Memorial Stories

Isaiah 6:1-8; John 3:1-17

May 27, 2018

Our imaginations house not only dreams of the future, but also memories of the past. The Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend seems like a good time to explore that notion, and we’ve begun with sharing some stories of people whose memories are sacred to us.

Mac Warford, one of my favorite seminary professors, was fond of saying that “the church is a house of memory.” What might it mean to speak of the church as a house of imagination?

To speak of the church as a house of memory means at least a couple of things: the church – the community of faith – houses the memory of a sacred story and it also houses the memory of itself – of the members and histories that make up the community. Of course, it is all too easy to slip from being a house of sacred memory to becoming a museum dedicated to preserving a past. Moreover, when we succumb to the all-too-human tendency to look back to a past that never really was – a look back through rose-colored glasses – then we begin to deal in the nostalgia business.

That has never been the proper business of the church. We may not be crystal clear at all times about what business we are in – the Jesus business, the justice business, the love business, the salvation business – but nostalgia is just not our business.

That lack of clarity makes discerning mission difficult, but, absent that clarity, few of us are willing to take the step Isaiah takes. Of course, nostalgia doesn’t lead to such steps either. That is to say, rosy memories of a past that was never really present will not lead us to answer the call of a God who is interested in a transformed future.

What, then, should we do?

I think my old prof had it almost right, but his aphorism was missing something crucial. I have come to see us – the church – as a house of both memory and imagination.

We do house, remember, and hold fast to a sacred story: the story of God’s abiding love for humanity. We also house, remember, and hold fast to the sacred stories of the people who have sojourned with this community over the past hundred years. All of that is good, and right, and appropriate.

But we hold on to those stories only to the extent that they both hold on to us and animate our lives by sparking our imaginations.

The old, old story that we hold and that holds us is the mystery that Nicodemus sought to understand when he went to Jesus by night. He knows that Jesus is a teacher come from God. He knows that through his teaching, Jesus is preserving and passing along the sacred story that binds God’s people together. He knows all this, yet he still cannot see something crucial: Jesus is more than a teacher of a sacred story long remembered; Jesus is the imagination of God become flesh in the world.

And what does God imagine? A world transformed by love.

For God so loved the world – the kosmos, in the Greek, which is to say the whole of the created order. For God so loved the world that God imagines a world made whole, healed, living as one community, which is to say “a world saved” by love.

Nicodemus can’t quite see it, though he clearly wants to. In fact, he comes back in the story much later, bringing expensive oils and perfumes to anoint Jesus’ body and prepare it for burial after the crucifixion. He is clearly looking for something, but he can’t quite see it.

This week I had this image of Nicodemus as a member of the British royal family trying to make sense of an African-American preacher teaching them about the power of love to heal a sin-sick world. Nicodemus’ position as a leader of the religious establishment blinds him to the reality standing right in front of him: the imagination of God made flesh in Jesus. Nicodemus wants to see it, but his whole life has transpired against him.

The royals, it seemed, wanted to hear Bishop Curry’s message about love and a world transformed by love such that all of us are one family, but the entirety of their lives – royal blood, privilege, unimaginable affluence – blinded them to that transgressive possibility presented right before their eyes.

Now, I’m not now nor will I ever be part of any royal family, and I am leader of a decidedly marginal religious community, but I know that I am more like Nicodemus than I care to confess when it comes to having eyes to see the imagination of God at work in the world in my midst.

Nevertheless, despite my own myopia – or is it presbyopia – despite my blindness by whatever name, I am convinced that the sacred story of which we are current stewards contains the power to transform the world if we would but let go of nostalgia and allow our souls to be set afire by the imagination of God. The world longs for salvation, let’s go out and share a saving memory and a transformative dream with a world in dire need of transformation. Amen.

True Stories

Psalm 1; John 17:11-19

May 13, 2018

The author of John’s gospel is concerned with the truth. John’s Jesus proclaims, “I am the truth.” He tells his followers, “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” And, in our passage this morning, Jesus prays, asking God to “sanctify [his followers] in the truth; for God’s word is truth.”

The gospel of John is a story of truth.

How do we receive these words at a time when truth, itself, is under daily assault from the highest offices of the land? We are called to speak truth to power, but power, quite clearly, cares nothing for truth. In such a context, what can it possibly mean to speak the truth in love?

Honestly, I have no answers to these questions. I remain convinced, against the rising tide of deceit, that the truth still matters, but I freely concede that the evidence for that conviction is slight.

