Scripture: Mark 8:22-26, 9:30-37.
Let me start out by backing up a little bit…to last week.
I was saying that I wanted to talk about covenant, what covenant is in general and what ours here at Sojourners is in particular. I said I wanted to talk about that not only during that one sermon but in various ways throughout this fall season of the church, and that I envisioned a kind of process in worship that began with the gathering of the waters and regathering of our community and that would end in November with a service where we all have the opportunity to renew our relationship to the church. What I didn’t say is why I wanted to talk about covenant. I realized after last Sunday’s sermon that it might not have been entirely clear to everyone why I chose that topic and not just for one Sunday but as a kind of theme for the next couple of months. It was not just a topic I sort of randomly pulled down off the shelf.
This is still a relatively new community. We are still forming and re-forming in many ways. We haven’t really had a chance yet to become set in our ways, so we don’t have fixed ways of thinking or doing things. The statement on our bulletin says that Sojourners connotes movement, fluidity, a changing relationship to God, and I am finding that to be pretty much a true description of life at Sojourners.
I am still pretty new to this community. There are just lots of things for me to think about, given the fact that the community itself is in such a dynamic state and that I am new to it. I have no problem thinking of things to preach about. Lots of things present themselves, and I approach preaching not as a presenting of “here’s what the Bible says”, and also not as “here’s what I think”, but as a kind of thinking out loud about “what we are about” here in this Christian community.
All of which is to say that the idea of reflecting on our covenant, which is a way of asking who we are and are trying to become, all of this comes sort of naturally to me as I go about my business of trying to be a pastor in this community and it comes to a large extent from real life conversations that are part of the everyday life of this congregation. Many of those conversations have occurred out loud. Some, I admit, take place inside my head. But in any case this is not a theoretical, abstract, or arbitrary subject. I won’t go through all the ways issues of covenant have come up in the months I have been here. Let me give just one example.
We recently received new members into the church. It would be a natural thing for people thinking about joining a church to ask, “What does it mean for me to join this church?” What do I have to say or do? What am I committing myself to? What am I getting myself into? And people did ask some of those questions. They are all questions of covenant, and it’s probably especially natural to ask questions like that at Sojourners, where, if I may say so, the meaning of church membership is not entirely obvious.
For one thing, we don’t make many distinctions between members of the church and friends, respecting whatever reason a person may have for not officially joining the church, but otherwise not letting that concern play much of a part in the way we relate to each other. And when people come forward to join the church, we do not ask them a single question.
This is not an approach to membership that says “whatever”…although I admit it may seem that way, maybe even to ourselves. The lack of questions in our membership ceremony is not a negative statement that we don’t care what a person believes, but actually quite the opposite. We care enough about what we believe together and individually that we will try in a more than ordinary way to make sure that the words we say, or that we ask one another to say, are honest and authentic, not merely orthodox or churchly.
In this light even as seemingly basic a question as “Do you affirm your faith in God?” may for some people not be so simple, and though the answer in the end may be yes, the authentic answer may involve saying “Yes, but not the God who inspired crusades and inquisitions, and not the God I was taught about in Sunday School who would have sent me to hell 20 times over, and not the God who loves Christians just a little bit more than other people.”
For some of us it is not honest or authentic to say “yes” without saying the rest of it, whatever the rest of it is. Refusing to turn faith into formulas and striving for as much authenticity as we can is, in my understanding, part of our covenant here, and so when new members join and do not answer a series of faith questions, or even one faith question, they are by that silence affirming that they are buying into a faith community that understands itself this way.
Obviously questions about what it means to be a member, or a friend, of Sojourners will come up when we are talking about membership, but they come up in other contexts as well in the church, and it seemed to me that this was not just a question of or for new members but for all of us. Because, as I tried to say last week, we are not just a collection of individuals and are not primarily about the business of providing religious services—because we are a community which tries to stand for a different set of values and way of life from the society around us, it becomes very important to be more or less constantly involved in trying to define and redefine, to articulate what the core values of this community are.
Covenant for us is not like a contract where we sort of say “I’ll do this if you’ll do this.” Covenant instead is a shared sense of being part of a community that stands for something, and the question of what it is we stand for will continue to confront all of us in endless and unexpected ways, even though there are many core values that have been understood from the beginning and that are not ever in question. It never hurts to ask ourselves what our covenant consists of, even if we think we know a large part of the answer already.
What does hurt is if the process of reflecting on our covenant or core values becomes a process of looking inward instead of outward. We do not clarify who we are simply by asking questions of ourselves or carrying on a conversation with ourselves. We give flesh, we give credibility to what we stand for by what we do. We define who we are by what we do. And this brings me to the point of making some comments about the leading concern that was discussed and recommended by the people attending the retreat several weeks ago, and that was officially adopted by church council last Tuesday. We have agreed that as our leading concern for the coming year we will address racial injustice in the Charlottesville area.
