Lately, at my house, I’ve been hearing a lot of “Look, Dad! Look at me, Dad! Look at this, Dad!” It could mean a lot of different things. It could mean Romey has just invented some new death-defying stunt involving all the living room furniture, or maybe he’s doing a good job on his big-boy bicycle, or maybe he’s just drawn some new picture of a tractor-trailer truck with like 25 wheels. But whatever it is, it’s going to be more fun and more satisfying, and there’ll be a bigger laugh and a bigger sense of pride, if he knows that Bonnie or I are watching what he’s doing. And if we’re not paying enough attention? We might get some misbehavior to get our attention.
It's a fascinating aspect of human nature. I remember the feeling of it from when I was a kid (maybe you do too): that yearning, that need, to have mom or dad’s eyes on me was so strong. If we’re being rational or maybe pessimistic about it, we might say, “Well, this instinct probably evolved to ensure that the parent protects the child and feeds the child and doesn’t forget about them or neglect them.” But it’s not just the scraped knees and the hurt feelings that our kids want us to attend to; it’s not just tying shoes and cooking dinner and everything else that they can’t do yet that they want us for. They also need us—just as much—to pay attention to the things they can do for themselves and to affirm their joy, and to share in their accomplishments. I remember watching TV as a kid and if something funny happened, I would turn to look at my mom so that we could share the laugh. It was better together. For kids, being watched, being paid attention to, seems to me to be a need—a need as real as needing calcium or exercise or school. Being seen and knowing—knowing not just on a physical level, not just on a social level, but knowing on a psychological, spiritual level—knowing that we are not alone is a key ingredient to our healthy development as we grow up. We worry so much as parents. We work so hard to provide. We want our kids to have every opportunity. We don’t want them to suffer any disadvantage or loss or disappointment. We don’t want them to lack for any good or service that money can buy. But maybe what our kids need most from us in our busy lives, in a world full of distractions, is our simple, but undivided presence of mind. Yes, I see you. Yes, I affirm this joy you feel is real because I feel it too. Yes, together let’s turn that joke on TV, let’s turn your make-believe rock concert, let’s turn you climbing a tree into meaning. Children teach us that life is full—absolutely full—of opportunities to experience meaning in our lives. And they remind us that we come to a healthy understanding of meaning in our lives primarily through shared experiences. An experience doesn’t need to be profound, character-building, or expensive to provide meaning—it needs to be shared, to be experienced with someone outside of myself who can affirm for me that this deep level of satisfaction and joy and purpose which we call meaning—which is so ephemeral and hard to define—is, in fact, absolutely real. Meaning is real. It exists. And we don’t need any science, any philosophy, any book, or even any religion to make it real for us. It’s real simply because Dad saw it too, because Mom experienced it with me. Now, as we grow up, the ways in which we find and make meaning also grow up with us. But they’re all founded on those early shared experiences. And we all eventually develop a healthy desire for some level of privacy, but the desire to be seen, to be watched, and to share never goes away completely. We still need other people, we value community. Other people continue to help us identify what is relevant in a world full of information and possibilities. But, if we’re lucky, we’re not like a leaf in the wind, being swept along with the tides of other people’s opinions and social media trends. Because, if we’re lucky, we’ve discovered that the One who watches—who when we were young we could only discover outside of ourselves (in Mom or in Dad or some other close adult)—the One watches now lives within us. So, when I sit down and write a sermon alone in my office with the door closed and the lights off, I don’t feel alone. There is a watcher present with me who sees and knows and shares the meaning of that private experience. But that is a spiritual reality that I first learned to access through the intervention and care and attention of my parents. A 2021 study by YouGov showed that 26% of the general population believes that life has no meaning. And an additional 15% aren’t sure life has any meaning. That’s a crisis—a tremendous crisis of meaning in our world. We’re becoming more individualized, more lonely, more isolated, more online, more polarized. Anxiety, depression, and despair are increasing. Many of the institutions that helped us to make meaning together—like churches—are in decline. We’re less likely to belong to clubs, social groups, sports teams, service organizations than we were in generations past. The pandemic and the precautions we took to stop the spread of the virus had very real and perhaps unintended but not unpredictable consequences, and it added to this growing sense of distancing and meaning loss. But I’m sure that the crisis in meaning also traces back to our most formative years and the intensity of the attention that’s lavished on us. Are the adults around us just providing for us and keeping us safe or are they present with us, paying attention, watching us, and by watching us and responding to us, helping us to discover that highest pinnacle of human consciousness—meaning. We heard in our reading this morning, “As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” I think if Jesus were here today, he would find much the same thing. What is it that makes people “like sheep without a shepherd?” Is that we can’t find the best grass to eat? That we can’t protect ourselves from wolves? That we can’t cut our own hair? No, we can do all those things for ourselves. We’re like sheep without a shepherd when we don’t have that sense that someone is watching. And without those loving eyes affirming us, we become anxious and restless, we wander aimlessly and meaninglessly, we become lost, and we stray into dangerous territory. Bringing your sick relative to see Jesus was not like a trip to doctor’s office to get a prescription for Amoxicillin. It was a trip into the presence of someone whose gaze had the power to hold you, a power so strong that it stayed with you long after you went back home. You felt it there watching you, experiencing with you, affirming you. It smiled with you, wept with you, longed with you, dreamed with you. It was there in every hour of drudgery, and it was in every epiphany of joy. And you felt less lost and less alone because that presence was tapping you into the most important connection of all—the connection to everything, the connection to God, the connection to meaning. What our world needs in the midst of war, and mass shootings, and frantic social media antics, and political polarization is a new Spirit of meaning making. One of the problems with living in a crisis of meaning is that people will latch on with all their strength to anyone who promises loudly to provide meaning—cults, conspiracies, corporations, trends, subcultures, gangs, fascists. Providing meaning is not about telling people what to believe or not, it’s not about judging the morals of others, it’s not about some system or structure of belief. It’s all about being present, about giving people an opportunity to be heard, giving them a feeling of community, joining them where they are, wherever they are. And we have to do it in a way that challenges the volume of all the false prophets—the media, the markets, the politicians promising meaning that they’re not equipped to provide. We—the Church—need to be more present, more attentive than those false voices. Beloved, the certain feeling that there is a power within (and beyond us) who is watching us and imbues our existence with meaning is not a psychological trick. It is the truth. It is the truth without which all the food and opportunity and money and success and accolades of the world amount to nothing. The trick, or perhaps the arrested development, is the idea that there is no meaning. And the disease is the desperate wandering and lashing out that arises from unmet need. Like an ignored kid, the world is screaming for attention. Does Christianity stop at the stone wall that divides the Church from the outside world? Of course not. Do we come to church once a week merely to recharge our meaning battery for seven more days of drudgery and disconnection? No. We go out into the world as ambassadors of the Kingdom of God. We are the messengers of meaning. The world is shouting desperately, “Look at me! Look at me! Please, somebody, tell me I’m not alone! Please, somebody, tell me there’s a reason and a hope to this life!” Will you be paying attention? Will you look them eyes? Will you help the world to find the meaning it so desperately needs? The meaning, beloved, which I promise you is within you. Amen.
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I had planned to sort of eulogize John the Baptist this morning. I was going to tell you about everything John had accomplished in his life, what he stood for, what he wouldn’t stand for, and about what a great influence John the Baptist has had on me personally, on my faith. But I know that the thing that is frontmost on many of our hearts and minds this morning (certainly on mine) is yesterday’s assassination attempt on former President Trump.
