Give an Account
October 26, 2008
Luke 1:1-6; 1 Peter 3:10-18
Accounting seems to be pretty important these days when so many accounts seem so out of balance. Thus it strikes me as both perfectly appropriate and profoundly important to speak together today about what it means to give an account, to take account, to account for ourselves.
In a few minutes, session will present a draft budget for the congregation for 2009. That’s one way that we account for our common life. A few moments ago, we baptized a new disciple of Jesus Christ and welcomed into membership in our common life at Clarendon four people committed to trying to follow the way of Jesus in the world. They were asked – along with the rest of us – to state their purpose, to give an account of their trust in Jesus as lord and savior. That’s another way that we account for ourselves.
The author of Luke clearly understood the importance of giving account for his trust in Jesus, for telling the story of how he understood Jesus as lord and savior. The author of 1 Peter knew that followers of Jesus would be asked to give account for their own commitments to Jesus as lord and savior.
So here we stand, October 26, 2008, the church of Jesus Christ at Clarendon. People of the way of Christ, living in what many cultural commentators are calling a critical historical juncture, what New Testament writers might have called a kairos moment – are we prepared to give an account of the hope that is in us?
Ezekiel understood the power of giving an account. Speak a word of hope to the dry bones in the valley and they will rise up again with new life and dance. Offer a testimony to a future otherwise and the people will rise to embrace it. That is what it means to give testimony, and speaking that word of hope to the world is central to our common life.
Christian faith has always been a personal matter, but it has never been a private possession. We are called to share it with the world, to give an account of the hope that is within us.
Diana Butler Bass suggests that “Testimony is not about God fixing people. Rather, it speaks of God making wholeness out of human woundedness, human incompleteness.”
While not identical with preaching, testimony does involve what Walter Brueggemann, in his seminal work Testimony to Otherwise, said in defining preaching: “the chance to summon and nurture an alternative community with an alternative identity, vision, and vocation, preoccupied with praise and obedience toward the God we Christians know fully in Jesus of Nazareth.”
We call forth a future otherwise when we speak to the way that God is active in our lives because God at work in our lives is always at work on bringing into being the kingdom of God in our time. This is the hope that is within me as God works in my life. So let me give an account this morning for the hope that is within me.
What is the nature of this hope? Well, what is the nature of the wholeness that we seek and of the woundedness that we bear?
I had my initial contact with Clarendon Presbyterian Church just about six years ago, when I found the pastoral position posted on the PC(U.S.A.) web site. The story – the testimony – of the common hope for a more just and welcoming church, a congregation trying to live out the love and the justice of the gospel of Jesus Christ resonated deeply with me. The courageous and outspoken commitment to sharing the gospel with those long marginalized by the church and the commitment to giving voice to those long silenced spoke to me.
The effort to maintain and grow that witness from a small, struggling institution – well, truth be told, that scared me. The thought of moving to a place where the cost of living was going to outpace our prospects for making a living was certainly a bit intimidating. The challenge of learning how to lead in this context was just this side of overwhelming.
Nevertheless, I believed from the beginning of our common ministry more than five years ago that God has called us together for just such a time as this.
We are, all of us, broken in some way, and the specifics of the wounds suffered in this community give us some equally specific and powerful gifts as well. Let me offer my testimony on how I see God making wholeness out of our woundedness, shalom out of our brokenness.
Because this is the Sunday of our fall congregational meeting, I’m going to frame this testimony around the way that we organize our common life and lift up some specific instances of God at work in this common life and work. And, because we should always work with an attitude of gratitude, I’m going to testify to the way God is at work in and through the lives of some specific individuals to whom I want to express profound thanks for being Christ to me during the past 12 months.
About exactly one year ago I was struggling through one of the periodic bouts of depression that are part of my genetic inheritance. The focal point of that depression was the sense that we were stuck here at Clarendon in an unproductive kind of dance rhythm of two steps up and three steps back, three steps up and two steps back – going nowhere fast.
