Scripture: Luke 4:16-21
I’m still trying to finish a sermon I began two weeks ago. At first I thought I would finish it two weeks ago, but it turned out that what I wanted to say on the subject of incarnation wouldn’t fit into one sermon, so I had to carry it over to another week, which I thought would be last week but turns out to be this week. Thanks to everyone who filled in last week for me and Beverly and Timmie—Lee, Henry, Aila, David, Allison, Uriah. It’s nice when the three regulars can all either go away or get sick on the same Sunday and have people ready and willing to carry on at a moment’s notice.
I was saying two weeks ago that the incarnation is not all about Jesus. It is certainly partly about Jesus, doctrines the church has put forward about Jesus, but also more personal ways in which Jesus might for some people, does for me, open up different ways to think about, understand, believe in, and know God. Not that Jesus defines and limits our ways of thinking and believing but that, again for me, opens God up, reveals God…Well, I don’t want to repeat the whole sermon from two weeks ago. Then I will have to carry it over to next week. But at the end of what I was saying two weeks ago I said that while incarnation is often thought of in connection with Jesus, that that isn’t the only way to think about it, that it also has to do with the indwelling of God in these very earthly lives of ours. And it’s that thought that I didn’t get to go into very much, and that I want to talk about today.
This sermon is inspired partly by a piece I read not too long ago by a man named Thomas Long, who is a teacher and writer and apparently sometimes facilitates workshops for churches. He tells the story that at the end of one workshop he was leading that had to do with worship, after he had spent several hours talking about all sorts of issues in worship, reflecting on what worship is and how we do it, giving historical background, different views of the sacraments and so forth, he says he finally stopped talking and asked for questions. One person’s hand went up right away, as though he had been just waiting for the opening when he could ask his question. The man seemed very agitated and Long says that he expected a question on one of the hot button issues in church worship—the use of inclusive language, a perceived drift away from old fashioned Biblical preaching or golden oldie hymns—things like that that often get people stirred up.
But it turns out it wasn’t any of those things that had this man stirred up. He said that there was one thing about the worship service in their church that he just couldn’t stand, and that was…the announcements. They were boring. They took too long. They destroyed the mood of worship. They needed, as far as this man was concerned, to be done away with. And when he said all this, heads around the room were nodding in unison. Thomas Long says that clearly announcements were not popular in Indiana on that Saturday morning.
But of course truth to tell there are a whole lot of places other than Indiana where announcements are not popular. I had to smile at the story because it could have been about Sojourners, or for that matter any other church I have served and many others I’ve heard about. Over the years I have listened as numerous people complained, including more than a few here at Sojourners, that the announcements interfered with their experience of worship, that whatever it was they were hoping for from worship, whatever it was they thought worship ought to be or needed to be for them, announcements were not it. I’ve not only listened. I’ve been sympathetic. More often than not I have agreed at least to the extent of being able to say, “yes, it’s a problem, announcements are a problem”. And on more than a few occasions over the years I have found myself in groups of ministers who are talking shop and where the discussion turned to worship and one person in the group would say, “and what do you do about announcements?” and everyone will respond by shaking their heads sadly and saying “that’s a problem.”
And of course it’s hard to disagree. I doubt that anyone comes to church just really looking forward to the announcements, hoping that there will be lots of them that day because they are just so enriching. But maybe there is more than one way to look at all this. Maybe there is a little something to be said for announcements, something to say beyond the fact that they are a necessary evil and we should keep them as short as possible and find a place for them in the order of the morning that interferes as little as possible with what we are really here to do. Maybe there is another way to look at this or another thought to be had…about announcements.
It’s not that I’m going to try to tell you that announcements are a great source of inspiration in and of themselves, but at the same time maybe they are something more than a nuisance. What I’m thinking is that they are a gentle reminder of the not too difficult or profound thought that ideas, intentions, inspiration, dreams, visions—all these nice spiritual things—are meant to become flesh, meant to be incarnate, meant to become firmly embedded in the concrete, earthly reality of our lives. Maybe announcements are not about committee meetings, community events, or the need for volunteers for this or that project. Maybe they are about incarnation. Maybe they say something very important to us and about us: that we mean for the words we say and the songs we sing, the values and beliefs we express, we mean for these things not to be simply things that make us feel good, that warm our hearts, but that we mean to give them flesh and blood life, somehow, no matter how imperfectly, but somehow in the life of the church and the life of the world around us. And if that connection is too far-out or too far-fetched, then there are more serious problems that need to be addressed than where to put the announcements in the order of worship so that they will be best hidden, least noticed, and most easily forgotten.
