Sermon, 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 11, 2021, "All called to be prophets"

B Proper 10 15 Ord Pilg 2021

Amos 7:7-15

July 11, 2021 

           One of the only reasons I remain in ordained ministry is because I believe what we do in church matters—not just to us as individuals but to our community, to our nation, and to the wider world.  And so, when I first started at this blessed church, with verses from First and Second Samuel staring at me in the Revised Common Lectionary, I thought it important to share with you all the deep anti-authoritarian thread that is found deep within our tradition.  In this moment in time, I would want you to engage your family members, your neighbors, and your government officials with a faith that says, “What my faith tells me is this, that when all the power flows in one direction, this is directly counter to the will and desire of God.  For it is God’s grand wish that power be shared, that the vulnerable be protected, and that the least of these—the poor, the morning, the imprisoned, the stranger, the land and the water—are dear to God’s heart. 

We heard that in Scripture verses chosen by the families of Fred Gibby and Maria Melcher this week as a way that defined who they were in the world and how their faith was lived out as members of Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ.  In listening to their family members define their lives, I heard them state with great confidence who Fred and Maria were and are.  They are now our faith ancestors who form a cloud of witnesses, a communion of saints, ancestors who walk with us so that we might walk confidently before our elected officials and say, “I know God’s heart.  And I demand, by that heart, that you act accordingly.”  I truly believe that it was only those kinds of courageous statements, often made by every day people, that saved our country from going headlong into an authoritarianism based in white evangelical Christendom—an authoritarianism that still threatens us all.

Three years ago, Stephanie Wilkerson, owner of the Red Hen farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, had been called by the chef to tell her that President Trump’s Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, had arrived with a group of people at the restaurant.  The staff was concerned.  What should they do?  Stephanie hopped in her car and headed down to the restaurant.  It was true.  Sanders, party of eight, had taken their seats and were eating from the cheese boards.  She knew what the Trump Administration had meant to many of her employees, several of them identifying as members of the LGBTQ+ community.  Wilkerson quickly huddled with her staff and asked them what they would have her do.  The staff wanted to ask Sanders and her party to leave.  Wilkinson asked Sanders to step outside with her and said, “I explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation.  I said, ‘I’d like to ask you to leave.’”  Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party left, with Sanders then tweeting out her displeasure. 

It was the week of July the 4^th, one week and three years ago to the day when we celebrate the values of our country, a remembrance, sometimes, of where we have grossly failed, a grand experiment in democracy we may never get fully right, and the peculiar idea of the United States as a country where e pluribus unum—“out of many, one.”  The common idea of a monolithic state where the one person or one faith dictating to the many has been tried and tried and been found morally wanting.  “One person, one vote” is that sense that we are all participants in this grand experiment, our voice and our basic life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness matters, such that when others try to usurp, fabricate, or manipulate away from not only our equal protection but also the common good, something is amiss and we must engage and confront. 

So it was that on July 2^nd, three years ago, middle-school teacher Kristin Mink was out for lunch with her two year-old son when she noticed the then Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Scott Pruitt, out for lunch as well.  She loaded her son on her hip, her son an important part of shaping her values, and headed over to Pruitt’s table.  She began

 

Hi.  I just wanted to urge you to resign for what you are doing to the environment in our country.  This is my son. He loves animals. He loves clean air. He loves clean water. Meanwhile, you’re slashing strong fuel standards for cars and trucks for the benefit of big corporations. You’ve been paying about 50 bucks a night to stay in a D.C. condo that’s connected to an energy lobbying firm, while approving their dirty sands pipeline. We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who actually does protect our environment, somebody who believes in climate change and takes it seriously for the benefit of all of us, including our children. So, I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out.[1]

 

When she was finished, Scott Pruitt thanked her.[2]  Three days later, Pruitt did resign, most assuredly not from the singular confrontation of Kristin Mink, as Mink herself knew of the number of people who have called him out.  But any embarrassment or shame or dishonor Pruitt experienced on that day came from a person who spoke and carried her values plainly, truthfully, forthrightly, in a confrontational, non-violent manner.  Just the week before, Kristin Mink had been arrested at the Hart Senate Office Building for protesting the separation of children from their parents at our country’s border with Mexico.[3] 

Whether it is Karen Mink with her two-year-old son or Stephanie Wilkerson with her Red Hen staff, love shows a willingness to align ourselves with others and not let go, not turn away, to show up and stand up.  Justice is love with legs on, what love looks like in public.[4]

We need to get back to basics—to tunnel down to who we are in relationship to Creator, to the good earth Creator is continuing to shape and form, to each other as blessed partners in mutual care and public love for one another.  We do that, I believe, by beginning to affirm that we know what God intends for us—life, rest, love, play, and joy. 

