Preaching and Teaching

Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, DC
June 28, 2009
 

Text: John 1:1-13

I used to work this tiny country church in Louisiana. And even though it was in the middle of downtown, I didn’t like going there at night by myself. There weren’t many houses nearby, and so it felt kind of secluded. I was worried that if I cried out for help no one would hear me.

Not only that, but South Louisiana is a different kind of place. They believe in ghosts there, and my upstanding members regularly went to voodoo doctors for their health problem. So, you think about the spiritual realm of things a lot more in Louisiana, and the nighttime—I’m not afraid to admit it—feels kind of scary.

The first time I went there in the evening, I creaked open the heavy side door. And I could see silhouette in the library. It looked as if there was a man there, standing just beyond the doorway. I drew a deep breath and my neck muscles tightened. I didn’t know exactly what to do, but I decided to enter. I could hear the floorboard moving beneath my feet, but I was trying to step lightly so that I would not make a sound. I still had not begun breathing. I finally made it to the light bulb, turned it on, and found a fern– A big, bushy plant on a stand. I had forgotten that I had moved it earlier in the week. That dreaded, scary feeling that gripped me just seconds before, lifted from me.

Now there was nothing in that room that changed. The reality of the situation was still the same. There was the exact same furniture in those specific places. But, suddenly, with the light on the situation, I could see the many different colors that surrounded me, I could distinguish the object with greater clarity, and my fears were relieved. I began breathing again.

It is like that with so many things. Once we begin to shed a bit of light on them, we move from seeing gray, shadows and outlines, to seeing a diversity of color, forms have more depth, and we can identify certain shapes. We are able to see clearly what is in front of us. Light is an extraordinary thing. 

Light is a theme that runs throughout the Bible, and the subject of light is both metaphoric and actual. And throughout the summer the children will be learning lessons about light. So, when they come home on a Sunday afternoon, or when you see a child in the coffee hour, you can ask them what they have learned about light.

They might tell you about creation, and how God made the light, separated it from the darkness. There was an interesting cosmology in the Old Testament. They assumed that they world was flat, and that the sky was like a dome on the earth, and so they understood how light and stars worked a lot differently than we do.

The kids might tell you about the burning bush—the light that gave Moses such courage, as it called Moses away from living his comfortable life in the palace, to challenging Pharaoh to let go of his slaves and leading the people on a long trek to the Promised Land.

Or, the pillar of fire that led the sons and daughters of Israel through the wilderness at night, burning as a constant reminder to the people that no matter how difficult things became, God would be with them. God was guiding them. 

For one poet, God’s word was like a lamp for his feet and a light for his path. And his song teaches us how, even today, the words of the Bible can guide us and give us clues about how to live.

Then there is the ancient Jewish ritual in which the bridesmaids spent the night together, and they had to be ready with their lamp oil, because if they didn’t have enough light, then they wouldn’t be able to go to the wedding celebration. 

Or, how Jesus was called the light of the world. And he was. Jesus walked from town to town, and while a lot of visitors only see the tourist destinations—in Jesus day, that would have been the fabulous libraries, or beautiful artwork—Jesus seems to do something different when he walks into the city. He goes out of his way to see the outcasts. He sees the people who are poor, the lepers, and the women who ought to be hidden, outside of the city gates. Jesus calls out to the man with the withered hand and tells him to stretch it out.

Which may not seem like a big deal. But back then, they didn’t have Purell dispensers or lots of running water like we do. They also didn’t have knives forks and spoons at every meal. So they would do their bathroom duties with one hand and eat with another. This man, since he did not have one hand that worked, he had to do both things with one hand. This really grossed people out, but not Jesus. Jesus saw the man, called out to him and healed him.

He takes mud, spits on it, and puts it on the blind man’s eye, so that he can see, the diverse colors and shapes. He eats with people whom most would shun. This great religious man, who taught in Synagogues where men had to ritually bathe eight times before entering certain parts of it, would heal the unclean by touching them. And in all of these acts, Jesus was not content in letting the poor, the sick, or the needy be hidden away outside the city walls or in the synagogue. Jesus would shed light on the outcasts, he would heal them, and invite them for dinner. And Jesus said, to all of us, that we are to be lights to the world.

You and I, ordinary people, who may not have any healing powers, we are to be lights in the world. Which means that we are to go into our communities and our towns, and shine the light into the shadows, under the bridges, in the tent cities, even when our communities try to hide people, or difficulties. Even when we try to deny that we have problems like poverty, homelessness, or children who go to bed hungry every night, we do not allow anyone to turn the lights out and let people suffer in the darkness.

We are challenged to look at the problems within our families that we would rather not face—when people are depressed, fearful, or addicted.  We do not allow ourselves to become afraid of other people because they look different than we do, and we do not understand them. But, instead, we turn on the lights. We are to look, we are to care, and we are to see how we can be a healing force in this world.

