Practice to Prepare

Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8

Dec. 7, 2014

Some years ago I heard an interesting counterpoint to Isaiah’s vision that “every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” Responding to that passage, someone said, “making the way too easy removes the challenges that make us who we are.”

I agree with the general sentiment. As M. Scott Peck suggests, "Our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."

However, when it comes to this particular passage from Isaiah, it’s an interesting interpretation that, alas, rests on one of the most common interpretive mistakes we make: we think the text is about us. That is to say, we imagine that the way is being made clear for us. But the highway in the desert is not for us.

To begin with, in this text, the highway is for God – it’s a way through the desert places to the place of human habitation. It’s the way for God to come close to us.

But even if I hear in these words a call to smooth the human way – that is, to build a road where there is no road – I ought to understand first that no road exists just for me. As much as I’d like to believe that the new HOV lanes on I-95 are being made just to make my way smoother, that doesn’t make it so.

It’s never about just me.

Indeed, if it’s Isaiah, it’s probably about justice, not just me and not even just us. If it’s about a way for humans in Isaiah, it’s going to be for all humans and it’s going to be a fair and level way – a way, that is, that lifts up the lowly and knocks the high and mighty from their lofty perches.

It’s a compelling word for us to hear this week, as we see yet another instance of white cops getting off the hook in the killing of a black man. I’ve just got to imagine that if Eric Garner were still living, he wouldn’t mind if some of the rough places got smoothed out just a bit.

Against the seemingly endless litany of injustices, it’s pretty simple see that if we’re going to make a way in the desert of injustice for the God of justice to come near we’ve got a whole lot of work to do.

Indeed, on this point I’m going to do something that I’m pretty certain I have never done in 15 years of preaching: I’m going to quote favorably a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention. Following the announcement of the Long Island grand jury’s decision, Russell Moore, president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said,

Romans 13 says that the sword of justice is to be wielded against evildoers. Now, what we too often see still is a situation where our African-American brothers and sisters, especially brothers, are more likely to be arrested, more likely to be executed, more likely to be killed. And this is a situation in which we have to say, I wonder what the defenders of this would possibly say. I just don’t know. But I think we have to acknowledge that something is wrong with the system at this point and that something has to be done.[1]

Yes, we’ve got a lot of work to do. If what we are building is a way for to be brought closer to God – for God to bend low to us – then what we’re talking about in Isaiah is a massive construction project – one that puts the past ten years of work on the Mixing Bowl to shame.

You’d think, after more than a decade of work on that road they’d finally get it right. After all, they say that practice makes perfect. Then again, we’re 60 years past Brown v. Board of Education, and we’re still struggling mightily in this nation trying to find a way toward authentic repentance from our original sin.

Now, of course, the way Isaiah announces is not an actual road; it’s a metaphor. It’s about creating deeper human relationships with God, and about creating just and right relationships between and among God’s children. But just as building an actual road takes some actual practiced skills, so does building deep relationships with God and with one another.

It’s takes time. It takes commitment. It takes practice.

Doing justice is a spiritual practice of Christian life. Offering hospitality is a spiritual practice of Christian life. Generosity is a spiritual practice of Christian life. These are among the tried and true, age-old practices of the faith that followers of Jesus have used to draw themselves more deeply into the heart of God.

The season of Advent invites us to prepare a way in our own hearts for the nearness of the divine. So, this morning, I want to spend some time sharing some of the practices of our own faith lives that draw us closer to God; that deepen our faith; that embed us more deeply in relationship with the people of God; that draw us more tightly into the circle that centers on the way of Jesus; that bring us closer to that image that Isaiah offered – swords into plowshares, that Jesus imagined – the kingdom of God, that King dreamed – the Beloved Community. We’ll only get to such places if we make a way in the desert. We’ll only be able to make a way if we practice.

What are some of your practices of faith?

*****

I spent some time last week leading worship and offering a few thoughts to the Virginia Ecumenical Camp and Retreat Leaders Gathering. I talked with them about the notion of “constant whitewater”: the situation of being constantly buffeted by chaotic conditions. As a young man I was a whitewater enthusiast, and the first time I heard the phrase at some leadership development conference 15 or more years ago my first thought was: “great! Toss me a paddle and let’s go!”

Of course, if you’ve ever spent a day paddling, you know it leaves you spent at the end of it. Imagine how you’d feel if you had to do it all the time, all day, every day. You’d be desperate for a big rock in the river to eddy up behind, or a gently slopping shore to rest on for a while.

Imagine what if feels like to be foundering in raging rapids; to be struggling mightily at work, in school; worse yet, to be victimized or marginalized on account of, oh, for example, the color of your skin … or your gender … or your gender identity … or your sexuality … or your poverty. Constant whitewater, indeed.

I left the camp leaders with the challenge or invitation to take up a spiritual practice that could be for them an anchor place, a calm center, perhaps, in the raging whitewater that they encounter in their work. Similarly, I encourage you, this season of Advent, to commit or recommit to a spiritual practice of the Christian faith that both buoys you in the whitewater of your own experience, and that also continues that great construction project of making a way in the desert of contemporary life for the coming again of our God. Amen.

