Giving Thanks

November 21, 2010
Thanks. How many things can I be thankful for in 10 minutes, while sitting at Busboys sipping mocha?
To begin with: coffee and toast and a friendly waiter in a warm, bright space on a cold, sunny morning. Then, of course, the sunshine, always, because I don’t like the gray.
Thanksgiving interrupted by sneezing brings me to give thanks for generally good health.
Fresh butter … and the cows and the farmers and the land. If thanks for the cows, then thanks, of course, for the rest of the creatures. Surely, then, for the way that creation sustains us with abundant food.
The cooing baby behind me. Thanks for her. And, first of all, of course, thanks for my babies now well on the way to grown up. Thanks so much for their mom, my love.
Ooops. A few crumbs fall. I’m thankful they do not fall in the keyboard of the laptop. So, almost at once, thanks for living in this time of incredible invention and innovation, and thanks for my parents who taught me the good manners – among so many other things – that ensure that I have a napkin in my lap so my jeans don’t get smeared with jelly. Thanks for blue jeans.
That leads down two threads:
Thanks for Levi Strauss, and for his cousin Claude Levi Strauss, the French structuralist philosopher and sociologist of the 20th century whose work was foundational for the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida whose work sparked my own philosophical imagination so many years ago and back in dissertation days.
But more than that, just thanks for blue jeans, and for the gift of a life that allows me to live, mostly, in jeans. Thanks so much for a congregation that allows me to be myself, in my blue jeans, and not to have to pretend that I am something other than what I am. That is to say, thanks for being a people who really get it, and understand that “reverend” is a noun that names a position in the church not an adjective describing the one who holds the position.
Thanks for each of you. Whether you are here for the first time this morning or if you’ve been part of this community for half century or more, thanks for you. Thanks for your faithfulness, your compassion, your kindness to each other and to all of my family, your love, your imagination, your joy, your intelligence, your passion, your generosity with time, talents and treasure, your creativity, your willingness to be honest and to hold me accountable to the best of what we are and who I am and what we can be together, your patience with my inattention to details, and your attention to them, your grace, your willingness to take risks and to bless me when I do so in the public square.
Thanks for that public square and the myriad opportunities it holds for us to serve our sisters and brothers, to witness to justice and peace, to speak truth to power.
Thanks for the gift of voices, and thanks for the courage to use them. Thanks for breath. For the laughter that causes us to lose our breath. Thanks for song, and music, and rhythm and dance.
Thanks for the Lord of the Dance, Christ the King, the one in whom we live and breathe and move and have our being, the one in whom all things come to be, the one to whom we offer this simple word: thanks. Amen.

Enough

Exodus 16:6-12; Matthew 14:13-21
November 14, 2010
Talk about your whiny, ungrateful, obnoxious, insufferable, … did I mention whiny … unappreciative … and, well, at the end of the day, typical human beings. The children of Israel, wondering with little direction and no appreciation for their leaders, somewhere on what feels like the long decline from bad to worse, uncertain of the future and unhappy with the present. Does that sound familiar?
And yet, they have all that they really need, and it has come as a gift not of their own making at all. Freedom? It’s theirs more in spite of them than because of them. Food? It’s raining bread from heaven.
And yet. And yet they rise up to complain about their lot in life. Why?
Because they are human … and they are afraid.
They are afraid that they will not have enough because they do not have control.
If I had to sum up “the human condition” in a single sentence that might just be it: human beings live in fear of scarcity because we do not have control.
That’s what is happening to the Israelites in the wilderness, and then, as Walter Brueggemann puts it so aptly:
“In answer to the people's fears and complaints, something extraordinary happens. God's love comes trickling down in the form of bread. They say, "Manhue?" -- Hebrew for "What is it?" -- and the word "manna" is born. They had never before received bread as a free gift that they couldn't control, predict, plan for or own. The meaning of this strange narrative is that the gifts of life are indeed given by a generous God. It's a wonder, it's a miracle, it's an embarrassment, it's irrational, but God's abundance transcends the market economy.”
And yet, we continue to believe and embrace the story of the market economy. In that story, so familiar to us that we can literally sing its hymns, we are what we own, what we create by the work of our ruggedly independent individual sets of hands, what we achieve by the sweat of our brows. The hymn book or common prayer book for this liturgy? Well, surely it includes, “just do it,” and “things go better with …,” and “have it your way.” And if you close your eyes for a moment and think back I’m sure you’d even recognize some of its hymns – “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.”
Whatever its content, my copy of the hymnbook plays on my $200 i-pod nano, that I plug in after I put on my $120 New Balance shoes to head out on a run with the intention of pondering scarcity.
And wouldn’t you know it, no kidding, up pops this song:

Will you come and follow me,
If I but call your name?
Will you go where you don't know
And never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown,
will you let my name be known,
will you let my life be grown
in you and you in me?

Will you leave your self behind
if I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind
and never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare
should your life attract or scare,
will you let me answer prayer
in you and you in me?

Will you love the 'you' you hide
if I but call your name?
Will you quell the fear inside
and never be the same?
Will you use the faith you've found
to reshape the world around
through my sight and touch and sound
in you and you in me?

