Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons

Acting Out

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, December 18, 2016, the fourth Sunday of Advent.

Text: Matthew 1:18-25

 

When a child is tired or anxious or hungry or sick they will often “act out.”  That is, their discomfort or need may lead to temper tantrums, defiance of authority, or fidgety activity.  The tendency to act out doesn’t go away as we age, though it may take slightly different forms.  As we mature, self-awareness allows us to manage these reactions a bit better.  But the truth is, a “problem child” (of any age) is usually one who has a valid, verifiable need and who simply yearns to have that need met.

 

This Advent we’ve been asking the question: What does it mean to be “prophetic?”  As we bring this series to a close, it occurs to me that prophets tend to “act out”—not in a childish way, but in a way that intentionally calls attention to places of pain, hunger, burden, or illness.  Guided by the biblical scholarship of Walter Brueggemann in his ever-relevant text, The Prophetic Imagination, we have learned how our Judeo-Christian tradition inspires prophets to “act out.”  Prophets are deeply grounded in the particular story of a God who is love, a God of mercy, beauty, justice, and peace, a God who has a stubborn tendency to act for the humanizing of the world through people others might ignore—folks like enslaved people (Israel) and unwed mothers (Mary).  This sacred story provides a concrete alternative to the illusions, empty promises, and inherent violence of prevailing culture, and reminds us of what is both desirable and possible through the steadfast, eternal love of God.  With the vision and values of this story as a corrective and a guide, the prophetic witness identifies and critiques the inhumanity and injustice of the current reality.  To be prophetic is to tell the truth, to name the pain that empire seeks to silence, to allow the realities of human suffering to disrupt the status quo.  And it is also to see the beauty and possibility of the world and to imagine a world that seems unimaginable—a world where favor falls even upon the meek, vulnerable and lowly and where love and compassion prevail.  To be prophetic is to be countercultural, to challenge the ways of empire—that is, to challenge oppressive “rule by a few, economic exploitation, and religious legitimation.”[i]  Prophets and prophetic communities  “act out”—not through a temper tantrum, but through the expression of righteous anger fueled by love and the desire for justice—not through mindless defiance of authority, but through principled standing up to death-dealing powers—not through fidgety activity, but through focused organization and action in response to sneaky, systemic oppression. 

 

Prophetic witness is inherently hopeful—for it shatters the illusion that the way things are now will be forever.  Prophets are the voice crying in the wilderness of the dominant consciousness, a consciousness that seeks to steal our power.  Brueggemann writes, “The [dominant] consciousness leads people to despair about the power to move toward new life.”[ii]  Joseph was caught in the dominant consciousness of his time.  In our Gospel, we see him trying to act in a loving way without breaking the law.  He chose to shield Mary from the worst laws of the day which would have called for her to be publicly humiliated and humiliated and disgraced as pregnant and unwed.  But he also chose to follow the law and “dismiss her.” (Mt 1:19)  The dominant consciousness both provided religious legitimization for Joseph to abandon Mary and also made him afraid to move toward the new life that was being offered to him.   Caught in “the way things are,” Joseph must have feared God’s judgment if he broke the law, he must have feared humiliation, the loss of relationships,—not to mention the difficulty of working through the issues with Mary (that FaceBook relationship status would most definitely be “It’s complicated”!) 

 

But, as the story goes, Joseph fell asleep in fear but encountered a messenger of God, arising from deep in Joseph’s being through a dream. The messenger and message says, “don’t be afraid.”  And from the depths emerges the name Emmanuel, the truth that God is with us… And—see! understand!—God and God’s love is more expansive than the God propagated by the dominant consciousness.  And, as happens again and again for people throughout the sacred story, the word of God empowers Joseph to wake up with greater clarity and wisdom, and with courage to stand up to the powers that be, to challenge the status quo, to take a risk for the sake of love and in the hope of new life. 

