Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Confessions and Commitments

Joel 2: 17-29; Luke 4:16-20
October 24, 2010
At the Stony Point gathering I attended week before last we were talking about the challenge of change, and we noted that real change, in individuals, organizations, communities, cultures requires honest accounting and confession. We also noted that American culture really does not know anything about honest confession.
Think about the kinds of public apologies you hear these days. They mostly follow this pattern: person A does or says something patently offensive and gets called on it by person B. Person A then says, “I am sorry if you were offended.”
It was a songs conference, so I wrote a little ditty:

I'm sorry that you feel that way.
You clearly didn't get what I was trying to say.
It's not my fault that you've had a bad day.
I'm sorry that you feel that way.

It's not my fault if the words don't rhyme.
What you clearly didn't offer was abundance of time.
If I used that word that you're forbidden to say,
well I'm sorry that you feel that way.

Now I'm usually known as a sensitive guy.
Some folks say I wouldn't hurt a fly.
So if you're offended then you don't have to stay.
I'm sorry that you feel that way.

I don't care if you don't like my song.
I may not be right, but I'm so sure you're wrong.
If you cannot communicate with the words I say,
then I'm sorry that you feel that way.

We talk a lot here about “honesty of confession.” Well, as a confession, that falls a wee bit short of, well, honesty or confession.
So let’s be honest for a moment. First, let’s be honest about our own situation. Two years ago session adopted some goals. They included increasing attendance by 10 percent. It’s actually decreased by about 10 percent since then. We aimed to grow the pledge part of the budget by about 5 percent. It’s decreased by about that much. We wanted to increase participation in spiritual formation, worship leadership, and community outreach. At best we’ve flat-lined there.
You see the pattern.
So let me simply say, I have not done my job as leader of the community. I have not held myself accountable to those stated goals, and I have not held you accountable to them either. I have gotten distracted by things that are not of ultimate concern, to borrow Paul Tillich’s phrase that he coined to describe the central focus of faith.
The good news of the gospel is that I – and all of us – receive the grace of God’s mercy and the power of God’s love to recommit, to begin again, to experience resurrection and new life.
So my commitment is equally simple:
To be accountable to the clearly stated goals and intentions of the community, and, specifically, to spend the next six months encouraging and equipping the saints for ministry because I firmly believe that if we “do justice” well then growth will follow – and that six months is plenty of time, at this last stage, for us to discern clear signs of change.
If, six months from now, we are in the exact same place as we’ve been – small and shrinking, powerless to impact the community around us, failing to share light with a world that dwells in darkness – then it will be time for some serious reconsideration of my role, because friends, while I love to write songs, I do not want to spend my time composing funeral dirges for a dying church.
It is only intelligent to take stock of the broader context, and to acknowledge the profoundly difficult challenge we face. Just last week the sociologist Robert Putnam, who has studied church life for a generation, published an article in the Los Angeles Times naming the context:
“The most rapidly growing religious category today is composed of those Americans who say they have no religious affiliation. While middle-aged and older Americans continue to embrace organized religion, rapidly increasing numbers of young people are rejecting it.
“As recently as 1990, all but 7% of Americans claimed a religious affiliation, a figure that had held constant for decades. Today, 17% of Americans say they have no religion, and these new "nones" are very heavily concentrated among Americans who have come of age since 1990. Between 25% and 30% of twentysomethings today say they have no religious affiliation — roughly four times higher than in any previous generation.”
