Signposts or Endorsements

September 25, 2008
Psalm 146;
I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but there’s a group of conservative evangelicals who have declared today “pulpit freedom Sunday,” and they are making explicit endorsements of political candidates, including for president of the United States, from their pulpits during worship this morning.
I suppose it’s not too surprising that a faith movement that has almost completely aligned itself with a political movement would do this; indeed, the only surprising thing would be if any of these pastors stand up this morning and say, “God is not a Republican … or a Democrat.” The only thing more surprising than that would be if one of them should say, “you should vote for Barack Obama for president.” Now that would be a surprise.
When I read about this, I visited the web sites of the various sponsoring organizations. I was thinking about the various issues and concerns facing the nation and those who would lead it: financial crisis, 50 million uninsured, two wars. I wondered, will I find anything about peace and about serving the least of these the victims of financial and health insurance systems that have failed them. To my sadness if not my surprise, I found nothing about any of those issues, but a whole lot about personal sexual morality of a certain conservative bent that is far more Victorian than Biblical.
As I took all of this in – political endorsements from pulpits, the issue foci of the organizations – I pondered again the wisdom of the Psalmist: do not put your faith in leaders whose plans come and go like the wind. Moreover, I pondered, again, the central question of who we are called to be as a people whose faith is supposed to be in something larger and deeper than the particular issues and candidates for office who are before us at any given moment – even one as critical as the present moment.
In particular, what does it mean to be the church progressive, inclusive and diverse in such a moment, if first and foremost it means that our faith is in some larger and deeper and less transient than issues and candidates?
Last spring the session of this congregation embarked on a broad effort to lead the church in refocusing its mission. We want you to be part of this process and the various survey instruments we’ve asked you to fill out are the first step in the journey.
For the remains of the liturgical year – right up to the beginning of Advent this December – we’re going to take steps together during worship that, I hope and trust, will lead us into a common language about our common faith and how we ought best express it as Clarendon Presbyterian Church in this first decade of the 21st century.
What has this to do with political endorsements? Well, nothing … and everything.
Nothing, because we’re really not going to touch too much on the narrow political issues of the day -- even as we acknowledge how important some of them are right now.
And everything, because this common language of faith, the deeply held practices of Christian life, shape and inform the way we look at the world. They shape and inform the way we make judgments about the world and the ways in which we express those judgments. In other words, these deeply held practices of Christian life shape our deepest values, and those deepest values shape – our, at least, ought to shape – the way we think about the shaping of the broader community and society. In other words, our faith ought to inform our politics – not in any narrow and partisan way, but in an insistence that the things Jesus cared about – or, more accurately – the people Jesus cared about be at the forefront of our politics.
Nothing, then, and everything to do with endorsements.
So let me offer up my endorsement this morning ….
And you thought I was reaching for a yard sign or a button!
No, I’m endorsing a book this morning, and, moreover, I’m endorsing the practices of Christian faith that its author endorses.
For the past six months or so, various small groups here have read this book, Christianity for the Rest of Us. The book group read it, the Lenten CALL group read it, and session has been reading it.
It comes out of the growing renewal movement within mainline Protestant churches in North America – in other words, out of the experience of hundreds of congregations with whom we share a deep-rooted heritage from the best of liberal theology of the 20th century and the emerging prophetic voice resounding from just such churches, including this one, in our new century.
My endorsement of Diana Butler Bass’s book comes with a proposal and promise and a challenge.
The proposal is that we follow the lead of this work during our season of mission refocusing. In other words, as we look at what we do well and what we could do better, let’s us the ten practices of faith, or ten characteristics shared by vital progressive congregations that Bass identifies and explores in this book.
The promise is that I will focus my preaching and our Sunday-morning worship on these practices or characteristics from now till Advent.
The challenge is that you engage this material as well. Pick up a copy of the book – it’s widely available, including in our new church library. Consider the faith practices presented here, and explore them through other sources of information and reflections on them. Consider how we, as a congregation, might more fully articulate our faith through these practices.
It should come as no great surprise that we are already doing many of the things named here – some of them quite well, others just barely. The surveys we have been doing will help us bring to greater light what it is we do well and what we need to work on.
One of the things we do a lot of here happens to be the first characteristic Bass names: hospitality.
This is nothing new under the sun. On more than one occasion, I have heard Peg True tell the story of being a young girl here and coming to church one snowy Sunday morning, only to encounter a large drift blocking her way. One of the men of the church, without a word, scooped her up and lifted her over the snow. A simple gesture of welcome.
