know. Do you?

          But the most interesting comment I heard as that the wrath of God is God’s wounded love. These are the same wounds that we see on the cross, where God identifies with our suffering.

          The wrath of God is God’s wounded love.

          So we draw near to the conclusion of our journey into God’s compassion. God’s compassion is about as deep as we limited human beings can go into God’s very being. I truly believe that this is the unique gift of Christian faith over all other religious ideas or creeds. That God suffers: he understands, he identifies and he continues to love.

God’s love is so deep because God understands us fully. Unlike the superficiality of much of our so-called compassion. A lot of this compassion is superficial sympathy, as when a horse walks into a bar and the bartender asks, “Why the long face?”

God is the father who greets us at the edge of the farm, welcoming us home. He is the God at the bedside of every dying COVID patient. She is the one who mourns as we mourn the injustices that millions of God’s children suffer.

          What the world needs now is love, sweet love. And the beauty of love is that is freely given. You cannot force anyone to love you, nor can you force anyone to love the source of all love, God. It wouldn’t be love if coerced like that. Jesus is the great courtier. He woos us with gentleness, with mirth and gentle prodding. God wants our love as we want the love of those whom we love! Our love for him completes the gift of our life.

          We live in a love world, and the only thing keeping all of us from loving one another is our blindness, refusal or ignorance in opening our eyes to the wonder of our existence on this fragile earth, our island home.

          I ask you. I have said that our greatest, our only, need and desire is to be loved and to love. But isn’t our deepest love the desire for those we love to be happy?

          Look for your neighbor in yourself. And look for you in your neighbor. Reach out, understand your neighbors as more than names, and you will see the glory of God and rejoice. What’s more you will love.

Amen.

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, October 24, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

Compassion III:
Easy to Love, Hard to Love

“God,…increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and love.”

 (Collect, Proper 25)

“With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.” (Jeremiah 31: 7-9))

“Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.

Those who sowed with tears will reap with songs of joy.” (Psalm 126:2)

We call on God in today’s opening prayer to increase our love. Goodness knows, we need it, and goodness knows, we know that this is what we need and what we desire. In fact, as I have argued, and I have heard none of you contradict me, love is the only thing we need and the only thing we desire. Of course, I’ll argue for you, we need food, shelter, clothing, a respectable living and many other quite desirable things. Sure, but all of these are predicated on a foundation of love and care.

          “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of….Not just for some, but for everyone.” Remember that delightful ditty from the mid-sixties, sung by Jackie DeShannon.

          And has it ever struck you as odd that this glorious commodity, which brings so much harmony, understanding, peace, and joy, can seem at times to be in such short supply? Why is that, I wonder? For there is plenty of it—love, that is. It’s like a bar advertising free drinks for life and nobody bothers to sidle up to it.

          I can suggest a couple of reasons. Perhaps you can add to my list. First of all, it seems to be that everybody wants to be loved, but few of us want to do the loving. Even this reluctance to love (we could call it selfishness, the human condition), can stem from our own lousy feelings about ourselves. You know when you’re not feeling good, your motivation to be nice, even to family members, can reduce dramatically. We can, in other words, turn into bears. And many of us carry the marks of abuse and trauma and we just aren’t emotionally very healthy and so can’t be very loving towards others—since we aren’t very loving towards ourselves.

          In other words, I have said that everybody wants to be loved, but the longer we nurse deep hurt and sorrow, even abandonment, the harder it may be even to want love, since we really believe that we don’t deserve love. Can there be anything sadder than this? But unfortunately, this seems to be the fate of many of us.

          A second reason many of us may stay away from the fountain of love, that bar that serves free drinks for as long as we wish, is that we are stuck on stupid. That is, we have a pinched, judgmental view of our lives and those around us. I was in graduate school with a very bright man, whose father, in fact, was one of the inventors of television, and he said to me solemnly one day, “Steve, we are born, we live and we die…and that is that!” He said it with such conviction and vehemence that I have never forgotten it.

Sure, in one sense he was right. Looked at it coldly and clinically, we are born, we live and we die. But “Where’s the beef?” as the TV commercial used to wonder. Where’s the music, the color of our lives? As Auntie Mame says in that famous play, “Life’s a banquet and most sons of bitches are starving to death!”

