Creation & Commission

June 15, 2014

Genesis 1; Matthew 28

I have been variously accused during my 15 years of ministry of being too political, of being not political enough, and of being too subtle. I suspect that in the next 15 minutes of my ministry, I’ll be each of those things again, and I do hope that in the next 10 to 15 weeks, we’ll be all of those things, and more, together.

Over the past couple of years, we have engaged in several cooperative ventures in worship with our daughter congregation, the Church of the Covenant, and our sister congregation, Arlington Presbyterian. This summer, we’re going to welcome an additional community, Fairlington Presby, to this circle and the four congregations will be working from a shared liturgy each Sunday. We’re working on some plans for a Labor Day weekend multi-congregational picnic and worship – about which much more is to come.

“So,” you might ask, “what does this have to do with politics?”

Or, you might just ask, “so what?”

We just read the rich and quite familiar words from the first creation story in Genesis. Generally speaking, these words, in that very familiarity, are more comforting than challenging, and that’s probably a good thing given where the lectionary is going to take us this summer.

We’re in Genesis throughout the summer, but we’re skipping straight from the pastoral images of the creation myth into the discomforting, even strange world of the founding stories of God’s chosen people. Yes, we’re spending the summer in the company of the wildly dysfunctional First Family of Israel: Abraham and Sarah and their offspring.

Summer is often “family reunion” time, and on Sunday mornings at CPC this summer we’re going to visit the family reunion of Abraham and Sarah. We’ll hear their stories. You’ve heard them before. Remember that crazy hiking trip Abraham took with Isaac? How about that little thing, or fling, Abraham had with the servant girl, Hagar?

Oh, right. Polite families don’t talk about such things.

Well, apparently the people of Israel not only talked, but they wrote down these stories and canonized them as sacred scripture. We’re going to spend the summer with this crazy family, and explore some of the sex and violence at the roots of our own tradition.

Sex and violence at the roots of our family tree.

That’s the subtle part this morning.

Well, maybe not. Actually, our gathering, around the water of the font, was the subtle beginning of our family reunion. In the waters of our baptism we are connected – to our sisters and brothers worshipping today at Covenant and Arlington and Fairlington, and to every other sister and brother who walks and stumbles along the way of Jesus.

We say we are washed clean in the waters of baptism, and, before you go to meet extended family, don’t you want to clean up a bit?

I don’t know about you, but I know that many time, before I step into the circle of extended family, I not only want to clean up, but I also want to set aside things that are burdening me, that are weighing me down. So we began our worship in an act of prayerful unburdening, lighting candles to symbolize those situations in our own lives that we hold in the light of God’s love and grace.

Having come to the font, I feel ready to take on the less subtle parts of engaging the family – including the political parts.

I noted a moment ago that the creation story is often a comforting one, and it should be that. Lots of us find comfort in trusting the God who created the world and all that is in it, and pronounced it “good.”

That’s well and, well, “good,” as far as it goes. However, we cut off the reading there. Of course it goes on through all the days of creation, and includes the charge to be fruitful and multiply – we’re still in the words of comfort that far – but then comes the great responsibility: “dominion” over the earth.

This does not mean domination over the earth, but rather stewardship, care and concern for it, as with a garden. More to the point, the creation story invites us into ongoing relationship with the Creator and with the whole of creation.

The reality of our world compels us, in the words of our Brief Statement of Faith, to confess that “we threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care.”

Present reality and Biblical mandate taken together do not an overly subtle point make. Indeed, they cry out loudly and clearly for a politics of creation care, and as church in the capital of the nation that uses way more than its fair share of the earth’s resources, that politics might just need to start with confession that strives toward reconciliation and restored right relations with creation and with the rest of the human family, as well.

The condition of the environment is enough to make one angry, to spark one’s passion, to get one out of bed in the morning to work for change. It’s far from the only concern, and this is not about rank-ordering of passion nor a hierarchy of suffering. It is, however, about us; about our passions; about what sparks us. So I want to pause, for just a moment, for a prayerful naming of passions.

We’re not engaging in expository, explanatory, issue papers here. We’re offering prayers. Still, I do invite you, in the quiet of this moment, to name issues and concerns about which you are passionate:

Lord, hear our prayers.

* * *

Lord, hear our prayers, and give us the courage of the followers of Jesus, who have prayed in all times and all places the prayer he taught. …

Praying together, following the teaching of Jesus, is one of the ways we practice discipleship. It’s one of the ways we follow the great commission: go into all the world discipling – as Matthew 28 could well be translated. That is, go out into the world and invite all kinds of people to join in a community whose life is centered on what Jesus taught.

And what is that? As James Robinson put it, “Trust God to care for you, and hear God calling on you to care for your neighbor.”[1]

Hear God calling.

Listen for the voice of a 1^st century rabbi from the little town of Bethlehem: “if you love me, feed my sheep; if you love me, tend my sheep; if you love me, feed my sheep.”

God calls us to send us. How do we hear this call?

The pull of conscience when we know our consumption is fueling the earth’s warming, the fracturing of your heart at the most recent spasm of gun violence, the rending of your peace at the latest example of sexism or racism or heterosexism. These are the ways God speaks. These are the ways God calls. These are the foundations of our politics.

