A Community of Trust

April 29, 2007
The texts this week are full of sheep; you certainly want to enunciate that clearly! From lying beside still waters in Psalm 23 to hearing the shepherd’s voice and following him in John, the people of God are sheep this week. And the flocks would be even thicker if we’d picked up the final reading for the morning, from Revelation, where we hear this strange message:
For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
I’ve got to admit that the sheep images in scripture never really speak to me. I’m a city boy, after all, and all I know about sheep is that they’re pretty stupid and easy to lead astray. Thus I always approach these “sheep” passages with a good deal of suspicion. After all, who among us wants to be compared to something stupid and easily led astray? Worse yet, who among us wants to be compared to dinner?
Sure, we can profit some from these readings by focusing on what they tell us about God. The good shepherd tends the flock with love and concern, spreading a feast for the flock even amidst the wolves, walking alongside the sheep even through the darkest and most dangerous valley. It is, of course, always good to be reminded of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness to creation, and it is equally good to give thanks for that.
But I somehow doubt that most sheep have the capacity for gratitude. The farmer comes, the farmer goes. Food shows up. Life is what it is, and then you die. I don’t know about the interior life of sheep and I’m certainly guilty of anthropocentrism here, but it’s a bit difficult for me to imagine much in the way of awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation, much of transcendence, much of hope, much of agape.
It is precisely our capacity for those experiences that makes us human.
If you accept that line of reasoning – and reason itself is another distinctively human capacity – then perhaps the sheep metaphors serve to remind us about another human characteristic that we 21st-century North Americans deny at every turn: our radical dependence.
That essential characteristic, the fundamental part of begin human, runs absolutely counter to the way the culture wants us to think of ourselves. The ruggedly independent, self-reliant individual is the stock figure in the stories we Americans tell about ourselves whether it’s Han Solo from Star Wars, the Marlboro Man from commercial fame, or the Horatio Alger self-made man. These are the stories that we tell ourselves, and they shape the way we think of ourselves and our world.
The sheep stories from scripture tell another story: a story of dependence and interdependence. These stories remind us that we depend upon each other and that we depend upon God. Moreover, they remind us that, utterly contrary to the myths of the culture, we are at our very best when we live in mutual dependence, when we create and live in communities of trust.
The church can only be what it is called to be when it lives as such a community. We, at Clarendon Presbyterian, can only be the progressive, inclusive, diverse expression of Christian life and faith that we have been called to be if we live as such a community of trust.
Such trust does not come naturally to most of us. We are taught, in this society, to separate ourselves from one another in so many ways, and while some of that process is good and right and necessary for healthy human development, we tend to take the necessary developmental process of individuation and turn it into the ultimate goal of human life.
We learn to distinguish ourselves in competition as children on playgrounds and in classrooms and we keep right on aiming to be number one. It’s the “Ricky Bobby” philosophy of life: “if you ain’t first, you’re last.”
Of course, that makes losers out of all of us because not one of us finishes first every time.
The other day I was talking with a friend about 12-step programs. Every congregation I’ve ever been part of has members who are in such programs, and they often find themselves there for the first time when they feel most lost and most like losers. My friend said the great thing about 12-step programs is the complete acceptance of people right where they are. There’s no separating out by rank and station, winners and losers, because within the circle of the group everyone shares a common brokenness whether it’s drugs or alcohol or food or sex or any of the myriad other addictive behaviors.
There is a deep trust within the circle that begins with the simple sharing, “hi, I’m David, and I’m … whatever it is.”
Sometimes I think that’s the way we should begin worship; and, to an extent, we do because we begin worship with confession. It’s as if, in the prayer of confession, we all say, “hi, I’m me, and I’m, well, human.”
For each and every one of us shares in the brokenness of humanity, each in our own particular way, but broken and longing to find the wholeness of the circle in which we are welcome in spite of the broken places.
Still, despite the fact that we begin worship with confession, I often feel as if we move past that moment as quickly as possible, perhaps like whistling past the graveyard. I know the high school kids at our church in Cleveland Heights always referred to the prayer of confession as the “we suck” prayer because of its focus on our many and manifold sins.
If that’s all we make of confession, then it’s no wonder we want to move right through it and never linger too long. If all we make of it is mechanical routine, a gesture that we repeat because we’ve inherited it, then it means little and transforms less.
But, if we make of this moment, however brief and simple, something akin to the opening of a 12-step meeting – also brief and simple – then something powerful and transformative can be born in our midst.
It makes of confession that moment of our gathering when we say, in effect, “hello, my name is … David … and I am a human being, broken and wounded, in ways that are all too typical and in ways that are uniquely my own, but gathered here in this circle of concern, this community of trust, where I can be utterly honest with myself, with the gathered community, and with God.”
If we are, as Jesus taught, strongest in our weakness, most powerful from our places of brokenness, most compassionate when we recognize our own suffering in the suffering of others, and most free when we recognize our interdependence, then the moment of confession is, in fact, the exact opposite of “we suck.” It is, in fact, that moment when we lay claim to our common humanity and the enormous power and possibility at the heart of that humanity.
But in order to lay claim to that power and live out of it at the center of our lives we must be part of a community of trust, for Christian spirituality – and confession is the heart of such spirituality – is inherently communal; personal, yes, but never private. To build that community requires building relationships.
Therefore, our challenge, in this place, is to construct a web of mutuality that connects us each to one another. The good news is the web is already under construction and is strong in many places, but in order to extend and strengthen its strands we must accept and take up the challenge of building new relationships. Thus, the charge for this day is both incredible simple, but also deeply serious – indeed, the future of this congregation depends upon it.
This day, this morning, before you leave this building, find someone here whom you do not know well and set a time to get together over coffee or a meal or whatever. Have good conversation; share some of your own story with one another; find out what draws you to this place, what gives you joy, what ticks you off in the world. Build relationship, build trust, forge stronger bonds upon which genuine community can be built.
For out of such comes the kind of community of trust that characterized the church described in Acts, and this community is the container of the hope articulated in Revelation: They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
These words describe the beloved community, and remember, at the head of this community stands a shepherd who does not abandon us just because we share the common brokenness of human being. Indeed, there stands one who loves us because we share that common humanity and because we share also a common source and identity: we are the beloved – let us build the commonwealth of the beloved in this place, in our time. Amen.

