The Word Proclaimed @ CPC

Greater Visions

2012-01-19T08:36:00.001-08:00

John 1: 43-51
January 15, 2012
Does anyone know the mission statement of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference? When Dr. King and others gathered SCLC in 1957 in the afterglow of the Montgomery bus boycott, they claimed as their mission “to redeem the soul of America.”
Now that’s quite a mission. What comes to your mind when you hear it?
When I read that statement a couple of things come to mind. First, though it’s been years since I first encountered it in reading Civil Rights histories, I have never forgotten it. Second, it describes a situation – the soul sickness of a culture – and proposes a solution: redemption. Third, it’s not really a “mission statement” at all – it’s a catch phrase, a slogan and it was not developed through any formal process, it was written, by Dr. King, on the window of SCLC’s Atlanta office, most likely in a moment of frustration when the future did not seem particularly clear, the work felt overwhelming, and the organization not up to the immense challenges it faced.
At such moments, some people will say it’s time to revise expectations downward, it’s time to scale back, or maybe even time to quit. But at precisely such moments, the prophet casts an even larger vision, a more expansive view of a future otherwise. At precisely such moments, God calls forth people of faith to be transformed and to transform that which is sin-sick.
As we sit together this morning, a small congregation in a shrinking denomination that struggles against seemingly inexorable tides of history and culture, what is our view of the future? Is it continuing the trend lines of the past 40 years that lead, imprecisely but inevitably, toward an end of a church and a congregation? Or is there a future otherwise?
Or, as the magician asked Wesley in The Princess Bride, “what you got that’s worth living for?”
Martin Luther King and SCLC had a vision of the promised land, the beloved community, a future otherwise for the sin-sick soul of the nation. It was enough to see them through.
So, I’m wondering about us. Can anyone here this morning recite the mission statement of Clarendon Presbyterian Church? No cheating by looking at the flyers in the pews! Anybody remember any parts of it?
All are welcome at Clarendon Presbyterian Church. We are a community that tries to reflect the love and justice of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We invite all those with faith and with doubts to join us as seekers of God’s amazing and inclusive grace and truth.
It’s in the e-blast every week. It’s on the web site. It used to be on the bulletin every week.
What strikes you about that statement? What comes to mind when you hear those words? Does it ring true as a statement about who we are as a congregation? How so? What does it tell you about us? What does it say to someone who knows nothing about this congregation?
Friends, that has been the identity of the Clarendon Presbyterian Church for a long, long time. Or, to be more accurate, that has been the identity statement of the Clarendon Presbyterian Church. You could, and, indeed, we have called it a mission statement but it’s not really. It doesn’t tell us anything about why we exist, what our fundamental purpose is, or what is unique and distinctive about us relative to the thousands of other congregations that these days proclaim that “all are welcome.”
Moreover, it doesn’t say anything about our imagined future, what we long for, our dreams and visions, much less anything that we propose to do toward that imagined end.
It’s time for us to restate the mission and re-write the vision, because if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. We are embarking on a process of revisioning that will unfold rapidly over the next few months beginning in earnest with the congregational meeting on the 29th as together we work to create a more vibrant congregation.
Now it may strike you as odd, perhaps discordant even, to lift up this conversation about mission and vision in the context of a sermon on the Sunday of the King Day weekend. You might well argue that today should focus on justice, on civil rights, on nonviolence or peacemaking. All those would, of course, be perfectly reasonable subjects for our consideration.
But given our particular circumstance today, it seems to me that there are other lessons to be drawn from the example of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement, and as I went searching through my library of King histories to find direct reference to the SCLC slogan I was reminded that King and his colleagues faced the same kinds of questions we struggle with.
At an SCLC board meeting in its early days, Ella Baker, who was at the time SCLC’s only paid staff person, raised a couple of critical questions that could well have come up at our session retreat last weekend. Baker said, “Have we been so busy doing the things that had to be done [just to keep the organization in existence] that we have failed to [do] what should be done?” And then the kicker: “Have we really come to grips with what it takes to do the job for which SCLC was organized; and are we willing to pay the price?”
If we are to become a more vibrant congregation we must answer clearly those questions as they pertain to us: what are we busy about? Is it the right thing? Are we clear about why we are here? Are we willing to pay the price to remain?
These are not questions that we answer in a single gathering, certainly not in one sermon. After all, these are questions that we answer together in prayer, worship, conversation; the answers are not mine to give.
However, I can point to a couple of touchstones for our season of vision casting:
The first comes out of the long struggle we celebrate on King Day: the project of redeeming the sin-sick soul of the nation is not complete, and on another day we might study King’s story in more depth and detail to mine the riches it has to give us for the struggles that remain before us. For now, I’ll simply say that an authentically vibrant congregation will be engaged in the work of creating the beloved community, the work of transformation of individuals and of society.
The second touchstone comes from the gospel reading this morning: John’s account of the call of Philip and Nathaniel. Jesus sees Nathaniel standing under the fig tree and calls him. Nathaniel is amazed that Jesus knows who he is just from seeing him standing there, and he immediately proclaims that Jesus is the messiah.
Jesus responds, "Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these."
And that’s just the point: if we follow the way of Jesus we will see great things.
That is no promise that the way will be easy nor that the path will be straight, but it is deep and abiding assurance that we do not go that way alone. There is one there with us, leading us on.
There is one with us even though we’re tired, even though we’re weak, and even though we feel alone. There is one with us through the storm, through the night, to lead us on to the light. There is one there to take our hands, precious Lord, and lead us home.
Take My Hand, Precious Lord was Dr. King’s favorite song, and his final words, called out over a hotel railing in Memphis in the moments before he was shot, were to a young musician who was scheduled to sing at a rally later that evening. “Ben, be sure and sing ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand.’ Sing it real pretty.”
We never know how long we are given in this life, so let us strive together for greater visions by which to live the time we have been given. Amen.

Don’t Quench the Spirit

2011-12-15T06:58:00.001-08:00

December 11, 2011
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28.
We cozied up one evening last week and watched A Charlie Brown Christmas. It first aired when I was six – prime childhood Christmas-loving age to be sure, and, since Baby Boomers have seen it more than once it’s a tradition. It’s been part of 46 seasons for me, and remains my favorite of all the pop-culture homages to Christmas. Maybe it’s the amazing Vince Guaraldi score. Maybe it’s Linus asking for “lights, please” and giving the definitive reading of Luke’s Christmas story. But I think it’s more likely poor old Charlie Brown asking plaintively, “Isn’t there anybody who can tell me what Christmas is all about?”
Actually, it’s not that question that gets me so much as the very first thing Charlie Brown says: “I think there must be something wrong with me Linus. Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel. I just don’t understand Christmas I guess. I like getting presents, and sending Christmas cards, and decorating trees and all that, but I’m still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.”
Charlie Brown is not the only one who feels that way. In fact, I’d guess that most grownups share that feeling some times.
There are reasons that sometimes we feel like Charlie Brown around holidays. The culture, especially the mass consumer culture in America around Christmas, screams at us in every imaginable way that this is “the most wonderful time of the year,” and that we can find joy around every Christmas tree.
Against those claims, however, we confront often harsh reality. Whether it’s deep social problems, injustices, violence and war, or more deeply personal concerns, there is a disjunction for us whose depth equals the depth of our concerns.
For those who have lost loved ones, the holidays can be particularly difficult, especially if the loss happened during the holidays even years ago. The emptiness feels all the more acute when all around you people seem so filled with the so-called “Christmas spirit.” Their joy seems to mock your pain.
Like all who grieve, you want to scream to the world that keeps on spinning, “Stop! Can’t you see the pain I’m in!”
Against the backdrop of mass consumer culture’s warped version of Christmas, that cry of human suffering may just be the most authentic carol of the season. Indeed, the suffering cry draws closer to the spirit of Christmas than anything you’ll find in the stores or on line or wrapped beneath your Christmas tree, for the baby in the manger was God’s most gracious response to human suffering, to human bondage, to human brokenness and injustice.
The prophet Isaiah’s words give meaning to the nativity scene: the spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives.
That’s what Christmas means: the spirit of God is turned loose on earth! This is not just any birth; the hopes and fears of all the years are to be met when the spirit of God is loosed in human history.
As Charlie Brown understood, there’s nothing at all wrong with giving gifts, sending cards, decorating trees and generally making merry as we Northern Hemisphere Christians try to light up the darkest days of the year.
But there’s also nothing wrong with feeling depressed sometimes, with feeling sadness at new or not so new grief and loss, feeling disconnect when you’re far from family and homeplaces, feeling a bit left out when your mood doesn’t quite match up with the mood that Madison Avenue tells you to feel.
That’s just it: God doesn’t tell you to feel happy. Jesus was not anointed to make you feel good, but rather to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, and proclaim liberty to the captives. And, Jesus chose to live out that anointing, that calling, in a community with disciples called to participate in that hope-filled but always difficult and sometime incredibly sad work.
Those disciples? That’s us. You and me. Not called to “be happy,” but called to bring good news!
The heart and soul of the good news is quite simple, maybe even as simple as Linus’ response to Charlie Brown’s ultimate cry for the meaning of Christmas: “there were in the same country shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night … fear not for behold I bring you tidings of great joy for unto you is born this day a savior which is Christ the Lord … glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill toward all.”
Unto you is born a savior. That is to say, one who will bring you salvation, healing, wholeness, communion with one another and with God. That is to say, shalom – peace, and good will to all.
That news is no guarantee that you’ll experience December as “the most wonderful time of the year.”
It is, however, an invitation to open your heart to something deeper, that your cries of sorrow may be met by the Spirit that calls you into the more profound hallelujah that we sing together as we stumble along the way of Jesus in the world.
The ways of Christ are never simple. I was reminded of that again last week in corresponding with my friend Rick Ufford-Chase, who is on his way home today from Bethlehem where he represented the Presbyterian Church at the Kairos Palestine gathering. He sent me a note Thursday saying, “I was in Manger Square in front of the Church of the Nativity this morning at 6:30 when they rang the bells. The security wall is a 20 foot high concrete barrier visible from my hotel - and from almost everywhere in Bethlehem. How's that for the juxtaposition between hope and despair?”
The day before I’d sent him an Advent reflection from David Hanson, a Georgia writer, who noted in his thoughts on this third Sunday of Advent, which traditionally focuses on hope:
“Ultimately, if we aim to continue in the ways of Christ, we must develop the discipline of hope. But hope is a volatile business and a difficult practice in our world. When we resist hope, we resist the second comings of Christ, the returns of God, toward which Advent calls us. But that is not all. When we resist hope, we also resist being disappointed with God. And we will be disappointed, make no mistake. Our hope in God, if not God, will fail. To truly develop the practice of hope, we must confront and embrace this disillusionment with God, the failures of God, the long delay of God, the absence of God. Unless we do, we are condemning ourselves to delusional saccharine spirituality, a false hope that will wither in times of anguish, turmoil, and loss. But a hope that also can mourn the loss of hope is a beginning of a deeply centered Christian practice. And if we can manage to endure and mourn the loss of hope in God and in ourselves, perhaps then we can begin the process, like Abraham and Sarah, of hoping against all hope.”
I think hope is a gift of the Spirit, and, further, that sometimes hope is how we experience the spirit of God. The spirit simply feels like hope. It does not necessarily feel like happiness, for it may well be hope that comes watered by a river of tears.
Advent will not always feel like joy, but our sorrows cannot ultimately quench the spirit of the Lord that is upon us calling us to share what is, after all, good news.
For you Christ has come, and for you, surely, Christ is coming again.
Open your heart to this good news, and may the spirit of God be poured out upon you in abundance these days.
Last night Rick sent me another note. This one included a quote from the Rev. Mitri Raheb, a Palestinian Christian who lives in Bethlehem. He told the Kairos gathering last week:
“In the Kairos document, the most powerful section is the section on Hope. There is a big difference between optimism and hope. None of us will leave this meeting with optimism. ….”
Calling on the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Mitri continued “even if we know there is no way we can be successful, still, we have only one option: to go out today into the garden and plant olive trees. We do the work. This is what Kairos is about - planting an Olive Tree when the world will come to an end tomorrow. This is crazy - but the world needs our kind of crazy. Otherwise, there will be no shade in which our children can play. There will be oil to light our lamps. There will be no branches to wave when peace finally comes. Our hope creates a culture of life. Optimism is what we see. Hope is what we do.”
Advent hope is like that; it does not require mere happiness, or even really any happiness from us. Rather, it understands that often the way through our own despair is by way of the suffering of others as we do the faithful work of hope, the faithful work of planting seeds that we already know we may never see grow, but that are planted so the future might be otherwise.
As the prophet Isaiah put it,
“For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.”
The spirit of God was loosed on the world through the life of a baby born in a stable in the tiny little town of Bethlehem. That spirit continues in all times and places, through you and me and so many others, to do the work of Advent hope.
May that spirit continue to pour forth in you and through you even now. For that, Charlie Brown, is what Christmas is all about. Amen.

Glad Tidings

2011-12-06T06:58:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 40:1-9; Mark 1:1-8
The gospel of Mark begins like this: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Matthew’s “gospel” begins with, “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah ….” Luke’s “gospel” opens with an author’s note to Theophilus. John starts his “gospel,” famously, “In the beginning was the word.”
We call each of these writings “gospel,” and refer to them collectively as “the gospels.” But what is this “gospel”?
Turn on your google machine and you’d think, for starters, that “gospel” is music, which, of course, it is. But it was something else first. A second glance at the same google machine confirms what you’d expect: gospel is religious.
Indeed, it is all but impossible for us to hear the word “gospel” as anything other than religious, but, fascinatingly enough, the first readers of Mark’s “gospel” – the oldest of the gospels – would not have heard his opening sentence as religious at all.
“The beginning of the gospel, the good news, the glad tidings of Jesus Christ” would have struck the ears of first century Palestinian hearers of these tidings as a tweak in the face of Rome. “Gospel,” as a literary genre, consisted at that point almost entirely of propaganda from the empire.
It is as if you turned on the television to watch the State of the Union address and found a story about salvation instead. And, if you bothered to listen to the whole message, you would hear that this healing and wholeness for your life and your society were not coming through the work of a president or a congress or the powerful or the wealthy or the “job creators,” but, instead, through the lives of the poor, the sick, the outcast and the occupied. The convention is turned on its head, and the reason for doing so would quickly become clear.
Mark is up to something. His second sentence gives another big clue as he quotes Isaiah, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'"
The gospel, the glad tidings, the good news about Jesus is, before it is anything else, a message of hope to an occupied people. Before it is anything else – before it is “religious,” before it is about “eternal life,” way before it is about something called “church,” – the good news of the gospel comes as a response to the cry of those people asking – as oppressed people have always asked – is this the way it’s supposed to be?
Is this the way it’s supposed to be?
Your own answer to that question is an excellent way to gauge your own response to the gospel. If everything is just fine the way it is then you have no need of tidings – glad or otherwise – that begin with the declaration, “Turn everything around, for the kingdom of God is at hand!”
That’s as good a translation as you’ll get of Jesus’ earliest teaching. Metanoia – the Greek in the gospels – means to turn from the path one is on. The essence of Jesus’ message? Everything must change!
Is this the way it’s supposed to be?
If you’re fine with the way things are then Jesus really has very little to say to you – except, perhaps, for that basic Advent imperative: wake up!
Wake up! Wake up and look around you. Everything is not fine, and this is not the way it’s supposed to be.
Have you seen the 60 Minutes clip that is making the Facebook rounds lately? The one that focuses on homeless families in central Florida? The one that mentions a county there that has 1,100 homeless children in its school system? The one the features a 15-year-old girl and her younger brother who live in a van with their carpenter father because, well, because there is no room for them in the inn?
Is this the way it’s supposed to be?
Wake up! Wake up and look around you. Everything is not fine, and this is not the way it’s supposed to be.
Have you noticed that our U.S. tax dollars – yours and mine our friends’ and loved ones’ – pay for almost half of the entire world’s total spending on war and the preparation for war? And have you noticed that nobody even talks about that anymore? Swords, plowshares, prince of peace?
Is this the way it’s supposed to be?
Wake up! Wake up and look around you. Everything is not fine, and this is not the way it’s supposed to be.
Have you felt the broken places in your own life lately? Have you wondered why some simple things are so often just so damned difficult? Have you felt hope slip away like water down a drain pipe and wondered when justice might flow like a might water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream?
Everything is not the way it’s supposed to be. Repent. Turn around on the path you’re on and look toward a new horizon. There, like a bright morning star, stands the one whose glad tidings are for you: the good news of Jesus the Christ.
On this good news everything depends. On this good news begins the great turning of the world. On this good news rest the hopes and fears of all the years.
So, recalling that, in those days, a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered, and that the glad tidings of Jesus the Christ register first and foremost God’s discontent with the way things are, and also God’s invitation to register our own hopes for the way things could yet be, pause for a moment to consider your own “hopes and fears” this Advent season.
We all come from some place, and we meet here for a little while along the way. We bring to this place our brokenness, that we might experience something of God’s healing grace. We bring to this place our deepest longings, that we might find here bread for our journeys into hope.
We come to this place to register, then, our hopes and fears, and to join our voices in the glad tidings that say, “no, this is not the way things are supposed to be,” and thus to join our voices with the ancient prophets to declare good news:
"In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
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.” Let it be so, and may I participate in the transformation. That is to say, amen.

We Are the Least of These

2011-11-25T14:32:00.000-08:00

November 20, 2011
Matthew 25: 31-46
A decade ago I was asked in a job interview what passages of scripture I would choose to preach on if I set aside the lectionary and simply chose my favorite preaching texts. I named four: Micah 6:8 “what does the Lord require of you, but that you do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God;” Amos 5:24 “let justice roll down like a mighty water and righteousness like an everflowing stream;” Isaiah 6:8 “here I am, Lord, send me;” and this closing “kingdom parable” at the end of Matthew 25. “What we do to the least of these” … one of my favorite pieces of scripture. In fact, it’s one of my favorite pieces of writing – period.
You will have noticed a common theme running through these texts that focus on answering God’s call to the ministry of social justice. So, throw me in the briar patch and make me preach on a passage that lends itself so easily to my favorite theme, and what, frankly, I take to be the central purpose of Christian faith: doing justice.
Except, this time around. It’s not that I don’t want to preach on Matthew. I still love it, and I reach for it often. It’s just that this time around I heard it differently.
More than one colleague has observed that I can roll out of bed in the morning and preach a social justice sermon. But when I rolled out of bed earlier this month to work on this passage, it didn’t strike the kind of chord that I expected. So this morning, I’m not going to tell you that we ought to be doing more to tend to the homeless poor; you already know that anyway. In fact, at session later today we’re going to be talking about a new Arlington initiative to do just that. I’m also not going to tell you that we need to work harder to give voice to the voiceless; you already know that, too. And I’m not going to tell you that we ought to be doing more to feed our neighbors in need – even though we heard a great moment for mission from the kids concerning just that a few minutes ago.
No. This morning I want to say simply that, sometimes, we are the least of these. Sometimes, the least of these is sitting next to you in the pew, disguised as a comfortably middle-class, gainfully employed, healthy, well-fed resident of Northern Virginia.
Sometimes, the one sitting next to you in the pews is struggling mightily. Sometimes, for that person, just getting out of bed is an act of defiance. The one sitting next to you may be struggling economically.
The one sitting next to you may be grieving a deep loss, may be brokenhearted by a ruptured relationship, may be angry and aggrieved by work, may feel overwhelmed by school, may be experiencing a spiritual hunger with sighs too deep for fathoming.
Sometimes, the one facing all or any of that may be the one facing you in the mirror. Sometimes, we are the least of these.
While surely that is fairly obvious on the face of it, sometimes taking a closer look at the obvious can illuminate the stuff that is a bit more hidden.
For example, and this is another observation of the obvious, a lot of folks who stand outside the church as critics reject the church because, they say, faith is just a crutch.
To that accusation William Sloan Coffin famously responded, “of course faith is a crutch; what makes you think you don’t walk with a limp?”
Others charge that church-goers are hypocrites. That line of criticism gets amplified with every church scandal, and it grows steadily louder when the church’s internal dialogue sounds no different in tone than the worst of political debate or culture war.
But underneath those criticisms rests a deeper truth – indeed, a deep invitation: it’s OK here to be who you are, to limp on in and bring to this place your burdens and your brokenness, because there’s nothing hypocritical about being human. It’s only hypocritical when we claim to be something else.
That’s why this Sunday called “Christ the King” is important. It’s an urgent reminder that we are not the center; Christ is the center. We are not here to be the center; we are here to be drawn closer to the center because that is where the healing of our broken selves begins.
Of what, then, is Christ the center?
A few weeks back at Unchurch we talked about what church is. I did a “word cloud” based on responses to that question. You’ve all seen word clouds: they capture visually what words or phrases get most often used in a discussion. In response to the question, “what is church?” the biggest word in our cloud was, “community.”
When we’re being faithful, when we’re at our best, that’s what Christ is the center of for us: the center of our community.
In terms of our text this morning, we best approach the center of our community when we care for its most broken members. If Christ is the center, we get closest to him when we care for the least of these, our sisters and brothers. That is to say, each other, when we are the least.
In addition to the obvious ethical injunction to care for the homeless poor, to feed the hungry, to do justice in the wider world, this morning I’m suggesting that Matthew 25 carries also the ethical injunction to care for each other. Moreover, this ethical injunction to care for each other is directly related to how well we are able to respond to the ethical injunction to care for the homeless poor, to feed the hungry, and to do justice in the wider world.
We are only ever any good at that when we are a community that owns its own brokenness and embraces its own when we are broken.
This is not a question of program or priority. In other words, I’m not saying, “we can’t feed them till we feed ourselves because we’re no good to anyone if we’re starved.” That may or may not be the case. As I said, it’s not a question of program or priority, it’s simply a principle that we reflect in our liturgy: we begin worship acknowledging our own brokenness and, therefore, our need to be made whole by the grace of God that we experience as we draw near to the center that is the way of Jesus.
Drawing closer to the center, we are drawn closer to one another, and we have the opportunity, the great gift, that is each other with whom to experience healing.
Out of these deeper truths flow a couple of principles for our life together. As we end one liturgical year and prepare to begin a new one next week with the first Sunday of Advent, this is an auspicious time for naming some key principles, and it’s all the more so given that the next year is going to be filled with the challenges that come with significant change.
So, remembering that sometimes we are the least of these in and through whom we minister to Christ, here are a couple of principles for life together:
First, bring your worst! Huh? No, seriously, bring your brokenness and own it. But don’t remain stuck in it. We begin our worship with confession, but we don’t stay there. We don’t wallow in it, we confess it trusting that there is in our relationship with God an abundance of healing grace.
Which brings us to the second principle:
Bring your best self, too. Bring the gifts you have been given. It’s been a truism in every congregation I’ve known that we often tend to leave our best behind when we come to church because we don’t church to feel like work. For years I was reluctant to bring my print design skills to church work because it’s what I did for a living outside of church. I know that some of you have similar stories.
But if what we want at church is community – and that is the most common response people give when asked what they’re looking for – we must face up to the fact that community is not an off-the-shelf, fully formed commodity. Community is what we make of it. Community is what we build.
We will, inevitably, bring our worst to the community – and we should. But, if that is all we bring to it, well, then, at the very least our expectations should be tempered!
On the other hand, and this is where Matthew 25 spoke powerfully to me this week, if we acknowledge that sometimes we are the least of these, and if we remember always that the way we respond to and relate with the least of these is the way we respond to and relate with the Christ at the center of our common life, then out of the least that we are and the least that we bring something profound and powerful will be born.
That’s how resurrection works. But it only works in community if we are willing to run the real risk of building authentic relationships with one another, if we are willing to acknowledge our brokenness, to share our deepest longings with each other. For the one bright truth that shines through Jesus’ kingdom parable in Matthew 25 is this: only by way of the least of these do we find ourselves living the way of the greatest of these – the way of Christ the center.
We’re going to move now into a time of prayer, but we’re going to do that a bit differently this morning as, together, we do the work of the people. I invite you to enter a brief time of silence and think about the place of joy and of sorrow in your own life right now. Think about something for which you give thanks today, and also about something that feels out of joint in your life. Then in a moment I’ll invite you to turn to the person closest to you in the pews – and you can sort out just how to do that – and share with one another one thing that you are thankful for this morning, and one thing that you long for, one broken place that needs healing.
Then we’ll gather that up in a closing prayer of the people.
I invite you now to stand up and spread ourselves around in a circle. We’ll join hands and share our prayers of the people, and then we’ll close in song – so take your bulletins with you because the words to the closing hymn are printed on the back.
Let us pray.

Got Talents?

2011-11-16T07:37:00.001-08:00

Matthew 25:14-30
November 13, 2011
There are at least two ways to read this funky little story that comes near the end of Matthew’s gospel. These readings are, quite frankly, almost completely at odds with one another, but each has something to offer. So, this morning, dueling interpretations of the gospel.
The most common way of reading this story is to see the wealthy landholding master as God, and to judge ourselves according to the way we use what we have been given. Such a reading has much to offer, especially during the middle of our annual November stewardship season when we are talking about what we have been given and when many of us are making personal decisions about how much we will give to the mission of this congregation for the coming year.
Read this way, the parable urges us to account honestly the value of what we have been given. As one popular commentary puts it, “It is routine for Christians to excuse themselves by protesting that their gifts are too modest to be significant. This parable insists that the gifts are precious and are to be exploited to the full.”
Read this way, Jesus’ parable insists that we recognize a central truth of the psalmist: “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein.” Put a bit differently, we belong to God, and so does all our stuff. In that light, this parable pushes us to recognize that everything we have is a gift.
That recognition is profoundly countercultural. We have, as Americans, been taught from the beginning of our lives to believe that we get what we merit in this life. We make our own way in the world. We earn our living from the sweat of our own brows, and all that we have we deserve, including absolute freedom in deciding what to do with it.
The parable says, “wait a minute; all that you have has been given to you by the one who created all that is, including you.” At best, we are tenants in this house of God caring for it for just a little while before passing it along to those who will come after us.
In this reading, we are challenged to be wise but also risky with the gift, and warned against the consequences of hoarding it or hiding it away. In other words, use the gifts you have been given. You have been given them freely, so use them expansively for the sake of the gospel.
This reading, as useful as it is, begins to break down for me right here, because, for me, responding to the invitation to use my gifts freely for the sake of the gospel depends upon faith. In other words, for me to take real risks with what has been given to me I have to trust the giver of the gifts.
If God is, as suggested by this reading of the parable, a “harsh man, reaping where he did not sow, and gathering where he did not scatter seed,” then I’m not sure I trust that there is steadfast love enduring forever and for me as I take risks for the gospel.
But, if I let go of all my 21st century North American privileges and put myself in the place of the poor and landless peasants to whom Jesus told the story, another reading opens up new wisdom.
First, let’s clear up one common misconception about this parable: talents are not gifts or skills or things that you’re good at. Talents are money, and a lot of it.
One comment I read on this text said a talent would be worth about $6 million in our currency. We might conclude that this parable is actually about the one percent and not the 99 percent. Perhaps the target of Jesus’ anger is not a lazy servant but instead a capricious money manager.
From that point of view, reading the text from below, the slave who is cast into outer darkness looks quite different, perhaps even heroic.
Writer and activist Ched Myers, a Sojourners contributing editor, suggests an alternative reading:
“There is no theme more common to Jesus' storytelling than Sabbath economics,” Myers says. “[Jesus] promises poor sharecroppers abundance (Mark 4:3-8, 26-32), but threatens absentee landowners (Mark 12:1-12) and rich householders (Luke 16:19-31) with judgment. […]
“The notorious parable of the talents (pounds) shows how Sabbath perspective as an interpretive key can rescue us from a long tradition of both bad theology and bad economics (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:11-28). This story has, in capitalist religion, been interpreted allegorically from the perspective of the cruel master (= God!), requiring spiritualizing gymnastics to rescue the story from its own depressing conclusion that haves will always triumph over the have-nots (Matthew 25:29). But it reads much more coherently when turned on its head and read as a cautionary tale of realism about the mercenary selfishness of the debt system. This reading understands the servant who refused to play the greedy master's money-market games as the hero who pays a high price for speaking truth to power (Matthew 25:24-30)—just as Jesus himself did. “
Myers’ reading insists, further, that we take the parable as one part of the broader story through which Jesus paints God as the loving father welcoming home the prodigal, as the mother hen worrying over her chicks.
If we trust that God welcomes us always and holds us always in loving hands, then, though the risks of faith may entail a high price – our money most assuredly, and also perhaps our lives as well – we have already an ultimate assurance, sealed, as it were, by the unsealed tomb: God will be with us even when circumstance casts us into the outer darkness.
By either reading, then, Jesus invites us to lives of risky faith.
But when I read this parable of Jesus from below I also imagine a more personal parable.
Once upon a time there was a young man who thought that God was calling him to use his life in a particular way, for particular service. The young man, though, had his doubts. He wasn’t sure about God, and sometimes wondered if the still, small voice he heard in his heart late at night wasn’t just his own projection, or maybe indigestion. But sometimes other people would say to him, “you have real gifts; have you ever thought about using them for the sake of the gospel?”
And then the young man would wonder. He would wonder about the voice, and he would wonder about the gospel. Just what was that gospel? What did it mean? What was this good news?
He’d seen it in action since he was a child: how people who believed that they were really, truly loved could do remarkable things for others. He’d seen his own mother give her life to the families of school children who showed up at school in mid-winter without a coat, sometimes without shoes to cover their feet even though it was snowing outside. He knew she did this because she believed that God loved her, and that God loved those kids, too.
He’d seen his own father working with homeless men in the city’s streets. He’d seen his father brokenhearted when one of the men died on a cold January night and there was no family even to claim the body. And he knew that his father did this because he believed that God loved him, and that God loved those men who lived under the bridge, too.
But the young man had a good job. He had young children, too, and a wife with her own career and her own goals. What would it mean to them to quit his job, and to take a huge detour on their fairly clear path to the American Dream of hard-earned upward mobility? What would it mean for buying a house? What would it mean for the minivan?
But, after the family had already traded in about half its income in exchange for more time to raise young children, the young man began to hear that still, small voice speaking with more urgency. “Now is the time,” it seemed to say, “come, and follow me.”
So in the next year’s Christmas letter, the young man chose this way to tell their friends that he was going to follow the call he had discerned: “last year we cut our income in half and enjoyed it so much we decided to do it again.”
The young man had been given so much, but if he believed for a minute in a wrathful God that was about to throw him into outer darkness because he’d hoarded those gifts and used them mostly for the good of his own family and his own career and his own wants for a long time … well, if he believed that God was like that there was no way in the world that he would risk the radical changes required to respond to that still, small voice.
What is the still, small voice saying to you these days? Can you hear it? Do you trust God’s love enough to follow where it leads?
My little parable does not negate the traditional reading of the parable of the talents, but I hope I’ve complicated it a bit because our faith is a complicated and challenging journey. It cannot stand still, for, a faith that changes nothing is worth nothing. What are you willing to risk from what you have been given for the sake of the changes that the gospel demands?
No matter which way you read this parable, it asks a simple question and provides a simple answer: got talents? Then use them.

A Time to Choose

2011-11-08T09:24:00.000-08:00

Joshua 24:1-3, 14-15
In the weeks since his death, there’s been a Steve Jobs quote bouncing around the internets. It came from his address to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford. Jobs told them,
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Graduation day is a kairos moment, what the Bible might call, “the fullness of time.” It’s one of those moments when you step out of ordinary time, the seemingly ceaseless flow of one moment into the next, and catch a glimpse – however fleeting and incomplete – a glimpse of almost infinite possibility.
Joshua has called the people of Israel together to offer his own valedictory address. He is old, and they are about to graduate from his leadership and be set off on their own. They have a choice to make.
Our lives find their ultimate shape in the way that we respond in such moments, to such choices.
I have a somewhat mixed reaction to what Steve Jobs advised the Stanford grads in that particular moment, that kairos time, and somewhere in the mix of my own response I also discern guidance for our own path through such moments.
On the one hand, Job’s morning mirror story is quite similar to the ancient monastic practice of St. Ignatius who asked each day variations on the basic question, “what this day has fed me and made me feel whole, what has drawn me closer to God and what has pushed me away?” Patterns in one’s response to such questions over time are excellent indicators of where God is calling you. I’ve commended that practice to many people over the years, and I fall asleep each night with my own responses swimming around my mind.
I commend such practice to you, as part of faithful living and discerning God’s call and claim on your life. So I read what Steve Jobs said and I want to say, “amen to that!”
On the other hand, I read the quote and also think, “what an incredibly privileged position to be in, that you could even imagine changing something if, upon greeting the new day, you do not want to do what you know you must do and will do that day.”
I find myself feeling convicted in my own privilege, because I know that there are billions of people around the world who simply do not have the choice to change.
Remember the scene from the movie Groundhog Day? Bill Murray’s jaded and self-important weatherman finds himself stuck inside an endlessly repeating day, and, what’s worse, he’s now stuck at a bar with a couple of fairly drunk blue collar workers. Murray says,
“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”
One of the guys looks over his beer and responds, “that about sums it up for me.”
Because it’s a movie, and a comedic one, hilarity ensues.
At the tragic end of the same scale, however, I’m mindful of a friend who tells the story from a Christian Peacemaking Team accompaniment journey to a war-torn country in the developing world. His group was in a village, and they asked a villager if she could imagine herself happy. She thought for a long while before finally responding, “I guess on the day that I die. That will be a happy day.”
At my ordination service, many years ago, I had some friends perform a song called Solo la Pido a Dios. It’s a song by Argentinian singer-songwriter Leon Geico. It translates simply as, “One thing I ask of God: that God not let me be indifferent to the suffering.”
In particular, from my privileged North American position, I ask that God not let me be indifferent to the suffering of those whose conditions I am complicit in. To turn that around, what I am saying is that I bear responsibility for the suffering of the villager who cannot imagine the simple happiness I take utterly for granted. My wealth is not separate from her poverty, and because my wealth and its security are contingent – to whatever degree – upon her poverty and insecurity I cannot rest from the work of trying to create a more just and peaceful world, for when I do I stand convicted of the great moral crime of indifference.
The gospel reading this morning insists that we do not know the time when time runs out. In that vein, Steve Jobs was absolutely right in insisting that we should be asking ourselves what to do with the time we have been given. But the arc of the story of faith pushes us to inquire further. The question is not only “do I want to do what I am going to do today, is it going to bring joy to my life.” For our lives to be complete – to be morally whole – we must push through the fog of indifference to ask also, “what might I do so that on this day someone else experiences joy as well.”
My joy cannot be complete if there is no joy for you.
We are all, whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not, bound together in this world. As Martin Luther King was fond of saying, we wear a single garment of destiny; we live, and move, and have our being within a great web of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly affects us all indirectly, and, therefore, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
I had lunch last week with some colleagues with People of Faith for Equality Virginia. We were talking about marriage equality and about bullying, and about taking action in regards to those concerns in January and February. It’s not my marriage, my security, my well-being or my safety that is at stake in those conversations. But it is my soul that is at stake. “One thing I ask of God: God do not let me be indifferent to the suffering.”
This is the choice that Joshua puts before the people: choose this day whom you will serve – the God who brought liberation to the captives, who let the oppressed go free, or some other god unconcerned with the well being of others far distant from me.
Choose this day whom you will serve: the God of exodus hope, the God of liberating love, the God of faithful justice; or some other god. As for me and my household, we will strive to serve the Lord, the God made known in the life of the one called to bring good news to the poor, to restore sight to the blind, to bring liberty to the captives and let the oppressed go free.
God, do not let me be indifferent to the suffering.
Amen.