For those of you who may have missed the news, a gunman opened fire on Mr. Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. Mr. Trump was struck in the ear, but—thank God—he’s OK. Unfortunately, one other man at the rally was killed. Two other men were seriously wounded. The gunman was also killed by the Secret Service. That’s about all we know, regarding the details, at the moment. But I think all of us also know and feel that this is terrible news for our country, terrible news for this election, terrible news for those of us who continue to dare to hope that there is a possibility of healing the increasingly violent political polarization that is diving our country. This is going to make everything worse. OR—dare I hope?—maybe there’s an opportunity here to turn things around? When I arrived here five years ago to become your senior minister, I began occasionally, in my preaching and praying, to intentionally include “political” material. There is no such thing--no such thing—as an apolitical Christianity. A Christianity or a church that attempts to avoid all political issues, that attempts to avoid offending the political sensibilities of its members or neighbors by making the mere mention of politics taboo is avoiding the fullness of the Gospel's call to engage with the realities and injustices of our world. When we do this, we neglect our prophetic role—crying out for justice, for peace, and for the almost forgotten common good. Religious values are political values and politics are often wrapped up in or reacting to religion, and therefore abandoning political discussion forces a church to abandon its duty to participate in the most important discussions of our time. Imagine a church saying that the discussion of religious values is better left to the politicians. The Church should remain silent on issues like the morality of our leaders, mass murder in our schools, providing healthcare, defining marriage, addressing poverty. It’s ridiculous, but it’s the unintended stance of churches who attempt to avoid anything “political.” There’s no such thing as apolitical Christianity, but that doesn’t mean descending into the muck of politics. Christianity has always been a path of transcending politics, getting past our worst political instincts, and coming together across very real divides. The Apostle Paul wrote to the first Christians in Gaul, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” In Christ, Paul is saying, we do not ignore the world or the social and political differences between us. In Christ, we transcend those differences, not by ignoring them, but by creating a church where—against all the political and social norms of the world around us—we gather, we sing, and we eat—all of us at the same table—class, gender, ethnicity, citizenship be damned—all of us together. That church in Gaul wasn’t ignoring politics, they were defying politics. They were transcending politics and creating something new. So, when I arrived here five years ago, I began intentionally and gently, inserting not political opinions but political reality into my preaching and praying. And it was hard on some of us. Because it was hard to hear even the mention of politics without thinking that this crazy long-haired guy is bringing up politics in order to try to force me to accept his politics. What I am hoping to do is to open up enough political honesty between us that we can learn to love one another despite very real political differences and disagreements, where we can learn to respect someone different than us even when we can’t accept their opinion. Imagine if I said to you, “I love you—BUT only because I don’t know everything about you. If you spoke freely about your thoughts on—let’s say—Joe Biden, I would probably stop loving you. But as long as you keep your mouth shut, I really do love you.” Would you believe me? Is that the kind of place we want our churches to be? Is that the kind of love we want to practice? The very reasonable fear, of course, is that if politics come out in the open, we’ll become as profoundly divided in church as we are outside of it. And, yes, that’s a risk. But in the rest of the country, in the world outside these walls, politics and the discussion of politics isn’t going to go away--ever. And our culture desperately needs local, in-person communities of healing and restoration that are willing to do the hard work of loving one another across very real divides and differences. Shouldn’t churches be at the forefront of that political movement? Imagine if in every town and city across this country there were these historic spiritual communities with lots of social capital and a respected moral voice holding community events, volunteer opportunities, and services where Americans could learn the countercultural values of loving and respecting and maybe even needing someone who is different from myself. Jane is a never-Trumper, but my kids love going to Vacation Bible School with her, and we couldn’t do it without her. Bob is way out there into some lefty stuff that just isn’t for me, but when I was sick, he brought me gluten-free zucchini muffins, and they were good. Who’s going to make that vision a reality if not us, if not the Church? And that vision, if we believe in it, requires us to talk regularly, respectfully and lovingly, about politic reality and to see one another fully in order to love one another fully. The devil’s in the details, of course, and it wouldn’t be easy, and there’d be growing pains for sure, but if not us, then who? The price of our inaction is pretty clear: more violent rhetoric, violent speech, and violent actions as we lash out against our enemies. This kind of conflict doesn’t just go away. It continues to escalate unless it is somehow transformed. Where would you rather live? In a world where you were empowered to revile your enemies at the price of devolving into political instability and violence? Or a world where you were truly free to love those who were truly different than you with the benefit of an imperfect but evolving sense of the common good? Beloved, our country needs us. Our community needs us to be bold and courageous. It’s easy to decry violence. It’s hard to respond to the deep-seated polarization and loneliness that are driving people further and further apart—that’s driving us to extremes, to hate and to violence. We can’t overcome this division by ignoring it. We’re going to have to turn around, face reality, face one another with charity and love, and learn through Christ to transcend the differences. If not us, then who? Preaching on: Mark 6:1–13 I had a great time on vacation in Italy two weeks ago. It was just Bonnie and me, no kids, so there was plenty of time to really unwind. I swam in the Mediterranean for the first time. I practiced my Italiano. I ate lots of pasta. I discovered the joys of ice-cold limoncello on a hot evening after eating too much pasta. And I saw a UFO—believe it or not, while eating an absolutely delicious pasta.
It was a seven-course wedding banquet, outside, right by the beach on the night of the full moon. Beautiful. When suddenly up over the horizon comes something in the sky like nothing I’ve ever seen before. There were some low fluffy clouds that night and this thing, all lit up, flew up through the clouds and was lighting the clouds up from inside. It was completely silent and looked like just a little dot in the sky. But it was very visible because it had an enormous, bright cone of white light coming out of the front of it and an identical cone of white light coming out the back of it. The two cones of light basically touching in the middle. And flying along next to it was a separate, very thin, bluish light. It looked like a flying snippet of blue laser light, just off to its left. Through a mouthful of delicious pasta I shouted to the table, “UFO! UFO! Look at that! There’s a UFO! I’ve never seen anything like it!” Of the twelve of us at the table, only about half of us looked up. It came out of the clouds and moved across the open sky towards the sea. “What is that?” I asked everyone. “Has anyone ever seen anything like that before?” A couple people were intrigued and began discussing it at the table. Some were dismissive saying it was just a plane—it was not a plane. But still, even as it moved across the sky and out of view, about half the table didn’t even look up at all! Which shocked me. Even if you’re doubtful about UFOs, wouldn’t it have just been so easy to look up and see for yourself? So, for the rest of the night, I was thinking about that reaction or lack of reaction. And I began to realize, I was naïve to feel shocked at people’s lack of interest. Much of my life can be characterized by being deeply interested and excited by things that other people think are just make believe. I’m interested—in whatever form it comes in—in the reality that lies at the very edges of our perception. And I have said to that reality—in whatever form it shows up—that when it shows up, I will pay attention, I will be led, I will believe. If there’s ever been a word that I’ve struggled with in my life, it’s the word belief. It’s really like a contronym—a word that contains its own opposite. Like “fast” means both speedy and stuck; “original” means both the very first and the very latest; “forged” means both to make something and to fake something; “antique” means valuable and obsolete; “refrain” means stop and repeat. I could keep going like this because for a few years I became a little obsessive about noticing and keeping a list of contronyms. I had no idea why I was doing it. I just knew that I had to keep going and if I kept going with it, the reality at the edge of my perception would in time reveal itself to me. Eventually, I realized that I was obsessed with contronyms because I needed to work out my relationship with this one word that had so bedeviled me: belief. Just like the word “cleave” can mean adhere closely to something or split something open, the word “belief” contains this same contradiction. Belief can mean both strict adherence to a particular worldview that is dismissive toward any new or unexpected possibility that is trying to reveal itself, and it can mean an opening up of a person beyond all preconceived notions to allow an authentic encounter with something truly new and unexpected. Belief can mean (at a linguistic level) both strict closemindedness and intentional openmindedness. Linguistically speaking, everybody sitting at my banquet table was a believer. Some of us were “look up!” believers and some of us were “don’t look up” believers. Jesus in his life and ministry makes it clear that God is not a worldview of limitation trying to keep out the new. God is rather the new