“Souls Made for Community”

     I want to let you all in on a little known fact about myself. I share this with some reluctance, because I don’t like to brag, I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I am all puffed up on myself, but facts is facts, as they say, so I’ll just spill the beans and let the chips fall where they may. Here it is: I am a GREAT golfer.

            I know, I know, you might object. You might say, ‘But Reed, you don’t even own a set of golf clubs!” You might say, “But Pastor, the closest you come to golfing is watching the Masters on television.” You might even add in, “Reed, you never practice golf, why you have never swung a golf club since you were in high school anywhere except on a miniature golf course.”  All true, yes.

But let me tell you – I am a great golfer because in my head I know I am. I don’t need to practice to be a great golfer, because in my heart I believe I am.

Lots of folk think they are great Christians. Now they don’t own a Bible, and if they do it is gathering dust on a bookshelf. They might on occasion turn on the TV to watch a televangelist. They may even have a bracelet with WWJD on it – what would Jesus do. And they have not seen the inside of church since they were back in high school. They are Christians, they insist, because they believe they are.

In the same way that I am a great golfer.

            The Rev. Mary Luti, who is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and preached at my installation here some years ago, tells of a wonderful person who came to see here one day and said that she had been coming to church for quite some time, but had not been raised in the faith, and wanted to become a Christian And then she asked where to begin.  Mary reflected on this. Perhaps reading the Bible – always a good thing – unless you get bogged down in the boring “begat” sections. Perhaps reading a book on theology – again, always a good thing, but the Christian faith is about more than head-stuff. But she said instead, “Keep on coming to church, become part of our community.” Because what better way to learn it than to live it, and to live it in its rich, living, organic form?

            Which is, of course, the problem for anyone of us of sound mind. It is why so many people in all sincerity say, “I am spiritual, not religious.” Because being spiritual is something we think we can do on our own, without all the other stuff that comes with being part of a faith community – including, of course, all those problematic people. The personality conflicts, the power plays, the insensitive remarks, the enabling behaviors. As one theologian once put is, “Church is the place where the one you can’t stand always is.”

            Sounds a lot like a family, doesn’t it? Like a family, and not one of those idealized old-time Leave it to Beaver type families, but the messy kind we all pretty much end up in, with Uncle Frank who tells the same boring jokes and dozes off in the easy chair, and grandma who can’t resist pinching your cheeks and telling you how much you have grown, and the little sister who can’t let go the grudge now forty-year old, and on and on.

            But then there is the other side to family, families they stay together by keeping in touch, by being there for one another, offering support and encouragement, providing  comfort in times of trouble or loss, showing up for each other, and so much more.

            Paul the Apostle (Ephesians 2: 19-22) reminds us that we are part of a new family, a Christian household of faith, part of God’s family. Which is a great thing these days, because while it was once true that we lived in a Christian culture, that is just not the case these days. We are in a very real way aliens in the society we once created. So how much more important it is that we are no longer strangers and aliens from God, but have joined a new family, a new household.

            So getting back to the golfing analogy, the question is not merely an intellectual one: “Do you believe?”, or “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”, or “What would Jesus do?” It is also the political and social question: “Will you join up?” And, more importantly than that, will you come to practice? It is like that cartoon going around the internet, with Jesus speaking to a young man kneeling at his feet, and saying “No, when I said follow me, I did not mean on Twitter.”

            We are souls –spiritual beings --  made for community.

“God’s Place of Business”

Jacob is a fugitive on the road, with only a stone for a pillow on a bitterly cold night in the wilderness. Jacob lays down to sleep, alone and without a friend in the world, without even so much as a rote prayer before bedtime. (Genesis 28:10-19a)

            And right there, at the strangest, loneliest, most apparently God-forsaken moment in his life, God comes to Jacob. As if often the case in the Old Testament, God comes to Jacob in a dream.

            In that dream, there is a stairway to heaven – but it is not a stairway that Jacob buys or even builds, and it is not a stairway that he climbs to meet God somewhere up in the clouds high above. It is a stairway that reaches down from heaven to earth, and upon which angels are going up and, more importantly, down. Angels, in Jacob’s time, were thought of as spiritual beings who were God’s messengers.

