Peace, Be Still: Reflections for a Simple Summer Sabbath

Mark 4:35-41
June 21, 2009
Sung: Peace, be still … peace be still. The storm rages, peace be still.
This passage from Mark has long been one of my favorites, especially for meditation, and I was grateful that the lectionary cycle brought it before us this Sunday. I’ve been thinking about summer worship, and how it might be a time of reflection for us as a community, and I decided well before I turned to the lectionary readings that this morning would be an excellent time to celebrate a simple summer Sabbath of readings and songs and relatively few preached words for a Presbyterian worship.
These words from Mark strike me as the perfect text for such a service, because they invite us into quiet, reflective trust – in other words, into deep faithfulness. These words are not about believing, not about creed, not about theology or Christology or ecclesiology. They are about trust, about letting go in the midst of the storms of life and simply trusting that, in the end, it will be all right.
To be guided also in this by Paul’s admonition to the church as Corinth is all to the better.
That is the perfect way to begin a summer season of reflection – with an attitude of deep trust that it will be all right.
This summer we are going to reflect on the vision for Clarendon Presbyterian Church. I will introduce this theme with a bit of detail next Sunday. The following week – the Sunday of the 4th of July holiday weekend – we will have a good, old-fashioned hymn sing.
Singing praise to God ought to get us in precisely the right frame of mind and soul to think together, through the Sundays of July, about what God is calling us to be and do in the seasons just ahead. We’ll focus in worship during July on three areas that the mission discernment group has lifted up: worship; our common life together; and local mission.
The first Sunday of August, we’ll pull that all together into a more-or-less cohesive vision.
The second Sunday of August we will focus on our experiences in local mission. The middle two Sundays of August will be full of song and celebration, then we’ll take the whole thing on the road for a picnic on August 30, before the final summer Sunday, September 6, when we will celebrate work on the Sunday of the Labor Day weekend.
So, theirs is the thumbnail sketch of summer at CPC. I hope that you will feel called to be part of worship as often as possible this summer, knowing that each of us will be away from time to time. Summer worship 2009 is important in helping us lay a common foundation for the season to come in our common life.
In part, summer worship will be important because we are going to experience it in a slightly different frame: more of you, less of me. We will be “preaching together.” Preaching, at its best, is an inherently communal activity – a multi-voiced conversation involving the preacher, the congregation, the lively text, and the Spirit of the living God.
Too often, in our heady Reformed Protestant tradition, the preacher’s voice drowns out all others – especially, far too often, the still small voice of the Spirit.
We can do something about that, and we will this summer – beginning right now as we engage this text from Mark together.
Sung: Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me …
The remainder of this “sermon” will be a community lectio divina on the text from Mark.

A New Creation

2 Cor. 5:14-17; Ezekiel 17: 22-24; Mark 4:26-34
June 14, 2009
Almost 30 years ago, President Ronald Reagan, quoting Thomas Paine, remarked in a speech setting forth his agenda to reshape the federal government, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
Last week in Cairo, President Obama paraphrased them both, saying, “We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning.”
A direct line stretches through Paine to Reagan to Obama, and touches a great many American leaders along the way, and that direct line demarcates an American heresy.
For as much as our American mythology would like us to believe that individually and collectively we have it within ourselves to make the world anew, John Calvin would have recognized the heresy at the heart of the mythology.
For Calvin was an excellent reader of Paul, and Paul understood quite clearly that while renewal and rebirth are profoundly important and necessary aspects of faithful living, we do not have it within ourselves, by ourselves, to make the world anew.
Listen for a word from God from the prophet Isaiah: “behold, I am about to do a new thing.”
“I am about to do a new thing,” says the Lord.
Not Thomas Paine and this nation’s Founders. Not Ronald Reagan and his followers. Not Barack Obama and his.
If there is to be a new creation, in Paul’s words, it will be God’s doing. If something new is going to spring up on the mountaintop, in Ezekiel’s image, it will be God’s doing. And if there is to be, among us and within us, something new, it will be God’s doing.
Why raise this today, at the beginning of summer when the planting is done and the harvest is still far off and mostly we want to kick back and take it easy?
Several reasons: first, these are the texts that the lectionary places before us this week, so we ought to attend to them and listen to them for a word from God.
But more importantly, these are words in season. They are ripe for us right now, especially coming as the Sabbath season of summer breaks upon us.
Finally, they speak to us of something new at a moment when we desperately need to be reminded of that possibility, for we have been reminded close to home this week of the ancient hatreds that mark the old patterns of human behavior and relationship that Ezekiel and Paul and all of the other prophets and apostles, and most decisively for us, Jesus, called people to set aside and be done with.
In the passage from Mark printed in the bulletin this morning, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed and uses harvest imagery to remind his listeners that the kingdom of God does not arrive like other kingdoms with military power and grand pronouncements from on high. Instead, God’s kingdom – God’s beloved community – comes subtly and unnoticed by most. It presses in from the margins and is embodied initially by those furthest from traditional sources of power.
That is no doubt why signs of the kingdom of God seem so scarce to us. We live in Rome – the heart of the empire – the most powerful city in the most powerful empire in the history of the world.
