An Interesting Inheritance

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

We’ve designated today “Heritage Sunday” at Clarendon, and this morning we’ve celebrated some wonderful moments from our past.

The church, especially the church in the Reformed tradition, has a curious relationship to its own past, so calling a Sunday “heritage Sunday” immediately puts us in something less than perfectly smooth waters.

After all, we are a “religious” people, and the very roots of the word “religion” mean, in part, to be bound back, or to be attached by ligaments – that’s the “lig” in the middle of the word – to be attached back to the past – that’s the “re” at the beginning of the word.

But if you are also part of a religious tradition whose slogan is “the church Reformed and always being reformed” then clearly not all of the ties that bind are necessarily eternal. The challenge comes in discerning the difference between links that should remain strong and ones that should be let go of.

After all, you know the old joke: how many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb? Change?!?

Heritage Sunday is not a designation of the whole church; just something we wanted to do here as we begin our 90^th year as a worshipping congregation and as we enter a season of change. On the liturgical calendar of the broader Mainline Protestant world this Sunday is designated as Trinity Sunday. Talk about an interesting heritage: the three-in-one God; the mystery of Father-Son-Holy Ghost, Creator-Redeemer-Sustainer, Presence-Wisdom-Power, Almighty God-incarnate word-holy comforter.

There are countless ways to add up the three persons of the Trinity.

This particular theological construct is one of the most interesting parts of our inheritance. Alas, another part of our inheritance – the tendency to literalize the metaphorical – significantly reduces the richness and power of Trinitarian theology.

For example, despite a wealth of images of God offered in scripture, we’ve tended, following Trinitarian language, to reduce God to “Father” and, and the same time, to lose sight of the humanity of Jesus in his relationship to God. And, of course, the Spirit remains a big ol’ hot mysterious mess most of the time!

But our own tradition, our own sacred story, provides resources to deepen our understanding of God. Take, for example, the passage from Proverbs: who is Wisdom? This figure which has been, from the beginning, with God?

To begin with, wisdom, like the Word in the prologue to John’s gospel – in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God – wisdom, like the Word, was with God from the beginning. Wisdom is also clearly a feminine figure, and perhaps a feminine aspect of God’s self.

But before we go further, it’s crucial to remember, and to state it over and over and over again: all of our language about God is metaphorical and approximate. Our names for God are not God, and God will not be confined by the limits of our language or our imagination.

As the great Thomas Merton said, “Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time.”

In such a world, the great and essential comfort we can rely on is also this simple: wherever we find ourselves, there God is also, always, already.

Now, in our present situation, that means that God is with us through the changes, just as God has been with this congregation for nearly a century. The wonderful thing, the great gift, in our own particular heritage here is that we’ve been for 90 years a community that has always been open to the new things that God is doing in our world, and thus, we have been a community that has embraced change over and over again.

That doesn’t mean that change has come easily and without discomfort, but it does mean, for us, right now, that we have only to look around this space to know that we stand faithfully in a long line of faithful mothers and fathers of the faith who were open and willing to change. That is a heritage worth preserving and honoring with our own actions in response to what God is doing in our time in this place.

Our first hymn this morning is one of my favorites. It was sung at my ordination almost 15 years ago; someday I’ll sing it at a retirement service; and – heads up kids – one day, I hope way on down the road, I’d like it sung at my memorial service.

The song means a lot to me because it was written for a particularly significant moment in the life of the Presbyterian Church: the 1988 General Assembly that celebrated the reunion of the northern and southern branches of the church upon the opening of the Presbyterian Center in Louisville that brought together sister denominations who had been estranged since before the Civil War.

The Presbyterian Hymnal, published in 1990, was created, in part, to serve the newly reunited denomination, and, of course, it contains this song.

I’ve taken this slight musical excursion to lift up a several points for this day:

We are a people used to, and rather adept at change, including in hymnals!

We are being called into a season of renewal, which feels obvious all around us just now, and that entails change, including, as it happens, in hymnals!

