SunJun212009
Scripture: II CORINTHIANS 6:1-13; MARK 4:35-41
Last Sunday afternoon, a large contingent of Federated people joined the Rev. Judy Bagley-Bonner for her installation as pastor and teacher of Bainbridge Community United Church of Christ. It was a heart-warming display of love and encouragement for our dear colleague and pastor who has moved on to a new call.
Two of the features of an installation service are what are called “charges,” one given to the pastor and one to the congregation. Different from a sermon, these charges essentially instruct the pastor and the congregation, respectively, on how to think about their role in the church. I want to try something a little different this morning, as new members join us, and attempt to charge both myself and you, with an eye especially to the passages we heard earlier from Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, and from the gospel according to Mark.
Now some of you may remember that last Sunday morning I said how great it would be if I received in my inbox every week a message that said, “Your sermon is ready.” Well, lo and behold, this week I got just such a message from one of our long-time members! In her note was the outline to a complete, and very fine, sermon. Looking a gift horse in the mouth, however, I feel called this morning to issue a charge, and to charge us all with five duties and responsibilities.
Here’s our charge: first, and most important, trust in God. The temptation is so often to think that we need to do it all. Remember, though: we are not alone. We are filled by, and surrounded by, a power greater than all others. Paul talks about “this marvelous life God has given us” (6:1, The Message)—with its azaleas and tender caresses and fulfilling work and passion and care and music and art and love-making and peace-making. The Giver has provided us with an embarrassment of riches. Trust it.
Second, let’s make it a point to approach that power, and invite that grace-filled Father into our lives. When we are open to the forgiveness and acceptance God offers, it gives us strength to endure the toddler or teen years, support to get us through a relentless addiction, peace to traverse that last chapter that leads to death. Prayer—talking to and listening to God—is vital. As Paul says, “now is the right time to listen, the day to be helped” (6:2).
Third, it’s crucial that we focus on the right things, the most central matters. I’m going to spend longer with this third charge this morning. Henri Nouwen, one of my teachers in seminary, used to say something to the effect that we should do not merely what’s important, but what’s crucial. At home, for example, it may be important to carry your share of the load around the house—to do the dishes or mow the grass. But that’s not enough: it’s crucial to let your spouse or partner know that you love him or her. Don’t just do your duty, in other words. Be filled with love.
Paul puts it like this: “please don’t squander one bit of this marvelous life God has given us” (6:1). Don’t waste it. Near the end of that passage, he says this: “your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way” (6:12). It’s an indicting line. And I think we know what he’s talking about. We do squander our lives, we do live them small: hung up on the wrong things, obsessed sometimes with trivia, beholden to priorities that only squelch us, consumed by the merely important.
A recent advice column featured a letter from a man who found his fiancée to be amazingly beautiful. This is what he wrote about her, though: “I am engaged to a beautiful woman who spends a lot of time on her appearance. She . . . is very, very into makeup and dresses and accessories. . . .
“On the one hand, I love and am proud of how good she looks. On the other hand, having to deal with all the energy that goes into this passion feels really shallow and tiring.” To him, it’s a kind of high-maintenance beauty. It bores him, and, in his eyes, it seems like misplaced energy (The Plain Dealer, June 18, 2009, p. E9).
It’s easy to get caught up in cosmetics. It happens in churches, as well—being consumed by the merely important. For example, a bulletin and a building and a budget are important to a church. The bulletin lets us know what’s going on. The building and budget let us engage in all sorts of ministries that wouldn’t be possible without them. We get to worship without having rain fall on us and provide facilities for Sunday School and AA. We get to have office space and plan a payroll and map out how our ministries will be carried out. These things matter. They’re important.
But they’re not the heart of the church. Too often, in the church, and maybe in our families and workplaces, too, we forget what’s at the heart. As a result, we bicker and obsess about less than crucial matters. Perhaps you know the old saw that says, “The reason that fights in churches get so vicious is that the stakes are so low.” As one astute observer notes, “Trivial issues peripheral to the mission of the church—the color of the new carpeting in the fellowship hall, dress codes for junior high dances—consume a disproportionate share of time and energy and sometimes lead to outright conflict” (Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 3, p. 158).
A great band called Lost and Found played in this sanctuary on Friday evening. They were fun and funny and enormously entertaining. (One of them looked alarmingly at this thing that hangs over my head, and called it a “preacher snuffer.” And who knows—maybe there is indeed a hidden control somewhere that can bring this down on the unsuspecting preacher as punishment for wayward preaching!) And they wrote and performed fabulous songs. In one of them, the storyteller has just returned to church after a number of years away, and wistfully sings of what seems to be missing in that church: “they strive for attendance, while I seek transcendence.”
We, too, can get lost in attendance-seeking or intricate financial maneuvering or excessive proof-reading of the bulletin or defending particular turf, and while some of those can be tools of our central mission, they are not the mission itself. Transcendence is the heart of our mission. So the charge is there to be heeded: let’s focus on the right things. People in the Chagrin Valley are starving for the good news of the gospel. They want to know that God loves them no matter who they are or what they’ve done. They want to know that their lives have a purpose, that they’ve been filled with their own unique gifts, that they have valuable ways of making a difference in the world. They want to be bathed in love, and to give that love away.