I reckon that’s what I get for putting John Bell on my i-Pod.
But John has put the question rather starkly. Will you come and follow me? It is the question raised by the stories from scripture we’ve read this morning, and it is the question raised, fundamentally, by the simple word, enough.
For, you see, at the end of the day, the question for us is do we trust in the one who provides? Bread for the journey? Bread in the wilderness? Bread for the multitudes, blessed, broken, given for all? Bread of heaven? Bread of life? Do we trust this One? Or would we rather put our trust in the various gods of the marketplace? Surely, as the holiday season approaches, and as we consider our community’s budget, these are the questions that press in on us.
Brueggemann, of course, complicates the question a bit, asking,
“Wouldn't it be wonderful if liberal and conservative church people, who love to quarrel with each other, came to a common realization that the real issue confronting us is whether the news of God's abundance can be trusted in the face of the story of scarcity? What we know in the secret recesses of our hearts is that the story of scarcity is a tale of death. And the people of God counter this tale by witnessing to the manna. There is a more excellent bread than crass materialism. It is the bread of life and you don't have to bake it. As we walk into the new millennium, we must decide where our trust is placed.”
When Jesus looked out across the hillside at the thousands who had come to hear his teaching, he saw hunger in their eyes. They were hungry from something that would sustain their souls as well as, at the late hour of the day, their bodies.
So he took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them.
That is the pattern, if we think of it, that all Christian life follows. Like bread, we are blessed, broken and given to and for the world, just as Jesus was.
That pattern is what it means to follow the way of Jesus, and it is what it means to care for what we have been given, that is to say, what it means to be stewards.
We tend to think of stewardship as what we do during November as we think about making pledges for the next year’s budget. We talk about “stewardship season,” as if this pattern of living with care and concern for what we have been given is a one-off consideration that ends – one might say – on Black Friday in an orgy of consumption. We talk, that is, as if stewardship is something other than the very heart of what it means to be Christian.
Stewards – that is what we are called to be as followers of Jesus, for the world belongs to God, the earth and all its people. Everything we have comes from God. Everything that we are belongs to God.
As followers of Jesus, we are called to care for what we have been given. Indeed, we are called to love it.
Douglas John Hall asks us to consider the possibilities implied in this identity, “what if,” he asks:
“What if this care became, not just a sentiment, an ethic, a duty but the very way of being? What if, in the midst of such a [consumerist, market-oriented] society, instead of showing up as a well-known religious element going about our well-known attempts at saving the world from its moral wickedness, or winning converts, or winning arguments, or influencing the powerful, or just trying to survive (!), the church began to be perceived as a community that cares for the world as such, for its welfare, its justice, its peace, its survival? […] It would not be enormously successful,” he concludes. “It would not conquer the world. It would not convert, baptize, confirm, marry, and bury everybody! But it would be … enough.”
To love the world, then. It is enough. It really does come back round to that John Bell song that popped up on the i-Pod, and the same question we asked last week: are we following Jesus? Because if we, we are loving the world, and it is enough. It is enough.

As We Gather

Exodus 16:2-5; Ecclesiastes 3:1-15
November 7, 2010
As We Gather …
There is a time for every purpose under heaven, indeed, including a time to sing and shout for joy, and a time for lamentation; a time to speak, and a time to remain silent; a time for new things to be born and a time for things to die; a time to shed and a time to gather together. The truth is, most times are some strange, often compelling mix of all of that and more.
Such are the times of our lives, and the season we find ourselves in right now. We do live in times of great difficulty, but also times of miracle and wonder, times of great hope and promise.
I think the great mix of times that is our time compels us, in particular, to treat this time as a time to gather together. We’ll do that in a few moments here at the table of our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. Being together is a gift, and it beats the heck out of being torn asunder, being alone and apart.
Moreover, being together at table is a particular and powerful grace.
Why?
Because at this table we encounter an invitation and a promise – an invitation to new life and a promise that such renewal is not only possible, it is in the very order of things. I know that some of us are bearing the gloom of an election cycle that did not seem to be the harbinger of hope, but when we gather together – and the gathering, the being together, is essential – when we gather together here all things are possible.
The challenge that lies at the heart of the invitation is profoundly difficult though remarkably simple: follow Jesus. That’s it. That’s what our gathering here – at table, in this sanctuary, week after week after week, for all our yearning years – that’s what our gathering is all about. It’s not about the politics of the moment. It’s not about moving to the left or to the right. It’s certainly not about following Barack Obama or John Boehner. It’s about following Jesus.
And so the only question we need ever ponder is the simple one: are we following Jesus?
It’s not a creedal statement about virgin births or bodily resurrections or sitting at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. I don’t believe that any of that matters a whit, though if you choose to believe it all or none of it at all, your choice is fine by me.
Consider, for just a moment, the oldest classic creedal formulation: I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only son our Lord who was conceived by the Holy Ghost – comma – born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate … and so on.
The actual life of Jesus reduced to a comma between the birth story and the crucifixion.
Compare that as a summation of Christian belief to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew or the Sermon on the Plain in Luke: love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, give to those in need, be merciful, judge not, pick up your cross and follow me.
I simply don’t care about the creeds except as interesting historical markers.
What I really want to know – about you and about me and, especially, about us as a community, is quite simply this: are you, am I, are we following Jesus?
Because if the answer to that is no, then gathering here does not matter a single bit. It simply doesn’t.
We can recite creeds till we’re blue in the face, but if we’re not following Jesus, then we might as well stay home in bed on Sunday mornings; we should just chuck the whole enterprise.
But, if we are following Jesus, then God knows what is possible among us.
If we are following Jesus, then lives are going to be transformed in our midst.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for faith, hope and love to abound in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for life and new life in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for a season of spirit in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for doing justice in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for feeding the hungry in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for welcoming the outcast in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for caring for the least of these in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for making peace in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for breaking bread in our gathering.
So: are you following Jesus?
If you want to be, then come to this table and be fed, for the way is long and we need bread for the journey. Let us gather together at the table of our Lord. Let us give thanks to the Lord. Let us pray.