Truth and Compassion

Pentecost, the celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit, the birthpangs of the church. The first sign the church was filled with the Spirit was that the disciples were able to speak the truth. Three thousand people were so convicted that they joined the church. The second sign the church was filled with the Spirit was that the church became a compassionate community. So the two characteristics we are given here of a Spirit-filled church is that it is known for its truth and compassion.
It is never enough for a church to proclaim its truth Sunday after Sunday. There is nothing distinctive about an organization claiming it has the truth. Competing political organizations all claim the truth. Non- profits try to convince you of the truth of their cause. Advertisements peddle their products as the true answer to your needs. Most of the conflicts in society are between people who claim to have the truth. What would be distinctive is if the truth made people loving.
“All who believed were together and had all things in common. They would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need . . . with glad and generous hearts.” In Acts chapter four, we are told that Barnabas chose to sell a field he owned, and he laid the proceeds at the feet of the apostles that they might care for the needs of the church. Can you imagine belonging to a group of people who cared so much about you that they would sell their possessions to take care of your needs? Not because they had to, but because they got to. Because they had glad and generous hearts. Well, you do belong to such a community. Over the last year as I have talked with so many about their commitments to our church’s campaign to build community, I have been moved by the Barnabases living among us. Those who have caught the vision for what we are trying to do have told me they will be traveling less, putting off buying a new car, or selling off their stock, all in order to give to you. It’s not because they have to. It’s because they get to. And it’s because they have glad and generous hearts.
The need that we are trying to meet with this campaign is the great yearning for community today. After decades and decades of rampant individualism, self-constructed lives, lives unteathered to the great claims of a holy tradition, and each of us seeking to enlarge his or her own borders, what have we found? Some of us are successful but lonely and so very confused about the holy purpose to life. Others around us are not so successful. We would love to make a difference for them but don’t know how. We need to be a part of a community that will help us remember who we are and whose we are. And we need a community that will allow us to be loving to those who have so little.
Too often we are dominated by the self. We worry about our jobs, our money, our health, our future. When we don’t get a promotion, we wonder about our dreams. When we get home and the family doesn’t rise to salute, we wonder why they don’t appreciate me. When we get stuck in traffic, we ask, “Why are they doing this to me?” After a week jammed with anxiety about me, by the time we get to church on Sunday, if you are like the rest of us, you are sick and tired of the self. You are ready for someone who has a better story going than you. That’s why we just keep talking about Jesus Christ here. He saves us from ourselves. He fills our lives with holy mission. And he gives us love for them.
Those who get the deep truth of that, like Barnabas, are just so glad. And glad people are always generous. This is what the text means in claiming they “had glad and generous hearts.” So if you are not glad and generous, you don’t get the deep truth because our truth makes us loving, glad, and generous. It is for this reason that we have not marketed this building campaign, or our church’s community, for what you will get out of it. It would be easy to look at our plans and to say, “I’m not getting much out of this.” It would be easy to look at our ministry and to say, “They are not meeting my needs at the church.” You may be right on both accounts. But that is because our focus is not to appeal to your dreams but to the dreams Christ is unfolding among us. In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Nothing is more dangerous to authentic community than our dreams for it. For we will always love our dreams more than community, which is not a human idea but a divine reality.” That doesn’t mean it is perfect. And it doesn’t mean we don’t have dreams. But our dreams are not the dreams for a community but the dreams of a community. Dreams for a community are about what you want it to do for you. The dreams of a community are about what the community dreams.
One of the dreams of our community is that everyone who enters here would encounter Jesus Christ not only in worship, but also in education and in hospitable fellowship. That is why we have to make changes to our facility. We don’t just need better accessibility for those with disabilities, a better way to receive visitors. We also need to encourage two or three to come together, even over coffee, because Jesus Christ is in their midst. One of the glorious dreams of this community is that we would be known for our glad and generous hearts. This may be the most important reason for our campaign. Again, truth is manifested in love. And people who love most want to give. We need to commit to this community because giving is what we do when we are at our best. You, too, can be Barnabas—not because you’ve got to, but because you get to. Because your heart is glad and generous.

