Scriptures: Psalm 33; Micah 6:6-8
I have a small collection of thoughts to offer today, and I apologize if some of them may sound a bit more like discussions of church life as opposed to broader and loftier spiritual reflections. But I won’t apologize too much, or too sincerely. Just as my thoughts were sort of naturally drawn toward the September 11 anniversary, or anniversaries, last week, I have found my thoughts being drawn this week toward some of the specific things happening among us and I feel called to say something about some of those things, and I hope and trust that the specific things that happen at Sojourners do have some relation to that vague category I referred to of broader and loftier spiritual concerns.
I’ll begin with Sunday school, which as most of you know began the regular fall season last Sunday. Many of you may also be at least somewhat aware that we are introducing a new curriculum for the younger children this year, called Godly Play. The adults helping with the program of course have been introduced to it, and last week and this week parents—half of the parents each week—are being oriented by actually going through a class like the children will be going through, so some of you in the congregation this morning are more familiar with this curriculum by now than I am. But I want to say just a few words about it, partly because I think it’s a good thing for all of us, not only parents but the whole church, to have some idea of what is going on in other parts of the building on Sunday morning.
A few handfuls of you have experienced the “Godly Play” approach to things directly. I have not, but as it has been described to me, the idea is that Biblical stories are told to children as stories, not just read out of a book or presented as part of a lesson where the story is often all mixed in with whatever the curriculum or the teacher sees as the point of the story, but the stories are just told to them by a person whose role is to be simply a storyteller.
After the story is told, there is time for a response, but it is a specific kind of response. It is a wondering time. Children are encouraged to respond to the story by saying “I wonder.” I wonder why this person did this, or how that person felt, or why God did what God did, or how God felt. It’s been a long time since my children were that young, but I seem to remember that children often surprise you with what they wonder about, both because it might be something that I as an adult have long since stopped wondering about and/or because what children wonder about can sometimes be quite profound.
In any case I’m thinking that maybe part of this curriculum is to encourage children in their wondering, and to help them not to grow out of their wondering, and to wonder about more and more things and to know that it’s safe to wonder about all sorts of things and to help them wonder in different and more thoughtful ways. It was that wondering time that won me over to this curriculum when Peg Witmer first described it to me.
But maybe you’ve guessed that I don’t tell you this only to pass along some information about our Sunday school. I tell you this because I’m thinking that wondering time is not such a bad way to describe what we do here in this room on Sunday morning as well. That’s not all we’re about by any means, but it’s an important part of what we’re about, or should be about, a way of thinking anyway about what we’re about. We could do worse than to think of this time we spend in worship as a wondering time. I’m thinking we don’t do enough of it, wondering that is, and that we could stand to attend to that part of ourselves a bit more. As adults we tend to want to solve problems not just endlessly debate them. We want to think things through to a conclusion. We want to have something to show at the end of the day for our efforts. We focus on results, often quantifiable results. And it’s not all bad. It’s necessary. It’s good, good to accomplish things. Except that along the way our capacity to wonder diminishes, gradually but steadily, and plays a smaller and smaller role in our lives. We do outgrow, at least we have this tendency, to outgrow our capacity to wonder.
And as Christians too we are not likely to want to linger very long with wonder. We want to get to the point of the story. After all there must be some truth to be told. That’s what we’re here for after all, I say somewhat sarcastically. I would like to think that maybe that’s not so much the case at Sojourners, that we’re not fixated on arriving at the Truth with a capital T. But we do, even in our Sojournerish approach to Christianity, have our tendencies to bypass wonder. And I would like to think that I am not a grievous offender in this regard, but I am an offender.
And so, for instance, let’s say that we have a story among us on a given Sunday about a miraculous healing that Jesus performed. And some Christians would take this story as an occasion to assert that although our scientific prejudices tell us the story couldn’t have happened that way, that we should believe it did happen that way because it’s in the Bible and the Bible is God’s truth and the point of the story, after all, is precisely that Jesus was no ordinary human being and that since he had these divine, scientifically unexplainable, powers, the story argues for his divinity. And other Christians reading that same story might say no, the story doesn’t need to be taken literally and that the point of the story is not the God-likeness of Jesus but the compassion of Jesus and how he reached out to the people who were hurting, or who were outcast, or who were living on the margins, or who had lost hope, and how the point is that the followers of Jesus are not so much those who believe in his divine nature but those who exercise Christ-like compassion toward other human beings.
I have given more than a few sermons along those lines in the 37 years I have been giving sermons. But in both of those cases, whether the point being made is one we agree with or not, in both of these hurried examples, there is a point being made. And we tend to want points to be made. We want truths, conclusions, meanings. But what if we approached such a text with more of a sense of wonder and less of a need to find a point, even if it happened to be a pretty good point. What if we could get past the points and the position-taking that someone like me may be advocating, or the debate that may be going on in our heads let’s say about whether something in the Bible did or didn’t, could or couldn’t have happened? What if we allowed ourselves to wonder about such things but didn’t feel the need so much for answers. And what if we allowed ourselves to wonder what a leprous person might feel like as a person who was told to shout “unclean” as he moved about so that wherever he went people would scatter. What if we allowed ourselves to wonder what Jesus might have felt as he reached out to touch the person, wonder whether he held his hand or hugged him.
