Advent: Look for Purpose

Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36

First Sunday of Advent:  December 2, 2012

Every year at this time, not unlike other pastors, I suspect, I feel a little bit like someone standing on the shore of the ocean trying to hold back the tide.  Christmas season is rushing in, trying to overtake us, and every year I am the one who has to say, “no, not yet.  Hold on.  Wait.”  Well, I don’t say that, our church calendar and liturgy says that.   We don’t get to read about Jesus’ birth until Christmas eve, and we don’t sing Christmas carols until Christmas eve “Wait,” we’re told.

And it’s hard.  The Christmas season is about joy, light, excitement, parties, music.  It’s about kids eating cookies and singing Christmas carols in the basement of St. Mary’s church as money is raised to help the homeless.  These things, we know because of our inner experience, are not bad. 

But from the very first Sunday of Advent, we see in no uncertain terms that something else is going on here at church.  While the rest of the world sings Christmas carols, we read about the “end times.”  It’s dark, ominous, depressing, and otherwise un-Christmassy. 

Why do we do this?  Why not ride the joy of the season right to Christmas?  Why does the church have to be such a downer – a kill joy?  Jingle bell holiday on Friday, apocalypse on Sunday?  Church: the great gathering of Ebenezer Scrooges. 

Well, the reason we do this is that while the rest of the world says this is the time when we wait and prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, and calls it all Christmastime, we remember that we are waiting for even more than that.  We remember that we are waiting with a world that is groaning at times in the pain of violence, oppression, poverty, and darkness, and Christmas trees, gifts, and eggnog will not fix it.

Writing more than 500 years apart, both of the authors of our texts this morning were addressing people who lived in this waiting world.  Jeremiah wrote to people right around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Babylonians in the 6^th century before Christ.  The author of the gospel of Luke wrote to people living about 15 years after the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.  As distant as they were from one another in history, both communities were struggling with the same, fundamental question:  Where in the world is God in all this?

They believed God had promised them a new world order: one free of oppression, one where they would be rulers over their own land, one where justice would reign, the poor would be fed, widows and orphans taken care of, and peace would flow like an everlasting stream.  But all they saw was destruction – destruction of their city; destruction of the very house of God, the center of all they believed in.  All they could feel was God’s absence.

Both of our authors speak to this reality by talking about “end times,” as we have come to call it – or eschatology, or the apocalypse.  Both speak of a day when all will be made right, when God will come to reign on earth as in heaven.  There will be a new Jerusalem, a new temple, a new kingdom, a time when, as the prophet Isaiah says, “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,” and “swords will be turned into plowshares.” 

Now, 2,000 years after the gospel of Luke was written, we don’t normally talk in terms of “end times.”  Most of us – unless we’re a part of some cult or Hollywood producers – don’t spend much time thinking about the imminent end of the world as we know it.  So, when we get to Advent and hear about these “end times,” it is easy to just write it off and move on with our Christmas shopping and decorating.

But, when we stop and think about it, don’t we too have the same questions as the people Jeremiah and Luke are writing to.  Don’t we too ask, “if God is so good, why are there so many swords and not enough plowshares?”  Don’t we at times stop and think, “If Jesus was so great, the Messiah who was supposed to bring about this incredible world that the prophets envisioned, then why do the lambs still get devoured by the wolves?

If we can translate the idea of end times as Jeremiah and Luke saw it, it might have something to say to these questions that endure in every generation.  Talking about “end times” was the way Jeremiah and Luke answered this basic question about what God was up to in the world.  It might feel like God is absent, they tell people, but in fact, God is present now, has always been present, and is already present in the future that we imagine. 

In other words, there is a purpose in all this, if we can uncover it.  There is a purpose built in to creation and the world that is completely outside ourselves and our abilities.  The purpose is God – it is a movement – drawing us all closer to the new kingdom, the new world that is in the future if we join in the movement.  That’s a pretty bold faith statement.  Given the evidence around them, from where do they get the gall?

