Scriptures: Romans 12:1-3, Hebrews 12:1-4
This is a right-brain sermon, I think. My brain sometimes gets confused about what is right-brain and what is left-brain, but if right-brain is when there’s no orderly progression of ideas, then this is probably a right-brain Sunday. I’m feeling this sermon to be a little bit like a collage, made up of just a collection of thoughts and images.
Anyway, first item, a question: How do you get to our church office? I know some people have really wondered about that question as they were driving around hoping for some divine guidance and not getting it.
My standard directions to the church office say that coming from the center of town you go out Preston, pass Rugby Rd. on your left, pass Rugby Ave. on your right, and when you come to the fork in the road, instead of taking the road that takes you down the hill into the Barracks Rd. shopping center you stay straight (which is still Rugby Rd., even though it’s at a 90 degree angle to the Rugby Rd. you just passed), and then you take the second driveway on your left, follow it around to the back of the house, where you will see our new office at the rear of the property (Sojourners seeming to have a fondness for taking up residence is someone else’s back yard).
It has occurred to me that there is a different way of saying all this. You take Preston Ave. out from town, pass Rugby Rd. on the left, pass Rugby Ave. on the right and when you come to the fork in the road, you take “the road less traveled”. Then you turn left into a driveway, but you have to go down this road with faith, because you can’t really tell where you’re going, and you don’t know exactly what’s around the curve in the road. This is what we might call the spiritual version of the directions to the church office—directions that I think are appropriate for people of faith, for any people of faith, and especially for Sojourners. You take the road less traveled. You turn left. You head down a path where you don’t know what’s around the bend in the road and where you don’t see clearly where the road leads. It seems pretty appropriate for Sojourners, don’t you think? Anyway, that’s one piece of the collage.
Here’s another. Peter and Jesus out there on the Sea of Galilee, Jesus walking on water, Peter giving it his best shot. I talked about this story last week, talked about Peter as the hero of the story not because he had enough faith to venture out of the boat all the while looking at Jesus and filling himself with Jesus and then having a failure of faith as he looked down at the stormy sea and realized the danger and took his eyes off Jesus. I talked about Peter as the hero not because of all that but because he had the courage to look down at the troubled waters and recognize that their threat was real and yet that he tried somehow to walk, even to dance, on those troubled waters anyway.
I said last week that there was an alternative interpretation of this story, which wasn’t so thrilled with Peter’s part in this story. Some people have said that Peter was out of line to begin with. Some have said that his saying to Jesus out on the water, “Lord, if it is you, tell me to come to you”, that this is an echo of the words of the devil at the time of Jesus’ temptation saying, “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread…or…. jump down off the temple.” In other words, that what Peter was really doing was playing the devil, asking Jesus to prove himself, do one of his tricks, show everyone how great and godly he was, and while he was at it allow Peter to demonstrate how great and godly he was too. So you see some people aren’t impressed with Peter at all. Some see him as grandstanding, showing off, asking to be exempt from the troubles that would drown other people but that he felt entitled to be spared from.
Everyone pays attention to Peter, and as I said last week, the miracle. That draws all the attention. But some people see the real heroes in this story as being the people in the boat, who don’t expect any miracles, don’t ask for any, don’t look for any spectacular displays of faith, but who keep on rowing, not knowing for sure that they’ll pull through but praying somehow through their muscles and their sweat that some combination of their effort and Jesus’ presence will see them through. No miracles, no glamour, no exemptions. That’s where faith resides, for those disciples, and for us. That’s the alternative view on that story.
And I appreciate the effort to see it from a different vantage point. I appreciate the effort to be appreciative of not so much the heroes of faith, the St. Francises, the Father Damiens, the Mother Theresas, the Martin Kings, the Dorothy Days and Sojourner Truths, but all the ordinary, anonymous Christians who keep on rowing, sometimes against pretty heavy odds but who express their faith truly, valiantly, and faithfully.
Still, I come back to Peter. Not because of charisma or heroism, but because he wasn’t content with what was normal, or standard, or routine. I don’t think it’s necessary to see him as asking for miracles, asking for an exemption to the troubles that plague everyone else. I see him simply as one who was willing to take one more step, a step beyond what might be considered sensible and clearly called for, testing not so much God or Jesus as himself, the limits of his own faith. I do still see Peter as the hero of this story.
That brings me to another piece of the collage. I had a flashback this week, a flashback of more than thirty years to the time when I was being ordained. As I was thinking about what scripture I might read and reflect on today, I remembered one of the scriptures I chose for my ordination—from Hebrews. The passage, which you heard earlier, has some familiar sentences in it, such as being surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses and running the race that is set before us, but the sentence that appealed to me at the time was the one that said, “In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” I even remember why that sentence appealed to me.
I’m not a great fan of the bloody parts of the Bible, or of the blood imagery in the Bible, or in hymns for that matter. I’m not a great fan of shedding blood period, my own or anyone else’s, so I wasn’t hearing that phrase about resisting to the point of shedding blood in a literal sense.
