Grace Along the Way

John 6:1-21; Ephesians 3:14-21

July 29, 2012

We’re going to begin this morning with conversation rather than end that way. But first we’ll begin in a time of silence in which I invite you to consider this question: where have you experienced grace this summer? What has come to you unexpected as a simple gift that lifted your spirit and filled your soul? It doesn’t have to be earth-shaking or life-altering; perhaps a simple act of kindness, refreshing cool on a sultry day – where have you experienced grace this summer?

* * * * *

We’ve all been shocked and saddened by the news of so much of the summer. I don’t suppose this is terribly different from any other season in any other year. Natural disasters, senseless violence, political intransigence, economic distress. The shootings in Colorado and the fires out there, the violent storm that racked our part of the world, international news that includes wars and rumors of war.

It is not hard to fall into apocalyptic thinking, so it’s not odd that I would get the old REM song stuck in my head: “It’s the end of the world as we know it …” and, of course, the song’s next line, “I feel fine.”

I feel fine! I don’t know why that is. I can get as cynical and morose as the next guy. The news out of Colorado is certainly heartbreakingly sad, and it is far from the only violence plaguing the nation or the world. Indeed, the cycles of violence seem endless and there is no good news to be had. We seem as far from ever from the vision of the psalmist – that we live together in unity – as we ever are.

Nevertheless, in the face of all that, we hear this simple story of feeding – John’s version of the feeding of the multitudes. People gathered by the thousands to hear a message of grace and transformation and experiencing that very grace in the simple gesture of breaking bread. This is the good news of the gospel, and it is enough for the day, somehow.

Imagine the scene: the occupied Middle East; an oppressed religious minority; state violence; extreme poverty and limited economic opportunity for the masses; end of time prophecies abounding; cataclysm at every turn. Sound familiar?

Into all that steps a man who takes a few fish and some bread and feeds the masses. It was the end of the world as they knew it. The world of hunger and hopelessness ended when the bread was broken.

And Jesus felt fine. So did Paul in his letter to the church at Ephesus. “We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus to live the good life as from the beginning God had meant us to live it,” Paul writes.

Live the good life – not in some “don’t worry, be happy” kind of Pollyannish willed ignorance of the world, nor in a pie-in-the-sky-bye-and-bye longing for the next world, but rather in a deeply faithful way of living here and now that trusts God’s providence and God’s saving activity in this world.

If this is the end of the world as we know it, then I feel fine, these texts say to me. Why? Well first, the world as we know it is deeply broken. The good news is that we don’t have to keep on living this way, broken and mired in our own brokenness.

Of course this can be a bit scary. After all, God gives us the gifts to change. Why is this scary? Well, because we have to use the gifts we’ve been given or the change will never come – not in our own lives; not in the life of this community; not in the life of the world.

So why feel fine even in the face of our own fears? Because we have been given what we need. Bread for the day, as the story from John insists. The power of the Holy Spirit, as Paul’s benediction for the church insists.

Grace abounds, as our own lives bear witness. Remember the stories you all shared just a few moments ago: signs and wonders of God’s amazing grace. We live in an economy of gracious abundance. There is more than more than enough for the day. There are all around us signs and wonders as miraculous as feeding 5000 people from a few loaves and fishes.

You remember our amazing Easter Sunday worship? We filled the sanctuary with seeds and seedlings. We actually planted some seeds, right here on this table during the middle of worship. Remember that?

Check this out. Here’s a handful of seeds: tomato, cucumber, pepper. These came from plants we’ve grown and harvested in our front yard, and they’re about exactly the same things that we planted in little seed beds right here on this table back in April.

Tiny little seeds. You couldn’t feed a squirrel on these.

We started with not much. Just an idea, really. Then we got some seeds and some dirt. Then we got a bit of lumber and added some sweat. We prayed together and we worked together, men and women, straight and gay, children and older folks, and now we are feeding our neighbors.

So here we stand – in the midst of the chaos and violence of the present moment – a community called to gather at table, spirits open to the thrust of grace, signs and wonders – and peppers and tomatoes and okra – all around us.