Nine Theses

2011-11-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

Matthew 5:1-12
October 30, 2011
When Martin Luther posted his famous 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg church, on October 31, 1517, he could not have imagined that his act of ecclesiastical disobedience was part of a larger movement that would give birth not only to a new church but also to an entirely new social order. If he had known that where once there was one Christian church in time there would literally thousands of denominations, perhaps he would not have been so bold. Perhaps he would have said, “let somebody else take the heat.” Perhaps he would have been frightened by the very forces of faith and liberty he helped unleash.
But his time demanded a response of conscience and so Luther said, “here I stand, I can do no other.”
Jesus, 1,500 years before Luther, walked up the mountainside, sat down to teach, and said, in effect, the same thing. “This is what I believe, I can say nothing else.” Rather than 95 theses concerning the life of the church, Jesus offered up a simple list of blessings that framed his vision of the kingdom of God, the commonwealth of the beloved.
We, the heirs of Jesus’ vision and of Luther’s original impulse for reform, live with a church and a social order in similar need of new vision and reformation. Where, then, shall we stand?
Considering the magnitude of the Reformation – whose founding gesture we celebrate today – it may strike you as overstating the case to suggest that the present moment calls for change of similar scale.
On the other hand, look around. If ever a time cried out for being reformed on a massive scale, it is our time.
Thomas Merton, writing 40 years ago, named our times this way:
… we are confused, empty and discontented. We have no spiritual and ethical center. We do not have the motives which would enable us to build a peaceful world, because we do not have a sufficient reason to restrain our violence.[1]
I reach for Merton’s voice to underscore that the present crisis reaches far beyond the Tea Party movement or Occupy Wall Street. It encompasses but is not reducible to the Arab Spring or the movements of radical Islam or fundamentalist Christianity. It includes the collapse of Christendom in Europe and the end of the Protestant Establishment in America. It is marked by and recorded through world-changing advances in communication technologies on the one hand, and world-threatening advances and uses of industrial technologies on the other.
They are all symptoms of a far deeper and considerably older crisis that accompanies the twilight of modernity.
We are living in a period of multiple crises, but each is first and foremost spiritual in nature. The present moment inescapably calls forth a new way of living together.
There is a sense, of course, in which every age, every epoch, calls forth a new way of being that breaks with the orthodoxy of any given moment. Indeed, as Brian McClaren points out in A Generous Orthodoxy,
In the Middle Ages, “straight thinking” was a kind of government function – like right business practices, similarly enforceable by censorship, imprisonment, torture, inquisition, and massacre. In the Modern Era, protest and conquest were the spirit of the age, so “right opinions” were one’s ticket to power and dominance. But in the world that is emerging out of roots in the modern and medieval worlds, perhaps we will believe again that the meek will inherit the earth and that truth is a treasure not best found or held through coercion and threat or competition and dominance, but by humble seeking, sincere faith, resilient hope, patient love.[2]
You can hear in McClaren’s description echoes of the Beatitudes: “perhaps we will believe again that the meek will inherit the earth.” As that suggests, Jesus faced his own time in the spirit of reformation. The meek were certainly not inheriting the earth in first-century Palestine; the poor in spirit dwelled far from the kingdom of heaven; peacemakers were called many things – but children of God was no more likely then than it is today.
Yet from under the thumb of an oppressive empire, Jesus cast a vision of a future otherwise that still animates dreams and visions 2,000 years later. Likewise, from under the thumb of an oppressive church, Martin Luther cast a vision of a future otherwise that still empowers the church 500 years later. Just as Jesus proclaimed in his time and Luther in his, so I say to you today: another world is possible. Another world is possible.
But it is not inevitable. It will not simply come with the rising of the sun and the breaking of a new dawn.
God calls it forth in sovereign love. But, in freedom we have the capacity to remain enslaved to the present time. In brokenness we can choose to remain broken. In sin we can continue to turn away from God and from the future that God is calling forth.
What does that future look like? The future of God’s imagining?
Jesus captured its spirit and cast a vision from the mountaintop when he cried out for a community of passion and compassion – a community in which the mourners would be comforted and in which lights of faith, hope and love would be lifted high against the darkness; a community in which the poor are blessed and peacemakers are called the children of God; a community of compassion structured by a politics of love and justice.
Where, today, can we find our own Martin Luther? Where, today, can we find people willing to forego security for the sake of conscience? Where, today, can we find a community of reformation unafraid to declare boldly to the world that there are at least 95 more things that need to change?
Well, as I have said to you before, we are the ones who we’ve been waiting for. The task of our time is to name the present age accurately and to cast a vision of a future otherwise.
The present way of ordering and arranging our economic life is inadequate and incomplete, the present way of ordering and arranging our political life is inadequate and incomplete, the present way of ordering and arranging international affairs is inadequate and incomplete. These may sound like political or social concerns, but they are first and foremost theological concerns and our response to them must be grounded in the vision that Jesus casts in the Sermon on the Mount.
The vast economic inequality and growing gap between the haves and the have nots is an affront to the gospel. The consolidation of political power in the hands of the wealthy at the expense of the poor is an affront to the gospel. War is an affront to the gospel.
And yet the church, too timid and tepid to lift again the banner of reformation, acquiesces quietly to a status quo that relegates spiritual questions to the confines of private life all but oblivious to the deep and public spiritual crisis of our age.
Where is the church? Where is the community of compassion that can respond to this crisis of spirit? Where is the vision of a future otherwise?
Unfortunately, the present way of ordering and arranging our spiritual life is also inadequate and incomplete.
Nevertheless, here we stand. We can do no other. Therefore, let us offer, as mere bullet points, and by way of invitation, a glimpse at the church of the second reformation.
This is the age of Facebook posts, so there’s no way the world will sit still long enough for 95 theses. So, let’s start with a tenth of that: nine theses for the community of compassion and transformation.
Remember that Luther’s theses did not set in motion a singular new institution, but instead began a long journey into new ways of being together.
Perhaps we may use this shorter list as bread for our journey together here, as we try in our own time and place to be faithful to Jesus’ founding vision of a community that lived in recognition that the kingdom of God was near at hand.
As we welcome new members into this community today, and, in a few minutes, as we begin thinking anew and afresh about some basic structures of support and staffing for this community, may we be guided by commitments such as these, watered by the wellspring of our own tradition, and rooted and grounded deeply in our trust in the love of God, the grace of Christ and the communion of the Spirit. Amen.
________________________________________
[1] Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004) 19. This volume of Merton’s work went unpublished for more than 40 years. For a description of the controversy surrounding the work, see the introduction by Patricia A. Burton.
[2] Brian D. McClaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervans, 2004) 294.
Rev. Dr. David Ensign

The Last Word

2011-10-25T07:25:00.000-07:00

October 23, 2011
Matthew 22:34-40
For the past several Sundays we’ve been following the lectionary cycle of readings through the latter part of the gospel of Matthew. While we haven’t dwelled on it – or, really, even mentioned it – the stories we’ve read this month all come from Matthew’s account of Holy Week.
I haven’t raised that until now because doing so felt, to me, like making this a bit of a “word out of season.” I lift up this context now, still clearly out of season in terms of the liturgical calendar, primarily to underscore the stakes.
Jesus has been engaged in a running argument with the religious authorities over such questions as the source of Jesus’ teaching authority, whether or not it is lawful to pay taxes to Rome, and who gets to marry whom in resurrection life. In each case, Jesus has resisted being pinned down to an easily dismissible – and arrestable – response.
Finally the authorities pose what turns out to be their last question: “which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Like all of the rest of the questions, this is a trick and a trap, though it doesn’t seem so to our 21st-century Christian eyes or ears. But one of the reigning Jewish legal theories of Jesus’ day held that all of the laws – all 600-some of them – were of equal weight and importance. To lift one above the rest was impertinent, at the least, and blasphemous at the worst.
After all, who was Jesus to say which law mattered most? He was not in the learned class of the Pharisees, and he was certainly not qualified to speak decisively on God’s law – to, in effect, speak for God on which law mattered most to God.
And yet, that is precisely what he sets out to do.
What’s the most important law? Jesus offers the last word; the word to end the debating; the word on which to hang everything that has been at stake from the very beginning for Jesus.
The word is love.
You shall love the Lord your God with … with everything that you have, and, at the same time, you shall love your neighbor.
On this, Jesus says, hangs all of the law and the prophets. That phrase is crucial in the text. It echoes the phrase that inaugurates Jesus’ ministry in Matthew. At the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, back in the fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus utters its parallel – “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”
Now, as his teaching draws to a close, he gives the final word, the word that fulfills the law and the prophets: love God and love neighbor.
Simple enough, except that Jesus has spent his entire teaching ministry deepening our ideas about love and complicating our ideas of “neighbor.” By this point in the story it’s clear that, as Douglas John Hall puts it, “really to love others is far more demanding than just ‘doing good deeds’ or ‘being nice.’ For most of us, to be honest, it means that we have to stop loving ourselves so much, putting ourselves first; and that is a transformation neither easily nor quickly achieved.”
By this point, moreover, it’s clear that Jesus not only includes pretty much everyone in the definition of neighbor but also that he puts clear priority on the neighbor who is poor, who is vulnerable, who is powerless, who has been cast out and looked down upon. What’s more, he has also included enemies within the circle of neighborliness. In other words, “neighbor” includes a lot of folks who seem to ruin the neighborhood.
Thus, “love God and love neighbor,” means a bit more than piously affirming one’s position in the pew, one’s rank in the hierarchy of the temple, one’s standing in the sanctuary. Indeed, Jesus doesn’t seem the least bit interested in any of that. He seems a lot more interested in hanging out with folks in the streets.
In the streets, loving God and loving neighbors becomes a matter of life and death, and of grace and forgiveness.
In his book Choosing Against War, John Roth tells of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that many credit with averting the bloodbath that was widely expected in the aftermath of the collapse of apartheid.
Roth tells of an elderly woman whose son and husband had been murdered by white policemen, who had burned the bodies and celebrated around the flames. In 1994, the woman faced the leader, Mr. Van de Broek, in court. Roth writes:
Those involved had confessed their guilt, and the Commission turned to the woman for a final statement regarding her desire for an appropriate punishment.
“I want three things,” the woman said calmly. “I want Mr. Van de Broek to take me to the place where they burned my husband’s body. I would like to gather up the dust and give him a decent burial.
“Second, Mr. Van de Broek took all my family away from me, and I still have a lot to give. Twice a month, I would like him to come to the ghetto and spend the day with me so I can be a mother to him.
“Third, I would like Mr. Van de Broek to know he is forgiven by God and that I forgive him, too. And, I would like someone to come and lead me by the hand to where Mr. Van de Broek is so that I can embrace him and he can know my forgiveness is real.”
I think that’s what Jesus would do. I think that’s what Jesus what have us do. I think that’s what it means to love God and love neighbor.
Of course, it’s incredibly complicated, and never easy. “Love God and love neighbor” may fit neatly on a sign, but it’s hardly a political program. If you raise it up – “love God and love neighbor” – then critics, the realists, will complain that you’re not offering any real solutions, that it’s not clear what you want. If, like Jesus – especially since he’d just turned over the moneychangers’ tables – you say it in the context of pressing for social changes, critics will insist that you’re just creating a public spectacle without offering a program or a plan to address people’s problems.
And, of course, the critics would be right.
Jesus does not offer a program or a plan. Instead, he articulates a core conviction by which all programs and plans are to be judged.
You have a plan to reduce the nation’ budget deficit? OK. Does it stand first on the side of the poor, who are my neighbors?
You have some detailed thoughts on national security? Fine. Do they reflect, truly and authentically, love for those whom we have called enemies, whom I now call my neighbors?
You have some proposals for financial reform? Great! Do they serve first the interests of the least of these, my neighbors, my sisters and brothers and only then trickle up?
You have a plan for feeding and housing the least of these? Fantastic! Does it reflect real love for them even with all of their messy and broken lives?
Love, Jesus insists, must be the true and final measure of all that we do. Love of God and love of neighbor.
In the end, Jesus suggests, it’s the same thing: to love neighbor – fully and authentically – is to love God; to love God – fully and authentically – is to love neighbor.
That’s the last word. Amen.

Occupied Exegesis

2011-10-18T07:39:00.001-07:00

Matthew 24:15-22
October 16, 2011
I spent some time last week with the folks, mostly young folks, who are occupying K Street at the moment. As the old Crosby, Stills and Nash song put it, “there’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.”
Clear or not, there is something happening here, and through it I think the spirit is trying to say something to the church.
Last April, as the Arab Spring was in full flower, I had a fascinating conversation with our eldest, who’s a junior at Mary Washington this year. He was closely following the news – watching Al Jazeera streaming on line because they were covering what U.S. media was largely ignoring. He was also creating a video game to simulate the situation.
I was incredibly amused at the dichotomy: Arab kids in the street, American kid turning the experience into a video game, so I asked him why his cohort, who are shouldering so many of the worst burdens of the Great Recession, weren’t following the lead of the Arab youth and taking to the streets here.
Now I know the answer: they were getting ready.
As of last week, there were Occupy Together Meet Up groups in more than 1,400 cities and towns across the United States. There were roughly 120 active occupations in American cities. There were related demonstrations in Europe, Asia and Africa over the weekend.
While not everyone I met at the K Street occupation was younger than 30, the vast majority are, and that seems to be holding true across the country. Whatever is happening, it’s happening among young people.
More to the point, this widespread social unrest is happening precisely among the generation of Americans who feel abandoned by or failed by all of the major social systems that previous generations of Americans have come to take for granted.
Consider:
• For more than 30 years – the lifetimes of the young adults we’re talking about – American education has been a failing system. To be sure, not every aspect of it, not every classroom, not every teacher. But the system as a whole, from preschool to graduate school, is broken.
• For those same 30 years, American politics has been broken. Outside of the well-connected, it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who believes their elected leaders hear them or care what they say. If citizens no longer believe in democracy, then it’s broken.
• The failure of our politics is not unrelated to a far bigger systemic failure that young adults, statistically speaking, pay far more attention to than their elders: the failure of the environment, and, in particular, our inability and unwillingness to come to grips with the looming disaster of global climate change.
• As this cohort comes of age, the American economy has been broken as well. The unemployment rate for 18-24 year olds is double the rate for all workers. The average young adult graduates from college with $20,000 in student loan debt, and almost half of them spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. A generation ago, fewer than 20 percent of 25-34 year olds spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent.
This litany goes on and on, but the bottom line is this: most Americans now believe that the current generation of young adults will be the first in American history to be economically worse off than their parents.
And what is the generation least likely to show up in a church, mosque or synagogue for worship?
Whatever is happening, it’s happening precisely among the people whose absence is lamented in American houses of worship.
None of this is particularly new or startling, but it has occurred to me for a while that if young adults are not going to come to church – and, let’s be utterly honest with ourselves, they are not about to – then perhaps church should go to them. And not go to them asking, “why don’t you come to us?” but, rather, go to them and ask, “what’s going on in your life?” “what are you most concerned about?” “what makes your soul sing?” “what breaks your heart?” and, with respect to all of the huge issues that hang like a multi-bladed sword of Damocles over the futures of an entire generation, “what would you like to hear the church say right now?”
So I went down to the demonstration … not to get my fair share of abuse, because, even in my clerical collar, to a person, the young adults with whom I spoke were happy to engage in respectful conversation with a representative of the church even as many of them offered sharply worded harsh criticism of the church.
Indeed, they have sharp criticisms. Not surprising or novel criticisms, to be sure, but sharp ones.
Megan, a young woman from Richmond, a military vet, decried the church’s hypocrisy about sex, and especially the way the church has condemned gays and lesbians.
Megan’s friend, Mary, nodded in agreement, and wondered why the church condemned people of other faiths.
Will, a young man who grew up Lutheran in suburban Maryland, said that it is hard to take seriously an institution that takes its ancient scriptures literally, especially when it comes to questions that are answered definitively by science. He said, “you’d be better off if you stuck to the parts of the Bible that are written in the red letters.”
Ah, yes, the red letters, the parts that are attributed to Jesus. The things like, “blessed are the poor,” or “love your enemies,” or “I came that you might have life.”
The folks I spoke with at the occupation certainly do not want to hear anybody tell them, “believe the orthodox creeds about Jesus or you’re going to hell.” That makes no sense to them whatsoever.
But they do find Jesus to be a powerful and attractive figure. The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount makes sense to them. If the church reflected that Jesus, then they might find something attractive in it, as well.
Of course, that Jesus is the one whose own religious leaders sought to trap and, eventually, to have executed. That Jesus did not spend much time huddled behind stained glass windows. That Jesus did not surround himself with only the most respectable types. That Jesus did not care overly much for institutionalized religion. That Jesus was constantly on the move, and he was clearly much more interested in building a movement than in cultivating an institution. That Jesus was in the streets.
That Jesus was occupying Israel. And from that midst of that occupied zone he offered up the most creative readings of his own ancient texts.
He went up on a mountainside – outside, occupying open space – and he said, at least the way my southern ears hear it, “y’all have heard the religious authorities teach you about what these ancient texts mean, but from where I stand – here, amidst people struggling in an unjust economic system with failing religious institutions – from where I stand those texts say something different. You have heard, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ but from where I stand that just leaves the whole world blind. So I say, ‘do not return evil for evil. Pray for those who persecute you.’ That’ll confuse the hell out of them!”
Jesus offered up what I’ll call “occupied exegesis.” That is to say, he did his reading of sacred scripture not in the confines of the temple but out in the street where the theological rubber hits the road of life.
That’s where he found himself confronted by the thorny question of taxes. Funny thing about that question: it turns out controversies over taxes are nothing new under the sun, and under the autumn sun shining down on the occupied zones in my part of the world this weekend you could find a lot of folks complaining about taxes – about who pays and who doesn’t, about who owes what to whom. When the powers that be confronted Jesus on the question of taxes he knew that if he said, “yes, pay them,” he would be capitulating to Rome whose taxes were a constant reminder of the hated occupation. On the other hand, if he said, “no, don’t pay them,” he would be executed immediately as a revolutionary insurgent.
Jesus’ response to the question about taxes – “render unto Caesar the things that belong to Caesar’s and to God the things that belong to God” – satisfied neither side, and it is not going to solve the problems that are at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement, either.
Nevertheless, his words are particularly instructive for the church if we want to have anything at all to say to the present moment.
Writing in Sojourners years ago, Jim Wallis said of this passage, “Jesus didn't give a clear and direct answer to the specific question being asked. Rather, he put it in a larger framework of worship, idolatry, and ultimate loyalty. The issue at stake here is: what do we owe to whom?” (Jim Wallis, Sojourners, May, 1983).
In a way, I think that the occupation of our cities is doing the same thing. If there’s one thing I heard over and over again from McPherson Square, it was a deep desire to move beyond the political logjam of Left and Right, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, and the related accusation against the church for being too politically aligned with the Republican Party in particular. While that accusation is clearly not accurate for churches such as the one I serve, it’s abundantly clear that the loudest part of American Christianity for the past 30 years has been the conservative segment.
In pushing beyond that either/or, I believe the occupation is pressing us all to ask one basic question: “what do we owe to whom?”
Critics have been complaining that there’s no clear agenda to the occupation, no set of demands, that nobody really knows what these folks want. I think what they want is for all of us to sort out what belongs to whom, and to figure out together how we return it.
As it turns out, according to Walter Brueggemann, that is the Biblical definition of justice. Justice amounts to sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it to them.
The church has history and insight with this question, and now the youth of our time are insisting that this question be front and center in our national conversation.
Could this be, against all odds, our time?

Guess Who’s Coming to the Unpower Banquet?

2011-10-14T12:02:00.001-07:00

October 9, 2011
Guess who’s coming to dinner? Well, if we take the gospel to heart the answer is: not the ones you thought.
That simple observation raises all kinds of questions, and, in particular, questions that ought to press in on us here as we live through the fascinating challenges of the present moment. If part of what we’re doing here is asking fundamental questions of ourselves about the very nature of “church,” then one of those fundamental questions is going to be, “who is included?”
And if we ask those fundamental questions about church, pretty soon we’re going to find ourselves confronted by equally foundational questions about who is included in all kinds of other social arrangements from family, to neighborhood, to citizenship, to economy, to political power.
Clearly, I don’t think Jesus was just talking about a dinner party.
But before getting too far along this morning, it’s worth our time to understand just a bit of the cultural context of the parable. Matthew is writing to a community that has experienced the destruction of Jerusalem a generation after Jesus. Matthew’s retelling of Jesus’ parable includes a morality play that understands the destruction of Jerusalem as punishment for a lack of faithfulness.
There was yet another article in the Post this week reporting that worship attendance in Christian, Jewish and Muslim houses of worship in the United States has decreased by more than 15 percent over the past decade. At the same time, the news is full of stories from occupied Wall Street, from debt-crushed Greece, from tea partying conservatives, to a still war torn Afghanistan.
Toss in earthquakes and hurricanes for a bit of dramatic background and Matthew’s moralism might suggest that God is punishing all of us for a lack of faithfulness.
I hold that reading out there not because I think it’s true, but rather to indicate the inherent dangers of using ancient texts to interpret our times. After all, the ancient texts don’t agree with each other about their own time, why should we expect that they would offer clarity about our own?
For example, Luke’s version of the same parable does not go the route of easy moralism, but, instead simply notes that "the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame," accept an invitation to the party after others better off have made their excuses for not coming.
For our present circumstances, I find Luke’s telling more helpful. If we stick only with Matthew’s account we might find ourselves stuck in asking “who’s responsible” for the current situation. Trying to place blame, as Matthew seems to do, is the perfect recipe for getting stuck in the past.
That does not mean that we avoid accountability and responsibility when codes and rules and laws have been clearly violated, but it does mean we don’t get stuck there because our larger challenges have arisen through an incredibly complex mix of social and cultural shifts that we have yet to fully comprehend.
Take just the church, for starters. Lots of folks have turned down the invitation to have dinner with Jesus’ friends. Look around. The powerful community leaders who used to fill pews in Mainline Protestant congregations are mostly absent now.
So, guess who’s coming to dinner now that the better classes have declined. To figure out who might be on the revised guest list let’s ask ourselves what would happen if we did take the gospel seriously. What would happen here if we invited in the 25 percent of Arlingtonians who speak Spanish as a first language? What would happen here if we truly invited in the thousands of Arlingtonians who receive a handout at AFAC or from A-SPAN? What would happen here if we invited in our African-American sisters and brothers? What would happen if we invited in the kids occupying K Street?
By these questions what I really mean to ask is, what do we have to change about ourselves in order to make such invitations authentic? For more than my entire lifetime it has been true that 11:00 on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in American life. It is segregated not just by race, but also by economic status, political persuasion, language, and almost every other category by which we can wall ourselves off from each other.
If we believe, and we say that we do, that the church is somehow and in some small way a provisional expression of the kingdom of God on earth, then what are we saying about that kingdom? Well, let’s start with concerns about the patriarchal language of kingdom. When we use that language, which we’ve inherited from the tradition, we immediately set up a hierarchy and hierarchies are all about exclusion. Is that what heaven is all about? And if we’re building a bit of it here and now, are we building it inside of high walls and locked doors and stained glass barriers?
It’s worth noting in passing that our passage this morning from Paul’s letter to the Philippians ignores one critical traditional hierarchy. When Paul writes about Euodia and Syntiche he is writing about women who have worked alongside him for the sake of the gospel. So the tradition itself provides some of the tools and some of the history that we need for rereading that very tradition, and for reading the signs of our own time.
But let’s not fool ourselves for a moment into thinking that we are not also inheritors of the most difficult aspects of our tradition, and all of the hierarchies it sets up. The tradition having set them up, we recapitulate them in all kinds of subtle and not so subtle ways. Male over female. Straight over gay. Rich over poor. Majority over minority. Well educated over less educated. “High” culture over “low” culture, and so on and on to degrees that vary by location but in a pattern that is long-established and often simply left unquestioned. Even in communities such as ours.
But in this quirky little parable about the banquet, Jesus, the messiah, the savior, the lord, the king, says, “no” to all that.
How does he do that? He insists that God is among the lowly, always, and from the beginning; and this gospel insistence on the lowliness of God raises questions for us about the entire way we think about God. What if, instead of reaching for a “higher power,” Jesus is, instead, pointing in the opposite direction? What if God – the God who chose to be made known through the life of a baby born in an animal stall who grew into an outcast crucified on a barbaric instrument of state execution – what if that God is the essence of powerlessness, calling us to let go of all pretensions to power, such that we really do look at one another as fundamentally equal beings?
The guy I handed soup and sandwiches to last week in the soup line down in Rosslyn? The one who didn’t smell so good because he hasn’t had a shower in while? That one. Fundamentally, in every way that matters to God, my equal. That woman next to him? The one who was talking to herself? Same thing. The auto mechanic who wrecked my car after changing my tire? In every way that matters to God, my equal. The kids currently occupying Wall Street and K Street? Fundamentally equal to the investment bankers and lobbyists who look down upon them from their corner suites. How about the guy who stole my Macbook a couple of years ago? Fundamentally equal to Steve Jobs, and to me.
None of this means that we allow people to abuse others, but it does mean that we are called to live together differently and thus to think anew about accountability, responsibility, punishment and forgiveness, to name just a few constructs that we still rarely get right because we have not begun to learn to live together differently in the way that Jesus calls us to.
We are called to live together differently as church. We are called to live together differently as families. We are called to live together differently as schools. We are called to live together differently as neighbors, as colleagues, as citizens.
When we begin to consider such changes to basic patterns of life, the metaphor of a great banquet in a single room gives way. We can’t sit still; we can’t even stand in one place. We don’t have a lot of solid ground for building any great banquet halls these days. Indeed, in many ways, we are less like builders of banquet halls and more like small craft tossed about on a mighty and stormy sea.
It is quite clear that we are living through an age of massive cultural, economic and political change. Many have noted that the church is ripe for another reformation, and that Christianity has lived through historic shifts roughly every 500 years since the time of Jesus.
It is naïve in the extreme to imagine that massive shifts touching almost every aspect of contemporary life would somehow leave a little church in Arlington untouched.
It is impossible, in the middle of a sea change, to see the shape of the shore toward which we sail.
Moreover, Jesus never promised his followers smooth sailing. Instead, he promised to be with us in the boat when the storm is raging.
His life shows us a way to live together in the midst of stormy seas, and one thing seems abundantly clear even through the fog of uncertainty: we’re all in the same boat now.
So let’s acknowledge that reality, and sail forward with two key commitments. First, we can celebrate where we’ve been and remember it fondly, but let’s not let the past be an anchor dragging us back toward a time that will never be again. And second, let’s get rid of the imagined hierarchies with all the barriers that come with them. We don’t have first class and steerage on this boat. We really are all in it together: one human family, bound together lightly and subject to only one power – the power of love. Let love guide the way. Amen.

Bread and Darkness

2011-10-03T07:11:00.000-07:00

Psalm 27; Philippians 3:4b-14; Matthew 21:33-46
October 2, 2011
I like to ask people God questions: When do you feel God’s presence, and how would you describe that? What does God feel like to you? What times or places or circumstances open you to the presence of God? What are thin places for you, places where the luminous presence of the divine shines through?
More than one person has described to me those moments of pure contentment when they have felt fully alive and when, in their words, “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.”
Sometimes, in the same manner as Eric Liddell from Chariots of Fire fame, “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure” even if God did not make me particularly fast. Sometimes, when I’m standing on a mountaintop or at the edge of the ocean watching the inexorable tide roll in, I know myself as a spirit open to the thrust of grace, and I feel that grace wash over me.
I get that, and it makes good sense to me that when we feel most fully alive, most fully the creatures we were created to be that, at such moments, we would feel particularly connected to the one who created us.
But what about in the darkness? I don’t mean literal darkness – like caves or the middle of the night, though sometimes there and then. I mean figurative and emotional darkness. I mean depression. I mean grief. I mean failure. I mean loss. I mean death.
I’ve found that the wisdom of Psalm 27 lies in its final lines, “wait for the Lord; be strong and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord.” For, when I wait through the darkness, the light comes. Even, sometimes especially, in the midst of the darkness, when God feels most like an absence, I feel even that absence as compassion. It is as if God is suffering too, alongside me, letting me know that though the pain is real and the darkness thick and there is no clear end of it in sight, that I am not alone in it, and that it will, in the end, simply be all right.
Why meditate on the darkness on this World Communion Sunday, this Peacemaking Sunday? Well surely the weather for the past month in these parts would bring on thoughts of darkness to all but the most passionate lovers of London fog or Seattle rain. But it’s not been the weather, nor even the state of the world that’s got me connecting with the patient suffering of the psalmist.
I blame it on the Bible. Scripture is filled with the stories of people who find God most fully present in the midst of their deepest valleys. In the times of trial God is present.
This could begin to sound like little more than Hallmark card sentimentality if we leave it at that, but scripture is not a greeting card, and the New Testament passages in the lectionary this morning insist that we think more deeply about profoundly difficult circumstances.
Paul, in writing to the Philippians, claims and confesses his own troubled, dark history. Born to all the privileges of empire and having achieved rank and authority in the religious institution of his people, Paul comes to a stark realization on the road to Damascus: the institutions which have given him life and to which he has given his life are dying. The movement of Jesus is calling forth new life, and Paul has been utterly transformed, such that he is giving his all, even his life, to that resurrection movement.
The gospel passage, the strange parable of the tenant farmers who kill the master’s slaves and then his son when he sends them to collect the harvest, speaks directly to the dire condition of the religious institutions of the time. Jesus’ listeners would have recognized, in the economic relationships that the parable describes, the role that the religiously powerful played in their lives, and would have heard Jesus calling for the death of the religious institution that dominated those lives.
In other words, both the gospel reading and the reading from Paul center on the end of particular faith communities, and as we sit here this morning in a small, struggling congregation that is part of a much larger, struggling denomination, that is part of a tradition that is fast losing its hold on an entire generation of North Americans and has already forfeited its position across the entire continent that was home to its greatest glories, I cannot help wondering if there is a word from God for us in these passages.
Session met for several hours yesterday morning to consider the congregation’s budget for 2012, and we are contemplating major changes that may include the end, the death really, of some longstanding ministries. That’s ministries, not ministers. That said, while we certainly aren’t planning for any physical deaths, we are also contemplating some major changes in staffing patterns.
Our texts this morning insist on the necessity of change, but they do not pull punches in pretending that change is simple, without pain, without loss and letting go, without the experience of mourning and grief, without time in the darkness.
I’m not saying any of this to scare you or despair you, but rather to invite you into the process and the conversation through the rest of this month as we head toward presenting a preliminary budget to you at the end of the month.
By dent of circumstance – or grace – this evening Cindy Bolbach, moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), will be with us for unchurch. Cindy is an incredibly wise and intelligent woman who, through her travels as moderator, has a far broader perspective on church than any of us. Come tonight and listen, and ask her questions.
For the next three Sundays of unchurch, again by circumstance or by grace, two of the initially planned guests have had to postpone and we’d intended an open forum for the third already. So, we have now three scheduled evenings that we will use for an open conversation on the future of Clarendon Presbyterian Church.
Why now? Last spring we celebrated together the passage of amendment 10-A, the change in our denomination’s form of government that, frankly, catches the rest of the church up to where we’ve been for almost 20 years – ordaining gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender church officers and empowering them to leadership in the church. Thanks be to God.
Over those 20 years this small congregation has played out outsized role in changing the Presbyterian Church, and we’ve also played a significant role in shifting the culture. When I came here a bit more than eight years ago, Clarendon was one of a tiny handful of Presbyterian congregations in National Capital Presbytery with openly partnered gay or lesbian elders serving on its session. We were one of 17 churches in the entire denomination on the “watchlist” of the conservative Presbyterian Layman. The Layman doesn’t even keep such a list anymore because it just got too long to keep track of. Thanks be to God.
When I came here eight years ago, Clarendon was one of a tiny handful of congregations – of any denomination – in the metro area where a same-gender couple could walk in for the first time and no one in the sanctuary would think anything other than, “hm, new folks. Nice.” Today, there are dozens and dozens of congregations – Presbyterian, Episcopal, Methodist, even Baptist – where that is true. Thanks be to God.
When I came here eight years ago, the Commonwealth of Virginia was preparing to pass an amendment to its constitution to ban same-gender marriage. In the face of the passage of that amendment, we were in the news across the country for the stand that we took on marriage equality. Today that amendment would not pass the popular vote in the Commonwealth, and our own policy is no longer particularly noteworthy. Thanks be to God.
We have so much to be thankful for in the parts that we have been able to play in helping to bend the arc of the moral universe a bit closer to justice over these past two decades. Thanks be to God.
We have run the race with perseverance, and we have fulfilled our calling. With have lived fully into our ordination. Thanks be to God.
If this were a movie, we could roll the credits, collect a few Oscars, and gather at the wine bar to celebrate.
But this is not a movie. A central part of why we existed has, plain and simple, changed dramatically and, frankly, far more quickly than most of us dared to dream even five years ago.
And all of that, which is to be celebrated wildly, also leaves us in a far different cultural and even ecclesiastical context than we were in eight years ago. It leaves us facing, as a community and as individual leaders within it, the fundamental questions of ordination.
If our ordination – our calling to help transform church and culture – has been fulfilled, do we have a new calling?
If the answer is “no,” then how do we move with faithfulness, to a grace-filled ending of this ministry.
If yes – if we have a new ordination, a new calling – what is it precisely, and how do we begin to live into it with grace, and with excitement, transformative passion, energy, imagination and love?
Friends, I do not know the answers to these questions, but I do know three things:
First, we must ask them now, or time and circumstance will answer them for us in ways that we will not like.
Second, this is a grace-filled community in which love reigns and we will ask the questions well and hang together as we do.
Finally, and most essentially, God is with us as we ask these questions and will be with us we live into the answers no matter what those answers are.
At the beginning of this sermon, I asked “why raise this stuff on World Communion Sunday?” Well, what better day to think about the ordination of the congregation than the day when we celebrate the fact that we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, that we are part of something much larger than ourselves, and that we do this work of the people as a people fed always on the bread of life and the cup of salvation.
Let us pray.
O God our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, grant us the wisdom and the courage for the living of these days. Amen.

Wind and Fire

2011-09-13T13:02:00.001-07:00

Wind and Fire
Genesis 1:1-5; Exodus 15:1b-11, 20-21
September 11, 2011
In the days after September 11, 2001, I found myself listening repeatedly to John Rutter’s Requiem. It is among the most transcendently beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard, and its profound depth is equal to the measure of September 11.
If I could write such music … well, if I could write such music I would not stand up here talking, and I would never even attempt to speak to the monumental tragedy of September 11 and the decade of violence that has come since.
But words, inadequate as they will be, are all that I have.
The words, the poetry, that is the beginning of our scripture, the words with which we opened worship – “in the beginning …” – those words were first spoken by a Hebrew poet and theologian writing, scholars believe, during the Babylonian exile. Genesis was written for a faith community in exile, not to explain how the universe came into being but, rather, to reassure the people that the God who created the universe and called it good was still God, and had not yet finished the work of creation with the people.
At a moment when one might have expected words of fear, of hate, of vengeance, the poet in exile spoke a word of light and of hope into the darkness and despair of exile.
Of course, scripture compiles many voices, and the lectionary places before us this day the dancing song of victory from the Exodus story. God has triumphed. Horse and rider have been swept away. Miriam puts on the timbrels and dances in celebration. I read that today and think of the spontaneous celebrations that followed the death of bin Laden last spring.
However, I also read that story of triumph mindful of the midrash of the ancient rabbis, who told the story of the angels dancing in heaven when pharaoh’s army got drowned but then noticing that God was weeping. The angels stopped dancing and asked why God was crying at such a triumphant moment, and God answered, those soldiers are someone’s son or husband or father. Now is not the time for dancing.
There is a time for dancing and a time for weeping, and sometimes it is difficult to know and name the time. When we cannot name the time, it becomes incredibly difficult to speak the right words. When we are lost in our own time we are like exiles, far from home. In such a time, is it yet possible to speak a word of hope?
After ten years of seemingly endless violence that tears at the very soul of the nation is it yet possible to speak a word of light and of hope into our own darkness and despair?
Oh, to be sure, most of us have long since moved on from the emotional trauma of that bright September morning. We have come to grips – and some have come to profit – from the national security state. We accept as normal and necessary inconveniences to our movement and invasions our privacy that would have outraged us a generation ago.
In the new normal most of us don’t feel anything like constant despair and the world doesn’t strike us as particularly dark. We’ve adjusted. We’ve moved on. There is a rising generation that has no memory of the actual events of September 11, 2001. They have lives to live. We have lives to live.
And yet, I can’t help hearing Isaiah – the great prophet of the Exile – who spoke a truth that named the present time for his people:
A voice says, “Cry out!” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades (Isaiah 40:6-8).
To a people who surely felt their flower fading, who knew what it was to be grass tossed into the Babylonian fires, Isaiah named the moment. He named the despair. He named also the deep brokenness and sinfulness of his own people castigating their leaders for ignoring the widows and the orphans. He spoke what could have been merely a word of doom.
Nevertheless, he proclaimed that though “the grass withers and the flower fades, the word of the Lord endures forever.”
On that pivot – the word of the Lord – turns the whole, not only of the several texts of Isaiah, but also the whole tradition of our holy texts. More than that, I would even say that on that pivot – the enduring word of the Lord – turns all of our histories.
And what is the word of the Lord for us on this day, on this tenth anniversary, when we have learned to live as exiles, adjusted to our captivity to endless war and willingly pledging our allegiance to the national security state?
Well, what was the word of the Lord for the exiles in Babylon?
“In the beginning, when God was creating the heavens and the earth …”
From the midst of exile, God speaks a new and creative word that reminds the exiles that God has been creating for a very long time and that God is not yet finished with us. In spite of ourselves, in spite of what we do to one another and to a creation that God has called good, in spite of all of that, God is not finished with us yet.
The present moment must surely have felt dark and the Babylonian exiles surely, from time to time, felt themselves stumbling blindly in the darkness of their captivity. Into that darkness, what was the word of the Lord for the exiles?
“Let there be light.”
In the darkness, God speaks a new and creative word, to remind us that God is not finished with us yet.
“Let there be light!”
So what is the word of the Lord for us today? Followers of Jesus, exiled in a post-Christian culture? People of faith in a age of disbelief? Followers of the prince of peace in a time of endless war?
What is the word of the Lord for us?
God speaks to us and through us in all kinds of ways. It is, after all, what God does. God spoke to the exiles through the poetry of Genesis and Isaiah. God speaks still, often through the words of our own poets.
I may have first heard Mary Oliver’s poem, A Summer Day, on a September 11 edition of Garrison Keillor’s The Writers Almanac a few years back. It struck me the first time I heard it as a wonderfully prophetic, creative word to speak into the darkness and doubt, the confusion of our times. The poem, written almost 20 years ago, ends like this:
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
In the beginning, when God was creating … creating your wild and precious life and calling it good … in our rising up each day into new beginnings, when God is still creating your one wild and precious life. What shall you do with it? How then shall you live it? What can you hope for?
This morning, you get the final word, and the invitation to write your own answer to those questions.
In a moment I’m going to play a piece of Rutter’s Requiem, and as the music plays I invite you to jot down your own hopes – for your family, for this community, for the nation – whatever level you’re thinking on this morning. Then we’ll gather at table, and I invite you to bring your hopes to the table where you will share in the grace of Jesus Christ, the ground of all our hopes. Amen.

An Inevitable Kindom

2011-07-26T06:40:00.001-07:00

July 24
Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Have you heard the one about the little boy whose mother was from Ohio and father from Iowa. He asked his mom one day if he was a Buckeye or a Hawkeye. His mom said, “well, you can be anything you want to be.”
The kid said, “good; I want to be Chinese.”
Smart kid. Alas, there are some things we can choose, and some things we can’t.
We are all children of God. We can choose whether or not to act that way.
The kindom of God is all around us; we can choose whether or not to live into it.
Jesus, the gospels tell us, came preaching about the kindom of God.
The kindom of God is the reign of God’s love.
Let me repeat that: the kindom of God is the reign of God’s love.
Kin-dom, here, rather than kingdom, because under the reign of God’s love we are all sisters and brothers, and there is no birthright hierarchy. Sisters and brothers, then, whether we like it – or each other – or not.
There are some things we can choose, and some things are inevitable.
The lectionary mashup this week brings together two wonderful passages that, taken together, tell us one simple thing: this kindom of God is inevitable. As Paul put it to the Romans, nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing. “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God.”
The reign of God’s love is inevitable.
Now, to be sure, it does not feel like that sometimes. Perhaps even often.
The news of the day seems to separate us from the reign of God’s love.
War. Economic chaos. Political quagmire. The seemingly always widening gap between rich and poor.
Our own behavior seems to separate us from the reign of God’s love.
We say hurtful things to the ones we love. Sometimes we do it by accident. Other times, we’re just mean. We do stupid things to ourselves. We put things into our bodies – and our minds – that we not only know we shouldn’t be we wish we wouldn’t. We fail at the things that matter most to us.
As Paul also put it to that same church in Rome:
“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. … I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”
Can anybody else in here relate to that? We don’t need to devolve into group therapy or maudlin sharing to own up to the simple, common, human constant: each one of us, way more often than we want to admit to our selves, does the very thing that we hate in ourselves.
How can we be living in – or even in to – the reign of God’s love when we can’t even make it through the day without falling back into the reign of our own brokenness?
And yet, it is that same Paul, in that same letter, to that same group of persecuted and broken followers of Jesus, who insists that nothing, nothing, nothing in all of creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God.
The reign of the love of God is inevitable.
If Jesus were preaching in these parts today, he’d tell you that the kindom of God is like kudzu. It cannot be controlled. It spreads everywhere. And it covers everything in its path.
It also has no marketable purpose, so it cannot be domesticated. People say of kudzu that it is worthless.
So is the kindom of God – if the measure you use is the market, winning and losing, gaining and keeping, and all of those other cultural values that we use to keep score.
Why bother, then?
Because that way lies salvation. Salvation: a freighted theological word weighed down by so many centuries of accrued abuse that perhaps we ought to jettison it altogether, but one whose root meaning is simply wholeness and well-being, a close cousin to shalom -- hermeneutically if not etymologically. That is to say, salvation and shalom mean the same basic thing.
Jesus offers salvation precisely because he points the way, and paves the way, toward the kindom, toward the reign of God’s love.
In our conversation last Sunday about the meaning of church more than one of you raised the specter of “Jesus problems.” Perhaps it would be accurate to say that you “confessed” to having questions about Jesus.
Now I could say here, in all honesty, that I seriously doubt that any of you have had more Jesus questions than I have, but rather than retrace my own deep doubts it will probably be more helpful to note that this is, after all, nothing new under the sun. The gospels themselves ask over and over, “who is this guy?”
Jesus’ own response is instructive, both for our own personal faith lives but all the more so for getting at our core question of a week ago – what is the church for?
Jesus never says anything that sounds like an orthodox declaration. He never says, “believe in me; I’m the second person of the trinity,” or anything like that.
But he does say, over and over and over again, two key things that are, I believe, crucial for your faith and mine, and crucial for understanding the purpose of the church today.
He says, in all kinds of difficult circumstances – situations that often sound like they came straight out of the news of the day – terrible storms, economic distress, disease and death – in the face of all the vicissitudes of life, Jesus said, “do not be afraid.”
Do not be afraid.
And then he said this, perhaps more often than any other instruction, he said simply, “follow me.”
I believe that out of the intersection of those two simple invitations comes the way of Jesus.
Set aside your fear, and follow Jesus.
That is what it means to be a Christian today. There have been other meanings in other contexts: join the club of the saved; pledge allegiance to the Roman Empire; join the Protestant Establishment. Those have been meanings of the church in other times and places, and we could analyze and criticize them but none of them matter much today.
Today, to be a Christian, means simply this: set aside your fear and follow Jesus.
Was Jesus “the son of God”? Well, let’s be honest. We don’t even know what that would mean. Is that some kind of biological statement? If it’s not a biological claim, then it’s a theological one. But we still don’t know what it would mean to be the son of God when one of our principle affirmations is that each of us is a child of God.
Personally, the arguments are only interesting as theoretical exercises and textual studies. I’ve been there and done that, and it changes nothing. Indeed, it’s perhaps notable that Paul did not include “theological argumentation” in his list of things that do not separate us from the love of God! The church is not a discussion group nor an academy. Oh, to be sure, we discuss and we study, but we do so in order to move more effectively into the world in order to participate in God’s active and transforming love for the world.
For the love of God does transform things. In fact, the love of God transforms everything – including you and me.
I would never argue or suggest that the way of Jesus is the only way into the heart of God. I do not believe that is true, and I don’t believe that Jesus believed it either.
But I will attest, I am a witness: the way of Jesus takes one into the heart of God. The way of Jesus brings one under the reign of God’s love.
When I was a kid, growing up in a town that proudly considered itself to be the buckle on the Bible Belt, I heard more than my fare share of talk about “accepting Jesus.” That phrase, and the implied question – have you accepted Jesus? – seemed to be the sum total of what it meant to be Christian.
The funny thing is, Jesus seems to have gone out of his way to be pretty much unacceptable. As Scott McKnight puts it in his recent book about Jesus, the guy didn’t want to be accepted into anyone’s life; instead, “he wanted to take over.”
Just like kudzu. Just like the mustard tree. Just like the kindom. Just like the reign of God’s love.
What is a Christian? Someone who follows the way of Christ without fear for the consequences.
Why does the church matter in this? Two key reasons come to mind:
The church matters because the way of Jesus is not easy. We need each other along the way, to bear one another’s burdens, bind one another up, and love one another; not to mention, holding one another accountable, picking each other up when we stumble and fall, pointing the way when we get lost.
And, the church matters because the way of Jesus is the way of the kindom, which is to say, the way of Jesus is the way of a community, and the church, at its best, is the provisional expression of that community in the world. We are the community that together answers, without fear, when Jesus calls.
Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?
Will you go where you don't know and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown? Will you let my name be known,
will you let my life be grown in you and you in me?

