Worship Sounds

When we gather for worship, the sanctuary is filled with the sound of human voices - songs of praise, the spoken words of scripture and prayers, glorious anthems and "Little children, come unto me..." 

Then there are the sounds of organ and piano, of handbells and guitars and brass and more. Worship has a rich texture of sounds.

After 36 years "on the bench," our Organist and Director of Music Ministries, Julia Callaway will retire in the fall. Sunday to Sunday, year after year, she has played the organ and the piano, accompanied the choir and many soloists, selected hymns and musical offerings, introduced new songs and orchestrated the flow of every service. Julia has given 36 years of her professional life to the glory of God and the worship life of God's people at Vine Street, 36 years of beautiful, creative worship sounds. And while we are making plans for retirement parties and celebration concerts, we must also talk about the next chapter in Vine Street's ministry of music.

Over the next few weeks we will get together in groups of various sizes to talk about worship sounds and what kind of music leadership we will need. Our leaders want to hear from all of us so they can develop staffing scenarios that are in tune with our vision for the future.

We ask all our members and friends to participate in a triplet and/or attend a listening group. The triplets are groups of three that meet five times (between March 10 and April 15) to talk about songs, instruments, worship, and related things. All you have to do is sign up, and we'll let you know who your triplet buddies are. The triplets schedule their own sessions, and they are free to talk about a wide range of issues. We will provide a set of guiding questions/statements for each session, and each triplet will appoint a scribe to report important findings.

The listening groups are three open, facilitated sessions, each following the same agenda (so it's OK to attend just one, but it's also great to attend more of them: with different people in the room, the dynamics will be very different in each case). The agenda of the listening groups is a very condensed version of the topics the triplets will discuss. This may sound pretty confusing at first glance, but it's actually a pretty flexible process:

• You may not be able to commit to meeting with a triplet five times; but you can fit one listening group in your busy schedule. 
• You love the triplet idea, because you enjoy talking about these things in depth, and you know it's a great opportunity to get to know two other members of the church. You also want to attend at least one of the listening groups, because you're curious about what other people have to say.
• You enjoy the energy in the room when a larger group of people talk about things they are passionate about. You make sure you have all three listening groups on your calendar.

The point is, each of these combinations (and any other combination you can dream up) works; what we are aiming for is to give all our members and friends an opportunity to participate in this important conversation about leadership in music ministry. The only rule: when you make a commitment to a triplet, you commit to make every effort to participate in all sessions (that's why each triplet gets to schedule their sessions independently).

• The triplets meet five times between March 10 and April 15
• The open listening groups meet at the church on Wednesdays, March 14 and March 21 at 6:30pm, and on Sunday, April 15, for lunch after the 10:45am worship service.

To make room for sharing music and comments outside of these meetings, we created a page on Facebook. Check it out, and feel free to post your own favorite worship songs and listen to what others have posted.

This turned into a much longer post than I expected, but I don't want to end it without encouraging you to sign up for one of the triplets; please complete and submit this form, and you will soon hear back from us. Thank you!

And not be silent

I love the psalms, I have long loved them. I love them because they are so very old, and yet they don’t talk about ancient realities, but about the life I know. I love them because they are familiar, human speech.

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.[1]

Whoever wrote those lines – who knows when – gave words to a longing and a thirst we all know in our bones. Walter Brueggemann wrote, “The Psalms, with few exceptions, are not the voice of God addressing us. They are rather the voice of our own common humanity, gathered over a long period of time; a voice that continues to have amazing authenticity and contemporaneity. It speaks about life the way it really is, for the same issues and possibilities persist in those deeply human dimensions.”[2]

The voice of our own common humanity that speaks about life as it really is. I love the psalms for that voice, and for the ways in which it gives witness to the elusive presence of God – elusive, but utterly trustworthy:

Weeping may linger for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.[3]

Whoever wrote this line – who knows when – has wept through many a night and came back with a song about the faithfulness of God. I love the psalms because they invite us to sing along.

In the early fourteenth century, Richard Rolle wrote about the psalms in the preface to his translation,

Psalm singing chases fiends, excites angels to our help, removes sin, pleases God. It shapes perfection, removes and destroys annoyance and anguish of soul. As a lamp lighting our life, healing of a sick heart, honey to a bitter soul, this book is called a garden enclosed, well sealed, a paradise full of apples![4]

Wether we sing them, say them, chant or read them, the psalms invite us into conversation with God about things that matter most. In these poems and songs we encounter God, who meets us in the depths of need and on the heights of celebration. “The Psalms draw our entire life under the rule of God, where everything may be submitted to the God of the gospel.”[5]

The psalm we said together this morning ends on a note of joyous praise and gratitude:

You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you haven taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.

For a while, though, the psalmist remembers, for a while silence was a very real possibility; not the beautiful silence of holding a sleeping infant in your arm or gazing at a full moon in the winter sky. No, a very different silence, the silence that spreads when life drains away.

There was a time when everything was just right. You had a job and you loved it. The kids were doing great and you didn’t have to worry about your parents. Your doctor smiled when she saw you and said, “Whatever it is you’re doing, keep doing it.” Your friends loved hanging out with you and you enjoyed food, wine, music, movies, and making travel plans. You were the poster child of happiness and confidence – and then it was like a pit opened and threatened to swallow everything. That is the very moment where this psalm comes from: As for me, I said in my prosperity, “I shall NEVER be moved – and then my whole world began to spiral downward. The rock of my life had turned into quicksand and I was sinking fast.”

Life is about well-being and joy, about vitality in our relationships and in our sense of self, and about flourishing in all of life’s seasons; and death is, in many ways, part of life. But we also know death as a force that invades the realm of the living out of season and drains all vitality and joy from it. We know death as a reality that doesn’t serve God’s purposes, but negates them. A pit opens and threatens to swallow everything in a silence from which there is no escape.

Sometime at the beginning of the 20^th century, somewhere in southern Appalachia, somebody wrote a song that sounds almost like a psalm. No one has the foggiest idea who wrote it, and there are a lot of versions of that song scattered throughout the South.[6] I’m not from these parts, and so I first heard it when I watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? I’m talking about Ralph Stanley singing O Death.

O, Death. O, Death.
Won’t you spare me over ‘til another year?

(…)
‘O, death’ someone would pray
‘Could you wait to call me another day?’
The children prayed, the preacher preached
Time and mercy is out of your reach
I’ll fix your feet ‘til you can’t walk
I’ll lock your jaw ‘til you can’t talk
I’ll close your eyes so you can’t see
This very hour, come and go with me
I’m death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
(…)

O, Death. O, Death.
Won’t you spare me over ‘til another year?

My mother came to my bed
Placed a cold towel upon my head
My head is warm my feet are cold
Death is a-movin’ upon my soul
Oh, death how you’re treatin’ me
You’ve closed my eyes so I can’t see
Well you’re hurtin’ my body, you make me cold
You run my life right outta my soul
Oh death please consider my age
Please don’t take me at this stage (…)

This song emerged in a world where death holds great power. So overwhelming is death’s power that it has been personified, and there is no one else to plead with. There’s nothing here to chase away the fiends or remove the anguish of soul, no lamp, no light, no honey to a bitter soul.

O, Death. O, Death.
Won’t you spare me over ‘til another year?

The song ends in silence, after a plea that can imagine life’s continuation only as the whim of a tyrant.

I love the psalms because they don’t white-wash the reality of death that surrounds us in the midst of life. The psalms sing of life’s fragility, of the depth of human suffering, and even of the terrifying experience of God’s silence and absence – but they affirm, with a voice we recognize as our own, that God hears our cries and is summoned by them and is able to make all things new.

I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up,
and did not let my foes rejoice over me.
O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,
and you have healed me (…)
you brought up my soul from Sheol.

Sometimes endings disrupt our sense of life’s goodness and promise. Sometimes death invades our world and we find that our experiences clash painfully with our beliefs, even to the point of feeling abandoned and forsaken by God. Sometimes the pit opens and there is nothing left to hold onto but a cry. I love the psalms because they do not deny that reality or drown it out with happy ditties; they acknowledge it, they give us words to speak about it, and they praise God who can make a way where there is no way; they sing of new joy, new hope, new purpose, and invite us to sing along.

You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.

The psalms are songs of transformation; they declare how God has turned mourning into dancing, exile into homecoming, death into resurrection. The psalms are songs of transformation; whether we sing them, say them, chant or read them, they nourish divine hope in our hearts. They are what Walter Brueggemann has called “songs of impossibility,” songs that make the bold and joyous claim “that conventional definitions of reality do not contain or define what God will yet do.” [7] Reality is not closed in by death, but open to the creative possibilities of God who lifts up the lowly and brings down the mighty, who feeds the hungry and sends the rich away empty, who makes the barren woman the joyous mother of children, and brings the exiles home. These wonderful songs challenge everything but the faithfulness of God. Things don’t have to be the way they are, they declare, because God is God.

And so we come together to sing the songs of impossibility. Every Sunday we give praise to God who raised Jesus from the dead. Every day we say to the world, “All our presumptions about what can happen have been overruled!” And therefore no one, no man, woman, or child must be left singing songs of despair that plead with death to spare them over ‘til another year. Nothing is more realistic now than boundless hope. So let us praise God and not be silent.

---

[1] Psalm 42:1-2

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms (Winona, MN: Saint Mary’s Press, 2001), p. 13

[3] Psalm 30:5

[4] Richard Rolle, The Psalter or Psalms of David and Certain Canticles, with a Translation and Exposition in English by Richard Rolle of Hampole. Edited from Manuscripts by the Rev. H. R. Bramley, with an Introduction and Glossary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), p. 3; my italics

[5] Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1984), p. 15

[6] Kansas City Star http://www.kansas.com/2004/08/21/19245/song-oh-death-dates-back-to-the.html

[7] See Patrick Miller, “In Praise and Thanksgiving,” Theology Today Vol. 45, No. 2, p. 186

The Banquet of Community

In 1945, Rabbi Julius Mark of the Temple and Dr. Roger T. Nooe of Vine Street Christian Church encouraged the men’s clubs of their congregations to have a dinner meeting in February as a celebration of what was then known as “Brotherhood Month.”

The men met for dinner and decided to make this “Brotherhood Dinner” an annual event. Within just a few years, the women of the congregations joined them, and the tradition continued as the “Brotherhood/Sisterhood Dinner.” Over the years, other Nashville congregations were invited to participate, and the inclusion of Catholics and African-American Baptists showed the intention to build bridges where the community at large seemed too comfortable with disinterested coexistence or outright segregation.

For more than sixty years, this dinner gathering was an occasion for many to reflect on the role of faith communities in the fabric of our public life. In recent years, leaders from the Temple (Congregation Ohabai Sholom), St. Henry Catholic Church, First Baptist Church - Capitol Hill, Belmont United Methodist Church, and Vine Street Christian Church realized that our desire to include the Islamic community required some fresh thinking. In addition, we noticed that younger generations were not nearly as eager as their parents to come to the “Brotherhood/Sisterhood Interfaith Banquet.” We wanted to continue the great tradition of coming together to grow in our mutual understanding and to build and strengthen bonds of friendship in our city; but we also knew that new forms had to be found.

For a few years, I had been reading about a young man in Chicago, who was doing excellent work with college-age men and women of many faiths. A couple of times, I had heard him on the radio, thinking, “I wish we could bring this guy to Nashville.” When the congregations of the Brotherhood/Sisterhood Interfaith Banquet were looking for a new form to channel and direct their interfaith passion, I thought the time had come. I called the Interfaith Youth Core, the organization Eboo Patel had founded in Chicago, and learned that his work had gained international attention - bringing him to Nashville would be possible, but the cost was beyond reach for a handful of congregations. Then I learned that Vanderbilt was interested in bringing this recognized interfaith leader to Nashville, and the Elders quickly decided to partner with the university.

Funding from the Roger T. Nooe Lectureship for World Peace made it possible for us to reserve Langford auditorium on the Vanderbilt campus for the keynote event on February 21 (see the poster below). In the morning of that Tuesday, we invited faith leaders from Middle Tennessee congregations and schools to discuss with Mr. Patel how we can continue our work for mutual understanding. We’ll only have breakfast, but to me it will be another course in the banquet of community. Rabbi Mark and Dr. Nooe would be pleased to see what became of their dinner idea.

I hope you will join us for the lecture on Tuesday, February 21, at 7pm, and that you will invite your friends and neighbors. We encourage our members and neighbors to meet at Vine Street at 6:30pm, so fewer vehicles will be used and people with limited mobility can be dropped off near the entrance to Langford auditorium.

Unshackled Conversation

There is a saying of Jesus that makes him sound like a master thief. You may prefer thinking of him as a master teacher, but this still sounds like an excerpt from Burglary 101: “No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.”[1]

This saying is a rather curious way to describe the mission of Jesus, and it is how he himself sees it. He has entered the strong man’s house. Following his baptism, Jesus was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan, and now he’s returned, proclaiming the good news of God. He has tied up the strong one, and now he is ready to plunder the house. It may sound like burglary, but in truth it’s an invasion whose purpose is to free those in the house from foreign occupation. Jesus returned from the wilderness not to edify, entertain, or enlighten his audience – as much as we enjoy that – but to liberate us, to set us free from the power of sin, free for life under God’s reign.