To Be ... Or Not

April 22, 2007

Texts: Acts 9:1-6; John 21:1-19

The question is not simply, as Hamlet would have us believe, to be or not to be, whether tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune … and so on, but rather this: are we to be who we are called to be or are we content merely to be according to the dictates of culture, fashion and situation?

As I mentioned last Sunday, we are going to spend the next several weeks circling around that question together. Of course, when I introduced this theme a week ago, none of us knew that the intervening days would be marked with violence striking close to home.

I don’t want to bring together this morning things that ought not be brought together, and if I wind up there, please forgive me, but I feel it only decent and respectful to acknowledge the awful tragedy in our state this past week. I have no answers or particular insights, but was mindful this week that six years ago this month I preached a sermon two days after a member of the congregation I was serving committed a rampage murder that claimed the lives of five people in the Pittsburgh area.

That April Sunday, one week after Easter in 2000, to the gathered community and members of the press who came to hear what the church would say after one of its members had killed five people, I said, “God is not the author of our pain.” I believed that then, and I believe it now. That morning I said, “there is a balm in Gilead.” I believed that then, and I believe it now. That morning I said, “God is at work in the world redeeming history.” I believed that then, and I believe it now.

That morning and again today I affirm this core belief: We believe in the God who created us, sustains us, and redeems us.

Such a God is not the author of our pain. God did not will these shootings at Virginia Tech any more than God wills the ongoing daily violence in Baghdad, where 157 people where killed on the same day that the Post profiled the 32 people who died in Blacksburg. Indeed, the first heart broken last week in Blacksburg and in Baghdad was the oft-broken heart of God.

Such heart-breaking events, whether on a quiet college campus or in the streets of a war-torn city, defy easy understanding. As Nikki Giovanni said at the memorial convocation last week in Blacksburg, “We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.”