Irresistible Grace

2011-06-14T10:12:00.001-07:00

Ephesians 4:1-6; Acts 2:1-13; Matthew 28:16-20
June 12, 2011
Perhaps it is the case that running during midday in the middle of a heat wave produces a sermon that
brings hell and grace, and sacraments and sacrifices together on Pentecost. Whether it was the wind and fire of the Holy Spirit or just the fire of the heat, I can’t say for sure, but I do know that I felt a preponderance of fire and a lack of wind last week, and it occurred to me that Presbyterian pastors might just be close cousins to mad dogs and Englishmen – or, at least this one might be.
It is, indeed, a good day to give thanks for Mr. Carrier! Could air conditioning be sacramental?
We’ve spent the past seven weeks of this season of Eastertide talking together about sacraments. We’ve gathered at table to share the Lord’s Supper, we’ve celebrated the sacrament of baptism. In addition to the “official” sacraments of the Reformed Tradition, we’ve talked about music as sacramental, about our bodies as sites of the sacramental, about families as sacramental, about food as sacrament, about memory and about vocation as sacraments.
I hope that these conversations have not only expanded and deepened your appreciation of the sacramental nature of creation, but I also hope the conversations have prompted some thinking about what it would mean to think about sacraments much more broadly than our tradition generally does.
Throughout these conversations we’ve been guided by the traditional definition of sacrament that traces back at least to Augustine: sacraments are an outward sign of an inward grace, or, if you like, a visible sign of an invisible grace.
In other words, the bread and cup of the communion table let us see – and taste – the grace of Jesus. The water we sprinkled on Tara’s brow – an outward, visible sign of that same grace.
But even in expanding our conversation about sacraments, perhaps we have not gone far enough.
Perhaps we’ve focused overly much on the signs, and need to consider a bit more carefully the nature of the grace.
While it is both of these things, more than inward and invisible grace is irresistible. How else do you explain Pentecost?
Think about it. The disciples, the second chapter of Acts tells us, were all together. Why? Because they were afraid, confused, and lost. Jesus has been murdered by the empire in collusion with the religious leaders. The disciples could well be next on the list. This is a matter of life and death.
But as the story tells us, the gift of the Spirit overcame the fear that they felt and, when they felt the invisible grace of the spirit’s presence they experienced the power of an irresistible grace.
We celebrate Pentecost as the “birthday of the church,” but I am pretty damned sure that the disciples were not sitting around a conference table debating rules and regulations for an institution. They were simply spirits open to the thrust of irresistible grace that was blowing through their midst such that they moved from cowardice to courage, from hiding in a building to building a movement, from their private fears to very public proclamation.
How else do you explain a group of fearful folks suddenly stepping out into the public square to proclaim the truth that they have been given to understand? How else do you explain Peter? The disciple voted most likely to leap before he looked and most likely to say something stupid at the most inappropriate time – you have to read some unauthorized gospels that include the high school yearbooks of the disciples to get this information, but it’s in there! How else do you explain that this same Peter suddenly can preach the good news in ways that everyone can hear and understand?
The grace of Pentecost was simply irresistible, and when the irresistible force, the power of the holy, touched their lives it moved them far beyond the limits they had previously recognized and lived by. Suddenly, these simple folk were speaking to men and women from every corner of their world. Irresistible grace knew no bounds, and so it spread out to touch everyone everywhere.
It still does.
Sisters and brothers, it still does.
The good news of the gospel, that you and I are the sons and daughters of a loving God, made good in the image of that God, beloved for who – and whose – we are no matter what – that good news remains good enough for all the world, and it connects us – whether we like it or not – to all the world.
For example, this past week many of my friends and colleagues in the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship have been fasting to draw attention to the proposed Colombia free trade agreement. I did not join the fast, but I did take the action that the fasters were asking of the rest of us: calling the White House to urge the president to keep a promise he made during the campaign to oppose this treaty.
As our friend, Rick Ufford-Chase, moderator of the 216th General Assembly and director of the Peace Fellowship, said, “Our partners in Colombia are crystal clear that this trade agreement will mean greater disparity of wealth, greater insecurity across their country and the weakening of the fabric of civil society.”
Why should we care? There is only slim likelihood that I’ll ever set foot in Colombia, and the same probably goes for most of you. Why should we care?
We care because we are baptized. That’s what happens in these waters: we are claimed as God own – for the world.
As Martin Luther King put it in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
There are more than 4 million internally displaced persons in Colombia – driven from homes, farms, communities by almost 40 years of civil war. That’s roughly 10 percent of the population, and the figure includes hundreds of thousands of children. Like our evangelical brother Rob Bell, I don’t believe in hell – except for the hells that we create ourselves. There are hundreds of thousands of children – as beautiful and precious as Tara – living in hell in Colombia.
These children are Tara’s sisters and brothers because “there is one body and one Spirit, just as we are called to the one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” Tara is our child; they are our children. The vows we just took as a community – to teach Tara the good news of the gospel, to be her friend and, thus, strengthen her ties to the household of God – those vows extend to her sisters and brothers in Colombia because we are bound together in that inescapable network, that single garment, because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Now it may be the case that Colombia is not your particular calling, your vocation – although that does not get you off the hook for contacting the president and our senators. But the larger point remains: injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. It is not enough to come to church and seek forgiveness merely to go back out and live unchanged lives – that is the essence of cheap grace. Irresistible grace compels us into the public square to care for our sisters and brothers at risk to ourselves, to feed the hungry mouths that we can feed, to clothe the naked bodies that we can clothe, to make right what we can make right. No excuses! Just like for the disciples at Pentecost, this is life and death.
This is the heart of Christ’s teaching that we are to love our neighbors, and that those neighbors come from everywhere. This is the story of Pentecost.
The disciples probably didn’t grasp this even as they gave voice to good news. Beyond their own understanding, beyond even their wildest imagining, suddenly, what was once the personal, private possession of a privileged few was given to all; what was once understood by only the insiders who spoke the right language was suddenly comprehensible to everyone.
This was the gift of the spirit. This was irresistible grace.
The spirit that gives this grace calls us still today toward a tomorrow of God’s imagining.
Spirit, spirit of restlessness, stir us from placidness. Wind, wind on the sea.
Call from tomorrow, to break ancient schemes,
From the bondage of sorrow the captives dream dreams.
Our women see visions, our men clear their eyes.
With bold new decisions, let the people arise!
Amen and amen.

Sacramental Remembering

2011-06-01T07:27:00.001-07:00

May 29, 2011
John 13:34-35, 14:15-21
Have you ever awakened with a start from a vivid dream and wondered where you were? Or ever awakened while on a trip and found the unfamiliar surroundings utterly strange and disorienting? Ever searched for 15 minutes for your car keys – or for your car?
Ever had on the tip of your tongue the name of an acquaintance or a friend or a family member? Ask my kids how often they’ve been called by the wrong name, or worse, by the dog’s name.
More poignantly, have you visited with a loved one who suffers Alzheimer’s or another form of memory loss?
Memory is crucial to who we are. It would be difficult to make it through a single day without the gift of memories. They are as common as recalling a name, a place, a meal, and as extraordinary as the first time you saw your lover, or the birth of a child, or the death of a parent. They are as commonplace as learning to ride a bike or tie your shoes, and as life-changing as remembering your a,b,c’s or that 2 + 2 = 4.
Without memory, we do not know who we are, nor to whom we belong.
That’s why we ask that baseline catechism question all the time: who are you? I am a child of God.
We need to remember who we are, and to whom we belong. Memory makes manifest in our lives the simple grace of that foundational truth: we are children of God.
Memory is clearly crucial to our understanding of sacraments. After all, we gather at this table because Jesus said, “this do in remembrance of me.”
One of my favorite seminary professors, Mac Worford, had a pithy phrase that he impressed upon a generation of seminarians: “the church,” he told us often, “is a house of memory.”
He said this by way of reminding us that the churches we would serve did not and would not ever be “ours.” First, of course, they would belong to God. But second, they would belong to the people who had arrived long before we got on the scene and who would, in most cases, be there long after we moved on.
They – you – have built up the church stone by stone.
Of course, like all phrases that are more than merely pithy, Mac’s observation had a bit of a biting edge to it, as well. For when the foundation stones become stumbling blocks, the house of memory turns into a museum of nostalgia, and the movement of the spirit in the world which is the church of Jesus Christ, becomes an ossified institution unworthy of its namesake or his memory.
So, on this Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend, can memory serve a sacramental function for an institution that is far too often bound to its history such that it is unable to reflect the unbound spirit of the living God? Can memory serve a sacramental function in our individual lives – inspiring us to live into the best of who we are by making newly present in the world the grace of God that we have experienced in the past?
The essence of Ignatian spirituality – named for St. Ignatius of Loyola, father of the Jesuits – rests in the conviction that memory can be sacramental – even if Ignatius, himself, never put it that way. The heart of Ignation spiritual practice resides in the simple, daily work of recalling the day. Of course, it’s not as simple as remembering what you had for breakfast or whether or not you got the milk from the grocery store. It’s more about being attentive to where God is active in your day by paying attention to, and remembering, the moments of the day that fill you up, that remind you of God’s love for you, that witness grace or kindness in the world. Which means, of course, that breakfast or grocery shopping might turn out to be moments of grace, but it’s not just the cereal or the shopping, but rather also the presence of God that you notice in the simple and ordinary moments as well as in the rare and extraordinary.
Our time of confession this morning, for example, was a simple variation on Ignatian spirituality.
We often open session meetings, or other small group meetings at Clarendon, sharing with one another the highs and lows, the moments that lift us up and the ones that weigh us down, places of light and of darkness, from our own lives. This is all straight out of the work of St. Ignatius.
He was convinced that if you pay careful attention, over the long haul, to the ordinary and the extraordinary moments of your life that you will discern patterns. The patterns will reveal what gives you life and what drains life from you, and that will point you toward the presence of God in your life, and toward your own callings in life.
Memorial Day is a fine time to, well, remember, and, in particular, to remember all of the people who have served our nation. Not only that, it is a fine time to remember the moments when you have served the commonwealth.
It is, moreover, a good time to examine our own lives and our common life, to see what we are serving these days.
Are we living sacramentally? Do our lives show forth the love of God? Do our lives make manifest in the world the otherwise hidden grace of God? Are we a means of grace? Do we remember the simple yet profoundly difficult commandment of our Lord – to love one another just as he loved – and do we ground our lives in that challenging word?
Moreover, do we believe that doing so matters? Does it – would it – make a difference in the world to live that way, moment to moment all of the moments of our lives?
Listening to Peg speak about life here during wartime I was struck – as I always am when I listen to people who lived through those days – by the shared sacrifice and the common purpose that bound people together. You do not have to glorify war nor even agree on whether or not it is or was necessary to recognize and honor the sacrifices made by those who set aside narrow personal interest for the sake of a common cause.
A great common cause binds people together.
Living each day in obedience to the commandment of Christ is a great common cause, and it is the singular cause of the gathered community of the church. Or, it could be.
George McCloud, who founded the Iona Community in Scotland in 1938, as a prophetic witness for peace in a time of war and as a sign of hope in the midst of the despair of the Great Depression, argued that a shared commitment to an impossibly large task is a prerequisite to community. In other words, if you don’t have something worth giving your lives to, then you will not give your life to a community because authentic community is about sharing your life deeply and fully and, let’s face it, at great risk. Authentic community takes hard work and shared sacrifice.
The community that formed around Jesus responded to a singular charge, or invitation, that came to order their lives together. Jesus charged them to live according to a new commandment, and he told them that their lives would be measured by it: love one another as he had loved them.
“If you love me,” he told them, “you will keep my commandment.”
It really is all that simple, and, of course, impossibly difficult, as well. But it is that impossibly difficult common task that binds a community together.
In pursuing such causes we often feel the presence of God powerfully and palpably moving in our midst. On our Rebuilding Together work sites over the past several springs, we have taken on some huge tasks, and we have felt drawn tightly together in working to accomplish them. Indeed, without being drawn together we would never have accomplished them.
In such binding together, we are also bound in the spirit’s tether. That is to say, when we come together to take on a worthy, difficult, common cause we are truly the body of Christ in the world, and are bound together as such by the Spirit of God moving in our midst.
We will not be engaged every day in such work, but we can be empowered by the shared memory of the common cause. That is the sacramental nature of memory – it can make visible in our lives a grace that has been hidden by time.
So this morning, what hidden graces do you need to recollect, to remember, that will empower you again to live more fully into Jesus’ simple, yet impossible commandment. What do you remember that enables you to love as Jesus’ loved?
The work of such recollection, such remembering, lies close to the heart of sacramental living.
May this word be bread for your living this week.

The Graces of Our Callings

2011-05-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

1 Peter 2:2-10
May 22, 2011
Our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers have a more expansive list of official sacraments of the church. I’m offering no opinion on whether or not that’s a good thing; it simply is the truth of the matter. They have seven; we have two.
Among the official sacraments of the Roman church is the sacrament of Holy Orders, or what we refer to as ordination. We are just coming through the beginning of the end (I hope) of our denomination’s long struggle over one aspect of ordination – that is to say, over who may and who may not be ordained.
But in one crucial way, we are all ordained. We are all called to ministries. We all have our orders, as it were, and they are holy.
Broadening our perspective on what it means to be ordained might just help us live more fully into the new reality of the denomination. When each of us claims our own calling, claims our own ordination to ministry, and understands the sacramental nature of our callings, it becomes easier to see more clearly in each other the gifts for ministry that God has given us.
Broadening our understanding of the sacramental nature of so much of life ought to change the way we look at a lot of things, and broadening our view of ordination, in particular, ought to change the way we look at the manner in which we spend so much of our lives: that is to say, it ought to change the way we look at our work.
But to begin with, before blowing up, tossing out or replacing any definitions, let’s just put it out there baldly: ordination is a visible sign of an invisible grace. In other words, ordination is sacramental. Moreover, let’s put it out there as well that building fences around just a few recognized “offices” in the church – elder, deacon, minister of word and sacrament – my help us organize churches but it may just get in the way of actually being the church.
To be called by God, and to be blessed in that calling by the gathered community – that is the fundamental understanding of ordination that has guided the church for a long, long time. Indeed, it goes all the way back to Paul, who understood that various members of the church – of the body of Christ in the world – had various gifts and various callings to use those gifts for the good of the whole community.
Paul may have been thinking only of the community of Christians, but our challenge is far bigger: how do we use these gifts of ministry for the good of the wider world?
Stepping outside of the institutional structures of the church, which have their place and purpose, I want to conflate for now the idea of ordination and that of calling. For the purposes of our conversation today, they mean the same thing. There is some of this conflation already going on in Paul’s great riff on gifts and call in his first letter to the young church at Corinth:
“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of healing, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.”
Our passage from First Peter is also concerned with gift and call, but there’s a different emphasis:
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
We should hear some tension between these two passages.
The tension rests on the essential pivot between individual calling, on the one hand, and the calling of the entire community on the other. Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, is concerned about in-fighting in the church and he insists that there are as many gifts as there are members, that each and all of them have important roles to play, and that, basically, they ought to quit squabbling over it and get on about the business of the church – which is the business of showing forth God’s love in the world. That is the more excellent way toward which he points in the great hymn to love that follows the words we just read.
There’s a whole lot going on in First Peter, but the social tensions that prompted this letter existed not inside the faith community but rather between the faith community and the larger Greco-Roman culture. Let me pause for a moment to mention that the version of this sermon that will be posted on the sermon blog has a long footnote here that goes into the weeds of Pauline authorship, patriarchy and other historical notes that you may find interesting, but that are not directly germane to the key point.
The crucial thing is not simply getting some more or less interesting historical information. The crucial thing is how we make use of these texts in our own context, in our own lives. For this morning’s purpose, the main point – the “take-away,” as it were – is simply this: we are all called, individually and as a community, to the ministry of reconciliation that Jesus launched.
So, what of that calling? What of your calling? What of our calling as church?
We say in our worship bulletin every single week that all of the members of the community are the ministers of the church. To each of us and to all of us has been given this ministry and the wide variety of gifts for carrying it out in the wider world. We have all been ordained to this ministry. It is our common calling.
When we do it well, we do make grace visible in the world. It is sacramental. Our several callings are sacramental. Vocation is a sacrament, and not just in the Roman church. That is to say, we can and do make grace visible in the wider world when we go about our work responding to the Spirit’s moving in our lives – and in every aspect of them.
The idea of vocation clearly touches on our work lives in some fashion, and this should raise questions for us. Do you consider what you do for a living to be a calling? If not, does what you do for a living support your callings? Does what you do for a living conflict with your callings?
Note that I’m using the plural – while most of us have only one job that pays us, we all have several callings. For example, I feel a deep sense of call to this job – that’s one calling that happens to coincide with my job. On the other hand, I do not feel called to every aspect of the job. Some of it I do because it has to get done, whether or not I feel ordained to it: locking up the doors; changing out light bulbs; minor repairs; furniture moving – I don’t feel called to it, but I do it and, to some degree, it does support my calling.
On the other hand, I have a deep a sense of call to parenting – that’s a separate calling and while it is certainly work it is not a job because nobody pays me for doing it. Or, if they do, the check keeps getting lost in the mail. Sometimes my call to parenting conflicts with my call to ministry. Sometimes it supports it.
Likewise with being husband. Those are not just roles that we play; they are callings of God, or they can be. Surely there are folks who get married and have children but have no gifts or callings toward either, and we’ve all witnessed the results.
All of which is simply to say, all of us have several callings, several vocations, to which we have been ordained by God. Sometimes they coincide with our jobs. Sometimes they conflict. Sometimes they coincide with each other; sometimes they conflict. These callings, our vocations, touch on every important aspect of our lives. But most of us do not think about them as sacramental: as signs and as means of grace.
What difference would it make to think of these callings, these vocations, as sacramental? Parenting as sacrament? Being a husband or a wife as a sacrament? Our job as a sacrament?
“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
So, what difference would it make to think of this “chosenness,” these callings, these vocations, as sacramental? Parenting as sacrament? Being a husband or a wife as a sacrament? Our jobs as sacraments?

Life Abundant

2011-05-18T08:30:00.001-07:00

May 15, 2011
John 10:1-10; Acts 2:42-47
Have you ever thought of your body as sacramental? That is to say, have you ever considered your body as a visible sign of an invisible grace? Have you ever thought of your body as a means of grace, a way for grace to be made manifest in the world? Have you ever thought of your body as a sacrament?
Consider the texts for this morning. Acts tells the story of the first Christians, known simply as the people of the way. They embodied the faith in ways that few of us dare consider, much less actually try out. Living in community, attentive and attuned to signs and wonder and awe.
“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
How could you live like that? Imagine it. Think of your stuff. All of your stuff.
I can’t actually do that, because I don’t know how much stuff I have, but just for starters, take my bag. I carry this with me almost all of the time. I had a free bag – swag from last summer’s General Assembly. That bag replaced a backpack that remains in perfectly fine condition. I just decided that I wanted to go “messenger style” for a while. I really ought to hear a cautionary note with the word “style” there.
Be that as it may, I liked this bag so I bought it. I can’t remember how much I paid, but it was at least 50 bucks. Fifty dollars … more than the average daily wage of 85 percent of the world’s population.
Still, I need a bag … because I have all this stuff.
My laptop. I must have that, of course, to write with and stay connected and all of those other things I do. My books. I can’t live without them. My phone. Certainly need that.
I’m really not making fun of myself here. I can justify all of this stuff. More or less legitimately, but, still, as I make the case for my stuff I do see Jesus sitting across from me with a wry smile – not one of judgment but rather one of deep understanding – understanding that the only one I’m fooling as I justify all of my stuff is me.
I suspect most of us fall into this same pattern. The entire culture tells us that we should consume, that it is not only our right but that it is a good thing to do. Mass consumption is so all-pervasive in our culture that we take for granted that it has been ever thus, and that there is no other way to organize a culture or an economy, and that we are all the better for it, and that we are, well, “happy.”
The first, and perhaps only, American beatitude is this: happy are those who shop.
But what if we paused for a moment to consider the church in Acts.
They were all together, sharing what they had, and selling off their stuff so that everyone would have enough, and they were happy.
The text tells us that day by day people were being added to their number – sometimes thousands per day. That only happens when something powerfully attractive is happening. Thousands of folks don’t look at a dour, unhappy band, no matter how fabulously tricked out, and suddenly say, “wow! I want some of what they’re having!” No. That’s not what attracts. Abundant life! That’s what attracts; and that’s what Jesus promised, and promises still.
By stripping away the stuff, getting down to real lives, real relationships, lives were transformed. It’s tempting to take “the thief” Jesus calls out in John and equate him with all those places, people and institutions in the culture that call us to clothe ourselves in stuff, stuff and more stuff, but it suffices to leave that figure alone this morning and focus instead on the abundance that Jesus promises – an abundance that clearly has nothing to do with the stuff, and, as it turns out, everything to do with what we’ve already been given: our bodies.
That seems somehow backward – getting rid of stuff to get to abundance.
But I think the lesson here is simply this: we have been given what we need from the very beginning.
We’re given a creation teeming with life, and all the richness that we need to sustain our lives is built in. We are given these bodies – these feet for walking the earth, these hands for reaching out to give and to receive the bounty of the earth, these eyes for seeing beauty – for seeing one another, these ears for hearing the great hymn of creation. We are given these bodies for meeting one another, and for meeting God – in the flesh, as it were.
If you are thinking now of the Eden story, then I have done my job. Our bodies, naked before God, are the first visible sign of the grace of creation.
I think that’s why the two official sacraments of the Reformed church are so bodily in nature: baptism – the washing over our bodies of cool, clear water; communion – taking into our mouths bread and juice, tasting the presence of a grace that we cannot see. The sacraments are sensual, bodily.
This thought is nothing new. Almost 700 years ago, Julian of Norwich wrote: "So I understood our sensuality is founded in nature, in mercy and in grace, and this foundation enables us to receive gifts which lead us to endless life. For I saw very surely that our substance is in God, and I also saw that God is in our sensuality, for in the same instant and place in which our soul is made sensual, in that same instant and place exists the city of God, ordained from him without beginning. "
Bodies, of course, come in all sizes, shapes and conditions. They are also the way in which we experience pain and suffering. Ultimately, they are the site of our dying.
This, too, is a Godly thing. As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “Pain makes theologians of us all.”
That is to say, the bodily experience of hurt – whether it is the short-term burst pain of a cut or bruise or broken bone, or the long-term experience of chronic pain – real pain brings forth all of the deepest, most difficult questions of life and faith: why? God, why? Why me? Why now? Why, God?
Our bodies are the site, the location of this most fundamental striving for understanding, and they are also the location for our most basic ministries to one another.
I knew a woman in Cleveland who had cancer. When I met her she was already into about the fourth year of a diagnosed six-month life expectancy. I visited her often over the two years I was there, and her life gradually compressed from a whole house, to one floor of the house, and finally to a room in a nursing home. We talked a lot, about all kinds of things, but I realized pretty early on that I left every visit with her feeling like she had ministered to me a whole lot more than the other way around.
So I asked her about that, about how she managed, even in a single small room of a nursing home, to reach out and extend the gift of hospitality and generosity to everyone who came into her room, from ministers of the church to the orderlies who cleaned the space.
She said something like this:
“I don’t waste any time asking “why me? Why do I hurt?” After all, why not me? Instead I just try to keep doing what I’ve always done: love the people I have in the time that I have, and thank God for all of it.”
So she always spent more time asking after me, and my family, and the folks at church whom she didn’t get to see much any more. She was genuinely concerned for their lives, their joys and their suffering such that she didn’t spend much time on her own pain. And she always laughed until she said it made her stomach hurt. Her way through her own concerns was her concern for others.
I don’t know anyone who likes to hurt – although I do know of them. I certainly know a lot of folks who do everything they can to avoid pain. Either way, everybody hurts.
As Taylor puts it:
“There will always be people who run from every kind of pain and suffering, just as there will always be religions that promise to put them to sleep. For those willing to stay awake, pain remains a reliable altar in the world, a place to discover that a life can be as full of meaning as it is of hurt. The two have never canceled each other out and I doubt they ever will, at least not until each of us – or all of us together – find the way through.”
The way through comes in the meetings of our bodies, for the surest way through our own suffering is by way of the suffering of another. Each of us, all along the way, experiences moments of ecstatic joy and of profound hurt. At both extremes, if we can but be awake to it, we find God fully present, and thus our very bodies are the means for experiencing the presence of the Divine.
In countless ways – and in many demonstrable ones as well – we know way more than those early Christians in Acts. But they understood far better than we do that stripping away the clutter of our lives – the stuff that we tote along in our expensive bags – is the best first step we can take to get closer to the Holy, to get closer to one another, and to be bound up more fully with the body of Christ.
If our ethics is grounded in our sacramental theology – and I believe it must be – then there are all kinds of implications that flow from considering our bodies as sacraments. From what and how we consume the stuff of our lives, to the ways in which we encounter the bodies of others – friends, lovers, and enemies alike – if our bodies are signs of grace then this flesh with which we touch and are touched is holy ground – the ground of signs and wonders and awe.
So, have you ever thought of your body as a sacrament?
Now that you have, if only ever-so-briefly, considered that question, what do you think? What difference would it make to think of your body as a sacrament? Amen.

In the Breaking of Bread

2011-05-10T07:08:00.001-07:00

Luke 24
May 8, 2011
Last week as we fed our neighbors with the Arlington Street Peoples Assistance Network, Martin noted one particular gentleman whom we’ve served previously. The man has an amazing shock of white hair and a beard that lends credence to the rumor I am here inventing that he was an original touring member of the Grateful Dead. He’s a gregarious, friendly man, and Martin remembered in particular that the guy had disapproved of the behavior of someone else in the line back in December, saying, “some people give us bums a bad name.”
For better and for worse, you get to know people best in the breaking of bread.
I was reminded of that in reading again the story of the long walk to Emmaus, in which the feeble-mindedness of a pair of Jesus’ followers could certainly have given the rest of them a bad name. It takes a complete stranger, so it seems, to explain to these two the significance of the story, and the reality of their own experience. More to the point, it takes the breaking of bread for them to recognize the one who is in their very midst.
There’s a whole lot going on in this little story that comes toward the end of Luke’s gospel. It raises all kinds of questions. To name but a few: why this dialogue? Why the road to Emmaus? Why bread? And, most importantly, what is the word of the Lord for us in this story?
So let’s run through these initial questions briefly before opening up some conversation on that last one.
Why this dialogue along the road?
Wasn’t this simply Jesus’ way? Engaging everyone he met in rich conversation, and understanding that every moment is, as we might say today, a teachable one. Moreover, every moment is also sacramental, or potentially so. Every conversation presents the possibility of revealing invisible grace, of speaking a word of grace into an otherwise ordinary moment.
Luke could have set this story just about anywhere. He wasn’t writing journalism, he was proclaiming gospel. Jesus could have unfolded Moses and the prophets pretty much anywhere, but he writes this as a revelation along the way.
The walking is important. As Barbara Brown Taylor writes in An Altar In the World, “walking [is] one of the most easily available spiritual practices of all.” She goes on to say, “All it takes is the decision to walk with some awareness, both of who you are and what you are doing.” The Emmaus story suggests that an awareness of one’s companions on the journey is also crucial to the spiritual practice, to making the journey itself sacramental.
She writes, “Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are” – or, in the case of the disciples on the road, with whom we actually are spending our time. So why are they there, on that road?
Why the road to Emmaus? It could be a simple matter of heading home after momentous events in the big city. Emmaus was something of a suburb, although seven miles would be at least a couple of hours journey. It could be that Emmaus stands in for that place that each of us has, or wants to have, to escape when the world is too much, a place of forgetting, perhaps, or of giving up when life has defeated us.
All of that is possible.
Historically, Emmaus was the scene of a famous Maccabean rebel victory related in 1 Maccabees, where Judas Maccabeus urges the rebels on saying, “then all the Gentiles will know that there is one who saves and liberates Israel” (1 Maccabees 4:11). The despairing friends on the road to Emmaus had hoped that Jesus was “the one to liberate Israel” (Luke 24:21). Perhaps the road to Emmaus is the road of violent revolution, but in the breaking of bread Cleopas and his friend recognize the nonviolent Jesus and reverse course and return to the community of the disciples to proclaim again the good news of God’s triumph over the violence of the empire.
All of that is possible, as well.
Luke is the great story teller among the gospel writers. He is the one whose account is always rich in details of place and time, so it comes as no surprise that he would note the passage of time along the road, and be attentive to the fact that the hour gets late.
Say what you will about the ability of Cleopas and his friend to discern the signs of the times, to interpret the law and the prophets, or even to recognize the one who is in their midst, but they absolutely understand the one clear thing that scripture is always about: hospitality.
UCC Pastor Kate Huey puts it this way, “Hospitality isn’t a condescending or begrudging, dutiful sharing […], it’s a kind of openness and welcoming to change and the new learning change brings […]. Hospitality and openness make transformation possible, brought to us from the most unexpected places by the most unlikely people, perhaps even strangers.”
Ultimately, hospitality is not simply about sharing with someone – friend or stranger – our food or even our shelter, it is about giving someone our selves.
Hospitality is sacramental, for it is the visible, tangible, even ingestible sign of the invisible grace of our own lives.
Jesus’ entire life testified to that simple truth, expressed most eloquently in the words that institute our church sacrament of table: “this is my body, broken for you.”
Why bread?
It is the visible sign of the invisible grace of creation.
Think about it – about real, actual, simple bread. A bit of flour – begun as a seed buried in the earth; in this case an invisible sign of an invisible grace, a sign to come of a promised and delivered grace. A bit of yeast, perhaps, – that mysterious, living organism that gives rise, literally, to the fully realized bread. A bit of water – that elemental gift upon which all life depends.
Why bread? Because it is fundamental, in one shape or another, flat, round, rice or wheat or whatever, basic to every culture’s table.
In the breaking of bread, the disciples realize, “hey, we are in the presence of the Holy.”
In the breaking of bread, any time, any where, we are in the presence of the holy.
In the breaking of bread in the A-SPAN line, we are in the presence of the holy.
In the breaking of bread at this table, we are in the presence of the holy.
In the breaking of bread at our own kitchen tables, we are in the presence of the holy.
So, as we consider our common life at Clarendon and our individual lives in the wider world, what is the word of the Lord for us in this simple story of broken bread?

He Is Risen, and He Is Fabulous!

2011-04-26T08:25:00.000-07:00

Isaiah 25:6-9;
Easter Sunday, 2011
I have a sister who’s several years older than I am. As it turns out, we were born on opposite sides of the great divide between the tail end of the Baby Boomers and the dawn of Generation X, although that line is quite fuzzy and most of us born in that cohort have cultural touchstones that lie on both sides of the line. Personally, I love the Beatles and REM.
This is not unusual, and the only reason I bring it up at all is that the divide lived out in our lives at the church we grew up in. She was part of the last large high school youth group that congregation ever had. I was part of the much smaller faithful remnant after the great church exodus of the late 60s and early 70s saw that congregation, just like this one and thousands of other Mainline Protestant congregations across the United States, lose about half of its members in what must have seemed like the blink of an eye.
Why bring this up on Easter Sunday? On a day when churches fill up for one morning like they used to every time they opened their doors?
It is not nostalgia. Trust me on that. I do not ever long for the “good old days,” because I know that they were, in fact, not so good. After all, back in those old days of the 1960s and early 70s, the evangelical wing of the church was starting up all kinds of so-called “Christian” schools that, upon closer examination, seemed to educate only the children of Christians who happened to be white. Back in those old days the Presbyterian Church had held about 180 General Assemblies and never elected a woman moderator. In point of fact, in 1970 the church had only been ordaining women ministers for 14 years. We were still three years shy of the first Assembly at which the Rev. David Sindt, founder of the predecessor organization to More Light Presbyterians, stood on the floor of the General Assembly and held up a sign that read, simply, “Is anyone else out there gay?”
So, no, those were not “good old days,” and it’s not nostalgia that has me looking back this morning.
Actually, I’m looking back this morning in recollection of a Youth Sunday that my sister’s high school group led way back when. They asked the congregation a whole bunch of provocative questions, including “what would Christianity be without the literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus?”
There are tons of sociological reasons for the decline of the Mainline Protestant church in America during and since the late 1960s, but I am convinced that the singular theological reason for the decline is that the church could not give good and honest answers to the questions of its youth.
So here we are almost a half century further on: the faithful remnant, gathered on Easter Sunday. Can we yet imagine good and honest answers to the questions of our youth about resurrection, about salvation, about redemption, about any of those dismal and catechismal questions of orthodoxy?
Perhaps we need to begin by understanding the questions. Deep questions about faith so often come down to this: how can I find meaning for my life when there is so much brokenness all around me? Or, how can there be such suffering in the world if God is good? The Good Friday variation is simply, how could a good and loving God have allowed the cross to happen to Jesus? The personal version is runs like this: How could God allow the people of Japan to suffer so much? Or the people of Libya? Or the people of North Carolina? Or my neighbor? Or my parents? Or my child?
In other words, our most profound questions of faith bring us to the edge of the abyss of life.
The invitation of Easter is simply this: step into that abyss, give yourself over to life, lived fully, authentically in this one sweet, small moment that you have been given. Step into the abyss, and trust that God will be with you all the way down, all the way through, and all the way to your own rising up.
Of course, as Anne LaMott suggested recently in an NPR interview, that’s pretty un-American.
“The American way,” LaMott said, “is to trick out the abyss so it's a little bit nicer. Maybe go to Ikea and get a more festive throw rug.”
Make it fabulous! It is certainly a brighter, shinier path to fulfillment than picking up one’s cross and following Jesus.
We’d like to follow a bright, shiny path to salvation: a trip to a big box shop where we can purchase happiness right off the shelf. After all, that is our fundamental right as Americans – to pursue happiness, primarily in the form of what can be packaged and sold.
Of course, it doesn’t work that way, and not so far deep down we all know that. Knowing it doesn’t mean that we don’t keep trying it. Lord knows a bright, shiny iPad would probably make me completely happy!
When it doesn’t work out that way, when we stumble into the abyss instead of the Best Buy, it’s a huge letdown.
For many folks of my generation – and those who have followed us – a deep cynicism and snarkiness is our principle generational inheritance, as we live into the realization that we will be the first generation of Americans who are not materially more well off than our parents, and that the institutions we were taught to trust as children are in such utter disrepair that it seems irresponsible to depend upon them at all.
When that is your primary orientation toward the world, it is difficult to give voice to resurrection hope.
I think often these days of the words of the late Archbishop Oscar Romero, who said, “I try not to depend on hope, because unfulfilled hope leads to despair, and we have no need of despairing people.”
The deep cynicism of our age is grounded in the despair of unfulfilled hopes.
If, as scripture tells us, faith is hope in things unseen, then the one thing we refuse is hope because our hope in the things we can see has been so often disappointed. If our hopes in the things – the people and the institutions – that we can see has been dashed then we are not about to place hope in things we cannot see and touch and make demands upon.
Of course, Romero did not say merely that he tried not to depend on hope. He completed the thought saying, “I try, instead, to depend on faith.”
What’s the difference?
Hope is an abstraction; faith is a relationship – one marked by trust.
I hope that nothing bad will happen to my children when I kiss them good-bye. I trust them to make good decisions no matter what happens.
I’m pretty sure that the disciples hoped Jesus would somehow escape the clutches of the empire. They trusted that he would be with them always, no matter what the abyss, that nothing – not even death – could separate them from the love of God that they experienced in his presence because they had experienced so much that was, well, frankly fabulous beyond words.
It’s a bit like the difference between the traditional dictionary definition of “fabulous” and its contemporary usage. We hope that things will turn out fabulously – that is, they way they do in happy fables. We trust in the One who is “wonderful, loving, awesome, inspiring, passionate, hope-filled, transformative,” as the Urban Dictionary defines fabulous, at least in the part of its definition that sounds almost like it could have come from Isaiah.
As a resurrection people we are called to nothing more, but nothing less, than faithful living, trusting in that same love the disciples experienced in Jesus’ wonderful, loving, awesome, inspiring, passionate, hope-filled, transformative presence.
After all, if resurrection simply means “rise up” – and it does mean just that – it is something we do every single day, day after day, in faith that in our living and in our dying we belong to the God made know to us through the fabulous life of Jesus. That faithful rising up is the ground of all authentic hope.
Thus, in following the way of Jesus – the way of resurrection, of rising up day after day – we walk upon the ground of authentic hope.
The way of Jesus is the way of salvation – it’s a more difficult way than the route down I-95 to the Ikea, for it does go by way of the cross. It does not seek to avoid the abyss or to trick it out nicely. It goes straight on through. For Jesus went that way: the way of poverty, the way of the outcast and marginalized, the way of the sick and the imprisoned, the way of suffering, and ultimately the way of death.
As Fr. Richard Rohr wrote years ago,
It is indeed difficult to lead people to believe in the "bad news" of the crucifixion. It is hard to trust death; ironically, it is even more difficult to trust the good news of resurrection. We are afraid to call upon the new power of risen life and expect it to be there. Or to put it another way, many Christians would sooner put up with death than confront it.
The resurrection of Jesus is an active assault upon the death and hopelessness of the world. Jesus stands in the midst of the fear of the upper room and turns it into Pentecost. To be Jesus Resurrected is to be a new power standing over and against the sick world. To be Jesus Resurrected is to be glorified body, new order, new world, new person; it is to be church.
You and me and all of us together are to be Jesus Resurrected, living faithfully in the world as it is, witnessing everyday to the world as it should and could be.
Jesus went the way of the suffering servant with joy, because he trusted completely in the faithfulness of God, in the abundance of God’s good creation, in the love of God that is from everlasting to everlasting. Jesus trusted completely that in him and through him God was at work doing a new thing in the world that would, ultimately, confront and defeat the powers of despair.
Jesus went with joy – I am convinced that there was great good humor and laughter, with abundant food and drink at most stops along the way, all kinds of fabulousness – and, at every step along the way Jesus trusted the love of God that would be with him for his rising up every single day.
It will be a great day for the whole body of Christ when we embrace all kinds of fabulous, and when we find the fabulous most deeply in living the same life that Jesus did: a life of joyous service, of healing and hope, of liberation and love, of faith in the loving Father and Mother of us all.
So on this Easter Sunday, 2011, I am thinking way back: way back to the church that David Sindt confronted 40 years ago; way back to the church of my youth, and to the questions of its young people.
But I’m also thinking about the future: about the church that soon, and very soon, will finally respond to the challenge that David Sindt and so many others have faithfully embodied; about the church that our young people will inherit and the questions they are asking of us.
Do you believe in the literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus?
I don’t think that’s the right question, and it doesn’t bother me at all however you choose to answer it for yourself. If answering, “yes,” helps you to rise up each day and faithfully follow the way of Jesus, then great. If you answer that question more figuratively, focusing on the continuing reality of Christ’s presence in the world, that’s great, too.
As for me, even if I don’t think it’s quite the right question, if pressed, I’ll say simply this: he is risen; and he is fabulous!