Jesus is in the house, and the anxiety level among demons and evil spirits is high. They know him, and they know the purpose of his intrusion: to tie them up and throw them out. “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” they shriek. “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Jesus is in the house, their time is up, and they know it. No matter how much they cry and whimper, they can neither evade nor resist his authority. Jesus speaks, “Be silent, come out,” and the man is free.

To spread this freedom, throughout all of creation, is the ministry of Jesus. He is not just another teacher or preacher; Jesus is a Holy-Spirit-empowered invader who reclaims the house that has become a playground for demons; he reclaims the place as the home of God’s people. Those who encounter him are astonished, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” This teaching goes way beyond the best of tradition, it goes beyond building on the wisdom and authority of the past for the sake of the future. This teaching is like the voice that spoke to Moses at Mount Sinai. This is new teaching that does not become just another tradition; this is the voice that brings about newness; this is the voice that interrupts the flow of time with the fullness of fulfilment.

Jesus is not just a terrific new teacher. He speaks, and it comes to be; his words bring a new reality into being.

He speaks, and the oppressed are unburdened.

He speaks, and the possessed are unshackled.

He speaks, and the wounded are healed.

He speaks, and sinners are forgiven.

He speaks, and the evil spirits obey.

Jesus is in the house, the reign of God has come near, and it’s hard to say whether it’s songs of angels or the fragrance of new life that fill the air.

The first century world was full of demons and spirits; they regularly interfered in human life, often capriciously. It was common knowledge that they did control human behavior because they were more powerful than human beings. Most of us no longer use this kind of language; our world is not inhabited by demons and other spirit beings. But that doesn’t mean we no longer experience powers in our lives that are stronger than ourselves, ungodly powers that oppress and enslave us.

Some of you know about my friend Ruth who used to think that all those demons-and-spirits-stories in the Bible were just prescientific hocuspocus – until she did an internship with the Salvation Army. She spent time with homeless men on the streets of Hamburg, men whose lives were in the grip of powers they couldn’t escape on their own. Most of them had lost all contact to their families; many struggled with alcohol or drug addictions. And one day it clicked for Ruth.

I know there are all kinds of sociological, medical, and political explanations for the circumstances these men find themselves in. But to most of them it’s a hopeless fight against very powerful demons; they have given up and surrendered. Jesus is the only one who can save them, in a very real way. They don’t need new and better scientific explanations, helpful though they may be; they need people who love them enough to care and face the demons with them. They need to know that there is somebody who hasn’t given up on them and who is stronger than their demons. I know that One, and it’s up to me to embody that hope for them.

I used to think that demons were little more than an imaginative way to understand mental illness or oppressive political systems. But faced with the almost success of the Nazi genocide of European Jews, I keep returning to pre-scientific notions of the demonic. Sure, there are historical factors and political reasons and economic causes and cultural circumstances, but those kinds of explanations can only do the work of trying to grasp what happened from great distance, and to me, such distance feels like betrayal. I need the One who has bound the strong one to help me face the demons.

Robert Lifton is a psychiatrist who conducted interviews with Nazi doctors who had worked in the death camps. He had a conversation about this work with Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor.

We were discussing Nazi doctors—I had begun to interview them and he had observed a few from a distance in Auschwitz—when he posed this question to me: “Tell me, Bob, when they did what they did, were they men or were they demons?” I answered that, as he well knew, they were human beings, and that was our problem. To which Elie replied, “Yes, but it is demonic that they were not demonic.” [2]

In the face of evil, explanations will not do. In the face of evil we need a different kind of knowledge, one that can ground us in the presence of the redeemer. We need the encounter with the living Christ. There is no room in the house for demons and unclean spirits, but they are here because we are here. We need the encounter with the living Christ, because in his presence they become uneasy and frightened and they resist, but he calls them out and throws them out.

He speaks, and it comes to be.

He speaks, and the oppressed are unburdened.

He speaks, and the possessed are unshackled.

He speaks, and the wounded are healed.

He speaks, and sinners are forgiven.

He speaks, and the evil spirits obey.

In his presence, the demonic cannot keep its grip on power.

When we hear the good news, we are set free and drawn into the ministry of Christ. Like Ruth in her work with homeless men, we learn that new and better explanations are important for our understanding of the world, but not sufficient for doing ministry in it. We must seek to embody for others the liberating and healing presence of Christ.

What strikes me as crucial about the witness of the gospel is its two-fold nature: the battle is won; the strong man has been bound—and the results of that cosmic victory are enacted locally, in everyday encounters, face-to-face. God’s love for creation and humankind is not a global, distant reality. God’s love is not like the wind that blows everywhere, but always concrete like the breeze touching a face.

I was reminded of that earlier this week when I listened to a story on the radio. Immigration has been a contentious issue for years, and the debate doesn’t always bring out the best in us. The temperature quickly rises, the tone easily gets shrill, and conversations turn into ugly shouting matches. In this brief radio commentary, Jose Arreola invites us to a better way.

We had to decide whether we were going north or south to get into California. My friend decided it would be best to go south to avoid the big snow storm up north. But south would take us through Arizona. I really really didn’t want to go through Arizona. I got more and more nervous. I felt paralyzed. My friend kept asking me what my problem was. Finally I told him: I’m undocumented.

I came to the United States when I was three with my family. And Arizona had just passed a law that gave police officers the authority to check people’s immigration status. If we got stopped in Arizona, I could be detained and deported.

My friend is white. He comes from a really privileged, upper-class background. He attended a private high school, the Santa Clara University with me – I went on scholarship. Politically he sees things a little differently than I do. We’ve had our disagreements.

He was quiet for a while. Then he barraged me with questions; I answered the best I could. Silence again. Then he told me about his grandfather. How he hadn’t been able to find work in Ireland, so he decided to hop on a fishing boat and get off in New York. He worked as a janitor without citizenship. Now his son, my friend’s father, is a high-ranking bank executive.

The whole time through Arizona my friend drove like 50 miles an hour. He didn’t even want to change lanes. He told me he wasn’t going to lose his best friend. He wasn’t going to let that happen.

The immigration debate became real to my friend in the car that day. We had a very different conversation than the one politicians are having right now. The minute actual undocumented immigrants are included, the conversation always changes.

Now I’m completely open about my status. I’m still afraid. Conversations don’t always go well. And it’s always a risk. But as long I remain in the shadows, I will never really get to know you, and you’ll never really know me.[3]

Jesus is in the house, the reign of God has come near, and the love of God and neighbor is always concrete. Now it’s up to us to help change the conversation. It’s up to us to do our part in casting out the demons.

---

[1] Mk 3:27

[2] Robert Jay Lifton, Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2011) p. 240

[3] My Life Is True works with people at the hard edges of the economy to explain, in their own words, a significant experience or a stubborn problem. Then their two-minute personal stories are submitted as public radio commentaries. For more information, visit www.mylifeistrue.org I heard the commentary on Marketplace on January 23  http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/commentary/secret-keeps-man-margins-economy

Micah in the Middle

In scripture, Jonah and Nahum are neighbors, and they can be hard to find. They are each only a few pages long, and it’s just too easy to flip from Obadiah right to Habakkuk and miss them all together. Jonah and Nahum are neighbors, but not next door neighbors; Micah lives between them. What they have in common, is their close connection with a city, Nineveh.

Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire, a middle eastern super power before the rise of Babylonia and Persia. In Israel, Nineveh was a hated city. Painful experience had turned it into a symbol of sinful and violent oppression. Nahum’s entire proclamation is infused with pain and rage against Nineveh.

Ah, city of bloodshed,
utterly treacherous,
full of violence,
where killing never stops!
Crack of whip and rattle of wheel,
galloping steed and bounding chariot!
Charging horsemen,
flashing swords and glittering spears!
Hosts of slain and heaps of corpses,
dead bodies without number—
they stumble over bodies.
Because of the countless harlotries of the harlot,
the winsome mistress of sorcery, [Nineveh]
who ensnared nations with her harlotries
and peoples with her sorcery,
I am going to deal with you—
declares the Lord of Hosts.[1]

I am going to deal with you; violence for violence. The city must fall. The book of Nahum ends with a question:

All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has not suffered from your constant malice?[2]

In 612 BCE the city was totally destroyed and never rebuilt. For people who are oppressed and abused by brutal regimes, Nineveh’s fall from glory can be a source of hope, and they can draw strength from the greater power of the Lord who declares, “I am going to deal with you,” and brings down the mighty.

The book of Jonah also ends with a question, but the whole book is like a question mark. It begins,

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, “Go at once to Niniveh, that great city, and proclaim judgment upon it; for their wickedness has come up before me.”[3]

But Jonah set out and went West as far as his feet would take him, until he stood on the beach, with his toes touching the waves of the Mediterranean Sea; but it wasn’t far enough. He found a ship going to Tarshish, a port far beyond the horizon, at the end of the world, as far away as he could from the presence of the Lord. Jonah ran away and got on a boat to go where God was not, only to find out that there was no such place. The Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea: Jonah was thrown overboard in the storm, and a large fish swallowed him up. And after three days and three nights, the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land – it was the same beach where his adventure at sea had begun. There he was, fish slobber all over him, when the word of the Lord came to him a second time.

“Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.”

And this time, Jonah went. Not a word about how he felt, what was going through his mind. All we’re left with, all he’s left with is the stark inescapability of God’s presence and call. Jonah went a day’s walk into the city and cried out,

“Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

That’s just eight words in English, five in Hebrew. No sign of passion, neither rage nor fear. No explanation; no accusation; no call to repentance; just this brief pronouncement. And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.

Wait a minute! What just happened here? Somebody pinch me, this is unreal! Did I take the wrong exit? This can’t be Nineveh, symbol of wickedness and arrogant oppression!?

No, you wait, Jonah, because it didn’t end there. No, when the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, put on sackcloth and sat in ashes with his people. And then came the royal decree proclaiming a fast in the city, no food or water, only prayers and repentance, and cattle and goats covered with sackcloth, and you may think that’s a little over the top, and it probably was, but everyone in the city, from king to cattle, repented!

“Who knows?” the king wondered. “God may turn and relent and turn back from his wrath, so that we do not perish.”

God saw what they did, how they were turning back from their evil ways. And God renounced the punishment he had planned to bring upon them, and did not carry it out.

And Jonah? Jonah who had just witnessed the most fantastic response any prophet on the face of the earth could dream of, Jonah was grieved. He didn’t like what he saw, didn’t like it at all, and he prayed,

“O Lord! Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know that you are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, and ready to relent from punishing these people. Take my life, for I would rather die than live.”[4]

Jonah was very unhappy because his pronouncement of certain destruction had become, in the ears and hearts of his audience, a call to repent from their evil ways; and the king’s careful weighing of possibilities, “Who knows? God may turn” had become reality.

This very curious story ends with a question, and thus it remains open, awaiting our response.

God said, “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”[5]

We are quick to identify a city that has become a symbol of evil, violence, and oppression with its people. It doesn’t take much to imagine severe punishment and say with Nahum, “All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has ever escaped your endless cruelty?” The book of Jonah keeps the door open for a different consideration than the inescapability of punishment. The city is inhabited by human beings, and human beings, as much as they have been shaped by sinful structures, human beings can turn and change. Nineveh, the city of bloodshed, must not remain a paradigm for how the powerful God deals with violent systems in order to bring about true human community. In the curious book of Jonah, Nineveh was spared and allowed to thrive and flourish, because acts of repentance on earth were met by mercy from heaven.

I mentioned earlier that in Scripture, Jonah and Nahum are neighbors, but not next-door neighbors; the wise ones who compiled the books may have thought that the two might clash, and so they inserted Micah between them. And Micah decries injustice and corruption in the cities, he decries oppression and censorship with the passion of Nahum, but he also declares hope, hope gleaned, perhaps from the pages of Jonah.

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?[6]

Injustice, arrogance, and covetousness turn every human city into Nineveh, but acts of repentance on earth, who knows, may yet be met by mercy from heaven.

We heard a very short reading from Mark this morning.

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

John was arrested because his proclamation was not pleasing to Herod’s ears. But Jesus continued to proclaim the nearness of God’s reign, and he called people to repent. He called people to turn around and start living now with the changes God would bring about to make all things right. None of us want to pretend we know what all these changes might be, but we must start living into the ones we do know, because the time is fulfilled, which is to say there is no better time to wait for. The world continues to be in the grip of sinful powers beyond our control that can make us feel small and helpless: Nineveh is a harsh oppressor, Babylon is a heart-breaking exile, Rome is a violent empire – but rather than wait for their violent demise on a day of divine vengeance, Jesus invites us to live subversively now within these systems as citizens of a better city. That is why we seek to do justice that is steeped in kindness, and we seek to love kindness with passion and humility, and we walk in the company of Jesus lest we forget the power of mercy.