On the road again

“As they were going along the road, someone said....” All four of the gospel writers love to use this “as they were walking along” phrase. That’s because our encounters with Jesus always occur along the way in life. Jesus can find you while you are on the way to your first apartment or the nursing home. He can find you on the way to a great career or a terrible divorce, on the way to give birth or on the way to bury the dead. You thought you were on the road up, or the road down, but once you encounter Jesus along the way in life, you’ll discover that he always bids you to follow him on a new road.
Jesus never stops moving. He didn’t buy any houses. He didn’t join any clubs, PTAs, pension plans, or even churches. He just kept moving toward Jerusalem. And if you are going to follow him, you’ll find that he is constantly moving your life around as well.
Have you ever been at a place where you got your life just right? You have close friends who
are always available when you need them, your family members are all healthy, work is going
pretty well, and you’ve got yourself a good church where they sing hymns you know. Usually. Didn’t you want to say, “Okay, this is it. This is just right. Nobody move!” Well, take a picture because that is always the moment when Jesus blows a whistle and says, “Everybody out of the pool!”
Do you want to know what 2008 will bring? I can’t tell you that. I can promise you what you
will find in the new year—change. Now, why is that always true? Why do you have to keep letting go of cherished things and adjusting to new things? Doesn’t Jesus know you’re an old dog? Why do have to keep learning new tricks? Families, friendships, workplaces, congregations, the city—they all just keep changing. Why can’t everything stay right where it is? Because you are not to Jerusalem yet.
What is so special about Jerusalem? Most of the time, the disciples don’t know. You see, Jerusalem is not just an ancient city. In the Bible it stands as a symbol, as the place of our salvation; it’s the place where we finally understand what Jesus is doing. At the end of the New Testament we are told about a New Jerusalem where God’s reign is clear, where all creation is restored, and where there are no more tears. So Jerusalem is a symbol of that place in time when you join heaven, and earth will utter the great celestial exhale because then we can all stop moving. But you are not there yet. Jerusalem comes at the end of the story, which means we are always more clear about what Jesus is asking us to give up than we are about where he is taking us.
Each year of your life, he will call you to drop something else that you are carrying because it
is too heavy and weighs you down. So the road to Jerusalem is always a bit difficult because we have to let go of things along the way. But by all means, Jesus cautions, “Don’t look back!” It will only make the journey harder.
As a pastor, I have discovered that people have their reasons for looking back. One reason is
because they have too much hurt back there. Maybe it is a hurt they caused. Maybe it is a hurt someone else gave to them. Maybe the hurt still hurts. And maybe they have become such good friends with the hurt that they can’t leave it behind.
Another reason why people look back is that they like the past better than the present. Have
you ever noticed that some of us can make the past better with time? It can grow by mythic proportions. I do not believe that Jesus is telling us that we cannot grieve our losses or remember our past. No one ever gets over the death of a family member. And no one ever learns without remembering the past. Our lives are shaped by the joys and heartaches of the past. If we ignore that, we ignore ourselves. But that is not where life is found. Not anymore.
Jesus is calling us to keep moving because the opportunity for life is now waiting down the
road. But it is hard to stay on the road of change . . . unless we see Jesus along the way. That is what faith is. It is a way of seeing that Jesus is with us on the Journey. That is why we come to worship and why we commit ourselves to Sunday school classes, Bible studies, and daily devotions. It is all a way of seeing Jesus with us. It is why we learn to reach out to others with compassion and care. Jesus can always be seen in the face of those in need of a cup of cold water. It is why we put our hands to the plow and do the work we’ve been given to do today. Jesus still loves to appear along the way of our lives. And you have got to keep your eyes on him, or you’ll never make it to Jerusalem.

