Topher Anderson: Growing as An Empathetic Church

(audience applauding)

My name, for those of you who have not met me,

is Topher Anderson.

I am a member of Table Church, been a member since 2020.

I am a queer person of faith, uses he, they pronouns.

A former resident of the Washington, D.C. area

whose family still resides here.

And I am ordained to the role of chaplaincy

and am the ER and ICU chaplain

at St. Joseph's Ascension Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

And man, is it good to be home.

What's going on, y'all?

It is so good to see you all this evening.

And just before we go any further, I had like five ways I was gonna intro this after that

whole piece, and then just listening to the giving section that we just talked through.

And just what a beautiful example of how a church can come together even tonight just

between our prayer team and our music team, the first impressions team that's set up out

front.

And I just like, just wanna give you guys kudos.

Kudos. Kudos for even coming out tonight. It is cold and wet and rainy.

But just know that you are seen and loved while you're here.

A lot of my sermons tend to come from my personal life and from my tales of the ER.

Now that I get to actually use that as like a life spin thing.

Tonight I don't have any like trigger warnings per se, but just know at any time this is a safe space.

You feel free to bathroom through that way.

there are snacks in the back,

and probably when I start getting into

scriptural theology in the next five minutes,

snacks are in the back.

Well, you can come back in about five minutes.

So, tonight we're just gonna go right into it.

We're gonna be looking at 1 Timothy chapter six,

verses, uh, uh-oh, that's on me.

It's fine, I apologize.

Verses three through 10.

So, a little overview of tonight.

So just by way of, if you haven't read any of the letter

of 1 Timothy, 1 Timothy is a letter written

from a church leader to his young protege,

in which he's giving him guidance on how to handle

complicated social and spiritual situations,

particular to that protege's community.

The author shows his protege and us

that the life of a Christian in community

comes back to releasing ourselves from fear and greed

from that thing we call mammon, and instead is

called to a life of beatitude.

Beatitude living releases us from fear and greed,

and instead gives us peace that comes

from trusting in God's goodness.

This is not only a personal call for each one of us,

but a call for the table church as community.

So tonight, that's what we're going to be looking at.

Now, a little bit of an overview,

and then what does it mean for us as table church

to move away from the love of the love of money or mammon,

and then instead moving into a life

of gratefulness and beatitude.

So the first epistle of Timothy,

or First Timothy for short,

is one of three letters in the New Testament

that are often grouped together

and are called by theologians the pastoral epistles.

The word pastoral meaning to pastor someone.

In this case, it's being really literal.

It's letters that literally talk from one person to another

about how to handle church stuff.

And it's grouped together with two others.

That would be Second Timothy, yes, they're related,

and Titus.

And dang, I had a slide for this

that I just remembered I didn't put in.

I was gonna put two Tims, Tim Cook and then Tim Allen,

and then I was gonna put Titus from,

oh, what was that show?

When were they?

Anyways, it was very set up and I just realized

it's definitely not up there.

Next time, we'll get there.

So this letter is attributed to,

or traditionally to St. Paul,

but, and it mainly consists of counsels

to a younger colleague that has been sent

to the Church of Ephesus in order to help them.

Most scholars say that the pastoral epistles

probably were written after Paul died, record scratch.

If you see a problem there, it's okay,

we'll get there in a second.

And they suggest that they were probably written

around 150 AD.

Why do I tell you this?

Because at that time, this was a pretty common thing.

The way I describe it is ghostwriting

for a president of the United States.

It's really cool to write a president

of the United States story as an author,

and you're gonna get really good praise.

How much cooler it is to be like,

I'm writing like Barack Obama, about Barack Obama.

So they're kind of the same thing.

He is, the writer is using Paul

because Paul has a lot of clout behind his name

as the 13th apostle.

And then for anyone who's a super nerd,

this is the, do we have the slide before this one

with the big shredded thing?

So for the super nerds in the room,

that is the earliest document of First Tim that we have

and it's about 1,700 years old.

And now we can actually go to the scripture.

So tonight's scripture, 1 Tim 6, 3 through 10.

