Rumors of Hope

Isaiah 56:2-8; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25
March 27, 2011
In a little while we’re going to close our worship singing a song that is chock full of rumor and innuendo. Well, sort of.
But with that “introduction,” you are now looking at your bulletins to see what this song is. That is the way of rumor and innuendo. They are all but impossible to ignore. Even the hint of such is enough to get you searching through a bulletin looking for a hymn title.
Having not, I trust, given away too much, too soon, let me ask, to begin with, what comes to mind when you hear the word “rumors.”

“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”
That’s a line, sometimes attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, sometimes to Hyman Rickover, uh, rumor has it that no one really knows where it comes from. In any case, I don’t know what events were happening in that person’s life when he or she said it, but I’d like to start the rumor that it was said by someone with few ideas and fewer friends … or, maybe, just a depressed philosophy grad student who had a hard time at a cocktail party.
Just kidding. But seriously, what a ridiculous and pompous statement. Ideas and events are meaningless absent the people who live them out or live through them. Talking about people is not only essential and essentially human, it is holy.
It’s about all Jesus did talk about, in fact. You don’t find Jesus waxing eloquently about the great theological themes that, down through the ages, come to define – and confine – so much of Christianity.
Instead, you find him talking with and listening to and drinking with and laughing with and praying with and crying with people, as he heals the sick, makes whole the broken, and brings hope to the hopeless – without ever once saying, “let me share with you my theology of atonement,” or “let’s talk about the mystery of the trinity, shall we?”
And perhaps that is why rumors about him spread like wildfire.
From the very beginning, stories seemed to spread. Recall the opening stories of his ministry from Luke. He comes to the synagogue, takes down the scroll of Isaiah, and sings out about bringing new sight to the blind, liberation to the captives, freedom to the oppressed and good news to the poor, and pretty soon the crowds start gathering everywhere he goes.
Rumors of hope spread out, and the people come.
At the National Capital Presbytery meeting a couple of weeks ago, John Bell spoke to us about rumors and community building. After acknowledging some of what we’ve already named, about the destructive power of rumor and the community-breaking sin of rumor mongering, he reminded us of the rumor that founded the church, “he is risen.”
Beginning with the empty tomb and the witness of Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Mary the mother of James, the story spread on the lips of an ever-expanding circle of witnesses: “he is risen; he is risen, indeed.”
The story that could have ended in despair, the story that the authorities wanted to end with death, instead becomes the story of hope’s triumph, the story of life overcoming death, the story of God’s great “yes” flying in the face of the “no” of the world. Foolishness in the eyes of the world, said Paul, but talk about rumors of hope. Rumors of hope, indeed.
Last week, a small group of us got together to talk about CPC’s mission and outreach to the community. We talked about the core commitment to radical hospitality that guides so much of what we do here. We talked about the continuing call that we discern to engage in hands-on ministries of feeding and housing. We talked about different kinds of hunger that people experience, including the physical hunger that we respond to working through AFAC and A-SPAN and the spiritual hunger that everyone feels at various points in our lives.
And we talked about what our efforts have in common. At that point I think it was Molly who said, simply, “hope.”
What all of our efforts to reach out to and serve the community have in common is the offer of hope.
Wouldn’t it be a great thing if the rumor spread that Clarendon Presbyterian Church is a community of hope!
Oh, but some will say, the rumor is that church is too small. The rumor is that church is hidden away where no one can find it. The rumor is that church doesn’t have enough money. The rumor is that church may not survive. The rumor is that church has too much of this and not enough of that. The rumor is they painted a parlor purple.
OK, sometimes a rumor is true, and even the ones that are not the whole truth often contain kernels of truth. We are small. We are a bit difficult to fine. We don’t have enough money to do everything we’d like to do.
But hold those up against the witness of scripture.
Take the blessings of Jesus:
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
It is surely difficult to understand that promise these days, as war grinds on with no end in sight. But surely this blessing can inspire a rumor of hope that someday we might live into the shalom of God’s desire.