Our inclination these days is to hear these apocalyptic texts as predictions of the end of the world in literal way.  They aren’t.  They are meant as a faith statement.  Things are terrible, Luke says.  You have seen signs of terrible things: days and nights pitch black by lack of moon and sun; earth in distress.  But, God has broken into this world and shown us new life, new ways, a new kind of world where God is in charge and justice reigns; God continues to do so, and will do so in the future.

Theologian Guy Sayles reminds us that these texts are not about some kind of literal “end of time.”  He says these authors remind people that “when we have crashed into the limits of our knowledge, power, and courage, God’s kingdom breaks into the here-and-now to startle and save us.  God isn’t waiting,” he writes, “until the Son of Humanity comes to do these surprising and saving things.  Jesus doesn’t just come twice: once in Bethlehem as a baby and once “on a cloud” to wrap things up [spending the meantime waiting in the wings somewhere].  By the Holy Spirit, Jesus comes over and over again.” 

Luke is not telling the people to be ready so that when Jesus “comes again,” they will be swept up to heaven while everyone else suffers in the disintegration of the world.  Luke is telling people to look now for God who comes into this world of darkness over and over and over, making it new in every generation.  These things will happen before this generation passes away, Luke says: the signs of destruction and God’s movement to make things new again.  This will happen in every generation.  But that’s the key, he says:  “Look!”  When things feel as bad as they can possibly feel, “Stand up!  Raise your heads, and look.” 

This is why Advent is important to us as people of faith during these weeks leading up to Christmas eve.  It’s our bold faith statement.  The “Christmas season,” without Advent, can fool us into only looking for something that’s already happened – the birth of Jesus.  That is supposed to make us happy – supposed to remind us that Jesus fixed everything, made everything right, saved us all.  Which would be great, if indeed he had.  But if he had, then why is the world that is still so broken, hurting, and groaning.  Our faith tradition tell us that Jesus – the great symbol of God breaking into our world – continues to save.

Christmastime, in my experience, is such a dramatic mix of the profane and profound.  We know it does matter that Jesus was born, we know that Jesus somehow offers hope beyond what we can imagine, and we try to express that with moving music, giving gifts, caring for one another, emphasizing light and love – both to honor Jesus’ birth and to anticipate God’s further action in the world.

But these profound things are obscured by the profanities of consumerism, exploitation of emotion, sentimentalism, forced happiness, triumphalism, and on and on.  Christmas, without an Advent perspective, loses its grounding in reality, and so has nothing to say to the real world beyond be happy! 

Advent, and its crazy stories of end times, tells us we are in the world of “already and not yet.”  God created this world, was in the beginning, is already here, has always been here, came in the person of Jesus, and continues to be with us in the Holy Spirit.  But there is also a “not yet,” part.  We know that all is not well, and for joy to be real and mean something, we have to have something to say to that “not yet” part.

And Luke does.  Stand up, raise your head, look around.  When we see signs of distress, horror, destruction…when we wonder if God is anywhere to be found, if there is any point to it all, if we are on our own, Luke tells us to lift up our heads and look again.  Rise up above the fray.  I imagine being buried in a crowd of people, only able to see what’s happening right in front of us, the rest of the world blocked by the bodies of crowds closing in on us. 

Then we climb up on someone’s shoulders, or find a rock or a chair, and we can get our head above the heads of all those around us, and see a great distance.  And when we do, we see signs that the kingdom of God is, in fact, near – the green buds on what seemed like a dead fig tree.  Look for God’s activity in the world, Luke says, and there lies the purpose in the midst of despair.

We can do this on two levels:  First, these “end times” passages from Jeremiah, Luke and other books in our scriptures invite us to lift our heads above the fray of our own limited time in history.  See the larger story – both of the past, where we see evidence of God’s activity in the world, and of the future, where we can see that what we know is not the end of knowledge, not the whole of history: we gain perspective.  When we can lift our heads above the fray of our own time in history, we see that over and over again humanity has found itself in times so dark it seemed the world was going to end.  Yet, time and time again, the world continued sustained by God’s creative movement. God broke in to give hope and direction, and possibility. 

But for these next four weeks, we are also going to lift our heads above the fray not just of our time in history, but of our immediate surroundings.  We are going to use Advent in the church to help us, from time to time, raise our heads above the fray of the Christmas season.  Not because we must resist it entirely – declare war on all things secular and all Christmassy things that come too early.  But because Advent can give us a way to see the profound amidst the profane.  We can uncover God’s purpose that is often obscured by the imposed false purposes of the world.             