Says, if you have, and for tonight,

unless I mention it, we're gonna use

the message translation, the reason being,

it just really works for us at Table,

and especially for this.

The guy, Paul, who I will call Paul the rest of the night,

when you read it directly translated,

he uses a lot of extra words that just kind of got in the way.

So in the message translation, it

reads as, "If you have leaders who teach otherwise than Jesus,

those who refuse the solid words of our master Jesus

and this godly instruction, tag them for what they are.

Ignorant windbags who infect the air with germs of envy,

controversy, bad-mouthing, and suspected rumors.

Eventually, there's an epidemic of backstabbing,

and the truth is but a distant memory.

They think religion is a way to make a fast buck.

A devout life does bring wealth,

but it's the rich simplicity of being yourself before God.

Since we entered the world penniless, and we'll leave it penniless,

if we have bread on the table and shoes on our feet, that's enough.

But if it's only money these leaders are after, they'll self-destruct in no time.

Lust for money brings trouble and nothing but trouble.

Going down that path, some lose their footing in the faith completely

and live to regret it bitterly ever after.

So, just a quick breakdown of what we've just read there.

Verses 3 through 5, which is the "if you have leaders" and ends with "make a fast buck."

The writer is focusing on those who are leading this church in Ephesus.

So this church has had a hostile takeover.

And these folks that have come in before this letter is written, and the reason that Timothy

is sent there is because they've gotten word back to Paul that the folks leading this church

have brought in some really wonky teachings.

And he's trying to help Timothy to kind of course correct a lot of these things.

And this is a really good set for all of us here at Table to ask questions like, "Do

we come to church on Sunday as a cult of personality?

Do we feel like we're living double lives sometimes?"

I like the words here in the message, "They think religion is a way to make a fast buck."

That was hilarious to read as a guy who's a chaplain at a hospital because my life is

literally now based on religion.

And so, and it's a good point for each of us, I think, to ask, "Do I come down Sunday

because I like the music, which isn't a bad thing per se, but it's something to know.

Or do I go and join a group because I want to be seen doing the service more than actually

doing the service itself?

Again, just something to know.

Each of us comes with a need, so that's okay.

But I like what Pope Francis reflected on in 2013.

He gave an article, a reflection from him called A Big Heart Open to God, to America

magazine and he says this, "The thing the church needs most today is the ability to

heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful. It needs nearness, proximity. I

see the church as a field hospital after battle. It's useless to ask a seriously injured person

if he has high cholesterol or about the levels of his blood sugars. You have to heal his

is wounds.

Then we can talk about everything else.

Heal the wounds, heal the wounds,

and you have to start from the ground up.

So the question becomes,

when we as a church sometimes forget

that we're meant to be wounded healers,

and I'm using that phrase on purpose,

to one another, we can make church something that it isn't.

It isn't about how good the music is,

although I will say we are spoiled here.

Or the preaching, thank heavens, says me.

Or how hip the preacher's clothes are,

again, says me, thank God.

But three to five reminds us as such,

reminds us that it's about something more.

The great 20th century preacher and writer Henry Nowen

tells us during one of his exemplar books on ministry

called The Wounded Healer,

hence why I picked that language earlier.

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone

who's never been there.

And this is really important.

And it's an important distinction that I want to make.

I'm not saying that us as a church cannot be happy, that we can't have good lighting

and upbeat music, and those who can lead from the front, be as God's graced them with all

this talent, shouldn't.

But in fact, I think all of that can be a witness and a testament to who God is and

what they've done for us.

But it's more of a question, who is all of this for when we gather on a Sunday night

or a Sunday morning?

So my triplet brother, so there are three of us, Steven, Julie, and myself, him and

his wife live in Anacostia.

I'm back for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving, we're my family known as Anderson Palooza 2023,

because Thanksgiving for us is the Super Bowl.

Where most of us, I would imagine Christmas is a huge holiday,

for us it is Thanksgiving and wrapped around this tradition

that started with my mom.

My mom was, should have been a professional baker

and literally had been hired as one.