possibility breaking wildly and silently into the world. There is so much potential in God and God’s potential is so easily overlooked. An important component of Christian theology is that God is omnipotent—all powerful. I’ve more or less said this to you all before, but maybe not this directly: I don’t think that God is omnipotent. Or I think it’s slightly the wrong emphasis. Instead, I believe that God is “omnipotentiate”: God contains all possibility. Being all powerful means that God can snap her fingers and move any mountain. Containing all potential means that in God there is no unmovable mountain. But actually moving the mountain, if it is moved, will unfold through the possibilities and potentials at play in creation. In other words, God won’t or can’t override us, instead God is working through us. Jesus makes this clear in our scripture reading this morning. The hometown crowd apparently see his great deeds and hear his wisdom, but neither the deeds nor the wisdom fit their limiting belief that Jesus is just some hometown schmuck. And the text says, “he could do no deed of power there.” The potential for power existed, but the power itself was in short supply because there was no openness to it among the people. It wasn’t that Jesus chose not to perform miracles there to punish them. He was trying his best, but God’s power was limited by our beliefs. All sorts of theological attempts have been made to rescue God’s omnipotence from this reality, but none of them really work. They cleave to God’s power where they should be cleaving open our understanding of the power of our own beliefs. We’re all believers. The question is “what kind?” Are we open to the possibilities? Or closed? Jesus’ response to his hometown reception tells us a lot about the difference between the two kinds of belief—limited and open. Encountering stuckness at home, Jesus decides to send his disciples out into the world for an opening experience. He sends them out two by two on what seems like an unnecessarily risky journey. The disciples will be sent out with basically no supplies—no bread, no bag, no money, no extra clothes. They will have to rely entirely on the hospitality of other people. Now, if you really just wanted to ensure that they would be successful in spreading their message, you would certainly send them out with a care package of things that would help them along the way. Help them get through the tough times. But that is not what Jesus does because it's not necessarily about them being successful in that sort of worldly way. It's about the inner transformation that they will experience on this particular journey. Jesus understands a psychological reality—that leaving all our comforts and securities behind forces us into an attitude of openness. When we make reservations for a hotel a month in advance, we’re very discriminating. We’ll get the place that suits us best. When we’re rolling into town with no money and have no idea where we’ll be staying or how we’ll be eating, we’re suddenly open to anything. As you all know by now, my last Sunday as your senior minister will be September 8. What comes after that for me is not yet entirely clear. And that’s scary. And I’m really looking forward to it. Because I know that God is calling me on to something new and the possibility will only reveal itself through me, through my belief, my openness, my willing to look up and to be led and to receive. While this is happening for me, something similar will be happening for all of you—the transition period between settled ministers. There may be pulpit supply, there may be a bridge minister, there may be an interim minister. Almost always in churches there’s a desire to rush through the transition zone and get back to what is known and what can be relied upon. That of course is only natural. And there are real concerns, of course. What if people disengage, stop coming, stop giving? What if we can’t sustain this program or that initiative? We want to continue to give our very best. But every once in a while, the very best we can give is an openness to possibilities. My prayer for you all is that there is some appetite to “look up” in the coming season of transition, that there is some room made for dreaming and visioning. When we open ourselves up to the God’s potential, that’s when God enters in. When we very well-meaningly try to rush past possibility to get back to security, we may sometimes close a door that God was trying to enter in through in a new and unexpected way. Preaching on: Mark 5:21–43 I think most of you have heard by now that a little more than a week ago I announced that I’ll be stepping down from my position as your senior minister here at the church. And in the interval here the church council and I have set my last day, which will be Sunday, September 8—which gives us 10 good weeks to say goodbye. And we need that time, I think, to say goodbye well—there’s a lot to celebrate that we’ve accomplished together, there’s a lot of gratitude to express for the way we’ve been there for one another, there are lots of fond memories to share, and there’s going to be some real sadness for some of us—certainly for me and for Bonnie. If you haven’t received my letter yet, please let me know and I’ll make sure you get a copy.
Since my announcement I’ve gotten a lot of phone calls and emails and letters from folks and had in-person conversations with some of you, and you’ve all been so gracious and kind and complementary and encouraging even, which actually makes it a lot harder to leave, to be honest. It would be a lot easier if you all just said, “Good riddance! Scram! Don’t let the door hit you!” But instead, your kindness and graciousness highlight for me all the more just how difficult this departure will be for me. It means so, so much to me that I’ve been able to be a positive part of your lives, and your support and your well wishes deepen the bond that we’ve built together over the last five years. And I think that’s the process of a healthy goodbye. It’s not trying to loosen the bond; it’s deepening the bond to the point of completion, so that we can let go with sadness and with joy. Your love and encouragement as I take this next step in my life and career mean more to me than I can adequately express right now. Thank goodness, I’ve got 10 more weeks to hopefully work it out. As I’ve spoken to colleagues and friends and family about my decision, the first question they have for me when I tell them I’m leaving (after they find out that I’m not taking the expected path of leaving for another position at another church is, “Why are you leaving then? What went wrong?” Lots of ministers drop out because they’re emotionally or financially abused, their congregations are hotbeds of conflict and immaturity, or because they’re simply overworked, and one way or another they just burn out. But nothing like that is the case for me here. We have our moments, of course, everybody does! But that’s just a little spice in the curry here. We wouldn’t want things to get boring! But this is a healthy, stable congregation in a desirable area with amazing people and lots of resources where I’m appreciated and supported. Everything is great. So, what the heck could possibly cause you to want to risk losing all that? Good question! I’m going to be completely honest with you all and vulnerable to boot and let you know that I don’t know exactly how to answer the question, “What’s next?” yet. All I know is that like Jesus in our scripture reading this morning, I have been interrupted. And for reasons that I can’t fully articulate yet, I know that I need to stop and give that holy interruption an opportunity to reveal and name itself in my life. Just imagine the scene here for a minute: Jesus is on an important mission. Jairus’ daughter is dying. They’ve got to rush to get there in time to heal her. They’re fighting their way through this thick crowd, their minds must have been totally fixated on their goal֫—get to the house in time to save the little girl. And then Jesus does something totally bizarre. He just stops everything. “Somebody touched me! Who touched me?” And the disciples must have been like, “Look around you, scatterbrain, like everybody is touching you. Remember the dying little girl? Let’s keep moving! Come on!” And Jairus! Can you imagine how he must have felt? He must have been in an absolute panic for his daughter’s life. What could be more important than just continuing to get there? And really—really—did Jesus even need to stop at all? The woman with the hemorrhage was right, she was already healed just by touching Jesus’ cloak. You’d think he'd be grateful she didn’t throw herself at his feet and demand his attention the way that Jairus and so many others did. He could just get on with it. Hemorrhage healed, keep going. But not Jesus. In the middle of this critical, life-or-death mission for this big shot from the synagogue, Jairus, Jesus allows himself to be interrupted by an unnamed unknown. He stops everything simply because of a feeling inside of him that doesn’t really make any sense to anybody else, especially under the circumstances. And Jesus invites that unknown—that holy interruption—to speak and to reveal itself. 