Jesus came preaching repentance and the kingdom of God, the gospels proclaim. His clear message: Rome was not the kind of kingdom that God had in mind. These texts before are ancient and speak from specific cultural, historical and political contexts to be sure, but they also speak to our time and the message should be just as clear: America is not the kind of kingdom that God has in mind either.
No empire, no matter how conceived nor to what purpose dedicated, will ever be what God has in mind. For the God revealed in and through the life of Jesus is profoundly anti-imperialist for the plain and simple and abiding reason that every empire is established by and maintained through violence.
The question for followers of Jesus in the face of this truth is equally plain, simple and abiding: how shall we be the church in the midst of empire?
The question is an abiding one because the church in every age and context faces it anew, because thus far in the 2,000-year history of the Christian movement every age has been the age of empire. That historical fact begs a crucial question: is empire simply part and parcel of human life? Is there something innate in human being, in our psychology, in our nature, in our living together that results in organizing the polis around structures and institutions of violence?
Is the violence of empire in the heart of each of us?
After all, violence breaks in all around us. In the past few weeks violence has twice desecrated holy ground – in the murder of a doctor in his church and in last week’s shooting at the Holocaust Museum. You don’t have to look through more than one day’s edition of the Post to find violence tearing apart neighborhoods close to us, or violence rending the fabric of families in our town. War is not confined to contests between nations. Often we are at war with ourselves within our own souls, as anyone who has struggled with addictions or mental and emotional illnesses well knows.
This insight is probably as old as human thought. Indeed Lao Tzu, who lived 500 years before Christ, put it this way:
If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.
In this ancient wisdom lies the key to understanding Paul’s notion of a new creation, and to grasping how that notion of new creation informs our understanding of the kingdom of God that Jesus compares to the mustard seed.
The new creation begins not with the work of great empires, but in the heart work, the soul work of each of us. That does not mean that public action and public policies are unimportant – far from it. But it does mean that the peace we long for must begin within each of us.
As Ghandi put it, “we must be the change we seek in the world.”
The crucial role and, indeed, the ultimate purpose of the church of Jesus Christ is to be the community that shines forth this change because we are living it out in our own lives and in our common life together.
When we gather as the church in worship we are not merely a spiritual filling station through which we gather strength to endure another week in the world as it is. Instead, we gather together to gather strength to change the world into a place that we do not merely endure but in which we share in abundant life. Moreover, we gather to be a community which opens a window – not matter how small and smudged and occasional cracked it may be – but a window nonetheless on how the world might be made anew.
We gather as the church to be a foretaste of the kingdom of God, the beloved community, a new creation. We are the mustard seeds being planted for the birth of a new creation in which people can go to work and not worry about violence shattering their lives, in which children are fed and cared for and educated, in which our elderly live with dignity and independence, in which, as Isaiah envisioned, nation shall not life up sword against nation and they will study war no more.
If you want to live in such a world, do not look to the White House to create it. Do not wait patiently for such a world to be created by the mighty and the powerful. Instead, look with a certain holy impatience within your own heart and open it that God’s work can begin there to bring a new creation.
Let us close with a prayer for New Zealand that speaks to this longing and openness:
Lead me from death to life,
from falsehood to truth;
lead me from despair to hope,
from fear to trust;
lead me from hate to love,
from war to peace.
Let peace fill our heart,
our world, our universe. Amen.

The Colors of Hope

Romans 8:12-25; Isaiah 6:1-7
June 9, 2009
As Bud and I wandered the streets of Rome, Florence and Venice last month I noticed a whole lot of these flags flying from windows and a few storefronts in the cities.
“Pace” or “peace.” Certainly the European peace movement, outspoken throughout this decade of American war, is a strong presence in Italy so I understood the “pace” part, but what was the rainbow saying?
In American cities, dating back to the 1970s in San Francisco, the rainbow flag has been a sign of hospitality for the GLBT population.
But the history of the rainbow banner is much older than that. With its obvious Biblical connection in the Noah story, the rainbow has been a sign of hope for thousands of years. When God gave Noah the rainbow sign, as the old spiritual puts it, it was a promise about the goodness and constancy of creation and the created order.
Even before that story, the rainbow itself, occurring as it does in the midst of the combination of sun and storm and so often at the end of the rain, is simply a natural sign of hope that the storm is over.
Thus it’s no wonder that people in various cultures have used the colors of the rainbow as colors of hope.
Apparently the Incas used a variation on the theme to mark their territory, and it became a sign of resistance when the Spanish invaded. In the early part of the 20th century, the international movement of cooperatives used the rainbow as a sign of unity in diversity. And, back to my Italian balconies, the peace movement in Italy began using the rainbow in the early 1960s. During the run up to the war in Iraq the Italians began a campaign they called Pace da tutti i balconi ("peace from every balcony"), encouraging people to show their opposition to war by flying the flag from their balconies.
All of which reminds me that hope springs eternal, or, as the late Harvey Milk said, “you gotta give ‘em hope.”
Hope is not enough to live on, but without it life is impossible, so you gotta give ‘em hope!
The apostle Paul certainly understood this: We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
So, this morning, as we celebrate More Light Sunday, and lay claim once again to our own hopes for a church as generous and just as the God we worship, and for a social order of justice and equality, what hope colors our lives? This morning, what is the color, or nature, or content of your hope? What are you hoping for today?

