A Larger Story

Deuteronomy 18: 15-20; Mark 1:21-28

January 28, 2018

We are the heroes of our own stories. That is true enough as far as it goes. The problem, though, is that our stories are too small. And we tend to leave out the edges where our stories overlap with other stories that have other heroes.

So, within the constraints of reasonable time, this morning I want to tell of a story that is big enough for this moment, and expansive enough to have many heroes.

Each January, on the Sunday of our annual meeting, I preach what I’ve come to think of as the state of the church address. This morning we’ll touch on that, of course, but in a more deeply personal way than I typically approach this. Which is to say, part of this is my story, but you are its heroes.

About six years or so ago, I discerned a personal call – a particular vocation, if you will. I perceived that a major focus of my work at Clarendon had to be creating a pastoral job that someone else would feel called to. That is to say, six years ago I felt like you’d have a hard time replacing me – not because I’m all that and more, but because the job was, frankly, all that and less.

I firmly believe that leaders in any endeavor should always have an eye on the future, including the future that lies out there beyond their own tenure. Six years ago, that future was difficult to discern.

A leader’s job, it seems to me, is to find the tallest tree in the forest, climb to the top, look around for a good while, and then shout back down to the folks below, “hey, we’re in the wrong forest!” Six years ago, we were in the wrong forest.

So, together, we set out to change things and session articulated its leadership goal simply: to become a more vibrant congregation. Six years into this endeavor I can say to you that we have succeeded in remarkable ways. Clarendon Presbyterian Church is simply a far more vibrant, engaged, creative, joyous community of faith than we were a half dozen years ago. In that respect, the state of the wee kirk is strong!

Think back over the past year alone: we’ve engaged in a rich variety of spirited worship from gospel-tinged to Taize-inspired to wildly experimental and improvisational; we’ve had butterflies and sea-monsters and labyrinths in this space; we’ve fed countless neighbors through A-SPAN and AFAC and our garden; we’ve welcomed the stranger and refugee through immigration and naturalization workshops providing sanctuary in the sanctuary; we’ve worked through some challenging personnel situations and are coming out on the other side well with a wonderful, creative, diverse music leadership consortium and an emerging community-based Sunday school; we’ve taken our rebuilding skills on the road to help out at Camp Hanover; we’ve continued to be outspoken advocates for GLBTQ justice in the church and in the public square; we’ve begun using our space in ever-more imaginative and mission-driven ways welcoming new friends through Impacto, launching Songs from the Sanctuary, welcoming TBD not just to rehearsal space but to community engagement, hosting the GenOUT youth chorus bandcamp, making a joyful noise and creating new connections and bonds of community; and we’ve done all of that and much, much more within the congregation’s budget.

The state of the wee kirk is strong.

At the same time, I can also say to you that, in my particular vocation, I have failed in some ways that may not have mattered a lot along the way, but that do matter now.

This morning we meet at the crossroads of those successes and failures, and where we go from here depends on how we hear the still, small voice of God blowing through this intersection.

I want to begin mapping this intersection three ways this morning: biblically; contextually; and personally.

In our text from Deuteronomy this morning, Moses is telling the people that their story is going to grow larger, that it will be big enough for multiple heroes, and that God will raise up from their midst new prophets and leaders. They may not see it clearly yet, and he will not likely see it with them, but, Moses tells the people, they will see this story emerge and be part of its long unfolding.

Similarly, in Mark’s gospel, Jesus is inviting the people into a larger story. Indeed, it’s as if he has climbed the tallest tree in the forest and is calling back down, “we’re in the wrong forest, y’all. Indeed, there are demons here that we must rebuke and drive out.”

Among those demons: old institutional rules built up around proper observance of the Sabbath, institutional rules about who and what is clean or unclean, or, more to the point, who is welcome and who is excluded. This new teaching instructs the people to look beyond an old narrative that may have served well but whose limits must now be transgressed if the people are to thrive.

I once heard John Green refer to scripture as “the lively word of the living God,” and as I read these texts this week I thought, yes, even in these ancient stories God is still speaking a word that matters for our time and context.

That’s good, for our time and context desperately need both ancient wisdom and new understanding. I’m not going to rehearse the statistics or repeat the trend lines other than simply to note that I was born, in 1959, at the peak of the Mainline Protestant establishment in Eisenhower’s America. My entire life has stretched out in the long sunset of that earlier status quo and the slowly breaking dawn of post-Christendom across the western hemisphere.

