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Once again, I want to say a word of gratitude to President It Azari and for the invitation to be with you for the enriching lecturers and all that we have learned and we'll continue to learn, learn

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in this time. Thanks be to God. Let's pray together. Let the good news come o God , not only in word but in power that as the scriptures are read and proclaimed, we might hear

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and be transformed and be raised up to follow you through Jesus Christ. Our Lord amen. Our scripture lesson comes again from Paul's letter to the Romans the 12th chapter beginning at the ninth verse. Here we

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are in the middle and the mess of Paul's vision of the Christian community. Listen, let love be genuine hate. What is evil? Hold fast to what is good, love one another with mutual affection

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. Now do one another in showing honor. Do not lag and zeal be ardent in the spirit, serve the Lord rejoice and hope be patient in suffering , persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of

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the saints, extend hospitality to strangers, bless those who persecute you bless and do not curse them, rejoice with those who rejoice weep with those who weep , live in harmony with one another. Do not

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be haughty but associate with the lowly. Do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. And if

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it is possible so far as it depends on, you live peaceably with all beloved, never avenge yourselves , but leave room for the wrath of God for it is written, vengeance is mine. I will

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repay. Says the Lord, no, if your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they're thirsty , give them something to drink for by doing this , you will keep burning coals on their heads.

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Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. In 2017, the Washington Post investigative reporting team revealed that the quote Facebook engineers

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changed the company's algorithm to pri prioritize and elevate posts that elicited emoji reactions, many of which were rolled out in the year 2017. According to the post , the company's data scientists confirmed in 2019 that the

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posts that sparked angry reaction. Emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity and low quality news even better. Someone at Facebook headquarters learned that people clicked on things that upset them or instigated them to post

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or comment angrily to the person or persons who posted it. In other words, Facebook discovered that they could make money off our civil unrest and our divisions as a society and set an algorithm to monetize it

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. So if Mark Zuckerberg were to listen to Doctor Emily Towns, which, which I desperately wish would happen, I guess you would say to her why lament and hope for something better if I can monetize

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what I have this past. August David Brooks wrote an article for the Atlantic entitled How America got mean in it. He described a world and culture that seems to thrive on insults, amorality and using power

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to troll our enemies or punch down on those on the outside looking in and in the midst of all the meanness. Though he mentioned that in the summer of 2020 the Apple TV series, Ted Lasso pre

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premiered, here's how he describes the series. And the protagonist Ted Lasso is about an earnest, cheerful , transparently kind man who enters a world that has grown cynical Amoral and manipulative an episode after episode,

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even through his own troubles and foibles, he offers people around him opportunities to grow more gracious, to confront their own vulnerabilities and fears and to treat one another more gently and wisely amid lockdowns and political rancor

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, it became a cultural Touchstone and the most watched TV show on Apple TV. This January right now at Saint Charles Avenue, Presbyterian Church. We have a gospel according to Ted Lasso Sunday school class in

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which we look at various clips from the series and apply it to life. And Christian community, such lessons have not ended there but have continued to spill out in weekly benedictions. They remind the gathering people

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that becoming a Christian community in this world means asking for help. When the world seems to reinforce the power of self sufficiency, it means relying on others . When the world seems to be wired on pulling

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ourselves up by our own bootstraps, it means accepting our vulnerabilities and not seeing them as something that needs to be papered over. But the very way that God can use, not just our triumphs but our

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failures and our flaws. You mean for evil, Joseph rightly declares to his brothers at the end of Genesis, but God used it for good at the beginning of his book on the Parables, Robert Farar

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Cap and begins his comprehensive study of jesus' Parables with an introduction about right-handed power and left-handed power. He writes, there is a direct straight line intervening power , what he refers to as right-handed power. Perhaps

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its more egregious forms are coercion, manipulation, intimidation , threats. And then there is left-handed power which he borrows from Martin Luther. Left-handed Power cap and writes is precisely paradoxical power. Paradoxical power. Power

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that looks for all the world like weakness, intervention that seems indistinguishable from non intervention. More than that he says left handed power is guaranteed to stop no determined evildoers. It might touch and soften their hearts

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, but it might not in other words in many ways and from many angles, left handed power, it looks like to borrow a phrase from yesterday weeks off. But cap and reminds us that every one