I don’t know if you feel it, but it is abundantly clear to me that we are all witnesses to a powerful sign and wonder: the future of this community laid out before us in joyous worship, joyous service, children, families of all kinds, gay and straight, young and old, filling this house with song and celebration, with laughter and praise, with word and sacrament, and filling this table with bread and vegetables and God knows what else!

It’s time to take this food and feed the world. Time, obviously, to take the literal food and feed the literal hungry bodies of our neighbors, but time also, and way past time, to take the spiritual food on which we are fed in this place and share that with our neighbors as well.

Signs and wonders. If it’s the end of the world of holding back, and fear, and scarcity, and of not sharing invitations with our friends and neighbors, and of unwillingness to share good news with a broken and fearful world – if it’s even the beginning of the end of all that, then I feel fine.

So let’s do it. Let’s go out into the world to share what we find at this table.

And I mean that literally. Let’s go, right now, out to our garden so y’all can see what I’m talking about.

It’s going to take us a couple of minutes, but that’s fine. We’ll process out, with care and assisting those who need assistance, and gather in a circle around the garden where we’ll close our worship this morning – out in the neighborhood where we belong.

The Joy of Our Several Callings

Mark 6:31

July 22, 2012

This is one of the great summer Sabbath passages in scripture. Jesus says, “hey guys, we need to get away for a while. I know a great little place out on the lake where no one ever goes. Let’s take a week off.”

Sounds good, right? I was on vacation last week, and while I was away I read an article reporting on a study that found that, low and behold, vacation is good for you! For about the millionth time in my life I thought, “they did not need to spend money studying that; they could have just asked me and I would have told them.”

Yup, turns out that relaxing, getting away, chilling out for a stretch is good for you! And, in other breaking news, the sky is up, the sun is hot, and chocolate is delicious!

Other than the chocolate part, I’m pretty sure Jesus knew all of that, too. He also tried to get away, but the work followed him. Most of us do not have work that is nearly as important, as life sustaining, as world-changing as Jesus’ work, so most of us – OK, really, all of us – can get away from the work for a while and, as much as we hate to admit it, the work will go on without us.

Of course, Jesus’ vacation plans didn’t quite go as expected. As so often happens, work went with him and the disciples. Perhaps they made the classic mistake of taking their cell phones along, or checking the email every day, or calling back into the office to make sure the place wasn’t going all to hell in their absence.

Have you ever done that?

For those of us not named Jesus, it’s called a messiah complex – the belief that the world cannot get along without us for even just a little while.

Truth be told, many of us arrange our lives such that the people around us cannot get by without us. We engineer dependency, and elevate our own importance so that we can voice that classic American workaholic mantra: I just can’t get away.

Perhaps we do this to avoid the stark truth: none of us is indispensable; not only that, but at some point down the road, the world will go on just fine without us.

It’s true. The work – and, indeed, the world will go on just fine without us. That doesn’t mean that we don’t matter, it just means that we don’t matter as much as we like to think that we do.

And what all of that means is this: find the work that matters the most to you because, in the end, the work matters more to you than you do to the work. Unless people are following you on vacation to touch your cloak and be healed then the work matters more to you than you do to the work.

Again, this is not at all to say that we don’t matter. It is, however, to say that since you and I can each be replaced in our work then we ought to choose the work that matters the most to us. Choose the work that brings you the most joy. If you have the luxury of choosing, then choose work that fills your heart, not just your savings account.

Following the way and the example of Jesus, choose work that brings healing and wholeness to the world, not only because, as the news of last week underscores again, the world obviously needs healing and wholeness. But so does your life, and work that brings healing and wholeness to the world brings shalom to your heart – every time.

In my own experience, such work also brings deep joy. It is not always easy or fun, by any means, and work that brings healing and wholeness into the world will necessarily take us into places of cruel disease and deep brokenness. But participating in God’s healing and wholeness in precisely such places brings a deep and abiding joy.

Yesterday morning a group of us from Clarendon had the opportunity to serve our neighbors in need at AFAC. AFAC can be a place of pretty deep brokenness, but it is also a place of God’s healing and wholeness, and it has been for many of us a place of deep and abiding joy over the years. We’ll get another chance to do some work there in a couple of months. I hope you get a chance to participate.

