We Are the Least of These

November 20, 2011
Matthew 25: 31-46
A decade ago I was asked in a job interview what passages of scripture I would choose to preach on if I set aside the lectionary and simply chose my favorite preaching texts. I named four: Micah 6:8 “what does the Lord require of you, but that you do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God;” Amos 5:24 “let justice roll down like a mighty water and righteousness like an everflowing stream;” Isaiah 6:8 “here I am, Lord, send me;” and this closing “kingdom parable” at the end of Matthew 25. “What we do to the least of these” … one of my favorite pieces of scripture. In fact, it’s one of my favorite pieces of writing – period.
You will have noticed a common theme running through these texts that focus on answering God’s call to the ministry of social justice. So, throw me in the briar patch and make me preach on a passage that lends itself so easily to my favorite theme, and what, frankly, I take to be the central purpose of Christian faith: doing justice.
Except, this time around. It’s not that I don’t want to preach on Matthew. I still love it, and I reach for it often. It’s just that this time around I heard it differently.
More than one colleague has observed that I can roll out of bed in the morning and preach a social justice sermon. But when I rolled out of bed earlier this month to work on this passage, it didn’t strike the kind of chord that I expected. So this morning, I’m not going to tell you that we ought to be doing more to tend to the homeless poor; you already know that anyway. In fact, at session later today we’re going to be talking about a new Arlington initiative to do just that. I’m also not going to tell you that we need to work harder to give voice to the voiceless; you already know that, too. And I’m not going to tell you that we ought to be doing more to feed our neighbors in need – even though we heard a great moment for mission from the kids concerning just that a few minutes ago.
No. This morning I want to say simply that, sometimes, we are the least of these. Sometimes, the least of these is sitting next to you in the pew, disguised as a comfortably middle-class, gainfully employed, healthy, well-fed resident of Northern Virginia.
Sometimes, the one sitting next to you in the pews is struggling mightily. Sometimes, for that person, just getting out of bed is an act of defiance. The one sitting next to you may be struggling economically.
The one sitting next to you may be grieving a deep loss, may be brokenhearted by a ruptured relationship, may be angry and aggrieved by work, may feel overwhelmed by school, may be experiencing a spiritual hunger with sighs too deep for fathoming.
Sometimes, the one facing all or any of that may be the one facing you in the mirror. Sometimes, we are the least of these.
While surely that is fairly obvious on the face of it, sometimes taking a closer look at the obvious can illuminate the stuff that is a bit more hidden.
For example, and this is another observation of the obvious, a lot of folks who stand outside the church as critics reject the church because, they say, faith is just a crutch.
To that accusation William Sloan Coffin famously responded, “of course faith is a crutch; what makes you think you don’t walk with a limp?”
Others charge that church-goers are hypocrites. That line of criticism gets amplified with every church scandal, and it grows steadily louder when the church’s internal dialogue sounds no different in tone than the worst of political debate or culture war.
But underneath those criticisms rests a deeper truth – indeed, a deep invitation: it’s OK here to be who you are, to limp on in and bring to this place your burdens and your brokenness, because there’s nothing hypocritical about being human. It’s only hypocritical when we claim to be something else.
That’s why this Sunday called “Christ the King” is important. It’s an urgent reminder that we are not the center; Christ is the center. We are not here to be the center; we are here to be drawn closer to the center because that is where the healing of our broken selves begins.
Of what, then, is Christ the center?
A few weeks back at Unchurch we talked about what church is. I did a “word cloud” based on responses to that question. You’ve all seen word clouds: they capture visually what words or phrases get most often used in a discussion. In response to the question, “what is church?” the biggest word in our cloud was, “community.”
When we’re being faithful, when we’re at our best, that’s what Christ is the center of for us: the center of our community.
In terms of our text this morning, we best approach the center of our community when we care for its most broken members. If Christ is the center, we get closest to him when we care for the least of these, our sisters and brothers. That is to say, each other, when we are the least.
In addition to the obvious ethical injunction to care for the homeless poor, to feed the hungry, to do justice in the wider world, this morning I’m suggesting that Matthew 25 carries also the ethical injunction to care for each other. Moreover, this ethical injunction to care for each other is directly related to how well we are able to respond to the ethical injunction to care for the homeless poor, to feed the hungry, and to do justice in the wider world.