A little over a year ago session set some fairly ambitious goals for increasing worship attendance, membership, participation and giving. I was, frankly, in a funk about the prospect of attaining any of them, and while it gives me no pleasure to say it, it does not grieve me much this morning to report that we have not met any of the measureable goals that we set.
Attendance is about where it was last fall – hovering between 45-50 most Sundays. Our pledges came in a few thousand dollars short of what we initially talked about, and we are running a little bit behind on fulfilling what we did pledge.
But you know what? I am filled this morning with a profound sense of gratitude and hope. Why?
Well maybe we set certain goals a bit too soon. Maybe not. And maybe we’re measuring only part of what we should or could. Maybe not.
Whatever the case on determining the proper metrics for church vitality, I am standing before you this morning to testify that the Spirit of God is alive and well in this small community and that the people of God are responding to that Spirit in remarkable ways.
We’ve witnessed it already this morning as we welcomed a few more folks into this fellowship and as we celebrate the baptism of a young woman who is finding her way with God in our midst.
We’ve witnessed such growth in the lives of many of our members over the past year, so I want to invite a few folks to stand up here with me.
To begin with, I want the young people and all those who have worked with them to join me. You have been incredibly faithful this year: painting the nursery, painting the clinic room, sharing music with us, inspiring us with you energy and enthusiasm. So I want to give y’all a small token of my gratitude with this book of songs, and the promise that I will gladly work with you to learn them so we can teach them to the whole community.
While you are up here, do you have any testimony – anything you’d like to say about what church means for you, or about what y’all are working on together?
Next, will all the folks who have helped with the worship planning team during the past year come up please?
We have experienced a sense of authentic worship revival at Clarendon during the past year, thanks be to God and to the energy, imagination and love of this group. We’ve experienced the power of testimony in our worship during Advent, Lent and through the summer. We look forward to more of the same in the months to come, and toward that end I’m pleased to give this group both props and resources.
While you are up here, do you have any testimony to offer concerning the ways that we have worshipped, the ways your own sense of God’s presence in your life has been enhanced, or any hints of things to come?
My own definition of worship is pretty expansive. I think whenever we gather together and God is honored or praised and God’s creation is loved we have worshipped. One of the things that has lifted my soul over and again during the past year is sharing meals with you. Another has been sharing music with you. Both of those experiences have been greatly enhanced by the great improvements we have made together to our space.
So, I want to invite up all the folks who have painted, scrubbed, measured, or otherwise labored in this vineyard to make it a more welcoming place. And, at the same time, I want all those folks who have cooked for Wii Kirk or cooked for the More Light Annual Meeting to come up. And, I want all those folks who have served as greeters for worship services or other events to come up as well.
As we talked about in worship a couple of weeks ago, hospitality is a central practice of Christian faith. We express our faith in God and our commitment to follow the way of Jesus in the way that welcome strangers into our midst. Making and breaking bread together is one of the ways we express that hospitality. So I want to offer you two things that capture the work of the past year for me: a paint brush and some cookies!
While you are up here, do you have any testimony to offer concerning the ways that we have offered hospitality during the past year or any hints of things to come?
When God’s presence in our lives becomes powerful and real we respond, inevitably and inescapably, with acts of service for the sake of the least of these, the powerless and the outcast. I do not claim to understand precisely why that is so, I simply stand here as a witness. I have seen it over and over and over again, and can testify to this truth: when we become God-filled we are love-filled and it overflows and touches lives all around us.
So, I want to invite up here all those who have bagged groceries at AFAC during the past year, all those who helped with the More Light Annual Meeting, all those who helped paint the children’s clinic room last spring, and those who supported our work with the women’s shelter last Christmas.
The love of God flows through us as we seek to follow the risen Christ, and as we see Christ in one another and in the least of these our sisters and brothers we hear and respond to the call of Jesus to serve and love and welcome all those who so desperately need to hear a word of love and acceptance, those who so desperately need to feel an embrace, to be fed, to be clothed, to find a measure of justice and of peace.