Are We There Yet?

2011-04-19T13:24:00.000-07:00

Palm Sunday, April 17, 2011
I want to tell you a story this morning, but first let me put an image in your mind, courtesy of something that Henri Nouwen wrote some 30 years ago:
There is a little man in Peru, a man without any power, who lives in a barrio with poor people and who wrote a book. In this book he simply reclaimed the basic Christian truth that God became human to bring good news to the poor, new light to the blind, and liberty to the captives. Ten years later this book and the movement it started are considered dangerous by [the United States of America] the greatest power on earth. When I look at this little man, Gustavo [Gutierrez], and think about the tall Ronald Reagan, I see David standing before Goliath, again with no more weapon than a little stone, a stone called A Theology of Liberation.
“Are we there yet?” the little one cried from the backseat looking out across the dusty hills toward the city whose skyline was just visible against the setting sun. We’d been on the road since dawn, eating breakfast and then lunch at roadside stops along the way. The children were road-weary and beginning to get whiney.
“Are we there yet?”
Traffic was heavy, way worse than usual, but, then again, it was festival season in the city and people were coming from all over to celebrate, to gather with family and friends. Passover always brings folks together. It’s just a joyous time!
But just at the moment there was no joy in our little band. The kids were ready to be done, and so were the grownups.
We’d come to a complete standstill on the road. There was some kind of commotion up ahead. We could see a lot of dust swirling around, and the noise of a distant crowd drifted on the breeze.
“What’s going on?” one of kids asked.
“Can you see anything, Dad?” asked another.
I stepped down and walked past the edge of the roadway to see if I could get a good look at whatever was causing the traffic jam. Probably a wreck, or maybe an animal in the road.
“Is it the king’s parade?” my wife asked.
“Hm. … I don’t think so,” I said, remembering that, yes, in fact, the king’s soldiers did parade into the city during the festival and it was a sight to behold – soldiers marching, drums beating, weapons gleaming. But we were coming into the city from the east, and the military parade always came into the city from the west. I think their barracks are out that way.
“Aww, bummer,” said my teenaged son. “I’d like to see the king. That’d be cool!”
“Well,” I said, “maybe we will, but I’m pretty sure that whatever is holding up the works, it’s not the king.”
Just then a little boy, no more than 10, barefooted and dusty, came running along the side of the road from the direction of whatever was up there blocking the way.
“It’s the king! It’s the king! It’s the king!” he yelled.
“Come and see! Come and see! Come and see!”
“Let’s go see, Dad,” came a pleading chorus. “Can we? Can we, please?”
Looking at the crowd ahead, and the line of traffic stretched out behind me, I thought, “well, we’re not moving this vehicle anytime soon, and the kids are sick and tired of being cooped up … why not?”
“Sure, why not?” I said to a wave of happy shouts.
“Now let’s stay together, kids. It looks like a mob up there.”
They joined me at the road’s edge and we half-walked, half-trotted along around the stopped traffic ahead of us. The closer we got the bigger the crowd grew and the noisier it got.
We could hear shouting now:
“Hosanna! Hosanna! Hosanna!”
“Save us! Save us!”
“Pretty weird thing to be shouting at the king,” I thought. After all, the king was not particularly popular. He wasn’t really a king at all. He was just a lackey of the emperor, and I was pretty darn sure that the emperor was not in the center of this crowd. Everybody sounded way too happy for that.
We kept squeezing our way forward. It helps to have kids dragging you along because sometimes people will make way for a child. Today they did, and pretty soon we found ourselves surging toward whoever it was that was the center of all this attention.
Suddenly the people right in front of us parted, and there he was – the man at the middle of all the fuss. The one who had stopped traffic for miles around.
“He doesn’t look much like a king to me,” my daughter said, and she was right. He was a pretty average looking guy, as far as that goes. He surely didn’t have on a crown, or jewels, or any of that. He didn’t have guards around him either, and he was not riding on an imperial horse done up in parade armor.
The guy was on a donkey! And if I had to guess, I’d say it was a Jenny, too, because the little colt at its side wasn’t big enough to be weaned yet. What a sight!
Guy rides in on a nursing, female donkey! And the crowd calls him king? What kind of king is that? Who was this guy? What is going on!
“Momma,” said our daughter, “isn’t that guy Jesus? Remember. The rabbi we heard talk back home.”
“I think you’re right. Didn’t he say something like, ‘blessed are the meek’?”
“Well, he sure got that right! There’s not much more meek than what he looks like on that donkey!”
And just then, the donkey slowed, and Jesus turned his head our way … and he laughed out loud.
I didn’t hear the joke, but it must have been a good one.
The strange parade moved on toward the city, but I stood still watching, holding my wife’s hand, and keeping our kids together.
“Can’t we follow him?” asked one of my sons. “Listen to the songs; I want to go with him.”
Oh those songs. I can still here that music:
I’m on my way to freedom land … I’m on my way to freedom land … I’m on my way to freedom land … I’m on my way, praise God, I’m on my way.
If you can’t go, don’t hinder me … if you can’t go, don’t hinder me … if you can’t go, don’t hinder me … I’m on my way, praise God, I’m on my way.
And my son asking, again, “can’t we follow him?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, thinking to myself, “I’m not sure how long he’s going to be laughing and singing.”
To my family I simply said, “the traffic is thinning out now. We should go get our stuff and head on into town. We’ve got things to do and people to see.”
That was all so many years ago. You know what happened that week. The army had marched in to the other side of town. The king got wind of the little parade with the donkey, and I don’t think he liked the joke at all. The rich folks weren’t happy with Jesus either; not after that stunt he pulled in the temple square. And the religious leaders didn’t like it one bit; not when folks started calling Jesus, “messiah.”
I think back sometimes to the question my son asked me that dusty afternoon: can’t we follow him?

Render Unto God

2011-04-13T07:14:00.001-07:00

Matthew 22:15-22; Psalm 146
April 10, 2011
For some reason that I cannot explain – and do not want to try – when I read Psalm 146 the theme song from Ghostbusters runs through my head:
If there’s something strange
In the neighborhood.
Who ya gonna call?
Ghostbusters!
When I read the passage from Matthew that we just heard, I think of the sign that hangs above the cash register in a second-hand store I was in a while back: In God We Trust; All Others Pay Cash.
And, of course, this week I have to play the Beatles’ Taxman song at least once or twice. After all, April 15 is right around the corner.
What can I say? Sometimes my brain works like a search engine whose algorithms are a bit wonky.
In any case, this disparate set of Biblical texts set off a strange set of connections for me over the past several days, reminding me that our exegesis – our interpretation – of scripture is always bound to time and place. It’s tax week. It’s the week before Holy Week. It’s the weekend when we’ve been brought face to face with the regional crisis, and for some of us, the family crisis of a government shutdown.
There’s a scripture study practice known as “dislocated exegesis” which holds simply that where you read changes how you read. There’s a truth there that’s both physical and more broadly social.
That is to say, imagine sitting on the front steps of the U.S. Capitol and reading Psalm 146: do not but your trust in princes, in mortals whose thoughts perish when they draw their last breath.
Imagine standing in the A-SPAN soup line and reading, “blessed are the poor,” or, perhaps, Jesus’ instruction to not “worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.” How much different would those words sound if read in line at Macy’s?
Imagine reading the story of Jesus sitting down to dinner with the tax collector with someone who works at the IRS, or the passage from Matthew about rendering unto Caesar with someone who refuses to pay taxes because she does not want her money going to support America’s military machine.
Where we read, when we read, with whom we read makes a difference in how we read and what we understand.
Jesus understood this, and his give and take with the Pharisees underscores this awareness. The Pharisees and Herodians named in this passage mean collaborators with the Rome occupation of Israel. They have put their trust in the Empire and they are clearly deeply suspicious of this rabble rousing rabbi.
The question that Jesus asks them is, at its essence, simply this: in whom do you paces your ultimate trust. This is, fundamentally, the question of Lent, the question of our journey near to the heart of God:
in whom do you place your ultimate trust?
Think of all the people and institutions to whom we render our trust, to whom we give our trust. Better, think for a moment about the people and institutions who ask for your trust?
How do you give them trust? What actions indicate your trust?
Now, think for a moment about the ways that God asks for your trust?
On the slip of paper you have, I invite you to draw an image, an icon, a symbol – whatever your artistic bent – that points toward a way that you give your trust to God – an aspect of your life that reflects what you render unto God.

Our trust is what, ultimately, belongs to God. As you’ve just imagined and “rendered” in pencil, we render our trust in many ways.
Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God,
who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.
The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the Lord!

Have You Not Heard? Have You Not Seen?

2011-04-05T07:11:00.001-07:00

Matthew 5:33-48; Ephesians 5:8-14
April 3, 2011
There’s a beautiful image returned from the Hubble telescope about a decade ago. On the Hubble web site it’s described this way:
“’Starry Night,’ Vincent van Gogh's famous painting, is renowned for its bold whorls of light sweeping across a raging night sky. Although this image of the heavens came only from the artist's restless imagination, a new picture from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope bears remarkable similarities to the van Gogh work, complete with never-before-seen spirals of dust swirling across trillions of miles of interstellar space.”
Last Wednesday was the 158th anniversary of van Gogh’s birth. If anyone in human history understood the play of light and imagination, it was van Gogh, who said once, “I have a terrible need of, — dare I say the word? Religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.”
I understand the impulse. Sometimes, when I feel a terrible need of being bound back to the tradition and community of Christ (that’s my personal definition of religion as it pertains to Christianity) I go looking for the inspiration of compelling, mysterious beauty. If the night sky is unavailable, sometimes I come in here and look at the windows.
Take a moment to look around.
We may not have every possible color shining through, but Roy G. Biv is well represented.
As you take in these beautiful colors, the various shades of light shining through this glass, what color do you feel like this morning?
I spent quite a bit of time in here last week. Perhaps because it was so gray out, and so colorful in here. When I’m stuck for inspiration I walk the sanctuary and look at the windows, and I lift you up in prayer.
We’ve shared a great deal during this first month of the journey of Lent: letting go of what needs to be let go of, giving voice to our lamentations, building on that broken ground a stone foundation of hope.
This week I want to extend that.
In the book of Hebrews faith is defined as the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen (Heb. 11:1).
I reckon that is the perfect Lenten point of view from a North American perspective. After all, Lent falls, for us, in spring when the greens of summer are as yet unseen but the evidence of their coming is all around us. Even during such a gray week as last one, things unseen are working their way to full bloom.
Besides all that biological evidence all around us, baseball season began again! Heck, even though last Thursday was a cold, drizzly day, it was also opening day, and from that vantage point it was even possible to imagine the Nats as playoff contenders – if you have a very good imagination.
Imagination, Einstein famously said, is more important than knowledge. I certainly cannot speak to how that plays out in physics or in the science behind Hubble or in the mechanics of a baseball game or even in the production of great art, for in all of that there is a balance between knowledge and imagination, between technique and inspiration.
But I can tell you that imagination is far more important and powerful than knowledge when it comes to Christian faith. It’s not that knowledge is worthless to the life of faith – far from it. We do need to learn the history of our own tradition, and, indeed, of our own small congregation. We do need to know about the history of the texts that are central to our tradition. It does matter that we understand that the authors of the Genesis creation accounts were not engaged in writing a scientific account of the beginnings of the universe but were, rather, writing an account of the beginnings of a particular people and of that people’s multi-faceted relationship with their Creator.
The Genesis account really was something new, sprung from the imaginations of writers trying to give words to the beginnings of their people’s faith story. That people’s story of faith and doubt and struggle and exile and unbelief and restoration is marked throughout by imaginative renewal. God’s covenant with God’s people is renewed over and over and over again.
“Out of the depths I cry to you,” the psalmist says, and over and over and over again God responds.
From the depths of enslavement, God renews the covenant through promised liberation in the imaginative actions of Moses.
From the depths of exile, God renews the covenant through promised restoration in the imaginative witness of Isaiah.
From the depths of oppression under the crushing weight of Rome, God renews the covenant through promised reconciliation in the imaginative life of Jesus.
Liberation. Restoration. Reconciliation. These are the constant promises of God renewed in every generation through the creative acts of God and the imaginative responses of God’s faithful servants.
That renewal comes through a distinctive interpretive practice of the faithful, and through their willingness to pay the price that comes with making things new.
Jesus’ words in the section of Matthew that we read a few moments ago demonstrate the practice, and our entire journey of Lent toward Jerusalem and the cross reminds us of the cost.
Jesus gives distinctive voice to the interpretive practice in his refrain, “you have heard it said … but I tell you.”
Every time he uses that refrain he begins by quoting the sacred scriptures of his own people, and then proceeds to reinterpret them for his own time. For example, an eye for an eye was an early Judaic rule of justice that aimed to reduce tribal violence. An eye for an eye was a rule that tempered the violence by balancing injury for injury in an age when mass slaughter was often the response to relatively minor insult.
But Jesus pointed beyond that tempered violence to a reign of nonviolence, taking the sacred text and reimagining it.
Jesus had a new mind for his time, and, in the Sermon on the Mount, his essential teaching might be paraphrased that way: you’ve got to get a new mind for a new time.
The title of this brief meditation, “Have you not heard? Have you not seen?” is taken from God’s words in Isaiah, when God says, “Behold, I am about to do a new thing! Can you not see it?” You’ve got to get new eyes for this new time, as well.
I began with the amazing images from Hubble. Before anybody here was born, Herman Oberth got the idea that a telescope in space might “see” things that no telescope on earth could see. One can imagine him saying, “you have heard it said that the telescope on Mt. Wilson is the greatest ever, but I say to you if we could just put that sucker in space ….”
I don’t know if Dr. Oberth thought he might see images that would remind the world of van Gogh or not, but I don’t have any trouble at all imagining van Gogh saying something like, “you have heard it said that if you want a figure to appear holy just give him a halo, but I say to you ‘I want to paint women and men with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize and which we seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrations of our colouring.’”
The artist and the scientist – each had a mind for a new time, and not necessarily a time which their contemporaries could imagine.
Jesus had that same mind – an imagination that saw a future otherwise and began living into it in his own time regardless of the ridicule, regardless of the persecution, regardless of the risk.
He had to set aside that which needed to be set aside. He lamented that which needed to be lamented. He constructed a foundation of hope. And on it he imagined a future in which the poor, the mourners, the peacemakers, the pursuers of righteousness and justice would all be blessed.
Imagine that. If you can.
Imagination is a multi-color word to me, and when I think of great imagination I think of van Gogh, of Marc Chagall’s American Windows at the Art Institute in Chicago, of the artists in my own family. Individuals gifted to see things in ways that I don’t imagine until I look at their work, and get to step forward into their world. When I step back from that world of artists and colors, I try to hold onto that same imagination in broader social and theological terms, and imagine a future otherwise for the church and the society in which we live.
That’s why you have a piece of colored paper this morning – a small spark for your own faithful imagination.
What do you imagine today for the church and the social world of tomorrow? We know, all too well, that the world we live in is marked by so much that we need to let go of – the fears that we cling to, the false idols of security that we construct. It’s marked also by so much that we lament – the suffering that scars us, the violence that destroys.
But we know that the God of hope goes before us – a pillar of fire shining in the night, a light that the darkness shall not overcome. In that light we can see the bright colors of a new dawn breaking forth: a future otherwise.
What will it contain? What do you bring to it? What, this day, is your hope for the days to come?
I invite you, in the next few moments of quiet, to take the colored paper you received a while back, and on one end of it jot down one hope for the days to come. On the other end, jot down what you can do to bring that hope to fruition. Then tear the paper in two, and as you leave, to go forth into God’s beautiful, multi-colored creation, drop the end with the “hope” into the basket at the door, and we’ll put our colorful hopes on the stones of hope from last week, to be with us through the remainder of this Lenten journey.
Keep the other end – the one that says what you can do to bring hope to life. Carry it with you as a sign of your own promises, and as a reminder to live into those promises day by day.

Rumors of Hope

2011-03-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

Isaiah 56:2-8; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25
March 27, 2011
In a little while we’re going to close our worship singing a song that is chock full of rumor and innuendo. Well, sort of.
But with that “introduction,” you are now looking at your bulletins to see what this song is. That is the way of rumor and innuendo. They are all but impossible to ignore. Even the hint of such is enough to get you searching through a bulletin looking for a hymn title.
Having not, I trust, given away too much, too soon, let me ask, to begin with, what comes to mind when you hear the word “rumors.”

“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”
That’s a line, sometimes attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, sometimes to Hyman Rickover, uh, rumor has it that no one really knows where it comes from. In any case, I don’t know what events were happening in that person’s life when he or she said it, but I’d like to start the rumor that it was said by someone with few ideas and fewer friends … or, maybe, just a depressed philosophy grad student who had a hard time at a cocktail party.
Just kidding. But seriously, what a ridiculous and pompous statement. Ideas and events are meaningless absent the people who live them out or live through them. Talking about people is not only essential and essentially human, it is holy.
It’s about all Jesus did talk about, in fact. You don’t find Jesus waxing eloquently about the great theological themes that, down through the ages, come to define – and confine – so much of Christianity.
Instead, you find him talking with and listening to and drinking with and laughing with and praying with and crying with people, as he heals the sick, makes whole the broken, and brings hope to the hopeless – without ever once saying, “let me share with you my theology of atonement,” or “let’s talk about the mystery of the trinity, shall we?”
And perhaps that is why rumors about him spread like wildfire.
From the very beginning, stories seemed to spread. Recall the opening stories of his ministry from Luke. He comes to the synagogue, takes down the scroll of Isaiah, and sings out about bringing new sight to the blind, liberation to the captives, freedom to the oppressed and good news to the poor, and pretty soon the crowds start gathering everywhere he goes.
Rumors of hope spread out, and the people come.
At the National Capital Presbytery meeting a couple of weeks ago, John Bell spoke to us about rumors and community building. After acknowledging some of what we’ve already named, about the destructive power of rumor and the community-breaking sin of rumor mongering, he reminded us of the rumor that founded the church, “he is risen.”
Beginning with the empty tomb and the witness of Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Mary the mother of James, the story spread on the lips of an ever-expanding circle of witnesses: “he is risen; he is risen, indeed.”
The story that could have ended in despair, the story that the authorities wanted to end with death, instead becomes the story of hope’s triumph, the story of life overcoming death, the story of God’s great “yes” flying in the face of the “no” of the world. Foolishness in the eyes of the world, said Paul, but talk about rumors of hope. Rumors of hope, indeed.
Last week, a small group of us got together to talk about CPC’s mission and outreach to the community. We talked about the core commitment to radical hospitality that guides so much of what we do here. We talked about the continuing call that we discern to engage in hands-on ministries of feeding and housing. We talked about different kinds of hunger that people experience, including the physical hunger that we respond to working through AFAC and A-SPAN and the spiritual hunger that everyone feels at various points in our lives.
And we talked about what our efforts have in common. At that point I think it was Molly who said, simply, “hope.”
What all of our efforts to reach out to and serve the community have in common is the offer of hope.
Wouldn’t it be a great thing if the rumor spread that Clarendon Presbyterian Church is a community of hope!
Oh, but some will say, the rumor is that church is too small. The rumor is that church is hidden away where no one can find it. The rumor is that church doesn’t have enough money. The rumor is that church may not survive. The rumor is that church has too much of this and not enough of that. The rumor is they painted a parlor purple.
OK, sometimes a rumor is true, and even the ones that are not the whole truth often contain kernels of truth. We are small. We are a bit difficult to fine. We don’t have enough money to do everything we’d like to do.
But hold those up against the witness of scripture.
Take the blessings of Jesus:
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
It is surely difficult to understand that promise these days, as war grinds on with no end in sight. But surely this blessing can inspire a rumor of hope that someday we might live into the shalom of God’s desire.
Take the promises of Isaiah:
To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.
To the eunuchs – the sexual minorities, excluded by law and tradition, the ultimate outsiders to a tradition that so treasured paternity and family – to them is promised an everlasting name, a monument within the house of God. Sure, Isaiah does not say, “the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) shall ordain gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender members to church office, but talk about a rumor of hope.
And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast my covenant— these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
To the foreigners – the non-Jews, the ones outside of the covenant of Abraham, maybe even ones on the wrong side of the waters that Moses walked through – to them is promised joy in the house of prayer – a house to be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Oh, to be sure, Isaiah does not say anything about the Muslim, the Hindu, the atheist, but I promised in my ordination vows to receive the scriptures of the new and the old testaments as authoritative, so I must monger this Biblical rumor of hope that everyone, everyone is welcome in the house of God.
It was to the scroll of Isaiah that Jesus turned in his first public teaching, according to Luke’s gospel, and he sang out these words,
“The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s jubilee.”
Talk about rumors of hope.
We’re going to close our worship with a hymn that recalls these words.
Now, as we sing, it’s important to recall that when Jesus finished preaching these words, the people took him out to a hillside and tried to pitch him off a cliff.
I got insight into that about 10 years ago when I put this song in a service of worship, and the music director came to me and said, “I will not play that song; it’s Marxist.”
I was reminded of Oscar Romero’s remark: “when I feed the hungry that call me a saint; when I ask why the people are hungry they call me a communist.”
Jesus is talking about real hope here, and real hope has the power to transform – to transform both individual lives and also to transforms systems and structures that leave people hungry, cast out, and cut off from community and from autonomy.
The challenge to us, a wee small church tucked away in a quiet neighborhood, comes directly from Jesus: give voice to hope and be open to transformations big and small.
When we do this, rumors will spread. Let the people talk. Amen.

Lamentations

2011-03-22T13:01:00.003-07:00

March 20, 2011
1 Kings 19.6-16
What do you notice in this story?
This story should confound us in the same way it confounds Elijah. After all, he heads off to the mountains for 40 days immediately after he has shown up the prophets of Baal, the servants of King Ahab, by calling down fire from heaven in a grand and over-the-top display of God’s power. If you recall, Elijah has a sacrificial bull placed on an alter to be burned, and after the prophets of Baal cannot get their god to light it up, Elijah has jugs of water poured over the wood to make it all the more difficult to ignite. Then, in a flash of lightning from heaven, Elijah’s God grills the bull.
Needless to say, Ahab is a bit put out that his prophets have been shown up – not to mention shown the sword by Elijah – and Ahab swears that vengeance will be his by the next day.
Elijah heads for the hills, running for his life.
Given that the roaring flames had been the way God worked just a few days earlier, it seems natural enough to Elijah that he might hear God in the fire, if not in the mighty wind or the shaking earth.
But that’s not how God chooses to speak to Elijah.
Instead, in a still, small voice – the sound of sheer silence, the text puts it – God speaks.
Not only is the voice unexpected, but also the message. God basically says, “what’s up with this 40 days on the mountain business? I want you back down in the city. Yes, the very place where your words so upset the apple cart of business as usual that the king wants you dead. That is where I want you to speak my word.”
As we consider our own lamentations today – whether for personal situations of pain and suffering or for the overwhelming suffering in the wider world – can we hear the still, small voice of God speaking in and through our own tears? Can we discern in that voice both the presence of God in the midst of brokenness, and the calling of God to us to be also present to one another in the midst of brokenness?
These are, to me, fundamental questions of these 40 days. Our journey of Lent – the journey to Jerusalem and the cross – is a journey into the broken heart of God.
Ellery Akers is a California.
The Word That Is a Prayer
One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he’s saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don’t go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.

Lamentations

2011-03-22T13:01:00.001-07:00

Blessed Are Those Who Journey

2011-03-18T11:57:00.001-07:00

March 13, 2011
Matthew 5:1-12
By way into this famous, beautiful passage, I want to do two things:
First, a couple of textual notes that I hope will be helpful, and second, a brief word from the Quaker educator Parker Palmer that I will put out there as an invitation to the journey of Lent.
Barrels of ink, reams of parchment and paper, and millions of bits and bytes have been given over to reflections on and studies of the Beatitudes. Indeed, you can find an entire society – the Beatitudes Society – devoted to them. So nothing we say this morning is anything like a final word – merely introductions and invitations.
But first, a note on the structure of the passage and one key word. It is worth noting that Matthew places these words on a mountaintop setting. There is a theological point here underscoring Matthew’s consistent theme that holds Jesus alongside Moses as heir to that prophetic and liberating role. Thus the Sermon on the Mount, which opens with the Beatitudes, is to Jesus as Sinai and the 10 Commandments are to Moses. For Matthew, this stuff is the centerpiece of the gospel, somewhat in contrast to the way Luke presents essentially the same material in the Sermon on the Plain in his accounting.
Also contrasting with Luke, Matthew does not have Jesus offer any of the balancing “woes” to his blessings, for example, in Matthew Jesus does not say, “woe to you who are rich” as a counterpoint to the first blessing: blessed are the poor in spirit. It’s also worth noting that Luke does not include the phrase “in spirit.”
I don’t want to go to deeply into the weeds here, though they are fascinating weeds and we may explore them a bit in the weeks to come. I do, however, want to say a brief word about the first word, translated in the NRSV as “blessed.”
The Greek word here is “makarios,” the passive voice of a word that has no precise English equivalent. It would have carried the strong sense of divine providence but not mere dumb luck in the Koine Greek of the New Testament. Of course, Jesus probably used an Aramaic word, either “ashrei” or “tovahoun” which, in addition to meaning “blessed” also mean “get up” or “wake up.” So there is, in these pronouncements of God’s blessing also an implicit call to act out of that blessedness in the world. That sense is made all the more apparent when, just a few verses further on, Jesus teaches the prayer that hinges on the phrase, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Or, as Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon put it in their classic, Resident Aliens, "The Beatitudes are not a strategy for achieving a better society ... they are an indication ... of life in the kingdom of God.”
The kingdom of God – that reality that Jesus said is “close at hand,” that is among you, even at this moment – that is what the Beatitudes summon. Contrary to what many traditions of Christianity taught, the way to the kingdom of God is not up and out of this life. It is, instead, down and in – deep down, and way in to this one life, this one soul, this one spirit we have been given.
For our moment, for this season of Lent, these blessings call us to journey near to the heart of God.
So, as we take these initial steps on this journey, listen also for a bit of wisdom about the inward journey from Parker Palmer:

“Here is a small story from my life about why one might want to take the inner journey. In my early forties I decided to go on the program called Outward Bound. I was on the edge of my first depression, a fact I knew only dimly at the time, and I thought Outward Bound might be a place to shake up my life and learn some things I needed to know.
I chose the week-long course at Hurricane Island, off the coast of Maine. I should have known from that name what was in store for me; next time I will sign up for the course at Happy Gardens or Pleasant Valley! Though it was a week of great teaching, deep community, and genuine growth, it was also a week of fear and loathing!
In the middle of that week I faced the challenge I feared most. One of our instructors backed me up to the edge of a cliff 110 feet above solid ground. He tied a very thin rope to my waist—a rope that looked ill-kempt to me, and seemed to be starting to unravel—and told me to start “rappelling” down that cliff.
“Do what?” I said.
“Just go!” the instructor explained, in typical Outward Bound fashion.
So I went—and immediately slammed into a ledge, some four feet down from the edge of the cliff, with bone-jarring, brain-jarring force.
The instructor looked down at me: “I don’t think you’ve quite got it.”
“Right,” said I, being in no position to disagree. “So what am I supposed to do?”
“The only way to do this,” he said, “is to lean back as far as you can. You have to get your body at right angles to the cliff so that your weight will be on your feet. It’s counter-intuitive, but it’s the only way that works.”
I knew that he was wrong, of course. I knew that the trick was to hug the mountain, to stay as close to the rock face as I could. So I tried it again, my way—and slammed into the next ledge, another four feet down.
“You still don’t have it,” the instructor said helpfully.
“OK,” I said, “tell me again what I am supposed to do.”
“Lean way back,” said he, “and take the next step.”
The next step was a very big one, but I took it—and, wonder of wonders, it worked. I leaned back into empty space, eyes fixed on the heavens in prayer, made tiny, tiny moves with my feet, and started descending down the rock face, gaining confidence with every step.
I was about halfway down when the second instructor called up from below: “Parker, I think you better stop and see what’s just below your feet.” I lowered my eyes very slowly—so as not to shift my weight—and saw that I was approaching a deep hole in the face of the rock.
In order to get down, I would have to get around that hole, which meant I could not maintain the straight line of descent I had started to get comfortable with. I would need to change course and swing myself around that hole, to the left or to the right. I knew for a certainty that attempting to do so would lead directly to my death—so I froze, paralyzed with fear.
The second instructor let me hang there, trembling, in silence for what seemed like a very long time. Finally, she shouted up these helpful words: “Parker, is anything wrong?”
To this day, I do not know where my words came from, though I have twelve witnesses to the fact that I spoke them. In a high, squeaky voice I said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Then,” said the second instructor, “it’s time that you learned the Outward Bound motto.”
“Oh, keen,” I thought. “I’m about to die, and she’s going to give me a motto!”
But then she shouted ten words I hope never to forget, words whose impact and meaning I can still feel: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!”
I had long believed in the concept of “the word become flesh” but until that moment I had not experienced it. My teacher spoke words so compelling that they bypassed my mind, went into my flesh, and animated my legs and feet. No helicopter would come to rescue me; the instructor on the cliff would not pull me up with the rope; there was no parachute in my backpack to float me to the ground. There was no way out of my dilemma except to get into it—so my feet started to move and in a few minutes I made it safely down.
Why would anyone want to embark on the daunting inner journey […]? Because there is no way out of one’s inner life, so one had better get into it. On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is in and through.

Sound the Trumpets?

2011-03-08T09:38:00.001-08:00

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
March 6
Blow the trumpet! Sound the alarm! But please do so quietly and without drawing undue attention to one’s self.
At first blush that seems to be the mixed message from these distinct passages.
Joel is all hot and bothered, and wants everyone to know about it. “Assemble the aged; gather the children, even the infants. Call back the honeymooners. Get the priests. No one is too busy or important or otherwise engaged. Call a solemn assembly to attend to this message. Now!”
Jesus, on the other hand, says “do not sound a trumpet” but practice your faith quietly, praying in your closet, giving alms in secret, fasting but telling no one about it.
So which one is it? Trumpets or no trumpets? Vast public assemblies – worship – or quiet, contemplative, prayers?
I will begin this in confession: this meditation is a work in progress the reflects both my own wrestling with these two passages and also my deep conviction that lives of faith are marked by a deep commitment to struggling with ultimate questions rather than a conviction that we have been given ultimate answers. So, let’s struggle together.
A while back the child care center had a fire drill, which involves setting off the fire alarm, which, trust me, will get your attention no matter where in the building you happen to be. That’s a good thing: if you are a fire alarm, your job is to be heard above all else.
In case of emergency, you want loud alarms.
Joel, apparently, is speaking to an emergency.
I was walking through the building a couple of weeks ago knowing that the fire inspector was coming to check things out, and I noticed that one of our “Exit” signs was askew. If you are an “Exit” sign, your job is to be seen, and seen clearly, so I got a step stool and fixed it.
You want those signs on all the time, in case of emergency but not just in an emergency. You want them on before the emergency so you learn where the exits are.
Jesus seems to be speaking to a different moment in life than the one Joel addresses – not a five-alarm fire emergency, but also not a walk in the park on a spring day when God is in heaven and all is right with the world. I’d call it, for the moment, a season of looming crisis.
Emergency or crisis, then. There is a difference. Now, to be sure, it may be only a difference in perception – one prophet’s crisis being another prophet’s emergency. That simple truth underscores for us one necessity of faith: the practiced determination to read accurately the signs of the times.
Are we living in a looming crisis or is it an emergency?
There are, of course, all kinds of crises and all kinds of emergencies. For example, eating and exercise habits that see you gaining considerable weight constitute a crisis that calls for deliberate and long-term changes. If, however, you do not pay attention to the crisis, then the heart attack that results is an emergency that calls for 911.
For union officials in Wisconsin, for example, the campaign for election of a new governor was a crisis that probably put a few hundred, maybe a few thousand members out on the campaign trail. The subsequently elected governor’s announcement of his plan to strip the unions of their collective bargaining power was an emergency that put a hundred thousand bodies in the streets.
If, for example, you’re driving down the interstate and see a sign that says “395 to DC center lanes; 495 to Baltimore left lanes; 495 to Tysons right lanes: 2 miles” this is a crisis. If you find yourself in the far left lane needing to be in the far right lane and you can see the Jersey barriers – that is an emergency.
The decades long struggle for ordination rights for GLBT members of the Presbyterian church has been a crisis for the church. The vote in our Presbytery on April 30 constitutes an emergency for those of us with the power to vote, and, if present trends continue through this spring, sometime a few weeks after Easter something entirely new will emerge for our church – just to underscore that emergencies are not always negative.
Crisis time is the approach to the crossroads. Emergency time is when you realize you’re in the wrong lane for your turn. Crisis time is the season – however compressed or lengthy it may be – the season to decide. Emergency time is the moment to act.
Do we sound the trumpets now, or just polish up the instruments?
That question is, to be sure, one of the reasons that Karl Barth said that preaching should be done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Reading the signs of the times is a critical practice of our faith.
But by holding two disparate texts – indeed, two completely different kinds of texts – in tension, we must see that faith itself lives always in the uneasy tension between crisis and emergency.
Is there no down time? No ordinary time? No time with neither crisis nor emergency?
On the one hand, if we are honest, we know that the most accurate answer to that is probably “no.” On the other hand, and it remains crucial to hold on to this “other hand,” we are commanded to remember the Sabbath and to keep it holy. That is to say, we know that “wars and rumors of wars,” disease and death, and so on and so forth are constant in human experience – crises and emergencies will be with us always, but we also know that we have been given green pastures to lie down in, trusting that we do not have to carry the load of history on our own shoulders. Resting from the calling to shoulder some of the load some of the time is both good and right as well as faithful. It is also the subject of a different sermon.
We know that somewhere near to us always someone we care about is facing a moment of decision, a time of crisis – whether it is about a job or a relationship or school or an illness or an addiction or a housing situation or family changes, someone we love is in crisis. That same someone could well be facing an emergency soon.
That’s why we hold disparate texts together and read them alongside one another. Taken as a whole, the texts speak to the whole of our own lives, and while pieces of the text stand in tension with other pieces the same is true of our own lives: some parts just don’t always mesh smoothly with others and, yet, there is often deep richness in the rough places.
The invitation uttered through both the prophetic word of Joel and that of Jesus in Matthew is to a way of living through these disparate and sometimes difficult seasons of our lives.
We do not know the precise nature of the crisis to which Joel responded. Indeed, scholars differ by some five centuries in merely affixing a date to the text. There’s no way to name a specific, historical incident to which the author of Joel is responding.
However, as Rabi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it so eloquently, “In a stricken hour comes the word of the prophet.” Heschel goes on to insist that the prophets of Israel throughout “maintained that the primary way of serving God is through love, justice, and righteousness.”
The stricken hour comes when justice is perverted, righteousness no longer prevails, and love has been replaced by fear. Sound the trumpet, then! Assemble the people!
Jesus would have understood this reading of the prophets completely, and he, too, sounds the trumpet with his own voice at moments of emergency in his ministry. But in the text from Matthew, he is pointing out the crisis that will give rise to the emergency, and offering up a way of living that fundamentally alters the context itself. The prophets would have understood.
His invitation to a “prayer retreat” is not an invitation to escape the cares of the world by ignoring the sirens around us, ignoring the suffering around us. Nothing else in either the Sermon on the Mount, in which this passage is found, or the broader gospels suggests any such thing. Jesus never offers or recommends escapism, though he does honor the Sabbath.
But here he sees the crisis, the suffering, around him, and invites people to follow him on a way of life that responds to the crisis by living with the suffering rather than imagining that we can somehow live above it all.
The ones who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them have, in effect, placed themselves on lofty thrones above the masses, above the sick and suffering, above the poor, the outcasts, above the rabble. Jesus calls his followers, instead, into the very midst of that rabble – indeed, he called his followers from the rabble, not to live above it but to live differently in the midst of it precisely in order to transform it by lives of love, justice and righteousness.
As I read these two texts together last week, Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous serenity prayer kept running through my mind. If you Google it, you find the most commonly recited version: Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.
Interestingly, it turns out this is not exactly the way Niebuhr originally wrote it. Instead, in a slight but significant difference, he wrote, “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I should; and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Do you hear the difference? The courage to change the things I should change does not respect the impossibility of some situations. It presents, instead, an ethical imperative to act regardless of whether or not we believe we can make a difference. It presents an ethical imperative to live constantly lives of love, justice and righteousness.
I believe we are called to act both in the midst of crises and in the midst of emergencies. The difference may be as grand as the distinction between acts of charity and acts of justice, or as insignificant as the differences in tactics and strategies. In the end, that really doesn’t matter, because they are all acts of faith.
You see, when Joel calls forth the trumpet blast and when Jesus invites us to quite prayer and fasting, in both cases we are being called to live differently in the world trusting that whether or not we can change things God can – in us and through us, God can and does calm the storms of looming crises and heal the wounds of emergencies.
Our calling, through all of those seasons, however we construe them, is simply to live faithfully in the moment that we have been given with lives known by their loving kindness, justice and righteousness. May we find the courage to live such lives. Amen.