Beyond the horizons of our relative comfort, right here in Chagrin Falls and in nearby Cleveland, in faraway Central America and South Africa, people are starving for a different kind of food and care—people who need nourishing bread and sterilized cotton swabs and clean water. We are beckoned to pay attention to the hungers of the empty stomach and the aching body and the lonely human heart, to be in a giving mode, to not live small, but to “live openly and expansively” (6:13). That’s the heart of our mission. That’s where our energies belong.
I have been struck, in recent weeks, by the tenacity of the conversations that mark our times. The vitriol expressed in so many quarters is alarming. Political discourse has been tremendously coarsened. Violence spawned by misguided passion for particular points of views has claimed lives. Frank Rich notes that “the writer Camille Paglia, a political independent, . . . detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When ‘the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,’ . . . there is reason for alarm” (New York Times website, posted June 14, 2009).
I’ve noticed a deterioration in the tone of conversations here at Federated, as well—not to the point of violence, of course, but still noticeable and saddening. There’s an unsettledness in the air. And my guess is that this somewhat more clipped and harsh rhetoric is a reflection of a deep anxiety in the culture. Like the disciples in the boat with Jesus (Mark 4:35-41), we’re scared. We don’t know what the future will bring. For the first time in recent memory, we can see that the limit may not be the sky but something much smaller. The horizon has shrunk: am I going to be able to afford college for my children; will my monthly pension be enough; will I still have a job in a month; how will the church be affected by the economy’s drastic downturn; what’s becoming of the culture and the world? So people bring that anxiety to church: are my favorite programs going to survive; will the new staffing model disrupt too much; are we going to be able to care for our facilities? The truth, though, is that these institutional questions are but smokescreens. The real questions are far deeper: will this culture that we hold so dear continue to thrive; will my family survive these changes; will I withstand these upheavals? “Do you not care that we are perishing?” ask the disciples (Mk. 4:38) as the waves beat into the boat and capsizing seems imminent. And that’s our question, too. “God,” we say, “give us peace.”
As your pastor, I want simply to say: it’s going to be OK. If not everyone gets what they wanted, if resources shrink, if material deprivation increases, even if we have to bring blankets to keep us warm in the pews during the winter, this church will not only survive. It will thrive. And it’s not because anyone’s particular staffing plan has been put into action. It’s not because the budget balanced or the roof was fixed. The reason this church will thrive is that Jesus stills the storm. God is present. The Spirit is alive. Peace is ours. Our third charge today is to focus on that: the transcendent presence who made the heavens and the earth is also right here in our midst. When that’s what’s at our center, the rest will take care of itself.
One more charge. And it’s got two parts. Sometimes when there’s ferment in a family or an organization or a nation, it’s because people aren’t crying and laughing enough. On the sadness side, psychologists call it unresolved grief. If you haven’t wept for your losses, you may well be bringing those losses to work or family life or church as brittleness or inflexibility or impatience. The sadness comes out sideways, often with an edge. Far better to weep about it than to express it indirectly. It’s important for me, for example, on this first Father’s Day after my father’s death, to grieve his passing, to mark the loss of his sense of humor, his playfulness, his scholarship, his principles. Just yesterday, I had a vivid memory of sprinting on the beach with him in the summer, being oddly proud that he could still beat me in a foot race until I was in my early teens, and realizing that he never raced me again after a certain point: he knew when I would beat him, and he stopped before that happened. I miss him. So here’s charge 4A: let’s grieve our losses—personal, ecclesiastical, financial, and cultural. It’s OK. It’s a wonderfully freeing thing to do.
And here’s the second part of that charge. But before I issue it, I need to tell you a story. My wife Mary heard this from a relatively new Federated member. It’s a true story. It seems that a young boy came running into the house one day and breathlessly asked his father, “Dad, what’s it called when one person sleeps on top of another?” His father looked somewhat startled, but immediately realized that he needed to deal straightforwardly with this new stage in his son’s life. “That’s called ‘sex,’” he said. Evidently satisfied, the boy ran back out to play. A little while later, though, he came storming back into the house again, and he said to his father, “Dad, Mrs. Moore wants to talk to you! It’s not ‘sex,’ it’s called ‘bunk beds.’”
So here’s charge 4B: when things are tense and serious, it’s a great thing to be able to laugh together. Laughter is the spirit of God roaring through a place. It’s a holy gift, and it’s one to be treasured.
I said that was the last charge. But there’s really one more. My fifth and last charge is the same as the first. Trust God. Even if everything falls apart; even if you lose your job or discover tomorrow that you are sick unto death; even if the roof falls in; even if the policies and procedures you favor don’t come to pass: it’s all in God’s hands. When we give ourselves into God’s care, we are, as Paul says, “immersed in tears, yet always filled with deep joy; . . . having nothing, having it all” (6:10). That’s who we are: we are children of God who are treasured and adored. For those who receive it, God stills the storm. Have faith. And, as Paul says, because of “this marvelous life God has given us . . . [let us] live openly and expansively” (6:13).