Peace, all. Here’s a sermon from July 12, 2026, shared (along with various tangents) at the Community Church of Fontana, UCC. It was a lovely morning. Hope you dig it.
MULTIPLYING LOAVES`
It's 2020. We've just had a kid. Hannah. She's incredible.
As well as very small. Like, normal small - but you know: she’s a newborn.
And after having served a couple of ministries in Chicago, proper, we've now moved two whole blocks west of the city, into "the Bungalow Belt"
in Cicero, Illinois.
I've just received a Call at Gethsemane Lutheran Church, a historic congregation in that historic town.
Our first Sunday together was Transfiguration Sunday. A good one.
We burned our palms, and we buried our Alleluias.
And then, with Ash Wednesday, Lent arrived.
And so we reminded each of our mortality by smearing the ash from the palms on one another’s heads.
And then, of course.
Transfiguration…
Ash Wednesday
Lent
And then it was …
It was
[no! Not Easter!]
No. It was…
the pandemic.
A difficult time in the history of the world.
And if I am being honest, certainly not my best years, either.
That was February and March of 2020.
~~
To open the east door into the building there, you'd insert your key [like this] and then you’d turn it, and then you’d pull the door outward before stepping up the concrete step and onto the landing inside.
The stairs there go up to the church in one direction
and down into what, through the 1950s or 1960s, was known as the "smoking room," where congregants would share a smoke with the pastor and talk about Jesus.
This room is now known as the library as well as the deep freezer room. And it smelled like both. Old dust. And books. And that weird freon smell that's always somehow amplified by the reverberation of the compressor, and the buzz of fluorescent lights.
A few more steps down and you're in the sort-of exposed basement. Beautiful golden, dandelion stained glass surrounds you in every direction, making the room appear warm and inviting and mystical.
Folding chairs. And folding tables. Piles of old milk crates.
It’s still 2020. And February.
And every week, the same volunteers would gather here.
Tough, scrappy baby-boomers (that didn't look too different from many of you), many of whom founded this particular ministry back in the 1980s, when their churches came together across Cicero, Berwyn, and Stickney to assess
and eventually meet
a need in the community.
That’s when the CBS Anti-Hunger Task Force formed, which would eventually give birth to the CBS food pantry, which had, by this point, had made a home in the downstairs of Gethsemane.
Rain or shine, pandemic or not, there they were.
Some from the neighborhood who walked over.
Some driving back each week to the “old neighborhood” where they had grown up, reminiscing about what the storefronts used to be.
Characters. All of them.
~~~
And… I’m being honest…
the thing I remember the most vividly, the thing I remember the most about all of it, is:
when you rounded the corner into that basement:
not a darn one of them was wearing a mask.
[Footnote: that’s not entirely true, some certainly did!]
[PAUSE]
Now:
I had certain categories for people like that.
My phone and my friends had helped me to form and to reinforce them.
And I suppose we could say that the words used to describe that category of people were, at the time, something other than kind.
Certainly, to use Jesus’ words, “rocky soil,” in comparison, would’ve been more of a compliment. Amen?
But I held my tongue. And I hesitated.
After all, this was their ministry. And I was the new guy.
And honestly, this was all sort of uncharted terrain for all of us.
MOVING MOUNTAINS
Flashback about a decade. It’s January of 2011.
Our super-ripped, super-tall, always-sleeveless-shirt-wearing, bald-shaved-head neighbor Pipe-fitter Pete, who is called that because he's a pipe-fitter,
and our [same] neighbor who also happens to have an incredible grape-crushing and wine-making operation in his back yard...
On this particular day in January of 2011,
Pipe-fitter Pete has just finished carefully placing a clearly-stolen-from-public-works giant orange cone, all wrapped around with reflector tape,
and a couple of folding chairs
in front of his house.
You see, it's winter.
And as you probably know:
there's a system in Chicago.
[And I’mnot talking about the plows].
And there's a system especially in our neighborhood of Bridgeport.
If it snows
and you shovel out a parking spot on the public street (amen?)...
if you shovel it out, then, well,
then that spot is yours.
Amen?
It’s yours.
But: you gotta mark it.
Or else: you lose it.
And folks like Pipe-fitter Pete get pretty creative about how to do so.
A system, as you know, that is affectionately referred to as “dibs.”
~~
Dibs ensures that your work does not get stolen by another neighbor after you shovel out from a big storm. And it helps you prepare if you know a storm is coming. We did it too, my roomates and I–everybody did. And if you didn't, you'd be driving in circles all night looking a mile away in the snow for a place
from which to walk home.
~~
But then. January 31. February 1. February 2. It arrived. In full force. For three days it arrived.
And it arrived heavy. And wet. And strong.
Cars immobilized and buried on Lake Shore Drive.
Power outages. Y’all know a little something about that. Amen?
Folks unable to get out to go anywhere.
The city frozen, both in temperature and in mobility. Stuck. No business as usual. Everything. Just. Stopped.
“Snowmageddon” they called it.
And they weren't too far off in that assessment.