Go Forth and Clean

2011-03-01T09:55:00.001-08:00

James 2:15-17; Mark 6:30-44
February 20, 2011
So late last week I was walking around in here, looking at the windows, thinking about the history of the place, thinking about where each of you typically sits, thinking about the years that I’ve been here, and, basically, looking for some inspiration for this sermon.
You’d think that with Mark’s account of one of the great feeding stories of the gospels and the immortal words from James – faith without works is dead – that have been watchwords of progressive, engaged, social-justice seeking Christians throughout history – well, with all that before me you’d think inspiration would come easily.
In fact, I was so convinced that it would be easy that I’d already written a sermon title and printed out the bulletins, fully confident that I would write a sermon that would fit under the title “Faith You Can Eat.” It was not working out like that – and, as you’ll hear, it never did.
I was thinking about feeding stories and remembering the beautiful and powerful stories that several of you shared last fall – James and Ron finding fruit along the side of the road in Spain, Peg receiving unexpected hospitality in the Holy Land. I’ve been on the receiving end of unexpected abundance many times in my life.
But none of that was speaking to me at all. And frankly, I was a bit impatient with the whole process. I’d figured that with these texts this was going to be an easy week for preaching.
So, as I often do, I came in here and walked. Up and down and around these aisles. I thought about you, and lifted you up in my prayers. I gave thanks for you, and the joy it is to be in ministry with you.
And while my spirit was full of gratitude, my brain was dull and empty.
So I started cleaning up a bit.
These little candles have been in the windows since Christmas. Time to pack them away. Oh, and if they’ve been there that long, it’s past time to dust the window sills.
An old bulletin? That can go.
Last week’s sermon. Recycle bin.
I walked out to get a bag to put some stuff in, and I wound up picking up some glasses that have been lying around for a while and some Tupperware that I hope someone will claim.
I think these reeds probably belong to our friend, Peter, the clarinetist.
I have no idea where this door closer came from or why it was in the building at all.
This book mark is a lovely reminder of the eternal truth that organizes our lives, but it clearly hadn’t organized the space or it wouldn’t have been lying around.
And gradually it dawned on me – faith without works is not only dead, it’s downright dirty, too.
The disciples in Mark’s telling of the feeding story really seem to think that the situation they found themselves in would just take care of itself – thousands of hungry people in a deserted place far from the nearest 7-11, the hour getting late. It would all be just fine if those pesky, hungry people would just leave and go take care of themselves.
Then the disciples could hang out with Jesus, have some more stimulating conversation, feed themselves and call it a night. Kind of the attitude I had about the whole sermon-writing thing. It will just take care of itself.
But then Jesus says, “these people are hungry, so you feed them.”
For their trust in Jesus to have any real effect in the world, for it to matter at all, for it to change anything at all, they had to act on it.
So they did. They organized. They broke the thousands into small groups. That may be the single most important step of all – break the huge, impersonal, unmanageable crowd into small groups where people have a chance to get to know each other, build some relationships, recognize their commonalities – including hunger, feel that shared suffering and experience real compassion – suffering with – and act to relieve it by sharing resources such that all have enough.
That is, to be sure, a beautiful, compelling, powerful, accurate vision of nascent Christian community – as far as it goes.
But there’s a part of the story that mostly gets glossed over or, worse, “miraclized.” That is to say, reduced to the realm of miracle and thus easily dismissed. I’m speaking of the penultimate verse: “and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish.”
It’s easy enough – and correct, for that matter – to hear in this line an image of incredibly, even ridiculous abundance. Out of their individual poverty they discover that, in fact, they share this common abundance. All of that is true enough and worthy of our attention, but I want to point out something a bit homelier this morning.
They picked up all the trash! They cleaned up after themselves.
I have often observed that ministry today has a great deal in common with janitorial services. To be in ministry means to clean up other people’s messes. And I don’t actually mean any of this stuff.
To be in ministry in our time means cleaning up the colossal messes that churchmen – and I use that term pointedly because, let’s be honest, it’s mostly men – the messes that churchmen have made of God, of scripture, of sexuality, and of religion itself.
Theologically speaking, to be in ministry in our time means, for example, cleaning up the mess that’s been made of God. I’m not sure just how we got here, but somewhere along the line, we moved from the God whom Jesus called “daddy” to one whom the church came to call, in all capital letters and spoken in a stained-glass voice, “OUR HEAVENLY FATHER.” If the “father” image of God works for you, that’s fine, but we should all know quite well by now that it is not the only Biblical image of the Divine, and, more to the point, whatever image of God resonates with your spirit, the central and defining understanding of the God whom Jesus points us to is simply this: love.
Somewhere along the line, we made a mess of that and we turned God into a wrathful, capricious, violent judge, and then took that God and aimed him at everyone we don’t like.
To be in ministry in our time means cleaning up that mess.
As people of the Book, to be in ministry now means cleaning up the mess we’ve made of the Bible. Somewhere along the line we tried to make a biology or cosmology textbook out of stories that are supposed to bind us to God and to each other, not to prescientific worldviews. Somewhere along the line we unlearned how to read poetry and allegory and parable, and have made mess out of scripture.
To be in ministry means cleaning up that mess.
Of course that scriptural mess led us to make a huge mess of human sexuality. When, for example, you take a handful of isolated passages that are bound by their own culture and history and use them to oppress and exclude women or take another handful and use them to oppress and exclude gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons, then you leave behind a huge mess that has real consequences.
Broken families, broken lives, abuse, self-loathing and all of the myriad dysfunctions that flow forth from that vile stew of hate – to say nothing of the more general mess we’ve made of human sexuality by adopting a frankly Greek distinction between mind and body instead of the more Hebraic unity of body and soul.
Ministry means cleaning up that mess.
We know that messed up lives lead to messed up communities and societies, and somewhere along the line we employed religion itself to serve as a way of making our own messed up tribe somehow sacred while demonizing some other equally but differently messed up tribe. We made a mess of religion itself and we turned it into a weapon.
Ministry means cleaning up that mess.
It is simply not enough to show up to our services of worship or to our daily prayers or to our offices of devotion. It is simply not enough to say the right words of faith or to claim the correct beliefs. Faith without works makes too much mess.
Walking around the building last week reminded me of this quite concretely – and it was an especially self-reflective reminder because more than a little of the mess that I clean up was mess that I, in fact, had made. Sermons left behind. Water glasses – or coffee cups – left stashed here and there. Sheet music left lying about. To name but a few of my own messes, and not even to touch on my study!
To be sure, I mean this far more figuratively and expansively and significantly than merely cleaning up the church building – though that is also important.
You see, cleaning up these theological messes is important because the biggest mess of all is us. Jesus understood this. He looked around at the crowds and saw individuals, scattered and isolated, flung apart by circumstance, alone in their hunger, stuck in a huge mess without any hope.
He saw that reality, but he imagined something completely different. He imagined a beloved community in which the people would come to feel God as close to themselves as the air. He imagined a community of faith in which the people would hear in their sacred texts the simple and eternal message that God loves the whole of creation including every human creature. He imagined a community in which people would use for the good of all the particular gifts they had been given irrespective of their differences. He imagined the kingdom of God – a community bound by love.
I doubt that he could have imagined all of the messes that we would make over the centuries out of that, but I am pretty sure that he’d understand that the work of faith right now involves a whole lot of cleaning up.
So, go forth and clean! Amen.

Love & Power

2011-02-15T06:42:00.000-08:00

Song of Solomon 8:6-7; Ephesians 3:14-21
February 13, 2011
Tomorrow is Valentines Day, the feast of Saint Valentine, or the many saints whose name was Valentinus, patron saint of, well, probably a Chaucerian legend with no real grounding in history. Oh well. Happy Valentines Day, nonetheless. Oh, and the name Valentinus derives from the Latin valens, or powerful. Love and power – inseparable concerns even when it comes to Valentines Day.
Sometimes the Spirit moves me through a finished story or complete argument, but this morning I am more thinking out loud about love and power. Getting love and power is essential to understanding and practicing Christian faith. My thinking out loud was prompted a couple of weeks ago, when a group of 45 Presbyterian pastors sent an open letter to the church telling us that the denomination is “deathly ill” and needs to be “radically transformed.”
I don’t know if any of you have seen or read their letter, but I’d be willing to bet that you can guess what it’s about if I told you just one thing about the signers: all 45 of them are men.
Moreover, they come from churches that average more than 1,000 members, so they are men who sit atop large institutions with sizeable budgets.
It will not surprise you, I will hazard a guess, that their concerns are prompted by our divisions over ordination issues but there’s more at stake, as they acknowledge. They write,
“Homosexual ordination has been the flashpoint of controversy for the last 35 years. Yet, that issue — with endless, contentious “yes” and “no” votes — masks deeper, more important divisions within the PC(USA). Our divisions revolve around differing understandings of Scripture, authority, Christology, the extent of salvation amidst creeping universalism, and a broader set of moral issues.”
In truth, I don’t disagree with them, though I would name these concerns a bit differently. However, I think that they ignore the one huge issue that rarely gets named or confronted in the church, or in the broader society: the question of power – its sources and its proper uses. They ignore it, I’d guess, because they so clearly embody it that they cannot even see it.
In fact, when called on to explain why there were no women signers they pleaded innocent of practicing any exclusion. They just didn’t notice. They so clearly embody power that they cannot even see it.
Why bring this up today, in connection with the beautiful love song that is Song of Solomon?
To begin with, anyone who has ever been “in love,” in a deep relationship, knows that balancing power is the most challenging and essential work of such relationships. The best relationships are said to be marked by “mutuality” when power is shared in various ways. The worst are destroyed by abuse when power is in the hands of one party.
We know this because we see it in all kinds of relationships ranging from the personal and intimate to the broadly corporate. We see people – often we see ourselves – grasping for power because we are so fearful. We fear not having power. We fear not having control. We fear not being loved.
Yet the power that we find ourselves grasping for so often is such a pale imitation of real power.
Listen again for how the author of the great Biblical love song speaks of the power of love:
“Love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”
That is real power.
Real power resists all of our efforts to control it.
Take the list of concerns that our brothers in Christ want the Presbyterian Church to focus on:
Understanding of scripture? I’ve witnessed and participated in the contentious debates in our denomination for a long time now, and I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. I’ve seen an ever smaller contingent of fearful people who don’t grasp that love is not an orientation and who cannot see the new thing God is doing in the church because they are blinded by fear – of change, of the unknown, of the other. So they disregard the primary Presbyterian principle of interpreting scripture: the rule of love.
The rule of love holds that “any interpretation of Scripture is wrong that separates or sets in opposition love for God and love for fellow human beings.”
The question of authority gets completely muddled, then, when scripture is used as a bludgeon in argument rather than as an invitation to deeper relationship with God and the community of followers of Jesus – whose new commandment was simply this: love one another as I have loved you.
When the question of authority is muddled, power will be abused.
It is no accident, for example, that the letter in question was signed by 45 men. Further, it is no accident that the letter was signed by 45 clergy and not a single Presbyterian elder or other lay leader even though we claim to practice a priesthood of all believers. It is no accident that these men lead large churches whose high steeples project an image of power despite the fact that we worship a crucified God whose greatest power is exhibited in and through human weakness and frailty even unto the cross.
That would be the summary statement of my own Christology, to pick up from the list of concerns the letter names. In and through the weakness and frailty of the human being, Jesus, God exhibits the limitless power of divine love, offering a resounding “yes” to the world that offered the “no” of the cross.
If God would say “yes” to the Roman imperial culture and society that got it all so wrong, why would God say anything but “yes” to the loving desire expressed in and through religious experiences other than our own? If you want to convict me of “creeping universalism,” so be it. Here’s my defense: God did it first.
The love of God does not recognize the limits that human beings always want to place on and around it. We build fences with our fear and thus surround our feeble frames to ward off that which we do not or cannot or will not grasp with our minds or welcome with our hearts. God’s love refuses to acknowledge those fences. God’s love is the raging flame that burns those fences to the ground.
Our own desire, at its highest and best, mirrors that raging flame.
Which is, of course, why it is also such a fearful and fearsome thing.
The fearsomeness is also probably why we don’t often read from the Song of Solomon in church. It is filled with the power of desire. It is a lengthy poem dedicated to that power. Down through the years the institution – whether of the church or the synagogue – has often tried to tamp down this power by trying to convince people that it’s really all just an allegory about love for God or God’s love for us.
But I’m not buying it. Any poem that begins with “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine” is not talking about God.
I hope you have had the chance in the past couple of days, or will take the chance soon, of reading the whole thing. It doesn’t take long – a half hour if you read slowly and linger over the images. If you’re going to take your time, I recommend reading it with a friend! Hey – tomorrow is Valentine’s Day!
But seriously, this love poetry is all about real power – the power of desire, the power of love. Or, put better, the power of love trying to happen.
That lovely phrase comes from Sebastian Moore’s book, The Contagion of Jesus: Doing Theology as if it Mattered. “Desire,” Moore writes, “is love trying to happen,” and, as such, desire is the key to understanding our longing for God, our reaching out to God.
Because, as Moore puts it, “God is a god of desire, not of power and prestige, and Jesus knew God as the object of all our deepest desires – for joy, for laughter, and the love of friends, for sexual fulfillment.”
While I appreciate Moore’s focus on God’s desire for us and God as the authentic object of our own deep desire, I think he makes the common error of identifying power only negatively and aligning it with prestige. That understanding of power also easily equates it with money and might, which are surely forms of power, but understanding power only in those terms misses the deep power of love itself, and it has the paradoxical effect of leading us to embrace powerlessness.
That is to say, if we think that power is always a negative force we are reluctant to use power, and, in fact, often tend to deny that we have any power to begin with.
But such denial is dangerous self deception. We all have power. Consider your most intimate relationships – with lover, with child, with parent.
A good friend posted a Facebook “distress signal” last week bemoaning the fact that her three-year-old has given up her nap. Mom is not happy about this development. Talk about a primordial power struggle. All of our relationships, especially our most intimate ones, involve power struggles and negotiations.
This is true all the more so for our relationship with God, which is why theology matters so much. If we understand God as the great and powerful judge behind the distant curtain of clouds – the Wizard of gods, as it were – then our struggle of faith is marked either by trying to meet standards that are, by definition, unmeetable because they are not of this world, or by running away to hide from this vengeful and violent god. If, on the other hand, we understand God as the creator who longs desperately for relationship with the creature, and for a world in which all of creation lives in the shalom – the wholeness, the peace, the community – that was the animating desire behind the burst of creation itself, then the journey of faith is marked by desire itself.
As Moore puts it, “A theology that downgrades desire as such is going to make of the desire for God something rarefied and otherworldly, instead of being what it is, the hunger for the reign of God.”
In other words, the hunger for God is the desire for beloved community, the kingdom of God on earth. The hunger for God is the desire to know ourselves as beloved.
Diana Butler Bass writes, in the conclusion of her People’s History of Christianity, “Christianity [is] a story of accumulated human experience of God that reveals a certain kind of wisdom in the world: To love God and love one’s neighbor constitutes the good life. Love is, as the apostle Paul wrote, the greatest of all things. Without love we are, as the good apostle said flatly, “nothing” (1 Cor. 13). Without love, Christianity is either a pretty bad joke or a twisted political agenda.”
Without love, the church is destroyed by the love of power at precisely those points when God wants us to be drawn together by the power of love. For when we are drawn together in the circle of God’s love we truly become light for a world that dwells in darkness, water for a parched earth, balm for a broken world, voice for the voiceless, liberation for the captives, welcome for the outcast. That is the authentic power of love.
Thus my prayer for us all – including for the 45 brothers who believe we are part of the deathly illness of the church – is the same one that Paul offered:
that, according to the riches of God’s glory, God may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through the Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Amen.

Standing on Holy Ground

2011-02-08T13:46:00.001-08:00

Exodus 3:1-17
February 6, 2011
In preparation for this high holy day of Super Bowl Sunday it occurred to me to Google the phrase “Lambeau Field” AND “Holy Ground.” I got 1,100 hits, about the same as for “Wrigley Field” AND “Holy Ground” and “Fenway Park” AND “Holy Ground.” Yankees fans take heart: “Yankee Stadium” AND “Holy Ground” turned up more than 3,000 web pages.
“Burning bush” AND “holy ground,” on the other hand, turned up more than 60,000 pages.
Not at all sure what to make of that little excursion into the untamed worlds of the web, but nothing I ran across along the way dissuades me from considering as essential to understanding ourselves and our faith the following questions:
Have you ever seen a burning bush? Ever heard the voice of God? Have you ever stood upon holy ground?
Setting aside the pyrotechnics and stage craft, the flames and the disembodied voice, I think this, for us, is an essential question of our faith: what makes ground holy?
Think about the places you have set your feet, the places that felt holy beneath the soles of your feet. What made them feel that way? What makes ground holy?
Thinking about this over the past few days I started a list of places where I’ve stood that felt like holy ground. So I want to begin this morning asking simply what places feel like holy ground to you?
* * *
Given the Google search I mentioned a moment ago, naturally enough, I began my list of “holy ground on which I’ve stood” with Yankee Stadium. Well, I’m almost serious about that. I did get to see Greg Maddux throw a complete game, three-hit shutout at Yankee Stadium once, and that was pretty darn close to a holy moment.
Completely seriously, there is nothing wrong with finding deep appreciation and even holiness in the beauty of the games we play.
As Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Perry wrote last week, “Let’s take some breaks, pace ourselves and allow some joy despite the persistence of social problems, because movements are not sustainable if those who do the work are exhausted. Let’s laugh at ourselves and at the comic madness of our circumstances, recognizing that humor does not diminish the gravity of our moment but simply lightens the load as we bear it.”
Or, as Mother Jones put it, “if I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
I believe God made us for joyousness as well as for justice, for pleasure as well as for peacemaking. I think of the great line from Chariots of Fire, when the young Eric Liddell says, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel his pleasure.”
While I don’t feel much of anybody’s pleasure when I run, when playing basketball I have felt what Liddell describes, and I’m certain soccer players and hockey players and baseball players and skiers and figure skaters and dancers and swimmers and football players and anyone else who has played games with complete abandon have felt it as well.
Our fields of play can surely be holy ground.
Just plain, old, ordinary fields can be as well. I’ve watched the amber waves of grain as breezes blew across the Great Plains and felt that surely God was in that place, holy ground indeed.
Or watching the blue waves of the ocean crashing into the rocky coast of Maine or gently lapping the wide beaches of North Carolina, I have know that the earth belongs to God, and it is holy ground, even if it is almost wholly water.
Or standing on the top of a mountain in Colorado looking out at a crystal clear lake under a cobalt blue early winter sky. A Rocky Mountain high, to be sure, standing on holy ground a couple of miles above sea level.
The earth belongs to God, the psalmist sings. Moreover, scripture reminds us throughout, God created it. It is holy; all of it. Perhaps we should never wear shoes.
And while the sheer, incredible, and awe-inspiring beauty of our little blue planet can often fill me with the sensation of standing on holy ground, when I reflect on my own experience refracted through the lens of the Moses story I focus on the second part of the psalmist’s phrase: the earth belongs to God, yes, the earth, and all its people. The earth: holy, yes, but even more holy: all its people.
As I think about other holy ground upon which I have stood I realize that I consider certain places holy because of what happened there, and who else stood there before me. Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery where God spoke through a young preacher named Martin, the modern Civil Rights Movement launched, and ground was hallowed.
This sanctuary is holy ground, and not just for me of course. But for me it is holy not because someone long ago set it aside for worship, it is holy because I got to baptize Lenka and Jackson here, I got to join David and Travis in holy union here, I got to memorialize Woody here, I got to ordain Amber and Suzanne and Carol here, I got to serve you bread and cup here. In each of those moments, God’s love was spoken here. This is holy ground for me because of you, and because of what God has done and is doing in and through you here. Whenever God speaks a word of love ground is hallowed.
That leads me to wonder what was particularly holy about the ground that Moses was standing on. Was it just that God was present? I’d say, in principle, that could be true of all places at all times, so I think there was something more at stake in that moment and place than the simple presence of God.
I believe God called “holy” the ground that Moses stood upon because of what God would say there, what God would invoke there, what voices would be heard there, and what God would do in and through Moses.
The most obvious voice heard in the burning bush story is the voice of God, and God invokes God’s own name – reveals it, in truth – at that moment. But the more telling voice, the voice that invokes God, as it were, is the voice of the people crying out from the weight of their oppression.
What does God say of the people?
“I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come to deliver them.”
In that moment, God calls forth justice, and it is this call for justice that makes the ground upon which Moses stands holy ground. Whenever God speaks a word of justice ground is hallowed.
It’s timely that we should have this story in front of us this week, when the land of Egypt is once again the location from which voices are crying out for justice. Did you happen to see the photograph from last week of Egyptian Christians encircling a group of Egyptian Moslems to offer a protecting circle of bodies while the Moslems knelt for prayer? Surely God was in that place. Holy ground, indeed.
Faithful people heard God’s voice, God’s words of love and of justice, and in their response – responding with their very bodies – in their response, ground was hallowed.
From fields of play, to fields of beauty, to fields of dreams of liberation and justice, God makes holy the ground upon which we stand.
Most of us will not live through revolutionary situations that capture the attention of the entire world. Few of us will be called upon to put our bodies on the line to protect our sisters and brothers in such dramatic fashion. Fewer still will hear God speaking from a burning bush. But God still speaks, and each and every one of us has the opportunity at every moment in every place to listen for God speaking a word of love, a word of justice, on behalf of the powerless, the hungry, the outcast, the poor, the marginalized, the voiceless. When God speaks a word of love and justice, and we respond with faithful acts of service, of doing justice, of making peace, of faithful worship, the ground on which we stand is hallowed. So kick off your shoes! You are standing on holy ground! Amen.

Reconciling Dreams and Visions

2011-02-01T13:09:00.001-08:00

1 Chronicles 15:16-21; 2 Corinthians 5:16-6:2; Romans 12
January 30, 2011
What is your ministry at Clarendon Presbyterian Church?
For years I’ve harbored this daydream vision of stepping to a pulpit, putting out a provocative question or observation and then just sitting down. Our regular, every Sunday note in the bulletin naming all the members as the ministers of the church prompted this one. What is your ministry?
A colleague for whom I have a great deal of respect recommends that pastors offer up their “dream sermon” or “state of the church” at least once a year. I don’t suppose that I am particularly unusual among pastors in having more dreams for the church than any one sermon can express. You want to know my dreams and visions for church? Well, do you have a week or two to talk about it?
But one simple dream is that at any point someone could stand up here, ask that question – what is your ministry at CPC – and everybody would have an answer that names their own part in the mission and ministry of this community.
One might say, “my ministry is hospitality” while another might say, “I help feed the hungry.” Someone else might say, “my ministry is educating our children” and another might say, “I lead parts of worship.”
“I provide care for our elderly to help them stay connected even though they can’t make it to worship.”
“I do outreach to the unchurched in the metro corridor.”
“My ministry is helping the people make a joyful noise in praising God.”
“I work for justice for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender folk in the church and the community.”
“My ministry is helping people develop their spiritual lives more fully.”
“My ministry is working to reduce gun violence in metro DC.”
“I do liturgical arts, so I guess I’m part of the ministry of beauty.”
There are, of course, many more ministries going on here than the ones I’ve named, but all of the ones I’ve named are happening.
As Paul put it to the church in Corinth and again to the one in Rome, together we are the body of Christ and individually members of it. We do not all have the same gifts, so we do not all offer the same ministry, but together we make up the whole body. The ministry that we share together is what Paul called “the ministry of reconciliation” and it involves being reconciled to one another and to God.
He spelled out what it looks like, too:
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
This is how we do what we do. That is how we do who we are. There is a deep congruency between the way we are together and the purposes for which we are together. Means and ends meet in Christ.
Not to go all Presbyterian on you or anything, but I believe that it’s fair to say that we are about “the great ends of the church,” as our Book of Order – the constitution of the Presbyterian Church – names these foundational purposes of the church. What are we here for? We are here to be the church, to do ministry. We are here:
To proclaim the gospel for the salvation of humankind;
To shelter, nurture and provide spiritual fellowship for the children of God;
To maintain divine worship;
To preserve the truth;
To promote social righteousness; and
To exhibit to the world the kingdom of God.
In a few minutes, when we gather downstairs for our annual meeting, we’ll talk about the ways we put flesh on these particular bones that support the body of Christ. We’ll talk about the ministry teams that structure our work, and I hope that each of you will see yourselves engaged and involved in some aspect of our common life and work.
My dreams for the church, for Clarendon Presbyterian Church, in the year of our Lord 2011, focus in on our common ministry, and were shaped to a great extent by the series of small group gatherings that we held last fall. More than 75 percent of our members participated in one of these. Frankly most of those who did not participate missed out because we did not get the last one scheduled soon enough and we ran into the holidays.
Several key things came out of those gatherings, and when we gather downstairs you will hear a little more about one in particular – the new music staff position that session approved that was developed in direct response to your hopes expressed through those gatherings.
One other key finding from those gatherings – and one that speaks directly to the dream I have for this community – was an oft-repeated desire to have more opportunities to be together in small groups. Our ministry – your ministry – in this congregation is directed by small groups that we call ministry teams. During the coming year we are going to work to make these groups more than mere planning groups, more than mere task forces, more than committees by another name. We want them to be the place where we go deeply into our faith and spiritual lives and into our life together, and then from that deep place of common faithfulness these same small groups become the place that we then go out into ministry, into our several callings that together we might be more fully the body of Christ.
My dream for the church is that we might, each of us, find our own calling in that ministry; that we might find in that calling some deep and profound hope, and that we might, each of us, be able to give an account of the hope that is within us. For when we share that hope with the world we not only cast a vision of a reconciled world, we begin to bring it to life right here, right now.

Wizards, Aliens, and Strangers

2011-01-25T12:10:00.001-08:00

January 23, 2011
Leviticus 19:30-38; Matthew 25:35
So I finally managed to see the most recent Harry Potter flick last week, and thus the warning from Leviticus brought a smile to my face.
Do not seek out wizards, indeed. I paid good money to see the wizards of Hogwartz, and I figure I got my money’s worth, and, perhaps, some insights more important for us than the wizard warning.
“Do not turn to mediums or wizards; do not seek them out, to be defiled by them.” I’d guess – though it’s only a guess – that this line from Leviticus is one of the passages that certain conservative Christians use to warn against giving J.K. Rowling any more business. It’s only a guess because that kind of narrow mindedness just ticks me off so I try not to delve too deeply into it. I say, give J.K. her due: she spins a good yarn.
In fact, I’d say more than that, she tells a tale enriched with some of the core values at stake in both of our passages this morning.
From the early days of the series, Rowling’s story gives voice to clear concern for outsiders, for the strangers and aliens. As Professor Dumbledore says in The Goblet of Fire, “You place too much importance … on the so-called purity of blood! You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!”
I suppose it’s all too easy to hear in that single line what certain so-called Christians would fear in such a story. After all, we live in an age when, on the day of his inauguration, the governor of Alabama says it quite clearly:
“Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister.”
In other words, if you’ve not been washed in the purifying blood of the lamb, then you are not my brother or sister. There is so much not to like in that, beginning with the basic civics question of just what office this guy was being inaugurated to last week? Is he the governor of Alabama or theologian in chief? I can’t speak to his governance, but his theology raises all kinds of questions.
Such views, at their worst, reflect a vision of the church as keepers of purity and as guardians of some secret truth revealed only to those worthy of a seat at the table of God’s power. But is that the role of the church? To guard this simple table to keep out the unworthy? That is a theology, but it is not one that the Jesus of Matthew 25 would recognize.
I am always bothered and deeply saddened by the fundamental lack of imagination on display in such comments, whether they come from small-minded politicians or from small-minded wizards.
To be generous to the governor, one could hear in his statement a recognition that followers of Jesus are bound together in a specific, particular way, and thus we are stuck with one another whether we like it or not. In other words, the governor is my brother in Christ whether or not he or I like it, so we are bound together. At our very best – our seldom-achieved very best – the church can be a light to the nation by showing how we can live together in peace and affection, in genuine love, even when we disagree.
Now I’m far from certain that the governor had that in mind, but it doesn’t really matter. Either way, in putting it out there as he did, his statement reflects a profoundly limited theological imagination that we ought to question. For the sake of this morning, I’d argue that it is challenged by the Jesus described in Matthew 25, and, as it turns out, by Professor Dumbledore as well.
Now I didn’t study at Hogwortz Academy, so I’m not conversant with the sacred texts that guided Dumbledore. But I did go to seminary, so I do know the very first thing that we learn about God in our sacred texts. Go back to the first line: in the beginning, when God was creating …. God creates! It’s what God does. It’s who God is. All of scripture points to the relentlessly creative force of the divine who reveals herself to Moses as the one who will be who he will be.
Notice what I did there with gender? God will be who God will be – engendered or beyond gender, spirit, incarnate – God will be who God will be.
As such, God is always about to do a new thing, or is already about doing it. The entirety of scripture attests to this whether it’s freeing the Israelites from Pharaoh or dwelling completely in Jesus, the Christ. God will be who God will be.
Moreover, we learn from the beginning that we are created in the image of this creative God, and therefore we must also be creative.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing us today, as Christians, as citizens, comes in learning again how to be creative, how to think creatively, how to live creatively, how to see the world creatively, how to see one another creatively. The real problem with the governor of Alabama – to pick on his example again – is that he is not creative enough to see strangers as sisters and brothers unless they see Jesus the same way he does.
What’s at stake is who’s in, who’s out, and how we make those distinctions. It was the same for Harry Potter. Harry’s nemesis, Draco Malfoy, put it this way early on in the series:
“I really don’t think they should let the other sort in, do you? They’re just not the same, they’ve never been brought up to know our ways” (from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone).
But seeing others differently is precisely the move that Jesus made. More than that, even, in the famous passage from the 25th chapter of Matthew, Jesus has the imagination to see strangers as himself, and to insist that his followers treat the least of these – the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the prisoners, the outcast, the widows and orphans – as they would treat him.
It’s a sentiment that Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, would understand. “If you want to know what a man is like,” he said, “take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals” (also from The Goblet of Fire). We are measured best, he seems to suggest, by how we treat the least of these.
I think Jesus would agree with that. Moreover, in the Matthew text, Jesus does not put up any barriers based on belief either. Thus it is up to us, in our creativity, to extend the list of those we ought to treat as if they were Jesus: the foreigners, sexual minorities, the poor be they Hindu, Sikh, Moslem, Jew, nonbeliever. Whatever we do to them, the least of these who, Jesus says, “are members of my family,” we do to Jesus.
As followers of Jesus, we like to think we know how we’d treat Jesus. We’d welcome him in, and make sure he had a seat at the table. Well, as followers of Jesus that is how we’re called to treat everyone we meet, wherever and whenever we meet them: at the grocery store, in the office, at school, at the 7-11, on Facebook, in the comments section of our favorite blog, in traffic, in staff meetings with disagreeable colleagues, in the governor’s mansion, at the White House, at the little shack way up at the end of the holler. Moreover, it is how we are called to treat those whom the broader culture teaches us to think of as our enemies.
All of which means, also, that as a follower of Jesus I am called to treat the governor of Alabama just as I would treat Jesus. In other words, it means that we are called to treat those with whom we disagree just as we would treat Jesus.
This does not mean that we are called to agree with them, or to sit by silently when they say harmful or hateful things, but it does mean that we are called to be loving in our response to them, in our opposition to them. All too often, this is where our creativity fails us. All too often, this is when we need a wizard to help us out.
It would be nice, sometimes, to have a magic wand. But out there at the end of our creativity and at the edge of the magical is where we ultimately have to part company with Harry and his friends. We part as friends, entertained, and maybe even a bit inspired by their adventures, and we continue on here in the real world without a wizard.
We have, instead, a God who is creative enough to not need magic. We have a God creative enough to live in and through the life of a carpenter’s kid, and show us through that singular life, what it means to be children of God. We have a God, then, who chooses to work through folks like us – indeed, to work through us to fulfill the Divine vision of a world in which we learn to treat one another as fellow creatures sprung from the mind of the same Creator, as children of the same God, as sisters and brothers. Amen.

What Is Power For?

2011-01-19T13:33:00.001-08:00

Amos 5:21-24; 2 Chronicles 9:3-8
January 16, 2011
It’s that weekend when we roll out the dream again. That one time a year when we dust off the most famous words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and hear pundits and politicians praise him as reporters speak in hushed and reverent tones of the “slain civil rights leader,” mostly neglecting to mention that he was, first and foremost, a preacher and a man concerned about the community of faith that is the church.
I could join my voice and quote the Dream speech, and talk about living in a nation where we are judged by the content of our characters rather than the characteristics of our bodies. We could measure our distance from that more perfect union in all kinds of ways, and, indeed, we could make the measure in terms of King’s framework of racism, militarism and poverty – the three great social evils that King named as eating away at the heart of that union.
And there would be nothing wrong with any of that. I have, in fact, done pretty much precisely that on this Sunday in other years, but this morning something else concerns me, and it was a central concern of King’s as well.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about power. What it is? Who has it? What is it for? I don’t think we can live faithful lives without getting this question right. All of our lives involve relationships with power, so how can we be faithful in our use of power those relationships?
To begin with this morning, let’s step back and talk about power in general terms. When you hear the word “power” what comes to mind?

In community organizing circles, power is defined like this: organized people and organized money.
That’s a useful description, but I think there’s a more basic definition, more physical, if you will. Power is simply the ability to make something move. In reflecting on power, Dr. King said, “Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose.” He went on to say, in the realm of human relationships, power “is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change.”
It’s an interesting phenomenon in many white liberal church contexts that when the subject of conversation turns to power people begin to squirm.
So my second question this morning is this: how do you feel about power?

I believe people get uncomfortable talking about power because all of us, in every social relationship in our lives, are constantly engaged in negotiations over power. Who has it and how shall it be exercised? It’s true in offices, whether your office sits on Capitol Hill or some location far less lofty – that is to say, less powerful. It’s true in classrooms. It’s true in church. It’s true in relationships and in families.
We are almost always engaged in negotiations – often in struggles – over power.
Frederick Douglas famously remarked, “power concedes nothing without a fight; it never did and it never will.”
In political, economic and social relationships in general and in most personal relationships, as well, I would agree with Douglas, because in those contexts the struggle for power is a zero-sum game. Power comes in limited supply, so sharing it means one party’s power is going to be reduced. Think about your most recent disagreement with a loved one. Where was power at stake? It almost certainly was.
But Dr. King had some instructive words for us about power.
“What is needed,” he said, “is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
King’s words help me to answer my own title question, “what is power for?”
When the queen of Sheba visited King Solomon, she witnessed God’s answer to that question. She looked around at all that Solomon had built, she observed that state of the people, and she said, “God made you king – God gave you power – so that you can do justice.”
Using Dr. King’s standard, then, God gave the king power to correct everything in his world that stood against love.
As a church, we are right to question power because it is so often abused. However, we abdicate our own responsibilities when we pretend that we are somehow above power. When we imagine that we’ll get our hands dirty by engaging power, we are refusing to engage a fundamental question of our faith, indeed, a foundational practice of our faith.
Moreover, I’d argue that we are denying something essential about power, and about God; something essential that ought to turn our understanding of power on its head.
You see, we struggle and fight over power because we believe it is in limited supply. But the reality is, authentic power is a gift from God, and thus its supply is without end.
Let me put that just a bit differently. God gives us authentic power – that is to say, the capacity and strength to change those things in personal, social, economic and political relationships that stand against love. That is a gift from God, because God is love, and God desires transformation of all relationships that are marked and debased by impediments to God’s own self.
God gives us power that we might find our way to God in every imaginable context and relationship.
In the earliest days of the Christian experience, the church, the community of faith, was sometimes symbolized as a boat. Joan Gray, former moderator of the General Assembly, is fond of pointing out that the church at its best is a sailboat, powered by the wind of the Holy Spirit. At our most dysfunctional, we’re a rowboat, powered only by human hands, never certain of our direction. As the church, then, at our best, we open our sails to catch the power of God and move with it into the world.
We do so not for our own sakes, nor for the sake of a good show on Sunday morning. Our passage from Amos surely underscores that truth.
No, we cast off and spread our sails to move with the Holy Spirit that justice might roll down and righteousness might flow forth.
If power is about God’s purposes for justice, then your calling as a Christian comes down to this: open your life to God’s power so that you might be used, in all of your relationships, in every context, to remove everything that stands against love. Live so God can use you, anytime and anywhere. Amen.

Come and See

2011-01-11T10:11:00.000-08:00

January 9, 2011
John 1:29-41; Romans 12
So, have you heard the story of the 10-year-old girl in Canada who helped discover a supernova and it’s now named after her? Apparently, after about 10 minutes worth of work, she found something no one else had ever seen, even though it’s been out there for tens of millions of years. Star gazers and astronomers often spend thousands of hours searching the night sky, and most never make the kind of discovery this little girl made in less time than the average 10-year-old will spend avoiding taking a shower.
Sometimes it just works out that way. An epiphany of a lifetime happens in a flash – a flash of inspiration, perhaps, a flash of recognition, a flash of dumb luck.
Take the opening story from John’s gospel. What did John the Baptist see in Jesus that, apparently, no one had seen before, even though Jesus was roughly 30 years old? What did the first disciples see in him that they were willing to leave their lives behind and “come and see”? What did Jesus see in them? What were any of them looking for when they found each other?
Was it a flash of inspiration? Was it some inspired kind of recognition? Was it plain old dumb luck?
What were they looking for? What brought them together?
Well, let’s pause right there for a moment, and test our own experiences. What are you looking for that brought you here? To this place at this moment?

Let me tell you why I am here. I am here, at this moment, in this place, because I heard this voice, calling in the night, saying simply:
Will you come and follow me,
If I but call your name?
Will you go where you don't know
And never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown,
will you let my name be known,
will you let my life be grown
in you and you in me?

Those are, of course, John Bell’s* words, but I think they capture well the essence of Jesus’ invitation to the disciples: “come and see.”
The same invitation resounds for us today. It is an invitation to live our lives differently than we would otherwise, to live them differently than we would absent this summons, this invitation. It is an invitation that Paul heard on the road to Damascus when he was invited to live differently. It is an invitation he repeated to the young church in our passage from Romans:
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
When Jesus says, “come and see,” he invites those who hear to follow him on a journey of transformation that involves renewal, over and over and over again, as we leave our old selves behind to live into lives that are closer to what God has in mind for us.

Will you leave your self behind
if I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind
and never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare
should your life attract or scare,
will you let me answer prayer
in you and you in me?

Risking the hostile stare … have you ever felt that way about your faith? Have you ever found it difficult to “come out,” as it were, as a Christian, as a follower of Jesus?
I certainly have felt that way. I have heard the words of condemnation from those who do not understand that the Creator’s love is not limited by the creature’s sexual orientation – and from those who do not believe that any Christian could speak a word of hope to those who have heard so many words of hate.
I have heard the mocking words of those who believe that the present time ordains an identical future, and thus dismiss as naïve efforts to, for one small but certainly profoundly significant example this weekend, do something constructive to address the epidemic of gun violence that plagues our nation.
It is often easier simply to keep one’s mouth shut. But when Jesus says, “come and see,” he calls us also to speak – to speak the truth in love and to speak truth to power.

Will you love the 'you' you hide
if I but call your name?
Will you quell the fear inside
and never be the same?
Will you use the faith you've found
to reshape the world around
through my sight and touch and sound
in you and you in me?

