Fear Not

Psalm 51; Jeremiah 31:31-34; John 12:20-27
March 25, 2012
Last week we talked about the gospel, the good news that we are loved, the simple, fundamental proclamation that God loves us and that we belong to God.
I believe this is what Jeremiah was talking about when he said, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
The great good news is that every step of the way in our long journeys we belong to the God who loves us, the God who makes us alive, the God who raises us up!
That’s what I said last Sunday … and then I asked you what difference that makes.
This morning I want to tell you what difference it has made in my own life. I’ll not attempt to speak for Cheryl and the kids on this, but as for me, I am no paragon of virtue. As the psalmist said, “I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.” There are plenty of cracks in this jar of clay, and I can only hope that they let the light in sometimes.
But in spite of those cracks I have always trusted that baseline gospel message that has been written on my heart. God so loves the world, and somehow, regardless of my own brokenness, I am included in that promise, and that has made all the difference.
“What difference?” one might well ask. Simply this: trusting that I am somehow included in the promise to the beloved has allowed me to live at least a bit more fearlessly, to make choices that may not align with the values of the broader culture because trusting that promise has freed me – not all the time, to be sure, but at critical moments – freed me from paralyzing fear.
That liberation is essential because God is not finished with me yet. If the journey was done, if God was through with me, I would never again face any fearful moments or decisions. But that’s not how this life works: we all face times of decision, times of crisis, times of fear, sometimes all of the time.
An early one for us came when, as the old song says, I “left a good job in the city …” back in the mid 90s, and we cut our family income roughly in half in order that we might live more faithfully into the often fearful calling to be parents of young children – a vocation which, at that moment, seemed more likely to be lived well in Lexington, Kentucky, than in Chicago, Illinois.
Before we’d been in Kentucky even six months, I discerned quite clearly another calling that I really thought I’d buried under years of denial and neglect, having run, like Jonah, far from Nineveh. So, having enjoyed so much the liberation from half our income, we decided to try it again. We did, for the second time in as many years, cut our income roughly in half so I could go to seminary.
There is not much in American life that runs more counter to the prevailing cultural values than that, but we made the decision as a couple trusting, simply, that God loves us, makes us alive, raises us up and would be with us all along the way.
We did not know that any of this was right. We did not know how any of it would turn out. I listened for, longed for, prayed for the kind of lightening-bolt-from-the-sky clarity that would make the next step, the next turn, the next decision utterly clear, but I never heard a voice from heaven. Instead, in hundreds of little things – a supportive word from a trusted friend, an unexpected opportunity to do meaningful work, a prophetic word from a pulpit – in hundreds of little things way became clear.
By the end of the 90s we were in Pittsburgh, struggling in a place where we never felt remotely at home, because sometimes even what seems clear and faithful turns out muddled and painful.
At that point the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was living through the earliest efforts to change or repeal G-6.0106b – the provision voted into the Book of Order in 1997 requiring candidates for ordination to “live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.”
We took a family vacation in the summer of 2000 to the Gulf Coast of Florida, a destination I pushed primarily because I wanted to drive through my birth state of Alabama. We could take the kids to the space center in Huntsville – which they would love – and to the Civil Rights historical sites in Birmingham and Montgomery – which I would love.
Standing at the base of the Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon, we marveled at what human beings can imagine and accomplish.
Standing in Martin Luther King’s first pulpit in the small sanctuary of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, we marveled at the same thing. Looking out at our children from that pulpit I came to some clarity. “What would I say,” I wondered, “when 20 years down the road my children asked me what I did during the great civil rights struggle of my day?”
I returned to Pittsburgh – among the most conservative Presbyteries in the country – resolved to speak out on an amendment before the denomination that year that would have prevented any church officer from participating in any way in any service that blessed a same-gender union, and would have prevented sessions from allowing church property to be used for such services. The General Assembly had approved the amendment while we were on vacation.
Prior to Pittsburgh Presbytery voting on it in January, 2001, I preached a sermon insisting that same-gender marriage was a civil right that Dr. King would have insisted upon. Two weeks later I was asked to resign.
I don’t recount this personal history to claim any particular vision, any particular courage, certainly not any particular rectitude. If anyone has such a claim to make in this story, it’s Cheryl, who lovingly supported me through all of it, often against her own self-interest.
No. All I’ll claim in any of it is this: I really do believe that God loves us, God brings us to life, God raises us up, God is with us. And that has made all the difference. That simple truth has freed me from the shackles of my own limited vision, my own narrow self-interest, my own abiding fear.
