Potters & Possessions

Potters & Possessions

Jeremiah 18:1-11; Luke 14:25-33

September 8, 2019

I’ve thrown a few pots in my time. I’m not at all good at it. People who can do it well seem like magicians to me. So I get the first part of Jeremiah’s parable – “the vessel the potter was making was spoiled in the potter’s hands.” Been there; done that.

But making the “spoiled vessel” into something new and useful – that regularly eluded me when I sat at the wheel working the clay.

I suppose it depends a lot on what medium you choose and what gifts and practice you bring to the work. I’ve rescued some “spoiled writing” in my time, and worked out a song or two that seemed destined for the waste basket or the delete key. Visual arts? Not so much. Culinary arts? Not a chance. Human arts? Well ... that’s always a work in progress.

God, Jeremiah suggests, has gifts for the human condition. That is to say, as Jeremiah understands the divine, God is driven to rework us, to create in us something more, something more pleasing, something more grace-filled, something more loving.

At the same time, God knows, sometimes we are less than we could be.

In the challenging text from Luke’s gospel, Jesus takes aim at some of what gets in the way of our becoming more. It comes down to possessions:

“None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

We often spiritualize this text or take it metaphorically to take some of the weight off of it. That’s understandable for us Christians who are also citizens of the richest empire in the world. It’s understandable for us Christians living in the 21^st century in the wake of the triumph of consumerism as the dominant global ideology. It’s understandable for us Christians living in houses that are, on average, three times as big as the ones our parents or grandparents lived in back when I was born almost 60 years ago. We “need” those big houses because, in the United States, we consume twice as many material goods as we did 50 years ago. Most of our homes have more televisions than people. A quarter of our two-car garages don’t have room in them to park one car, which probably explains why about 10 percent of our households rent off-site storage spaces – explaining why that industry (which basically didn’t exist when I was born) has been the fastest-growing segment of the commercial real estate market for 40 years.

That’s a lot of stuff – a lot of possessions to give away.

We rich Christians really don’t like to do the hard work of accounting for our wealth and our possessions. Oh, we might embrace the Marie Kondo form of shedding the things that don’t bring us joy, but no sooner than we’ve cast off one item that doesn’t bring us joy we’ve been on Amazon ordering two more that, we trust, will bring us that shot of consumer joy we’re addicted to.

Having said that, and standing before you convicted by my own words, I am, nonetheless, going to point away from the things themselves toward a different possession – a spiritual possession, perhaps, and, perhaps, a demonic one – as I think about the possession I most need to give up in order to become a disciple of Jesus.

What do I possess? What possesses me? What stands in the way of more faithfully following Jesus? What gets between me and the something more that God is trying to shape in me, that God is trying to call forth from me?

Now it may well be that my material possessions are still what I should be trying to shed, but when I think of what I possess than has made so much of that material well-being possible I am compelled to look more deeply. What I see, when I look in the mirror, is privilege staring right back at me.

Male privilege. Straight privilege. White privilege. These possessions – and a longer list of similar marks of privilege – cling to me more inescapably than the material things. I cannot let go of them, for I bear them on my skin, most clearly in the case of my privilege as a person of pallor. White privilege. I possess it. It possesses me. I cannot give it up.

I can, however, give it away. How? Well, first let’s be clear, I will always walk through the world as a straight, white, well-educated, Protestant, man in a society where each of those unearned attributes readily open doors to me that folks who don’t have them have to work way harder to squeeze through. So if I will, inevitably, retain these possessions, how can I also give them away?

I see at least four ways before me – four practices that I can take on that open up possibilities that are otherwise foreclosed.

First, I can pick up a different lens through which to see the world – the lens of antiracism work and the awareness that comes through that work. When I look at the wider world through the lens of antiracism work I am better able to see the intersections of the concerns that tug at my heart.

For example, looking through that lens I am more likely to notice the fact that violence against trans people is heavily tilted toward trans women of color. Gay men of color face barriers that this straight, white man cannot even imagine. To take another example, looking through the lens of antiracism work I am more likely to notice that a disproportionate number of families of color suffer food insecurity. Similarly, immigrants of color are far more likely to face discrimination that white immigrants.

In other words, all of the issues that we have named as our principle callings at CPC, can be viewed with more clarity through the lens of antiracism work. When we see things more clearly we respond to them more effectively.

In responding to the issues I feel called to engage, the work of antiracism invites me into a second practice: using the power that comes with my privilege to make sure that others who do not enjoy that privilege can be seen and heard.

The third practice is closely related but is important enough to name it as a distinctive practice: giving away the power of privilege by remaining silent in situations where the last thing a conversation needs is one more white, male voice. And, yes, I am certainly thinking about the current presidential campaign when I say this. Seriously, after the fifth or sixth middle-age, straight, white man tossed his hat in the ring did the next 15 to do so have something new and distinctive to offer the conversation?

If so, I have not heard it. But what I have heard is the call to a fourth practice: encouraging others to engage the practices of dispossessing. Maybe we should send invitations to a dozen candidates for president to join us in this work this fall!

Probably not. But, I do encourage you to join the conversation this fall as we engage the work of antiracism as a lens through which to see all of our mission more clearly.

