Peace, Be Still: Reflections for a Simple Summer Sabbath

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

A New Creation

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

The Colors of Hope

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

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

Blessed Spirits

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