We Journey by Stages

September 28, 2014

Exodus 17:1-7; Philippians 2:1-8

“Isn’t this exactly where we were last week?”

Now that could be the commentator’s question about the text this morning, after all, we read a passage from Exodus last Sunday in which the children of Israel were wandering in the wilderness and complaining to Moses and Aaron about their lot in life.

“Isn’t this exactly where we were last week?”

On the other hand, that could be the complaint of the people of Israel.

“Hey! I think we’ve been here before! I recognize these rocks. We’re going in circles!”

Sometimes a journey feels like that. I reckon that’s why the Romans invented mileposts to mark progress along the road.

Out in the wilderness, the sojourning people had little to tell them where they were, and only a vague and poetic vision of a land flowing with milk and honey to tell them where they were going. Out on the edge like that, what seems firm is usually the past. “We were better off then, in the golden age of our enslavement, than we are out here where we don’t know what’s coming next!”

Funny thing about the past, though. At one point it was someone else’s future, and it was just as scary to them as it is comforting to us.

I’ve been thinking about stages of journeys a lot this fall, and as I was preparing this morning’s worship, I was particularly mindful of transitions along the way. We’ve used some old and traditional selections for the so-called “service music” this morning. I can’t tell you the last time the traditional “Gloria Patri” was sung in this sanctuary, and we haven’t used the doxology for several years, either.

Those pieces of service music take me back to the church of my childhood, where both were used every single Sunday without fail – world without end, as it were. Amen, amen. It just wouldn’t have been church without them.

But the church of Jesus Christ survived for many centuries without them. In fact, that traditional “Gloria” was only written in 1851. I have this image of the stately Calvary Episcopal Church in Manhattan, where Henry W. Greatorex led the music, wondering what in the world was this new-fangled piece of music they were being asked to sing the first time the choir sprung the “Gloria” on them.

The music for the doxology is much older – almost 500 years old. Which means that the church of Jesus Christ had only been around for 1,500 years before Louis Bourgeois composed what we now know as The Old Hundredth. He wrote the tune as a setting for Psalm 100. Interesting note about Bourgeois: he was imprisoned in Geneva in 1551 for the crime of changing psalm tunes without a license. He was released upon the personal intervention of John Calvin, but the town council ordered the burning of his choral instructions on the grounds that they were confusing to the singers.

The text we used in the doxology this morning is a mash-up that I put together drawing on some words from the late 1600s and others from the late 1980s. You can send me greetings in jail when the musical authorities come to take me away for messing with those lyrics.

I can’t help but think that Jesus would have been somewhere between laughter and rage at all the ways that people calling themselves his followers have found to fight over the manner they choose to express their commitment to following him. I’m pretty sure he would look at so-called “worship wars” in the same way he looked at the Pharisees – a mix of sadness, anger, ironic amusement.

I am absolutely certain that, in such a time as this, he would say that ending real wars is a way more urgent concern than fighting worship wars. I am certain that he would want to remind us, as we navigate our own changes, of what is most important.

Recall how he answered when asked to name the greatest commandment: Love God and love your neighbor.

As the Protestant revolution played out its final act in the British Isles some 1,600 years after Jesus, the Westminster Divines were asking themselves the same question: what matters most? Or, as they put it, “what is the chief end of man?” Their answer: worship God and enjoy God forever.

Put a slightly different way, with emphasis on the community of the church, the wisdom of our heritage insists that the core mission of the church in all times and places is the same: worship God.

What is left for us to decide is how best to worship in our own time and our own cultural context.

The Exodus story is the story of a people struggling through the stages of a long journey toward a self-understanding centered on that core identity: they are the people of God, called out to love and worship God. Moreover, they are called to do so from a radically different cultural context than the one they had grown accustomed to. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

More than the situation, though, the people themselves sound mighty familiar.

Think about them for a moment. God calls forth this people – this “stiff-necked,” ungrateful, lost, broken people to be a light in the darkness. God calls forth this people – a motley crew that includes murderers, adulterers, thieves, liars and drunks (and that’s just among the leaders, mind you, the heroes of the story) – God calls forth this people to be a city on the hill, a light to the nations, a community that will proclaim God and worship God forever.

So do not think for an instant that just because your own life includes a great deal of brokenness that God is not calling you. Do not think for an instant that just because you are all too familiar with your own darkness that God is not calling you to share light with the world.