She worked in a cookie company

and they were sending her to work in their test kitchen in Philadelphia.

and then she found out she was pregnant with triplets,

like three days later.

And so she kind of lived as a professional baker

for three kids her whole life.

And Steve has the bug.

He's great talent,

which he didn't think he was very talented for a while.

And then one day my mom was like,

"You know you bake as good as I do."

Well now Thanksgiving is his time to show off.

We gather like 20 people a year in his house

and we just go to town.

For instance, he started making the crust for pies last Wednesday, like nine days ago.

Him and my niece, we literally sent us a picture of the two of them just sitting in the kitchen,

just getting ready at like seven in the morning before school.

And the funny part is, throughout the years, he's taken my mom's recipes and he's made

them better.

He's become this tour de force.

He's the guy that for Christmas will be like, "Can you get me a dehydrator?

And I'll go, "I'm not even gonna ask you why.

"Sure, just send it to me on Amazon, I'll send it for ya."

Because this is his niche, this is his thing.

And yet, the thing that he loves the most

is sharing it with people.

You don't go home from Anderson, Palooza

without at least a pound of food in a bag

full of reusable, if anybody's seen The Bear,

those reusable plastic soup containers

that you sometimes get from takeout places.

So you go home with at least five of those full,

each one of us do.

Unfortunately, because I'm now on an airplane

tomorrow morning, I'm not, but it's okay.

I'll just have to come back.

But the thing is, and it was funny watching him on Thursday,

the best part of the day was turning around

and seeing him standing there with a glass of scotch,

just quietly watching all of us interact, eating,

and he's just kind of standing there as a proud papa

because he's doing exactly what God has asked him to do.

So in that vein, with that example,

we hold on to that question for just a moment.

Who is all of this for, particularly

church on a Sunday night?

We'll come back to it shortly.

And that question leads us in the next two verses,

6 through 8.

And I love the language here in 6 through 8.

A devout life does bring wealth.

As I was practicing for preaching this,

I kept reading it as "does not" and then had to, like, stop.

So it does bring wealth, but it's

the richness, simplicity of being yourself before God.

Since we've entered the world penniless

and we leave it penniless, we have bread on the table

and shoes on our feet.

That's enough.

So that's the meat and the potatoes

of what I want to focus our attention on tonight.

This is a call to humility in our spiritual and practical

lives. But notice it's not outside of our lived experience. We enter and leave the

world the same way. The entire time we do all have something. We have our humanity,

we have our childhood in God, we have the breath in our lungs, beating hearts, and a

connection to one another and to God themselves. The writer argues that if we

if that's what we have, then it's human almost to speak

that last phrase as a mantra.

We have bread on the table and shoes on our feet.

That's enough.

Come back to that in just one more moment.

So, nine and 10, the end of what we're looking at tonight.

The lust for money brings trouble, and nothing but trouble.

Going down that path, some lose their footing

in the faith completely and live to regret it,

literally ever after.

So when Anthony emailed me, I was like,

hey, here were the three that we're thinking of doing

for a three-part for on giving,

and like yours is gonna be 1 Timothy 6, starting at three.

I was like, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.

Wait, isn't that Giving Sunday?

Isn't that, aren't there gonna be an appeal during that?

Okay, this is gonna be interesting.

How do we balance these two things?

And it was interesting, because I was thinking about,

how do we handle this at one of the wealthiest

cities in the world?

I will tell you, having gone away for 10 weeks to a mid-range

city in Wisconsin--

lots there, lots of very happy people--

and then to fly back on Wednesday morning and to land,

it's--

coming into DC, especially if you fly through DCA,

I mean, even the way they construct the way you land

is there to make a statement.

Like, you fly over, like we were flying over the Pentagon.

I was like, okay, well, I forgot that happens.

Interesting.

Yep, you can literally see everything this city is about

from about 200 feet in the air.

And so, and the funny thing was, reflecting on it,

there's so many folks in our parish,

both of this service and the morning service,

who, they're very successful.

And they have jobs that have very high salaries,

and you would never know it.

Because in the West, salaries show us scope

and they show us importance.

But these folks give of their time,

they give of their gifts, their spirit.

