Scripture: Psalm 39; Hebrews 11:8-10, 13-16.
These first three sermons—last week, this week, and next week—sort of go together in my mind, all of them having to do with some introductory thoughts as we begin a new ministry together. Last week, I tried to describe something of the prayerful attitude I feel is important as we set out on a new leg of our journey. Today I want to speak about some of the thoughts I have coming into this situation, very preliminary thoughts about who this congregation is or might be and what we are about, thoughts based on a little bit of conversation during a couple of visits and a couple of weeks on the job, a little bit of reading, and a name.
I actually have quite a few things on my mind this morning. I have a number of places I want to go in this sermon, some people, some theological ideas and some feelings to visit, and I want to apologize ahead of time for not being able to stop for very long anywhere along the way. It may very well have the feel of being all over the map. But then again maybe that’s appropriate for a sermon that’s entitled, “Sojourners”.
I have been intrigued by the name of this congregation from the beginning. In fact it was the name Sojourners that first aroused my interest in this church. There is a book that the U.C.C. puts out monthly that lists all the churches that have positions open; this is one major place ministers find churches they might want to apply to. The churches are listed by conference and Central Atlantic is followed by Central Pacific, so one day I was passing through New Jersey and Maryland and D.C. and expected to pass rather quickly through Virginia on my way to Oregon when suddenly the name Sojourners reached out and stared me in the face.
Sojourners. An unusual name for a church. Don’t think I know any other churches by that name. Must be a church a little bit off the beaten path. Think I’ll look into it. Which, of course, I did, and in the course of interviews and conversations since then the subject of the name has come up a number of times, and during that first week I was here I spent a few hours one afternoon reading through some old newsletters. I came across one newsletter which said that we’re still trying to come up with a name, even though the church was incorporated, had standing, a constitution and by-laws, everything but a permanent name. There had been a poll taken of various names that had been suggested and the results of the poll were as follows: Hope UCC 8, Community UCC 6, New Beginning UCC 5, Charlottesville UCC 5, Affirmation UCC 5, Grace UCC 5, Companion UCC 4, Peace UCC 3, Safe Harbor UCC 2, Genesis UCC 2. Clearly consensus was not nearby, and though a number of possibilities had been proposed, Sojourners was not among them.
Just a little more than a year later, the Newsletter carried a headline, “We Have a Name”. Sojourners, it said, and our bulletins still say, “connotes movement, fluidity, pilgrimage, inclusion of those who do not want set answers or rigid systems, but who instead want to be in a moving, changing relationship with God, and with each other. It speaks to that part of us called to be on a journey together with other sojourners, always open to God’s call to move on.”
I like that statement. It describes the kind of faith community I want to be part of. And I think it is a well worded summary of “why this name”. But I also have to say that what the name connoted for me when I first ran across it was more than that. It caused me to turn some things over in my mind, and I want to tell you what some of those things are, because I am still turning them over in my mind.
I also need to say that I am not talking about our name just to play games with words. It’s not a matter of trying to define a word. This takes on importance for me because it has caused me to think about who we are, who we might be, who we aspire to be, and the name Sojourners is all a part of thinking about those things. Sojourners is not just a name. It’s a name with a lot of associations. Here are some that it had for me.
Sojourner Truth. If Sojourners is a distinctive name for a church, it is also a distinctive name for a woman, and for me that connection was a very natural and conscious one. Thinking about the name of this church made me think of Sojourner Truth. In fact, it led me to go read a biography of her. Like many people, I suspect, I knew a little about her, but decided I wanted to know more. And some of the things I found out about her were suggestive.
Most people who know anything about her know her as a person who was an eloquent and powerful voice on behalf of black people and on behalf of women in the period just before the Civil War. There were actually very few black people in the movement to abolish slavery. Many people could see the evils of slavery but were not accustomed nor easily accepting of black people actually taking leadership roles and addressing white audiences. Nor were they accustomed to or easily accepting of women addressing public gatherings of any sort. Since Sojourner Truth was both black and a woman, and because she was a commanding presence physically and because of what she had to say, she stood out from the crowd. She was a woman of conviction and courage. Then and now she was a symbol of a strong woman who disrespected the boundaries that had been artificially and unjustly set for her by conventional society. Just in her public persona, the image of her that has come down to us, there are some interesting similarities, I think, between Sojourner Truth and Sojourners Church. I don’t know how much of an actual connection there was in choosing the name of the church, but I do know my understanding of who Sojourner Truth was is congruent in many ways with who we are as a congregation.
And this in some less well known ways as well. Spiritually she was a seeker, and this was probably one reason she took the name of Sojourner, not someone settled into one truth but someone in a moving, changing relationship to God. She was variously connected to the Dutch Reformed Church, Methodists, Pentecostal movements, a group of people who expected the end of the world in 1843, and something called spiritualism which included communication with the dead. She was a sojourner in a physical sense of moving around a lot, being an itinerant preacher on behalf of her causes, but also in the sense of not staying in one place spiritually.
We also need to remember that Sojourner had another name—Truth. There are probably a number of things Isabella had in mind when she took the name Truth, but one of them surely was that she intended to speak the truth of her own experience, her experience as a woman, as an African American, as a survivor of domestic violence. She intended to speak the truth she knew and speak it in her own voice, not to speak truths that were official or orthodox. She spoke the truth that grew out of her experience, and it was a voice too little heard.
And truth for Sojourners United Church of Christ also I think is not so much the truth of the ages, the truth of Christian tradition, or even the Truth of scripture (but hear me on this) in the sense of the truth of scripture that comes to us filtered through the people and the cultures who have interpreted it. We too often think that it is scripture that speaks, when it is really someone else. Truth here, as I perceive it, is rather something that emerges through the voices of people who have their own truths to tell, who do not necessarily subscribe to official versions of the truth or who do not do so easily, and who may even have been wounded by the truths of official religion. Here at Sojourners truth has many voices.