Christians have been doing this, ever since Jesus walked the earth.

Pastors like Walter Raushenbush, who was called to serve as a pastor in Hells Kitchen, and through that experience, he began to re-imagine what the Kingdom of God would be like. He began to write about the social gospel, challenging the world to a different reality, a world as it out to be.

Women like Dorothy Day, a journalist who began the Catholic Worker movement, who was not content in allowing the hardships of poor people fester without us knowing about it. She began a movement, to help the poor, and began a newspaper, an eight-page monthly about men and women and the problems of destitution.

Men like Martin Luther King, Jr., who would not keep silent about the injustices that were occurring on a daily basis to the African Americans in our country. Even though he was told over and over again that it was not time yet, that they country was not ready for his message, that we should keep these horrifying stories in the dark, King stood up and preached. He stood up to shine a bright light into our dark world.

And we shine a bright light in our dark world, when children begin to stick up for those who are being taunted on the playground, and when we work for policies that help get medical care for all people. When we begin to understand the problems of families that are caught in destructive cycles of addiction and domestic violence. When we do not ignore the destruction that carbon emissions are causing our planet, but we figure out ways to heal the damage that is being done.

Each and every time that we refuse to allow problems to languish in the dark, or outside the city walls, every time we can muster up the courage to light a candle, flip on a switch, and walk in the light of God.

To the glory of God, our Creator,
            God, our Liberator,

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
June 21, 2009

Text: I Samuel 17:15 to 18:5, 10-16

So the other day, I was on Facebook, realizing that the nature of “friendship” is changing. Those of you who don’t know what Facebook is, it’s on the Internet. And I guess the best way to explain it is to imagine that there is a giant community scrapbook. I have a page, where I put my basic information, my family photos, funny things I saw on TV, or interesting newspaper articles. I write in the scrapbook what I’m doing that day, or even that moment.

Then other people can have pages in the scrapbook too. There are people all over the world making these scrapbook pages, until there are millions of them. But the only people who can look at my scrapbook are people who live in the D.C. area and my “friends.”

That’s another key to Facebook. People “friend” you. You heard me right. They do not “befriend” you. A completely different verb that has evolved. They “friend” you.

Now, there are some basic rules of social engagement on Facebook. Usually you friend people whom you have met, face-to-face, at least once. Unless you are a public figure or a networker, then people friend you all the time, whether you know them or not.

A networker is someone who makes it their job, or often their hobby to have as many connections and friends as they can, not only on Facebook, but also on other sites. And just as a person who knows a lot of important people in D.C., has a certain clout, a person on the Internet who has a lot of connections has a certain clout.

I have a friend who is a networker as a hobby, and he has a popular website that has been around for a long time, and so publishers send him books, tech people send him cameras and software. If he complains that his iPhone case broke on his blog, then he wil receive a new one immediately in the mail. He just gets all sorts of things in the mail. Even though he’s just a regular youth pastor in California, he has so many connections, that he is also a hub of knowledge. Corporations know that if he talks about something, then they can reach a huge audience of people who will be reading what he has to say. And they will be reaching a whole group of people who cannot be reached through traditional advertising, like newsprint or television.

In all of this, the nature of friendship can be confusing. I know another networker, well I sort of know him. Actually, we just shared breathing some space in high school, but now he is a famous networker. He works for a big news organization in town, and we have a mutual friend, whom I will call “Bob.” A couple of years ago, my high school acquaintance asked me to become friends on Facebook, and I looked at his profile, or his page in the scrapbook, and I saw how much he had accomplished and how famous he was, and I was sort of flattered. I didn’t really remember him from high school, but I assumed that I had made an impression on him, because he went out of his way to look me up on Facebook.

When I was talking to Bob about him, I was acting as if I had just met him at a high school reunion and I said, “I don’t really remember him. But, don’t tell him, I don’t want to hurt his feelings…”

And Bob said, “Carol. He’s a social networker. He does it for a living. He friends anyone who has ever come within a twenty feet radius of him.”

Then, I was less flattered, and more kind of embarrassed. And I realized that the nature of friendship is changing.

There seems to be two things going on in our society, when we talk about friends. The first one is what I’ve just described, with Facebook and other social networking sites. In addition, we know that men and women are getting married later in life. Generally, in our society, we wait until we are “settled down” before we get married. Which means we often wait until our educations are complete, and we have some financial security before we tie the knot.

But, especially in D.C., this puts a lot of people in a trap. Because for most of us, the economy is based on two-incomes households. So, people put off getting married before they are economically stable, but then they cannot become economically stable, before they become married. As a society, we’re really wrestling with this. About half of sons and daughters who are in their twenties move back in with their parents because they cannot afford the cost of housing when they are trying to pay off school debts.

We see the frustration with our friends, for those who wait and wait until the perfect time to have children, and then when they try, they find out that they can’t have them. As a society, different sort of arrangements are beginning to form. For those who are religious, new monastic communities are springing up. These are intentional communities where men and women live together, sharing what they have.

