Dialog and Call

March 3, 2013

Texts: Psalm 63, Isaiah 55:1-9, and Luke 9

May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, Oh Lord, our Rock, our Redeemer and our Spring in the Desert.

Let me offer two words to keep in mind throughout our teaching today:

Dialog, and Call.

Dialog and Call.  These are two of the many things I’ve learned about since I spun into the orbit of the Church of the Saviour last summer.

Let me also ask you to take those two ideas  - dialog and call – and tie them to a third idea  - Thirst – an idea that appears throughout our scriptures for today as they talk about how Christ quenches our thirst in this world.

Seven months have passed since I started coming to Eighth Day – back in those sticky 100 degree days of August – for what I knew would only be a nine month stay in Washington.  Soon after that, I moved in as a renter at Andrew’s House, which has been a blessing in ways far too numerous to count here.  It’s hard to believe, but only two months remain before my leave in DC ends in April and I return – I think – to being a law professor in Vermont, or to something that combines that work with more time in the Arctic, which is where my true call lies.

I wanted to share with you, the beloved community of Eighth Day and friends, some of what I’ve learned from being with you.  That is, what I’ve learned …

… about Dialog,

… about how to listen for what Christ is calling us to do, individually and collectively, and

… about how acting on that call quenches our thirst, stills our yearning, and has the power to imbue us with a quiet joy. I hope that what I say today can help you remember to see the joy in the midst of the enormous problems I see you trying to tackle, and at the same time to help us all to take ourselves less seriously even as we go about serious work.

I have learned these things more as observer than participant, and want to thank you for your patience with my hanging mostly on the margins, not quite diving in; for letting me look and learn and ask.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that one of the first guests to pass through Andrew’s House after I moved in last fall returned just last week to spend another few days back at Andrew’s House.  Last fall, Tomas Spath told me about his organization, the Institute for Civility in Government.  It had humble beginnings: as a boy Tomas wrote regular letters to his Texas congressman, asking him to tell Congress: stop funding the Contras.  That dialog, between a young boy and a man of power with a different view of the matter, led to a mutual respect and ability to listen to each other, to an enduring connection, and to a will to change policy.  This experience led Tomas eventually to found the Institute, which, in its own words, is

“a grassroots, non-partisan, non-profit organization that is building civility in a society that all too often seems tilted toward uncivil speech and actions.  The Institute does not endorse any political candidate, nor [does it] take a position on any issue. [It is] about process, not positions. [It] serve[s] as a catalyst for change. Together we can make a difference!”

And they do.  Tomas was back in DC last week with three other colleagues and ten high school students, some from the gang culture of urban Houston, on an incredibly intensive schedule of meetings with their congressmen and their Senators’ staffs, seeing the sights in DC, and giving the teenagers a sense of how issues can be worked out with talk and not violence, how process can provide a way forward.  Given the sequestration outcome Friday, you may wonder whether this was the best week for them to visit. But the underlying message of Tomas’ work, and of his life, is that dialog can happen, against all odds.  And that it is up to us to initiate it.

Those of us who were at our 8th Day retreat yesterday morning heard several people mention the “Miracle of Dialog.”  This is the title of a book by Reuel Howe that the Bridge to Hope mission group – Dottie, Carol, Fred, Orlando and Alice – chose to read as it explored the group’s own transition into other calls.  They invited visitors to join them, and both Emily and I took up that offer.  Needless to say we are both deeply grateful for the gift of those eight weeks together.  We were welcomed into a quiet circle of concern around the lack of dialog in many parts of our lives – especially in public life but, the deeper we looked, in other parts of our life, too, and sometimes even here at Eighth Day: i.e. do we really welcome the stranger, the visitors in our midst “not on our terms but on theirs” (as someone said yesterday, in their own language)?; do you really listen to different views from the comfort of what many presume is your shared Left Liberal Christianity or do you squirm and move on without wrestling with the tensions raised, or without even seeing that there are friends in our midst who have a different take on things but feel they cannot speak up?  

Howe wrote the book, Miracle of Dialog, when he was a seminary professor in the 1960s, but it still rings clear and true today.  He based his work on the power of Christ’s message and model of dialog: reaching – in love - across lines that divide us.

Here are some of the themes that stood out for us at the end of our eight-week study, as we looked back. 