Some of us can feel that in our bones.  Others need to engage practices to get that into our bloodstream:  practices like counting our blessings, regular movements in prayer, gratitude, meditation, and the stretch and pull of our bodies sunward.  Still others are like me growing up in the midst of evangelical Christianity.  It is not in my bones.  Some of us have been so beaten down, hear another message so much in our lives, that we have to fake it till we make it:  teach and preach it so much that it gets into us, ask good friends and colleagues to hem us in with their love, wisdom, and warning, use our imagination, science fiction, to see the world not how it us but how God wills it, desires it, with us in it—living surrounded and embraced in love, rest, play, and joy, or even call our good ancestors to bear to remind us who we are—our sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, siblings and cousins from another realm who encircle us and urge us on.

           That is one of the basics.  One of the other basics is the birth story of the Jewish people, the Exodus.  The Children of Israel were victims of abuse and exploitation, enslaved in bondage by the most powerful nation of the age, Egypt.  It is the mark of compassion that God identifies with them, promises to release them from bondage, and delivers them.  God would not let go, did not turn away, showed up and stood up.  In the same way, the Jewish people were held captive in Exile.  The most powerful nation of the age, Babylon, razed the Jewish Temple, salted the promised land, and carted off the best and brightest to sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land.  In that foreign land, God identifies with the Jewish people in compassion, promises to return them from exile, and delivers them.  God would not let go, did not turn away, showed up and stood up.  The action of God in Israel's past history is to ground and shape Israel's own continuing action on behalf of those comparably abused and marginalized.”[5]  

The prophets were those reluctant leaders who held onto the plight of the people in one hand, asked for God’s mercy, and held the hand of God in the other, unwilling to let go of a character that demanded compassion for people in their own nation who might identify as Hebrew slaves in Egypt or Jewish exiles in Babylon in another age.[6] 

Earlier in chapter 7, the prophet Amos pleads for the people, begs as an intermediary for God’s mercy.  But now a plumb line has been established, a way to say that God’s compassionate character for the economically poor and the socially outcast cannot abide by systemic evil found in Israel.  The way must be made straight.  In an ode to the Exodus story, God can no longer “pass over” this violence, injustice, and evil.  God must pass through--wreaking desolation and waste on the halls of the political power and the signs and symbols of spiritual collaboration and corruption.[7]

           Indeed.  Amos is regularly preaching at Beth-el, literally meaning, “the house of God”, that place where Jacob encountered the Divine.  The ruling priest at Bethel, Amaziah, shows just how coopted he is by the political establishment.  Rather than assert the freedom intended to provide necessary critique to the political establishment as a spiritual leader, Amaziah wants Amos to stop preaching at Bethel. In verse 13, Amaziah sends out an edict, “Don't prophesy anymore at Bethel, because this is the king's sanctuary and the temple of the kingdom.”

“With those words the religious justification of political empire is complete, and faith is reduced to patriotic cheer-leading.”[8]

Hebrew Scripture scholar, Terence Fretheim, penned an article way back in 2008, titled, “The Prophets and Social Justice:  A Conservative Agenda.”  Fretheim’s point was that social justice was not a new morality or a novel analysis.  He writes, “In promoting social justice, the prophets were religious conservatives. They built on the ancient traditions of Israel and the central promises of God to call Israel to attend to issues of justice on behalf of the oppressed.”[9]  What the prophets did do differently and creatively and new in each age, Fretheim observed, was to figure out how to “get in the face” and “under the skin” of the rulers, public officials, and religious elite, often at great sacrifice.