Many surprising things happened that day in Nineveh when Jonah declared that the city would be overturned, and the people of the city decided to turn instead. Ordinary men and women turned away from their evil ways, and – perhaps most surprising of all – the king and the nobles were paying attention, and the people’s repentance, their small acts of turning away from arrogance, injustice, and covetousness, their small acts became the royal decree, the law of the land.

“All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you,” Nahum declared, imagining the world’s applause after Nineveh’s fall. But we dare to imagine the world’s applause after Nineveh’s repentance. We have heard the good news of divine mercy, and we clap our hands.

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[1] Nahum 3:1-5a (JPS)

[2] Nahum 3:19 (JPS)

[3] See Jonah 1:1-2

[4] Jonah 4:2-3

[5] Jonah 4:11

[6] Micah 6:8 (NRSV)

Roger T. Nooe Lecture for World Peace

I am very happy about the partnership between Vanderbilt's Project Dialogue, Vine Street Christian Church, and Familiy of Abraham that made a great community event possible.

On February 21, Dr. Eboo Patel will be in Nashville. In the morning he will meet with interfaith leaders to discuss new approaches to building bridges between the faith communities in our city. He will spend the day in meetings with students and teachers on the Vanderbilt campus, and in the evening he will give a keynote address at Langford auditorium to which the entire community is invited.

This keynote address is the 2012 Roger T. Nooe Lecture for World Peace, and I am pleased about the new level of cooperation that the partnership between Vanderbilt, Vine Street, and Family of Abraham represents. I hope we will continue to work together in seeking new ways to build understanding and strengthen ties of friendship between the many faith groups in our city. 

Members and friends of Vine Street Christian Church will have the opportunity to car-pool to the lecture.

Calling in the Night

The boy Samuel grew up in a precarious time. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. The future looked dim. It was a time of major political shifts. The period of the judges in Israel was winding down, the time of charismatic tribal leaders was coming to an end, and nobody knew what the future would bring. The Philistine cities to the West were growing and their military strength threatened Israel’s survival. The political structures Israel had at the time were too weak to address the growing threat, and some groups were calling for uniting the tribes under a monarchy. It was a time of great anxiety not unlike our own.

As if to drive home the point that Israel was living in dark times, the narrator tells us that Eli’s “eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see” and “the lamp of God had not yet gone out,” but you can almost see it flickering. Eli was in his nineties. Almost all of his years the old priest had been serving the God of Israel. He had given his life to handling holy things, performing rituals, saying the proper prayers, and listening for the voice and word of God.

Eli had been listening for years. It was not an easy time to listen for the word of God because, as the story says, the word of God was rare in those days. Some may have thought that God’s silence was punishment for their lack of faithfulness. Others must have been quite happy; they didn’t miss that peculiar voice: more time and attention for them and their voices, more room for their aspirations.

Eli went to bed in his room, and I imagine he wasn’t sleeping very well. He was having many sleepless nights because of his sons who had taken over most of the priestly duties. Eli went to bed under the shadow of severe judgment; a man of God had come to him and declared, “Thus the Lord has said, ‘Why do you look with greedy eye at my sacrifices and my offerings that I commanded, and honor your sons more than me by fattening yourselves on the choicest parts of every offering of my people?’”

That wasn’t all, but Eli knew what the man was talking about. His sons, the new generation of priestly leadership in Shiloh, had made it a habit to take a cut of every offering, and not just that, they took the best cut of every sacrifice for their personal backyard BBQ. The contemporary term for that type of corruption would be embezzlement. Add to that serious sexual misconduct; everybody in Shiloh and beyond knew what Eli’s sons were doing with some of the female staff.

The old man was troubled by their actions;  he rebuked them for abusing their positions of privilege to enrich and fatten themselves, but he did nothing to stop them. At night, though, he lay awake worrying about the future of his family, the future of the sanctuary, the future of Israel. He went to bed under the shadow of judgment, and in his heart he already knew that things would soon fall apart for him and his priestly family: His sons would die in battle against the Philistines, he would fall from his chair and break his neck upon hearing that the the ark of God had been captured by the enemy, and his daughter-in-law would die giving birth to a boy she named Ichabod, meaning “the glory’s gone.”

Eli went to bed under the shadow of judgment, worried about what would become of God’s people after the glory was gone.

And then the voice of God intruded the darkness, “Samuel! Samuel!” Three times the voice called the boy who was tending the flame in the sanctuary. Three times the boy arose to ask Eli what he wanted. We know it was God calling Samuel, but the boy didn’t, and neither did Eli at first. Discerning the voice of God is no simple matter. Samuel was so used to doing what the old priest told him, it was difficult for him to even imagine that God would speak outside of the sacred tradition he had been practicing, outside of the handling of holy things and the performing of sacred rituals and the saying of proper prayers. But Eli, old Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, old, worried Eli wasn’t completely blind. He finally remembered that the God of Israel was known to do this kind of thing. “Go, lie down,” he said to the boy; “and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’”

I have long loved this story. Ever since it was first read to me when I was a little boy. I liked it because it was about a kid, a kid I imagined to be like me. I liked it because it showed me that God wasn’t for grown-ups only, but that sometimes God speaks to little ones. I still identify with young Samuel and the slow process of learning to distinguish the voice of God from the busy chatter of anxiety or the authoritative voice of tradition.

I’m not an old man yet, but I am old enough to identify with Eli and his worries about the future. We live in a time of major transitions in the world, in our nation, and in the churches, and with age comes the knowledge of all the things that are no more and the things that are beginning to fade; some of them I won’t miss a bit, but others I know I’ll ache to hold on to and not let go. We worry about the dysfunction in our political institutions, we worry about the economy, we worry about the fractured church and how rare the word of God has become in our time; visions are not widespread.

I love this story because it speaks about a new beginning in the midst of painful endings. The voice of God intruded the darkness. Samuel heard it, but he didn’t know it. Eli knew it, but he didn’t hear it. For the voice of God to be heard and known, the old man and the boy had to come together.

The word of God was rare in those days, but God wasn’t silent. Samuel lay in the darkness and waited, and then the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, and Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” And the Lord spoke and Samuel listened and then he lay there until morning. And in the morning he opened the doors of the house of the Lord like he had so many times before. He opened them wide, knowing that this was a new day, knowing that the Lord was about to do something in Israel that would make both ears of anyone who heard of it tingle. And Samuel began to declare it. The word of the Lord was no longer rare.

As a congregation, we will live through a major transition this year with Julia’s retirement after 36 years as our organist. It’s not a tectonic shift of global proportions, but for us it certainly is a painful disruption at the heart of what we hold sacred and dear. We may find it impossible to imagine worship in this sanctuary without Julia playing the organ, but we know we must. Over the course of just a few weeks, we must learn to bring our sacred traditions and the condensed experience and wisdom they contain into conversation with the new thing God is doing in our midst; over the course of a few weeks we must open our hearts and minds to discover the future God has in mind for us.

I can’t help but hear the story of Samuel and Eli against this background. I am encouraged by its powerful affirmation of God’s presence in all our endings and beginnings, whether large or small. We know that this transition in our worship is small compared to the global changes that effect us is so many ways; but we also know that this very local change is part of larger shifts in our culture and the place of worship in our life. It is good for us to remember that God is not bound to how things used to be nor to how we imagine things ought to be. God is present and at work and speaking in the changes we face, in the beginnings and the endings, and so we can focus on moving forward with trust and attentiveness. God is not bound to the past or the future, but to God’s people. It is good for us to remember that.

When Samuel was asleep in the sanctuary, next to the ark of the covenant, he was there to tend the flame, a small lamp representing the presence of God. The lamp was a witness against the darkness, but it was also a way to carry the fire of the altar from the end of one day to the beginning of the next. A little flame burned all through the night to start the fire again in the morning. Gustav Mahler, the Austrian composer coined a beautiful phrase. “Tradition is the preservation of fire, not the worship of ashes.”

Eli was almost blind when he heard the word of judgment against the priestly tradition he represented, and yet he was blessed to see how God made a way through Samuel for God’s vision and word to be known in Israel. Samuel was young and inexperienced when he encountered the voice of God, but he was blessed to have Eli as a teacher. Each was open to the other, and together they made the word of God heard in a time when it was rare. The fire would continue to burn. It is good for us to remember that in the changes and transitions we are facing.

Down in the River

Today we celebrate the baptism of Jesus. In it we find the gospel in a nutshell.

Whenever we have a baptism here at Vine Street, we say a prayer, and in it we tell the story of life – and a river runs through it:

We give you thanks, Eternal God,
for you nourish and sustain all living things
by the gift of water.
In the beginning of time,
your Spirit moved over the watery chaos,
calling forth order and life.
In the time of Noah,
you destroyed evil by the waters of the flood,
giving righteousness a new beginning.
You led Israel out of slavery,
through the waters of the sea,
into the freedom of the promised land.
In the waters of Jordan Jesus was baptized by John
and anointed with your Spirit.
By the baptism of his own death and resurrection,
Christ set us free from sin and death,
and opened the way to eternal life.
We thank you, O God, for the water of baptism.
In it we are buried with Christ in his death;
from it we are raised to share in his resurrection;
through it we are reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Water is powerful. Water can be chaotic, threatening, and destructive; and water nourishes, sustains, and protects life – in the womb, and the sea, and all over the earth. Water floods and flows, giving life and taking lives. Water is powerful.

A river runs through life from the beginning of creation to the city of God. Today we celebrate that Jesus stepped into that river.

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, and a lot of people from Jerusalem and the countryside were heading down to the banks of the Jordan to listen to John’s preaching and to be baptized by him, confessing their sins. One by one they stepped into the water. They could smell wild honey on John’s breath, they could see the light in his eyes as they said what needed to be said. Then they let his strong, sun-burned arms plunge them beneath the surface, into the silent depth of the old river. Their ancestors once entered the promised land crossing this river; it marked the border between the wilderness and the home of God’s people. The men and women who came to John wanted to be worthy of being counted among God’s people, worthy to live in the land of God’s promise. They prayed that the river would wash away their sins, and that they would emerge from the chilly depth with their lives scrubbed clean, prepared to face the day of the Lord.

Jesus began his ministry where sinners gathered, and he came like the rest of them had come, walking on dusty roads and down to the river’s edge, waiting in line in the heat of the day, and finally stepping into the water to be baptized, like the rest of them. Such a crowd was gathered at the river, you couldn’t have picked him out from the many faces, and the way Mark tells the story, neither could John. Standing in the water, he didn’t realize that his arms were holding the one whose coming he had been announcing. He plunged him beneath the surface, into the cold silence, down into the darkness at the bottom.

As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Water, Spirit, and a voice. As in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth: darkness covered the face of the deep and a wind from God swept over the face of the waters, and God said: Let there be light! And there was light. And God saw that the light was good and called it Day. The beginning of the good news is like the beginning of creation, and it is a new creation: water, Spirit, and the voice of the One who creates, beholds, and names. God saw that the light was good. Earth and sea were good. Plants and trees were good. Sun and moon and stars were good. Fish and birds, cattle, creeping things, and wild animals of every kind were good. God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good. God was delighted. And when Jesus emerged from below the face of the deep, God was delighted. It was a new beginning for the world, a new day.

Mark doesn’t tell us a Christmas story of Jesus’ wondrous birth. Mark is the most economical of story tellers: no genealogy, very little biographical detail; all he tells us is, “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” Everything is pared down to the essentials: Jesus, the one who would baptize with the Holy Spirit, enters the water and is himself baptized – acting in radical solidarity with all human beings, disappearing in the deep, not to be washed, but to drown and rise. In his baptism we find the gospel in a nutshell. This is where he comes from and where the heavens are torn apart never to be closed again above the earth.

Listen to this; it’s from a psalm in which God addresses the king: You are my son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession; you shall break them with a rod of iron.[1] Many scholars believe that this psalm used to be recited at the coronation of Israel’s king. It speaks of the king as God’s son, which was a rather common idea among ancient cultures. The voice from heaven doesn’t quote the psalm word for word, but there is enough of an echo for us to hear Jesus of Nazareth being crowned with royal authority.

But the divine voice also echoes another passage of scripture. There is a short poem in Isaiah, where God says, Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights. I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.[2] Again it’s not a word for word quote but there’s enough of an echo to let us know that this beloved son is the chosen servant who will bring justice to the earth, and who will not break a bruised reed, nor quench a dimly burning wick. There’s enough of an echo to let us know that this is the one “given as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.”[3] 

Jesus is the servant king who rules not with an iron rod but with words of authority and deeds of healing. He is a king in solidarity with his people, the chosen servant who entered the river with us. He is in the water with us, disappearing in the deep, not to be washed, but to drown and rise. He is in the water with us, to bring to an end all that keeps us from abundant living and make a new beginning.

When we are baptized into Christ, we die with him and rise into newness; his life becomes our life, his story our story, his way our way. We emerge from the waters assured of our identity as God’s beloved sons and daughters, assured of our kinship with God and with each other and with all those on the river banks hoping for a new beginning. The Son of God came that we might know who and whose we are, know it not just in our minds, but hear that voice in our proud and fearful hearts, “You are my child, my beloved, my delight.” No matter who you thought you were before you were immersed in the death and life of Christ, remember this, I have made you my own.