Let me share, very briefly, this morning three hopes of my own.
I organize these hopes under three headings: Christ, community, and call.
First, I hope that, in the words of an Irish blessing, we will keep Christ before us, behind us, and beside us as we move forward together in the work of justice for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. We are going to hold a strategy meeting here on the last Saturday of the month to discuss the way forward within National Capital Presbytery. We know that many within the larger church are tired of talking about ordination and sexuality, and we want to be mindful of that both from pastoral and strategic perspectives. Nevertheless, we also know that over the years thousands of faithful, called GLBT Presbyterians have been denied ordination, and continue to live as outcasts within the household of faith, and they are tired of that. Therefore, we cannot tire in our work for justice. As we pursue that work – along with all of the rest of the mission and outreach, the feeding, the peacemaking, the rebuilding, the work of compassion and of advocacy to which we are called – I hope that we will keep Christ in our hearts so that our work in his name is advanced by means he would choose and employ. That is to say, I hope and trust that we will together continue to speak the truth in love, and speak that truth to power as we are called.
Second, I hope and trust that we will do this together – that is to say, as a community actively living out its faith together in worship, study, prayer and action.
Bruce Reyes-Chow, the current moderator of our General Assembly, posted a note on his Facebook page the other day saying that if you think you are leading but turn around and find no one there then you are only out for a walk. As Bruce noted, leadership and solitary walks are both good things, but they are not the same thing.
I have been engaged in a good deal of activism over the past couple of year: working with People of Faith for Equality in Virginia on GLBT concerns in the public square; working with Christian Peace Witness for Iraq on precisely what the name implies; and working a bit on the interfaith effort to build a faith-based community organization in Northern Virginia.
While some of the relations that I have built in that work are among the most important and sustaining relationships that I have, and while I treasure them, I am also aware that, with respect to this community at Clarendon Presbyterian Church, my social justice work has been a solitary walk as distinct from congregational leadership.
I am concerned about this distinction, and I believe we need to explore it together – in community. If we are a congregation of followers of Jesus called to be a progressive, inclusive and diverse expression of Christian community, what does that mean with respect to the Biblical imperative to do justice, and what does this mean with respect to my own calling both to community and congregational leadership and to the work of justice and peacemaking? I conceive of these as open questions, and, fundamentally as questions that we must address together as a community.
Part of addressing such questions entails, of course, looking at some foundational questions anew:
Who are we?
How are we called to express that identity in the world?
Are we responding faithfully to that calling?
Paul knew a thing or two about such questions. In some sense, his entire life – or, at least the parts that we know about through his writings – was spent trying to answer them.
Who was he? A Jewish man, to be sure. A citizen of the Roman Empire, also. But finally a man trying to come to grips with and respond to his encounter with the living Christ. In that encounter, Paul discerned both his fundamental identity and his true calling. As he put it in the letter to the Christians in Rome: “we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
If heirs, then, children living in response to the promise of God and living out of that promise. What does that mean? What does it look like in the world?
For Paul, and for us, also heirs to this promise, the answer to that question lies precisely in the life of Jesus. If you want to know what God desires of human beings, read the gospel stories of Jesus. Here is human life fully realized and lived in intimate relationship with the divine and in obedience to its leading.
And in this lies our hope – for ourselves and for the world.
So my final hope is that we, too, might live faithfully into our several callings in this place.
Just as Isaiah said, so shall we. When the living God, creator of all that is, calls to us through creation, what shall we say? Do we dare respond, “here I am, Lord”? When the Spirit, blowing where it will, calls to us in wind and fire, what shall we say? Do we dare respond, “here I am, Lord”? When Christ stands in our midst, as the poor one, the outcast, the marginalized, victimized by violence and injustice, silenced by rules in the church – when this Christ stand in our midst and beckons, what shall we say? Do we dare respond, “here I am, Lord”?
In our response lies our hope, if we dare. Amen.

Blessed Spirits

Matthew 5:1-16; Ezekiel 37: 1-14
May 31, 2009
Bonjourno!
It is good to be back. It was good to be away, and must appreciated. In case you somehow missed it, Bud and I spent a week in Italy, and the entire family spent a weekend in Philly. I’ve been posting a few pictures on my blog and Facebook page, and perhaps at the next AFAC gathering we’ll inflict more. I promise, however, that no one will be subjected to all 300 photographs or three hours of video clips.
Travel is always a good way to learn, and, not surprisingly, our sojourn through Italy and a few days in Philly offered up some interesting prompts concerning church.
Italy is full of ancient and beautiful churches. We stepped inside more than I can recall, and toured many of those. Renaissance art and architecture abound. The size and scope of the buildings is amazing: you could fit our entire building four or five times over inside some of the sanctuaries we walked through.
And my first observation was simply this: thank heavens we do not have to take care of a thousand-year-old building! You think we have paint problems here and there? Imagine having to worry about a Renaissance masterpiece crumbling in your chancel. You think our flooring is old and troublesome? Imagine having to worry about the marble covering a hundred tombs beneath your feet as you worship.
You think we have plumbing and electrical issues? Imagine the challenges of a building constructed a thousand years before electricity and centuries before indoor plumbing.
