Here are my worship notes for this morning: it was a joy and privilege to baptize a young
Introduction
This week
marked the 34th anniversary of my ordination into Christian ministry
as pastor and teacher: it has been my
privilege to serve four congregations – six including my two internships during
seminary – and all in wildly different parts of the United States. I was first a seminary youth minister in
Darien, CT, then an exchange student in San Jose, Costa Rica, and finally an
assistant pastor at a large, inter-racial urban church in Jamaica, Queens, New
York.
Over the
next three decades, God called me to serve rust belt communities like Saginaw,
MI as well as the economically challenged urban center of Cleveland, OH. We spent 10 years in the desert southwest in
an oasis known as Tucson, AZ and now it has been nearly nine years in the green
hills of the Berkshires. One of the unique joys for me in presiding at the ordination
ceremony of Robert Hyde last weekend was that it was both a sacred celebration
for Robert as he begins his journey of service and ministry in Christ’s name,
and also an unexpected invitation for me to look backwards upon the trajectory
of my own years in ministry. The bard of
Vermont, Frederick Buechner, once called us all to:
“Listen to our lives with care and
insight.”
Listen… and see (your life) for the fathomless mystery it is. In the
boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch,
taste and smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the
last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace… There is
not event so common-place but that God is present within it, always hiddenly,
always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the
more fascinatingly because of that!
It was an
insightful exercise for me. And while I promise not to get all doe-eyed and
nostalgic on you, I do want to share one observation that I hope resonates: it would seem that I, like First Church
itself, have been on a journey from big acts of ministry towards small acts of
tenderness. Theologically it has been
for me a pilgrimage from feeling driven to do bold and dramatic things for God,
to a life where I cherish doing quiet and beautiful things for the Lord. When I was president of the student body at
Union Theological Seminary, the professor of homiletics – that is, preaching –
the great Jim Forbes of the Riverside Church in NYC, called me into his office
one day and asked: “Lumsden, why are you
so busy?”
At first I
didn’t know what to say, so Dr. Forbes continued: “You are a father of two
small children, a husband, an assistant pastor, a student and president of the
student body – and now they tell me you are organizing a bus to go to a
demonstration in Washington, DC to protest aid to the contras in Nicaragua, is
that right?” “Yes, sir” was all I could say. To which he replied with clarity
and compassion, “Son, there’s plenty of time after you leave seminary to
get yourself killed if that’s what you want. Why not use this time to slow
down, savor your studies and learn something you don’t already know. Even
Gandhi took a break in his battle against the Brits to get some perspective and
soul food. Why don’t you do likewise?” I
didn’t have an adequate response then – and for after-wards decades I was
haunted by his words – because they were so prophetic.
I didn’t
change my activity much in seminary and kept at it after graduation, too. In Saginaw,
I threw myself into anti-nuke activities and participated in two different
peace vigils to the former Soviet Union – one of which involved taking 50 high
school teens and their parents from our church to Russian in the middle of the
winter. In Cleveland, beyond our ministry to street kids, I got elected to the
Board of Education in an inter-racial reform team and took two more groups to
the Soviet Union as well. When we went
to Tucson, I served a large church with 250 people attending two very different
worship services – and took on the job of Moderator of the South-west
Conference of the United Church of Christ, too.
And for a
few years, our more humble successes started to drive me crazy because I felt
like a failure. Not so much anymore,
because it is clear to me that this is a time for doing something beautiful
for the Lord - something tender and even something hidden rather than public –
but for a while it was a challenge.
These days
I’m rather fond of the Psalmist’s song we heard earlier: Do not be like a horse or a mule without
understanding whose temper must be curbed with a bit and bridle else it will
not stay near you… but be glad and rejoice in the Lord. Psalm 32 opens with a small Hebrew word, asher, that is often translated “happy”
or even “blessed.” But asher cuts deeper than feelings – it literally
means to take a straight path in life – and path that turns away from
selfishness and stupidity, and lives into God’s grace. The blessings suggested by asher are not emotions, but the result
of being guided and disciplined by the unforced rhythms of grace.