When Jesus says, “come and see,” he is inviting us to bring our best – and our worst – our whole lives to bear for the sake of the world that God so loves. Paul put it like this:
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”
Worship, then, is not something that we do for an hour or so on Sunday morning, when we read some ancient words, say a few prayers, sing a couple of hymns and then go back to the same old, same old. Worship is giving our whole lives to the one who says, “come and see.”
And what lives they are! What glorious, beautiful, creative, joyous, but also broken, suffering, lonely, lives. All of that, is what God asks of us. Our whole lives – lived wholly for the sake of a broken, suffering, lonely world.
When Jesus says, “come and see,” that is his summons, his call, his invitation. It is the one he heard in the voice that said, at his baptism, “this is my son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased.”
It is a call, ultimately, to live as if death does not get the last word. Think about that: death does not get the last word.
That is the epiphany of the incarnation. That is the singular insight of the Jesus story, and it is not, in the end, a flash of inspiration or recognition, and certainly not just dumb luck. It is the promise that makes possible the lives we are called to lead. You’re not going to get a supernova named after you when you answer this call. You’re going to get something far greater.
For, when we get over that primal fear of our own demise, then the life that Jesus calls us to truly reveals itself: a life of joyous, risky, barrier-breaking, peace-making, justice-seeking, hope-filled, faithful, loving, and worshipful service to the One who gave us these lives in the first place; the One who promises us, in baptism, that we will never be alone, and that nothing in life or in death will ever separate us from the love which is the ground of creation itself.

Lord, your summons echoes true
when you but call my name.
Let me turn and follow you
and never be the same.
In your company I'll go
where your love and footsteps show.
Thus I'll move and live and grow
in you and you in me.

“Come and see,” Jesus says now, to you. “Come and see.”

*(The Summons, words and music by John Bell)

The Advent of Joy

2010-12-21T11:53:00.001-08:00

Isaiah 7:10-16; Titus 3:4-7
December 19, 2010
The text from Titus is both a theological mouthful, and a simple invitation: “the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, and saved us, according to God’s own mercy, through the Spirit poured out for us through Jesus the Christ.”
In other words: joy to the world, the Lord has come; let earth receive her king.
Joy to the world!
Joy to the world!
The world could certainly use a little joy these days – a little authentic joy.
Too often, instead, we paper over joylessness, and worse, with bits and pieces of cheap happiness.
We can easily shop ourselves into a stupor this time of year and call it the pursuit of happiness, but deep, lasting, authentic joy does not come in a package no matter how big and beautiful it may be.
It’s important to recognize that simple and oft-stated truth, because the truth is some people feel out of place, out of season, this time of year because gifts don’t make them happy, much less truly joyful. Some folks even feel guilty because they don’t feel happy, but there are all kinds of good reasons for not feeling happy this time of year.
Some of us get sick this time of year, and boy do I feel your pain this year. Others, in our part of the world, have moods the mirror the darkness of December days.
But even if you’re hale and hearty and don’t mind winter, Christmas can come as a painful reminder of past loss, of broken relationships, of hope disappointed, of loved ones no longer with us. Blue Christmas is not just an old pop song.
On the other hand, lots of us find all kinds of simple sources of happiness this time of year. Some folks just love the carols of the season. Others love the decorations. Most everyone enjoys the bright eyes of expectant children. Some people even love to shop, and there are even those who love winter weather and long winter nights.
But whether Christmas is a time of the blues for you, or a season of festive cheer, there is deeper good news that should be of great joy for all of us. After all, unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.
That the government will be upon his shoulders is a promise of a future unlike the past or present, and should bring great joy to all … except maybe those who hold too tightly to the power they have.
The he should be called “wonderful,” “counselor” should bring great joy to all of us who suffer, who despair sometimes, whose hearts ache from time to time – that is to say, all of us. That comes as less than good news only to those who sell cheap forms of grace.
That he should be named “mighty God” should come as deep joy to all of those who have suffered what I like to call theological abuse at the hands of those who engage in theological malpractice and try to convince their followers and the rest of us as well that God only loves folks just like them or that God only blesses folks just like them or that there is only one way – always their way – to find the heart of God. Because the Jesus of the gospels does not point us to a God of confined love or restricted blessing or less than awesome mystery, and that is joyous good news indeed, unless you’re peddling a lesser god.
That he shall called “prince of peace” – well that should come as joy to the entire war-weary world.
These tidings of great joy which shall be for all people come with no strings attached.
They also come with an invitation, and one that complicates matters a bit for some. You see, this good news comes with, or, better, comes as an invitation into a relationship. Even better, or more accurately, the good news – the gospel of Jesus Christ – comes as an invitation into a web of relationships.
The gospel invites us into relationship with the God made known through the Jesus story, and into relationship with God’s people in the community of faith that is the church.
There was an article circling around the Facebook world last week, entitled “7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable.” While I’m certain that we could add to the list and complicate is in lots of ways, the seven reasons the author named struck me as legitimate commentary on our times, and they all came down to the same core concern: a profound lack of authentic relationships shaped, formed and sustained in authentic community has left us adrift, unanchored, and fearful in the midst of the constant whitewater of our high-tech, rapidly changing culture.
The great joy that shall be for all people can only be truly experienced and participated in when we are bound together in the kinds of relationships that anchor us firmly.
When we speak, during this Advent season, of preparing our hearts for the coming again of Christ into the world, we are talking about opening our hearts to deep relationships with one another and with the God made known to us through the one whose birth announced the great turning of the world.
So let us turn. Let us turn from paralysis to faithful action in the world. Let us turn from despair toward Advent hope, from fear toward the Advent of love, from strife and division toward the Advent of peace, and from the surface prompts of the marketplace with its false claims of happiness toward the depth of authentic relationship that announces Advent joy. Let us turn, then, toward Bethlehem. Let us turn toward the manger. Amen.

The Advent of Love

2010-12-17T08:37:00.001-08:00

Psalm 146; Isaiah 35:1-10
December 12, 2010
To begin with this morning, what are some of the signs of hope that you have witnessed of late?
For me, hope is grounded always in community, and, to borrow from Emily Dickinson, it is given wings by the power of love. Without wings – that is to say, without agency, without the ability to move something, to transform, to change – without that hope will always be disappointed, and thus it will lead to despair.
Last week I quoted Archbishop Romero – “I try not to depend on hope, because unfulfilled hope leads to despair, and we have no need of despairing people. I try, instead, to depend on faith.”
I’d like to suggest this morning that love is the power that moves us from hopes and dreams to faithful action in the world.
This is not easy, to be sure.
As Chris Hedges noted in an essay a couple of weeks ago urging people to speak out for an end to the wars, “Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something.”
I think that is mostly right, but only when the power of love moves us from vague and idle hopes into faithful engagement with the suffering and brokenness of the world around us.
It’s crucial to remember that the New Testament concept of love is grounded in Jesus giving of himself for the sake of the world. “Greater love has no one than that he be willing to give up his life for his friends,” Jesus told his followers.
It’s all too easy to sentimentalize love, but the gospels refuse to do so – even down to the Greek word the gospel writers chose: agape. Koine Greek offers three words for love: eros, or romantic, erotic love; philia, or the love of kin, brotherly love as it were; and agape. What distinguishes agape from the others is that it refers to love that expects nothing in return. Romantic love desires its own return in the relationship among lovers. Brotherly love is given out of the obligation of kinship, and one is bound to repay it. But agape is utterly self-giving, without regard for its own well-being or expectation of being returned.
There is incredible power in such love, and when we open our hearts to that love in the person of Jesus we find ourselves moved from passive hope to faithful acting in the world. Advent is about just such opening.
That is to say, I can stand up here and hope that people don’t go hungry on Christmas Eve, or I can open my heart to the love of Christ and move my butt into the street on Christmas Eve to feed people. I can hope that people in this community who are shut in by illness or infirmity know that we care about them, or I can open my heart to the love of Christ and pick up the phone and call them or move my butt and visit them. I can hope that wars will cease, or I can open my heart to the love of Christ and act in the world for nonviolence. I can hope that justice will be done for my GLBT sisters and brothers, or I can open my heart to the love of Christ and move my butt to work for that justice in the church and in society. I can hope that all people know that they are created good in the image of a loving God and hope that they learn to live out of that fundamental identity, or I can open my heart to the love of Christ and then go out into the world to show everyone I meet along the way that they are beloved.
The advent of love is about moving from fear to hope and from hope to faithful action in the world.
In the beautiful carol, O Little Town of Bethlehem, we sing about the hopes and fears of all the years being met on the Holy Night. I believe that’s what the Advent of Love is all about: meeting the hopes and fears of all our years with the love of God known to us in Jesus.
This season of Advent is about preparing a way for that to happen again, about preparing our hearts for the love of Christ.
So this morning, I invite you now to come forward with the strip of cloth you were given, and the notes of hope you’ve attached, and lay them in the cradle as a sign and symbol of preparing the way of the Lord.

The Advent of Hope

2010-12-07T08:05:00.000-08:00

December 5, 2010
Romans 15:4-13; Isaiah 11:1-9
The word “hope” appears just a few more than 150 times in scripture. Perhaps not surprisingly, about twenty percent of those instances come in the psalms. Truly, these are songs of hope sung by people of faith.
Perhaps surprisingly, the book of the Bible with the next most instances of the word “hope” is the story of Job. To be sure, almost all of the references to hope in Job are negative, as this:
“For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. 8Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, 9yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. 10But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they? 11As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, 12so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep.”
Nontheless, it is fair to say that Job is filled with hope, even if it is only a hope for hope itself. In many respects, Job is the most humanist part of scripture. Job is everyman or woman – laid low by happenstance utterly beyond his control. Yet still longing after the God of hope.
Earlier this fall I heard Rick Ufford-Chase, past moderator of our General Assembly and current director of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, say that he does not have any time left for hope. Rick was speaking as the director of the peace fellowship during a time of endless war, and as past moderator of a denomination that is clearly dying.
But you do not need to go to such high places to find such feelings.
Rick told us the story of his friend, Romona, a woman he knew twenty years ago living in an extremely poor community in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. One of the seminarians Rick was leading on a delegation asked Romona where she found hope in her life, and her response was something along the lines of the following: "Hope is a luxury I can't afford. I get out of bed in the morning and I do what has to be done. Hope is for people who have access to resources."
I can imagine Job uttering just such words. And I can also imagine that if, for example, on Christmas Eve we asked the men and women in the food line when we hand out meals for A-SPAN what gives them hope, we’d probably get back some quizzical looks. Hot soup and a safe place to sleep are probably foremost on their minds.
In such a context, hope is a luxury. Indeed, in the face of such desperation, hope might just be the last thing you need.
Rick also quoted the late archbishop Oscar Romero to us: Romero said, try not to depend on hope, because unfulfilled hope leads to despair, and we have no need of a despairing people. Try instead to be faithful, to do what needs to be done.
I am not generally given to despair, though I carry around a satchel full of unfulfilled hopes, and as I listened to Rick speak that evening, the words of the late Harvey Milk kept running through my mind. “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living. You have got to give them hope.”
So, during this Advent season, as we gather around this ancient story that tells us that Christ is coming again, what does Advent hope mean for us? When Paul wrote to the Romans almost 2,000 years ago he firmly believed that the words of Isaiah – a root shall spring forth from the stump of Jesse – foretold the imminent return of Jesus. Whatever our Christology these days, we have to confess that what Paul believed, what he thought and what he preached and wrote about Jesus coming back to earth certainly did not happen. Does Paul’s unfulfilled hope necessitate our despair?
Not at all. The truth is, we share Paul’s hope even now, though we understand it through the long lens of history. Nevertheless, the hope we share would be familiar to him: that Christ is, indeed, coming again into our lives, and that our lives might reflect that hope.
Paul, in his beautiful words from the Corinthian correspondence, speaks of hope in conjunction with two other foundational virtues: faith and love.
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three …”
The key to understanding the hope of Advent, and, indeed, the advent of hope, lies in that trinity of virtues – faith, hope and love.
Interestingly enough, I think Harvey Milk was pointing in the same direction when he famously said, “you’ve gotta give ‘em hope.” He said those words in a speech delivered just before he was assassinated in 1978, and if Harvey had been a good southern boy he would have known to use the plural “you,” and he would’ve said, “y’all have gotta give ‘em hope.” What he said, instead, was this: “you and you and you – gotta give ‘em hope.”
In other words, hope is not and cannot be an individual possession, because authentic hope only arises in community. Authentic hope is only possible in community.
That’s why Paul insists on the power of love – that is to say, the binding force that holds community together is love, and only where there is love can there be hope.
Faith, which is never first about belief but is, instead, foremost about relationship, faith binds us to a particular community and gives specific content to our hope.
Let me flesh that out just a little bit in terms of this season and this community.
First, though, let me say that I agree with Rick not only about certain prospects for the near term, but also about the necessity for faithfulness in the present moment. I think he’s absolutely right about the coming demise of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). We are living into a post-denominational age, and are already well beyond the age of the mainline Protestant establishment in America. I cannot tell you what comes next, but the church I grew up in no longer exists, and we are simply in denial if we think it’s ever coming back again.
There are profoundly serious cultural, personal, ethical, theological, and political issues at stake in the dissolution of the Protestant consensus in America, and if we cling to some false hopes about a return to the good old days then we are doomed to precisely the kind of despair that Romero had in mind when he said that we do not need people dragging around the despair of unfulfilled hopes.
For those hopes are really nothing more than sentimental nostalgia, the longing after an imagined past that never truly was. Moreover, those hopes can easily be reduced to private possessions. I can curl up in front of the fireplace or the Christmas tree with a Hallmark version of the season, and lose myself in the private revelry of my own imagination. And there’s nothing wrong with that in small doses. But there is no real life there, and thus, there is no real hope there either.
Real hope, real Advent hope, is about new life being born in the most unexpected places: unemployment lines, soup kitchens, the day laborer sites, along the borders, far from the seats of power, but also at kitchen tables and back yards where smaller scale family and neighborhood crises get played out every day against the background of a culture of despair that isolates us from one another at every turn.
Why should this be so? Why should God show up in such places? The God revealed at the manger is the God whose very name is, “I will be who I will be,” and whose steadfast promise is “I will be with you always, in just the way that I choose to be.” Emmanuel. God with us. As God chooses. And as the witness of scripture and especially the story of Jesus make abundantly clear, God chooses first to be with the least of these.
We’re going to talk more about this next week – in particular, about the relationship of hope and love, but for this morning, let me close with a story of Advent hope.
Rick and I have traded some e-mail correspondence on hope over these past days, and he framed his questions about hope in part like this:
“I think my point is that although I dream and feel hopeful all the time, and that motivates me a great deal, I also recognize the luxury of feeling hopeful. As I've been reading through the Psalms over the past two years in morning prayer, I find that I have to push myself to read the Psalms of lament. It makes me wonder what would happen if I lost everything I consider security in my life. What if Kitty had a terminal illness, or we lost our jobs, or one of our children was dealing with a significant disability? Then, I think, I would need to begin to depend more on faithfulness than on hope.”
Those are hugely trying, difficult, even tragic circumstances, but they are also typically human. They are Job like. I look around at our community. Some in this circle have lost spouses to terminal illness. Some in this circle have lost jobs. Some have dealt with loved ones with significant disabilities.
Jean Paul Sarte famously remarked, “Hell is other people.” I would content that hope is other people, other people who respond to desperation in others out of the deep wells of hopefulness that they find in the steadfast presence and promise of the God of Advent.
I know that in the most trying times of my own life – job loss, serious illness in my family, times when I have felt helpless and hopeless, times when I felt that Job might not have much on me – I have been upheld by the compassionate acts of other people to whom I have been bound in the fellowship of the communion of the church, and in their compassion I have found renewed hope.
Last spring I travelled down to Tennessee to help my parents, who are both facing serious constraints on their mobility. My mother loves to work in the garden. It is a place of soul restoration for her, a thus a place of hope. The house that we helped them move into a year ago has a lovely back yard but no easy way to get into it after the ramp we had built for access to the house blocked the steps into the yard.
I went down determined to build some steps, but not sure how I was going to accomplish the task by myself in the time I had. But when I got to Chattanooga, it turned out a retired gentleman from my mother’s church had heard about what I was up to and so he showed up with tools and a truck and we got the job done. Nothing miraculous, nothing like what Job faced, and not even among the most trying times of my life, but still a simple gift of hope embodied by a member of the community who didn’t know me from Adam, but who stepped into a small crisis and offered his own gifts.
Authentic hope – whether it is in the face of huge and systemic concerns or small and personal ones – authentic hope is only possible within communities grounded in the deeper hope of the God of the Exodus and the God of Advent.
May this be a season of authentic hope for each of us who share the bonds of this community. Amen.

Wake Up!

2010-12-02T06:25:00.001-08:00

Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44
November 28, 2010
Have you ever had the feeling that something was about to happen but you weren’t sure what it was? Weren’t even sure if it was going to be a good thing or a bad thing? Just the feeling that something was coming? Kind of like the feeling of electricity in the air when a summer storm is brewing, the air seems to come alive even as it falls strangely still. Something is in the air. Something is coming, but you don’t know what it is.
Paul’s entire correspondence – at least the letters that scholars agree Paul actually wrote – contain this feeling of anticipation, especially in passages like this one in the letter to the Romans. “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.”
Salvation is nearer to us now. Something is coming, but you don’t know what it is or where to look for it. Now is the time to wake up!
Having spent more than my fair share of time napping over the past week trying to beat back a cold, it’s particularly ironic to preach a sermon called, “Wake Up!”
Moreover, I’m better, I confess, at pointing out the places to avoid than the ones to seek out as you look for whatever this salvation is that is coming. You’re not going to find this salvation at the Best Buy. I promise you. It may be what you’re aiming for, but it’s not at the Target, even though you can get some bumper-sticker theology like this one I saw last week: lots of people who plan to turn to God at the 11th hour die at 10:30. That is a theology, though not one that offers much in the way of salvation – that is to say, much in the way of healing, wholeness, shalom right here, right now, near to us, where we desperately need it.
It’s not available on-line, either, not even at Christmas.com. There really is such a site. You can find everything there from pre-lit Christmas trees to Christmas traditions. I clicked on the latter and went to Christmas.shopzilla.com. True story. I searched for “Jesus” on the site and got “low prices on Jesus at Amazon.com.”
Somehow I just don’t think this is what Paul had in mind when he noted the closeness of salvation. I don’t think this is what Jesus meant when he said “the kingdom of God is near.” And if the author of Matthew could possibly have imagined our context I think he would have despaired over the possibility of anyone keeping awake through all of this.
And waking up is precisely what is so desperately needed at this historic moment. There’s a global economic crisis going on. We’re fighting two wars, and have been for the better part of a decade. We can argue about cause and effect till we’ve run out of breath for the argument, but the global climate is changing and our grandchildren, for better or for worse, will never see Disney World because it’s going to sink under the rising ocean water while we sleep. Meanwhile, we have allowed coal companies to rape mountains for a generation, scraping the tops off a thousand Appalachian peaks eons in the making. But it’s not in our backyard, so we can just roll over and go back to sleep.
Waking up is precisely what we so desperately need, but instead, we have political leaders, opinion shapers, talking heads, entertainers and all of the rest of us: sleepwalking through our own brief moment, our one small chance to make a difference – our time in history. So we get liberals triangulating themselves into thin air and blowing their chance to ban employment discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender workers because it might risk an election outcome that was inevitable anyway. We get conservatives so bent on denying the president any political victory that they’re willing to block arms control treaties begun by their sainted President Reagan. We get talking heads slamming an American-made car because it doesn’t fit their political narrative, even when it wins Motor Trend Magazine’s car of the year award. And we get the equal opportunity ignorance of on-line comments from what passes for an engaged citizenry: Pallin is an idiot; Obama is a socialist; and we’ll all get to Hitler within six comments or less no matter what the topic.
Meanwhile the Korean peninsula is on the verge of war, but all the TV news cares to show us is dressmaking for a royal wedding. Almost 15 percent of American households are “food insecure” – a wonderfully Orwellian phrase if ever there was one. It means this: 17.4 million American families face hunger as a regular part of life. And back on the news, everyone is all abuzz over Bristol Pallin dancing with the stars, at least, that is, until everyone gets all atwitter over the security theater of the TSA, happily ignoring the tens of millions of Americans who are out of work and can’t afford an airline ticket anway.
What passes for news is about the same as what passes for education, and most all of it is nothing more than infotainment designed to make good consumers of us all, and so it is no accident that every commercial is a 30-second salvation story. The closest we come to pondering infinity is in a car lot. Inspire is a perfume. Truth is a clothing line.
Meanwhile we’re all tinkering with our latest gadgets, and trying desperately to sleep through such things as reports that wi-fi signals are damaging trees; that talking on cell phones – with or without our hands – while we drive is as dangerous as driving while drunk; or that if we could put one year’s worth of thrown-away electronic gadgets into train cars the train would circle the globe. And still, I lust after the i-Phone and a new laptop.
When Karl Barth remarked that one should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other I don’t think he had the Black Friday ad pages in mind.
And don’t even get me started on what we do in the church, on how we domesticate Jesus and reduce his radical call to love to Hallmark card sentimentalism, how we decent-and-in-order ourselves right out of inspiration, and narrow our field of vision and of mission to avoid offence to others and inconvenience to ourselves. Meanwhile the rich get richer and the poor get “we’re praying for you,” and the gap between the two grows to a gapping scar on the commonweal.
Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ. Jesus, the Christ.
Oh, yeah. That guy.
The one whose coming threatened an empire. The one whose coming again – here and now – could turn upside down the empire of anesthesia in which we all doze, and, if we let it, the empire of real violence that props up all of the rest of this litany I’ve named this morning.
To be wide awake to the coming of Christ in the midst of the empire is the greatest act of resistance to the violence of empire.
When Jesus, at the far end of his life, stood before the Roman prelate, Pontius Pilate, he said to him, “Your Roman Empire, Pilate, is based on the injustice of violence, but my divine kingdom is based on the justice of non-violence.”
Jesus would say the same thing to us, today. The empire – our empire – is based on the injustice of violence, but the kingdom of God, the commonwealth of the beloved, is based on the justice of nonviolence. If you want to be there for the coming again of Christ in the world, then go to those places where the spirit of the living God is most palpably at work: the barrios, the soup lines, the Ninth Ward, the day laborer lines, hospitals and hospices, A-SPAN, AFAC, the places of creative nonviolence and resistance. Those are the places of Advent.
This is not some “God damn America” sermon, but it is also not some “God bless America” sermon either. It is an Advent sermon, and therefore it is a “God, wake up America” sermon. Wake us up. For to sleep at such a time as this is to bless the injustice of the status quo. Wake us up now, before the hour grows too late. Grant us the clear vision to discern the reality of the present moment, before it slips away. Grant us the strength to carry on in wakefulness though the culture would lull us to sleep. Grant us the courage to change the things that should be changed, now, before it grows too late.
Besides all this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for us to wake from sleep. The night is far gone, the day is near, and salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. Something is in the air, for Christ is coming close. Wake us up to your presence, O Lord of all. Amen.

Giving Thanks

2010-11-22T12:24:00.000-08:00

November 21, 2010
Thanks. How many things can I be thankful for in 10 minutes, while sitting at Busboys sipping mocha?
To begin with: coffee and toast and a friendly waiter in a warm, bright space on a cold, sunny morning. Then, of course, the sunshine, always, because I don’t like the gray.
Thanksgiving interrupted by sneezing brings me to give thanks for generally good health.
Fresh butter … and the cows and the farmers and the land. If thanks for the cows, then thanks, of course, for the rest of the creatures. Surely, then, for the way that creation sustains us with abundant food.
The cooing baby behind me. Thanks for her. And, first of all, of course, thanks for my babies now well on the way to grown up. Thanks so much for their mom, my love.
Ooops. A few crumbs fall. I’m thankful they do not fall in the keyboard of the laptop. So, almost at once, thanks for living in this time of incredible invention and innovation, and thanks for my parents who taught me the good manners – among so many other things – that ensure that I have a napkin in my lap so my jeans don’t get smeared with jelly. Thanks for blue jeans.
That leads down two threads:
Thanks for Levi Strauss, and for his cousin Claude Levi Strauss, the French structuralist philosopher and sociologist of the 20th century whose work was foundational for the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida whose work sparked my own philosophical imagination so many years ago and back in dissertation days.
But more than that, just thanks for blue jeans, and for the gift of a life that allows me to live, mostly, in jeans. Thanks so much for a congregation that allows me to be myself, in my blue jeans, and not to have to pretend that I am something other than what I am. That is to say, thanks for being a people who really get it, and understand that “reverend” is a noun that names a position in the church not an adjective describing the one who holds the position.
Thanks for each of you. Whether you are here for the first time this morning or if you’ve been part of this community for half century or more, thanks for you. Thanks for your faithfulness, your compassion, your kindness to each other and to all of my family, your love, your imagination, your joy, your intelligence, your passion, your generosity with time, talents and treasure, your creativity, your willingness to be honest and to hold me accountable to the best of what we are and who I am and what we can be together, your patience with my inattention to details, and your attention to them, your grace, your willingness to take risks and to bless me when I do so in the public square.
Thanks for that public square and the myriad opportunities it holds for us to serve our sisters and brothers, to witness to justice and peace, to speak truth to power.
Thanks for the gift of voices, and thanks for the courage to use them. Thanks for breath. For the laughter that causes us to lose our breath. Thanks for song, and music, and rhythm and dance.
Thanks for the Lord of the Dance, Christ the King, the one in whom we live and breathe and move and have our being, the one in whom all things come to be, the one to whom we offer this simple word: thanks. Amen.

Enough

2010-11-16T08:08:00.001-08:00

Exodus 16:6-12; Matthew 14:13-21
November 14, 2010
Talk about your whiny, ungrateful, obnoxious, insufferable, … did I mention whiny … unappreciative … and, well, at the end of the day, typical human beings. The children of Israel, wondering with little direction and no appreciation for their leaders, somewhere on what feels like the long decline from bad to worse, uncertain of the future and unhappy with the present. Does that sound familiar?
And yet, they have all that they really need, and it has come as a gift not of their own making at all. Freedom? It’s theirs more in spite of them than because of them. Food? It’s raining bread from heaven.
And yet. And yet they rise up to complain about their lot in life. Why?
Because they are human … and they are afraid.
They are afraid that they will not have enough because they do not have control.
If I had to sum up “the human condition” in a single sentence that might just be it: human beings live in fear of scarcity because we do not have control.
That’s what is happening to the Israelites in the wilderness, and then, as Walter Brueggemann puts it so aptly:
“In answer to the people's fears and complaints, something extraordinary happens. God's love comes trickling down in the form of bread. They say, "Manhue?" -- Hebrew for "What is it?" -- and the word "manna" is born. They had never before received bread as a free gift that they couldn't control, predict, plan for or own. The meaning of this strange narrative is that the gifts of life are indeed given by a generous God. It's a wonder, it's a miracle, it's an embarrassment, it's irrational, but God's abundance transcends the market economy.”
And yet, we continue to believe and embrace the story of the market economy. In that story, so familiar to us that we can literally sing its hymns, we are what we own, what we create by the work of our ruggedly independent individual sets of hands, what we achieve by the sweat of our brows. The hymn book or common prayer book for this liturgy? Well, surely it includes, “just do it,” and “things go better with …,” and “have it your way.” And if you close your eyes for a moment and think back I’m sure you’d even recognize some of its hymns – “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.”
Whatever its content, my copy of the hymnbook plays on my $200 i-pod nano, that I plug in after I put on my $120 New Balance shoes to head out on a run with the intention of pondering scarcity.
And wouldn’t you know it, no kidding, up pops this song:

Will you come and follow me,
If I but call your name?
Will you go where you don't know
And never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown,
will you let my name be known,
will you let my life be grown
in you and you in me?

Will you leave your self behind
if I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind
and never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare
should your life attract or scare,
will you let me answer prayer
in you and you in me?

Will you love the 'you' you hide
if I but call your name?
Will you quell the fear inside
and never be the same?
Will you use the faith you've found
to reshape the world around
through my sight and touch and sound
in you and you in me?

I reckon that’s what I get for putting John Bell on my i-Pod.
But John has put the question rather starkly. Will you come and follow me? It is the question raised by the stories from scripture we’ve read this morning, and it is the question raised, fundamentally, by the simple word, enough.
For, you see, at the end of the day, the question for us is do we trust in the one who provides? Bread for the journey? Bread in the wilderness? Bread for the multitudes, blessed, broken, given for all? Bread of heaven? Bread of life? Do we trust this One? Or would we rather put our trust in the various gods of the marketplace? Surely, as the holiday season approaches, and as we consider our community’s budget, these are the questions that press in on us.
Brueggemann, of course, complicates the question a bit, asking,
“Wouldn't it be wonderful if liberal and conservative church people, who love to quarrel with each other, came to a common realization that the real issue confronting us is whether the news of God's abundance can be trusted in the face of the story of scarcity? What we know in the secret recesses of our hearts is that the story of scarcity is a tale of death. And the people of God counter this tale by witnessing to the manna. There is a more excellent bread than crass materialism. It is the bread of life and you don't have to bake it. As we walk into the new millennium, we must decide where our trust is placed.”
When Jesus looked out across the hillside at the thousands who had come to hear his teaching, he saw hunger in their eyes. They were hungry from something that would sustain their souls as well as, at the late hour of the day, their bodies.
So he took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them.
That is the pattern, if we think of it, that all Christian life follows. Like bread, we are blessed, broken and given to and for the world, just as Jesus was.
That pattern is what it means to follow the way of Jesus, and it is what it means to care for what we have been given, that is to say, what it means to be stewards.
We tend to think of stewardship as what we do during November as we think about making pledges for the next year’s budget. We talk about “stewardship season,” as if this pattern of living with care and concern for what we have been given is a one-off consideration that ends – one might say – on Black Friday in an orgy of consumption. We talk, that is, as if stewardship is something other than the very heart of what it means to be Christian.
Stewards – that is what we are called to be as followers of Jesus, for the world belongs to God, the earth and all its people. Everything we have comes from God. Everything that we are belongs to God.
As followers of Jesus, we are called to care for what we have been given. Indeed, we are called to love it.
Douglas John Hall asks us to consider the possibilities implied in this identity, “what if,” he asks:
“What if this care became, not just a sentiment, an ethic, a duty but the very way of being? What if, in the midst of such a [consumerist, market-oriented] society, instead of showing up as a well-known religious element going about our well-known attempts at saving the world from its moral wickedness, or winning converts, or winning arguments, or influencing the powerful, or just trying to survive (!), the church began to be perceived as a community that cares for the world as such, for its welfare, its justice, its peace, its survival? […] It would not be enormously successful,” he concludes. “It would not conquer the world. It would not convert, baptize, confirm, marry, and bury everybody! But it would be … enough.”
To love the world, then. It is enough. It really does come back round to that John Bell song that popped up on the i-Pod, and the same question we asked last week: are we following Jesus? Because if we, we are loving the world, and it is enough. It is enough.

As We Gather

2010-11-09T12:17:00.000-08:00

Exodus 16:2-5; Ecclesiastes 3:1-15
November 7, 2010
As We Gather …
There is a time for every purpose under heaven, indeed, including a time to sing and shout for joy, and a time for lamentation; a time to speak, and a time to remain silent; a time for new things to be born and a time for things to die; a time to shed and a time to gather together. The truth is, most times are some strange, often compelling mix of all of that and more.
Such are the times of our lives, and the season we find ourselves in right now. We do live in times of great difficulty, but also times of miracle and wonder, times of great hope and promise.
I think the great mix of times that is our time compels us, in particular, to treat this time as a time to gather together. We’ll do that in a few moments here at the table of our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. Being together is a gift, and it beats the heck out of being torn asunder, being alone and apart.
Moreover, being together at table is a particular and powerful grace.
Why?
Because at this table we encounter an invitation and a promise – an invitation to new life and a promise that such renewal is not only possible, it is in the very order of things. I know that some of us are bearing the gloom of an election cycle that did not seem to be the harbinger of hope, but when we gather together – and the gathering, the being together, is essential – when we gather together here all things are possible.
The challenge that lies at the heart of the invitation is profoundly difficult though remarkably simple: follow Jesus. That’s it. That’s what our gathering here – at table, in this sanctuary, week after week after week, for all our yearning years – that’s what our gathering is all about. It’s not about the politics of the moment. It’s not about moving to the left or to the right. It’s certainly not about following Barack Obama or John Boehner. It’s about following Jesus.
And so the only question we need ever ponder is the simple one: are we following Jesus?
It’s not a creedal statement about virgin births or bodily resurrections or sitting at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. I don’t believe that any of that matters a whit, though if you choose to believe it all or none of it at all, your choice is fine by me.
Consider, for just a moment, the oldest classic creedal formulation: I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only son our Lord who was conceived by the Holy Ghost – comma – born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate … and so on.
The actual life of Jesus reduced to a comma between the birth story and the crucifixion.
Compare that as a summation of Christian belief to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew or the Sermon on the Plain in Luke: love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, give to those in need, be merciful, judge not, pick up your cross and follow me.
I simply don’t care about the creeds except as interesting historical markers.
What I really want to know – about you and about me and, especially, about us as a community, is quite simply this: are you, am I, are we following Jesus?
Because if the answer to that is no, then gathering here does not matter a single bit. It simply doesn’t.
We can recite creeds till we’re blue in the face, but if we’re not following Jesus, then we might as well stay home in bed on Sunday mornings; we should just chuck the whole enterprise.
But, if we are following Jesus, then God knows what is possible among us.
If we are following Jesus, then lives are going to be transformed in our midst.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for faith, hope and love to abound in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for life and new life in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for a season of spirit in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for doing justice in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for feeding the hungry in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for welcoming the outcast in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for caring for the least of these in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for making peace in our gathering.
If we are following Jesus, then it is a time for breaking bread in our gathering.
So: are you following Jesus?
If you want to be, then come to this table and be fed, for the way is long and we need bread for the journey. Let us gather together at the table of our Lord. Let us give thanks to the Lord. Let us pray.

Confessions and Commitments

2010-10-26T07:58:00.000-07:00

Joel 2: 17-29; Luke 4:16-20
October 24, 2010
At the Stony Point gathering I attended week before last we were talking about the challenge of change, and we noted that real change, in individuals, organizations, communities, cultures requires honest accounting and confession. We also noted that American culture really does not know anything about honest confession.
Think about the kinds of public apologies you hear these days. They mostly follow this pattern: person A does or says something patently offensive and gets called on it by person B. Person A then says, “I am sorry if you were offended.”
It was a songs conference, so I wrote a little ditty:

I'm sorry that you feel that way.
You clearly didn't get what I was trying to say.
It's not my fault that you've had a bad day.
I'm sorry that you feel that way.

It's not my fault if the words don't rhyme.
What you clearly didn't offer was abundance of time.
If I used that word that you're forbidden to say,
well I'm sorry that you feel that way.

Now I'm usually known as a sensitive guy.
Some folks say I wouldn't hurt a fly.
So if you're offended then you don't have to stay.
I'm sorry that you feel that way.

I don't care if you don't like my song.
I may not be right, but I'm so sure you're wrong.
If you cannot communicate with the words I say,
then I'm sorry that you feel that way.

We talk a lot here about “honesty of confession.” Well, as a confession, that falls a wee bit short of, well, honesty or confession.
So let’s be honest for a moment. First, let’s be honest about our own situation. Two years ago session adopted some goals. They included increasing attendance by 10 percent. It’s actually decreased by about 10 percent since then. We aimed to grow the pledge part of the budget by about 5 percent. It’s decreased by about that much. We wanted to increase participation in spiritual formation, worship leadership, and community outreach. At best we’ve flat-lined there.
You see the pattern.
So let me simply say, I have not done my job as leader of the community. I have not held myself accountable to those stated goals, and I have not held you accountable to them either. I have gotten distracted by things that are not of ultimate concern, to borrow Paul Tillich’s phrase that he coined to describe the central focus of faith.
The good news of the gospel is that I – and all of us – receive the grace of God’s mercy and the power of God’s love to recommit, to begin again, to experience resurrection and new life.
So my commitment is equally simple:
To be accountable to the clearly stated goals and intentions of the community, and, specifically, to spend the next six months encouraging and equipping the saints for ministry because I firmly believe that if we “do justice” well then growth will follow – and that six months is plenty of time, at this last stage, for us to discern clear signs of change.
If, six months from now, we are in the exact same place as we’ve been – small and shrinking, powerless to impact the community around us, failing to share light with a world that dwells in darkness – then it will be time for some serious reconsideration of my role, because friends, while I love to write songs, I do not want to spend my time composing funeral dirges for a dying church.
It is only intelligent to take stock of the broader context, and to acknowledge the profoundly difficult challenge we face. Just last week the sociologist Robert Putnam, who has studied church life for a generation, published an article in the Los Angeles Times naming the context:
“The most rapidly growing religious category today is composed of those Americans who say they have no religious affiliation. While middle-aged and older Americans continue to embrace organized religion, rapidly increasing numbers of young people are rejecting it.
“As recently as 1990, all but 7% of Americans claimed a religious affiliation, a figure that had held constant for decades. Today, 17% of Americans say they have no religion, and these new "nones" are very heavily concentrated among Americans who have come of age since 1990. Between 25% and 30% of twentysomethings today say they have no religious affiliation — roughly four times higher than in any previous generation.”
Who lives in all of the new housing all around us in the Metro corridor? The “nones,” as Putnam calls them. And who have we consistently named as the cohort we feel most strongly called to serve, to be in ministry for and with, to engage with the gospel? The “nones.”
Friends, if this stuff was easy we’d surely have figured it out.
But I firmly believe the simple good news that Joel proclaimed:
“I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.
Even on the male and female slaves,
in those days, I will pour out my spirit.”
Even in these days, the spirit of the living God is power in our midst.
So, while I may not be up to the challenge that lies ahead, God is up to it. The power of the divine, the holy spirit, is up to it.
Jesus understood, quoting Isaiah, the purpose of that power. What is the Spirit of the Lord poured out for? It’s clear and simple:
• To bring good news to the poor;
• To proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind;
• To let the oppressed go free;
• To proclaim the year of God’s jubilee.
This is the gospel of Jesus Christ in its most distilled form. The good news to the outcast is simply this: you, too, are beloved. The commitment of the followers of Jesus is equally simple: to live out that love day by day in the ways that we respond to every single person we encounter and in the ways we work to shape and reshape the society and institutions we live and work in.
Look around us these days.
• Consider the bullied gay adolescents who’ve been in the news of late. What could be more important than sharing the good news with them, showing them that they are beloved?
• We’re living in the midst of the worst economic crisis of our lives. What could be more important than sharing good news with the poor, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless?
• We’re still mired in endless war, while Jesus calls us to love those we would call enemies.
Share the good news. Feed the hungry. Make peace. These are core gospel demands upon each of us.
We are not called to feed the hungry if we have time. We are called to feed the hungry. We are not called to do justice if we can fit it in the budget. We are called to do justice. We are not called to be peacemakers if it is convenient and comfortable. We are called to be peacemakers. And we are called to risk all – even the church – for the sake of the gospel of love and justice.
So here’s what I propose to do about this, and what I invite you to prayerfully consider:
To spend the next six months – from November through Easter, an almost neat liturgical season – in prayer, study and action on a daily and weekly basis – a liturgy, if you will, that moves like this.
• A practice of daily prayer with a common content.
• A practice of daily study.
• A practice of weekly common worship.
• A practice of doing justice.
• A practice of invitation.
I think it was Woody Allen who observed that 90 percent of life is just showing up. The question is, what do you show up to, and how much of you shows up? Let’s be honest, it’s easy to give part of yourself to something. How many of you have ever, for example, sat in on a conference call and been checking your e-mail or the book of faces? Or sat in a classroom reading something not on the teacher’s agenda? Or sat in worship thinking about brunch?
I’ll readily confess to all three of those.
Showing up means bringing all of ourselves, the best of ourselves to this very moment, to the moment of prayer, the moment of study, the moment of worship, the moments of doing justice, the moment of inviting others to share in all of this.
This is not something to step lightly into, and I’m not even going to ask you to today. In fact, all I’m asking you to do this morning is to go home, think about it, talk about it, and pray about it. Next week, the day of our fall congregational meeting, the day when we elect leaders and preview the budget that puts money where our mouths are, next week I plan to bring a six-month calendar of prayers and readings. That’s when I will ask you to join me in this commitment.
For now, I’ll simply invite you to join me in prayer.