Take the promises of Isaiah:
To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.
To the eunuchs – the sexual minorities, excluded by law and tradition, the ultimate outsiders to a tradition that so treasured paternity and family – to them is promised an everlasting name, a monument within the house of God. Sure, Isaiah does not say, “the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) shall ordain gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender members to church office, but talk about a rumor of hope.
And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast my covenant— these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
To the foreigners – the non-Jews, the ones outside of the covenant of Abraham, maybe even ones on the wrong side of the waters that Moses walked through – to them is promised joy in the house of prayer – a house to be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Oh, to be sure, Isaiah does not say anything about the Muslim, the Hindu, the atheist, but I promised in my ordination vows to receive the scriptures of the new and the old testaments as authoritative, so I must monger this Biblical rumor of hope that everyone, everyone is welcome in the house of God.
It was to the scroll of Isaiah that Jesus turned in his first public teaching, according to Luke’s gospel, and he sang out these words,
“The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s jubilee.”
Talk about rumors of hope.
We’re going to close our worship with a hymn that recalls these words.
Now, as we sing, it’s important to recall that when Jesus finished preaching these words, the people took him out to a hillside and tried to pitch him off a cliff.
I got insight into that about 10 years ago when I put this song in a service of worship, and the music director came to me and said, “I will not play that song; it’s Marxist.”
I was reminded of Oscar Romero’s remark: “when I feed the hungry that call me a saint; when I ask why the people are hungry they call me a communist.”
Jesus is talking about real hope here, and real hope has the power to transform – to transform both individual lives and also to transforms systems and structures that leave people hungry, cast out, and cut off from community and from autonomy.
The challenge to us, a wee small church tucked away in a quiet neighborhood, comes directly from Jesus: give voice to hope and be open to transformations big and small.
When we do this, rumors will spread. Let the people talk. Amen.

Lamentations

March 20, 2011
1 Kings 19.6-16
What do you notice in this story?
This story should confound us in the same way it confounds Elijah. After all, he heads off to the mountains for 40 days immediately after he has shown up the prophets of Baal, the servants of King Ahab, by calling down fire from heaven in a grand and over-the-top display of God’s power. If you recall, Elijah has a sacrificial bull placed on an alter to be burned, and after the prophets of Baal cannot get their god to light it up, Elijah has jugs of water poured over the wood to make it all the more difficult to ignite. Then, in a flash of lightning from heaven, Elijah’s God grills the bull.
Needless to say, Ahab is a bit put out that his prophets have been shown up – not to mention shown the sword by Elijah – and Ahab swears that vengeance will be his by the next day.
Elijah heads for the hills, running for his life.
Given that the roaring flames had been the way God worked just a few days earlier, it seems natural enough to Elijah that he might hear God in the fire, if not in the mighty wind or the shaking earth.
But that’s not how God chooses to speak to Elijah.
Instead, in a still, small voice – the sound of sheer silence, the text puts it – God speaks.
Not only is the voice unexpected, but also the message. God basically says, “what’s up with this 40 days on the mountain business? I want you back down in the city. Yes, the very place where your words so upset the apple cart of business as usual that the king wants you dead. That is where I want you to speak my word.”
As we consider our own lamentations today – whether for personal situations of pain and suffering or for the overwhelming suffering in the wider world – can we hear the still, small voice of God speaking in and through our own tears? Can we discern in that voice both the presence of God in the midst of brokenness, and the calling of God to us to be also present to one another in the midst of brokenness?
These are, to me, fundamental questions of these 40 days. Our journey of Lent – the journey to Jerusalem and the cross – is a journey into the broken heart of God.
Ellery Akers is a California.
The Word That Is a Prayer
One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he’s saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don’t go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.

Lamentations

March 20, 2011
1 Kings 19.6-16
What do you notice in this story?