+ Psalm One amplifies this using
the same word to kick things off: Blessed are those who do
not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; their delight is in the law of the Lord, the practice of God’s way, and they meditate on
God’s guidance both day and night. They
are like trees planted by streams of
water, which yield their fruit in its
season and their leaves do not wither.
+ Jesus says much the same thing
when he begins the Sermon on the Mount: blessed are those… who know that they’re at the end of their rope;
with less of you there’s more room for God.
And blessed are those who can show others how to cooperate instead of compete
and fight – that’s when you all discover that you are a part of God’s family.
To be
blessed, you see, is to know God’s grace and love inside you and then practice
sharing that grace by the way you live. Blessing is a commitment to gratitude,
the practice of spreading the beauty of God’s grace by how you choose to
live. St. Paul speaks of this as living
as God’s new creation – people who can rejoice in the Lord always –
because their lives are moving in God’s guidance.
Insights
Now in order to live as God’s new creation,
real people need a vision to practice and help organize their thoughts, habits,
and actions. The wisdom tradition of ancient Israel clearly states that without
a vision, the people perish. They flounder and get caught up in fears and
anxieties or else turn towards selfishness, hatred and acts of aggression. That is what both readings from the Old and
New Testaments articulate: without an inner experience of trusting God’s grace
and an outward vision to shape and guide us, we will become our worst selves.
In the
Elijah, Ahab and Jezebel cycle this is expressed when Israel’s king – the one
appointed to protect God’s people – chooses the way of greed and death over
compassion and integrity. And we need a
word of context to make sense of this story because this is not about a real
estate deal gone bad.
In ancient Israel people didn’t
treat land like we do today in 21st century America. The land was
a
sacred trust given to families passed on from one generation to the next. Bound
by both religious law and tradition, these ancestral lands provided security and
livelihood, farms for food and pasture to raise crops for sale, and could not
be sold. If the people of Israel kept
the covenant – essentially honoring the Sabbath and living as good neighbors –
then God would preserve them. So let’s
be clear that what King Ahab was proposing was against the law of the land. And to make matters worse, Ahab was Israel’s
king – appointed and anointed to uphold the covenant – and he was trying to cut
a deal because he wanted a kitchen garden.
+ So Naboth
wasn’t being cranky or uncooperative: he was walking the path of blessing –
maintaining the covenant – honoring the way of asher – the practice of blessing.
And just to make matters worse, Ahab’s queen, Jezebel, hated the God of
Israel. My wife, Dianne, tells me that
Jezebel was the Hebrew Bible’s equivalent of Cruella DeVille from 101 Dalmatians. Just mean-spirited, self-centered and evil.
+ Now, did you
grasp the vicious and bloody scheme she cooks up to violate the commandments and
get rid of Naboth in the process?
Jezebel first yells at Ahab – dude, aren’t you the king? – you can do
whatever you want – then she puts into action a plan for Naboth to be murdered
so that Ahab can take possession of the vineyard. And just so that we don’t miss the horrific
consequences of all this, the text keeps telling us that the reason why Ahab
wanted Naboth’s ancestral vineyard is because the king wanted to plant a
vegetable garden.
So we have a king violating the commandments for some
tomatoes, a queen plotting murder because she hates Israel’s religion
and an innocent farmer’s family losing their land and their livelihood because
no one would stand up for justice. The practice of blessing had fallen into
disrepair in the land – and the result was murder – plain and simple. That’s one of the powerful insights we
inherit from the prophetic tradition, if we’re paying attention: namely that
God’s people do not separate the social from the spiritual because ALL of life
is to be lived as a blessing. The great
Protestant reformers called this becoming a living doxology: praising the Lord with the content of our
lives. Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa
put it like this:
I don’t preach a
social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord
Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus
didn’t say, ‘Now is that political or social?’ He said, ‘I feed you’ because
the good news to a hungry person is bread.
