The Word Proclaimed @ CPC

Peace, Be Still: Reflections for a Simple Summer Sabbath

2009-06-23T07:28:00.000-07:00

Mark 4:35-41
June 21, 2009
Sung: Peace, be still … peace be still. The storm rages, peace be still.
This passage from Mark has long been one of my favorites, especially for meditation, and I was grateful that the lectionary cycle brought it before us this Sunday. I’ve been thinking about summer worship, and how it might be a time of reflection for us as a community, and I decided well before I turned to the lectionary readings that this morning would be an excellent time to celebrate a simple summer Sabbath of readings and songs and relatively few preached words for a Presbyterian worship.
These words from Mark strike me as the perfect text for such a service, because they invite us into quiet, reflective trust – in other words, into deep faithfulness. These words are not about believing, not about creed, not about theology or Christology or ecclesiology. They are about trust, about letting go in the midst of the storms of life and simply trusting that, in the end, it will be all right.
To be guided also in this by Paul’s admonition to the church as Corinth is all to the better.
That is the perfect way to begin a summer season of reflection – with an attitude of deep trust that it will be all right.
This summer we are going to reflect on the vision for Clarendon Presbyterian Church. I will introduce this theme with a bit of detail next Sunday. The following week – the Sunday of the 4th of July holiday weekend – we will have a good, old-fashioned hymn sing.
Singing praise to God ought to get us in precisely the right frame of mind and soul to think together, through the Sundays of July, about what God is calling us to be and do in the seasons just ahead. We’ll focus in worship during July on three areas that the mission discernment group has lifted up: worship; our common life together; and local mission.
The first Sunday of August, we’ll pull that all together into a more-or-less cohesive vision.
The second Sunday of August we will focus on our experiences in local mission. The middle two Sundays of August will be full of song and celebration, then we’ll take the whole thing on the road for a picnic on August 30, before the final summer Sunday, September 6, when we will celebrate work on the Sunday of the Labor Day weekend.
So, theirs is the thumbnail sketch of summer at CPC. I hope that you will feel called to be part of worship as often as possible this summer, knowing that each of us will be away from time to time. Summer worship 2009 is important in helping us lay a common foundation for the season to come in our common life.
In part, summer worship will be important because we are going to experience it in a slightly different frame: more of you, less of me. We will be “preaching together.” Preaching, at its best, is an inherently communal activity – a multi-voiced conversation involving the preacher, the congregation, the lively text, and the Spirit of the living God.
Too often, in our heady Reformed Protestant tradition, the preacher’s voice drowns out all others – especially, far too often, the still small voice of the Spirit.
We can do something about that, and we will this summer – beginning right now as we engage this text from Mark together.
Sung: Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me …
The remainder of this “sermon” will be a community lectio divina on the text from Mark.

A New Creation

2009-06-16T07:16:00.001-07:00

2 Cor. 5:14-17; Ezekiel 17: 22-24; Mark 4:26-34
June 14, 2009
Almost 30 years ago, President Ronald Reagan, quoting Thomas Paine, remarked in a speech setting forth his agenda to reshape the federal government, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
Last week in Cairo, President Obama paraphrased them both, saying, “We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning.”
A direct line stretches through Paine to Reagan to Obama, and touches a great many American leaders along the way, and that direct line demarcates an American heresy.
For as much as our American mythology would like us to believe that individually and collectively we have it within ourselves to make the world anew, John Calvin would have recognized the heresy at the heart of the mythology.
For Calvin was an excellent reader of Paul, and Paul understood quite clearly that while renewal and rebirth are profoundly important and necessary aspects of faithful living, we do not have it within ourselves, by ourselves, to make the world anew.
Listen for a word from God from the prophet Isaiah: “behold, I am about to do a new thing.”
“I am about to do a new thing,” says the Lord.
Not Thomas Paine and this nation’s Founders. Not Ronald Reagan and his followers. Not Barack Obama and his.
If there is to be a new creation, in Paul’s words, it will be God’s doing. If something new is going to spring up on the mountaintop, in Ezekiel’s image, it will be God’s doing. And if there is to be, among us and within us, something new, it will be God’s doing.
Why raise this today, at the beginning of summer when the planting is done and the harvest is still far off and mostly we want to kick back and take it easy?
Several reasons: first, these are the texts that the lectionary places before us this week, so we ought to attend to them and listen to them for a word from God.
But more importantly, these are words in season. They are ripe for us right now, especially coming as the Sabbath season of summer breaks upon us.
Finally, they speak to us of something new at a moment when we desperately need to be reminded of that possibility, for we have been reminded close to home this week of the ancient hatreds that mark the old patterns of human behavior and relationship that Ezekiel and Paul and all of the other prophets and apostles, and most decisively for us, Jesus, called people to set aside and be done with.
In the passage from Mark printed in the bulletin this morning, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed and uses harvest imagery to remind his listeners that the kingdom of God does not arrive like other kingdoms with military power and grand pronouncements from on high. Instead, God’s kingdom – God’s beloved community – comes subtly and unnoticed by most. It presses in from the margins and is embodied initially by those furthest from traditional sources of power.
That is no doubt why signs of the kingdom of God seem so scarce to us. We live in Rome – the heart of the empire – the most powerful city in the most powerful empire in the history of the world.
Jesus came preaching repentance and the kingdom of God, the gospels proclaim. His clear message: Rome was not the kind of kingdom that God had in mind. These texts before are ancient and speak from specific cultural, historical and political contexts to be sure, but they also speak to our time and the message should be just as clear: America is not the kind of kingdom that God has in mind either.
No empire, no matter how conceived nor to what purpose dedicated, will ever be what God has in mind. For the God revealed in and through the life of Jesus is profoundly anti-imperialist for the plain and simple and abiding reason that every empire is established by and maintained through violence.
The question for followers of Jesus in the face of this truth is equally plain, simple and abiding: how shall we be the church in the midst of empire?
The question is an abiding one because the church in every age and context faces it anew, because thus far in the 2,000-year history of the Christian movement every age has been the age of empire. That historical fact begs a crucial question: is empire simply part and parcel of human life? Is there something innate in human being, in our psychology, in our nature, in our living together that results in organizing the polis around structures and institutions of violence?
Is the violence of empire in the heart of each of us?
After all, violence breaks in all around us. In the past few weeks violence has twice desecrated holy ground – in the murder of a doctor in his church and in last week’s shooting at the Holocaust Museum. You don’t have to look through more than one day’s edition of the Post to find violence tearing apart neighborhoods close to us, or violence rending the fabric of families in our town. War is not confined to contests between nations. Often we are at war with ourselves within our own souls, as anyone who has struggled with addictions or mental and emotional illnesses well knows.
This insight is probably as old as human thought. Indeed Lao Tzu, who lived 500 years before Christ, put it this way:
If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.
In this ancient wisdom lies the key to understanding Paul’s notion of a new creation, and to grasping how that notion of new creation informs our understanding of the kingdom of God that Jesus compares to the mustard seed.
The new creation begins not with the work of great empires, but in the heart work, the soul work of each of us. That does not mean that public action and public policies are unimportant – far from it. But it does mean that the peace we long for must begin within each of us.
As Ghandi put it, “we must be the change we seek in the world.”
The crucial role and, indeed, the ultimate purpose of the church of Jesus Christ is to be the community that shines forth this change because we are living it out in our own lives and in our common life together.
When we gather as the church in worship we are not merely a spiritual filling station through which we gather strength to endure another week in the world as it is. Instead, we gather together to gather strength to change the world into a place that we do not merely endure but in which we share in abundant life. Moreover, we gather to be a community which opens a window – not matter how small and smudged and occasional cracked it may be – but a window nonetheless on how the world might be made anew.
We gather as the church to be a foretaste of the kingdom of God, the beloved community, a new creation. We are the mustard seeds being planted for the birth of a new creation in which people can go to work and not worry about violence shattering their lives, in which children are fed and cared for and educated, in which our elderly live with dignity and independence, in which, as Isaiah envisioned, nation shall not life up sword against nation and they will study war no more.
If you want to live in such a world, do not look to the White House to create it. Do not wait patiently for such a world to be created by the mighty and the powerful. Instead, look with a certain holy impatience within your own heart and open it that God’s work can begin there to bring a new creation.
Let us close with a prayer for New Zealand that speaks to this longing and openness:
Lead me from death to life,
from falsehood to truth;
lead me from despair to hope,
from fear to trust;
lead me from hate to love,
from war to peace.
Let peace fill our heart,
our world, our universe. Amen.

The Colors of Hope

2009-06-09T07:53:00.001-07:00

Romans 8:12-25; Isaiah 6:1-7
June 9, 2009
As Bud and I wandered the streets of Rome, Florence and Venice last month I noticed a whole lot of these flags flying from windows and a few storefronts in the cities.
“Pace” or “peace.” Certainly the European peace movement, outspoken throughout this decade of American war, is a strong presence in Italy so I understood the “pace” part, but what was the rainbow saying?
In American cities, dating back to the 1970s in San Francisco, the rainbow flag has been a sign of hospitality for the GLBT population.
But the history of the rainbow banner is much older than that. With its obvious Biblical connection in the Noah story, the rainbow has been a sign of hope for thousands of years. When God gave Noah the rainbow sign, as the old spiritual puts it, it was a promise about the goodness and constancy of creation and the created order.
Even before that story, the rainbow itself, occurring as it does in the midst of the combination of sun and storm and so often at the end of the rain, is simply a natural sign of hope that the storm is over.
Thus it’s no wonder that people in various cultures have used the colors of the rainbow as colors of hope.
Apparently the Incas used a variation on the theme to mark their territory, and it became a sign of resistance when the Spanish invaded. In the early part of the 20th century, the international movement of cooperatives used the rainbow as a sign of unity in diversity. And, back to my Italian balconies, the peace movement in Italy began using the rainbow in the early 1960s. During the run up to the war in Iraq the Italians began a campaign they called Pace da tutti i balconi ("peace from every balcony"), encouraging people to show their opposition to war by flying the flag from their balconies.
All of which reminds me that hope springs eternal, or, as the late Harvey Milk said, “you gotta give ‘em hope.”
Hope is not enough to live on, but without it life is impossible, so you gotta give ‘em hope!
The apostle Paul certainly understood this: We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
So, this morning, as we celebrate More Light Sunday, and lay claim once again to our own hopes for a church as generous and just as the God we worship, and for a social order of justice and equality, what hope colors our lives? This morning, what is the color, or nature, or content of your hope? What are you hoping for today?

Let me share, very briefly, this morning three hopes of my own.
I organize these hopes under three headings: Christ, community, and call.
First, I hope that, in the words of an Irish blessing, we will keep Christ before us, behind us, and beside us as we move forward together in the work of justice for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. We are going to hold a strategy meeting here on the last Saturday of the month to discuss the way forward within National Capital Presbytery. We know that many within the larger church are tired of talking about ordination and sexuality, and we want to be mindful of that both from pastoral and strategic perspectives. Nevertheless, we also know that over the years thousands of faithful, called GLBT Presbyterians have been denied ordination, and continue to live as outcasts within the household of faith, and they are tired of that. Therefore, we cannot tire in our work for justice. As we pursue that work – along with all of the rest of the mission and outreach, the feeding, the peacemaking, the rebuilding, the work of compassion and of advocacy to which we are called – I hope that we will keep Christ in our hearts so that our work in his name is advanced by means he would choose and employ. That is to say, I hope and trust that we will together continue to speak the truth in love, and speak that truth to power as we are called.
Second, I hope and trust that we will do this together – that is to say, as a community actively living out its faith together in worship, study, prayer and action.
Bruce Reyes-Chow, the current moderator of our General Assembly, posted a note on his Facebook page the other day saying that if you think you are leading but turn around and find no one there then you are only out for a walk. As Bruce noted, leadership and solitary walks are both good things, but they are not the same thing.
I have been engaged in a good deal of activism over the past couple of year: working with People of Faith for Equality in Virginia on GLBT concerns in the public square; working with Christian Peace Witness for Iraq on precisely what the name implies; and working a bit on the interfaith effort to build a faith-based community organization in Northern Virginia.
While some of the relations that I have built in that work are among the most important and sustaining relationships that I have, and while I treasure them, I am also aware that, with respect to this community at Clarendon Presbyterian Church, my social justice work has been a solitary walk as distinct from congregational leadership.
I am concerned about this distinction, and I believe we need to explore it together – in community. If we are a congregation of followers of Jesus called to be a progressive, inclusive and diverse expression of Christian community, what does that mean with respect to the Biblical imperative to do justice, and what does this mean with respect to my own calling both to community and congregational leadership and to the work of justice and peacemaking? I conceive of these as open questions, and, fundamentally as questions that we must address together as a community.
Part of addressing such questions entails, of course, looking at some foundational questions anew:
Who are we?
How are we called to express that identity in the world?
Are we responding faithfully to that calling?
Paul knew a thing or two about such questions. In some sense, his entire life – or, at least the parts that we know about through his writings – was spent trying to answer them.
Who was he? A Jewish man, to be sure. A citizen of the Roman Empire, also. But finally a man trying to come to grips with and respond to his encounter with the living Christ. In that encounter, Paul discerned both his fundamental identity and his true calling. As he put it in the letter to the Christians in Rome: “we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
If heirs, then, children living in response to the promise of God and living out of that promise. What does that mean? What does it look like in the world?
For Paul, and for us, also heirs to this promise, the answer to that question lies precisely in the life of Jesus. If you want to know what God desires of human beings, read the gospel stories of Jesus. Here is human life fully realized and lived in intimate relationship with the divine and in obedience to its leading.
And in this lies our hope – for ourselves and for the world.
So my final hope is that we, too, might live faithfully into our several callings in this place.
Just as Isaiah said, so shall we. When the living God, creator of all that is, calls to us through creation, what shall we say? Do we dare respond, “here I am, Lord”? When the Spirit, blowing where it will, calls to us in wind and fire, what shall we say? Do we dare respond, “here I am, Lord”? When Christ stands in our midst, as the poor one, the outcast, the marginalized, victimized by violence and injustice, silenced by rules in the church – when this Christ stand in our midst and beckons, what shall we say? Do we dare respond, “here I am, Lord”?
In our response lies our hope, if we dare. Amen.

Blessed Spirits

2009-06-02T08:24:00.001-07:00

Matthew 5:1-16; Ezekiel 37: 1-14
May 31, 2009
Bonjourno!
It is good to be back. It was good to be away, and must appreciated. In case you somehow missed it, Bud and I spent a week in Italy, and the entire family spent a weekend in Philly. I’ve been posting a few pictures on my blog and Facebook page, and perhaps at the next AFAC gathering we’ll inflict more. I promise, however, that no one will be subjected to all 300 photographs or three hours of video clips.
Travel is always a good way to learn, and, not surprisingly, our sojourn through Italy and a few days in Philly offered up some interesting prompts concerning church.
Italy is full of ancient and beautiful churches. We stepped inside more than I can recall, and toured many of those. Renaissance art and architecture abound. The size and scope of the buildings is amazing: you could fit our entire building four or five times over inside some of the sanctuaries we walked through.
And my first observation was simply this: thank heavens we do not have to take care of a thousand-year-old building! You think we have paint problems here and there? Imagine having to worry about a Renaissance masterpiece crumbling in your chancel. You think our flooring is old and troublesome? Imagine having to worry about the marble covering a hundred tombs beneath your feet as you worship.
You think we have plumbing and electrical issues? Imagine the challenges of a building constructed a thousand years before electricity and centuries before indoor plumbing.
I am so glad that such places remain; and I am all the more so glad that I don’t have any responsibility for their care.
But on this day of Pentecost, as we consider the birth of the church, I can’t help but observe also that the church in Italy strikes me as remarkably similar to the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel.
The heart of the ancient church, the home place of the Roman Catholic tradition, the hearthstone of historic Christianity: these days no more than one in ten Italians participates in church. All of those ancient and beautiful churches? Most of them function more as museums than as living houses of worship and praise.
There are, of course, all kinds of historic and cultural reasons for this. The challenge of being the church in Europe after Auschwitz is staggering, particularly when so much of the church was, at the very least, complicit in the Holocaust. Postwar existentialism was not merely an intellectual movement, it was and remains for many a cultural reality that makes secularism the dominant milieu for an entire continent.
The toll of two world wars can be measured not only in bodies and buildings destroyed, but also in belief systems thoroughly undermined.
It is not merely the question of doubt, however. After all, doubt is part and parcel of faith. Indeed, the opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty. And the certainty that seems to prevail in the contemporary secular West is this: we are on our own; there is nothing more than what we can see and taste and test.
The bones are dead and dry. There is no breath of spirit within them, and none coming from without to revive them. The bones are dead, and death is the end. Period.
On the other hand. On the other hand, we visited historic Christ Church in Philadelphia last weekend. Benjamin Franklin, William Penn, Betsy Ross and so many others worshipped there. They sat in the same sanctuary that stands today: 312 years old.
Sure, it is but a baby compared to the Italian churches, but, just like them, it too has many bones lying beneath its floors.
The tombs contain the bones of the famous and of the faithful unknowns, and the guide told us the story of one of the latter: a woman who died more than 200 years ago, whose name is not writ large in the history of the nation, but is surely recalled in the household of God. She set up a fund that continues, more than 200 years after her death, to help feed the hungry of Philadelphia.
She understood, clearly, that her faith – her trust in something beyond what she would see and taste and test in her own life – called her to ministry beyond her own horizons. She trusted that the Spirit of God not only empowered her, but would continue beyond her own time to empower the faithful to lives of loving service. She opened her heart to the Spirit, let its breath inspire her own, and her faithful work has continued down through the generations.
Blessed are the meek, indeed.
Some dictionaries define “meek” as “submissive” or “compliant.”
It will not surprise you to hear me say that I have never interpreted that phrase, “blessed are the meek,” to be an instruction to quiet acceptance of that which should not be accepted.
Instead, I hear in this beatitude a blessing of those who resist without recourse to violence.
That way, sometimes, lies martyrdom, to be sure. We had dinner one evening in Rome at a ristorante in Campo di’ Fiori – a plaza in which stands a statue of Giordano Bruno, a 16th-century philosopher burned at the stake in that plaza in 1600, having been declared a heretic by the Inquisition. Historians differ as to the precise nature of Bruno’s heresy: was it a precursor to Galileo or a more strictly theological matter?
What is clear, however, is that Bruno was put to death.
If by the “meek,” as suggested by the Greek word in question (praeis), Jesus meant “those who do no harm to others, even those others who have done harm,” then clearly the church itself has much to answer for.
But answering for its own violence has never been a strong suit of the church – whether the Roman Catholic Church or its Protestant step children. On the 400th anniversary of Bruno's death, Cardinal Angelo Sodano declared Bruno's death to be a "sad episode." However he added that people should not judge those who condemned Bruno. He went on to argue that the inquisitors wanted "to preserve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save [Bruno’s] life.”
Perhaps our own inability to confess – to engage in simple truth-telling – helps explain empty churches across Europe and increasingly across the U.S.
What, in the end, is the gift of Pentecost? It is the spirit of truth.
Jesus did not say, “blessed are those who tell the truth,” but truth-telling is at the heart of the Beatitudes.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit”? Who are these poor in spirit? Jesus would have been referring to those economically marginalized – either by choice or situation – who practiced an utter reliance upon God. In other words, those who grasped and were honest about our common existential reality: we are all, ultimately, utterly dependent upon God. Some of us are truthful about this; most of us live in denial.
Likewise with the blessing of those who mourn. Each and every one of us mourns. We suffer. We lose loved ones. We grieve and sorrow and mourn. But too often in our own culture, in particular, we do not wish to acknowledge our own brokenness and suffering for fear of being perceived as weak. Jesus extends the blessings of God, here, to every one of us, and thus creates space for our own truth telling about our own common human condition.
What might happen if the church became a site for such truth telling? Is the Spirit calling us to this?
Of course, if we are to become such a place – a site for truth telling, a place of honest confession – then persecution will follow. After all, those who have truly followed Jesus in every time and culture have found the way difficult, the gate narrow, for Jesus spoke a truth that the world has never wanted to hear much less acknowledge.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives. God has sent me to proclaim recovery of sight to the blind. God has send be to set the oppressed free and to proclaim the year of jubilee.”
When Jesus announced that mission in his first public sermon in his hometown of Nazareth, the crowd responded by trying to throw him off a cliff.
But the truth is, the poor desperately need good news. The world desperately needs to be set right. Those captive to a culture of bigotry, violence, homophobia need to be set free.
We are the ones called, at this moment, in this place, to speak that truth to the world no matter what it costs us.
For on this day of Pentecost, we are richly blessed and the Spirit of the Lord is upon us. Let us walk in the light of that Spirit and go boldly into God’s world to feed the hungry, bless the poor, speak the truth, resist all violence for in so doing we lay claim to the truth – the living embodied truth – of the kingdom of God among us. May it be so, and may we be call blessed spirits. Amen.