Advent

This past Thanksgiving weekend, many of us had several days in which we departed from our usual routine and time-tables and calendars and spent time with family or around the house, not paying much attention to the time. On one day, it was either Thursday or Friday (I’m not sure which, since I wasn’t paying much attention to the day, either!) I looked out the window and saw that it was dark, and yawned and figured it was about time to get ready for bed. I then looked at the clock for the first time in hours, and noticed that it was 6:00. It is an irony, isn’t it, that the most hopeful of all Christian seasons, the season of Advent, takes place when it is the darkest season of the calendar year.
And it’s not only dark physically with shorter days, but somehow, the anticipation, the preparation for the coming of Christ stands in sharp contrast with darkness. The war in Iraq has now gone longer than World War II . The genocide in Darfur, the summit in Annapolis that will focus on Palestine and Israel. The world seems to be ever so fragile. There was crime in Plainfield and we are all aware of the violence in our own communities, on our streets, in our homes. And though this season should be a time of excitement and joy, we are reminded that illness and suffering and death do not take a holiday during the holiday season. The clouds of anxiety about the future are hovering so low and close that you can barely see your hand in front of your face.That’s why the candles on the Advent wreath does not come one second too soon for me. I need a light, a light that comes from God. And I need to hear the angel appearing to Mary, I need to feel her joy and sing with her. I need to hear a whole heavenly chorus of angels singing glorias to the shepherds. I need to visit the manger and bow with the wise men. I need this Advent season.
But hold on, scripture remind us. We need to prepare. And not just by getting the tree up and buying the presents and baking the cookies. We prepare...get this... by hearing this heart-stopping message that predicts the end of the world. Jesus speaks of “signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars,” of “distress among nations,” of people who will “faint from fear and foreboding.” Isn’t that where we already are? Isn’t there enough fear and foreboding in our lives, and in our religion?
The good news that God intends to make the world right again. The good news that Jeremiah proclaimed years before Jesus came onto the scene: “The days are surely coming when I will fulfill the promise I made.” Things were every bit as dark in Jeremiah’s days, perhaps even darker, yet he was sustained by his conviction that the outcome of human history was in the hands of God, who could be trusted to make the city a place of safety and the land a center of salvation. The coming of a Savior, then, is not just a personal thing between me and God. It’s not something that just begins in the heart and stops there. It’s not something that doesn’t cover much more territory than our living rooms. It’s something that happens to the whole world. Something or someone is coming to redeem not just us, and people like us, but the whole groaning and travailing creation.
How about that! “the whole world waiting at the window for the day of redemption. The promise of Advent is that day will come. We do not know the day, but we do know that we will not be forsaken. For the shaking of the cosmos is not a sign of the world’s falling apart. Rather, it is just the opposite. It is evidence that, as Jesus himself put it, “your redemption is drawing near.”
And so bring on the candles. Bring on the candles as we light candles to pierce the darkness of our hearts, our streets in Plainfield, and our world. Light candles to prepare for that redemption, we people of hope, by waiting at the window on behalf of the whole wide world. Light a candle, for the world’s greatest drama is about to begin! The Good News is near, even for us.

Opening lines

Something grabbed me this week as I took a look at the Epistle to the church in Colossae. I don’t know what it was, but the opening touched me, and touched me almost to tears. It’s not particularly scintillating. These greetings to the church rarely are: “To the saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father.” Nothing unusual there. It was the proper greeting of the day for those early Christians.

And then he let those dear Colossians know that he was praying for them, giving thanks to God for them. He had heard of their faith, and their love and their hope through his friend, and maybe that’s where it struck me.

“Have I told you recently that I love you?” Can you see why Paul’s letter struck a chord in me? “Have I told you recently that I love you?” But Paul didn’t stop there, of course. There is a prayer of thanksgiving, but there is also a prayer for the future of the church a prayer that in a gentle way urges the church on, gives us our marching orders. And so my prayers have not only been prayers of gratitude for you, but more. Paul continued: “I have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will ... so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord ... as you bear fruit in every good work.” (1:9-10)

Some of you have read Sue Monk Kidd’s book, The Secret Life of Bees. There’s a passage in which Lily and August are talking.