If, on this Sunday of a congregational meeting, our primary concern is institutional maintenance, then this cultural context sounds like bad news. Indeed, if our primary concern is institutional maintenance, our culture context is a death knell – make no mistake. If our primary concern is institutional maintenance, then we will face the same demons Jesus rebuked. Ours will say, “if it doesn’t happen on Sunday mornings in the sanctuary then it’s not worship and it doesn’t count as church. If we can’t count it then it doesn’t count,” the demons will say.

But, as the scriptural context reminds us today, Jesus did not come to found an institution, to build up a congregation, to grow a church, to count the butts in the pews and the budget on the books. Instead, Jesus came to launch a movement around an authoritative new teaching about community. He came to invite us into a new way of being community based on relationships of mutuality, love, and justice, rather than of tribe and blood and tradition.

We gather as students of that still-challenging teaching and as disciples of its greatest teacher. We gather, also, at a crossroads that, as I noted in beginning, we’ve arrived at because while I believe we have succeeded in much of what we set out to do together six years ago, I have not yet succeeded in creating a job that will be easy to fill when I leave.

You may have noticed my mention of being born in 1959, and you may well have said to yourself, “David was born in the 1950s? Damn, he’s old.” I know I have said that to myself a time or ten. So, part of the intersection we’re approaching is the reality that I want to retire at some point in the next ten years. Our family reality is that, if I am to do so, I need to be making a full-time salary beginning before the end of this year.

As part of our annual review process last month I let the personnel team and the session know this, and we’ve begun a conversation that I’m now inviting you to engage. Six years ago, when we set out to build a more vibrant ministry here, I told session that I was willing to go to half-time in order to free up enough money in the budget to create the staff pattern that could support the ministry we were beginning to envision together. Session, the congregation, and I eventually settled on a 3/5 pastoral position, and, over the next several years, we moved to 70-percent. The reality is, however, that I have never really honored that. Last year, for example, I preached or otherwise led worship on 46 Sundays. Regardless of other responsibilities, that is simply not part-time work.

Please understand, I chose this. I am not complaining. I love to create and lead worship. I am, however, marking this out as a failure to create a job that someone else will take. If I were to leave right now I believe you would find it difficult to attract someone else willing to accept the terms I have created.

So I’ve climbed back up the tallest tree I can find, and it looks to me like we’re still not quite in the right forest.

That’s the challenging news. But here’s the good news: I think we’re pretty close to the right forest, and, if we work together over the next few months, I think we can cut a path through the woods we’re in to the woods where we need to be next.

In a few minutes, we’ll transition downstairs to share a meal and conduct the business of the institution. Elders Keith and Fisher will walk us through the budget that session has adopted, and ask you to approve terms of call. As that unfolds, I think you’ll see that, while we are not far from “the right woods” – or “the next woods” – there’s some serious, important, and challenging work to do to get there.

I want to take just a couple of minutes now to give you a preliminary outline of that work, and to suggest several possible outcomes.

At our retreat at the beginning of this month, session began creating a small discernment group charged with engaging the congregation and the community in evaluating our mission and mission priorities, exploring new opportunities to engage the mission, and providing a report to session for its April meeting. Session will use those findings in shaping personnel decisions that will be reported to the congregation in May. If such decisions include changes to pastoral terms of call, we will hold a special congregational meeting to make decisions on session recommendations.

The season of Lent, which begins on Valentines Day – because nothing says “I love you” quite like the reminder that “we are dust and to dust we shall return” – provides a perfect setting for an intentional, creative, contemplative, spiritual journey of community discernment. We intend to use the Sundays of Lent to study ourselves, our community context, our gifts, and our several callings to begin discerning the larger story that session firmly believes we are being invited to live into. We’ll begin introducing specifics in the next couple of weeks, but, for now, I’d simply invite you to set aside time on Sunday evenings beginning Feb. 18, to join the conversation that will inform and help shape the work of the smaller discernment group.

Having engaged in a season of research, listening, and discernment, there are several places we may come out. Up front, I assure you, I am perfectly at ease with any one of these places. I see at least three broad possibilities, each of which, in its own way, invites CPC into a larger story:

It is possible that the community may discern that 70-percent terms of call for the pastoral position is realistic, and that the congregation has excellent internal resources to make that work realistically for a new pastor. If we come down there, we will celebrate wildly our rich and wonderful 14+ years together and I will move to full-time work elsewhere.

It is possible that the community may discern that CPC has a larger calling ahead, and that engaging that larger calling will also create additional revenue that supports full-time terms of call. We may discern together that I am the right fit to lead in this expanded ministry and we will celebrate wildly and dive in whole-heartedly.