Some years ago I was talking with someone about a church-related plan that was unfolding with painful deliberateness, much too slowly for this person, and I said, trying to be reassuring, “it will work out in the long run.”
The person responded, “in the long run we’ll all be dead.”
It was said lightly and I responded in kind, but I should have said, “No, in the long run we will all live, and we’ll live lives free from the fearfulness that binds us in this life.”
You see, at the heart of the gospel is this astounding claim: death is not what defines us. Rising up in the face of death is what defines us! Resurrection is real!
The great thing about living faithfully here and now is that you taste the liberation of resurrection life. Faithful life is not life without pain or suffering, it is life without fear and such life is worth savoring.
That’s what Jesus meant when he cautioned his followers about clinging too much to this life. “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
That messages runs counter not only to the culture, but, indeed, to our very DNA. We are programmed to cling to this life. Such clinging is the logic of survival. Take a deep breath. Now hold it … for about three minutes!
In an address to the NextChurch conference last month in Dallas, theologian Stacy Johnson, citing Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, suggested that there are two ways of living as Christians: “We can live as those who are perishing or those who are being saved. Mainline religion,” he said, “faces a tsunami of change that may make us feel that we are perishing.”
You know what? It’s not just mainline religion that faces waves of change. Each and every one of us confronts change on an almost unimaginable scale almost every day.
How many of y’all remember Netscape? How many of you remember the first time you encountered the letters “www” as meaningful? The web, as we know it, is younger than our first child, who took his first legal drink last month. The job that he hopes to have this summer did not exist when he was born.
The waves of change that we try our best to stay ahead of or on top of can certainly make us feel like we are perishing.
The goal of the logic of survival in this, and any, context is to live for as long as possible, and surely longer than average.
As Johnson told the folks in Texas, “We’ll say or do almost anything to achieve that goal. Yet we know that Jesus of Nazareth embodied a different logic – the logic of the cross. Jesus … lived under Roman domination and occupation but Jesus’ message was … not to give in to the reign of the Romans but to trust in a different reign: the reign of God.”
To trust in a different reign means letting go. For the church it means letting go of ancient orthodoxies in order to get back to deeper truth. For each of us along the way it means letting go of our longing for security in order to rest in the deeper security of the gospel.
God is not done with me yet. God is not done with this church yet. God is not done with you.
Letting go does not bring unending waves of joy – at least not in this life. But it does bring deep peace, true shalom: wholeness, healing, communion with one another and with the God who is not yet done with us. That’s what difference the gospel makes, and therefore it is good news worth giving your life to. Amen.

The Work of Faith

Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21
It is good to go to the beach.
Can I get an “amen” to that?
Yes. It is good to go to the beach.
I go to the beach to stand at the edge of the ocean, to stand in that liminal space where the water meets the land, to stand there at night and stare out into the blackness and see the lights of a million stars, to be in what has always been for me a “thin place” – a place where the huge distance between me and the Holy and the wholly other God gets closed a bit as I stand in awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of creation.
It is good to go to the beach.
Of course there are other lessons at the edge of the ocean. As we drove down the narrow spit of sandy earth south of Virginia Beach toward the place where we stayed for a few days last week one of our kids observed that “the wise man did not build his house upon the sand.”
No, but the rich man did. Wow! You think Arlington has expensive real estate? I ran past a 1950s block-house last week, on the Back Bay side of the spit, a little square, one-story cinder block construction that was no where close to even a thousand square feet, and the sign out front said it could be mine for a mere $650,000.
That sign got me to thinking about what we value in this life, and why.
In real estate it’s easy: location, location, location. But what about how we order other priorities, how we order our lives? What about where we place our faith, and, ultimately about how we respond to the only questions that really matter: who are you, and to whom do you belong?
That’s what’s at stake for Moses and the people of Israel wandering in the wilderness. They do not have location, location, location, so they’re left to confront the other questions without the security of place. Who are they? To whom do they belong?
Before they entered the wilderness the people of Israel had answers to those questions. Who were they? They were slaves. To whom did they belong? They belonged to Pharaoh.
But what about now? They are wandering Jews, completely unsure of their ultimate allegiance. Like most of us, in their fearful insecurity they gripe, they lash out, they point fingers. Does that sound remotely familiar? Ever been in a workplace that was dominated by uncertainty? How about a family in the midst of uncertainty? Any finger pointing in those settings? Most of the time when people respond to their fears and insecurities with anger and blame things just get worse; and that’s exactly what happens in this story.
