Scriptures: Psalm 137 and Mark 9:30-37
It’s been awhile since I’ve done this, this preaching thing. We’ve had some special events going on at worship recently—hymn sing, picnic and outdoor worship, Nancy Elsenheimer from Cleveland last week. I’ve gotten a bit out of the habit, and I feel like I sort of have to ease back into the routine. Isabel helped me with the easing part, making sure I didn’t just sit down at the computer as I normally would on Friday.
In a way I feel like we’re all sort of easing our way back into the fall season, in many areas of life maybe, but in church life too, and as we do that, I want to talk about us this morning. I want to talk some about how I see the church in general, but also about us particularly as a faith community. What are we doing here? How do we understand or think about what we are doing here? In some ways what I have to say will be stating the obvious, which is not always a bad thing, and sometimes a necessary thing to do. In some ways what I want to talk about is such a large thing that it’s ridiculous to think you can say anything very meaningful in these few minutes we have here on a Sunday morning. But I want to suggest a tone or a framework for our congregational life in the weeks, months, indefinite time ahead. In a way, working myself back into this preaching thing, the sermon this morning is less of a sermon on its own and more a kind of laying the groundwork or pointing toward some future sermons that may lie ahead.
What I have to say is just a suggestion. It is not my job alone to define what this framework is, how we see ourselves. But it is partly my job, as it is partly yours. And I think it is my job to try to put words to such things as who we are and who we aspire to be, not because that will be the last word, but so that we have something to think about and talk about amongst ourselves. What I have to say this morning is only one way of seeing things, seeing what churches need to be about, but it is one way. It is a way that I suggested to the group that met in August to look at worship for the fall, and that they agreed to.
The direction of my thinking was actually suggested by the Sunday School material for the fall. As you may know, it’s called Seasons of the Spirit, and one of the things this curriculum does is try to make us aware not just of what the Bible reading is on any given Sunday, but what else is going on around us. It points out, for instance, that Rosh Hashanah starts next Saturday, the Jewish holy days leading up to Yom Kippur. And later that Ramadan begins on October 27. Such things seem small, but I like the fact that this curriculum, while certainly aiming to ground us in a Christian identity, thinks it’s important as part of that identity to be aware of and respectful of the traditions and beliefs of others.
Seasons of the Spirit also notes other occasions coming up this fall, such things as Peace Sabbath, Children’s Sabbath, International Peace Day, World Food Day, Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and so forth. It also happens to note that the first decode of the 21st century has been designated by the UN as the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence and the World Council of Churches voted to designate the same period as a Decade to Overcome Violence.
Now I have to confess that part of me has some negative and cynical reactions to slogans like this. For one thing, even a decade, though it’s better than a month or a year, a decade to overcome violence or to build a culture of peace and non-violence doesn’t seem quite enough. And if we’re talking about this decade, we better get moving. We’re three years into this decade and moving rapidly in the wrong direction. The word that this is a decade to build a culture of peace doesn’t seem to have gotten around. It’s hard for me not to be a little bit cynical, or a lot cynical, about what good such well-meaning but maybe in the end empty gestures do in the face of the overwhelming violence that is all around us and at every level of our lives, even if such designations are, as this one was, the result of a request to the UN from every single living recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Anyway, I might not normally pay too much attention to such things, but in this case it suggested to me a way we might think about the church and about what we are really doing when we come together on a Sunday morning and in the total life of the church in all its various forms. The word culture caught my attention. The idea that we live in a culture of violence and that we can be and ought to be engaged in building within that culture of violence an alternative culture of peace and non-violence. Those were thought that helped me focus my own thinking about what we are doing here at Sojourners as we re-gather for the fall season, what we are re-gathering for.
I know that there are all sorts of reasons for our coming together, and we all have our valid personal reasons for getting ourselves out of bed at what for some of us is an un-Godly hour to come here. People have told me that church gives them a good start on the week, puts them in the right place to deal with whatever lies ahead. We come to see people, to connect with people, to be around people who are not only like-minded but who somehow enrich us. We come to have our insides broadened, or deepened, or challenged, or troubled by things worth being troubled about, or comforted in mysterious and “not cheap” sorts of ways. And for all sorts of other reasons, simple and complicated, mundane and profound, we come.
We also come…I think…maybe…for this other kind of un-defined, somewhat abstract, but absolutely crucial reason: to work somehow at building—here among us and wherever we can, however we can—an alternative culture to the one that surrounds us. We come, I hope, in part in order to work at growing a culture of peace and non-violence in an increasingly violent world.