I know that I come here on Sunday mornings looking forward to greeting Woody at the door and being greeted by him – another simple gesture of welcome.
I look forward to seeing each of you every week and to enjoy the warmth of this fellowship marked by so many simple gestures of welcome.
As I look around the place – and I mean the physical space now – I am simply amazed at how remarkably it has been transformed by your hard work and generosity over the past five years. I remember walking through this building in January of 2003 – so much of it was dark and dreary. Now it is filled with light and life, and we are experiencing a bit of what I’ll call “Field of Dreams” theology: if you build it – or, at least repaint it, they will come. In other words, create a space that is welcoming and inviting and people will want to spend time in it.
All of that is good and right and as it should be, but it falls short of authentic Christian hospitality. For thus far we have managed to transform the space, but we have not ourselves been transformed.
As Diana Butler Bass puts it in Christianity for the Rest of Us, “hospitality changes both the guest and the host.”
Hospitality is transformative not because of the welcoming space that a host creates – although that is not unimportant. Hospitality is important because of where it focuses our deepest attentions. This is the lesson of the quirky little tale of Mary and Martha. Martha is busily transforming the space, and contrary to some readings of the story, she is not condemned for the choice. Nevertheless, Jesus makes it clear that Mary’s focus is more important: she is focused on welcoming the guest, welcoming Jesus, into not merely her physical space, but into her heart.
As Joan Chittister puts it, “hospitality means we take people into the space that is our lives and our minds and our hearts and our work and our efforts. Hospitality is the way we come out of ourselves.”
We’ve been together now for more than five years in this shared ministry, so we can be completely honest with each other. We say, every single week, week after week after week, that all are welcome in this place. The mission statement that appears each and every week on our bulletin is a statement of hospitality. When we respond, in the liturgy that we’ve been using for a while now, to the assurance of pardon, we speak of God’s wildly inclusive love. That is a statement of God’s hospitality. We believe that God is radically welcoming and that we should be, too.
But too often we do not want to come out of ourselves and risk being, ourselves, transformed in the practice of hospitality.
There are lots of reasons for this, but in the end, it usually comes down to one simple thing: fear.
Acts of hospitality involve risks in the face of strangers. Our egos can feel at stake: maybe she won’t like me. Our positions can feel at stake: may he’ll question my authority. Our relationships can feel at stake: maybe she’ll like her better than she likes me. Our safety can feel at stake: maybe they will hurt me.
The truth is, all of these risks may be genuine sometimes.
But the deeper truth is this: the opposite of faith is not wrong belief; the opposite of faith is fear.
This is where hospitality becomes a question of Christian practice. We are called to faith, to trust. We are called to be open to the presence of Christ in the face of the stranger. We are called, in the way of the Quakers, to seek that which is of God in everyone we meet. We are called to trust that the light of the Creator dwells in each creature.
Moreover, we are called to let that light within us shine out upon everyone we meet. In this interplay, we are opened to the presence of God and, thus, open to the possibility of our own transformation.
So, as we work together these days to hear God calling us to renewal, practice a radical openness here. Welcome the stranger in our midst. Seek out the stranger beyond our walls and be open to the possibility that we are called, by the stranger, to be transformed.
I wish I could spell this out with clarity. I wish I could offer a blueprint here. But I cannot. I can only urge this openness and promise a renewed effort to practice it myself. Together, let us risk living more fully into the commitment made here long, long ago, to be a place of radical welcome where we worship a God who welcomes us all.
I began with the suggestion that there is a connection between the practices of our faith and the values we take from it into the public square. Hospitality is a perfect example, for, in the end, it is not so much an individual virtue or private piety as it is an orientation to the world. As such, it becomes a lens through which to ask questions of such things as, say, immigration policy or, in terms of the crisis de jour, a financial crisis whose solution may well determine who gets to stay in their home and who doesn’t.
Obviously, such judgments are incredibly difficult, which, in the end, is why the actions of certain conservative pastors this morning are of questionable political wisdom. Moreover, the suggestion that only one party reflects Biblical values, is more than questionable – not only in terms of the values of the Constitution but, more to the point, in terms of the values of our faith.

Arise ! Shine!

September 21, 2008
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a crisis going on.