This story should confound us in the same way it confounds Elijah. After all, he heads off to the mountains for 40 days immediately after he has shown up the prophets of Baal, the servants of King Ahab, by calling down fire from heaven in a grand and over-the-top display of God’s power. If you recall, Elijah has a sacrificial bull placed on an alter to be burned, and after the prophets of Baal cannot get their god to light it up, Elijah has jugs of water poured over the wood to make it all the more difficult to ignite. Then, in a flash of lightning from heaven, Elijah’s God grills the bull.
Needless to say, Ahab is a bit put out that his prophets have been shown up – not to mention shown the sword by Elijah – and Ahab swears that vengeance will be his by the next day.
Elijah heads for the hills, running for his life.
Given that the roaring flames had been the way God worked just a few days earlier, it seems natural enough to Elijah that he might hear God in the fire, if not in the mighty wind or the shaking earth.
But that’s not how God chooses to speak to Elijah.
Instead, in a still, small voice – the sound of sheer silence, the text puts it – God speaks.
Not only is the voice unexpected, but also the message. God basically says, “what’s up with this 40 days on the mountain business? I want you back down in the city. Yes, the very place where your words so upset the apple cart of business as usual that the king wants you dead. That is where I want you to speak my word.”
As we consider our own lamentations today – whether for personal situations of pain and suffering or for the overwhelming suffering in the wider world – can we hear the still, small voice of God speaking in and through our own tears? Can we discern in that voice both the presence of God in the midst of brokenness, and the calling of God to us to be also present to one another in the midst of brokenness?
These are, to me, fundamental questions of these 40 days. Our journey of Lent – the journey to Jerusalem and the cross – is a journey into the broken heart of God.
Ellery Akers is a California.
The Word That Is a Prayer
One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he’s saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don’t go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.

Blessed Are Those Who Journey

March 13, 2011
Matthew 5:1-12
By way into this famous, beautiful passage, I want to do two things:
First, a couple of textual notes that I hope will be helpful, and second, a brief word from the Quaker educator Parker Palmer that I will put out there as an invitation to the journey of Lent.
Barrels of ink, reams of parchment and paper, and millions of bits and bytes have been given over to reflections on and studies of the Beatitudes. Indeed, you can find an entire society – the Beatitudes Society – devoted to them. So nothing we say this morning is anything like a final word – merely introductions and invitations.
But first, a note on the structure of the passage and one key word. It is worth noting that Matthew places these words on a mountaintop setting. There is a theological point here underscoring Matthew’s consistent theme that holds Jesus alongside Moses as heir to that prophetic and liberating role. Thus the Sermon on the Mount, which opens with the Beatitudes, is to Jesus as Sinai and the 10 Commandments are to Moses. For Matthew, this stuff is the centerpiece of the gospel, somewhat in contrast to the way Luke presents essentially the same material in the Sermon on the Plain in his accounting.
Also contrasting with Luke, Matthew does not have Jesus offer any of the balancing “woes” to his blessings, for example, in Matthew Jesus does not say, “woe to you who are rich” as a counterpoint to the first blessing: blessed are the poor in spirit. It’s also worth noting that Luke does not include the phrase “in spirit.”
I don’t want to go to deeply into the weeds here, though they are fascinating weeds and we may explore them a bit in the weeks to come. I do, however, want to say a brief word about the first word, translated in the NRSV as “blessed.”
The Greek word here is “makarios,” the passive voice of a word that has no precise English equivalent. It would have carried the strong sense of divine providence but not mere dumb luck in the Koine Greek of the New Testament. Of course, Jesus probably used an Aramaic word, either “ashrei” or “tovahoun” which, in addition to meaning “blessed” also mean “get up” or “wake up.” So there is, in these pronouncements of God’s blessing also an implicit call to act out of that blessedness in the world. That sense is made all the more apparent when, just a few verses further on, Jesus teaches the prayer that hinges on the phrase, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Or, as Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon put it in their classic, Resident Aliens, "The Beatitudes are not a strategy for achieving a better society ... they are an indication ... of life in the kingdom of God.”