Our passions are God’s calling to us.

Here’s the political part: we are called, in Jesus’ great commission, to build relationships with all peoples.

Politics, rightly and fully and deeply understood and realized is nothing more and nothing less than the order of power in the city. Any “politics of Jesus” must be first, and foremost, about the ways power is used in the city in the pursuit justice.

And what is justice? In scripture, justice amount to this: sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it.

The rub is this: to understand that, to get it right, requires that we live in deep, authentic relationship with one another. We can start with our sister congregations, and that’s good, but it is all the more necessary today that we build such relationships with people who are not like us – people who understand “belonging” differently, who may have different priorities around “what belongs to them” than we do, and people who may have a valid claim on what we have come to think of as “ours.”

A politics of Jesus begins in relationships, in sticky, difficult, challenging human relationships.

That’s why to table is central to our life.

It where we hear Jesus call; it’s where we respond to that calling by saying “send me, Jesus, lead me Jesus, fill me Jesus. Send me, lord.”

Thuma mina.

Lord, when we see our neighbor hungry, send us out with food, and help us shatter every barrier to tables of plenty and welcome.

Thuma mina.

Lord, when we read the news of another school shooting, lead us to some deeper wisdom, some political courage, and the passion to insist “not one more.”

Thuma mina.

Lord, when we witness sexism, racism – however subtle or not – give us the courage of our convictions to speak up and speak out, and the passion to make the personal into the political and work to change not only hearts and minds but also systems and structures of patriarchy and racism.

Thuma mina.

Send me, Jesus. Lead me, Jesus. Fill me, Jesus.

Send us out into all the world – the world created good by the triune God – to build and foster relationships between and among all peoples.

Lead us into deep relationships where we learn to listen for quiet voices – for your voice – and where we learn together to follow the way of the nonviolent Jesus.

Fill us with your Spirit – a spirit of love and of grace – that we may be instruments of your peace. Thuma mina. Send us, lord. Amen.

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[1] James M. Robinson, The Gospel of Jesus: In Search of the Original Good News (Harper, 2005), xi.

Table of Hope

Acts 1:6-14

June 1, 2014

This is not a partisan comment, and certainly not an endorsement, but I’ve gotta say I am really enjoying driving around town these days and seeing all the signs that say “Hope for Congress.”

I just kinda like the idea of hope for such a dysfunctional body.

As Harvey Milk reminded us, “you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living.”

So, yeah, there are way worse things to hope for than hope for congress.

It may seem a bit anachronistic to think about hope in the midst of this season of recalling our past. After all, hope is always about the future.

Times of remembering almost always yield, at least a bit, to the temptation of nostalgia and even sentimentality. We tend to remember the distant past as rosier, simpler, and better than the present moment, and given the past decade or so of our history we can certainly be forgiven for imagining that the past was better than the present and, surely, more glorious than will be the future.

On the other hand, when we think back to the founding of this congregation we are thinking back to a world still recovering from the first world war, sitting on the brink of a global financial depression, and soon to enter the horrors of holocaust and World War II. Jim Crow still reigned throughout the American South. Women had had the vote for all of four years.

It may well have felt like “the roaring 20s” to those who founded this congregation, but surely they knew – or would know so very soon – that it can all turn to dust in a moment’s notice.

I wouldn’t trade places with them even if I could.

And, of course, I cannot and neither can you. If we are to have hope, it will be hope for a future otherwise.

We certainly know that it can all turn to dust in the blink of an eye. The news of the week – whether it’s the death of a beloved poet, the latest mass shooting, or weather-related devastation – reminds us of that. Indeed, the news of any week would suffice. Closer to home, the news of our own lives and families and communities will remind us as well of the incredible fragility of life.

When it can all turn to dust so quickly how do we hold on to hope?

We may be among the first generations to know fully that it could literally all turn to dust in the flash of nuclear bomb, but we’re certainly far from the first to understand how quickly life can become undone.

Jesus’ followers understood. The early church understood. Their story, in the book of Acts, begins in fear and trembling. Death is very close. Grief is still raw. Sorrow and confusion reign.

So what do they do? They gather together. They share their grief in prayerful conversations. They sit around tables and break bread, and very soon they begin to serve those around them.

They understood that the best way out of their own sorrow and pain would be found going into the pain and sorrow of others.

And that journey of compassion began at the table of hope.

That’s where church begins, because church is, first and foremost, a complex web of human relationships and relationships are born and nourished when we break bread together.

Church does not remain, always, fixed and frozen at table. We are gathered and sent. But we return, over and over, to this place because we need to be nourished every day. We need to be filled once again with hope, because we live in a world starving for it, and that world will empty us out.

We need to be filled with the spirit of hope, because standing in solidarity with the hopeless is wearying. We need to be filled, because working for equality in a world marred by sexism, racism and homophobia is draining. We need to be filled, because making peace in a world addicted to violence is just plain hard.

So, come, you who are weary, you who are sick, you who are hungry. At this table you will find rest for your weariness, balm for your soul, nourishment for every empty place within you.

You will also find your sisters and brothers; we who share this human condition and this divine hope. At this table, joined in a spirit of hope, we become once again the body of Christ for the world. Let us break bread together. Amen.