January 4, 2026

Dancing Women and Fat Priests?

The title of my sermon this morning springs quite naturally from my own reaction to reading the lectionary passage from Jeremiah.  The prophet – or someone writing in his name – was describing the return of the people of Israel from their exile in foreign lands to their home, and I read, “Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry.  I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.  I will give the priests their fill of fatness, and my people shall be satisfied with my bounty, says the Lord.”  And I thought, “Dancing women and fat priests?  Really?”  One look at the Holy Land today makes this passage sound even more absurd.  In fact, a glance around the world at the dawn of 2026 puts the kibosh on most thoughts of dancing and celebrating the bounty of Divine goodness.  In many ways, it’s an ugly reality that this new year has been born into: the kind of violence and carelessness that I spoke of last week.

Reflecting back on things like school shootings and global conflict, I was put in mind of an horrific short story by Flannery O’Connor titled, A Good Man Is Hard to Find.  It’s a very disturbing tale of a family that is murdered by an outlaw and his buddies while on a trip to Florida.  The leader of the three murderers is called “The Misfit”.  And before he shoots the grandmother of this family, he has a conversation with her about Jesus.  “Jesus thown everything off balance,” he says.  “It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me.”  He goes on to explain that it’s a good thing to have a signature of your own so you can sign papers and prove you’re not as bad as the authorities claim.  “‘I call myself The Misfit,’ he said, ‘because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment. . . . Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?’”¹  The Misfit shares all of this philosophy with the grandmother shortly before putting threes slugs in her chest.  As I said, it’s a very disturbing story.  But, in many respects, The Misfit is a creation of the grandmother.  Out of her own needs and errors, she has led the family to this place, she started a chain of events that led them to run off the road in their car, and she stands and waves her arms to stop the approaching vehicle which turns out to be occupied by the murderers.  Just before he shoots her, she looks into his eyes and says, “Why you’re one of my babies.  You’re one of my own children!”  In short, it seems that The Misfit represents all that this woman has done wrong in her life, and it all comes round to destroy her and those she loves.  This is the sad tale that we read in the newspapers every morning.  Life is full of error and misdirection, and the world is a very unforgiving place. By the way, I’m told that when a reader complained that this story had left a bad taste in her mouth, O’Connor replied that she hadn’t intended she should eat it.

So if this is how the world works, where does Jeremiah get off telling the children of Israel that they will exchange their sorrow for gladness, their women will dance, and their priests will get fat?  What’s more, where does John get off telling us that the eternal Word, existing from the beginning of creation was life that was the light of all people and enlightens everyone, and that the Word became flesh and from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace?

Here’s my thesis: As we stand on the threshold of another year of conflict and trial, it is very important to come face to face with evil – to know fully just how cruel and unfair life can be.  But it’s equally important to recognize that the newspapers report the news, and the definition of news is that which is exceptional.  The fact that a gunman takes lives indiscriminately is reported because it’s not what happens every day, everywhere, and it does not take into account the billions of human interactions going on around the world at the same time that involve compassion and generosity, or that reflect the nobility of being human.  Every experience, every interaction, every act represents a decision – a choice.  And that choice is always between greed and generosity, between carelessness and compassion, between good and evil, if you will.

There’s a wonderful book called Sustainable Happiness.  It’s a collection of essays from Yes! Magazine about, well, happiness and how living simply and living well can make a difference in one’s life and in the world.  In one essay, Jeremy Adam Smith admonishes us to Choose Gratitude and relates how doing so can change one’s life for the better.  He lists important ways to nurture gratitude, including recognizing the reality of death and loss (which makes one more appreciative of life), taking time to “smell the roses”, recognizing that the good things in life are gifts not birthrights, being grateful to people (not to things), and expressing that gratitude in very specific and to the point ways (like thanking one’s spouse for making pancakes or giving hugs when needed).  But then he writes, “Let’s get real!  Pancakes, massages, hugs?  Most of these examples are easy.

“But here’s who the really tough-minded grateful person thanks: the boyfriend who dumped her, the homeless person who asked for change, the boss who laid him off.

“We’re graduating from basic to advanced gratitude,” he writes, “so pay attention.”  Then he quotes a Doctor Robert Emmons: “‘It’s easy to feel grateful for the good things.  No one “feels” grateful that he or she has lost a job or a home or good health or has taken a devastating hit on his or her retirement portfolio.’”

“In such moments, he says, gratitude becomes a critical cognitive process – a way of thinking about the world that can help us turn disaster into a stepping stone.  If we are willing and able to look, he argues, we can find a reason to feel grateful even to people who have harmed us.  We can thank that boyfriend for being brave enough to end a relationship that wasn’t working; the homeless person for reminding us of our advantages and vulnerability; the boss for forcing us to face a new challenge.”

Smith says that “Processing experiences through the gratitude lens doesn’t mean masking pain with ‘superficial happiology’.”  He points instead to the power it puts in our hands – the power to change our minds and therefore our lives.²

By the way, this book goes on to offer some valuable insights about things like restorative justice and community based sustainable living.  Those are also some very promising ways to find happiness, for ourselves and for our world.  It’s worth a look.

Jeremiah was a prophet and John was an apostle, but in a very real sense, both were preachers.  It’s the responsibility of the preacher to tell the good news, and there is good news to tell, even in a time when the children of Israel were exiled in foreign lands, even when the first century fledgling church was wrestling with opposition, rivalry and heresy, and even in a day when the nightly news is hard to watch.

I came across some good news just the other day in a post from the UCC.  In the year 2025 forty churches became newly Open and Affirming.  Across the denomination now there are nearly 1,950 Open and Affirming churches nationwide, each with a public covenant of welcome and affirmation.

Here is the good news, and it is the keynote for the year ahead: do not allow yourself to be consumed by the darkness, because there is always, always, always light.  Keep looking for the light.  When you see it, it may be enough to make you dance, or even fat and happy.

¹ Flanner y O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. P.  21.

² Jeremy Adam Smith, Choose Gratitude, from Sustainable Happiness, Berrett-Koehler, 2014, p. 85.