And so I had to question, like,

are they on the road to ruin and destruction,

as the scripture says?

And what about our siblings?

I've heard of many of us who have been laid off recently,

who struggle to find meaningful work just out of college,

who, because of systems of oppression,

are told they're unable to move out

of the neighborhood they're in.

I see a lot of that in Milwaukee.

Find healthy food, stable housing,

who work three jobs just to make ends meet.

Is the desire for financial stability

somehow the slippery slope to more grief?

To quote the artist Propaganda in his verse

on John Beck MacMillan's "No Country,"

"We're just trying to feed our kids."

So what do we do with all this?

There's this piece of the road to ruin is lust for money,

But also, if we have the shoes on our feet,

the food on our table, that's enough.

How do we make this all work?

Well, the thing I want to suggest tonight is,

is that the writer, Paul, is actually riffing off

of the Gospel of Matthew.

And so we're going to look at two pieces tonight.

The middle, which is Matthew 6.

We're going to look at Matthew 6, 24.

And then we're going to look at the beginning of Matthew,

which is the Sermon on the Mount.

So, this is the famous God and Mammon

from the middle of Matthew.

Jesus is in the middle of this great sermon.

It would have been on the side of a hill

so everybody could hear him.

And this is really his coming out,

his I am the Son of God.

There are other places that he has moments

in which he experiences who he is,

but this is his first public ministry of preaching.

And in the middle of it he says,

"No one can serve two masters, for they will either hate the one and love the other, or

be devoted to the one and despise the other.

You cannot serve God and money."

But before this, and the thing he starts this whole for Matthew 6, what he starts with,

somebody in the audience says, "Lord, teach us how to pray."

And he goes, "Thanks, I was hoping you'd say that."

And he starts with the Our Father.

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Your kingdom come, your will be done

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts

as we've forgiven our debtors.

Lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from the evil one.

So this is his answer to how she would pray.

It's not just a spiritual discussion for him,

but also a cultural one.

Jesus is Jewish and a Jewish from first century Palestine.

So this is, he is making a statement

about what prayer should look like.

And notice what's in it.

Again, it's almost like we're hearing that phrase,

like if we have bread on the table

and shoes on our feet, it's enough.

We literally say to God every week here,

give us this day our daily bread.

And then he talks right afterwards,

Jesus goes into another piece of the other really

kind of big piece of Jewish culture at that time,

both public and private, which was fasting.

And so he says, "When you fast, do not look somber

as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces

to show others they're fasting.

Truly, I tell you, they received the reward in full."

And it's not so much the fasting piece he's going after,

what he's saying is, if you're gonna do it

for the sake of other people seeing you,

you've gotten what you've asked for.

It's funny that he ends these two pieces

with a discussion on worry.

And it links the attitudes he presents

to each lifestyle as he's interpreting it.

And he says, "Therefore I tell you,

"don't worry about your life,

"what you eat or drink or about your body,

"what you will wear.

"Is not life more than food and the body more than clothes?

"Look at the birds of the air,

"they do not sow or reap or store away in barns

"and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

"Are you not much more valuable than they?"

Again, we hear that phrase again,

that if we have food on our table and shoes on our feet, it's enough.

And he finishes with this question,

"Can any one of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your life?"

So he's turning the culture that he lives with on its head.

In this, we can kind of make a couple of inferences.

It was a very public culture, religiously public culture.

And he's saying it's not about that.

It's about between you and God

and how you treat other people

because of that relationship.

He's also saying you really shouldn't try

to get anything out of it.

That you should just be happy with as best you can

with the place that God has called you to be,

which is different necessarily than where you are.

I don't want to confuse it tonight to say

that there are systems of oppression

that hold many of us back.

That is not, and was actually something

that I preach against, but in this case,

it is more of knowing your true self

and allowing God to work through that as best as possible.

And what I think Jesus is telling us

is that in being human, there are certain pitfalls

that we should watch out for.

So for instance, the lust of money,

it's not just the dory for evil,

and it is, for instance,

our Western industrial war complex.

Christian organizations recently being hit for fraud.

