Red Bison Faith: Akbaakuxshé: Sermon, Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, "God in the in-between"

Monday, January 31, 2022

Sermon, Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, "God in the in-between"

C Epiphany 4 2022
I Corinthians 13; Luke 4:24-30
January 30, 2022

Ugh. I could see the frustration on her face. It was brutal. A former colleague of mine was trying to lead her congregation through a mission and visioning exercise. The congregation was listing the number of missions and ministries to which the church had given money or to which individual folks in the church had given time, money, and effort. These missions and ministries were many and varied and represented almost every individual’s pet project. The pastor was trying to help us develop some focus for our mission and ministry, some common goal or unified plan. What could we all agree that we would work on together. By the end the facilitator was exasperated by the unwillingness of our group to come together.

I wanted to thank her for all of her hard work when a church member, a former university professor, pushed through our handshake to share her wisdom, her knowledge, the way of being around these parts and in this congregation. Rather snidely, she said, “See, you’ll never get us together with all the different things we have going on.” And maybe this church member was right.

Sometimes I think one of our downfalls as Christians is that we would rather be right than loving. We stand out in the forest, all alone, proclaiming ourselves to be right rather than doing the hard work of evangelization to bring others on board and build community, or engaging others who might disagree with us or even prove us to be wrong. We would rather avoid conflict than be in real relationship.

We never invest for fear that we might find something out about ourselves and why we believe as we do. We never take the chance that we might be transformed by another, or that we might have the leadership gifts to transform others. It is almost as if we are the audience or an Olympic judge at one of the ice-skating events. We want to shout our desires, needs, wants, and critiques from afar as others do the skating. When we all should be out on the ice skating. The Russian judge is always giving me low marks.

In our Scripture reading for today, Paul addresses the early churches he founded in his second missionary journey to the seaport city of Corinth. Paul sees in Corinth, a church deeply divided over issues like leadership, sexual immorality, personal conduct, spiritual gifts, and questions concerning the resurrection—issues that would never cause problems in our modern-day church (eye roll). In one of his opening letters to the people in Corinth, 1 Corinthians, chapter 1, Paul undercuts all claims to greatness by saying what we preach as Christians is Christ crucified. Christ did not win. He was not successful. He was brutally tortured and executed. This is not Paul romancing Christ’s suffering, or as might be heard popularly, Christ suffering for our sins. This is undercutting the Roman pyramid which only sees people as valuable and divine if you are on the top of that pyramid. The Romans intended crucifixions to remind people who was at the top of the bottom of the pyramid. And Paul . . . owns it!

Creator places no value in striving to be top dog, bending to the frame of the pyramid. Preaching Christ crucified means that the gospel’s value is not in carrying the day or being on the side of the winners. God in Christ is not about being successful or winning.

In Paul’s time, around the year 50, these folks called “super apostles” had arrived with a gospel that created a hierarchy of being in Corinth and distrust among the community. Armed with mystical and spiritual powers, like speaking in tongues, some Corinthians had elevated themselves to the top of the spiritual pyramid. As it was in Egypt with Hebrew slaves, so it was in Rome as an occupied people. Paul believed that love did not allow for this hierarchy of being or this spiritual pyramid. Pyramids always have this structure with a few running the show at the top while there are many on the base doing the real labor.

Paul writes to try and break the arrogance of those who claim to be greater because of their gifts. He suggests that faith is a journey in which we can only prophesy, know, and see in part or dimly—there should be a humility which recognizes that we cannot know it all. And knowing it all, or having superior knowledge, is not what Paul values. Love should be the stuff that transcends whatever differences there are to hold the community together. The opposites of love are arrogance and violence, a power over. Notice that Paul does not write, “Love wins,” a common misunderstanding and book title from a former evangelical pastor. “Love wins” leads us to hopelessness in the face of violence and trauma. No, Paul writes, “Love endures.”

When Paul wrote to the churches in Corinth, he saw plenty of diversity--with all of that diversity jockeying for position as to who would win out in the end. Rather than squash their diversity for something a little more orderly, he praises the great diversity he sees among them. He does not want them to be a little less diverse so that they can be a little more unified. No, Paul wants them to find their unity on the far side of diversity.

Paul defines love as the willingness to work through diversity to find their unity or their common cause, for the building up of community. That’s why the first word Paul uses to define love is “patient.”

If you have special gifts alone, who cares? If you have spiritual powers alone, who cares? If you are willing to sacrifice to show your devotion alone, who cares? If you are not engaged and invested in one another, who cares?

This chapter, the love chapter, begins with Paul remembering a Jewish tradition instituted by King David. David ordered that loud music would be played to connote the Ark of the Covenant, the presence and habitation of God being restored to the Jewish people. Musicians playing nebels (medium-sized harps) and kinnors (a type of lyre or stringed instrument), kettle-drums, cymbals, and pipes would accompany the Ark of the Covenant in a processional of joy and thanksgiving.[1] The instruments were to be played in unison as the procession continued.

When the Temple in Jerusalem was dedicated, musicians played cymbals, nebels (those medium-sized harps), kinnors (those lyres or stringed instruments), and trumpets.[2] The book of Nehemiah relates that musicians playing cymbals and kinnors having psalteries (a psaltery is like a dulcimer) were also a part of the rededication of the Temple when Jewish people returned from Exile. Having been a percussionist myself, I was interested to learn that the cymbal player was rightfully! considered the head musician in this musical ensemble.