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[1] Quoted in “In Wake of Eric Garner Case, Southern Baptist Leader Rips Racism in the Church,” by Sarah Posner, in Religion Dispatches, Dec. 4, 2014.

But There Is No Peace

Isaiah 64:1-9; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9

November 30, 2014

A friend of mine who lives in Oakland posted this on Facebook last week on the morning after the grand jury decision on the Ferguson shooting was announced:

On the bus this morning, a 17-year-old boy asked me about what I thought about last night. We talked about anger and sadness and how to keep going. He talked about his music career and how he has been mixing and producing tracks. He talked about getting shot in the leg for "being in the wrong place at the wrong time" and how he never really knew his dad growing up because he was in and out of jails until he was shot five times by the police in 2002. The kid would have been five when his dad died. So much pain.

I confess, I do not know what to do with the pain, with the sadness, with the anger. I found the images from the streets of Ferguson – militarized police firing smoke grenades into crowds, looters setting fires, and holiday lights hanging over all of it – I found it profoundly sad and unsettlingly strange, all the while being also all-too-familiar.

Seasons greetings, indeed. Peace on earth, and goodwill to all? Well, maybe later. How do we, in the midst of that, gather here and talk about joy, hope, love and peace?

When a group of us sat together in this space one evening early this month to talk about worship during Advent, we concluded that the readings for this morning, and in particular the one from Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, spoke to us of peace and grace.

Less than a month later, and it was all too easy to entitle this homily, “But there is no peace.”

Paul would have understood the feeling. To be sure, the particulars we confront are vastly different than those in first-century Palestine, but Paul knew and understood deep social divisions, anger, mistrust, and the violence they breed.

The church at Corinth, after all, was certainly not all beer and skittles.

We don’t know with precision the facts about Corinth – any more than we know with precision the facts about Ferguson. What we do know about Corinth suggests an abiding division between the affluent and the impoverished, a feeling of being marginalized in some quarters, an attitude of entitlement from others, and a general atmosphere of suspicion.

“Uh, excuse me,” you might well ask, “is that Corinth or Ferguson you’re talking about there?”

Well, yes. Exactly. When such conditions explode into violence we should not be surprised.

It is easy to stand at a great distance, watching the fires in Ferguson, and condemn the looting and violence. But, as Martin Luther King said in a similar context, “It is not enough to stand before you … and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible  … to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. […] A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?”

King asked that question more than 40 years ago, so the answer today must be that we have failed to hear what we already know. We know, or should know, for example:

·      Despite the fact that rates of drug usage are approximately the same across all racial groups, in many states more than 80 percent of those imprisoned on drug charges are people of color.[1] Thus, while five times as many white people use illegal drugs, 10 times as many African Americans as whites are sent to prison on drug charges.

·      Prison sentences reflect deep racial bias, and blacks serve approximately the same amount of time for drug offenses as whites who were convicted of violent crimes.[2]

·      Young men of color are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than young white men, and, during a typical week in the United States, two black people are killed by white police officers. [3]

The litany of inequality goes on and on and on, and covers access to education, housing discrimination, employment discrimination, financial institutions, voting rights, and it includes the fact that, as Dr. King noted in 1963, “eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.” This is what we should hear.

As Paul Waldman, writing in the Post following the grand jury decision, noted:

It took cooperation to create last night’s conflagration, a conspiracy of failure that ran deep and wide. It took a local political system constructed to keep power in the hands of a white minority. It took police practices designed to degrade, dehumanize, and intimidate people. It took a criminal justice system that makes it all but impossible to hold police accountable when they kill, as they do hundreds of times every year in communities across the country.[4]

This litany of hopelessness likely leaves us feeling what Isaiah describes – We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. 

Nevertheless, as Eberhard Arnold, founder of the Bruderhoff community, wrote during the hopeless years that witnessed the rise of Hitler in his country, “Advent hope is a certainty of faith that shows itself in action through mutual responsibility for the whole of life. The church of Christ is the fellowship of this hope. It believes so unreservedly that it is convinced that the divine must conquer the demonic, that love must conquer hate.”

That’s the hope that Martin King clung to in Birmingham. It’s the hope that Mother Theresa clung to in Calcutta. It’s the hope that Paul clung to in Rome, and the one that he encouraged those in Corinth to embrace. It’s the hope that we cling to now when we insist that black lives matter.

It is the hope that we lift up as we light a candle in the darkness and lift it high for all in the house to see.

Paul, let’s recall, opens his Corinthian correspondence with gratitude for the grace God has given the fractious community. Though there is as yet no peace among and between them, there is grace. We begin with grace. That is to say, prior to our acts – whatever they may be – there is the grace of God. All is gift, to begin with, and there is a place at the table for everyone born – men, women, rich, poor, black, white, straight, gay, old and young. All. All. All. All lives matter.

That is why this morning we began this new liturgical year with communion. The gifts of God for the people of God form the foundation of the community of faith, and for all it can accomplish in God’s world.

The question is not, then, what can we do to bring grace and healing and wholeness to this present brokenness. No, the question is, how shall we respond to the grace, healing and wholeness of God already at work in a broken world?