We are only ever any good at that when we are a community that owns its own brokenness and embraces its own when we are broken.
This is not a question of program or priority. In other words, I’m not saying, “we can’t feed them till we feed ourselves because we’re no good to anyone if we’re starved.” That may or may not be the case. As I said, it’s not a question of program or priority, it’s simply a principle that we reflect in our liturgy: we begin worship acknowledging our own brokenness and, therefore, our need to be made whole by the grace of God that we experience as we draw near to the center that is the way of Jesus.
Drawing closer to the center, we are drawn closer to one another, and we have the opportunity, the great gift, that is each other with whom to experience healing.
Out of these deeper truths flow a couple of principles for our life together. As we end one liturgical year and prepare to begin a new one next week with the first Sunday of Advent, this is an auspicious time for naming some key principles, and it’s all the more so given that the next year is going to be filled with the challenges that come with significant change.
So, remembering that sometimes we are the least of these in and through whom we minister to Christ, here are a couple of principles for life together:
First, bring your worst! Huh? No, seriously, bring your brokenness and own it. But don’t remain stuck in it. We begin our worship with confession, but we don’t stay there. We don’t wallow in it, we confess it trusting that there is in our relationship with God an abundance of healing grace.
Which brings us to the second principle:
Bring your best self, too. Bring the gifts you have been given. It’s been a truism in every congregation I’ve known that we often tend to leave our best behind when we come to church because we don’t church to feel like work. For years I was reluctant to bring my print design skills to church work because it’s what I did for a living outside of church. I know that some of you have similar stories.
But if what we want at church is community – and that is the most common response people give when asked what they’re looking for – we must face up to the fact that community is not an off-the-shelf, fully formed commodity. Community is what we make of it. Community is what we build.
We will, inevitably, bring our worst to the community – and we should. But, if that is all we bring to it, well, then, at the very least our expectations should be tempered!
On the other hand, and this is where Matthew 25 spoke powerfully to me this week, if we acknowledge that sometimes we are the least of these, and if we remember always that the way we respond to and relate with the least of these is the way we respond to and relate with the Christ at the center of our common life, then out of the least that we are and the least that we bring something profound and powerful will be born.
That’s how resurrection works. But it only works in community if we are willing to run the real risk of building authentic relationships with one another, if we are willing to acknowledge our brokenness, to share our deepest longings with each other. For the one bright truth that shines through Jesus’ kingdom parable in Matthew 25 is this: only by way of the least of these do we find ourselves living the way of the greatest of these – the way of Christ the center.
We’re going to move now into a time of prayer, but we’re going to do that a bit differently this morning as, together, we do the work of the people. I invite you to enter a brief time of silence and think about the place of joy and of sorrow in your own life right now. Think about something for which you give thanks today, and also about something that feels out of joint in your life. Then in a moment I’ll invite you to turn to the person closest to you in the pews – and you can sort out just how to do that – and share with one another one thing that you are thankful for this morning, and one thing that you long for, one broken place that needs healing.
Then we’ll gather that up in a closing prayer of the people.
I invite you now to stand up and spread ourselves around in a circle. We’ll join hands and share our prayers of the people, and then we’ll close in song – so take your bulletins with you because the words to the closing hymn are printed on the back.
Let us pray.

Got Talents?

Matthew 25:14-30
November 13, 2011
There are at least two ways to read this funky little story that comes near the end of Matthew’s gospel. These readings are, quite frankly, almost completely at odds with one another, but each has something to offer. So, this morning, dueling interpretations of the gospel.
The most common way of reading this story is to see the wealthy landholding master as God, and to judge ourselves according to the way we use what we have been given. Such a reading has much to offer, especially during the middle of our annual November stewardship season when we are talking about what we have been given and when many of us are making personal decisions about how much we will give to the mission of this congregation for the coming year.
Read this way, the parable urges us to account honestly the value of what we have been given. As one popular commentary puts it, “It is routine for Christians to excuse themselves by protesting that their gifts are too modest to be significant. This parable insists that the gifts are precious and are to be exploited to the full.”
Read this way, Jesus’ parable insists that we recognize a central truth of the psalmist: “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein.” Put a bit differently, we belong to God, and so does all our stuff. In that light, this parable pushes us to recognize that everything we have is a gift.
