Readings: Genesis 1:1-5; “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson
I’m not real big on New Year resolutions, but the new year is often for me one of those “stock-taking” times where you sort of step back from yourself and ask yourself what you’re doing and why and whether there need to be some adjustments along the way and what kind of attitudes and intentions and other kinds of baggage you’re bringing to the new year, that sort of thing. I’m also not real big—at all—on sermons that focus on the life of the church, and I’ll have some things to say about why that is as I go along this morning, but since my life is significantly tied up with the life of this congregation, my stock-taking necessarily includes some thoughts about the church and what I see as being on our agenda at Sojourners, and therefore on my agenda, as we begin the new year and as we approach our congregational annual meeting two weeks from today. I don’t want this sermon to become a discussion of church business, but I do have some stock-taking kinds of thoughts on our common life that I want to share.
Let me begin with some thoughts of a personal nature that may also relate to our church life. I chose the opening hymn this morning because it does a pretty good job of expressing where I am spiritually these days. For one thing, lots of questions. It seems to me that it’s pretty hard to live in the world these days without lots of questions? Some of a personal nature maybe…How will I feel physically or emotionally a year from now? What will my life look like a year from now? For some there may be an awareness that some major changes are in store, or are needed, in our personal lives.
Some questions are of a more global nature. What is in store for our planet, or its people? What is to be done about the actual violence we human beings are doing to each other, and the violence we are doing to this earth? We hardly need Genesis to remind us of this, but it does…remind us that however we put it into words that the earth is a gift, a sacred gift, that we are using up and destroying at a rapid rate. And then there is the specter of possible violence, the threat of terrorism of one kind or another, that we have all had to learn to live with, but then again have not learned to live with, and what is to be done about that? And that leads to questions where the personal and the global interact…How do I open myself to the world and let it into my spirit and not despair? How do I not let the sorrow overcome me? How do I navigate my way through feelings of anger and fear?
So I can identify with a hymn that asks a lot of questions. It’s not typical, you know, for hymns to ask questions. Usually they invite us into an attitude of belief or praise or commitment. Not too many questions in hymns. And I have had a number of people both here at Sojourners and in other congregations express to me their dislike of the hymn saying they don’t like it or they don’t get it…all these questions. At least I’ve always assumed that’s the reason some people don’t like it. It just leaves us with a bunch of questions. I don’t know for sure whether that’s the reason some don’t like it. I’ve always liked it myself for pretty much exactly that reason. It leaves us with a lot of questions, which is often where I find myself and where I find myself again now, poised at the starting line of 2006. But I also have to say that I find some answers in the hymn too. Some of the answers are even in the questions themselves.
How does the creature say Awe? How does the creature say praise? How does the creature cry Woe or Save? How does the creature say Grace, Thanks, Care, Life, Love, Peace, Joy, Home? Those are all questions whose answers are not short or pain-free. But in the asking of them, in the singing of them, there is a suggestion to me that those are more the right questions than many others.
There are of course lots of things in our lives that are uncertain, lots of things that may make us anxious, lots of things to worry about and make us wonder what lies ahead. But if somehow we can set our hearts on how we individually and we together are to say Care and Life and Peace, perhaps there is a good measure of grace in the asking. Perhaps in the asking of those questions, the fears and the frustrations and the anger become a little less overwhelming. We may not be able to help asking in some form what is to become of me, or what is to become of us, but if I set my heart to asking how I am to say Awe in my life, or how we are to say love in our life together, maybe the rest is a little less oppressive.
The hymn has some other answers in it too, if you recall. They are modest answers to be sure, but then again modest answers are the kind that appeals to me these days. As people of faith we are guided into a new year not only by a suggestion of what the right kind of questions might be but by the resources that are available to us. For me those resources don’t come in the form of formulas of faith, large or certain statements of belief. They come in the form of images and stories and notions, fragments of belief if you will. They are not beliefs that claim to answer all questions. They do not offer clear instruction or proclaim Truth with a capital T. They do contain truth I believe, if we live with the fragments we are given and let them shape our thinking and feeling and believing and acting.