30 years ago this summer, at age 16, I heard the call to ministry. It was the same kind of thing—a literal interruption in my life, an abrupt moment where something shifted within me, and I suddenly knew beyond any doubt that I was going to be a minister. I heard a voice and everything. The whole shebang. The next 10 years were spent simultaneously exploring and running away from that voice, that calling, that interruption in what I had previously thought my life might be. And then for the last 20 years, I fully committed to this inevitable and strange and wondrous calling. I went to seminary and worked my way up through ministry to arrive in this amazing place. And I assumed that the next 20 or 30 years would be much the same. I didn’t think I’d be in Glen Ridge forever, but when I left, I assumed I would be leaving for the next logical step—a bigger church, a bigger platform, a bigger budget, a bigger staff, a bigger salary, etc. etc. Not that those things were necessarily motivating me, just that that was the next logical and acceptable career move laid out for someone in my position. But instead, I’ve been interrupted. This has been a very slow process. It started for me in earnest last summer. God began to speak to me. Not all in one moment, not with one voice, but in dreams, and synchronicities, and relationships, and books, and longings within me that could not be ignored. And over the last year of struggle and exploration and prayer, God’s intentions for my life have become clear to a degree. God is saying, I’ve got something for you to do that is off the beaten path. For the last 30 years, you have faithfully walked the clear path laid out for you by the church—college, the academic study of religion, resistance to the call, seminary, interfaith dialogue, internships, field education, a thesis, discernment, career counseling, psychological evaluation, search and call, ordination, chaplaincy, community minister, associate minister, interim minister, and senior minister. But now I’m asking you to risk it all, to take a leap of faith, and to step off the path of everybody’s expectations (including your own) and do something different. As Robert Frost famously wrote, “Two paths diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” The thing about the road less traveled is that you don’t know exactly where it’s going to take you. What I know for sure is that I’m not leaving ministry, I’m not abandoning my call, I certainly haven’t lost my faith. God is calling to me now to focus my energies and gifts on a new kind of ministry beyond the walls of the established church. I have some ideas about what this might look like and what it might become, but they’re not fully formed. They’re nascent, fetal. They’re still in the process of revealing themselves, and out of respect for them and this process, and in order to protect their integrity, I really can’t lay it out for you—but most of all I can’t do it because I don’t know yet. Vaguely, I can say that I’m going to begin to work as a spiritual director and I’m going to be working on some creative projects like a book, and at least one podcast that’s in the works, and some classes and retreats. And maybe—just maybe—I’m going to build something new and needed—maybe a new kind of church for a changing world. But in order for that to happen, I have to be faithful to this process and I have to allow myself to be interrupted and I need to make room in my life for something new to grow—as hard as that is to accept. I wonder if you are open to interruptions. I’m not suggesting that everybody leave their jobs and try to make it on their own. This, for me, is a calling. You all have your own callings in life that are different than mine, look different from mine. But it’s worth taking some space to consider if you’ve made enough room in your busy schedules, in your impressive accomplishments, in your noble and worthy goals, on your bucket lists, for a little something new that wants to be known to interrupt you. Interruptions are not often immediately appreciated. If they don’t demand our attention, it’s easy to let them slip away. But paying attention to them might (might!) make all the difference. Preaching on: Mark 4:26–34 I’d like to invite you all to come by my yard sometime—take a good look—because right now everything is looking pretty good. I’ve been mowing it regularly (even the hard part, that steep rock-filled drainage ditch between the sidewalk and the road), I got the spring pruning and trimming all done, I cleared out the brush piles behind the garage that had been building up since last spring, I filled in all the old groundhog and chipmunk and rabbit holes, I pulled all the weeds growing out of the cracks in the driveway, we’ve cleaned up the garden beds, and I bagged up all the clippings. It’s pretty impressive! …If you’re going to walk by though to check it out, please do it soon, because in just about a week everything’s probably going to look terrible again.
It makes me anxious when the yard looks bad, especially in a neighborhood like this where most people’s lawns are professionally maintained and look perfect all the time. When I get too busy to mow or weed whack or prune or whatever, I feel like I’m letting everybody down, I feel like I’m letting the “Garden State” down. If someone stops to let their dog relieve itself in my yard, I worry even that the dog is judging me for my long grass. So, I prefer for things to look neat and tidy. I prefer for things to be under control. I prefer my lawn to look like everybody else’s lawn. I really do. But the yard has this mind of its own! It thwarts me! The grass and the shrubs and the weeds and the seeds, they have their own agenda. Being “in charge” of a couple yards these last five years has taught me that I’m not actually in charge at all. The yards are in charge. I’m just like nature’s janitor, I’m the cleanup crew. I am not the boss, I’m just here to respond. And I take my orders from a higher power. “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle because the harvest has come.” The Kingdom of God is like a lawn: you think you’re in charge of it, you think you control it, you think you own it, you think you’re responsible for it, but the fact is that your influence is very limited. You can plant and you can cut. But the real magic—the life, the growth and transformation, the flowers and the fruit—they belong to God. This all comes down to our spiritual attitudes, which are very important. In some ways, spirituality or Christianity is just an attitude. It’s an orientation to life. I plant tomatoes in my garden in the spring. I pick tomatoes off my vines all summer. I must be the King of Tomatoes! Tomatoes are here to serve me! But to those of us willing to listen to Jesus’ spiritual wisdom, we must cultivate a different attitude. I have received a gift too wonderful for me. And in response to that gift, I will become a servant to these tomatoes. In Genesis, God tells Adam and Eve to work and care for the earth. God calls all of us to become stewards. But stewards, over time, often forget themselves and begin to behave like entitled kings and queens. When we elevate ourselves over the magic we are supposed to serve, we lose sight of it. God’s magic is a ground-level, grassroots kind of magic, and we need to stay close to the ground to really appreciate it. We’re also called to be stewards of the church. We work and take care of it. And it’s critically important that we maintain the attitude that if God is at the heart of the church, just like God is at the heart of nature, then one of our most important jobs is to know when to get the heck out of the way of the magic. Get out of the way of the growth and the change and the transformation that can only ever truly belong to God. And I’ll go one step further still. How often have you heard someone say, “Take control of your life!” “Become the master of your own destiny!” “Make your own future!” I’m not saying those things don’t work. There is a reason we live in a culture of power and dominance and control—because it produces results! I can’t argue with that. It also produces a lot of problems—war and conflict and pollution and the like at a global scale, but also, at the individual level, anxiety, and depression, and disconnection, and disease. So, being in control “works,” but I’m not sure we’ve really reckoned with everything we get in that bargain. In my life, my greatest achievements, the biggest growth, the deepest and most meaningful callings have not been my doing. I’m only standing here with you today because God has made some magic in my life, magic that is far beyond my control. I am a steward of that magic, a responder to it. I’m along for the ride. I’m not the boss here. An instrument doesn’t play itself. I cannot understate the difference it makes in our lives to plant tomatoes and pick tomatoes as if you were a child at God’s magic show, as if you were instrument being played by God’s hand, as if (at any moment) a new and unexpected seed might be planted in your life. Because when we take control, all the yards look the same. When we take control, we stick to the well-worn path. When we take control, we think we already know everything we have to look forward to and we miss what God is doing. The mustard seed is the smallest seed of all. But when it hits good soil, it grows like a weed. It takes over the whole lawn. Soon it’s a bush so big that the birds move in and make it their home. That’s what the Kingdom of God is like, Jesus tells us. It’s the seed you barely notice, that produces the weed you most want to mow down, that if you would only let it grow would transform your whole life. When you’re in control all the time, it’s very hard to go in an unexpected direction. It’s very hard for something new to sprout up in your life. We so desperately want to believe that the Kingdom of God is the greatest power in the universe! No other kingdom can stand up to its greatness! God is almighty! All powerful! Whatever is happening in the world must be God’s plan! But Jesus’ teachings on the matter couldn’t be more opposite. The Kingdom of God is tiny, low to the ground, quiet, and easily overlooked. It must be searched for like a lost coin, like a lost sheep, like a perfect pearl. That means the Kingdom of God only has power when we pay attention to it in our lives. It only has power when we search for it in our lives, when we allow it to grow, when we humble ourselves to the point of placing ourselves within its power. The Kingdom of God only has power if we let it have power. It only has power if we respond to it. When was the last time you were genuinely surprised by your relationship with God? When was the last time you let your spiritual yard get messy? When was the last time you allowed a pesky weed a little room to grow in your life? When was the last time you gave up control without giving up attention? When was the last time you got out of the way without turning your back completely on what was taking place? Beloved, living a spiritual life requires a foundation of faith. Faith is not a series of beliefs that we assent to intellectually and then go about our business being the boss of everything. Faith is an attitude, a humbling orientation to life that enables us to believe in, and by believing respond to, God’s unexpected possibility. May there be meaning in your messiness; may there be joy in your unexpected twists; and may there be magic whenever we get close enough to the ground to touch the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen. Most of us here, as Americans, have this deep inner sense that the freedom of speech is both a sacred right and a necessary evil. And whichever way you happen to be thinking of it at any given time has a lot to do with whether or not you’re in agreement with the last opinion you just heard. I’m feeling compelled to talk about freedom of speech this morning for just this reason. Because we all know we would never want to live in one of the many places where people aren’t free to speak up, speak out, speak the truth. And none of us—no person—is a true free-speech absolutist. We all feel like the line must be drawn somewhere, and we struggle with where, when, and how to draw that line.