But then Jacob realizes that the Lord God is standing right there beside him, and the next thing you know Jacob is being given the same blessing and promise that had been given to his father before him, and to his grandfather, Abraham, before him: a blessing of land, and a future of untold generations who will in their turn be a blessing to the world.

And then there is even more: a promise that this fugitive, alone and on the run, would never again be alone, for his God would be with him, guiding and protecting and bringing him back safely to that very place.

            The claim of this account of Jacob and the stairway from heaven is this: that God’s place of business is right here, and that we are God’s business. We all – even the ones who grasp and trick and steal from our brothers and sisters and who flee like fugitives and even forget to say our prayers or come to church – we all are God’s business, right here, right now.

You may have come to church this afternoon because you thought you were about reaching out to God, reaching up to God. But the account of Jacob and the stairway tells us that God is just as busy reaching out to you, that God’s place of business is not up there somewhere, not on the 964^th floor of a skyscraper whose top lies nestled in the clouds, but right down here,

on the shop room floor,

 in the cubicle with you and your laptop,

in the kitchen at dinner time,

in the bedroom as you discuss the events of the day with your spouse.

In each and every one of those places, you might accurately echo Jacob’s astonished gasp, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!”

 This is the meaning of the account of Jacob and the ladder from heaven – this is God’s place of business.

And more than that, just as Jacob, with all his faults, with all his lack of faith, with all his flawed life and wrong choices, was God’s unfinished business, so too we, with all our varying degrees of faith, with all our pasts of wrong choices, with all our flaws and defects of character – so too we are God’s unfinished business.

It is the meaning of the incarnation, of our Christmas celebrations – that God came to us as Jesus to save the world and everyone in it; and it is the meaning of Pentecost, that God sent to us the Holy Spirit to help us in our journey. Because we are God’s unfinished business.

You may have the recently released film “Soul Surfer”, which is based on actual events. Brittany Hamilton, a teenager living in Hawaii, was a successful surfer who was on the cusp of dominating the professional surfing circuit when one day a shark took off one of her arms. Surfing was her life, and so she believes there is nothing left for her. But after recovering, she learns to surf with one arm, and determined to make a comeback, enters a surfing competition – where she is thoroughly beaten by her rivals. Devastated, on a whim she goes off on a mission trip with her church youth group to Thailand, where to compound her despair she learns that her lack of an arm makes her pretty useless on the construction site. But then, on a day off from the work, she finds herself down at the beach, and learns that she has a gift for teaching – she finds a surfboard, and teaches a young child to get over his fear of the ocean through learning to surf.

On her return to the states, she finds that her home is snowed under my mail – fan letters from around the world. She cannot understand it at first – she had failed in her comeback attempt at competitive surfing. But then she starts to read the letters, and finds that her attempt had inspired other-abled folk around the world, inspiring them to find ways to make new lives despite the setbacks that had been visited upon them. Far from being a failure with nothing to live for, Brittany discovers that she is a gift that gives hope to countless others who face their own struggles with disabilities.

Brittany Hamilton had thought her life was over when she lost that arm, but God had unfinished business with her.

And God has unfinished business with you as well.

No matter what your past, no matter what your faults, no matter the catalog of excuses and lists of back-sliding, no matter the bad habits and the repeated failures – God has unfinished business with you.

God loves you, and God loves you just the way you are – but God also loves you too much to leave you that way.

Thanks be to God, you are God’s unfinished business.

The Gift of Rules

         

My generation – those of us who came of age in the late Sixties and early Seventies – did not have much time for rules. Rules – laws, regulations, even the unwritten customs that governed how our parents lived – were viewed as mere legalism at best, oppressive totalitarianism at worst. We rebelled against dress codes, hair length, the draft, drug use laws, sexual mores, the unwritten rules about the proper roles of women and men in society, and more. A popular song summed it up for us, with its refrain, “Signs, signs, everywhere there’s a sign, blocking up the scenery, breaking up my mind, do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?” We rebelled against everything in the name of freedom.