Love Makes a Family

2009-05-12T07:40:00.001-07:00

Matthew 12:46-50; Ruth 1:1-21
May 10, 2009
One of the challenges I recall from seminary days was the invitation to sum up in a sentence what you think scripture is all about. Think about that for a moment. Is the entirety of scripture about eternal life? Is it about proper religion? Is it about justice? Is it a biography of God? Is it a single story about the people of God? Is it about liberation? Is it about the national identity of the people of Israel? Is it about law? Prophets? Love?
That long list of possibilities in and of itself suggests that scripture resists reduction to a single narrative thread or central theme, and I tend to believe that scripture is, indeed, about all of these and more. But, if compelled to say right now, in a sentence, what scripture is about I would say this:
Scripture is the story of the ever-expanding understanding of the limitless nature of God’s love.
Scripture is the story of the ever-expanding understanding of the limitless nature of God’s love.
Throughout the stories, we encounter people whose understanding of God and of divine love is pushed beyond initial limits. Abraham is called to leave behind the narrow and geographically fixed definition of his kind, his tribe, and go to a place that God will show him. Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, is compelled to expand his own self-understanding and his understanding of who is in and who is out of the covenant relationship with God. Moses, raised with a royal consciousness, is confronted by the cries of an oppressed people and he must choose. Paul, the oppressor of the early church, leaves the confines of the temple and spreads good news far beyond the tribal boundaries of his people.
And Jesus, even Jesus, is constantly recognizing that good news is not just for the people of Israel but also for the Gentiles, for women, for children, for the poor and the marginalized – so much so that he finally confronts that fundamental human question: who is my brother? Who is my sister?
In other words, who is in and who is out? Who constitutes the family if the parent is God?
Family … you can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t shoot ‘em! Well, then, what happens if everybody is in?
Isn’t that the question? We spend so much time trying to define who is in and who is out.
A group of us got together a few weeks back to watch For the Bible Tells Me So. The film tells the stories of several families coming to terms with a gay or lesbian child coming out – including that of Bishop Gene Robinson. The stories underscore the difficulties posed by narrow interpretations of scripture. In other words, the families come face to face with their own understandings and that of faith communities that read scripture is about law, scripture read as a strict and fixed code of morality.
Never mind that we pick and choose which parts of the law we will attend to at any given moment. As John Stewart said last week on The Daily Show after Maine legalized same-sex marriage, the move transformed “Maine’s annual lobster-fest into the state’s second biggest violation of Leviticus. … God hates gays, and scallops,” Stewart concludes.
When we take scripture as a narrowly defined rule book and understand the church as arbiter and enforcer of those rules we wind up with religion as a weapon and, too often, family as its target.
A couple of months ago I was at a conference at Stony Point, along the Hudson River in New York. I offered up for our morning prayers a Pat Humphries song for the gathered people that, I thought, expressed the sense of unity that was growing among the group. I’ll sing the chorus for you:
We are living ‘neath the great Big Dipper; we are washed by the very same rain.
We are swimming in the stream together, some in power and some in pain.
We can worship this ground we walk on, cherishing the beings that we live beside.
Loving spirits we’ll live forever; we’re all swimming to the other side.
Into the prayerful silence one young man – a senior in college – spoke up and declared that the song represented “rank idolatry.” The most interesting part of the moment was that no one responded to him. It was quite clear that no one agreed with him, but it was also clear that we wanted to be gentle with him. I took his youthful certainty as a byproduct of understanding scripture and orthodoxy as a strictly drawn circle around a narrowly defined set of rules.
Scripture was to be used as a way of defining who is in and who is out, and how we will permit ourselves to speak or sing of those lines and definitions. Family, understood in light of such a reading, is easily reduced to tribe and kin.
Yet the Bible is full of stories that challenge precisely that reduction.
Take the story of Ruth and Naomi. There are clear lines of tribe and kin at stake, but something far deeper comes to define family.
Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die — there will I be buried.
What else is that but a declaration of undying love? Where you go, I will follow. Where you live I will live.
I am alone and I am searching, hungering for answers in my time
I am balanced at the brink of wisdom, I’m impatient to receive a sign
I move forward with my senses open; imperfection, it be my crime
In humility I will listen. We’re all swimming to the other side.
We’re all living ‘neath …
On this journey through thoughts and feelings; binding intuition, my head, my heart
I am gathering the tools together. I’m preparing to do my part.
All of those who have come before me, band together and be my guide
Loving lessons that I will follow; we’re all swimming to the other side.
Jesus clearly understood that tribe and kin were not enough to make a family. “Who is my brother?” he asks. It’s not blood or biology. It’s not tribe, religion, culture. It is, he declares, doing the will of God.
And what is that? This will of God that Jesus’ own life translates for us? Love God and love the neighbor – the law and the prophets hang on this. Love one another, by this they will know you are my followers. Love also the enemy – be makers of peace and, therefore, be called the children of God. Be part of my family.
If, as the Bible tells us, God is love, then we are all children of love, bound together by that common identity. There is no in or out from that circle. We are all children of a loving God.
The trick, of course, is to live as if that were true in every aspect of our lives, in our every interaction with others, in the way that we shape our lives and our churches, and in the ways that we try to make our smaller families reflect that truth as well.
God is love. Love makes a family. There is an inescapable logic at work in the relationship between those two statements. No abuse of scripture, of creed, confession or institution will ever make it otherwise.
Beloved, let us love one another, for God is love and we are created in that image.
Carry the spark of the divine in your life and let it seek out that same spark in every one you encounter. By this you will be able to answer in your own life the question Jesus posed, “who is my brother, my sister, my mother, my father?”
You are that one, my beloved sisters and brothers.
When we get there we’ll discover all of the gifts we’ve been given to share
Have been with us since life’s beginning and we never noticed they were there
We can balance at the brink of wisdom never recognizing that we’ve arrived
Loving spirits will live together. We’re all swimming to the other side.

A Passion for Peace: That We Should Be Called Children of God

2009-04-27T14:05:00.000-07:00

April 26, 2009
Luke 24: 33-49; 1 John 3:1; Psalm 4:8; Acts 3: 13-16
For more than a year, now, I’ve had sitting in a corner of my study a big bag of ribbons and clothe and pennants and banners and rope. They were part of the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq last spring, sent in from across the country with letters such as this:
Dear Clarendon Presbyterian, “Thank you for this action in Washington, DC. We are a united church – Presbyterian and UCC. We have an ecumenical prayer group in Big Rapids, MI. We have met for almost five years to pray for peace and justice every Tuesday morning at 7:00.”
Or, this:
To participants, “Thank you for witnessing in this peace-filled, nonviolent way to stop the war in Iraq. We have formed a [nondenominational] ‘peace cell’ [in International Falls, and] meet weekly, focusing our intention for peace within ourselves and spreading to family, community and the world.”
Or, this:
Hello friends, “Our church together has committed to a process of prayer, study, and action focused on Jesus’ call to love all, even our enemies, and a vision that the church could turn the world toward peace if every church lived and taught as Jesus lived and taught.”
Of course, I also received an email last week entitled simply, “God will judge you harshly.” You can’t win ‘em all.
If I have learned anything in my life in ministry it is this: when you put yourself on the line for peace and justice there will be reactions. Or, as one of my ministry mentors said to me, “if we are doing our jobs, there will be scars.”
Jesus certainly understood this reality, this risk. As the Johanine literature reminds, the world did not recognize him. As the Acts passage underscores, the world killed him.
There’s no convoluted atonement theology in Acts. No Jesus being sent to die for the sins of the world as some kind of blood sacrifice to appease an angry tribal god. No bizarre economic theory that poses Jesus as a repayment for our debts. No, for the author of the Luke/Acts literature it comes down to this simple truth: the world did not understand Jesus. The powers that be – secular, religious and political powers – were threatened by his presence. And they killed him.
I was trading e-mails with Candace Chellew-Hodge, who will be with us next weekend conducting a workshop, and she commented, “grace always causes outrage.”
“Grace always causes outrage.”
If we do not understand that it is because we have trivialized grace. We have domesticated grace to such matters as, “we were graced by good weather,” or to other events over which we have no explanation or control – accidents or disasters.
But when God’s grace erupts in the world it is not all sunshine and cherry blossoms. God’s grace upsets the order of the world.
Last weekend, when we were graced by beautiful weather, I was privileged to officiate at Heather and Lisa’s nuptials – to make them unlawfully wedded wives. You do not have to look far to find the outrage that such an event causes in the world, but it was such a grace-filled afternoon that we began to witness – even in the midst of the service and reception – the power of grace and love to change the world.
Let me say those words again: the power of grace and love to change the world.
I was speaking with someone there – a family member self-described as a conservative Baptist. He spoke of his own coming to terms and mentioned that his 10-year-old daughter had asked, on the way to the service, if we were going to be on the news.
I think I recoiled in horror at that thought, and said something to the effect of “thank heavens, no.”
And he said, “it should be on the news, because people need to see this.”
The world so desperately needs to see this, but the world remains blinded by fear to this basic truth: Grace and love have the power to change the world.
Jesus understood this, and he lived into this reality day by day.
Of course, you don’t have to look too far – not in his time nor in ours – to find those who are threatened by the prospect of change.
Remember: grace always causes outrage.
How is this so?
Consider, for example, the common argument that same-sex marriage will undermine the institution of marriage around the world. While I still do not understand why Heather and Lisa’s union should undermine my marriage to Cheryl, I do understand the logic of scarcity at work in such thinking. If a commodity – in this case, a happy marriage – is scarce then it has greater value. If everyone can have it, it becomes a commonplace. The outrage flows from fear of the perceived loss of distinctive value, status and exclusive access to certain rights and privileges.
Some version of this logic is at work every time rights are extended, every time we add another leaf to expand the circle of those included at the table of grace.
Grace causes outrage.
The same logic of fear is at work on every question of justice, and thus also on the questions of war and peace.
As Thomas Merton wrote almost 50 years ago, “At the root of all war is fear, not so much the fear men have of one another as the fear they have of everything.” To paraphrase Merton just a bit, “It is not merely that we do not trust one another: we do not even trust ourselves. If we are not sure when someone else may turn around and kill us, we are still less sure when we may turn around and kill ourselves. We cannot trust anything, because we have ceased to believe in God.”
We cannot trust anything, then, because we have ceased to believe in grace, in mercy, and in love. We have ceased to believe in the power of love and mercy to change the world. We fear the loss of scarce security, because we do not trust the only authentic source of security – the grace and mercy and love of God.
This is nothing new under the sun, although it takes it own distinctive forms with every generation.
In Jesus’ time, an empire of fear was itself fearful of every threat. That’s why the highways were lined with crosses hung with the bodies of insurgents and political enemies of the state.
In more recent times, the empire of fear that was the Jim Crow South that I was born into was itself fearful of every threat. That’s why the back country roads were lined with trees used for lynching.
In our own time … well, suffice it to say that we have lately lived under a dark cloud of fearfulness, and I do not believe it is any stretch at all to suggest that the road alongside which Matthew Shepard was hung for the crime of being gay travels directly to the door of Abu Ghraib prison where the guilty and the innocent alike hung from shackles at the hands of our national security apparatus working in our names to ensure that our lives and lifestyles are not interrupted by those whom we fear.
Into such a world as this – riven by fear of the other and the outcast – Jesus came. To such a world as this – huddled in tribes behinds walls and borders – Jesus came teaching love of neighbor and of stranger and even of those on the other sides of walls and borders. And when just such a world sent Jesus to his passion – his suffering and death on a cross – to that world God spoke an ultimate word of love that we know as resurrection.
Resurrection is God’s answer to the passion. Such wondrous love as this is God’s answer to human suffering.
In the garden, Jesus said, “put away your swords” – lay down your sword and shield and study war no more. His passion for peace led directly to his passion. He suffered and died.
And who would have blamed his followers if they had simply said, “well, that’s what happens to those who are naïve enough to believe in nonviolence, that’s what happens to those who are foolish enough to believe that justice is possible, that’s what happens to those who try to love in the face fear.”
Who would have blamed them if they had picked up swords at that point?
But while they were still huddled together in fear and trembling, before they even had a chance to reorganize with weapons, God breathed life into their midst again, and they heard Jesus, once again, say simply, “peace be with you.”
Peace be with you.
My good friend Rick Ufford-Chase says, quite simply and clearly, “War is not the answer for those who call themselves followers of Jesus.”
Put away your swords … or, as Rick’s then 10-year-old son famously put it, “beat your swords into lawnchairs.”
Put away the sword. Tear down the wall. Break down the barriers.
Whether we are talking about the rights of minorities or the violence within families or the wars of nations, the same logic of grasping fear pervades.
The question is: what can we do about it?
Writing in 1962, Thomas Merton said, “the task is to work for the total abolition of war.”
Merton was right then, and he is right now. Indeed, if anything, the task is more urgent now than it was in 1962.
Merton was not naïve. He understood that the task that he named as the abolition of war involved work on multiple levels on multiple issues starting at the level of our own hearts.
He ended his great essay on the roots of war with these words:
“It is absurd to hope for a solid peace based on fictions and illusions! So instead of loving what you think is peace, love other men [and women] and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are warmongers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.”
I have been praying for peace, marching for peace, organizing for peace, working for peace, donating for peace, witnessing for peace, singing for peace, petitioning for peace and every other act for peace I have been able to imagine since I was in high school. I have a passion for peace.
As I read Merton, I am reminded that a passion for peace, like any passion, involves suffering and death. I am further reminded that my work for peace is work for the death of injustice, tyranny and greed in my own heart.
Such heart work is done best in community. That is why I really hope that some of you can join me and hundreds of others this Wednesday evening at 7:00 at National City Christian Church as we worship and witness for peace in our own hearts and in the heart of our nation.
As Martin King said in 1967, some five years into another endless war, “Now let us begin … let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the [children] of God.”
Grace and love can change the world.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
Amen.

