For weeks I playfully urged the youth group, fresh from its
"Gleaning for the Hungry" mission trip, to re-write the hymn,
"Gleaning on the Everlasting Arms." In their wonderful
presentation at the "stock brunch" last Sunday (DVD
available!) they revealed their main song together while standing all
day on the work line to salvage the peaches was "Glean on Me!"
Ready?
Sometimes in our lives / We all have pain, we all have
sorrow
But if we are wise / We know that there’s always tomorrow
Lean on me, when you’re not strong
And I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on
For, it won’t be long
Till I’m gonna need somebody to lean on
Please swallow your pride / If I have things you need
to borrow
For no one can fill / Those of your needs that you won’t let show
You just call on me brother when you need a hand
We all need somebody to lean on
I might just have a problem that you’ll understand
We all need somebody to lean on . . . .
Bill Withers
Not a bad word for World Communion Sunday and United Nations Month,
with CROP Walk and Trick or Treat for UNICEF, as we try to relearn,
among nations and peoples, as well as among congregations and families,
or households, the power of relationships! The power of partnerships!
Even the power of Holy Communion. In fact, there are only two kinds of
power in the world. One is organized money. We’ve seen where that gets
us, nationally and internationally. Follow the money, follow the power,
follow the children, follow the pain! (Care to say that with me?) The
other kind of power is organized people! All we the people can turn to,
can glean on, in the grip of organized money is one another!
In fact, I ask us to see October as a month to think about
"gleaning," and November to think about
"harvesting." What’s the difference? What is gleaning? It is
a kind of harvesting, a kind of gathering of what is left behind or left
out of the harvest. We glean what others may have overlooked or even
thrown away. We glean because we see value in something that others may
have rejected or not seen at all. It is a kind of salvaging, a kind of
rescuing, of making do with what we find along the way. Not a bad way of
living! Some more modern and urban terms for gleaning might include,
what? Recycling! Thrifting! Yard-saleing! Even dumpster-diving! It’s
not even a bad way of seeing discipleship! Jesus often calls on those in
whom others have seen little or no value. In fact, God may be as a
gleaner of Jesus when Jesus is rejected and needs to be resurrected! Is
resurrection a kind of gleaning? Rescuing from the dung heap?
Gleaning has massive implications for the issues John Emerson raised
with us last week, issues to keep before us as we move through this
month to Children’s Sabbath and to a study of our Bishops’ Letter
called "Community with Children and the Poor." There are lots
of web sites under "gleaning," including the Department of
Agriculture’s "Gleaning and Food Recovery." One called
"The Gleaning Project" informs us, "1) An American child
is born into poverty every 32 seconds. 2) One-fifth of all the children
in the U.S. under the age of 18 live in poverty. 3) There is a enough
food grown to feed everyone on the earth a daily diet of 2350
calories." What a godly activity, what a gleaning, to connect
hungry children with existing resources. What is "holy
communion" but our participation in the blessed distribution of the
goodness God creates and provides for all of God’s children?
Everywhere in God’s church? Everywhere in God’s world?
"It ain’t easy being glean." Who invented that saying?
Great eco-theologian Kermit the frog! It ain’t easy being Green! Being
responsible toward all the world God loves so much as to break God’s
own flesh and spill God’s own blood, not to condemn the world but to
save it, to glean it! We just passed the birthdays of Gandhi of South
Africa and India and of St. Francis of Assisi, two of the saints of God
whose lives bear most witness and service to the needs of the
"little ones" of this life and of this world, the "minores"
of Francis, the anawin of Gandhi those who are youngest, and
oldest, and weakest, and poorest, and thus live lowest on the food chain
and closest to the earth. There are folks of this congregation who sleep
on the ground every night! Gleaning is all about learning to "look
out below!" To look out for "little people," for animals
and for other living things. Remember the African saying, when elephants
fight, it’s the grass who suffers! And we seem to be the only elephant
on the planet right now.
It ain’t easy being human. And yet it’s all we got to be. No
matter how we delude ourselves, there’s nothing else we can be but
human, painfully human. Thus, the story of Job in our scriptures this
month. All caught up today in these "heavenly politics," these
power plays of God and Satan. How do we like this God? Testing us to
protect God’s own honor? We think God needs such protecting from us!
We are forever trying to "put God" in public places, in city
halls, courtrooms, and schools, as if God were not there long before we
got there! As if God would not be there long after we’re gone. Job
might testify, we need more protecting from God than God needs
protecting from us! Thus, the story of Lear in the play we are reading
on Thursday nights and attending later this month. All caught up in a
cosmic kind of "family politics." I just want to say the
obvious, that we human beings are the only species on earth who
willfully maim and kill, reject and starve our own kind. We are the
latest of species arriving on earth, the least mature and the most
deadly. We seem to put the creation itself at risk.