 

“It is the task of prophetic imagination and ministry to bring people to engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God.”[iii]  We live in a culture that is so susceptible to fear and that, in these days, is vulnerable to despair and “acting out” in all sorts of destructive ways.  The ability to be mindful—that is, quiet enough to listen for the messenger of God—is challenging in this context.  But if we are open to receive the word, we are reminded today that we need not fear, that even in the midst of this moment, new life can and will be born; because our God is with us and ignites our power to move toward something new.  Even though we tend to be like Joseph, trying to do the best we can within a system that does harm, God is always initiating a new thing. God calls us to not wait for legitimation of that new thing by the dominant consciousness or current system, but rather—in principled defiance—to imagine a new system and begin living in love, compassion, and peace NOW.  This doesn’t mean that we abandon our country or our church.  Rather, as prophet and Benedictine nun, Sister Joan Chittister says, the prophetic witness is to remain “inside a sinful system, and love it anyway.” She writes, “It is easy to condemn the country, for instance.  It is possible to criticize the church.  But it is prophetic to love both church and country enough to want them to be everything they claim to be—just, honest, free, equal—and then to stay with them in their faltering attempts to do so, even if it is you yourself against whom both church and state turn in their attempts to evade the prophetic truth of the time.”[iv]  Brueggemann suggests that prophets stand within the culture and not only critique the present and imagine a hopeful future, but also let those things energize ways of being aligned with the ways of God revealed in the tradition, actions that embody our hope for the future, and actions that remain open to the truth that God can always do something completely new.

 

Over the past weeks as deeply disturbing actions, appointments, and revelations have emerged following the presidential election, one of the questions I have seen and heard often is “What can we DO?”  I want to let you know that, in addition to all that Foundry already is and does, we are organizing to participate in sacred resistance of what appear to be real threats not only to the most vulnerable among us, but to all of us and to our planet.  Under the leadership of Pastor Ben Roberts, Director of Social Justice Ministries, a yet-to-be-named team will convene in early January for the purpose of identifying, vetting, and publicizing weekly actions of protest and resistance.  We know there will be an ongoing need to engage and push back on proposed policies or actions; we also know there will be too much to keep track of on our own; we know that many opportunities will flash across our screens to engage—some which may have little (or dubious) impact.  In response, the vision is to have a group of knowledgeable, committed folks be a kind of “clearing house” for actions that will have the greatest impact and that are of the highest priority at a given moment in time.  These actions will include everything from writing a letter to making a phone call to showing up for an in-person protest.  With the weekly action shared on Sundays and through our website and social media, this will be a resource not only for those of us who are active in and through Foundry, but also for anyone who desires to stay awake and engaged in the work of prophecy.  Many of you, through your vocational work or personal networks, will have information about things that need attention. Once this new team is organized, we will share how you can share potential actions with the team. 

 

As we began this series I said, “In the present we hope for the future because we know what God has done in the past.”  In the past, God has consistently energized people like Mary and Joseph to listen up, to stand up, and to act out for the sake of a more loving, just, and human world.  Now is our time. And, thanks be to God, the promise is Emmanuel, God is with us. 

 

[i] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Second Edition, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001, pp. 13-15.

[ii] Ibid., 60.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Joan Chittister, Joan Chittister: Essential Writings, Selected by Mary Lou Kownacki and Mary Hembrow Snyder, New York: Orbis, 2014, p. 164.

Imagine

A homily preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, December 11, 2016, the third Sunday of Advent.

Texts: Isaiah 35:1-10, Matthew 11:2-11

 

How much of your life do you spend feeling disappointed?  If I’m being honest, I will tell you that disappointment has been my close companion all my life.  During this season, it is perhaps especially easy to be disappointed.  Maybe we have a vision of how things will go this year…and, so often, things just don’t turn out like we envisioned.  And this is true not only of the season, but of life in general; anyone who’s lived a while knows that human life is always more and less than we hoped for.  It’s the “less” that we tend to get stuck in. 

Today we encounter John the Baptist again.  We see him not out in the wilderness being his dreadlocked, camel-hair-wearing, locust-eating, charismatic, fire and brimstone self, but rather ten chapters ahead where he’s landed in prison.  John is evidently disappointed.   He dispatches some of his disciples to ask Jesus a doozy of a question:  “Are you the one who was to come or should we expect someone else?” (I hear subtext: “You know, someone better?”)  Jesus isn’t the kind of person or leader that John had envisioned.  “When John announced the coming of God’s kingdom and proclaimed Jesus as God’s anointed…he expected the world to change; now, some months (or even years?) later, things seem all too dreadfully the same…”[i]  The kind of Messiah John was looking for was the one who would clean things up, make things better, get rid of all the problem people and the injustice of a world not in our control.  Today we see John wondering whether his hopes about Jesus have been misguided. 