I am so glad that such places remain; and I am all the more so glad that I don’t have any responsibility for their care.
But on this day of Pentecost, as we consider the birth of the church, I can’t help but observe also that the church in Italy strikes me as remarkably similar to the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel.
The heart of the ancient church, the home place of the Roman Catholic tradition, the hearthstone of historic Christianity: these days no more than one in ten Italians participates in church. All of those ancient and beautiful churches? Most of them function more as museums than as living houses of worship and praise.
There are, of course, all kinds of historic and cultural reasons for this. The challenge of being the church in Europe after Auschwitz is staggering, particularly when so much of the church was, at the very least, complicit in the Holocaust. Postwar existentialism was not merely an intellectual movement, it was and remains for many a cultural reality that makes secularism the dominant milieu for an entire continent.
The toll of two world wars can be measured not only in bodies and buildings destroyed, but also in belief systems thoroughly undermined.
It is not merely the question of doubt, however. After all, doubt is part and parcel of faith. Indeed, the opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty. And the certainty that seems to prevail in the contemporary secular West is this: we are on our own; there is nothing more than what we can see and taste and test.
The bones are dead and dry. There is no breath of spirit within them, and none coming from without to revive them. The bones are dead, and death is the end. Period.
On the other hand. On the other hand, we visited historic Christ Church in Philadelphia last weekend. Benjamin Franklin, William Penn, Betsy Ross and so many others worshipped there. They sat in the same sanctuary that stands today: 312 years old.
Sure, it is but a baby compared to the Italian churches, but, just like them, it too has many bones lying beneath its floors.
The tombs contain the bones of the famous and of the faithful unknowns, and the guide told us the story of one of the latter: a woman who died more than 200 years ago, whose name is not writ large in the history of the nation, but is surely recalled in the household of God. She set up a fund that continues, more than 200 years after her death, to help feed the hungry of Philadelphia.
She understood, clearly, that her faith – her trust in something beyond what she would see and taste and test in her own life – called her to ministry beyond her own horizons. She trusted that the Spirit of God not only empowered her, but would continue beyond her own time to empower the faithful to lives of loving service. She opened her heart to the Spirit, let its breath inspire her own, and her faithful work has continued down through the generations.
Blessed are the meek, indeed.
Some dictionaries define “meek” as “submissive” or “compliant.”
It will not surprise you to hear me say that I have never interpreted that phrase, “blessed are the meek,” to be an instruction to quiet acceptance of that which should not be accepted.
Instead, I hear in this beatitude a blessing of those who resist without recourse to violence.
That way, sometimes, lies martyrdom, to be sure. We had dinner one evening in Rome at a ristorante in Campo di’ Fiori – a plaza in which stands a statue of Giordano Bruno, a 16th-century philosopher burned at the stake in that plaza in 1600, having been declared a heretic by the Inquisition. Historians differ as to the precise nature of Bruno’s heresy: was it a precursor to Galileo or a more strictly theological matter?
What is clear, however, is that Bruno was put to death.
If by the “meek,” as suggested by the Greek word in question (praeis), Jesus meant “those who do no harm to others, even those others who have done harm,” then clearly the church itself has much to answer for.
But answering for its own violence has never been a strong suit of the church – whether the Roman Catholic Church or its Protestant step children. On the 400th anniversary of Bruno's death, Cardinal Angelo Sodano declared Bruno's death to be a "sad episode." However he added that people should not judge those who condemned Bruno. He went on to argue that the inquisitors wanted "to preserve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save [Bruno’s] life.”
Perhaps our own inability to confess – to engage in simple truth-telling – helps explain empty churches across Europe and increasingly across the U.S.
What, in the end, is the gift of Pentecost? It is the spirit of truth.
Jesus did not say, “blessed are those who tell the truth,” but truth-telling is at the heart of the Beatitudes.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit”? Who are these poor in spirit? Jesus would have been referring to those economically marginalized – either by choice or situation – who practiced an utter reliance upon God. In other words, those who grasped and were honest about our common existential reality: we are all, ultimately, utterly dependent upon God. Some of us are truthful about this; most of us live in denial.
Likewise with the blessing of those who mourn. Each and every one of us mourns. We suffer. We lose loved ones. We grieve and sorrow and mourn. But too often in our own culture, in particular, we do not wish to acknowledge our own brokenness and suffering for fear of being perceived as weak. Jesus extends the blessings of God, here, to every one of us, and thus creates space for our own truth telling about our own common human condition.
What might happen if the church became a site for such truth telling? Is the Spirit calling us to this?
Of course, if we are to become such a place – a site for truth telling, a place of honest confession – then persecution will follow. After all, those who have truly followed Jesus in every time and culture have found the way difficult, the gate narrow, for Jesus spoke a truth that the world has never wanted to hear much less acknowledge.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives. God has sent me to proclaim recovery of sight to the blind. God has send be to set the oppressed free and to proclaim the year of jubilee.”
When Jesus announced that mission in his first public sermon in his hometown of Nazareth, the crowd responded by trying to throw him off a cliff.
But the truth is, the poor desperately need good news. The world desperately needs to be set right. Those captive to a culture of bigotry, violence, homophobia need to be set free.
We are the ones called, at this moment, in this place, to speak that truth to the world no matter what it costs us.