Yep, don’t want to be Chicken Little, but the economy is a mess, the country is fighting two wars, hurricane season is far from over and the Yankees are out of the playoffs for the first time since Bill Clinton’s first term.
Like I said, there’s a crisis going on; but a crisis doesn’t necessarily bring all bad news. I, for one, am happy to see the Yankees get October off this year and let somebody else have a turn. Crises bring opportunities.
In the midst of all this, for some reason, I’ve been thinking this week about the Northside Presbyterian Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It’s the church I grew up in. It sits on the top of a hill on Mississippi Avenue, right next door to the Normal Park Elementary School, where I spent a few happy years back in the 1960s.
Northside Pres is, and always has been, considerably larger than Clarendon. Today, having stabilized over the past decade, the membership is a bit more than 300. I suspect that when I was a child it was more than three times that, but I don’t really remember.
Let me tell you what I do remember, and, more to the point, who I remember.
First, the what. Northside is more than 100 years old, and the older part of its building dates to the 1920s. The newer part is circa 1960 – the height of the Baby Boom and of church attendance across America. I would guess the place had more than 1,000 members in the early 60s, when I was a little boy in Sunday School, literally climbing the walls of the place while waiting for my parents to finish chatting with folks after worship on Sunday mornings.
We always sat in exactly the same pew in worship – it was right next to a long crack in the plaster that ran from floor to ceiling in a room with extraordinarily high ceilings. Naturally, that crack was an item of endless fascination for a little boy sitting through another sermon. It’s funny, but even after all these years, several restorations and paint jobs, the crack is still there. These days I take it as a theological reminder that we are all of us broken and in need of grace even if we are the church.
By the end of the decade of the 60s, the membership was half what it had been at the dawn of the decade, and attendance was probably less than half of membership.
In other words, it was a fairly typical mainline Protestant congregation, held together by fairly typical, yet extraordinary mainline Protestant men and women.
There was Mr. Eckerd, who taught Sunday School through my middle school and high school years. I remember two things about him: most instantly noticeable, to a teenage boy, was the striking fact that Mr. Eckerd literally had blue hair. When the sunlight hit his graying mane just right, it was quite clearly blue, and that fact always amazed me. Less noticeable, but far more important, was the simple fact that Mr. Eckerd cared enough about other people’s kids – for his own were grown by that time – to show up each week and listen to our thoughts and opinions and share his own as we tried to learn how our faith and our adolescent lives related to each other.
Then there were the two Mr. Smiths. Jim Smith, a WW II vet, who gave me my first job, ran an upholstery shop and I helped strip furniture and deliver it back starting when I was 14. He was a quiet, soft-spoken gentleman, and we never talked about church-related things that I can recall. What I do recall was his dedication to craft, his honesty in dealing with customers and his unfailingly gentle and polite manner. That, and the fact that he introduced me to the Northside Lunch – the most wonderful dive lunch counter you can imagine.
The other Mr. Smith, Hal, was a runner who became great friends with my marathon-crazed younger brother. What I mostly remember of him, however, was the singular talent he had of being the first person to stand for every hymn. He was like the great sign for the congregation – when Mr. Smith stood up it was time for everyone else to stand. I’m not sure how they know these days.
There was Mrs. Cooper, who taught the little kids Sunday School, which was both appropriate and, perhaps, necessary as she stood barely four feet tall herself. But she packed a lot of attitude and energy into that small frame, and everyone knew that you didn’t cross her. Her husband, Paul, created the large, wooden cross that centers worship in the sanctuary.
Then there were the Pipers: George, whose tall, bald head stuck out over all the other basses in the choir, and Mary, who was unfailingly upbeat. Their kids were all at least a few years older than I, but they still reached out to all the children in the church with a familiar kind of hospitality.
Our family doctor, Dr. Clark, was a member of the church as well. I can recall on several occasions receiving an impromptu examination while laid out on a pew following worship.
As I said, none of this is unusual, but all of it is formative. The quiet witness of these and so many others formed the incubator in which I came to my own faith. Their faithfulness created space for me to hear Jesus when he said, first, “come and see,” and then, later on, “follow me.”
As I consider what God is calling forth from the church today, I know that it is vastly different from what we were called to be as church in the 1960s and 70s. But I would be fooling myself and lying to you if I suggested that we have it tougher now.
Oh, to be sure, we are into at least the second post-establishment generation in this country, and we live in a much more transient time and place than the sleepy southern city I grew up in. Our minister could ask of his flock, “how many of you grew up Presbyterian?” and anticipate that most of the congregation would answer in the affirmative.