It doesn’t get much worse than snakes!
Perhaps that’s the key. It’s as bad as it can get. They’ve hit rock bottom: wandering aimlessly in a wilderness, not enough food to eat or water to drink, and now: snakes.
At the end of their collective rope the people confront their own reality. They look at themselves in the mirror, and they confess. The essence of their confession comes down to this: they’ve lost faith. Put a bit differently, they’ve failed to keep faith with the one who brought them up out of the land of Egypt, the one who redefined their very being, the one who gave them a new identity, a new name, a new life.
While this particular story doesn’t name any false gods, you can sense the implication: the people have placed their trust in things that are less than ultimate – namely security, the security of place in particular.
We are not that different these days. We find all kinds of lesser gods in which to place our trust: money, jobs, the right school, the right neighborhood. We hold on to these gods with all our might – indeed, with all our hearts, all our souls, all our strength.
When we grip and grasp after lesser gods we have no time, no energy, no passion for the one true God. We have no ears to hear God’s call. We have no time to live into it. We have no heart to give to God’s heart, and we have no heart to give for God’s people.
And so we get God all wrong, with disastrous consequences. In a particularly timely example of getting God all wrong, a friend posted this note on his Facebook wall last week: “Too many people put God in a box. And then they put that box in their underwear. God is bigger than our sex lives!”
Indeed.
It is so easy, so tempting, to shape God to suit our own purposes, our own agendas, to remake God in our image rather than looking with care and love for what’s left of the image of God that has been within us from the beginning. But it’s only when we find that image that we can do the long – life-long – work of conforming the whole of our lives to that image.
That is the work of faith. As Moses and the people of Israel surely knew, it is no easy walk to the promised land.
We began worship this morning talking about some of the places of fear, of struggle, of brokenness that we find ourselves in at various points in our own journeys. As we think about some of those places I wonder what needs to be changed in order for healing and wholeness to emerge, for the journey into the promises of God to continue without spending 40 years lost in the wilderness of our own fears.
The people of Israel needed, just as we all need, a little reassurance, a little hope in order to take the next steps along the way. God provided a sign of reassurance, of hope in the wilderness.
The story in John’s gospel is the same. God provides a sign of reassurance, of hope, for our wilderness journey in the person of Jesus.
The passage we heard a few minutes ago contains one of the most famous and most abused verses in all of scripture: John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that he sent his only son, that whoever trusts him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
It’s always struck me as odd that this verse gets used like a weapon, like a great line dividing the world into insiders and outsiders, into the club of the saved and the legions of the damned. It’s odd because the very next verse says this: “Indeed God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved.”
As activist Robert Roth wrote in Sojourners about the lectionary passages this week:
“God saves lives. God saves souls. God saves peoples. God has not come in Christ to condemn, but to save. In Numbers, Moses is instructed by a Lord who wants people to live. In the psalm, God’s ‘steadfast love endures forever’ (Psalm 107:1). In Ephesians, God ‘loved us,’ ‘made us alive,’ and ‘raised us up’ (Ephesians 2:4-6).”
This is the good news that we celebrate in this place! Living fully into this good news is the work of faith. The great good news is that every step of the way in our long journeys we belong to the God who loves us, the God who makes us alive, the God who raises us up!
That is the God I meet in the liminal spaces, the thin places of beauty and grandeur – the edge of the ocean, the mountaintop. This same God meets me in the much more difficult places as well – those places of brokenness and incredible challenge, places of hurt and darkness. This same God beckons me to follow, step by step, from darkness into the light of the good news.
That journey tells me who I am: a follower of Jesus; and it reminds me that I belong to the God who meets me in that following. The way of Jesus answers for me the only two questions that really matter.
So, by way of closing but not of ending, I have two other questions for you:
First, if we believe good news to be good – if we believe that God loves us, makes us alive, raises us up – what difference does it make?
And second, if we believe this, are we not compelled out of simple human kindness to share it with others so that they, too, might live into the light?
Go out and do that – share the gospel. If necessary, use words. And share it knowing that every step of the way, you belong to God. Amen.

What’s In a Name

March 4, 2012
Genesis 17
What’s in a name? A rose is a rose is a rose, and all that.
So, how many of us were named after someone in our family?