For on this day of Pentecost, we are richly blessed and the Spirit of the Lord is upon us. Let us walk in the light of that Spirit and go boldly into God’s world to feed the hungry, bless the poor, speak the truth, resist all violence for in so doing we lay claim to the truth – the living embodied truth – of the kingdom of God among us. May it be so, and may we be call blessed spirits. Amen.

Love Makes a Family

Matthew 12:46-50; Ruth 1:1-21
May 10, 2009
One of the challenges I recall from seminary days was the invitation to sum up in a sentence what you think scripture is all about. Think about that for a moment. Is the entirety of scripture about eternal life? Is it about proper religion? Is it about justice? Is it a biography of God? Is it a single story about the people of God? Is it about liberation? Is it about the national identity of the people of Israel? Is it about law? Prophets? Love?
That long list of possibilities in and of itself suggests that scripture resists reduction to a single narrative thread or central theme, and I tend to believe that scripture is, indeed, about all of these and more. But, if compelled to say right now, in a sentence, what scripture is about I would say this:
Scripture is the story of the ever-expanding understanding of the limitless nature of God’s love.
Scripture is the story of the ever-expanding understanding of the limitless nature of God’s love.
Throughout the stories, we encounter people whose understanding of God and of divine love is pushed beyond initial limits. Abraham is called to leave behind the narrow and geographically fixed definition of his kind, his tribe, and go to a place that God will show him. Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, is compelled to expand his own self-understanding and his understanding of who is in and who is out of the covenant relationship with God. Moses, raised with a royal consciousness, is confronted by the cries of an oppressed people and he must choose. Paul, the oppressor of the early church, leaves the confines of the temple and spreads good news far beyond the tribal boundaries of his people.
And Jesus, even Jesus, is constantly recognizing that good news is not just for the people of Israel but also for the Gentiles, for women, for children, for the poor and the marginalized – so much so that he finally confronts that fundamental human question: who is my brother? Who is my sister?
In other words, who is in and who is out? Who constitutes the family if the parent is God?
Family … you can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t shoot ‘em! Well, then, what happens if everybody is in?
Isn’t that the question? We spend so much time trying to define who is in and who is out.
A group of us got together a few weeks back to watch For the Bible Tells Me So. The film tells the stories of several families coming to terms with a gay or lesbian child coming out – including that of Bishop Gene Robinson. The stories underscore the difficulties posed by narrow interpretations of scripture. In other words, the families come face to face with their own understandings and that of faith communities that read scripture is about law, scripture read as a strict and fixed code of morality.
Never mind that we pick and choose which parts of the law we will attend to at any given moment. As John Stewart said last week on The Daily Show after Maine legalized same-sex marriage, the move transformed “Maine’s annual lobster-fest into the state’s second biggest violation of Leviticus. … God hates gays, and scallops,” Stewart concludes.
When we take scripture as a narrowly defined rule book and understand the church as arbiter and enforcer of those rules we wind up with religion as a weapon and, too often, family as its target.
A couple of months ago I was at a conference at Stony Point, along the Hudson River in New York. I offered up for our morning prayers a Pat Humphries song for the gathered people that, I thought, expressed the sense of unity that was growing among the group. I’ll sing the chorus for you:
We are living ‘neath the great Big Dipper; we are washed by the very same rain.
We are swimming in the stream together, some in power and some in pain.
We can worship this ground we walk on, cherishing the beings that we live beside.
Loving spirits we’ll live forever; we’re all swimming to the other side.
Into the prayerful silence one young man – a senior in college – spoke up and declared that the song represented “rank idolatry.” The most interesting part of the moment was that no one responded to him. It was quite clear that no one agreed with him, but it was also clear that we wanted to be gentle with him. I took his youthful certainty as a byproduct of understanding scripture and orthodoxy as a strictly drawn circle around a narrowly defined set of rules.
Scripture was to be used as a way of defining who is in and who is out, and how we will permit ourselves to speak or sing of those lines and definitions. Family, understood in light of such a reading, is easily reduced to tribe and kin.
Yet the Bible is full of stories that challenge precisely that reduction.
Take the story of Ruth and Naomi. There are clear lines of tribe and kin at stake, but something far deeper comes to define family.
Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die — there will I be buried.
What else is that but a declaration of undying love? Where you go, I will follow. Where you live I will live.
I am alone and I am searching, hungering for answers in my time
I am balanced at the brink of wisdom, I’m impatient to receive a sign
I move forward with my senses open; imperfection, it be my crime
In humility I will listen. We’re all swimming to the other side.
We’re all living ‘neath …
On this journey through thoughts and feelings; binding intuition, my head, my heart
I am gathering the tools together. I’m preparing to do my part.
All of those who have come before me, band together and be my guide
Loving lessons that I will follow; we’re all swimming to the other side.
Jesus clearly understood that tribe and kin were not enough to make a family. “Who is my brother?” he asks. It’s not blood or biology. It’s not tribe, religion, culture. It is, he declares, doing the will of God.
And what is that? This will of God that Jesus’ own life translates for us? Love God and love the neighbor – the law and the prophets hang on this. Love one another, by this they will know you are my followers. Love also the enemy – be makers of peace and, therefore, be called the children of God. Be part of my family.
