Love & Power

Song of Solomon 8:6-7; Ephesians 3:14-21
February 13, 2011
Tomorrow is Valentines Day, the feast of Saint Valentine, or the many saints whose name was Valentinus, patron saint of, well, probably a Chaucerian legend with no real grounding in history. Oh well. Happy Valentines Day, nonetheless. Oh, and the name Valentinus derives from the Latin valens, or powerful. Love and power – inseparable concerns even when it comes to Valentines Day.
Sometimes the Spirit moves me through a finished story or complete argument, but this morning I am more thinking out loud about love and power. Getting love and power is essential to understanding and practicing Christian faith. My thinking out loud was prompted a couple of weeks ago, when a group of 45 Presbyterian pastors sent an open letter to the church telling us that the denomination is “deathly ill” and needs to be “radically transformed.”
I don’t know if any of you have seen or read their letter, but I’d be willing to bet that you can guess what it’s about if I told you just one thing about the signers: all 45 of them are men.
Moreover, they come from churches that average more than 1,000 members, so they are men who sit atop large institutions with sizeable budgets.
It will not surprise you, I will hazard a guess, that their concerns are prompted by our divisions over ordination issues but there’s more at stake, as they acknowledge. They write,
“Homosexual ordination has been the flashpoint of controversy for the last 35 years. Yet, that issue — with endless, contentious “yes” and “no” votes — masks deeper, more important divisions within the PC(USA). Our divisions revolve around differing understandings of Scripture, authority, Christology, the extent of salvation amidst creeping universalism, and a broader set of moral issues.”
In truth, I don’t disagree with them, though I would name these concerns a bit differently. However, I think that they ignore the one huge issue that rarely gets named or confronted in the church, or in the broader society: the question of power – its sources and its proper uses. They ignore it, I’d guess, because they so clearly embody it that they cannot even see it.
In fact, when called on to explain why there were no women signers they pleaded innocent of practicing any exclusion. They just didn’t notice. They so clearly embody power that they cannot even see it.
Why bring this up today, in connection with the beautiful love song that is Song of Solomon?
To begin with, anyone who has ever been “in love,” in a deep relationship, knows that balancing power is the most challenging and essential work of such relationships. The best relationships are said to be marked by “mutuality” when power is shared in various ways. The worst are destroyed by abuse when power is in the hands of one party.
We know this because we see it in all kinds of relationships ranging from the personal and intimate to the broadly corporate. We see people – often we see ourselves – grasping for power because we are so fearful. We fear not having power. We fear not having control. We fear not being loved.
Yet the power that we find ourselves grasping for so often is such a pale imitation of real power.
Listen again for how the author of the great Biblical love song speaks of the power of love:
“Love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”
That is real power.
Real power resists all of our efforts to control it.
Take the list of concerns that our brothers in Christ want the Presbyterian Church to focus on:
Understanding of scripture? I’ve witnessed and participated in the contentious debates in our denomination for a long time now, and I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. I’ve seen an ever smaller contingent of fearful people who don’t grasp that love is not an orientation and who cannot see the new thing God is doing in the church because they are blinded by fear – of change, of the unknown, of the other. So they disregard the primary Presbyterian principle of interpreting scripture: the rule of love.
The rule of love holds that “any interpretation of Scripture is wrong that separates or sets in opposition love for God and love for fellow human beings.”
The question of authority gets completely muddled, then, when scripture is used as a bludgeon in argument rather than as an invitation to deeper relationship with God and the community of followers of Jesus – whose new commandment was simply this: love one another as I have loved you.
When the question of authority is muddled, power will be abused.
It is no accident, for example, that the letter in question was signed by 45 men. Further, it is no accident that the letter was signed by 45 clergy and not a single Presbyterian elder or other lay leader even though we claim to practice a priesthood of all believers. It is no accident that these men lead large churches whose high steeples project an image of power despite the fact that we worship a crucified God whose greatest power is exhibited in and through human weakness and frailty even unto the cross.
That would be the summary statement of my own Christology, to pick up from the list of concerns the letter names. In and through the weakness and frailty of the human being, Jesus, God exhibits the limitless power of divine love, offering a resounding “yes” to the world that offered the “no” of the cross.
If God would say “yes” to the Roman imperial culture and society that got it all so wrong, why would God say anything but “yes” to the loving desire expressed in and through religious experiences other than our own? If you want to convict me of “creeping universalism,” so be it. Here’s my defense: God did it first.
The love of God does not recognize the limits that human beings always want to place on and around it. We build fences with our fear and thus surround our feeble frames to ward off that which we do not or cannot or will not grasp with our minds or welcome with our hearts. God’s love refuses to acknowledge those fences. God’s love is the raging flame that burns those fences to the ground.