I don’t know about you, but I can relate to John’s disappointment.  Sometimes all the talk of hope, peace, and joy seem empty when, even after all these years, all these Advents, after all these Christmases “the more things change, the more they stay the same”—dreadfully the same. 

Walter Brueggemann says that prophets challenge that kind of thinking.  He says, “it is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing” alternative futures.[ii]  The ways of empire make us feel stuck.  The masters of empire try “to banish all speech but their own”[iii] and offer bread and circuses to keep people distracted and sated. As a result, Brueggemann says, “we have neither the wits nor the energy nor the courage to think freely about imagined alternative futures.”[iv]  John pointed to a future messiah; and Jesus affirms John’s powerful, countercultural prophetic ministry. But even John couldn’t fully wrest himself from the expected future to imagine what God was up to.  Jesus is not the expected “same old, same old” but rather is God doing a new thing, something people couldn’t imagine would ever happen.

What Jesus reports to John (and to us) is that he has come to be with the vulnerable, with those who for centuries have little reason to expect that anyone would go out of their way to care for them; Jesus has come to those who thought their situation was hopeless.  Counter to what John may have wanted, there is no celebrity face-off between Jesus and Herod on cable news; no flashy sign of a big ax whacking away at the root of the tree, chaff getting thrown into unquenchable fire, the known world instantly, miraculously sorted into the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Instead, simple and amazing things have happened in people’s lives, things that bring surprising, unexpected, unimaginable newness. Jesus is living and loving counter to the prevailing way, counter to the prevailing expectation!  // I wonder whether John could let go of his disappointment in order to see that.  As satisfying as it might be for Jesus to have breathed fire in some awesome, Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark-kind of way, getting rid of the chaff in every life and heart, that’s not really his style.  And, therefore, we learn that’s not really God’s style.  It seems that God insists on taking a smaller, quieter, simpler, more vulnerable approach to salvation. 

Jesus comes to human beings—to us—in our need in order to inaugurate a new life.  And, if he’s paying attention as he sits in the darkness of a prison cell, John just might have the ears to hear this as good news of great joy.  At the end of his résumé, Jesus adds “blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”  In other words, Jesus says, “This is who I am and this is what I do…I come to you in your need and meet you in your brokenness, I touch your hearts and minds to open your imagination to new possibilities, I offer unconditional love and mercy…and this is the nature of God and of God’s saving grace.  Some will find it unsatisfactory and disappointing.  But blessed are those who can hear and see the gift being offered…” 

To be prophetic is to have the imagination to hear and see God’s grace and to imagine a world that seems unimaginable—a world where favor falls even upon the meek, vulnerable and lowly and where love and compassion prevail.  (If we can’t imagine it, how can we work toward it?)  Prophetic imagination is what allows us to live in hope, peace, trust, and joy—even when it seems absurd. To be prophetic is to let the world laugh at our hope.  It is to persevere in peace.  It is to trust that new every morning is God’s love for us and that all day long God is working for good in the world.  To be prophetic is, as prophet/poet Wendell Berry says, to “be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”[v]  It is to sing in the face of all that is wrong: “Glory to God in the highest and, on earth, peace to all people!”

 

[i] David Lose, “Disappointed with God at Christmastime,” published on WorkingPreacher.org, http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=2911

[ii]Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Second Edition, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001, p. 40.

[iii]Ibid., 65.

[iv]Ibid., 40.

[v]“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems, 2008; New Collected Poems, 2012.

Beautiful Broken World

A homily preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC December 4, 2016, the second Sunday of Advent.

 

 Texts: Isaiah 11:1-10, Matthew 3:1-12 

 

Why do we have to feel pain?  Our physical bodies are designed to alert us when there is danger; when we touch something hot, pain causes us to protect ourselves.  Ignoring chronic physical pain allows whatever is causing the issue to get worse.  Emotional pain is less straightforward perhaps, but wisdom reveals that there are similar dynamics at play.  Loneliness, betrayal, fear, disappointment, insecurity, guilt, loss, grief…these things have to be named and addressed or the pain of them will continue unabated.  We know that denial or suppression of our emotional pain does not make the source or the pain disappear, but rather can lead to all sorts of nasty, destructive behaviors.  In order for any healing or freedom to happen, we have to allow ourselves to feel the pain; we have to acknowledge the pain, be in it, go through it…  And that just stinks.  It is hard. We generally don’t want to do it. We try to get out of it in all sorts of ways:  distractions, addictions, rationalizations.

