C
Proper 11 16 Ord 2016
Hebrews
11:29-12:2
July
17, 2016
One of my historical mentors in the
United Church of Christ was Rev. Dr. Jack Good.
I think I always admired Jack’s plodding, dispassionate work on behalf
of social justice. He was a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race
guy, a marathoner, and I realized very quickly in ministry that I was going to
have to acquire some of his skills and characteristics to move mountains. Though my head always knew the problems of
the world could not be solved in one sermon, one meeting, or one retreat, my
heart had some catching up to do. Jack
helped me to recognize that consistent pressure applied persistently could
bring about radical change. I still have
that within me, the idea that if I just wrote and preached a little better, the
tide would be turned and all would be saved.
Not healthy.
Some time ago Dr. Good wrote a book titled The Dishonest Church in which he “outed”
a particularly unhealthy behavior and pattern found in many mainline seminaries
and churches. Tracy and I have
experienced this behavior and pattern when we go to cluster or conference
meetings where clergy gather for water cooler conversations about life in the
local church.
It begins like this. Someone makes a statement about pastoring in
the real world and how seminary equipped or didn’t equip us for such a
task. Inevitably, someone speaks up and
says, “Oh, does anybody really use what they learned in seminary for their work
as a church pastor? My spirituality
really fell apart when I was in seminary.”
In other words, study is no longer seen as a spiritual practice and
seminary education is some intellectual ivory tower with no training for what
pastors will experience in the real world.
In The
Dishonest Church, Dr. Good writes that he believes the gulf between the
seminary and the local church creates pastors who are unwilling to connect
their seminary training with their real life experience. Such a gulf, Good argues, may keep people in
the pews pleased, but it creates a fundamental dishonesty which does not allow
our churches to do their mission in the world.
He sees ordained clergy entering their first church and too often
resorting to a popular, childish Christianity that existed in their lives
romantically before they entered seminary.
This romanticism kills off any hope for a growing, vital, and
challenging faith for clergy themselves and is often passed on to their
parishioners.
I have been privileged to serve a
number of churches with a wide diversity of gifts and challenges. I even served the church Rev. Good served in
Champaign, Illinois, on the campus of the University of Illinois, and would
love to make an addendum to his book to suggest that sometimes churches who do
honor your seminary education also then treat you as the professional Christian
where you are asked to do the work and dream the dreams for the congregation as
they sit back and give you a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” for “your
performance.” Sometimes churches strongly
related to university settings like the pastor to provide an intellectual
“goody bag” every week without a recognition that we are all called to mission
and ministry in community life.
What I perceive the church doing on a
regular basis is forgoing honesty for romance.
We want to be the loving community.
We want to believe there is no conflict or strife in healthy families or
communities. And so the difficult work
of honesty is often lost as we talk broadly about what a loving and good people
we are. Much like the alcoholic family, we can leave the tough work of heart and head behind in favor of something
that has no basis in the real world. We
believe that conflict and strife are sure signs that we are not those loving and
good people when, in truth, conflict and strife are often a sign that a
congregation is seeking out a necessary honesty in its faithful walk and
relationships.
Extending Dr. Good’s argument even
further, seminary does more than just ask for an intellectual honesty too often
missing in local churches. Seminary
requires us to look back over the history of the Judeo-Christian faith and
tradition to see peoples and movements that transformed systems and structures
and brought about liberation and justice—that the church has never been that
place without conflict or strife. Prophets
and apostles, saints and pilgrims endured prison, torture, and even death as a
way of being authentic and faithful.
What may seem common sense and understandable now,
was, at the time, stepping out onto the precipice without any real clarity as
to what might happen next. Not unlike
how we abandon intellectual honesty for comfort and practicality, seminarians
often enter the church only to abandon their idealism. Idealism is tossed aside for practical
concerns about long pastorates, balanced budgets, and access to power. Maybe many of us can identify with a call or
a vocation to which we were called which now feels like “making peace” with the
realities of the world.