Later on this afternoon I’ll be down in Fredericksburg for the quarterly meeting of the board of People of Faith for Equality Virginia. The work I’ve done with that organization over the past five years has been another source of deep and abiding joy in my life, and as we begin to focus on some activism in Northern Virginia around bullying and around marriage equality I hope that some more of you will be able to share in that joy.

I always hope that the work I’m privileged to do here, week in and week out, brings some healing and wholeness into the world, and I am excited about what God is doing in our midst as we work together to grow this ministry and make this congregation even more vibrant. Looking around over the past many months, it is a deep and abiding joy to see so many folks taking on so many aspects of the work, and I trust that this will continue and grow in the season just ahead.

Each of us has several callings in our lives: we are children, we are siblings, we are spouses, parents, uncles and aunts and grandparents. We are neighbors and we are citizens. We are workers in the world. We are students and we are teachers. In each and every one of our several callings we are also, first and foremost, followers of the way of Jesus.

The story from Mark this week, finding me, as it did, on vacation, reminds me that from our central vocation there is no vacation. We are always, in each of our several callings, followers of Jesus – even at the beach or the amusement park or the mountains. We are always followers of the way of Jesus because we have been claimed in the waters of baptism and fed at the table of grace.

It does not matter what you believe about creed or theology or Christology, about virgin birth or literal resurrection, about the “sonship” of Jesus. It really does not matter. What matters is simply this: follow the way of Jesus. Following the way of Jesus is our central calling.

To the extent that we live well and fully into that calling we will find deep and abiding joy in our several callings. Amen.

David’s Dance Party

2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12-19

July 15, 2012

Sometimes the lectionary places before us scripture that seems particularly – even amazingly – timely; sometimes it is as if in drawing up the cycle of readings for the church the designers of the lectionary had some peculiar insight into the unfolding of history such that the word of the Lord for the church is delivered just in time.  Sometimes the cycle of readings brings together a set of passages that seem designed to speak to one another.

Other times, not so much.

Sometimes, like this morning, the lectionary simply places before us a good story. So this morning I’m trusting that whatever word you may need to hear from the doxology from Ephesians that we just heard will come to you by the grace of God, because I’m not going to touch on it at all. And the gospel story, the beheading of John the Baptist, was just too gory for a mid-summer Sunday morning!

The story from the older testament, on the other hand, is just so much fun! Listen for a word from God in a passage from 2 Samuel that I like to call, “David’s Dance Party.” Given that title, it strikes me as fitting to read it in bits and pieces, and to interrupt the reading with some music. So, listen with the ears of your hearts, and sing when the spirit says sing.

David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel, thirty thousand. David and all the people with him set out and went from Baale-judah, to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the name of the LORD of hosts who is enthroned on the cherubim.

They carried the ark of God on a new cart, and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart with the ark of God; and Ahio went in front of the ark.

n  Marching in the Light of God/Siyahamba

David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the LORD with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals.

So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom to the city of David with rejoicing; and when those who bore the ark of the LORD had gone six paces, he sacrificed an ox and a fatling. David danced before the LORD with all his might; David was girded with a linen ephod.

I got a Living Social offer last week for Fatback’s Funk-a-thon Dance Party! I wonder if that’s what inspired King David to get his groove on in front of the ark of the covenant.

I love this little story of David’s dance party. It’s a wonderful reminder that sometimes you just have to express your worship with your whole self. Sometimes, as this old kids’ song reminds us, when the spirit says dance, well, that’s just what you gotta do!

n  You Got To Sing

A friend and colleague posted on his blog last week a small dream he has, inspired by this passage. He said that when he read the story of David dancing before the ark he got an image in his mind of charismatic Christians, the so-called “holy rollers” who sing and shout and whoop and holler and clap and stomp and move in worship – the kind of folks of whom the Muppet Movie might say, “don’t look like Presbyterians to me” – the kind of folks who might sing in non-native languages! Oh, my!

n  Tu Eres Mi Gran Amor

My friend wondered if we could imagine a time when Presbyterians and charismatics might share one another’s gifts, if we could imagine a time when we “frozen chosen” might worship the Lord with abandon and when charismatic Christians might study deeply the sacred texts of our common history.