I’m thinking this morning that if we did that, if we wondered about the stories more and were less anxious to find the point or the meaning of it, it might help us to actually cultivate compassion rather than proclaiming what a good thing compassion is. I don’t have any programs to propose in this regard this morning. That would be sort of out of the spirit of what I am trying to say. I am just wondering about wonder and bringing that to you and hoping that part of what we bring to God is not so much settled belief or firm conviction but this sense of wonder.
I’m going to jump now to another specific event in our congregational life that may seem to be quite different from what I’ve been talking about so far. It is the forum that will be taking place after church today. I am very happy that Pam Moran is able to come today, even though Rosa Atkins from Charlottesville found that she was not able to come and promised that she would come at a later time. I’m happy the forum is happening because it represents the continuation and the renewal of a commitment that Sojourners made as a congregation. I’m sorry to go over some ground that longer term members of the church may be familiar with, but I feel the need to say just a few brief words here and to make clear that having the school superintendents come is not something that someone thought up sort of out of the blue as something that would be a good thing for us to do, being that we are public spirited church that cares about what happens in the community.
About five years ago Sojourners, as a congregation, adopted as a priority or a leading concern “racial injustice in the Charlottesville area”. I’m not going to go through the details of the process of how that came to be and the thinking that went into it, or the various things we have done as a result. My point in mentioning it here in worship as part of the sermon is to say that we have said as a congregation that racial justice/injustice is not incidental or adjunct to who we are, not something that is to be delegated to a committee on social concerns, not something we pay tribute to in February (black history month) or on a few other special occasions, whenever we think of it. We have said to ourselves that the process of seeking racial justice is to be considered central and essential to the way we think about being Christian. Seeking racial justice is intrinsic to our way of being Christian and to the way we want to go about building a Christian community. It is not something we do. It is one of the things that defines who we are. Not that we are so good at it. Not that we have succeeded in placing an anti-racist identity in the marrow of our churchly bones. We haven’t. But we have said to ourselves collectively that that’s the way things should be for Christians and the way we want them to be here and that this will be one of the ways in which we measure ourselves.
That’s why I’m so happy for the forum today. This is a long journey, toward having anti-racism be part and parcel of who we are as a congregation, and I think we would have to say that moving into this building and all the adjustments that have gone along with it have caused us to be on a bit of a detour with regard to that journey. The forum today is just a single, tiny step toward getting us back on the main road, but it is a step and for me a welcome and hopeful one.
Now let me connect this back to what I was saying earlier about wonder and wondering. The connection may be a gentle one, but there is a connection, at least to me. From one perspective, you could say that in addressing issues of systemic racism, whether in the schools or anywhere else, what we precisely do not need is wondering. You could say that we don’t need to wonder about racism; we need to do something about it. You could say that wonder is a luxury we don’t have any more, and never did for that matter. You could say that wondering by its nature is a sort of non-committal activity where we entertain different options and don’t rush toward conclusions and what we need in the arena of racial justice is much more in the way of commitment. And if you said all those things, I would agree with you. But I would also want to say something else.
What we need in the area of racial justice is not only action; we also need to dwell in the racism of our society. When I say that, of course, I am speaking specifically to the white folks among us. People of color in our society dwell with racism all the time. They don’t have a choice. Part of being a white person of privilege in our society is that we can avoid thinking about racism if we choose to, and an important part of resisting racism is not making that choice, the choice not to think about it. If wondering about Bible stories is a way of just dwelling with them, living within them, instead of rushing to find the point so we can say what it is and move on to something else, if that’s what wondering about Bible stories is about, then we need something equivalent in the area of anti-racism work and the concern for racial justice. We need to dwell with it. It needs to be an ongoing, everyday part of our inner reality. And what that means to me is not only that we think about it, not just on days when there is a forum at church or some other event to raise the issue, but that it becomes in embedded in our thoughts. And not just that, but that it is one of the things we talk to God about in whatever, very private, ways we have of doing that. When we come in wonder before God and can talk or bring to consciousness with God whatever we want and whatever is in our hearts and whatever burdens our spirits, when we do that that racial justice and racism becomes one of those things we have to talk to God about, one of those things we have to talk to God about. It is not just a concern. It is not just a Christian concern. It is our soul work.
I’m talking about prayer of course, but in a much larger sense maybe than the way we sometimes talk about prayer. Sometimes we talk about prayer as though the point of it were to present God with an action plan. Here, God, is a list of things that I would like done. It’s ok. It’s ok to tell God what’s on our minds, what we would like done, as long as we don’t take ourselves too seriously when we do that. But a larger view of prayer would be where we don’t have this no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase approach to prayer, where we just tell God what we think God should do, but where we let ourselves dwell in the reality of the person we are praying for, not knowing what lies ahead for any of us, but dwelling with that person spiritually and bringing that reality to God with the burden of it, the hope of it, and the wonder of it, bringing it all to God. We do that when people we love are burdened with illness, say, or some kind of grief, and because they are burdened we are too. In the same way the burdens of our racism, which are out there and in here, are matters we need to be talking to God about on a daily basis. That too is our soul work. That too is the stuff of which prayers are made. And from just about any perspective, no matter how you look at it, no matter which way you turn, we are all standin’ in the need of prayer. That, from where I stand, is for sure. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 17, 2006