If, as the Bible tells us, God is love, then we are all children of love, bound together by that common identity. There is no in or out from that circle. We are all children of a loving God.
The trick, of course, is to live as if that were true in every aspect of our lives, in our every interaction with others, in the way that we shape our lives and our churches, and in the ways that we try to make our smaller families reflect that truth as well.
God is love. Love makes a family. There is an inescapable logic at work in the relationship between those two statements. No abuse of scripture, of creed, confession or institution will ever make it otherwise.
Beloved, let us love one another, for God is love and we are created in that image.
Carry the spark of the divine in your life and let it seek out that same spark in every one you encounter. By this you will be able to answer in your own life the question Jesus posed, “who is my brother, my sister, my mother, my father?”
You are that one, my beloved sisters and brothers.
When we get there we’ll discover all of the gifts we’ve been given to share
Have been with us since life’s beginning and we never noticed they were there
We can balance at the brink of wisdom never recognizing that we’ve arrived
Loving spirits will live together. We’re all swimming to the other side.

A Passion for Peace: That We Should Be Called Children of God

April 26, 2009
Luke 24: 33-49; 1 John 3:1; Psalm 4:8; Acts 3: 13-16
For more than a year, now, I’ve had sitting in a corner of my study a big bag of ribbons and clothe and pennants and banners and rope. They were part of the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq last spring, sent in from across the country with letters such as this:
Dear Clarendon Presbyterian, “Thank you for this action in Washington, DC. We are a united church – Presbyterian and UCC. We have an ecumenical prayer group in Big Rapids, MI. We have met for almost five years to pray for peace and justice every Tuesday morning at 7:00.”
Or, this:
To participants, “Thank you for witnessing in this peace-filled, nonviolent way to stop the war in Iraq. We have formed a [nondenominational] ‘peace cell’ [in International Falls, and] meet weekly, focusing our intention for peace within ourselves and spreading to family, community and the world.”
Or, this:
Hello friends, “Our church together has committed to a process of prayer, study, and action focused on Jesus’ call to love all, even our enemies, and a vision that the church could turn the world toward peace if every church lived and taught as Jesus lived and taught.”
Of course, I also received an email last week entitled simply, “God will judge you harshly.” You can’t win ‘em all.
If I have learned anything in my life in ministry it is this: when you put yourself on the line for peace and justice there will be reactions. Or, as one of my ministry mentors said to me, “if we are doing our jobs, there will be scars.”
Jesus certainly understood this reality, this risk. As the Johanine literature reminds, the world did not recognize him. As the Acts passage underscores, the world killed him.
There’s no convoluted atonement theology in Acts. No Jesus being sent to die for the sins of the world as some kind of blood sacrifice to appease an angry tribal god. No bizarre economic theory that poses Jesus as a repayment for our debts. No, for the author of the Luke/Acts literature it comes down to this simple truth: the world did not understand Jesus. The powers that be – secular, religious and political powers – were threatened by his presence. And they killed him.
I was trading e-mails with Candace Chellew-Hodge, who will be with us next weekend conducting a workshop, and she commented, “grace always causes outrage.”
“Grace always causes outrage.”
If we do not understand that it is because we have trivialized grace. We have domesticated grace to such matters as, “we were graced by good weather,” or to other events over which we have no explanation or control – accidents or disasters.
But when God’s grace erupts in the world it is not all sunshine and cherry blossoms. God’s grace upsets the order of the world.
Last weekend, when we were graced by beautiful weather, I was privileged to officiate at Heather and Lisa’s nuptials – to make them unlawfully wedded wives. You do not have to look far to find the outrage that such an event causes in the world, but it was such a grace-filled afternoon that we began to witness – even in the midst of the service and reception – the power of grace and love to change the world.
Let me say those words again: the power of grace and love to change the world.
I was speaking with someone there – a family member self-described as a conservative Baptist. He spoke of his own coming to terms and mentioned that his 10-year-old daughter had asked, on the way to the service, if we were going to be on the news.
I think I recoiled in horror at that thought, and said something to the effect of “thank heavens, no.”
And he said, “it should be on the news, because people need to see this.”
The world so desperately needs to see this, but the world remains blinded by fear to this basic truth: Grace and love have the power to change the world.
Jesus understood this, and he lived into this reality day by day.
Of course, you don’t have to look too far – not in his time nor in ours – to find those who are threatened by the prospect of change.
Remember: grace always causes outrage.
How is this so?
Consider, for example, the common argument that same-sex marriage will undermine the institution of marriage around the world. While I still do not understand why Heather and Lisa’s union should undermine my marriage to Cheryl, I do understand the logic of scarcity at work in such thinking. If a commodity – in this case, a happy marriage – is scarce then it has greater value. If everyone can have it, it becomes a commonplace. The outrage flows from fear of the perceived loss of distinctive value, status and exclusive access to certain rights and privileges.
Some version of this logic is at work every time rights are extended, every time we add another leaf to expand the circle of those included at the table of grace.
Grace causes outrage.
The same logic of fear is at work on every question of justice, and thus also on the questions of war and peace.