For many people, the lifestyle is not that drastic, but delayed marriage means that we have formed a deeper commitment to our friends. People often live far away from their families. They do not have the support of their parents or siblings, and so we learn to form groups of friends who can rely on each other.

Two things are happening. First, there is an online world where the number of “friends” that one has can literally be transferred into a commodity. In politics, marketing, and journalism, people who have a lot of connections are considered hubs, and they are great assets.

Now, it may sound like I’m presenting these online interactions as a shallow thing, but I can’t help but notice that communities form through social networking, and now my friends are much more likely to marry someone that they met online. So there is something deeper happening here, and I don’t mean to blow that off. But it is different.

Second, in our flesh-and-blood worlds, we are relying more and more on friendship. In fact, many sociologists are wondering if friends are replacing families.

The nature of friendship is changing. And yet, we realize that there is so much about friendship that stays the same. We read in the Scripture passage this morning about one of the most interesting ancient friendships, between David and Jonathan. It says that David’s love for Jonathan was greater than the love for a woman. Many scholars see these words and assume that David and Jonathan had a homosexual relationship, which seems reasonable to me. But whatever the relationship, there is an intensity to it

Jonathan was the King Saul’s son, and David was a shepherd and a musician. David got a gig playing the harp in the palace for the king, and I suppose that this is how the friendship between David and Jonathan was able to grow up. The friendship got a lot more complicated though. David grew to be a soldier, and won many battles for the people of Israel. David’s popularity soared, and it became pretty clear that Saul’s throne was in jeopardy and David might become the next king. Saul began jealous of all of the attention that was being heaped upon David. He had a horrible, violent temper, and so he tried to kill David on several occasions.

Jonathan was the rightful heir to the throne. And yet when his royal father was trying to kill David, Jonathan went out of his way to make sure that David was safe.

Throughout the story, we can see that this is a friendship that grew, even though the two men were of different classes, even though their families did not get along, even though every thing in their situation said that they ought to be bitter enemies. Their friendship remained.

As we read about these two men, we realize that there is a virtue in their friendship; there is a relationship here that remains in our bonds today. Even with all of the societal and technological changes, true friendship remains.

We do not talk about it very much in our society. We watch how friends interact on television, our most popular shows in the last decades have chronicled groups of friends–on Cheers, Seinfeld, Sex in the City, and Friends. Yet, friendship is something that we seem to take for granted. When children are small, we tell them the basics of friendship: how to share and how to be kind. Yet, there is not that much emphasis on friendship when we are adults. It’s seems to be like potty training. It’s a stage of development that we go through at a very young age, but we don’t talk about it much once we’ve mastered it. 

Yet, other cultures thought about friendship differently. There is certainly a lot about friendship in the Bible. Jesus began his ministry by gathering a group of friends, and stated that there is no greater love, than a person who gives up his or her life for a friend. Friends were at the core of Jesus’ ministry.

When we look a couple hundred years before Jesus, we see how important friendship is. Aristotle speaks a great deal about friendship, and he describes three types in his Nicomachean Ethics: (1) is for good, (2) is for profit, and (3) is for pleasure.

The first one is a relationship that grows up between virtuous people. In this first instance, friendship is a covenant, a life-long relationship between two good people. In this sort of friendship, there is a basis to it, in that a person is to love oneself. Also, there is an intensity in this relationship that makes it so that one person cannot have many good friends. Just as one person cannot have that many intimate lovers, he or she cannot have many good friends. There are just so many hours in the day.

Second, there is friendship for profit. In other words, there is a sort of usefulness to the relationship. One person gains something by being friends with another person. In this sort of friendship, people can achieve something together.

People who have studied race relations in our nation, often come to the conclusion that when there are ethnic tensions in a society, it is difficult to get people to talk to each other for the sake of just getting along. Yet, if men and women have something to accomplish, a goal that they need to meet together, then often friendships form across traditional ethnic barriers. So, we can see how sports teams among children produce friendships that may have never existed before. The children have a goal to win, and so they work together and form friendships even in the midst of their differences.

I think that this is where some of our modern technology comes into play. Numerous friends can become a valuable asset as our modes of information shift. In some cases, friends can almost literally translate into profit.

The third type of friendship is for pleasure. Here, Aristotle uses humor or beauty as the basis of friendship. We might become friends with someone because they’re attractive or witty, but a good friendship evolves when the relationship survives during times that are not funny and even as a person grows less physically attractive. 

Friendship is such an important part of Aristotle’s philosophy that he understands justice in society on the basis of friendship. And, as I said, to Jesus, a sacrificial love between friends was the highest form of love.

