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First United Methodist Church of Reno, Nevada
Rev. John Auer
(Psalm 1, Mark 9:30-37)
"Like A Tree: Only the Children May Move
Us"
Just like a tree, that’s planted by the Truckee, we shall not be
moved! They may be moving the Truckee! Getting it ready for Doug to come
kayaking on! But they are not moving us! Except for the children. Only
the children may move us. Jesus would love this Hopi story, our Words
for Meditation, with its circle of the complete community: the fools
(May I see the hands of the fools?), the witches, the hunters, the
creators, the shamans and politicians, most importantly, at the center,
the children’s fire, and by the children’s fire, the grandfather and
the grandmother.
The bottom line of the story is, only the grandparents have veto
power. Every question that comes to the circle must pass the simple but
ultimate test: Does it help or hurt the children? Can we even imagine
the wisdom of that? If every decision before city councils, county
commissioners, state legislators, national congresses, and United
Nations faced the test: Does it help or hurt the children?
Julie and I remember our first field trip with the congregation in
San Rafael to do restoration work of the ecology of Muir Woods. A giant
tree had fallen across the visitors’ path. Were we asked to move the
tree? No. We were to move the path! That’s what it means to move for
the children. Even seven generations from now! For we who love this
place this morning, as we renew our commitments to the Capital Building
Enhancement Campaign, we know: We not only inherit from the past. We
also borrow from the future. We are legacies in the offing.
It is the history of this congregation, this building, as I
understand it, that even as we have been planted here, we have faced
chances, opportunities, even temptations to move from here. Is that
right? And we have decided to stay. To bloom where we are planted. To be
a church of the downtown. That decision was last made, as I read the
history, after seven years of study in 1977. It says, In order to do
this it was necessary to do a major remodeling project to all areas of
the church with the exception of the sanctuary and the office space. A
building committee defined needed objectives, many of which were
required to meet city building codes. These included repair and
replacement of steam heat pipes, electrical wires and fixtures. We
have been here before, have we not?
We have put down our roots here: the roots of worship, study,
fellowship, prayer, the roots that sanctify and sustain us as
congregation, that we might bear witness and service here, both the
personal, pastoral service of responding to immediate needs, and the
public, prophetic service of changing systems to reduce the number of
needs. And we as Reno’s First United Methodist Church have born and
sent forth fruit this place (Not peaches, we hope, the youth group is
saying!), to help begin the St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in
northwest Reno in 1955. And the South Reno United Methodist Church in
1986.
(By the way, youth group, as you prepare to report next Sunday on
your mission trip to "Gleanings for the Hungry," I still
encourage you to re-write the hymn, "Gleaning on the Everlasting
Arms!" In the church history I found, in 1924 we started a young
women’s Sunday School Class and called it the "Gleaners!"
The church parlor even became known as the Gleaners’ Room! And look at
the title in the Human Relations Day brochure for the special offering
we take today: "Extend hospitality to strangers." The motto of
our Gleaners was, "A Stranger But Once!" Just imagine all
those peaches in our parlor!)
We only move for the children. The children of the communities where
new churches have begun: St. Paul’s with its inclusive and subsidized
child care program, South Reno with its plans to expand education
facilities. And children and families of this community: Those of this
congregation, of course, -- Let’s hear it for them! – and those who
may live in cars, in motels, in apartments, wherever they can. John
Emerson will be bringing us more on that next week.
As we invest in this congregation, including this building, this
place we love so much, this congregation, in turn, invests in this
community. Thanks to those who represented us on the River Walk
Merchants’ "Wine Walk" yesterday! ( www.renoriver.org) We are a player in this whole community, planted by the
water. Many of our congregation are players in the systems and
structures of this larger community, city and county, of which we are
part! I hope we will spend time assessing our role, including our
leverage, to stand for justice and hope, in city, in county, in state,
in nation, in world, and in all creation herself! One small way is to
join in support of small businesses here, including, believe it or not,
the parking garage!
It is radical, that is to say, it goes to the roots of the matter, to
stand today for and with small businesses, small farms, small towns,
small schools, small congregations, small parts of the city, as well as
small people called children! Small IS beautiful! It is time to look up
to what we look down on. I specially would like soon to share with you
the work of a local group called the Conscious Living Network. Please
let me know of your interest. (I will send out a preliminary proposal if
you want one.) As every good tree by the water knows, unless we stand
for something, we are apt to fall for anything!
Part of what we love most about this place is its famous underground,
its catacombs, dug out, literally, by hand, back in the 1940s. Is that
right? As space to serve the children! The "hallelujah
children" still watching over us! And the youth! And now space to
serve homeless families through Interfaith Hospitality Network! It is one and an indispensable thing to love a person, a
family, friends and small groups of people. But how do we love large
groups of people? Masses of people? How do we love a whole city? How do
we love institutions? How do we love this place? Let us begin to count
the ways.