As Thomas Merton wrote almost 50 years ago, “At the root of all war is fear, not so much the fear men have of one another as the fear they have of everything.” To paraphrase Merton just a bit, “It is not merely that we do not trust one another: we do not even trust ourselves. If we are not sure when someone else may turn around and kill us, we are still less sure when we may turn around and kill ourselves. We cannot trust anything, because we have ceased to believe in God.”
We cannot trust anything, then, because we have ceased to believe in grace, in mercy, and in love. We have ceased to believe in the power of love and mercy to change the world. We fear the loss of scarce security, because we do not trust the only authentic source of security – the grace and mercy and love of God.
This is nothing new under the sun, although it takes it own distinctive forms with every generation.
In Jesus’ time, an empire of fear was itself fearful of every threat. That’s why the highways were lined with crosses hung with the bodies of insurgents and political enemies of the state.
In more recent times, the empire of fear that was the Jim Crow South that I was born into was itself fearful of every threat. That’s why the back country roads were lined with trees used for lynching.
In our own time … well, suffice it to say that we have lately lived under a dark cloud of fearfulness, and I do not believe it is any stretch at all to suggest that the road alongside which Matthew Shepard was hung for the crime of being gay travels directly to the door of Abu Ghraib prison where the guilty and the innocent alike hung from shackles at the hands of our national security apparatus working in our names to ensure that our lives and lifestyles are not interrupted by those whom we fear.
Into such a world as this – riven by fear of the other and the outcast – Jesus came. To such a world as this – huddled in tribes behinds walls and borders – Jesus came teaching love of neighbor and of stranger and even of those on the other sides of walls and borders. And when just such a world sent Jesus to his passion – his suffering and death on a cross – to that world God spoke an ultimate word of love that we know as resurrection.
Resurrection is God’s answer to the passion. Such wondrous love as this is God’s answer to human suffering.
In the garden, Jesus said, “put away your swords” – lay down your sword and shield and study war no more. His passion for peace led directly to his passion. He suffered and died.
And who would have blamed his followers if they had simply said, “well, that’s what happens to those who are naïve enough to believe in nonviolence, that’s what happens to those who are foolish enough to believe that justice is possible, that’s what happens to those who try to love in the face fear.”
Who would have blamed them if they had picked up swords at that point?
But while they were still huddled together in fear and trembling, before they even had a chance to reorganize with weapons, God breathed life into their midst again, and they heard Jesus, once again, say simply, “peace be with you.”
Peace be with you.
My good friend Rick Ufford-Chase says, quite simply and clearly, “War is not the answer for those who call themselves followers of Jesus.”
Put away your swords … or, as Rick’s then 10-year-old son famously put it, “beat your swords into lawnchairs.”
Put away the sword. Tear down the wall. Break down the barriers.
Whether we are talking about the rights of minorities or the violence within families or the wars of nations, the same logic of grasping fear pervades.
The question is: what can we do about it?
Writing in 1962, Thomas Merton said, “the task is to work for the total abolition of war.”
Merton was right then, and he is right now. Indeed, if anything, the task is more urgent now than it was in 1962.
Merton was not naïve. He understood that the task that he named as the abolition of war involved work on multiple levels on multiple issues starting at the level of our own hearts.
He ended his great essay on the roots of war with these words:
“It is absurd to hope for a solid peace based on fictions and illusions! So instead of loving what you think is peace, love other men [and women] and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are warmongers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.”
I have been praying for peace, marching for peace, organizing for peace, working for peace, donating for peace, witnessing for peace, singing for peace, petitioning for peace and every other act for peace I have been able to imagine since I was in high school. I have a passion for peace.
As I read Merton, I am reminded that a passion for peace, like any passion, involves suffering and death. I am further reminded that my work for peace is work for the death of injustice, tyranny and greed in my own heart.
Such heart work is done best in community. That is why I really hope that some of you can join me and hundreds of others this Wednesday evening at 7:00 at National City Christian Church as we worship and witness for peace in our own hearts and in the heart of our nation.
As Martin King said in 1967, some five years into another endless war, “Now let us begin … let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the [children] of God.”
Grace and love can change the world.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
Amen.

Resurrection Movement

Easter Sunday, 2009
Good morning. My name is David Ensign, and I’m here to recruit you!
You will have recognized, no doubt, echoes of the late Harvey Milk and his signature greeting as he invited people to join the gay liberation movement of the 1970s.
Why invoke that memory today? Easter Sunday, 2009?
What if, in our call to worship, we heard not only an invitation to join our hearts to an ancient story and to engage our spirits in live-giving ritual, but also a call to join our lives to a movement for human liberation? What if, in the invitation to bow our heads in prayer we heard not only a call to acknowledge our dependence upon God but also a call to join our lives to a movement for radical transformation?
What if, in the call to follow Jesus, we heard not merely an invitation to join a religious institution, but instead a beckoning to join a movement of resurrection?
If the church is, as the apostle Paul suggested, the body of Christ in the world, then it cannot be reduced to mere institution for it is a living body that must, most surely, move … or die.
The time has long since come for the church to move. For a church that moves nothing, that risks nothing, that transforms nothing is worth nothing.
What better season to proclaim this than Easter?
On the other hand, we could be like the first disciples as depicted in the oldest gospel, Mark. The women go to the tomb to anoint the body and find it empty. When the young man in white tells them that Jesus has been raised, they flee in amazement and terror and don’t say a word because they are afraid.