That recognition is profoundly countercultural. We have, as Americans, been taught from the beginning of our lives to believe that we get what we merit in this life. We make our own way in the world. We earn our living from the sweat of our own brows, and all that we have we deserve, including absolute freedom in deciding what to do with it.
The parable says, “wait a minute; all that you have has been given to you by the one who created all that is, including you.” At best, we are tenants in this house of God caring for it for just a little while before passing it along to those who will come after us.
In this reading, we are challenged to be wise but also risky with the gift, and warned against the consequences of hoarding it or hiding it away. In other words, use the gifts you have been given. You have been given them freely, so use them expansively for the sake of the gospel.
This reading, as useful as it is, begins to break down for me right here, because, for me, responding to the invitation to use my gifts freely for the sake of the gospel depends upon faith. In other words, for me to take real risks with what has been given to me I have to trust the giver of the gifts.
If God is, as suggested by this reading of the parable, a “harsh man, reaping where he did not sow, and gathering where he did not scatter seed,” then I’m not sure I trust that there is steadfast love enduring forever and for me as I take risks for the gospel.
But, if I let go of all my 21st century North American privileges and put myself in the place of the poor and landless peasants to whom Jesus told the story, another reading opens up new wisdom.
First, let’s clear up one common misconception about this parable: talents are not gifts or skills or things that you’re good at. Talents are money, and a lot of it.
One comment I read on this text said a talent would be worth about $6 million in our currency. We might conclude that this parable is actually about the one percent and not the 99 percent. Perhaps the target of Jesus’ anger is not a lazy servant but instead a capricious money manager.
From that point of view, reading the text from below, the slave who is cast into outer darkness looks quite different, perhaps even heroic.
Writer and activist Ched Myers, a Sojourners contributing editor, suggests an alternative reading:
“There is no theme more common to Jesus' storytelling than Sabbath economics,” Myers says. “[Jesus] promises poor sharecroppers abundance (Mark 4:3-8, 26-32), but threatens absentee landowners (Mark 12:1-12) and rich householders (Luke 16:19-31) with judgment. […]
“The notorious parable of the talents (pounds) shows how Sabbath perspective as an interpretive key can rescue us from a long tradition of both bad theology and bad economics (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:11-28). This story has, in capitalist religion, been interpreted allegorically from the perspective of the cruel master (= God!), requiring spiritualizing gymnastics to rescue the story from its own depressing conclusion that haves will always triumph over the have-nots (Matthew 25:29). But it reads much more coherently when turned on its head and read as a cautionary tale of realism about the mercenary selfishness of the debt system. This reading understands the servant who refused to play the greedy master's money-market games as the hero who pays a high price for speaking truth to power (Matthew 25:24-30)—just as Jesus himself did. “
Myers’ reading insists, further, that we take the parable as one part of the broader story through which Jesus paints God as the loving father welcoming home the prodigal, as the mother hen worrying over her chicks.
If we trust that God welcomes us always and holds us always in loving hands, then, though the risks of faith may entail a high price – our money most assuredly, and also perhaps our lives as well – we have already an ultimate assurance, sealed, as it were, by the unsealed tomb: God will be with us even when circumstance casts us into the outer darkness.
By either reading, then, Jesus invites us to lives of risky faith.
But when I read this parable of Jesus from below I also imagine a more personal parable.
Once upon a time there was a young man who thought that God was calling him to use his life in a particular way, for particular service. The young man, though, had his doubts. He wasn’t sure about God, and sometimes wondered if the still, small voice he heard in his heart late at night wasn’t just his own projection, or maybe indigestion. But sometimes other people would say to him, “you have real gifts; have you ever thought about using them for the sake of the gospel?”
And then the young man would wonder. He would wonder about the voice, and he would wonder about the gospel. Just what was that gospel? What did it mean? What was this good news?
He’d seen it in action since he was a child: how people who believed that they were really, truly loved could do remarkable things for others. He’d seen his own mother give her life to the families of school children who showed up at school in mid-winter without a coat, sometimes without shoes to cover their feet even though it was snowing outside. He knew she did this because she believed that God loved her, and that God loved those kids, too.
He’d seen his own father working with homeless men in the city’s streets. He’d seen his father brokenhearted when one of the men died on a cold January night and there was no family even to claim the body. And he knew that his father did this because he believed that God loved him, and that God loved those men who lived under the bridge, too.