This is all especially relevant to us right now because we just experienced a historic, controversial, and divisive antiwar, pro-Palestinian campus protest movement that’s left many of us with big questions about freedom of speech and expression, about the tactics and rhetoric of protesters and counter protesters, and about the response of the educational institutions and the police. And many of us are wondering: Where do we go from here? So, I think I need to try to cover, briefly, three things this morning. I’m going to talk about the actual content of what the protesters have been saying. I’m going to talk about why I think freedom of speech is so important. And I’m going to talk about what our response should be to expression or opinion like the recent protests. One of the biggest reasons that the campus protests have been so controversial and divisive is because they’ve been accused of being antisemitic. And there are a lot of competing opinions about whether or not that’s true. For example, there are pro-Palestinian Jewish protesters who say that they haven’t experienced any antisemitism at all in the encampments and protests. And there are Jewish students, students who believe that Israel’s war in Gaza is unjust and should be stopped, who have reported being targeted on campus because of their Jewish identity. We’ve seen reports of things like Nazi flags being flown at the protests. And we’ve heard from protest organizers that these things are isolated incidents from fringe individuals. We’ve heard chants like “Globalize the Intifada” which many Jews hear as a call for globalized violence against Jews, but which protesters claim is a non-violent call to action. We’ve heard “From the River to the Sea” which many Jews hear as a call for the total genocide and displacement of Jews in Israel, but which protesters claim is just a call for Palestinian freedom in the place they live. We’ve heard from protesters that Zionists are people who believe that Palestinians should never have a state of their own. We’ve heard from many Jews that Zionists are people who believe the Jews should always have a state of their own. Zionists have been particularly targeted by the protesters in terms of speech and action (“Zionists” have been harassed on campus and blocked from moving through campus, for example). Many Jews claim this is just a way to target Jews. Some protesters claim that they’re not targeting Jews, that they’re targeting Israel, its rightwing government, and its policies. Some Jews have claimed that any criticism of Israel, especially in this moment, is antisemitic. I admire the protester’s calls to action for the Palestinian cause. I abhor war and violence. I hate the devastating toll this war has had on innocent people. There should be a ceasefire in Gaza now. And there needs to be a better, self-determining future for the Palestinians, ideally with their own state. That won’t be easy, especially with a group as absolutely detestable and dangerous as Hamas in charge of Gaza. But we need to figure this out or it’s only going to get worse for everybody. Israel cannot wipe out Hamas. I wish they could, but it’s just impossible without wiping out all of Gaza, and we can’t let that happen. I think the people in charge in Israel are smart enough to know they can’t wipe out Hamas, and they’re probably actually being motivated by other factors—from politics to revenge and even hatred. And it has to stop. So, to that point, I’m in accord with the protesters. But what I—especially as a Christian, who recognizes the shameful part the Christian Church has had to play in the framing and perpetuation of antisemitism, and the key role the Church has had in establishing genocidal violence and persecution against Jews—what I cannot stand by or give a pass to under any circumstances is antisemitism. Have the campus protests been antisemitic? Well, anecdotally there’s a lot of evidence that they have been. It’s really hard, in my opinion, to fly a swastika and then claim you don’t have a problem. But were these just isolated incidents? Or were the protests themselves systemically founded upon principles or narratives that are inherently antisemitic? That’s a harder question to answer. Where I’m at right now is that I am absolutely sure that the protests and the protesters, by and large, were not trying to be careful about antisemitism. It is not a priority for them. For me to be truly comfortable with any movement in criticism of Israel or Jews, I would need to make sure that a commitment to anti-antisemitism is a foundational principle. The left has told us that passively not being racist is not enough. We need to be actively antiracist. For me, an outspoken commitment to anti-antisemitism has been sorely lacking in the protests and, I believe, it’s what is morally and strategically required by the campus protest movement as it moves forward. Now should protests which are not anti-antisemitic and which sometimes cross the line in indisputable antisemitism be allowed to continue? Should these protesters be allowed to speak and express themselves freely. I believe, absolutely, yes. There are a lot of reasons to support the general principle of freedom of speech even when you will almost certainly disagree with some of that speech and even when some of it will be problematic and some of it will be vile. I don’t have time to get into them all. So, I’ll talk about one that I think is especially relevant to the recent campus protests. In the West, especially in the United States, the freedom of speech has become a critical cultural rite of passage for young people (especially) in the process of discovery of who we are, of what we believe, and of what we’re capable of. Every person deserves to be a part of the conversation and deserves to express their deepest ideals to the rest of us. Absolutely no one should be silenced by the government or punished by the government for speech. As for the rest of us, we should do our best, as much as possible, to cultivate a tolerance for diverse opinions. Many of the campus protesters have been described as naïve or as unaware of the history in Israel and Palestine. I’m sure that’s true of some of them, perhaps it’s even descriptive of the movement as a whole. But that’s a terrible justification for silencing someone. In fact, it’s all the more reason to engage them as productively as possible. It’s not always possible to engage people productively when they’ve barricaded themselves in your administration building, but it should be one of our guiding principles, certainly a long-term guiding principle. Like, we have no choice but to arrest you today, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to talk to you tomorrow. We should honor the voices of these young people, even when they’re wrong. We should listen to them, even when it’s hard for us to do so. We should call them out, when they need to be called out. But we should engage them, rather than simply trying to make them go away. Now, I’m talking now about speech—about the expression of ideas and opinions. But these have been protests—protests which (by design) have been extremely disruptive, sometimes destructive, sometimes a threat to safety and perhaps to necessary moral stands against antisemitism. Allowing someone the freedom to speak and to express themselves is not the same as allowing them to burn down the library, right? We all have a line. And every institution had to calculate that line for themselves. Some did better than others. It was extraordinarily difficult and stressful, and some of you were a part of those decisions. As a longtime leftie agitator, I can tell you absolutely that these protests are designed to get you to call the police on them. That’s part of the process here. It’s part of the dance. But when and how the police are called, and what they do when they arrive, is critically important. We cannot let ourselves get to a place where every time we see a bunch of young people getting rowdy and expressing themselves, we just automatically call the police and have them cleared out. That would be a huge mistake. I saw very peaceful, relatively contained encampments cleared out violently by police under the watchful eyes of sniper rifles. I’m totally against calling the police out to attack peaceful, contained protests. If the response to your speech is a boot and a gun, you’re not likely to change your mind or to grow because you’re not likely to be able to give the opposing viewpoint, which is hidden behind force, any serious consideration. It is a huge tactical mistake, and it doesn't honor the process that these young people are engaged in. We should have some tolerance for disruption in order to allow people the ability to fully express themselves and the ability to fully hear opposing opinions. And that peaceful, contained disruption should be intellectually and morally engaged with and negotiated with. That is, I believe, a process, a ritual, a rite-of-passage in our culture that should be held sacred. As Christians, especially as Protestant Christians, this right to freedom of speech and expression is central to our identity. The word protest is right there in the name—Pro-test-ant. We should extend this grace to others as much as possible. We should be, as James advised us in our reading this morning, quick to listen and slow to anger. And when speech is so vile as to be irredeemable, we should do everything we can to meet hate speech with loving speech, to meet bad ideas with good ideas. As Paul suggests in his letter to the Romans this morning, freedom of speech is not primarily a way of having arguments with the people you disagree with. It’s not about division. It’s about, as much as possible, offering people who are different from you, and perhaps even wrong, the grace and the space to still have a place at the table. And, I believe, a place at the table, and the right to express oneself, is the process by which we will grow toward greater love and greater justice. I’ve done a lot of work in interfaith dialogue, speaking candidly and openly with believers from other faith traditions. And one of the questions about Christianity that comes up most often from other monotheists (people who believe there’s just one God), especially Muslims and Jews, is “Could you explain the Trinity to me? It sounds so crazy, I must be missing something. Please, make it make sense.”