How many of us were named after a figure in the Bible?
Anyone named after a famous public figure?
How many of us don’t know why we were given the name we carry?
Over the years I’ve found lots of folks who don’t know why they have the name they have, so it’s not particularly unusual, on the one hand. On the other, you’d think that something as dear to us as our own name would be something we’d know everything about.
Moreover, you’d also think it would not be easy to give up. Yet that’s just what Abram and Sarai do – they give up the names by which they’ve been called for many, many years to be called by something new.
What’s in a name, indeed?
My friend Bob Pryor, who is the retiring director at Camp Hanover outside of Richmond, has a remarkable gift for names. He makes an almost always successful effort to learn the name of each and every camper who comes through the place, which, in a full summer means more than 600 kids who are there, at the longest, for two weeks.
He makes the effort because it honors people and tells them that they are important.
Names matter because people matter, and, in calling each one by name, Bob is telling kids that they are beloved.
On the other hand, sometimes we get things a little messed up around names.
God is the one who calls us by the name that matters: “beloved.” The other names fade in comparison – especially the titles: doctor, pastor, teacher, general, president. None of those matters, because God strips them all away to reveal us to ourselves as what we really are: beloved children created in the image of a loving God.
We mess that up – mar, damage even destroy the image of God in others and ourselves – precisely at the moment when we make the names the culture gives us more important than the one God gives us. It happens even in the church, and sometimes it happens with the best of intentions.
I was walking around in here this week, meditating on these passages, and I took note of some name plates: the pulpit lights – given in memory of Donald Moriarty; the table, in honor of Irene and Alexander Evens; each of the windows has a name attached.
There’s nothing wrong with honoring loved ones, and attaching their names to things, but there is a danger there that the “thing” becomes more valuable than the memory or than the person honored.
When that happens, especially in churches, memorial stones become stumbling blocks. You know the old joke, “how many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer: “you can’t change that light bulb; my precious Aunt Sadie donated that light bulb 65 years ago. See? Here’s the plaque.”
Change is hard, and so often – as organizations and as individuals – we make it even harder.
That’s what’s so remarkable about the Abraham story: it’s all about change – right up to and including a change of names.
Sometimes I’d like to change names, myself.
For quite a few years now I’ve heard fellow liberal Christians lament the capture of the name “Christian” by the Religious Right. Isn’t there some other name we could call ourselves by?
After all, the earliest followers of Jesus were called, simply, “people of the way.”
And therein lies the rub.
They were called people of the way because they lived a certain way; their lives conformed to the way that Jesus lived. They were people of the way because they were called to a way of living and they responded to that call with their whole lives.
Following the way of Jesus sounds simple enough. In fact, I remember being told by somebody years ago when I was doing youth ministry that what he wanted was for me to teach kids to be nice and honest and polite. That was the sum total of Christian teaching, as far as he was concerned, and it would lead the kids toward success in middle class American life.
I still wonder what he made of passages such as the one from Mark’s gospel, in which Jesus taught his followers that he would suffer, be rejected by the religious authorities of his own people, and ultimately be killed (Mark 8:31-38).
Mark tells us that Jesus taught this quite openly, and that Peter, for one, didn’t much care for it. In fact, the story goes, Peter took Jesus aside and said, “knock it off, man.”
Jesus looked right at him and said, “get behind me, satan. You’ve got your mind on the wrong things. I’m focused on God and on following God’s call; you’re caught up in the world’s values. I don’t have time for that.”
Then comes the kicker – the line that no one has ever asked me to teach their children, the line that most of us grownups would prefer not to deal with either:
Jesus called the crowd and his disciples and he said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
When Jesus uttered those words the cross was not a piece of jewelry. It was not a sign of belonging to a faith tradition. It was certainly not the sign of anything of power. It was the sign of an empire’s crushing hand.
To take up one’s cross did not mean to wave it as a sign of triumph. It meant to carry the burden that Jesus knew would fall upon anyone who lived the kind of life he was living – a life that challenged the status quo of structural economic, political and religious inequality; a life that challenged the status quo of kinship and tribe; a life that challenged the status quo confinement of God to a particular religious practice; a life that challenged the powers and principalities by looking at people called “outsider” by the powerful and renaming the poor, the sick, the dispossessed as the “beloved.”
That kind of life is going to draw the attention – and the wrath – of anyone whose power, position or wealth is upheld by the way things are and is threatened by the prospect of change.