Yet hear what the psalmist says of us and to us this morning! "O
Lord, what are we human beings that you are even mindful of us? Much
less that you, who make everything, care so mightily for us? You have
made us just a little less than Yourself, God! And have crowned us with
glory and honor! You have made each of us in your own image, and given
us all, as a species, dominion over, responsibility for, relationship
and partnership with, all of the works of your hands!" Do we hear
that, my sisters and brothers? Do we hear what the rabbi says in our
Words for Meditation? That we carry two stones in our pockets? One of
them cries out, with Job, "I am but dust and ashes!" Come on,
let’s cry out: I am but dust and ashes! What? Yet the other cries out,
with the psalmist, "For my sake was the world created!" Are
you with me? For my sake the world was created! One more time!
We are in the high holy Days of Awe between Rosh Ha Shanah and Yom
Kippur. We celebrate the birthday of the creation of the whole world!
The shofar has sounded. The Jubilee has been proclaimed! All is
forgiven, again! All is made new, again! What difference does it make to
us? How are we called to atone? To be "at-one" with ourselves?
With one another? With all the Earth and the One Who Creates it each
day? Frederick Buechner says here, Every 24 hours God makes the world
new again! Every morning we wake up to something that in all eternity
never was before and never will be again! (Just as each time we worship
we are unique and unrepeatable!) And the we that wakes up every morning,
thank God, is never the same before and never will be the same either!
There is so much more to be said of these texts this morning!
Especially with Jesus speaking here of divorce, in Reno, where as I get
the history divorce came to be called "Reno-vation!" But
Jesus’ point here is not to condemn divorce. As Sue Roberts is so good
at making plain to couples who come to us to be married, Jesus is about
equal partnerships in committed relationships. It is the practice of
patrimony he opposes, the treatment of women as chattel of men. Jesus
turns law upside-down here, giving women an equal right to divorce!
Jesus is not oblivious to the pain of divorce, especially since Jesus
gives rights and respect not only to women but also, scandal of
scandals, to children! Divorce, we know, is costly to all, like a death,
from which we may never fully recover. We must always be, as openly and
as graciously as we know how, a church community of recovery to one
another. We all know the pain of broken relationship, broken
partnership, broken communion. After all, what is Holy Communion but
wholeness broken and poured out for us, who live in such brokenness of
so many kinds all the time?
There is not time to go on with these texts, and besides, Jeanne
Barnett has died. Let me just say, if you come to be to be married, I am
not going to ask you if you are male or female. That is for you to know,
even for you to decide. Irrespective of gender, I will ask, what do you
love about one another? For that we love whom we love is perhaps the
greatest mystery of God’s Spirit at work in our lives. I will ask,
what makes you think you are made for each other? For in God we are made
for relationship, partnership, and communion. God says it is not good
that we are alone. "We all need somebody to glean on!"
We will talk about both sex and sexuality as vital parts of that
relationship. But we will keep them in context. I always get so crazy
when we hear the stories of Adam and Eve and of Can and Abel, as we are
doing on Wednesday nights, to think that the so-called "original
sin" carries sexual connotations, while the murder after it gets
such a pass. So now we own 200 million guns among us! Not to mention
many armies, many wars.
But Jeanne Barnett has died, peacefully, October 1, of a heart attack
and complications from diabetes. Former lay leader of this annual
conference, surrounded with faith community, accompanied by Ellie
Charlton, her life-and-love partner of nearly 20 years. When the
Judicial Council of our church, in 1998, singled out the Social
Principle prohibiting same-gender unions by our pastors and in buildings
and gave it the status of "enforceable law," Rev. Don Fado,
St. Mark’s, Sacramento, preached his intent to perform holy unions and
his desire to do one with co-officiants as a way to witness against this
use of church law. Jeanne and Ellie, already partners for 15 years but
never dreaming their union could be as blessed as any other, said, here
we are, Lord. Why not us?
I close, almost, with the words of "Blessing and
Announcement" in which some 150 co-officiants joined on that day of
January 16, 1999: "O God, our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, we
bow before you to ask your blessing upon Ellie and Jeanne, whom we now
bless in your name. Their commitment to one another grows out of their
commitment to you, whose loved is revealed through Jesus Christ. We pray
for you to guide and strengthen them, that they may remain open to your
spirit and continue to grow in love. We thank you for Jeanne and
Ellie’s love and faith which they so readily share with us. We
recognize in this service the place of family, friends, church and the
entire human family; we are able to love because you first loved us. O
God, our maker, we gladly proclaim that Jeanne and Ellie are loving
partners together for life. Amen."
I close with words Rev. Judith Stone, once a pastor to this
congregation, gave
