Journeys of Joy

1 Corinthians 12:12-20, 21-31; Luke 4:14-21

January 27, 2013

Often on the Sunday of our winter congregational meeting I’ll use the sermon time during worship as an opportunity to give a kind of “state of the church” address, as it were. I don’t want to dispense with that altogether, so let me do it in brief: the state of the larger church continues to be as complex and fraught with uncertainty over the future as it has been for at least the past generation.

Just Friday morning, a good friend who works at the Alban Institute posted an open question on Facebook about whether or not it’s time for denominations to close most of their seminaries because they are training pastors for jobs that do not exist, and there is a large and significant controversy brewing in our denomination over changes in policies of our Board of Pensions. All of these are being driven by massive shifts in our culture that do not augur well for the future of the church in America.  It is not hopeless, for with God all things are possible, but it is not all beer and skittles!

The state of the wee kirk, here at Clarendon, on the other hand, is good. Beer and skittles all around! Well, perhaps not that, but good, nonetheless. We’ll talk a bit more about the particulars over brunch in a little while, but the body of Christ here at Clarendon is strong, it is growing, and it is filled with the Spirit. Thanks be to God.

It’s good to have a strong body, healthy and whole, and a joyous spirit when one is on a journey. It’s not necessary, mind you. There are many folks whose bodies are not quite whole who set out on remarkable journeys and complete them fully. Have you ever seen Oscar Pistorius run? He’s the South African Olympian they call “Blade Runner.” A double-amputee, he reached the semifinals of the 400 meters at the London Olympics last summer running on carbon-fiber prosthetic legs.

The broader church, whose body seems so often so dysfunctional these days, could learn a thing or two from folks who do very much with what, at first glance, seems very little.

Which is to say, I reckon, that strong bodies come in all kinds of shapes, sizes and configurations, and often human beings find their greatest strength precisely in what we might first consider weakness. My prayer for the larger church is that we discover strength precisely in places that we might consider weaknesses – places, dare I suggest, such as small, progressive congregations who are boldly trying new ways of being the body of Christ. Strength doesn’t always come in numbers; sometimes it comes in joyous spirit.

Of course, a joyous spirit is not necessarily always a happy one. Some of the great saints of the church suffered almost debilitating despair at points along the way. Mother Theresa’s diaries revealed both deep doubts and depressions, but nevertheless a full spirit animated her life’s work. There are other examples as well: Martin Luther King, Jr. suffered bouts of deep depression but still managed to cast a vision that resonates with a nation a half century after he put it into words.

So wherever you find yourself along the great spectrum of bodies or in any personal measure of happiness, there is a sweet, sweet spirit of deep and resonant joy moving in our midst to sojourn with us.

Sojourn is the key here. We do not journey alone, but as part of something larger than ourselves. Together, as Paul told the church at Corinth, we are the body of Christ, and individually members of it. So if sometimes our part of the body feels a bit weary and worn, there are other parts to bring renewal and restoration. We may stumble and we may fall, but there are other hands to lift us up as we follow Jesus’ call.

That is the crucial work of the church for its own members, and the work that we do for one another enables us to follow that calling of Christ into the world where our calling is the same one he felt and claimed in Nazareth:

To bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, liberation to the oppressed and jubilee to the world!

We do this in all kinds of ways, called according to our gifts and appropriate to our circumstance. We are called, always, to meet this moment along the way.

So, here we are, the recipients of countless gifts and faced with also countless opportunities to use them. The state of this wee kirk is strong. Let us sojourn together with joy. Amen.

Of Castles and Cathedrals

1 Corinthians 12

January 20, 2013

As most of you know, I spent most of the past week in Scotland celebrating Martin’s 19^th year just in time by taking him to the land of my forebears and introducing him to their native drink. In truth, the whisky drinking was a very small part of the trip. We spent most of our time exploring old castles because, well, they’re castles!  

You can climb all over the ruins of these buildings that date back, many of them, more than 1,000 years. Of course, at a certain point, you either run out of steam for looking at castles or you begin to ponder something a bit bigger than the architecture. To be sure, the buildings themselves are interesting to look at, and they do lend themselves so very well to moody photographs.

Martin and I took more than 500 pictures, and right about now you are probably giving thanks that this sanctuary does not have a video screen! Do let me know if you want to look at castles!

Actually, I wish I could show you a couple of pictures because they are instructive. For example, in St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, the High Kirk of the Church of Scotland and the mother church of Presbyterianism, there’s a fine example of one of the common gestures of the Reformation: taking the pulpit from the front of a long sanctuary, placing it on one side wall in the center and turning all the seating to face that point. Whether or not it’s an example worth following in its specifics, on a general level it’s a great reminder that when the physical space gets in the way of how you feel called to worship then no matter the weight of history and tradition you change the space even if it already has centuries’ worth of tradition!

When the fascination with the rock piles wears thin you begin to listen for the echoes of lives and histories, and that’s where what risks being a travelogue turns toward being a sermon, or, at least, a meditation on life and faith and the word of God through the lens of castle and cathedral.