Consumerism tells us we can buy a happy Christmas.  Glitz and glitter try to tell us we can make a perfect experience for ourselves and our kids.  Culture wars, religious piety, and simplistic tales drown out the voices of the hurting, searching, lonely, and shunned.  We find manipulative noise, false light, words that try to sell us something, music that rings hollow and empty through the malls, and falsities about who we are and are meant to be.  And the result is exactly what Luke says it will be:  we are weighed down by the worries of life, thinking Christmas is supposed to “be” something that others tell us it is supposed to be.  We feel stress, exhaustion, emptiness, and at times even despair. 

In this space set apart each week, we lift our heads above the fray.  In moments of silence, visions of soft light, words of depth and meaning, music that draws us into the truth of what’s around us, prayers for the world, honest confession of who we are and what’s true in our lives, we can lift the veil created by the profanities and see the profound.    

Finally, we have to remember that it’s not our responsibility to create joy – it’s not our responsibility to bring about the new kingdom of God – we can’t force something that’s not ours to create.  And that frees us from a quest that only provokes anxiety.  Instead, we affirm that God is in control, and we lift our head above the fray to look for what God is already doing. 

The horror of the world at times should not distract us from this truth.  The horror is not proof that God is not here.  Instead, the truth that God is here should transform the horror of the world.  And so we must look for God – for God’s movement and purpose, and we realize, with Advent as our lens, we do see this in some of what’s going on.  There are things right now, Christmassy things before Christmas eve, that do align with God’s purposes – kids singing in church basements comes to mind – but these are no longer mere events on the Christmas season schedule…one more thing to do.  If seen as part of God’s purposes, maybe they can have a greater meaning because they can point a hurting world to God’s in-breaking of joy, love, and hope.   

 

For the next few weeks when we gather in worship, let’s raise our heads above the fray of the holiday season – not to escape it entirely, but to see where God is moving; genuinely creating, and renewing, so that when we come down off the rock – back into the fray – we have a sense of where to head, which direction to go – toward God’s purpose.  Ten we can join in the movement of true Christmas.  Amen.

Out of this World

John 18:33-38a

Reign of Christ Sunday:  November 25, 2012

Christ the King Sunday is a great time to think for a moment about how we talk about God.  And this really isn’t just a little side trip, or a time out from the rest of the Sundays.  Since words about God are one of the primary ways we come to know God, the words we use to describe God, and our understandings of what those words mean, have enormous power over us and who we are and what our faith looks like.

For example, we say God is our father.  There is no way to use the word “father” without it evoking all of our associations with that word – whether we become conscious of that or not.  In fact, the only way this word can be helpful to us in getting to know God better is if we do have preconceived notions about what “father” means.  Otherwise, the word is, literally, meaningless.

But we always have to remember we are talking about God, and so any word we use for God will never finally describe God.  The language is symbolic, and when a word points to God it always both is and is not God.  God both is and is not a father.  God both is and is not a rock.  God both is and is not a judge.  And on and on.  There is simply no way around this.

But because we have a fairly small repertoire of images for God, we use them over and over until, I think, we lose the “is not” part of the whole thing.  The words become over familiar representations of God and over time become synonymous with God, not symbols for God.  When we say God is father, we usually only think about how God is like a father.  We haven’t trained our brains to immediately think about how God is not like a father. God does love us with the fierce love of a parent, so God is like a father.  But God is not a gendered human being that, treats us like children who can’t be trusted with our own lives.

This is the world of faith.  It comes with the territory.  And it’s not a problem to be solved by just looking for more precise words that get closer to defining God without having the “is not” problem.  In fact, the “problem” of the limitations of language and words in describing God itself points to a truth about God: God can’t be known fully through words.  They fall short – they obscure as much as illuminate.  That is saying as much about God as calling God father.  But we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about this or being conscious of this. 