“How come if your favorite color is blue, you painted your house so pink? Lily asks.

August answers, “That’s May’s doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the color. I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, well, this is the tackiest color I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but it can lift May’s heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it.”

“All this time I just figured you liked pink,” I said.

She laughed again. “You know, some things don’t matter that much, Lily. Like the
color of a house. How big is that in the over all scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart, no, that matters. The whole problem with people is...” “They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t,” I said.

“I was gonna say, the problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it.
You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose

Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”

We know what matters. We know what God requires of us. Jesus made it very simple and very clear: We love God and we love our neighbor. We know that. But the really, really hard task is to choose to do that. And so my prayer for all of us is that as we grow in our faith and in our commitment to Christ, we will choose what matters; we will choose to do what God requires of us.

The Peaceable Kingdom

I met 19th century artist, Edward Hicks, and began a life long journey with “the Peaceable Kingdom.”

Edward Hicks was trained as a carriage maker, and got acquainted with paint only as a necessary step to a finished product. Then he started to do what was called “ornamental painting,” things like tavern signs. He’d seen quite a few of those, evidently. And then he got religion. After a winter’s night of following tavern signs he saw the light. He felt the Inner Light of the Quakers and became an ardent member of the Society of Friends. He gave up drinking but not painting. The Quakers frowned on ornamental art, certainly tavern signs. But they winked. Brother Hicks needed to make a living to support his family and his other newfound vocation: that of preacher.

The man history remembers as an artist was known by his contemporaries as an eloquent preacher, a master of metaphor, and a not quite Quaker-like adversary in a conflict that eventually divided Quakerism. No peaceable kingdom there. The man who died painting the peaceable kingdom lived in an unpeaceable one, in the place you should most expect some semblance of peaceable: in the church. In his case, the Society of Friends, known as Quakers, known as pacifists, were deeply divided and finally broken apart over some of the same issues that have us quaking and dividing and unpeaceable today.

Somewhere in all of that, Hicks’ imagination was caught by Isaiah’s prophetic vision. It expressed a longing for reconciliation and unity. It acknowledged that every person had animal propensities and passions. So with carriage paint and signboards he created “The Peaceable Kingdom.”

It was a visual call for peace. The children and the animals were mild; no tension visible in postures or expressions. An ideal to make real. He painted over sixty variations on this theme over a period of thirty-some years.

Hicks had a kind of holy obsession with the peaceable kingdom. Or perhaps the kingdom had a hold on him. No mere curiosity about how a world at peace might look, but a passionate pursuit of an ideal that was as elusive—and as essential—to his world as it is to ours. He continued to bring the peaceable kingdom into sight the rest of his life, painting the subject until the very eve of his death. Moving through a chronological sequence of the kingdom paintings you start to see more than variations on composition and color. You see explorations of the meanings of Isaiah’s prophesy and their relevance to a possible reconciliation between the Quaker factions. The animals’ expressions change, as do their positions with one another. After the opposing Quaker groups actually separated, he painted tightly unified groups of animals with tense, fearful expressions as if gathered in uncomfortable and tentative peace. You wonder if Hicks kept painting that image more because he saw it less.

In one particular painting from 1834, all of Isaiah’s animals are there, some at home in the Pennsylvanian woods, and others, a little exotic and out of place, let alone proportion. Check the scale of the lion and the ox! A sermon Hicks preached during the winter of 1837 paints the lamb, the kid, the cow, and the ox as “good men and women”; the wolf, leopard, bear, and lion as “figures of the wicked” who would “cruelly destroy each other.” Interesting personality profile! All of the kingdom paintings from this period on have in the upper left a depiction of William Penn’s treaty with the Leni-Lenapi Indians, a statement about human predators and the peace needed in our political kingdoms. Isaiah’s children are there, too. Hicks painted his own children into the scene, as if to give that ancient vision a future face. A hopeful, human face.