God weeps at human tragedy. Scripture tells us that Jesus wept at the death of a friend. Jesus wept again last week as the children of God killed and died, just as Jesus weeps whenever and wherever the image of God is violated in us and through us by the violence that erupts when human brokenness and suffering lead to rage.

Of course, while this unfathomable tragedy at Virginia Tech is deeply troubling, it does not strike quite so close to home – for me – as did the one in Pittsburgh. Perhaps because of that distance, perhaps because I am somewhat familiar with the terrain, I am willing to consider, perhaps too quickly, what this event, and others like it, have to do with who God is, who we are and with how we are to be who we have been called to be.

While I tend to be somewhat of a “process theologian” and understand God dynamically and relationally, there are aspects of God that remain constant. What I said a half dozen years ago, in similar circumstances, remains true today. “God reigns over all of history. God is working still in the world to redeem history. We trust that even in the midst of our worst brokenness, God can work again to redeem us and to make us whole.”

Yes! To all of that, yesterday, today and tomorrow.

“God created the world and called it ‘good.’ God created human beings and called us ‘good’ as well. And so you and I, we bear within us the image of God.” We are, just like the innocents gunned down in the halls of academia and the streets of Baghdad, children of a loving God. Yes to that, of course. But also to this: the suicide bombers in Baghdad are children of God; Seung Hui Cho is a child of God – scarred and broken and lying dead in an academic building after killing so many other children of God, but still a child of God.

God is the one who is merciful and loving when human beings are not. God is the one who desires reconciliation while we scream for revenge. God is the one who loves when all the world cries out with hatred. God weeps tears of sorrow when we cry tears of rage.

For God knows that each of us is scarred and broken; the Good Friday story tells us that God has borne those scars and that brokenness. The Good Friday story tells us that, in our brokenness, we human beings are capable of horrific acts of terror and evil. The Good Friday story tells us that God is in the midst of suffering.

Where was God last week as tragic events unfolded down in Blacksburg and over in Baghdad? In the short story Night, Elie Wiesel’s holocaust memoir, he recounts the hanging of a small child at Auschwitz. The Nazi guards forced the prisoners to line up and watch the execution, and as the child was hanged, one of the prisoners asked, “where is God? Where is God, now?” Wiesel writes, “And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows. …”

God with us. Emmanuel. That is the name we call the God we worship. Even in the midst of our worst suffering, in the midst of our greatest fear, God is with us. There is a balm in Gilead. God is there, hanging on the gallows.

But the story does not end there.

We know that God has created us. We know that God is with us. The prophet Isaiah puts it this way: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.” We know that God sustains us even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

But the story does not end in the shadows. The Easter story tells us that terror and evil, that hatred and violence, that death itself does not have the last word. God redeems us. The stone is rolled away; the tomb is bare and the cross stands empty to the sky.

And that brings us to us – it brings us face to face with ourselves, because we are called to be an Easter people in a Good Friday world.
We are called to live resurrected lives in a world still entombed by fear and hatred and violence.

We are called to be a community of Godly worship in a world that worships power, money and success.

We are called to be a community of compassion and forgiveness in a culture of malice and punishment.

We are called to be a community of reconciliation in a world that cries out for revenge.

We are called to be a community of peacemakers in a culture of violence.
We are called to be a community of hope in a world marked by deep cynicism.

We are called to be a community of faith in a culture of disbelief.

We are called to be a community of love in a world torn by ancient hatred and tribal division.
This common calling means nothing, amounts to nothing, transforms nothing if it does not lead to concrete actions by real people in the world. In other words, you and me, called to be this community, marked and shaped by these values, acting out of them day by day for the healing of the world.

Are we to be, or not to be, this community?

In the face of each instance of brokenness, are we to be a community of restoration?

Last week I heard someone suggest that schools would be safer if all of the faculty were armed and trained. My initial response was to think back on my junior high band leader, Mr. Francis, who was known to throw his baton straight through the sheet music of offending young musicians. Any weapon more deadly than that … well.

But my more reasoned response is this: we are called as a community to witness to and practice more faithful strategies of security based upon our deepest values of compassion, generosity and love, rather than out of fear. We are called to be a community that trusts in the one who said, “love your enemies;” not folks who place their trust in weapons and guns.