Do not think for an instant, that just because we are a small band struggling with our own questions and decisions, that God is not calling us, as a congregation, to let our light so shine that others will see it and praise God for it.

Like the Exodus children, we are pilgrims on a journey. We journey by stages. Sometimes, for sure, it feels like we’re going in circles. “Hey! Haven’t we been here before! Didn’t we already argue over the words to the doxology 25 years ago!”

Sometimes, for sure, it feels like we’re taking a step backward, or in the wrong direction. I can assure that sometimes it feels like that because we are and we did! We’ll stumble sometimes. We’ll make some wrong turns sometimes. We’ll sing a new song, and we’ll sing it off key sometimes.

But we know why we are here. God has called us together to be a light in the darkness, to be doers of justice in an unjust world, to be makers of peace in a world rent asunder by war, to worship God and to invite others into the community of light.

“If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete,” Paul wrote another small congregation with its own struggles. “Be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.”

Will we do this perfectly and well all of the time? Not a chance. But that is OK, for the heart of our proclamation is this: God so loves the world.

Who are we? We are children of God. What does that mean? God loves us.

We journey by stages into the fullness of that reality. Let us journey together. Step by step. Amen.

Unexpected Grace

Exodus 16:2-15

September 21, 2014

Don’t you just love the “whole congregation of the Israelites”? Can’t you just hear Moses talking with God?

“Take my people. Please.”

What an ungrateful gathering! Seriously! Moses and Aaron have just pulled off one of the greatest feats imaginable. They had walked out of Egypt with thousands of liberated slaves – at the urging of the owner! Of course, the owner changes his mind and chases after them, but Moses and Aaron lead on, God parts the waters. The people – long enslaved – are free at last, free at last! Thank God almighty, they are free at last!

You’d think they’d sing a song of celebration. But, instead, this is the refrain:

“If only we had died … we’d be better off dead than wandering around out here in the wilderness not knowing where we’re going or where our next meal is coming from … we’d be better off ending it all right now, than in not knowing what the future is going to bring.”

Isn’t that so like us, so very human. There’s not much that we hate more than not knowing. As every good suspense writer or film director knows well, we fear most that which we do not know, and, in that fear, we tend to lose perspective, make mountains out of molehills, foresee the worst possible outcome even when it’s the least likely result.

This pattern plays out on small scales – in homes, classrooms, offices, and, yes, in churches. And it plays out on much larger scales in international relations – all too familiar and easy to see as nations, led by ours, march off toward war again, foreseeing the worst possible outcome – “we’re all gonna die!” – and blind to every possibility of grace.

Part of the simple power and truth of John Newton’s great hymn lies in those opening images, “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.”

We stumble blindly through so much of life. Bound up in fear of the unknown, we miss grace altogether.

But sometimes grace bursts through unmistakably. That’s the story of the Exodus. It’s hard to miss manna on the ground, even if you don’t recognize it or know what it is. Even in their uncertainty and fear, the children of Israel can see what lies right in front of them: a gift from God that will sustain them.

We have all been given such gifts. Indeed, take a deep breath. A gift from God that will sustain you. Sometimes we receive sustaining gifts in challenging moments and in unexpected ways. Manna in our desert times.

I invite you now, into a time of quiet reflection and meditation on this question: when have you received unexpected grace? What did it feel like? Who carried it for you, or made it manifest in your life? What difference did it make in your life?

So, when have you received unexpected grace?

Everyone has experienced grace – whether or not we recognize it. Indeed, rising up this morning to greet another day is a gift; it is grace. Sometimes, all we can do is receive it. We are too tired, too broken to respond at all. We are in the valley of the shadow of death, and a little light is a gift but it doesn’t empower us to do anything more than take one more step through the valley. Sometimes in our lives that is just fine.

But other times – most times, for most of us, I’ll suggest – the deeper question, really, is not so much, “when have you received unexpected grace?” But, rather, what difference did it make? What did it change in your life? How are you living, today, in response to grace?

Indeed, John Newton’s great hymn was possible for him to sing only because grace literally turned his life around – from captain of a slave ship to crusader for abolition. Most of us don’t life lives quite that dramatic, to be sure. But, in gratitude for the graces we have received, we can always live transformed lives.