[Remember the word apocalypse which we often translate as “revelation” means to un-cover, to un-veil, to re-veal something that was once, perhaps, obscured.]
And despite all of that thick cover, I think something really was revealed.
OR: MOVED BY MOUNTAINS
You see, you might think that after an event like Snowmageddon, or really in the midst of it, especially in moments like that, you might think that our individual impulses toward self-preservation might kick in.
That is: you might think that we’d all be thinking:
“Dang! I need a bigger lawn chair. And I gotta be careful with my salt. I gotta make it last. And... what am I gonna do to make sure I can get where I need to go?”
But the thing is: at least there, and at that time, in the middle of that snow-pocalypse, that's not at all what happened.
In fact, that Snowpocalypse is when I actually, really, on a deeper level, met Pipe-fitter Pete. And when I learned his name.
And it's where I met a bunch of our other neighbors, too. Because, you see, Pete and other people like him, more seasoned by the city than I, understood something.
On a lot of days, they knew: dibs is fine.
It's a sufficient practice, for the sake of being fair.
Flawed, but good enough.
But when the storms come, when the “real” weather arrives, what's fair and what’s not fair changes.
[PAUSE]
But when the storms come, when the “real” weather arrives, what's fair and what’s not fair changes.
And what's fair, in this case, meant everyone with a shovel was outside. In the alleys. In the street. On the sidewalks. Way before the plows.
And what's fair during those three days meant all of us, everyone with a shovel, was in this, and in community,together. And everyone with a shovel cleared the streets, the sidewalks, and the alleyways.
Everyone pitching in. Everyone digging everybody out.
This included, I learned from Pete, also prioritizing and helping neighbors who could use the help and who couldn't necessarily shovel themselves out on their own. Maybe they didn’t even have shovel.
“Fair is fair,” Pete taught us, when individual work is to be honored.
And even more so: what is fair changes when it's not just about you or just about me, but when it’s about us, when survival and quality of life for all of us is at stake for all of us.
Rocky soil, rich soil, thorny gardens, whatever. In situations like the Snowpacalypse:
everyone gets a little bloom. Amen?
Not a bad way to live.
[PAUSE]
OF TWO MINDS
There's a psychologist and educator by the name of Dr. Lisa Miller, who teaches out at Columbia University out there in New York.
In her work, which includes psychology and spiritualities, Miller distinguishes between two modes of orientation that we tend not only to experience but also to orient ourselves through.
The first, she calls our achieving brain:
This mode is oriented toward goals, and benchmarks, and getting results, and increasing profits and so on. Most of us are familiar with the “achieving” brain and have certainly been encouraged to put it on at least at work. Amen?
The other she refers to as the “spiritual brain.” This mode of thinking and perceiving and experiencing, she says, has less to do with achievements and more to do with making connections, finding meanings, identifying coincidences, and so on.
The ability to navigate both of these “brains’ she says, is important. And good. And she says, in American society, in the world as it is, for most of us, most of the time, the default is to orient ourselves–as well as judge ourselves–from a place of achievements–or from a place of the lack thereof. Amen?
Nonetheless, she notes.
When disaster strikes.
When tragedy hits.
When a rock-bottom or two reaches up and finally pulls us the rest of the way down…
In other words:
when we meet the limits of our power
and of our ability,
even if for 3 minutes or three days,
to achieve…
When we reach these kinds of limits, that’s often when we’re shaken (or perhaps quickened/stirred) enough to slip back into our “spiritual brain” and to connect with and remember things of value that we might be quick to forget in our everyday day-to-day. Amen?
Often times when we reach the limits of what we can ‘achieve’ on our own, we return to the values and the stories and the meanings that formed us and that do something different in our hearts and in our minds… amen?
~~~
I think that’s what happened with the snowpocalypse .
I think that’s what happened with me and my roommates and our neighbors and Pipe-fitter Pete.
And I think that’s what allowed at least a day or two of pretty darn beautiful community (despite the circumstances) to take root and to bloom.
And looking back, I think thats a little bit of what happened with those boomers in that Cicero basement, too.
TAKE AND EAT
As I think back now,
It’s clear what, in the moment, I managed to miss.
It wasn't that the masks didn't matter. We were freaked the heck out. And we had a baby. And our neighbors were dying from the virus. This stuff absolutely mattered.
And we didn’t want our kid or our parents or anybody to get sick or to die. Amen?
These things mattered. A lot.
And they’re not the only thing that mattered.
Even though, for a little while, it seemed, they were only thing of those folks that I seemed to be able to see.
They were a thing. But they weren’t everything. Amen?
Because underneath whatever was or wasn't covering their faces,
those volunteers were showing us all their hearts.
And their hearts were really friggin good.
Mask or no mask. Dibs or no dibs.
When the sn*w hit the fan, these were the folks, [names omitted for privacy here] just like Pipe-fitter Pete, who showed up when the world was shut down because they believed that:
rocky soil, rich soil, thorny garden, whatever:
Everyone deserves dignity.
And everyone should be able to eat. Amen?
And these were the folks who showed up to make sure that they could.
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