Last weekend, while y’all were worshipping here at the wee kirk, Martin and I were in St. Andrews. You may know St. Andrews for its role in the iconic opening scene of Chariots of Fire – the lads running along the beach to that famous score and then hopping over a couple of low fences to run across the green, green grass. Perhaps, you know it as the historic birthplace of the game of golf, and we did stroll along the home hole of the Old Course and looked across those very same low fences and that very same green, green grass in the wind and fog and rain and sleet and snow. I’ve never been any place where the old saw about the weather is more accurate: don’t like the weather in Scotland? Stick around 15 minutes; it’ll change.

Anyway. That much I knew. I did not know, however, that the castle and cathedral at St. Andrews played a significant role in the development of the Scottish kirk, and, therefore, in our own development as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Turns out that a fellow by the name of George Wishart, who had studied under John Calvin and whose heart was aflame with the ideas of the Reformation – ran afoul of the cardinal and, alas, in the way of things in the mid 1500s, found the rest of himself aflame, too, right in the middle of the street outside the castle at St. Andrews on March 1, 1546.

A sign there today says that the spot on the street where Wishart was burned at the stake is marked with a GW, though I couldn’t locate it. In any case, John Knox had been moved greatly by Wishart’s teaching and when he heard about the fate of his friend he rushed to St. Andrews from Edinburgh to preach the message of the Reformed church. For his efforts, Knox was imprisoned as a galley slave aboard a French ship for more than a year.

Contrary to the cardinal’s hopes, the martyrdom of Wishart and the imprisonment of Knox did not dampen the spirit of reform but, instead, eventually spurred the Reformation onward in Scotland. Meanwhile, at the end of May that year, followers of Wishart and Knox finagled their way into the castle, murdered the cardinal and hung his body out a castle window.

Upon his release by the French, Knox was exiled to England then forced to leave there as well, which led him to Geneva where he studied under Calvin. He was finally able to return to Scotland around 1550, and spent the last two decades of his life defending the ideas of the Reformation and the Scottish kirk to whose founding he was central.

The intrigues of those final decades – especially Knox’s running feud with Mary Queen of Scotts – have filled more than a few volumes of Scottish history and echo still off the stones of castles and cathedrals from Edinburgh to Loch Leven, from Stirling to St. Andrews.

What has any of this to do with us, more than 3,500 miles and almost 500 years removed?

Well, some of the connections are obvious: the roots of our contemporary Presbyterian polity lie in Scottish soil and in the fertile ground of Knox’s theological imagination. The impulses toward democracy imbedded in our Book of Order – and, not coincidentally, in our nation’s Constitution – come straight out of Knox’s thinking about church and civil order. So it was not just for the sake of a Facebook status when I doffed my cap to the statue of Knox there in St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh where he preached some of his most fiery calls to Reform.

This morning, though, I’m mindful of a more subtle connection. On his deathbed, in 1572, Knox had his wife read to him Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, which includes our passage for this morning:

“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit. […] All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.”

It can certainly be misleading to read history through the lens of contemporary values, but as I read Paul’s words again and think about the story of Knox and all those Scottish kings and queens and reformers, I am struck again by just how hard it still seems to recognize that the same Spirit is the source of all good gifts that can be used for the common good. Oh, to be sure, their times were complex, and lacking a shared vision or understanding of the common good it may simply have been impossible to see the world differently than they did.

The cardinal of the cathedral of St. Andrews could not recognize that the same Spirit gave George Wichart and John Knox gifts that were so readily available for the common good. In the same way, Knox himself could not see the gifts in either the Roman Catholic church leaders or in Mary Queen of Scotts.

I wonder if, there on his death bed, hearing Paul’s words – and, especially the ones that come next about the gift of love – John Knox gave any consideration to the possibility that some of the people he had railed against might also have had great gifts for the common good.

More than that, though, as Martin and I climbed over the various castle and cathedral ruins, and strolled the ancient cobble stones of Edinburgh, I wondered what blindness we have to the gifts of the Spirit that other folks have? Moreover, what blinds us? What stands between us and a shared vision of the common good in all of the various spheres of our lives?

I certainly don’t pretend to have the answers to all of those questions, so I’ll leave them as questions and close us in prayer.  Mary Queen of Scots is reputed to have said, “I fear the prayers of John Knox more than all the assembled armies of Europe.” So let’s close with one of the prayers of John Knox. Whether or not his words ring much true for us, almost 500 years after they were prayed, they do stand as a reminder that the same God who gives us gifts for our own time is the God who hears our prayers in all times.

“But, O Lord, infinite in mercy, if thou shalt punish, make not consummation; but cut away the proud and luxuriant branches which bear not fruit, and preserve the commonwealths of such as give succour and harbour to thy contemned messengers, who long have suffered exile in the desert. And let thy kingdom shortly come, that sin may be ended, death devoured, thy enemies confounded; that we thy people, by thy majesty delivered, may obtain everlasting joy and felicity, through Jesus Christ our Saviour, to whom be all honour and praise, for ever.”

“Amen. Hasten Lord, and tarry not.”