This morning, we respond in worship. We light candles to symbolize hope, and we make commitments to pray and act for peace in a world darkened by fear and violence.

May we go forward from this place and bear that light into all the world. Amen.

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[1]http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/americanprospect/20110102specialreport/#/20

[2] http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet

[3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/14/police-killings-data/14060357/

[4] Paul Waldman WaPO 11-25 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/11/25/barack-obama-ferguson-and-racial-wounds-unhealed/?hpid=z5)

Being Who You Are

Matthew 25:41-56

November 23, 2014

Most of you have heard me rant about my least favorite camp song: “I just wanna be a sheep, bah, bah, bah, bah.” But, really, I do not want to be a sheep. So, what’s it gonna be then? A goat?

Sheep or goats? That seems to be the choice before us in the story the youth just shared with us. Or, as a vastly superior song asks, “Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?”

“Choose this day whom you will serve,” Joshua challenged the Israelites before concluding, “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

Scripture regularly challenges its readers to choose, to pick a side, to stake a claim, to, in effect, claim the name by which you shall be known. Christ the King Sunday seems like a good idea to name who we are, and to whom we belong.

You know what? We do that all of the time – whether we know it or not, in countless small matters, every single day. We say who we are, and, this is the key to Jesus’ parable, we say who we are by things that we do.

In other words, you are what you do.

Perhaps it is one of the hazards of middle age, but lately I have been pondering more and more the question of how I spend my time, how that has changed over the years, what I want to do with the time that I have left, and what that says about who I am in ways both large and small.

For example, I spend a fair amount of time these days running. I’m not particularly good at it; I’m a classic middle-of-the-pack runner. I remember the days, 30 years ago, when I thought nothing of running a six-minute mile, and could keep such a pace over a fair distance. In fact, I thought so little of it that I pretty much gave it up for a good long while, in part, no doubt, because there were so many others so much faster. For 20 years I ran only rarely and did not participate at all in the running community – the men and women of all ages who gather regularly for races of various lengths.

I got back into it for a variety of reasons that are neither unusual nor particularly interesting, and now I call myself a runner – not because I am particularly good or gifted at it, but because I do it.

Similarly, I put down my guitar for many years – at least a decade during which I rarely played and never wrote songs. These days I am always working on at least one song, and I play at least as often as I run.

Some years ago I was chatting with David LaMotte, a singer-songwriter who has released a dozen albums, toured on five continents, and published a couple of books, to boot. In singer-songwriter circles he is both well known and roundly respected. At some point in that years-ago conversation, I said something to the effect of, “well, I play a little but I’m not a musician.” He cut me off immediately, and said, “if you make music, you’re a musician.”

You are what you do. How you spend your time is how you become identifiable in the world, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you do it for money or whether or not you are, objectively speaking, particularly good at it or not so much.

So, while it may be true that as a runner I make a decent guitar player, and as I musician I make a runner, I am, in fact a runner and a musician.

Putting names to something claims them, and it puts us under their claim, as well. That may be the only reason why membership in a church matters.

If we stand under the name of Jesus that name claims us. Thus claimed, we are shaped and framed by the stories of Jesus and of his followers.

If, as I believe, the fullness not so much of God, but of humanity, was pleased to dwell in the person of Jesus, then when we stand under his claim we are shaped into the fullness of what we can be as human beings.

Claiming that name – and being claimed by it – does not mean that we’re good at it! It’s aspirational more than ontological. In other words, claiming the name of Jesus is more about who we hope to be than who we are at the moment. Just as when I say, “I am a runner,” it does not mean that I am fast or that I win races. It means I’m going to get out there and run the race that is set before me. When I say, “I am a musician,” it does not mean that I am a professional making money at it, nor that I am particularly “good” at it, but it does mean that I will make a joyful noise.

These names – runner, musician, parent, sibling, writer or whatever one you offer – mean something. The ones I’ve lifted up here mean that my life is shaped by running, by making music. My life is shaped, deepened, given meaning, by these identities that I claim and am claimed by.

I am a Christian. My life is shaped, deepened, given meaning in the journey of trying to follow Jesus. As with running and making music, this works better in community than as a solo act. That is not to say there are not solitary times, for surely there are.

But if you’ve ever made music with others you know that there’s something indescribably wonderful about that experience that is qualitatively different than playing alone. If you’ve ever run with others – on a team, with a running partner, at a race – you’ve experienced something similar.

The community of the church is the same. To be sure, there are individual practices of our common faith, but there is a depth of joy, a profundity of understanding, an expansive power in our shared experience that is simply not possible absent the company of those similarly claimed by the name of Jesus. The community of those sojourning under the name of Jesus – that is the church.

Its marks are clear: when people are hungry, we feed them; when people are thirsty, we give them drink; when people are imprisoned, we visit them; when people are naked we clothe them.

So, how do you want to be known? If you want to be known as generous, then give. I you want to be known as compassionate, then be willing to suffer alongside those who hurt. If you want to be known as loving, then love. If you want to be known as a Christian, then live like Jesus.

I still don’t wanna be a sheep; but I do know which side I am on. Amen.