All of this makes me pause and wonder. Do we take notion of friendship too lightly? Do we use the term too randomly? Do we take our friends for granted? Do we nurture the good friendships enough in our lives? In our success-oriented society, do we make enough time and space for friends who may not be for our profit or our benefit? In this particular time and place, I’m not sure that we nurture our friendships enough. And yet, if Aristotle is right, friendship is a basis for a just society.

May we learn to nurture this great love in our lives. With our parents, our children, our spouses, and our dearest acquaintances, may our friendships grow, deeper and stronger.

To the glory of God our Creator,

God our Liberator,

            And God our Sustainer. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
June 7, 2008

Text: Luke 18: 15-17

Brazilian theologian Hugo Assmann crafted a great theological term: the “epistemological privilege of the poor.” Epistemology is the study of how we come to know things. Assmann asserted that poor people see things from a privileged or unique perspective. They see things the non-poor do not see; they see differently what others do see.

When teaching, the analogy I use to explain Assmann’s concept relates to buying a used car in Wisconsin. Smart people never buy a car by looking solely at the engine or the condition of the car’s exterior. A wise buyer literally gets under the car to see how much corrosion exists on the body’s chassis due to the salt applied to winter streets and roads. From that epistemological perspective, one may see a very damaged vehicle.

Looking at society from the bottom up, the poor see things those of us looking from the top down do not see. Most of us here this morning understand the way mortgages, health insurance and cost of living adjustments work. The poor understand the way justice, mental health and social service systems oftentimes don’t work for them. We view the police and courts positively. Many poor people view them with suspicion. We think of an emergency room as a place for immediate help. Many poor people view it as a place where they wait for hours to be treated.

But the poor are not the only people with an epistemological privilege. People of color, women, the LGBT community, immigrants, and many others possess epistemological privileges of their own. Their unique experiences, both positive and negative, enable them to know things others may not know. Our experiences shape our perspective. Our perspective shapes our knowledge.

Epistemology, what we know and how we know it, is at the center of the controversy over comments by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. To use Assmann’s terminology, Judge Sotomayor has asserted an epistemological privilege for Latina women. In a speech given at Berkeley (where else?), the Judge said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

I really wish the White House hadn’t declared her statement to be a poor choice of words. It wasn’t. It isn’t. The Judge was expressing a fundamental truth.

Our experiences, when used properly, can help us make better decisions, reach wiser conclusions than those who have not had the privilege of those experiences and the knowledge flowing from them. This is not an argument for capricious subjectivity. It is an argument for the objective value of experience; an objective value Jesus treasured.

The story about Jesus welcoming the little children is usually used to show Jesus’ love of children. I think there was more to it than that. I am convinced Jesus wanted to hear from children, not just love them; just as he wanted to hear from women, Samaritans, lepers and tax collectors.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus reached out and listened to groups of people who were routinely excluded from decision making in first century Israel. He wanted, needed to hear their epistemologically privileged perspectives. The children not only had something for Jesus in the gift of the love and joy they bring to life. Jesus knew that children see things adults oftentimes don’t see.

Children see the hypocrisy of adult behavior to which many adults are totally blind. They understand who has power and how it is used. They know love is sometimes mixed with abuse in confusing, debilitating ways.

As Christians, we have a large theological stake in the Sotomayer controversy. Christian epistemology is governed by the axiom that human beings are incapable of grasping God or God’s Truth in any final and complete manner. Human sinfulness gets in the way. As a result, our knowledge of God and life is always provisional, partial and dominated by perspective.

This is why it is so important to have a diverse church. When we pool our perspectives, we get much closer to the perspective of our God. This is why the Supreme Court should be one- half female and multi-cultural. When the Court reflects the diversity of this nation, it will be able to tap the wisdom produced by such diversity.

My conservative friends tell me that liberals have elevated inclusivity to an unwarranted position of authority. I disagree. If we are to resemble Jesus and act in Jesus’ image, an inclusive church has to be at the top of our list of priorities.

When Jesus set out to create a community of followers, he didn’t look for people who thought, looked and had the same background as he did. On the contrary, he intentionally welcomed all kinds of people considered unacceptable or unworthy by society. He didn’t want the perspective of the righteous or the sinners, men or women, rich or poor. He wanted the perspective of them all.

Certainly, we can overcome our limited perspectives. But when we think in the context of homogenous rather than heterogenous groups, we make the task of discerning the truth much more challenging than it need be. Heterogeneity is a key part of God’s creation. It must be a key part of the way we come to know.

In last Sunday’s The New York Times, Adam Liptak wrote a great piece entitled “The Waves Minority Judges Always Make.” He quoted Justice Antonin Scalia describing the impact of Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Court’s decision making process. Justice Scalia said, “(Justice Marshall) wouldn’t have to open his mouth to affect the nature of the conference and how seriously the conference would take matters of race.” The mere presence of an African American Supreme Court Justice in the room changed the epistemological workings.

