More Than More Than Enough

July 26, 2009
John 6:1-13
Last Monday evening 15 of us Clarendon folk gathered at the Arlington Food Assistance Center and filled 500 bags with groceries for our sisters and brothers who live on the edge of hunger. We have been doing that on the third Monday of every month for years now, and in the current economic climate the need is the greatest that it has been in a long, long time.
Back in April, about 10 of us gathered with our Episcopal sister and brothers to help rebuild the home of a 90-something year old Arlington resident.
Earlier in the year, we collected gifts and supplies for the women and children of Doorways. We have knitted for warmth and for justice.
No. I don’t suppose we’ve fed 5,000, but I am certain that despite our numbers we have more than more than enough to feed God’s people – to house the homeless, to clothe the naked, to care for the sick.
As we were bagging groceries last Monday I thought back to the various ways that we have done this work together in recent months, and it struck me that more than 40 percent of our members have been directly involved in some hands-on local mission work. Moreover, another 10 percent have been directly involved in worship planning. And another 15 percent or more have been directly and actively involved in various aspects of our programming including education, stewardship and care for our facilities.
As I considered this level of activity – more than 65 percent of our membership actively involved in some aspect of our ministry beyond Sunday morning – I realized with numerical certainty that we do have more than more than enough.
There may be only 75 or so active members on our rolls, but you do remarkable ministry. I have worked for congregations with 10 times as many members who would have given their eye teeth to have the same level of ministry involvement among their members as we have at Clarendon. In point of fact, those churches would actually have had no idea what to do with that level of participation.
Why bring this up in July when our attendance is usually quite small?
Well, what better time to remind ourselves of the vibrant life of this community?
Indeed, as I considered this passage from John and the disciples wondering how they were ever going to accomplish the monumental ministry tasks that Jesus challenged the 12 of them to undertake, I realized, again, that we have more than more than enough to do what we are challenged to do.
I have been privileged to serve as your pastor for six years now, and for every one of those six years we have talked about growing the congregation, but as we gather this morning we have almost exactly the same membership that we had six years ago.
But let’s pause for a moment and consider what Clarendon has done, with a small group of faithful followers of Jesus, in that time.
Through our work at AFAC we have fed more than 5,000. On the Gulf Coast we have helped countless families either through the direct, hands-on experience of a few of us or through the relief money and supplies that we have sent. We’ve brightened the lives of young patients at the Arlington children’s clinic by painting and decorating rooms and by donating dozens of books.
Moreover, we have had an impact far beyond our numbers in shaping the conversation about justice and welcome in the PC(U.S.A.) and in the Commonwealth of Virginia through our work with More Light Presbyterians and People of Faith for Equality in Virginia.
Margaret Mead famously said, “never under estimate the power of a small group of people to change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
I don’t often claim to understand what Jesus was feeling, but when I read this story from John I think I do know just what he felt as he looked at a sea of hungry faces and then looked into the faces of his small band of followers, because, as I look around this morning, I know that we have more than more than enough.
The question for me is not whether we can do what we are called to do. We know the answer to that. With God all things are possible, so surely we can do what we are called to do. We have more than more than enough.
The question for me is why do it?
It is easy enough to say, “because we are called”; but what does that mean, and how do we know it?
For me, the answer to those questions cannot be found in mere conversation or in deep study. The answer to those questions is only found when we step out in faith to do the work that is right in front of us to do.
Jesus famously told his disciples that the poor will be with you always. He was not expressing despair at ineffectual antipoverty programs. No, we was naming the nature of the gathered community, the people of the way, the church of Jesus Christ. There will be in our number always those who are poor. We will not build nor become an isolated, gated community of the privileged but rather we will be a people who welcome rich and poor – economically, spiritually, and in every other measure.
Thus there will always be ministry to do right in front of us, and as we step out in faith to engage that work we will discover our true sense of call and uncover the gifts we have been given with which to do the work.
Why? Because in the doing we discover also the answer to our deepest, most urgent questions: who are we and to whom do we belong.
In a passage that we did not read this morning, Paul offers this prayer that answers for me the “why do it?” question. He says, I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Why do it? Why engage in mission work? So that we may be filled with the fullness of God, so that we may know ourselves the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ, so that we may be root and grounded in love as we live. So that we may recognize the reality that we have always had more than more than enough.
So my questions for us this morning are simple ones:
When in mission work – however you define that – have you felt rooted and grounded in love?
What gifts have you discovered in yourself in the midst of such work?
What passions have bubbled up for you about mission work?

