November 22 2009
Text: Psalm 80
I must warn you that what I am about to say represents what I call theology - that is, trying to understand and talk about the reality of God, how God has manifested himself in history, how God manifests himself/herself today. It’s been my impression that many of you are a bit allergic to theology. I may not be right about this but my impression has been disturbing to me. I consider theology a primary gift that I can offer this community, and when I see people’s eyes glaze over at the mention of theology I tend to doubt whether I have my call and gift right.
In some ways I am sympathetic to resistance to theology. Some of what we have been taught as theology in the past doesn’t make sense today, and at worse, it is downright manipulative. It doesn’t have to be that way.
My vision is 8th Day Church being a place of excitement about theology along with sound psychology and ethics and political responsibility.
So, rather than hold these feelings inside, I’d like to test them out with you. What follow is a little attempt to do theology. You certainly don’t have to agree with it. I hope you will engage me on it.
My title for this teaching is “Faith finding us”. This is different from “you and I finding faith”. It is also faith finding us as a faith community. Community, as more than a collection of individuals.
One way to begin this conversation is with the help of a brief story. Years ago, a depressed Jesuit Catholic priest sought the counsel of the renowned Protestant theologian Karl Barth. “Professor Barth, the priest said, “I have lost my faith” to which Barth calmly replied, “Where did you get the idea that it was your faith to begin with?” This story is similar to the one told by David Hilfiker about himself on Recommitment Sunday. When he was a member of the Potter’s House Church, David was sometimes troubled by the gap in beliefs that separated him from what he understood to be the mainstream beliefs of the church. He asked different people whether - given the differences and uncertainty in his beliefs – he belonged? Some said no. Mary Cosby said, “David, I’m sure you belong here. As for your lack of faith, why don’t you lean on mine.”
At first glance, some of you might say, “that’s just vintage ‘Mary Cosby’” - inclusive and gracious to the core – which it is of course. But I also hear in what Mary said to David an echo of what Karl Barth said to the Jesuit priest. Now let me share with you why I think Barth’s and Mary’s answers make theological sense.
David Hilfiker is now leading for several Sundays at 8:30 AM a class exploring James Speth’s book “The Bridge at the Edge of the World.” David thinks, and I agree, that Speth is a modern prophet. He lays out in detail the danger of the course we are on of destroying the environment upon which we depend for survival and thriving. Unless we as a nation, the most militarily powerful in the world, change our ways, our grandchildren will inherit an impossible burden; and - by the time of their grandchildren - human civilization as we know it may be extinguished. The problems we face are so complex and interwoven, that only a massive shift in consciousness and sacrifice, change and creativity flowing out of that shift in consciousness will save us.
Where can this massive shift in consciousness that is needed to save us come from? For some that is a human question, pure and simple. It’s up to us period. For others of us it is also a theological question: who is God and how does he works in the world and among us?
This brings us to our scripture text, Psalm 80. Today is the last Sunday of the Christian year. Next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent when the Christian year begins all over again. Every year the scriptures for these two Sundays have a common theme – namely, the revelation we are headed toward. Let me repeat – the revelation we are headed toward. This is the theme that ends one Christian year and launches the next. This is a theological issue. How can we begin to think about God as a player in history – in the world’s history, in our community history, in our personal history?
David has just led you in reading Psalm 80 as it was read for centuries in worship in ancient Israel and later in Jewish synagogue and early Christian worship. The reading goes back and forth between lament at what has gone wrong and refrain calling on God for help. Notice especially verse 18b just before the last refrain: “Give us life and we will call on your name.”
I must acknowledge before someone beats me to it that some of the statements in this psalm would be a challenge for Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims. They suffer grievously from Israel’s claim of entitlement to the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River as gifted to them by God for all time, irrespective of other rights. I mention this fact because if our theology is to be honest it must engage current issues of peace and justice, but Israel-Palestine is a conversation for another time.
Psalm 80 resounds with the familiar human lament of suffering and cry for help in a time of adversity. It grounds that lament and cry for help in the faith of the community. Here we are back in the territory of the Karl Barth – Jesuit priest and David Hilfiker – Mark Cosby stories. Worship engages the community in remembering its theology. Here is the community reciting its faith, Sabbath by Sabbath, festival by festival: Restore us, O God. You seem to be frowning. You seem withdrawn. Let your face shine, that we may be saved. We remember your blessings in the past. The forces working against us are greater than our strength. Forgive us the barriers we have erected against you. Forgive us for forgetting you, ignoring you. Remember your faithfulness in the past and bless us again. Give us life again and we will call on your name. We will turn from other gods – money, success, military might – and re-center ourselves in you, our deepest hope.