          People who fail to join in the general dance are missing out. Sure, I’m not saying that many of us do not have terrible burdens to bear; wounds too deep for words; and we are not being so cruel or unfeeling not to have heavy hearts for them, especially if they are unable to rally from their pain. I get it. Love’s deepest expression is compassion, our ability to identify with those who are the most unhappy.

          For we saw last week that we cannot generate compassion until we can show some for ourselves, and we really cannot love until we know that we are loved. It’s sort of like a relay race. We must be given the baton of love in order to run with it to others.

          Now that we have acknowledged that most of us want to be loved but are not so crazy about loving others, we ask ourselves the next big question? Why is that? Why do we find it hard sometimes to love? First, let’s be honest. Some people are just easier to love than others. Am I alone in thinking this? One of my favorite Cole Porter songs says it so beautifully:

For you’d be so easy to love
So easy to idolize all others above
So sweet to waken with
So nice to sit down to eggs and bacon with

We’d be so grand at the game
So carefree together that it does seem a shame
That you can’t see
Your future with me
‘Cause you’d be, oh, so easy to love

It’s easy to love those who are easy to love. But this song, a romantic song, sugarcoats the reality that the first blush of love is delightful. Check in on this same couple a short time later, and they have separated. Divorce is the name of hundreds of thousands of relationships. Forming a true partnership with another human being, putting two fallible, sinning human beings next to each other is, to put it mildly, a challenge.

          You’d be so easy to love. Ok. But we all know that you’d be so hard to love as well. Very hard. Heartbreakingly hard. We can easily fall into the deep hole of self-recrimination if we are too hard on ourselves. After all, in whatever relational conflict we have had, it takes two to tango. There are two sides to most misunderstandings. It takes mutual commitment for both parties to understand each other fully, and a breakup is almost in part due to not having sufficient understanding to fully understand the other.

And there is a certain defiance and pride that keeps us from the very reconciliation and love that is our birthright.

          I suppose the most reassuring insight I have been given when I am beating myself up for the thousand and one ways I am not loving enough is to realize that I am not creating more love, for love is always there, flowing in the universe with or without my participation. My only question is whether I am swimming in the ocean of love or remaining dry from my fears and hesitations.

For that ocean of love is the love of God.

O love, how deep, how broad, how high!
It fills the heart with ecstasy.

As Jonathan Edwards said, God’s love is an ocean without shores of bottom.

As John Paul Young, the Scottish-Australian pop singer sings:
Love is in the air, everywhere I look around

Love is in the air, every sight and every sound

Love is in the air, in the whisper of the tree

Love is in the air, in the thunder of the sea

Love is in the air, in the rising of the sun

Love is in the air, when the day is nearly done

          How do we miss it? It is everywhere.

For God is love, and God is everywhere.

Amen.

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, October 17, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

Compassion II:
Please Understand Me!

“Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases….And by his bruises we are healed.”

 (Isaiah 53:4-12)

“[His angels] shall bear you in their hands, lest you dash your foot against a stone….Because he is bound to me in love…I will protect him” (Psalm 91:12,14)

“For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” (Mark 10:45)

          From one of my favorite movie musicals, Damn Yankees, they sing,

You’ve gotta have heart/
all you really need is heart./
When the odds are sayin’ you’ll never win/
That’s when the grin should start./

All you really need is heart!”   

And it is in the heart where love is born and resides. It is the mixing bowl out of which comes the most important thing. In fact, to pick up and repeat last week’s theme, there is one need and one wish that every human being has, and that is the need and the wish to be loved and to love. And I further claim that this love is all we need. All you need is love, lots and lots and lots of love. Is there ever enough love? Only if you place a limit on it. It flows like the sun shines. There is no stopping it and no way of stopping it.

          Compassion is another word for love. And compassion is the subject of this series of meditations. As the Dalai Lama sings, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion; if you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

          Compassion is perhaps the richest, deepest and most challenging of those other-directed emotional words, including the words “sympathy” and “empathy.”