Those signs of God’s creative love are breaking out everywhere and we best pay attention to recognize that the Divine is seeking ways to make love public.  It might be a Parkland, Florida, student, with stubborn, opportunistic discipline, in love for their classmates, asking an elected official to not take one more dime from the NRA as a way to move through thoughts and prayers to real action to curb gun violence.  Or it might be an organization of kayakers, in love of the earth, who will not allow an oil-drilling rig moored in Seattle to leave port to make its way up to Alaska.  It could be Native people who continue to hold camp steadfastly in northern Minnesota in prayer and wisdom, for the love of water, to stop the advancement of a pipeline that crosses the Mississippi River twice, drilled down this past week and hit a valued aquifer, and threatens the wild rice fields of the Anishinaabe people in breaking their treaty rights, considered the supreme Law of the Land.

Do you feel it?  It is the love of God, bubbling up among those who know those communal values, who know words like “community” and “citizen” and “family” are defined far wider and broader than what the domination system tells us.  We define those words in a way that is far more long-standing, in a way that might sound new or novel but in a way that is Biblical and ancient and religiously conservative to attend to issues of justice on behalf of the oppressed.  Amos defines God as a lioness, on the hunt, on the prowl, her feet padding out of the den to say, “Enough!  No more!  It is time to restore the ancient values on which the good earth was created.”  She roars and she is ready.  And I am asking you to be prophets with God.

I think, somewhere along the line, we were told that religion makes us into nice, civil people.  We are supposed to be nice.  I just don’t see it.  Not with these cantankerous prophets—tambourine players, shepherds, stutterers, and carpenters.  Not with this wild God who seems much happier in a tent than in a palace, is found changing the world more out in the desert and wilderness than in the halls of Congress, and on this day is coursing in you to bring about the transformation of this community and this country. 

Pshaw, you say.  Not happening you say.  In every time, there will be religious leaders like Amaziah who try to shut you up and tell you not to preach.  We are part of a long-standing tradition, a conservative tradition, a Biblical tradition, that will not shut up.  In the time of Christ, the religious elite tried to quiet the crowds, and Jesus knew.  He knew that God would have the very stones sing out if the crowds were quieted. 

Why are we losing hope?  God’s movement is breaking out all across our country.  All it requires is for us to enter the struggle in love.  As Christians, we are called to do this confrontation non-violently, with a discipline and wisdom that represents our freedom apart from any political party.  We seek transformative justice.   We do not confront, or get under the skin, or get in the face to do what I call “garbage can protests”—where we feel content hearing our own voices or seeing our own signs from two blocks away.  We find creative ways, opportunistic ways to confront with deeply held, Fretheim’s basic, conservative values seeking transformation.  And we also do this confrontation with an idea of what we will do next.   Then we keep practicing and practicing and practicing until what was once on the skin, gets under the skin, what was under the skin gets into the bloodstream, what was in the bloodstream gets typed on every, last red blood cell found in the body politic.  Amos defined it as letting justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.  It just keeps rolling and flowing.  All we have to do is rock and roll, get in the flow. 

Basic, conservative faith tradition.  Nothing new.  Nothing novel.  It was the daughter of the assassinated indigenous land and water protector, Berta Cáceres, her daughter, Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres who said when a U.S. trained former military officer and businessman was found guilty in Honduran court:

 

We recognize this as a step toward justice, as a victory for the communities around the world who have accompanied us through this process in solidarity. … We urge the international and national communities to continue their efforts against impunity in Honduras and to support the efforts of social and popular organizations. In the words of our Berta Cáceres, we reiterate that justice is built by the grassroots from our daily work with the defense of our territories, the fulfillment of our life projects and the constant fight against inequities and injustices.

 

In true faith, after reading this statement, the crowd shouted back, “¡Berta no murió, se multiplicó!”   Berta did not die.  She multiplied.   It is the true fear of those in power, that love in justice will not remain dead but that the blood of the martyrs might be the seed for our collective soil.  As Amos might say, “Justice rolls down like waters.  Righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

You are loved.  Do not fear.  In love, God seeks the transformation of oppression, abuse, exploitation, and domination.  In the public square.  With legs on.  God is on the move.  Ready to roar.  We best walk together. Amen. 