You’ve no doubt noticed that we’ve been using this purple hymnal for a while. What you may not have noticed is that it’s a sampler of a new Presbyterian hymnal that will be published sometime this fall. We’ll be talking further about this in the weeks to come, but for the moment I wanted to lift up this particular artifact of our history.

Early in Clarendon’s history, when the congregation was less than 10 years old, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United State of America, published The Hymnal. I’m not sure what color it actually was, but I’m going to call it blue. It served the church for 20 years, until The Hymnbook came along. The great Eugene Carson Blake served on the committee that put it together, and I wonder how long they debated the shift from the hymnal to the hymnbook.

Be that as it may, the red hymnbook served the church until The Presbyterian Hymnal came along in 1990, and there are still countless Presbyterians across the country who refer to this as “the new hymnal.” Among the concerns that prompted this hymnal was the recognition that our hymnody at that point used almost exclusively male language to refer to God, and that our theological heritage is, in fact, far richer than that.

Wisdom, which has been there from the beginning, perhaps as the feminine divine, takes her stand at the crossroad, our text tells us. In this congregation, we have a long, rich heritage of standing at the crossroads and looking boldly toward the future through the eyes of wisdom, discerning with care and prayer the future that God is calling us into.

Whether the crossroads concerns new ways to sing God’s praises, reappraisals of our sacred space, new understandings of how we are called to serve our community or new understandings of whom God calls for ministry, we have a powerful history here of listening for God’s call and, when we have heard it, saying, simply, here I am Lord, send me. May it continue to be so among us. Amen.

Eyes on the Prize

Acts 16:16-34

May 12, 2013

The lectionary still has us along for the ride with Paul in Acts, and this morning’s text is the story of Paul and Silas, bound in jail. As the song and story tell us, they began to preach, to sing, to shout and the jail doors open.

The song has them walking straight on out, but the text is even more interesting. Listen for a word from God in this story:

²⁵About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. ²⁶Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened. ²⁷When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. ²⁸But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” ²⁹The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas.³⁰Then he brought them outside and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” ³¹They answered, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” ³²They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. ³³At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. ³⁴He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.

Paul and Silas don’t just walk out. Instead, they turn the entire situation upside down and inside out. That’s more or less the pattern of the whole of Acts: taking customary expectations – about the way of the world and the ways of God – and turning them upside down and inside out.

You would think that prison would be the last place that such expectations would be turned around. After all, when the jail doors do open you’d think that walking right on out would be the only impulse one would feel. But Paul and Silas understand that the patterns of life-as-it’s-usually-lived are not the prize they are after. Walking out, in that moment, would be giving up on that prize; it would be surrendering to expectations. It would be saying, in effect, “the powers that be have the right to control our coming and our going.”

Instead, they stand up and say, “you truly have no power here. God is in charge.”

The good news that they share from the prison cell insists that the powers that be, the ones that keep you shackled in fear, have no power. God’s love – for you and for all – is a force more powerful. Sharing that good news is all that Paul and Silas care about.

The powers that be – whatever they are and whoever embodies them – never want to hear their presumption questioned. Indeed, they will silence all dissent. That’s why running away seems like a perfectly viable option. That’s why hiding out seems like a decent choice. That’s why the wilderness seems to beckon.

But if your prize is overturning the powers and principalities, then running away is not an option. That part of the story the song gets exactly right.

*****

So what imprisons you? What powers and principalities hold sway over you? What fears shackle you?

Often we construct our own jail cells: we fear that we do not have enough, so we shackle ourselves to the pursuit of a more perfect balance sheet. We fear that we do not look good enough, so we shackle ourselves to the pursuit of a more perfect appearance. We fear that we have not achieved enough, so we shackle ourselves to the pursuit of a more perfect resume.

What is the purpose of prisons? Literal or metaphorical, whether built by ourselves for ourselves or by the government or a contracting corporation for those deemed criminals, prisons serve two ends: punishment and separation.

We punish ourselves for failing to live up to the imagined expectations of the idols we’ve been accustomed to worshipping: affluence, appearance, achievement, to name the three major gods of American consumer culture. Shackled in these jail cells, we separate ourselves from one another and from God.

