6-2-19
Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our
Risen Lord and savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, amen.
When I was in seminary, I remember reading a very long
and complicated article on the history of the Lutheran church in the United
States from eighteen hundred to the present day. I know, really fascinating
stuff. It went something like this: these two Lutheran groups formed a synod,
but later a small group left and joined this other synod, which after a while
split into two, but a few years later rejoined, teamed up with another synod,
but soon after another group left and formed their own group, who joined up
with this other group, who later split….
And on and on this went, for pages upon pages, decades
upon decades. As boring as that article was, it taught me one thing – human
beings, yes even Lutherans, find it difficult to get along with one another.
And if you keep going back in the history of God’s church
on earth, you will find schisms and splits and fighting and conflicts, going
all the way back to the early church, all the way back to Jesus’ own disciples.
Within a few years of Jesus’s resurrection, different
factions were embroiled in conflict over things that we would now find very
strange – eating practices, circumcision, the rapture, and others.
In our day and age, we are caught up in our own
conflicts, such as the inclusion of those who are gay, lesbian, transgendered,
queer, and non-binary, the ethics of abortion and women’s reproductive rights, the
status of immigrants and refugees, our struggle to curb the tide of gun
violence, just to name a few of our current hot-button issues. Things can get
pretty nasty between those of us who claim to follow the way of Jesus.
This prayer of Jesus comes during the “Maundy Thursday”
moment for the disciples. They didn’t know it yet, but they were on the cusp of
the worst – and best – weekend of their lives. Maundy Thursday, if you
remember, is the day before Good Friday. Maundy Thursday is the day Jesus is
betrayed, arrested, then charged and tortured under false pretenses. Good
Friday is the day that Jesus was nailed to a cross and died, with the day ending
with the darkness and finality of a tomb.
THIS what Jesus knows is coming, for both he and his
disciples. Easter, yes, Easter IS coming… but not before Maundy Thursday and
Good Friday. Resurrection is coming… but not until death has its way first.
Jesus had to have foreseen that we really struggle to get
this “oneness” thing. But still he prayed for his disciples… and he prayed for
us too. He prayed that we would all be one, just as he and God
the Father are one. Because God is Love, and oneness is the sign of this love.
The ultimate expression of that love was when Jesus, who
was one with the Father, became one of us. He would be born of poor
parents and grow up to teach love and peace. He would heal the sick and
feed the hungry and talk to the outcast. He would pray for his followers, even
when he knew that the moment the “amen” left his lips he would walk out the
door and into the garden, right into the waiting arms of Judas.
Jesus became one of us so that we would become one with
one another. And though we are still far from fully living into this calling,
every so often God gives us glimpses of what this can look like, if we are
really paying attention. Some may call this visioning, some may call it
dreaming, others, imagining or aspiring. No matter what we call it, Jesus dared
us to look beyond our Maundy Thursday moments, to see the big picture, as he
could see it. To break the tombs of minutia to the great wide world that might
await God’s people… if we raise our eyes to see it, born in our minds eye at
the planting of the Holy Spirit.
The Church finds herself in a Maundy Thursday moment.
Anxious and fearful of the future, certain that hard and scary times are about
to come our way, but not yet sure what they are going to be like. We wonder how
we will ever face this Good Friday. What we forget sometimes… and what the
disciples forgot too, in the face of the FIRST Maundy Thursday and Good
Friday... they and we forgot that we aren’t facing this scary night alone. I’m
not just talking about the “We always have Jesus with us bit” which sometimes
feels like an easy answer with no teeth.
The real presence of Jesus IS a real and true comfort,
don’t get me wrong… but what I’m taking about is that is that OTHER CHURCHES
are sitting around the table with us, shut away in the upper rooms in our
Maundy Thursday, passing a cup that seems to get emptier and emptier, gathering
crumbs as best we can. If we concentrated our gaze only down at the table, this
would be all we would see. But if we looked up, we might catch a glimpse that
the door to this upper room is actually open, and that Jesus is pointing us to
what is lies beyond.
At the Festival of Homiletics, I attended in the middle
of May, I even heard about a pastor who developed a church and “raise” it from
4 people in her living room to thousands of members. Her name is Pastor Cynthia
Hale, and she revealed to us that in her 30 years of ministering this church, things
weren’t always constant. After reaching a peak, they dwindled back … ten
thousand… eight thousand… four thousand… two thousand….. six hundred hundred… over
the years, she said, they had a few Maundy Thursday moments… which always
seemed to occur the moment they stopped dreaming as a church.
“Dreams get differed when we are too busy maintaining,”
Pastor Hale informed us. We tell ourselves - we’ll dream and figure out a
vision after we get all our ducks in
a row, when we get some more members in the pews and dollars in the plate, when
we can see our way out of this Maundy Thursday Moment on our own.
But the only way out
is through. The only way through is to follow Jesus out that door of that upper room and out into the
night of unknown and travel until you get to Good Friday and death… and keep
going… because we know that Easter and resurrection is on the other side.
Family of God is having a Maundy Thursday moment, the
same as many other churches. And the only way through is to listen to the words
Jesus prayed for his disciples that night, and now that they are for us too.
They are meant to encourage us to keep going, and to keep dreaming.
How do we do that? Hopefully by now many of you have
signed up for one of our “family chats” and if you haven’t, please be sure to
on your way out, or call the church office to get yourself signed up. Because
this is exactly what we’re going to do together. We’re going to dream in the
name of Jesus. We’re going to “what if” in the name of the Lord.
What if Family of God took a risk and dreamed BIG. Beyond
coffee and deficits and maintenance projects? What if we put all of our
God-given time, energy, resources, connections, relationships, drive, and
passion into doing one big thing for the Kingdom of God and the Buckingham
community before our time is done?
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| Photo Credit Jess Clarke |
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| Joyful Noise Service, Hamilton NJ |
What if …. Family of God started a worship service that
was specifically tailored to the needs of children on the autism spectrum and
their families? And what if … we held it in our newly repainted, newly
sound-dampening-curtained multi-purpose room, fully fitted out with
air-conditioning for the summer, and with folding chairs that are actually
comfortable? And if a ton of people
of all ages and abilities came, and we outgrew that space and decided to host
it in the sanctuary? What if we
decided to retire our pews, throw them a big party to thank them for their
faithful service… and then put in movable, cushioned chairs instead…. So that
we can have room for the parachute songs and the dancing and the noise and the
instruments that come when children worship together with their “church
grandmas and grandpas”….?
And what if,
after this huge influx of energy and excitement, people are falling over
themselves to join us for our next task: crafting a welcome statement
specifically for the children of God who are gay, lesbian, transgender,
bisexual, queer, gender-non-binary, and intersex, so that we can join hundreds
of congregations across the ELCA in becoming a Reconciling in Christ
congregation?
These dreams may seem too big…. But do you really think
that the disciples on the night of Maundy Thursday could have come close to
imagining where the church is at NOW?
Eventually they DID dream big… taking the
gospel on road, baptizing people and spreading the word…and here we are... and now we are going
to do the same. So, lets get moving. There is no moment like now. Amen.
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