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of us would rather choose the right-handed logical theology of power, coercion and control over the left handed mystery of faith that abides let love be genuine hate. What is evil, hold fast to what is good

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love one another with mutual affection, outdo one another in showing honor. The church is at its best . When it accepts that to be a creature of the word and spirit is to be a creature of

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left-handed power, even in a culture that seems to thrive on outrage, cynicism, manipulation, and trolling our haters. If you're familiar with Triumph, the insult, Comic Dog of Conan o'brien fame, then

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I would make recommend taking a look at his triumph on Hulu politics. Episodes from the 2016 republican primaries when he mentors former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, I am now quoting triumph, the insult comic dog in

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a sermon which may have never happened in a sermon not written at the last minute on a Saturday night . This is triumph to Governor Huckabee. I can help you. Here's how I can help. Do

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you know what I do for a living? I hurt people's feelings. I am an insult comic. That is the wave of the future. That's what our most successful candidate is doing right now and beating

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your brains out. That's how you win elections triumph then continues mentoring Hu Huckabee triumph is a puppet. By the way, you need to steer your answers to hurting someone else. This is what people want

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now, this is what people want now keeps ringing in my ears as a puppet insult, comic dog speaks truth to a political candidate that the way to get ahead is to insult people. In contrast,

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endeavoring to live together in a community like Paul describes here in Romans, a community that seeks to offer people opportunities to grow more gracious, to confront their own vulnerabilities and fears to treat one another more gently

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and wisely is hard, unpopular and often times never breaks through the noise. I remember 20 years ago standing in my clinical pastoral education assignment and listening to an older colleague in ministry offer this lamentation. You

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know, when I was growing up, the local Presbyterian minister in town got a free membership to the Shady acres country club. Those days, he sighed , meaning the days of free memberships to country clubs

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for the ministers. Those days are long gone. Look how far we have fallen. Gone is our power and our prestige and our, our seat of influence next to right handed power. All we have

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left is our left-handed power. All we have left is a morsel of bread and drink from this table . Could it be that our ecclesial anxiety that we all harbor from time to time is is more of

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a fear of loss of right-handed power and prestige than it is a loss of any of our meaning, purpose and mission as the church of Jesus Christ. Could it be the power? Could the power of

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God be even more vibrant, true and more faithful when disclosed? And what we think is a weakness rather than when we think we found it in touchdowns triumphs and, and riding shotgun next to whoever holds

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power at any given moment. I think Paul had something to say to the Corinthians about that, that God shows what is low and despised in the world , things that are not to reduce to nothing,

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things that are many years ago, Professor Edward Dowie at Princeton Theological Seminary published a commentary on the confession of 1967. And it, it also included a little bit of introduction to each of the confessions in

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the Presbyterian Book of Confessions in his essay before introducing the theological Declaration of Barman in 1934 Dowley wrote that the confessing church that produced that confession was a church of tangled motives, cross purposes, bickering, plagued

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, plagued by its own anti Semitism. It was also the clear minority in the larger church. And in many ways, this confessing church failed, failed to see Jewish human beings as fully human beings failed

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to stop Hitler's totalis power over the whole culture, failed to prevent the conflation of the cross and the Swastika Gospel and nationalism failed at at stopping democracy from turning into a fascist fundamentalist, ill liberalism in the

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aftermath of that horrible epic of history. Dowie quotes Albert Einstein though, who saw something else in the church's failure. And I quote, in all segments of society, only the church stood squarely across the

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path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth. I am forced to confess that what I once despised. I now praise unreservedly. That's the problem with left-handed power and the power that we see in Paul's description

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of the Christian community here in Romans. We think our best happens when we are winning when we are on top of the world, when we are getting published, getting tenure, preaching home run sermons.