I have some things on my heart that I find I need to say about this today. I’m not sure this fits neatly or logically into this sermon, but I need to say them anyway.
The idea of having a leading concern or priority is not mine. My sense is that it really originated in discussions that were going on before I arrived, but that it began to be put into words and formalized into a proposal over the last six months or so. I have been part of that process, and I have fully supported the idea all along. I have thought all along and continue to think that this is a good thing to be doing. I also specifically support the leading concern that we have adopted, the addressing of racial injustice in the Charlottesville area.
But I also have this feeling that I need to say out loud—and it’s not meant to be hostile or critical or in any way negative. It’s just that choosing to address racial injustice as our leading concern seems like—excuse the inelegant language—an awfully “white” thing to do.
People of color in our society do not choose to address racial injustice. It chose them, and continues to choose them every day. For people of color in our society addressing racial injustice is not an issue, a priority, a focus, or a leading concern. It is part of the fabric of life. Choosing to address racial injustice as a leading concern feels to me like a very white thing to do. It feels that way to me. I am not claiming to know how people of color in this congregation feel about it; it is how I feel about it.
As we move into trying to actually live out our leading concern, I am concerned on several counts about addressing racial injustice as an issue. An issue is something we generally hold at arm’s length. We read about it. We analyze it. Hold it up this way. Turn it around and look at it this way. Put in this other light…and never let it get too close to us. That can keep us from taking action because there are always more things to learn and it is always more comfortable to study something than to let it compel a response from us. That’s one thing.
But another thing is that treating racial injustice as an issue that is out there, at arm’s length, also helps us to avoid dealing with each other on this issue. And that too is something that it is easier not to do.
Speaking for myself, somewhere down the road, some months from now, my own evaluation of whether we are succeeding or failing will be based partly on whether we have taken meaningful actions, partly on whether racial injustice has become for me a little less of an issue and a little more a part of the fabric of my life, and partly whether we have addressed not just an issue but one another.
I see this as part of our covenant too. I sense that we have an implicit understanding of ourselves that says that we do not address issues “out there” without addressing each other, without taking time to listen to each other not just about those issues but to listen, period. And that we do not address one another, and we do not address God, without addressing those issues out there in the world, and that we need to be willing to push the envelope on this, not be satisfied with a prayer and a gesture of concern here and there.
When I originally described to the worship committee a few weeks ago what I was thinking about for this sermon, I used the phrase “recovering the I-Thou”. That phrase refers to a book written by the Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber that I read when I was in college and remember being greatly influenced by. The book itself is rather dense. I went back and read most of it after I said was going to preach about “recovering the I-Thou”, and I was amazed that I understood it when I was 19 years old. But then again maybe I didn’t. And I don’t really care to try to tell you about the book, but just why I thought of it in connection with this sermon.
I-Thou refers to a certain way of seeing ourselves and relating to other people. It is distinguished from what Buber calls the I-It, which is our sort of normal everyday way of going about our business where we plan and organize and analyze and try to accomplish things and where we see each other as sort of objects to be encountered in our world and where we relate to other people in order to do something, accomplish some task, achieve some goal. Every time I think of this way we have of relating to each other, I think of the story where Jesus restores sight to a blind man, and the first time he opens his eyes he sees people but, as he says, they look like trees walking. Then Jesus touches his eyes again and the scripture says then he sees clearly.
There is this second sight we might say that Buber talks about and that the scripture points to, where we relate to each other not as teacher to student, boss to employee, co-worker to co-worker, or church member to church member but where we are simply person to person, human being to human being, soul to soul. We should not think that this last kind of relationship is anything but rare. But it is where we are called as a community of faith.
And for me, it is where I am called in my relationship to God. Martin Buber saw I-Thou as describing not only our most profound way of relating to other people but also as our most profound way of relating to God—when God becomes not an object among other objects, not even an object to be worshiped, not a means to some end, even if the end is a good one, not a being to be talked about, but a Thou, a holy presence, a being we talk to and live in.
In some way that at least for now escapes my ability to tie it together in words, I believe all these things are related:
- A commitment to address racial injustice in Charlottesville
- A commitment for those of us who are white to see it less as an objective issue and more as a personal reality, a personal reality for others but also for ourselves
- A commitment to say what we need to say to one another, built as much as we are able to do so on seeing each other not as an it but a thou
- A commitment to nurture a faith where God becomes for each of us a holy Thou but where we may also trust that when we are truly present to each other, that God will be there too.
Somehow we are about all of these things at the same time, and not just in the sense of trying to juggle a bunch of different tasks but in the sense of slowly weaving together the threads of a tapestry. We do not just try to build community and also set out to address racial injustice in Charlottesville. We do the one by doing the other. We address racial injustice by making ourselves into a community of justice, and we deepen the meaning of community among us by addressing racial injustice.
In the midst of it all we continue to see the holy of face of God, who is present in our midst, and who is also present, may we truly believe, in one another. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 24, 2000