A
Lent 2 BFC 2017
Genesis
12:1-4a; John 3:1-17
March
12, 2017
One of my favorite novels is from 1937, Zora Neale
Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching
God. Hurston tells the tale of Janie
Crawford, who takes this circuitous path to finding blessing and joy. The poetic and sensually detailed ways that
Hurston describes this through Janie’s eyes are what captivates me. Janie had a hard life, a difficult life,
filled with hurricane and hardship, the bitter sting of rivalry and racism. Yet, she still knew her path to be blessed. That was beautifully described at the end of
the novel. Before Janie even begins her
journey, Hurston describes Janie’s kind heart, the way the universe blesses her
difficult path:
[Janie] often spoke to falling
seeds and said, “Ah hope you fall on soft ground,” because she had heard seeds
saying that to each other as they passed.
She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of
ether. She knew that God tore down the
old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the
sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her
so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off.[1]
The way Hurston describes Janie in this short
paragraph, before she heads out on her life’s journey, we are made aware that
whatever the journey, Janie would walk the path with an expectation of goodness
and an intention for kindness. I hope
you fall on soft ground. She had heard
seeds say that to one another.
While I was the youth pastor at Community United
Church of Christ in Morton, Illinois, my family was living in Sheffield, a
small town outside the small town of Princeton, Illinois. On the days I went into work, I would travel
the hour and a half down Route 40 past corn fields and soybean fields, past
abandoned farm houses and Tanner’s Orchard.
Ok, so sometimes I would stop at Tanner’s Orchard and get the best apple
fritters known to humankind, the best days when they were right out of the oven
into my hands.
Morton, Illinois, was twenty minutes
away from my home church in Metamora, Illinois, so all this traveling reminded
me how much the geography had become a part of my being. Metamora is home, where I could play out in
the yard on a fall evening and hear my dad over the public address system as he
worked with the high school band to get the halftime show right before football
games, play wiffle ball games with my brother all summer long, or have hot dogs
and baked beans with my family on Sundays just after Mutual of Omaha’s Wild
Kingdom moved into the Wonderful World of Disney. All of these memories and experiences
rhythmically tied into me this idyllic, rural white family life—most of it
true, some of it not sharing the whole truth.
So it was especially hard when my adult family
decided to leave those landscapes and make the move to Wichita, Kansas. I would literally bawl as I drove past those
corn and soybean fields, those abandoned farm houses and, ok, I would still
stop at Tanner’s Orchard. I was leaving
home for Wichita, Kansas. What I could
not imagine until I was in Wichita, far from all that was familiar, was that
there were two United Church of Christ churches which would bear me and my boys
up as my marriage continued to disintegrate.
Never would I believe that God had called me to Wichita. And yet . . .certainly, God blessed me on
that path.
When Tracy and I were working together
in New Hampshire, people would point to the direction of the church and say,
“Is it clear to you now that God called you to this church?” We appreciated what we thought was a nice
compliment in that question, implying that things were going well enough to
believe that God had somehow blessed our ministry and the relationship we had
with the church. After all, the Junior
and Senior High Youth groups were going well, the Sunday School seemed to be
running full steam, and women’s book club was going strong. . . . Ok, God had blessed Tracy’s ministry
in North Hampton and I was just learning at her feet.
Seriously though, I’m not really sure
I believe God gets involved in that kind of micromanagement, choosing a
specific road we shall walk. I believe,
rather, God shows us how to walk the road, whatever that given road is to
be. And too often it is the case that as
Christians we want to know that we are on the right road when, actually, there
are any number of roads we can take. We
have defined faith as a particular road, trusting God to lead us down the right
road. Perhaps faith is knowing that all roads
are blessed as long as we walk the road with character. Faith is trusting the way God has given us to
walk will meet with God’s presence.
We just need to get on the journey so
that it can be blessed. We are a pilgrim
people. That is the story of our
ancestors.
Abram and Sarai take up the journey started
by Abram’s father, Terah, to leave their ancestral home, located in what is now
southern Iraq, to travel through Iran and Syria, to they know not where. Unfortunately, the travel ban would make sure
that our spiritual ancestors would never make it to our part of the world. Abram and Sarai do not know the place, but
they learn how they are to walk the road.
Almost all of our spiritual ancestors were immigrants and refugees,
nomads depending on the hospitality of others, showing their character and kindness
by then extending hospitality and kindness to others.
In the Gospel text, Nicodemus comes to
Jesus at night, perhaps hedging his bets and wanting to assent to the truth he
hears in Jesus without doing any traveling himself. Nicodemus wants to nod his head without making
any life-transforming decisions.
Nicodemus says to Jesus, “Hey, I’m old, you can’t expect me to give
birth at this age?” Jesus does not
validate the reasons why Nicodemus cannot travel. The birth needs to happen. The blessed path and transformation
beckon. Set out from the familiar place
and begin. It is not where you go, it is
who you are as you go.
All institutions, but particularly the
Christian church has a bad habit of ignoring stories like these to take one
experience of God, building an altar in that place, and then fully expecting
that without moving—God will forever appear at that one place in the road. We know God calls us to be a pilgrim people,
but we so want to believe that God will appear in that same exact spot in the
same exact way again. If we just stay in
this place, where we saw and talked and had an experience of God the last time,
we believe God will show up again. Oh,
and it will happen, we convince ourselves.