Local church pastors can also often
dodge our original idealism and calling through our obsession with “red herring
disagreements.” We catch ourselves too
heavily invested over the color of the carpet in the sanctuary, the firmness of
the pew cushions, where the memorial plaques are to be located, or whether
clapping should be allowed during the service.
When we do have lengthy discussions over issues like these, we never
have time to talk about what it means to be an open and affirming church, what
it means to be a just peace church, or how we shall embody the faith and
traditions of ancestors who found a way to slog through to accomplish the historical,
the meaningful, the faithful.
Within the teaching of Hebrews are
these faithful people and movements who waited for the promise of God to be
fulfilled over the course of many generations.
By faith, many of these people, not knowing what would happen in their
next step onto the riverbed or as they marched around the city wall or as they
welcomed the stranger into their midst, ventured out to unknown places or
landscapes.
I
took the calling to this church about two years ago and had one of my favorite
pieces of literature read at my installation—a piece written by a white South
African who was seeking to end apartheid way back at the turn of the 19th
Century. The piece was Olive Schreiner’s “The Dream”
where a young woman looks out over the deep river before her . . . wondering
how she shall cross. Reason, that old
man, tells her that she is capable but that she will have to throw off the
mantle of “Ancient received opinions” and the shoes of dependence. As she discerns how she shall cross, she
ages, matures, and grows wise. Schreiner
communicates that the water can only be forded after the people have struggled
long, when by faith they can picture their values up, out in front of them
guiding them, and when, by faith and grit, they are willing to venture out to
participate in that dream themselves.
Perhaps the dream, the promise can only be fulfilled when the people are
ready. We are told, “When the student is
ready, the teacher will appear.”
But sometimes, as the Hebrews passage
teaches us, these struggles and dreams are not resolved or forded in a single
generation. Hebrews 11:39 reminds us
that these people of faith “did not receive what was promised.” Still, in not losing the dream, their
idealism, they did something historical, something that indelibly wrote their
names in the narrative of faith.
Saints and martyrs ventured out. By faith the Bishop of Nicaragua withheld
communion from wealthy plantation owners believing that God did not want the
indigenous people enslaved or oppressed.
Though he was murdered, we know the name of Bartolome de Las Casas, who
followed his example and became known throughout history as the defender of the
indigenous peoples. Claudette Colvin,
was the little known fifteen-year old African American girl who refused to give
up her seat on the bus. Her teacher,
Rosa Parks, followed her example and became known throughout history as one who
began a movement.
Cleo Fields, who at 25 was the
youngest person ever elected to Louisiana’s State senate said during the 1988
presidential campaign, “Booker T. Washington started to teach so Rosa Parks
could take her seat. Rosa Parks took her
seat so Fannie Lou Hamer could take her stand.
Fannie Lou Hamer took her stand so Martin Luther King, Jr., could
march. Martin Luther King marched so
Jesse Jackson could run.”[1] I remember about 7 ½ years ago watching Jesse
Jackson in tears at Hyde Park in Chicago as Barack Obama came forward to
acknowledge his election as President of the United States. Jesse Jackson ran so that Barack Obama could
be president.
We are forever surrounded by a cloud
of witnesses. We are surrounded by
people and communities who trusted that God was on the move again, leading us
out through our deepest values and highest ideals, invested in making history
through them. By faith . . . the faithful venture out to a new reality.
We are surrounded by a cloud of
witnesses. From Congregationalists who
ventured west to Montana to found this church to those who made us a national
story through Not In Our Town to today when our congregation sits at a
crossroads. We have a chance in the
upcoming years to invest in our deepest values and our highest ideals to believe that God is making history
through us.
In a few weeks, we will begin our
visioning dinners where I will ask all of you to talk about the future
possibilities of our church building and its mission and ministries. The Steering Committee has already begun
meeting with High Plains Architects to help facilitate and lead your
discussions about what is possible at 310 North 27th. I will begin a sacred place sermon series
where I ask us to break into groups of three and four to talk backwards and
forwards, up and down, long and short of what is a sacred place, what makes
this a sacred place, and what might we do intentionally to make sweeping,
historical decisions. We will be taking
three tours, of three different churches, to think outside of the box and see
how other faith communities are using their space, or creating space, or
defining their space. We will have a
Downtown Billings Alliance Sunday in which I will ask you to all dress in
purple and celebrate our citizenship as a downtown church and what we yet might
do and receive a first ever award for our work.