Numerous people have written or said, “Well, let’s not forget. It was nine white males who overturned the segregation laws.” Well, yes…. after almost two hundred years of white, male Supreme Court Justices not challenging slavery and segregation!

However, the presence of diversity is not enough. Too often, we fail to listen to the perspectives others possess. In the same article, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “I will say something (in a meeting)…(but) it isn’t until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point.” I don’t know how many times I have seen that happen in a meeting. A woman makes a point and it is ignored until a male restates it.

Clearly, the debate over inclusivity is not over. We are not yet in the Promised Land. Carol encounters huge resistance to her arguments that the church needs to include and embrace younger leaders in the church. A nominee for the Supreme Court states the obvious, that a Hispanic woman may well understand some things better than a white male, and the forces of exclusion call her a racist. Many would prefer to keep marriage a relationship exclusively for heterosexuals. The struggle for an inclusive society is far from over.

But the forces of exclusion are losing the battle and they know it. For God will not rest and neither will we until everyone has a place at the table—at this, God’s Table, at the board room table, and at every other table in the world.

Not everyone will choose to come and sit with us, some for positive reasons. Some African Americans prefer to worship in a historically black church. Some Korean Americans prefer to worship in Korean speaking congregations. Some in the LGBT community prefer to worship in a church created by the LGBT community. That is ok.

Our goal is not to eliminate institutions that celebrate and emphasize a particular perspective. Our goal is to be welcoming, remove barriers to participation and insure that decisions are made with the maximum diversity possible. It is a goal we are much closer to reaching than we were even fifty years ago. But as the current debate over Judge Sotomayor’s comments reveal, a dying dinosaur still has the ability to put up a fight.

Let us pray: Gracious God, you have created us different so we can teach one another, learn from one another. Help us to do so. May we here at Western be a congregation where people feel welcome, their opinions valued, and their participation encouraged. All this we pray in the name of One who gathered an amazingly diverse group in ministry. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
June 14, 2009

Text: Mark 4:26-34

Many years ago, Western helped build a large sanctuary in Ho, located in the rural Volta region of Ghana. When we began the project in the late 1980s, several hundred people worshiped at the Ho-Kpodzi church. Since the sanctuary was completed, several thousand have been worshiping there. As with any ministry that is creative and risk-taking, we have had a couple of mission efforts that didn’t reach their goals. But the congregation in Ho is one of Western’s resounding success.

During the construction period, I visited Ho three times. On one trip, standing by the sanctuary, I noticed a young man shepherding a group of animals past the church. I asked him if the sheep were his. He looked at me like I was from Mars and said, “Boss. These are goats, not sheep.”

I have laughed as I imagined what he told his family that night. “These people are the most powerful country in the world. They put a man on the moon. They build buildings that touch the clouds. But they don’t know goats from sheep. How come they are rich and we are poor?”

While I do know the difference between sheep and goats, I swear I do, our urban-dominated culture’s disconnect with nature produces a lot of misunderstandings. Even people living in rural areas in this country are no longer necessarily as knowledgeable as their ancestors about the basic workings of nature.

If we were more connected to nature, my guess is, we wouldn’t have the global environmental crisis we have today. People who understand they, their children and their children’s children are dependent on the planet are less likely to pollute and exploit the planet the way we have done. However, most of us are not directly in touch with the consequences of our toxic actions, so we pollute away (although the consequences of out actions are becoming increasingly clear by the day).

Our lack of knowledge about nature also impedes our reading of Scripture. Jesus was first and last, a country preacher talking to country folks. He grew up in a rural area. His family and friends were rural folks. Rural life was his milieu. Therefore, he used agrarian images to teach about God.

As he taught, he compared the Realm of God with a mustard seed; Jerusalem to a fig tree; evangelism to fishing; reading the signs of the times to predicting the weather; Christians to salt; humans to tenant farmers in a vineyard; and twice, he used the image of a person scattering seeds to describe the way God works in the world.

By using nature as a teacher, Jesus continued the tradition we find in the books of the Old Testament. Amos compared justice to rushing water and righteousness to an ever flowing stream. Micah compared the sinful person to someone with nothing to eat after the summer fruit has been gathered. Hosea has God saying, “I am like an evergreen cyprus, from me comes your fruit.”

If we don’t understand nature, we are not going to understand the various implications of biblical metaphors rooted in nature. As important, our lack of knowledge about nature causes us to miss one of the primary revelations of how God works and who God is. For nature is a revelation of God. The Creator is reflected in the creation.

As we watch God work in nature, we can learn how God works in and around us. In nature, it takes time for things to grow. In life, it takes time for humans to grow. In nature, random things can set a crop back for an entire season. In life, random events can set us back for extended periods of time. When plants are deprived of things essential to their growth, they don’t grow. So it is with us. Pollutants in the soil destroy it. Putting pollutants in our bodies destroy us.

In the bible, the parallels between nature and humans are too many to detail in one sermon. So this morning, let us will focus on the images we read in Mark.