It is for those, and in honor of you who have given of yourselves, that I offer up these gifts of food for AFAC and personal care items for Doorways.
While you are up here, do you have any testimony to offer concerning the ways that we have offered compassion and service during the past year or any hints of things to come?
All of this work and worship would not be possible without the careful stewardship of our financial gifts. So I want to invite up everyone who has worked on the budget and finances, everyone who has counted on a Sunday morning, and, now, everyone who as contributed financially to the work and witness of the congregation.
I wish I can offer a gift of treasure in your honor that would, once and for all, close our budget gap, but I cannot. So I’ll simply pledge to you that we will continue to work in our household to be faithful to God’s call to be generous with what we have been given.
While you are up here, do you have any testimony to offer concerning the ways that we have offered from our treasure during the past year or any hints of things to come?
Finally, as I look around at each of you this morning, gathered here around font and table, I am mindful of that old Civil War-era hymn. Through all the tumult and the strife, how can I keep from singing.
So I am grateful this morning for the gift of song, and since the choir and Amy are already up here, let me express my gratitude with a couple of gifts for y’all in the form of music.
As I look around this morning I know that my testimony is embodied in you. Christians understand truth as revealed in and through the relationship of humanity with God in Jesus. Truth is not some abstract tenant out there waiting for us to argue it out correctly. Truth is incarnate in real human lives. The hope that is within me rests on that truth as it is incarnate in you. The testimony of our faithfulness is the lives that we are together leading in this place. Some folks look around here and see a valley of dry bones. I look – and listen – and discern the spirit of God blowing through us with power and might.
So as I look back over the last year, I can see with the clarity of hindsight the ways that God is bringing forth wholeness through the brokenness of our lives, and as I look forward with, shall we say, the clarity of hope, I do firmly testify that God is working still in this place and we shall, as the psalmist put it, see the glory of the Lord in the land of the living. Thanks be to God.
Luke 1:1-6; 1 Peter 3:10-18
Accounting seems to be pretty important these days when so many accounts seem so out of balance. Thus it strikes me as both perfectly appropriate and profoundly important to speak together today about what it means to give an account, to take account, to account for ourselves.
In a few minutes, session will present a draft budget for the congregation for 2009. That’s one way that we account for our common life. A few moments ago, we baptized a new disciple of Jesus Christ and welcomed into membership in our common life at Clarendon four people committed to trying to follow the way of Jesus in the world. They were asked – along with the rest of us – to state their purpose, to give an account of their trust in Jesus as lord and savior. That’s another way that we account for ourselves.
The author of Luke clearly understood the importance of giving account for his trust in Jesus, for telling the story of how he understood Jesus as lord and savior. The author of 1 Peter knew that followers of Jesus would be asked to give account for their own commitments to Jesus as lord and savior.
So here we stand, October 26, 2008, the church of Jesus Christ at Clarendon. People of the way of Christ, living in what many cultural commentators are calling a critical historical juncture, what New Testament writers might have called a kairos moment – are we prepared to give an account of the hope that is in us?
Ezekiel understood the power of giving an account. Speak a word of hope to the dry bones in the valley and they will rise up again with new life and dance. Offer a testimony to a future otherwise and the people will rise to embrace it. That is what it means to give testimony, and speaking that word of hope to the world is central to our common life.
Christian faith has always been a personal matter, but it has never been a private possession. We are called to share it with the world, to give an account of the hope that is within us.
Diana Butler Bass suggests that “Testimony is not about God fixing people. Rather, it speaks of God making wholeness out of human woundedness, human incompleteness.”
While not identical with preaching, testimony does involve what Walter Brueggemann, in his seminal work Testimony to Otherwise, said in defining preaching: “the chance to summon and nurture an alternative community with an alternative identity, vision, and vocation, preoccupied with praise and obedience toward the God we Christians know fully in Jesus of Nazareth.”