The kingdom of God – that reality that Jesus said is “close at hand,” that is among you, even at this moment – that is what the Beatitudes summon. Contrary to what many traditions of Christianity taught, the way to the kingdom of God is not up and out of this life. It is, instead, down and in – deep down, and way in to this one life, this one soul, this one spirit we have been given.
For our moment, for this season of Lent, these blessings call us to journey near to the heart of God.
So, as we take these initial steps on this journey, listen also for a bit of wisdom about the inward journey from Parker Palmer:


“Here is a small story from my life about why one might want to take the inner journey. In my early forties I decided to go on the program called Outward Bound. I was on the edge of my first depression, a fact I knew only dimly at the time, and I thought Outward Bound might be a place to shake up my life and learn some things I needed to know.
I chose the week-long course at Hurricane Island, off the coast of Maine. I should have known from that name what was in store for me; next time I will sign up for the course at Happy Gardens or Pleasant Valley! Though it was a week of great teaching, deep community, and genuine growth, it was also a week of fear and loathing!
In the middle of that week I faced the challenge I feared most. One of our instructors backed me up to the edge of a cliff 110 feet above solid ground. He tied a very thin rope to my waist—a rope that looked ill-kempt to me, and seemed to be starting to unravel—and told me to start “rappelling” down that cliff.
“Do what?” I said.
“Just go!” the instructor explained, in typical Outward Bound fashion.
So I went—and immediately slammed into a ledge, some four feet down from the edge of the cliff, with bone-jarring, brain-jarring force.
The instructor looked down at me: “I don’t think you’ve quite got it.”
“Right,” said I, being in no position to disagree. “So what am I supposed to do?”
“The only way to do this,” he said, “is to lean back as far as you can. You have to get your body at right angles to the cliff so that your weight will be on your feet. It’s counter-intuitive, but it’s the only way that works.”
I knew that he was wrong, of course. I knew that the trick was to hug the mountain, to stay as close to the rock face as I could. So I tried it again, my way—and slammed into the next ledge, another four feet down.
“You still don’t have it,” the instructor said helpfully.
“OK,” I said, “tell me again what I am supposed to do.”
“Lean way back,” said he, “and take the next step.”
The next step was a very big one, but I took it—and, wonder of wonders, it worked. I leaned back into empty space, eyes fixed on the heavens in prayer, made tiny, tiny moves with my feet, and started descending down the rock face, gaining confidence with every step.
I was about halfway down when the second instructor called up from below: “Parker, I think you better stop and see what’s just below your feet.” I lowered my eyes very slowly—so as not to shift my weight—and saw that I was approaching a deep hole in the face of the rock.
In order to get down, I would have to get around that hole, which meant I could not maintain the straight line of descent I had started to get comfortable with. I would need to change course and swing myself around that hole, to the left or to the right. I knew for a certainty that attempting to do so would lead directly to my death—so I froze, paralyzed with fear.
The second instructor let me hang there, trembling, in silence for what seemed like a very long time. Finally, she shouted up these helpful words: “Parker, is anything wrong?”
To this day, I do not know where my words came from, though I have twelve witnesses to the fact that I spoke them. In a high, squeaky voice I said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Then,” said the second instructor, “it’s time that you learned the Outward Bound motto.”
“Oh, keen,” I thought. “I’m about to die, and she’s going to give me a motto!”
But then she shouted ten words I hope never to forget, words whose impact and meaning I can still feel: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!”
I had long believed in the concept of “the word become flesh” but until that moment I had not experienced it. My teacher spoke words so compelling that they bypassed my mind, went into my flesh, and animated my legs and feet. No helicopter would come to rescue me; the instructor on the cliff would not pull me up with the rope; there was no parachute in my backpack to float me to the ground. There was no way out of my dilemma except to get into it—so my feet started to move and in a few minutes I made it safely down.