As the Confession of ’67 urged, we must commend the pursuit of peace to the nations even at the risk of national security; likewise, we must commend and practice the pursuit of peace in our personal lives even at the risk of our own security.

That means speaking out for forgiveness and reconciliation even when all around you cry for blood. That means seeking restoration as well as restitution. That means trusting that, just as God turned Paul around on the road to Damascus, broken human beings in our time can be healed and restored. This means living as if we believe that even the one who denied Jesus three times can be called to tend Jesus’ flock. That means that justice and love walk arm in arm, and neither advances a single step without the other.

The miracle in Acts is not that Paul saw the light, but rather that God chose Paul. The miracle at the end of John’s gospel comes when Jesus seeks Peter’s love three times after Peter had said, three times, “I don’t know him.”

Through these miracles, God is calling us; Jesus is teaching us. If we would but listen, perhaps we would learn that we cannot arm ourselves with violent weapons to overcome a culture of violence; for in both word and dead only peace can overcome violence. We cannot blanket fear with fear and expect anything but fear, for only love casts out fear. We cannot speak words of hate in the face of hate, for in word and deed only love can overcome hate.

The question before us today is simply this: shall we be the community of generosity, compassion, faith, hope and love that we are called by God to be, or shall we huddle alone in our fear trusting whatever security apparatus we can construct instead of trusting in the God of resurrection?

God places before us, in moments such as this, the choice between death-dealing cynicism or life-giving hope. To be or not to be the community of compassion, the commonwealth of the beloved. Choose this day whom you shall serve; whom you shall trust.

As for me and my household, we shall trust the God of resurrection hope and receive each day as a gift filled with the promise of new and abundant life. And we shall serve that God with faith, hope and love every step of the journey. Amen.

On God’s Holy Mountain

Easter Sunday

Isaiah 65:17-25

Christ is risen!

There’s earthshaking, rock rolling good news to celebrate on Easter Sunday: he is risen! Risen indeed.

Earthshaking, rock-rolling good news, indeed.

God is about to create new heavens and a new earth! Earthshaking good news – especially when you consider the shape of the present earth: riven by racism; harrowed by homophobia; diminished by malice; rent asunder by warfare.

It seems all but impossible to see that new earth from where we stand – even on Easter Sunday. “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together” – I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be the wolf at that dinner party.

But there’s this promise: “they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.”

So, on Easter Sunday morning, I must ask: where is this holy mountain?

Isaiah’s vision of a new Jerusalem is so evocative: “no more shall there be an infant that lives but a few days … one who dies at a hundred will be considered a youth … they shall not plant and another eat … they shall not labor in vain … they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.”

Reading the news, I’ve been wondering of late: where is this holy mountain? One in four children in the richest country on earth living in poverty? More than 40 million of our citizens without health care insurance? The inconvenient truth of climate change? Iraq? Terror? Where is this holy mountain?

Looking out the windows of my study, I can see no mountains at all – holy or otherwise. Just the neighbor’s house across the street. Where is this holy mountain? On the drive home down in south Arlington, I can see no mountains. Just more houses full of families struggling to make ends meet, to raise children, to make it through another day. Where is this holy mountain? If I go into the District, I see no mountains. Just houses full of more families with similar struggles, and buildings full of more workers trying to make it through more weeks, and monuments to wars and warriors staring out across a nation that still believes in the myth of redemptive violence. Where is this holy mountain?

Sure, I grew up in East Tennessee, in the foothills of the Smokey’s, and I could look out our dining room window and see mountains. But I don’t recall seeing mountains that struck me as particularly holy as a child. Perhaps, in my youth, I was not attuned to holiness. Still, years later, at a stage of more intentional attention to the holy, I did a lot of ministry in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, but the mountains there were more full of holes left behind by coal mining operations than they were full of any particular holiness.

Where is this holy mountain?

Perhaps it’s not in any particular place, but rather in human relationships. But when I look there, I feel no closer. I think of friends whose relationships are broken by mistrust or trust abused and I wonder, where is this holy mountain? I think of families devastated by losses and paralyzed by their grief and wonder, where is this holy mountain? I consider those lives I know that are broken by addictions, and I wonder, where is this holy mountain? Or the friends whose work is so stressful and so unrewarding; the young people struggling to find their way in a world that seems so unwelcoming; the sexual brokenness that is a particular mark of our times – and I wonder: where is this holy mountain?