Epiphany: Open to the Light

Isaiah 60:1-6

January 6, 2013

There were two short videos circulating around the social network right before Christmas. You may have seen them. One, published by the New York Times, was a series of still photographs set to haunting piano music. The pictures were taken from an third-story window overlooking a New York City sidewalk where someone had set a piano out to be picked up by trash haulers. The photos, screened without comment, showed a random series of folks stopping to check out the old piano. Some plunked its keys. Others tried to push it along. One young couple clearly wanted to take it. They played it. Pushed it. Walked around it trying to figure out how they could get it home. Then they left it. In the wee hours of the next morning, a group of men came at the piano with crowbars and sledge hammers and smashed it to bits. Later on, the young couple returned. This time with a piano dolly, only to find the instrument scattered in pieces all over the sidewalk. The video ends with them walking away sadly, leaving the otherwise empty sidewalk.

I’ll tell you about the second video a bit later.

But first, as we begin a new year together, I want to reflect briefly on the one just past.

A little less than one year ago, session gathered for our annual planning retreat day and we adopted an ambitious agenda for the season we’ve just lived through together. We said that we wanted to create together a more vibrant congregation.

Now a few of you may be more than a bit tired of the word “vibrant.” I’ll grant you that!

But we said back then that we wanted, in the year that lay ahead of us, to clarify our congregational mission, to discern a model of ministry appropriate to that mission, and to redeploy our staffing resources accordingly.

It’s tempting to stand up here this morning and go all George W. Bush on you and proclaim, “mission accomplished!”

Well, we all know how that worked out so I think I’ll avoid the temptation.

Indeed, we are Christians and today is the day of Epiphany. Taken together, those two facts ought well to remind us that the mission is never fully accomplished, and that the vision always shines brightly before us calling us on toward an unfolding future of God’s imagining.

In the meanwhile, we do the work that is before us, trusting that the present moment and the unfolding future belong to God, and trusting that we have been given the gifts that we need for the moment that we have.

I began pondering this morning’s sermon last month, on a particularly foggy morning when I couldn’t see a block in front of me much less see a future unfolding over months and years to come. I was walking past the construction site out there on Irving St. and it struck me that the workers scurrying around the site probably did not have, at that – or any given moment, a perfectly clear vision of precisely how their present task would work into the finished building.

Indeed, at that point in the project most of them were either still clearing earth from the bottom of the pit or building the framing into which the foundation would be poured. Moreover, the way construction works, a lot of the guys working on this part of the project won’t even be around to see the finishing touches. They all remain a long, long way from finished.

That’s where we are this morning: a long, long way from finished, but beginning, step by step, to see some fog lifting, some near-terms plans unfolding, some hopes beginning to be realized.

Joseph and Mary weren’t even at that stage when the magi came calling with their strange tale of following a star and their intriguing gifts. It’s easy, and fairly common, to mock those gifts – gold, frankincense and myrrh. We’ve heard the joke – if it had been wise women they would have asked for directions and brought practical gifts.

But Martin Smith, an Episcopal priest, suggested a while back in Sojourners that the gifts of the magi are more down-to-earth practical than we might imagine. Smith writes, “The Son of God appears as a poor child at risk in just those ways that millions of children are today. The Magi’s gifts are not exotic luxuries, but practical relief aid. Mary and Joseph need financial help. A cramped peasant’s house, with animals crowded on the other side of the manger that divides the single room, stinks of their excrement. The baby has a rash because the manger is crawling with fleas. The wise men are wise enough to offer money, fumigation, and medication.”

With simple gifts, the magi help to transform a marginal and tenuous existence into something just a bit more sustainable, and with the vision to see danger just ahead they help to ensure that this child will grow up to share his gifts with the whole world.

It’s probably not too far from accurate to say that the existence of any small, mainline Protestant congregation in North America is marginal and tenuous these days, but we have been given incredible gifts – among them the imagination to cast a vision for a future otherwise that we can share with the whole world: imagine a world where everyone is welcome at the table, where everyone has enough to eat and to prosper, where everyone lives in shalom.

That future otherwise is the light that shines before us. We can live in it and live into it, if we but have the vision to use well what we find right before us – as available as a cast-off piano on the sidewalk. If we do what we can with what we have where we are in this very moment, that future otherwise is not only possible, it is assured because God is calling it forth and God will not be mocked.

Of course, we can, if we choose, ignore the gifts or abuse them. We can smash the piano to smithereens. Or … or we can do something beautiful with very, very little.

So, I told you that I’d seen two videos. The second video, which I happened to see the day after I’d seen the first, is a very short documentary – less than four minutes. It tells the story of the landfillharmonic symphony – a group of young musicians from a slum in Paraguay. Their homes are built in, on and around a landfill. Their instruments are made from trash. Among the first musicians shown is a 19-year-old named Juan who plays a cello constructed from an oil barrel, a meat tenderizer and what looks like a 2x4. He plays a piece from Mozart with such beauty that it brings tears to your eyes.

If the life of Christian faith is about anything at all, it is about this: finding new life where only death seems to reign. We are a resurrection people. We trust that a light shines in the darkness that the darkness shall never overcome. Epiphany celebrates the light, and the moment when our eyes are opened to see the gifts we have been given again for the first time.

Arise, shine, for your light is come! Live into that light. Amen.