In the prophet Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom the distinctions between predator and prey collapse. Instinct bows to a higher calling. Creatures great and small go beyond co-existence to community. They live together, sleep together, eat together, play together. The lion need not control and the lamb need not fear. The bear eats corn. The wolf looks mellow. Little children pet wild beasts. The world is a safe place even for the most vulnerable ones.

The Peaceable Kingdom. Where is it? How to love the animals in it? How to hold it and unfold it as God’s vision for us? Who are the lions, who are the lambs? Someone like Edward Hicks gives us an image, but the story of his image gives us pause, as well. It is always difficult for our vision to be clear, because we look through human experience and personal need and prejudice, and the expression of an ideal easily becomes a reflection of what is real. The animals still line up as predators and prey, good guys and bad guys. Our peace is still tentative and tense. God’s promised peace is always confident and joyful.

“The Peaceable Kingdom” hangs peacefully at the top of our stairs at home. I see in it something of Jesus’ prayer that we may all be one. I see in it something of Isaiah’s prophesy that creatures and children may be at peace, even in a new time and a strange place.

In his last painting of the Peaceable Kingdom, just before he died, Hicks portrayed a child leading a young lion off, beyond the canvas. As if to say, “Not here, not yet, but on the way. It will come. To the wolves and the lambs and all the rest. The Peaceable Kingdom. As promised.”

Songlines

Songlines are part of the sacred belief of the Australian aborigines. These people believe that the wisdom and knowledge of their ancestors are like invisible footprints, sacred tracks through their land, which they call songlines. By finding the right songline, they connect with their ancestors. In the beginning, the Great Ancestors sang the world into existence. Thus, these people believe that part of their task in life is to help keep the world created.... All of their songs, their works of art, their tending of creation is their way of making real what is already present. Perhaps not unlike the Psalms which are so precious to our faith tradition and which were originally sung. They, too, carry great wisdom and knowledge, expressing the fullest possible range of human emotions, all of which are embraced by Almighty God.

The Psalms help sing our faith into being. Many of us have held dear the promise from Psalm 40: “He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.” Sacred tracks for the terrain of our soul. Such singing is a knowing, a power and an exchange, a web and a connection to the past.... It acts like connective tissue to hold the community together and make it human.... Once you know the song, you can never get lost.

Our ancient songline is the same, even as we are different. Throughout time, communities, as well as individual lives, have experienced the ups and downs, the ebb and flow of our common story. Our human story. Our faith story.

“He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.” These images hold different things for different people: despair, danger, death, isolation, pain, fear, depression, anxiety. It is in the desolate pit or the miry bog that we often finally face our souls and the ambiguity and chaos of our inner world.

But then how remarkable it is when at last you feel the rock underfoot and can sing again.... Realizing you have escaped the quicksand of despair or failure or grief. Embracing the good, the bad and the ugly—then means we have our life in our arms to give to others; and a knowing that we are held in God’s arms always.

Consider the verbs from the Psalm—active verbs: God DREW him up and SET his feet upon a rock and PUT a new song on his mouth. That’s what God did. And what did the Psalmist do? “I waited patiently for the Lord...he inclined to me and heard my cry.” “I waited patiently.” Waited expectantly. Anticipating that surely God would respond to his cry. This is our hope. This is our songline. This is God’s promise.

Living, breathing examples of Psalm 40—of those who surely cry out to God to be drawn up from the pit. God sets our feet upon a rock so that in the graced moments that find us high and dry and hopeful, we may help others negotiate the currents and quicksand. The strength is the rock of faith.

The new song in our mouths is in the truth of our ancient songlines as we continue to sing God’s world into being. We are out of tune with God’s universe if we are unable to find joy in that hope. The God who has delivered us and continues to deliver us is the God who became flesh in Jesus Christ and thus fell into the desolate pit, the miry bog, in order to know us fully, and so that we might fully know God and the saving ways of God which will lead us from rock to rock to rock.

Sometimes we have trouble singing from the miry bog, but the melody still haunts us. Sometimes it is the waiting which stretches tunelessly ahead of us. Sometimes when we do sing, we are singing the same words but our tunes are different. This may lead to great dissonance, but may also with humility lead to new harmonies. Sometimes we’re not always sure of the next note. But sing we will and sing we must, because God gives us a new song when we least expect it, and it is part of an ancient songline. Once you know the song—you can never be lost.