What other ones did I have here?

Oh, loving families being ripped apart through inheritances,

through inheritance law.

But it also is a way that brings our life

into a life of worry and fear,

and that looks inward.

It's constantly driving us to make more,

especially in this culture that we live in.

So I want to pause for a minute and say

actually met truly greedy people. I'm sure we could come up, each one of us,

maybe on our hands, truly greedy, that's their par excellence, people. But for most

of us, I think it's, at least speaking out of my own experience, I've seen money and

the love of money kind of worm its way as a response for a need of control. And

that control almost always comes from a perceived or lived wound. So what are we

to do? In a world that often hurts us, in a world that people use their privilege as

a weapon, and frankly, there is a difference between less of money and having the things

that we need so that we can live life without social, cultural trauma, how do we find freedom

from all this? Especially when we're up at night worried about the bills, worried about

what our friends and our family think, worried about our basic worth when so much is expected

of us? Let's go back to the very beginning of that sermon, the beginning of chapter 5.

It's a road map that flips religious practice on its head and it offers perspective about

life without that lesser money or without fear, beatitudes. So there are nine of them

in the Gospel of Matthew. They go like this. "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs

to the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for they will be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they

will be called children of God.

And blessed are you who are persecuted because of righteousness' sakes,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you

and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

Rejoice and be glad,

because great is your reward in heaven for the same way

they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

So, when I read this, it's brilliant.

It's poetic.

It's sing-songy.

It's got flow.

"You could wrap this thing

"if you had it in the right translation."

And it often leaves me not really questioning what's in it.

Mostly because I've heard it so many times.

'Cause when I went back and was getting ready

for this preaching, and started really reading through it,

I was like, "Oh gosh."

And one of the things that I noticed,

and I want us to notice tonight,

is that Jesus starts each one of these things

with a blessing.

The blessed are you.

Blessed are, insert person here,

and each one of the groups of people that he mentions

are normally marginalized people in a society.

So the meek, for instance.

We all know that kid at our middle school who was beat up

or who was ostracized because of what they loved

or who they loved or what they looked like.

You know that particular kid?

He didn't really fight back, did he?

We all know the story of someone for whom the powers take away

every piece of their agency that they have

and they leave them hopeless.

That person, God promises, will inherit the earth.

The morning, often we've seen folks gather

around those who've lost someone,

only for a few weeks later,

that person to share they feel utterly alone.

The world has moved on,

and it seems to be an expectation that they should too,

but their heart just can't, and they're seeing ghosts,

and they don't know when, if ever, life will be okay.

Jesus promises them comfort.

So notice the first one, the poor in spirit.

Poor in spirit, to have little to nothing,

even if your bank account is full.

To know exactly how much you depend on the will of God.

To know the darkness of your own heart

that keeps you up at night.

Broken promises, lost goals, relationships

that need fixing, the prisoner, the refugee, the queer human

standing in a crowded room, begging for someone

to notice them, really notice them.

The person of color wondering when the next George Floyd

or Breonna Taylor will come.

The Israeli mother wondering if her child is alive.

The Palestinian dad waiting on the same news.

The NICU baby suffering from withdrawal.

The old man dying alone.

We're just trying to feed our kids.

Theirs is the kingdom of God.

So here's the point.

Here's the point that Paul is making.

And here's the point that he's saying to Timothy.

If we as a church are called to bring God's kingdom to earth,

we're not called to that same poverty of spirit.

We're called as a community to be that blessed life.

The metric in which we measure success

shouldn't be on the coolest stage set up

or what the worship band is singing.

Sorry, worship band.

I love you.

It should be on the generosity of hearts that make up

this thing we call church.

So what might that look like?

Let's go back one more time to 1 Tim 6.

In 6-8 he says, "A devout life does not bring wealth,

"but it's the rich simplicity

"of being yourself before God.

"Since we've entered the world penniless

"and leave penniless, we have bread on the table

"and shoes on our feet, that's enough."

Paul tells Timothy that if a church's only desire

is to make money, then the lust for power

will eventually do them in.

But the phrase, if we have bread on the table

and shoes on our feet, that's enough.