Who lives in all of the new housing all around us in the Metro corridor? The “nones,” as Putnam calls them. And who have we consistently named as the cohort we feel most strongly called to serve, to be in ministry for and with, to engage with the gospel? The “nones.”
Friends, if this stuff was easy we’d surely have figured it out.
But I firmly believe the simple good news that Joel proclaimed:
“I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.
Even on the male and female slaves,
in those days, I will pour out my spirit.”
Even in these days, the spirit of the living God is power in our midst.
So, while I may not be up to the challenge that lies ahead, God is up to it. The power of the divine, the holy spirit, is up to it.
Jesus understood, quoting Isaiah, the purpose of that power. What is the Spirit of the Lord poured out for? It’s clear and simple:
• To bring good news to the poor;
• To proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind;
• To let the oppressed go free;
• To proclaim the year of God’s jubilee.
This is the gospel of Jesus Christ in its most distilled form. The good news to the outcast is simply this: you, too, are beloved. The commitment of the followers of Jesus is equally simple: to live out that love day by day in the ways that we respond to every single person we encounter and in the ways we work to shape and reshape the society and institutions we live and work in.
Look around us these days.
• Consider the bullied gay adolescents who’ve been in the news of late. What could be more important than sharing the good news with them, showing them that they are beloved?
• We’re living in the midst of the worst economic crisis of our lives. What could be more important than sharing good news with the poor, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless?
• We’re still mired in endless war, while Jesus calls us to love those we would call enemies.
Share the good news. Feed the hungry. Make peace. These are core gospel demands upon each of us.
We are not called to feed the hungry if we have time. We are called to feed the hungry. We are not called to do justice if we can fit it in the budget. We are called to do justice. We are not called to be peacemakers if it is convenient and comfortable. We are called to be peacemakers. And we are called to risk all – even the church – for the sake of the gospel of love and justice.
So here’s what I propose to do about this, and what I invite you to prayerfully consider:
To spend the next six months – from November through Easter, an almost neat liturgical season – in prayer, study and action on a daily and weekly basis – a liturgy, if you will, that moves like this.
• A practice of daily prayer with a common content.
• A practice of daily study.
• A practice of weekly common worship.
• A practice of doing justice.
• A practice of invitation.
I think it was Woody Allen who observed that 90 percent of life is just showing up. The question is, what do you show up to, and how much of you shows up? Let’s be honest, it’s easy to give part of yourself to something. How many of you have ever, for example, sat in on a conference call and been checking your e-mail or the book of faces? Or sat in a classroom reading something not on the teacher’s agenda? Or sat in worship thinking about brunch?
I’ll readily confess to all three of those.
Showing up means bringing all of ourselves, the best of ourselves to this very moment, to the moment of prayer, the moment of study, the moment of worship, the moments of doing justice, the moment of inviting others to share in all of this.
This is not something to step lightly into, and I’m not even going to ask you to today. In fact, all I’m asking you to do this morning is to go home, think about it, talk about it, and pray about it. Next week, the day of our fall congregational meeting, the day when we elect leaders and preview the budget that puts money where our mouths are, next week I plan to bring a six-month calendar of prayers and readings. That’s when I will ask you to join me in this commitment.
For now, I’ll simply invite you to join me in prayer.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