I admit it.  I read a fair amount of the chatter online about the Tuesday night Grinnell basketball game this week.  I really enjoyed seeing what “the world” had to say about a basketball player scoring 138 points in one game.  I enjoyed it almost as much as being at the game when he did it.  I think part of the reason I enjoyed it so much is because I am on the inside.  I am in the know.  I enjoyed watching people struggle to articulate why it bothered them, or why they loved it, when they didn’t know much – or anything at all – about Grinnell basketball. 

Understanding Grinnell basketball requires holding on to two realities that seem contradictory – it requires the “is” and “is not” thinking that we have to do with words about God.  What they play both is and is not basketball – and that’s what makes it so great.  It is basketball – it is in relationship with all the other teams and people who play basketball, it follows the technical rules.  To try and claim – as some people actually do – that it’s not basketball is to lose the ability to talk about it in any meaningful way at all. 

But in order to really be in the know about this team, to really “get” it, you have to know that what they play is not basketball – at least not in the sense that most people immediately associate with the word basketball.  It may follow the technical rules, but not the conventional ones.  And I would even go out on a limb and say David Arsenault is trying to be both in the world of basketball and upset the world of basketball by playing in a style that both is and is not basketball.  Because that’s the beauty of it – the “is” and “is not.”  It means it is doing more than just participating in something that is already determined…it is trying to shape, make more complex, interesting, and fun, disrupt and deconstruct the very thing in which it is participating.  In this case, not understanding this means one misses out on something fun.  Which in the scheme of things is a fairly trivial consequence.

But In the case of words we use to talk about the divine, forgetting the “is” and “is not” reality of those words means we miss out on connecting with God in meaningful ways.  For me, that is not a trivial consequence.

That is what we see in the conversation between Jesus and Pilate.  The author of the gospel of John uses this scene to help his readers better understand God.  Pilate becomes the foil, the example of what happens when we don’t understand the ability and inability of common words to describe who God is.  Through Pilate’s interaction with Jesus, the author is drawing on what the readers know of the world, but only to help them transcend what they know so they can grasp a little something of the transcendent God, the God that both participates in what we know and changes it.

Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you king of the Jews?”  And Jesus doesn’t answer directly.  He appears cagey, in fact.  But finally says “my kingdom is not from this world.”  The way Pilate hears that is, “Yes, I am a king.”  He can’t hear anything else.  When Jesus says, “my kingdom,” that means he is saying, “I am a king,” and that’s all Pilate needs to know to put Jesus to death.

My kingdom is not from this world:  When we hear this – this familiar, oft used verse – we are vulnerable to the same thing Pilate was.  When Jesus says, “my kingdom,” he is, in fact, saying that he is a king.  You can’t have a kingdom and not have a king, right?  But we tell ourselves, that means he is beautiful, sparkly, Jesus wears a robe and jeweled crown, etc.  His kingdom is out of this world, existing in some kind of parallel universe, but operates the same as the kingdoms we know. 

The problem is, when this verse is quoted, rarely do I hear someone go on to quote the next verse – the one where Jesus is essentially saying, “I am not a king, and my kingdom is not a kingdom…at least not in the sense that you, Pilate, understand those words.”  He says that if his kingdom were like other kingdoms, when he was arrested, his followers would have risen up and fought violently to the death in order to try and free him.  Because, that’s what you do when your king is captured by another kingdom. 

“My kingdom is not from this world,” does not just mean it exists in some other “world”.  It means it is right here, it grows out of this world, but shatters everything we know about kingdoms.  It teaches us new things about how we can be in this world, what power can look like, how we can live in community together.  Kingdoms were what people knew…it was the only organizational structure for living together people had.  Jesus had to start there in order to relate to people at all; it was the world in which they participated. 

But he was also turning it all on its head to say there is a new reality…an alternative to what we know.  It grows “out of this world,” but is radically different from this world, and that can actually change and affect the realm in which we participate.

Christ the king.  The kingdom of God.  We are well versed in the ways these things do describe Jesus.  Jesus is powerful because a king is powerful.  Jesus rules over people, because a king rules over people.  Disobeying Jesus will invite immediate judgment and punishment, because that is what happens when one disobeys a king.  You get the point. 