What it meant to me was that I was very much aware that the steps I had taken to bring myself into the church and into the ministry, although they had been difficult and slow and even painful steps in many ways, still they had been pretty safe steps. In choosing that passage from Hebrews I was wanting to say, mostly to myself, that I was very much aware of that, that so far my Christianity had been pretty much of the safe variety.
Even though I had been involved in many of the protests of the ‘60’s and was hardly a typical or traditional church-goer, I was very much aware that my faith had so far been a pretty safe affair, that I hadn’t carried it so far as to really put myself at risk in any serious way, and that that was always a possibility—that faith had the potential, always, to do that, to ask something more of us than what is safe, psychologically or physically, to ask something more than what would seem safe and sensible and reasonable at any given time.
And I also wanted to say to myself that this business of being ordained, that I didn’t want this to mean settling in to some established role within the institutional church, some well-defined, pre-defined role that had more to do with institutional maintenance than it did with faith. I wanted to say to myself (hoping others might hear) that there should always be something a little bit different, maybe even a little dangerous, about being an ordained minister…no not just about being a minister but about being a person of faith period.
I felt I needed to be reminded, as someone entering a church vocation who could easily get too much tied up in churchiness, and I felt maybe North American Christians in general needed to be reminded, that being a Christian in the early church meant being literally, physically at-risk, that being a Christian in other parts of the world today sometimes means being literally, physically at risk, especially if being a Christian means taking the side of those without power. We need to be reminded sometimes, more than sometimes, of the comfortableness of our Christianity and at least hear the echo of the call to people of faith not to be conformed to the world, to the society we live in, or to the present age. Isn’t there a call for us somehow to be…different…something other than comfortable in our faith, something more than conventional in our faith?
I need to stop with the different things that are part of my mental collage for the week, so as not to go on too long. There were others which I’ll have to return to some other time when I come back to this theme, which I will because it’s a theme that sort of goes with me along my Christian journey. And that theme that ties together the different thoughts and images I’ve been talking about and those I haven’t talked about—that theme has to do with the feeling that living a life of faith always requires something more of me, always requires me to take some next step, and no step we take will somehow allow us to feel satisfied that we have gone far enough in trying to follow Jesus or live out our faith, and if we keep on taking those next steps eventually we will find ourselves traveling down some less traveled road, or taking that step out of the boat, or placing ourselves in some real danger. I am troubled by the question of how many of those next steps God wants me to take. How radical is the gospel’s demand or invitation? I don’t have a nice, neat answer to that question, except to say that I don’t believe we should ever be without the question.
It is a comfort to me to feel part of a community, as I do at Sojourners, where I have the sense that we are all looking for a personal faith that is at least a little bit unconventional and a community of faith that is perhaps more than a little bit unconventional. I feel pretty safe in saying that because for most of us anyway if we were looking for something conventional we wouldn’t be here. We would clearly be in the wrong place. We may not be all looking for quite the same unconventional thing. We may not even quite be able to describe what it is in our personal faith or this community of faith that we are looking for that is so different. And of course it is not just differentness, never just differentness, that we are looking for but a way to be faithful that is different. There’s a big difference between wanting to be just different and wanting to faithful in a different way. And then there’s the question different from what?
For people who have been harmed or turned away from some real life Christian church, it is natural to say, I want to be part of a church that’s different from that, from what other churches sometimes, too often, have been. For people who know that others have been harmed or turned away, it may be natural to say, I want to be part of a church that’s different from that. For anyone who is aware of the very real failings of very earthly churches, it may be natural to say, I hope and pray that this church will be different from that. But there are some dangers lurking here too. There is always a danger in comparing oneself favorably with someone else, the holier-than-thou attitude that can taint all good intentions.
The real people we have to be different from—whether we’re talking about churches or about ourselves as individuals—the real people we have to be different from are ourselves. Yes, faith does require us to be different but not different from other people, not different from other churches, but different from ourselves.
It’s not my purpose to try to be different from you as a person. I already am. It’s my job to try to be who I am, truly and consistently and with determination. It’s not our job to be different from other churches. We already are. It’s our job to try to be ourselves, truly and consistently and with determination. It is our job though to be different from ourselves, that is not to settle for who we are, not to be conformed to who we already are, not to allow ourselves to be too comfortable being who we already are. It requires us always to be asking ourselves, as individuals or as a church, what is the next step I need to take along the journey that is mine.
The reference point is not other people, not other churches, but ourselves. What is my next step, what is our next step, along the road less traveled? I’m thinking about those questions this summer. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. What’s the next step for Sojourners? Or for that matter, what’s the next step for you personally, and for me?
It’s important that we share those questions too, because it’s important that although our faith may lead us along a road less traveled, that we know that we don’t have to travel that road alone. Certainly part of being a community of faith is to see to that, to try to see to it that we don’t have to make our journeys alone. And then to trust that somehow, some way, God will be there too, maybe not in a way we can always identify or easily recognize but in a way that nevertheless has power to sustain us and that makes all our journeys sacred. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 8, 2001