Our own desire, at its highest and best, mirrors that raging flame.
Which is, of course, why it is also such a fearful and fearsome thing.
The fearsomeness is also probably why we don’t often read from the Song of Solomon in church. It is filled with the power of desire. It is a lengthy poem dedicated to that power. Down through the years the institution – whether of the church or the synagogue – has often tried to tamp down this power by trying to convince people that it’s really all just an allegory about love for God or God’s love for us.
But I’m not buying it. Any poem that begins with “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine” is not talking about God.
I hope you have had the chance in the past couple of days, or will take the chance soon, of reading the whole thing. It doesn’t take long – a half hour if you read slowly and linger over the images. If you’re going to take your time, I recommend reading it with a friend! Hey – tomorrow is Valentine’s Day!
But seriously, this love poetry is all about real power – the power of desire, the power of love. Or, put better, the power of love trying to happen.
That lovely phrase comes from Sebastian Moore’s book, The Contagion of Jesus: Doing Theology as if it Mattered. “Desire,” Moore writes, “is love trying to happen,” and, as such, desire is the key to understanding our longing for God, our reaching out to God.
Because, as Moore puts it, “God is a god of desire, not of power and prestige, and Jesus knew God as the object of all our deepest desires – for joy, for laughter, and the love of friends, for sexual fulfillment.”
While I appreciate Moore’s focus on God’s desire for us and God as the authentic object of our own deep desire, I think he makes the common error of identifying power only negatively and aligning it with prestige. That understanding of power also easily equates it with money and might, which are surely forms of power, but understanding power only in those terms misses the deep power of love itself, and it has the paradoxical effect of leading us to embrace powerlessness.
That is to say, if we think that power is always a negative force we are reluctant to use power, and, in fact, often tend to deny that we have any power to begin with.
But such denial is dangerous self deception. We all have power. Consider your most intimate relationships – with lover, with child, with parent.
A good friend posted a Facebook “distress signal” last week bemoaning the fact that her three-year-old has given up her nap. Mom is not happy about this development. Talk about a primordial power struggle. All of our relationships, especially our most intimate ones, involve power struggles and negotiations.
This is true all the more so for our relationship with God, which is why theology matters so much. If we understand God as the great and powerful judge behind the distant curtain of clouds – the Wizard of gods, as it were – then our struggle of faith is marked either by trying to meet standards that are, by definition, unmeetable because they are not of this world, or by running away to hide from this vengeful and violent god. If, on the other hand, we understand God as the creator who longs desperately for relationship with the creature, and for a world in which all of creation lives in the shalom – the wholeness, the peace, the community – that was the animating desire behind the burst of creation itself, then the journey of faith is marked by desire itself.
As Moore puts it, “A theology that downgrades desire as such is going to make of the desire for God something rarefied and otherworldly, instead of being what it is, the hunger for the reign of God.”
In other words, the hunger for God is the desire for beloved community, the kingdom of God on earth. The hunger for God is the desire to know ourselves as beloved.
Diana Butler Bass writes, in the conclusion of her People’s History of Christianity, “Christianity [is] a story of accumulated human experience of God that reveals a certain kind of wisdom in the world: To love God and love one’s neighbor constitutes the good life. Love is, as the apostle Paul wrote, the greatest of all things. Without love we are, as the good apostle said flatly, “nothing” (1 Cor. 13). Without love, Christianity is either a pretty bad joke or a twisted political agenda.”
Without love, the church is destroyed by the love of power at precisely those points when God wants us to be drawn together by the power of love. For when we are drawn together in the circle of God’s love we truly become light for a world that dwells in darkness, water for a parched earth, balm for a broken world, voice for the voiceless, liberation for the captives, welcome for the outcast. That is the authentic power of love.
Thus my prayer for us all – including for the 45 brothers who believe we are part of the deathly illness of the church – is the same one that Paul offered:
that, according to the riches of God’s glory, God may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through the 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. Amen.

Standing on Holy Ground

Exodus 3:1-17
February 6, 2011
In preparation for this high holy day of Super Bowl Sunday it occurred to me to Google the phrase “Lambeau Field” AND “Holy Ground.” I got 1,100 hits, about the same as for “Wrigley Field” AND “Holy Ground” and “Fenway Park” AND “Holy Ground.” Yankees fans take heart: “Yankee Stadium” AND “Holy Ground” turned up more than 3,000 web pages.
“Burning bush” AND “holy ground,” on the other hand, turned up more than 60,000 pages.
Not at all sure what to make of that little excursion into the untamed worlds of the web, but nothing I ran across along the way dissuades me from considering as essential to understanding ourselves and our faith the following questions:
Have you ever seen a burning bush? Ever heard the voice of God? Have you ever stood upon holy ground?