What if we spoke that as a church?

For instance, ah man, I wanna help out

with first impressions, but I'm so busy.

How will I make time?

If you're thinking that, I encourage you

to let God handle that last question.

And I'm gonna tell you that first impressions leadership

is probably gonna start throwing things at me

for saying this out loud, but if it is easier for you

to not be inserted into a calendar,

you feel inspired on a Sunday afternoon, just show up.

I guarantee we'll find a spot for you, something to do.

They will definitely throw something at me

after the sermon for that.

Or for instance, I know so-and-so just got that diagnosis,

or they've had a death in their family,

or they just seem off, but I don't know what to do about it.

Maybe just smile, a hug, or simply just sit next to them

the next time you see them at church.

It honestly does not have to be big.

And to give you one more example,

and this is from my own life,

God, I'm exhausted.

I've spent the whole week giving and sharing

and trying and working, and it's Sunday,

and I just wanna stay home.

It's been me the past six weeks

since I started at St. Joe's.

And if anything, preaching this week

has reminded me that I too sometimes

need to accept my pain for what it is

and place it into the heart of God, to go be with people

and to be church.

So I had a patient recently in our unit.

So I'm the emergency department and the ICU chaplain.

So in the ICU, we have what is called the critical care team.

This team is filled with 10 to 12 of us

who are all experts in their fields.

Most are doctors, couple nurses, social worker, case manager,

PTOT myself.

And we do rounds every day.

So what that looks like is we stand

at a desk outside of somebody's room where they can't hear us.

And we talk about them and how we're

going to help them heal for that day

and the days going forward.

And it starts with the intensivist,

who is kind of the lead.

And then it just goes around the room.

And the first eight or nine people

are all in the hard medicines.

So they got to work together because your respiratory

and your heart rate, and your kidneys.

It's all got to balance.

And then you got social work coming in

because there could be things at home that are causing this.

Then he goes all the way around, and I'm the last.

And I go, how many people have visited them?

Who's their family?

Do they have a religion of practice?

How do they seem?

And then we go from there.

So about six weeks ago--

five weeks ago at this point.

And I had just gotten used to rounding like this.

This was new for me.

We had a patient come in.

They're in their room.

And as we get to them, we're starting to round.

We just, out of the blue from behind their curtain,

hear Celebration by Sly and the Gang.

(SINGING) Celebrate good times, come on.

And we all crack up.

And so like I told you, the intensivist goes first.

Chaplain goes last.

Because I'm the soft sciences.

It's fine.

I lean forward and go, doctor?

He goes, yeah.

I'm like, dibs.

Chaplain calls dibs.

And he goes, all right, chaplain's got first dibs

on that patient.

Great.

So go in to see them.

And they're just lovely.

They are very sick.

And they are just lovely.

And of course, we all, over the next two weeks,

fall in love with this patient.

About two weeks later, on rounds, outside of the room,

they have just had breakfast.

They are talking about going home with the case manager.

We're all excited.

They de-stat.

De-stating is all of those numbers

when you're in a hospital that talk about your body.

They all go the wrong direction at once.

It's not good.

So team goes in.

I run to the outside of the room, praying for everybody.

About two hours later, the person is back.

And I go in the room and kneel in front of them

just to see if they need anything, see how they are.

And I grab my hands.

This whole time, they've called me pastor.

They're the only patient I've had so far

that's called me pastor.

I have called myself chaplain at least nine times in front

of them, Pastor Chris.

OK, great.

grabs my hands and says, pastor, I went someplace

and you all pulled me back.

And then they start to cry.

What do you say to that?

Nothing.

There's nothing to say.

I know holding their hands for an hour,

encouraging them, listening to them,

because the thing I knew in that moment--

and I don't know how I knew this--

was the only thing that was going

to help them in that moment, in that moment of crisis,

was knowing that the team cared and knowing

that God loved them.

The blessed life, the life of beatitude,

it doesn't guarantee us a life without problems or pain.

In fact, the lust for money, why it's so attractive,

is because it literally promises us that.

Why am I speaking so much about this tonight?