I could spend a lot of time with Sojourner Truth—she is certainly worth returning to—but I need to move on, move on to talk for just a few moments about Sojourners community in Washington, D.C.
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the magazine Sojourners or the loose organization that surrounds the magazine. I am not real familiar with it but have certainly been aware of it, and have appreciated it for many reasons. I did not assume, when I saw the name Sojourners, that there was any specific relationship between this church and that movement, but again the name is unusual enough that it caused me to wonder if some of the same sensitivities might be involved in both.
Let me read to you from the homepage of the website of Sojourners magazine. This is the description they offer of themselves:
“Sojourners is a progressive Christian voice with an alternative vision for both the church and society. Rooted in the solid ground of the prophetic biblical tradition, Sojourners represents a grassroots network for personal, community, and political transformation. We preach not political correctness, but compassion, community, and commitment. We refuse to separate personal faith from social justice, prayer from peacemaking, contemplation from action, or spirituality from politics. We offer old truths but also new visions for changing times, and we believe passionately in the power of hope…We are Christians who want to follow Jesus, but who also sojourn with others in different faith traditions as we share our spiritual journeys together.”
Sojourners, the Washington D.C. Sojourners, as I understand it, had its origins among a group of people who were mostly of evangelical, what we might think of as a conservative religious background, but who found that taking their faith seriously might very well lead them to take positions which were not generally accepted or even acceptable among the church they had come from…or the society in general. We do not need to agree with every stance taken by this group or its leaders, we do not need to agree with any particular position taken by them to recognize that our faith may indeed lead us away from the agreeable, middle ground and may cause us to end up in some rather uncomfortable places. I do have this preconceived notion that we have at least this much in common with our namesakes in Washington, that we are willing, and in fact know it is necessary, to step outside the mainstream if we are going to follow our faith, if we are going to follow Jesus.
And that brings me to scripture. As it so often does, scripture adds a dimension of depth to this whole discussion of what it might mean to be a Sojourner.
Scripture reminds us—I am going to put this simply—scripture reminds us that this world is not our home. The book of Hebrews:
“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he had received as an inheritance; and he set out not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land…For he looked forward to the city that has foundations whose architect and builder is God…All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth. For people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland…they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed God has prepared a city for them.”
Now I know that statements like these can be taken in more than one way, and some ways to take them can lead us in directions that I, for one am not comfortable with. The spiritual “Steal Away” is a good example of what I’m talking about.
You know spirituals very often had a double meaning. They often sounded like they were expressing the hope of going to heaven, of escaping the trials and sufferings of earthly life and finally one day going home to Jesus where things would be better. That’s the way a song like Steal Away might have sounded to a slave owner, and many of them would encourage such songs because they seemed to promote an attitude which encouraged people to simply endure the troubles of life on earth because if they could just hang on for a little while, then heaven would be their reward. That message was not threatening to slave owners, so that is what they often chose to hear.
And that may have been part of what African Americans understood when they sang a song like Steal Away, but there is also evidence from the testimony of ex-slaves that the song had another meaning as well, that it also spoke of the hope of stealing away across the Ohio River or to some other earthly place where a black man or a black woman could be free. Slave owners didn’t want to hear that message but black people understood it, and sometimes the spirituals were even a kind of code that signaled that maybe tonight was the night. Ain’t got long to stay here.
For us too there is this double meaning. There are those who have put forward an otherworldly version of the Christian faith which in effect asks people to imagine that they are just passing through this world on their way to a better place, and that therefore we don’t have to worry too much about making things better here because they’ll be better there, and the implication may be that people are to accept the present order of things, to be obedient and content, to patient and docile, all in the faith that soon we’ll be able to quit our sojourning and come home.
That image of what Christianity was all about was one of the things that for a long time stood in the way between me and Christianity. If that was what having faith meant, I didn’t want any part of it…and still don’t.
But being a sojourner in a Biblical sense doesn’t have to mean having that otherworldly theology. It is true for me that I feel like a sojourner on the earth. I feel like truly the earth is not my home, as though I do not belong here. I will need to save some of my thoughts on this for next week, but I can tell you now that one of the meanings that has for me is that as a Christian I refuse to be at home, I refuse to be adjusted, I refuse to be content and at rest in the world as it is.
We live in a world in need of redemption. No matter how beautiful that world is (and I have certainly been reminded of that since we have been in Charlottesville), no matter how filled with miracles it may be, it is not a world meant for the Christian to feel at home in, certainly not a place to be at rest in.
It is my perception that this Sojourners community has this kind of theology, that it is not possible for faith to be sedentary in this world. It is my perception that one of the things we are about here is a common effort to find some different ground to stand on than that ground our society offers us—that we have some stealing away of our own to do, in search of that homeland, that better country, that city whose architect and builder is God.
We are not just doing church here. I believe we are gathered for the purpose of seeking a place where truly our race or our gender does not matter, where truly sexual orientation or age or marital status or differing abilities and disabilities do not matter.
This much this community has already said out loud, made explicit, though we may need to think about how to keep saying it and saying it even more clearly, making sure it does not become taken for granted. We may also need to think about what more there is to say about this different ground we seek to stand on, what scripture calls a homeland.
There are lots of things for sojourners to think about, talk about, pray about. As I say, Sojourners is a suggestive word for me. It’s a rich concept, and I hope we will continue to explore together what all it might mean for us to be Sojourners, which is to say people of faith and children of God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 20,2000