 

There is a sinister way in which this human aversion to pain becomes systemically magnified in human societies.  Our guru for this series on what it means to be a prophetic witness, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, describes empire as oppressive “rule by a few, economic exploitation, and religious legitimation.”[i]  And he says that this reality leads to a “numbed consciousness of denial.”[ii]  Brueggemann says, “Imperial economics is designed to keep people satiated so that they do not notice.  Its politics is intended to block out the cries of the denied ones.  Its religion is to be an opiate so that no one discerns misery alive in the heart of God.”[iii]  In other words, the imperial reality distracts, rationalizes, and drugs the populace so that the awareness of suffering and human pain won’t get in the way of business as usual and a healthy bottom line for those in the top 1%.

 

Brueggemann insists that part of what it means to be prophetic is to name the pain, to cry out in grief, to allow the realities of human suffering to disrupt the status quo.  He writes, “The replacing of numbness with compassion, that is, the end of cynical indifference and the beginning of noticed pain, signals a social revolution.”[iv]  Just as in our personal lives, the beginning of societal healing and liberation is to tell the truth, to name the source of our pain, to acknowledge that there is hurt, and to begin to address it with love and compassion.

 

Several years ago I came across a collection of “Poetry for Peace” written by kindergarten through 8^th grade students.[v]  You can imagine how sweet some of the entries were.  A kindergarten class wrote, “…PEACE is when we can work together in our class and in our world…PEACE is when we can listen quietly on the learning rug…PEACE is when we take turns and share without being told to.”  But just when I started feeling sentimental about how wise children are in their prophetic vision of how the world should be, I came across seventh grader, Skye Green’s poem simply entitled “Peace”:

My belly starved

Unhappy, I eat once

Muddy streams I drink

Evil invades my house

Takes me, my sisters

They slap my mother beloved

Sorrow, pain.

Can’t do anything

Dark weeps,

Gunshots, crying

“God, why us?”

Hard life, pain,

All over again,

Father died,

Killed by evil.

 

I am a man.

Where’s my childhood?

 

This is (also) prophetic speech. To be prophetic is to cry out, to name what is real in all its messiness and pain and disappointment and anger and fear.  Brueggemann suggests that poetry, lyric, and metaphor is the primary language of prophecy.  Not that we have to be able to rhyme, write poems, or know meter and music to be prophetic.  Rather, the point is that the common prose is often unable to keep us awake.  Skye Green and prophets through the ages get to the center of things, to the truth of things in words that don’t go together in the day-to-day way of writing articles and briefs and reports and action plans. 

 

Did you hear John the Baptizer out there in the wilderness this morning?!  He shows up bathed not only in the waters of the Jordan river, but also up to his eyeballs in the flow of prophecy:  John employs the prophetic poetry of the past to point toward God’s future—all the while calling people to change their ways in the now.  And when the Pharisees and Sadducees appear to make a show of their populism—to show that they are “down with the people,” John uses a killer metaphor—brood of vipers!—to critique and break through their rationalizations. “Vipers are mostly nocturnal creatures, seeking their prey after dark.  In the daytime, vipers camouflage themselves and, if encountered, may appear sluggish; but they can lash out in a split second when provoked. Vipers have limited stores of venom; they may bite humans without poisoning them, saving their venom for the smaller creatures on which they can more easily feed.” So, metaphorically, vipers hide—like the religious elite who want to hide behind their tribal pedigree; vipers do the most damage to the “little” ones, those perhaps considered “non- or sub-human  in society—those least able to contribute materially to the economic cycle on which the empire depends.”[vi]  

 

John shows us what a prophet looks like:  Grounded in and guided by the sacred story, a prophet publicly speaks up—using language that quickens the heart and cuts to the core of things— to name what is real, to critique what is inhuman and unjust in the world, to notice the pain and to give it voice.  Prophetic witness will always cry out in grief over the suffering of innocents, the callous inhumanity of so many in power, the greedy destruction of what is good and true and beautiful.  Because a prophet looks upon the world and sees beauty and goodness, love and harmony…sees both what is and what can be.  But a prophet also sees that things are deeply broken, sees that we all participate through capitulation to the culture, and sees that things—that people—must change.  So a prophet will always name the pain of our lives and of our world because that is the beginning of social revolution.  A prophet—and, by God’s grace, this prophetic community—will tell perhaps the hardest truth:  there is a limit to what we can do; that truth brings its own pain and calls for humility and surrender (talk about countercultural!).  But a prophet proclaims: in the face of death and the worst the world can do, when human powers fail and human community breaks down, God shows up ready to do something new.  The prophetic witness—whether that is your own voice or the collective witness of this congregation—will always say: “One more powerful than I is coming…” who will gather up all the broken pieces and make us whole.