Can we see if from here?

Well, therein lies another problem. What can we see from here, from the quiet confines of this sanctuary where we gather from time to time when if feels like we need to or ought to? Once a week at best; a couple of times a year for many.

Sure, this is a beautiful space, but what has it to do with all of the brokenness of the world? And, of course, the peacefulness within this space is pleasant, but what does it amount to measured against the violence out there? Yes, the windows are particularly beautiful, but you can’t see through them. They are somewhat like the Easter story itself: remarkable, but rather opaque.

What can we see, from here?

Consider the Easter story itself: what do Mary of Magdala, Joanna and Mary the mother of Jesus see?

Well, nothing, really. Empty space. The presence of an overwhelming absence. The absolute heart of the Easter story is this utter emptiness.

There, where we would expect, perhaps, everything, we find nothing. No thing at all.

Paul understood this well, and captures the essence of this emptiness in his letter to the Philippians, to whom he wrote:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being born in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”

The mind of Christ then: humility, obedience and self-emptying. To look at one’s self in the mirror and see nothing of self but see, at the same time, in the same reflection, the glory of God, the spark of divinity.

For what brought death on the cross of Good Friday? The obedience of Jesus, to be sure. But also, just as clearly, the utter pridefulness and self-centeredness of humanity; our desire for certainty and the security we believe we will find in such certainty built from the work of our own hands out of solid building materials that we can see, and we can mold, and we can shape, and we can control. Not nothing but something. Not the risk of no thingness, but the security of solidity. Not self-emptying but self-absorption. Not a spark of divinity, but a heart of darkness.

So who cares what we can see from here looking through these windows or looking through the opacity of the Easter story? Who needs that anyway?

Let’s just get out of here and on to Sunday brunch and then back to work tomorrow in the real world. Who needs this mysterious resurrection myth anyway?

Let’s just get out of here and live with the concreteness of life that can be measured out in terms that we understand: accounting for what we have in the way of successes, no tears – or just a few – over failures; measuring out our days by what we have gained and lost and stored away in square feet and hard currency, in rank and station, bought and sold, lost and won and tallied up for all to see – but most especially for ourselves that we might measure whether or not we’ve made the grade.

But when we get “out of here” and back to the real world, the world we return to is precisely that place of utter brokenness that we cannot fix on our own. We cannot see God’s holy mountain out there. We cannot even imagine it.

And what can we see from here?

No thing at all. No thing.

And yet … for some reason I am drawn back to the slim view out the window of my study. It’s not much – just the neighbor’s house. Just a small garden with some potted herbs; a picket fence lined with some daffodils, and purple hyacinth; a flowering tree that I cannot identify but which blossoms all pink and white and welcoming. Really, nothing at all that one can account for or portion out.

And right here, in front of us this morning: a fern. Nothing much to look at, really. Not even an Easter lily, just an ordinary, somewhat scruffy houseplant.

You might think, following this brief discursis through the garden that I might be a green thumb. You would be wrong. You won’t find a living plant in my study, and the only live plants in this building survive through the care of others.

It took a while for folks here to realize that plant care was not part of my “terms of call,” nor in my understanding of the pastor’s job description. This fern was a victim of that misunderstanding, and anyone who pays attention to such things knows that not too very long ago there was nary a green shoot coming forth from that pot. Broken nubs sticking out of hard, dry dirt. Ready for the compost heap. Dead as could be.

But here it stands, full of life – refusing to take my “no” for an answer but instead responding to the care and compassion of a higher “yes” – in this case, embodied in the attention of Evelyn Woodson.

“But that’s no big deal,” you say. “It’s just an ordinary house plant, not an empty tomb.”

And you’d be right to say that. It is ordinary; it is, in fact, an ordinary resurrection.

That’s why I brought it in here this morning: precisely because it is so ordinary.

You see, resurrection is not the exception to the way of creation – it is, indeed, the Creator’s intention for creation.