Who wants their children taught to follow that kind of life?
“If anyone would be my follower, let them take up their cross and follow me.”
And yet, here we are, people who say that, yes, we want to follow Jesus.
It is not easy to follow Jesus, and a community that does it really well, really faithfully, really honestly may be vibrant, but it is not going to be huge.
But that’s OK. As an article I read in the past few days put it, “The church’s job is not to grow – not even to survive. The church’s job is to die – continually – on behalf of the world, believing that with every death there is a resurrection.”
God promised to make of Abram a great nation, but God also made it clear that a lot of Abram – including the very name he called himself – would have to die in order for that nation to rise up.
That same article I read last week concludes like this:
“Convincing the church she does not exist for the benefit of her members, but for the life of the world is a bad church growth strategy. It's also exactly what the church must do. It's a tough sell because crucifixion seems like a losing strategy unless you believe in the resurrection. Faithfulness seems like a losing strategy unless you believe that the power of the gospel trumps our ability to come up with all the right answers to all the right questions.”
Friends, I do not pretend to know all the right answers, and I’m not even sure about the questions.
But I do know this, at my baptism I was called, claimed and named a child of the covenant – a child of the promise that God made to Noah, that God made again to Abraham, and to Moses, that God embodied in Jesus. I am a child of the promise. I am beloved. And so, friends, are you.
Jesus calls us now to go out into all the world and to teach each person we encounter that he or she is also beloved, and then to demand that every decision, every policy, every action of every powerful person or institution consider first the effects of that decision or policy or action on the lives of the least of these, our equally beloved sisters and brothers. Let us live that way, and in so living claim for ourselves the name of those who follow the way of Jesus. Amen.

All Generations

Isaiah 58; Mark 1: 9-15
February 26, 2012
Did you see the blurb in the news last week about Anne Frank? It seems that a Mormon church is baptizing her … again. Apparently this is not the first time Anne has been “proxy baptized” by a Mormon congregation.
All faith traditions, including the Reformed tradition of which we are a part, have their quirks, and I don’t mention proxy baptism to make light of Mormonism. Actually, I bring it up because it adds to my general curiosity about why the Mormon church is growing while across the United States most religions are in decline.
A Facebook post from a friend in Oakland popped up on the same morning that I ran across the Anne Frank nugget, and it put my curiosity in some context. Nichola is a young woman I met a half dozen years or so ago while she was working for Rabbi Michael Lerner at Tikkun while he was trying to get the Network of Spiritual Progressives off the ground.
Nichola was really taken with my reports on our efforts at Clarendon to start the CALL discernment program. In fact, she was so taken with it that she took it – all the way home to Oakland where she launched a nonprofit organization called the Seminary of the Streets. Over the past six months or so she has been taking the Seminary of the Streets more fully into the streets with the Occupy Oakland movement, and they led a small Ash Wednesday service last week.
Thursday morning Nichola posted this:
So, at last night's Occupied Ash Wednesday gathering, the one person present who had no substantial connection to Christianity was blown away by Isaiah 58, and at the end, said something like, "Oh my God, this is so beautiful! If your book says this about 'raising your voice like a trumpet,' and 'shouting out loud about the rebellion of the people,' and 'feeding the hungry,' why isn't this plaza packed with church people?" Those of us who are Christian just looked at each other sheepishly.
Why, indeed, is the public square not packed, not mention the church house?
We can look all we want at growing faith communities, and ask all kinds of questions about what they offer, what they believe, what they provide, what they practice. And we should do so because there are things to learn. But if we don’t actually believe the words of Isaiah – the call and the prophetic vision of Isaiah – then we have nothing. These words inspired a person of no apparent faith on the streets of Oakland. What do they do for you?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.
If we do not believe that – and I don’t mean give assent to the argument, I mean give your life to the God whose story is told in the prophet’s words – if we do not believe that, then we have no ground on which to stand. Our foundations will crumble, and our dreams of vibrancy will return to dust.
I have found, over many, many years of searching, that the best way to discover faith is by living into it day by day. Come, these 40 days of Lent, and live deeply into the faith and vision of Isaiah.
It is the faith into which Jesus was baptized. It is the faith into which you were baptized. It is the faith sealed in the sign of the bow that God hung in the sky with the promise to Noah and to us: to be with us always, to be God with us, Emmanuel.
Come, live these 40 days into that faith, and we shall be called repairers of the breach, restorers of the city’s streets. Amen.