But the word king should also – at the same time – sound like fingers on a chalkboard when we hear it attached to Jesus’ name.  Jesus is not a king, because kings use force, coercion, and power to keep people in line.  Jesus is not a king, because kings are wealthy and better cared for than any person in the kingdom.  Jesus is not a king, because people aren’t required to serve him.  Jesus is not a king because he bows down at our feet and washes them.  And so the kingdom of God within this world is not like any kingdom we might know.  The rules are different.  That difference matters.  That difference means there are new possibilities.  We are not trapped only in what we know.  We are given access to something transcendent.

Over the years there have been both short and long conversations about God language in our church.  Over the years, choices are made each week about how to talk and sing about God, and those choices are made with great thought. 

But this conversation has at times been hard and frustrating.  There are no easy answers.  With each word we debate whether to use to describe God, something is lost if we don’t use it and something is lost if we do.  If we don’t use words that evoke easy associations in us – we risk losing the initial connection to God.  It reminds us God does participate in our realm.  But if we use it, its very familiarity, its conventional nature, can easily prevent us from remembering the “is not.”  We forget God seeks to transform this world. 

Again, this struggle is not a bad thing – not something to avoid, and certainly not a problem to be solved once and for all.  Our words will always both help and obscure; sometimes be well-chosen and other times not.  Imperfection is inevitable, but can be instructive at the same time.  Because the struggle itself is revealing something to us about God that is invaluable.

It is our tensions, even our disagreements, that illuminate God – that deepen our understanding of God, and that allow us to grow in faith.  We learn the necessary humility when trying to talk about God.  We learn that others bring a part of the picture we ourselves could have never had, we learn that different words affect people in different ways, and hopefully we learn that God is in it all, moving through it all, changing us all in marvelous, sometimes mysterious ways.  Amen.

The Lilies Have it Easy

Matthew 6:24-34

Harvest Sunday:  November 17, 2012

Like most people, when I was a child, too young to decide for myself, my parents chose my clothes for me.  From the pictures that we have – and there aren’t very many since I am the third child – they did a good job.  But that horrible day came…I can’t remember the exact moment, but I know it came, because I can remember one day in the store with my mom when she was telling me I had to pick out what I wanted to wear.  I’m pretty sure she even made me try it on.  I don’t think my mom did anything wrong – I guess that’s just part of the natural progression of things.  It’s just that I would have been happy – quite happy – to have never crossed that particular threshold.  I’d have been happy to have had my parents pick out my clothes for me forever.

I’d have been happy to never cross that other, related, threshold either.  The one where you go from your parents choosing each day what you will wear, to you having to pick out clothes for yourself every single morning.  At a pretty young age, though, I had figured out how to game the system on both counts.  I just decided I would wear sweats – sweatshirt and sweat pants – every day.  Socks, tennis shoes, and I was set.  This killed a couple of birds.  First, shopping was a breeze – did I need black, grey, or blue sweats was all I had to figure out.  And of course, dressing each morning was easy – black on Monday, Wed., and Friday; grey on Tues., Thurs., and Sat., and my nice blue sweats for Sundays. J 

Then came the day…I must have been in early high school:  my mother handed me a credit card and said, “Kirsten, you have to go shopping, you have to spend $100, and you are not allowed to get any sweats!!”  Now it still took a little while longer before she could force me to wear any of these great, non-sweat clothes …but in the end, she must have figured something out, because there are pictures of me from high school in which I’m wearing jeans and button down shirts.

When I went to college, it was a glorious day.  I figured out I never had to shop again.  As long as I didn’t change size, I was fine.  But one weekend, I went home, and ever the typical college student, I brought my laundry.  My mom was helping me get my clothes from the car, and she stood at the trunk, looked into one of my clothes baskets, and sighed a very heavy sigh.  Then said, “Kirsten, your clothes are ….,” well, let’s just say her description of my clothes was not g-rated. 

To this day, I hate clothes shopping.  Hate it.  I also hate figuring out what to wear every day.  Any nice clothes or outfits I have I were undoubtedly given to me by someone with far more fashion sense than I have – which, if you haven’t guessed by now, is pretty much everyone.  I hate that I have to remember what I wore two days ago, so I don’t wear it again.  I hate having to match clothes.  I hate having to figure out what shoes go with what pants.  I hate that it’s apparently not cool to wear things with holes or stains. 