Many of you know Janet Wolf; she used to serve as the pastor of Hobson UMC over in East Nashville. Years ago, the story has been told many times, a woman named Fayette found her way to Hobson. Fayette lived with mental illness and without a home. She joined the new member class, and the conversation about baptism especially grabbed her imagination. During the class, she would ask again and again, “And when I’m baptized, I am…?” And the class learned to respond, “Beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold.”

“Oh, yes!” she would say, and then the class could go back to their discussion. This is how Janet describes the day of Fayette’s baptism.

Fayette went under, came up spluttering, and cried, ‘And now I am…?’ And we all sang, ‘Beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold.’ ‘Oh, yes!’ she shouted as she danced all around the fellowship hall.

Two months later, Janet received a phone call. Fayette had been beaten and raped and was at the hospital. Janet writes,

I could see her from a distance, pacing back and forth. When I got to the door, I heard, “I am beloved...” She turned, saw me, and said, “I am beloved, precious child of God, and...” Catching sight of herself in the mirror—hair sticking up, blood and tears streaking her face, dress torn, dirty, and rebuttoned askew, she started again, “I am beloved, precious child of God, and…” She looked in the mirror again and declared, “…and God is still working on me. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll be so beautiful I’ll take your breath away!”[4]

Fayette’s story breaks my heart, but I am in awe of how she clung to her identity as a precious child of God. She had been in the heart of the sea, and the waters raged and roared and the waves overwhelmed her violently, body and soul, but by the grace of God she remembered.

The Son of God came that we might know who and whose we are, and know it not just in our minds, but hear that voice in our broken and wounded hearts, “You are my child, my beloved, my delight.”

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[1] Psalm 2:7-8

[2] Isaiah 42:1

[3] Isaiah 42:3-7

[4] Janet told the story in Disciplines 1999 (The Upper Room). I stumbled upon it in Jan Richardson’s blog, The Painted Prayerbook

The New Day

Just days before Christmas, I heard a portion of an interview on the radio. Somebody was talking to an astronomer about celebrations that emphasize light during the dark season of the year. They were talking about religious festivals like Hanukkah and Christmas, and non-religious traditions that nevertheless can be observed religiously, like putting a gazillion lights on every house and hedge. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors living in the northern hemisphere had noticed how, during the course of the fall, the sun set earlier and further south every day; how the days got shorter and the darkness lasted longer. And they noticed that somehow that trend was reversed and the days started getting longer. The season of life began once again, and that beginning called for celebration.

The astronomer in that interview mentioned that our New Year’s Day is totally random, astronomically speaking. It has no relation whatsoever to the moon or the sun or the stars. He then mentioned that as a graduate student he once spent an entire New Year’s Eve party locked in a closet by himself, in protest against the sheer arbitrariness of the occasion. I don’t know if his name happened to be Sheldon, but I hope somebody brought him a glass of champagne at midnight and gave him a kiss.

Anyway, when I think of New Year’s, a scene from Forrest Gump comes to mind, where Forrest, Lieutenant Dan, and two girls are celebrating New Year’s. They’ve had a few drinks, and the party is winding down, when, during a long moment of silence, one of the girls sighs, “Isn’t New Year’s great? One gets to start all over. Everybody gets a second chance.” She’s right, of course. The date for New Year’s may be completely random, but it’s good to celebrate beginnings, and even better to raise a glass to second chances. Grateful for the gift, we make promises to ourselves: to eat better and spend more time with the kids; to make our bed every morning and pick up our dirty socks; to text less and talk more.

New Year’s is great. One gets to start all over, and everybody gets a second chance. We leave the old year behind in the archives and step into the new era of possibility and promise. Now perhaps you think you are detecting a mocking undertone in what I’m saying; you may think I’m just making fun of new year’s resolutions we can’t even keep till February, but I’m not. Perhaps you are saying to yourself, “The year may be new, but we are not, we’re just another year older; and before the week is over, we’ll be back in our old, familiar routines.”

I don’t see it that way. I refuse to see it that way, although there is plenty of evidence to justify a little jadedness.I refuse to see it that way, because we just celebrated Christmas. We just celebrated the birth of Jesus. We just received anew the good news of great joy that to us a child is given who is God’s saving interruption of all our tired and deadly routines. We live in a new day, not because Earth has completed another course around the Sun, but because Christ is born, because the Sun of Righteousness is risen.

I love that this year New Year’s Day falls on the first Sunday after Christmas. We begin the year, not with heavy burdens of self-imposed resolutions, but with the gift of this child.

Luke tells us that Jesus’ parents brought him to Jerusalem to the temple to present him to the Lord, and Luke takes us along. We meet Simeon, a righteous and devout man, who has spent his years looking forward to the consolation of Israel. And we meet Anna, a widow of great age, who has devoted most of her life to worship.

Anna is there because that’s where she has been, night and day, ever since her husband died. Simeon is there because he followed the guidance of the Holy Spirit who had revealed to him that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah. We meet two old people who have shaped their lives around the promise and presence of God.

Outwardly they are bent by the years; climbing stairs demands all their strength and they must stop several times to catch their breath; their swollen joints hurt, and when Ruth says, “Getting old is not for sissies!” they smile, “No kidding!”

Outwardly they are bent by the years, but inwardly they live on tiptoe. They are open with anticipation, attuned to hear and see what God is doing in the world. For them, life and fidelity have become one. And when Mary and Joseph bring their child to be dedicated, Simeon takes him in his arms, he praises God and declares that now he is ready to die in peace. His arms are cradling God’s salvation, the good news for all people; his eyes have seen a light for revelation to the nations and for the glory of Israel.

David Steele was a Presbyterian minister and writer, and he wrote a little poem about Simeon that begins with a reference to yet another preacher.

This preacher
Claimed scholarly research had documented
That Simeon,
Of Simeon and Anna,
Had pronounced the very same blessing
(The one in Luke 2:27-35)
Over all the babies presented to him in the Temple
Those final years of his life
[…]

He was pulling my leg, of course.

But when I read the blessing
And thought about it,
I began to wish he was right
About Simeon … and those babies.
And I began thinking about our babies.
And I wished someone,
Some Simeon,
Might hold my grandbabies high … and yours …
The born ones and the not yet …
Proclaiming to them with great conviction,
“You are the saviors of the world!”
Meaning it so absolutely
Those young’uns would live it,
And love it,
And make it happen! [1]

Now before you wrinkle your brow with suspicion of blasphemous levity and complain about poetic license gone too far, think about it. Don’t you wish every child dedicated in our sanctuary would live as a light to the world and to the glory of God’s people? Didn’t Jesus say as much when he said to the disciples, “You are the light of the world! Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”[2]

Don’t you wish some Simeon or Anna would hold up every child on earth and recognize the promise of God and declare it with praise? Don’t you wish every old man and woman would recognize the Christ in every boy and girl? I do, and I believe it is happening. It happens with those whose hopes and expectations have been shaped by the promises and presence of God. Faithfulness in prayer and study (Anna) help us become attuned to what God is doing in the world. Openness to the prompting of God’s Spirit (Simeon) helps us be in the right place at the right time to witness the presence of Christ.

With the birth of Jesus we celebrate God’s way of interrupting the world’s tired routines with new life that has the power to completely transform us and change the world. Simeon and Anna were shaped profoundly by the promises of God and hence by a story that was yet to be completed. Their hope and fidelity prepared them for a joyful, face-to-face encounter with God’s Messiah. Living on the other side of Jesus’ death and resurrection, we see the story yet to be completed in the light of Christmas and Easter; and our wonder at the power and love of God is even greater than what Simeon and Anna could have imagined.

So how can we not add our voices of praise and blessing to theirs on this new day after Christmas? How can we not ask them to show us how to live in anticipation and hope every new day? How can we not ask them and the other Annas and Simeons among us to help us attune our senses and our souls to God’s unfolding redemption?

This is no day for burdening ourselves with resolutions. This is the day for recognizing the salvation of God.

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[1] David Steele, The Next Voice You Hear: Sermons We Preach Together (Louisville: Geneva Press, 1999) p. 46

[2] Matthew 5:14-15

Why doesn't God have a mommy?

Seven Questions 5

It may not be a great idea for a preacher to tell a bed time story during worship. Some of you may already be on the verge of dozing off, and all you need is a few moments with a soothing voice to gently take you to the land of dreams. I’m not going to worry, though; this is a fine story, and if it is the last thing you hear before you go to sleep, so be it.

Little Nutbrown Hare was going to bed. He held on tight to Big Nutbrown Hare’s very long ears. He wanted to be sure that Big Nutbrown Hare was listening.

“Guess how much I love you”, he said.

“Oh, I don’t think I could guess that,” said Big Nutbrown Hare.

“This much,” said Little Nutbrown Hare, stretching out his arms as wide as they could go. Big Nutbrown Hare had even longer arms. “And I love you this much,” he said. Hmm, that is a lot, thought Little Nutbrown hare.

“I love you as high as I can reach,” said Little Nutbrown Hare.

“I love you as high as I can reach,” said Big Nutbrown Hare. That is very high, thought Little Nutbrown Hare. I wish I had arms like that.

Then Little Nutbrown Hare had a good idea. He tumbled upside down and reached up the tree trunk with his feet. “I love you all the way up to my toes,” he said.

“And I love you all the way up to your toes.” said Big Nutbrown Hare, picking him up by his paws and swinging him up over his head.

“I love you as high as I can hop!” laughed Little Nutbrown Hare, bouncing up and down.

“And I love you as high as I can hop,” smiled Big Nutbrown Hare – and he hopped so high that his ears touched the branches above. Thats good hopping, thought Little Nutbrown Hare. I wish I could hop like that.

“I love you all the way down the lane as far as the river,” cried Little Nutbrown Hare.

“I love you across the river and over the hills,” said Big Nutbrown Hare. That’s very far, thought Little Nutbrown Hare. He was almost too sleepy to think anymore. Then he looked beyond the thornbushes, out into the big dark night. Nothing could be farther than the sky.

“I love you right up to the moon,” he said, and closed his eyes.

“Oh, that’s far,” said Big Nutbrown Hare. “That is very, very far.” Big Nutbrown Hare settled Little Nutbrown Hare into his bed of leaves, leaned over and kissed him good night. Then he lay down close by and whispered with a smile, “I love you right up to the moon – and back.”[1]

This is a wonderful story about being little and being loved. We read it to our children and grandchildren, and they know it’s about them and us – nobody needs to explain it to them. They know more about being little than we can remember, and they learn to love from being loved. We all do.

It doesn’t say in the story if Big Nutbrown Hare is Little Nutbrown Hare’s dad or grandpa or big brother, because it doesn’t really matter. Big Nutbrown Hare could be Little Nutbrown Hare’s mom or grandma or big sister or auntie. What matters is that every little one needs somebody big who loves them right up to the moon and back. Every little one needs somebody big who is there when they go to sleep and when they wake up. We all do.

We need somebody who’s there when we’re hungry or cold or frightened or proud of what we’ve done. Somebody who holds us when we need to be held and watches over us when we begin to move out into the world. Somebody who tells us the names of the animals and sings us to sleep. Somebody who hears us when we cry and comes to wipe the tears from our face.

Calin knows that. Calin is a little boy who is curious about many things; he asks great questions, and he gladly shares his observations about life. Calin says, “Everyone needs a mommy.” Everyone; there is no exception. People are different in so many ways, but this is something we all have in common. Everyone needs a mommy.

Everybody, of course, has a mother and a father, but that’s just simple biology. In order to thrive and flourish, though, and be fully alive, everyone needs to grow up under the loving gaze of a parent or, better yet, two, and aunts and uncles, grandparents and siblings and good friends and neighbors. Calin is little, but he can already imagine that life must be very, very hard for little ones without somebody big who loves them right up to the moon and back.

One day, just a few weeks ago, Calin had a big question. I don’t know when it came up. Was it after he had just finished brushing his teeth? Or was it in the car on the way to soccer practice? I imagine it came out of the blue after he had thought about it for a while: “Why doesn’t God have a mommy?”

Grown-ups know lots of things about God, simply because they’ve been around for a long time and have learned all kinds of interesting stuff and pondered deep questions. Grown-ups know that God is the very life of life, without end or beginning. Grown-ups know that God is the one mystery that is greater than all the mysteries of time and life. They know that God is the source and the ground and the goal of all things seen and unseen. Grown-ups know that God doesn’t need a mommy because God is not born, and God is never alone or hungry or afraid. Grown-ups walk along the edge of what words can express like artists on a tightrope, groping for words that will allow us to speak about God without putting God into a box.

Calin has picked up some of that time-tested knowledge, at home, in Sunday school, in worship – bold words about God – and he responds with what he knows. Mommy and Daddy were among the first words he learned because those names captured so much of his world. He knows how much he depends on them and their love for him, and he thinks about it, and – this is the most remarkable thing to me – he refuses to imagine a world where anyone would be without such loving attention and care. His question reflects more than curiosity about his world; it reflects kindness and compassion and the desire that everyone should receive what they need. Because we know Scripture and the testimony of generations, we know that Calin’s question is a godly one, one that reflects the will and character of God: Everyone needs somebody to love them right up to the moon and back.

