One year ago tomorrow, we gathered in this sanctuary and worshipped together not knowing that it would be the last time we would gather together like that for a very long time. Because the following Sunday (March 15, 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic caused us to move our services entirely online, a move which lasted until August, when we started limited gatherings on the lawn. On that last Sunday before COVID took over our lives, the Rev. Christie Dempsey stood in this pulpit and spoke these words: 

“Friends, now we remember during these days of Lent, Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem and his death on the cross.  It is all too easy to jump ahead to Easter, to the promise of the resurrection.  It is easy to ignore the suffering around us.  It is natural to question God’s call on our lives.  It is possible to simply ignore God’s direction.  But, let us not forget about the suffering Jesus endured so that we might live.  Let us not forget about God who can transform the image of hate and turn it into hope.  And, as resurrection people who celebrate the empty cross, let us think about God’s call on us to be disciples.  Perhaps as you reflect on your journey, you will find, as I did, that God is leading you – and perhaps has always been leading you — on an unexpected path.  If God can transform the cross, a symbol of evil, into a symbol of hope, imagine what God is doing in your life.”

Those words would prove never more true for us than in those coming weeks and months as we watched the world suffer.

I’ve been thinking back recently to those first weeks of online worship. It began with us setting up my phone on a tripod and trying to livestream the service. That lasted for just one week because the stream kept going down. So, then we bought a camcorder and began to pre-record the services. Those first weeks were far from polished, but it was unusual times and we were simply trying to make do. And there right there is the essence of Bishop Curry’s chapter for this week from “Love Is the Way.” He titled the chapter Making Do and Making New. And he describes how in the midst of suffering, love “makes do.” What he means by that is essentially what Rev. Dempsey spoke about in that sermon a year ago…that love enters into suffering and finds a way to transform it into hope. Bishop Curry describes this idea of “making do” like this: “My ancestors took a little and made a lot. They took what was left over and made sure no one was left out. They took foods that were put down and cast out by others and lifted the hungry up. That’s a miracle. That’s taking what is old and making something new. That’s making do!” God, through Jesus, took our situation and made something new…a way of hope, a way of restoration, a way of salvation. That is the essence of who God is and the essence of God’s love for us. God is always making something new for us.

But Bishop Curry adds to this an important caveat. He writes, “Making do is not that same as giving up or giving in to the status quo. It’s a way of figuring out how to both survive and thrive.” Then he connects to the words of the prophet Isaiah that we read this morning, “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” Like a potter molds and shapes the clay into a new creation, so God molds and shapes our lives into something new. That is the way of love. That is making do. Taking the suffer, the difficulty, the evil of the world and turning it around into something beautiful and good. We saw so many examples of this over the past year…so many people who made beautiful things out of the ashes left by the coronavirus pandemic. That is what love does.

And I think we all know that. But the question then becomes, how do we do it? How do we transform the sufferings of our world into hope? Bishop Curry presents us with a recipe to do exactly that. He calls it the “Recipe for Making Do.” This morning I would like to call it TrIG. As you may or may not know, I was a mathematics major in college. And one of my favorite things in math was trigonometry. I remember learning it for the first time my sophomore year of high school and it all just felt very normal to me…sine, cosine, tangent. It all just made sense in my brain. The TrIG that we will be talking about this morning is something completely different though. This TrIG is actually an acronym to remind us of the ingredients in the recipe for making do. So, don’t worry, I won’t be teaching you about sine, cosine, or tangent today…maybe.

So the Tr in TrIG stands for tradition. Bishop Curry describes tradition in this way: “Religion at its best is not an old cobweb-filled attic called tradition, and it’s not ‘the way we’ve always done it.’ It’s a treasure chest of wisdom gleaned from human beings who have dared, as the Bible says of someone called Enoch, to walk with God.” As Presbyterians, we like our traditions. But the meaning of our traditions comes not from a re-creation of the past but from taking the wisdom of the past and applying it to the present. Taking what is old and making it new again. Loving God, ourselves, and others is nothing new. It is something that originates with God and has been passed down from generation to generation. But it is our task to take that wisdom of old and make something new.