We saw the urgency of the need for:

- Listening to and understanding the other person’s point of view, and not being scared of disagreement.

- Moving from our own reference place to theirs; what are they trying to tell me and why are they trying to tell me that?  Any time someone is not like us we need truly to HEAR them and not just react to them.

 

We learned that true dialog can change the nature of the world, through changing individual relationships, not just in a “wouldn't it be nice” outcome, but in lasting ways.

 

We learned that dialog helps build community and that, with monolog you live in loneliness.

 

I personally was struck with how often Howe equated monolog with violence and destruction and dehumanizing the other person whom we refuse to hear – really hear.

 

We realized how difficult true Dialog is; but that with practice it becomes easier.

 

We learned that Dialog is dangerous (as Mike Brown has said) but is also one of the keys to peace.

So, for me, the Bridge to Hope group was a quiet circle of concern, but also one of joy and of faith that we might somehow take the lessons of dialog and apply them day-to-day.  

That hope was there even as the Bridge of Hope mission group decided it was time to disband and move on individually to other calls. 

Which takes me from Dialog to Call, and to Thirst.  Because call necessarily relates to thirst, to that for which we most yearn.

The scriptures for today are not so much about call, at least overtly, but they are about hunger and thirst.

At the core of all of the readings –Psalm 63, Isaiah 55, and Luke 9, is the fact that God can and does satisfy our thirst; that Christ is the spiritual rock from which we can all drink and be satisfied. 

But what does that mean – that Christ is the spiritual rock from which we can all drink and be satisfied?  How do we make that more than metaphor? And how do we translate this from mere textual study into lived work and deeds?  If I have learned anything in my nine months at Church of the Saviour it is how you all go about translating the Scriptures, and translating Christianity, into day-to-day life, and into addressing real and pressing problems in your city and your world. This is how I describe your model to others: 

A group of Christians identifies a problem you feel called to address; works accountably with each other through inward prayer and spiritual discernment to see whether and how your skills can be used outwardly to address the problem, and then… you go at it. 

To take just one example of many while I’ve been here:  David Dorsey, Maria Barker and others applied their skills in real estate and finance and worked to convert Wells Fargo’s penalties for its role in the mortgage crisis into affordable mortgages for people who would otherwise be closed out of homeownership.    You don’t set out to fix the whole system but you do bite off a manageable piece and take practical steps to make a difference.  

And you do so more effectively because you have taken time to listen to what God is calling you to do, and you refresh yourself inwardly from the spring of living water that Christ has been offering us for millennia: community, quiet, intimacy.  Today’s scriptures tell us this.  They remind me that our deepest yearnings are calls that God places in our hearts. 

So, as you listen to parts of these scriptures again, try to think about call.  David was in the Desert of Judah when he wrote Psalm 63:

O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my body longs for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

 

I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory.  Because your love is better than life, I will praise you as long as I live, …

 

My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you….”

That praise comes from work well done, from a call heeded, from a spirit paying attention to God.

Or take Isaiah, which Cruz read for us this morning:

Isaiah 55: 1-9

Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!

Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.  Why spend money on what is not bread and your labor on what does not satisfy?

I have heard these verses countless times but never thought about applying them to how I use my life and my skills, that if I spend my labor on what does not satisfy my inner hunger, I will not only shrivel up spiritually; I will not be doing much good in the larger world.   There cannot be a divide between my faith and my life, and you at Eighth Day have shown me more than any church I’ve been part of  how to live that way. Marcia said yesterday, in talking about spiritual formation as one of Eighth Day’s visioning groups, that “our spiritual life IS our life,” that our lives have to be integrated that way; that this relates to being fully alive and intentional, as Jesus was.

  Isaiah continues in this passage:

Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.

Give ear and come to me

Hear me; that your soul may live.

Giving ear, Listening for that call allows us to hear God; that our Souls may live.

And what about that fig tree parable in Luke,[1] which I’ve never liked; what does that have to do with call?

The vineyard owner is irritated with the fig tree that has not borne fruit and is using up good soil, so tells the gardener to cut it down. But the gardener says “leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.”

What does this have to do with call?  Perhaps simply this; that there are times we think we’ve discerned what we are supposed to do with our individual or communal lives, but that we need to be able to recognize, even after careful tending, when those paths aren’t bearing fruit and when we need to move on, or given them to others.