            So of course we – well, at least speaking for myself – have never been big fans of the Ten Commandments, the original engraved in stone set of rules. And a close corollary of this denigration of the Ten Commandments is the tendency to view the Old Testament as all about law, the New Testament all about grace, to think that Jesus was all about freedom, his Jewish tradition about a binding, legalistic ritualism.

            But when I understood the context of the Ten Commandments, I came to see them in a whole new light, and to understand that far from being an oppressive list of “thou shalt nots”, they instead are gifts from God, gifts designed to help the community thrive and flourish.

            Try to imagine what life was like for the enslaved Hebrews. They had no laws of their own – they were subject to Pharaoh’s rule alone.  Where they lived, what they did, when they woke and when they slept, all were dictated for them by their overseers.  Who was their god, the one who exercised total domination and control over everything in their lives? – Pharaoh. What was their sole task? – to obey unquestioningly, and to fulfill the work quotas.

            And then, suddenly and without time to prepare, they find themselves with more freedom than they know what to do with, a wandering group out in the wilderness, with no history of self-government, no law books, no rules or regulations or even ingrained customs by which they might order their society. All they know is the old way, a way of totalitarian control by an autocrat, where the chief values are unquestioning obedience and meeting production quotas.

            Which is where God steps in. With a set of rules, yes, but first, with a reminder. A reminder that this God is all about freedom.

            “Then God spoke these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery….”

            It is as if God starts off by saying, “Before we begin, let me remind you about who I am – I am the one who heard your cries when you were enslaved back in Egypt, and the one who acted on your behalf to bring you to freedom. No longer are you Pharaoh’s – now you are mine. No longer are you chattel to be brutalized and exploited by an Egyptian overlord; now you are mine, and I am all about giving you what you need, as a community, not only to live, but to live abundantly. So listen up….”

            When we get the youth group together each year, one of the first things we do is sit down and together come up with a set of rules by which we agree to live with each other. Rules like “no put-downs”, and “we will treat each other with respect”, and “no drugs or alcohol”, and so on. Everyone knows that these rules help us to live together as a youth group, they help prevent the kind of splits and divisions which can ruin a group. Do they restrict our freedom to do things – sure. But in the name of helping us build a life-affirming community.

            It is, of course, the same with those Ten Commandments. Far from being an arbitrary set of legalisms designed to hem us in, they instead are God’s vision for us of a flourishing, life-affirming community. And because those Commandments are linked to the Exodus, to God’s bringing the Hebrews up out of the brutality and exploitation of Pharaoh, they can be seen as a vision of an alternative reality, God’s reality, which God hopes we will we embrace.

            And so the first commandments remind us never again to submit to false gods, to the Pharaohs who would enslave us, either through military might or, as more often is the case, through the seduction of promises of wealth, or fame, or security, or a life of ease. And the latter commandments seek to enhance human community by putting limits on the acquisitive capacity of members of the community – the power individuals have to take by might or cunning from more vulnerable members of the community. As Old Testament theologian and preacher Walter Brueggemann reminds us, “”the protection of property is to be understood in the first instance not as a rule of property, but as a defense of the weak against the rapacious capacity of the strong.” (Theology of the Old Testament, p. 185).

            The Ten Commandments are, at base, not just law, but law rooted in God’s amazing grace, gifts freely extended to us, gifts embodying God’s wisdom, gifts setting out God’s vision for us of a world where God’s love is lived out by God’s people, in community, together. An amazing grace, not just for individuals who once were lost, but for the entire human community, that together we might truly see.

So this is the question for us.  Is it enough to just live by the rules, to “shalt not” when the Bible says “thou shalt not”? Or does God call us to do more, to not only see into the vision of a good life lived in community, but also to strive to make that good life in community a lived reality for all its members?

“On Holy Ground”

In the reading we just heard we had about Moses’ encounter with God (Exodus 3) – the same Moses that would go on to challenge Pharaoh and his army, the same Moses that would lead the Israelites through the parted Red Sea waters, the same Moses that would accompany them on their 40 year trek through the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land.

            It reminds of that story about President Bush’s trip to the Holy Land. Israel Prime Minster Ehud Olmert and President Bush had a scheduled meeting. Olmert arrived late, and Bush let him know in no uncertain terms that he did not like to be kept waiting.