Come Away; Come Together

Mark 6:31
July 19, 2009
This is one of the great summer Sabbath passages in scripture. Jesus says, “hey guys, we need to get away for a while. I know a great little place out on the lake where no one ever goes. Let’s take a week off.”
Of course, the vacation plans didn’t quite go as expected. As so often happens, work went with them. Perhaps they made the classic mistake of taking their cell phones along, or checking the email every day, or calling back into the office to make sure the place wasn’t going all to hell in their absence.
Have you ever done that?
For those of us not named Jesus, it’s called a messiah complex – the belief that the world cannot get along without us for even just a little while.
Truth be told, many of us arrange our lives such that the people around us cannot get by without us. We engineer dependency, and elevate our own importance so that we can voice that classic American workaholic mantra: I just can’t get away.
Perhaps we do this to avoid the stark truth: none of us is indispensable; not only that, but at some point down the road, the world will go on just fine without us.
We are given only a little while, so the question becomes, “what are we doing with the time we have been given?”
After all, it is quite clearly true that the way you spend your time is the way you spend your life.
The truth that Jesus embodied was revealed not in miracles – after all, scripture and contemporaneous literature suggests that miracles were fairly run-of-the-mill in those days when people had what we might call a miraculous consciousness. No, the truth embodied in Jesus’ life came precisely, simply, in the manner of that life.
He lived always in community with others and in communion with God. It was his way. It was, as the author of John’s gospels puts it “the way, the truth, and the life.” And those who lived it became known simply as “people of the way.”
Jesus trusted those in community with him so much that he promised them that they would do greater things than he had, and in some sense that was true. He died with but a handful of faithful followers, most of them in hiding or on the run. But those followers – those people of the way – laid the foundation for a worldwide movement that reached every corner of the globe.
What has that way to teach us today? What has it to do with the lives of 21st century North Americans living in a time of economic turmoil, international unrest, global climate change and all the rest? What has it to do with the church at Clarendon in 2009? What has it to do with you and me and our families, our lives?
The lectionary passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is instructive. Writing to a community grappling with issues of diversity and inclusion – sound familiar? – Paul says this, paraphrasing:
Remember when you were strangers and outsiders? When you were out beyond the pale? But now, in Christ, you are brought near, you dwell in the center of the beloved community.
And quoting directly, this: “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”
In Christ, Paul suggests, there is a new humanity – one humankind rather than many – and therefore the way to peace, to reconciliation, to community. Paul concludes this passage saying, “So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.”
The crucial connection between the gospel reading from Mark and Paul’s words to the church at Ephesus – and the word of the Lord for us today – lies in their insistence on the importance of living in communities of compassion where self-reliance is replaced by mutuality and a bearing of each other’s burdens such that those who were divided become reconciled, those who were outsiders find a place at the table, those who are merely encountered along the way, who could be ignored and passed by, instead are honored. Rather than people in the way, they become people of the way – not as measured by confessions or conversions but in terms of human beings encountered and honored as fully human and created in the divine image.
As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “the hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self – to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.”
Moreover, as Taylor points out, scripture speaks of loving the neighbor as the self just a few times; far more often it speaks of loving the stranger.
It was the plight of the stranger – not the ring of a cell phone underscoring his own importance – that cut short Jesus’ away time. He stopped to feed the hungry who lived on the wrong side of the tracks – or, in this case, the wrong side of the water.
The weight of this Biblical wisdom raises for me serious questions about the way we live our lives, about the kind of communities we create or fail to create.
Is Christian community transformative for us? Does our life in community help us stop along the way to reach out to the outsider? Does our common life welcome the stranger? Empower the powerless? Give voice to the voiceless?
Simply put, does life in Christian community help us honor the guy who picks up the trash? The girl at the checkout counter at the Giant? The teller at the bank? The annoying coworker? The grind of a boss? The unhelpful clerk at the bookstore or the coffee shop?
Does Christian community help us bear one another’s burdens such that individuals in community can get away when they need restoration and Sabbath time? Does community decenter us from the idolatry of individualism that is at the core of American culture, or do we practice community in ways that simply reinforce American mythology?
Perhaps, most simply given the text from Mark, how do we respond to Jesus’ invitation to come away for a while with him and to come together for a life as his followers?
Obviously, this string of questions is far more than we can hope to pin down in one morning, and, truthfully, it is more than a single passage of scripture – even one as rich as today’s – can honestly bear. Still, with the wisdom of scripture – the word of the Lord for us this morning – as our guide, let me pose a few questions for conversation this morning:
When has Christian community been most meaningful to you?
What practices of Christian community have been most powerful for you?
Can you name a way that you have been shaped or transformed by your life in Christian community?