And imagine it from their perspective. Here’s this religion that firmly insists that it is a monotheistic religion—ONE GOD, not many—and yet they pray to and worship what looks to the rest of us to be THREE DIFFERENT GODS. The Creator God of Abraham we’re all most familiar with, and then Jesus, who was a flesh-and-blood human being, and then this third “person,” the Holy Spirit, who’s a little harder to define, but who shows up in various places as whispers in the night, or blowing winds, or descending doves, or tongues of fire, or the still, small voice within. That is a little confusing to people outside of the Church and, if we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s also a little confusing to some of us inside the Church. But I actually think trying to square the circle here is a bit of distraction. The mistake I think that we make over and over again as Christians is trying to intellectually define and understand the unchanging, eternal nature of what God is, who God is, what God has always been. There have been so many books and creeds written trying to diagram how it is that God is both one and three at the same time, and where the three persons come from, and how they relate, etc. etc. In some ways, all these attempts remind me of medieval bestiaries. In the old bestiary, you’d have an entry for a rhinoceros, but reading the entry it was clear that the author had never seen a rhinoceros, nor even met anyone who’d ever seen one firsthand. It was all hearsay, and legend, and imagination that bore very little resemblance to the actual animal—like a weird game of zoological telephone. The important thing about the Trinity is not to categorize God or exhaust God through explanation. It’s not important that it’s logical, or consistent, or inoffensive, or exactly as we have traditionally described it, the important thing about the Trinity is what it tells us that God is doing in our lives and in our world. This is a fascinating aspect of this to me. It is really hard to overestimate the shift in religious and spiritual consciousness that occurred when Jesus’ disciples (who were traditional “one equals one” monotheists) began to realize for the first time in human history that their understanding of God’s nature was holding back their ability to live into what God was showing them and doing among them. Jesus’ resurrection shifted the consciousness of the disciples from “God can only be this one thing” to “God can be more than one thing?! God can be God and Jesus at the same time?!” And eventually this seismic shift in consciousness was rounded out at Pentecost with a trinitarian understanding of God. This was a revolution in the making. God is doing something new with us and for all intents and purposes it looks to us from our perspective that God is changing. This idea that God could at once be unified and diverse and that our understanding of God should not be based on what has defined God intellectually in the past but should be based on what defines God in our experience right here and right now, this idea began to spread over the decades and centuries to the wider Greek and Roman culture. And the world freaked out and spent a lot of time and energy trying to put the genie back in the bottle, trying to convince everyone that, in fact, God hadn’t changed and that God had always been a Trinity and always would be a Trinity. And this carefully described and contained Trinitarian doctrine became the new intellectual knowledge and belief that everyone would be indoctrinated into, which undermines, at the very least, the experience of the total, ecstatic, wild and mysterious revelation that the disciples were offering to all of Western culture and beyond—as our experience of God grows, God seems to grow with us. As we evolve, God seems to evolve with us. The heretical implication, what all the creeds and diagrams and dogmas are trying to arrest here, is that as we continue to experience our faith, as we continue to grow, as we continue to evolve, God will also continue to grow, to respond, to evolve, and to change for and with us. Our understandings of God, by definition, will always be incomplete. Jesus was a unique person—a person who embodied in his life, in his ministry, in his teachings and healing, in his relationships, the potential for this shift in God consciousness within all of us. Jesus taught us that God in our loving Father, shifting us away from royal, kingly metaphors for God. A king sits on a throne, somewhere in a palace far away, far removed from ordinary people by orders of magnitude. But a parent lives with you in your own house. A parent is not just a distant symbol of order, a parent is close to you. You can know your parent personally. And as we discover, as we grow up, as we lose our parents to distance and age and death, your parent lives on intimately inside of you. And this is exactly where Jesus tells us to look for God and the “Kingdom” of Heaven—within us. And if God’s Realm is within us, then we, as Paul said in our reading this morning, “are being transformed into God’s image” from within, from the Spirit. And if God is within us, then as we change, then so too does God. This is not to say that we define God. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s God who is defining us, but in the process of defining us, God is also responding to us, growing with us. It's the Holy Spirit now who represents this inner reality, this dynamic and intimate connection with the divine. The Spirit is not some abstract concept or distant third wheel in the Trinity. The Spirit is the living presence of God moving within us, changing us, evolving with us. So, what would I say today to our interfaith friends asking me to make sense of the Trinity for them? I'd tell them the Trinity isn't some theological puzzle in need of solving, but a living, evolving relationship that must be experienced to be believed. The Trinity is proof that we can't put God into a box of our own definition and understanding. God will always be breaking open our boxes. And the Trinity, as we have traditionally defined it, is proof that we’re always going to do our best to stick God back in the box, once God has gotten out. But thank God, that is truly a hopeless endeavor. It may give us stability and security for a time as we adjust to the new thing that God is doing among us, but eventually, there will always be another new thing, there will always be another level, there will always be a greater consciousness. The Trinity as I understand it, is a narrative of change. God the creator was up in Heaven. But God decided to come down to earth and enter human existence in the person of Jesus. Jesus departed this earthly life for heaven, but showed us that heaven is no longer above us, it is within us. And from that inner relationship, we Christians experience the Holy Spirit transforming us from within and responding to our own growth and change and love and compassion. And as we change, and as we change the world around us, God too grows, evolves, stretches out with us to meet a new horizon, a new hope, a new way. So, to my interfaith friends, and to my Christian friends, too, I would say: The Trinity is a profound reminder that God is with us every step of the way, not a distant or static being, but a fluid, evolving presence that breathes change into the very essence of our lives and in turn, is changed along with us. Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong would often tell a story about the Ascension and the world-famous astrophysicist Carl Sagan. According to Spong, while he was at a conference once, Sagan approached him and asked him, “Do you know what the Ascension would have looked like to an astrophysicist?” Spong replied, “You know, I’ve never really considered it. What would the Ascension have looked like to an astrophysicist?” And Sagan tells him, “If 2000 years ago, Jesus had left the earth traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), he still wouldn’t even have escaped our galaxy yet—and there are billions and billions of galaxies!”