Friends, the good news is this: the jail door’s open so come on out. You are loved by the God who created you just as you are. So much of what we pursue in life we simply don’t need. Let the chains go.

Around the table of grace, and in these waters of baptism, we are made free.

Paul and Silas share this good news, and next thing you know they are breaking bread with the prison guard and baptizing his whole family. That’s what the gospel of liberation is all about.

What is the prize, then? There are various ways of describing it, but not surprisingly, Wendell Berry names it simply and well. The chain of hand in hand, the prize we are to keep our eyes focused upon is simply this: kindness.

Writing in Christian Century last month, Berry concludes, “the wealth of this idea of kindness is not exhausted by kindnesses to humans. It is far more encompassing. From some Christians as far back as the 12^th century, certainly from further back in so-called primitive cultures, and from some ecologists of our own time, we have the idea of a great kindness including and binding together all beings: the living and the nonliving, the plants and animals, the water, the air, the stones. All, ultimately, are of a kind, belonging together, interdependently, in this world. From the point of view of Genesis 1 or of the 104^th Psalm, we would say that all are of one kind, one kinship, one nature, because all are creatures.

Much happiness, much joy, can come to us from our membership in a kindness so comprehensive and original.”[1]

This is the good news that’s breaks down prison doors. This is the good news that Paul and Silas proclaimed. This is the good news that binds us hand in hand. Keep your eyes on this prize.

For everyone born, then, membership in this kindness. For everyone born: let justice roll down like these waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. For everyone born: let there be a place at this table. Amen.

---

[1][1] Wendell Berry, “Caught In the Middle,” Christian Century, April 3, 2013, 31.

At the Table of Peace

Acts 16:9-15; John 14:23-29May 5, 2013The convergence of communion and Cinco de Mayo was too much to resist this morning, so, as you have already noticed, we have a slight “Latin” flavor to worship today. I’m always concerned in these moments that in trying to honor the authentic gifts of cultural differences we don’t slip into appropriation and, worse, into caricature.On the other hand, we gather at this table to express here our core conviction that this table belongs to one for all. The table belongs to Christ and he and his table belong to us all. Moreover, we believe that good news is for everyone.

That’s the conviction that emerges for Paul, over time and experience, through the stories collected in Acts. He starts out, famously, as the great persecutor of the followers of Jesus, and becomes over time the one called to share the story of Jesus far, far beyond the confines within which that story initially unfolded.

Paul is the one who first understands the implications of the story: if in Jesus God is demonstrating love for the world then that love is, indeed, for the whole world and not just for one small tribe. It’s Paul who first understands, in effect, John 3:16 – “for God so loved the kosmos” – and the Greek there is instructive. God’s love is for the cosmos, for the whole of creation and all who dwell therein.

That’s how Paul finds himself crossing over to Macedonia and traveling on the Philippi where he meets Lydia.

Let’s stop for a moment, before we follow Lydia’s example and gather at a table for shared hospitality, and consider what Paul has done. Or, perhaps more to the point, what God has asked Paul to do, what the Spirit has inspired Paul to do, and then, how Paul has responded to that call.

I don’t think Paul imagined that things would ever come to this. Even when he had the amazing conversion experience on the road to Damascus, I’d bet he figured on doing a little bit of work to support this small group of followers of Jesus pretty close to home. Bit by bit, his circle of concern has widened, but even so, Paul’s first journey was landlocked and when he set out on the next trip he wasn’t, according to the texts, planning on going beyond the edge of Asia.

But the Spirit speaks and beckons him across the sea to an entirely new continent. God, it seems, makes no small plans. We, it seems, only serve God and God’s world, when our response is a generous and expansive as God’s plans.

The spirit, that gift that Jesus promises to his followers in our reading from John, speaks to Paul and says, “go.” That same spirit speaks to Lydia, and she also responds in giving of herself. She is the first convert in Europe, and the whole of Christendom would be much better for it had it always followed her example.

She hears the good news that Paul proclaims, and her simple response is the one that we recall this morning: “come, join me at table, let us break bread together.”

At this table, we who were once strangers shall become friends; we who were many shall become one in the spirit of Christ’s peace. Come and see. Amen.