Resurrection Movement

2009-04-14T09:03:00.001-07:00

Easter Sunday, 2009
Good morning. My name is David Ensign, and I’m here to recruit you!
You will have recognized, no doubt, echoes of the late Harvey Milk and his signature greeting as he invited people to join the gay liberation movement of the 1970s.
Why invoke that memory today? Easter Sunday, 2009?
What if, in our call to worship, we heard not only an invitation to join our hearts to an ancient story and to engage our spirits in live-giving ritual, but also a call to join our lives to a movement for human liberation? What if, in the invitation to bow our heads in prayer we heard not only a call to acknowledge our dependence upon God but also a call to join our lives to a movement for radical transformation?
What if, in the call to follow Jesus, we heard not merely an invitation to join a religious institution, but instead a beckoning to join a movement of resurrection?
If the church is, as the apostle Paul suggested, the body of Christ in the world, then it cannot be reduced to mere institution for it is a living body that must, most surely, move … or die.
The time has long since come for the church to move. For a church that moves nothing, that risks nothing, that transforms nothing is worth nothing.
What better season to proclaim this than Easter?
On the other hand, we could be like the first disciples as depicted in the oldest gospel, Mark. The women go to the tomb to anoint the body and find it empty. When the young man in white tells them that Jesus has been raised, they flee in amazement and terror and don’t say a word because they are afraid.
I’ve always been fond of that stark ending to Mark’s gospel, and am convinced that it was the original text onto which some later scribe attached the longer ending that leaves the disciples looking far braver and ready for the work of sharing the good news.
No, I imagine paralyzing fear was the initial reality the disciples faced. In the face of fear, nothing much ever changes.
Fear freezes us, starting with our hearts and minds.
When I try to put myself in the disciples’ shoes at that moment I imagine mostly fear and trembling. Jesus has just been crucified – the empire’s response to voices that threaten to subvert its power and domination. We could very well be next. Hiding out for a good long while seems like a perfectly sensible plan in the face of looming danger.
I wonder how many of us have entertained that thought these days. In the face of an economic crisis that looms like a threatening storm over so much these days, wouldn’t it be great simply to get away from here for a good long while? In the face of senseless yet seemingly endless war, wouldn’t it be great simply to get away from here for a good long while? In the face of hatred and bigotry aimed at those long excluded from the church on account of sexuality, wouldn’t it be great simply to get away from here for a good long while? In the face of our own personal demons, diseases and distresses, wouldn’t it be great simply to get away from here for a good long while?
Can I get an “amen” from all those who would simply like to get away for a while?
I know I would sometimes. And, indeed, there is nothing wrong with getting away for awhile from time to time. Jesus retreated to the wilderness to be alone and to the garden to pray. Getting away can restore and revive us, and that is all to the good.
But when getting away for a bit becomes escape instead of restoration then we become like Monty Python’s “brave” Sir Robin: “run away! Run away!” instead of confronting what demands confrontation.
What is it that demands confrontation?
The Apostle Paul understood perfectly well, and even made a list: hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, the sword, death, rulers, things present, things to come, powers, height and depth, among others. We can translate those first-century threats to our own time quite easily and accurately.
Hardship? Surely we understand that, especially in the current economic crisis, as jobs disappear right along with life savings.
Distress? We feel that in relation to the tenor of our times, and we also feel it in our personal lives as we struggle with grief and loss, with sickness and separation.
Persecution? As a straight, white, Protestant man I don’t experience a lot of that in my own life, but I certainly understand the need to live in solidarity with those in my midst who do – my GLBT friends, the migrant laborers who gather down the hill from our house looking for work, women in church and society still after all these years, my Muslim friends to name but a few.
The sword? I am grateful to live mostly unthreatened by violence, but I know that is part of my own privilege not shared by hundreds of millions of sisters and brothers around the world.
We can all too easily do the work of translating Paul’s list.
These things demand confrontation because they threaten to separate us from God.
They give voice to a loud, clanging and persistent “No” as they announce the via negativa – the way of death and destruction, of heartache and despair, of bitterness and cynicism.
Good Friday witnesses to the power of this way in the world.
Easter witnesses to the power of God’s mighty “Yes” in response.
That list of Paul’s? It comes in the context of his own asking what can separate us from God? He wrote to the small group of Christians in Rome – the heart of the empire – and asked, “Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword separate us from God?… No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that 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 in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Resurrection is God’s resounding “yes” in the face of all of that. It is God’s unfailing promise that none of that will ultimately separate us from God’s creative, boundless love.
Resurrection is not one small breath of life into a dead corpse of one human being, Jesus of Nazareth.
Resurrection is a powerful wind – the breath of life for every human being.
Resurrection is not the over-and-done-with rising up of one man.
Resurrection is the continual rising up of every man and woman who stumbles and falls along the way.
Resurrection is not a one-time event that happened on a lonely hillside in first-century Palestine. Resurrection is a movement that sweeps through people in all times and all places, and is still sweep through us – here and now – lifting us and calling us forward into new life, into new hope, into a future otherwise of God’s imagining.
It’s no wonder the first disciples were afraid, and it’s no wonder that we still feel that same fear.
But perfect love casts out all fear, and resurrection is perfect love in action.
Mary came to the tomb on the first resurrection dawn, and she wept – tears of sorrow, of loss, of fear.
But the voice of God said, “oh, Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.”
“For you see, you are witness to the movement of resurrection, to the rising up of the spirit of God to set things right.”
“Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.”
“For you see, you are invited now to join your soul to that same movement, and be part of the rising up yourself.”
“Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.”
“For this is for all people, who are invited to join together in that resurrection movement, and be part of that rising up to set things right.”
“Oh Mary, don’t you weep.”
“Oh Mary, don’t you weep don’t you mourn.
Oh Mary, don’t you weep don’t you mourn.
Caesar’s guards been swept away.
Oh Mary, don’t you weep.
One these days in the middle of the night, people gonna rise up and set things right
Caesar’s guard been swept away.
Oh Mary, don’t you weep.”
Listen! Do you hear this invitation to join your hearts to an ancient story and to engage your spirits in live-giving ritual, and also this call to join your lives to a movement for human liberation? We bow our heads in prayer to acknowledge our dependence upon God and also to join our lives to a movement for radical transformation? We follow Jesus as the church, and also as a movement of resurrection.
Sisters and brothers, there’s a resurrection wind blowing through this place. Open your spirits and be filled with its freshness. Open your hearts and be filled with its love. Open your lives and be moved by its power. Amen.

Confessing Jesus

2009-04-07T14:24:00.001-07:00

Isaiah 50:4-9
Philippians 2:1-13
April 5, 2009
I want to pull out a single verse from our several readings this morning and offer a brief meditation upon it. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself.
Thomas Merton wrote, “If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how to comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person.”
Between these two answers.
Merton was not writing about Holy Week, but he could have been. For between the answers to the questions posed first by the drama of palms and passion and then by the empty tomb you can determine our identities as followers of Jesus.
In a few minutes we will ask again the foundational, ancient, confessional questions that Christians have posed for the better part of two millennia.
Who is your Lord and Savior?
Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.
What does it mean, today, to confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
We could travel down some historical, Christological byways together, and consider the root words from which we draw “lord” and “savior,” and trace their respective meanings to such ideas as the feudal lord who was the keeper of the loaf, and the Latin roots of “savior” meaning healing and wholeness. Or we could look at the original political context of the ancient confession and note that confessing Christos Curios – Christ is Lord – was a direct and political subversion of the Roman pledge of allegiance Caesar Curios – Caesar is lord.
We could explore those links and roots in depth, and it might be interesting and fruitful to do so, but I’m not going there this morning.
I believe that we live our entire lives as if on a high wire stretched out between palms and passion, kept balanced on this wire by our real hope of resurrection, and by the real experience of rising again when we fall.
Confessing Jesus gives the journey meaning and grounds it in a story of rising, falling and rising again. That is to say, confessing Jesus grounds our lives in hope, and you cannot live without hope.
Each of us has countless opportunities to embody such hope. In broad strokes, embodying resurrection hope is what we are living for as followers of Jesus. What do we think is keeping us from living fully into that hope?
I was graced with a couple of such opportunities last week. First, on Monday, when I joined People of Faith for Equality Virginia in witnessing to God’s love in the face of the hate-filled presence of Westboro Baptist demonstrators at George Mason.
While standing with the GMU students I had a brief conversation with one of the kids, Carl -- or Carly, as this transvestite-for-a-day-of-solidarity introduced herself. Carly spoke of growing up in the Roman Catholic church and leaving it behind because the church has so little tolerance for so many friends.
There was sadness in this story because of what has been lost. There was a falling, a hitting ground, suffering, passion.
But there was compassion – suffering with – and a joyous rising as well as people of faith showed up to proclaim love in the face of hate, to say a bright, shining “yes” against an ugly “no,” and to witness to hope and the possibility of living fully into it.
Later in the week, I had the opportunity to sit down with a young man from Sri Lanka who works there with a small gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender rights organization. In Sri Lanka it is against the law to be in a same-sex relationship, and the work that Dilshan is engaged in can be dangerous. His church would not accept him if he were out and open in that context.
He was curious about how we had arrived at this point of, well, grace, and was eager for suggestions that might help his community.
What is keeping him from living fully for the thing he wants to live for? Well, to begin with, the very real threat of death.
How to stay on the high wire and not tumble to a very rocky landing?
How to live into hope in such a hopeless situation?
I don’t pretend to know the answers to such questions, so all I could offer to him is shared stories. Stories of solidarity, of commitments, of lives and risks shared to create a community committed to the radical welcome of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
In the end, that is all that we really have. Our own commitments. Our own stories. Our own lives stretched between palms and passion, between celebration and suffering, between birth and death … and rising again and again and again in the face of falling down.
For young gay men and lesbian women in places such as Sri Lanka we can offer our stories as a source of hope. For those at George Mason, we can offer our bodies as incarnate testimony to those same stories of hope. For those suffering from injustices and violence, we can offer our lives – our lives.
That is all that Jesus asks when he says, “follow me.”
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself.
Let us pray.

Embodied Faith

2009-03-02T16:37:00.000-08:00

March 1, 2009
When I was working on my doctoral dissertation many years ago, my advisor made an observation on an early draft saying, “David, you write beautifully; and sometimes you substitute the turn of a phrase for an argument.” While I was in seminary, my homiletics or preaching professor said to me, “David, you love your words – sometimes maybe too much.”
So, for Lent this year, I am giving them up.
We say here often that we “preach together,” that we share rich conversation about the way the Spirit is moving in our midst, speaking to us through ancient text and contemporary issue.
It’s time to put that to the test together.
So, for these March Sundays, I have selected a series of texts under the broad heading “embodied faith” and I want to talk together about how our Christian faith is an embodied one. I will follow up our conversations with some Monday morning reflections on my blog, but I am going to let go, for Lent, of the writerly voice that sometimes closes my own heart to the voice of the Spirit.
Scripture is an earthy text. People walked the faith. They drank it in. They were invited to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”
Somewhere along the line, we lost much of that. We fell for the more philosophical separation of mind and body, of spirit and flesh, that would have felt foreign to Jewish thought that framed Jesus’ worldview. But if God breathed spirit into dust to create life – and, yes, I understand that metaphorically – if God breathed spirit into dust, then from the beginning there is divine concern for the material world, for the stuff of the earth is the stuff of life and of spirit.
So throughout Lent, we will focus on that as we preach together.

Glimpses of Light

2009-02-24T11:30:00.001-08:00

February 22, 2009
2 Kings 2:1-12; Psalm 50; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9
What does it mean to belong to a community that is faithful?
What does it mean to belong to a community?
What does it mean for a community to be faithful?
What does it mean to belong to a community that is faithful?
The disciples, confronted by these fundamental questions, could not see the answer when it was right there in front of them in “dazzling white such as no one on earth could bleach it.”
I find that profoundly comforting!
Let’s unpack the questions and the disciples’ response as suggested in the extremely strange, disquieting, decentering, unsettling, disturbing story of the Transfiguration of Jesus.
As I suggested last week, stories illuminate stories, and, as Calvin taught, scripture interprets scripture. The lectionary doesn’t always serve that teaching, but this week it surely does in holding together the apotheosis of Elijah with Jesus’ transfiguration.
If nothing else, these are two equally strange stories.
As Elijah prepares to depart this earthly plane, his disciple, Elisha, seeks understanding, as one imagines Jesus’ disciples seek as he hints at the cross that awaits him. The company of prophets keeps telling Elisha that he is about to be left behind, on his own; powerless and bereft they seem to believe. But while the disciples, as exemplified by Peter, want to pitch a tent on the mountaintop and hold on tight to the present moment, Elisha, on the other hand, says to Elijah, “I’m ready to be on my own, all I ask is for a double share of the spirit that I see alive in you.”
In other words, “I am ready to go down off this mountaintop experience that I have had as your disciple and take that spirit I’ve experienced into the world.”
That, it seems to me, is the word of the Lord for the church today. Go down from the mountaintop into the world; take what you experience in the intimacy of this gathering and carry it into the world.
So, if that is, indeed, the word of the Lord for the church, then what does it mean to belong to a community that is faithful, that listens to the word of the Lord, discerns the movement of the Spirit, and seeks to follow Christ into the world?
I’m not going to venture a guess or propose anything like a comprehensive answer to that incredibly complex, rich and fundamentally important question that presses in upon the church today with life or death urgency, but I am going to suggest a way forward.
As many of you know, I spent three days at Stony Point Center in New York last week in a gathering of people called together by Rick and Kitty Ufford-Chase to consider together one question: what must we do to lay the foundation for a Christian community that supports its members to lead faithful lives, deepen their spiritual practices and support justice and non-violence in the world?
My concerns with that question are both deeply personal and vocationally corporate. That is to say, engaging that question matters to me, deeply, and, I believe, it matters to us. As we were sharing what brought the fifty or sixty of us to the conversation at Stony Point, I thought back to the first time I read Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail,” when I was in high school or early in college. That letter is holy scripture for many people, and it is packed with passages that have become justifiably famous around the world. But the first time I read it, one rather less widely attended passage reached out and grabbed me and has never let me go. King wrote, “the judgment of God is on the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”
King wrote that letter almost 50 years ago. The church has not only forfeited the loyalty of millions in the United States during those five decades, but disappoint moved quickly past disgust to dismissal for the bigger part of an entire generation.
We pitched tents on the mountainside when we were called into the valley, and we never even really attempted to scale the heights of the mountain from which to look around and see an authentic image of the beloved community, the promised land of righteousness, justice and love.
And now here we are, a much smaller collection of folks stretched in the tension between fear and faith, perched on the side of the mountain like climbers in a hanging bivouac, huddled together as the winds of change that have been blowing through our tradition for more than a half century continue to rage and we don’t know whether to try to keep on climbing or find a way back down.
Sisters and brothers, I wish I could tell you that I have been to the mountaintop, looked over and seen the other side. I wish I could promise you that I have seen the way and assure you that we’ll get there soon and very soon. But I’ve been in that same tent.
What I can tell you is what I believe Elisha was trying to say to the company of prophets: I trust the vision of the prophet and I intend to follow his way.
As for me, I trust the vision of Jesus the Christ, and I intend to follow his way.
I really do not care a whit about the questions of orthodox Christology. Was Jesus God’s only son? What does that mean, really? How would one know? Would there be a DNA test for paternity?
But I do know this: at his baptism, on the mountaintop, on the cross and at the empty tomb, God was saying, “this is my beloved, listen to him.” Listen to him. Follow his way.
That, to me, is the sum total of what it means to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior.
The listening is not simple, nor the way easy, but the choice does lie clearly before us: choose this day whom you will serve.
As for me and my household, we will follow Jesus.
What does that mean?
I believe that as we live into the answer to that simple question, we also find the answers to the questions with which we began.
What does it mean to belong to a community that is faithful?
What does it mean to belong to a community?
What does it mean for a community to be faithful?
What does it mean to belong to a community that is faithful?
For those of us who live somehow under the sign of the cross, for those of us who are trying to follow Jesus, what it means to be faithful members of a faithful community is inextricably bound to that following, that discipleship.
So let me close with a couple of concrete invitations to discipleship.
Lent begins this Wednesday, a season of 40 days that is a gift to us. How will you use it?
Over the past 18 months or so at Clarendon, we have transformed our space remarkably, for which we all give thanks (especially to Karen Kimmel and Suzanne Fuller, but also to everyone who has faithfully stewarded money and time to this effort). We have a strong and beautiful foundation. Now it is time to take that deeper, and transform our spirits.
Beginning next Sunday afternoon, we will start a Lenten journey of transforming spirits. I invite each of you to participate. I’ll warn you right now: we’re going to be doing a whole lot of praying together, and that can be dangerous! Prayer changes things! Prayer changes people! Prayer changes churches! Just look what happened on that mountaintop with Jesus. Transfiguration happened!
I know that not everyone can be part of these gatherings, and that’s OK. But each and every one of you can pray for these prayerful gatherings. So please, for the 40 days of Lent, set aside a few minutes each day to hold the transforming spirit group in the light – and especially set aside a few minutes on Sunday afternoons to hold us in the light. We will include the names of participants in weekly e-mail blasts and Sunday bulletins as soon as we know exactly who is participating.
So there are two invitations: participate and pray.
Here is a third: if you have been coming to worship, participating in various activities of the community, putting your toes in the water – all of which is great – take another step this Lent and explore what it might mean for you to become a member of the congregation. Beginning next Wednesday – the one after Ash Wednesday – we will gather a group for three weeks to talk about what it means to be part of a faithful community at Clarendon, and what it means to join the congregation. Participating in these gatherings is not a final decision, but it is an important step. As Jesus said, “come and see.”
Here is a final invitation: Come here this Wednesday evening at 7:00, to worship and commit yourself to a Lenten discipline. Come each Sunday of Lent to worship and renew your spirits. Worship is our mountaintop.
We’ve been dangling on the side of the cliff for far too long. Visiting the mountaintop is lovely and vitally important. We need to catch glimpses of light. But you cannot live on the mountaintop, because we are called back into the valley and the long, faithful journey to Jerusalem.
Lent is a season for this journey. Come and see. Come and follow. Amen.