But the young man had a good job. He had young children, too, and a wife with her own career and her own goals. What would it mean to them to quit his job, and to take a huge detour on their fairly clear path to the American Dream of hard-earned upward mobility? What would it mean for buying a house? What would it mean for the minivan?
But, after the family had already traded in about half its income in exchange for more time to raise young children, the young man began to hear that still, small voice speaking with more urgency. “Now is the time,” it seemed to say, “come, and follow me.”
So in the next year’s Christmas letter, the young man chose this way to tell their friends that he was going to follow the call he had discerned: “last year we cut our income in half and enjoyed it so much we decided to do it again.”
The young man had been given so much, but if he believed for a minute in a wrathful God that was about to throw him into outer darkness because he’d hoarded those gifts and used them mostly for the good of his own family and his own career and his own wants for a long time … well, if he believed that God was like that there was no way in the world that he would risk the radical changes required to respond to that still, small voice.
What is the still, small voice saying to you these days? Can you hear it? Do you trust God’s love enough to follow where it leads?
My little parable does not negate the traditional reading of the parable of the talents, but I hope I’ve complicated it a bit because our faith is a complicated and challenging journey. It cannot stand still, for, a faith that changes nothing is worth nothing. What are you willing to risk from what you have been given for the sake of the changes that the gospel demands?
No matter which way you read this parable, it asks a simple question and provides a simple answer: got talents? Then use them.

A Time to Choose

Joshua 24:1-3, 14-15
In the weeks since his death, there’s been a Steve Jobs quote bouncing around the internets. It came from his address to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford. Jobs told them,
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Graduation day is a kairos moment, what the Bible might call, “the fullness of time.” It’s one of those moments when you step out of ordinary time, the seemingly ceaseless flow of one moment into the next, and catch a glimpse – however fleeting and incomplete – a glimpse of almost infinite possibility.
Joshua has called the people of Israel together to offer his own valedictory address. He is old, and they are about to graduate from his leadership and be set off on their own. They have a choice to make.
Our lives find their ultimate shape in the way that we respond in such moments, to such choices.
I have a somewhat mixed reaction to what Steve Jobs advised the Stanford grads in that particular moment, that kairos time, and somewhere in the mix of my own response I also discern guidance for our own path through such moments.
On the one hand, Job’s morning mirror story is quite similar to the ancient monastic practice of St. Ignatius who asked each day variations on the basic question, “what this day has fed me and made me feel whole, what has drawn me closer to God and what has pushed me away?” Patterns in one’s response to such questions over time are excellent indicators of where God is calling you. I’ve commended that practice to many people over the years, and I fall asleep each night with my own responses swimming around my mind.
I commend such practice to you, as part of faithful living and discerning God’s call and claim on your life. So I read what Steve Jobs said and I want to say, “amen to that!”
On the other hand, I read the quote and also think, “what an incredibly privileged position to be in, that you could even imagine changing something if, upon greeting the new day, you do not want to do what you know you must do and will do that day.”
I find myself feeling convicted in my own privilege, because I know that there are billions of people around the world who simply do not have the choice to change.
Remember the scene from the movie Groundhog Day? Bill Murray’s jaded and self-important weatherman finds himself stuck inside an endlessly repeating day, and, what’s worse, he’s now stuck at a bar with a couple of fairly drunk blue collar workers. Murray says,
“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”
One of the guys looks over his beer and responds, “that about sums it up for me.”
Because it’s a movie, and a comedic one, hilarity ensues.
At the tragic end of the same scale, however, I’m mindful of a friend who tells the story from a Christian Peacemaking Team accompaniment journey to a war-torn country in the developing world. His group was in a village, and they asked a villager if she could imagine herself happy. She thought for a long while before finally responding, “I guess on the day that I die. That will be a happy day.”
At my ordination service, many years ago, I had some friends perform a song called Solo la Pido a Dios. It’s a song by Argentinian singer-songwriter Leon Geico. It translates simply as, “One thing I ask of God: that God not let me be indifferent to the suffering.”