I don’t know if we actually think that way. I don’t know if we actually get up on Sunday morning saying to ourselves, “I’m going to Sojourners where we are building a culture of peace and non-violence.” Well, I do know of course. I know I don’t get up thinking that way, and I’m pretty sure you don’t either, but I also suspect that at some level we do come for that reason too. As people have often said to me, we can worship God and feel close to God by ourselves, and if all we needed was to have a little time with God, faith communities would probably be of marginal benefit. But we don’t begin to build a culture of peace or a culture of anything else by ourselves. We need the church to be about that. The church needs to be about that.
Thinking along these lines, Psalm 137 came to mind. I might have thought of Psalm 137 as a good example of how Biblical texts themselves can contribute to a culture of violence, since as you heard the Psalm ends with a call for Babylonian children to be dashed against the rock. But that’s not why Psalm 137 occurred to me. It occurred to me because of the plaintive verse that asks the question: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” The children of Israel were conquered, captured, carried off to a foreign land where, as the Psalmist says, “we sat down and wept”. Taunted by their captors to sing one of those cute little Jewish songs (my interpretation), the Psalmist then asks, “But how could we sing the Lord’s song in this foreign land?”
Many people—I am one of them—have taken that verse to describe our own feelings, feelings we have in our own time and situation. I identify with the verse because I do, quite often, have a sense of living in a foreign land. I feel like the land we live in is foreign not only because, but partly because, and largely because I feel like we are immersed in a culture of violence and although that culture is a world-wide culture and has been brought about by human beings and seems to be rather deeply engrained in human beings, it is in fact hostile to humankind and foreign to the kind of being we are meant to be.
Of course, culture of violence is not the only way to describe the foreign land we live in. We could, equally accurately, say that we live in a culture of racism, that also is a world-wide culture (although it takes specific forms in specific societies), and that also seems deeply engrained in human beings but that is in fact foreign and hostile to who we are and who we are meant to be. And we could, I’m sure, have an interesting and fruitful discussion on how to describe some other ways in which the land we live in is deeply foreign to us as human beings.
It is the task of the church not to shrink from calling the land we live in a foreign land, whether we mean by that the particular land or society or country we happen to live in, or whether we mean in a broader sense the whole human landscape. It is the task of the church not to simply reflect or be an apologist for the particular land we happen to live in—in our case, the United States—or to deny that wherever we would sit down on the face of the earth, there would be plenty of cause to do what the Psalmist said: “There we sat down and wept.”
Of course “foreign land” is not the only way to describe either the particular society of which we are a part or the planet on which we live. The United States is, for many of us, an indescribably gorgeous, immensely diverse country and it is for most of us “home”. The earth is a miraculous gift of God and in a much deeper sense home. A question that may face us then is: “Can we live in a place that we love and that is deeply home for us and yet feel that we are living in a foreign land and need help in finding and singing God’s song in this place?” To the extent that the foreign land we live in is a culture of violence, can we find a way to both love it and resist it?
I read the gospel reading for this morning in this light as well. Jesus, walking through the countryside with his disciples, starts talking to them about his impending death. They, of course, don’t want to hear it, don’t understand it, and are afraid to ask. Instead, it turns out they start discussing which of them is or will be “the greatest”. Jesus has a sixth sense about such things and calls them on it, brings a child into their midst and, to put it in my own words, suggests that maybe they ought to pay more attention to such things as providing a place of welcome.
This is more than a story about how looking out for old # 1 is not always the most attractive of qualities or about how it’s good to be nice to children, still less on the psychological intricacies of how you become great by being a servant and whether you can be humble if you know that being humble will make you great and so forth. Those first lessons about self-centeredness and being nice to children would be ok, but I think Jesus is doing something more here. In an, I don’t know, maybe a bit of a subtle way he contrasts the culture the disciples are operating in—the culture in which people are constantly competing with each other and jockeying for position, to the culture that he is trying to create among his followers. I know Jesus doesn’t use the language I started out with this morning. He doesn’t say that the task of the church once and for all is to try to build a culture of peace and nonviolence in a world tormented by violence. But what he does say, and what he does, is not so different from that I think, especially of we think of violence in a broader way than simply people doing physical harm to each other. He creates a circle in which a vulnerable child may feel welcome and safe. Much more than saying wise or true or beautiful words, this is what Jesus was all about, as I read the gospels. He was building an alternative culture in the midst of a culture that was violent in a whole lot more ways than one.
And so I see us gathering in a kind of a circle, creating as best we know how a culture that is different from the one we move around in a lot of the time, a culture that can be described in a number of ways but that maybe we can think of a building a culture of non-violence in the midst of a culture of violence. It’s just a suggestion, just one way to think. And it doesn’t frankly get us very far. It doesn’t suggest a full blown program. It only suggests to me a starting point. But for this year it seems like a worthwhile place to begin, and I at least intend to see where it will lead me, as I ease my way back into preaching, and as we ease our way forward as congregation, called by God, I believe, to be an alternative voice and presence and learning to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 21, 2003