Setting aside the pyrotechnics and stage craft, the flames and the disembodied voice, I think this, for us, is an essential question of our faith: what makes ground holy?
Think about the places you have set your feet, the places that felt holy beneath the soles of your feet. What made them feel that way? What makes ground holy?
Thinking about this over the past few days I started a list of places where I’ve stood that felt like holy ground. So I want to begin this morning asking simply what places feel like holy ground to you?
* * *
Given the Google search I mentioned a moment ago, naturally enough, I began my list of “holy ground on which I’ve stood” with Yankee Stadium. Well, I’m almost serious about that. I did get to see Greg Maddux throw a complete game, three-hit shutout at Yankee Stadium once, and that was pretty darn close to a holy moment.
Completely seriously, there is nothing wrong with finding deep appreciation and even holiness in the beauty of the games we play.
As Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Perry wrote last week, “Let’s take some breaks, pace ourselves and allow some joy despite the persistence of social problems, because movements are not sustainable if those who do the work are exhausted. Let’s laugh at ourselves and at the comic madness of our circumstances, recognizing that humor does not diminish the gravity of our moment but simply lightens the load as we bear it.”
Or, as Mother Jones put it, “if I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
I believe God made us for joyousness as well as for justice, for pleasure as well as for peacemaking. I think of the great line from Chariots of Fire, when the young Eric Liddell says, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel his pleasure.”
While I don’t feel much of anybody’s pleasure when I run, when playing basketball I have felt what Liddell describes, and I’m certain soccer players and hockey players and baseball players and skiers and figure skaters and dancers and swimmers and football players and anyone else who has played games with complete abandon have felt it as well.
Our fields of play can surely be holy ground.
Just plain, old, ordinary fields can be as well. I’ve watched the amber waves of grain as breezes blew across the Great Plains and felt that surely God was in that place, holy ground indeed.
Or watching the blue waves of the ocean crashing into the rocky coast of Maine or gently lapping the wide beaches of North Carolina, I have know that the earth belongs to God, and it is holy ground, even if it is almost wholly water.
Or standing on the top of a mountain in Colorado looking out at a crystal clear lake under a cobalt blue early winter sky. A Rocky Mountain high, to be sure, standing on holy ground a couple of miles above sea level.
The earth belongs to God, the psalmist sings. Moreover, scripture reminds us throughout, God created it. It is holy; all of it. Perhaps we should never wear shoes.
And while the sheer, incredible, and awe-inspiring beauty of our little blue planet can often fill me with the sensation of standing on holy ground, when I reflect on my own experience refracted through the lens of the Moses story I focus on the second part of the psalmist’s phrase: the earth belongs to God, yes, the earth, and all its people. The earth: holy, yes, but even more holy: all its people.
As I think about other holy ground upon which I have stood I realize that I consider certain places holy because of what happened there, and who else stood there before me. Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery where God spoke through a young preacher named Martin, the modern Civil Rights Movement launched, and ground was hallowed.
This sanctuary is holy ground, and not just for me of course. But for me it is holy not because someone long ago set it aside for worship, it is holy because I got to baptize Lenka and Jackson here, I got to join David and Travis in holy union here, I got to memorialize Woody here, I got to ordain Amber and Suzanne and Carol here, I got to serve you bread and cup here. In each of those moments, God’s love was spoken here. This is holy ground for me because of you, and because of what God has done and is doing in and through you here. Whenever God speaks a word of love ground is hallowed.
That leads me to wonder what was particularly holy about the ground that Moses was standing on. Was it just that God was present? I’d say, in principle, that could be true of all places at all times, so I think there was something more at stake in that moment and place than the simple presence of God.
I believe God called “holy” the ground that Moses stood upon because of what God would say there, what God would invoke there, what voices would be heard there, and what God would do in and through Moses.
The most obvious voice heard in the burning bush story is the voice of God, and God invokes God’s own name – reveals it, in truth – at that moment. But the more telling voice, the voice that invokes God, as it were, is the voice of the people crying out from the weight of their oppression.
What does God say of the people?
“I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come to deliver them.”
In that moment, God calls forth justice, and it is this call for justice that makes the ground upon which Moses stands holy ground. Whenever God speaks a word of justice ground is hallowed.
It’s timely that we should have this story in front of us this week, when the land of Egypt is once again the location from which voices are crying out for justice. Did you happen to see the photograph from last week of Egyptian Christians encircling a group of Egyptian Moslems to offer a protecting circle of bodies while the Moslems knelt for prayer? Surely God was in that place. Holy ground, indeed.
Faithful people heard God’s voice, God’s words of love and of justice, and in their response – responding with their very bodies – in their response, ground was hallowed.
From fields of play, to fields of beauty, to fields of dreams of liberation and justice, God makes holy the ground upon which we stand.