What We Are Given

2010-10-21T09:13:00.000-07:00

October 10, 2010
Galatians 5:22-23; Isaiah 11:2-3
I saw Sam Harris interviewed last week by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Harris, one of the leading lights of the so-called “new atheists,” has just published a new book called The Moral Landscape. I’ll confess that I don’t pay much attention to the “new” atheists because, frankly, they bore me. There is really nothing new about them, and the god they so strongly disbelieve in is not a god that much interests me either.
But several of you have asked me several times to speak to the issues raised by Harris and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and others like them, so I paid particular attention to the Harris interview. What struck me this time in listening to Harris, who is a perfectly reasonable, albeit somewhat humorless man except when he is making fun of Christians, is his abiding faith in reasonableness. And, yes, I choose the word “faith” with care and intention here, for while Harris would no doubt dismiss the word it sure seems to me that he trusts the story of science in the same way that I trust the story of Jesus. On the other hand, while I welcome the expanding knowledge of science, Mr. Harris has nothing but contempt for the wisdom of faith and for those of us who find wisdom there.
That, after all, is what faith means: having faith is having trust, and religion, properly understood, is binding one’s self in trust to a story about that which is worthy of trust. That is to say, the God revealed in the story of the life, death and living again of Jesus the Christ, is worthy of my trust.
Harris, and others like him, completely lose me when they insist that faith is about belief in a set of improvable assertions, and that religion consists in giving one’s intellectual assent to those assertions in a systemic fashion. In other words, they insist that Christianity is reducible to accepting as facts the virgin birth, the literal bodily resurrection of the man Jesus, the literal story of the flood, and the notion that a guy named Jonah spent three days in the belly of a big fish and lived to tell one of the great fish tales of all time. Frankly, if that is what I believed we were about in this place I’d be out of here, too.
Oh, to be sure, the church, broadly speaking, has often and regularly fallen into that trap, and Harris rightly excoriates the church, mosque, and synagogue for the violence each has perpetrated in propping up systems to propagate such assertions. One imagines him regaling children with bedtime stories about the crusades and the burning of heretics or the stoning of women.
On the other hand, he remains strangely silent on science’s own history. I can’t quite imagine him telling bedtime stories about the great scientific discoveries deployed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the recently reported medical experiments on unknowing Guatemalans, to choose just two stories from a long catalog of science nonfiction that ought at the very least to give us pause.
I am reasonably sure that Harris would condemn them all, but I’m not sure on what basis he would make the moral judgment. Harris argues that science – and science alone – can discover the facts upon which to base the values that lead to the well being of conscious beings. That seems to be the ethical or moral bottom line for him, but, as a bottom line, it raises almost as many questions as it answers and, on its own, it really doesn’t answer the questions raised by, for example, nuclear weapons or even medical testing on unknowing subjects.
After all, plenty of Americans still argue that using weapons of mass destruction to kill a few hundred thousand Japanese men, women and children hastened the end of a war. And, if scientific tests lead to great scientific advancements that lead to the well being of millions or even billions of conscious beings what’s the harm if a few hundred Guatemalans get sick? You can base just such moral arguments on sound, and even scientific reasoning. But I don’t think Jesus would drop the bomb or infect the unsuspecting.
Don’t get me wrong here. I am far from dismissing the gifts of scientific discovery for all of us – for the well being of conscious beings, as it were. Our medicines and machines make our lives longer and richer, to be sure. Our understanding of the unfolding story of biology and the origins of species certainly deepens our understanding of our own place in creation. I’m simply suggesting that there are gifts, important gifts, for the well being of conscious beings that science at its very best simply does not offer or adequately explain. As Einstein put it, not everything that counts can be counted.
That’s why we began this morning with gifts, and why I chose the scripture passages that we read. We shared these gifts: Wisdom, understanding, right judgment, courage, knowledge, reverence, awe and wonder, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Scripture calls these, variously, gifts of the spirit or fruits of the spirit, and while some of them are also, surely, gifts that the best of scientific exploration and discovery offer – knowledge, to be sure – most of them fall into that category of “hard to count” or “hard to account for.”
Yet most of us would agree that a life absent these gifts, fruits, characteristics, or whatever you want to call them would not be one worth living.
This is a sermon – a brief one at that – not a book or even an essay. I don’t want to chase down every rabbit trail or debating point with Mr. Harris or his friends. Frankly, at the end of the day, my faith, my trust in the God whose story is told for me best in the stories of Jesus, rests mostly in reverence, in awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of creation.
Science has revealed and will continue to reveal ever more layers of that creation whether in the details of the brain or the vastness of the universe. But the reverence I feel in the face of it comes in a relationship that science can observe but can only explain away by reducing it to firing neurons. Rather than reduce it to firing neurons, I prefer to expand it to the fire of the Holy Spirit. I freely acknowledge that it is my preference, at the end of the day, merely a choice and one among many. Nevertheless, I prefer to ground my experience of awe and wonder in an expansive spirit.
For it is that spirit which gives us the gifts that we share in this community. As you have reflected on the gift you received this morning, what comes to mind in terms of the ways that this gift has been important in your own life?

Mustard Seeds

2010-10-05T07:42:00.000-07:00

Luke 17:5-10
October 3, 2010
What does it mean to have the faith of a mustard seed?
This story appeared in Sojourners more than 20 years ago. I’ve been thinking about it lately as I consider our own calling and opportunity to engage in ministries of hospitality and justice, of feeding and making peace right here in Clarendon.
A small group of peasants in Brazil lived on a piece of land that public and private interests wanted to develop. Laws were changed. Land was seized. Houses and crops were destroyed, and peasants removed to other lands.
Then someone wanted to develop those lands, so a few more laws were changed. And, all legally, more land was seized, houses and crops destroyed, and peasants moved on. Whenever the peasants tried to resist, the police came in. Poor people were arrested or shot.
So when the process seemed set to repeat itself again, the people despaired. One person asked, "Why should we resist? It will just mean that more of us will lose our lives." Another pointed out that even if they were not killed, they would die slowly of starvation. Without land, they had no way to live, no way to plant or grow food. Hopelessness was the prevailing mood. Then some of the women got an idea.
With a little research, they found out where the members of the Congress lived. While the government officials were at work in their offices, the poor women went with their children -- each to a different house -- and sat on the front lawns of the luxurious homes.
These were some of Brazil's most prestigious neighborhoods, and the sight of ragged women and their children on the lawns was an extraordinary and curious vision. After a while some of the wives of the Congress members went out with bread. The mothers told them, "We want no bread from you."
Others of the wealthy women came out with money. "We have not come here for money," said the mothers.
Eventually the wealthy women asked, "What do you want?"
The peasant women answered, "We are going to die. And since this is a nice place, we thought we would like to die here."
Then the wealthy women asked, "Why are you going to die?"
And the mothers told of how their land was about to be stolen again, how their children were going to starve, and how the Congress was voting to make their doom legal.
The phones at the Congress began buzzing. Every wife called her husband to plead with him not to vote for the bill in Congress. And in the end, the people kept their land and their future.
Maybe that’s what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed.
Do you know a story like that? Of course, you do. The entirety of the Jesus story is like that. Overwhelming odds. Creative, nonviolent, strategic response by powerless people.
And yet, we despair of ever making a difference, of ever seeing anything change. War seems endless. The gap between the wealthy and poor just keeps getting bigger. Simple changes supported by the majority of the people – ending don’t ask, don’t tell, for example – get lost in political maneuvering and just plain cowardice.
And we, who have been given so much, despair, of ever making a difference, of ever witnessing change much less of participating in it.
When I was a kid, in high school, my best friend and I got an issue placed on the ballot in our hometown of Chattanooga to change the way the city’s school board was chosen – no mean feat, that, requiring gathering thousands of signatures, presenting them to a skeptical city council, and then organizing a campaign to win the election in a city of about 170,000 people. We were 18 at the time, with no money, and mostly, I think, just too young and naïve to realize that what we were doing was impossible.
Maybe that’s what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed.
Almost a generation ago, now, right here in this room, a young gay couple walked into worship. I don’t know if Ron and James thought they were doing something impossible, and I don’t know if the members of the congregation at that time thought that, by extending hospitality, they were doing something impossible, either. But if you look back at what most churches looked like in the early 1990s, you realize that they were doing the impossible.
Maybe that’s what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed.
Ten years ago come January, I preached a sermon in another Presbyterian church calling the rights of same-gender couples a civil rights issue of great concern to the church and culture. I was no longer 18, and though I joke about having no money, the truth is, of course, that I was the married father of three kids, with a mortgage and a minivan, but still with enough naivety to “misunderestimate” the response, and, so, 10 years ago next February, I was on my way out of a job.
And maybe that’s what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed.
Almost 50 years ago, Peg True’s father and certain other men of this church decided that they would buy up all of the property on this block to build affordable housing for the elderly. They managed to get much of it, though never the whole thing, so the housing dream was never realized. However, we have the most creative playground in the neighborhood, an endowment, and an income stream to keep us going, and an array of possibilities for ministry as a result of those men’s dreams and visions.
Maybe that’s what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed.
We’ve got some hungry people in Arlington County these days, and, as Chuck reminded us, countless more at a further remove. We also have thousands of spiritually hungry people right out there in the Metro Corridor.
We have a story to share here: a story of hope that conquers despair; a story of light that outshines darkness; a story of love that drives out all fear.
We don’t have any guarantees. Maybe our dreams and visions will not be fully realized any more than were Peg’s dad’s. Maybe jobs will be lost – been there, done that, and lived to tell the tale. But maybe, just maybe, remarkable things will happen.
We have food to share with a hungry world.
To share it – that is what it means to have the faith of a mustard seed. Amen.

Names Matters

2010-09-28T07:54:00.001-07:00

1 Timothy 2:8-15
September 26, 2010
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me.”
What a crock that is.
Jap. Raghead. Kyke. Nigger. Bitch. Dyke. Faggot. Chink.
Tell me again that names can never hurt. Tell me again that names don’t matter.
These slurs and derogatory names slip into our common language and eventually we don’t even realize it.
“Paddy wagon.” It’s the name of the police van that picks up the drunk Irishmen. I’m Scotch-Irish to the core, and I did not know my heritage was being slurred until I found myself in the back of a police wagon a couple of years ago.
We really do violate the image of God in others and in ourselves and sometimes we do it so casually that we are not even aware that we are doing it.
But names matter, and the matter of names and naming is profoundly important for an authentically progressive Christian faith. It is not a matter of political correctness; it is a matter of hospitality and it is a matter of justice.
We talk a whole lot here about hospitality, about the welcome of strangers, about honoring the outcast and the marginalized. Hospitality is one of our core values, and it is one of our central practices of Christian spirituality, and it is foundational for justice. Hospitality is less Martha Stewart and more Margaret Sanger; hospitality is first about making the table open to all and then about making it beautiful. Hospitality is about justice.
So how do we square that with the passage I just read? How can we be a place of authentic welcome when we are gathered around a text that commends such practiced and systemic exclusion?
Before I jump into the swamp of exegesis, I want to open it up for just a minute or two with this question: what do you recall about the very first time you saw or heard a woman leading worship?

So, again, how do we square these experiences with the passage I just read?
Well, we could just stick with the lectionary cycle of readings that conveniently skips over these words from 1 Timothy and the parallel passages elsewhere in the letters of Paul. That would be easy and certainly more comfortable.
But if we pick and choose what we like and don’t like about scripture then we really are no different from those who proof-text to support exclusions of gays and lesbians and, still in some churches, women from positions of leadership and authority. If we do that, we really are no different from those who proof-texted support for segregation and slavery before that. If we do that, we really are just another voluntary association of like-minded individuals, and that is not the church of Jesus Christ.
So we have to take the time and the care and the study to wrestle with these texts, and, through them, to wrestle with our own limited vision, our own conflicted and contested histories, our own idols, our own prejudices. In other words, when we wrestle honestly with these difficult texts, we wrestle also with ourselves.
That is why names matter. That is why, moreover, our names and images for God matter so much, and that is why such names and images remain such hotly contested terrain.
You think this stuff is settled just because Clarendon has a long history of women leaders? You think this stuff is settled just because Clarendon has been ordaining gay and lesbian leaders for 15 years? Our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers are even today holding a conference on ordaining women.
About the time Clarendon was ordaining the first out partnered gay elder in the Commonwealth of Virginia – take another bow Ron Bookbinder! – about that time, Cheryl and I were sitting in a worship service at our church in Lexington, Ky. It was the first Sunday of the new interim senior pastor, who was following a pastor whose voice was prophetic enough to drag me back to seminary. The interim began preaching, and before three minutes had passed Cheryl was poking me every time the man used a masculine pronoun in reference to God. You know how at baseball games fans will post banners with a “K” every time their team’s pitcher strikes out a batter? It was like that, minus the banners. Every image of God as male and people in the congregation were mentally posting banners.
Theological convictions aside, it was a profoundly inhospitable act and one that is so easy to avoid as to be laughable. I dare say that you rarely notice the way the Rev. Peg True or the Rev. John Green or I refer to God in worship here. I’ve been preaching here most every Sunday for more than seven years. I have never referred to God with masculine pronouns, and only use the “father God” image in the Lord’s prayer and when we occasionally sing, “This Is My Father’s World,” which, I confess, I put in worship about once a year because it reminds me of standing next to my dad in church when I was a little boy. He loved that song.
Obviously, there is nothing wrong with imagining God as the loving father running to welcome the prodigal home, but that is far from the only experience of the divine that human beings have, even human beings who understand the fullness of God through the story of the human man, Jesus of Nazareth.
The gospel story we heard a few minutes ago, Luke’s account of Easter, tells us that the first to proclaim the gospel, the good news, were the women who went to the tomb. If they had not testified to their own experience of Christ as risen maybe the entire enterprise would have died on the vine … or, better, on the cross.
Indeed, the gospels include numerous stories of Jesus in the company of women who are clearly practicing ministry, and Paul names at least two women, Prisca and Aquila, as coworkers in the mission field. If they’d kept their mouths shut some early churches would never have gotten off the ground, and who knows if we’d be gathered here this morning.
So why the admonishment to women to keep silent that become so strident by the time of the Timothy correspondence, which comes decades after Paul though it is, in accordance with customs of the time, attributed to him?
In a word – and a decisive word – patriarchy.
The dominance of male power that held almost unquestioned sway in Western civilization well into the 20th century was the air that men and women in first century Palestine breathed. There was no other air. As the early church began to transition from a movement anticipating the imminent return of Jesus into an institution that would carry forth a tradition of worship and sacrament the church recapitulated institutional models of its culture. We must remember this as we read and interpret, not only because it helps us understand the context of scripture, but it helps us understand our own context in which we, too, recapitulate inherited institutional models.
“How,” you may ask, “have we, a progressive community certainly not bound by such sexist things, recapitulated institutional models of our culture?”
Look around this very room. You think the first church, the church of Prisca and Aquila, sat in rows of pews facing a preacher at a lectern? That is, in fact, pretty much a mid 20th century institutional frame – and one that clearly valued the central importance of a singular, male, voice, who stood on high to pronounce an authoritative word.
Even though we still gather like that mid 20th century church, we are not it. Thanks be to God, the father and mother of us all, the divine breath, the Creator in whose images we are created male and female, filled with that breath of God.
Why bother with this in 2010 – more than 50 years since the Presbyterian church first ordained women as ministers of the word?
In part to remember and honor the stories of those first women ministers, women like Peggy Howland who was one of the first and who still faithfully agitates the church through the Presbyterian Peacemaking Fellowship, on whose board she still serves; and women like Jeanne McKenzie, who was the first woman pastor in National Capital Presbytery and who still faithfully agitates the church through the board of More Light Presbyterians – which she helped found years ago; and women like Madeline Jervis and Peg True, who stood tall on the shoulders of their sisters.
This is living history, and it is not yet history secured because the same patriarchal power structure that scripture simply assumed – but did not bless – remains in place in far too much of the church and broader culture today.
Backsliding is not just a Baptist word, although the Southern Baptist Convention, with its contemporary advice that women be “gracefully submissive” to their husbands coming years after some of the same Baptists had ordained women pastors, has certainly raised backsliding to an art. It is, in fact, possible to go backwards. Hard-won gains can be lost in forgetting.
That’s why names, especially names for God, matter so much.
If the ultimate figure of authority is always and only imagined as male, then male authority is understood as normative. I don’t want to live in such a world, and I surely don’t want my sons and daughter to.
Almost 30 years ago, theologian Sallie McFague wrote:
The power of the patriarchal model is both its inclusiveness and its exclusiveness. It expands to include all of heaven and earth, and in so doing orders all of reality in a hierarchy in which women are always subordinate and invariably identified with the inferior or bodily dimensions of life. … But the model excludes women as well by not naming them, by refusing to include their functions and occupations as metaphors for God that will return to them as models for their own self-identity.
More succinctly, and a few years earlier, Mary Daly simply said, “If God is male then male is God.”
And then there is no place in the world for women doctors, lawyers, scientists, mathematicians, pastors, or, to follow the logic to its natural conclusion, no place for women beyond the carefully circumscribed roles of wife and mother.
That is the logical of patriarchy. It does not take much imagination to recognize the implications for every other marginalized population. If male is God then what names remain to be assigned to all those others?
Which brings us back to where we began with a list of names used to exclude and oppress.
But, if God birthed creation and nurtured it, if God includes the feminine divine, if God is the breath of Spirit, if God is wisdom incarnate, if that which is of God is reflected in human beings of every race and nation and gender and sexuality and age and ability, if all of that, then we need so many new names to use for God and we need to bury forever so many of the names we have used for each other.
Most all of this I learned from my mother, an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Amen.

Questions All Around

2010-09-21T06:46:00.001-07:00

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13
September 19, 2010
Let’s begin this morning with questions that we bring to these texts; we’ll end with the questions the texts press upon us. So, let’s open it up: what questions do we have? What questions do you have concerning these readings? Let’s see what these ancient words stir up for us this morning.

Here are a couple of my own questions: do I have to pray for all who are in high positions? Does that include the likes of Kim Jung Il, President Ahmadinejad, Ken Cucinelli? And, if so, how should I pray for them? Dear Lord, “please let these men enjoy a return to private life?”
Or how about this question: what is up with the dishonest manager in Jesus’ parable? “Step right up and I’ll cut your debts in half!” And why can’t I find such a manager to be in charge of, say, my mortgage or my Visa bill? Clearly, this guy does not work on Wall Street.
Lacking the good fortune to find such a manager of my debt, I do want to ask of Jeremiah, “is there, in fact, a balm in Gilead, or is it really just a bunch of tree sap?”
These are, indeed, three strange texts, and our questions have only skimmed the surface of their strangeness.
Take the Luke passage: commentators have spilled barrels of ink over the years puzzling out the story of the dishonest manager and Jesus’ praise for his scheming. For good middle class Protestant Americans who bring their children to church to be steeped in the old-fashioned verities and values of honest business dealings this parable is a serious dash of cold water. Jesus just doesn’t care about that.
Or take the section from First Timothy: almost as much wrestling has taken place over, especially, the call to pray for those in power. Does it mean that we must support whoever is in power? Must we pray for the success of their program even if we think it’s nuts? Not only that, but the strain of universalism hinted at in the text has caused a lot of theological tempests as well. So, does God desire the salvation of all of human kind? If so, does God get what God wants over the long arc of history, or not? That question may not trouble nice middle class generally liberal-minded folks, but it sure does cause a stew among serious Reformed theologians who err always on the side of the sovereignty of God. Indeed, it makes one want to ask, along with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “who is this God fellow anyway?”
Clearly, from our own questions and all of the voluminous commentary on these brief passages, the only thing that is clear is that, in fact, not much is clear at all in these texts. Nevertheless, as I wrestled with them last week it seemed to me that the word of the Lord for us this week was not a declarative word but rather an interrogative one. In other words, just as we, and thousands of others, have asked countless questions of these texts, the texts themselves ask us more questions than we ask them.
For example, if God, in Jeremiah, is weeping over injustice in the land how can we not also weep? When in the richest land in the history of the world more people are living in poverty than at any time in more than 50 years, why do we not weep? When one in five children in the country lives in poverty, how can we keep from weeping?
I don’t mean to be a downer this morning, and I promise it was not my idea to create these conditions or announce them, but, really, which one in five of the kids of this congregation would we choose?
The text itself demands our response, if for no other reason than Jesus’ stark clarity that, when it comes to matters of money, we can, we must, in fact we do choose this and every day whom we will serve: God or money. So which one shall it be? The text itself asks this question. This question is, indeed, the word of the Lord.
The strange parable of the dishonest manager does not offer an easy way out of this demand, but it does point toward a horizon of hope. It seems clear to me that Jesus really does not care about the bottom line in any traditional sense, but he does care about justice. And in this story – as throughout scripture – the Biblical meaning of justice amounts to this: sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it.
By any conventional measure, the middle management guy in this story is not giving what he owes to his boss – that is, honest business dealings. Instead, he practices what can best be described here as jubilee debt relief, because economic Sabbath, liberation from crushing debt is what belongs to human beings.
The specific debts named in this story are all overwhelming. These folks found themselves in mortgages that were upside down and way under water. Indeed, for the poor people who were Jesus’ first audience, the crushing system of debt that kept them virtually enslaved to the powers that be was the most soul-killing aspect of life.
“Forgive us our debts,” was not an accidental line in the prayer Jesus taught.
The hope here, the good news in this story, lies in what happens next, the untold part of the story. Forgiveness of debt evened the playing field so that balanced relationships could be restored or reconstructed. In other words, establishing economic justice created space for establishing authentic community.
So the inquiry of the text to us – whom do you serve, God or money – is, in fact, an invitation to live lives of joyous and generous service to God such that we, too, might create and construct bonds of authentic community right here and right now.
The invitation to live such lives could not come on a more appropriate Sunday than the one before the International Day of Prayers for Peace. For authentic community is the only foundation upon which to build just and lasting peace.
May this good news find life in our midst. Amen.

The Table of Grace

2010-09-14T07:45:00.001-07:00

The Table of Grace
1 Timothy 1:12-16; Luke 15:1-10
Sept. 12, 2010
There is a fire burning in the center of the table of grace.
Whether it is a candle lighting up the darkness or a bonfire threatening a consuming conflagration is entirely up to those of us who gather at the table.
It is easy, too easy, in fact, to point here toward the September 11 anniversary-marking book burning threatened by certain Christians in Florida, but they are not the only ones playing with fire these days.
Indeed, as the ancient Hebrew word, ruah, that we receive as “spirit,” reminds us, spirit is flame, spirit enflames, and spiritual matters can quickly become too hot to handle. The Pentecost story of the disciples receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit as tongues of flame underscores the connection. Spiritual matters can be dangerous. The fire that lights and warms can quickly become the fire that burns and destroys.
We Christians are certainly not the only ones who have spiritual lives, and thus we are not the only ones who dance delicately with this fire, but we American Christians do have a particular responsibility as those who are culturally dominate in the most powerful nation on earth.
We feel the weight of this responsibility all the more so when others, acting in the name of spirit, engulf a building in our own city in flames, as religiously motivated fanatics did nine years ago yesterday. In the face of such horror the temptation to fight fire with fire was more than we could, collectively, overcome, and the last long years of war and death and destruction stand as still flaming reminders of that fact.
Continued sporadic threats and deadly actions by extremists who claim some affinity for Mohamed cloud our horizons like the smoke from the forest fires in Colorado last week.
Do we react to this, as the infamous General William Boykin did a few years back, and declare that our God is bigger than their God, and thus draw our sacred texts out as religious flamethrowers? Do we get crazy like “Pastor” Jones in Florida and use fire more literally? Do we fight fire with fire?
We could easily respond like Saul of Tarsus and persecute those who approach the Sacred differently than we do. After all, the apostle whose writings gave voice to the first theological understanding of Jesus started his career persecuting Jesus’ first followers all because they felt the fire of the spirit in Jesus’ life and not even his death on a cross could extinguish the flame.
In his first letter to the young church at Corinth, the once proud persecutor Paul says that we followers of Jesus are “stewards of the mysteries of God.” Perhaps he might have called us “keepers of the flame.”
Unfortunately, the 2,000 year old story of we Christian flame keepers is loaded with instances of flame throwing and burnings at stakes, and the anti-Moslem rhetoric flowing from so many so-called Christians these days is but the latest flashfire.
So, what should we do? What can we do to use the fire of the holy for purposes that are holy?
The story of Paul is instructive here, and the words from First Timothy in particular: “I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly ... a persecutor, and a man of violence. … But … I received mercy.”
“I received mercy,” Paul says, and that is what made him an example. In other words, mercy made him worth looking at and a blinding flash of grace allowed him to see himself. Grace also allowed others to see God at work in him. Grace lit the darkness for him and for others.
The great turning of Paul’s life is the great turning of the world writ small, and it does not come as a result of Paul’s burning passion but simply as a gift of forgiveness and an invitation to sit at the table of grace and be warmed by the fire that burns there for all who gather in its light.
It is, however, all too easy to imagine that once we have experienced the light of mercy, grace and forgiveness that we possess the light and control it. Once we have experienced our own liberation, it is easy to imagine that we hold the keys for everyone else. Altogether too often, though, we forget the keys and, instead, use the red-hot flame of the spirit to forge chains for all those who do not see things the same way we do.
September 11 marks the anniversary of what happens when that logic extends to its own violent conclusion – a world chained to spiritual violence becomes a world engulfed in flame.
Such spiritual violence – using of sacred texts as weapons, taking their words and twisting them into instruments of death and destruction – was precisely what Jesus was warning against with the scribes and Pharisees who did not like the company he kept. So he told them a story:
“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’”
The crazy thing about this story lies in its extravagance. Do the math. Would you risk losing 99 percent of your business to rescue one failed percent, or would you just write off the loss? And, really, would you throw a party to celebrate the one percent if it succeeded? Probably not, but in the great economy, the economy of the kingdom of God, the one counts just as much as the many, because it is never a zero sum game.
So, for example, the one Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, is worth God’s time, God’s grace, God’s mercy, God’s forgiveness, and God’s love, even though he was surely lost, burning with the flames of his own spiritual violence.
I say, “if it’s good enough for Paul, it’s good enough for us! If Paul – who persecuted the disciples to death, literally – if Paul is worth God’s time and attention and love, then so are you. So am I. So is that annoying coworker and that whiny child. So is the irritating neighbor and the guy who’s been running that jackhammer all week. So is the aged and increasingly clueless grandpa, and so is the newborn baby girl. So is the homeless guy who stands at the intersection over in Balston. So is the drag queen getting her drag on. So is the substitute teacher, the math geek, the guidance counselor, the potheads, the poets and the freaks. So is the baseball player making millions and so is the peanut guy making peanuts. So is the Catholic and so is the Hindu, so is the atheist and so is the Jew. So is the imam building the community center in New York, and so is Glen Beck who demonizes him. So is Jon Stewart who makes me laugh at the pitiable Pastor Jones, and so is Pastor Jones. So is Nancy Pelosi and so is Sarah Pallin. So is the self-righteous, theologically challenged General Boykin, and so is the Somali warlord with whom he squared off. So are the families of all those who died on September 11, and so are the families of those who did the killing on that day. So is President Obama and President Bush before him and, yes, so is Osama bin Laden whom they both want to kill.
Saying God loves us all does not mean that everything that each one does is OK; it does not mean that we suspend judgment. It does not mean that there is not darkness in the world. It does not mean that God was just fine with Saul persecuting the early church. That God loves Pastor Jones does not make Pastor Jones right; it doesn’t even mean that the man is not, well, at least a little bit nuts. It does, however, mean that we are called to love him, too, and to pray for him, and it means to avoid inflammatory name-calling even as we condemn his actions – otherwise we are playing loose with the same fire that he’s threatening to unleash. If we fall into the same darkness then we are all stumbling blind.
That God loves all of us, even the worst of us, also means that we who know that we are beloved are called to show forth that love – and that baseline theological conviction that we share here that God is love. It means that we are called to show forth that love in specific, practical, hands-on and public ways, so that others will see the light of God’s love shining forth through us and, in that light, know that they, too, are loved.
This is why we bag groceries at AFAC. This is why we feed the hungry with A-SPAN. This is why we rebuild houses together. This is why we work together to end wars. This is why we witness in the public square for marriage equality. This is why we are who we are.
A friend and colleague posted this comment on Facebook last week inviting the media to stop paying attention to people such as Pastor Jones. She wrote,
Your attention implies to the rest of the world that he represents a larger group. Instead, find the pastors who are busy every day feeding the poor, caring for the community, participating in interfaith dialogue, working for peace and nurturing a gospel of love
I would add only this: check out their congregations as well – millions of people in thousands of communities who are putting their time and their talents and treasures to work to feed the hungry, to do justice, to make peace. Millions of people gathering at the table of grace, trying only to reflect to the world a bit of the light that they find there.
It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, and we who know the love of God, are called to share the light of that love, the fire of the spirit, with the world in love. May we do so this year at Clarendon. Amen.

The Potter’s House

2010-09-08T09:50:00.000-07:00

Jeremiah 18:1-11
Sept. 5, 2010
It’s tempting, and maybe even appropriate, to read this passage from Jeremiah and note the obvious metaphor of God as potter, of humankind as clay in the potter’s hands, and then to point out the cry against injustice and oppression that is at the heart of Jeremiah’s prophetic vision.
It is tempting, and not inappropriate, to seek some contemporary meaning in the words here attributed to the Creator – “At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it.”
It is tempting, and certainly within our understanding of the preacher’s job, to point out the ways our nation might be implicated in Jeremiah’s jeremiad.
And it is tempting, and well within the bounds of a Reformed theological understanding of the theological task of preaching, to speculate on what God is here saying about God’s own nature, what with the evident delight in God’s freedom to change God’s own mind on full display here.
Any one of those approaches to this text would be appropriate, perhaps enlightening, and surely worthy of a Sunday sermon, and thus each is tempting. But while I pondered each perspective while wrestling with this text, one image kept coming back to me and leading me in an entirely other direction. So, I’m first acknowledging in passing the many possible readings of this text that I’m setting aside in favor of one image: the actual potter, the artisan who lives and works at the potter’s house.
Have you ever been in a potter’s workshop? What words come to mind as descriptions of such a place?
I thought of dusty and musty, in a rich kind of way.
All of these possible descriptions – a place with jars of clay, a potter’s wheel, an oven for firing pots, tools for shaping and so forth – have in common the clear understanding that we are talking about a place of work.
When you consider your own place of work what words come to mind as descriptors?
I could reduce the description of my work place to Karl Barth’s famous dictum that one should preach with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Barth overlooked one thing: good coffee!
Seriously, any place with books and tools for research, reflection and writing is a good beginning for me and if there’s a pot of good coffee, well all the better. But that is only a beginning, because my workplace must also be filled, some of the time, with each of you else none of it is worth doing.
We all have places of work, and, ultimately, that work touches the lives of other people or it’s not worth our time.
What strikes me about the potter’s house, however, is the apparent ready ease with which Jeremiah is able to sense the presence of God. God is in the potter’s house. The potter’s work lends itself readily to Jeremiah’s understanding of God, and that understanding also shapes the way the potter’s work is understood. God is in the potter’s house, and in the potter’s work.
On this Sunday of the Labor Day weekend, a weekend when we celebrate work by taking a day off from it, it’s good and right and appropriate to ask ourselves where we see God in our own work. Do we feel called by God into the particular work we do? Do we sense God’s presence in the work itself? Does our work further God’s purposes in the world?
The singer Charlie King has a wonderful line in one of his old songs: our life is more than our work and our work is more than our jobs.
How would you answer these questions with respect to your job? With respect to your work? With respect to your life?

Called to What?

2010-08-24T12:16:00.002-07:00

August 22, 2010
Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 13:10-17
So God says to the young man, Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations."
The story of the calling of a prophet. Scripture relates many such tales, but what have they to do with us? Are you called to be a prophet to the nations? Am I called to that?
Frankly, I doubt it, and if so, then clearly we’re not doing so well at it. The nations don’t seem to be paying a whole lot of attention to what we’re saying or doing here. Truth be told, I don’t think the nations know we’re here at all.
One the other hand, we do have a story worth sharing here. In fact, one of the most heartening things I’ve heard in a while was a word from a seminarian in Richmond who says that she’s been singing the praises of Clarendon ever since she preached here last winter. You may remember her, Allison Unroe, one of the many kids we’ve met over the years at Camp Hanover. Allison told us this month that lots of her friends are looking for and longing for a church like this one. So, yes, we do have a story to tell, but are we called to tell it to the nations?
Frankly, I’ll be happy when we can tell it well to ourselves, and I’ll be thrilled when we figure out how to tell it well to the broader Clarendon community.
So, if we’re not called to be prophets to the nations, to what are we called? To what are you called?
What does it mean, really, to be called? To anything?
Put only slightly differently: what are you supposed to do with this one life that you’ve been given? When we can answer that central question, then these others flow from it: Are we already doing it? Doing it well and completely? Could we be doing it better and more fully? How?
The texts this morning invite us to explore these questions, and they invite you to explore your own sense of call as well.
But first, here’s a commercial interruption, from our sponsor: Sunday, September 12, we begin our next Life Direction Lab in the CALL program that we developed a few years back. A number of folks here have been through this small-group journey, and it’s gotten richer and fuller as we’ve repeated it. Perhaps this fall is your time to explore your own vocational journey, your own sense of call. If so, I urge you to sign up, and I’m happy to talk with you about it.
Whether or not you participate in the Life Direction Lab to explore the fine lines of your own vocation, the Jeremiah story and the gospel text invite us to consider some broad outlines of vocation this morning.
It would be easy to listen to the Jeremiah text and respond, “that’s all well and good for him; he was called to be a prophet, to be, as it were, a religious professional. That’s not my call.”
Without getting into the “job description” of the prophet in ancient Israel, let that question complicate the matter for our contemporary context. In other words, “yes,” to be sure, there is a legitimate question to ask of the text: is this about the calling to specific roles within faith communities or should we hear a more general word in this text?
The question itself gets at a problem that is, frankly, endemic in contemporary American culture for people of faith. Do we believe in vocation, in calling, any more?
A few years back, in a work entitled simply, Vocation, Douglas Schuurman noted that many Americans find it “difficult and strange to interpret their social, economic, political and cultural lives as response to God’s calling.”
In other words, when you consider your job do you feel as if your work is something God is calling you to? When you watch TV or go to the movies or listen to music or take in a ballgame or otherwise participate in the culture do you feel the leading of God? When you shop or make major economic decisions, are you following God’s call? When you participate in the political process do you do so in response to the call of God?
Does God have anything to do with any of that? Or do we sense God’s call only with respect to our most private lives or through participation in the life of the church?
In other words, do we reserve a carefully and narrowly circumscribed sphere of our lives for God and otherwise keep the Divine at bay, equally carefully fencing God out of our work lives, our cultural lives, our economic lives and our political lives?
Personally, I find these among the most difficult and challenging questions we affluent North American Christians can ask ourselves because they get at the heart of what it means to try to follow Jesus into the world and they challenge so many of our comfortable assumptions about work and about church, as well. So, whether I’m trying to preach a pastoral sermon responding to the lives you lead or an ecclesiastical sermon trying to build up the body of Christ, that is, the church, these fundamental questions nag at me, challenge me, confuse me.
So, here’s what I propose to do about it. First, I’ll share just a bit of my personal struggle, which I believe is not that different from many of yours. Then, I’ll point to where that struggle crosses with a deeper challenge that is, I believe, part and parcel of our economy. Finally, I’ll propose some ways through the confusion.
I began pondering the whole “church professional” sense of ministry in my own life when I was in high school. I’m sure that came from the stew of growing up in the church, having parents who are both elders, developing a mentor/older brother relationship with the youth minister at our church, lionizing Martin Luther King and William Sloane Coffin, and finding the conservative religiosity of so many of my friends so deeply troubling.
If you look back at your own life, you will no doubt see a web of relationships and experiences, of heroes and mentors, of gifts and circumstances that shape who you have become and the choices you have made about work.
I turned my back on the church as a job site even while pursuing a graduate degree in the best Divinity School in the country, because, frankly, I just couldn’t imagine a congregation that could put up with me or that I could put up with, and because I have always carried a satchel full of God questions that seemed like more baggage than a “man of God” should claim.
On the other hand, I have always felt that I should be giving my life to something bigger than I am, and that there should be some essential connections and congruity between what I say I believe in and the work that I devote so much time to. It was never enough for me to work for an enterprise that “did no harm.” I felt called, driven even, to put my time where my heart was led. After all, how we spend our time is how we spend our lives.
That sense of congruency, or, in any case, the desire for congruency, lies at the heart of the traditional Protestant understanding of vocation, captured well in the early 20th-century Book of Common Prayer’s prayer “For Every Man in His Work.” Recall the era reflected in the language: “Deliver us, we beseech thee, in our several callings, from the service of mammon, that we may do the work which thou givest us to do, in truth, in beauty, and in righteousness, with singleness of heart as thy servants, and to the benefit of our fellow men.”
Unfortunately, it feels altogether impossible to speak that prayer today – and not because of its outdated language, but rather for its quaint perspective on work and the economy.
As Wendell Berry wrote more than 20 years ago, “What is astonishing about that prayer is that it is a relic. Throughout the history of the industrial revolution, it has become steadily less prayable. The industrial nations are now divided, almost entirely, into a professional or executive class that has not the least intention of working in truth, beauty, and righteousness, as God’s servants, or to the benefit of their fellow men, and an underclass that has no choice in the matter. Truth, beauty, and righteousness now have, and can have, nothing to do with the economic life of most people.”
Truth, beauty and righteousness, however, have everything to do with the Christian life, and therein lies the challenge, to me as a “church professional” and to all of us in our several callings, in our work, in our lives. The challenge arises because only those in the full-time employ of the church, we “religious professionals,” can be expected to lead lives of equally full-time devotion to God’s purposes of truth, beauty, righteousness and all the rest. In other words, only the paid professionals can be “full-time Christians” whereas everyone else must serve the economy first and serve God in your spare time.
The situation is flipped entirely from the one Jesus confronts in the gospel text. By his actions in the Luke text, and his words in similar stories, Jesus insists that the Sabbath was made for us, not the other way around. Our challenge lies in trying to see the economy the same way. Are we made to serve the economy, or is the economy made to serve us?
What do our lives say about that question?
For Jesus, it is clear that life – all of life – is supposed to be about healing, about creating wholeness out of brokenness, about doing justice, about speaking and honoring the truth that sets us free, about care for the beauty of the created order, about living righteous lives. These texts – the call of a young prophet, the healing of a woman – challenge us to ask ourselves what our lives are about? What our whole lives are about? For God does not desire simply the edges, the margins, the extra bits, the spare time of our lives. God wants the whole of it.
The good news in all of this lies in the guidance that the Jesus story, as a whole, provides. It is abundantly clear from the gospels that we are called to particular ways of living – ways of healing, wholeness, love and justice. It is equally abundantly clear from the gospels that this way of living is not easy, nor should we expect it to be embraced or enabled by the broader economy in which we must function.
That may not sound like good news, but it is, because the gospel story also makes clear that we are not alone in this journey, this struggle, and that we are invited to struggle together as a new community that explores and exhibits to the world alternative ways of being in the world. In a broken and fearful world, no call, no job, no vocation can be more important. The good news is embodied right here, as we try to live together into the great economy that is the kingdom of God.
Friends, that is what the journey of call, of vocation, is all about. Struggling together as a community of the beloved: that is what we are called to do. That is what the world needs to see. We have been, as it turns out, called to be prophets to the nations.