We will hear from the UCC Cornerstone Fund, Chuck Hollingsworth coming
the second week of September, to talk about our options financially and how our
denomination, local, State, and national government might help us complete our
wildest dreams. My hope and prayer is
that like those people of faith who walked out onto a dry riverbed in the time
of Moses, like those people of faith who marched around the city walls in the
time of Joshua, like those faithful people like Rahab, Dorcas, and Lydia, who
granted hospitality, we will mirror the faithful people and movements who knew
that God was leading them to venture out in ways they had not imagined until
that time.
Ed Gulick must get tired of hearing me say it. My biggest fear in this whole process is that
we will think too small about what is possible for literally the most
historical church in Billings, Montana.
We will piecemeal it, sell God short, and fine tune what we are doing
just to survive.
When I was a pastor in the Illinois Conference, a
story was told of a delegation of people who had returned from visiting a
historic UCC church in Henderson, Kentucky.
Zion UCC continues to be a progressive Christian presence in a very
conservative part of the world. Several
years ago, Zion UCC was near death.
Their church had been strongly invested in the Civil Rights Movement but
now their energy had waned, their numbers had dropped off, until there were
only about six historical people left in the church. Those six people had a difficult decision in
front of them. Being good stewards, they
could close the doors to the church and sell the property to the
denomination. Or, they decided, when
there was a far different climate in our country, much more fear around the
inclusion of the LGBT community, they could call an openly gay pastor and
venture in a new direction. Zion UCC
decided on the latter and the church grew by leaps and bounds as the gay and
lesbian community recognized the hospitality opened to them by this
congregation.
One of the members of the Illinois Conference
delegation spotted one of the six historical members of Zion UCC as she entered
the sanctuary the Sunday they were there.
He asked her, “Aren’t you a little concerned that this church is being
overrun by the gay and lesbian community?”
The elderly woman turned on her heel and said, “I’ll tell you what. This church was dead. And now it’s alive.”
When I went with Witness for Peace to escort
Guatemalan Refugees back to their homeland for the historic first return, I
really goofed up, thought that I had excluded myself. I took one of my tuberculosis pills too close
to the other one and ended up with the upset stomach. And there I was, grounded in Comitan while
everyone else went out to the Mexican States of Quintana Roo and Campeche,
thinking that I had missed the first return.
Little did I know the busses would be held up in those States, while the
little community I accompanied with my good friend Barb Wenger, a Witness for
Peace long-term volunteer, would lead out the first return. There I was, part of it, because I had
messed up my pills.
When I returned to the States, Rev. Dr. Sterling
Carey, the Illinois Conference Minister, came up alongside of me as we both
exited a room. He said to me, “You know,
you did something historical.” I
hesitated to take any credit, knowing how it had happened, “Yeah,” I said, “I
guess it was.”
We have a chance to do something historical by
intention and not by accident.
We are nowhere near the place where Zion UCC was,
with six members left, thinking of closing its doors. But all the prognostications for mainline
church are more dire than when Zion UCC faced its crossroads. What we are learning is that unless local
churches get lucky in their demographics and offer a radical welcome to the new
people coming into their communities, their future does not look good as
presently structured. The church model
we presently use requires a radical transformation, a venturing out by faith to
walk with God as our historical faith ancestors did. They
surround us now as a cloud of witnesses, remind us of their courage, that they
did not know the details of the way, but, in faith, trusting that God would
once again be a lamp unto their feet. What
we are learning is that faith and life are breaking out all across lives, and
communities, and movements at a time when God so needs us to join that cloud of
witnesses. By faith, may we venture out
as our ancestors did. Amen. .
[1]
“Living the Word,” Joyce Hollyday, Sojourners,
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj9507&article=950749.
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