People ask me sometimes around this time of year if I believe in the resurrection. I say, “how can I not believe, when I have seen it myself so many times.”

In my own family, I saw my father’s dreams die when he was struck by serious mental illness when I was just 10 years old. And I’ve seen him rise up over the course of some 35 years to continue being a community leader, a loving father and husband, and now grandfather. How can I not believe in resurrection?

In my work life, I saw a close friend a colleague struck by breast cancer. She was the youngest breast cancer patient in Chicago when she had a radical mastectomy in her early 30s. Last year she celebrate 10 years cancer free by running a marathon. How can I not believe in resurrection?

I know a man who came close to suicide as his work and family life fell apart when he came out of the closet. The future seemed dead to him, but now he is a leader in his field and beloved member of his community and his church and his family. How can I not believe in resurrection?

We are intended to rise up! After all, that’s the simple meaning of the Greek word translated as “resurrection.” It just means to rise up; we do it every day of our lives.

But these days we are so surrounded by fearfulness – we live in a culture of fear, produced by and reproducing a politics of fear and religions based on fear – so surrounded are we by our own fearfulness that we cannot see and do not perceive the simple foundations of creation built on God’s designs for life. For life!

If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything is a nail. If all you have is fear, then you are entombed by death, and from the darkness of the tomb it is impossible to see God’s holy mountain where even the darkness shines like the new day sun.

In the past few months I have walked a few steps with several people through the valley of the shadow of death – friends here and family members elsewhere facing either the end of life or the end of life as they have known it.

Each time I have accompanied them I have entered the journey expecting a morose march to the tomb; and, to my amazement, each time I have found, instead, life and hope and faith and love beating back the darkness. Facing death – whether actual physical death or the death of relationships or dreams – in such light is not a naïve denial of death; rather beating the darkness till it bleeds daylight[1] means living each day according to the rhythms of resurrection. Rather than a long, slow, sad journey to the tomb, walking to that beat takes us closer to God’s holy mountain.

We may not have a crystal clear vision of the mountain within this space, but we do have something that you cannot find in the so-called real world: we harbor a vision, a prophetic imagination of a future otherwise – of a community of belovedness in which fear is not the air we breath, but rather we are surrounded by love and suffused in love’s light. It is no thing, for sure, but it is not nothing. For, as Jesus understood, perfect love casts out all fear. That is what the women at the tomb encountered that first Easter morning.

It’s what people the world over have encountered throughout history when they walk to graveyards and expect to find hope entombed but find, instead, new life springing up.

So this morning, here in the quiet of this sanctuary, lay down the burden of your fear. Be emptied of self and filled with love. Turn from the demands of a culture of selfishness and enter obedience to Christ’s command that we love one another as he loved. Step out from the darkness of fear and step into the bright light of God’s love and grace and mercy. The tomb of Good Friday is certainly real – as is all the brokenness I’ve named this morning. But it is not the full story and it is not the end of the story; it is not God’s intention for creation. Never forget that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And all that keeps us wrapped up in the darkness of the tombs of injustice are the bonds of our own fear.

Lay them down, and you can see the mountain from here.

And from the mountaintop, you can look over and see the other side: the promised land flowing with milk and honey and with the waters of justice and righteousness; a commonwealth of love and justice; the beloved community where they shall not hurt or destroy.

For this, Christ died; for this Christ is risen; for this we are his disciples.

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen!

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[1] “Beating the darkness till it bleeds daylight,” is a phrase from Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.”

