Centennial Sermon: The Gospel Today

Transcribed from the sermon preached June 24, 2007

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Ps. 95:1-6, Gen. 17:1-2,7,10, Phil. 2:5-11, Eph. 4:1-6, John 9:1-7, 16, 24-25

When our son Kevin was two, we signed up for the parent child swim class at the YMCA. After the first day Feliciana told me Kevin just jumped in unafraid. I thought, because of her limited English at that time, she was having a difficult time describing things to me so I didn't believe her description. I took him to his second lesson. I sat him on the edge of the pool and told him to wait. I put on my goggles and slipped into the pool, walked out a few steps and turned around. Kevin was gone. Seeing a shadow, I dove under. He was only a foot or so under, just floating in the liquid space, with a huge smile on his face, like the opening scene of  World according to Garp. Apparently we learn to fear the water, and the first reaction is joy and wonder. It makes sense, I suppose, for we start in the water of the womb, encompassed by that which gives us life.
 
          And so as a faith community celebrating its birth we have to go way back, deep into our own soul to that time when we were weightless with wonder and the joy of life. From this comes the first impulse to praise our God. "It was you who formed my inmost being, you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. In his hand are the deep places of the Earth, the heights of the hill are his also."
          And then we step forward to celebrate that we are a covenant people. We continue a relationship with a personal God who chooses to bless us. Here we might think, like Abraham, that God must be joking. Surely most of his life is past, he and Sarah had had their hey day, and at 99 their lives were winding down. How will our numbers increase? We have no children. But God has plans. If we remain faithful and honor God, God will continue to honor us. At 100 God is just getting started.
 
          Abraham learns what Micah tells us. How are we to honor this God, our Creator and his covenant? With what shall we come before the Lord? In this covenant with Abraham, we find an end to human and child sacrifice in the name of God. We are not to kill our children, or anyone else's for that matter, in an attempt to honor God. Shall I offer fancy gifts, a crystal cathedral or a silver communion set; shall we sacrifice the fruit of our body for the sin of our soul? God has shown us what is good, and what the Lord requires of us: to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.
 
          Our covenant with God unites us and bonds us to each other. We are, says Paul in Ephesians, to be humble and gentle, patient, bearing with one another in love. Humility is a key Gospel ingredient.
 
          All those things that make us different added up together, language, age, racial ethnic background, taste in music, theology, politics, sexual orientation, which side of the border we are born on, whether we prefer ketchup or salsa: it all pales in comparison to the power of the Holy Spirit which unites us.
 
          Once again in Philippians we run into humility as an essential piece of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus, who though equal to God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient tot he point of death - even death on a cross.
          Jack Miles in his book, Christ, writes that "Winners usually look like winners and losers like losers. But in Christianity's epilogue to the God-story that it inherited from Judaism, the Lord God becomes human without ceasing to be the Lord and, unrecognized by all but a few, experiences the human condition at its worst before winning in the end a glorious victory. By losing to Caesar, he wins a duel with the Devil and defeats death itself... One of the many implications of this epilogue to God's life story has been that in the West no regime can declare itself above review. All power is conditional; and when the powerless rise, God may be with them... As his executioners nail him to the cross, Jesus prays: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"(Luke 23:24). Wherever lines like these or the ideas behind them have spread, human authority has begun to lose its grip on unimpeachable legitimacy. In the West, any criminal may be Christ, and therefore any prosecutor Pilate. As the abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell put it: 'Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne - Yet the scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.'"
 
          Through Christ, we find both the call to humility and the strength to stand up against the arrogant. Still, the Gospel always comes back to that personal encounter with the God of grace incarnate. Sooner or later we are hurt. Joy and wonder give way to fear, and in reaction we close up and narrow our vision. We break the covenant; we act in arrogance and commit injustice. We fall short of the Glory of God.
 
          Yet somehow grace breaks into our messy lives anyway. For a couple of weeks volunteers have been working to spruce this place up. Two weeks ago Gloria Worrel began washing down the parking lot walls. Then this week my father, Margy, Martha, and Charlie joined her, and they painted two coats. They finished Thursday afternoon. Thursday night someone came by and tagged the freshly painted wall with graffiti. Friday after spending a couple of hours cleaning the junk and dust from the dishwashing room, I found that the fill valve on the dishwasher had corroded shut.
 
          I have to admit I was a bit annoyed, even as we had our wonderful gathering on Friday night. There wasn't much I could do about the valve so I decided to go after the tagger. After everyone had left the building, with the lights off and the building locked down, I sat in the last room on the top floor next to the window with a good view of the parking lot. At first I was annoyed that it was too dark to work. My mind and body had been racing for the last several weeks. Perhaps a typical minister pitfall over functioning, feeling self-important, wanting to look good for you all coming in from out of town, for all the former ministers, for the presbytery folk. I felt ready and the tagger and dishwasher ruined my program. I wanted to catch him if he came back to do the other wall. Sitting in the dark, focused on the negative, hurt by disrespect, obsessed with outward appearance, blinded by hyper-business, my manic over functioning had finally landed me in a spot where I could do nothing.
 
          After about a half an hour, I decided to do some yoga. As the tension was stretched from my body, a funny thing started to happen. I stopped playing vigilante minister and my perspective began to change. A half moon was shining bright over the shadow of the redwoods out front. I was reminded of the Wendell Barry poem entitled Resurrection. Here is an excerpt:
 
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
 
The roof of the sanctuary formed a triangular silhouette that looked just like a volcano in Guatemala, and I was reminded of the paradox of the beauty and difficult life there.
 
          I noticed how the crack in the parking lot follows the contour of the not quite flat surface. I felt like God looking down from heaven on the beginning of the Grand Canyon, before it was so grand.
 
          Out the back window I noticed the immense oak growing the corner, its gnarled branches beautiful and majestic. Seven rubber balls, three trikes and countless other toys spread haphazardly across the childcare play yard: testimony to the fun had by children earlier that day, and the tired care givers, who, after passing the children off safely into parents' arms, had decided they had had enough for the day and went home to their own families. Certainly not the experience of innocence in the garden of Eden, not the free joy of the child in the womb of mother God, not the pure wonder of the high sierra mountain top, not even the final victory of a righteous battle won, just a mixed up minister in a dark corner of a worn-down building of an old church in a crazy town at midnight, with nothing to do but listen and observe. Incarnate amongst the cracks, corroded pipes and messy playground, God shows up and tags me. In big bold graffiti across the façade covering my heart, "Saved by grace."
 
          I'm not sure about this Jesus. Whether he is a sinner, I do not know. Maybe he isn't really the son of God. Maybe there is no God. All I know is that I was blind and now I see.
 
          There is no question that God has blessed this congregation with gifted people, with talented musicians and strong voices for peace and justice. We've had great ministers and even greater members who do good works for church and world. God has blessed the city of Berkeley, the Presbyterian church and the world with 100 years of St. John's ministry. There is a lot to be proud of. And, at the same time, no church lasts one hundred years without its ups and downs, without some hurt and pain, without a few gnarled branches, a few cracks and corroded pipes, shadows and blind spots. It is with this whole picture, with our gifts and imperfections wedded as they are, that we discover the unsurpassed, infinite beauty of the unconditional love and grace of God. Despite everything, God is still our God, and we are still God's people; called to be humble servants, to overcome barriers that separate with the bonds of love and peace. The building might change, the music might change, the issues change, the strengths and weaknesses of the ministers have changed, people come and go, but the love of our God stands forever.
 
"When we've been here ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we'd first begun."