What, you might be asking by now, is my point?  My point is this:  Those lilies have it easy.  Don’t worry about clothing, Jesus tells me.  Look at the lilies.  They don’t have to do a darn thing, and they are clothed more beautifully than any human in the history of the world.  When I’ve gone the no worrying route on the clothing front – the one where I just buy and wear sweat pants – people do not stop their car when they pass me, get out and admire my beauty.  Instead, they look at me and say, “Kirsten, your clothes are….,” well, you get the point.  The lilies have it easy.  Never once have they had to step foot in a Younkers, or the hell that is a department store dressing room. 

Okay – I know.  This is poetry.  It’s not really about Younkers, sweat pants, or dressing rooms.  But, still, I take issue with Matthew and his sweet story of the lilies who have to do not one thing and they are cared for by God, created to be beauty itself, nourished by the ground they are planted in, no need to wander in search of food or water.  Best of all, no brain.  Consider the lilies, Jesus tells us, they don’t worry.  Of course they don’t worry.  They have no brain.  If God is going to give me a brain, then God does not get to tell me to not worry.  Period.

Am I right?  Isn’t this a frustrating passage, to say the least.  Don’t worry about your life.  Don’t worry about what you will eat or drink or wear.  At BEST this is annoying.  I’m human.  I have needs.  There are things I have to do to meet those needs, and sometimes that means I’m going to worry.  At WORST, this is grossly irresponsible and cruel.  I’d like to see Jesus sit down among children in parts of Africa whose stomachs are distended from hunger and say, “don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or drink.” 

In fact, I have grown to resent this passage, because too often I hear it referenced in a bumper-sticker-like way, telling me and others that the Christian faith can be summed up in a Bobbie McFerrin song from 1988:  Don’t worry, be happy.   

I don’t know if Jesus “worried,” in the 21^st century sense of that word.  I don’t know if he had sleepless nights, or felt anxiety in his chest, or if he stewed about things over which he had no control.  But, I don’t think that has anything to do with what he’s saying here. I do think he longed for a world where people didn’t have to worry about where their next meal was coming from, or how they would keep their children healthy and warm.  I think Jesus longed for a world without cruel distinctions, or illnesses that made people outcasts.  He longed, in short, for the realm of God.  In the realm of God, people are like lilies planted in a field.  Without having to strive for it, they have what they need to live, love, and flourish. 

This passage this morning comes in the middle of the famous “Sermon on the Mount.”  The sermon on the mount is not really about individual instructions.  It’s not really about how I can personally be saved.  This sermon is a vision of a new world – a new way of being with each other as community – the vision and instructions are communal.  In this world, which he calls the realm or kingdom, of God, those who are hated and reviled are blessed.  The meek, the merciful, the peacemakers: these are the ones who serve as models for the rest of us.  In the kingdom of God, retaliation is not the order of the day.  In the kingdom of God, not only are you to love your neighbor, but you love your enemy as well.

Jesus is painting a picture that is more beautiful than any painting of a huge field full of lilies.  Human beings living with one another in such a way that no one has to strive for their daily food, no one has to worry about losing their land, no one has to worry about being “religious enough.”  The only thing people have to strive for is, as he puts it, the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness – God’s way.

Lilies need the ground and the dirt, the sun and the rain, to survive without striving.  People need community – community based on compassion, justice, peace, grace, and love.  That is how people grow and flourish – by being planted in communities based on God’s priorities.  If we strive for that kind of community…seek only the realm of God: then all these things will be given to you as well…no one would have to worry about their lives.  As easily as the lilies flourish in their fields, humans would flourish in the realm of God.  We would have what we need to survive. 

Without a community of people who care for one another, we do not know how to survive.  I don’t read this passage as a commandment to all individuals to “stop worrying.”  Instead, I read it is saying when people have to worry, that is a sign of something amiss.  It’s a sign that we have been uprooted from God’s intentions and God’s created order.  We have been taken from our field. 