We may discern together that someone else would be better-suited to lead in this expanded ministry, and, again, we will celebrate wildly.

You sensing a theme yet? Yes, we will celebrate wildly, because God is about to do a new thing here. The Spirit is at work in our midst. God is inviting us into a larger story.

If there are folks around to write the history of our time a thousand years down the road, they will say that America, in those days, suffered from a famine of imagination, that we elected small and venal men to lead us, and they had no vision. They will say that our God was too small. Friends, we are invited into the story of the God of the universe, whose loving heart still beats from the center of all this or ever will be. We are being called into a larger story. Come sing, O church, in joy! Come join, O church, in song! For the Christ, the Lord, has triumphed through the ages long. Amen.

Come and See

John 1:43-51; Psalm 139

January 14, 2018

I want to begin with something that was published 49 years ago this month, from an essay written by Martin Luther King and published nine months after his death.

A voice out of Bethlehem two thousand years ago said that all [people] are equal. It said right would triumph. Jesus of Nazareth wrote no books; he owned no property to endow him with influence. He had no friends in the courts of the powerful. But he changed the course of [human history] with only the poor and the despised. Naïve and unsophisticated though we may be, the poor and despised of the twentieth century will revolutionize this era. In our “arrogance, lawlessness and ingratitude,” we will fight for human justice, brotherhood, secure peace and abundance for all. When we have won these – in a spirit of unshakable nonviolence – then, in luminous splendor, the Christian era will truly begin.[1]

Who would have expected that a nobody from a nowhere town would emerge to lead a movement that changed the world? Has anything good ever come out of that sewer of Nazareth that only sends us its worst people, skeptics naturally asked.

“Come and see,” said the nobody.

Who would have expected that a nobody, a black Baptist preacher serving a middle-sized congregation that gathered in a small, aging dump of a building in the parochial little capital city of a backward southern state would emerge to lead a movement that changed the world? Has anything good ever come out of Montgomery, Alabama, skeptics naturally asked.

But, said that nobody to the first meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association in December, 1955, “there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.”[2] Come and see what it looks like when those people rise up.

I draw this comparison because I have too often heard Jesus’ words of call, his invitation to disciples in John’s gospel, used as an invitation to join the church. In other words, such an interpretation suggests, when Jesus said “come and see” he was articulating a fundamentally religious invitation, an invitation to join a religion, as it were.

That utterly misses the point, and, in so doing, it lets us off way too easily. At least, that is, until we are willing to entertain a radically different understanding of “church.” For, if we hear in this passage an invitation that amounts to “join the church,” then, in most places in America today, that seems to mean “come and join a voluntary association of like-minded individuals dedicated to blessing the status quo,” or, even worse, “come and join another group of middle-class Americans who look like you do.”

I am mindful here of the distinction that Dietrich Bonhoeffer drew when he wrote about “religionless Christianity.” As Lori Brandt Hale and Reggie Williams put it in the February issue of Sojourners, throughout his life Bonhoeffer developed the “distinction between religion [on the one hand] and Christ-centeredness [on the other]; religion is our effort to reach God, while Christ-centeredness embraces God’s self-revelation to the world in the incarnation” and in the community of disciples.[3]

When Jesus said, “come and see,” he was not saying, “go talk with the pastor about becoming a member of the congregation.” No. He was saying, “follow me,” and he said it understanding full well what that meant.

If, in December, 1955, Martin Luther King had invited the people of Montgomery to join his church they would have laughed him out of the room and history would have passed him by. Instead, he invited them to join a movement within history. He, too, soon came to understand full well what it meant to follow the way of Jesus within history.

Bonhoeffer also understood. Indeed, he most fully developed his ideas about religionless Christianity in a series of letters written from a Nazi prison cell in the final two years of his life before the Nazis executed him. He knew the cost of discipleship.

Lots of folks in the progressive part of American Christianity have been asking for a while now if we are living in a “Bonhoeffer moment.” I believe that we are, but I further believe that we have been for a long time. To our deep shame, we’ve ignored that reality in favor of lots of tinkering around the edges. We’ve reached for God through praise bands and emergent church and worship wars and culture wars, and mostly turned a blind eye to God’s self-revelation to the world.

We turn away because God, in sovereign love, chooses to reveal God’s self most clearly in and through the struggles of “the poor and the despised,” the people who come from places that the rich and powerful of our country – including our president – refer to as pigsties or, obviously, worse. Yeah, that’s where God is revealing God’s self to the world, and that’s where Jesus was headed when he said, “come and see.”