In the first parable, Jesus describes the Kingdom of God to seeds scattered on the ground. A person falls asleep and, much surprised, awakens to find the seeds producing growth. In the second parable, Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a tiny mustard seed that, again surprisingly, grows into a large bush. In both stories, humans are not the cause of the growth. They observe it.

Certainly, Jesus is not advocating a passive approach to life. No one was more proactive than Jesus. He aggressively and directly challenged injustices, discriminatory practices, distorted religious practices and other commonplace problems.

Jesus ordered his disciples to be proactive as well. The church didn’t become the world’s largest religion in four centuries by his disciples sitting back and watching God at work. The early disciples tilled the soil, planted seeds, trimmed off dead wood to help the church grow.

But Jesus did not want his believers to draw a direct cause and effect line between their work and their accomplishments. He wanted his followers to understand the inevitability of God’s Realm growing to maturity. It is not a matter of “if” God’s will shall be done on earth. It is a matter of “when.”

When we embrace this inevitability, our efforts lose the neurotic anxiety that drives so much human effort. We no longer have to prove ourselves to be able. We no longer need to try to force something to happen that will happen anyway. We are able to see ourselves as this generation’s tenant farmers who are tending the seeds planted by God, growing in our midst.

Surely, our efforts remain crucial for God to succeed. God needs us to work the vineyard. But we shouldn’t get overly discouraged when things go wrong. In time, God will make sure the fields yield the intended crops.

A lot of us have experienced significant setbacks over the past 18 months. If we are invested in stocks or real estate, we have less net value that we had a year ago. The organizations in which we work are struggling to keep people on the payroll and programs doing their work. Career trajectories have been changed for many.

This year’s graduation classes are really struggling. If a law student was fortunate enough to get a job commitment from a major firm, they may be getting paid not to go to work for a year. But for most students in most areas of the economy, they don’t have a job or prospects of a job.

Congregations around the country, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, have been laying off staff and cutting programs. In many instances, this means younger clergy are being let go. They are our future. Will we create a bridge for them into the future or abandon them to fend for themselves?

A friend in Chicago told me that her very successful forty-year-old nephew, in the middle of a very successful career, got laid off from his high paying job about six months ago. Despite full time efforts to get a job, the best he could do was selling hot dogs at White Sox games which he is currently doing. He and his wife are trying everything and anything not to lose the house in which they and their three kids live.

In times such as these trying times, nature can help us understand what lies ahead for us. When a fire rips through a forest, the devastation it leaves behind is extraordinary. Where once there existed an amazing diversity of living creatures, after the fire, nothing is left but charred remains and lingering smoke.

However, incredibly, it doesn’t take long for new life to reappear. The ash covering the ground and increased sunlight getting to the forest floor creates excellent conditions for new growth. Within days, birds fly back and sit on top of the remains of trees. A mole emerges from its subterranean safe house. Little green things start poking their heads through the soil. In a northern location such as Alaska, deciduous trees appear first, then conifers. Herbivore animals appear to eat the new greenery. Not long thereafter, predatory animals appear to eat the herbivores. At some point, humans take a walk in the woods. Such is nature’s way. Such is God’s way.

It doesn’t happen overnight, as in Jesus’ parable. It takes months, years for the forest to return to its intended state. But Jesus’ point is simple: it happens. God’s seeds will grow. On their own. Inevitably. Plan on it. Indeed, plan your life around it.

This is what is going to happen with our lives. The financial brush fire that appeared last year, fueled by the winds of greed, incompetence, dogmatic adherence to an ideology and fear, burned down many people’s lives. Lots of folks bought houses on false assurances from mortgage brokers. Many of them are now bankrupt and, in some cases, homeless. People who thought they had jobs for a lifetime in stable corporations and institutions are now looking for any kind of job. Retired people who had a secure financial future planned out are now going back to work, no longer secure. Thirty and forty somethings who thought they would soon move into better jobs as the boomers retired now face the prospect of boomers not retiring anytime soon. The devastation in our society is apparent from top to bottom, young and old, rich and poor.

But we can’t let the charred remains and lingering smoke from the fire fool us. They are not God’s final Word. While it is hard to imagine a stable economy ever reappearing, the regrowth has already started. Some forms of new life are already emerging.

Entrepreneurs are popping up all over the place. When the forest was dense, there was no sunlight, no room for them to grow. Now they have an open field in which to plant and grow their ideas.

Individuals and families are doing what we should have been doing all along—reducing consumption, increasing savings.

Congregations like Western are changing our financial basics to adapt to a new time and new opportunities.

People are losing jobs but, in some cases, finding new careers.

As a nation, we are realizing that some things we have accepted, like no health insurance for many of our neighbors, are unacceptable.

It isn’t easy, dealing with the devastation. It can be very painful. But growth, new growth is happening—while we sleep, while we are awake, right before our very eyes.