The Climb

There is a mountain in New Hampshire, which is sort of a Mecca for me when I vacation up there. Mount Shaw. You just go around Lake Winnepesauke to the west side and park your car and start hiking up. You can make the trek up and down in part of an afternoon. It’s not like climbing nearby Mount Washington, or far away Pike’s Peak, or even farther away Mount Everest. I have been with a 3 year old who climbed it, and I have been with an 83 year old who climbed it.
The first time I trekked up Shaw was probably 8 years ago, with my son Benji. If I remember correctly, I ran virtually all the way. The last time I climbed Shaw was this past summer. I didn’t run virtually all the way. As a matter of fact, I was amazed at how much steeper and higher it had gotten over the years. (Probably due to the geo-dynamic shifting of the earth’s crust to make higher and steeper mountains.) Hiking up Shaw made me think about a book called A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson, which was a journal depicting his hiking the entire Appalachian Trail.
“On the first day of the trail,” he writes, “it was hell. First days on hiking trips always are. I was hopelessly out of shape—hopelessly. The pack weighed way to much. Way to much. I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared. Every step was a struggle.
The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill...Each time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope there is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still, until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long. Eventually you reach a height where you can see the tops of the topmost trees, with nothing but clear sky beyond, and your faltering spirit stirs ... nearly there now! ... but this is pitiless deception. The elusive summit continually retreats by whatever distance you oppress forward, so that each time the canopy parts enough to give a view you are dismayed to see that the topmost trees are as remote, as unattainable, as before. Still you stagger on. What else can you do?”
Mountain climbing, I suppose, is not a bad metaphor for the life of faith. Scripture is full of stories that take place on mountains. There’s Moses on Mt. Sinai, Elijah on Horeb, Jesus with the Sermon on the Mount. The mountain is the place for God’s self disclosure. Back in the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa wrote “The knowledge of God is a mountain steep indeed, and difficult to climb.” That’s not the way we usually think of it, is it? If only we could find the right book on spiritual self-help. Perhaps there’s a conference, a spiritual retreat, perhaps if only we could develop the discipline of reading the Bible daily. All good things, don’t get me wrong. But building a relationship with God that gives us a sure sense of God’s presence, God’s guidance, and God’s sustaining love is hard, like climbing a steep mountain.
Is it worth it? Is the hard climb worth the view? Bill Bryson thought so. He continued in his journal after collapsing from exhaustion: “Finally, with a weary puff, you roll over ... struggle to your feet, and realize ... that the view is sensational ... This really could be heaven. It’s splendid, no question; but the thought you cannot escape is that you have to walk this view.”
We understand that. Too many people I know have been climbing and climbing and climbing to the point of exhaustion and despair. Some are in the midst of one heck of a climb: a teenager I know is diagnosed with cancer; parents I know whose son will soon be deployed in Iraq; a friend whose new job has crumbled after a month. Some feel that they have been walking for such a long time: Every time they hear their boss yell, it conjures up memories of their father yelling all those years. Sometimes a loss triggers memories of other losses. Sometimes it’s just weariness from too many responsibilities and too little sleep. Kids’ needs on the one hand and aging parents needs on the other, and the light is not at the end of the tunnel. And though we try hard, faith does not always come through as the comfort we would like.
But dear friends, let me say this. I believe with my whole heart that it is worth the climb, and at the end we will see the glory of God. We will know God as never before. That doesn’t mean we won’t encounter dangers and difficulties on the trek to the top. I know that there is so much more I need to learn about myself and my own limits, that I need a strength far beyond my own to make it up to the top of the mountain.
How long the climb is, I don’t know, because I’m still climbing. I do know that at times it is
difficult, a hard climb. Sometimes the ascent is treacherous and demanding. But from all that I
have been told, it’s well worth the climb.