We really need merely to read some of Dr. King’s words – all of which are more than a half-century old now – to understand that we’ve been living in a status confessionis moment most of our lives but we’ve mostly refused to confess it.

Heck, in the mid-1960s King wrote that “white backlash [has] become an emotional electoral issue.” Does that sound contemporary enough for us? He went on, saying, “Men long regarded as political clowns had [been elected …] their magic achieved with a witches’ brew of bigotry, prejudice, half-truths, and whole lies.”[4]

Does that sound at all familiar? We should be confessing that we have not grown beyond that depressing reality, and we should repent of the white supremacy that still stunts our growth. The sad familiarity of those words tells us that we remain in a status confessionis but still we do not confess.

A status confessionis moment is a time when the confession of the church rests on choosing, as it were, which side you are on. A status confessionis moment is a time when you clearly hear Jesus saying, “come and see,” and you must decide if you are up to the challenge implied in the invitation, if you have the faith and the courage to follow where he is leading.

What does it mean to say that we are living in a Bonhoeffer moment? What does it mean for the church to live in a status confessionis moment? What are we confessing, and what are we specifically opposing, when we say, “you can follow this political figure or you can follow Jesus but you cannot do both”? What does it involve to say, “you can follow this particular political agenda or you can follow Jesus but you cannot do both”? Bonhoeffer and his friends said, in effect, “you can make the Nazi salute or you can make the sign of the cross but you cannot make both.” Dr. King and his friends said, in effect, “you can burn the cross or you can follow the way of the cross but you cannot do both.”

In his time, Jesus said, in effect, “you can say Caesar kurios – Caesar is lord – or you can say Christos kurios – Christ is Lord – but you cannot say both.” You can follow the empire or you can pray “thy kingdom come,” but you cannot do both.

What are we saying today?

A few years ago Mary Oliver published a poem called “Of The Empire.” It goes like this:

We will be known as a culture that feared death

and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity

for the few and cared little for the penury of the

many. We will be known as a culture that taught

and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke

little if at all about the quality of life for

people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All

the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a

commodity. And they will say that this structure

was held together politically, which it was, and

they will say also that our politics was no more

than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of

the heart, and that the heart, in those days,

was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

We can make our peace with this small, mean empire or we can follow the Prince of Peace, but we can not do both. What is our confession today? What song of our faith will we sing? What dreams will we give voice to, and, having given them voice, what dreams will we pursue with all of our hearts and minds and souls?

So, with the psalmist I sing, O Lord, you have searched me and known me. And, with the prophets, I see your Spirit poured out such that our young folks will prophesy, our elderly will have visions, and even the poor and despised will dream dreams. And so I see a day when we will be known for the fullness of our hearts rather than the narrow bigotry of our politics.

O Lord, you know me when I sit down and when I rise up. So I see a day when all of us will tire of sitting by as the president dishonors his office through dog-whistle racism and overt bigotry, and that we will rise up to insist that our country live out its founding promise that all of us – all of us, rich and poor, women, men, non-binary folks, friends of every race and creed, immigrant and native born, gay folks and straight ones – all of us – are created equal and endowed by God with certain inalienable rights as we strive together toward a more perfect union.

O Lord, you search out my path … and are acquainted with all my ways. So I see a day when we will choose leaders who look to build bridges instead of walls, who chart a path toward justice by reaching up with lofty language to inspire instead of trolling deep in the filth of the sewer for words that divide. And I see a day when we will pursue policies that lift up the downtrodden without waiting for help to trickle down from the untaxed riches of Wall Street.

O Lord, even the darkness is not dark to you, and so I see a day when we will resist the darkness, when we will walk together through this deep midnight of our nation’s discontent to a dawning day when all God’s children can sit together at one table of plenty, break bread together, drink deeply when the wine is poured, and lift their voices in a thunderous chorus of praise and thanksgiving, of justice and of peace. I see a day.

Come and see. Come and see. Amen.

---

[1] Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope (San Francisco: Harper, 1986) 328.

[2] Address to the first Montgomery Improvement Association mass meeting, Dec. 5, 1955, http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/the_addres_to_the_first_montgomery_improvement_association_mia_mass_meeting.1.html

[3] Hale and Williams, “Is This a Bonhoeffer Moment?” Sojourners, Feb. 2018.

[4] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?” in A Testament of Hope, p***