Pressing on to a New Thing

March 25, 2007
Isaiah 43:16-21; Philippians 3:4b-14
With the weather turning spring like these past few days, it’s somewhat hard for me to believe that just 10 short days ago Bud and I walked three miles in driving snow with 3,500 of our closest friends in the Christian peace witness procession from the National Cathedral to the White House.
I’ve been thinking about that experience a bit over the past week, and especially so as I reflected on Paul’s letter to the Philippians and Isaiah’s words to the exile community of Israel.
“Press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus,” Paul says.
And Isaiah’s words: “Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, … Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
A way in the sea … rivers in the desert … the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus … a new thing.
What is this new thing? What is this calling? Where does this water flow? Where is this way?
From the barren desert of Washington, is it still possible to see such rivers flowing?
Amidst the cacophony of post-modern culture, is it still possible to hear such a heavenly call?
From the cynical heart of this new century, is it still possible to imagine a new thing?
We live in a culture that seems incapable of imagining a future otherwise. Do you remember back when the Who sang, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”?
It’s a memorable lyric because it rings true. I can recall my father coming home from work saying, in response to my mother’s inquiries about his day, “same old, same old;” and cautioning us to remember always that “the boss is the boss is the boss.”
How about Bill Murray, in Groundhog Day, asking, “what would you do if every day was the same as the one before, and nothing you did made any difference?”
Somehow, in the midst of all this, it has become the role of the church to bless the status quo. People come to church looking for nothing more than a fill up, a recharge to make it through another week, some help to keep putting one foot in front of the other until we shuffle off this mortal coil and pass over into what’s next.
The church, for its part, has embraced this chaplaincy and seems all too content to live under the soft tyranny of such low expectations. Look around at the “successful” ministries – the mega-churches promise “your best life right now,” in perfect echo of a culture of instant gratification that, even now, wages a war while pretending that such an effort is possible without sacrifice and where the inevitable sacrifices, borne overwhelmingly by the young and dispossessed, are turned into political symbols for use by the powerful.
And still, people come to church looking for nothing more than a little help to make it through – Marx’s “opiate of the masses.” The church, too timid and tepid to trouble the waters, sinks deeper and deeper into the depths of irrelevancy.
What of the “new thing” and, more to the point, what of the God who both promises newness and calls forth repentance, turning, transformation, metanoia?
God will not be mocked.
If we are not about the business of transformation – of our personal lives and of the life of the world – we are not about God’s business. If we are not about journeying deep into the heart of God and then taking the love found there deep into the heart of the world, then we are journeying down the road to nowhere. If we are not pressing forward on the way of Christ’s love and justice, then we are heading the wrong way.
We are called to a love that is both deeply personal yet also essentially public. We are to be a community of profound comfort to those who are wounded and suffering, but we are not a community of complacency for the comfortable looking to have the status quo blessed.
For the status quo of today doesn’t look that much different from what Isaiah saw: a people lost in an alien culture that violated the deepest values of the prophet’s faith. It’s not that much different from what Paul saw: a community of peace and compassion trying to make its way in the midst of a rapacious empire.
If the season of Lent is about anything beyond a quaint memory, anything beyond a relic from an imagined past, then it is about this: pressing on.
Now this pressing on could be mistaken for merely making it through another day. It could be misunderstood, and the church mistaken for the filling station on the way to nothing new.
But that is not what Paul was about, and it will not be what we are about either.
Paul urged the young church at Philippi to press on toward the call of Christ, and we are here to be about the same thing.
As you will hear in a few minutes in the congregational meeting, we are blessed with so many more resources than were the Philippians. We have been given so much more than the exiles to whom Isaiah preached.
Surely there have been and will be bumps in the road. That is inevitable. I know that I have created more than my share of those bumps along the way in sins of omission or commission. But let us collectively be better than any of us can be alone, and let God’s vision and God’s calling to us to be a progressive voice of Christian faith be more compelling than what we – with our limited sight and our propensity to fearfulness – ever dare to dream on our own.
So we are called forth here, to be a place of radical welcome to those marginalized by the larger church and culture – the GLBT community. So we are called forth here, to be a community of peacemakers especially in a time of unjust war. So we are called forth here, to speak truth to power in an era where truth is mocked in the public square.
We are called to compassion in a cruel age; to faith in a culture of disbelief; to love in a time of overwhelming fear.
We are called to these several callings in our personal lives, in our schools, in our workplaces. And we are called to witness in the halls of power and sometimes in the city’s streets.
Because God calls us forth, we shall be the church of Jesus Christ: pressing on in the midst of often desperate and difficult times toward a new thing – toward a future otherwise. Pressing on in the midst of a culture of death toward new life. Pressing on in a culture of consumption toward a community of compassion. Pressing on in a Good Friday world toward the resurrected Christ.
Walk together children. Don’t you get weary. There’s a new day coming. Don’t you see!