So what are we to do? Wish that things were otherwise? Wish that we did not live in such a time as this?

Alas, as Gandalf said to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, “so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

We have been given this time. What, then, shall we do with it?

Or, as the poet Mary Oliver asks, “what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”

While signals from the powerful certainly seem to suggest that one option is to lie and deceive, I will take my cue from another part of the Johannine literature, in which the author reminds us that “if we claim we have no sin we lie and deceive ourselves.”

Note clearly who is deceived. It’s not God. It’s not even other people. We lie and deceive ourselves. Denial, as they say, ain’t just a river in Egypt. We lie and deceive ourselves.

Now I can deceive myself with the best of them. For example, future me has, by now, certainly completed that marathon that past me – I mean, way past me; like 30-years-ago me – said he was going to run before the end of that year. In case I lost you in that time warp, yes, I have promised myself that I would accomplish certain specific things within certain specific timeframes only to see those grand aspirations crash around me because I was deceiving myself when I said I was going to do something without a clear plan for accomplishing it. 

So, yes, I can certainly deceive myself. Nevertheless, given the time in which we live, I believe that what we must decide to do with the time we are given is quite simply tell the truth.

Let’s start with a couple of foundational truths that shape our lives as a community of faith, and that we have learned well together in catechismal fashion:

Who are you? I am a child of God.

What does that mean? God loves me.

These are fundamental truths upon which we ground our lives. They are also radical – both in that they get to the root of things, and also in how they radiate outward and transform the wider world through their universal insistence that God’s love is for everyone.

Implied in these core convictions – and also spelled out in scripture – are other fundamental truths:

·      We are called to do justice with particular concern for the least of these.

·      We are called to care for creation, home to you and me.

·      We are called to practice nonviolence, for you and I both matter to God.

If we begin there – I am a child of God, and God loves me; you are a child of God, and God loves you – we necessarily arrive at these other core truths, and they are far from an exhaustive list.

Let’s see if we can flesh it out further: what other foundational truths shape our lives as a community of faith following the way of Jesus in the world?

These truths shape our confession of faith. That is to say, if we are called to tell the world who we are and what we believe, these are the places that we begin. They create the vocabulary for our statements of faith. They are the words we use to tell our true stories to the world. They are the truth in which we are sanctified.

While these truths demand much of us, they remain more or less comfortably familiar truths. We have learned them together, many of us, from childhood.

It is, however, possible to proclaim these truths – in good faith – and still deceive ourselves about some things that matter deeply. Things, for example, about the future of the enterprise of church.

That is to say, we can proclaim these core truths of our faith, and we can even do a half-way decent job of trying to live them out in the world, but our witness is not compelling and, increasingly, the world is turning its back to us. Church professionals certainly know the statistics and can trace the trend lines that describe the collapse of the Mainline Protestant church in North America over the past half century, and the more recent steep declines in religious participation across every faith tradition in the United States.

There are many and complicated reasons for this, but one of the key reasons is hypocrisy and, frankly, lies. As E.J. Dionne wrote in the Post last week:

“In their landmark 2010 book, “American Grace,” the scholars Robert Putnam and David Campbell found that the rise of the nones [those marking “none” when asked on surveys about religious affiliation] was driven by the increasing association of organized religion with conservative politics and a lean toward the right in the culture wars.

[…] Many young people came to regard religion, in Putnam and Campbell’s words, as “judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical […].”

If you want a particularly exquisite hypocritical moment, consider that on Thursday, the very day when [Donald] Trump had to admit his lies on the Stormy Daniels payoff, the president held a White House commemoration of the National Day of Prayer.”

Perhaps the president is merely deceiving himself about these affairs. He certainly isn’t deceiving many others. I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t care.

I do know and care deeply about two things:

First, if elected officials are so utterly dishonest that nothing they say can be trusted then democracy will die.

Second, if we, in the church, cannot be honest with ourselves we have no claim to make about any larger truth, and the church will die.

A friend noted on Facebook last week that the core tension facing churches as they discern ministry in post-Christian culture is whether to “bring them in here,” or “meet them out there.” I think he’s right, and I think there’s a truth embedded in that tension that most of us “in here” don’t want to confront.

But, more to the point, I don’t think that tension matters at all if we do not commit to honesty of confession, if we do not commit to owning up to the truth of who we have been, if we do not honestly confront who we are, if we do not learn again to speak the truth as we have been given to understand it.

Because, honestly, nobody wants to be lied to – out there or in here – because the truth really will set you free. Amen.