How else might we use our space? Especially now that we’re heated
and air conditioned? That we hope to be elevatored? With renovated
apartment and refurbished organ? How else might we use the downstairs,
the upstairs, the fellowship, even the worship space? How else might we
witness and serve children and families and others in need? How else
might we organize and act to reduce the number of needy? Perhaps through
the product liability and corporate responsibility of some of our
nearest and biggest and wealthiest neighbors downtown! Is that right? Is
that right . . . .
We as a congregation understand "underground." We
understand that our happiness, our blessedness, as the psalm says, lie
not so much in appearances, in what others can see of us, but in what
cannot be seen, what lies within us, beneath our surface, under the
ground of all of our beings. Where we are rooted, where we are grounded,
where we are "en-earthed." Please remind Julie and me, come
Advent, to introduce the concept of a "Yellow-Star Underground
Conspiracy to Wait for Jesus!" There is more to Jesus than
Christmas shopping.
Jesus in Mark’s gospel goes "underground," as we say, incognito,
and tries to avoid mass attention. He is acutely aware of the fate
that awaits him as "Son of Man," the "Human One."
There is a harsh context to this gentle text of embracing the children.
It is, for Jesus, one of those death-defying, instead of death-denying,
acts that gets him in trouble. The children’s arch stands for how
everyone looks to Jesus on Palm Sunday, his most public and most
prophetic day of all, to keep the children "in their place,"
somehow quiet and more respectable! On a day when even the rocks and the
stones should be shouting out with thanksgiving and praise as God begins
the subversion, the undermining of powers, as will burst forth from
underground Easter morning!
Where are we? What do we find worth standing for? Worth shouting for?
Worth risking for? Worth raising a ruckus for? As trees planted by the
waters of God. Weren’t the children just wonderful about that last
Sunday? Leading up to the baptism? How they "got it" that God
is like the waters we all swim in? Even the changing waters of the
Truckee! God like one river, with so many wells! One thing we know about
rivers: We never step in the same one twice! We step again, the old
river is past. Like God! Like Meister Eckhart says of God: "God is
a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can
stop."
Jesus knows here his life’s on the line. Is yours? Are ours? Is
mine? Am I willing to bear the cost? Of being fully human? Freely alive?
Taking the chances I have to take to be the person I have to be? Who
knows what form that may take in anyone’s life? The courage it takes
just to live out the life we find on our hands? Jesus knows how much his
life and work depend on this "remnant" of friends and
followers, this rag-tag and "motley crue!" Very much including
women and children! And all other "othernesses," all other
"differences" we can think of. Jesus loves all complexities,
all diversities, as well as all identities, all integrities. Jesus loves
to cross all of our lines, color outside all of our boxes.
Jesus also knows that we do not learn so much by "high
teaching," theory and abstraction, as we do by "low
learning," example and experience. Our United Methodist Church does
not fully grasp it yet, but this is not, under God, a time of orthodoxy,
right doctrine. Miriam Therese Winter says God loves "paradoxy!"
Rather, it is a time of orthopraxis, right action and right
relationship. It is not so much a preaching time, to my dismay, though I
confess I do take my time to preach! But a time for practicing what we
preach. A time of social ethics and public morality. A time, as the base
community movement puts it, to see, judge, act, and reflect. That’s
what we hope our own emerging adult education options are all about –
Please join us for any or all of them!
So Jesus here just cuts to the chase and shows his disciples what he
means! He puts the most immediate, threatened, vulnerable, powerless
flesh available on his words. He places the children, who have no being
at all under law of their time, and not much more under ours, at the
very center of our life together! God help us for the harm we have done
to children in and through our churches! God help us to honor them, our
debt to them, with the full Jubilee of a not only a better world, but
also a better church. It is so painfully partially human of us to worry
so, as the disciples do here, who among us is the "greatest,"
the "holiest," the "winningest," and the
"best!" Just as it is so fully human, so freely alive of Jesus
to let himself be so identified, so to stand with, the last and the
least, the smallest, the weakest, the poorest, the most abused.
Sisters and brothers, somehow it is all about "welcoming
children." Loving this place, investing in this community, renewing
this campaign -- All about welcoming children! Our great musician-friend
Pablo Casals improvises on these words of Jesus: "When will we
teach our children what they are? One should be able to say to them: Do
you know what you are? You are a marvel! You are unique! In all the
world there is no other child exactly like you! In the millions of years
that have passed, there has never been another child like you! One looks
at your body, what a wonder it is, your legs, your arms, your cunning
fingers. The way you move! You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo,
a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything! Yes, you are a marvel,
and when you grow up, can you harm another who is, like you, a
marvel?"
Jesus invites us to go forth this morning, each in our own way,
determined to find our way of saying, in our words and by our actions,
to one child, at least, to one child of any age, to any old child of God
who needs it of us: You are welcome! And even more than welcome: You are
a marvel. A marvel! Amen.
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