Rather than give Calin one of the grown-up answers, we first need to tell him what a wonderful question he has asked; he knows in his heart the care and loving attention God has for all things great and small. Then perhaps we tell Calin that God is so great with love that even mom and dad, grandma and grandpa, and all grown-ups can be little ones with God, like one big family where everyone belongs and everyone receives what they need. And then we tell him and all our children that God knows very well what it’s like to have a mommy. We tell them the story of Jesus.

Jesus was as little and vulnerable as all of us are at birth. He didn’t grow up in a big, fancy house, but his mom and dad loved him. He climbed into their lap and loved listening to their heartbeat as much as any little boy or girl. They taught him to talk and walk, to sing and pray, and they told him bedtime stories. When he was sad or hurt, they comforted him. When he was sick, they sat next to his bed. And at least once a week, they made his favorite breakfast.

God is great with love, but God knows what it’s like to be little. God knows what it’s like to be hungry and thirsty and cold. God knows what it’s like to be sad and afraid and alone, but God is great with love.

One day, Jesus was the loneliest anyone would ever be. He carried all that frightens us; he carried all our meanness and hardness of heart and the loveless things we do to each other and to ourselves; he carried it all. And when he closed his eyes he didn’t smile. But God whispered, “I love you right up to the coldest and darkest place in the universe – and back.”

Because of Jesus God knows what it’s like to be little; because of Jesus we know just how great with love God is. Because of Jesus we know that nothing in life is more important than that we love each other well. So tell the story, sing the songs of love divine, all loves excelling, coming to make its humble dwelling in us; and have a merry Christmas, everyone!

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[1] Sam McBratney, Anita Jeram, Guess How Much I Love You

Seven Questions 4

You ask how the church can serve as a peacemaker, and again I must begin by admitting that I’m not sure I know what the church is. I can point to various communities and institutions that refer to themselves as churches, but they don’t necessarily recognize one another as churches. Honesty would require that we rephrase the question and ask how churches can serve as peacemakers, and then we would have to begin with a long, humble look at our divisions and confess that we have little to say about peacemaking since we can’t even  recognize one another as members of the one body of Christ. We are very successful at tolerating one another, which is just another word for leaving each other alone, pretending that we have no need of each other.

I’d say the best way churches can serve as peacemakers is by being as faithful as they can in their prayers and their service, and by letting the sad reality of division and mutual exclusion bother us again and bother us enough to reach across the barren lands of tolerance between us. It is good that we no longer burn each other as heretics, but it is not good enough. Peace is not the mere absence of violent conflict or persecution; peace is the fullness of life that emerges when relationships are made right.

We heard lines from Psalm 85 today, a beautiful piece of Hebrew writing. I remember well when I first heard verses 10 and 11, I was a teenager.

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.

I was a teenager when I first heard these lines, and I was deeply troubled by the lack of righteousness I had begun to see in the world.

I was upset that small farmers in Africa were losing their land and livelihoods, so that agro businesses could grow green beans for export to Europe.

I was upset that governments in the U.S. and Europe were burning corn and dumping vegetables in the ocean to keep commodity prices from falling while people in other parts of the world were starving.

I was upset that the CIA arranged for the toppling of a democratically elected government in Chile to replace it with Pinochet’s military junta.

I was upset that German banks and manufacturers continued to do business in South Africa when the injustice and violence of apartheid was no secret.

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

I heard those words and I saw the embrace, and the image never left me. When I think of relationships made right, I think of these verses from Psalm 85 where the pillars of God’s covenant loyalty become a promise for us.

Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.
The Lord will give what is good,
and our land will yield its increase.

When I think of the world at home, I think of these verses that sing, “All will be well.” All will be well between heaven and earth, between God and humankind, between individuals and nations, between people and the land. All will be well.

The psalm doesn’t begin with that serene sense of peace, though; it begins with memories. It begins in a place where God’s redemptive actions in the past are remembered, and are needed again, now. The tone is rather demanding:

Lord, you were favorable to your land;
you restored the fortunes of your people;
you forgave the iniquity of your people;
you pardoned all their sin;
you withdrew all your wrath;
you turned from your hot anger –
Restore us again! Show us your steadfast love!
Life is not the way it’s supposed to be and we need you to do something about it. Will you not revive us again?

The words come from a place where God’s redemptive actions in the past are remembered, but are needed again, now. And after this long outburst of need and insistent questioning and persistent demand, suddenly the voice and tone change.

There is a moment of silence, a long moment of listening, and a single voice says,

“Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people.”

A single voice calls us to listen for the voice and word of God, confident that God will speak peace to the faithful, confident that God’s salvation is not far away but at hand for those who fear God. Nothing in the psalm indicates how long the moment of listening lasts – a day, a year, a generation? And then there is this burst of beauty and imagination, of promise and trust:

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.

The world will come to be the world God intends, a communion of shalom. All will be well between heaven and earth, between God and humankind, between individuals and nations, between people and the land. All will be well.

We are in Advent. We are in a time of waiting and watching, a time of staying alert and preparing to receive, again. We know something of redemption and of this God whose covenant faithfulness has been attested by generations of God’s people, and we wait for God to come again and speak peace.

Our life in the world is one of dispute and conflict, of juggling divisive issues and keeping violence at bay, and we wait. We are in Advent and we lean forward expectantly, because the world is under promise: All of creation is headed for God’s shalom.

Perhaps the most fruitful way for us to serve as peacemakers is to remember that God calls us to faithful relationship with God and with each other and with all our fellow creatures; and to remember in the ensuing debate over just how to do that, that the fullness God intends for us is not something some of us have and others don’t, but rather something we can only receive together.

Mother Teresa said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” We may prefer hanging out with the people who are like us. We may prefer talking with the people who think like us. We may prefer worshiping with the people who share our theology or our taste in music. We may prefer living in little tribes of conformity, but all we are doing is confirm our amnesia: we have forgotten that we belong to each other. We have forgotten that the fullness God intends for us includes the people who aren’t like us, who don’t think like us, who don’t share our theology or our musical taste or our political views.

I had a conversation with a group of divinity students at Vanderbilt last week. They told me how difficult it is to put one’s theological hunches into words when everybody in the room comes from a different background – how it can be both exhilarating and very frustrating. How you have to explain so much more and be really careful about what you say about the eucharist. You don’t want to offend a fellow student who may come from a non-sacramental tradition but rather help her hear what you found to be true and how you found it.

I listened and I nodded a lot, yes, it is difficult to do theology in an environment like that. “It was much easier when I went to div school. We were all white, we were all protestants, and the entire faculty was protestant and white and mostly male. I wish I had had the opportunity to study New Testament with a Jewish woman. I wish I had had the opportunity to study with Catholics, Mennonites, and Pentecostals. When we discussed the theology of the Lord’s Supper, we thought it was great fun laughing at Catholic sensibilities and teachings. It was easy enough, there were no Catholics in the room. At the end of my time in seminary, we met for a weekend with a class of candidates for the priesthood from a Catholic seminary. The conversation changed in an instant. We suddenly realized how little we had actually thought about the doctrines we had learned to repeat, because nobody had challenged our thinking.”

Mother Teresa had it right, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” Peacemaking begins with reaching across the barren lands of a tolerance that is nothing more but a mask for our ignorance, our fear, or our lack of interest. Peacemaking begins with listening to the voice and the voices we have excluded, intentionally or not. It may be the voice of spouse or a child, the voice of a Muslim neighbor or a pro-life co-worker or the old woman who never makes eye-contact. Peacemaking begins with the invitation, “Tell me your story.”

Things are far from how they’re supposed to be, and yet God’s salvation is near. We are in Advent. We are in a time of waiting and watching, a time of staying alert and preparing to receive, again. God’s covenant faithfulness has been attested by generations of God’s people, and we wait for God to come again and speak peace.

We are in Advent. We await the divine gift of a human community that will perform its life according to the will of the Giver of life. We practice kingdom living one relationship at a time. We practice leaning forward expectantly, because the world is under promise.

Seven Questions: 3

A woman took a walk in the fields, along the edge of the woods. It was a glorious spring-day, and the air was filled with the songs of more birds than I could name – warblers, wrens, and chickadees, robins, finches, and sparrows. It was a celebration of life unlike anything you could even begin to imagine in the cold, rainy days of November, but the woman didn’t notice; she was a botanist.

I smiled when I heard this on the radio, and I could see her walking along the edge of the woods, her eyes on the ground, fully absorbed in noticing and naming unique and spectacular little green things most of us would call weeds, or maybe wildflowers on a good day.

Attention is a strange and wonderful thing. The things I do attend to can so completely absorb my senses that I forget about time and everything else. And the things I don’t attend to in a sense don’t exist, at least not for me. We say we “pay attention,” suggesting that, when we are attentive, we are spending limited currency that should be wisely invested. We select a portion of all that’s there, and this thin slice of life becomes part of our reality, and the rest is consigned to the blurry margins and the shadows of oblivion.

Attention’s selective nature enables us to comprehend what would otherwise be chaos. We live in daily noise, some more so than others; we move through jungles of thoughts and ideas; we are drenched in feelings, constantly exposed to images; and attention allows us to protect our minds from overload and make our world from all that is happening.

About five years ago, the Washington Post published a great article. It was about a man playing the violine outside the Metro.

A youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was just before 8am on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, this violinist performed six classical pieces, and more than 1000 people passed by. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade was Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the greatest music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.

His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities – as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would great art have the power to disrupt the ordinary, hurried routines of passersby?

The musician played masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, including Bach’s Chaconne for solo violine, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.

The acoustics in the arcade proved surprisingly kind. The stone, tile, and glass somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician’s masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang – ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.

The writer apparently was paying attention, but what about the commuters?

In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run – for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look. Now, if a great musician plays great music but no one hears, is it still great and beautiful art or is it just more noise on a busy Friday morning?

Bell said, “At a music hall, I’ll get upset if someone coughs or if someone’s cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change.” This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Before he began, Bell hadn’t known what to expect, and he was nervous. “It wasn’t exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies; I was stressing a little (…) When you play for ticket-holders, you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I’m already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don’t like me? What if they resent my presence ...” [1]

It’s not that they didn’t like him, they simply didn’t hear him. For the vast majority of commuters that Friday morning Joshua Bell’s music was only part of the background while their minds were focussed on getting their kids to school before work or how to impress their boss with a presentation later in the day.

American Philosopher William James wrote in 1890, “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalisation, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”[2]

Attention allows me to focus on some things and filter out others; it distills the vastness of all that is into my world – and that means I must make choices. And making choices requires effort. And sometimes – too often, I’m afraid – I just take the lazy way out and drift along, and I squander precious currency on whatever happens to capture my awareness. Some of us like to blame technology for our diffused, fragmented state of mind, it’s the internet, it’s the cell phones, it’s texting and social media, but our seductive machines are not at fault. They each come with a power button.

Attention implies a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others. Thus the question is solely what it is we want to deal with, and that defines how often, how long, and how far we withdraw from other things.

I am talking about attention this morning because I believe it is at the heart of the question you asked me to address.

When we look back in history, we can see that dictators like Hitler were bad and we wonder why Christians didn’t stand up sooner to save the people. What about nowadays? When do we know to act, what to do? Where is our collective power?

When I first saw this question, my eyes skipped several words and jumped to “Hitler,” and I felt the pain and guilt and shame connected to that cursed name. I thought about the terror of those years, the unimaginable murder of Jews on an industrial scale, the war mongering, and how it all began in the hearts of human beings and with thoughts and words.

When we look back we can see… but the question that has haunted me since I started asking questions about my family, my people, my culture, my church, the question that I can’t answer is, why didn’t more people see when they didn’t have to look back? What was it they were paying attention to when they weren’t paying attention to the persecution of their neighbors? What were they paying attention to earlier when they weren’t paying attention to the transformation of public discourse into hate speech?

A pastor in Silesia, one of the many who had swallowed the junk food of so-called race theory and of Arian superiority, of German Christians and of “the Jewish question,” this pastor, this shepherd of his people, stood in the pulpit one Sunday morning and told the members of the congregation who didn’t qualify as Arian under the race laws, he told them to get up and get out – three times he told them, and we wonder why they didn’t all stand up and leave, we wonder why they didn’t all stand up and walk out together and leave him alone in his house of lies.

Then there was movement at the front of the sanctuary. There was a cross above the communion table, front and center, and the crucified Jesus came down from it and walked out, saying, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

What about nowadays? When do we know to act, what to do? I don’t know, what are you paying attention to?

Jesus points to the marginalized, the poor, and the suffering ones and says, “Can you see me now?”

