Anna’s Letter to the Corinthians / East Corinth Congregational UCC / Pentecost 5/24/26
Numbers 11.24-30 / Psalm 146 / Acts 2.1-21
Friends… since retiring eleven years ago, our world seems harder than ever to negotiate
and not just because of aging!
Patience and I feel an urgency to our discipleship and spiritual practice
due to the state of the world as well as because of our age! (PAUSE)
I retired from here eleven years ago to take up the ministry of writing.
One of the ways I’ve blended spiritual practice with writing is with active imagination –
writing with the voice of, for example today, a biblical prophetess without a prophecy – Anna, who, in Luke 2.36 greets Mary and Joseph and the Christ child in the temple
and who “spoke of the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.”
That’s it; that’s all we know about her. The clue is in that sentence:
She knows somehow that this child messiah will have a lot to do
with not only saving the Hebrew people from their oppression and corruption,
but saving humanity… and her vision is in the IHS on the cross:
in Latin, in hominum salvator (POINT TO CROSS)
She also seems to know the ambiguous history of his Church up to now,
and isn’t honestly very pleased about it!
This prophetess Anna comes to me in dreams and active imagination;
she has a lot to say after 2000 years!
In a dream I saw her: she looked like a serene queen with a silver sheen in her hair…
an elderly crone with a fine sense of humor.
She says to me what the woman prophet of Luke 2 might say to us now.
I’ve put what I hear her saying in the form of a letter… a rather passionate letter…
listen to her – the prophetess Anna… (PAUSE)
Dear friends across the millennia today in Corinth, Vermont:
Grace and peace to you! I have a lot to say but I’ll try to be brief!
I had a long life, as Luke reports – time enough to study the scripture of my people enough to know, somehow, that the child of Mary and Joseph presented,
as is our custom, in the temple, would be the one to fulfill my peoples’ longing
for a messiah, though not the way people thought.
First of all, he’d need no steed to enter Jerusalem like a warrior messiah.
Rather, he chose a donkey to ride; and he cried with grief for his own demise.
Even more, he grieved the corrupt condition of Israel,
as the people blessed him, waving palms.
He’d be the healer, dealer of fierce peace, dealing the corrupt moneychangers
and the temple elite a shock when he turned over their tables
and chased them out with a whip of cords.
And as the tables were turned, the authorities turned heads toward revenge.
But no eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth for him.
He’d already told them how the “Kindom” comes –
it only comes with uncompromising nonviolence;
“Put that sword away!” he tells Peter.
But somehow the world didn’t get it that Love’s Kindom comes even, maybe especially,
when integrity is murdered, when Love sacrifices itself, divides itself
into multiplying resurrected cells… death, life, death, life.
You know how a cell dies in order to become two cells, then four, then eight –
that’s how the Kindom should come!
One way to understand Love’s resurrection, and ours.
There, you see, I can be longwinded! But I have so much to say!
You may be thinking “we only have an hour max; get to the point!”
So, okay, here’s my best shot:
Tomorrow is your Memorial Day – a day you remember your nation’s fallen soldiers who’ve died in war.
All right, here I go… fasten your seatbelts!
These fallen often fell, unfortunately, unnecessarily.
Used to be, maybe, that they fell for a reason,
like in WW 2, your Civil War, your War of Independence.
Now? Not so much; how many fell in Vietnam unnecessarily? Iraq? Afghanistan? Iran?
Can you imagine the hell for surviving families?
Can you imagine their pain, their infuriation, their grief?
Imagine, too, that the grief of Memorial Day
relates to how the Kindom hasn’t come, sadly;
if it did, we’d not waste lives and resources
better spent for the widows, orphans, and sojourners –
read elderly, children, and refugees in the language of your day, reflecting Psalm 146 you read today.
I write to you with a two thousand year view of history.
It was bad enough in my day with the brutal carnage of Christ’s awful death
and the dreadful deaths of so many who died at the hands of domination systems
in conflict with each other because of the pathological narcissism of egotistical tyrants.
Today, so long after Christ’s sacrificial vision of his Love Kindom come on earth,
you are so far off track that the damage and the darkness are even worse than you think,
and many who call themselves Christians can’t see it.
Your job, your role, your joy! – it seems to me –
is to proudly show that Love’s Kindom isn’t lost!
It may be buried by a clueless or fancy church, but can be recovered,
as if with an archeological-theological dig
to recover the essence of Christ’s message and vision.
Ah, my friends, forgive me again! It’s Pentecost – what we called the Feast of Weeks.
Two thousand years ago it changed the world forever as 3000 new followers of Christ
took Matthew’s commission to “go into all the world to make disciples”
of Love’s Kindom and made it into a manifesto for the Beloved Community
which your Martin King manifested in a profound new way,
crossing new boundaries, but then the dominators killed him, too,
and the vision got lost again for a time, to be recovered, to be rediscovered, to be lived.
(PENSIVELY): You know… I know you come to worship with personal needs
beyond all the social needs I’m bringing up. You have to be well personally
in order to serve “the kindom come.”
Remember, Christ said “the kindom is within you,” too,
So as the winds of Pentecost blow on earth, they blow within you too,
to comfort you, heal you, inspire you – and those you are concerned about.
All right, in conclusion, I’ll follow my best shot with my last shot!
Pentecost hasn’t come to all yet; Christ’s Love Kindom hasn’t come,
because of a lack of prophets!
“Would that all the all the Lord’s people were prophets!” exclaims Moses,
supporting Eldad and Medad in Numbers 11 who felt the Spirit so strongly
that they prophesied God’s love and attention and comfort in the camp
without asking permission!
Moses’ point: don’t just rely on the charismatics to bring Love’s Kindom!
Be anointed, all of you, with the Spirit so that you, too, can annoy the couch potatoes!
Be anointed, all of you, with the Spirit, that you too can live out the hard love of Christ!
Be anointed, all of you, with the Spirit so that you too can find practical ways
to forgive someone who hurts you, probably because of their own woundedness,
to look for the good in someone who causes chaos, usually out of blindness,
to not hold a grudge; it only hoards bad blood instead of finding Christ’s good blood.
Be anointed, all of you, with the Spirit so that you can believe that you too
have the potential and power to prophesy –
literally meaning simply to speak for the Spirit to those around you,
and in your activism for actions bringing the kindom “on earth as in heaven.”
Friends! Prophesy with your lives like me! Even beyond death, prophecies live,
just like I live in the creative imagination of your old pastor…
God bless you for your faithfulness. As I leave, I hold you in my heart,
and in the heart of God. Bye for now, my friends! Amen.