          Let’s look briefly at those words. “Sympathy” is the socially acceptable, Kindergarten-level way of expressing care and concern. “I sympathize with you.” “I am simpatico with what you are feeling.” “I get where you’re at!” Empathy takes it further. It enters into understanding of another’s pain or predicament. It is free of judgment, perhaps the hardest quality to cultivate seeing how most of us love to judge people for where they are in their lives. How often have we thought that someone “complains too much,” “must be a hypochondriac” (as if we were qualified physicians), “should be over their grieving by now,” (as if we were in charge of someone’s emotional timeline). Empathy simply stands alongside someone else, free of judgment, hopefully short on advice, and, if we want to do our friend a big favor, keeping our mouth shut…tight! Empathy is like when someone is stuck inside a dark hole and we might shout down, “Hey, I know what it’s like down there.” Empathy: feeling with someone.

          Compassion is a kind of post-graduate caring, for it not only identifies with someone’s predicament, it shares its love with that person through its own suffering. “Passion,” as we saw last week, comes from the Latin for suffering. I link with your suffering through my suffering. We are brothers in our shared humanity. That is compassion.

          And the reason compassion is such a beautiful reality in the Christian life is because we look to the one Jesus who not just stands with us in our suffering, but who takes on our suffering. He is that close to us. A parent, a sibling, a close, close friend can feel intensely our pain as they sit with us in compassion. But our Lord Jesus takes our suffering into himself. This is the meaning of incarnation, and this is the meaning of salvation. Salvation means healing.

          I want to focus for a brief time on a key ingredient of this wonderful action of compassion. Compassion is not just a feeling. It is also an action. It involves our words, our attitudes, and our actions toward another. And in order for this compassion to take flight, to have real meat on its bones, it must involve understanding. Without understanding, we are flying blind and are apt to come to wrong conclusions about a person’s situation…and, yes, judge it!

          Most people, let’s face it, are facing their own struggles. They may not show it and for sure they may not want you to know that they struggle. For some reason struggle seems to be a sign of weakness. We can assume pretty accurately that almost everybody is shy and hiding to some degree behind unspoken sorrow, pain and fear. Making this assumption is halfway home to understanding and opens the love valve and makes genuine compassion possible.

          In addition to most people facing their own inner struggles and demons, those same people are doing about the best they can to cope with what is in front of them. We can in our arrogance claim that they are lazy. We may ask ourselves, just why are they not doing what I know would help them; just why don’t they stop their drinking and creating such chaos in their families. Good questions, but useless, uncaring questions. Because people are doing what they are doing. And that is the end of the story. We can cajole, wring our hands and judge all we want. As they will do it their way…until the cows come home. Moo.

They’re home. Now what? Moo, moo, moo.

          Where’s the love?

          I know there are examples in your lives when things changed radically when you began to understand more fully exactly where someone was coming from. We stopped being a psychic and filling in the blanks about a person’s life and saw the truth. Love starts the minute we step down from the judge’s bench.

          My favorite story about this is of two children who seemed to be accompanied by a priest were on a subway one busy morning. The kids were running wild throughout the subway car, chasing one another, bumping into the standing passengers. There were glaring eyes and hushed curses as the children continued to squeal and run. Finally, one of the passengers came over to the seated priest and demanded, “Can’t you do something about these children?”

          “I suppose so,” the priest replied, “but we’ve just come from their mother’s funeral, and I thought I would cut them some slack. I’m sorry for their behavior.”

          You see how this simple explanation, which leads to understanding, can change everything. Judgment turns to compassion. I believe if we understood everything as fully as Christ did, we would shed tears, we would wail so loudly, that the heavens would hear our cries.

          Someone said the other day, “Change only comes about with love.” Yes, and I would add understanding is the icing on the cake of love, for now we know more fully.”

          Compassion is entering into the suffering of the world. This entryway leads to a love that brings peace and joy, and yes, laughter through the tears.

          I read this week that we are “hard-wired for compassion.” This may be true. I’m not sure. There is the condition known as sociopathy. And society does teach us to fear and separate ourselves from others.

          But one thing we can do is to remember—re-member!—those times when we were understood. Those recollections can trigger or retrigger an outgoing of our love.

          What do you think about this? A friend put it this way: “When I love, it’s always in response to being loved.” Wow, what a great way of putting it. “When I love, it’s always in response to being loved.” We are loved. We Christians know it, or at least we had better know it. That is what all the angels shouting the good news was about. This is what our Eucharist meal is about: a love so great it envelops, surrounds, precedes and follows us every moment of our lives.