Dancing Before the Ark

2 Samuel 6:1-5,12b-15
July 12, 2009
Because we just celebrated John Calvin’s 500th birthday, I thought we might begin our meditation together with a word from Calvin, who wrote,
“There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.”
Young David understood this, and rejoiced in dancing in the presence of his God. Of course, though we didn’t read this part of the passage, not everyone approved of his style of worship. Saul’s daughter, perhaps a good old-fashioned church lady, looked down her nose in disapproval of David’s dancing before the ark.
That is, I believe, the first recorded shot in the “worship wars” – that age old contest between tradition and innovation, between order and inspiration, that has dogged organized religion throughout its long history.
Our Presbyterian heritage is certainly filled with its moments of deep disagreement about worship, but one of our touchstones, the Westminster Catechism – a document that formed the parameters of Presbyterian thought from the 1600s well into the 20th century – opens with this famous question:
“What is the chief end [or purpose] of [humankind]?”
The answer?
“To glorify God and enjoy God forever.”
In other words, the primary purpose of our lives is to worship the Lord and dwell in God’s house always.
Which begs the question: what is worship? And what does it mean to dwell in God’s house?
As you probably know, I’ve been on vacation for the past couple of weeks. As usual, I’ve spent a good bit of time reading – when not swimming, eating ice cream, visiting family, going to baseball games and museums or working on the house. I began the reading with a fine political thriller that kept me up quite late for several nights as I helped our hero through trials and tribulations and saved the nation!
Then I turned to a dangerous book: Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World.
She begins with a reflection on the Biblical story of Jacob, on the run for his life after his family is shattered by his scheming. Jacob, not the kind of man you want your daughter to bring home, not the man your want your son to grow up to be, not the one you want leading your community. Jacob, if not exactly a loser, then certainly a conniving thief who has stirred a murderous rage in his own brother.
To this Jacob, who has laid his head on a stone in the wilderness, God comes in a dream, and Jacob is wise enough to recognize that God is present in the world. Jacob sets up a stone, a cairn, an altar to mark the spot and names it Bethel, or House of God. With eyes wide open, Jacob realizes that the world is full of the spirit of God and he worships.
There is not a church building anywhere in sight. There is no formal liturgy. There is no written confession of faith. No hymn books. No ordained clergy or lay leadership. Just the world. The God-infused creation, and Jacob responds with reverence, in awe and wonder at the grandeur of it all.
That is the beginning of authentic worship.
So, using these stories, of Jacob and of David, as touchstones, and guided, let me suggest, by Paul’s enigmatic charge to the church at Rome to whom he wrote, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters,* by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual* worship” – let’s talk a bit about worship.
When do you feel most worshipful? What fills you with awe and wonder? Do you recall a time in “formal” worship service that you felt filled with awe and wonder?