Why would anyone want to embark on the daunting inner journey […]? Because there is no way out of one’s inner life, so one had better get into it. On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is in and through.

Sound the Trumpets?

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
March 6
Blow the trumpet! Sound the alarm! But please do so quietly and without drawing undue attention to one’s self.
At first blush that seems to be the mixed message from these distinct passages.
Joel is all hot and bothered, and wants everyone to know about it. “Assemble the aged; gather the children, even the infants. Call back the honeymooners. Get the priests. No one is too busy or important or otherwise engaged. Call a solemn assembly to attend to this message. Now!”
Jesus, on the other hand, says “do not sound a trumpet” but practice your faith quietly, praying in your closet, giving alms in secret, fasting but telling no one about it.
So which one is it? Trumpets or no trumpets? Vast public assemblies – worship – or quiet, contemplative, prayers?
I will begin this in confession: this meditation is a work in progress the reflects both my own wrestling with these two passages and also my deep conviction that lives of faith are marked by a deep commitment to struggling with ultimate questions rather than a conviction that we have been given ultimate answers. So, let’s struggle together.
A while back the child care center had a fire drill, which involves setting off the fire alarm, which, trust me, will get your attention no matter where in the building you happen to be. That’s a good thing: if you are a fire alarm, your job is to be heard above all else.
In case of emergency, you want loud alarms.
Joel, apparently, is speaking to an emergency.
I was walking through the building a couple of weeks ago knowing that the fire inspector was coming to check things out, and I noticed that one of our “Exit” signs was askew. If you are an “Exit” sign, your job is to be seen, and seen clearly, so I got a step stool and fixed it.
You want those signs on all the time, in case of emergency but not just in an emergency. You want them on before the emergency so you learn where the exits are.
Jesus seems to be speaking to a different moment in life than the one Joel addresses – not a five-alarm fire emergency, but also not a walk in the park on a spring day when God is in heaven and all is right with the world. I’d call it, for the moment, a season of looming crisis.
Emergency or crisis, then. There is a difference. Now, to be sure, it may be only a difference in perception – one prophet’s crisis being another prophet’s emergency. That simple truth underscores for us one necessity of faith: the practiced determination to read accurately the signs of the times.
Are we living in a looming crisis or is it an emergency?
There are, of course, all kinds of crises and all kinds of emergencies. For example, eating and exercise habits that see you gaining considerable weight constitute a crisis that calls for deliberate and long-term changes. If, however, you do not pay attention to the crisis, then the heart attack that results is an emergency that calls for 911.
For union officials in Wisconsin, for example, the campaign for election of a new governor was a crisis that probably put a few hundred, maybe a few thousand members out on the campaign trail. The subsequently elected governor’s announcement of his plan to strip the unions of their collective bargaining power was an emergency that put a hundred thousand bodies in the streets.
If, for example, you’re driving down the interstate and see a sign that says “395 to DC center lanes; 495 to Baltimore left lanes; 495 to Tysons right lanes: 2 miles” this is a crisis. If you find yourself in the far left lane needing to be in the far right lane and you can see the Jersey barriers – that is an emergency.
The decades long struggle for ordination rights for GLBT members of the Presbyterian church has been a crisis for the church. The vote in our Presbytery on April 30 constitutes an emergency for those of us with the power to vote, and, if present trends continue through this spring, sometime a few weeks after Easter something entirely new will emerge for our church – just to underscore that emergencies are not always negative.
Crisis time is the approach to the crossroads. Emergency time is when you realize you’re in the wrong lane for your turn. Crisis time is the season – however compressed or lengthy it may be – the season to decide. Emergency time is the moment to act.
Do we sound the trumpets now, or just polish up the instruments?
That question is, to be sure, one of the reasons that Karl Barth said that preaching should be done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Reading the signs of the times is a critical practice of our faith.