Ezekiel, after lamenting the fall of the holy city, utters his severe indictment against the political class,

“Woe, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and scattered, they became food for all the wild animals.”[3]

In a tradition of obligation that begins at Sinai, God’s covenant people are meant to be a community that is preoccupied with the well-being of the neighbor, and a community that is prepared to exercise public power for the sake of the neighbor, particularly the vulnerable neighbor in the person of the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant. Ezekiel insists that power cannot be sustained or give prosperity or security, unless it is administered with attention to the well-being of all who have little or no power. And Jesus asks, “Can you see me now?”

Everything depends on what we pay attention to. The real world in which God invites us to live is not the one made available by the rulers of this age, the masters of distraction, the peddlers of the simple answer, and the manipulators of our fears. The real world in which God invites us to live emerges when we let the good shepherd guide our attention, shape our imagination, and give us the courage to act.

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[1] See the full article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

[2] William James, The Principles of Psychology, Chapter XI: Attention

[3] Ezekiel 34:2-5; the readings of the day were Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 and Matthew 25:31-46

Seven Questions: 2

You gave me seven questions to address in sermons, and this morning I will respond to the second one: How do we make the circumstances of our everyday life lead us to holiness?

We don’t talk much about holiness, do we? We are much more comfortable speaking about living our faith or seeking to embody the love of God. Holiness talk makes most of us uncomfortable because we immediately think of sour-faced, holier-than-thou people who keep a halo by the door and seem to draw deep satisfaction from reminding us how far from perfect we are.

You could have asked me, “How do I make the circumstances of my everyday life lead me to holiness?” and I’m glad you didn’t, because our focus in matters of faith and spirituality already tends to be too narrowly individualistic. One of the songs in our hymnal urges us in four verses to Take Time to Be Holy, as though holiness were something one can add to one’s schedule like 30 minutes of exercise or a doctor’s appointment.[1] The rest of the song, with the exception of the repeated opening phrase, is actually quite helpful in suggesting practices that can sustain a life of faith – I just wish the writer had not entirely neglected the communal nature of our faith.

In Israel, talk about holiness begins with the unambiguous summons of God at Sinai:

You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.

They were a bunch of cheap laborers who had just escaped the oppressive machinery of Egyptian brick production for a taste of sabbath, and at Sinai the Lord God who alone is holy claimed them as God’s own, a holy nation, a people set aside for the purposes and intentions of God, a people with a mission.

“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy,” is the theme of Leviticus, and it’s all about the proper order of things, how to have holy priests and holy sacrifices and holy offerings and holy festivals and holy shrines and holy bread and holy everything. Leviticus is all about taking great care in knowing and maintaining the boundary between what is holy and what is not. It’s all about not mixing things that shouldn’t be mixed and protecting the purity of the sacred from contamination with the profane.

And then you read Deuteronomy, and in Deuteronomy you find that quite different matters are given weight and attention. There you read,

When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, don’t go back to get it. Leave it for the immigrant, the widow, and the orphan. And when you beat your olive trees, don’t strip what is left. Leave it for the immigrant, the widow, and the orphan. And when you gather the grapes of your vineyard, don’t go back to pick the ones you may have missed. Leave them for the immigrant, the orphan, and the widow.[2]

Holiness is not limited to matters of purity, it is also about the right ordering of social relationships. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that your God is passionate about justice for the poor. Be attentive to faithfulness in every dimension of your life together. Holiness is not about doing holy things in holy places during holy times. Holiness is about being a holy nation, a people claimed to manifest on earth the glory of the Holy One, a community that reflects in its life together the very character of God. All of the Old Testament is about this demanding relationship and the constant temptation to abandon it for the convenience of idolatry.

In the Babyonian exile the question became, how can we maintain our identity as God’s holy people without the land, without the temple, without priests and sacrifices and festivals, and without political power? How can we maintain our identity as God’s holy people when we have been stripped of all markers, except our stories and our songs?

How do we make the circumstances of our everyday life lead us to holiness when the circumstances aren’t favorable to the pursuit of holiness? What can we do to maintain our identity as a people claimed by God in a context where the gods of distraction are in charge and the masters of the sound bite rule?

Daniel suggests that we learn to say No. Daniel was a young man when King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon told his palace master to find the best talent among the exiles from Judah, smart, strong, good-looking young men who graduated top of the class and were competent to serve in the king’s palace. They were to be taught the literature and language of Babylon, they were to be given a daily portion of the royal rations of food and wine, and after three years they were to be stationed in the king’s court. The palace master did as he was told, and among the young men he chose were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. And the first thing he did was give the palace interns new names, Babylonian names: Forget who you are and learn whose you are now. Daniel he called Belteshazzar. And this could have been the end of the story: super power assimilates God’s people – resistance is futile.

But Daniel – the name means ‘God is my judge’ – "Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the royal rations of food and wine."[3] He and his friends asked for a ten-day experiment: they would eat only vegetables and drink only water, and at the end of the period the palace official could compare them to the rest of the interns. That’s what they did, and in our day you know that you could watch the whole thing as a reality show on Babylonian tv, anyway, after ten days, Daniel and his friends were not only the smartest in the bunch, but also the best-looking.

How do we maintain our identity as God’s people when it is under pressure from every side? Daniel would say, “We remember whose we are, and we find practices that sustain our identity.” Daniel said No to the royal rations of food and wine.

The circumstances of our everyday life will not lead us to holiness, they are simply the circumstances in which we must remember our identity as a people who have been claimed by the Holy One to participate in the mission of Christ. We must engage in practices that allow us to stay mindful of who we are, rather than swallow the royal rations of the masters of our exile.

We are far from home, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know where we belong. Christ has made us his own, and in our baptism we were claimed as sons and daughters of God and we ourselves claimed that new identity as ours. We are holy, not because of anything we have done, but because we belong to Christ. And because we are holy, we are called to live holy lives.

As Paul says in today's passage from his first letter to the Thessalonians,

You learned from us how you ought to live and to please God (as, in fact, you are doing), you should do so more and more. (…) Concerning love of the brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anyone write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another; and indeed you do love all the brothers and sisters throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, beloved, to do so more and more.[4] Do what you know is pleasing to God, and do so more and more. Love one another, and do so more and more.

The circumstances of our everyday life will change, but our identity as God’s own will not, nor will our calling to embody in our life together the love of Christ, for the sake of the world. We are not far from home, because we know where we belong: every Sunday we gather at the table to receive and share bread and wine, the royal rations of our Lord.

We Disciples say that we are a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world, and I think it’s a beautiful little oddity that holiness and wholeness sound so very similar. Both speak of our being claimed for the purposes of God, and every time we gather at the table we remember and proclaim Christ’s work of reconciliation that makes us holy and whole.

And after we’ve eaten we turn, not to protect the purity of the holy meal from unholy contamination, no, but to help extend God’s hospitality into every dimension of our life together. One in Christ and therefore one with each other we gather around the table and practice a new economy, one that isn’t defined by greed; we practice a new politics that isn’t defined by grasping control; we practice a peace that isn’t defined by bigger guns; we practice the new life that is holy, whole, and true in every way because it is rooted in generosity, mercy, and faithfulness.

We refuse to eat the junk food of the masters of our exile, because every Sunday we are invited to the royal banquet. And that’s why we can sing a better song than Take Time to Be Holy. We sing, Y’all Take a Day Off to Remember Who You Are. Y’all Take a Day Off to Celebrate Whose You Are. Y’all Take a Day Off to Get a Taste of Home. And we sing it to the tune of SABBATH.

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[1] Chalice Hymnal #572, words by W. D. Longstaff, 1882

[2] Deuteronomy 24:19-21

[3] Daniel 1:8

[4] See 1 Thessalonians 4:1-12

Seven Questions: 1

A few weeks ago, I asked you to jot down any questions you wanted me to address in a sermon, and you did; then I asked you to pick your top seven, and you did. I had a lot of fun with the process, watching the questions come in and wondering what I might say in response, and I got a little nervous when I watched my favorite question of all slowly drop from the top rank to the bottom. I was greatly relieved to see it in sixth position when the polls closed, and in case you didn’t know, my favorite question is one submitted by Calin: “Why doesn’t God have a mommy? Everyone should have a mommy,” and I’ll join him in wondering about this deep concern on the Sunday before Christmas. Today, though, I will try to respond to this one:

What should be the role of the church versus the moral and ethical corruptions of modern society? Handmaiden? Critic? Gadfly? Partisan supporter? Evaluator? Other?

It’s a question that offers its own possible answers, and I suppose I could choose one or perhaps two and elaborate a bit on my choice, why the church should be doing this or that or the other. Handmaiden? Sure, why not, as long as she remembers that she can’t serve two masters. Critic? Absolutely, since the word of God judges our thoughts, words, and deeds. Gadfly? I love the image of a tiny fly moving a heavy bear with a single sting. Partisan supporter? No, not a good idea, unless we think of God’s people as partisans of God’s reign in the thick forest of the world. Evaluator? Sounds a little distant to me, I see people in lab coats with clip boards or figure skating judges, not a pleasant thought. Which leaves “other,” and other with a question mark invites all kinds of possibilities to describe the church’s role versus the moral and ethical corruptions of modern society. Healer? Enforcer of divine law? Jester?

It’s not that there are so many options and I just can’t make up my mind. My problem bubbles up long before I get to the first question mark: I don’t really know what the church is. There are more churches in this city than all flavors of pop tarts, jello, and ice cream combined. Which one of them is the church that is to take on some role or another? Or is it all of them together, somehow?

Growing up, I was encouraged to study the ancient creeds of the church and the confessions of the reformation, and I learned to say,

The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered. And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments.[1]

Sounds simple enough, but look where agreeing on doctrine got us. And I’ll spare you the much wordier and much fierier paragraphs from the Westminster Confession.[2]

What the church is has been contested since the days of Peter, Paul, and Mary, and I’m not talking about the 60’s that tend to get blamed for everything these days. In talking about the church, the best we can do is confess our faith in the unity of the church, confess our sin of fracturing that unity again and again, and proclaim our faith that nevertheless the body of Christ is alive in the world. Despite the scandal of a fractured church, the mission of Christ in the world continues and we have the privilege of having been called to participate in it. So perhaps we should ask the question differently: What should our role be, what should you and I do about the moral and ethical corruptions of modern society?

We should notice them, and not simply in others, which is always convenient; we should notice them and our own entanglement in them. We may want to talk about business ethics on Wall Street, but we also need to talk about our own greed. We may want to talk about sex and violence on tv, but we also need to talk about putting tv’s in our children’s rooms. We may want to talk about drugs in sports, but we also need to talk about our own methods of self-medicating to numb the pain or to push us on. Yes, we should notice the corruptions, and we should begin to name them, and I for one believe we should make a habit of sitting with the prophets and the psalms, and learn to lament again and cry.

Our very souls have been invaded and colonised by the forces that corrupt our life together, and we need strong partners like Amos to free our imagination from the endless commercials and silly soundbites that occupy our minds. We live in dark times, and we keep telling ourselves and each other that it’s the economy, when in truth we have lost all sense of what it means to live together.

Amos cried when he spoke to the people of the city who had done well for themselves. “You desire the day of the Lord? What makes you think it is a day of glory and light? It is a day of darkness, a day of judgment and truth.” And then the tears of Amos became transparent as God’s own tears of anger and grief:

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.[3]

We live in dark times, and we keep telling ourselves and each other that it’s the economy, and we keep singing our songs or fighting over what songs to sing and presenting our offerings while God is in tears over the ruin of God’s people.

The light that shines in this darkness is the call of God to let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream. The light that shines in the darkness is the call to a life together that embodies the commandments of God.

What is our role versus the moral and ethical corruptions of our time? We notice them and our own entanglement in them, we name them, we lament the absence of fullness, and then we respond anew to the call of God to a life of faithfulness. And faithfulness doesn’t come easy. It is much easier to draw a line, choose a side, and start shouting across whatever the line of division may be.

I recently listened to a couple of conversations Krista Tippett had with two Christian leaders from very different camps, and I was moved and encouraged by their wisdom.

Richard Mouw is a conservative Protestant who is strongly opposed to same-sex marriage. Since 1993, he has been president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, one of the largest centers of Evangelical higher education in the world.

Frances Kissling is best known as the President of Catholics for Choice, a post she held from 1982 to 2007, fighting to keep abortion legal in this country. Both have been involved in heated debates about difficult moral and ethical issues, both learned important things, and I want to make room for their voices this morning.

Mr. Mouw said, “The kind of Evangelical fundamentalist Christianity that formed me early on had a very strong streak of incivility. We not only had enemies, but we felt that it was essential to our spiritual identity that we have enemies. It’s almost as if we’ve always got to have somebody that we feel legitimate about really hating. A lot of people today who have strong convictions are not very civil, and a lot of people who are civil don’t have very strong convictions, and what we really need is convicted civility.”

Then he went all the way back to Aristotle to explain that civility is about learning to live in the city, learning to live with strangers, and he added, “for Christians who take the Bible seriously, it isn’t that we have these convictions and then we also got to try to be civil, but the truth element of civility is itself one of the convictions.”

