The Invitation is Clear

Psalm 113 and Because by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

September 21, 2025

By Nicole M. Lamarche

Thank you for being here. We need this refuge of love where all belong. I

invite you to take some deeper breaths with me, breathing in peace,

breathing out worry, giving thanks for the gift of being alive and being here

like this.

So as you are moved, I invite you to join me in some prayerful

breathing……… and also we have some words for our prayerful breaths…

Spirit of Life, Creator and Sustainer, Peacemaker and keeper of

possibilities, open each of us to hear whatever we need to today. And may

the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable

in your sight, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

I was on West Pearl Street this week to hit one of my little favorite shops,

Old Tibet to get some more incense and things to burn to shift the energy at

home and here. I walked around the perimeter of the building with sage this

morning so if you smell something new or revolutionary, it might be that.

Wandering through the racks of flowy tops and grownup versions of pajama

pants in the back I noticed a sign that told me which singing bowls opened

which chakras. I have been in there many times, but I missed this detail. I

decided I needed a bowl in the key F to help open my heart. So I splurged.

My husband expressed suspicion that this will in fact open my heart, but I

told him surely it won’t hurt. I am confident that my heart won’t close or

harden from sitting with this intention as the bowl reverberates. The sign

over the bowls said that the ones in the key of F will help with compassion.

When I saw this poem from former Colorado poet Laureate Rosemerry

Wahtola Trommer came to me this week, it felt perfect.

“I can’t save the world— 

can’t save even myself… 

So I practice opening my heart…..

What’s the use… of trying?

But today, the invitation is clear: 

to be ridiculously courageous in love…

The invitation is clear. It is here, having arrived right in front of us in the

form of people surprising us with their beliefs, with their actions with their

failures, what does it look like to be courageous in love? If we are about

what we say we are about, this invitation cannot be ignored. This invitation

to be ridiculously courageous in love….

Will we RSVP?

I know that personally I feel a kind of fear I haven’t before, and I know

others of you do too. In some cases, our very existence is being

threatened. But I want you to know Gwen we won’t let you be erased. We

love you. We see you. What does it look like to be ridiculously courageous

in love…right now? When it’s clear we have shifted over into

authoritarianism. When the power of the government is being used to limit

speech, weaponized, wielding what is available to dominate and enrich,

while limiting what can be said, what can be shared in newspapers and on

major news networks, what does it look like to be ridiculously courageous

in love? When a new visa has been created for the highest bidder, for only

$1 million any foreigner can now be fast tracked for citizenship while

58,000 immigrants sit in detention in terrible conditions, over 70% of them

with no criminal conviction.

From my vantage point, the environment has changed. I want to say that

out loud. I know I need to grieve. This is not the trajectory I thought we are

on. But denying this reality only causes more harm for us because then we

are not responding with what is real. It feels important to be clear: things

are different and something different might be required from us, including

being willing to speak to this moment, framed from a moral and sometimes

even religious perspective.

It’s so weird to me that the language being used, as someone who has

been a part of the UCC my whole life the framework underlying much of the

harm is Christian-adjacent, but in places almost completely missing Christ.

So part of why I wanted to do this series on Healing from Toxic Christianity

this fall is that I feel moved to reclaim our power to tell a different story

using the language of our tradition and to remind everyone of our shared

humanity, of our connection to one another and the fact that these sacred

texts are meant to be about liberation, overcoming our own demons,

overcoming evil leaders, being uplifted from oppressive structures and this:

living as good news for the poor. As you heard from Psalm 113, “God

raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap…” It is

shocking to me how much I have read or heard recently that denigrates

those on the margins, a morning news pundit saying that homeless people

living with mental illness should be killed by lethal injection, verbally

attacking transgender people, passing a bill that gave the biggest reduction

in food support to children in poverty in our history. This is what I want to

speak to today. A Christianity that does not bring good news to the poor

has been poisoned by capitalism, corrupted by white supremacy, sanitized

by patriarchy. A Christianity that calls empathy toxic needs to do some

more Bible study. A Christianity that does not ground everything in

courageous in love and allies itself with power has lost its way. One of the

few threads that runs from the Hebrew scriptures all the way through to the

Christians scriptures is one that we heard today “God raises the poor from

the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap… Praise the LORD!” And

this same thread is found in I Samuel with the Song of Hannah where we

read that the “bows of the mighty are broken but the feeble gird their

strength….and again this same line “God raises the poor from the dust,

lifting the needing from the ash heap…” and we pick up this thread again in

the Gospel of Luke with one of the most significant pieces of Christian

scripture, “My soul magnifies the Lord, for God has looked with favor on the

lowliest of God’s servant…God has scattered the proud, lifted up the lowly;

filled the hungry with good things, sent the rich away empty…”

Empathy is not toxic. And with more and more being led or done by artificial

intelligence I want to make sure we keep empathy in our collective

conscience and unconscience because one of the few things AI cannot do

is offer empathy. It will need to be on us humans to tend to and preserve so

it cannot go extinct. Whatever name we have for God, it does not turn away

from those who are hurting. God raises the poor from the dust and lifts the

needy from the ash heap. Jesus’ message was and is good news for the

poor and so should ours be too. Knowing the invitation to us is clear: So

what does it look like be ridiculously courageous in love right now? How

can we speak and live and pray from a place of tending to a sense of

morality?

Communal Reflection

Knowing Jesus’ ministry was about love and liberation, with a message that

is “good news to the poor” what actions can we take to advocate for the

poor and marginalized right now? What does it look like for you to be

ridiculously courageous in love? What does it look like for us collectively to

be courageous in love?

I walked east on Pearl Street and took in the beautiful scene of Parent’s

weekend at CU and as I was making my way back to my car, heading west,

I noticed a man outside of the West End Tavern seated on a stoop. He

didn’t have a sign asking for money. He didn’t have a brown bag covering a

drink. He wasn’t playing music. He was just sitting there watching people

pass by. It struck me. “Are you okay?” I asked. He told me he was hungry

and then he said, “I have been sober for 4 days.” I gave him an exuberant

congratulations and told him what he already knew. “The first part is hard,” I

said. “Keep going. It really is one day at a time.” He looked rough and

smelled a little. And I confess that when he asked for a hug, I hesitated. We

wrapped our arms around each other right there in the crowd. Matthew is

his name. And I was feeling in that moment that he was giving me the gift

of not giving up on being fully human. I gave him $10. I could have done

more. I wondered if I should go back. But as we heard from the poet, “I

can’t save the world. Can’t hardly save myself.” And yet I have seen how

we really can be saved together when we are ridiculously courageous in

love. Let us go down the street heart first. May it be so. Amen.