Liberating Touch

2009-02-20T08:05:00.000-08:00

Mark 1:40-45; 2 Kings 5:1-14
February 15, 2009
Sometimes it takes stories to interpret and understand stories. That was my experience this week as I wrestled with the healing stories we’ve just heard from 2 Kings and Mark.
I came across two brief anecdotes this week – one in the Post sports page and the other from NPR’s “Story Corp” series. In the Post, a sports writer shared the story of boarding a train at Union Station this week coincidentally with Caps owner Ted Leonsis, one of the wealthiest people around town. As they made their way toward the Philadelphia-bound train, the writer, and most of the other passengers, passed an elderly homeless man sitting on the cold concrete concourse. Leonsis stopped, spoke with the man, noticed that he had no shoes, and gave him money to buy some.
The Story Corp bit featured a 90-something-year-old wedding ring salesman in New York, who began his career in Manhattan’s diamond district at the end of World War II. He told about how he used to come up to couples kissing on the sidewalk and hand them his business card, because, he said, “married people don’t kiss on the street.” It was a wonderfully charming little slice of life.
Hold on to those two brief narratives, because we’ll come back to them.
So, what’s up with these two leprosy stories? In the older story, from 2 Kings, we have a king who refuses to believe that healing can be so simple a thing as bathing in the waters. He’s ticked off because he believes there should be some high-toned to-do worthy of his exalted status. Why any old fool can go jump in the river! He’s a king, after all.
And then there’s Jesus, in these early Markan stories: He is going from town to town healing people, news is spreading, and he’s telling the healed to remain quiet about the experience.
What’s going on in these stories? What have they to do with us?
Calvin observed that scripture interprets scripture, and he was right, but it helps a great deal if we understand also a few of the cultural clues. In this case, the story from Kings provides the clues we need to understand Jesus and to let scripture interpret itself for our lives.
Why is the king upset about the simplicity of the healing?
Was it simply a case of misplaced pride? Of royal pomposity?
To be sure, there is some of that, and the humor of the tale lies in how the king’s aides puncture his pride by saying, “your most royal highness, if he asked you to do something difficult you’d surely comply, but when it’s simple you pitch a fit. Don’t be a dolt; be healed.” Of course, they put it more politely lest they be tossed into the river, but we get the point and the joke.
However, underlying the story, and also lying behind the reason that Jesus is moving from town to town, is the deeper story of the role that disease played in the ancient culture in which these stories unfold.
We all know that ancient people did not have access to modern medicine and the science that lies behind it. Too often, though, we miss in these stories the worldview through which disease itself was understood.
Why was Jesus moving so rapidly from town to town? Why was he insisting on a relative news blackout?
It cannot be that there was a general disdain for health care providers, or, closer to the mark, for healers. There were such folks in every community, as common as ring salesmen in New York, perhaps. If Jesus were merely the latest practitioner to come on the scene offering balms for wounds and concoctions for common ailments, he might have disturbed the competition a bit but he would not have drawn the threats and condemnation of the powerful – the social, religious, political, economic powers that be – of the nation. If he were simply another healer, one can imagine him setting up shop in Galilee and the townsfolk saying, “you got an ache, you gotta go see this Jesus; he’s got some healing potions and boy does he tell a good story, too.”
But he was more than that. His healing touch was laying bare fundamental contradictions and injustices at the heart of the social order.
In other words, the healings are not about miraculous power, and the silence is not about a “messianic secret.” The healings are about social liberation as much as they are about individual restoration, and the silence is strategic.
Ched Myers explains it this way:
We tend to assume that healing stories speak of the miraculous cure of physical pathologies, because in our modern worldview illness is equated with biological disorders (in medical anthropology this is called a bio-medical definition of illness). The ancient world, however, perceived illness primarily as a socially disvalued state (an ethno-medical definition) - that is, an aberrant condition that threatened communal integrity.
For example, what the biblical writers call leprosy cannot be identified with what we know (biomedically) as Hansen's Disease. Their concern, however, was not scientific diagnosis of symptoms but the determination of social abnormalities requiring quarantine. In the cultural system of Judaism, these were associated with impurity or sin. [The closest we can come to understanding this in our time may be to think of AIDS in the early 1980s.] From the ethnomedical perspective, then, healing was a matter first and foremost of resocializing the anomalous person. Hence the rituals associated with the cleansing of leprosy (see Leviticus 13-14) concerned not medical cure but symbolic re-entry into the community.
We will see that in every major healing episode in Mark, Jesus seeks to restore the personal and social wholeness denied to the sick by a sociocultural system which marginalizes them. His healing acts are symbolic actions directed as much at the system as the individual.
In the 2 Kings story, the king desired a ritual befitting his place in the social hierarchy. To be restored to his position of great power required a fittingly complex ritual. That he could be restored to that position with so simple a gesture is, in part, the prophet’s way of saying, “you are not as powerful as you believe yourself to be.”
Jesus’ healing gestures, likewise, are ways of saying, “you are not marginalized in the kingdom of God, and you should not be marginalized in this social order either, because if you are to be transformed, everything must change! Everything must be transformed. The social hierarchies by which we measure meaning and value must be transformed.”
Jesus was going from town to town to share the good news of transformation, of repentance and restoration, to be sure. He was also going from town to town because if he stayed put he would die because he was upsetting the applecart.
He healed on the Sabbath and in the temple square because the time and the location underscored and reinforced the social order and the power arrangements. The choices were made in compassion with the marginalized individuals, absolutely; but they were also strategic and, in a fundamental sense, political. That is to say, they were designed both to the restore individuals to shalom, to wholeness, but also to undermine the arrangements of power that governed the city and that destroyed the social fabric, the shalom of the city, the right relationship of human being to human being in which mutuality and compassion are the mark and measure rather than domination and subjection.
So, how do we take these ancient stories and hear their word to us, in our context?
Well, what are the dominant world views that structure our social order? They are numerous, and, just as in Jesus’ time, they are so widely accepted and unquestioned as to go unnoticed and unremarked upon most of the time. That’s why the two little stories I shared in opening struck me this week.
We take almost for granted the story of American rugged individualism and self-reliance. Indeed, we define our very lives according to the values of that archetypal story, and we are quick to categorize as outsider, as fundamentally different, anyone who cannot make it on their own – or, more accurately, anyone who cannot achieve the appearance of having made it on their own merits and efforts. That’s why the gesture that Ted Leonsis made was, at its core, transgressive.
He recognized in the homeless man, a fellow human being. Now maybe he didn’t think of it this way, but his gesture underscores it nonetheless. He saw not a failure, an outsider, someone to dismiss as “mentally ill” or “drug addicted” or “alcoholic.” But rather, someone about whom it can be said, “there but for grace, go I; there but for family, connection, compassion, institutions that worked for me, faith, hope and love, go I.” And, therefore, I must stop and reach out a hand to share that compassion, that grace, that gift that I have been given.
None of that is to say that the homeless man wasn’t addicted or mentally ill, or that he would use the money wisely. Rather, it is to understand that we are all complicit in his condition because we are all connected in one great fabric of life. We are not individual actors, ruggedly independent of one another. When the social fabric is rent, we are all wounded by its ripping. We are not self-reliant; we are God-reliant.
Only love can stitch together what has been rent asunder, and only love can free us from the explanatory lies that we tell ourselves. Jesus understood this, and his every gesture of healing made clear that no one lies beyond the liberating touch of God’s love, and every story that suggests such fixed bounds is a lie.
Which brings me back to the jeweler. He understood the importance of the tactile touch of love and its concrete symbols. His life’s work celebrated that liberating touch, but as I listened to his story, the day after our marriage equality witness last week, I wondered what would have happened if he had gone beyond pressing his business card into the hands of young straight lovers, and gone into the places where respectable business people did not go in the 1950s and 60s and 70s and so on. What if he had reached out also to same-gender lovers and said, the liberating touch of love is for you as well?
Obviously, this is not about one old ring salesman. It is about each and every one of us. It is not only about public gestures, but also about personal behavior. At the same time, though this life and faith be intimately personal, it is also never private.
Because, it is not so much that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere – though that is true. It is more that any break in God’s shalom leaves each and every one of us less than whole.
Our task, our calling, as followers of Jesus, is to be attentive to the breaks and to be repairers of those breaches. To be attuned to the shattering of shalom, and engaged in its rebuilding. To be awake to the rending of the fabric, and alive to its reweaving. Go, therefore, into all the world – or, at least, into your own little corner of it, and reweave, rebuild and repair whatever your own hands can touch with liberating love. Amen.

Have You Not Heard?

2009-02-09T08:11:00.001-08:00

Isaiah 40:21-31; Mark 1:29-39
Let’s begin with a shout out to Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday will be this Thursday. I wonder how many churches have taken note of the day, but we should celebrate the birth of this man whose insights gave the world a much keener appreciation of the way creation works.
This month’s Smithsonian has a piece on Darwin that ends with this paragraph,
Asked about gaps in Darwin’s knowledge, Francisco Ayala, a biologist at the University of California at Irvine, laughs. “That’s easy,” he says, “Darwin didn’t know 99 percent of what we know.” Which may sound bad, Ayala goes on, but “the 1 percent he did know was the most important part.”
Hold onto that thought; we’ll come back to it.
Have you ever been the bearer of news? Have you ever been the one to break the story for friends? Have you ever been a witness who gave an account?
I don’t have any great stories to tell. I can, however, recall a few times when I was the last to know. I was holed up working on my dissertation when the federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed. I was talking on the phone with my brother at least a day later when he said something about our father’s office of years ago being right across the street from the building that had been bombed, and I said, “what building are you talking about?”
Talk about feeling totally out of the loop, and a bit behind.
I heard from several old friends last week. It made me laugh; each of them sending me holiday greetings that hit the mailbox just after Groundhog Day. No, they were not “Groundhog Day Cards” – although I think there is a market for that.
The first note came from a dear friend who is more time impaired than I am. Let’s just say that it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if the card I just got was actually intended for Christmas 2007. Still, it was great to hear from her.
And, it’s not as if I’m one to beat the rush; in fact, last Christmas I gave up altogether and just put a Christmas post on my blog. Mind you, it was a darn fine post – with hyperlinks and pictures and all sorts of information that you don’t find in your ordinary, run-of-the-mill family holiday letter. It also did not require of me anything like copying, addressing or stuffing or stamping envelopes, or that final indignity – actually making it to the Post Office.
Perhaps e-mail is God’s gift to those of us who would otherwise be slower than the Pony Express.
Of course, not all news that travels so fast is good. I also got an e-mail last week from a high school classmate informing me of the death of another classmate. I do not recall knowing the woman who just died – in a class of 250 or so that happens. But the guy who sent the e-mail – the guy who sends all the e-mails that continue to bind together my class of ’78 – is the same guy who would have been voted “least likely to keep a current e-mail list and keep us connected” had anyone thought to imagine such an “award” 30-some years ago.
The last piece of correspondence came from a woman I’ve known since we were sixth graders together – a pair of smart kids who didn’t quite fit in, she because she’s Jewish in Chattanooga and me because I was forced to transfer into a new school in sixth grade due to desegregation realignments. Amy became my only close friend in that new school, and we’ve been friends ever since. I hadn’t heard from her in quite a while. Her second child is in college now, which is notable only because the spring before his senior year in high school he was diagnosed with a rare and serious cancer. He was on our prayer list for quite a while – Ethan Cohen – as his family struggled through the difficulty of his treatments for an entire year. It was truly good news to hear that he is doing so well now.
So, a trio of simple missives arriving in various forms over the course of several days. Nothing much in common among them, and nothing particularly unusual about them either, but they got me to thinking about news and connections and what we know and what we don’t know.
Have you not heard? Well, yes, I have, because a few folks took the time to tell me.
Have you not heard? Well, how would I if no one said anything?
Have you not heard? Well, what difference does it make that I did or didn’t?
Sharing news, speaking it, writing it, passing it along is essential to human life; it binds us together and creates communities.
Our communities are created by shared experience, by passing along the stories of life.
My friend Joe Nangle, writing in Sojourners some years back, said, “From time to time, we find ourselves called to form temporary communities. A stay in the hospital, the pilgrimage to an area of conflict, an occasional weekend reunion with one's extended family—these exceptional times present opportunities for true community, though we may miss seeing them as such. They surely require of us many of the same skills demanded by the more ordinary experiences of community.
In reflecting here on these occasional communities, we do not mean to include the brief exchanges of "I'm OK, you're OK." These are not the stuff of community. Rather, this meditation is about the intense life situations, which, though brief, draw us into true community. They are the building blocks of community just as surely as are the longer-term commitments to a stable and intentional group striving to achieve a purposeful communal life.”
The extent to which we create a community here can be measured by the extent to which we share the news of our lives, the stories that give shape, contour and context to our individual lives and our common life. That is surely true. But beyond that, the extent to which we create a purposeful community – that is to say, a community with a defining purpose – the extent to which we create such a purposeful community can be measured by the extent to which we share in the same news that Jesus shared – the extent to which we are, in some sense, comprehended by what Jesus comprehended.
The news that spread out ahead of Jesus – the stories of healing and wholeness – drew entire towns to him. Good news has the power to attract. At the same time, Jesus clearly understood that the good news was not the private property of a few lucky ones, but rather it belonged to all. He was compelled to go into the next town and the town after that to share the message of hope and restoration.
“Let’s go on the next town, and the one after that. They need to know. They need to hear. I have to share this news with them, because that’s why I am here.”
It’s been some 2,000 years since then. Think about all that Jesus did not know that we know now. A bit like that quote about Darwin 200 years after his birth, but I’d guess that in Jesus’ case he didn’t know 999 things out of 1,000 that we know today – the origin of the species among them.
But the one thing that he did know was the most important thing of all.
He understood, he knew in the deepest part of his being, that in the deepest part of an evolving creation – no matter how it works – at the deepest part of creation beats a heart of love for each of us, and moreover, if we live out of that reality it makes all the difference in the world. If nothing in life or in death can separate us from that love, then we are liberated from fear, set free to love and to build loving communities.
All of the news, all of the stories that shape our lives – from the mundane to the profound – are given new meaning, real meaning, ultimate meaning to the extent that we understand them in light of that one simple truth, that one message of good news.
All of the news, whether it is the current bad economic news or the latest scientific breakthrough, whether it is the birth of a baby or the death of a classmate, whether it is a recovery of health or the onset of disease – all of the news is given its ultimate meaning to the extent that we understand it in light of that one simple truth, that one message of good news.
It does not matter if you are the first to hear or the last one in the loop, if you know that you are loved and you are living out of that love. It does not matter if you are the herald of the scoop of the day or the one who is always just finding out last week’s story, if you know that you are loved and you are living out of that love. It does not matter if you are cutting edge or still in the analog age, if you know that you are loved and you are living out of that love.
Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth who does not grow weary of loving creation.
So do not let the news of the day beat you down. You are beloved, and that love shall renew your strength so that you mount up with wings like eagles, your will run and not be weary, walk and not stumble or fall.
Have you not heard?
Amen.
c. 2009, David Ensign

Finding Your Voice

2009-02-03T06:17:00.000-08:00

Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Mark 1:21-28
OK; here’s an oldie but a goodie: A priest and a taxi driver both died and went to heaven. St. Peter was at the Pearly gates waiting for them.
“Follow me,” said St. Peter to the taxi driver and led him to a huge mansion. “Wow, thanks,” said the taxi driver.
Then St. Peter led the priest to an old shack with no amenities.
“Wait, there must be some mistake,” said the priest. “Shouldn't I get the mansion? After all I gave my life to the church and preached God's word.”
“True,” said St. Peter. “But when you preached people slept. When he drove, people prayed.”
I wouldn’t put too much stock in that joke’s eschatology, but it does pretty much nail the question of vocation. Finding your voice is a tricky thing, and it is central to the challenge of discerning your calling in life. If, when you speak, no one listens, then either you are a parent or you are in vocational crisis.
I don’t mean the occasional frustrations that each of us encounters in life, but rather the feeling of utter isolation and viocelessness that comes when you are simply in the wrong place. I will remember with shame for the rest of my life that Halloween night when I was 17 years old and found myself in the back seat of a car with a group of teenagers when the driver said, “let’s go down to 9th Street and yell at the blacks” – only he didn’t say it so politely. And I sat silently wondering how I had wound up there and where my voice had gone to say, “no.” Thanks be to God, we never encountered a soul on the street, but I’ve lived with the shame of that silence ever since.
Voice and vocation share a linguistic connection, but they are far more intimately connected than a shared root word. That befits the idea that we are “zoon eschon logon,” or “animals that speak,” as Aristotle defined human beings. We can speak, and we are called to do so. Vocation and voice share more than a linguistic connection. At some level, they are about the same central concerns and questions. What is the word that you have been given to speak to the world?
Last week’s gospel story recalled Jesus calling his first disciples and promising to make them fishers for people. In other words, Jesus promised to give them a word – a message, good news – to share that would compel and invite followers.
This week’s reading from Deuteronomy contains a revealing and challenging promise from God: “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command.”
So, what is your word? And, perhaps more to the point, are you living in the right place to speak it? Is your life shaped in such a way that you can speak the word that you have been given for the world?
Mark describes Jesus speaking as “one with authority,” and we might rightly ask about the nature of that authority? Was it tied up in his messiahship, or was it something else? In other words, did his prophetic voice come from within his human being – his existence as a rational animal, a being with speech – or did it derive from a unique relationship with God?
It’s impossible to answer that Christological question on the basis of the text, because it simply doesn’t tell us. What is does tell us, however, is simple: when Jesus spoke things happened that brought the community around him closer to the kingdom of God. In the passage we just read, Jesus speaks and healing happens. Throughout the gospels this pattern is repeated: Jesus speaks and people are healed; Jesus speaks and people are liberated; Jesus speaks and people are fed.
Jesus was given a healing, freeing, sustaining word to speak and he spoke it with authority no matter what the risk. Moreover, he shaped his life such that he would be always in the places where such words were most desperately needed: among the poor, the imprisoned and the sick, the marginalized and the powerless.
He also seems to have shaped the community around his in such a way that the people could not only listen, but could also learn to find their own voices and speak their own words of healing, liberation, and sustenance.
That was and remains the test of vocation. When John sent his disciples to inquire whether or not Jesus was the messiah, Jesus says, “well, I don’t know about that; but tell John this: wherever I go the blind get new sight, the deaf get new hearing, the poor hear good news.”
The word is spoken and things happen – good news brings good results.
So, where in your life would good news be welcome? Where might a good word open the way to new hope, new promise, new life?
Can you speak a word of comfort to those who mourn?
Can you speak a word of welcome to those who feel left out?
Can you speak a word of encouragement to those who are distressed or depressed?
A word of uplift to those who are oppressed?
A word of healing to those who are sick?
A word of peace to those whose lives are broken by violence?
We all know such people and such situations. They don’t have to be the ones on the front page of the Post to gain our attention. They go to our schools. We work with them. They are in our own families and right here in the pews. What word needs to be spoken? What actions need to follow upon our words? What keeps us from speaking and acting?
Truth be told, each of us, from time to time, find ourselves standing in the need of a good word. That is, in part, why we gather here each week: to hear the good news of the gospel that God so loves the world and each and every one of us in it.
As a friend of mine sometimes says, “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it!”
That is the good word, the final word, that Jesus speaks again and again and again in the gospels.
He spoke as one with authority. Good words led to healing and wholeness, to salvation. Good words also compelled into the world an everlasting word that resounds again and again whenever the followers of Jesus speak a word of love into the world.
Speak that word with the authority that comes by virtue of being a beloved child of a loving God. That status doesn’t qualify you to be a messiah, but it does qualify you to be a servant. The servant’s word is the word of hope that the world needs just now.
Servants, as Jesus showed over and over again, speak up on behalf of those who have been silenced. Servants, in the mode of Jesus, do not remain silent.
If we remain silent, we cede the field to those who are willing to speak, no matter what they have to say. This is true no matter what field of endeavor is at stake. If, in the political arena for example, we refuse to speak up about the inherent equality of all people in the eyes of God, then those who see it differently and are willing to speak can and will create laws that, for example, restrict the right to marry to straight couples. If, in the family arena for example, we refuse to speak up about the God-given right to safety of all people when a woman is being abused then violence remains unchecked and those who abuse are given the last word. If, in boardroom, we refuse to speak up about the Biblical injunction to treat the poor fairly, then those whose god is the dollar give us subprime mortgages and a financial crisis of incalculable dimension that will count its victims first and foremost among the poor. If, within the church, we remain silent in the face of clergy misconduct we are passive participants in the breaking of God’s shalom, and we give the last word to those who have broken their word. If we remain silent, in whatever field we may find ourselves in, then we cede that field to those who are willing to speak, no matter what they have to say.
This is our calling, our vocation: find your voice – the servant’s voice – and speak a word of love.
Amen.