We call forth a future otherwise when we speak to the way that God is active in our lives because God at work in our lives is always at work on bringing into being the kingdom of God in our time. This is the hope that is within me as God works in my life. So let me give an account this morning for the hope that is within me.
What is the nature of this hope? Well, what is the nature of the wholeness that we seek and of the woundedness that we bear?
I had my initial contact with Clarendon Presbyterian Church just about six years ago, when I found the pastoral position posted on the PC(U.S.A.) web site. The story – the testimony – of the common hope for a more just and welcoming church, a congregation trying to live out the love and the justice of the gospel of Jesus Christ resonated deeply with me. The courageous and outspoken commitment to sharing the gospel with those long marginalized by the church and the commitment to giving voice to those long silenced spoke to me.
The effort to maintain and grow that witness from a small, struggling institution – well, truth be told, that scared me. The thought of moving to a place where the cost of living was going to outpace our prospects for making a living was certainly a bit intimidating. The challenge of learning how to lead in this context was just this side of overwhelming.
Nevertheless, I believed from the beginning of our common ministry more than five years ago that God has called us together for just such a time as this.
We are, all of us, broken in some way, and the specifics of the wounds suffered in this community give us some equally specific and powerful gifts as well. Let me offer my testimony on how I see God making wholeness out of our woundedness, shalom out of our brokenness.
Because this is the Sunday of our fall congregational meeting, I’m going to frame this testimony around the way that we organize our common life and lift up some specific instances of God at work in this common life and work. And, because we should always work with an attitude of gratitude, I’m going to testify to the way God is at work in and through the lives of some specific individuals to whom I want to express profound thanks for being Christ to me during the past 12 months.
About exactly one year ago I was struggling through one of the periodic bouts of depression that are part of my genetic inheritance. The focal point of that depression was the sense that we were stuck here at Clarendon in an unproductive kind of dance rhythm of two steps up and three steps back, three steps up and two steps back – going nowhere fast.
A little over a year ago session set some fairly ambitious goals for increasing worship attendance, membership, participation and giving. I was, frankly, in a funk about the prospect of attaining any of them, and while it gives me no pleasure to say it, it does not grieve me much this morning to report that we have not met any of the measureable goals that we set.
Attendance is about where it was last fall – hovering between 45-50 most Sundays. Our pledges came in a few thousand dollars short of what we initially talked about, and we are running a little bit behind on fulfilling what we did pledge.
But you know what? I am filled this morning with a profound sense of gratitude and hope. Why?
Well maybe we set certain goals a bit too soon. Maybe not. And maybe we’re measuring only part of what we should or could. Maybe not.
Whatever the case on determining the proper metrics for church vitality, I am standing before you this morning to testify that the Spirit of God is alive and well in this small community and that the people of God are responding to that Spirit in remarkable ways.
We’ve witnessed it already this morning as we welcomed a few more folks into this fellowship and as we celebrate the baptism of a young woman who is finding her way with God in our midst.
We’ve witnessed such growth in the lives of many of our members over the past year, so I want to invite a few folks to stand up here with me.
To begin with, I want the young people and all those who have worked with them to join me. You have been incredibly faithful this year: painting the nursery, painting the clinic room, sharing music with us, inspiring us with you energy and enthusiasm. So I want to give y’all a small token of my gratitude with this book of songs, and the promise that I will gladly work with you to learn them so we can teach them to the whole community.
While you are up here, do you have any testimony – anything you’d like to say about what church means for you, or about what y’all are working on together?
Next, will all the folks who have helped with the worship planning team during the past year come up please?
We have experienced a sense of authentic worship revival at Clarendon during the past year, thanks be to God and to the energy, imagination and love of this group. We’ve experienced the power of testimony in our worship during Advent, Lent and through the summer. We look forward to more of the same in the months to come, and toward that end I’m pleased to give this group both props and resources.