Bishop Curry suggests that to do that we must add a second ingredient (the I in TrIG): imagination. Curry writes, “Making do reaches fruition when someone dares to imagine another possibility greater than what appears to be the reality.” The Bible is all about this sort of imagination. We are encouraged to imagine a world beyond our own…a world where tears are wiped away, where pain is no more, where death can no longer touch us, where God is the only light we need. And Jesus showed us how to live in our current reality while imagining another, greater possibility and, in fact, working to bring that possibility into existence.

When Peyton Manning retired from professional football in 2016 as a Denver Bronco after 18 years in the NFL. Having come straight from college to the NFL, football was all Peyton had really known. But I love what he said in his retirement speech. He said this: “I’m totally convinced that the end of my football career is just the beginning of something I haven’t even discovered yet. Life is not shrinking for me, it’s morphing into a whole new world of possibilities.” That is the essence of imagination. Love opens us up to imagining a world better than the one we experience in daily life. It allows us to see beyond the anger in our neighbor and respond to them with love instead of frustration. Love allows us to step outside of ourselves and focus on the other. It allows the kingdom of God to draw near to us.

And that leads us to the G in TrIG. The G stands for God. Bishop Curry writes this: “When God–that loving benevolence behind creation, whose judgment supersedes all else–is factored into the reality of life and living, something changes for the good. It’s not wise to try to predict what that will be or how it will look, but something happens. The given reality is altered by another possibility. That’s why prayer matters–not as magic, like rubbing a rabbit’s foot. Prayer matters because when God is brought into the equation of life, something changes. Another possibility emerges.” If we were cooking something, God would be like the ingredient that determines what the dish truly is. It is that dish altering ingredient. When God enters into our life, it changes things. In 1 Corinthians, Paul writes, “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” The cross, the central act of God’s love and salvation for humankind, is the power of God. The act that felt most like defeat was transformed into victory by God’s love.

Bishop Curry tells an amazing story about the funeral for his Aunt Callie. The preacher spoke about Ezekiel and the Valley of Dry Bones. Thirteen year old Curry did not comprehend the words the preacher was saying much, but he was swept up by the rhythm with which the preacher spoke. And when the preacher began to cry out, “O Callie, Callie hear the word of the Lord. O rise up, Callie, rise,” he said that everybody at the service looked nervously at the coffin, almost expecting Aunt Callie to come walking right out. Curry wrote this about the experience: “Now, the coffin didn’t open up, and Aunt Callie didn’t get up, at least not from what we could see. Had she done that, I suspect I would have run from Birmingham back to Buffalo and Olympic speed. But that old preacher did conjure up something. It was an abiding hope, a life-giving conviction that there is a reality that we cannot see.”

That is what “making do” is about. It is about learning from the wisdom of the tradition passed down to us from our foremothers and forefathers. It is about imagining new possibilities that could spring forth in our lives. And it is about the hope that exists in God…the hope we have because of Jesus Christ. The hope that God is making ALL things new…and that includes us. At the very end of the chapter, Bishop Curry tells the story of Howard Thurman’s grandmother who had been a slave. She told her grandson about two church services that were held each Sunday for the slave: one by the master telling the slaves how to be better slaves and one led by another slave. This second service, she recalled, would always end with the words, “You are not slaves, you are the children of God.” About this, Curry writes, “No matter what the world and life itself may say or how it may make you feel, you are God’s children.”

That there is the essence of love making do. No matter what the world or life itself throws at us, love reminds us that we are beloved. Love inspires us to remind others that they too are beloved. And love flows out of us to heal the brokenness of our world and causes the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk, and the dead to live again. Love is the way and love makes all the difference. So let us live with that kind of transformative love, bringing healing to places of hurt, hope to places of despair, and light to places of utter darkness. And we will be certain to find God in those places with us. Amen.