The hymn suggests just a few such images: sparrow and whale and swirling stars, images of the wonder of creation—not arguments for intelligent design as part of a biology curriculum, mind you (just had to get that in)—but images of the wonder of creation. Earthquake, storm, rainbow, cross, empty grave, neighbor, foe, pruning hook, prodigal…we have stories to tell that involve these images. Sometimes they are Biblical stories. Sometimes they are stories taken from our world. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. Sometimes they are our very own stories and sometimes we are making them up as we go along, our lives becoming the telling of the stories of our faith. And all the while involved in these stories of faith is a God we are given a glimpse of in Genesis, mysterious spirit brooding over the face of the waters of chaos at the beginning of time, about to bring into being something just as mysterious as God herself, life, brooding maybe still over our lives trying to nurture life among us even now, trying to nurture life in you or me, an image of God the poet gives us, God bending over us like a mammy bending over her baby, nothing there but love, filling up our flesh and blood with soul and making love possible for us too.
I begin the new year with almost no certainties, not even the certainties of faith, maybe especially not the certainties of faith, but with a desire to at least ask the right questions and with some cherished stories and images and words to guide me and beckon me along the way. And that is essentially, I say to myself, what we are doing here at Sojourners together, one way to think about it anyway. We are asking questions together, questions that have to do not so much with what we think but with how we live, and we wrestle with those questions knowing on the one hand that there are no set or certain answers to these questions but that on the other hand that there are images, words, stories that evoke the spirit within us, that keep on giving us life, and that point us in the right direction. I will be measuring our life as a church, as well as my own life, by how faithful we are in trying to let the words and images and stories of our faith shape the way we live.
And this brings me to a related thought that has to do with challenges facing the church as we begin the new year. What I’ve been talking about so far is more just a way of thinking about what we are about. This is more in the nature of a specific challenge that I think is facing us. I said at the beginning that I am not real big on sermons that focus on “the church”. The reason I said that, and I’m sorry if this seems a bit basic but I’m going to say it anyway—the reason I said I’m not big on sermons that focus on the life of the church is that the church is not what we’re here for. The church is not a good in and of itself. What we seek in the church is not the good of the church. The church is not about the church.
That’s a thought that sounds simple but in fact isn’t. In the language I am using this morning, I’m thinking that we are here because each of us is trying to build some faithful way of living for ourselves and because we care about the way of life we are leading together in the world we live in. The church is important when it contributes to those tasks of shaping and re-shaping our ways of living. It is not so very important when it becomes an end in itself. The church can be a vehicle that is of help to us in our own ways of walking with God, of seeking God, of seeking a more just a loving world. The church can also be an obstacle to those very same things. Even a church that is comfortable and congenial to us and stands for the kinds of values we want it to stand for can stand in the way of creating faithful ways of living.
Making that distinction and staying clear about that distinction have been challenges for every church I have ever been a part of or known anything about. That includes Sojourners. Maybe it’s a special challenge for Sojourners. My read of the intention of Sojourners from the beginning, and my experience of it in the time I’ve been here, is that we have wanted to be as little encumbered by the need to do things just “because this is what churches do” as possible. That we have wanted to be more like a movement than an institution. That we have wanted to keep the impulses to be a safe and welcoming place and a justice-seeking community, that we have wanted to keep those values at the heart of this community. And so, for instance, some years ago we officially said as a whole community, by consensus, that we held the seeking of racial justice in the greater Charlottesville community to be at the heart of who we are as a community of faith.
I am feeling a need for us to ask ourselves as we begin this year how we are doing at keeping the impulses to be a safe and welcoming place and a justice-seeking community at the heart of our common life. I’m feeling a need to ask ourselves how serious we are going to be about the leading concern of racial justice. I’m feeling a need to ask ourselves how serious we are going to be about living out the meaning of our “Open and Affirming” commitment. In asking such questions I am not suggesting that we are failing miserably at any of this. But I am pretty sure we are not where we want to be either. And the reality is that churches that are living in a time of transition and that are still adjusting to owning and inhabiting a building have lots of institutional kinds of needs and those institutional needs can easily and quickly fill up all the available time, emotional energy, and psychic space there is in church life. No one I know at Sojourners, or anywhere else for that matter, would say that they want that to happen, but it does often happen anyway. It’s one of those things that can happen without your quite knowing its happening or without being willing to admit its happening. So from where I sit keeping a proper perspective on the church and not letting the church become too important to the church is a major challenge for us in the coming year.
Meanwhile, I continue to imagine God’s spirit brooding over us not at the beginning of time but even now, brooding over us here at Sojourners, brooding over this troubled world of ours, working in us patiently, continuously to bring forth new signs of life and new ways of loving. I continue to imagine God bending over us, like a mammy bending over her baby, filling the matter of our being with life-giving soul. May we be open to the spirit of God, bending over us, moving over us, moving within us. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 8, 2006