 

[i] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Second Edition, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001, pp. 13-15.

[ii]Ibid., p. 81.

[iii] Ibid., p. 35.

[iv] Ibid., p. 91.

[v] Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT conducts an annual “Poetry for Peace” contest, receiving submissions from K-8^th grade students. The winning selections are brought together into a small publication.

[vi] Thanks to my colleague, David Lott, for his “brooding about vipers” commentary on FaceBook! I am quoting his good research here.

The Past is Present

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, November 27, 2016, the first Sunday of Advent.

 Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5, Matthew 24:36-44

 

 

In the fantastic 1987 film The Princess Bride, self-proclaimed genius, Vizzini, says for the umpteenth time, “Inconceivable!” and the sobered up-revenge-seeking swordsman, Inigo Montoya, replies, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

 

As we enter into this new Christian year and the season of Advent, our focus here at Foundry is on prophecy—and particularly what it means to be a prophetic witness.  The word “prophetic” gets used a lot these days, assigned to all sorts of words and actions.  Sometimes I wonder whether that word doesn’t mean what we think it means.  For example, some will say that pastoral ministry isn’t prophetic ministry.  Some will think of “prophetic” as something mainly done outside the bounds of traditional churches.  Others might think of prophetic action as always being driven by anger and public protest; and still others as something that mostly proclaims future judgment.  Foundry Church’s call includes transforming the world through “prophetic leadership.”  So it is important for us to have clarity about what it really means to be “prophetic.”  Over these next several weeks, we will explore this together and today we make a modest beginning.

 

Renowned Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann describes what he calls “tired misconceptions” about prophecy this way:  “The dominant conservative misconception, evident in manifold bumper stickers, is that the prophet is a fortune-teller, a predictor of things to come (mostly ominous), usually with specific reference to Jesus…While the prophets are in a way future-tellers, they are concerned with the future as it impinges upon the present.  Conversely, liberals who abdicated and turned all futuring over to conservatives have settled for a focus on the present. Thus prophecy is alternatively reduced to righteous indignation and, in circles where I move, prophecy is mostly understood as social action.”[i]   Brueggemann goes on to say that prophecy is BOTH about pointing to a faithful future AND about faithful critique and action in the present.  But he says that even holding the conservative and liberal tendencies together doesn’t capture the fullness of what biblical prophecy is really about.  “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”[ii]  To be a prophetic witness is to concretely live, speak, believe, and choose in ways counter to the dominant culture.

 

Understood in this way, things like practicing Sabbath, tithing, and humility are prophetic acts right along with acts of social justice and belief in a living, radically free God. Brueggemann insists that the most difficult and crucial thing for the people of God to do is to resist being co-opted by illusions, to resist becoming enthralled with the claims, values, powers, and principalities of the world that cannot keep their promises.  Listen to some of those voices: “If you work all the time you will be rewarded with success and meaning and respect…Be afraid that you won’t have enough—and make sure you have plenty for unchecked spending on yourself…Come on—you know how things really work—throw your weight around and show ‘em who’s boss!...” Our culture of consumerism, self-help, virtual reality, and might-makes-right is like a siren-call that can lure even the most well-meaning among us into capitulation, numbness and apathy, as if this is simply the way things are and we can’t do anything but go along with it.

 

But if we’re paying attention, if we stay awake, we will be able to resist. How do we stay awake?  Active participation in a community that tells “the old, old story” not as nostalgia, but as a grounding, energizing shared history is a place to start.  Brueggemann suggests that a prophetic community is one in which “a long and available memory…sinks the present generation deep into an identifiable past that is available in song and story.”[iii]  This doesn’t mean that prophetic witness is stuck in the past, but rather, that our story grounds us in what is real, provides a concrete alternative to the illusions of prevailing culture, and reminds us of what is possible through the steadfast, eternal love of God.