For Bishop Spong, famously a very liberal reformer, this story was an illustration of the problem of taking our scriptures too literally. Did Jesus really literally physically fly off to heaven? If so, then according to Carl Sagan and Jack Spong, he’s still got a really long way to go. If Jesus didn’t go to outer space, where did he go? Where actually is heaven, anyway? Now we don’t have to go as far as the Enlightenment and science to find reason not to take the story of the Ascension too literally. Because even the Biblical text itself seems to advise us to hold onto this story with open hands and to try to let it breathe a little bit. There are actually two versions of this story. The first version is the final story in the Gospel of Luke. And the second version (which we read this morning) is the first story in the Book of Acts. And while both versions see Jesus floating off to heaven, other than that they’re very different tales. You wouldn’t know—believe it or not!—that they were written by the very same person (let’s just follow tradition and call him Luke). In a court of law, if you want to establish credibility and convince people of the truth of your story, you need to be consistent, right? If the details of your story change, that’s an indication that there’s something wrong with your memory or your honesty. But that doesn’t concern Luke. The last page of Volume One and the first page of Volume Two contain two different versions of the same story. The first version is a conclusion of Jesus’ earthly ministry, the removal of the human God, Jesus, from center stage; the second version is the beginning of our earthly ministry, the introduction of the Spirit God, the Holy Spirit, to the stage. Luke, without trying to hide what he was doing, without any worry that people would think it was funny, fully confident that he was playing by the rules of the game, changes the story to suit his purposes in each book. Luke is telling us: Jesus’ Ascension is not about a trip to outer space. Jesus’ Ascension is an encounter in our inner space. Like most miracles, the objective outer experience is less important than the subjective, inner effect it has upon those who are witnesses to it. So, naturally, the details of the story and the interpretation of the story change as our inner perspective changes. This is a double rejection of materialism. It rejects the materialist view that religion can’t be true because the physical details are impossible. And it rejects the fundamentalist view that the spiritual truth of religion can only be true if the physical details are facts. Both perspectives were utterly alien to Luke when he was writing. Something amazing happened! Let’s not get stuck on the pesky little details. Let’s talk about what this means! As if on cue, in the Acts version of the Ascension we read this morning, two new characters show up. Luke calls them men in white robes; you might call them angels. And they have a somewhat weird message. While Jesus is being carried away by a cloud, they ask the disciples, “Why are you just standing there looking up into heaven? Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” Even the angels are speaking strangely. It almost seems like they’re chastising the disciples a little bit for standing around and gawking. But it’s strange to do that while Jesus is flying away on a cloud. And it’s all the more strange to chastise them for looking up while admitting that Jesus will return the same way he left. I can only conclude that Jesus’ exit from this earth was a mysterious one and that his return to the earth will not be on a cloud from some physical heaven somewhere up above us but will be made manifest instead in this world through a spiritual process that cannot be accomplished merely by looking to heaven for answers or waiting for the inevitable apocalypse to come. I agree with Carl Sagan: Jesus’ Ascension was not a trip to outer space. It couldn’t have been a trip to outer space because heaven is not up in the sky. Now in the original Greek of Luke and Acts, there weren’t two different words for sky and for heaven. It was just the same word. The story of the Ascension acknowledges that linguistic limitation—that the world had not yet separated the idea of heaven from the idea of sky. In the cosmology of everybody everywhere at that time, heaven was UP. But the two angels enter this second version of the Ascension story to begin to challenge that connection. Why are you looking UP to heaven when heaven is not really UP? Jesus is not a trip to outer space, he’s on a journey to inner space, to source of everything, because as he literally told you, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. And so if Jesus is to return to us, he won’t return from the sky you experienced him departing to, he will return from the Kingdom of Heaven that you make manifest within you and that you together express into the world around you. That is how Jesus will return—he will return from within you. As Jesus says in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Astrophysicists look up in the sky and they seek out the origins of the universe. And they’ve traced it back so far to “the Big Bang”: a singularity that exploded and stretched into the entire expanding cosmos. And that’s great. I love that stuff. I have no problem with looking up at that story. When astronomers say, “We’ve looked 46.6 billion light years away and still no heaven!” I can only agree with them, and it doesn’t cause me any concern whatsoever. Because I know there’s another direction we can go. We can look up for the origins of the cosmos, but to discover the source from which the cosmos arises and returns, to find the Alpha and the Omega of all life and all creation, to truly encounter and experience God in this body, we must travel within. But Christianity is not a religion of individual inner experience alone. It’s a religion of community, togetherness, fellowship, love, mission, forgiveness, transforming the world for the better. So, this is the story so far: God the creator is up in Heaven. But God decides to come down to earth and become the human Jesus. Jesus departs the earth for the heaven no longer above us but within us. And from that inner experience, we Christians express the Kingdom of Heaven into the world through the power of God, now within and among us as the Holy Spirit. And for those of you who want to hear more, I’ll pick up from here on Trinity Sunday in two weeks. For now, Beloved, just know that it’s true. Jesus is not moving at the speed of light through space. He’s moving at the speed of our faith and at the speed of our expression through all of us. Don’t look up. Look within, look to another, and then act together. And as miraculously as he departed, Jesus will come again. Right around the time we were setting the date for Church Music Sunday, Pam was digging around in the church archives and she pulled out an interesting piece of church history. It’s the first edition of The Church Window, the magazine of the Glen Ridge Congregational Church, published in May 1930. And one of the articles is entitled Is Singing Wicked?
Now, don’t worry, even in 1930 the answer to this question in our church was already a foregone conclusion, so the author, John Tasker Howard, who was a prominent music historian, was asking the question somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But he was right, in a sense, about needing to ask the question because he understood that the Christian Church’s relationship to music throughout history and right up to the present day has been full of disputes and controversy. So, this morning I’m going to follow his lead. On this Church Music Sunday, I want to know IS singing wicked? Is it? What are the arguments that support the contention that singing is wicked? (Other than a quick glance over my shoulder at the choir—you don’t look that angelic if you don’t have something to hide!) But if we decide that singing isn’t wicked, what does our tradition’s occasional mistrust of music tell us about the power of music? And what does the power of music tell us (we who love church music) about what we believe about God? We don’t know much about music in the early Church. We know that for Gentile Christians, they were trying to separate themselves from the world, and music was a part of the world—their old lives. It was associated with pagan ceremonies, theater, drama, and all kinds of sinful passions. Despite this we know that early Christians were singing together and offering spontaneous solos, but they did it without any kind of instrumentation. Singing was tolerated as long as it wasn’t accompanied. Even the chanting of the Psalms was controversial because the Psalms refer to musical instruments. There are all kinds of things in the Bible that might make you squirm, but some of the first Christians just couldn’t handle the mention of musical instruments, which shows just how strongly they felt about the potential for worldly music to be a bad influence. In the Middle Ages the Catholic and Orthodox churches developed chants as the central form of liturgical music. Again, no instruments. But the singing being done in church was now standardized into a specific form and carefully controlled. No more spontaneous solos. The chanting we’re most familiar with in the West is Gregorian Chant. Chants are austere without being easy to sing. They could only be sung by someone with training. They weren’t sung by the congregation. So, they were a cautious embrace of singing. In traditions that were very concerned with hierarchy and with controlling the access of the people to all things holy, the control of music tells us that they understood that music was a direct connection to the Divine that needed to therefore be tightly controlled. So, so far we have music as dangerous because it’s too worldly and music as dangerous because it can connect us directly to God. The danger of music can go both ways. Now with the Protestant Reformation came another split in opinion about music. The Lutherans loved music. They believed that music was a gift of God and an incredibly powerful tool for spreading the Gospel message. Lutheranism developed all kinds of congregational hymns and choral singing. Our church music program today would not exist if it weren’t for the Lutherans. On the other side of the equation were the Calvinists. The Pilgrims and Puritans (who eventually became the Congregationalists) were Calvinists. The Pilgrims had congregational singing but they only sang the Psalms and other pieces of scripture. No instruments. No musical notation. And they didn’t even try to make the Psalms singable. You just sang them straight out of the Bible without any kind of rhyme or meter to make it a more pleasant experience. Since tunes were passed down orally, they were slightly different in every congregation, and when different churches came together to worship as a larger group the sound was particularly terrible. That’s very fortunate for us, because it turns out that even the Puritans came to believe that bad singing is more wicked than good singing. They decided they needed a Psalm Book with translations that were singable and tunes that were standardized. And that led down the slippery slope to