I suppose part of what my friend was imagining is captured in one little word from this song – it’s also one little word from our mission statement at Clarendon:

n  Come All You People

Of course, not everybody will appreciate what you do when the spirit says do it, and not everyone will join you in your song, your dance, your study of the word of God. Even in this joyous little episode from the life of King David not everyone is happy. Michal, the daughter of Saul, looks out her window in disgust at the display.

So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the LORD with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet. As the ark of the LORD came into the city of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.

The story goes on to say that she is appalled that the king uncovered himself before the maids of his servants – a line that has led some to suppose that David danced naked before the ark. I think what’s actually going on here is that David took off his royal garb and put himself on the same level as the rest of the people, dancing in a linen garment that would have been typical for folks of much lower standing than the king. It’s a bit like an image of the president in blue jeans. Some folks are just not going to like that because it doesn’t meet their expectations of what the powerful should look like.

I believe that was part of the resistance to Jesus – 2,000 years ago and today. We prefer our saviors not remind us that we all need salvation, that we are all broken, that we are, ultimately, alike in our frailty whether we live in the penthouse suite or alongside the city’s streets.

Oh, and we really do not want to think that we might find a savior – that we might find our heart’s true home, our own wholeness, our own deep shalom – among the destitute, some place like Butler St.

n  Butler Street

The good news in this story turns not so much on Michal’s response to David, but on David’s response: he just keeps on dancing! Indeed, in spite of the critics – and you just know there was more than one, because there always is – in spite of the critics, David just keeps on dancing!

Not only that, but the worshipful dance becomes a feast at which all are fed!

They brought in the ark of the LORD, and set it in its place, inside the tent that David had pitched for it; and David offered burnt offerings and offerings of well-being before the LORD.  When David had finished offering the burnt offerings and the offerings of well-being, he blessed the people in the name of the LORD of hosts, and distributed food among all the people, the whole multitude of Israel, both men and women, to each a cake of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins. Then all the people went back to their homes.

n  Amazing Grace

A table at which all are welcome and all are fed! That is the very definition of grace. Amen.

The View from Pittsburgh

Mark 6:1-13

July 8, 2012

After traveling back to Pittsburgh last week, it is almost overwhelmingly tempting to focus in on Jesus’ observation that a prophet is never welcome in his home town. I spent several days in Pittsburgh last week at the 220^th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and I was reminded during the week of, well, of Pittsburgh. Most of you know the part of my own story that includes 26 challenging months in the ‘burgh: first call out of seminary; disastrous mismatch of gift and call; the little thing about a sermon on the civil rights of same-sex couples; and an unceremonious resignation.

But I’ll pass by the temptation because, to begin with, Pittsburgh is not my hometown. More to the point, if there has ever been anything prophetic in anything  I said back then or since, it has been around the call to full inclusion and empowerment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Presbyterians, and, friends, while the GA in Pittsburgh did not advance that cause in any particular way last week it was abundantly clear that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has been transformed by more than a generation of faithful witness by dozens and dozens of prophets who continue to speak the truth in love and challenge the church to repent, to turn from its exclusionary practices and embrace the radically inclusive love and grace of our God.

Repent! Turn from the path of brokenness and division and embrace the grace that God freely offers, and in which you will find your heart’s true home, your wholeness, your salvation. That is the message, that is the good news that Jesus sent the disciples out to share.

While those old scars from Pittsburgh will be with me always, they’re just faint reminders now, not a place of pain. So I looked at the ‘burgh with fresh eyes and saw, again, the beautiful city nestled there where the waters meet in a valley bounded by steep ridges, and I remembered that the steel bridges of the Steel City were always my favorite aspect of the built city.

In a city of bridges, then, it was sad to watch bridges burned in actions of the assembly and the words of some of its participants, but at almost the same time it was a joy to watch new bridges being constructed through both faithful action and dynamic worship.

Let me explain. First, in terms of actions I turn to the newly formed “Presbytery of the Twitterfeed” – which meets at #ga220 – for the best summation I saw: “#ga220 let’s discuss how to discuss this for four hours, do parliamentary craycray, discuss for two hours, then vote to do nothing.” And that’s pretty much the “report from GA” section of the morning.

Seldom have so many confabbed for so long to get so little accomplished.