Most of us will not live through revolutionary situations that capture the attention of the entire world. Few of us will be called upon to put our bodies on the line to protect our sisters and brothers in such dramatic fashion. Fewer still will hear God speaking from a burning bush. But God still speaks, and each and every one of us has the opportunity at every moment in every place to listen for God speaking a word of love, a word of justice, on behalf of the powerless, the hungry, the outcast, the poor, the marginalized, the voiceless. When God speaks a word of love and justice, and we respond with faithful acts of service, of doing justice, of making peace, of faithful worship, the ground on which we stand is hallowed. So kick off your shoes! You are standing on holy ground! Amen.

Reconciling Dreams and Visions

1 Chronicles 15:16-21; 2 Corinthians 5:16-6:2; Romans 12
January 30, 2011
What is your ministry at Clarendon Presbyterian Church?
For years I’ve harbored this daydream vision of stepping to a pulpit, putting out a provocative question or observation and then just sitting down. Our regular, every Sunday note in the bulletin naming all the members as the ministers of the church prompted this one. What is your ministry?
A colleague for whom I have a great deal of respect recommends that pastors offer up their “dream sermon” or “state of the church” at least once a year. I don’t suppose that I am particularly unusual among pastors in having more dreams for the church than any one sermon can express. You want to know my dreams and visions for church? Well, do you have a week or two to talk about it?
But one simple dream is that at any point someone could stand up here, ask that question – what is your ministry at CPC – and everybody would have an answer that names their own part in the mission and ministry of this community.
One might say, “my ministry is hospitality” while another might say, “I help feed the hungry.” Someone else might say, “my ministry is educating our children” and another might say, “I lead parts of worship.”
“I provide care for our elderly to help them stay connected even though they can’t make it to worship.”
“I do outreach to the unchurched in the metro corridor.”
“My ministry is helping the people make a joyful noise in praising God.”
“I work for justice for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender folk in the church and the community.”
“My ministry is helping people develop their spiritual lives more fully.”
“My ministry is working to reduce gun violence in metro DC.”
“I do liturgical arts, so I guess I’m part of the ministry of beauty.”
There are, of course, many more ministries going on here than the ones I’ve named, but all of the ones I’ve named are happening.
As Paul put it to the church in Corinth and again to the one in Rome, together we are the body of Christ and individually members of it. We do not all have the same gifts, so we do not all offer the same ministry, but together we make up the whole body. The ministry that we share together is what Paul called “the ministry of reconciliation” and it involves being reconciled to one another and to God.
He spelled out what it looks like, too:
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
This is how we do what we do. That is how we do who we are. There is a deep congruency between the way we are together and the purposes for which we are together. Means and ends meet in Christ.
Not to go all Presbyterian on you or anything, but I believe that it’s fair to say that we are about “the great ends of the church,” as our Book of Order – the constitution of the Presbyterian Church – names these foundational purposes of the church. What are we here for? We are here to be the church, to do ministry. We are here:
To proclaim the gospel for the salvation of humankind;
To shelter, nurture and provide spiritual fellowship for the children of God;
To maintain divine worship;
To preserve the truth;
To promote social righteousness; and
To exhibit to the world the kingdom of God.
In a few minutes, when we gather downstairs for our annual meeting, we’ll talk about the ways we put flesh on these particular bones that support the body of Christ. We’ll talk about the ministry teams that structure our work, and I hope that each of you will see yourselves engaged and involved in some aspect of our common life and work.
My dreams for the church, for Clarendon Presbyterian Church, in the year of our Lord 2011, focus in on our common ministry, and were shaped to a great extent by the series of small group gatherings that we held last fall. More than 75 percent of our members participated in one of these. Frankly most of those who did not participate missed out because we did not get the last one scheduled soon enough and we ran into the holidays.
Several key things came out of those gatherings, and when we gather downstairs you will hear a little more about one in particular – the new music staff position that session approved that was developed in direct response to your hopes expressed through those gatherings.
One other key finding from those gatherings – and one that speaks directly to the dream I have for this community – was an oft-repeated desire to have more opportunities to be together in small groups. Our ministry – your ministry – in this congregation is directed by small groups that we call ministry teams. During the coming year we are going to work to make these groups more than mere planning groups, more than mere task forces, more than committees by another name. We want them to be the place where we go deeply into our faith and spiritual lives and into our life together, and then from that deep place of common faithfulness these same small groups become the place that we then go out into ministry, into our several callings that together we might be more fully the body of Christ.
My dream for the church is that we might, each of us, find our own calling in that ministry; that we might find in that calling some deep and profound hope, and that we might, each of us, be able to give an account of the hope that is within us. For when we share that hope with the world we not only cast a vision of a reconciled world, we begin to bring it to life right here, right now.