Fish Stories

2009-01-28T09:52:00.000-08:00

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Mark 1:14-20
January 25, 2009
We had a houseful last weekend. More than 25 people dropped in at some point over the weekend, and eight of them spent at least one night somewhere in our house.
It was great fun; a non-stop party from Sunday into Wednesday, and by Wednesday morning we were tired. But we still had three extra kids; young adults, actually, 22, 23, 24 years old, whom we’ve gotten to know through my summer work down at Camp Hanover. There they were, just hanging out in our living room chatting. Eventually, we went out to lunch and got them on the road back down I-95 sometime close to 2:00.
Cheryl and I were laughing together in a bemused bewilderment that these three great young adults would choose to hang out with a couple of old fogeys for way longer than good manners required, and wondering just what was up with that.
Then I read again our passage from Mark, “follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”
And it struck me quite powerfully that such fishing is at once incredibly complicated but also remarkably simple. People, unlike fish, want to be reached out to. People want to be drawn into a net of care and concern. People want to be caught by something bigger than they are. And, well, people want Barackalate Chip cookies.
The kids who were staying with us over the weekend are just like thousands upon thousands of young adults in this culture: they want to be reached out to, drawn in, and caught up in something bigger than they are.
But they don’t want to be trophies hung on the wall of an old sports club.
Enough with that metaphor! They don’t want to hang out in a church that does not speak to their lives, and that feels like their father’s Oldsmobile. Neither do I. Neither, I suspect, do any of you. They don’t want to gather with judgmental people who don’t accept their friends, and they’re not interested in religious leaders pushing old dogmas. Neither am I.
I suspect our young friends – two of whom are wrestling with their own sense of call into ministry – see in me a model of ministry that is not like so many others they’ve encountered, and maybe they find it compelling, or, at least curious.
Why am I sharing this?
It’s not to toot my own horn, but rather to invite you to toot yours. Back to the fishing metaphor: it’s not to show off the fish I snagged or to tell you a whopper about the one that got away, but rather to encourage you to go fish.
People want to be reached out to; people want to be drawn into a net of care and concern; people want to be caught up in something bigger than they are, especially during difficult times.
I love these Biblical fishing stories because I can so easily find myself in them. Jonah? I understand him well. I know what if feels like to be called somewhere you don’t want to go, and I know some fine strategies for avoidance, too – although none quite so creative as spending three days in the belly of a great fish.
And, then, when you finally do relent and heed the call? I know just what it feels like to be disappointed in the results, and to pout when God’s notion of outcomes does not match up to my own.
That is the great, and frankly hysterical result in the tale of Jonah: he preaches repentance, the people repent, God forgives, and Jonah is ticked off because there are no fireworks, nobody going to hell! Imagine that. God extends grace and mercy, but the religious leadership gets upset because that grace is extended to people they don’t approve of!
On the other hand, imagine taking that message of grace into the world of Ninevah while Jonah is sitting by the side of the road pouting. Do you think those people might be open to hearing a word of grace?
We have just such an opportunity in the progressive church these days. For a generation, the religious loud have voiced a message of intolerance in the name of a narrow reading of scripture.
But increasingly, even in some evangelical circles, God’s constant voice of love and mercy is resounding. Among the folks crashing at our house last weekend was a young man, Andy Marin, who spoke at the Olive Branch Interfaith Peace Partnership event at All Souls church.
Andy is writing a book called Love Is An Orientation and it comes out of his own experience of growing up as a self-described Bible-thumping, gay-bashing evangelical whose three closest friends in high school all turned out to be gay. When he prayed to God in lament, asking why his three best friends were gay, God answered saying, “Andy, you’re asking the wrong question. You should be asking, how do you think your friends feel when their closest friend condemns them because of who they are?”
From that prayerful passage, Andy began a two-way ministry of outreach and reconciliation between young gay, lesbian, transgendered and bisexual women and men and the evangelical wing of Christianity.
Andy just might be a contemporary Jonah, except that he is not pouting at the discovery that God’s love and mercy and grace are extended to the marginalized, oppressed and excluded. He repented – turned – from fear and loathing toward mercy and loving. Do you think there might just be people out there these days open to hearing such a message? And we don’t have to do nearly so much translating of our own recent history as do our evangelical sisters and brothers, for we have a story of love and mercy and grace extended right here for many, many years. Do you think there might just be people open to hearing such a message?
People, unlike fish, want to be reached out to. People want to be drawn into a net of care and concern. People want to be caught by something bigger than they are.
We are called to go fish.
Of course, fishing is not always easy, and Jesus’ invitation in Mark suggests some of the difficulties that would-be fishers of people will encounter. To begin with, the enigmatic phrase, “fishers of people,” has some challenging Biblical overtones that Jesus’ listeners would have heard. Both Amos and Ezekiel employ the term “hooking fish” in speaking a word of judgment against the wealthy and powerful. Amos says this to “those who oppress the poor, who crush the needy”: “The time is surely coming upon you,
when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fish-hooks” (Amos 4:1-2).
Over at All Souls Church where Andy told his own fishing story last Monday, I noticed a plaque on the wall dedicated to the Rev. James Reeb. Reeb was an associate pastor at All Souls when, in 1965, he answered the call to join the outcasts of Selma, Alabama, as they marched to Montgomery to demand the right to vote. On March 9, Reeb and two other ministers were beaten. Reeb died two days later from the injuries he suffered.
No, the call to fish for people is not simply a matter of inviting the outcast, the lonesome and the searching to come to church. It is a call to join the outcast, the poor and the oppressed in their struggle for justice, as well.
It is also a call to us to repent. Jesus called to fisherman who had businesses, and to follow him they had to repent of working merely for their own security in order to cast their nets more broadly and work, instead, for the salvation of all.
In the end, it does come down to salvation and how broadly the net of salvation will be cast.
I know that we in the progressive church often have difficulty with the language of salvation and its undercurrent of “who’s in and who’s out,” “are you saved,” and “who’s your savior.”
Set that discomfort aside for a moment and ask yourself, do you find in this place a sense of wholeness, of healing, of well-being, of communion with God and community with one another? Do you find in this community some deeper trust in something larger than yourself? Do you find here a clearer sense of who you are? Do you find, in the stories of Jesus that we share here, a clearer sense of the way of God?
I know that I do. Sisters and brothers, this is salvation as scripture describes it. It is living into the kingdom of God – not fully and completely, to be sure, but one step at a time, day by day, as we draw nearer to God and to one another in our effort to follow Jesus.
Wholeness, healing, well-being, communion with God and community with one another. Deeper trust in something larger than ourselves. A clearer sense of who you are. A clearer sense of the way of God.
Don’t you think that other folks long for such experiences, especially these days? Might such experiences have something essential to do, also, with building a community of love and justice in the midst of a society rent by economic upheaval and injustice?
We have such incredible good news to share in this place: that in a time of economic insecurity we dwell in an economy of gracious abundance; that in a time of global unrest we rest in the loving arms of God; that in a time of widespread fearfulness we know ourselves to be loved.
The world aches to hear such news.
People, unlike fish, want to be reached out to. People want to be drawn into a net of care and concern. People want to be caught by something bigger than they are.
We are called to go fish. Let us go fish. Amen.

Inaugurating Hope

2009-01-18T20:11:00.001-08:00

1 Samuel 3:1-20
January 18, 2009
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table. Hallelujah! I’m gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days. Hallelujah. I’m gonna sit at the welcome table; I’m gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days. One of these days.
In just a few hours, down on the Mall, Bishop Gene Robinson is going to stand close to the spot where, 45 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave voice to a dream that ended in a song of hope: Free at last, free at last.
Every January I get out my King tapes and listen to one or two of his speeches. Last week, I listened again to the “Dream” speech and marveled at its prophetic beauty and its call to sing out in hope. But let’s be honest, not even Martin Luther King had the audacity to dream of a day when a partnered gay bishop would open the celebration of the inauguration of an African-American president.
That it should happen well within the lifetimes of many who heard him speak in August, 1963, would, I believe, have shocked King right beyond singing.
So let’s take a moment and give thanks that we have come this far on the way. For though we have not reached that day when every valley shall be exalted and every mountain brought low, when the crooked places have been made straight and the glory of the Lord seen by all flesh together, as King recalled from Isaiah’s words, we have come a long, long way in the past half century.
Now that we are on the eve of inaugurating a new president, well past elections and risks to tax-exempt status, I can confess what some of you just might have suspected along the line: I was an Obama supporter.
As we’ve gotten closer to this historic weekend, I’ve tried to think back to when I first decided to back the man. While I’d like to say I began supporting him when he first entered the race, I think I really fell for him the night of the Iowa caucuses when he and his family took the stage and simply looked so wonderfully presidential.
Why look back at this now, and confess it in such fawning language?
Listen for a word from God in a second reading from 1 Samuel. This one comes when Samuel has grown to be a man, and is charged by God to anoint a future king.
8Then Jesse called Abinadab, and made him pass before Samuel. He said, ‘Neither has the Lord chosen this one.’ 9Then Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said, ‘Neither has the Lord chosen this one.’ 10Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, ‘The Lord has not chosen any of these.’ 11Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Are all your sons here?’ And he said, ‘There remains yet the youngest, but he is keeping the sheep.’ And Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Send and bring him; for we will not sit down until he comes here.’ 12He sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. The Lord said, ‘Rise and anoint him; for this is the one.’ Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.
The word of the Lord. The word of a sovereign God who has just fallen head-over-heels in love with David, smitten by the ruddy-cheeked, handsome lad with the beautiful eyes.
I know just how God felt: falling for an emerging young leader who looks the part. I think that a whole lot of Americans – the sovereign public – has shared that experience over the past year.
This is, by no means, a criticism or a political comment or a lament or a love song – merely an observation. But it is an observation with implications for the church, and, in particular, for the progressive church.
For while we all hope that the new president will be wise and effective, and that future generations might look back and say that in the early days of the 21st century the country wisely chose a young leader upon whom the spirit of the Lord, the spirit of wisdom and compassion, looked mightily from that day forward – while Americans of all political persuasions hope that might come to pass, we also know that the plans of princes and of mortals are as fleeting as breath, as Psalm 146 reminds us.
In other words, we know that there is a great distance between our hopes and the present reality, and that distance cannot be bridged by any one leader, no matter how gifted, ruddy-cheeked or handsome he or she may be.
Indeed, consider the two passages we’ve read together. In the first story, Samuel is called to level a word against his mentor, Eli, whose family has sacrificed its moral authority and failed to exercise power for the good of the people. Samuel’s difficulty in discerning God’s call may well have lain precisely in his understanding of Eli’s failure and the daunting task that awaited one who would name it as such.
In the second story, Samuel is called to anoint the future king. David’s inauguration, as it were, is full of hope. But the arc of the Eli, Samuel, David story does not end with inauguration. Instead, the narrative continues into the life of another prophet, Nathan, to whom it falls to hold King David accountable for his behavior when the king sleeps with Bathsheba and has her husband sent off to die in battle.
Just as God calls forth political leaders, God also calls forth prophets to hold those leaders accountable when they sacrifice the essential values that qualify them to lead in the first place. Samuel was called to tell Eli that he and his household had strayed from the paths of righteousness. Nathan was called to tell David that he had abused his power and his office.
It is way too soon to suggest anything about the incoming administration other than this: there will come a time when it makes compromises and mistakes.
The progressive church, especially during the administration of a progressive president, is both well-suited and particularly called to that age-old prophetic role of holding the leader accountable to the better angels of his nature, and to the core values that have made him such an attractive leader to begin with.
But the prophetic role is not merely that of critic. We are not the ones charged simply with complaining about the plumbing, but rather the ones charged with calling for justice to roll down like a mighty water. We are not called to complain about the flatness of the bread, but rather to be its leaven. We are not called to note the darkness and be bitter, but rather to be a light in the darkness.
In other words, we are called to give voice to a vision of hope, and to call power to bear upon that vision.
We are not called to complain about the leader’s lack of vision; we are called to provide the vision for where there is no vision the people perish.
It does not take great vision these days to see that we face huge challenges – challenges that strike at the core of the vision of the beloved community that Dr. King cast so many years ago. When we go down to AFAC tomorrow to bag groceries it is because we know that there are hungry people here in Arlington whose numbers increase daily in the present economic circumstance. When we go to the Olive Branch Interfaith Peace Partners witness tomorrow evening, it is because we recognize that God’s shalom is being broken by our nation’s wars. When we stand up for marriage equality on Valentine’s Day, it is because we know that we are still far from that day when all God’s children truly have a place at the welcome table of our nation.
Hunger. Inequality. Warfare. They tear at the fabric of our society and stand as an affront to our God. But God will not be mocked.
When Martin Luther King told the nation about his dream, he spoke of the “fierce urgency of now.” President-elect Obama often used that phrase during his campaign. Dr. King spoke of it in explaining why a people long denied their freedom and equality could not wait any longer for the nation to rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, “that all men are created equal.” He spoke of speeding up that day when freedom would ring out across the land, and concluded for posterity that “when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
Now, with that same fierce urgency, we are called to give voice to a similar demand that the circle be widened such that, were King to be speaking this afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial, he would urge us to speed up that day when black men and women and white men and women and men and women of every race and color, join with Jews and Gentiles, Protestant and Catholics, Muslims and Sikhs, Hindus and humanists, Palestinians and Israelis, Arabs and Americans, straights and gays, rich and poor, can join hands and unite in the common bonds of our humanity, and sing together a new song of hope.
That is the continuing and animating vision of the progressive church. The prophet Joel promised that there would come a day when God
… 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 (Joel 2:28-29).
That day is today.
That moment is now, with its fierce urgency of economic turmoil and global unrest. Followers of Jesus are called in every time to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God.
This remains our calling. To live into it requires us to step out in faith, and to engage the powers that be. The stories from Samuel that we’ve read together this morning serve as reminders of the difficulties of that relationship and the traps and stumbling blocks inherent in the dance between power and the prophetic call to justice.
But we have a great gift to offer to the present moment that responds directly to that difficulty: the gift of love. For what else is our ultimate calling as follower of Jesus than to offer to the world our love? Dr. King understood well the difficult weave of power, justice and love. As he said toward the end of his life, “What is needed 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.”
Followers of Jesus in every moment are called to exercise just such power as we work to do justice, to make peace, to welcome the stranger and care for the least of these our sisters and brothers, to bind up the broken, to comfort the brokenhearted and to love one another always.
This remains our calling, and our circumstance demands renewed vigor and focus such that we recognize in this moment the kairos time of God’s hope, that we give that hope voice and substance, and that, hearts filled with God’s hope, we lift every voice and sing:
Lift every voice and sing,
'Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won.
May it be so, for all of us. Amen.

Standing at the Edge

2009-01-12T08:39:00.000-08:00

January 11, 2009
I was going to write a nice reflection on call, spirit, being on the verge of responding, standing at the water’s edge, in keeping with the water theme this morning. It was going to be full of bad water puns; English is flooded with them and there was a rising tide just waiting to burst through the dam of my imagination … but, enough.
Instead, let me offer just a couple of thoughts arising from scripture, and then close with a song.
First point: remember that scripture is full of images of the water’s edge, and the decision suspended in that liminal space where the water meets the land. Think of Moses’ mother, holding a basket in her hands, standing at the edge, wondering if she is doing the right thing, and what will become of her child. Or, years later, that same Moses, standing at the edge of the ocean wondering, “what now?” Having led a stiff-necked people out of Egypt, now they stand at the edge, not knowing how they’re going to get across. Or Jesus, standing at the edge of the river, looking out at that crazy John the Baptist and not knowing where this will lead, and wondering, “what am I getting myself into?”
Have you ever felt that way? Standing at the edge, pondering a decision, not know how it is going to turn out?
Second point: our lives are scripture. They testify to our faithfulness and our struggles. Take a moment, and turn to the folks around you, and share that experience of standing at the edge.

We are standing at our own edge, as a congregation. Session spent yesterday together in a planning retreat, and we talked about the energy and excitement that we have felt in this place during the past year. We feel – and I know from many conversations – that many of you feel as well that we are standing at the edge.
The good news is, as the scriptures that we read and as so often the stories of our own lives testify, we are not at the precipice overlooking nothing all alone about to plunge. No, we stand at the edge of a future that God is calling us into, upheld by that same spirit that descended as a dove over the waters of Jesus’ baptism, promising that we are loved, that we are not alone, and that no matter what the future holds, God is with us.
As I thought about the images and ideas that press in upon us when we combine ordination with the Sunday on which we recall Jesus’ baptism – his own ordination, God’s claiming Jesus for the call that was before him – I realized that my good friend, Noah Budin, had already written this sermon and managed to put it into a song.
So, here’s Edge of the Ocean:
Are we standing at the edge of the ocean
Just to keep our feet upon the land?
Are we holding tight to our devotion
In our grip or is it slipping through our hands?
Have we been brought to the edge never to have crossed?
Had we entered the desert never having gotten lost,
Would we still fight for freedom no matter what the cost

El Emenah, Hineini, I am ready
I know not what may lie ahead upon the road
But I am ready

Have we scaled the slope of the mountain
Just to marvel at its size?
What if he did choose another way around,
Then would our lives have been realized?
What if he’d not taken those first steps from his land?
And what if he’d not followed, scared to heed the command?
Had they not been so willing, might they not have seen the ram?