Lakes, Woods and Fire

2010-08-24T12:16:00.001-07:00

August 15, 2010
Both of our passages this week – the gospel text from Luke and the words of Isaiah – could well be read as weather reports, and weather reports for the present time, at least for the Richmond area where I’ve been the past two weeks: scorching heat drying the earth to dust, followed by clouds rising in the west bringing storms.
I can read the appearance of earth and sky – and weather.com – with the best of them, but interpreting the present time? Well, that’s a tougher one, to be sure.
What are the signs of our times? The signs of our lives? What do they portend, and how might we respond?
I wish I knew. I bet you wish you knew, too. I even bet you wish I knew, so that I could tell you. Maybe you came this morning hoping I might be able to do that. It would surely bring us some comfort, some peace, some unity of purpose and I honestly wish I could do it. I like comfort. I like peace. I don’t like conflict and division.
On the other hand, in Luke’s gospel Jesus puts it straight out there: I did not come to bring peace to the earth, but rather division.
So perhaps our own lack of comfort, our own discomfort with the signs of the present time, should not be so distressing. After all, if we read the present time with comfort, then there’s probably something seriously the matter with us. Look around at the world these days. Gulf Coast oil spill. Great Recession. Ten consecutive years of American warfare. Not to mention the weather, and what it might be trying to tell us! Are you OK with all that?
Think closer to your own hearts. Families fracture along no-fault lines. We all suffer the vicissitudes of our own human frailty. Our bodies fail, friends and loved ones die. Wills falter. Like Paul, we do the very thing that we hate, and we can’t seem to stop. It often seems as if we are caught up in circumstances not of our own making and far beyond our own control.
At the time of Isaiah, the people are similarly torn asunder by circumstances far beyond their control. They are exiles living in a foreign land. The early chapters of the Isaiah collection, including the passage we just read, tell the people how they got where they are, and place the blame squarely on those who oppressed the widows and orphans, those who are unjust and who lead the people into violence.
By the time of Jesus, the people might be called resident aliens, exiles in their own land; dwelling in a homeland, the people live under Roman occupation and domination.
Jesus utters the challenging words of Luke 12 as if to say, “which side are you on?” "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”
Choose this day whom you will serve. It is as if Joshua has returned. Jesus seems clear, it is a time of crisis, a time for decision.
Think back to the list of issues that confront us right now. Add your own to my brief account. Think about these things: social, economic, foreign, environmental crises and then add your personal concerns. It is a weighty load. Seriously. If we are OK with that stuff and all the rest, then there is something seriously the matter with us.
Moreover, if we think that we can solve these problems – the ones that can be solved – on our own, without deep disagreements over both ends and means, over tactics and strategies, then we are also seriously deluded.
I don’t believe for a moment that such delusion is our problem. No. We know much of what is wrong in our own lives and in the life of the world, and we are not OK with those things that can be changed.
The real problems lie in knowing what to do, and then in doing it, and in figuring out what to do when that doesn’t turn out the way we expect!
But take heart! God seems to have a similar problem in Isaiah. God plants a vineyard and expects a fine fruit to grow, but instead some nasty wild grapes take hold and the wine is going to be a bitter vintage. God expected a fine meritage but got grape Nehi instead. God expected justice, but got violence instead. God expected the beloved community but got … well, the Middle East.
Last week at camp I made a bamboo flute. I researched before I began the process. I measured carefully. I placed the holes at precisely the right spots on the shaft. I expected a standard Western tuning scale. I got this much out of my first try, and even “flute 3.0” doesn’t play a standard scale, at least insofar as I can play it.
Mick Jagger was only half right. Truth is, you simply don’t always get what you think you are going to get, much less what you ask for. As the Isaiah text suggests, this is true even for God.
Indeed, much of scripture suggests that God doesn’t always get what God imagines – at least not on the first go round.
To a great degree, though, the entirety of the Jesus story is about the second go round, second chances, another shot – in other words, it’s about grace.
And the challenging words that open Luke 12 offer a surprising form of that grace. Jesus’ words about division are usually read as a negative challenge, a threat even. But what if they are, instead, an invitation to dwell more fully and honestly in our human condition?
A while back, writing in Sojourners, Chilean author Michaela Bruzzese, suggested a different reading. What if, she wondered, “division is not only inherent to our faith, [but] actually essential to it”? In other words, she suggested, “Given that individual and communal perspectives are profoundly limited and based on different life experiences, expectations and needs, our interpretations must be understood as only part of the story. For who among us is the possessor of the whole truth, the most accurate interpretation of scripture and the most loyal implementation of its message? Jesus’ words could be a warning that no individual, denomination, or faith can (or should) even attempt to make such a claim.”
I’ve been reading a biography of John Calvin this summer, and it simply amazes me how many people were jailed, exiled, tortured or executed over differences of opinion about such things as the meaning and interpretation of the Lord’s Supper, or the doctrine of predestination, or the names children could or could not be given upon baptism.
Oh, to be sure, there were all kinds of secular political considerations at stake in such disputes as well, but it is clear that the Reformers and their opponents took the theological issues with deadly seriousness and would have interpreted Jesus’ words on division as a demand to choose which side one is on. It was a choice with often fatal consequences.
But what if Jesus is inviting us, instead, to live faithfully into division from the limited points of view available to us this side of the Kingdom of God? What if the whole of the gospel is condemning not disagreements – which are inevitable – but violence – which is not.
Disagreement is inevitable for we are all limited in knowledge, perspective and experience. But it is ours to choose how to live in the midst of disagreements. Pick an issue – personal or political, individual or broadly social. There will be more than two sides, and chances are exceptionally good that no single answer will suffice. Disagreement may well be absolutely necessary in order to solve complex concerns.
I’ve been at camp for the past two weeks. You put a couple of hundred people together and force them to live in small groups under occasionally trying circumstances – 100 degrees, no AC, living in platform tents or small cabins, cooking over an open fire, violent thunderstorms and so forth – disagreements will happen.
The choice before you, in every such moment, is how you will respond. Will you hang together, as Ben Franklin famously asked, or hang separately? Will you pull together, or pull apart?
There was a young man who lived in a village in Africa … so begins a story that we used to tell in camp. Before his day is done, he will understand divisions that destroy and those that can be united to some deeper purpose.
He was a young man who had grown into an outstanding hunter. He often led the other men of his tribe on their hunts for big cats, one of whom would feed the entire village for several days.
The older men told tales of the great hunters of the past; hunters who could track and bring down even elephants.
The young man was determined to match those great hunters of the past.
In the days preceding the one I want to tell you about, the hunters of the tribe had seen a few signs of elephants in the grasslands a few miles from their village. So the young man decided to rise before dawn, and set out well before the others. He would find, track and kill an elephant that would feed his family for an entire season. He would be the hero.
Amazingly enough, he almost pulled it off just that way. He did go out and find tracks. He followed them with great care, and just as the sun began to rise over the savannah he spotted a huge bull elephant. He snuck up on it with great care, silently stalking it. He pulled out his finest spear, the one he’d practiced with for hours outside his village throwing it at ever smaller targets until he could hit a pebble from a hundred paces.
He studied the elephant and picked out just the spot that he knew would bring down the great beast. He drew his breath, steadied his heart, and fired. The great animal fell, and the young man felt a surge of joy. He would be a hero. The meat would feed his family for an entire season, and the hide would provide a new tent for them.
His only problem was how to get the thing home.
He ran the three miles back to the village, roused the others and said, I’ve killed a huge bull elephant. Come and see. Bring ropes and we’ll haul it back.
Roused from their slumbers, they joined his quickly, bringing ropes to tie the elephant and drag it back to the village. They hurried the three miles out, tied ropes around the great beast’s feet and began to pull.
They surged against the ropes in rhythm and the young man began to chant, “my elephant, my elephant, my elephant.”
The others heard his chant and began to think, “whose elephant?” They dropped the ropes and the elephant stopped, too. The young man looked up from his chanting and pulling and said, “why have you stopped?”
The others answered, “if it’s your elephant, you pull it back to the village.”
So he grabbed all of the ropes together, picked them up and began to pull chanting, “my elephant, my elephant, my elephant!”
The great animal didn’t budge an inch. The young man dropped the ropes. His shoulders slumped. He thought of all the meat that would rot in the sun or be eaten by lions. He looked around at the others. He picked up one rope, began pulling it again, and chanting, “our elephant, our elephant, our elephant!”
One by one, the others picked up ropes, joined their shoulders to the effort and their voices to the chant: “our elephant, our elephant, our elephant!”
Together they pulled the giant beast back to the village. They divided the meat. The divided the skins. They divided the spoils into many different families.
But they united in one common goal.
May we, in all of our glorious differences, find an uncommon courage to pursue the common goals of love and justice as we together follow the way of Jesus.

Summer Fruit

2010-07-20T09:18:00.001-07:00

Amos 8:1-12
July 18, 2010
So, what do you see?
A basket of summer fruit?
Well, that’s what Amos saw, too, but he must have been looking at the wrong thing because where Amos sees a fruit basket God sees a bitter harvest – Israel dying on the vine.
Perhaps Amos is suffering a severe case of prophetic myopia. Of course, like most of the Biblical prophets, Amos didn’t seek the role or feel particularly well suited for it. Nonetheless, God has chosen him and laid before him a vision, if he will just have eyes to see.
We, too, have been chosen, called by God for such a time as this, and given a vision for the church, if we will but have eyes to see.
So, what is in our basket of summer fruit?
Well, here’s a bottle of suntan lotion. One of the fruits of summer is Sabbath time, time away to rest and restore our selves so that we are renewed for service.
Of course, if we don’t take good care, sunburn can be one of the fruits of summer as well. Lots of life is like that. Taking good care, being well prepared, helps protect us. Scripture speaks of taking on the whole armor of God, the sword of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the butt-kicking, steel-toed boots of justice … OK, I may have made that last part up, but you get the idea. Sabbath rest is for a purpose – for God’s purposes.
Oh, and here’s a book. No, it’s not the Bible. In fact, it’s best described as a beach read, a spy novel I’ve had on vacation last week. There is nothing of any redeeming social value in it. Pure mind candy. Considering it I am reminded that Jesus said it is not what goes into the body but what comes out that corrupts. I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, because there is an amount of truth to the programmer’s wisdom – garbage in/garbage out. But I think Jesus was calling his followers to a practice of personal responsibility when he urged them to think beyond the strictures of dietary laws.
Understand that you have the freedom to choose, and the responsibility that goes along with it in all aspects of your life. You can choose to speak words of love and kindness, of support and concern … or not. You can choose this every day, no matter what you’ve put into your mind by way of summer reading.
On the other hand, consuming something better than candy will sustain you after the sugar rush has worn away, metaphorically speaking. So my basket has a couple of other things as well: a biography of Calvin and a phenomenally important commentary on Mark’s gospel that you will be hearing more about as summer fades to fall. I’ve had these with me as well over the past couple of weeks; though I freely confess that the spy novel is way more of a page turner than either of these more weighty tomes.
Well, well. Mixed in with the fruit are some weeds, as well. Lots of things grow during growing seasons, and not all of the growth is good. We’ve been talking on session of late about other mission projects or programs that we might take on in the coming year. As a congregation we’ve done a good job lately of weeding out programs that don’t fit our little patch of ground, and we’ve done a good job also of figuring out what we can grow best here: programs of hospitality, missions of feeding, explorations of new ways of being church together. Those are the things we feel like we can do well, and we’re doing them.
But we’ve got some big ideas. Too big, frankly, for our numbers. So we need to grow a little bit. In fact, I’d suggest that we need to gain about 20 or 30 more people in this community to tackle some of the things we’re talking about. To grow in that way we need to look carefully at our little garden – are there weeds we need to pull to create space for growth? For example, are we doing things in worship – things that we don’t even realize – that get in the way of welcoming newcomers? Are we doing things in other parts of our community life that get in the way? What are these weeds, and how do we get rid of them?
This is summer work, work appropriate to Sabbath time.
Amos is pretty clear about the purpose of Sabbath. When God speaks in the passage we just read, the word of condemnation relates to Sabbath practice. God accuses the powerful of asking, “when will the Sabbath be over so we can sell the wheat?” In other words, basically, “when can we get back to screwing the poor?”
Summer Sabbath time for us must be about rest and restoration, about planning and preparation for our mission to serve the poor, the marginalized and the outcast, our mission of being a church for the third millennia of Christianity. Otherwise, we are just like those who God condemns in Amos, focused solely on our own interests which come, necessarily, at the expense of the those we say we want to serve.
Why necessarily? Well, because, if we’re honest about who we are, we will acknowledge, with gratitude as well as fear and trembling, that we are among the very privileged few. We are, globally speaking, among the richest of the rich and we live at the heart of power, many of us in the employ of the government of most powerful nation on earth. If we are not careful, faithful and prayerful with our time, talent and treasure we will find ourselves among those to whom God is saying, “woe unto you.”
I know that is not where we want our hearts to lie, otherwise we wouldn’t be gathered here trying to figure out the most effective ways of following in the way of Jesus.
Perhaps that’s also why there’s a sandal in the basket. Summer footwear, to be sure, but also the footwear that slips off easily so that we can shake the dust of the wrong road off our feet and then set out anew and afresh as we continue seeking to follow the way of Jesus.
As we journey together we have and will again from time to time take a wrong turn and go down a deadend street. Sandals represent for me the nimbleness to turn around and try another way when the path we’re on is not taking us where we need to go, where God is calling us.
I am convinced, over and over again, that we are faithfully following the calling of God to seek out the way of Jesus in the world. So I am convinced that word of the Lord spoken to the prophet Amos stands firmly as signpost warning us against a road that we must avoid.
It looks like a road lined with riches, but is, in reality, a way watered with bitter tears.
That is not the road we’re on at Clarendon, and so I’m having nothing to do with bitter tears today, nothing to do with the lamentations that Amos speaks of. No, as I look at this basket of summer fruit, I don’t see anything of lamentation and mourning, instead, I see the feast of the children of God and I believe I hear their summer songs of plenty as well. Amen.

You’ve Gotta Give ‘Em Hope, part 4

2010-06-29T10:02:00.000-07:00

Matthew 25: 34-43; Amos 5: 21-24
June 27, 2010
The word “hope” appears a bit more than 200 times in scripture. Interestingly enough, almost 10 percent of those occurrences come in the book of Job. Think about that for a moment. The story of Job – beaten down, picked on, abandoned by God – is full of hope. Perhaps it’s simply because when everything else has been taken from you all you’ve got left is hope.
When Harvey Milk uttered the phrase that I’ve borrowed as the title for this month’s series of sermons he also said this: “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living.”
You’ve gotta give ‘em hope! You’ve gotta give ‘em hope!
Perhaps that is, in and of itself, the best and simplest articulation for my own hope for the world. I hope for a world of hope, a world filled with people full of hope, a world overflowing with hope. For it is the absence of hope that leads to the desperate acts of violence that tear asunder the fabric of society, that rip apart families, that leave us lost in the midnight hours of mourning and grief, is a desert of despair parched and desperately thirsty for living waters, for justice waters to roll down upon us.
The brilliance, and the continued resonance, of Milk’s formulation lies in its imperative voice: “you – you have got to give them hope.” In other words, it is up to each and every one of us to give each one hope. We are in this thing together. Hope does not arise in individuals in isolation, but is rather a gift that we give to each other. You have got to give them hope.
More than forty years ago, in the majestic Confession of 1967, the Presbyterian Church articulated powerfully some of the specific content of the hope that we Christians have to offer to the world. Less than 20 years later, in A Brief Statement of Faith, the church again spoke a prophetic word of hope to the world. The power of those documents, just like the power of the gospels themselves, comes in the counter-intuitive fact that the hope we have to offer is not something that the world generally wants to receive.
Most of us, when we think of the specific things we hope for, would like to be offered, oh, perhaps a winning lottery ticket, or, at least, a good job, as the means to the ends for which we hope. For example, I hope that our kids will go to the colleges of their choice, so having a pair of good jobs is an excellent means to that end. I hope that, someday, we’ll be able to do some things to our house, so a winning lottery ticket would be a nice means to that end. I hope that we’ll retire some day and enjoy that season of life. Jobs and the lottery may be in order for that hope to be realized. For these hopes I’ll need to reconcile the balance sheet of the home economics.
But in its powerful wisdom, the Confession of 67 offers something else. In its introduction, the Confession says, “God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which he has called his church are the heart of the gospel in any age. Our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ.”
It spoke directly to several specific areas of contemporary life that cry out for reconciliation, including: racism, militarism, and poverty. A Brief Statement of Faith, though far less a systematic theological statement than a liturgical confession, lifts up an additional area: environmental concern or creation care, as it’s become known in church circles of late.
The Confession of 67 warned that “Congregations, individuals, or groups of Christians who exclude, dominate, or patronize others, however subtly, resist the Spirit of God and bring contempt on the faith which they profess.”
It urged the church “to practice the forgiveness of enemies and to commend to the nations as practical politics the search for cooperation and peace. This search,” the Confession continues,” requires that the nations pursue fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict, even at risk to national security […].”
The Confession proclaims “that enslaving poverty in a world of abundance is an intolerable violation of God’s good creation.” It went on to say that any “church that is indifferent to poverty, or evades responsibility in economic affairs, or is open to one social class only, or expects gratitude for its beneficence makes a mockery of reconciliation and offer no acceptable worship to God.”
A few years further on, the church noted plainly in A Brief Statement of Faith that “we threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care.”
These statements retain all of their original power. The world is still torn by extreme poverty and seemingly endless war. Church and society still practice exclusion and domination. And we continue to threaten death to our own planet. In short, we remain caught in what our Presbyterian sisters and brothers in 1967 called “the moral confusion of our time.”
Consider the situations that the Presbyterian Church’s great confessional statements of the past half century name: Identity-based exclusion, extreme poverty, violence, environmental destruction. Now imagine the people whose lives are captured in those situations.
Imagine a young man in, say, Malawi. He happens to be gay, and he’s just met a man in whose presence he simply lights up. Enthralled in those first blissful days of a crush, he simply wants to stroll hand-in-hand with his boyfriend along the beautiful shores of Lake Malawi.
Imagine a family in, say, Baghdad. It’s a beautiful summer evening and they just want to have a picnic along the banks of the Tigris River.
Imagine a young woman in Eritrea, kneeling beside the Red Sea, in tears because she cannot feed her child.
Imagine a fisherman in Niger, no longer able to provide for his family because the once rich waters of the Niger Delta have been befouled by oil spills that dwarf the spill along our own Gulf Coast – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill once a year for the past 40 years.
All of that sounds so far from home. But imagine a man being denied access to the Northern Virginia hospital room of his beloved – and legally married husband who fell ill on a dinner cruise on the Potomac – because they are gay and their marriage is not recognized in the Commonwealth.
Imagine a family in Greenville, Mississippi, who lost their home along the banks of the great river having lost their jobs in the great recession and joined the more than 20 percent of Mississippian who live below the poverty line in America.
Imagine a young African-American man watching the sun set over the Pacific and feeling that the light has gone out of his life as yet another friend has fallen victim to gun violence.
Imagine a pastor in a little town in Appalachia wondering how she’ll explain to the children of her congregation what has happened to the mountain that used to cast its shade across the church yard on Sunday mornings, and why the creek that used to run clean behind the church is now black and foul.
It does not take any great imagination to picture these folks. Indeed, we probably know some of them, and the others we’ve seen on the news. All of this is all too real.
So where is the hope in this? What is the good news?
The wisdom and power of Matthew 25 lies in incarnation. Participating in the planning for GA with other overture advocates I’ve heard over and over the ugly yet useful phrase, “personning the issue.” Matthew 25 not only insists that hunger, imprisonment, poverty, homelessness are not abstractions, not “issues,” but are, instead, people – people caught in seemingly hopeless situations, but the passage also insists that each of these people is the son – or daughter – of God. Each of them -- each of these people we just imagined together – each of them is Jesus.
What we do – what you and I do – to give them hope in these hopeless situations is what we do for Jesus.
Next month in Minneapolis, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will consider adding to our Book of Confessions the Belhar Confession, a statement of faith written by the church in South Africa in the midst of Apartheid. If affirmed, it would become the first confession from the global South embraced by our church as an authentic expression of Reformed faith with constitutional authority in the church.
Belhar concludes with this affirmation. We believe, it states,
• that God has revealed himself as the one who wishes to bring about justice and true peace among people;
• that God, in a world full of injustice and enmity, is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged
• that God calls the church to follow him in this; for God brings justice to the oppressed and gives bread to the hungry;
• that God frees the prisoner and restores sight to the blind;
• that God supports the downtrodden, protects the stranger, helps orphans and widows and blocks the path of the ungodly;
• that for God pure and undefiled religion is to visit the orphans and the widows in their suffering;
• that God wishes to teach the church to do what is good and to seek the right;
• that the church must therefore stand by people in any form of suffering and need, which implies, among other things, that the church must witness against and strive against any form of injustice, so that justice may roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream;
• that the church as the possession of God must stand where the Lord stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged; that in following Christ the church must witness against all the powerful and privileged who selfishly seek their own interests and thus control and harm others.
These are words of hope and conviction. To be sure, they are just words, but they can shape lives if we so choose.
You will have noticed, to be sure, that as I imagined people in various situations I imagined them at the water’s edge. Most of us do live close to water, for all the obvious reasons. And, we are, ourselves, mostly water.
My friend David LaMotte has a song – ostensibly for kids – that concludes like this:
"And the water gonna roll from the mountain to the stream
And the water gonna roll from the river to the sea
We will roll on together until everyone can see
That the mighty tidal wave is made of little bitty drops like me"
When we say, with Amos, let justice roll down like a mighty water and righteousness like an ever flowing stream, we are talking about ourselves and we are affirming that our lives touch ever other life, just like all water rolls to the sea which touches every shore.
That is our hope. That our lives will touch and be touched by other lives. That we are all part of an ever-flowing stream. That we will roll down together, a mighty tidal wave of hope.

You Gotta Give ‘Em Hope, pt. 3

2010-06-23T11:19:00.001-07:00

June 20, 2010
Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 10:38-42
The late Richard Halverson, who served as chaplain to the United States Senate, is said to have observed that, in its infancy, the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then it moved to Greece where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. Finally, it moved to America where it became an enterprise.
The question, it seems to me, is “what’s next?” What is next for the church, and, in particular, for us? How do we, as a community, a congregation in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) express what’s next?
In the past two weeks we’ve talked about our personal hopes and our hopes for the broader church. This morning I want to think together about our hopes for this church. I almost said, “our church,” but, of course, it is not ours. This is the church of Jesus Christ at Clarendon. The church, like the world, belongs to God.
But this is our time in this church, and we are responsible for shaping the hopes of this community in this season.
I’ve been part of a number of churches over the years, and each has had its own vision, its own hopes, and each has shaped the way I think about church.
Almost fifteen years or so ago we were members of a church in Lexington, Kentucky, back when I was in seminary. It was a big church – almost a thousand members – and its numbers did provide critical mass for some remarkable ministry. But its size had little impact on my hopes for the church. Bigness has its place, but it brings along its own baggage and issues, which are not now nor will they ever be our issues.
A church the size of Maxwell Street, for example, is not nearly so likely to have a clear, sharp and shared sense of its core identity and purpose. I do not think it is an accident that almost all of the churches in the More Light network are far smaller than Maxwell Street. It is easier to be of one mind on difficult, yet decisive concerns, when you are talking about 60 or 70 souls as opposed to 950-1,000.
But while Maxwell Street may have been all over the map on some crucial concerns, it was clearly and deeply committed to active ministries of feeding, of welcoming refugees, of working with migrant workers, of helping the homeless, of hosting the families of prisoners in the federal penitentiary that sits on the edge of town. The church put its money and its members’ bodies where its mouth was. The community practiced what it preached.
When I think about my hope for Clarendon, I recall a small moment from our time at Maxwell Street. A woman with a young child came to town to visit her father, who was a prisoner at the federal pen. She discovered upon arriving that there’s no place to stay near the prison, and the cab fare back and forth from the hotel was taxing her slim resources. On top of that, her young child got sick and needed to see a doctor. To make matters even worse, she did not speak much English. Remarkably enough, she found herself in a cab driven by someone who did speak her native tongue, and when she broke down in tears in his cab he asked what was wrong. She shared her story, and he said simply, “I can’t help you, but I can take you someplace where they will.” He brought her to Maxwell Street because he knew – the hungry? Homeless? Prisoners? The sick? Helping them was the core of Maxwell Street’s identity. Helping them is what Maxwell Street did very well.
That is my hope for us: that we would be so well known in the community that people would be sent here for what we can do very well.
We know who we are. The core of our identity is that we are a community that practices hospitality and offers welcome to everyone. We proclaim the love and justice of the gospel, with particular attention to those who have been systematically marginalized by church and society. We take seriously Paul’s pronouncement that in Christ there is no east or west, Jew or Gentile, male or female. We take it so seriously that we know that in Christ there is also no first world or third world, no American or Taliban, no gay or straight, for we are all children of the same loving God in whose image we were all created good.
That is what we believe. That is who we are. The question now, for me, is simple: how shall we be it such that even the cab drivers and the coffee-shop owners and the neighbors know that this truly is a house of prayer for all people, a center of compassionate service for all people, a place of action for peace and justice for all people, a third millennial church for all people?
When session met last week, Travis led us in our opening devotion, and he took us through this story of Mary and Martha. As we talked together about the passage we reflected that, as a congregation, we have done a great deal of good and necessary “Martha” work over the past four or five years. We have almost completely restored this wonderful old building. We’ve painted almost all of the interior, and recovered almost all of our floors. We’ve upgraded lighting, and added air conditioning to most of the space. We created dedicated adult education space and a room for music. We have upgraded considerable meeting space for our own use and use by community groups and mission partners. We’ve restored the house that we own next door. We’ve remade Wilson Hall downstairs into a place where we want to gather. And just last week, session acted on one of the few remaining big-ticket items on our capital improvements list and so by the time winter roles around again we will be snug and secure in a building with new windows.
Of course, when you have a building whose “young” section is 50 years old, there will always be a list of “Martha” projects to tackle. But we have taken care of most of what we set out to do five years ago.
Now the question is, “how shall we do the “Mary” work?”
To be sure we have been engaged in the “Mary” side of the equation all along. We have embodied an open table as we’ve helped to feed thousands of Arlington families through our work at AFAC. Following Jesus’ example of empowering all of the faithful according to their gifts for ministry, we have been leaders in the movement to remove the barriers to ordination faced by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Presbyterians. We have lived into our baptismal promises in nurturing our children. Hearing Jesus’ proclamation that the peacemakers are blessed, we have worked for peace.
But even though we have done all of this and more, it is probably true that, as a congregation, we have spent more time, energy and money on preserving and restoring this sacred space than on other ministry and mission. The Martha work has been crucial and timely, but we are entering a new season with new hopes.
Is it a realistic hope to become a community widely known for its spiritually grounded work in the world, for its hospitality to everyone, for its work on behalf of the marginalized? What would that look like? How shall we be who we are? What gifts do you bring to the effort? How shall we use all of the gifts that we bring?
I do not know the answers to those questions, but I do know this: if we answer these questions well – with the best of who we are – then we will be again a community of men and women centering our lives of following Jesus.

You Gotta Give ‘Em Hope, pt. 2

2010-06-15T09:45:00.001-07:00

June 13, 2010
Mark 6:30-44
Last weekend at the June meeting of National Capital Presbytery, Frances Taylor Gench, who teaches at Union Seminary in Richmond, took us through a reading of this well known story from Mark’s gospel. She credited the Quaker educator Parker Palmer with the insights she shared, and I’m crediting both of them for any insight that might shine through this morning as we reconsider this Eucharistic tale.
It was a graceful coincidence that Frances chose this text, as I was pondering the feeding stories and “table texts” of the gospels as one frame for our consideration of hope, and, in particular, for thinking about our hopes for the church.
If I had to say in one sentence what I hope for the church, broadly speaking, it would be this: I hope the church can be faithful to its sacraments. By faithful, I mean, in particular, that the church be ethically responsible to our sacraments.
The core of the sacramental theology is the same as the core of this story from Mark: there is enough to go around. There is enough water in the font to baptize all who want to be baptized. There is enough bread at the table to feed all who come. There is enough in the cup to send no one away thirsty. There is enough. Plain and simple: there is enough.
I hope that the church will come to recognize this simple truth and live fully into it.
Consider the story from Mark. This passage opens with the phrase, “the apostles.” It’s the only time Mark uses this title for Jesus’ disciples, which is noteworthy because just prior to this story in Mark they have been sent out to spread the good news and the narrative is interrupted by the account of the death of John the Baptist. Their situation is getting serious, and, as the story suggests, they are growing weary of the stress.
I was feeling their pain in the midst of Pride Week – a lot of us have been busy sharing the good news, and in some places that can still be a dangerous activity. I was privileged last week to be part of a small audience listening in on a conversation between Bishop Gene Robinson and Ugandan Bishop Christopher Senyonjo. Bishop Chris, as he is known, began speaking out on behalf of GLBT citizens of Uganda about ten years ago. He has lost his job and his pension and been forced to relocate his family repeatedly in response to death threats – all for spreading the good news that God so loves the world, the we belong to God, that all of us are created equal in God’s image and in God’s eyes, that God’s love and grace know no limits. There is more than enough of them to go around.
Grace always disturbs the status quo, because the status quo is always premised on an economy of scarcity. If God’s love is limited, then I’d better get mine. If God’s love is limited, some people can’t have it.
But that is not the economy of the kingdom of God. It is not the economy of the gospels, and the feeding stories underscore this with striking, imaginative clarity.
So the apostles, the disciples, the bishops are moving from town to town seemingly on the run for their lives perhaps from dangerous mobs or unruly crowds. But Jesus sees the crowds and he is deeply moved by their plight. The Greek word – SPLAGCHNIZESTHAI – translated as compassion comes connotes gut-wrenching, we might say his heart was broken for them. They are caught up in scarcity – in the desert the text tells us – without someone to show them the abundance that surrounds them. They need most of all a teacher.
But the hour was getting late.
Doesn’t it feel that way sometimes? The hour is getting late. We are running out of time. We will never get through the to-do list – the thank you card, the call to a colleague, the kid’s school play, not to mention the chores – and get on to the really important stuff. So we better get those bothersome people out of the way.
That’s what the disciples want to do. Send them away to find something to eat. Send them out on their own to compete as individuals in the marketplace.
But Jesus will have none of this. “You give them something to eat,” he insists. “You give them something to eat.”
Huh? Say what, now? You want us to give them something? You might not have noticed, but we’re tired and hungry, too. We may not even have enough to feed ourselves. We do not have the money in this congregation to have that kind of ministry. We are just a small church.
But Jesus will have none of it. “You give them something to eat.” In other words, stop waiting around for a miracle … and participate in the one that is happening all around you.
It’s almost as if he says, “here, let me show you how this works. See what resources you already have. Hm, five loaves of bread and a couple of fish. That should do it. Now watch.”
First, organize the people into small groups – into communities where real communion is possible. Put them together in a space where relationships can grow. Put them down on the green grass – the green grass, in the middle of the desert. See? Get it? Green grass? In the desert? Work with me.
And then, foreshadowing the practice of eucharist – a word that means simply “give thanks” – practicing gratitude, then, Jesus gives thanks to God for the gift of bread. He takes, blesses and breaks the bread and sets it before his disciples.
It is as if the disciples, the people of the way, the first instance of the church, are set before the people as an example. See, we had this bread and these fish, and if we share it among ourselves there is enough.
Perhaps the groups of 50 and 100 will begin to look among themselves to see what gifts they bring to the table. Jesus clearly believes in the gifts of his followers, after all, he told them to see what they had after he told them to feed the people. He knew they had gifts even if they didn’t, even while they’re still panicking at the prospect of 5,000 hungry people with no 7-11 in sight.
He trusted abundance, not only among his own community but in the milling crowds as well. He also understood that in crowds there is scarcity, but in community abundance. Create community and you will create abundance.
But, if we act as if scarcity is real then we create real scarcity. We could look at the global economy and at the role that our consumer society plays in it, and we should do that regularly. But this morning, instead, just look at the church itself.
We act, for example, as if God doles out gifts for ministry like Scrooge giving coals to Bob Cratchet. Thus we build fences around ordination and imagine that some are unfit, as if God could not work through any one of us. Remember the disciples in this story: even they – as bumbling as Mark depicts them – even they came up with the resources to feed 5,000. Yet we act as if energy, imagination and love are gifts that only heterosexuals can have for ministry.
But that is not true. This is true: in baptism you are claimed as God’s own for the sake of the world – for ministry.
We proclaim in baptism that we belong to God in life and in death, be then we act as if our only sources of security come from the national security apparatus and we bless the nation’s wars or, what is even worse, we sit idly by, quiescent and impotent as if God’s love has no real power to change the course of history.
But that is not true. This is true: the steadfast love of God endures forever, and the powers and principalities can never separate us from that love. That truth is the foundation of nonviolence, and we are called to show it to the world.
We proclaim at table that this is a foretaste of the kingdom of God, that beloved community of nonviolence to which all are invited, but then we build fences around the table as if there were high walls and a moat around the kingdom, and only those who say the right phrases in the right ways to the right people or priests merit God’s love and welcome.
But that is not true. It is not true.
This is true: God loves you just the way you are. There is a place for you at the table of our Lord.
My hope for the church is this: that we might be a community that penetrates the illusion of scarcity to inhabit the reality of abundance. The ability to do so is the measure of our lives, and in such lives lies the hope of the world.
“And all ate and were filled; and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered 5,000.”
Amen.

You Gotta Give ‘Em Hope

2010-06-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

May 30, 2010
Romans 1:1-5
“Hope does not disappoint.” So says Paul, who surely knew a bit about hopeless situations, being, after all, the guy who sang his way out of prison.
When I look back over just the 50 years of my own life thus far I am impressed by two completely contradictory impulses that dwell in tension in my own soul: the clear conviction that the way things are is not the way they have always been, one the one hand, and despair at ever seeing things change, on the other.
I suspect that I’m not alone dwelling in this tension, this contradiction. I wrote the first draft of this meditation while sitting in the coffee shop of the Barnes & Nobles while waiting for my car to be serviced. Think about that for a moment: I needed access to the texts for the week so I got on line on my 3-pound laptop which has more computing power than the Apollo spacecrafts that went to the moon – also in my lifetime, come to think of it. My hybrid vehicle – which syncs automatically to my cell phone so I can talk on the phone without touching anything but the steering wheel – was getting an oil change.
Meanwhile, tons of oil was – and still is – spilling into the Gulf of Mexico because corporate giants wanted to save a bit of money so they cut a few corners and created the largest environmental catastrophe in our history, and the federal government is paralyzed by its cozy relationships with those very corporate giants such that the president is loathe to act decisively and the oil just keeps flowing.
Of course, that same president is a man who would have found it difficult and dangerous to register to vote in the state of my birth at the time of my birth, and one of my fellow native-Alabamans, one who played a central role in the changes there, now serves in the Congress of that same paralyzed government. On the other hand, others of those who played central roles in those momentous changes were murdered as a result, and the country is still deeply divided by race – even though, back to the Barnes & Nobles – I can without thought sit in a public accommodation and look up to see an African-American woman being served at the counter in a room populated at the moment by people speaking several different languages and hailing from at least – at a glance – a half dozen different ethnic heritages, none of whom would have likely lived in Virginia, or anywhere else in the United States, prior to the landmark 1965 immigration reform act, and several of whom would have been legally discriminated against in the Commonwealth prior to the 1965 Civil Rights Act.
On the other hand, the Republican Party in another southern state just nominated a candidate for the United States Senate who says, in 2010, that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was a mistake.
I left the Barnes & Nobles to head to a meeting planning the NoVA Pride Interfaith Worship service. Imagine trying that 50 years ago! Or 25 years ago. Or even 15 years ago, back when don’t ask-don’t tell was inscribed into law. Oh, and the news on the morning I began writing contained the announcement that the Obama Administration had reached a compromise agreement with Congress on a gradual repeal of that odious law.
Of course, that law pertains to men and women serving in the nation’s armed forces – forces engaged in ill-advised and seemingly endless wars of choice that have droned on so long that the entire nation seems to have forgotten that they are still going on – even though 5,500 Americans have died, including 50 last month alone. When I look at those figures I am reminded that the first two names on the wall of the Vietnam memorial are men who died in an ill-advised American war of choice the year of my birth.
Later in the week I participated in a pair of conference calls with other overture advocates preparing for this summer’s General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) where we will press the assembly to open ordination to everyone and to change the directory of worship to make the language of marriage ceremonies inclusive of same-gender couples. Imagine trying that 50 years ago. Talk about the short trip to being defrocked!
So, I have to ask myself, when one surveys the incredible technological and social changes of the past 50 years, how can it be that I still feel an often overwhelming sense of despair at the possibility of change? How can I feel so hopeless sometimes?
It is all too easy to shrug one’s shoulders and say, “the more things change the more things stay the same.” It is easy to slip into a knowing, sophisticated cynicism. In fact, it is often considered “hip” to do so, and it is certainly fun sometimes.
It is, however, not faithful.
Cynicism is not a faithful response to the present moment and it is destructive of hope for the future – no matter how desperate the present moment feels.
After all, as Vaclav Havel put it, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Havel knew a thing or two out seemingly hopeless situations, but he also knew that freedom and democracy made sense even in – especially in – a society imprisoned by totalitarianism.
Martin Luther King knew a bit about the soul-killing oppression of segregation, but he also knew that freedom and equality make sense.
We know a bit about the pain of our own denomination’s homophobic rules, but we know that the love of God knows no bounds and that radical hospitality and welcome make sense.
Some of us know the self-defeating suffering of addictions, but we know that sobriety makes sense so we take the steps to wholeness. Others of us know the depressing reality of unemployment, but we know that a job makes sense so we keep on keeping on in the search for work. We all know, from time to time, the great weight of grief, but we know that life itself makes sense so we walk into another day trusting that God will turn our mourning into dancing.
This is the nature and substance of hope: whether we are considering the broad social realm, the sphere of the church, or our own lives, we stride forth confident that the love and justice and compassion of God will be with us no matter how the future “turns out.”
So, this fine June morning, what is the content of your own hope?