My thoughts for this morning, such as they are, were also occasioned by the fact that I thought I would be offering them last Sunday, which of course was the Sunday just before the King holiday, and the morning of the King Day community celebration. Each year when King Day comes around I find myself reflecting, and regretting, that more and more, from where I sit, more and more the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King is reduced to the man who said “I have a dream”. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad he had a dream. It was a good dream. And it needed be said clearly and eloquently to the whole nation. And he said it clearly and eloquently in a variety of ways on different occasions but on one occasion to the whole nation. But the dream would not have mattered much, probably would hardly have been heard, if it hadn’t been for the marches and the bus rides and the bus boycotts and the sit-ins and the planning sessions and the committee meetings and the negotiations and the voter registrations and the non-violence training sessions, and so forth. Without the dream, spoken by Dr. King and others, it would probably have been hard to go on with all the rest. But without all the rest, the dream wouldn’t even have been very interesting.
All that leads me to be reminded of something in regard to myself that I know very well but that I still very much need to be reminded of: that all my good intentions, all my prayers, all the dreams I have been inspired by are also not very interesting, not even to myself, if they are not meaningfully incarnated somehow in my life. It’s not just a matter of doing something rather than just talking about it, though of course there is that. There’s always that. It’s certainly not, for me, any feeling that I need to be doing something more dramatic or world changing than I am. That’s not what incarnation is about, feeling guilty for not doing something more or something heroic. It is for me a realization that what I do need to do is to find ways to make sure that my good intentions with regard to racial justice become part of the tangible fabric of my daily life, so that racial justice is no longer an optional concern. I’m not there yet. I’ve made some progress in that regard, but I’m not there yet, and I know that in this sense incarnation continues to be on my spiritual agenda.
The lectionary scripture reading for today is the one we heard from Luke about Jesus reading from the prophet Isaiah. It’s a passage that’s referred to often because it comes at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and sort of sets the tone for it. He reads from the book of Isaiah, puts the scroll down, and says (to paraphrase just a little) that this is what we’re going to be all about, me and the community that will be forming here shortly. In a way it’s his “I have a dream” speech. I have a dream, he basically says, that one day the poor will have truly good news brought to them instead of the bad news and false promises they have always had to live on. I have a dream, Jesus says, that one day those who are in captivity, all kinds of captivity, will know release. I have a dream, he says, that those who are blind, all kinds of blind, will see. I have a dream, Jesus says, that one day those who are oppressed will be free. In fact, I hear him saying as I listen to this passage, that day is beginning today. In your hearing. Before your very eyes. Those words are not just prayers, wishes, dreams, but will be built in to the tangible fabric of the lives that will be gathered.
The rest of the story, to me, is about that, about incarnating what Jesus said at his home church in Nazareth when he read revolutionary words from the scriptures. Many other people I think see the rest of the story that is told in the gospels as being a testimony to Jesus, how he did all these amazing, miraculous things, demonstrating that he was in fact God on earth and people ought to believe in him as such. I don’t read the gospels that way, at all. I read the rest of the story as a testimony to the holy dreams Jesus spoke of becoming embedded in the tangible fabric of the lives of Jesus and the disciples. Some people are drawn to admire Christ’s miracles. I am drawn to admire his purity of heart in seeking what he referred to as the realm of God, the dreams which belonged to him and Isaiah and God and all of us. It’s an impossible standard, of course. The standard of having the dreams of God so fully built in to the fabric of our lives, the standard of such a purity of heart. But it doesn’t keep me from thinking I ought to try.
Or that the church ought to try. And of course there is no other way for us to do that than through the stuff of which announcements are made, and sign-up sheets, and congregational meetings. I have no idea what Thomas Long actually said to a bunch of Indiana church people about worship. What I feel about worship, at least one way I have of thinking about it, is that it is our weekly I have a dream speech. If our prayers, our songs, my words in sermons, the words we speak to each other do not somehow say what our dream is, then we are not worshiping very well. But then there is this matter of how well our dreams are enmeshed in the tangible fabric of the life of the church. And for the answer to that we might want to ask not whether we connected well with the sermon that day, or how touched or lifted we were by the music of the choir, but also how good the announcements are getting to be. It’s my hope that we will not find a way to lose the announcements, but that we will keep working on them until they become very good indeed, because even the announcements and what they refer to reflect somehow, even if only through a glass darkly sometimes, but reflect somehow the dreams of God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 25, 2004