Does our fate hang suspended in the air,
Like the hand that held the knife?
Is it enough just to say that we were there?
Or to live a righteous life?

We have crossed the sea and barren sands of the desert
And we’ve seen the mountain top.
And we’ve marched the streets of Selma, Alabama
Have we walked those many miles just to stop?

Can we drop our swords and lay our hands upon the earth
And feel the restless waters meet the river at its birth?

He could not find one righteous man, but should we stop the search?
c. Noah Budin, 2008.

The Hebrew – El emanah, hineini – translates roughly as “God of faithfulness, here I am.” Here I am, Lord, standing at the edge, listening for your calling, ready. Here I am; I am ready. Amen.

My Left Foot

2009-01-07T10:53:00.001-08:00

Sirach 24:1-12; Wisdom of Solomon 10:15-21
January 4, 2009
You’ve all heard variations on this joke: What would have happened if it had been three Wise Women instead of three Wise Men?
They would have asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, and brought practical gifts.
A version of it graces the last page of this month’s newsletter. It’s an oldie but a goodie, and it’s appropriate to this Sunday just prior to Epiphany.
But it makes me wonder – not what would have happened if the wise men had been wise women – but what would have happened if I had been called to be a wise man.
Would I have had the patience to look for a star? The curiosity to wonder about it? The wisdom to follow its call? The courage to defy Herod? The persistence to travel from afar? The piety to worship? Would I have paid attention when Wisdom became “a starry flame through the night”?
The challenge of the Christmas story lies in the fact that these questions – and a host of other similarly challenging ones – are not reserved for misty memories, but instead press in on us right now, in this moment, in our lives.
Why? The readings this morning tell us.
As Michaela Bruzzese reflects in Sojourners this month, these readings from the wisdom tradition, taken along with the gospel reading from John – the word became flesh and dwelled among us – “feature God’s presence as Wisdom and word-become-flesh: Jesus.”
The wisdom tradition, with its feminine image of the divine Sophia, is both a long-standing voice in Israel’s history and also the reminder that God is deeply concerned with this moment, with the here and now and not just with that ancient and not so ancient history. Bruzzese cites Elizabeth Johnson’s reminder that “Unlike the historical and prophetic books, the wisdom tradition is interested not only in God’s mighty deeds in history but in everyday life with the give and take of its relationships.”
Wisdom is the wise woman who brings the practical gifts, and her divine presence, just as in Jesus’ life and teaching, calls us to deeper concern with the place of that life and those teachings in our own day-to-day.
Over the past couple of weeks – with perhaps a heightened awareness – most of our day-to-days have involved the exchange of stuff. That is to say, most of us have bought, and some of us have sold, and many of us have given and most of us have received various and sundry things. And every exchange, and every thing has a history and involves us in various relationships.
And Wisdom demands of us an accounting. What are these stories? What are these relationships? Where is God in the midst of the buying, selling, giving and receiving that marks not only Christmas, but literally every day of our lives?
These questions came home to me in the most mundane way just after Christmas when I went to buy a new pair of running shoes.
As I was checking the size tags on each of the shoes, I noticed happily that the left shoe was made in the U.S.A. I felt good about that knowing that the workers were probably reasonably well paid and treated decently. Then I checked the right shoe to make sure is was the same size. It was; but I also noticed that it was made in China.
One pair of shoes, bought in a store in Falls Church. One of the shoes made in one of six U.S. factories, the other somewhere in China. Welcome to the global economy.
And, welcome to the challenge of trying to bring the deepest values of our faith into the daily transactions of our lives. What are the stories of the workers who made my shoes? How am I drawn into relationship with them? What would it mean to live in right relationship with them?
Literally every step I take implicates me in this relationship.
If I am going to say of myself that I walk with Jesus, that I am trying to follow the way of Jesus, a way of right relationship of compassion and solidarity with the least of these my sisters and brothers, what of my left shoe? What of my right one?
One of the other things that came into our household this Christmas season was the DVD of Chariots of Fire. My favorite scene in that wonderful film about runners, comes when Eric Liddell, a devout Scottish missionary is confronted by his sister, who is concerned that Eric’s running is distracting him from his calling to serve God in the mission field.
Eric acknowledges his divine calling, but reminds his sister that God “also made me fast. And when I run, I can feel his pleasure.”
I love that line, because it reminds me that God does call us all into various ministries, to various types of service to the kingdom of God, to various ways of following Jesus in our daily lives. But at the same time, God delights in our play, in our joy.
It struck me, as I went for my first run in my new pair of New Balance shoes, that maintaining our balance may just be the biggest challenge we face in trying to live faithful lives, and that our efforts to do so – more or less successful, more or less compromised, more or less consistent as they may be – our efforts to do so bring God pleasure. That is enough for the day.
Amen.

The Morning After

2009-01-03T08:08:00.000-08:00

December 28, 2008(Mary Brennan Thorpe)
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.”
In a few days, on January 2nd, my son Christopher will turn 25. A momentous birthday! And even though it has been a quarter of a century, I remember the moment of his birth as if it was yesterday. I remember the twenty hours of labor and a difficult delivery, I can see him, wiggling in the doctor’s hands, and looking at me and his father with the same skepticism and challenge that is still in his face, 25 years later. And I can remember the joy that filled my heart to bursting, the tears in our eyes, his father’s momentary weak knees, the bliss of the moment, as if it was yesterday. It was a gift, one that remains with me in my memory and in Christopher’s presence still.
After his birth, exhausted and happy, I fell asleep, dreaming of all the possibilities that awaited my little newborn son in the years ahead.
A few hours later, I woke up. The morning light streamed through the window. It couldn’t be possible that it was time for me to wake up – I was still so very tired – but the nurse was bringing Christopher in for feeding. There I lay, sweaty and lumpy and swollen. Parts of my body that I hadn’t even known about before hurt. A lot. My head ached from the spinal block I had been given. As the nurse gave me the baby, and as that baby latched on for his first feeding, I realized that the blissful dream that had filled my head just a few hours before was being obliterated, replaced by the reality of this child, attached like a leech to a tender portion of my anatomy. It dawned on me that this was the start of decades of him being attached to me either figuratively or literally. Oh, my. What had I gotten myself into?
Don’t get me wrong. I desperately wanted and loved this child, but the reality of motherhood suddenly was a whole different thing from my fantasy of motherhood.
There is that moment when we wake up…the morning after the night before. The pleasure of that night-time celebration is replaced by the prickly fact of the next morning, and the work that awaits us.
Those of you with little children may know that morning-after feeling all too well. You may have gone to a lovely Christmas Eve service, put the children to bed as they dreamed of Santa Claus, and were shocked by that five a.m. wake up call. “Mommy! Daddy! Santa came!” You dragged yourself out of bed – you had been up until one a.m. assembling the new bike – and went downstairs, as the children tore through the gifts under the tree. In what seemed like forty-eight seconds, every gift was unwrapped, the children had already had one fight over who got to play with the new game system first, the living room was a shambles of torn wrapping paper and ribbons, and a long day was ahead. There was work to be done. Not just the clean-up of the detritus of the gift-opening, but perhaps a meal for extended family to be cooked, or a long drive to another relative’s house. Before anything else, though, you needed to start the coffee and cook breakfast.
It’s the morning after the night before, and there is work to be done.
For those of you without children, it might be a slightly different story. Perhaps you’re planning a New Year’s Eve party, elegant, with great wine or champagne, delicious food, exquisite decorations, laughter, music…and you will wake on New Years morning with a sour stomach and a headache, knowing when you go downstairs there will be dirty glasses in the sink and the sour smell of the trash you really should have put in the garbage can before you went to bed….a morning of clean-up, perhaps a call to a friend to apologize since you inadvertently offended him with your silly teasing the night before. Work to be done, the morning after the night before.
Once we’ve unwrapped the gifts, once we’ve thrown the party, there is work to be done.
So, too it is with this gospel of John that we are hearing this morning. The remarkable thing about the Gospel of John is that, unlike the other three gospels, John gives us a synopsis of the whole story in just a few verses right at the beginning of the tale. It’s worth repeating:
He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.
Talk about the Cliff’s Notes version of the entire story of our Lord! Jesus Christ, one with the Father Creator, who came to earth….and those who should have recognized him, the great gift of the incarnate God, did not know him. But some did recognize him, and those who did became the adopted children of God.
This extraordinary Christmas gift, this God made man who lived among us, this incomparable joy. How could anyone not accept him?
Perhaps it’s like the Christmas gift we receive that’s so precious that we put it up on a shelf, for fear we will break it. Or that we want to save for a special occasion – I’m thinking here of the discovery that I made after my mother’s death, when I was cleaning out her home to prepare it for sale, and saw a number of gifts I had given her, beautiful soft nightgowns, silk scarves, lambskin gloves, still wrapped in the tissue paper from the gift box, saved for “good” as she would have said. It saddened me that she never got to truly enjoy those gifts as I had intended when I gave them to her. It felt, in that moment, like a waste of a good gift, even though I knew she appreciated the gift, to keep it wrapped up in tissue paper in a drawer, rather than to feel that whispery silk around one’s shoulders, that soft lambskin on one’s hands.
No, we believe that gifts demand their use, demand a response. When the little girl opens the beautiful American Girl doll under the tree, we say, “Let’s call Grandma and say thank you for that pretty doll.” When the little girl’s cousin comes over for Christmas dinner, we say, “Why don’t you and Hannah play with your new doll and your other things? You know how to share.” And when the little girl grows older, you and she decide another little girl, perhaps not so fortunate, would love to have a doll like this, loved and cared for by one girl, then passed along to another, and you donate it to a charity that will find a good home for this precious gift.
Gifts demand a response, and that is the overarching message of these few verses from the Gospel of John. On Christmas, we received a marvelous gift, Jesus come among us, to perfect our relationship with God by perfecting our relationship with each other. Jesus is a gift who demands to be used daily, vigorously, with the same passion and love with which he was given to us. It is the morning after the night before, and we have work to do with this great gift we have received.
We have a choice. We can be blinded by the brilliance of this gift, intimidated by it, misunderstanding its demand, and so we wrap it in tissue paper and tuck it away in the drawer, forgotten, unused. We can hoard it, not sharing it with others who would benefit from its wondrous light and warmth. Or we can put it to use, in so many ways. We can let the light of the newborn Christ suffuse our hearts and souls, and let the warmth of that light translate into good works, to being Christ’s hands and feet in this hungry and troubled world. We can tell those who do not know the story why that light shines within us, so they too can share the gift, and pass it on.
Gifts demand a response. Gifts should not be ignored. That dishonors the giver as well as the gift. The morning after, having said our great “thank-yous,” we have work to do.
So what will your response be? Will you carry the message of our gift, our newborn Lord and Savior, into the world? Will you share that light, that message, those works that affirm the joy we feel in knowing Christ? Or will you be among those who, in denying the insistent song of the gift, turn away from the adoption that gives us new life?
We have a choice. What will yours be?

Amen.

Sore Afraid

2008-12-25T07:06:00.001-08:00

Christmas Eve, 2008
Luke 1
“In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were sore afraid.”
Terrified. Scared witless. Filled with fear.
I sometimes think that they’d feel right at home in our age.
I was sitting over at Murky one day this week, listening to peppy music on the sound system, looking around at folks sipping warm drinks on a sunny, cold afternoon. The place certainly did not seem filled with fear.
And yet, we are a society permeated by a fear that has crept in like a cold mist and settled quietly around us. This fear goes usually unremarked upon, so unquestioned has it become in recent years. It is simply the wallpaper of our collective house.
It’s like the grass in a field of sheep: spotty in places, nothing much to look upon.
I suspect that shepherds in Luke’s story would have understood. While there were not two wars being fought around them, they lived under the tyranny of an oppressive empire governed through violence such that the cross which we think of as singular and unique was actually ubiquitous. Mary and Joseph quite likely passed quite a few of them on their trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
The economy they lived in was probably less functional than our own – if you can imagine. It was certainly less equitable than ours even though we live with the most inequitable economy in the developed world and one with a larger gap between rich and poor than at any time since the Gilded Age.
And we are sore afraid.
We probably don’t put it quite like that: we are worried, concerned, perhaps. But on this cold, dark night, if we are honest, we’ll acknowledge that there is so much quiet fearfulness around us.
Thus these days the word of the Lord to Isaiah strikes me as most wonderfully comforting:
“the people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness,
on them light has shined.
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
7His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness.”
We are that people, and this promise is for us.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it, John promised. Darkness comes in various hues in our lives but we all experience it.
When the light shines, however, people tend to react in different ways. The shepherds saw the light and were sore afraid. The wise men saw the light and chose to travel toward it.
Preaching in the middle of another era of great fear, the 1930s, the Harry Emerson Fosdick said, "In these visitors two basic human characteristics are portrayed. In the shepherds we see fear in motion, and in fact, we are all at times compelled to act in response to fear. But it offers us no enduring benefit.”
Fosdick’s defense of liberal theology against the straightjacket of fundamentalism cost him his pastorate in a New York City Presbyterian church, and his steadfast commitment to nonviolence cost him as well. In the midst of the Great Depression he wrote one of my favorite hymns, God of Grace and God of Glory, which prays, “grand us wisdom, grant us courage for the living of these days.”
But he understood that such a gift must be received and used if it is to have any meaning in our lives, if it is to make any difference, if it is to move us beyond fear. As he put it, “For strength that endures we must seek to be like the wise men, guided in the dark times of life by the light of love in motion. This is the key characteristic to a successful spiritual journey."
Love in motion. That is what the Christmas story is all about. Into the midst of darkness and fear, God sets love in motion. The question is, what shall we do in response? Turn away in fear? Or open our lives to live lovingly in response.
As John’s gospel famously reminds us, “for God so loved the world” – the cosmos, in the Greek, all of creation, not just the rich and the powerful and the religiously proper, but each and every one of us – for God so loves the world that God sets love in motion again and again and again.
We are invited this Holy Night, to open our lives to God’s creative love and find in it the deep reservoir of hope, faith and love that is fundamentally necessary for the living of these days.