The only difference between the lilies and humans seems to be that lilies don’t destroy their own field.  We do.  And it seems like one of the ways we destroy it is through love of mammon – wealth.  Through striving for individual gain or security instead of striving to create a field where anyone who is planted will flourish.

In his book, “The Working Poor,” David Shipler gets to know a number of families who struggle on the edge of poverty.  He looks at what factors lead people to never ending cycles of poverty and pain, and what kinds of things actually pull people out of a life of poverty into a life where they do not have to worry about mere survival.  His is not a research book – so his conclusions are based on observation and experience.  But what he decides is that the most important factor in whether or not people flourish is how good their networks of support are.  In other words, those who are – for example – a part of a faith community, or who have reliable friends or extended family fare much better than those who don’t.  It’s not a matter of intelligence, luck, work ethic, worldview, even education.  Those who are rooted in a community of love are better able to weather the storms that come into all our lives. 

I watched a video this week called “What is poverty?”  It’s a brief clip of a Brazilian pastor named Claudio Oliver answering that question:  What is poverty?  In the end, he said poverty is not just, or even primarily, lack of money, food, clothing, housing, healthcare.  Poverty, he said, is lack of relationships.  Now, he wasn’t some kind of out of touch, sentimental, privileged guy.  This wasn’t a sweet hallmark notion that friends are better than money.  He was pointing out the harsh reality that lack of resources could be a problem for anyone.  What makes someone poor is living in a world where you have to worry about whether or not, when you lack food yourself, you will have people there to help you and feed you when you need it.  If you don’t, that’s what leads to lack of resources – to vulnerability and at times death.

No matter how hard we strive, no matter how much we plan or save or whatever, a hurricane still might come and put us out of our home.  No matter what our best intentions, no matter how smart we are, the economy still might crash and leave us without a job or the ability to pay the bills.  Life is unpredictable.  We can’t plan for every contingency.  But, if we spend our time and energy building the community that Jesus envisions, planting ourselves and each other in fields of love, compassion, and justice, when those things happen, we will be as taken care of as the lilies are in their fields.

I have spent the week being somewhat irrationally giddy about the harvest dinner.  Now, I know this is a luxury I have because I do not have to be in charge.  It is a lot of work for the deacons.  It takes planning and cooking and people do, I can tell you first hand, worry about it.  Will there be enough food, will people like what’s there, will we have enough tables set up, who will cook the turkeys?  It is not a worry free endeavor.  But, for me – a non deacon – the harvest dinner is a taste of the kingdom of God.  That may sound overly dramatic, but let me explain.

I began working here in the middle of August, in 2005.  Three months after I started, I attended my first harvest dinner.  By then, I knew enough of this community to know it is not perfect, but that at times it is a sign…a taste…a glimpse of the realm Jesus envisioned.  And the harvest dinner was like a multi-sensory manifestation of that.  The sound, the smell, the taste, the feel, the sights…it’s all still with me.  I felt, to put it simply, at home at that first harvest dinner.

I’m not saying we are unique, or special – in fact, thank God, we are not.  And I’m not saying that only churches can be places that reflect the realm of God – thank God, that’s not true either.  But I do think we are trying to be a community based on God’s values, and that means, hopefully, people among us do not have to worry about whether someone will be there for them if the bottom falls out.  People do not have to worry that they are responsible for themselves and all their problems.  People do not have to worry that their neighbor cares more about mammon than their well being. 

The fact that people worry about the harvest dinner is a sign that people are striving not for wealth, but for the realm of God.  It’s a small thing: the harvest dinner.  I get that.  I know we fail each other sometimes.  I know some of you have had times of genuine worry and did not feel the church there for you.  But, I imagine Lydia, through all her senses today, experiencing the glimpse of God’s realm – even if she can’t put it into words yet.  I’m hoping growing up here will help her to not have to worry about striving for survival.  I’m hoping that she learns to worry about how to create a harvest dinner more than her own personal wealth.  I’m hoping she learn to create a harvest feast in the world, that others need not worry.

In fact, I’m hoping all of us experience this – and continue to strive for the realm of God.  The lilies have it easy.  I pray that our world becomes the field God intended for us so all human beings may have it that easy some day.  Amen.