Scripture: Romans 8:26-39
As you know, most of you, Ava and I were away week before last, in Chincoteague. In some ways Chincoteague was not really away, because the town of Chincoteague was plastered with political signs the way most places were that week. Driving through Chincoteague felt a little like driving through any part of Charlottesville. However, nearby there is the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge and there I really did feel away. Thousands of snow geese were there and although they could be quite loud, so far as I could tell what they were saying to each other was non-political, so they didn’t upset me. Otherwise things were pretty quiet. Herons and egrets seemed not to care too much about the election or the world of humans in general, and the ocean waves just kept rolling in, regardless of whether the few people standing there watching them roll were red or blue, so to speak. So the wildlife refuge was also a refuge for us. We humans need refuges too.
The signs in the town though kept me connected to the reality that by the time we returned the election would be just a day away, and I couldn’t help but think that by the time I stood up here again on a Sunday morning, it would all be over, and we would know the results, and I would have to figure out whether I would say something about it, or nothing, and if something, then what. Of course at the time I was thinking these things, I really didn’t know what because I didn’t know how things were going to turn out.
I am not a big fan of mixing electoral partisan politics with church life. I believe that we in the church need to be clear that our social agenda comes from someplace quite different than political parties or candidates and is not attached too closely to parties or people. I believe there needs to be room in the church for diverse political ideas and loyalties. Not all political ideas and loyalties mind you—inclusiveness should not mean that—but diverse political ideas and attitudes and loyalties. And so I had the thought that maybe I should just let the election pass. Maybe that’s the better part of wisdom and indeed the right thing to do. The work of the church should be pretty much the same, after all, regardless of elections or their outcomes. So maybe just best just to ignore it, not deal with it.
On the other hand, to be real this was an important event in the life of our country, our world, and was important to many of us who are worshiping here this morning. While I do not believe the church’s business is electoral politics, and we are not here to be a current affairs round table when we gather on Sunday, I am also not a big fan of just ignoring important events in the world around us as though they did not exist, or as though they had nothing to do with our spiritual lives. So although it seems somewhat right to ignore the election, it also seems wrong to ignore the election—a little bit like ignoring the elephant (excuse the expression), the proverbial elephant in the middle of the room. There was an election. I think really I ought to say something. But even after I knew the results it wasn’t immediately clear to me what I should say.
Now that the election is over and I won’t feel to myself like I am using the sermon for electioneering, I decided I am free not to pretend to a neutrality that I don’t have and that most of you know I don’t have. And I decided that on balance it would be better to speak of my feelings rather than to hide them, on the general principle that it is better to be personal and honest and straightforward, rather than abstract and disingenuous and sideways. So here is at least some small part of what I am feeling
Not safe. I am feeling not safe. I was not feeling safe before the election, but I was hopeful of feeling a little safer afterward. It didn’t happen. And of course I don’t mean this in the sense that is so often talked about these days of being safe from terrorist attacks. I mean it more in the sense that my values are not safe, that things I care about and people I care about are at risk. I know I am not alone in feeling this way. I have had others tell me, particularly gay and lesbian friends, that the results of the election, not just the presidential election but the totality of what happened, leaves them feeling exposed and vulnerable. Vulnerable in ways that I cannot feel directly but can identify with. I am feeling unsafe because I am identifying with some others among us, and wanting to feel in community with them, and when I do, the world doesn’t feel like a safe place to me. I am also feeing unsafe because some inside part of me feels uncertain and afraid of what the future holds for all of us, not only the most vulnerable among us.
I hope this doesn’t sound melodramatic or paranoid or inflammatory, as though because the election turned out the way it did that apocalypse is just around the corner. I don’t say these things in that spirit of saying the sky is falling or the world is coming to an end. It is more in a confessional spirit. Just…this is what I am feeling, and it is a prayer concern for all those who are feeling something like that. That’s all really. I’m certainly not wanting to imply that there is some theological basis for this feeling that would suggest this is the right feeling to have. I am not trying to state some general truth, just my truth, which is that at a lot of levels, I am not feeling very safe in these November days of 2004.
I was also thinking during our time away that maybe by the time we got back Sojourners would have legal ownership of a church building. I realized that was unlikely, but I thought, well maybe by the time I see everyone in worship again that will be the case. I knew that even that was probably being optimistic, given the fact—it must be somebody’s law—that things always take longer than you think. Still, I was thinking along those lines.