Life has a number of paradoxes. Jesus’ parables speak to one of them. On the one hand, we have to work hard. We have to plant seeds, till the soil. However, on the other hand, we have to understand that God will provide. Better put, God does provide.

Every day we see the way humans recycle/regrow themselves. We watch a small seed of sobriety grow into a life of sobriety; a small seed of love grow into a fifty-year marriage; a small seed of opportunity grow into a successful career; a dying D.C. congregation reborn and grow into a progressive force in the city.

It isn’t blind faith to which Jesus called us. He called us to a faith that believes that seeds grow, even in the face of the most adverse conditions. He called us to a faith that believes that, even in the face of the Great Recession, divorces, and disease, we can grow.

This is the most important thing we will teach little Greyson and every other child in the years and decades ahead. Make no mistake about it. As adults, they will encounter things as challenging as the things we are facing today. For one thing, our children are going to have to pay off the massive debt we have been incurring for the past nine years and will incur into the near future.

But if the church does its job, if we do our job, our children will have a deeply seated faith that things will work out; that seeds will grow, that forests will reappear. Why? Because it is God’s will. It is God’s Way.

Let us pray: Gracious God, amazing God, you simply refuse to accept defeat. From the ruins of civilizations, you build new ones. From the devastations nature inflicts on itself, you grow new life. From the things we humans do to ourselves and others, you find a way to lead us back to your Way. Thank you. Amen.

Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, DC
May 31, 2009
 

Text: Acts 2:1-21

Hagar was Sarah’s slave. Abraham and Sarah are characters from the Old Testament. Abraham knew that he was to be a father of a great people. Except something was going awry in the plan. Abraham and his wife, Sarah, were getting older, and they still didn’t have any children, and so Abraham forced Hagar to have his child, Ishmael. Then when Abraham and his wife finally did have a child of their own, Sarah and Abraham forced Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert. Abraham sent his own son out into the wilderness to die. Hagar was given a small bit of water, and that was it.

So, Hagar was wandering in the desert, with no place to go. The sun was beating down upon her. And I imagine her, walking with that sheer determination that a mother has when her child is in danger. But then the water ran out, Ishmael’s cries were getting louder and as much as she tried, she could no longer soothe him and it became clear that her sweet boy was going to die.

Hagar had no idea what to do. So, she placed her child under a bush, and then she called out to God, and pleaded that God would not allow her to look upon the death of her child, and somehow, there in that desert, she received a glimpse of God’s dream, she got a taste of God’s imagination, and she realized that she would become a mother of a great nation.

How did that happen? How did Hagar, a slave, who was forced to conceive her master’s child, stand in that barren desert, with no water and her small child crying, how did she suddenly imagine that she would become the mother of a great nation? I think it was because she caught a bit of the dream of God.

After she realized this, she looked up, and she saw a well of water on the horizon, and she and Ishmael were saved.

The Scriptures are full of stories like this.

There was Moses, who led the people of Israel out of slavery, and into the desert. They were wandering out there for forty years. And yet, all of that time, during all of that nomadic traveling amongst the dry and dusty sand, when the people were looking longingly back to a period when their children were killed or enslaved, Moses was not willing to go back. And in that desert landscape, Moses kept telling them stories about a land flowing with milk and honey.

How could he imagine it? How did Moses have the vision to see milk in honey, when his mouth and nose were full dry dust? I think it is because he somehow caught a glimpse of the dream of God.

And think about Esther. Esther was Jewish, in a land where she was an oppressed minority. Her parent’s died when she was a child, and so a relative, Mordecai, took care of her. When she was a young woman, she became a member of a harem, for a particularly vile king.

The king had gotten rid of his wife because the queen wouldn’t display her beauty (whatever that means) before his drunk friends. The king was humiliated and decided that if he let his wife get away with not obeying him, then it would be license for women in his whole kingdom not to obey their husbands. So he dismissed her, in order that every man would know that he was the master of his house.

Of course, shortly after he did get rid of her, he missed her and started looking for her replacement, so he gathered all of the most beautiful women in the land, of which Esther was one. After a year of intense beauty treatments, Esther was chosen to be the new queen. Yet, from what I can tell of the story, I’m not sure that it was much of a promotion. Esther was the victim of terrible violent threats. She could not reveal that she was Jewish, and she was not even allowed to enter the same room with her husband without the fear of being killed.

And yet, Esther, in spite of the years of racial discrimination, sexual victimization, and physical peril, somehow Esther realized that she was placed in her position at a particular time for a particular reason. She began to understand that she would be the savior of her people.

I wonder how, with her background, with her history, and with the terrible threats that she was under, how did Esther begin to see herself as the savior of her people? How did she have the courage to overcome the years of being violated and threatened? I believe that Esther, somehow, caught a glimpse of the dream of God.