 

On election day this year, Foundry offered morning, midday, and evening prayer services. At noon, we sang what is traditionally called the Gloria Patri—“Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”  I sang this every Sunday growing up.  It’s ingrained in me—like the Lord’s Prayer— in that way that makes it easy to just say the words without paying attention.  But on that Tuesday, singing the familiar words, I found myself brought to tears.  What was going on? What had touched my heart and mind was hope—the awareness that no matter what happened in the election, no matter what happens ever, the God who is at the beginning of all things IS now and ever shall BE.  Awareness of the steadfast, eternal presence of God brought (and brings!) the assurance that no matter what mess we humans make of things, no matter how lost we become, no matter how much damage we do to one another and to the creation, God has been, is, and will be at work to restore, renew, resurrect.  This assurance is not just wishful thinking or simple human optimism.  Christian hope in the presence and life-giving power of God is based on a lived history of a flesh and blood people.  The story we tell—a story of a God who creates all that is by the power of a loving word, who draws close to humankind in loving companionship, who is radically free to act in unexpected ways through and for unlikely people, who is passionate and unyielding in the quest to make us truly human (yet always without sacrificing our burden of free will), whose heart is literally broken by our stubborn, selfish rejection, and who has the power to bring life out of death—this story and this God is real, revealed to us through the scriptures, the prophets, and most fully in Jesus.  It is our history.  It is our story.  We are the people of God, the people of this particular, historically engaged God.  In the present, we hope for the future because we know what God has done in the past.

 

This is our “long and available memory… available in song and story.”  The past is present as a living memory and as a living hope.  Hope in God’s loving presence and life-renewing power allows us to believe that things will not always be the way they are today.  And our story affirms that as God’s people we have work to do as we lean into an alternative future.  Hope in a God revealed as with us and for us empowers us to live NOW in a way that is in line with the Kin-dom vision that will one day be brought to fulfillment.  That is really what our Gospel passage is about today.  At first glance, it seems a bit scary—and the whole of chapter 24 is pretty challenging, apocalyptic stuff.  But the basic theme of the passage is to keep alert—to watch and pray and persevere in living the life we’re made for right now.  We are to guard against being lulled to sleep or satiation by the sirens of the age.  Alert and awake, we are called to live in the hope and freedom and love of God as revealed by Jesus.  

 

Advent and Christmas is a time when memory and story is so powerful.  So many symbols—objects, songs, rituals—remind us of people and experiences that have shaped us and given our lives meaning.  I don’t know of any time of the year when my own past feels so palpably present.  And the old Christian story we tell at this time of year is a story that we are aching to experience in our world today: the appearance of God’s love in flesh, the promise of a world restored, the gifts of wonder and wisdom, beauty and joy, peace with justice.  Amidst the co-option and commercialization of our story, over the siren call to make the first coming of Christ saccharine and nostalgic, the jarring apocalyptic words of our tradition shake us and wake us to tell and to live the real story every day of our lives until Christ comes again and all things are truly made new.  The story we tell in this holy season is a story we need—it is a message the world needs: God loves you. God is with you. God is for you. God will not leave nor forsake you. God comes to you in ways both simple and profound. The Kin-dom of God is as near as your own breath. Look! Listen! Wake up!

 

We are God’s people, people with a particular history, grounded in a peculiar way of being that, from age to age, runs counter to the prevailing culture.  The temptation is to fall asleep, to check out, to give in to the self-serving, self-satisfied, self-defensive, self-made ways of the world.  But a prophetic community—this prophetic community—will not allow that to happen.  Today we claim the prophetic work of telling a story of love, mercy, compassion, and new life made possible in and through a God who has proved again and again that the way of abundant life is found not in selfish, defensive control, but rather in self-giving, vulnerable freedom.  Our shared, sacred story not only gives us solid ground upon which to stand, it provides a community with whom to walk and work and points us, together, in the direction of God’s promised future for all people. That is the work of our whole lives—not something only undertaken in this place.  Foundry is simply a prophetic community that, by the grace of God, tries to keep us awake.

 

[i] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Second Edition, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001, p. 3.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid., p. xvi.

Testify!

Testify!

 

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC November 113, 2016, the twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost.