The Road to Bethlehem

2008-12-22T17:43:00.000-08:00

Dec. 21, 2008
Luke 1 (selected verses)
BBC correspondent Aleem Maqbool has been retracing the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem on a donkey. Despite what our friend John Bell insists, that there was no donkey in the Biblical story, Maqbool decided that the 70 miles needed a beast of burden.
Alas, the first donkey he took refused to budge, the second one could not make the border crossing from Palestinian territory to Israeli territory because its papers were not in order. So, by day three of his trek, Maqbool was already on donkey number three.
It seems the political situation – as well as the stubbornness situation – has not improved a great deal in 2,000 years since King Herod’s threats caused the wise men to reroute their trip and forced Mary and Joseph to flee to Egypt. Indeed, UN officials told Maqbool that if Mary and Joseph were to make the journey that Luke describes in the Christmas story, they would have to go through five permanent check points, three temporary check points and get a permit to go into greater Jerusalem.
Maqbool’s reporting reminded me of the intimate connections between the spiritual and political, the personal and the public, the ethical and the ephemeral that always exist in Christian life and faith from its humble beginnings in the experiences of poor folks existing on the margins of first-century Palestinian life and in the writings of the earliest Christian communities.
The beautiful Christmas story from Luke, that we read again every year, begins not by accident with a description of the political situation. “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”
A decree: in other words, a political announcement as distinct from, say, an oracle or a heavenly announcement.
Emperor Augustus: in other words, a political leader as distinct from a religious one.
Governor of Syria: in other words, a leader from a particular political jurisdiction.
In passing, I would simply say that when folks complain about mixing politics and religion I always think of the Christmas story and “blame” the mixing on the authors of scripture who so clearly understood that if the Advent story – the coming of Christ into this world – was to have any meaning worth celebrating, worth recalling, worth opening our hearts to again and again, that meaning must essentially involve transformation – repentance, in the Biblical vernacular – a turning not only of our personal lives but also a turning of the world.
On the road to Bethlehem the intimate details of our personal stories intersect with the broader sweep of the story of our time. Each informs and shapes the other.
That is why, in the first place, we are still here. Why we gather, more than 2,000 years after the fact, to remember. But more than mere memory – which is all too easily reduced to nostalgia and fuzzy images on pretty Christmas cards – more than mere memory, we gather to rededicate ourselves, our lives and our treasures, to this story of transformation.
We gather to join together on the road to Bethlehem, to journey again to the manger.
And the manger, as Bonhoeffer pointedly reminded us, is one of two places, two sites, that cause the powerful to tremble. The second site is the cross.
For the journey to Bethlehem and the manger must also be, always and already, a journey toward Jerusalem and the cross.
The Christmas machine of American consumer culture wants no part of this journey.
But followers of Jesus have always been on this path. We know that the road to Bethlehem is also the road to Jerusalem, and we walk it nonetheless.
This year the journey finds me particularly moved by some of the folks I have been sojourning with. I hope I do not embarrass anyone here as I name a few names. It’s not my intent.
Naming names is important because it draws us down to specifics, and if Christian faith is about anything, it must be about specifics, it must be about incarnation. The Christ of our faith is, above all else, about making the generalized God of heaven specific and incarnate in our lives.
I was thinking about this the other day when I was visiting Woody in the hospital. I asked him my standard pastoral question, “how goes it with your soul, Woody?” He chuckled and said, “my soul is fine; it’s my body that’s worn out.”
Woody was part of that generation of American Mainline Protestants who wear their faith quietly, and don’t talk a great deal about spiritual practices or personal relationships with Jesus. But as I thought about making the generalized God of heaven specific and incarnate in our lives, it struck me that Woody, for many, many years, made incarnate among us, right at the front door, the deep and foundational Christian spiritual practice of welcome and hospitality. He lived a long, long time on the road to Bethlehem.
Sojourners, fellow travelers, if you will, are crucial to our journeys, and we never know just who they will be for us. I don’t imagine Mary and Joseph expected to encounter an inn-keeper who couldn’t give them a room, but who could find some space in the barn for them.
I doubt that Woody and Evelyn ever anticipated that some of us would be sojourners with them. Evelyn told me Friday that Ron and James had brought them cookies from the cookie bake last week, and that Ron had stopped by the day before on his way to work.
Imagine that: a D-Day vet and his war bride of 60-some years, being cared for by a gay Presbyterian elder and his partner of 20-some years. Two men who have, for many of us over the years, made incarnate the deep and foundational Christian spiritual practice of compassion, of being present with us and in solidarity with us in times of suffering and also in times of celebration and joy. They have lived a long time on the road to Bethlehem.
The road to Bethlehem stretches out before us, and the Spirit of God beckons us to gather round close to the manger again and open our hearts to the possibility of transformation.
Of course, we don’t have to have been on our journeys for a long, long time to make a difference in the life of the world.
I’ve been smiling all week thinking about the Christmas story as it was told to us last week by our young people. The wise boys and girl who brought their gifts to the moose/Joseph. The bunny-eared angels. Mary the cat.
It was as if the angel Gabriel came down to our Sunday School classroom and said, “Greetings favored ones. The Lord is with y’all! You have been called to bear God’s word into the world!”
As the moose/Joseph might have said, “what?”
Or, as Mary said in Luke’s gospels, “how can this be, for I am but a child.”
“Nothing is impossible with God.”
And so it was, that the youngest members of this community made incarnate for the rest of us the love and the joyousness of the gospel. They have not lived long, but they are living on the road to Bethlehem.
It is out of such living that the turning of the world, of which Mary sings, becomes possible.
Such turning is necessary, and if we are journeying on the road to Bethlehem as faithful followers of the Prince of Peace, then we do not have to look too far to understand and feel that urgency.
As Henri Nouwen reminded, “you are a Christian” – a follower of Jesus – “only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in … so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come.”
In other words, if you are to live on the road to Bethlehem, you must live with eyes wide open to what is going on all around you, while at the same time, casting a vision of that kingdom that was launched through the curious imagination of a God who understands greatness in the least of these, who understands the true power is born in a manger.
I think of Woody’s deep sense of welcome and hospitality, and understand in it the seeds also of his passionate concern for peace. The most anger I ever saw him articulate came through in his disgust with the war in Iraq and the terrible waste of so many young lives.
I think of Ron and James’ deep sense of care and compassion, and understand in it the seeds of their commitment to justice for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community.
I think of the kids’ creativity, joy and love, and can imagine in it the seeds of their future commitments –to a world that honors creation, to communities marked by deep joy, to lives defined by the love that radiates out from them. That joy reminds us that though the journey will be difficult at times, that the road we travel goes by way of the cross, that there will be tears along the way, it is a journey of life, of new life and of resurrection.
As Isaiah cried out for the exiles, “comfort, comfort ye my people,” trusting that the rough places would be made smooth, the crooked straight and that all of us will see the glory of the Lord, as the psalmist put it, in the land of the living.
As we journey along the road to Bethlehem, as we gather again close by the manger, may we together, through our hospitality and welcome, our care and compassion, our creativity, joy and love, and all the other gifts that we have been given – may our souls magnify the Lord, may our spirits rejoice in God our savior. For God has looked with favor on us. And through our lives, may the great turning of the world begin again in the small and intimate turnings of our own lives, as our mourning is turned to dancing, as the proud are scattered, the powerful brought down from their thrones, and the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled with plentiful food and the poor brought good news of a gospel that begins again and again on the road to Bethlehem.
May the way be made clear for all who want to travel it.
Amen.

Holy Waiting

2008-12-08T07:09:00.000-08:00

December 7, 2008
II Peter 3:8-15; Mark 13:24-37
On my way over to the coffee shop last week, I paused to chat with the child care center kids on the playground. One little girl was hanging from the monkey bars, just dangling there, swinging back and forth as she slowly made her way across under the watchful eyes of one of the teachers. The tiny body swinging back and forth struck me as just hysterically amusing – cute, funny, sweet and timeless.
The sight skipped my mind back to when Hannah was that girl, when her first successful crossing of those very bars was a milestone of our first year here.
I walked all the way to Murky with a smile on my face at both the sight of that little girl dangling there, and the thought of time passing. People I passed on the sidewalk probably thought I was an idiot!
Time, it is said, is God’s gift to us; what we do with the time that we have been given is our gift to God.
The season of Advent is all about what we do with the time that we have been given.
On the one hand, Advent is about waiting – which can seem utterly passive and often like a huge waste of time. On the other hand, Advent is about hope and preparation. Mostly, I believe, Advent is about living in the tension between the time that is and the time that is to come, and thus, about the tension between what we might call holy patience and holy impatience. Advent, then, is about faithful living in the present moment.
Both of our readings this morning emphasize attention to the present moment, the subtle signs of the movement of the Spirit, the intimations of God. The readings also underscore the utter uncertainty of the future. The author of the letter to Peter suggests that there is, indeed, something salvivic in the way that we tend to Advent time. “Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.”
In Mark’s gospel, Jesus puts it simply: “stay awake.”
Stay awake to the present moment. That may be the most difficult challenge of all for us – not only in the liturgical season that we call “Advent,” but in all of the advent seasons of our lives. After all, life is made up of countless small advents. From the expectation that a little girl on the monkey bars will grow to a young woman, to the hope that our work in this moment will amount to something good and lasting for the future. Through all such advent time, we are bound, it seems, to spend too much of our time worrying about that uncertain future or fretting, angry, grieving, over past losses or struggles. So we miss advent time because we are living in the past or worried about the future, and thus asleep to the present moment.
Against all that, Jesus says simply, “stay awake.”
Staying awake, being mindful, is being faithful in the between times in which we live and move and have our being. And if we are not mindful to the present moment, it is all too easy to miss the still, small voice of God which whispers to us, “be still, and know that I am God.”
I was pondering such mindfulness, such awakeness, this week and was struck by a couple of seemingly random experiences that brought to mind a pair of disparate conversations spaced apart by about a quarter century, through which, years later, God seemed to be speaking to me this week about Advent time. Let me unpack that for you.
As you may have seen on my blog this week, I happened to hit opening day of the new Capitol Visitors Center. It was an Advent kind of experience. After six years and $600 million of waiting and hoping and preparing – of the advent of the new center, as it were – the place finally experienced, a few weeks early, its own Christmas-type fulfillment. That was my own interpretation of the faces and attitudes of every staff person – from the security guards to the docents – whom I encountered in the 45 minutes I spent wandering the new center. They were all so clearly happy and excited finally to be able to play with their new toy! It was a little snapshot of hope fulfilled. Mind you, this is not a comment on the place, the money spent or any of that – merely an observation about the emotions on display among those who had waited, hoped, prepared, and expected this day for such a long time. Their patience was rewarded, their hopes fulfilled, and it was written on their faces.
The second experience involved a bit of house cleaning. I was dusting this week, and for the first time in too long I dusted the backs of book shelves behind the books. I’ve put that off for months, using my inability to do this motion as an excuse.
Anyway, in dusting behind one row of books I found a little book that had been pushed behind the others. It’s called, What Child Is This?, and it’s a simple little story aimed at early adolescent readers – you’d find it in the “young adult” section of the bookstore or library. I couldn’t remember when it came into our house, and I had not read it, so that evening I did.
It’s not great literature – a bit above average as kid lit goes in my experience. But it was a good story about foster kids longing for community, connection and family at Christmas time.
When eight-year-old Katie tells Mr. Pollard, the social worker that she wants a family for Christmas, he tells her to think little. Her teen-aged foster brother, Matt, tells her later that it isn’t true, that “Christmas is about big things.” Matt’s response to the social worker’s well-intended warning about false hopes stopped me cold: “There is no such thing as false hope, thought Matt, no matter what Pollard says. Hope just is. Every morning, every night. Hope doesn’t guarantee. Hope doesn’t promise. Hope doesn’t do a thing.
“But you have to have it.”
You have to have it. Hope, which is nothing more, but nothing less, than an orientation of faith toward the future, trusting that the intimations of God point toward the fulfillment of the promises of God.
Such hope entails, indeed, demands a practice of holy patience.
My friend, John Bell, calls it the discipline of waiting. Scripture is full of waiting, and Jesus spent a goodly bit of time in the discipline of waiting – waiting for the right time to go up to Jerusalem, waiting at the well to engage in conversation with a woman, waiting in the garden, waiting, ultimately, in the tomb.
John Bell suggests that “Waiting is an important countercultural spiritual discipline. And it is that for a number of reasons: In the first place, instant decisions, especially as they affect our life and the lives of others, are not always the best. […] Secondly, waiting allows for the development of relationships which would never mature if first impressions were the last word. […] Thirdly, waiting is the prerequisite for real intimacy. In personal relationships, the beloved will not give away what is deep in herself or himself until time and familiarity have enabled trust to develop and intimacy to be safe. […] Finally, waiting is a sign of love. Indeed it is perhaps the most clear indication of whether or not love is true.”
And so we wait, in Advent time.
But our patient Advent waiting is not a passive state, not a time of sleep, but of staying awake and aware to the subtle movement of the Spirit in our midst, beckoning us onward toward that Kingdom time in which we already partially dwell.
That thought, this week, reminded me of a pair of conversations. The first occurred more than 25 years ago, when I said to a faithful young seminarian, about something I’ve long since forgotten, “we’re closer to death every day, and we’ll all be dead for a long, long time.” He said to me, “David, we’ve only just begun to live, and my faith tells me that we will live for a long, long time with God.”
The second conversation was more recent, and was with someone from a church who was growing impatient with the pace of change and progress in the congregation. I said, “in the long run these things will happen.” He said, “in the long run, we’ll all be dead.”
There it is: the Advent tension between holy patience and holy impatience. We live in that balance, which is nothing new under the sun. Like the little girl on the monkey bars, we live suspended between a past to which we cannot return, and a future that beckons us onward in faith and hope. And as the mix of joy and determination on her face reminded me, this is life, and there is such joy in it!
Jesus lived that way, in that balance, as well.
When we pray together the prayer that he taught his disciples, we open our hearts to that tension as we say, “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.”
On earth, now, in our time – a holy impatient demand for the fullness of the kingdom of love and justice, of compassion and mercy, of grace and peace to be realized now, in our time, in our midst.
Balanced with the holy patience that understands that the kingdom of heaven is never fully realized, that it is always calling us from a future that will never be fully present and complete because creation itself is still living in Advent time, still emerging, still growing, still being completed, still to come in the future of God’s imagination.
The great gift of God in Jesus Christ, the great gift of Christmas, is to be shown just how to live in this Advent time: live into hope. For, if we are to live into an eternity in the presence of God, why not start living in that presence right here, right now?
May it be so, for each of us, this day and always. Amen.

Eyes Wide Open

2008-11-30T13:23:00.001-08:00

Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8
I’ve got an announcement to make this morning: We are expecting!
Now, before you get all excited and start thinking that Cheryl and I have had a middle-aged Moses and Sarah moment, I mean “we, here at Clarendon, are, this season of Advent, expecting.”
“Expecting what?” you may ask, anticipating the typical churchly response about “the coming again of Christ into our lives.”
But I’m not going to give that churchly response, because I’m not sure I believe it. Let’s be honest about the whole “coming again” thing. I mean, it’s been 2,000 years since Jesus of Nazareth lived and died. When we talk about Jesus coming again, do we really expect that same human being, Jesus of Nazareth, in his first-century garb with a first-century mindset, to show up in our midst?
Sure, in some more or less important sense, we do anticipate Jesus coming again, but do we really expect it?
And what would that look like, in practice?
Well, let’s see, what does it look like, in practice, to expect any particular event? For example, I expected y’all to show up this morning for worship on the first Sunday of the season of Advent. So I prepared: I found the Advent wreath and candles, planned worship, wrote a sermon, got out of bed this morning. I expected you to come, so I took action, I prepared, I made the necessary adjustments and arrangements. I put my faith in you into action. I put my beliefs into practice.
We’ve been talking together all fall about the way we practice our faith together as Christians. We’ve talked about worship, about doing justice, about contemplation, about discernment, about hospitality and about a host of other practices of Christian faith and life that give vitality to the church of Jesus Christ.
As it turns out, this first Sunday of Advent coincides with our look at the final one of these practices that Diana Butler Bass identifies in Christianity for the Rest of Us – beauty.
It is altogether fitting that we should consider beauty this morning, as we enter a season of light, of decking the halls, of filling the sanctuary with even more beauty than it typically shows.
For beauty is not mere decoration, although the idea of decoration is interesting. Like most, if not all, cultures, the ancient Israelites had a word meaning “decoration,” and its root meaning referred to the fruits that grow on the branches of the trees. In other words, to understand the purpose of the tree meant to appreciate its decorations. The decorations pointed to the meaning.
In the same way, beauty in this place points us to God, and often, in our everyday lives – out there in the world where we anticipate the coming again of Christ, perhaps, beauty also points us toward God.
So go into that world this Advent season with eyes wide open, for in a profound sense, that is how we prepare, how we make the necessary adjustments in our lives, how we walk faithfully in the world in expectation that Christ is coming again.
Beauty – whether it is natural or created by us, whether visual or aural – points us toward God as the original creator and artist. Our calling, particularly in this season of anticipation, is to live with eyes wide open.
So, as we prepare to gather at table, let’s reflect together for just a couple of moments on our experiences of the artistry of God, on places of beauty and wonder that we’ve experienced in God’s good creation.

Thinking Outside of the God Box

2008-11-24T18:40:00.001-08:00

November 23, 2008
Exodus 3:13-15; Matthew 1:1-17
One of the pieces of wisdom that old preachers pass along to those who follow in their footsteps is, “don’t preach the lists.” In other words, stay away from the genealogies – the long lists of names that crop up here and there in scripture and are, let’s face it, a bit tedious and tongue twisting to read through. But there’s a point to these lists; especially the quirky genealogy of Jesus that Matthew includes full of scoundrels, murderers and harlots. Not exactly the kind of family background to produce the king of kings and lord of lords, but then again, I suppose you can choose your friends but not your family.
Of course, that list of friends that unfolds in the gospels is not a whole lot more reassuring, come to think of it: tax collectors, more harlots, lower-class folks.
It seems as if the entire story of Jesus is about busting out of the mold.
Obviously, I’m going to like that story!
I’m not often accused of having thinking that is stuck inside of “the box.” However, I will confess that my thinking about God was stuck in the God box for quite some time and my thinking about the possibilities of church was stuck in, well, the sandbox.
My sojourn away from church as a young adult was driven by my own inability, and, to be frank, that of the communities of faith I had been a part of, to think beyond the God of height to one of depth, to think beyond a church of institution to one of movement. Perhaps I did not pay enough attention to the lists, and maybe my pastoral leaders ignored them. I’ll unpack the distinctions a bit later, but I want to suggest first that the failure was one of teaching and learning the distinctive and crucially important Christian practice of reflection or of thinking theologically.
I don’t mean by this merely the study of Christian theology or of foundational Christian texts – both Biblical and the texts produced by the post-Biblical tradition such as Augustine, Aquinas, the Desert Fathers, the writings from the Monastic periods, or contemporary classics such as Bonhoeffer, Barth or Tillich.
Although such studies are important and necessary for the living word of God to remain a lively word in our lives, I am more immediately concerned here with our capacity to see God acting in the world around us and to name God accurately in our lives. The ability to imagine God more fully and to name God more accurately for our time is a crucial task for the church in the 21st century, for when the God of love and justice is misunderstood as a God of merciless judgment human beings will call down the imagined wrath of God in holocaust that incinerates the innocent, the outcast, the marginalized and the powerless.
Therefore, our common task of theological reflection is critically important not merely as some esoteric academic exercise, but as central to our calling to live out the love and justice of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
By way of example here are two stories.
First, from one of my favorite theological texts, Sports Illustrated, comes the story of two young professional athletes who were involved, within the same year or so, in separate horrendous automobile accidents. Each of the young men was held up as a role model in his community. Each was a Christian. Each was in the phenomenal physical condition of elite athletes. One walked away from his accident without a scratch. The other was grievously injured and, if I recall correctly at this point, died from those injuries some months later.
Rick Reilly asked the one who walked away without a scratch about the accident, and the young man said, “as the car was flipping out of control I just took my hands off the wheel and called out to Jesus.”
When Reilly asked why he’d walked away without injury when the other guy, who also spoke of praying in the midst of his accident, had suffered such horrible injuries, the athlete responded, “he must not have said it right.”
When I read that story several years ago I remember thinking, “what a strange notion of God that is.”
That God, a God of height, up there somewhere with a private line that requires secret codes to access, answer prayers capriciously and pulls the strings of our lives like some mad puppeteer. As those who follow the bloodiest century in human history – as those living after Auschwitz, Cambodia, Rwanda and in the midst of Darfur – what can be said of such a God other than that he – and I use the masculine purposefully here – he is either not God or not good … or, perhaps, not good at being God.
That God is stuck inside a long, narrow, vertical box – a sarcophagus for a dead idol of our limited imaginations, and yet an image for God that remains dominant in so many churches, synagogues and mosques, in popular culture and imagination, and, significantly, in the minds of so many who call themselves atheists.
But what other images of God are possible if that God is dead?
Here’s another story, one that I posted earlier this week on my blog and beg your indulgence to repeat this morning.
As many of you know, my aunt Ruth died earlier this month after a long battle with cancer. Her memorial service was last Saturday and much of the clan gathered to worship and to honor and remember a life lived incredibly well and faithfully. Ruth and my uncle John, together with a small group of faithful Presbyterians, founded Camp Hanover outside of Richmond in 1957 – at the height of massive resistance to desegregation of schools and public accommodations in Virginia. From its inception, Hanover has been a place that welcomes everyone and its early days as a fully integrated southern institution came in the face of significant opposition.
Ruth died two days after election day and her final words, to my cousin Jo, were “see what we can accomplish when we all work together.”
Aunt Ruth was also an accomplished artist. At her memorial service, at Ginter Park Presbyterian Church near their home in Richmond, a banner that Ruth had constructed graced the sanctuary.
In her reflection, the Rev. Carla Pratt Keyes, the current pastor, told the story behind the banner. It was a story that Robert Fulghum tells about a conversation with philosopher Alexander Papaderos. In response to Fulghum's question, "what is the meaning of life?", Papaderos answered,
"When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day, on the road, I found the broken pieces of a mirror. A German motorcycle had been wrecked in that place.
"I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun would never shine -- in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find.
"I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child's game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of light. But light -- truth, understanding, knowledge -- is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it.
"I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world -- into the black places in the hearts of men -- and change some things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life."
Ruth heard that story and produced a piece of art that suggests mirror fragments falling from the Holy Spirit into outstretched hands of every size and color. Like all good art, the piece resists reduction to any single explanation or to words, but as I reflected on my aunt's final words and the testimony of her art, I thought about being one small part of the many who are holding small mirrors these days, trying to catch the light and reflect it into the darkest places of our world.
The God of a thousand shards of mirror is a very different God from the God of puppet strings.
Obviously, both are metaphors, images for a God who is beyond our words, but words and images and metaphors are all we have. More to the point, the words, images and metaphors we choose for God make all the difference in the world to the way we ultimately respond to God.
I don’t want any part of and will have no truck with a God who wills the deaths of innocents for some hazy higher purpose. But the God who, in the resurrection of the Christ, says a final, pleading “no” to such sacrifice, such violence, such murder for so-called “just causes,” well, that God calls me and compels me to act in the world with compassion and justice and mercy and love by means that are congruent with ends, by ways that reflect ultimate purposes.
That is the God I meet in Jesus. That is the God whose light spreads into the world and whose light I am called to reflect into the world’s darkest places. That is the God I meet in all those others who are also trying to reflect light into the darkness. That is the God indicated in the Quaker wisdom, “let the light in you seek out the light in others.”
That God is a God measured not so much in height as in depth and breadth – a God whose dimensions are not confined to the vertical but also include the horizontal, spreading out across creation and incarnate – not fully or completely and, too often to be sure debased – but incarnate nonetheless in creation itself, in you and in me.
That’s why the cross remains for me such a powerful symbol. Not only does it represent God’s “no” to violence, but moreover it speaks God’s final, powerful, undeniable “yes” of resurrection in the face of humanity’s fearful “no” to the love that Jesus embodied. Moreover, in its very construction, the cross draws together both the transcendent nature of God – the vertical aspect, if you will – with the incarnate One and the continuing incarnation in and through us – the horizontal aspect of God, if you will.
Thus it is that I can sing with a faith that is not triumphal but rather that of a servant, “lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim, till all the world adore his sacred name.” Amen.