Let me now share a recent experience of “faith finding me and others”. This is the territory of theology. Let’s see what you make of this.
Last spring a friend at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, where my wife, Sherrill, is a member, invited me to help develop a class there this fall on call and mission. She said that she wanted some serious input from the Church of the Saviour and she would like the class to use my book, Roll Away the Stone, as a text. She brought me together with three very bright, committed women to form a teaching team. We had no idea how many or if anyone would sign up for the class. In our planning as a teaching team we were drawn to the theme of the radical possibility that people of faith can do things that literally change the world, however modestly.
In thinking about radical possibility as fact, not just theory, we began to work with a distinction made by the Mexican liberation theologian, Jose Miranda, between “good deeds” and “good works”. Miranda develops this distinction in his study of the Gospel of John. In brief, “good deeds” are sharing time and resources in positive ways that, however, accept the world as it is. Generally, rather than work for fundamental change, most of us humans are programmed to give what we have left over to accomplish temporary relief. “Good works”, on the other hand, challenge the world as it is.
“ Good works” go against the grain of civilization as we know it. They align themselves with the grain of the universe as God created it and, according to the New Testament, is already in process of restoring. Miranda defines civilization as being characterized by two persistent mindsets. One is respect for the powerful and contempt for the weak. The other is oppression of the weak. Those on the bottom and at the margins of civilization are regarded with contempt, first structurally, second attitudinally. Today that is the poor. Not long ago – and still to a significant extent - it was persons of color and women and children.
Last winter, the superintendent of public schools in New York City was asked what are the primary indicators of school failure? He replied: “two clear-cut things – race and zip code.” Wow! Check it out. “Good deeds” leaves that structure in place. “Good works” disrupts it.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus’ miracles are called “good works’. They are both healing, life giving on the one hand and disruptive on the other. Because they are disruptive to the status quo, they invite the hostility of those whose lives derive their security from the status quo. In John’s Gospel, Jesus performs seven “good works” each of which is met with increasing hostility. The final good work is the raising of Lazarus in John 11. The community is amazed, but the opponents of Jesus respond that Jesus must be eliminated. He was a threat to the civilization - the status quo - which anchored their lives.
Prior to the beginning of the St. Mark’s course, the rector invited me to preach as an opportunity to share our vision for the course. Since we were going to use my book “Roll Away the Stone” as a text, I drew from it where I describe the three commands of Jesus in the Lazarus story as offering a translatable metaphor of “good works”. In John 11, Jesus gives three commands, two to the community and one to Lazarus. He commands the community to roll away the stone - an act that the person(s) in the tomb cannot do for himself. When the stone is rolled away he calls Lazarus – the victim representing all victims - to participate in their own liberation through their obedience to the call of Jesus to “come out”. When Lazarus emerges bound in grave clothes unable to walk, Jesus commands the community “Unbind him, let him go.” This reflects the normal long term commitment serious “good works” generally require.
I was amazed by the response to the sermon. 30 people, about half of them stating that it was because of the sermon, signed up for the course. I have never had a response like that in my whole life. All I can say is that the sermon my teaching partners helped me to craft struck a nerve. St. Mark’s has what they call a sermon seminar after their early service when the sermon is followed by about 20 minutes for members of the congregation to verbally respond. The response that day was very moving.
The teaching team planned an in-town retreat as the pivot point of the course, the point at which we hoped people would “get’ the distinctions of “good works” from “good deeds” and the radical possibility of doing “good works” in the world. I figured that the best way I knew to expose the class to “good works” and “radical possibility” with which they could identify was to expose them to a few of the missions spawned by the Church of the Savior. I chose six of the missions within a 5 minute walking distance of the Potter’s House: Jubilee Jumpstart, FLOC, Joseph’s House, Christ House, Jubilee Housing and the Church of Christ Right Now which includes inter racial and inter economic spiritual support groups and outreach to persons leaving prison. We convened here at the Potter’s House, scattered in six small groups to the six different missions and then reassembled in the backroom afterward for dinner and reporting.
The class was simply “blown away” by the depth of the conversations they had with their respective hosts and the calm, hopeful power they saw at work in those missions, including honest sharing about their struggles and uncertainties. They reported encountering what I would call a unique consciousness and integrity of action that evoked profound respect. I heard this response in the reports from all six of the visits. If the response had come from one or two groups, it would have been impressive, but when it came from the reports of all six visits, it said to me that something else was at work, something like faith manifesting as social witness “finding us”.
