Be Vibrant!

Galatians 5:22-25; Luke 9:51-62

June 26, 2016

It’s easy to romanticize the various stories of the call of Jesus’ disciples. After all, the scenes are fairly bucolic in most of them: seaside fishing villages, small towns along the way. It all seems so in keeping with the notion of “gentle Jesus, mild and good.” From the point of view of the affluent, suburban church of so much of North America – including, if we are to be honest, right here – most of the call stories strike us as sweet affirmations of the decisions we have already made.

They provide a middle-of-the-road mythology for the middle-of-the-road church, but by the middle of the story the author of Luke is having none of that. At this point in the story, Jesus has turned his face toward Jerusalem and a direct confrontation with the economic, political, and religious powers that be. He has neither time nor patience for those who are not prepared to follow what he must know is a road to the cross.

“No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” In other words, we don’t have time for the middle-of-the-road concerns of the middle-class. The hour is very late. Now is the time. This is the fierce urgency of now.

I have to confess that this passage terrifies me. Jesus is speaking to us, if we have ears to hear. We live with the dawning reality that, as our Brief Statement of Faith put it, “we threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care.” If we do not change the way we live, our children’s grandchildren will inherit a planet barely habitable for human beings.

And yet, most of us, most every day, put our hands to the plow and keep on working our jobs never disrupting the way things are for the sake of a better way. We are not fit for the kindom of God. We are not building the Beloved Community.

I wrote some of this last week while flying back across the continent from general assembly in Portland. I deeply appreciate the opportunity, and remain in awe of the miracle of living in an age when I can begin the day less than a hundred miles from the Pacific Coast and end it roughly the same distance from the Atlantic.

In the midst of a cross continent flight that leaves a Sasquatch-sized carbon footprint we applaud ourselves for recycling plastic cups. Meanwhile in Portland, the assembly is more worried about the denomination’s portfolio that it is about the consequences of our fossil-fuel addiction.

The hour is very late. Now is the time. There is a fierce urgency to this moment.

The assembly elected my friend and National Capital Presbytery colleague Denise Anderson as co-moderator, and she becomes the youngest person ever elected to the highest office in the denomination. It was nothing short of remarkable to see an African-American woman wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt presiding over the opening plenary Wednesday morning. While I was flying home, the assembly elected J. Herbert Nelson, a truly prophetic African-American man, to the office of stated clerk.

Nevertheless, we remain a church that is more than 90 percent Anglo. We stand on a centuries’ old history of white privilege. Our assembly met – as do most of our congregations – on land taken by force or coercion from the people of color who lived here before us.

As Pastor Annanda Barclay puts it:

The hierarchal system of race creates an inherent inequality of the worthiness of a human being, based on white supremacy. Notice, (she writes) I say human being, because I firmly believe white supremacy and racism oppresses white people as well. The idea that whiteness is inherently better automatically creates a false sense of entitlement, control, power, and even a false sense of godly righteousness.[1]

The hour is very late. Now is the time. There is a fierce urgency to this moment.

We gathered in Portland, of course, in the shadow of Orlando, where the toxic stew of homophobia and religious fundamentalism exacted its horrible toll just a few weeks ago. Rabia Terri Harris, founder of the Muslim Peace Fellowship and resident scholar at the Community of Living Traditions at the Stony Point Center, suggests that religiously motivate violence bubbles up when “we insist that our religion defines the holy, rather than humbly approximating it: that our image of ultimate reality is ultimate reality.” [2]

She goes on to suggest that “When we accept each other in God, we learn to recognize God through other names – names God has taught to people other than ourselves, to creatures other than ourselves. Might our time require that we learn to honor the immensity of the divine names?”[3]

The hour is very late. Now is the time. There is a fierce urgency to this moment.

Both Harris and Barclay wrote their words in essays for Rick Ufford-Chase’s new book, Faithful Resistance: Gospel Visions for the Church in a Time of Empire.

About five years ago, I challenged the session here to think about a new model of ministry for Clarendon. A few months later, we claimed as our yardstick the idea of “a more vibrant congregation.”

I did a bit of word study back then, and discovered to my deep joy, that the word “vibrant” shares a root connection with the word “agitation.” They both have to do with vibrating, and the agitation that comes from vibrancy depends upon resistance in order to be noticeable. That is to say, to make a difference, there must be resistance.

To make a difference in the world, the church must practice resistance.

I am increasingly convinced that if the church is to matter at all to even one more generation, much less to some imagined future, that congregational life must become about resistance, that congregations must become centers of resistance to the dominant culture. If we do not, we risk becoming what so many think we are already: chaplaincies to the comfortably middle class, articulating theologies that buttress the American empire and that bear no resemblance whatsoever to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Yet I do not despair. Indeed, I see signs of hope all around me, and I know that our sacred texts already provide the story in which this hope is grounded.

The text from Galatians tells us that love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are the fruits of the restless Spirit of the living God. In other words, when we center our community’s life on God and open ourselves to the movement of the Spirit in our lives, we discover at our disposal all of the gifts we need to resist values of materialism, militarism, racism, and the rest.

I spent most of my time in Portland working with a small group of young women serving as GA interns for the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship. Their energy, enthusiasm, imagination, deep thoughtfulness, intelligence, and love inspire me and give me hope. They are not naïve – they’re much too smart for that – but neither are they nearly as cynical as the generations immediately preceding them have been.

One of them, Annika, a twenty-something who lives in Portland shared with us a Tweet from a 24-year-old friend – a church critic who nonetheless was watching with interest the goings on from the assembly. When GA gave final affirmation to the nearly 10-year effort to add the prophetic Apartheid-era Belhar Confession to our Book of Confessions, Annika’s friend tweeted out that he could get excited about #aChurchThatDoesntSuck.

Friends, I, too, can get excited about a church that doesn’t suck!

The hour is very late. Now is the time. There is a fierce urgency to this moment.

Amen.

Following the sermon, ruling elder Travis Reindl offered this prayer:

God of this day, God of all of our days...
We come to you this morning delighting in the fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, patience, gentleness, faithfulness, self control - and the places they show up in our lives.  We bask in the warmth of the sun, the warmth of an embrace, the love of family and friends, the bounty of food and shelter.
But gracious God, we also come to you with heavy hearts, weighed down by the times we have pushed that fruit away or poisoned it by our own hands.  We do this with fear and anger that stretches from Samaria to suburbia, with hatred and violence, with our idolatry of contemporary culture.
Lord, call to us.  Agitate us to reclaim the fruit of the Spirit, give us the courage to leave our boats on the shoreline to follow you, to move from being the "frozen chosen" to being a "storm of reform," to live as the people you have called us to be.
Amen.

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[1] Annanda Barclay, “Dismantling White Supremacy,” in Rick Ufford-Chase, Faithful Resistance (Unshelved: 2016) 43.

[2] Rabia Terri Harris, “Learning Nonviolence in a Multifaith World,” in ibid., 75.

[3] Ibid. 79.