I’ve always been fond of that stark ending to Mark’s gospel, and am convinced that it was the original text onto which some later scribe attached the longer ending that leaves the disciples looking far braver and ready for the work of sharing the good news.
No, I imagine paralyzing fear was the initial reality the disciples faced. In the face of fear, nothing much ever changes.
Fear freezes us, starting with our hearts and minds.
When I try to put myself in the disciples’ shoes at that moment I imagine mostly fear and trembling. Jesus has just been crucified – the empire’s response to voices that threaten to subvert its power and domination. We could very well be next. Hiding out for a good long while seems like a perfectly sensible plan in the face of looming danger.
I wonder how many of us have entertained that thought these days. In the face of an economic crisis that looms like a threatening storm over so much these days, wouldn’t it be great simply to get away from here for a good long while? In the face of senseless yet seemingly endless war, wouldn’t it be great simply to get away from here for a good long while? In the face of hatred and bigotry aimed at those long excluded from the church on account of sexuality, wouldn’t it be great simply to get away from here for a good long while? In the face of our own personal demons, diseases and distresses, wouldn’t it be great simply to get away from here for a good long while?
Can I get an “amen” from all those who would simply like to get away for a while?
I know I would sometimes. And, indeed, there is nothing wrong with getting away for awhile from time to time. Jesus retreated to the wilderness to be alone and to the garden to pray. Getting away can restore and revive us, and that is all to the good.
But when getting away for a bit becomes escape instead of restoration then we become like Monty Python’s “brave” Sir Robin: “run away! Run away!” instead of confronting what demands confrontation.
What is it that demands confrontation?
The Apostle Paul understood perfectly well, and even made a list: hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, the sword, death, rulers, things present, things to come, powers, height and depth, among others. We can translate those first-century threats to our own time quite easily and accurately.
Hardship? Surely we understand that, especially in the current economic crisis, as jobs disappear right along with life savings.
Distress? We feel that in relation to the tenor of our times, and we also feel it in our personal lives as we struggle with grief and loss, with sickness and separation.
Persecution? As a straight, white, Protestant man I don’t experience a lot of that in my own life, but I certainly understand the need to live in solidarity with those in my midst who do – my GLBT friends, the migrant laborers who gather down the hill from our house looking for work, women in church and society still after all these years, my Muslim friends to name but a few.
The sword? I am grateful to live mostly unthreatened by violence, but I know that is part of my own privilege not shared by hundreds of millions of sisters and brothers around the world.
We can all too easily do the work of translating Paul’s list.
These things demand confrontation because they threaten to separate us from God.
They give voice to a loud, clanging and persistent “No” as they announce the via negativa – the way of death and destruction, of heartache and despair, of bitterness and cynicism.
Good Friday witnesses to the power of this way in the world.
Easter witnesses to the power of God’s mighty “Yes” in response.
That list of Paul’s? It comes in the context of his own asking what can separate us from God? He wrote to the small group of Christians in Rome – the heart of the empire – and asked, “Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword separate us from God?… No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Resurrection is God’s resounding “yes” in the face of all of that. It is God’s unfailing promise that none of that will ultimately separate us from God’s creative, boundless love.
Resurrection is not one small breath of life into a dead corpse of one human being, Jesus of Nazareth.
Resurrection is a powerful wind – the breath of life for every human being.
Resurrection is not the over-and-done-with rising up of one man.
Resurrection is the continual rising up of every man and woman who stumbles and falls along the way.
Resurrection is not a one-time event that happened on a lonely hillside in first-century Palestine. Resurrection is a movement that sweeps through people in all times and all places, and is still sweep through us – here and now – lifting us and calling us forward into new life, into new hope, into a future otherwise of God’s imagining.
It’s no wonder the first disciples were afraid, and it’s no wonder that we still feel that same fear.
But perfect love casts out all fear, and resurrection is perfect love in action.
Mary came to the tomb on the first resurrection dawn, and she wept – tears of sorrow, of loss, of fear.
But the voice of God said, “oh, Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.”
“For you see, you are witness to the movement of resurrection, to the rising up of the spirit of God to set things right.”
“Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.”
“For you see, you are invited now to join your soul to that same movement, and be part of the rising up yourself.”
“Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.”
“For this is for all people, who are invited to join together in that resurrection movement, and be part of that rising up to set things right.”
“Oh Mary, don’t you weep.”
“Oh Mary, don’t you weep don’t you mourn.
Oh Mary, don’t you weep don’t you mourn.
Caesar’s guards been swept away.
Oh Mary, don’t you weep.
One these days in the middle of the night, people gonna rise up and set things right
Caesar’s guard been swept away.
Oh Mary, don’t you weep.”
Listen! Do you hear this invitation to join your hearts to an ancient story and to engage your spirits in live-giving ritual, and also this call to join your lives to a movement for human liberation? We bow our heads in prayer to acknowledge our dependence upon God and also to join our lives to a movement for radical transformation? We follow Jesus as the church, and also as a movement of resurrection.
Sisters and brothers, there’s a resurrection wind blowing through this place. Open your spirits and be filled with its freshness. Open your hearts and be filled with its love. Open your lives and be moved by its power. Amen.