The truth is at stake not just in the positions we take, but in how we take them. Mouw continued, “[In First Peter, there’s] a verse that gets used all the time among Evangelicals, ‘Be ready at any time to give a reason for the hope that lies within you, of anyone who ask it of you.’ We’ve always had that. You know, we’ve always got to be making the case. We’ve always got to be defending our beliefs against people who disagree with us. But we seldom go on and quote the next part of that verse, which is, ‘And do so with gentleness and reverence…’ I’ve often thought how different our theological and even our interreligious disagreements would get played out if we constantly said to ourselves, I’ve got to treat the other person with gentleness and reverence.”

And then he added, “Maybe it’s time to stop yelling at each other and accusing each other in public and maybe we ought to just sit down and turn the agenda into something where I would ask my gay and lesbian activist friends, ‘what is it about people like me that scares you so much?’ And [then they] in turn would listen to me [as I tell them what worries me so much about what they are advocating. And then we’d] talk about hopes and fears rather than angrily denouncing each other as homophobes or as people who are engaged in despicable behavior.” That would be a very different kind of conversation.[4]

Ms. Kissling, a.k.a. “the cardinal of choice,” was very frank. “I’m not a big believer in common ground. I think that common ground can be found between people who do not have deep, deep differences. But to think that you are going to take the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Organization of Women and they are going to find common ground on abortion is not practical. But I do think that when people who disagree with each other come together with a goal of gaining a better understanding of why the other believes what they do, good things come of that. I have learned — I have changed my views on some aspects of abortion over the last 10 years based upon having a deeper understanding of the values and concerns of people who disagree with me. And as a result, I have an interest in trying to find a way that I can honor some of their values without giving up mine. What is it in your own position that gives you trouble? What is it in the position of the other that you are attracted to? Where do you have doubts? [We must learn to] acknowledge what is good in the position of the other, acknowledge what troubles us about our own position. The need to approach others with enthusiasm for difference is absolutely critical to any change.”[5]

I am grateful for the wisdom of these seasoned leaders. In nurturing “convicted civility” and “enthusiasm for difference” we will find better answers to the moral and ethical challenges of our time, and we certainly get closer to a renewed and faithful vision of life together.

---

[1] The Augsburg Confession (1530), Art. 7  http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/concord/web/augs-007.html

[2] The Westminster Confession (1646), ch. 25 http://www.reformed.org/documents/wcf_with_proofs/index.html

[3] Amos 5:18-24

[4] http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/ccp-mouw/transcript.shtml

[5] http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/ccp-kissling/transcript.shtml

Visit to Riverbend

We were able to schedule another visit to Riverbend (short for Riverbend Maximum Security Institution); so if you missed the tour on October 18, please join us on Monday, November 21. The tour begins at 5:30 and lasts about two hours, including conversation with two inmates.

Visit to Riverbend
Monday, November 21, 2011
5:30-7:30pm

Register now

The group size is limited, and we must submit the list of visitors to prison officials for background checks prior to the visit. Please use this form to submit your name and date of birth. We will organize child care as needed and make car pool arrangements. Registration deadline: Monday, November 14, 9:00am.

The visit is part of our prison:360 focus.

Where Are You From?

Recently, I overheard a conversation between two Lutheran pastors. They were talking about what to make of this Sunday at the end of October when many Protestants dust off the old battle drums for Reformation Sunday. One of the pastors said,

As it stands, Reformation Sunday is the only Sunday of the entire church year that commemorates a moment in the history of Christianity rather than a moment in the narrative of Scripture itself. It is elevated and idealized precisely because it is so unique. This needs to stop. 

The other replied,

You’re absolutely right. But I would argue that we should change how we celebrate Reformation Sunday rather than bury it. True, we’ve set our liturgical calendar to commemorate the date on which Brother Martin posted his 95 theses for public consideration.  However, one could (and I believe should) point out that there have been moments like this throughout the church’s history, all of which are worthy of being called reformation moments, moments where the church has been re-oriented toward the gospel, moved away from the many, many roads down which our distracted, narcissistic minds can take us.[1]

Reformation moments, I like that, moments where the church has been re-oriented toward the gospel, I like that a lot. But why set aside one Sunday for that? I think we need every single Sunday the good Lord gives us, not to celebrate past re-orientations, but rather to ask the risen Christ to re-orient us today, because there are indeed many, many roads down which our distracted, narcissistic minds love to take us.

The last thing we need are more opportunities to bolster tribal identities within the body of Christ. Luther himself was horrified when he heard people referring to themselves as “Lutherans.” “I ask that my name be left silent and people not call themselves Lutheran, but rather Christians.” Amen to that. And so we sing “A Mighty Fortress” on this Sunday with a nod to tradition, but we don’t make this a Protestant holy day; instead we celebrate that the Spirit of the risen Christ continues to work in such a fractured community as the church, and today we do so by remembering and giving thanks for those who have gone before whose lives embodied Christian faithfulness. We celebrate All Saints Sunday in a thoroughly apostolic manner: Paul addressed his letters to the saints, and he wasn’t writing to the few, the chosen, the stars among God’s people, but to all who had found new life through faith in Jesus Christ.[2]

It is difficult for us to say and celebrate who we are without stumbling into nasty messes. Who, for example, is an American and who is not? Well, the first people who came to this land were from Asia, and when the first Spanish settlers arrived, they called them Indians. They mingled and settled in what are today Florida and New Mexico, but the meaning of “American” continued to change. People came from England, Scotland, and Wales, from Holland and Germany, some to escape religious or political persecution, others to seek economic opportunity. Hundreds of thousands, of course, were brought here against their will on slave ships from ports on the West African coast.

The first U.S. Census in 1790 counted nearly 4 million people, the majority of them of English, Welsh, or Scottish heritage; the next-largest group were 757,000 blacks, followed by Germans. Not all of them qualified as “Americans”, though; only “free white persons” could apply for citizenship. Then came large groups of immigrants from Ireland and Italy, and Jewish immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe, constantly changing the mix of cultures, especially in cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. Emma Lazarus, herself the daughter of Portuguese Jewish immigrants, captured the nation’s welcoming spirit in an 1883 poem—“Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...”

But the surge in Irish and Italian immigrants to a mostly Protestant nation provoked a backlash against Catholics, and immigrants in general, with some believing that the Pope was plotting to undermine U.S. democracy. No wonder many Protestants were eager to celebrate Reformation Day with great enthusiasm!

Out West, the presence of Chinese immigrants also provoked protests. The abolition of slavery had produced a demand for cheap labor, and Chinese workers had been brought in to build railroads. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred all immigrants from China for 10 years, and the ban was later extended – while immigration from Europe continued unabated for almost 40 years.[3] Immigrants from Europe were considered better suited for becoming Americans than immigrants from China.

Maya Lin is a Chinese-American artist who gained worldwide recognition for designing the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C.. Years ago, I heard her recall in an interview a recurring scene in which somebody asked her where she was from. “When I said, ‘from Ohio,’ they replied, ‘No, where are you really from.’” Lin was born in Athens, Ohio, but in the imagination of those who asked her, people from the American heartland “just didn’t look like that.”

Just days ago I read something Benjamin Franklin wrote back in 1751 about the Pennsylvania Germans whom he considered to be a “swarthy” racial group distinct from the English majority in the colony.

Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion?[4]

Other 18^th-century proponents of Anglifying all people accused Germans of laziness, illiteracy, and a reluctance to assimilate, in addition to their excessive fertility and their Catholicism.[5] What strikes me in those statements, besides their rudeness and blatant racism, is how easily they could be recycled for use against Irish and Italian immigrants – and they were – as well as against several Spanish speaking groups, summarily referred to as “Mexicans” these days.

The circumstances of our lives change constantly, sometimes slowly and gradually, sometimes too fast for our souls and imaginations to keep up. And when the world around us changes faster than our minds, we get anxious. When the world around us changes faster than our ability to mourn our losses and comprehend the startling newness of things, fear creeps in. And when fear creeps in, we seek safety. And nothing feels safer than circling the wagons and shouting ugly epithets at those on the outside. Much of our public discourse reflects that sad reality these days. We just keep going down the many, many roads our distracted, narcissistic minds can take us. How can we be re-oriented toward the gospel in this fear-feeding mess?

Today’s reading from 1John urges us to remember who we are.

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.

Perhaps you think ‘children of God’ sounds a little too cute, too infantilizing. Try this: See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called sons and daughters of God; and that is what we are.

Everything around us may be in flux, but our Christ-given identity and status as those who belong to God will not change. We speak different languages, we sing different songs, we were born on different parts of the planet, we tell different stories, and we uphold different values – but see what love the Father has given us, that we should be called sons and daughters of God; and that is what we are. The world changes constantly, and when we locate the core of who we are in the world, we are building on hopelessly unstable ground and we are setting ourselves up for disappointment and worse. When we locate the core of our identity in the world, we end up being defined by the world: we become what we do or what those in power need us to be; we become what we earn; we become the clothes we wear, the neighborhoods we live in, and the schools our children attend; we become the job we have or no longer have, we become the house we can afford or slaves of our mortgage payments. But see what love the Father has given us, that we should be called sons and daughters of God; and that is what we are.

What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

Everything around us will continue to change, but who we are will not change, but rather continue to be revealed. We are growing into a future which resembles the one in whom we dwell, and that is why we can face all the changes and the losses they represent, with courage and with hope. Nothing will change who we are, and we will see with greater clarity what it means to be called sons and daughters of God. Our likeness will no longer be veiled by layers of ignorance and fear.

The witness who speaks to us through this passage from 1John urges us to live in the kingdom of God, to make that our first address, and to let it shape our loyalties. Then we continue to live in the world, but we don’t believe the stories it tells us about ourselves and others; we don’t allow its anxieties to define us. We trust the word that we are sons and daugthers of God, and we dwell in the land of mercy. And when our neighbors start circling the wagons, we will, by the grace of God, have better hopes to affirm.

There is no better way to honor the spirit of reformation or the memory of those who have gone before than to listen more carefully for the word of God amid the clamor of our days.

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[1] http://nachfolge.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-we-should-celebrate-reformation.html

[2] Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:2; 2 Corinthians 1:1; Ephesians 1:1; Philippians 1:1; Colossians 1:2

[3] http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/upfront/features/index.asp?article=f0904b

[4] The papers of Benjamin Franklin. Ed. Leonard W. Labaree. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959. vol 4:234

[5] http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/officialamerican/englishonly/

Can Prisons Be Places of Healing?

I still remember the faces of the women at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. I still remember the words they shared with each other, their courage to speak truth, hard, painful truth.

Eve Ensler conducting a writing workshop with inmates at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York.Monday night, as part of our prison:360 focus, I watched a documentary, What I Want My Words To Do To You, about a writing workshop led by playwright Eve Ensler inside a women's prison. I had the privilege to witness the power of words to open paths toward healing and wholeness. Fifteen women, the majority of them convicted of murder, used writing and conversation to delve into their most terrifying realities and grapple with their own culpability. If you haven't seen this documentary, I hope you will.

We all need places where we can speak the truth without fear, places where, in an atmosphere of love, we can explore the things that haunt and terrify us. We all need relationships that allow us to face our own brokenness, and for some of us prison can be the place where such relationships finally become possible.

On Sunday, we will have guest speakers from The Theotherapy Project, both during the Sunday school hour at 9:30 and during worship at 10:45. Mark and Dana West will talk about their work with small groups inside Tennessee prisons, and with former female offenders at Rivera House, a transitional home for women in East Nashville. Two of the residents will talk about their experience during worship. When truth is spoken and heard in a setting defined by love, healing occurs. Join us on Sunday in the fellowship hall and in worship, and you too will remember the faces and words of women who found healing behind prison walls.

Full of Blue

How long has it been since you heard the Ten Commandments read out loud?[0] I don’t remember, it’s been quite a long time. In some old churches on the East coast, worshipers and tourists can still find the words written on the sanctuary walls, framing the lectern and the pulpit, the baptistery and the table. Early Anglican tradition in the colonies, long before the American Revolution began, required that the Ten Commandments were to be “set up on the East end of every Church and Chapel, where the people may best see and read the same.” In those days, the East end was the front of the sanctuary. Before the service began, you could sit in the pew, meditate on the writing on the wall and reflect on your week in light of the ten words.

Martin Luther was convinced that knowing the Ten Commandments was tantamount to knowing the entire Bible. “This much is certain,” he wrote in the introduction to the Large Catechism, “those who know the Ten Commandments perfectly know the entire Scriptures and in all affairs and circumstances are able to counsel, help, comfort, judge and make decisions in both spiritual and temporal matters.”[1] He knew, of course, that knowing the ten perfectly doesn’t end with being able to recite them – but it certainly begins there. There are ten of them, which is very good because we can use our fingers to help us learn and remember. They are, for the most part, brief and simple, so we can take them to heart and hold them in memory. They become part of us so they can guide us in our living. Knowing them perfectly is not just about unfolding every possible nuance of their meaning, but about living with them, every day; becoming familiar with them as with a path you walk every morning, and every morning it shows you something new. They are more than just rules and laws; they are good words that open us to the will and wisdom of God.