A living
doxology means that social justice is simply the praise we share in the
marketplace or the corridors of power. Sometimes
praise looks like writing or singing hymns, but it also looks like taking on
the Keystone Pipeline. A living doxology might involve feeding the hungry,
challenging the greed of the 1% or burning incense, baptizing babies or silent
prayer. It might take place on a Sunday morning, but is no less real on a
picket line for marriage equality.
+ ALL that we do in life – all the
small things as well as the grand – are to be doxology:
ASHER – praising the Lord with our entire being. In the Ahab and Jezebel story, if the appointed
leader, the king, refused to deliver and serve Yahweh as Lord, then God would
raise up a prophet who would. In this case Elijah, whose Hebrew name means: MY
God is Yahweh - 'Eliyyahu. – The one who is guided on God’s
path of grace and calls out the corruption of the hour by offering an
alternative that restores doxology to the land.
+ That same commitment to doxology
is at work in Luke’s story of the woman anointing Christ’s feet with perfumed
oil: only this time we’re shown what happens when asher is celebrated and embodied. If we read this encounter carefully we
discover that apparently this woman of the streets has already been
forgiven her many sins by Jesus. That’s
what it says in verse 47: I tell you, her sins which were many, have
been forgiven – and that’s why she’s showing such great love. We don’t know the where or the when, but it
sounds like at some point in the past Jesus met her – talked with her and
showed her another path – and she turned her life around in order to walk in the
way of blessing.
Without a
vision, the people perish; without the guidance of God’s blessing, we don’t
know how to become a living doxology. So
how do we practice living as doxology in our era? How are we to embody a faith that not only
celebrates God’s love in a broken and all too busy world but does so in a 21st
century context? How are we
to live in harmony with people of differing faith traditions or no obvious
faith at all in a post-modern world that mistrusts religion and calls all meta-narratives
into question? Or even how do we reclaim
the blessings of Jesus in a culture contaminated with the blood of Ahab and
Jezebel? Last week I used the notion of living into the way of the Cross as
short hand. I told you that the way of
the Cross trusts that God isn’t finished with us yet. It is the spirituality of
Psalm 22 – the unity of both Good Friday and Easter – the Passion and the
Resurrection – that has been distilled into five words: let go and let God.
There wasn’t
time last to say this, but I understand that not everyone gets or even
appreciates aphorisms or affirmations, ok?
Some of us yearn for the wisdom that beneath these short sayings. As they used to say during some algebra
exams: I want to see your work. So let
me give you another take on the wisdom beneath the simplicity of a spirituality
of the Cross – a theologically sophisticated and rich articulation of what it
means to practice the way of asher in our time – a commitment to living into
the blessings of grace. It was
summarized first by the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians as faith, hope and love
and then fleshed out for our era by the contemporary Canadian theologian,
Douglas John Hall, who describes living as doxology like this in his book, The Cross in Our Context:
The best way
that I have found of conveying what it means to live into the vision of
Christ’s Cross is by considering the so-called virtues of faith, hope and love in the light
of what they are each negating. Unless the negation of each is understood, the
positive statement of this vision is cheapened and made into a cliché.
Fortunately, we do not have to speculate about what the virtues of faith, hope
and love negate, for in each case the negation is clearly present in the
collected works of St. Paul; and as the New Testament’s chief exemplar of this
“thin tradition,” Paul speaks for all who have been grasped by the principles
of the way of the Cross.
Hall is
telling our generation that to practice the way of the Cross – to live into the
discipline of God’s blessings as new creations who choose to let go and let God
– requires nuance and tenderness. Specifically, it is essential to be guided by
the via negativa – a path of understanding God’s truth shaped by what is
obvious AND by what remains mysterious – a spirituality that is rational as
well as mystical – paradoxical as well as analytical – a discipline that honors
the seen and unseen rhythms of grace. I
think he is on to something crucial, so please listen carefully to how he makes
sense of faith, hope and love in the 21st century.