Why Are We Here?

2008-11-17T14:57:00.001-08:00

Amos 5:21-24
November 16, 2008
As we consider that provocative set of suggestions about Jesus, let’s sing together the second verse of “I Love to Tell the Story.”
You might quickly recognize that we just read that famous passage from Amos for the second straight week. Last week, when our focus was “justice” reading about “justice rolling down like water” made perfect sense. But this week? When our focus is worship? How much sense does it make to read “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies”?
After all, we are gathered here to share good news, to celebrate with a certain festive air, are we not? And we are gathered with a certain seriousness of purpose that, while not necessarily solemn – as in dour – is at least decent and orderly as befits good Presbyterians.
So, what are we to make of this prophetic word today?
Why are we here?
Let me propose a way forward: let’s begin with our own Presbyterian heritage.
Our Westminster Catechism asks, in its first question, what is the chief end, or purpose, of humankind?
The answer? To glorify God, and to enjoy God forever.
We are created to worship. That is as good a place as any to begin understanding why we are here.
Then again, why are we here? In this particular space?
Again, looking at our own Presbyterian heritage, our Book of Order reminds us that
Because the identifying reality of Christian worship was neither the place nor the space but the presence of God, the early Christians could worship in the Temple, in synagogues, in homes, in catacombs, and in prisons. Wherever Christ was present among them in the interpretation of the Word and the breaking of bread, that space was hallowed. Yet the Church began to set aside special places for gathering in the presence of the risen Christ and responding in praise and service. To this day, when the Church gathers, it is not the particular place, but the presence of the risen Lord in the midst of the community which marks the reality of worship (W-1.3023).
None of this guidance from our heritage is unimportant. It reminds us, in a theological sense, of who we are and of who God is. It reminds us that God deserves worship, is worthy of our praise, and that we are, in some sense, created for that purpose – to reflect the glory of the creator and to praise the maker. Finally, it reminds us that we stand in a long line of fellow creatures who have worshipped and who have passed along to us a particular tradition.
All of that is good, and right, and appropriate; worthy of our study and respect. But it still does not answer, on a deeply personal and authentic level, the question we began with: why are we here? Put more personally, why are you here? In this very moment, in this space – why are you here?
Consider that question as we sing the third verse of “I Love to Tell the Story.”
So, what is your story this morning? Why are you here?
After several stories have been shared: “Let’s sing the fourth verse.”
Let me tell you why I am here this morning, but first I want to share a brief vignette from the conference I attended early last week up at the Stony Point Center in the Hudson River Presbytery about 30 miles up the Hudson River Valley from New York City. We were gathered for what was billed as a consultation on evangelism that was follow up to the General Assembly’s adoption of a report and strategy called Grow the Church: Deep and Wide. Former moderator Rick Ufford-Chase called the gathering together and three of the past four GA moderators were among the 80 of us in attendance. It was a diverse gathering, drawing folks from across the theological spectrum of the PC(U.S.A.), and at one small-group gathering I found myself seated next to a pastor from a confessing church, that is to say, a congregation that is part of a conservative movement of churches and groups that have reaffirmed 1. That Jesus Christ alone is Lord of all and the way of salvation. 2. That holy Scripture is the Triune God's revealed Word, the Church's only infallible rule of faith and life. 3. That God's people are called to holiness in all aspects of life. This includes honoring the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman, the only relationship within which sexual activity is appropriate. This pastor was interested in outreach – real, authentic, non-judging outreach – to the GLBT community. At that very moment I knew that I was not in Kansas anymore!
But lest I think for a moment that I was somewhere over the rainbow, in a different group someone lifted up the startling factoid that, among Presbyterian clergy, fully 70 percent would not attend the church they serve. In other words, they would not go to the church except that it pays them to show up.
So, let me tell you why I am here this morning.
First, it is not because you pay me, though I am very grateful for your continued generous support of our family both with your tithes and offerings, but also with your prayers, and, most of all, with your love.
But, before any of that was made manifest, I was on my way to this moment and this place because of Jesus, because of his presence in my life.
Now I don’t have any dramatic Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus conversion story. I don’t have any falling-down-drunk-on-my-knees-in-the-gutter-praying-for-salvation story. I certainly don’t have any turn-the-slave-ship-around-Amazing Grace story.
To be sure, I have my own share of broken places, of scars and wounds. I stand regularly in need of repentance and forgiveness. I have been driven to my knees in prayers of anger at God and at God’s church, to be sure.
And I have been reminded that, if we are doing our jobs as followers of Jesus, there will be scars.
Despite that, or because of it, I stand here this morning because of Jesus. Because the old, old story of Jesus and his love is the story that makes sense out of my life.
At the lowest point in my childhood, the morning that my father’s mental illness became horribly acute, the love of Christ was made manifest for my family through our neighbor, the associate pastor of the Presbyterian congregation in which my dad grew up. Jesus was present in the tears and the trembling.
At the most trying points of my adolescence – nothing overly dramatic, mind you, just the typical crap that comes with those years – the love of Christ was made manifest for me by the youth minister in that same Presbyterian congregation – sometimes in words of wisdom, but more often through the great theological medium of basketball and late-night tennis matches. Jesus was present in the sweat and laughter.
In college, in the midst of the typical sorting out of vocation and calling, the love of Christ was made manifest to me by the kids who responded to my leadership at a Presbyterian summer camp. Jesus was present along the rivers and around the campfires.
Are you sensing a theme here?
After the better part of a decade of holding the church at arm’s length and trying my level best to fend him off, Jesus showed me his steadfast love again through a Presbyterian session that said, “we support you” and “yes, you can” to my unsteady and doubt-filled path of decision about going back to school, again, to pursue ordination in a church with which I had and still have a passionate love-hate relationship. Jesus was present in the polity of the PC(U.S.A.).
And when a wounded part of that church lashed out at me out of its own brokenness and left me unemployed and in deep doubt and despair about the future of this entire irrational enterprise, another part of the body – with, of course, its own broken places – reached out and made manifest the love of Jesus in more ways than Cheryl and I could count, and which we could only repay by continuing to follow the call of Christ as it led us to this place five and a half years ago. Jesus was present in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
None of this is particularly dramatic – it may not even be particularly interesting!
But I cannot help be filled with wonder and gratitude as I reflect on the ways that the love of Jesus Christ has been made manifest, made real, been incarnate in and through the lives of so many men and women and children who are connected with the Presbyterian Church. That love of Christ, which calls me, comforts me, and challenges me every day, has taken me to places of far more drama than my own imagination could conceive: to witness Christ’s love among the victims of Katrina; to witness Christ’s renewal in our own worship this past year; to witness Christ’s compassion around the deathbed in a hospital in Kentucky as a broken family sobbed Silent Night and sought forgiveness; to witness Christ’s peace in a DC jail cell; to witness Christ’s forgiveness and grace in so many lives in this community; to witness Christ’s presence with grieving families. Jesus was present.
I have seen this congregation feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and proclaim good news to the poor. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, here among us. Amazing grace, indeed.
So I am here this morning for that oldest of reasons, that oldest of old, old Christian stories about the love of Jesus. I can tell you, as I learned so many years ago, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” And, what is more, Jesus loves me, this I know, for his people show me so.
May we continue to be that people and to show that love: to one another and to a world filled with people aching to know that they, too, are beloved. Amen.

Just Us?

2008-11-09T17:44:00.001-08:00

November 9, 2008
Matthew 25:31-45; Amos 5:21-24
I don’t know if y’all realize this yet, but there was an election last week. Barack Obama was elected president of the United States.
I mention this only because, well, I haven’t said a word from this pulpit about the elections – other than “vote early and vote often” – and I wanted y’all to be reassured that I have actually been reading the news and paying a little bit of attention.
Looking back at the past couple of months of worship here, I think the only direct references to partisan politics have been in reading Psalm 146 on a couple of occasions and reminding ourselves not to put our trust in princes, in mortals whose flesh is like grass and whose plans vanish with their final breath, but instead to trust in the sovereign God of history.
So, with most of the votes counted and most of the contests settled, I’m not going to shift from that scriptural advice on leadership.
Nevertheless, I do not want to suggest, and I do not believe that scripture suggests, that history doesn’t matter, that what we choose to do with this time that has been given us makes no difference.
Scripture does not describe a God indifferent to human history, but rather a God deeply engaged and involved with that history.
Thus, scripture does not invite human indifference to our own history either, but rather a faithful engagement with it.
And through it all, scripture describes an arc of history that bends toward justice, because it describes a God deeply concerned with injustice and a people struggling under the weight of oppression and injustice trying – in fits and starts to be sure – but trying nonetheless to discern and respond to God’s call to right was is wrong, to relieve the burdens of oppression, to set the captives free, to preach good news to the poor and new sight to the blind.
No single election, as I have said many times, will bring all of that about. No single candidate nor elected official will bring about the coming of the kingdom of God. It did not happen in the times that scripture reports, and it will not happen in our time either.
But we, the people of God, can and must participate in the inbreaking of that kingdom in the world in our time.
You see, if scripture is about anything at all, if the story of Jesus is about anything at all, if the history of the church is about anything at all, it is about more than just us – just you and me and our private and personal concerns, our own suffering, our own fear. Oh, that is part of the story, to be sure, but it is only one part of it. The story, you see, is not about just us; it is about justice – for all of God’s children.
Sometimes that story of the journey toward justice plays out on the grand stage of history, on the front pages, and, yes, in the politics of a people.
Last week’s election was such a moment. Whatever your partisan position, the election of the first African-American to the highest office in the land is such a moment. The gracious remarks of President Bush and Senator McCain underscore that, while many Americans will fairly and faithfully disagree with President Obama’s policies, people of good will across party lines recognize that Obama’s election says something profound and good about the long and unfinished journey of America to become a more perfect union. The hands that picked the cotton picked the president; the feet that marched for freedom stood in lines to cast the ballot.
But scripture also reminds us that the story of the long arc of justice unfolds in endless small stories, in moments when the least of these is either treated with mercy and compassion, love and justice, or not.
As a Southerner, born in Alabama when it was governed by Jim Crow laws, I found myself, Tuesday evening, thinking back to my growing up in the South.
I thought about the neighbors we had in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I was born. We lived, literally, on the dividing line between white and black Tuscaloosa. My parents became friends with the folks who lived right across the street from us, and when my mom needed to get to Birmingham one day to pick up our car that had broken down there she asked the woman across the street if she might catch a ride when her husband went to Birmingham the next day for the Alabama Black Teachers Association meeting. The woman refused to discuss it, and said that her husband would have to speak with my dad about it. After some discussion, the neighbor agreed to give my mom a ride provided she sit in the back seat of the car so that anyone who saw them would think he was a chauffeur.
I thought about those neighbors this week.
I thought about Northside Junior High School, which I entered in the seventh grade as part of the 90+ percent white student body and left after the ninth grade as part of the approximately 50-50 black/white student body. More to the point, I thought about Sterling Brownlow, a kid I played basketball with. Sterling was part of the large contingent of African-American students bussed in from across the river in downtown Chattanooga, a distance akin to being bussed from Capitol Hill to Arlington. I sat with him and his wife at our 25th high school reunion a few years back and, for the first time, asked him what it was like suddenly being removed from the neighborhood school he’d gone to and shipped to what had been predominantly white schools.
He said, “we were scared. I’d only been across the river once or twice in my life at that point, and we heard all kinds of stories about what would happen to us.”
I thought about Sterling this week.
I thought about the Northside Presbyterian Church in Chattanooga where I grew up. When I was about Martin’s age – an early adolescent – our choir director had established connections with the music program at the Seventh Day Adventist college in Chattanooga. Good Adventists worship on Saturday, which freed these voice majors to sing with our choir on Sundays. There was one young African-American man, Jesse, who frequently sang solos for us. He had a beautiful voice and a striking “stage presence.” His singing brought some of the rarest of Presbyterian worship responses: clapping. One Sunday Jesse came to worship with us, but not to sing. He sat in the pews that morning, and, by chance, happened to sit in the pew where some member of the church typically sat. I happened to be standing near the back of the sanctuary when the woman in whose place Jesse was sitting, stomped out the door muttering about “that boy sitting in my place.”
I thought about Jesse this week.
None of those stories will be written large in the history of American racial politics, but the stories of the least of these sisters and brothers are our stories, too. For whatever is done to those who live their lives in history’s shadows is done also to Christ.
I thought, also, about all the good church folks in the white mainline churches in those days who disagreed with racism, but found discussion of it in church to be disagreeable, to be too political. But when the status quo is unjust the failure to address it – no matter how uncomfortable addressing it may make us – the failure to address it condemns us all.
“When I was hungry, you did not offer me food … when I was scared to get on the bus you did not offer me comfort … when I was treated rudely in a house of worship you did not speak up for me … when I was in danger on the country highways you did not risk your safety for my dignity.”
Dr. King’s Letter from the Birmingham City Jail was addressed to the church and its leaders. His words still ring true:
There was a time when the church was very powerful--in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators."' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are.
But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.
In fact, though my heart soared watching the Obama family astride the stage of history in Chicago’s Grant Park Tuesday evening, my heart broke as I watched the election returns on California’s Proposition 8 show that, despite our progress as a people, bigotry is alive and well. And in the aftermath of that defeat, I have heard people, young and not so young, whose disappointment with the church has turned to outright disgust as leaders working in the name of Christ led the way in inscribing injustice in the law in yet another state.
You see, working for justice is not optional for Christians. It is who we become when we are baptized into Christ Jesus – we become the body of Christ in the world, his hands reaching out to help those in need, his feet walking the long dusty road toward justice, his heart defining justice always in terms of love and mercy and compassion for those who are history’s victims.
Such work in the world is inherently political because it has to do with the way we order life in the city, the polis, and it always involves power. As Frederick Douglas observed, “power concedes nothing without a fight,” and an unjust status quo always favors those who have power. But the redistribution of social power is not the work of any single political party or philosophy.
When God calls us to let justice roll down like a mighty water and righteousness like an everflowing stream, scripture does not specify the plumbing. There will be good and faithful ideas from left and from right and from in between, from those who call themselves Republicans, from those who call themselves Democrats and from those who claim no party – all simply seeking the most effective ways to let those streams run clear.
The measure of our politics, and of the church’s engagement, must not be secular partisanship, but rather spiritual discernment. What is justice? Matthew 25 paints a clear picture: justice in scripture is concerned with sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it to them. It is never perfect and complete, but is rather the journey of faithful living.
To those who are hungry belongs something to eat. To those who thirst belongs clean water. To those who are homeless belongs shelter. To those who huddle cold against winter’s chill belongs warm clothing. To those who are sick and without healthcare coverage belongs healing and compassion. To those who are held in prisons belongs justice. To those who are unemployed belongs an economic system that is fair. To those who love belongs the right to have that love recognized by civil society and by a church that recognizes that God has created us all equal and loves us all. To those whose lives are disrupted and devastated by violence belongs peace. To those who are voiceless and powerless belongs a seat at the tables where decisions are made.
To each and every one of us belongs a seat at the table that is set for us in the center of the beloved community toward which we journey with every step we take toward justice. May God guide our feet in the paths of righteousness, toward a highway of justice, in the ways of peace. Amen.