While you are up here, do you have any testimony to offer concerning the ways that we have worshipped, the ways your own sense of God’s presence in your life has been enhanced, or any hints of things to come?
My own definition of worship is pretty expansive. I think whenever we gather together and God is honored or praised and God’s creation is loved we have worshipped. One of the things that has lifted my soul over and again during the past year is sharing meals with you. Another has been sharing music with you. Both of those experiences have been greatly enhanced by the great improvements we have made together to our space.
So, I want to invite up all the folks who have painted, scrubbed, measured, or otherwise labored in this vineyard to make it a more welcoming place. And, at the same time, I want all those folks who have cooked for Wii Kirk or cooked for the More Light Annual Meeting to come up. And, I want all those folks who have served as greeters for worship services or other events to come up as well.
As we talked about in worship a couple of weeks ago, hospitality is a central practice of Christian faith. We express our faith in God and our commitment to follow the way of Jesus in the way that welcome strangers into our midst. Making and breaking bread together is one of the ways we express that hospitality. So I want to offer you two things that capture the work of the past year for me: a paint brush and some cookies!
While you are up here, do you have any testimony to offer concerning the ways that we have offered hospitality during the past year or any hints of things to come?
When God’s presence in our lives becomes powerful and real we respond, inevitably and inescapably, with acts of service for the sake of the least of these, the powerless and the outcast. I do not claim to understand precisely why that is so, I simply stand here as a witness. I have seen it over and over and over again, and can testify to this truth: when we become God-filled we are love-filled and it overflows and touches lives all around us.
So, I want to invite up here all those who have bagged groceries at AFAC during the past year, all those who helped with the More Light Annual Meeting, all those who helped paint the children’s clinic room last spring, and those who supported our work with the women’s shelter last Christmas.
The love of God flows through us as we seek to follow the risen Christ, and as we see Christ in one another and in the least of these our sisters and brothers we hear and respond to the call of Jesus to serve and love and welcome all those who so desperately need to hear a word of love and acceptance, those who so desperately need to feel an embrace, to be fed, to be clothed, to find a measure of justice and of peace.
It is for those, and in honor of you who have given of yourselves, that I offer up these gifts of food for AFAC and personal care items for Doorways.
While you are up here, do you have any testimony to offer concerning the ways that we have offered compassion and service during the past year or any hints of things to come?
All of this work and worship would not be possible without the careful stewardship of our financial gifts. So I want to invite up everyone who has worked on the budget and finances, everyone who has counted on a Sunday morning, and, now, everyone who as contributed financially to the work and witness of the congregation.
I wish I can offer a gift of treasure in your honor that would, once and for all, close our budget gap, but I cannot. So I’ll simply pledge to you that we will continue to work in our household to be faithful to God’s call to be generous with what we have been given.
While you are up here, do you have any testimony to offer concerning the ways that we have offered from our treasure during the past year or any hints of things to come?
Finally, as I look around at each of you this morning, gathered here around font and table, I am mindful of that old Civil War-era hymn. Through all the tumult and the strife, how can I keep from singing.
So I am grateful this morning for the gift of song, and since the choir and Amy are already up here, let me express my gratitude with a couple of gifts for y’all in the form of music.
As I look around this morning I know that my testimony is embodied in you. Christians understand truth as revealed in and through the relationship of humanity with God in Jesus. Truth is not some abstract tenant out there waiting for us to argue it out correctly. Truth is incarnate in real human lives. The hope that is within me rests on that truth as it is incarnate in you. The testimony of our faithfulness is the lives that we are together leading in this place. Some folks look around here and see a valley of dry bones. I look – and listen – and discern the spirit of God blowing through us with power and might.
So as I look back over the last year, I can see with the clarity of hindsight the ways that God is bringing forth wholeness through the brokenness of our lives, and as I look forward with, shall we say, the clarity of hope, I do firmly testify that God is working still in this place and we shall, as the psalmist put it, see the glory of the Lord in the land of the living. Thanks be to God.
posted by David Ensign at
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