But by holding two disparate texts – indeed, two completely different kinds of texts – in tension, we must see that faith itself lives always in the uneasy tension between crisis and emergency.
Is there no down time? No ordinary time? No time with neither crisis nor emergency?
On the one hand, if we are honest, we know that the most accurate answer to that is probably “no.” On the other hand, and it remains crucial to hold on to this “other hand,” we are commanded to remember the Sabbath and to keep it holy. That is to say, we know that “wars and rumors of wars,” disease and death, and so on and so forth are constant in human experience – crises and emergencies will be with us always, but we also know that we have been given green pastures to lie down in, trusting that we do not have to carry the load of history on our own shoulders. Resting from the calling to shoulder some of the load some of the time is both good and right as well as faithful. It is also the subject of a different sermon.
We know that somewhere near to us always someone we care about is facing a moment of decision, a time of crisis – whether it is about a job or a relationship or school or an illness or an addiction or a housing situation or family changes, someone we love is in crisis. That same someone could well be facing an emergency soon.
That’s why we hold disparate texts together and read them alongside one another. Taken as a whole, the texts speak to the whole of our own lives, and while pieces of the text stand in tension with other pieces the same is true of our own lives: some parts just don’t always mesh smoothly with others and, yet, there is often deep richness in the rough places.
The invitation uttered through both the prophetic word of Joel and that of Jesus in Matthew is to a way of living through these disparate and sometimes difficult seasons of our lives.
We do not know the precise nature of the crisis to which Joel responded. Indeed, scholars differ by some five centuries in merely affixing a date to the text. There’s no way to name a specific, historical incident to which the author of Joel is responding.
However, as Rabi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it so eloquently, “In a stricken hour comes the word of the prophet.” Heschel goes on to insist that the prophets of Israel throughout “maintained that the primary way of serving God is through love, justice, and righteousness.”
The stricken hour comes when justice is perverted, righteousness no longer prevails, and love has been replaced by fear. Sound the trumpet, then! Assemble the people!
Jesus would have understood this reading of the prophets completely, and he, too, sounds the trumpet with his own voice at moments of emergency in his ministry. But in the text from Matthew, he is pointing out the crisis that will give rise to the emergency, and offering up a way of living that fundamentally alters the context itself. The prophets would have understood.
His invitation to a “prayer retreat” is not an invitation to escape the cares of the world by ignoring the sirens around us, ignoring the suffering around us. Nothing else in either the Sermon on the Mount, in which this passage is found, or the broader gospels suggests any such thing. Jesus never offers or recommends escapism, though he does honor the Sabbath.
But here he sees the crisis, the suffering, around him, and invites people to follow him on a way of life that responds to the crisis by living with the suffering rather than imagining that we can somehow live above it all.
The ones who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them have, in effect, placed themselves on lofty thrones above the masses, above the sick and suffering, above the poor, the outcasts, above the rabble. Jesus calls his followers, instead, into the very midst of that rabble – indeed, he called his followers from the rabble, not to live above it but to live differently in the midst of it precisely in order to transform it by lives of love, justice and righteousness.
As I read these two texts together last week, Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous serenity prayer kept running through my mind. If you Google it, you find the most commonly recited version: Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.
Interestingly, it turns out this is not exactly the way Niebuhr originally wrote it. Instead, in a slight but significant difference, he wrote, “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I should; and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Do you hear the difference? The courage to change the things I should change does not respect the impossibility of some situations. It presents, instead, an ethical imperative to act regardless of whether or not we believe we can make a difference. It presents an ethical imperative to live constantly lives of love, justice and righteousness.
I believe we are called to act both in the midst of crises and in the midst of emergencies. The difference may be as grand as the distinction between acts of charity and acts of justice, or as insignificant as the differences in tactics and strategies. In the end, that really doesn’t matter, because they are all acts of faith.