The point is, in these celebrations to announce and process with the Temple as a representation of God’s presence in their midst, the cymbals are never played alone but always accompanied by other instruments, singing, and words of praise.[3] Biblical scholar Anathea Portier-Young believes Paul is deliberately using imagery from these Hebrew Scripture celebrations to talk about the “building up” of God’s dwelling place among the community much like the Ark of the Covenant was built up, the Temple was built up, and the walls of Jerusalem were built up once again after the Babylonian Exile.[4]

Paul writes to those churches in Corinth, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” The problem is not that cymbals are noisy or clanging. The problem is that they are playing all alone. A signpost that communities are being built up in love is when trumpets, lyres, harps, dulcimers, drums, cymbals, and voices are all raised in praise together—when the whole band is playing, when the whole body is interdependent, when they are truly one in the spirit of the song.

Love holds the whole structure of the community symphony together. While we use the word "justice" in Judeo-Christian tradition to define God's activity in overarching systems and structures, the word we use to define God's activity in community is "love."

Love is engagement and investment in people who are different than we are. Love is, brace yourselves, glue. Love is glue. Don’t think too hard about the ingredients that go into glue or the meaning of the sermon will gross you out or lose meaning altogether. Love is glue.

When love is defined as engagement and investment in one another, nobody gets to stand on the sidelines, hold a judge’s scorecard, mumbles or critiques, even applauds, without also talking about themselves. We all recognize that we are into this Christian enterprise for one another. Love is standing across from someone in all their faults and foibles, greatness and goodness, joys and sorrows, beauty and scars, and not turning away. You recognize that you are connected. You are glued.

My belief is that if we can recognize our connections to one another, slow down to invest and engage, play our instruments together in the grand symphony of community (I got cymbals!), we might actually find that there are others in the struggle who are celebrating our joys to multiply them, sharing our struggles to divide them. So that when I play my cymbals, they are not noisy or clanging, but part of a beautiful symphony that is held together in love. And it is music to God’s ears.

Rabbi Sandi Eisenberg Sasso wrote a children’s book some years back that had a small community sending a man and woman out to the four corners of the earth in search of God. The man and woman went to the mountain top to find God. They went to the deepest ocean in search of the Almighty. They coursed across the driest desert. They entered the deepest and darkest of caves. The man and woman returned unsuccessful in their search for God. They did remark, however, that whenever they worked together, they began to see God, “wherever we are.” The man and woman saw God in the “in-between”—in between the two of them. Rabbi Sasso titled the book, “God In Between.” God is in the in-between, not in any one of us singularly, but in the ways we weave together community with one another.

In movements all across the world, people are waking up to this wisdom, this knowledge, this way of being that God shares with us through the apostle Paul. It is a way of being counter to the message of all of the superhero movies that are so popular, the idea that we will be saved by some superhuman being that intercedes in the struggle and saves us. The wisdom-givers and truth-tellers around climate change, Civil Rights, international relationships, and so much more are saying that it takes all of us, as the Body of Christ, to come together in love.

When we think about it, this is the message our nation is so resistant to in this pandemic. Nobody makes it alone or unscathed. We either do it together or we die alone. We either take care of our community or everything unravels. Your positive test might not harm you with anything but a short doctor’s visit, but it might get in the way of people who desperately need a doctor, a hospital room, just a bed in a makeshift emergency room.

As this truth has unfolded in this last generation, the way of salvation in community love is also being said by people who do not belong to faith communities.

Liz Carlisle, native Montanan, wrote about the underground movement of farmers who were trying to change the narrative around farming in Montana where arable land was being lost, water was being poisoned, and, as a detriment to everyone, family farmers were leaving in droves. Now Montana farmers are notorious for their fierce independence, self-reliance, and willingness to go it alone, particularly in what is the short growing season, just south of Canada, in what is known as “The Golden Triangle.” Carlisle talks about the long view, not filled with instant return or quick profit. She writes,

But the fact is that biological fertility is more than just a different nutrient management approach. It's an entirely different way of life--one in which time and space broaden considerably, and the illusion of control falls apart. Building your soil biologically is not a precise prescription for a particular crop, but a contribution to a larger ecology, subject to independent variables, geologic time, and global biogeochemical cycles. You will not capture all the value on this farm, in this year. You cannot individualize your return. To build biological fertility is to build community--to accept interdependence with other creatures and foster a common benefit. This way of life cultivates a new kind of awareness, a new empathy. You have to pay attention beyond this season. You cannot spray and then forget about it and go to the lake. Planting organic lentils--and all the other crops that go with them--becomes part of who you are, what you are conscious of, how you see the world. It forces you to listen more deeply, more expansively. And it softens, to some extent, the borders of the self. This is the great irony of the lentil underground, or perhaps its secret. What rugged individualism brought together, only community can sustain. When I'd ask Casey Bailey to reflect on the biggest lesson he'd learned by bucking the corporate farm industry, he'd paused for a full ten seconds, then answered firmly, "That you can't do it alone."[5]

For I am . . . alone—a noisy gong or clashing cymbal. But love is glue. We are . . . together—the Body of Christ. We are . . . together—a beautiful symphony. Hear in that definition of love the hard work it takes to knit together community among a diverse group of people. We are . . . together—the place of God’s spiritual joy. We are . . . together with each other and along with the plants, trees, sea, sea creatures, and animals, the manifestation of the divine in the world. Thanks be to God! Amen.