How many of you grew up Presbyterian? How many in some other Christian tradition? How many in no faith tradition at all?
Our context is certainly different. On the other hand, we are living through the end of the cultural upheavals that were just being named in their time. They experienced the mass exodus from mainline churches that is memory here, but not the present reality.
The Vietnam War raged at its most violent in those years, and the Civil Rights Movement was a cultural upheaval that informed everyday life. Martin Luther King observed in his Letter from the Birmingham City Jail that he was meeting young people every day who increasingly viewed the church as an irrelevant social club; Northside was part of the club struggling to remain relevant. As Will Willimon, the insightful Methodist bishop names our time, we are living in exile; my parent’s generation were the leaders on the scene when the dislocations and disruptions leading to the exile happened. The accepted verities of the culture were rudely yanked right out from under them.
Why rehash this ancient history now? It is not for the sake of comparative studies in suffering, I assure you. No. It is simply to remind ourselves that whatever the reality of the present moment, the church has been down difficult paths before and has persevered and prospered.
To us, the church in cultural exile, the voice of Isaiah rings out, saying, “arise; shine, for your light is come!”
Like exiles dwelling in deep darkness, we too often do not open our eyes to that light that shines forever in the darkness such that the darkness cannot overcome it.
But, I promise you, the light does shine for you and for me.
So, as I look around this morning, I do not see a dying congregation nor a congregation in crisis, but rather a congregation at a kairos moment. I look around, and I see the Mr. Smiths of our time, the Pipers of this flock – the people whose steadfast faithfulness holds us together, witnesses for our children and leads us on as we strive together to follow Jesus in our time.
Not every step of our striving will be along the line of faithfulness; there will be stumbles along the way. It has been ever thus. A few years ago, my childhood church came into a lot of money by way of a generous bequest. Some folks, my father among them, wanted to see the money spent on the church’s mission in the community. For better or for worse, the will specified spending money on capital improvements, so the church got a major facelift – although the crack reappeared in the sanctuary wall soon after it was repaired.
Along the way, my dad, who grew up in the church, raised his family in it, served his fair share of terms on session, got fed up with the way the money was being spent and began attending a different Presbyterian church.
Which is simply to say, there will be scars along the way as we try to follow Jesus together.
We need to look carefully at those scars, at the broken places, at our own weaknesses. Faith ought to be a clean mirror reflecting the deepest places of our lives.
The survey we did this summer is part of that mirroring process. It told us that we’re really good at being a warm and friendly place. We’ll reiterate that in a few minutes as we break bread together. But the same instrument reminded us that we are not good at reaching out to new folks and welcoming them into the community.
That’s an interesting set of findings, and perhaps suggests the seeds of restoration.
Indeed, over the course of the past 18 months, as we have done the work of restoring this old building, we have created a place of warmth and welcome. Our experience in the last nine months, since Wilson Hall was restored, is instructive. Now that the Hall is someplace that looks like people would enjoy gathering in it, well, what do you know, people have been gathering in it! A lot of people! A lot of times! For food, for fun, for music, for building the kind of community that so many folks say they long for these days.
So we have transformed the space such that it directly responds to an aspect of our common life that needs attention. The transformation took a lot of hard work and dedication, but, if we are honest, I think we will confess that transforming our space is considerably simpler than transforming ourselves. The reaching out and welcoming that we are called to in this next season of our common life is going to stretch each of us in ways that will not always be comfortable, to be sure.
But this is where Isaiah’s words of comfort are written precisely for us this morning:
Arise, shine; for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
2For darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you.
3Nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

Called to Love

Called to Love
Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20
September 7, 2008
This was going to be one of the shortest, simplest sermons I’ve ever offered.
Paul went on at great, complicated, theologically dense length in his letter to the Romans, but he sums up his thought quite clearly and succinctly in this 13th chapter: “everything comes down to this: love your neighbor as yourself because love is the fulfillment of the law.”
In Woody Guthrie’s great, “Rolling Along,” there’s a verse that goes something like this: the preacher folded his papers, took up a collection and said I’ll have to be rolling along.”
Love your neighbor as yourself. Church all does come down to that. Church really is all that simple … and church is all that hard.
Now, if I was simply to say, “amen” at this point and then sit down, some of you might be mighty pleased that we finished up with church so soon. Others of you have come to expect a little more out of church than that.