Because we're going into a season

where Target will literally tell you over a commercial,

It'll fix all your problems if you just buy a PS5.

No offense, Target.

It's great advertising.

But Beatitude promises us that no matter what,

by allowing God to be present in our lives

as we walk through whatever pain and hardship we go through,

we will be blessed by God.

Paul tells us at the end of chapter 6,

Tell them to go after God, who piles on all riches we could ever imagine.

To do good, to be rich in helping others, to be extravagantly generous.

If they do that, they build a treasury that will last, gaining life that is truly life.

That's our call as church.

To look out from our pews and to see the persons who suffer in our city and in our pews as

blessed and to draw close to them.

And the glory of it is we can't get away from suffering.

It happens to all of us from time to time.

It's the great equalizer in this life.

There is something true and honest

about that whole death and taxes thing.

So we don't have to worry about titles or the most

attractive lighting or anything else.

But if we use our community--

if we as a community use our hearts

to have compassion and empathy for those in our church

body and a wider community, we will see God's blessing.

I want to leave you with a line.

Anybody Brene Brown-Frans in here besides me?

Cool.

I think then if you are, you'll know exactly

what's about to pop up.

Aha.

She did this incredible interview

where she talked about the difference

between sympathy and empathy.

She says, "Empathy has no script.

There's no--" oh, nope, I have it backwards.

Sorry.

He says, "Rarely does an emphatic response

"begin with, 'At least.'

"For instance, 'My dog died.'

"At least you have another one.

"Yeah, that's not very emphatic.

"Someone's just shared something with us

"that's incredibly painful,

"and we're trying to put a silver lining around it."

He says, "Instead, that empathy has no script.

"There's no right way or wrong way to do it.

with simply listening, holding space,

withholding judgment, emotionally connecting,

and communicating that incredibly healing message,

you are not alone.

So what does any of this have to do

with Anthony's implication 20 minutes ago?

Each one of the things we have set up here

that help this place run,

that generosity of heart that comes from that way

also allows for each one of us in our own gifts

to be able to share that love with one another.

For some of us who are introverted,

you may not want to walk up to people and be like,

hi, how are you doing?

My story, I just told you from the ICU,

might just be like,

you'd be like, what in the world does he do for a living?

We have things for you.

For the extroverts in the room

who really want to get up here and do this,

her team is always looking for members to come up,

announcements, things like that.

Our technologically gifted friends,

please, we love you, thank you.

There's lots of things to play with back there

that I would break.

But each one of those things is a chance for us to acknowledge

and to understand that this space here

is a space of love for those who come in.

We're heading into that season of Advent.

For those of you who didn't grow up with Advent,

Advent's the season before Christmas

in which we're waiting for Christ's coming

with anticipation.

We ask God to open our hearts that we

might welcome more of his love for the coming of our Savior.

It's a time to look at our own calling as church.

We're blessed as those who are in some way poor in spirit.

Can we open our hearts this Advent

to in some way notice that poverty in others

and to have empathy to stand by them because we too

understand it for ourselves?

If that seems impossible to you right now,

if the world you're going through right now

is pain and poverty and so many other things that hold us back

and having any type of joy, I invite you to come to the Advent retreat on

December 10th at 2 p.m. A weary world rejoices. It's a beautiful time to step

away from the holiday bustle and to find joy in the midst of being weary and even

in pain. I hope you'll join the prayer team as they are preparing for this

and it really is gonna be wonderful. For tonight, one last thought as we head into

to communion again from Henry Nowen.

The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership

is to give your life for others.

Amen?

Amen.

Amen.

Let us pray together.

Father God, thank you for tonight.

Thank you for the love that you show each one of us.

In this moment, I ask that your spirit be in this place.

I ask that each one of us, with gentleness and mercy,

know and see our own poverty.

And from that, and from your grace and your love,

when we see others who are hurting,

others who are in pain, when we are tempted to hold back

or to not give, to--

instead that we might find generosity in our own hearts

that comes from knowing that each one of us

are children of you.

And we see each person as a child of you.

We give you all glory, honor, and praise.

Amen.