          A Hindu saying is this: “Extend your awareness into the bodies of other living beings. Feel what those others are feeling. Leave aside your body and its needs. Abandon being so local. Day by day, constrictions will loosen as you become attuned to the current of life flowing through us all.”

          All we need is love. Love is the divine emotion. Love is the emotion of God. Love is the being of God. And it is ours for the taking.

Amen.

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, October 11, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

God’s Call to Compassion

“For I know how many are your transgressions,
and how great are your sins—you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe,
and push aside the needy in the courts.”
(Amos 5:12)
“Surprise us with love at daybreak; * then we’ll skip and dance all the day
long.”
(Psalm 90:14, The Message Bible)
I believe that there is one need and one wish that every human
being has, and that is the need and the wish to be loved and to love.
And I further believe that this is all we need. And this sentence,
which is the thesis sentence of a series I am beginning this morning,
is the frame in which I wish to speak with you about compassion.
Compassion: the love of and the love for ourselves and one another.
The constant harping on sin that we find in the Bible, and
especially in the Old Testament, as we find in the Book of Amos, is not
so much to chide and shame us but to call us out of what we are
missing—that our lack of concern, of deep concern, for ourselves and
one another kills our spirit. When we hide love from one another, when
we pursue our own selfish ends (this is what all the fuss about rich
people having trouble getting into heaven is all about), then it is
ourselves who will suffer. That is, we bring judgment on ourselves. I
believe that anger, if you want to call it that, is our frustration as to what

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we are missing. Every moment we fail to love is us digging our own
graves of sorrow and alienation. Amos says as much: “Seek good and
not evil, that you may live.” Virtue is its own reward. We simply feel
better. We reflect the light and the love of God itself. This is why the
psalmist has the boldness to declare, “Surprise us with love at daybreak;
* then we’ll skip and dance all the day long!”
Did you hear about the husband who said that his wife said that he
lacked empathy? He replied, “I don’t understand how she could feel that
way!”
Haven’t we all noticed a lack of empathy in the land? What’s
going on with all this nastiness we show toward one another? Can we
even put our minds around the number of people who have died from
this dread COVID? Our own pastor, Father Shearer, fell prey to this
virus. Our failure to fully face our grief is part of what lies behind the
fear and the anger so rampant in our land. We are in an empathy
epidemic. Fear shuts down empathy. And our anger is partly our anger at
ourselves that this empathy is being stunted.
Compassion mean having feeling towards another. Having passion
with someone else. We won’t take time distinguishing sympathy,
empathy and compassion. Love is love and we want and need plenty of
it, both to receive and to give! But, of course, we need for this
compassion to begin with ourselves. Most of us are much too hard on
ourselves. When we are hard on ourselves, it follows that we lack the

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ability to look up and out on our brothers and sisters standing right next
to us.
The Latin word passion means suffering, and we look to Jesus
whose compassion confronts us every Sunday when we look at the Cross
on which Jesus hung. Can we even believe someone’s empathy going
the length of suffering right alongside us, with us? Our pain is his pain.
Boy, that should wake us up! As long as we keep the focus on ourselves,
compassion will be limited.
And yet, and yet, we have to come to be comfortable with who we
are, accept our shortcomings, know that we are not the manager of the
universe. Letting go of the control stick can help us relax into the
wonderful people that we really are, and then we can look outwards and
forget ourselves and join in the dance with others.
The funny thing is this: we cannot really forget ourselves until we
love ourselves and have a clue as to exactly who we are! And, to take
this even further, coming to love ourselves depends on trusting and
knowing that we are loved. We receive the love of parents, friends,
clerks in the grocery store; this strengthens our sense of who we are;
then we can throw this love we have found away on others.
Love, love, love. All you really need is love. The Beatles were
dead right. This love is not all kum-ba-yah. It is not all about feeling
good and rosy. I close with this poem by folk singer David Wilcox:
It is love who mixed the mortar

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And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love that made the stage here
Though it looks like we’re alone
In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
In this darkness
Love can show the way
—David Wilcox, “Show the Way”

Amen.

Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, September 26, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher

Everything Is Grist for the Mill

“You have made us but little lower than the angels; * you adorn us with glory and honor.” (Psalm 8:6)

“What we do see is Jesus, made “not quite as high as angels,” and then, through the experience of death, crowned so much higher than any angel, with a glory “bright with Eden’s dawn light.” In that death, by God’s grace, he fully experienced death in every person’s place.”
(Hebrews 2:5-13, Message Bible)
 

One of the great mysteries, as far as I can determine, is why there is not much more shouting and laughing and weeping with joy in this life of ours. What is with us human beings that we allow ourselves so much sorrow, or why life visits on us such hardship and suffering?

It may not be such a good idea to point fingers here. Certainly God gets a good deal of the blame for our misery, such as it is, for God is, after all, the power that brought us into existence.

Our attitude to hardship has a lot to do our responses to pain and trouble, and we seem, or we are told anyway, that we are pretty much in charge of our reactions. I’m not so sure. Sometimes I do talk myself out of a funk, or I do shift my perspective, which keeps me from thinking dark thoughts. But more often I seem to have little control over my thoughts, moods and attitudes And I sure as the devil had better not judge someone caught in the rut of depression or chronic sorrow. First of all, nobody walks in anybody else’s shoes, and we can identify only to a limited extent with someone else’s situation. And even if we are thoroughly familiar with other people’s circumstance, how dare us think we have the right to judge their attitude or that we have the power to do much more than to be present with those in trouble?

          But the disturbing reality is that, as Thoreau mused, “the mass of [us] live lives of quiet desperation.” It is not just when life hits the fan and we are thrown into a slough of despond. This extremity is sometimes only temporay. Others of us carry wounds with us for decades and never reveal the source of our anguish or dare to speak of it from shame or fear.

A lot of this charade of the spirit is cultural. Certain national cultures teach us to avoid expressing our feelings. And in the South, where I grew up, we were taught that grown men don’t cry. My parents, as lovely as they were, were not particularly expressive or effusive in their feelings towards one another. It just wasn’t done, so to speak. And there are so many hidden stories, toxic secrets that shield us from the sunlight of the spirit and prevent us from living the free life that we somehow suspect is ours by birthright.

The psalm this morning says that God made us only a little lower than the angels and has adorned us with glory and honor. “Doesn’t feel that way to me,” we might argue. And unfortunately many of us betray this despair in our demeanor and behavior.

I suppose one thing to notice about whatever life presents, pitches, or slings at us, is that those things are grist for our mill, are opportunities for growth. We can use them to grow or postpone. Like the things we toss on the compost heap in our backyards. Even seemingly useless things can serve to create something healthy and beautiful. As a friend puts it, everything is either a blessing or a lesson, and every lesson can become a blessing.

And our scripture, the seedbed that nurtures our lived faith, provides so much solace. We needn’t listen to all the scolding and judging we find there (these are but projections from our confused and complex human experiences), but we can listen instead to the overwhelming affirmation from the God who created and abides with us.

“Out of the depths have I cried to thee, O Lord,” the Psalmist writes. (Psalm 130) We cry for the voice of the Lord. Are we quiet enough, patient enough, humble enough to expect an answer? For testimony has it from thousands of us that God does answer—often in ways that we do not expect. I’ll bet each of you can point to situations in your life that turned out in a way you did not expect but in time you saw to have been better, sometimes much better, than what you had dreamed.

“God himself is with us.” I love this line from the hymn. God himself—not an emissary, not an idea drummed up by some preacher, but God itself. Imagine that. Can there be a more wonderful visitor? God himself is with us!

And in the Epistle this morning, the Message translation sheds light on one of my least favorite letters, the Letter to the Hebrews. It literally opens a portal to a glorious understanding of Jesus. It reads “What we do see is Jesus, made not quite as high as angels [this marks the great humility of a God who comes into all the places of our lives, however dark and sad and lonely], and then, through the experience of death, crowned so much higher than any angel, with a glory ‘bright with Eden’s dawn light.’ In that death, by God’s grace, he fully experienced death in every person’s place.”

He fully experienced death in our place. Think of this. God enters our death. Now, each of us can be an angel to our neighbor. We can be present in times of fear or grief, but we can never enter as intimately or as closely into anyone’s life as the one who experiences death. God himself is with us and fully experiences each of our deaths. This is the message of the angels at Christmas: “Fear not, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy.” This is the message of the risen Christ: “Fear not, for I am with you always.”

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul…

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me…

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

          Amen.