In particular, from my privileged North American position, I ask that God not let me be indifferent to the suffering of those whose conditions I am complicit in. To turn that around, what I am saying is that I bear responsibility for the suffering of the villager who cannot imagine the simple happiness I take utterly for granted. My wealth is not separate from her poverty, and because my wealth and its security are contingent – to whatever degree – upon her poverty and insecurity I cannot rest from the work of trying to create a more just and peaceful world, for when I do I stand convicted of the great moral crime of indifference.
The gospel reading this morning insists that we do not know the time when time runs out. In that vein, Steve Jobs was absolutely right in insisting that we should be asking ourselves what to do with the time we have been given. But the arc of the story of faith pushes us to inquire further. The question is not only “do I want to do what I am going to do today, is it going to bring joy to my life.” For our lives to be complete – to be morally whole – we must push through the fog of indifference to ask also, “what might I do so that on this day someone else experiences joy as well.”
My joy cannot be complete if there is no joy for you.
We are all, whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not, bound together in this world. As Martin Luther King was fond of saying, we wear a single garment of destiny; we live, and move, and have our being within a great web of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly affects us all indirectly, and, therefore, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
I had lunch last week with some colleagues with People of Faith for Equality Virginia. We were talking about marriage equality and about bullying, and about taking action in regards to those concerns in January and February. It’s not my marriage, my security, my well-being or my safety that is at stake in those conversations. But it is my soul that is at stake. “One thing I ask of God: God do not let me be indifferent to the suffering.”
This is the choice that Joshua puts before the people: choose this day whom you will serve – the God who brought liberation to the captives, who let the oppressed go free, or some other god unconcerned with the well being of others far distant from me.
Choose this day whom you will serve: the God of exodus hope, the God of liberating love, the God of faithful justice; or some other god. As for me and my household, we will strive to serve the Lord, the God made known in the life of the one called to bring good news to the poor, to restore sight to the blind, to bring liberty to the captives and let the oppressed go free.
God, do not let me be indifferent to the suffering.
Amen.

Nine Theses

Matthew 5:1-12
October 30, 2011
When Martin Luther posted his famous 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg church, on October 31, 1517, he could not have imagined that his act of ecclesiastical disobedience was part of a larger movement that would give birth not only to a new church but also to an entirely new social order. If he had known that where once there was one Christian church in time there would literally thousands of denominations, perhaps he would not have been so bold. Perhaps he would have said, “let somebody else take the heat.” Perhaps he would have been frightened by the very forces of faith and liberty he helped unleash.
But his time demanded a response of conscience and so Luther said, “here I stand, I can do no other.”
Jesus, 1,500 years before Luther, walked up the mountainside, sat down to teach, and said, in effect, the same thing. “This is what I believe, I can say nothing else.” Rather than 95 theses concerning the life of the church, Jesus offered up a simple list of blessings that framed his vision of the kingdom of God, the commonwealth of the beloved.
We, the heirs of Jesus’ vision and of Luther’s original impulse for reform, live with a church and a social order in similar need of new vision and reformation. Where, then, shall we stand?
Considering the magnitude of the Reformation – whose founding gesture we celebrate today – it may strike you as overstating the case to suggest that the present moment calls for change of similar scale.
On the other hand, look around. If ever a time cried out for being reformed on a massive scale, it is our time.
Thomas Merton, writing 40 years ago, named our times this way:
… we are confused, empty and discontented. We have no spiritual and ethical center. We do not have the motives which would enable us to build a peaceful world, because we do not have a sufficient reason to restrain our violence.[1]
I reach for Merton’s voice to underscore that the present crisis reaches far beyond the Tea Party movement or Occupy Wall Street. It encompasses but is not reducible to the Arab Spring or the movements of radical Islam or fundamentalist Christianity. It includes the collapse of Christendom in Europe and the end of the Protestant Establishment in America. It is marked by and recorded through world-changing advances in communication technologies on the one hand, and world-threatening advances and uses of industrial technologies on the other.
They are all symptoms of a far deeper and considerably older crisis that accompanies the twilight of modernity.
We are living in a period of multiple crises, but each is first and foremost spiritual in nature. The present moment inescapably calls forth a new way of living together.