I’m confident that I could take you through an economically precise and historically accurate accounting of the deep connections between late-capitalism’s obsession with possessions and the deep roots of white privilege in the ideology of white supremacy. It’s pretty easy to point to scores of books recounting that economic and social history. All of that scholarly work points to one simple conclusion: it’s no coincidence that the ideology of white supremacy arose side-by-side and hand-in-hand with the ideology of free-market capitalism. Both are ideologies. Neither is natural. Both are the results of political choices.

Both misshape and deform the potter’s clay, and both rely for their continued support on a profound misreading of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Other choices remain possible. The future is not written in stone. Nevertheless, none of us can become disciples of Jesus until we find a way to give up our possessions and the demons that possess us.

I invite you to engage this work of dispossession in community this fall. Amen.

What Is Our Work?

Jeremiah 2:4-13; Luke 14: 1, 7-14

September 1, 2019

What is our work? That seems like a good question to ask on the Sunday of the Labor Day holiday. It’s a basic question, and one to ask over and over and over again throughout our lives. It’s a question foundational for each of us, as individuals, at every stage of life. It is also a crucial question for organizations and institutions to ask, and it is an essential – though oft-neglected – question for cities, states, and nations to ask themselves, as well.

What is our work?

Already, by naming the possessive “our” in various ways, we are also asking, “who am I?” and “who are we?” Depending on how we answer those questions, we’ll begin also to get at the other obvious preliminary question: what is work?

At its simplest, work is producing or accomplishing something. Neither the object nor the means is important in terms of the definition which is, I suppose, why we tend to modify the noun with adjectives: good work, hard work, busy work, school work, necessary work, homework, handiwork, art work, and so on.

This is nothing new under the sun. The Greek word, ergon, which drifted down through Old English to arrive in our vocabulary carrying the same essential meaning, shows up in the New Testament more than 150 times. That’s about half as many times as love shows up, but it’s definitely a lot, and with a frequency that might prompt one to consider the New Testament as an employee manual describing our work as followers of Jesus.

As I’ve noted here probably more than 150 times over the years, one of my favorite New Testament Greek words is liturgy, which means, literally, work of the people. You can hear the root ergon in the -urgy part of liturgy.

So, what is our work, as followers of Jesus? Liturgy, simply put.

The good, old Westminster Catechism, a document with a ton of problems, to be certain, begins with clear certainty about why we are here. In its 17^th-century language it asks, “What is the chief end of man?” The answer: “to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”

The work of the people is to glorify God. One might say that liturgy is our liturgy.

Jeremiah’s prophetic work begins with calling the people back to this work. The people have turned away from God. Turning away from living water, as Jeremiah puts it, will lead to a dry and barren land, and a people with unquenchable thirst. Having turned away from the source of this living water, Jeremiah observes, the people have begun trying to create their own wells.

In other words, the people have made the classic error: they have mistaken themselves for God.

Jesus, in the reading from Luke, decries that same human tendency, and invites his followers to humility. 

Our work is like that – marked by humility. The lectionary this morning also includes a passage from the book of Hebrews that we might just hear as a job description: “let mutual love continue; do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers; remember those who are in prison; keep your lives free from the love of money; do not neglect to do good and to share what you have; continually offer praise to God.”

Years ago Richard Rohr, a Franciscan spiritual writer whose work often nudges me deeper, said that the work of following Jesus amounts to “a way of being in the world.” I would say that is our work, our liturgy – to follow a way of being in the world that is, in Rohr’s words, “simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However,” he went on to say, “we made it into a clever ‘religion,’ in order to avoid [the work] itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain, and still believe that Jesus is their ‘personal Lord and Savior.’ The world has not time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on earth is too great.”

Our work is too alleviate the suffering where we can with what we’ve got, and to be present and compassionate – to be in solidarity with the suffering when we cannot, in fact, alleviate it.

Our work is not glorious, and it will rarely make any headlines. Our work will not save the world, but it will change it. And that’s OK, because our work doesn’t demand that we become saviors, but, rather, that we follow the way of the One who came that the world might know salvation and shalom – that is to say, wholeness, healing, communion.

For when we share communion we share a foretaste of that salvation, we participate in the in-breaking of the reign of God.

That, too, is part of our work.

We do that work – that liturgy – in part at this table. We do that in worship as we gather to break the bread of life and share the cup of salvation.

We can make of that just another piece of “clever religion.” We can make it formal and grand, if we like, but it’s not real that way. In real life, the work of the people is messy. It’s rarely linear, and it’s seldom efficient.

So, this morning, we’re going to live into that reality. Our table is messy. So we’re going to do the work of the people and clear it so that we may gather around it.

All of this stuff has been given so that kids at Bridges to Independence can begin the school year with some new supplies. It’s one of the ways we do our work – proclaiming good news to the poor, serving those with the least, giving from our table of plenty to our neighbors who have less.

Here’s how it’s going to work.

We’ve got seven bags or backpacks up here; each has a note card attached for listing what’s going in so the folks at Bridges can distribute it easily. We need several folks for each bag: one to hold open the bag; one to put items in carefully; one to write down what’s going in.

Meanwhile, on the tables in the rear of the sanctuary, we have a bunch of notecards. You’re invited to create your own, or use one that we made earlier this summer, and write a “back-to-school” note of encouragement. We’ll put those in the bags, as well.

What is our work?

This is our answer for the morning. Let us continue our liturgy. Amen.