At the heart of the ten commandments is the good word about remembering the sabbath. Jesus taught that the sabbath was created for humans, and not the other way round, humans for the sabbath.[2] Of course, we want to know what it means that the sabbath was made for us and whose it is. I thought about that particular commandment these last few days, as I sat and chatted with Emily Dickinson. I had read her little poem, Some keep the Sabbath, and, curisously, I both loved it and felt moved to protest.[3]

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church —
I keep it, staying at Home —
With a Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an Orchard, for a Dome —

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —
I, just wear my Wings —
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton — sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —
I’m going, all along.

It’s easy to see her, sitting in the orchard with the birds, isn’t it? She’s smiling, there’s not one boring moment, the sermon is never long. I think I know the place she’s writing about so beautifully, and I think you know it too.

A couple of weeks ago, nine of us drove to the mountains. The sky hung low like a grey blanket, and the early morning air was cold. We drove to Chattanooga, on to Cleveland, and up the Hiwassee, waiting for the sun to rise. We pushed our kayaks in the water and started paddling down the river – and with every paddle stroke, it seemed, the clouds got thinner. Suddenly the sky was bluer than a Titans jersey, and the light awakened the colors all around us: the trees on either side of the river, with specks of yellow and red, the ancient rock faces with hues of silver and copper, the bright green patches of eelgrass in the water right below us, and on the edge of an island a little red flower whose name I still don’t know. It was as though the sunlight had kissed the world awake and everything was singing.

Heaven is declaring God’s glory;
the sky is proclaiming God’s handiwork.

We were paddling down the river surrounded by an anthem of praise – but there was no speech, no words, only the lovely sound life makes when it is very good.

The Psalm we heard this morning also sings about this place where the sermon is never long.

One day gushes the news to the next, and one night informs another what needs to be known. Of course, there’s no speech, no words — their voices can’t be heard — but their sound extends throughout the world; their words reach the ends of the earth.

Who, then, in Ms Dickinson’s orchard, speaks of Sabbath? Who proclaims the promise of peace in the garden? Who told her that the joy she finds there is of the heavenly kind? Neither day nor night nor the bobolink break the silence of nature with a word of heaven.

Kathleen Norris, in her book Dakota, writes about a little girl she met at an elementary school where she taught creative writing for a while. The little girl had recently moved from Louisiana to the vast Dakota landscape, and she wrote what Norris says is “the best description I know of the Dakota sky.” It’s a most beautiful line:

‘The sky is full of blue / and full of the mind of God.’[4]

There is a fullness we cannot know unless a voice ends the silence of the sky. The psalmist knows what it is like when we see more than we can say, when we run out of words to give voice to our awe and wonder and we reach for the power of metaphor. In the psalm we heard, the sun rises like a groom coming out of his honeymoon suite, and like a warrior, it thrills at running its course. But unlike Ms Dickinson, the psalmist also reminds us that God has broken through the silence of nature, disclosing God’s name and making known the mind of God in the liberation of God’s people and the gift of the commandments. Suddenly, out of the blue, the psalm sings of the Lord’s perfect instruction, faithful laws, and pure commands, of God’s torah in words that revive, make wise, gladden the heart, enlighten and last.

They are more desirable than gold —
they are sweeter than honey —
and there is great reward in keeping them.

The psalm is as exuberant in giving voice to the wonders of God’s word as in singing of the silent witness of earth and sky.

Every creature is a song of praise, a poem of divine glory – and so are we, when we are fully alive. Yet we are only fully alive when we can tell God from idol. For us to be fully alive, we must live with these ten good words and with the One whose life embodied and proclaimed their deepest meaning.

I told Ms Dickinson that I believe we must keep the Sabbath going to Church not only to hear about and taste the promise of Sabbath peace in contrast to a world that tells us to do what we want and then goes on to tell us what to want. We need to keep the Sabbath going to Church because our coming together is part of the peace God intends. We do not come to the garden alone. We don’t paddle down the river by ourselves. We must be together in order to know God’s good word perfectly. Hearing it again and again is the beginning. Embodying it together is the fulfillment.

The psalm has a third movement after the silent witness of creation to the glory of God and the exuberant praise for God’s torah. The third movement is quiet and introspective. It takes us back to the pew in a little church somewhere in Virginia or Massachusetts where the Ten Commandments are written on the wall facing the congregation. Perhaps you got there early, before the service began; perhaps the sermon was long and your mind started wandering. Now you sit there reading the words, from the first to the tenth, and you reflect on your life in their light. You notice the shadows. “Can anyone know what they’ve accidentally done wrong?” you wonder with the psalmist and you pray with the psalmist, “Clear me of my unknown sin and save your servant from willful sins. Don’t let them rule over me.”

The psalm moves from the grandeur of the heavens to the surrender of the heart; from the power of God to create and speak to the power of God to forgive and save. The final words are not words about God, but words addressed to God. The final word is a heart trusting in God.

I promised Ms Dickinson that today’s sermon would not be long. So allow me to close with a song whose writer was inspired by our psalm.

All things praise thee—night to night
sings in silent hymns of light;
all things praise thee—day to day
chants thy power in burning ray;
time and space are praising thee,
all things praise thee—Lord, may we![5]

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[0] In worship, we read the ten commandments and Psalm 19 from the Common English Bible

[1] The Book of Concord: the confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, by Robert Kolb, Timothy J. Wengert, Charles P. Arand (Augsburg Fortress, 2000) 382; older editions online, e.g. http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/catechism/web/cat-01.html

[2] Mark 2:27

[3] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182809

[4] Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993) p. 21

[5] George W. Conder, Appendix to the Leeds Hymn Book, 1874; sounds lovely to the tune of "For the Beauty of the Earth"

Seven Questions

I asked you to submit questions for a sermon series, and you did. Thank you! I asked you to select the top seven from all the questions that were entered, and you did. Thank you! Here they are, seven questions that I will address in upcoming sermons:

How can the church serve as a peacemaker in dealing with the divisive issues (other Christian traditions, other faiths, political extremes, social values) of our time?
This one I will address on December 4.

How do we make the circumstances of our everyday life lead us to holiness?
This one I will address on November 13.

When we look back in history, we can see that dictators like Hitler were bad and we wonder why Christians didn’t stand up sooner to save the people.  What about nowadays?  When do we know to act, what to do? Where is our collective power?
This one I will address on November 20.

What should be the role of the church versus the moral and ethical corruptions of modern society? Handmaiden? Critic? Gadfly? Partisan supporter? Evaluator? Other?
This one I will address on November 6.

Can you be a Christian if you don’t care about “going to heaven”?
This one I will pick up in January.

Why doesn’t God have a mommy? Everyone should have a mommy.
This one I will pick up on December 18.

Whatever happened to the concept of sin? Aren’t many of our serious social problems related to The Seven Deadly Sins (wrath, greed, sloth, lust, envy, gluttony, pride) and the lack of support for The Seven Cardinal Virtues (fortitude, justice, prudence, temperance, faith, hope, charity)?
This one I will pick up in January.

It has been so much fun working with you on this project. Thank you for your input! I so look forward to preaching those sermons...

A Temple in the Streets

“You ride into town on a donkey, and you allow the crowds to greet you as king. You enter the temple and you drive out all who are buying and selling there. You overturn the tables of the money changers. You allow the blind and the lame to come to you in the temple, and you cure them. The children sing to you, Hosanna to the Son of David, and you do not stop them. Just who do you think you are?”[1]

The temple authorities were not just curious, they were angry and they demanded answers. “What kind of authority do you have for doing these things? Who gave you this authority?” Where did you go to school? What is your degree? When and where were you ordained? Do you have letters, certificates, diplomas?

The temple authorities lived in a very orderly world where authority was hard-earned and carefully assigned. You study hard, you finish top of your class, you get the right internships, you network in the outer courtyards to find a way into the inner circle, you make sure the people in charge remember your name.

It is easy to see how these seasoned temple leaders were disturbed and shaken by Jesus’ freedom. His words and actions went against all that was holy to them. And his words and actions undermined their power: Forgiveness of sins was temple business, yet Jesus forgave sins on the street.

The crowds saw it and praised God, who had given such authority to human beings, but the temple authorities couldn’t see it that way.[2] The crowds shouted, the children sang, but the chief priests and the elders of the people raised angry questions. “What kind of authority do you have for doing these things? Who gave you this authority?” They only knew the authority of the law and the authority of tradition, and Jesus didn’t fit.

They asked Jesus, but only they themselves could answer these questions, just like you and I trust the word and witness of others only to the point where we ourselves know the authority of Jesus. It’s a matter of seeing. We know his authority because it grabs us, it changes us, it puts us on a different path. We give the answer when the question isn’t a question anymore, and we give it with your lives.

Jesus didn’t give them an answer, because he gave it with his life as well. Instead he asked them a question, “Where did John get his authority to baptize? Did he get it from heaven or from humans?” They remembered John, who called people to repentance, and who baptized those who confessed their sins. They remembered him: he had called them a brood of vipers – not a phrase they could forget easily. John challenged them along with all the sinners gathered at the river’s edge to produce fruit that showed that they had changed their hearts and lives.[3]

Now Jesus asked them whether John’s authority came from heaven or from humans. What were they to say? They didn’t discuss if John was a prophet from God or just a crazy wild man, but they showed great concern for the political implications of their response. “If we say ‘from heaven,’ he’ll say to us, ‘Then why didn’t you believe him?’ But we can’t say ‘from humans’ because everyone thinks John was a prophet.” The safest thing to do was to plead ignorance. “We don’t know,” they replied. The entire conversation wasn’t shaped by a desire to know the truth, but by political considerations. Power was at stake, and these men were not free to respond to John or Jesus, because they were trapped in positions of privilege. An honest answer, either way, would have threatened those positions.

The way Matthew paints the scene makes it very easy for us, too easy, I believe, to stand in the courtyard and chide the religious authorities for their failure to respond with honesty. It doesn’t take great courage to demand honesty when others are the ones faced with the question. But if we’re honest – and I can only speak from my own experience, but I suspect I’m not alone – if we’re honest, we must admit that our own response to Jesus is determined by considerations of power and privilege, all the time: calling Jesus my Lord and Savior involves letting go of habits of thinking, speaking, and doing that are quite comfortable. And when I’m not ready to let go, I’m as good as the first of the chief priests at pleading ignorance.

I hear the little story of the two sons with great humility. A man had two sons. Now he came to the first and said, “Son, go and work in the vineyard today.” “No, I don’t want to,” he replied. But later he changed his mind and went. The father said the same thing to the other son, who replied, “Yes, sir.” But he didn’t go. Which one of these two did his father’s will?

Yet another question, and this time the temple leaders didn’t huddle to discuss their answer. “The first one,” they said. It was a good answer. What we say matters, but not as much as what we do. Actions speak louder than words. Well done is better than well said. It was a good answer, but it was also a word of judgment. Jesus draws our attention to the actions of notorious sinners, people who never claimed to do God’s will: When John came, they trusted his word that repentance was the gate to the kingdom. Tax collectors and prostitues changed their hearts and lives, and they are entering God’s kingdom ahead of you. Those who were blind are able to see. Those who were crippled are walking. Those who were deaf now hear. Those who were dead are raised up. The poor have good news proclaimed to them. [4] And all you do is ask, ‘Who gave you this authority?’ What does it take for you to see the grace of heaven at work on earth? What does it take for you to join the company of sinners in the embrace of God’s mercy? Are you so proud? Are you so proud?

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky writes about the “lady of little faith.” She is an old woman who has doubts about her destiny in the face of death, and she seeks spiritual advise from Father Zosima.[5]

He tells her, “Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, … no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.”

“In active love?” she replies. “There’s another question—and such a question! You see, I so love humanity that … I often dream of forsaking all that I have, leaving [my family], and becoming a sister of mercy. I close my eyes and think and dream, and at that moment I feel full of strength to overcome all obstacles.”

She wants to say ‘yes’ with her whole heart, but then she wonders how long she could endure such a way of life. What if the patient whose wounds she would so lovingly and selflessly be tending, what if that patient should fail to respond with gratitude? “If anything could dissipate my love to humanity, it would be ingratitude,” she says.

Then the priest tells her what a doctor once told him.

“He was a man getting on in years, and … spoke as frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. ‘I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. … The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.’ ”

“But what’s to be done?” the woman asks. “What can one do in such a case? Must one despair?”

“No,” the priest replies. “It is enough that you are distressed at it. Do what you can, and it will be reckoned unto you. … If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. … What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. … Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love … I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all ... But active love is labor and fortitude.”

The love of God which encounters and invites us in Jesus is not a love in dreams. It is a love that reveals its depth in the long labor of our redemption.

In the life of Jesus, word and action become one to build a temple in the streets. He calls us to change our hearts and lives and to join the company of sinners in the embrace of God’s mercy. He calls us to let go of our pride and recognize one another as brothers and sisters in our need for forgiveness. He calls us to join him in the dailiness of love’s labor, which is our priestly service. He calls us to give the answer with our lives.

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[1] See Matthew 21

[2] See Matthew 9:2-8

[3] Matthew 3:1-12

[4] See Matthew 11:5

[5] http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1073265&pageno=37