There is a sense, of course, in which every age, every epoch, calls forth a new way of being that breaks with the orthodoxy of any given moment. Indeed, as Brian McClaren points out in A Generous Orthodoxy,
In the Middle Ages, “straight thinking” was a kind of government function – like right business practices, similarly enforceable by censorship, imprisonment, torture, inquisition, and massacre. In the Modern Era, protest and conquest were the spirit of the age, so “right opinions” were one’s ticket to power and dominance. But in the world that is emerging out of roots in the modern and medieval worlds, perhaps we will believe again that the meek will inherit the earth and that truth is a treasure not best found or held through coercion and threat or competition and dominance, but by humble seeking, sincere faith, resilient hope, patient love.[2]
You can hear in McClaren’s description echoes of the Beatitudes: “perhaps we will believe again that the meek will inherit the earth.” As that suggests, Jesus faced his own time in the spirit of reformation. The meek were certainly not inheriting the earth in first-century Palestine; the poor in spirit dwelled far from the kingdom of heaven; peacemakers were called many things – but children of God was no more likely then than it is today.
Yet from under the thumb of an oppressive empire, Jesus cast a vision of a future otherwise that still animates dreams and visions 2,000 years later. Likewise, from under the thumb of an oppressive church, Martin Luther cast a vision of a future otherwise that still empowers the church 500 years later. Just as Jesus proclaimed in his time and Luther in his, so I say to you today: another world is possible. Another world is possible.
But it is not inevitable. It will not simply come with the rising of the sun and the breaking of a new dawn.
God calls it forth in sovereign love. But, in freedom we have the capacity to remain enslaved to the present time. In brokenness we can choose to remain broken. In sin we can continue to turn away from God and from the future that God is calling forth.
What does that future look like? The future of God’s imagining?
Jesus captured its spirit and cast a vision from the mountaintop when he cried out for a community of passion and compassion – a community in which the mourners would be comforted and in which lights of faith, hope and love would be lifted high against the darkness; a community in which the poor are blessed and peacemakers are called the children of God; a community of compassion structured by a politics of love and justice.
Where, today, can we find our own Martin Luther? Where, today, can we find people willing to forego security for the sake of conscience? Where, today, can we find a community of reformation unafraid to declare boldly to the world that there are at least 95 more things that need to change?
Well, as I have said to you before, we are the ones who we’ve been waiting for. The task of our time is to name the present age accurately and to cast a vision of a future otherwise.
The present way of ordering and arranging our economic life is inadequate and incomplete, the present way of ordering and arranging our political life is inadequate and incomplete, the present way of ordering and arranging international affairs is inadequate and incomplete. These may sound like political or social concerns, but they are first and foremost theological concerns and our response to them must be grounded in the vision that Jesus casts in the Sermon on the Mount.
The vast economic inequality and growing gap between the haves and the have nots is an affront to the gospel. The consolidation of political power in the hands of the wealthy at the expense of the poor is an affront to the gospel. War is an affront to the gospel.
And yet the church, too timid and tepid to lift again the banner of reformation, acquiesces quietly to a status quo that relegates spiritual questions to the confines of private life all but oblivious to the deep and public spiritual crisis of our age.
Where is the church? Where is the community of compassion that can respond to this crisis of spirit? Where is the vision of a future otherwise?
Unfortunately, the present way of ordering and arranging our spiritual life is also inadequate and incomplete.
Nevertheless, here we stand. We can do no other. Therefore, let us offer, as mere bullet points, and by way of invitation, a glimpse at the church of the second reformation.
This is the age of Facebook posts, so there’s no way the world will sit still long enough for 95 theses. So, let’s start with a tenth of that: nine theses for the community of compassion and transformation.
Remember that Luther’s theses did not set in motion a singular new institution, but instead began a long journey into new ways of being together.
Perhaps we may use this shorter list as bread for our journey together here, as we try in our own time and place to be faithful to Jesus’ founding vision of a community that lived in recognition that the kingdom of God was near at hand.
As we welcome new members into this community today, and, in a few minutes, as we begin thinking anew and afresh about some basic structures of support and staffing for this community, may we be guided by commitments such as these, watered by the wellspring of our own tradition, and rooted and grounded deeply in our trust in the love of God, the grace of Christ and the communion of the Spirit. Amen.
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[1] Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004) 19. This volume of Merton’s work went unpublished for more than 40 years. For a description of the controversy surrounding the work, see the introduction by Patricia A. Burton.
[2] Brian D. McClaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervans, 2004) 294.
Rev. Dr. David Ensign