You see, when Joel calls forth the trumpet blast and when Jesus invites us to quite prayer and fasting, in both cases we are being called to live differently in the world trusting that whether or not we can change things God can – in us and through us, God can and does calm the storms of looming crises and heal the wounds of emergencies.
Our calling, through all of those seasons, however we construe them, is simply to live faithfully in the moment that we have been given with lives known by their loving kindness, justice and righteousness. May we find the courage to live such lives. Amen.

Go Forth and Clean

James 2:15-17; Mark 6:30-44
February 20, 2011
So late last week I was walking around in here, looking at the windows, thinking about the history of the place, thinking about where each of you typically sits, thinking about the years that I’ve been here, and, basically, looking for some inspiration for this sermon.
You’d think that with Mark’s account of one of the great feeding stories of the gospels and the immortal words from James – faith without works is dead – that have been watchwords of progressive, engaged, social-justice seeking Christians throughout history – well, with all that before me you’d think inspiration would come easily.
In fact, I was so convinced that it would be easy that I’d already written a sermon title and printed out the bulletins, fully confident that I would write a sermon that would fit under the title “Faith You Can Eat.” It was not working out like that – and, as you’ll hear, it never did.
I was thinking about feeding stories and remembering the beautiful and powerful stories that several of you shared last fall – James and Ron finding fruit along the side of the road in Spain, Peg receiving unexpected hospitality in the Holy Land. I’ve been on the receiving end of unexpected abundance many times in my life.
But none of that was speaking to me at all. And frankly, I was a bit impatient with the whole process. I’d figured that with these texts this was going to be an easy week for preaching.
So, as I often do, I came in here and walked. Up and down and around these aisles. I thought about you, and lifted you up in my prayers. I gave thanks for you, and the joy it is to be in ministry with you.
And while my spirit was full of gratitude, my brain was dull and empty.
So I started cleaning up a bit.
These little candles have been in the windows since Christmas. Time to pack them away. Oh, and if they’ve been there that long, it’s past time to dust the window sills.
An old bulletin? That can go.
Last week’s sermon. Recycle bin.
I walked out to get a bag to put some stuff in, and I wound up picking up some glasses that have been lying around for a while and some Tupperware that I hope someone will claim.
I think these reeds probably belong to our friend, Peter, the clarinetist.
I have no idea where this door closer came from or why it was in the building at all.
This book mark is a lovely reminder of the eternal truth that organizes our lives, but it clearly hadn’t organized the space or it wouldn’t have been lying around.
And gradually it dawned on me – faith without works is not only dead, it’s downright dirty, too.
The disciples in Mark’s telling of the feeding story really seem to think that the situation they found themselves in would just take care of itself – thousands of hungry people in a deserted place far from the nearest 7-11, the hour getting late. It would all be just fine if those pesky, hungry people would just leave and go take care of themselves.
Then the disciples could hang out with Jesus, have some more stimulating conversation, feed themselves and call it a night. Kind of the attitude I had about the whole sermon-writing thing. It will just take care of itself.
But then Jesus says, “these people are hungry, so you feed them.”
For their trust in Jesus to have any real effect in the world, for it to matter at all, for it to change anything at all, they had to act on it.
So they did. They organized. They broke the thousands into small groups. That may be the single most important step of all – break the huge, impersonal, unmanageable crowd into small groups where people have a chance to get to know each other, build some relationships, recognize their commonalities – including hunger, feel that shared suffering and experience real compassion – suffering with – and act to relieve it by sharing resources such that all have enough.
That is, to be sure, a beautiful, compelling, powerful, accurate vision of nascent Christian community – as far as it goes.
But there’s a part of the story that mostly gets glossed over or, worse, “miraclized.” That is to say, reduced to the realm of miracle and thus easily dismissed. I’m speaking of the penultimate verse: “and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish.”
It’s easy enough – and correct, for that matter – to hear in this line an image of incredibly, even ridiculous abundance. Out of their individual poverty they discover that, in fact, they share this common abundance. All of that is true enough and worthy of our attention, but I want to point out something a bit homelier this morning.