I have been hesitant too to say very much if anything about “the building” in sermons this fall, partly because there have been plenty of opportunities for all of us to talk to each other about our plans, and I didn’t feel I needed to use the sermon that way. But more than that, as a matter of principle, another of my prayer concerns this fall and all along as we have dealt with building issues, as I have expressed in various ways along the way, is that when the time comes, we are able to own a building without the building owning us. And part of that is a concern that we not spend all our energy or focus too much attention on building-related matters. In a sense similar to the idea that the church’s task is pretty much the same regardless of the swirl and outcome of political activity, so the church’s task is also pretty much the same wherever we are, with or without a building of our own. And I have wanted to keep that idea clearly in focus for myself and therefore have consciously resisted any temptation to let my preaching be driven by matters directly related to our impending move.
The other side of that though, as with the election, is that this is clearly an important event in our lives, and not to say something is also in the long run not right. So as I was thinking during vacation that building ownership if not an accomplished fact is drawing very, very close, I was also thinking that maybe the time has come to break my self-imposed silence on that too. But again, what to say at this point!
Here too my thoughts took shape around the notions of safe and unsafe. There’s a certain sense in which owning and gradually inhabiting a building of our own probably offers us a sense of security that we have not had. A home, with the sense of refuge that implies. A sense of permanence. No need to live with the threat of having to look for new office space, or worship space, that will still be temporary. The promise of growth. The vision of being able to do some things we have not been able to do. And so on. Real things. Good things. We all have some version of those things.
I hope we all also have a strong sense that as we take this step we are stepping out into uncharted territory and that we are entering a place that in many ways is also unsafe for us. Partly because the future is unknown and things will be different, so different we don’t even know how different they will be, in what ways they will be different. Thoughts that are sort of obvious, maybe a bit trite, but nonetheless real and not to be underestimated. The number of new things we will shortly be dealing with.
But more than that if we remain firmly committed to the quest for racial justice, especially in ways that make that quest real in our local community, if we remain firmly committed not only to being a safe place of worship for sexual minorities but an active voice for justice, if we remain committed to being diverse and inclusive in all the ways we are and to becoming more so, if we remain committed to not taking those qualities for granted but continue to be working on them, if we do all that even pretty well, then we will not be safe wherever we are. And we should not be safe wherever we are. And we should make sure that we are not safe wherever we are.
That maybe sounds a bit different from the way I mean it. Of course not that we should seek out ways to make ourselves feel as unsafe as we can, but that we not lose sight of what our goals really are. If we continue trying to be who we have meant to be all along, and trying to improve on that, we will not be safe. I said earlier that I was feeling like my values were at risk in our cultural, political climate. But the real danger to my values, I remind myself, comes not from other people, not from outside, but from me myself. Losing energy, losing clarity, losing focus, losing sight, losing resolve, losing hope. We are so in need of safe places, all of us are in one way or another, that it is easy to lose sight of our need to do things willingly and intentionally that will put us in unsafe places. That faith by its nature is an unsafe adventure is not just my truth but a general truth.
But here is another general truth that Christianity has to offer: that although we often find ourselves in situations where our lives feel, for all sorts of reasons, insecure and unsafe, and although as individual Christians and as a community of faith, we need to try to make sure in many ways that we do not feel safe, although this sense of unsafety is sometimes unavoidable and in some ways is where we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to feel, still in a deeper, truer sense we are safe. Because to use some of the traditional language of faith, we are in God’s hands. Because, to use the traditional language of Paul’s letter to the Romans, neither life nor death, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation can separate us from the love of God we have seen and understood in Christ Jesus.
We don’t always hear, aren’t always able to hear, this truth, receive this assurance. And it is one of those things that may not just ring loud and clear all the time because it is one of the many paradoxes of our faith. It is the case that faith requires us to acknowledge our vulnerability, to recognize the insecurity of our lives and all the things from personal health to world events that may make us feel exposed. It is the case that faith calls us to say things and do things and stand in places that are not necessarily comfortable and don’t always feel safe. But it is also the case that faith offers a view of things that says that at the most fundamental level, we are safe. Things all around us and within us are not ok, but at the same time they are. By circumstance and conviction we may feel unsafe and truly we are. There is no safe place for us…sojourners that we are. But because of being children of God, because there is no way to fall outside the circle of God’s embrace, we are safe in ways deeper than words. Both things are true, not sometimes one and sometimes the other, but both at the same time, and one is not true without the other. May God, in the ways that we need, make us insecure, uncertain, not safe. May God hold us firmly, lovingly in the palm of her hand. Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 7, 2004