Text:  Luke 21:5-19

 

I begin today by telling my truth:  this past week has been excruciatingly painful and difficult.  In past presidential elections, my preferred candidate has lost plenty of times.  That’s not what this is about.  What I’m dealing with grows out of the convictions of my faith and the contours of my experience.  My faith and experience have raised concern and discomfort about both Democrat and Republican candidates and administrations in the past.  What is happening now, however, feels like a whole new category of concern.  I’m not so naïve to have believed that a campaign fueled by fear, bullying, and boldfaced racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and prejudice of every kind couldn’t win.  But I was caught off-guard by the depth of my reactions to the election results—grief, rage, humiliation, the visceral sense of my own vulnerability as a woman and survivor of sexual assault; and painful awareness of the much greater vulnerability of my sisters and brothers who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, black, brown, immigrants, Muslim, disabled, or poor.  I haven’t even begun to unravel my thoughts and feelings about the hypocrisy represented by the polling data related to Christians. Add to that, worry about the safety of the planet and our relationship with nations around the world… I know full well that there are others who are having different reactions to the past week, who hold very different perspectives, many of which are truly not fueled by hatred.  I am profoundly grateful that we live in a country in which the transfer of power is accomplished without violence—something I pray we as a nation never undermine or take for granted.  But today, I feel I must begin with the truth of where I am.  I am anxious and fearful for people I love and for what may be in our collective future as a nation.

 

In our Gospel assigned for today from Luke, those who heard Jesus must have felt the same way as he predicts the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. The temple represented not only the center of religious and civic life, but also the very presence of God among the people.  Nothing would have felt more devastating.  For us to make any sense of this passage, it helps to understand that the author of Luke is writing around fifteen years after Jerusalem was sacked by Rome in 70 CE.  When Luke’s version of the Jesus story got into the hands of the early Christians, the whole story had already happened—including what Jesus talks about in our passage today:  not one stone of the temple left upon another, nation against nation, arrests, persecutions, betrayals.  All of these have occurred.  The Romans have killed the Jews—including Jewish Christians—and have razed Jerusalem.  Those holding the book of Luke for the first time are people who have suffered, are suffering, persecuted for who they are, persecuted for their faith, persecuted by those in power, reviled by family and friends, and some even tortured and murdered.  The first hearers of this text know this story.  It has already happened TO THEM—the pain still fresh, the dust still settling… I imagine them adding their own, personal stories to the accounts of persecution. Into the flow of memory and pain, Jesus throws a line, teaching that even victims, those powerless against stronger forces, have the power to choose what they believe and to be a witness: “This [awful situation] will give you an opportunity to testify.”  These are not words only pointing backward to those who have already stood firm in their faith.  These are words for those reading the story—those who are still suffering, still struggling, still being persecuted and facing trials and temptations.  These are words for us today.

 

Today, this gathered body and our nation as a whole is facing trials and temptations. There is suffering and struggle, division and demonization, anger and confusion, fear and deep uncertainty.  I hear blame flowing in every possible direction.  Theories about what is going on in our nation abound.  The “problem” is described in terms of rural versus urban, white versus black, educated versus under-educated, establishment versus anti-establishment, rich versus poor. “Versus” is the common denominator… The “problem,” depending upon who is speaking, is “coastal elites” or immigrants or evangelicals or Muslims or the media… // The best I can tell, there is not just one “problem” but rather a whole mess of deep-seated, and often interrelated issues that have contributed to our current situation.  In this and every moment of deep division and struggle, subtlety and nuance and the realities of history and complex intersections in human community are often lost as we cast about for some scapegoat for our own anxiety and fear and rage.  But there is no quick “fix.” Blaming someone won’t bring transformation. 

 

This is not to say that there is nothing to be called out, renounced, and challenged.  Lord knows Jesus didn’t mince words with purveyors of injustice.  But Jesus never ever acted with violence or hatred or deceit.  He was angry at the death-dealing ways of Empire; he was angry at the perversion of religious law. But Jesus’ anger was fueled by his love for people and a desire for all people to experience the liberating love of God and life in God’s Kin-dom; it was not an anger seeking a scapegoat, but rather reconciliation, mercy, and justice. 

 

You and I find ourselves in this complicated and volatile moment in our nation’s history, gathered as a community who bear the name of Jesus the Christ.  And Jesus speaks to us today saying: “This will give you an opportunity to testify.”  What will your testimony be?  How are you going to respond?  How are you going to choose to live?

