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June 5, 2005
Rev. John Auer
Scripture:
Genesis 12:1-9, Matthew 9:9-13
“Transitions &
Tributes, Journeys & Jaunts: The Beat Goes On!”
Ruth Duck long ago wrote some new words to
the Lancashire tune of “Lead On, O King Eternal.” In the spirit of life and
faith journeys we share -- as persons, as relationships, as families, as
congregations, even as nations – and in our sense since Abraham and Sarah that
God is not fixed in any one place but journeys with us, even before and behind
us, Ruth Duck calls her words, “Lead On, O Cloud of Presence” –
“Lead on, O cloud of Presence, the exodus is
come, / in wilderness and desert our tribe shall make its home. / Our slavery
left behind us, new hopes within us row. / We seek the land of promise where
milk and honey flow. “Lead on, O fiery Pillar, we follow yet with fears, / but
we shall come rejoicing though joy be born of tears. / We are not lost, though
wandering, for by your light we come, / and we are still God’s people. The
journey is our home.”
The journey is our home. We might pause at
the beginning of every summer, traditional season of travel for many people, to
offer such a prayer as we find in our Words for Meditation – “Lord God our
Father and Mother, you kept Abraham and Sarah in safety throughout the days of
their pilgrimage, you led the children of Israel through the midst of the sea,
and by a star you led the Wise Men to the infant Jesus. Protect us now in this
time as we set out to travel, make our ways safe and our homecomings joyful, and
bring us at last to our heavenly home, where you dwell in glory with your Child
and the Holy Spirit, one God forever.”
We want to say of our life in faith this
morning that we do not have to go anywhere to know that life is a trip! Life
can be full of false starts, wrong turns, and dead ends. Life can be full of
bumps and stalls and detours of every kind. I mean, just try getting around
Reno and Sparks any time soon! Life can be all too full of awkward arrivals,
short stays, and sudden departures. We can get tired, depending on where we are
in life, of saying so many hellos and good-byes. We make up so much of life on
the way, on the run, as if it were only all about getting to some place else, as
if the journey could not be its own reward – all the sights, the sounds, the
smells, the tastes, the touches, and all the feelings and all the memories of
life. Even the very meal we share on the way, our thanksgiving for life and
communion with one another, originates in the experience of making haste to
leave bondage in Egypt. It becomes with Jesus a meal for those with no fixed
place to call their home, no sure place even to spend the night.
On this Sunday of special transition for
director Mike Cleveland and for the Chancel Choir, and on this Sunday of
tribute, of recognition and honor, to as many volunteers in and of the church as
we can think of (We always will come up short! That’s in the nature of how
congregations work. There are always more people and more spirits contributing
than we think there are!) I want to express the hope that we can find ways
together to become more aware and intentional about celebrating and supporting
one another though all the changes of life. There are so many – retirement and
relocation, subtraction and addition, separation and renewal, injury and
illness, discernment and discovery, call and commission, work and vocation –
These are just some of the ways our lives and relationships, families and
communities, are changing all the time. We could not and probably would not
share every detail. But how might we bring – to worship, to fellowship, to
support group, to prayer – those changes that challenge the life and the growth
of our faith as a family of faith together? How might we be sure we are saying
and doing “Thank You” to and for one another as often as we can?
It takes all of us to be the church, to hear
the calls of God in our lives, in our own ways, in terms we can grasp, and in
responses we can make. No two responses, no two ways of serving and witnessing
for our faith, in the church and in the world, will look or sound or act exactly
alike. Whatever we do, however we do it, is bound to get us in some kind of
trouble with someone some of the time. Certainly there will be times we feel at
great odds with ourselves – Who are we, really, in mind? In body? In spirit?
What gives our lives conviction and faith, courage and hope, compassion and
love? Given that our transitions may be many, our tributes few and far between,
what is worth doing? How do we keep going? Who is important to us, both in
general and in particular? What can we do to show their importance to us, given
how little time and space we work with?
Abraham and Sarah here become our parents in
faith. Their vocation in response to the calling of God – God about whom they
know nothing but their own direct experience! Imagine how far-out fanatical
they are perceived to be! – Their vocation begins with upheaval! With gross
disruption of their whole lives – country and kindred and home! They are called
to let go and let God, to live by the promise of God. No matter how awesome for
us all that promise may be, no matter how fervently we may believe in it, taking
just that first step in unsettling, upsetting the whole of our lives often seems
a huge step beyond us. Surely we cannot take such steps alone. We are the only
ones in the end who can put one foot in front of the other and start in a new
direction. But we can be so much more than alone if we let ourselves be
surrounded by that “faith-family” called church, keeping us in that “faith-talk”
called prayer, doing that “faith-thing” called breaking bread, literally
becoming companions, com-pan-eros, together.
The old song says, “Freedom’s just another
word for nothing left to lose.” If Abraham and Sarah are our parents, Jesus is
our brother in faith. Jesus literally loses his life, in others and in us, long
before he dies on the cross. The cross goes wherever he goes, meets whomever he
meets, calls whomever he calls, befriends whomever Jesus befriends. Jesus lives
with the constant cross of the risk of being so known by the company he keeps.
Gustavo Gutierrez puts it so unsubtly: “Welcoming sinners, the sick, the
unworthy manifests the real universality of the offer of salvation which Jesus
is bringing. God’s love is concretely universal in the expressed partiality and
preference for the humanly unworthy and despicable.” The ancient “preferential
option” of God for the poor.
Like Abraham and Sarah setting out for a land
only promised, unseen and unknown to them, so Jesus spends his whole life
crossing borders and climbing barriers meant to distinguish us and to divide us
from one another. Look around at ourselves, here in our church and in our
larger community. There’s nobody here but us sinners! Those “others” who seem
so bound to get us in trouble with them! Look around at ourselves. What
unlikely company for God to appoint – sinners and even tax collectors like
Matthew! Old folks like Sarah and Abraham! Too few, too busy, too tired, too
distracted, too cautious, too liberal, too conservative, too generous, too
cash-flowed-out! What choice has God got but to use whom God can! Sitting with
sinners each Sunday is scandalous to us all.
Jesus will not withhold himself from us.
Jesus will still be seen with us, identified with us, connected with us,
invested in us, even now still at table with us, breaking bread, in company with
us, every last step of the way. In that very way, offering himself, his very
life- flesh and blood, to everyone, Jesus is strangely fulfilling God’s promise
to make “a great nation” of Sarah and Abraham. It just may not look like any
“great nation” we know. God says God is willing, through us, to bless every
last family, every last person, on earth! Jesus is always learning, always
growing, always enlarging the realm of “acceptable” followers and disciples.
How do we ever keep up with the nerve of this Jesus?
In words of tribute to us all, written by
Marianne Williamson of Marin County, then made popular in the 1994 Inaugural
Address of South African President Nelson Mandela, who spent twenty-seven years
in solitary confinement and hard labor – talk about unlikely suspects for God’s
choosing! –
Our deepest fear is not that we are
inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our dignity, not our darkness,
that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves: “Who are we to be
brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?” Actually, who are we NOT to
be? You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the
world. There’s nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people
won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the
glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it is in
everyone.
It takes all of us to be the church. Thank
you, Mike Cleveland. Thank you, all! Amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
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