I’ve been asked many times how I became involved in the work of More Light Presbyterians and People of Faith for Equality in Virginia and other witness for equality and justice for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender – queer folk. After all, I’m a straight, married man with no close relatives who are gay. To that extent, “it’s not my issue.” Right?

When asked, I always tell the same story, though I don’t always think of it in terms of grace. I became deeply involved in this work almost 15 years ago when, on a vacation trip through the land of my birth – Alabama – we visited several significant sites of the Civil Rights Movement. As a white kid growing up in the South during the 1960s and 70s, the unfolding drama of the Civil Rights Movement was the air that we breathed, the context of all kinds of everyday family decisions around neighborhoods and schools and churches. So many of the individuals who gave so much to that movement for human freedom were church folks – people of faith – and they became my heroes.

Standing in the pulpit of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery – Martin Luther King, Jr.’s first church and the birthplace of the Montgomery bus boycott that launched the modern Civil Rights Movement almost exactly five years before my birth – a simple question pressed in on my mind: when my kids are grown and want to know what I did during the great civil rights question of my time, what would I say?

Would I have to say, “well, there was just so much uncertainty and fear in the church, so I played it safe and kept my mouth shut.”

The grace of that moment, the gift of that history, and the graces of my own incredible privilege – were as readily apparent as manna in the grass. The only question was, “how will you choose to live in response to all that?”

That really is the only question for each of us: “how do we choose to live in response to what we have been given?”

A friend shared a note with me and Cheryl on Facebook last week. She wrote, saying, “our beautiful, perfect, created in God’s image son is most at home in a dress with a wig on … I was struggling and my husband said, ‘how blessed are we that God has given us this child, and has enough faith in us to entrust us with this child.’”

How do we choose to live in response to what we have been given? That is the question that presses in on us always. The answer? Paul says simply this: Live a life worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Always. In every moment. Amen.

Be Bold!

1 John 4:12-21; selected “follow me” verses from the Gospels

September 14, 2014

As many of you know, Don Hodgen and I spent the better part of the past two days as part of a relay team in a 200-mile run from Cumberland, Md., down to National Harbor. In the New Testament book of Hebrews it says, “run with perseverance the race that is set before you.” I was sorely tempted to preach on that passage; now I’m merely sore.

Actually, it is one of my favorite passages – it’s the one that begins, “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance …”

It’s actually not the running that I want us to consider this morning; it’s the great cloud of witnesses. More to the point, it’s our part of that cloud, our role as witnesses, that’s been pressing in on me of late.

The more I have pondered this, lately, the more I have come to a simple conclusion: We have failed to be bold in our proclamation! We have failed to be bold in our invitation to others to join the community of followers of Jesus. We have failed, even, to say with boldness, “come and see.”

I did a search for the word “bold” in scripture last week. It turns up more than 200 times, in all kinds of contexts, from being bold crossing the River Jordan to being bold heading into battles. But the single book of the Bible that contains the most instances of the word “bold,” is the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. Acts, that story of the early church and the explosive expansion of the movement of the followers of Jesus, is a story marked by boldness.

It would have to have been, for the movement would have died quickly had the first followers of Jesus, the people of the way, been anything less than audaciously bold in sharing with their world what they had found in responding to Jesus invitation: “Follow me. Follow me. Follow me.”

More than any other phrase in all his teaching and preaching, that’s the one that captures Jesus best, and, clearly, the one by which Jesus captured the imaginations of those who followed him. To follow him required boldness.

Jesus spent precious little time, according to gospel accounts, wrapped up in Christological debates. That is to say, he didn’t spend a great deal of time focusing on claims about who he was. I suspect he knew his time was short, so it was much better spent living the life he was called to, and inviting others to journey with him, than in endless debates about “the lordship of Jesus Christ,” as it were.

Such debates take the matter of Christian faith into the halls of academia where the drama of Christian life is reduced to obscure statements of belief that produce a great abundance of arguments but precious little by way of abundant life.

An old seminary joke captures this tension.

“Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asked.

The seminarian replied, “You are the eschatological manifestation of the Ground of Being, incarnation of the divine Logos in whom we find our ultimate meaning and reason for being over against the Angst, alienation and uncertainty of the existential condition of human life.”

To which Jesus says, “huh?”