That has been the question I’ve asked myself again and again over these past days.  The challenge has been to feel what I feel even as I keep perspective of the larger picture, to resist being pulled into polarized, absolutized, scapegoating and blaming scenarios on the one hand, and to resist capitulation to any easy “peace” on the other.  The struggle is real!   But my simple grounding is this:  I am a Jesus-follower and that means I am called to love, compassion, forgiveness, and humility.  I am called to sacrificial solidarity with the most vulnerable.  I am called to non-violent resistance to empire and to courageous renunciation of weaponized religion.  I am called to mutual respect and reconciliation as I seek fulfillment of God’s vision of a peaceable Kin-dom.  In other words, I am called to Love God. Love each “other.” Change the world. 

 

Here at 16^th and P Street, NW, we find ourselves called into a great struggle for the heart and soul of our nation and of our church and of the Christian faith itself.  This struggle is not new; it has been going on in every age and generation around the globe—it is the ongoing struggle for God’s vision of love and mercy and peace with justice to appear on earth as it is in heaven.  The struggle is not new, but this is our time, our moment in the struggle.  This struggle, Jesus reminds us, provides an opportunity to testify.  What will our testimony be?  Love God. Love each other. Change the world.  That has been our testimony here at Foundry and it will continue.  Our testimony will be to try to follow Jesus who laid down his life for the sake of love and justice.  Our testimony will be to support policies and politicians that support the wellbeing of all people.  Our testimony will be to challenge any policy or politician that does harm.  We will continue to proclaim and seek concrete ways to witness that Black Lives Matter.  We will continue to embrace and cherish LGBTQ persons, families, and marriages.  We will continue to advocate for the poor and homeless, to feed the hungry, to walk gently upon this planet.  We will continue to be Foundry and to do what we know we are called to do. But here’s the thing: I believe this work will require even more from us in the years to come. Already dangerous streets will likely become more dangerous, not less.  We must not only be alert to emerging needs for care, sanctuary, and support, but we simply must stay in the struggle for the long haul.  Jesus says, “By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

Where does the endurance come from?  How do we find the energy and will to persevere?  How do we manage to keep perspective and to be wise and discerning when all the forces in the world make us want to revert to the reptilian brain of reactivity, fight or flight, scapegoating, and all the rest, when grief tempts us to fall into the abyss?  The endurance we need is not something that we can achieve by our own strength.  We need help.  And our help comes from God.  If we lose our ability to trust in the promise of God’s presence, God’s goodness, God’s faithfulness, then we are sure to fall into despair or worse.  New every morning, we have to choose…choose to trust God’s love, choose to trust that God’s vision of peace is more than a pipe dream, that the lions and the lambs, the hawks and the doves, will not hurt or destroy, that justice will finally reign, that holocaust of people and of creation will cease, that people will learn to love one another and that the church will one day be the resurrected Body of Christ and not just the crucified and broken Body.  We need to trust that God’s love has triumphed even when the empire strikes back and seems to be winning the day.  We need to trust that our lives are part of God’s life and that God will give us grace in order to not only withstand the pains of life, but also to act, to testify to our faith, hope, and love in the midst, that God’s grace will help our lives be concrete signs of the inbreaking of God’s reign on earth as it is in heaven.

Towers and temples fall, illusions crumble, eco-systems disappear, empires come and go, flood and fire are real, hearts are broken, bodies age, fall ill, and die.  “Heaven and earth will pass away,” says Jesus, “but my words will not pass away.” (Lk. 21:33)  Jesus’s words and life testify to this truth:  what truly endures is God—God’s presence, God’s Word, God’s promise, God’s love; GOD endures.  Forces seen and unseen keep trying to run God off and stamp God out and break God down.  They thought they had done it when they tore down the temple. They thought they had done it when they nailed Jesus to a tree.  But the love of God is stronger than every evil, every suffering, every death-dealing, destruction-seeking power.  Everything else falls apart and passes away, but God is indestructible.  And by God’s amazing grace at work in our lives, here and there and now and again our own little lives will testify to that truth even though some call us fools.  Our hope draws us forward into a life that requires engagement in the struggle, a life that is not free from pain, uncertainty and risk, but that is full of meaning, vitality, and love.  Our hope is not in vain.  What we hope for has already happened, after all.  We know the story of the cross. And we know the story of Easter morning.  And we are an Easter people—so even now in the face of this present moment of struggle:  hope, love, trust, be brave… this will be powerful testimony.  Hold on to each other.  God holds on to us from age to age until all things are made new.