Homily, September 14, 2025, Rev. Holly Cardone

Being Hope Center

September 14, 2025

The events of this week, the killing of Charlie kirk, 31-year-old, conservative political influencer and speaker, broke my heart. Not because I like Charlie Kirk. I don’t. His rhetoric was demeaning to people of color, the LGBTQ community, women, and immigrants. He wanted a whiter, more conservative America. Regarding gun violence in the US he said, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” It broke my heart because our nation continues to deteriorate into a nation solving problems with hate speech, dehumanization and violence.

Charlie Kirk was a Christian. Not in the way I understand what being a Christian, a follower of Christ means, but a Christian none the less, and a human being. He was a husband and father and a son. He didn’t deserve to die. And as I’ve heard repeatedly in the news outlets I listen to and read, killing someone because you don’t like their politics or religious beliefs is horrific. Violence is never the answer. Saying you approve of people dying by gun violence each year to protect your right to have a gun, disgusting. To die by gun violence even when you have such heinous beliefs is abhorrent.

The prophet Jeremiah was active from 627 to 586 BCE. When Jeremiah began prophesying, Assyria, which had dominated the regions for centuries was crumbing. Finally, the Assyrian capital, Nineveh fell in 612 BCE and their empire collapsed by 609 BCE. Babylon became the new superpower, defeating the Egyptians in 605 BCE. Judah was just a small pawn caught between Egypt and Babylon. Being a small territory between two powerful forces each king of Judah faced impossible choices. Do they ally themselves with Egypt or Babylon? Jeremiah was clear, warning the kings that resisting Babylon would bring disaster, but they ignored him. Finally, Babylon besieged Jerusalem, destroyed the temple in 586 BCE and sent many Jews into exile. That’s what was happening politically.

The religious context of the time was one of crisis and transition. King Josiah instituted sweeping religious reforms: centralized worship in Jerusalem, abolished local shrines, and emphasized covenant faithfulness based on a rediscovered “Book of the Law,” thought to be Deuteronomy. Jeremiah lived through the reign of 4 more kings after Josiah.

Jeremiah supported the call to covenant loyalty but was critical of superficial reform. People were going to the Temple to worship but were still practicing idolatry and injustice. Many in Judah were still worshipping Baal, Asherah, “the queen of heaven,” and other deities. Jeremiah was critical of the lack of compassion and care for the widow, the orphan, the destitute. He was saying that God was using Babylon as judgement and that surrender was the only way to survive.

And so, Jeremiah speaks the words we hear this morning. Jeremiah could very well speak those same words today.

I can’t help but think, in the light of everything that has happened in the last 9 months, if believed in that “Old Testament” God, I would agree with everything Jeremiah is saying to the people of Israel. I might believe that God thinks we are foolish. That we don’t know him. I might believe God thinks we are stupid children with no understanding, but we are skilled in doing evil and don’t know how to do good. I might even think that our God is looking down on the earth and sees waste and void. Mountains are quaking and hills are moving to and fro in response to evil and violence that man is perpetrating on humans. That genocide, war, and violence had made the heavens dark. I might think all that true if I were tasked to preach any news, good or bad, of an “Old Testament” God.

But that’s not our God, is it? Our God is the God revealed in the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. God, the shepherd, who leaves the 99 to look for the one who is lost, adrift, abandoned. God, the woman, who turns her whole house upside down to find one lost coin. Upon finding the one lost sheep and returning it to the fold, God calls for celebration. Discovering the lost coin, and returning it to her purse, safe and sound, God invites her friends, neighbors, and family to rejoice. Rejoice! Exult! Revel! Celebrate! Delight! The one that was lost is found!

Jesus is telling the parables of the one lost sheep and one lost coin to a grumbling bunch of religious leaders angry because Jesus was eating with sinners. He was trying to communicate in the best way he knew how, through story, parable, metaphor, that God rejoices over the one who was lost, broken, had gone astray and is found, then the 99 who have gone to church, done everything right, and then holds it over everyone’s heads and disgraces and humiliates the ones thought to be “sinners.”

I met a sinner yesterday. I recognized him, because I am one myself. He was sitting a table, taking donations for Hope Center, a homeless services organization on skid row. His table was set up outside the grocery story I was running into to buy my best friend flowers for her 19th sober birthday. She’s a sinner too.

I dug my last 5 dollars out of my purse and put it in his box. I told him I work in homeless services, and he told me some of his story. He lived on Skid Row for many year, using drugs, lots of drugs. He was strung out, homeless, dirty, no-where to lay his head. For years. No house. No pillow. No food. No love. Then love showed up in the form of a human from Hope Center on Skid Row, who talked to Ricky and convinced him to go to treatment. He did. 8 months. Way outside of Los Angeles, up in Kern County. After 8 months of treatment, they said he was ready to leave, but he said he wasn’t ready, so he moved to sober living and got a job. He saved for an apartment and moved out on his own. He works and lives in Rosamond, 2 ½ hours from Los Angeles. He’s 3 years clean and sober and goes to AA and NA meetings and a couple of times a month he gets in his car at 5am to drive down to Skid Row to pick up the table, chair and donation can from the Hope Center to drive up to Glendale and sit outside a grocery store to collect donations for Hope Center, the place that saved his life. This is a person, a black man, who quietly serves God, in secret. A man, once lost, now found expressed deep gratitude for all he has today.

God weeps for us as a nation, I believe. God wants us to be Hope Center. That’s what Jesus was, a traveling, storytelling, miracle working Hope Center. Saving people’s lives with love. God sent Jesus to show us what saving people’s lives with love would look like. I feel powerless over what’s happening in our country. But I know I can make a difference in my little corner of the world by being decent, loving and kind. A little Hope Center of my own. I hope you will be too.