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[1] Kristin Mink, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXLIsLLlLIA.  Kristin Mink, “Meet the Mother Who Confronted Scott Pruitt & Urged Him to Resign—Three Days Later, He Did,” Democracy Now!, July 6, 2018, https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/6/meet_the_mother_who_confronted_scott.

[2] Bonnie Fuller, “Kristin Mink:  5 Things to Know About Teacher Who Told Scott Pruitt to Resign in a Restaurant,” Hollywood Life, July 3, 2018, https://hollywoodlife.com/2018/07/03/who-is-kristin-mink-confronted-scott-pruitt-restaurant/. 

[3] Ibid.

[4]Dr. Cornel West, of course.

[5] Terence E. Fretheim, “The Prophets and Social Justice:  A Conservative Agenda, Word and World, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring 2008, p. 164

[6] Ibid, pp. 152ff.

[7] John Holbert, “Preaching from Amos? Reflections on Amos 7:7-17,” Patheos, July 7, 2013, http://www.patheos.com/progressive-christian/preaching-amos-john-holbert-07-08-2013.html

[8] Daniel P. Clendenin, “Remembering Romero:  Amos the Prophet vs. Amaziah the Priest,” Journey with Jesus, 2010, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20100705JJ.shtml.

[9] Fretheim, “The Prophets,” p. 159

Second Sunday after Epiphany, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday, "Taking our faith to the casket," January 19, 2020

Epiphany A2

John 1:29-42

January 19, 2020

      

The annual celebration of the life, ministry, and dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., will continue with a worship service we host today at 3:00 p.m.  I got a chance to do a joint interview with the preacher for this afternoon, an attorney at Russ Plath law firm here in Billings.  I want her to be my friend.  Seriously, she is a powerful person bent on justice, a new member of Not In Our Town.  I look forward to the message she has for the Billings community. 

During this time when we remember King, I’d like to turn to the story of Emmett Till, a young Chicago boy who traveled to Mississippi to stay with his great uncle, Moses Wright, in the late summer of 1955.  Three days after arriving in Money, Mississippi, Emmitt joined a group of teenagers to purchase refreshments at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, a white owned store, catering to sharecroppers.  Some of the teenagers outside the store claimed that they heard Emmitt whistle at Carolyn Bryant, after he entered the store to purchase bubble gum. 

          Four days later, at 2:30 in the morning, Emmitt was kidnapped from his uncle’s home by Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy, and Roy’s half-brother.  For an offer of money, Roy and his half-brother later described brutally beating Emmett Till, taking Emmett to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, shooting Emmett in the head, fastening a large metal fan used for ginning cotton to Emmett Till’s neck with barbed wire, and pushing Emmett’s body into the river.

          Emmett’s body was later retrieved from the Tallahatchie River and identified by his uncle who recognizes the body from a ring his mother, Mamie Till, had given Emmett in memory of his father, a casualty in World War II.  Emmett’s casket was sent to Chicago where his mother collapsed in grief when she first saw his body.

          Mamie Till decided to have an open casket funeral, Emmett’s head so brutally beaten that it is five times the size it was when he left Chicago for Mississippi.  Thousands of people in Chicago waited in line to see Emmett’s brutally beaten body.  Jet magazine and the newspaper, The Chicago Defender, published photos of Emmett’s brutally beaten body.  Roy Bryant and his half-brother were later acquitted of the kidnapping of Emmett Till by an all-white, all-male jury after that jury deliberated for 67 minutes.[1]

I know it is strange to say but, as a church pastor, I lose faith quite a bit.  This week I took what I thought was a necessary trip out to Yellowstone so I could walk two miles into the Lamar Valley with the new hiking boots I got from my mom for Christmas.  I walked two miles into the Lamar Valley entering near the Soda Butte landmark, using the Lamar River’s edge to make sure I wasn’t stepping in too deep of snow.  I yelled and screamed at God on the way in, “Don’t you see me?” I yelled.  “Don’t you see what I am trying to do here?” I screamed.  “Why won’t you answer me?”  I bawled and cried, wanting my rather charmed life to be different.  I sat on a tree log and ate my yogurt cup, and then started to make the walk back.  Almost immediately, snow began to fall and the wind blew such that it was a white-out.  I couldn’t see much in front of me, and my tracks back covered quickly.  I was now in waist deep snow with every step and my right foot began to sting.  I kept walking, hoping the bridge across the river would show.  But I had missed it about a half mile to the west.  And I looked down and it looked like my foot had broken through my boot.  No, it was just that my boot had been sucked off my foot in some of that deep snow.  And I wasn’t retracing my steps to find my boot.  I had to walk another mile and a half with one boot and a sock.  And there were times when I fell and wondered briefly, with wolves howling in the distance, whether my faith means anything. 