the pianos and organs and choirs and anthems and hymns and artistic expression and even (gulp) the clapping that have become a part of our church’s music program. So, is singing wicked? No, singing in church is a form of devotion and music connects us directly to God. Earlier generations worried that if the music and the singing were too good, they would distract us from worship. This led on the one hand to very beautiful, but very controlled (almost professional) chants. And on the other hand, to very accessible but very bad congregational singing. If you want music that is really accessible and really good, you need what our church music program provides: You need instruments, you need art, you need to teach everyone to sing and read music and play instruments, and (while you’re allowed to have musical tastes) you shouldn’t be overly concerned with the appropriateness of particular style of “worldly” music making its way into sacred music. Rev. James Cleveland, one of the greatest gospel musicians of all time, explained this to the crowd during the recording of Aretha Franklin’s live gospel album Amazing Grace. He said that it was OK to perform secular music in church because what you sing is only half the equation. The more important part, in fact, is “who you sing it to.” What we’ve come to believe in our church music program is that good music is not a hindrance to worshiping God. The better the music, the deeper the devotion, the higher the praise. That’s what we believe about the power of music. This also tells us something about the God we believe in. Our music connects us to God because it reflects God in a profound way: Our music program is full of talent, creativity, diversity, and harmony. Talent is wonderful thing because the gifts of talent come to us directly from our creator and are inspired and sustained by God’s Holy Spirit. When we express our talents in singing and music, we become an expression of the Holy Spirit among us. We become an expression of God. Our God is a creator God, who is always making something new. Our creativity in music and performance is a testament to who God is and to what God is doing in the world. Our music program teaches and performs music from a variety of cultures and backgrounds and styles, both sacred and secular, because our God is the God who is everywhere, who made and celebrated the great diversity of the heavens and the earth and human beings too. And when we make music, when we sing, when we pray, we make it sound good, because our God is a God of harmony and beauty, so our greatest devotion in art to God is to make our art really good art, not as a distraction from God, but as an expression of and a testament to who God truly is. Beloved, singing is far from wicked; it’s divine. As we continue to embrace and grow our church music program, let’s remember that music offers us a unique and profound way to experience and express our faith. Let us sing, then, not just with our voices, but (as we read from Ephesians this morning) with our hearts, with our souls, celebrating the God who has given us the gift of music. Because when we sing good, when we play good, we affirm that our God is good—a God of beauty, creativity, and endless love, whose presence is magnified in every note we sing, in every melody we play. So, let the Church sing—knowing that in every note, God is with us. There’s an unwritten rule that every minister is required to preach one sermon on The Velveteen Rabbit, the 1921 children’s story by Margery Williams, about a little stuffed bunny’s journey to become Real through the love of the little boy who owns him. I love the way the best children’s books explore these really deep theological themes. I still remember the first time my mom read this book to me when I was little and how it made me feel. And there’s a message here in The Velveteen Rabbit for Emilia and Griffin and Reeve and their parents and godparents and all of us as we promise to raise and teach and form and love them well. And there’s a message here about what it means to be in a relationship with God. Probably you’ve read The Velveteen Rabbit or had it read to you at least once, but if not, here’s what you need to know:
A little boy gets a stuffed bunny for Christmas, but it’s not as cool and exciting as some of the other windup toys he gets, so the bunny gets ignored in the nursey where he has plenty of time to talk to the other toys. He learns from an old toy horse all about what it means to Real. If a child truly loves a toy, then that toy becomes Real. Does it hurt? the bunny wants to know. Sometimes, but when you’re Real you don’t mind being hurt. Does it happen all at once or bit by bit? It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. You’ll be a very worn out, shabby toy by the time you become Real, but you won’t mind because Real things can never be ugly except to people who don’t understand. Eventually, the bunny becomes the boy’s favorite toy, and they have wonderful times playing together. One night, the nanny refers to the bunny as “just a toy” and the boy is very upset. You mustn’t say that. He isn’t a toy. He’s REAL! And when he hears that, the bunny knows that it’s true, the nursey magic has worked on him, and he’s become Real. That night “so much love stirred in the rabbit’s little sawdust heart that it almost burst.” One day, playing outside, the little stuffed bunny meets some wild rabbits who are disturbed by his appearance. They ask him to play with them, but the bunny doesn’t have any hind legs for jumping and so the wild rabbits tell him that he isn’t Real like them which is very upsetting for him. When the boy gets Scarlet Fever, the bunny stays with him in bed. When he finally recovers, the doctor orders everything that was in bed with the boy while he was sick to be burned—especially that old, ratty bunny. Sitting on the burn pile at the end of the garden the bunny becomes very sad and sheds a real tear which lands on the ground. A fairy flower grows from the tear and the nursey magic Fairy comes out of its blossom. She tells the bunny that she’s going to turn him Real now. Wasn’t I Real before? he asks. You were to the boy, but now you will be to everyone. She turns the bunny into a wild rabbit in the garden living with the other wild rabbits he met before. And he has real hind legs now that he can jump and twirl with. And in the spring when the boy comes out into the garden to play, he sees the rabbit and thinks it looks a lot like the old bunny he lost when he had Scarlet Fever, never realizing it was “his own Bunny, come back to look at the child who had first helped him to be Real.” The End. When I became a parent, I was pretty shocked to be handed the pink, wriggly ball that was my first son. Of course, there was joy. And for me, also, an immediate and heady experience of falling in love with this kid. At the same time, I also felt stirring in me this primal, animal, balled-fists instinct to protect my child. And my brain, addled by that night’s emotions and hormones and lack of sleep began to worry away at the problem of every threat and danger that I would need to save my son from through the long course of his life. I could feel the momentous responsibility of keeping him safe and protecting him from all the pain and grief and injury that can happen in life. At the same time, deep in my heart I was realizing—as my brain’s list of potential threats and heartbreaks got longer and longer and longer—that although I’m going to do everything I can do to keep my son safe, I’m not going to be able to rewire the universe. He’s going to get sick. He’s going to feel sad. I’m going to disappoint him and maybe even occasionally fail him. Simply put, I couldn’t protect him from his life. And I realized falling in love with him that night that the best protection I could offer him wasn’t a shield from life’s slings and arrows. The best protection I could offer him was to love him so thoroughly and so completely that when pain, and disappointment, and injury, and frustration, and heartache, and disease, and old age inevitably got to him that he would have the strength and the perspective to deal with their consequences. One of the jobs we have as parents and godparents and grandparents and teachers is to help our children recognize that the price of life is totally worth paying. We can’t teach them that by protecting them from life. We teach them that by loving them through life. The Velveteen Rabbit’s perspective is that you only become Real after you’re worn out and broken. But hopefully you’ve had the experience and the perspective to realize that your fur is rubbed off, and your seams are busted, and your paint is chipped not because life is some heartless meatgrinder, but because you were so thoroughly loved by and loving to the people around you. My prayer this morning for Emilia, Griffin, and Reeve, and all our kids is that we offer them as much of this kind of unselfconscious, joyful, playful love as we can—that we believe in them. And if we love them and believe in them, they’re going to grow up, and one day leave the nursery, and discover that they can walk on their own two feet. And may they be filled with the power to love their lives and every joy and challenge that life brings their way. And, of course, we want our children to have a relationship with God too, right? And so let’s teach them that the gift of God is waiting for them. It’s waiting to be noticed among all the other busy, shiny, exciting toys in the nursery. The gift of God is already in every life waiting to be picked up, to be noticed, to be loved. And once we pick God up, every snuggle, every game, every secret whispered in God’s ear brings God closer into our lives and closer to the world through us. Just like the boy's love breathed life into the bunny, our love and attention breathe reality into the Divine. God, like the bunny, doesn't usually become Real in an instant but evolves with each act of love, each night under the covers, every afternoon playing in the garden—God grows with us. God loved humanity into existence in the book of Genesis. And now we here today love God into existence through our lives. And when we love God into existence in our lives, God becomes an undeniable presence, guiding us, giving us strength and perspective. The Bible tells us “God is love.” So, when we fill our kids with the love to appreciate and thrive in the face of life’s challenges, we are filling them with God. God is that love-filled perspective—the widest and deepest dimension of human existence. And when we bring that Divine dimension to life inside of us, because it is far bigger than us, it eventually escapes us, escapes the nursey, overflows and breaks free into the wide and wild world. The moral of the story, The Velveteen Rabbit, is that things are Real not because they move or are busy, but because somebody has loved them into reality. A sign that something is Real is that it’s been worn down by that love. I have no doubt that Emilia, and Griffin, and Reeve will know that kind of love. And I pray that as that love grows up in them that it also overflows into the friends, and family, and work, and community, and world all around them. Amen. |
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