And you all will have noticed that I keep repeating the word “church.”
You see, that is what I take as the key and central element from the readings this morning. In Matthew, Jesus uses the word Ekklesia – church – for the second and final time in all of the gospels. Ekklesia is actually a political term drawn from Greek democracy. It comes from a root word meaning to call, and might best be translated as “those called out.”
The church has always been about call, about the voice of God speaking in and through and to us as we gather trusting that where two or three of us come together there we will be also in the company of Jesus – the one who calls us to follow.
We are the ones who have been called. Called, then, to what?
Paul puts it bluntly, “love your neighbor.” Jesus situates that call within the body itself: deal lovingly with one another always, even and especially when you disagree.
I’ve been pondering this call, this challenge over the last couple of weeks. Y’all all know that I am a political activist; some near and dear to me might say rather that I am a political junkie. So the prospect of back-to-back national political conventions in the year of a wide open and historic presidential campaign is, for me, something akin to getting the keys to the Ghirradeli shop would be to a chocoholic.
On the other hand, given the tenor of so much of our political discourse these days, the more apt metaphor might be “a pig in slop.”
For partisan politics at this moment in our nation’s history is nothing if not full of slop and mud; anger and vitriol. Whether it’s from the Right or the Left, there is way more heat than light emerging from our politics these days. As a proud, life-long liberal, I would like to be able to point the finger at conservatives and say, “you caused this.” But then one look at most any liberal blog forces any honest broker to confess that the log in my eye is problematic, to say the least, and at least as troubling as whatever is in the eye of the other guy.
This mutual blindness to one another is the scandal of democracy in our age.
And that is both a great problem for our society and great opportunity for our church.
You see, as Laurel Dykstra writes in this month’s Sojourners, “Conflict in the church is not a scandal or a shame; rather, living that conflict, together in love, has been the work of the church from its beginning.”
The coming of the kingdom, it seems to me, is not about reaching some point of final agreement on everything.
In fact, that sounds deadly dull to me. Wherever there is human imagination at work there will be new ways of doing things introduced, and wherever there are new ways of doing things introduced there will be conflict. Inertia is not only a law of physics; it is a law of human behavior. Moreover, when two or three are gathered, not only is Jesus in our midst, but at least two or three personalities and egos and work styles and personal preferences are involved. Thus, there will be conflict.
At the beginning of the book of Acts, that account of the earliest days of the church, it says that the disciples were all in one accord. That’s not a reference to a circus act – you know, clowns in a Volkswagon, disciples in an Accord. No, it names a rare moment of agreement, but you do not have to read much further in Acts to find those very same disciples in sharp disagreement about strategy, direction and creed.
The inbreaking of the kingdom then was not about the absence of conflict and the inbreaking of the kingdom in our time will not be about the absence of conflict either, but rather about the presence and power of love to guide us to just resolutions of the inevitable conflicts that will arise when two or three are gathered.
This is the great good news that we have both as a treasure to be tended to in our common life, and as the gospel to share with the world.
It is a treasure to be tended in our common life because we are entering this fall into a season of discernment and refocusing of our mission. I anticipate some disagreements and conflict along the way as we decide together how best to use our time, talent and treasure to further the goals of the kingdom in our community and in the wider world. Our challenge is not to avoid disagreement or conflict in this journey of discernment, but rather to be obedient to Christ’s call to love one another even and especially when we disagree, when we behave disagreeably, when we irritate one another or get on each other’s nerves.
To the extent that we are obedient disciples – to that extent and no further – we are light and more light for a world that dwells in deep darkness. Because when we are obedient disciples we love one another even in the midst of conflict, we practice merciful kindness even when we disagree, we strive to do justice even when we don’t see issues from the same perspective, we walk humbly with God even when we feel that our egos are at stake.
And when we do this – when we stumble ahead by fits and starts but stumbling together, picking each other up when we fall, supporting if not agreeing – when we do this we become a city on a hill.
The city – the polis, in the Greek, the heart of politics – the city, then, is what is ultimately at stake in our being together as church. The city, that gathering together of folks from all over, striving to make connections, is broken in so many ways these days. We are called to tend to that brokenness, to insist that all those who live in it are neighbors whom we are called to love, to be bread broken for a broken world.
In that spirit, we gather at this table, to share in the brokenness of our Lord. Amen.