The Imperative of the Porch

Ephesians 6:10-18
August 23, 2009
Oh, excuse me. You no doubt expected something a bit different at this point. Perhaps something that looks a bit more like worship than practicing putting down the center aisle.
Well, blame it on Paul, or, to be a bit more specific, blame it on the conclusion of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians where he goes all Tim Gunn on them and describes the outfit appropriate to doing battle with the powers and principalities.
We’ll read it in a moment, but I seem to recall that the last time this passage came around in the lectionary I brought a bag full of accessories to augment the “whole armor of God” that Paul describes for the Ephesians. I believe I wore the steel-toed, butt-kicking boots of justice and the Hawaiian shirt of good humor for the occasion.
Naturally enough I’ve been pondering the outfit and accessories again while reading Paul this week.
Here’s what Paul says:
Ephesians 6:10-18
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace.
With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.
All of that is well and good, and I’ve not problem with it as far as it goes. But I believe Paul, like most of us, has neglected something crucial here. He’s forgotten, in fact, one of God’s commandments. In fact, one of the top 10!
To be specific, he’s left out number four, the most often neglected and rejected of them all: remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.
Listen to this wisdom from Barbara Brown Taylor:
“In the eyes of the world, there is no payoff for sitting on the porch.”
When you’re just sitting on the porch no work is getting done. The weeds are growing and not being pulled. The e-mail is piling up and not being answered. The homework sits in the backpack. But, as Taylor puts it continuing the thought:
“In the eyes of the true God, the porch is imperative – not every now and then but on a regular basis” (ibid.).
The porch is imperative. Taking time out simply to be, and to be at rest, is part of God’s plan for salvation. Therefore, the whole armor of God must include some additional items.
I’m starting with the sandals of salvation: shoes that allow my feet to feel the earth underneath them and remind me that I come from that earth and to it I will return, that I am a part of it not apart from it.
The Panama of patience? Well, no. How about the Fedora of faithfulness? Not exactly. Maybe the headwear of wackiness or the piece of junk of joyousness. Or, as my children call it, the drunken dad on vacation hat. In any case, we all need something to remind us to lighten up, to remind us that we are not, in fact, the center of the universe and that the world can get by just fine without our work for while when we take time to rest in the hands and heart of God.
Now, as many of you know, Cheryl and I try to respond regularly to the imperative of the porch, and there are a few additional items that you need.
The porch swing of patience is nice. The beverage of blessing is essential – whatever the nature of that beverage.
But the most important aspect of the porch most of the time is the company. It is all well and good, and even important, to spend some time in solitude in order to journey deep within ourselves, but as the creation story from Genesis underscores, it is not good for us to be alone. We are made for community.
So the most important thing about the porch is the company you keep there, and the opportunity the space creates for building, deepening and sustaining the bonds of community.
At our best, as a community of faith, we create time and space for the porch. So we’re going to spend a bit of porch time this morning. I invite you to get together, right now, with someone you’ve been meaning to connect with, someone with whom you began a conversation before worship, or someone with whom you were sharing a bit more than the peace of Christ before being cut off by the order of worship this morning. Or reach out to someone you don’t know well yet and share a little bit of yourself.
We can live deeply only as deeply as we are connected to one another, and we cannot connect deeply with the Creator if we do not connect deeply with fellow creatures. Sabbath time is time for tending to these connections. It is the imperative of the porch.