And I am moved and measured by people like Mamie Till who go through great tragedies, incredible trauma, and demand that their personal and communal pain mean something in the world.  They wring it out of the situation in a way that dwarfs the yelling and screaming I did in Yellowstone. 

I so desperately want religious faith to mean something.  I want it to be more than a pomp and circumstance that acquits me of my sin every week and helps me get by.  I want it to be about existence here on earth and the gritty, real life struggles here on earth.  My fear, however, is that religious faith is becoming more and more marginalized.  My fear is that religious faith has become irrelevant and has become a sideshow for the comfortable and guilt-ridden.

Jim Wallis, former editor of the Christian evangelical social justice magazine Sojourners, wrote a book some time back titled God’s Politics:  Why the Religious Right Has it Wrong and the Left Just Doesn’t Get It.  Though I have not read the book, I have read enough of Jim Wallis to imagine that he critiques those of us on the left for our inability to think that faith or religion has any power or relevance in the world.

Even during the early 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., wondered in his letter from the Birmingham jail whether the church was willing to have any relevance, willing to step out in courage to be real in the world, willing to be anything more than an “irrelevant social club.”[2]  Close to 60 years later, are we still trying to bury the violence and evil of the world behind verbal niceties?  Are we still unwilling come to the casket and look, still unwilling to look at the photos of those destroyed by our violence.  Mamie Till opens the casket and makes us look--and the photos are published far and wide.

In our continuing New Testament scripture about the baptism of Jesus, John the Baptist points at Jesus and says, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”  Such strong historical allusions would be understood by the Jewish people.  “Lamb of God” refers to the lamb that is slain by the Hebrews, a reminder of the violence as its blood is put on the doorposts of the Hebrews so that the angel of death would pass over Hebrew homes.  The angel of death takes all of the first born of the Egyptian sons—a reversal of Pharaoh’s declaration to kill all the Hebrew male children.  At every turn, God sought to soften the heart of Pharaoh through non-violence.  It was not to be.  The angel of death comes to liberate the Hebrew people; while death-giving to all that prevents their liberation.

Making the connection, Jesus is the “Lamb of God” who takes away the sin.  Sin is defined as political and economic slavery and oppression.  Jesus and his relationship with his community point the way to liberation and unmask and lay open all the violence and death brought by its systems and structures.  While the Lamb of God worries about real  life and death issues, we, in the Christian church, have sometimes trivialized religious faith by becoming overwrought with personal sin and guilt.  Although I do believe God cares about the way our personal sin and guilt interacts and is in relationship with others, I also believe that God cares little about setting up some scoring system where rights and wrongs are enumerated. 

God cares about the salvation of the world—a place where we move and breathe and lay open the truth in life-giving ways.  That we care less about how we and others are to be perfectly moral, and care more about how what we do brings life into the world.  That we care less about how we pray, and care more about how we shall plead and lay bare the broken and hurting places in our community and world.  Are we able to look at the lamb upon the cross and say, “No more.  Never again in our world. We shall be resolute and struggle so that crosses no longer appear on Golgotha.”  Or is the cross we wear merely a fashion statement, a Christian nicety to remind us of our morality?

Remember one of the turning points in the Viet Nam War?  The results of the violence, the body bags, were beamed onto the television screens in the United States.   In today’s tightly controlled media messaging, the government remembers its mistakes and controls when the results of death and violence come home. How often are we made to look at the results of violence and war?  When will be the caskets be opened?