More specifically, on the hot-button issues before the assembly they voted down the assembly committee on Middle East concern’s most controversial recommendation on divestment of holdings in three companies – Hewlit-Packard, Caterpillar, and Motorola – that continue to do business with the Israeli defense forces in the occupied territories. GA did endorse a boycott of Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories’ products and dates from Hadiklaim, both companies produce their products in the occupied territories in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

On the other closely watched item – same-gender marriage – the assembly, again against the recommendation of its own committee, defeated an overture that would have changed the wording in the worship directory section on Christian marriage that defines marriage as between “a man and a woman” to “two people.” The assembly declined also to offer an authoritative interpretation of our Constitution that would have offered protection from prosecution in church judicial courts to pastors who preside at same-gender weddings in civil jurisdictions where same-gender marriage is legal.

I was disappointed but not particularly surprised by these votes. After all, this assembly installed my friend and neighbor, the Rev. Tara Spuhler-McCabe as vice moderator after the moderator election last Saturday, and then sat back and watched as a conservative drumbeat mounted against Tara for presiding at a same-gender wedding in the District this spring. When the noise reached an ugly level, Tara decided, on Wednesday, that to continue as vice moderator was too much of a distraction to the assembly so she resigned.

In that atmosphere, there was simply no way that deep discerning was going to occur. In truth, sometimes the assembly struggled to maintain simple civil discourse.

In the midst of the anger and hurt and exhaustion and disappointment that follow on such decisions, it’s important – essential, even – to note the good, but often overlooked work of the assembly; and it is fundamental to who we are to lift up the mighty power of God evident in worship at the assembly and, sometimes, in the committees themselves.

In terms of business that reminded me of God’s powerful presence: the 220^th General Assembly endorsed the interim report on discerning God’s call to the Presbyterian Church to consider the question of aligning ourselves with the historic peace churches with respect to questions of violence. That effort, which lifts up a truly profound possibility of transformation in the church, began in our session.

The assembly also spoke a prophetic word to the church and the culture around several financial and economic issues. We have been instructed, as congregations and as individuals, to look carefully at lending practices of the financial institutions with whom we do business. If they are part of the problem of predatory lending and usurious interest then we are part of the problem, too.

Scripture throughout warns against financial practices that victimize the poor and the economically marginalized precisely because such practices erect insurmountable barriers to justice and thus to community, and, fundamentally, such barriers to community are also always barriers to communion with God.

The gospel passage used in each worship of the assembly was Mark 2:1-12, the story of the paralytic whose friends cut a hole through a roof to get him close enough to Jesus to be healed.

Pittsburgh’s Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community drama team reconstructed the story set in a contemporary Presbyterian church whose elder-in-charge-of-greeting cares more about the appropriate appearance of the church and its members than about sharing the gospel. Appropriate, in her eyes, clearly meant white, middle-class, straight and clean cut. After offending several visitors who didn’t quite measure up to her standards, the new minister shows up. The new minister is an African-American woman – the horror! The new minister invites the elder to accompany her down to the city where, she says, she’s met Jesus living under a bridge. The elder-in-charge-of-greeting is dumbstruck, resists until she falls down exhausted, screaming “don’t take me to Jesus; I have to go to church!”

That enactment of the gospel led to the preaching of elder Tony De La Rosa, a partnered gay man who opened his sermon welcoming his mother and his mother-in-law. Tony, who is interim executive of the Presbytery of New York City, really could have sat down at that moment.

Instead, he preached a powerful, poignant and prophetic word to the assembly calling upon the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to dig through the ceiling and break down the walls to help the outcast, the broken, the sin-sick get to Jesus.

Years ago I brushed the dust of Pittsburgh off my feet because the folks in positions of power in the church there didn’t care to hear what I felt called to say. It was a joy to return barely a decade later to witness a married gay man preaching the word of God to the General Assembly of the church.

We have still a long way to go, but the arches on the bridges of Pittsburgh bend gracefully across three rivers to carry the rich and the poor, the struggling and the lost, the wondering and the redeemed across to the other side. Those graceful bending arcs of steel reminded me last week that the moral arc of the universe does, indeed, bend toward justice. When we do the work of love it bends the whole world round, and it will carry us on to the other side. Amen.