Likely, he spoke simple, plain words like those from 1^st John: God is love! Children, love one another, that is how they will know who you are, and who I am.

It’s no accident that Jesus sought his followers not among the scribes and the Pharisees – the educated religious leaders of his life – but, instead, among folks who worked with hands and hearts, deeply engaged in the marketplace of life.

In some sense, this was a curious choice, and Jesus wound up with a rather mixed bag of close associates. Take Judas; and I’m sure that Jesus would’ve be glad if you did. An out-and-out betrayer is, perhaps, an extreme example.

So, instead, take Peter. He failed over and over again. When the chips were down, he denied even knowing Jesus. He, too, wound up crucified. Nevertheless, upon this rock, Jesus said, “I will build my church.”

Personally, I love Peter. There he is, a fisherman in his boat – that is to say, a guy who knows a thing or two about water. But when Jesus said, “follow me,” Peter steps out of the boat and takes a step on the water.

Of course, he sank before the second step, but he took a step in faith, and he walked on the water.

Talk about bold!

Sure, he foundered and would have sunk had Jesus not reached out to him. But Peter took one step. He failed in his effort to walk on the water, but so what. That’s what people do. We fall. We founder. We fail.

I wrote part of this homily sitting in the visitors’ waiting room of the DC detention center. Talk about witness to human brokenness.

We have and will fail again and again. Sometimes our brokenness is a personal struggle. Sometimes it spills across many lives. Sometimes our brokenness is the shadow side of our strengths and gifts, and sometimes our best efforts at building something beautiful, even our efforts to be disciples of Jesus, fall apart due to the brokenness that clings to us.

But let us sin boldly, as Luther said, as we follow more boldly still.

Because in the company of the followers of Jesus we are not alone. We may stumble, and we may fall, but there’s another’s hand to lift us up when we follow Jesus’ call.

That makes all the difference in the world. We all desperately need authentic community, and most of us spend our lives searching for it and finding only bits and pieces of it here and there in neighborhoods or circles of friends or classes or clubs or jobs. Those can all be wonderful connections, but they tend to break down in the face of challenges that go beyond the close circle. Faith communities, by their nature, invite us into a relationship with that which is beyond the close circle of friends, that which is, indeed, beyond the bounds of our own time.

Connecting with something that is decisively bigger than we are, that was here before us, and that will long outlast us brings not only deep meaning to our lives, but it also connects us with wellsprings of life that sustain precisely in the moments when life seems to be coming apart at the seams.

That is why the great cloud of witnesses matters.  That’s also why this is not, after all, a sermon about just the race that is set before us. We are bold enough to proclaim that the leg of the race that is set before us is but one part of a much longer procession. Maybe this sermon really is about the Ragnar relay that Don and I ran!

But, seriously, as much as I enjoy running, that’s not the aspect of my own life that matters most to me. In truth, the various gifts I may have, and their shadow sides, and the opportunities along the way – family life, work, creative life – through which all these have been made manifest, for better and for worse – all of that has meaning for me because, at the center of my life, that still point around which all else revolves and from which all else takes it meaning is this: I have given my life to following the way of Jesus in the community of so great a cloud of witnesses.

I am bold enough to say that, and even more bold to say that I think others should join that community, too.

Community matters. Desperately.

It can; it has; it will again save lives.

If you’re already a member of the church, I hope you’ll hear in this encouragement to invite others to come and see, to experience the life-giving community of followers of Jesus.

If you’re sitting on the edges of the community, holding back for any of dozens of more or less good reasons – and, yes, there are definitely a host of very good reasons for not joining a church – but if that’s where you find yourself these days, I hope you’ll hear in this an invitation to join this community.

Yes. I think you should join the church. It’s a commitment, and it’s a promise. It’s not the last word of your life on the matter of the lordship of Jesus Christ, the ontological status of the unmoved mover or any of that other stuff. I am a witness here. For years, I used my own uncertainty as a fine intellectual excuse for avoiding a commitment to living a life committed to love; to justice; to peace; to following the way of Jesus in the company of fellow travellers – sojourners – pilgrims on the way. Finally I came to see that Jesus was fine with uncertainty. What he wasn’t OK with was folks too timid and tepid to give their lives to the journey – to follow him with boldness.

We have been given something precious here, and we are called to share it with boldness. Lives are at stake.