Mamie Tilll, way back in 1955, at the funeral of her fourteen year old son, stepped up to the lectern at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago and said:  “I don’t have a minute to hate.  I’ll pursue justice for the rest of my life.”[3]  In opening the coffin of her son, Emmitt Till, Mamie said, “No more.  Never again in my world.  I shall struggle and be resolute so that lynchings never again happen in this country.” 

So, my sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins.  I beg of you to live as Mamie Till.  I beg of you to say no more, to say never again.  I beg of you to make the church relevant and to be willing to look hard at the pain and trauma of the world until you say, “No more lynchings.  No more crucifixions.”  I beg of you to find faith by recognizing that it is often found among those who believe their trauma is not ordained by Creator but that Creator is ordaining a revolution of values.   I beg of you to listen to words of Dr. King as he spoke to Riverside Church in New York:

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just."[4]

May we have the courage to take our faith to the caskets of the world, to see faith in the grit of the every day and live out of an understanding that God wants us to move from personal narratives to a broader and wider justice. 

Amen.

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[1] PBS:  “The Murder of Emmett Till.”  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/timeline/index.html.

[2] “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963

[3] Cornel West, Democracy Matters (New York:  The Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 20-21.

[4] King, “Beyond Viet Nam.”

Jeremiah Sermon Series, Jeremiah 6, November 4, 2018, "God's Mission Statement"

Jeremiah 6 (9) BFC 2018

Jeremiah 9:17-24

November 4, 2018

           

Tracy shared with me this morning this Facebook post from our General Minister and president, Rev. John Dorhauer.  This is a real billboard outside of St. Louis, Missouri.  The cross with the flag superimposed on it.  Make the gospel great again. And the Word became flesh.  John 1:14.   President Trump portrayed as the Christ.    

Many of you know that I am an avid reader and listener of African American scholar and Christian theologian, Dr. Cornel West and have related that the FBI comes to visit him and people like him about twice a year to tell him that he is on some rather infamous lists.  Some 12 years ago, the FBI told Dr. West that he is on the list, a targeted list of 276 white supremacist militia groups.  I cannot even imagine what that number must be right now.  Into that hatred and evil, Dr. West responded:

That’s like four fascists for every progressive.  And they’re organized.  With guns!  What are we talking about?  You better get your spiritual identity together.  You going to talk in that space with that kind of force?  You better have a sense of who you are.  You better be willing to die.  You better be clear about what the depth of your level of commitment and love is.  This ain’t no plaything.[1]

I am a huge fan of family systems thinking espoused by Murray Bowen and Edwin Friedman.  That family systems approach was popularized in the Christian Church by Lutheran pastor, Peter Steinke, who developed a whole curriculum called “Healthy Congregations.”  I used that curriculum for the first time in a very conflicted church in Wichita, Kansas, Pilgrim Congregational Church (a church that loved me well), to try and reset a church that had had a tumultuous relationship with its pastor and to remind them of what church was supposed to be at its core.  One of the ways we reset is by coming up with a mission statement for the church. 

          Healthy Congregations suggests three requirements for a mission statement.  First, the statement should be no longer than a sentence.  Second, the statement should be understandable to a twelve-year old.  Third, if the congregation were held at gunpoint, the whole congregation could repeat it.  After years and years of gun violence, they have changed the third requirement to the whole congregation being able to repeat the mission statement under duress. 

          During this interim ministry work in Wichita, Kansas, I was able to coax a whole table full of people from Pilgrim Congregational UCC to attend a Healthy Congregations workshop.  When the speaker began reciting the requirements for a good mission statement, our moderator began distributing around our table the two-page mission statement written by a former pastor.  When the speaker arrived at the third requirement, our moderator hastily re-collected the mission statement she had distributed and leaned in with a smile to whisper, “I’m getting the revolver out of my purse right now.”  We all laughed with a lump in our throat.

           The reason for such requirements is that mission statements should not demand an encyclopedic memory for us to be able to clearly inscribe or give full throat to their meaning.  Mission statements should not be so intellectually-driven that a Confirmand is unable understand them.  And, finally, mission statements should so captivate our heart, soul, mind, and strength that we can bring them forward to guide us at times of great stress or discord.  We should not have to run for some document buried in our archives to know what our mission statement is.  A mission statement should convey the most deeply-held values written on our collective hearts.  Like a North Star, a mission statement should lead us forward, tell us next steps, especially when the night is full of shadows.