Songs and Lessons from the Wood

August 16, 2009
Like Thoreau, I go to the woods to find myself. I go to remember – to remember who I am called to be and to remember who I was long ago.
We live in a culture that dismembers the best of us, thus to re-member is counter cultural in a profound way. The church is a house of memory, and thus we remain, at our best, a profoundly counter-cultural site.
I am increasingly convinced that each of us needs a place or a practice of remembering and of recentering ourselves.
But such remembering and recentering practices – spiritual practices, as we call them – are not an end unto themselves. As much as we might like to go away to places of particular significance to us and simply not come back, we cannot nor should we. For spiritual practices without social action are self-indulgent sentimentality.
On the other hand, social action untethered to spiritual foundations too often slips from righteous faithfulness to self-righteous cynicism. While we are called to faith in body, spirit and mind – and thus called to sharp and critical assessment of the social order – cynicism – as easy and sometimes downright fun as it is – is not a faithful response to God’s world.
But that sounds pretty heavy and serious, and I go to the woods also to remind myself that faithful living can be full of laughter and play. After all, as the great Westminster catechism reminds us, the chief end of humankind is to praise and revel joyously in God, or, as the Westminster divines put it, “to praise God and enjoy God forever.” It is impossible to be cynical when you are praising and enjoying God, when you are singing and laughing together.
A-A-Alleluia!
Like Jesus, I go to the wilderness to rediscover or rekindle my sense of call. Everyone should have a place like that – what I like to call a thin place. Much of the time we live out our lives in places that are dense – not people who are dense, places! Places and situations where it is difficult to feel the presence of God, where God feels hidden, sometimes absent and often shrouded by layers of stuff, silenced by other voices beckoning us to follow false gods of affluence or appearance or individual achievement.
But there are thin places where God feels as close as the air that we breathe, where the voice of God rings clearly. For some the mountains are a thin place, for others it is the beach or some other water. Some find thin places in gardens or fields. Some find the sanctuary a thin place. Others discover a thin place in song or dance. Where is your thin place? Wherever it is, do not neglect it.
For me, the sandy paths of camp, that I know so well I rarely turn on a flashlight even on dark nights; the woods thick with sounds of birds and bugs broken up by laughter of small groups; the lake whose ripples are disturbed by the path of a canoe – those are thin places where I hear God speak and renew my sense of call.

It’s not merely the beauty of nature – although touching foot to ground is incredibly important in an age where we breathe conditioned air, walk a few steps on concrete to get into cars that move our bodies around. In addition to feeling the earth, and feeling part of creation, I go to the woods to learn the lessons of leadership.
I’ve learned more about leading from 10-year-olds at camp than from all the gurus whose books I’ve read or whose conferences I’ve attended. Watch a group of a dozen 10-year-olds trying to get into one canoe without tipping it over and you know how crucial effective communication is to leadership. Watch that same group, having learned that water weighs eight pounds per gallon and that a canoe holds 100 gallons of water when it tips, and you know that the lessons of ineffective communication carry a cost. Watch that same group, having tipped said canoe twice and emptied it twice, discovering that a quiet little girl has a good idea but that they have to listen to each other to hear the idea and act on it, and then watch them triumphantly get in the canoe and, sans paddles, move it across the water, and you know that effective leadership often emerges from unexpected places.
I’ve been thinking about that lesson in particular as I’ve thought about the fall season here, and the list of opportunities to lead and serve in this community. Each of us has gifts for leadership in different aspects of life and ministry. Is God calling you to use your God-given leadership gifts in a new and unexpected way here this fall?
As noted in the August newsletter, we are stepping out in faith and trusting that you will provide leadership here in such areas as coordinating our ministry of hospitality – making sure that people are signed up to host coffee hour, coordinating outreach to visitors, scheduling Wii Kirk, planning third Sunday brunch. We trust that you will step up and lead in such capacities as elders on session, of which we need a class of three for 2010. We trust that you will step up and lead our Christian education efforts in teaching Sunday school.
You have been given remarkable gifts, and have tremendous capacity for leadership. Where are you called to lead now?
The most remarkable aspect of leadership in the community of Christ is that the first step in leadership is simply to follow where Christ calls.