And what about Mary? Imagine her, this young unmarried teenager, looking down at her bloated tummy, trying to swallow back her morning sickness she realized that if anyone found out that she was pregnant, then an angry mob of people would surround her, they would pick up stones and throw them at her, and they would keep pelting those rocks at her until her body was so bruised and broken that she would finally die.

And yet, somehow, as her ankles began to swell and her skin began to stretch, she reminded herself that she was the most blest among all women.

How did it happen? How did these people, in the most disturbing, violent and oppressive circumstances, how did they begin to see living water in the desert, milk and honey in a dry land? How did they begin to see themselves as mothers of great nations, saviors of a people, and the most blessed among all women? How did they leave their lives of bondage, slavery and abuse behind? How did they have the imagination to begin to see themselves as something different? How did they begin to envision a life without gender discrimination, sexual slavery, and racial oppression?

I think it was because each one of them became open to the dream of God. They began to see visions that were far removed from their actual settings, from their present environments, and they began to imagine the most extraordinary things.

When our family wakes up in the morning, often times we ask each other, “Did you have any interesting dreams last night?” And the most fascinating conversations follow. We can usually remember our dreams, and after we explain the long detailed story, we try to figure out what they mean. I don’t know how to interpret dreams. I don’t know the particular symbolism that people have developed around dream archetypes, but it is interesting to wonder what our subconscious has been working hard on during those dark hours. I often realized certain emotions that I was feeling, that I didn’t know existed. Or I realize that my concern about a particular situation, something that I was trying to blow off, looms large in my mind. Sometimes, I allow myself to dislike a person or a job in my dreams that I would never admit to disliking while I was awake.

Dreams are so common. Experts, who have studied brain activity and eye motion, say that we all dream, whether we recall the images or not, we all dream. We all have that ability. I wonder if we have all have the ability to wake up and dream.

Pentecost is such an extraordinary event, full of wonder and miracles, and yet, it is also filled with such ordinary things. The disciples were together in one room, praying, trying to figure out what to do next. They felt quite abandoned and confused. It had not been long since Jesus, who was killed in a brutal public display, began appearing to different people in very random places: on the beach, on a road, in a locked room.

Then, after getting his followers’ hopes up, Jesus gathers some disciples onto a mountainside, and ascends into heaven, leaving the disciples in physical danger, scared and bewildered. Until Pentecost.

On the Sunday of Pentecost, they were all in a room together, praying, and trying to figure out what to do, when suddenly they heard the sound of rushing wind, and tongues of fire appeared on each person’s head. People began to speak in different languages, when they never had that ability before. The old and the young began to dream dreams, and see visions.

And, as God so often does, the Holy Spirit moved in those common, ordinary things—fire, wind, words, dreams, and visions to make something miraculous happen.

When I was in Sunday school, I was confused by the idea of a vision, and so I asked my teacher what visions were. And she told me something interesting. She said that they were dreams that happened when we were awake. I like this idea. Visions are dreams that we have when we are awake.

And perhaps that is the promise of the Holy Spirit which has been poured out upon all of us. The Spirit allows us to wake up and dream. The Spirit gives birth to us, so that we can begin to see ourselves as new creations. We can begin imagining a world where men and women are no longer enslaved, where peace reigns.

Jesus talked a lot about the Kingdom of God. But the metaphor doesn’t make that much sense in our current context. It was a powerful image in the Jewish context that Jesus moved and taught in, but it is a bit foreign to most of us. Most of us are seeped in democracy. We’re more used to the idea of a president, and we chafe a bit when we think of being subjects of a king.

So theologians try to think of other words to use. Often they talk about the reign of God, to at least get past the Patriarchy of it. Or it’s the reign of God. Recently, I heard a theologian use the term the Dream of God.

The dream of God! What a beautiful concept. The dream of God is that the hungry will be full and there will be peace. And here, at this Pentecost moment we have a group of people get a glimpse of the dream of God.

When this miraculous moment occurred, it became clear to so many that the grace of God was no longer just for the Jews, but it was poured out upon men and women, young and old, of every language, of every ethnicity, of every socioeconomic background. That is the dream of God. And the church was formed, by God sharing the dream with a handful of people.

It is the dream that allowed men and women to form an underground railroad, so that black slaves in the United States could escape to freedom. It is that vision that wakes women up from years of abuse, and allows them to create a way out of the violence. It is the hope that stirs within men and women who suffered abuse or discrimination as children, and allows them to look into the mirror and see the image of God staring back at them.

Pentecost marks the fact that the dream of God runs through us. It flows through this sanctuary. It is that imagination that so captures a dying church to become a place of feeding and hospitality for homeless guests. It is the Spirit that stirs so boldly within us, until we can begin to imagine living water in the desert, milk and honey in the wilderness. And it is what encourages us to go out from this place, and to live boldly, into this Pentecost Spirit.

To the glory of God, our Creator,

 God, our Liberator,

And God, our Sustainer. Amen.