What We Are Given

October 10, 2010
Galatians 5:22-23; Isaiah 11:2-3
I saw Sam Harris interviewed last week by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Harris, one of the leading lights of the so-called “new atheists,” has just published a new book called The Moral Landscape. I’ll confess that I don’t pay much attention to the “new” atheists because, frankly, they bore me. There is really nothing new about them, and the god they so strongly disbelieve in is not a god that much interests me either.
But several of you have asked me several times to speak to the issues raised by Harris and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and others like them, so I paid particular attention to the Harris interview. What struck me this time in listening to Harris, who is a perfectly reasonable, albeit somewhat humorless man except when he is making fun of Christians, is his abiding faith in reasonableness. And, yes, I choose the word “faith” with care and intention here, for while Harris would no doubt dismiss the word it sure seems to me that he trusts the story of science in the same way that I trust the story of Jesus. On the other hand, while I welcome the expanding knowledge of science, Mr. Harris has nothing but contempt for the wisdom of faith and for those of us who find wisdom there.
That, after all, is what faith means: having faith is having trust, and religion, properly understood, is binding one’s self in trust to a story about that which is worthy of trust. That is to say, the God revealed in the story of the life, death and living again of Jesus the Christ, is worthy of my trust.
Harris, and others like him, completely lose me when they insist that faith is about belief in a set of improvable assertions, and that religion consists in giving one’s intellectual assent to those assertions in a systemic fashion. In other words, they insist that Christianity is reducible to accepting as facts the virgin birth, the literal bodily resurrection of the man Jesus, the literal story of the flood, and the notion that a guy named Jonah spent three days in the belly of a big fish and lived to tell one of the great fish tales of all time. Frankly, if that is what I believed we were about in this place I’d be out of here, too.
Oh, to be sure, the church, broadly speaking, has often and regularly fallen into that trap, and Harris rightly excoriates the church, mosque, and synagogue for the violence each has perpetrated in propping up systems to propagate such assertions. One imagines him regaling children with bedtime stories about the crusades and the burning of heretics or the stoning of women.
On the other hand, he remains strangely silent on science’s own history. I can’t quite imagine him telling bedtime stories about the great scientific discoveries deployed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the recently reported medical experiments on unknowing Guatemalans, to choose just two stories from a long catalog of science nonfiction that ought at the very least to give us pause.
I am reasonably sure that Harris would condemn them all, but I’m not sure on what basis he would make the moral judgment. Harris argues that science – and science alone – can discover the facts upon which to base the values that lead to the well being of conscious beings. That seems to be the ethical or moral bottom line for him, but, as a bottom line, it raises almost as many questions as it answers and, on its own, it really doesn’t answer the questions raised by, for example, nuclear weapons or even medical testing on unknowing subjects.
After all, plenty of Americans still argue that using weapons of mass destruction to kill a few hundred thousand Japanese men, women and children hastened the end of a war. And, if scientific tests lead to great scientific advancements that lead to the well being of millions or even billions of conscious beings what’s the harm if a few hundred Guatemalans get sick? You can base just such moral arguments on sound, and even scientific reasoning. But I don’t think Jesus would drop the bomb or infect the unsuspecting.
Don’t get me wrong here. I am far from dismissing the gifts of scientific discovery for all of us – for the well being of conscious beings, as it were. Our medicines and machines make our lives longer and richer, to be sure. Our understanding of the unfolding story of biology and the origins of species certainly deepens our understanding of our own place in creation. I’m simply suggesting that there are gifts, important gifts, for the well being of conscious beings that science at its very best simply does not offer or adequately explain. As Einstein put it, not everything that counts can be counted.
That’s why we began this morning with gifts, and why I chose the scripture passages that we read. We shared these gifts: Wisdom, understanding, right judgment, courage, knowledge, reverence, awe and wonder, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Scripture calls these, variously, gifts of the spirit or fruits of the spirit, and while some of them are also, surely, gifts that the best of scientific exploration and discovery offer – knowledge, to be sure – most of them fall into that category of “hard to count” or “hard to account for.”
Yet most of us would agree that a life absent these gifts, fruits, characteristics, or whatever you want to call them would not be one worth living.
This is a sermon – a brief one at that – not a book or even an essay. I don’t want to chase down every rabbit trail or debating point with Mr. Harris or his friends. Frankly, at the end of the day, my faith, my trust in the God whose story is told for me best in the stories of Jesus, rests mostly in reverence, in awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of creation.
Science has revealed and will continue to reveal ever more layers of that creation whether in the details of the brain or the vastness of the universe. But the reverence I feel in the face of it comes in a relationship that science can observe but can only explain away by reducing it to firing neurons. Rather than reduce it to firing neurons, I prefer to expand it to the fire of the Holy Spirit. I freely acknowledge that it is my preference, at the end of the day, merely a choice and one among many. Nevertheless, I prefer to ground my experience of awe and wonder in an expansive spirit.
For it is that spirit which gives us the gifts that we share in this community. As you have reflected on the gift you received this morning, what comes to mind in terms of the ways that this gift has been important in your own life?

Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Mustard Seeds

Luke 17:5-10
October 3, 2010
What does it mean to have the faith of a mustard seed?
This story appeared in Sojourners more than 20 years ago. I’ve been thinking about it lately as I consider our own calling and opportunity to engage in ministries of hospitality and justice, of feeding and making peace right here in Clarendon.
A small group of peasants in Brazil lived on a piece of land that public and private interests wanted to develop. Laws were changed. Land was seized. Houses and crops were destroyed, and peasants removed to other lands.
Then someone wanted to develop those lands, so a few more laws were changed. And, all legally, more land was seized, houses and crops destroyed, and peasants moved on. Whenever the peasants tried to resist, the police came in. Poor people were arrested or shot.
So when the process seemed set to repeat itself again, the people despaired. One person asked, "Why should we resist? It will just mean that more of us will lose our lives." Another pointed out that even if they were not killed, they would die slowly of starvation. Without land, they had no way to live, no way to plant or grow food. Hopelessness was the prevailing mood. Then some of the women got an idea.
With a little research, they found out where the members of the Congress lived. While the government officials were at work in their offices, the poor women went with their children -- each to a different house -- and sat on the front lawns of the luxurious homes.
These were some of Brazil's most prestigious neighborhoods, and the sight of ragged women and their children on the lawns was an extraordinary and curious vision. After a while some of the wives of the Congress members went out with bread. The mothers told them, "We want no bread from you."
Others of the wealthy women came out with money. "We have not come here for money," said the mothers.
Eventually the wealthy women asked, "What do you want?"
The peasant women answered, "We are going to die. And since this is a nice place, we thought we would like to die here."
Then the wealthy women asked, "Why are you going to die?"
And the mothers told of how their land was about to be stolen again, how their children were going to starve, and how the Congress was voting to make their doom legal.
The phones at the Congress began buzzing. Every wife called her husband to plead with him not to vote for the bill in Congress. And in the end, the people kept their land and their future.
Maybe that’s what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed.
Do you know a story like that? Of course, you do. The entirety of the Jesus story is like that. Overwhelming odds. Creative, nonviolent, strategic response by powerless people.
And yet, we despair of ever making a difference, of ever seeing anything change. War seems endless. The gap between the wealthy and poor just keeps getting bigger. Simple changes supported by the majority of the people – ending don’t ask, don’t tell, for example – get lost in political maneuvering and just plain cowardice.
And we, who have been given so much, despair, of ever making a difference, of ever witnessing change much less of participating in it.
When I was a kid, in high school, my best friend and I got an issue placed on the ballot in our hometown of Chattanooga to change the way the city’s school board was chosen – no mean feat, that, requiring gathering thousands of signatures, presenting them to a skeptical city council, and then organizing a campaign to win the election in a city of about 170,000 people. We were 18 at the time, with no money, and mostly, I think, just too young and naïve to realize that what we were doing was impossible.
Maybe that’s what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed.
Almost a generation ago, now, right here in this room, a young gay couple walked into worship. I don’t know if Ron and James thought they were doing something impossible, and I don’t know if the members of the congregation at that time thought that, by extending hospitality, they were doing something impossible, either. But if you look back at what most churches looked like in the early 1990s, you realize that they were doing the impossible.
Maybe that’s what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed.
Ten years ago come January, I preached a sermon in another Presbyterian church calling the rights of same-gender couples a civil rights issue of great concern to the church and culture. I was no longer 18, and though I joke about having no money, the truth is, of course, that I was the married father of three kids, with a mortgage and a minivan, but still with enough naivety to “misunderestimate” the response, and, so, 10 years ago next February, I was on my way out of a job.
And maybe that’s what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed.
Almost 50 years ago, Peg True’s father and certain other men of this church decided that they would buy up all of the property on this block to build affordable housing for the elderly. They managed to get much of it, though never the whole thing, so the housing dream was never realized. However, we have the most creative playground in the neighborhood, an endowment, and an income stream to keep us going, and an array of possibilities for ministry as a result of those men’s dreams and visions.
Maybe that’s what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed.
We’ve got some hungry people in Arlington County these days, and, as Chuck reminded us, countless more at a further remove. We also have thousands of spiritually hungry people right out there in the Metro Corridor.
We have a story to share here: a story of hope that conquers despair; a story of light that outshines darkness; a story of love that drives out all fear.
We don’t have any guarantees. Maybe our dreams and visions will not be fully realized any more than were Peg’s dad’s. Maybe jobs will be lost – been there, done that, and lived to tell the tale. But maybe, just maybe, remarkable things will happen.
We have food to share with a hungry world.
To share it – that is what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed. Amen.