Bread of Life

John 6:24-35
“Take this moment, sign and space
Take my friends around;
Here among us make the place
Where your love is found”
Do you recall the first time you received communion? The first time you shared in this sacramental mean of broken bread and cup poured out?
I wish I did, but that moment, sign and space are lost to me. I do, however, have deep connections and specific memories that circle round this sacrament in which we receive the bread of life.
One of my mentors when I was in seminary, a wonderful elder at the church we were members of in Lexington, told me once why it was that I wanted to be ordained. I thought I knew. I thought it was to lead God’s people, to interpret God’s word, to help the people name God accurately in their own lives and experiences. She knew better. She told me, quite simply, “David, you want to share the sacraments.”
She was right. I understand the life of the church through this table, this moment, this sign and space as we gather together around a table that none of us created, to share gifts that none of us bought or paid for, to dwell together – if only for a moment – in the depths of the spirit of God.
“Take the time to call my name,
Take the time to mend
Who I am and what I’ve been,
All I’ve failed to tend.”
The first time anyone else mentioned to me that they thought I ought to consider ministry happened around the word communion. It was at camp, where I’ll be for the next couple of weeks. We were walking with a group of kids to a vespers service, and I wanted them to take the walk in silence. When I was a camper there many years earlier, our counselors, no doubt wanting a rest for their ears, bribed us into a silent trust walk by promising a candy bar to the one who stayed quiet the longest. I did not have a candy bar to bribe my kids with, so I gave them something else to chew on. I challenged them to think about the word communion, to come up with as many different meanings and connections to the word as they possibly could but not to speak any of them until we got to the vesper dell. Remarkably enough, they walked in deep quiet for about 10 minutes, and when we worshiped together they had some amazing thoughts to share. As we were breaking up after worship, another counselor came up to me and said, “David, you should think about ministry.” I said, “well, I have, but I’ve got too many God issues.”
“Take the tiredness of my days,
Take my past regret,
Letting your forgiveness touch
All I can’t forget.”
We all have God issues, I suppose. In more secular settings we call them authority issues. None of us wants to imagine that we are not in control. We all want to believe in our own independence. We treasure the illusion that we have made our own way in the world.
But when we gather at table, those illusions shatter. We did not get here on our own. We did not do anything to deserve a space at this table. Truth is, as Paul put, we’ve all fallen short of the glory of God. Heck, I’ve fallen short of a lot lesser measurements than that – just in the past week!
But here, at the Lord’s table, the burden of our tiredness is lifted for a moment. Grace is extended yet again. Our hungry hearts receive the gift of bread, broken for us.
“Take the little child in me
Scared of growing old;
Help me here to find my worth
Made in Christ’s own mold.”
The most amazing thing that I have discovered at table is that I do have gifts for ministry. Each and every one of us does. Some of you have been given the gift of setting the table – literally, the gift of great and generous hospitality that enables them to make the stranger welcome at their own table. I was reminded of that in, of all places, a hospital room last week when I was visiting with Ditty. She is such a generous soul, who always makes you feel welcome in her space, and that was true even when that space was a hospital room.
Others of you have been given gifts of great patience. Well, perhaps all of you have because you’ve been putting up with me for six years! Those gifts enable you to teach our children or, as I’ve witnessed first hand for the past year, lead our choir. Many thanks, Amy, for putting up with our joyous, silly little band, which seems infinitely capable of finding our inner child – and, sometimes, capable also of discovering wonderful gifts of song as well.
You have been given the gift of compassion. I know this because I’ve fed the hungry with you. I know this because I’ve seen you reach out to one another in times of sickness or mourning.
You have been given the gift of bread – to share with a hungry world.
“Take my talents, take my skills,
Take what’s yet to be;
Let my life be yours, and yet
Let it still be me.”
So, this morning, as we gather again at this table, come to the table remembering. Remember the gifts you have been given. Remember the times that others have recognized these gifts in you. Remember the source of the gifts. Remember when you have been fed on the bread of life. Remember your own call to ministry – to service to the least of these our sisters and brothers. Take, eat, and remember.
Amen.