First there is faith – and what
does this term negate? The metaphor that crops up in
Paul’s writings is “sight.” Faith, which “comes by hearing” (that is, by
listening to the stories of how God’s grace has touched real people) is
precisely a not-seeing. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction
of things not seen,” Paul writes in the letter to the Hebrews. And what this describes is a trust that is
not elevated beyond its proper limit. The act of trusting and the One trusted,
is glimpsed—as through a glass darkly - but not seen face to face. Faith that
is not sight is thus a trust in God that warns us against presumption. It is a
faith that is able to live with its antithesis, doubt, so that we never act
like we alone have a monopoly upon truth.
(Are you with me? First we
practice trust knowing that we do not have all the answers – and can never have
all the answers – because we are not the Lord.
Second there is hope: hope is at once an orientation to the future and
a recognition that the present is still lacking its promised fulfillment. Hope
realized is no longer hope. The stance that we call hope is one
constantly made conscious of the fact that the present is always a
falling-short of what is most to be desired. So the hope that is faith’s future
dimension is always “hope against hope” (Rom 4:18). So, just as faith must
live with doubt, so hope must live with its antithesis, hopelessness or despair.
Further, what is hoped for must not be taken for granted. (There is always
more of God’s grace than what is obvious as this moment – or any moment – is
never the end of the story.)
And third there is love: love negates many things as Paul makes so plain
in the famous hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13. “Love is not envious or
boastful or arrogant or rude. It does
not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but
rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all
things, endures all things.” But
I think that what must receive priority here is power: “Love does not insist
on its own way.” “Power or control is the antithesis of God’s love. The crux of
the cross,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr “is its revelation of the fact that the
final power of God over human beings is derived not from control but from the
self-imposed weakness of God’s love.” God freely chooses to suffer in order to
strengthen love and this is complicated for all to accept if we think chiefly
in terms of power, omnipotence, almighty-ness. If God is love, how-ever, then
the divine power must accommodate itself to divine love and not vice versa – that
is basic.
I’ve printed
those out for you to ponder as the week unfolds: faith, hope and love – what is
seen
and what is unseen – what we can comprehend and what is beyond our
comprehension – is how we practice living tenderly and humbly and blessedly
into the way of the Cross. Such a
spirituality fits with this moment in history. It makes sense for us as a faith
community. We are no longer FIRST Church
– the founders and propagators of the faith in Pittsfield and the Berkshires in
a big and bold way – rather we are a collection of broken, wounded, loving,
gentle, creative, beautiful, blessed but often confused people celebrating
God’s grace and trusting that God’s love goes beyond our capacity to comprehend
or see. I like the way Niebuhr distilled
the essence of faith, hope and love for our generation saying:
Nothing that is worth doing can be
achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing
which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate
context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do,
however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by
love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our
friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the
final form of love which is forgiveness.
Conclusion
As I have
discovered in my own ministry, this small and tender way of being a believer is
liberating. Do your part, trust the Lord, let go and let God. There is a beautiful sermon that another
wounded healer, the theologian Paul Tillich, once offered up that is
illuminating, so let me close with his words:
One of Martin
Luther’s most profound insights was that God made himself small for us in
Christ. In doing so, He left us our freedom and our humanity. He showed us His
heart, so that our hearts could be won. When we look at the misery of our
world, its evil and its sin, especially in these days which seem to mark the
end of a world period, we long for divine interference, so that the world and
its daemonic rulers might be overcome. We long for a king of peace within
history, or for a king of glory above history. We long for a Christ of power.
Yet if He were to come and transform us and our world, we should have to pay
the one price we could not pay: we would have to lose our freedom, our
humanity, and our spiritual dignity. Perhaps we would be happier; but we should
also be lower beings, our present misery, struggle and despair notwithstanding.
We should be more like blessed animals than men and women made in the image of
God. Those who dream of a better life and try to avoid the Cross as a way, and
those who hope for a Christ and attempt to exclude the Crucified, have no
knowledge of the mystery of God and or humanity.
In our day I am more convinced
than ever that we have been called to reclaim a theology of the cross that
looks to faith but not sight – to hope but not consummation - and to love but
not power or control. Let our lives be a
humble but joyful doxology to the Lord, beloved, as we stand and proclaim our
faith in song.
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