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But most often we are at our most faithful and courageous and impactful when we are questioning ourselves, when we are not sure what we do what to do , when, when we have to ask for help

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, when we're worried about the next step the next day. And what is next to come? My first pastoral call was a solo pastor church in small town, rural North Carolina made up of teachers,

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farmers, nurses, bankers, pickle plant employees, a doctor, a mix of working class and community professionals. Some of my early days in ministry, I couldn't believe I got paid to study, read

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scripture, prepare sermons. And then there were days that I couldn't believe I got paid because I had no idea what I was doing. One of those days was spent with a family whose third grader was

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hit by a car one day after school and suffered traumatic brain injury. On my 22nd day on the job, I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to pray for. I didn't know

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how to help. All I could do was keep showing up. All I could do was stumble through my prayers with them. All I could do was walk with this family through this crisis, not knowing

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what the future held and not knowing if what I was doing was correct in the pastor manual. But it was in those very moments of insecurity, uncertainty , vulnerability, where I became their pastor and we

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became church, not at my triumphant ordination and installation service where everybody was in all their red Pentecost swag . Not when I preached what I thought was my best sermon. But in the heartache and heartbreak and

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holy moments and sleepless nights and contentious session meetings and late night phone calls every Christmas. The church I serve now as a special Carol service the third Sunday in advent. And this year, I got a

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message about a visitor who came to the service that at one point in the service, she confessed, the tears started falling down my cheeks. She felt embarrassed at first, but then looking around the people

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that were seated near, she saw several people, both women and men with a tear or two running down their faces So she wasn't alone and being literally moved to tears by what was happening in worship.

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But then as she wrote to a friend about being there, perhaps there's more to the tears she experienced . She has deep concerns about the health of her older son, a young man in his thirties who's

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had health challenges for much of his life. She'd been particularly worried and anxious in the past several months that perhaps his life would not be as long as she had hoped. Somewhere in the middle of this

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service, she told, she started to feel that despite this worry, she could cope with it and reflect on the good things about her son's life, accepting what the future will bring. One of my

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favorite quotations about the church which I have no way to prove or disprove with evidence comes from the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple who said that the church is the only organization in the world that doesn't exist

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primarily for the sake of its own members. Now notice he didn't say churches never act like that. That's their main job to serve their own members. But he said that's not our primary mission. And

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potentially the only thing that makes the Christian community unique is that we exist. Church exists for the sake of those outside our walls. Christian community attempts to return no one evil for evil, extend hospitality to

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strangers. Well, attempts and fails, tries to overcome evil for good, not to make us better people, not to get us in a divine favor or even to make our country great. Again,

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we do it for the sake of those outside. We do it with the hopes that what we are doing enriches our world and a and reflects the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ on to places and people

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, the world otherwise ignores and misses all together. We do it not just for how worship makes us feel, but also for those people who come in and out of our community and our lives whose names

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we don't know who we may never see again. Those who found comfort and joy in their own deepest anxieties and fears. Those who found healing and hope even when the diagnosis was not better. Those who

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found meaning and hope in their own vulnerability and in their own tears. This past week, I got word that a member of that first church I served died on the right handed power scale. She was

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a negative score. She was disabled, married to an alcoholic and pretty late in their lives almost by miracle. They had a little boy. By the time I came to know the know them, the

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the father had already died and she and her son lived in poverty in a mobile home that when I visited, I could see the sunshine hitting the grass through the cracks in their floor in case you haven't

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figured it out yet. I would not immediately self identify as a radical. At least not the first word that may come to mind. But at one point in ministry, Patricia was in a very bad

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car accident and was incapacitated. And the clerk of session and I went to family court and got temporary joint custody of her son felt pretty radical. At least to me, sometimes being church makes you do

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things you would never do in your own right mind . Tricia's obituary had this to say Patricia had a servant's heart and was always willing to share with others what she had. She provided local transportation to many

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needing rides to doctor's appointments, grocery shopping or necessary obligations. I can remember getting frustrated, borderline mad with her for those rides, taking people for an errand or to buy groceries when I knew for a

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fact that she couldn't pay for her gas or needed groceries and her bills paid herself by so many measurements . Her life had little value not by a stewardship campaign or by her social status or even the most

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generous ways we would define right-handed power. On top of that. I don't think she got much support from her larger family. Her relationship with her son could be tense and she could often be her own

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worst enemy. But in that community of faith, she lived confidently with the sense that her humanity was a gift that she had worth that she had something worthwhile to do with her life in the life of

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that Christian community in ways I could scarcely believe she knew that she belonged and that she had value and life together. There was a leveling grace and an exalting justice in the realm of left handed power in

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the body of Christ. She flourished. So May