We’re just not praying hard enough or singing loud enough or something
enough like we did back then to get God back.
And very often God is far down the
road, looking back, wondering why we’ve stopped, hoping we will follow. We sound just as shocked as Nicodemus that
God wants to talk about new birth, a new road to travel with unfamiliar
landmarks. “Hey, God, we’re here,
remember us, remember last time.”
Billings First Congregational Church
has a glorious past. It has been served
well and I’m sure many of you, who have been members here for an untold amount
of years, can share idyllic stories that are mostly true, some of them maybe
not sharing the whole truth. And for
some reason, inexplicably, almost three years ago now, this congregation called
me to ordained ministry in Billings, Montana—one of the former VISTA
volunteers, not really feeling the love at the time, referred to Billings as
Mississippi but with cold and snow. I
was leaving a congregation that I loved but that would refuse to get its
financial house in order and coming to a congregation that had a 2 million
dollar endowment, planning for its financial future—which was mostly true.
Let me tell you what I saw when I
arrived. I saw a church, strongly aware
of its past identity, struggling to find its own identity in something that was
present and future, some of that wondering whether that was found in
downtown. I saw a downtown, being
dragged by great leadership, kicking and screaming into a renaissance of
re-naming and inclusivity, responsibility and diverse understandings of beauty. I saw great female leaders, throughout our
congregation and in downtown, emerging as the real workers in healing,
coalition, and community building. I saw
Native American people tired of the everyday racism that had gotten into the
bones of their families and communities deciding that something was stirring
and emerging which would bring health and life and recovery not only to the
Native American community but to all of Billings. I saw an influx of young adults into Billings
through programs like Americorps VISTA, Jesuit Volunteers, and United Methodist
ministries and personally witness the power, idealism, and energy these young
adults bring to our community. Many of
those young adults have heard God’s call to care for our planet and Northern
Plains picked up on that, smartly hired many of them, and continues to be a
place of leadership around building alliances with conservatives, progressives,
Native American communities and nations, and celebrates that regularly with
good food and music.
All of that is what I see, energy and
life and courage, bubbling at the surface, calling some faith community, any
faith community, to the road, a blessed path where God, or whatever you want to
call God, is waiting to unleash that energy, life, and courage on some people
who believe that walking the hard road together is worth it. I see God praying with full and hopeful heart
that there might be a “house for all peoples” in Billings--a people who learn
to form alliances with those seeking inclusion and justice; a people who follow
Jesus in challenging all social boundaries that seek to exclude to embrace the
reality of pluralism so we can become an advocate of multiculturalism; a people
and home who reclaim and imagine a collective experience and common place that
rediscovers a love for the land, gives voice to the possibility of local
economic self-determination; a people who are about community and collective
practice that lives within the context of our geographical landscape.[2] We do not know what road or path we are
called to walk, but we do know we are called to walk it with a certain
character.
By contrast, Ken Sehested[3]
retells a story from philosopher and Christian theologian, Søren
Kierkegaard. The story is about a flock
of geese sequestered in a barnyard.
Every seventh day these geese stood in neat and solemn rows and their
most eloquent orator got up on the fence and told them of the wonders of
geese. He described the courage of their
ancestors who had dared to mount up on wings and fly great distances. He spoke of the Creator who had given geese
strong and able wings that allowed them to soar and swoop.
The words never failed to inspire the
assembled flock, filling them with awe and wonder. Time and again, they would nod their heads in
conviction. One thing, however, they did
not
do—they did not fly. For the
corn was good and the barnyard was secure.
Sehested goes on to say that like
these geese in Kierkegaard’s story, we rarely respond to the tales of our
faith-filled spiritual ancestors with more than a nodding of our heads. We say, “Amen,” we feel a wonderful warming
in our hearts, but we do not fly.[4]
When the corn is good and the barnyard
is secure, we forget that we are a pilgrim people. We forget that the stories of Abram and
Sarai, Jesus and Nicodemus tell us that God is very often calling us from those
familiar, safe places to walk the road, to a new birth, to fly.
Unlike those comfortable fowl on the
farm, my hope is that people in this congregation are being encouraged to
fly—for the corn here is good and the barnyard secure. Our faith stories tell us that no matter what
our age or the time of day, we are being asked to set out expecting new births,
transformations, and the presence of God to go ahead of us. Let us respond to those faith-filled spiritual
ancestors by flying as they did.
As Janie did.
At the end of Their Eyes Were
Watching God, Hurston writes that beautiful, sensual prose,
The
kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was
peace. [Janie] pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around
the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its
meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.[5]
The road, the blessed path, the horizon
beckons. God calls. What do our souls see? Amen.
[1] Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1937), p. 32
[2] Ched Myers, Who Will Roll Away the Stone?: Discipleship Queries for First World
Christians (New York: Orbis Books, 1994), p. 273. Myers uses the words “anarchicism and
bio-regionalism” to define practice. I
have great love for those words but do not believe they can be heard rightly in
a North American context. So I have made
them about community and collective practice.
[3] Sehested was formerly
executive director of the Alliance of Baptists and co-pastor of the Circle of
Mercy in Asheville, North Carolina. He
is now the editor/author of the online journal, prayer&politiks.
[4] Ken Sehested, “Trust and
Obey: Notes toward a spirituality of
justice,” The Other Side, March and
April 2002.
[5] Hurston, Their Eyes, p. 286.
No comments:
Post a Comment