            Olmert replied, “I am sorry Mr. President, I was meeting with someone more important than you are.”

“Who is more important than the President of the United States?” Bush demanded.

            Olmert replied: “Moses; I was meeting with Moses.”

            “You know Moses?!”, Bush exclaimed. “Get him on the phone. I want to talk to him.”

            Olmert picked up the phone, dialed, listened, and then hung up. “He doesn’t want to talk to you,” he told Bush. “He said the last time he talked to a bush it cost him forty years in the wilderness.”

You gotta love this account of Moses and the way in which God comes to him. Moses, who was raised in Pharaoh’s court and knew just how oppressive the Egyptians were to the Israelites they had enslaved, is going about his business as a shepherd when one day he is walking up a mountain and saw something amazing – a bush. A bush on fire. A bush on fire with a flame that did not consume it. And then he hears a voice calling him, saying “Moses! Moses!” And when Moses answers, “Here I am”, that voice tells Moses that he is in a very special place, a holy place, and so he should take off his shoes.

            We aren’t shepherds, and we don’t often find ourselves on mountainsides surrounded by bushes which might catch on fire, so maybe we should not expect God to speak to us through a burning bush on Mt. Sinai. But still, we might well ask, what are the common things in our lives through which God’s message might come to us?

Maybe in the text messages and tweets and Facebook postings that fly across our digital world;

maybe in a conversation with a troubled co-worker over break;

maybe in the car pool to soccer practice,

or in a walk on the beach, or on the morning news,

or even in a wooden building some almost 300 years old.

Maybe holy ground is not just over there, in what is often called “The Holy Land”, maybe holy ground is everywhere and anywhere that God might speak to us, if we had ears to listen and eyes to see.

            But if we were on holy ground, if God were indeed calling to us, what might we expect to hear? I think we can take three clues from the account of Moses and the burning bush.

            First, just as Moses’ call was linked to the cries of his people crying in captivity, so too our call will likely be linked to the cries of those in need in our time and place – the suffering of the unemployed, the homeless, the bereaved, the ill.  Those televised purveyors of the Prosperity Gospel will tell you that God’s call to you is all about you, you, you – about making you richer, you more successful, you increasingly insulated from the pain of the world. God’s call to Moses reminds us that we are called to be a servant people, to partner with God in caring for our neighbor.

            Second, we can expect that God’s call to us will not be a welcome one! Like Moses, we will have plenty of reasons that we just don’t want to belly up to the task placed in front of us. I am not faithful enough. I am already over-committed. I don’t have the training. The job is too big for me. It’s all rather vague – I think I’ll wait until I get more of the details. It’s too hard.

            And finally, we can expect that when God calls us to a task, God will equip us for it as well. The same God who gives Moses what surely must have seemed to him to be an insurmountable task, also promises to be with him, with power, every step of the way.  It may look to the casual onlooker that Moses stands naked before Pharaoh, on his own, unaided and powerless. But the person of faith knows that this is far from the truth, that when Moses stands before Pharaoh, God is with him, fully engaged in the struggle.

            It is the same with us. When God calls us to a task, that call comes with the assurance that we will never be left alone or unaided. It is not for nothing we have that adage, “One plus God makes a majority.”

Who was Moses to lead his people up out of slavery to the Promised Land? Only a man called by God to do so and gifted with the resources to make it happen.

Who was Nelson Mandela to lead South Africa into a post-apartheid era of racial harmony and reconciliation? Only a man called by God and then gifted with the patience and wisdom and ability to embody extravagant forgiveness  so as to transform a nation and inspire the world.           

                       

Who were Lauren Abraham, Sharon Minehart, Dianna Henson, and Bobbie Jordan,  to do something new in a 400 year-old church, worshipping in an almost 300 year-old Meetinghouse, to start up a new worship service on Saturday afternoons? Only regular folk called by God and then gifted with the inspiration and enthusiasm and will to do the work to make that new thing a reality.

Friends, we stand on holy ground. So let’s roll up our sleeves, get to work, and rejoice!