They picked up all the trash! They cleaned up after themselves.
I have often observed that ministry today has a great deal in common with janitorial services. To be in ministry means to clean up other people’s messes. And I don’t actually mean any of this stuff.
To be in ministry in our time means cleaning up the colossal messes that churchmen – and I use that term pointedly because, let’s be honest, it’s mostly men – the messes that churchmen have made of God, of scripture, of sexuality, and of religion itself.
Theologically speaking, to be in ministry in our time means, for example, cleaning up the mess that’s been made of God. I’m not sure just how we got here, but somewhere along the line, we moved from the God whom Jesus called “daddy” to one whom the church came to call, in all capital letters and spoken in a stained-glass voice, “OUR HEAVENLY FATHER.” If the “father” image of God works for you, that’s fine, but we should all know quite well by now that it is not the only Biblical image of the Divine, and, more to the point, whatever image of God resonates with your spirit, the central and defining understanding of the God whom Jesus points us to is simply this: love.
Somewhere along the line, we made a mess of that and we turned God into a wrathful, capricious, violent judge, and then took that God and aimed him at everyone we don’t like.
To be in ministry in our time means cleaning up that mess.
As people of the Book, to be in ministry now means cleaning up the mess we’ve made of the Bible. Somewhere along the line we tried to make a biology or cosmology textbook out of stories that are supposed to bind us to God and to each other, not to prescientific worldviews. Somewhere along the line we unlearned how to read poetry and allegory and parable, and have made mess out of scripture.
To be in ministry means cleaning up that mess.
Of course that scriptural mess led us to make a huge mess of human sexuality. When, for example, you take a handful of isolated passages that are bound by their own culture and history and use them to oppress and exclude women or take another handful and use them to oppress and exclude gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons, then you leave behind a huge mess that has real consequences.
Broken families, broken lives, abuse, self-loathing and all of the myriad dysfunctions that flow forth from that vile stew of hate – to say nothing of the more general mess we’ve made of human sexuality by adopting a frankly Greek distinction between mind and body instead of the more Hebraic unity of body and soul.
Ministry means cleaning up that mess.
We know that messed up lives lead to messed up communities and societies, and somewhere along the line we employed religion itself to serve as a way of making our own messed up tribe somehow sacred while demonizing some other equally but differently messed up tribe. We made a mess of religion itself and we turned it into a weapon.
Ministry means cleaning up that mess.
It is simply not enough to show up to our services of worship or to our daily prayers or to our offices of devotion. It is simply not enough to say the right words of faith or to claim the correct beliefs. Faith without works makes too much mess.
Walking around the building last week reminded me of this quite concretely – and it was an especially self-reflective reminder because more than a little of the mess that I clean up was mess that I, in fact, had made. Sermons left behind. Water glasses – or coffee cups – left stashed here and there. Sheet music left lying about. To name but a few of my own messes, and not even to touch on my study!
To be sure, I mean this far more figuratively and expansively and significantly than merely cleaning up the church building – though that is also important.
You see, cleaning up these theological messes is important because the biggest mess of all is us. Jesus understood this. He looked around at the crowds and saw individuals, scattered and isolated, flung apart by circumstance, alone in their hunger, stuck in a huge mess without any hope.
He saw that reality, but he imagined something completely different. He imagined a beloved community in which the people would come to feel God as close to themselves as the air. He imagined a community of faith in which the people would hear in their sacred texts the simple and eternal message that God loves the whole of creation including every human creature. He imagined a community in which people would use for the good of all the particular gifts they had been given irrespective of their differences. He imagined the kingdom of God – a community bound by love.
I doubt that he could have imagined all of the messes that we would make over the centuries out of that, but I am pretty sure that he’d understand that the work of faith right now involves a whole lot of cleaning up.
So, go forth and clean! Amen.