As far as I am concerned, this was a human event that was deeply theological. I went home feeling that once again faith had found me – the faith that has been at work for 60 years in the network called the Church of the Saviour. That night, November 6, 2009, we were exposed not to high achieving individuals but the faith of committed small groups changing the world at a specific place, not settling with civilization as it is, but ordinary people risking themselves in ventures that witness to God’s new creation.
The St. Mark’s class was not all “peaches and cream”. There were some challenges. Some of the people who responded so warmly to my sermon struggled in the class. Some dropped out. On the last night of the class a member of our teaching team invited people to share both what they liked and didn’t like about the class. One man shared that he had had a hard time staying in the class because he just didn’t buy the religious language we had been using. We thanked him for sharing his honest feelings and said that we wished things had worked so that we could have engaged such feelings early on.
One of my favorite hymns is “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” At the same time I must say with friends in the class who are put off by such language that this hymn doesn’t make any sense to me theologically either. It makes of God a gigantic human being and the world an entity separate from God.
Old Testament scholar Terence Freitheim says that there are two misunderstandings that undermine our thinking about God. One is pantheism where God is identified with the world is such a way that God and the world are collapsed into each other so that there is no distinction between God and nature. This is the “new age” view of God, God as energy, God as force, as in the Star Wars movie: “The force be with you.”
At the other extreme is dualism where God and the world are viewed as independent of one another. Dualism emphasizes the discontinuity between God and world. God stands outside, apart, above, beyond as in “He’s got the whole world in his hands”.
Freitheim says that between these two poles there is a third way. From his study of the Old Testament he is convinced that the world is not only dependent upon God. God is also dependent upon the world. The world is not only affected by God; God is affected by the world in both positive and negative ways. God is the transcendent Lord, but God is transcendent not in isolation from the world, but in relationship to the world.
Freitheim says that according to the Bible there are two fundamental realms within creation – heaven and earth. God is thought to have built his own residence – that is, the living space of God, into the very structures of the created order. The heavens thus become a shorthand way of referring to the abode of God within the world. From God’s space, God sees or hears or speaks. Yahweh’s place is in the world and where there is world there is God, where there is God there is world. There is no God “left over” in some sphere which is other than world. God who is other than world has wholly immersed himself in the world.
The heavens are a sort of consecrated zone within the created world. The earth is that worldly realm where God’s will is contested. God’s will is done in heaven in a way that it is not done on earth. History appears to have fallen out of the rhythm of the cosmic order that is still reflected in creation, as Native Americans once felt, and many still do, so deeply. In other words, the cosmic order remains loyal to its origin, and it knows about it. God moves freely back and forth across the realms of the world. While heaven is unreachable from the world, unreachabililty does not mean that we can’t influence the heavens. God hears the prayers of the people and is affected by what happens on earth. Heaven is a symbol of God’s exaltedness.
In Jesus Christ and scripture, God has said to the world “I have not abandoned you. I will not abandon you regardless of how you mess up, your stupid arrogance and your tenacity in resisting my vision. I will call you out and I will empower ‘good works’ to wrestle for your hearts.
Let me close now by recalling the promise that we share every Sunday when we participate in the Lord’s Supper. On this occasion we repeat the promise that Jesus will come again. This is the faith of the church from the Day of Pentecost to today. Jesus is coming again. Practically all of us in this room have trouble with grasping this. The way it makes sense to me is that the day is coming when the consciousness embodied in the incarnation of God in Jesus will reach a tipping point in this world. This is the consciousness stirred up at least for an evening in the visits between members of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and leaders of missions spawned by the faith of the Church of the Saviour.
Do I expect Jesus as some gigantic superman to descend on public television for every person on earth to see simultaneously? No. Do I share the faith stated in the Lord’s Supper that Jesus will come again? My answer is “This faith has found me and I stand on it.”
Years ago when I was writing Roll Away the Stone I was grappling with how change on a local, national and worldwide scale occurs. Drawing upon other’s thinking and my knowledge of scripture, I focused on the reality - the fact - of consciousness and how consciousness may be at bottom the key factor in change of any scale of real conversion or transformation, personal, social or political. I return to that idea now - that it will be in the form of the bursting forth of the consciousness incarnate in Jesus that will save the world and unite heaven and earth, theologically understood.
That is the faith on which I rest my case. Thank you for your attention.