Finally, let me turn to a fourth scripture that I did not ask Cruz to read, but is also in the lectionary for today, I Corinthians 10: 1-13.   For me, it ties together call and thirst and dialog. It takes us back to wandering with Israel in the desert, and ties their longing for physical and spiritual food and drink to our longing for the very same things today.

Paul calls on the Jewish Christians in Corinth to remember their heritage:

For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea.  They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. The all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.[2]

Wait a minute; Christ was there in the wilderness with Israel? Well, yes: in the form of the Spirit – that same spiritual spring from which we drink today.

These verses tie into something else Marcia said yesterday in summarizing the work so far of 8th Day’s Spiritual Formation visioning group: that our Christian Community is formed out of and deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition.   It also relates to a hunger that Meade expressed yesterday, for us to be explicit about how communion relates to our spiritual formation.   Finally, it is a surprising reminder that Christ was in the world as Spirit long before Christ came in human form, for an even more intimate dialog with us. 

This tie to our Jewish roots is also a critical lesson of the Servant Leadership School class that Tim is leading on “Race and the Christian Imagination”[3]: that early European Christianity did everything it could to imagine Christianity as superseding and separating us from God’s chosen people, as refusing dialog and intimacy with our Jewish brothers and sisters. Willie James Jennings, the author of the book, argues that this refusal of dialog with the other laid the groundwork for European Christianity to corrupt God’s great desire for intimacy with and between all human beings, by requiring the rest of the world to live up to the white measure of what it meant to be Christian. This refusal to dialog in turn laid the insidious and pervasive foundation for Christian nations and individuals to engage in the slave trade and somehow, astonishingly, to reconcile it with their understanding of God’s favor … a legacy of racism that we are still mired in.   Here, again, a group of you has heeded a call – listened to that passion that God planted in your hearts – to try to dismantle racism in our own community: Dawn and Karen and Steve and Wendy and others in Friends of Jesus and 8th Day have recently started the Racial Justice & Healing Mission Group: a call to dialog about an intractable and hard issue.

Before closing with a word on my own call, I have one last example of how Eighth Day has shown me the connection between call and dialog. Last week David Hilfiker expanded, profoundly, on an announcement he and Marja made a few weeks back, that he has Alzheimer’s.  In his teaching last week David talked about the ways that this disease is calling him to new levels of trust and freedom.   As awful as the disease is, and it is, I saw my own dad become more free as his Alzheimer’s progressed, and to be very much in the moment, as you so well described, David.  We all have to thank you for turning what could have been awkwardness and discomfort into the chance for dialog about a difficult topic and to come closer to you and each other.  Who knows, perhaps a group of us might feel called to find ways to form a mission group around Alzheimer’s.   

Finally, let me close with a word about the call God has put on my heart. Some of you know that my work as a professor deals with Arctic policy. God has given me inklings of this call throughout my life: as a kid loving to run around in the outdoors and the snow and the cold, and loving that outdoors and wanting somehow to serve it.  But it was not until I was fifty that it all came together, when I had the chance to spend, over the course of two summers, some three months on an icebreaker in the Arctic Ocean. There I was surrounded in light 24 hours a day, on an ocean of ice and snow that stretched to the horizon, and felt immersed in the Holy Spirit in ways I had never experienced.  The living water that is Christ was transformed for me as light and ice! I have since taken that admittedly ethereal experience and translated it into the more nuts and bolts work of reviewing laws and regulations and treaties, working with and learning from Inuit colleagues and others to figure out how best for communities in the Arctic to adapt to all of the climate induced and other changes that are happening in the North.  It is amazingly satisfying work. It is quenching my thirst to be doing what I was made to do.  I am listening intently, having learned from you how to do that, for what my next steps should be to continue that work in a life giving way.  Somehow, this Eskimo poem from the 19th century sums up how this call, and this light and this drinking from a deep well all come together. So I end with this, asking you to try to imagine especially what the light means when it returns after a long winter of darkness. Think your way into that other world for a minute:

 

And I think over again
My small adventures
When from a shore wind I drifted out
In my kayak
And I thought I was in danger.

My fears,
Those small ones
That I thought so big,
For all the vital things
I had to get and to reach.

And yet, there is only
One great thing,
The only thing.
To live and see in huts and on journeys
The great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.[4]

Amen.