A mission statement should state values that say, when the going gets tough, here is how I or we will be acting in the world.  

The Scripture from Jeremiah is just after The Exile has begun.  God calls in the professional mourners to weep over leaving their land.  The land—the very thing that was part of the covenant with the people—is now lost.  Homes on the land have been destroyed.  Public and community places, where people would gather on the land, are now no longer available.  In the fields and farms, the land was fertilized by human corpses.  All the ways the land provided for human habitation and vitality were no more.

  God observes what the values, the national mission statement was of Judah and Jerusalem before the Exile began, the values that led to the unraveling of creation, making the land a desolation.  Judah and Jerusalem boasted of a word used often in Hebrew Scripture synonymous with power and use of the military.[2]  They boasted of might or strength.  They boasted of a word used often in Hebrew Scripture to connote royal riches.[3]  They boasted of their wealth.  They boasted of a word used by Jeremiah to suggest the access and control of worldly information and media.  They boasted in their wisdom.  The Living God asserts that Judah and Jerusalem’s values, their mission statement, which included might, wealth, and wisdom, led to their fall.  Let the wailing and grief begin.

          These are such important words in the lexicon of Jewish theology that even the apostle Paul, six hundred years later, picks them up to detail his alternative values and his alternative mission statement.  In one of his letters to the churches in Corinth, Paul writes, “If I am to boast, let me boast not of might but of weakness.  If I am to boast, let me boast not of wealth but of poverty.  If I am to boast, let me boast not of wisdom but of foolishness.”[4]  To recognize how truly counter-cultural Paul’s values are, think about how many Christians you see on TV or in print boasting of these Christian values—weakness, poverty, and foolishness. 

But where God was once an observer, God is now a subject who ask the people to remember.  We learn God’s values.  God’s mission statement is found in the last part of the Scripture passage read for today. “I am the Living God.  ‘I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight,’ says the Living God.”  In contrast to the triad of might, wealth, and wisdom, God acts with the triad of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness—chesed, mishpat, and tzedekah.  These words are found all over Scripture and define the God of our tradition and the life, mission, and ministry of Christ.

The Living God makes it clear that this is no namby-pamby mission statement.  God says, “I delight in these things.  I get jacked and jazzed for them.  I am passionate about these things.”   These words are full of persistence, grit, and determination.  As this is God’s mission statement, every once in a while we should pause to ask ourselves why we are doing the things we do?  What is our mission statement?

I want to ask you now.  What kind of life do you want to live?  What are the values that get you jacked and jazzed for living in the world, get you jacked and jazzed enough to walk with them through tough times?  What do you delight in? 

On the back side of your song sheet, I would like you now to write out what you consider to be your mission statement.  If you can’t come up with one, hopefully this prods you to think intentionally about what it might be.  Or how you want to define one to live more intentionally.  Then also, I’d like you to think about what the mission statement might be for our church.  What does our church get jazzed about, find life in?  What do you see Billings First Congregational finding delight in?  Ok, take some time to think about that now.  I’ll probably stop you before you are ready but let’s give it a try.  I would love to hear some of the ones you might have for the church. 

Sheet hand out:

1.   Not more than a sentence

2.   Simple enough for a 12-year old to understand

3.   Can be repeated under duress

What do you take delight in?  What gives you a sense of satisfaction and joy?  When there is delight in your life, what is going on?  What do you see, hear, taste, feel or touch?

What is your mission statement?  Or what would you like to be your mission statement?

When there is delight and joy in this church, what is going on?  What do you see, hear, taste, feel or touch?

What is the mission statement of the church?  Or what would you like to be the mission statement for the church?

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[1] Dr. Cornel West, “The Socratic, Prophetic, and Democratic,” 4^th Annual Barry Ulanov Memorial Lecture, James Memorial Chapel, March 29, 2006.

[2] I Chronicles 29:12; 2 Chronicles 20:6; Esther 10:2

[3] I Samuel 17:25; I Kings 10:23; Esther 1:4

[4] I Corinthians 1:31ff.