White Meeting House Blog

It is worth reflecting once and a while on my rather odd job of preaching.  And no better time to do that than after a long time out of the pulpit.  It’s been five weeks since we’ve been here worshipping together!   Every July I can’t wait for the break and I think to myself that the August recess is a brilliant idea.  Midway through August the luster is off of it, and by this first Sunday in September, especially if August is a long 5 week-er, as it was this year, I positively itch to be back in the pulpit again, engaging the scriptures and trying to engage you in that engagement.
Time for confession:  This year, I did not make it anywhere to worship on Sunday morning.  Between being here working on other things on Sunday morning and vacation, when I could have but didn’t go to worship, I missed it.  Perhaps my itch is related to my need to be in worship. But that itch is also related to the work of thinking about the scriptures, of writing a bulletin and of preparing a sermon.  All of these things make me happy, even if Saturday nights out with me are not so fun because my mind is elsewhere and my anxiety level is higher than normal.  The mental energy it takes kicks up a notch as the hour approaches.
The definition of energy is simply the capacity to do work. Work takes energy.   The basic laws of physics seem to apply to our psychology as well, systems tend toward dissipation of energy — toward entropy.  Working is hard work.  And yet, we’ve all experienced, to some degree or another, the joys of work, the gift of holding the entropic tendency of the universe and our minds at bay while we creatively accomplish something.
This is a central theme of Christianity: the work we do, the actions we take, are inextricable from the one who induced those actions.  Or we could say, as it is classically said, God’s grace is utterly and unconditionally given, despite what we do — but our good works, when we do them, we do them because the gift of grace, in that act of giving is experienced also as a call to respond in works.
Because these two are inextricable, God’s grace and our work,  we could say that  to talk about God is to necessarily talk about actions induced by God.  This is not to deny that we have agency and responsibility — we do — but to suggest that a change in the definition of one’s god is to change the way one wants to act.
Here’s a labor day example:
We’ve all heard about the famous Protestant Work Ethic.  The Protestant Work Ethic was a term coined by the socioligist Max Weber to give some explanation to the industrial revolution, to put it very broadly.  He drew on the thinking of two of the original Protestant reformers: Martin Luther and John Calvin.  Martin Luther thought that work was a fulfillment of God’s will for humans, and so, an obligation.  Luther’s idea of God was informed by his sense that freedom was essential to humans and God — work for him was a voling of God, depending on one’s gifts.  Calvin’s view of God was much stricter.  Calvin could not see how an all powerful, all-good, God could have created the mess he observed around him.  As a result, his God created this mess, and assigned to some responsibility for it, and therefore a place in hell.  But humans, in his scheme, do not know who is predestined for hell, and who for heaven.  That lack of knowledge functions as  an incentive to us poor fools to work harder.
While that may be a kind of solution, the solution forgets that in fact, one’s actions are informed by one’s conception of God, and a God who rules through fear, finds subjects who act fearfully, who cannot intelligently begin to solve the social ills of their day.  You might be thinking that thankfully, this kind of Calvinism is gone the way of the typewriter, but in fact it has not, it has instead simply taken on new names — and the Protestant work ethic is similarly informed.  Hence, the unlimited seeking of wealth that was seen by Calvin as a proper response to God, is today it’s own gospel.
If we were instead to base our work ethic on what seems more widely attested in the gospels, that God is love, and that that love takes the form of real relationships then the Sermon on the Mount begins to explain why and how people might want to live like the lilies of the field.  It’s a different vision of life than the one envisioned by Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic.
We have all, I daresay, experienced work as  drudgery, as demeaning and self-defeating.  I recall working in a factory after graduating from college where my job was to fold boxes and prepare them for the line.  I did not work at that job long, but long enough to recognize the self-defeating unhappiness that seemed to pervade.  All jokes seemed to be lewd and destructive, conversation at break time was similar and held only between drags on their cigarettes.  Especially for people whose livelihood’s depended on these jobs, I’m sure that some found joy in small things that an impatient young man just out of college could not see.  The two men, for example, I observed, who had learned sign language so that they could talk to each other over the din of the factory floor.
We live because such work is built  into its structure.  Again, the Calvinist solution is to bear it up — it’s God’s way.  But this cannot result in the kind of ethics we see Jesus about.  Instead:

• One-quarter of all the jobs in the U.S. pay poverty-level wages, so low that a full-time worker cannot keep a family of four out of poverty.
• Some jobs are unnecessarily dangerous. In the U.S. someone dies from an occupational illness or injury every eight minutes. Often, they (and their survivors) have not received fair compensation for their losses and they may also bear large health care expenses.
• Nearly 80% of low-wage workers do not have paid sick days so they can stay home, with pay, when they are ill and not fall further int financial trouble.
• Low-wage jobs are often dead-end jobs with no opportunities for advancement. At a poultry processing plant in Ohio, a 55-year-old man still gets just $8.10 an hour with minimal benefits after 20 years in the plant.
• In Florida over the past 10 years, seven cases of modern-day slavery have been exposed involving over 1000 workers and 12 employers. Workers are confined and if they try to leave or refuse to work they are beaten.
• All of us have purchased and worn clothing made with sweatshop labor. We have eaten fruits and vegetables harvested by farm workers who live in deep poverty thousands of miles away.

We could go on.  I titled my sermon, Stop the flagellation and be happy because of a note sent my way after the newsletter was published last Thursday in which I suggested that we need to put an end to the tag sale.  “I salute the resolution to stop the flagellation and to find other ways to serve our loving God.”
I do not doubt that our Protestant work ethic theology  also includes God wanting us to be happy — just that we get there in different ways — The Calvinists suggest that happiness comes a kind of slavery to a divine Master.  But Calvin had no idea that workers would be beaten for not working extra hours — or if he did he managed to convince himself that they were not really people worthy of the same kind of consideration as his privileged white male position was.
An ethics of work whereby we stop the flagellation and find other creative ways to be happy, and to serve this God of grace, like the ethic we find in the SM, could easily be criticized for romancing the small, rural way of life.  Jesus avoids this danger, though, by taking Calvins’ messed up world seriously.  “The beatitudes [which we’ll start reading next week, and work with over the course of the fall] detail the daily troubles: poverty, sorrow, brutality, injustice, lack of mercy, impurity of heart, war, and persecution of the righteous . . . [in the end though] what makes the world so dangerous is human folly and sinfulness.  In the face of all of this, it is due to God that the world endures despite its disasters, and that the possibility exists of finding a way through it all.  No question, every day has its own trouble, but thanks to God there is not only a way to survive, but a grace to change.  Amen.

As many of you know, last week was the occasion of the ground-breaking at the location of the newest Habitat for Humanity House.  The house will be located on the corner of Crosset Hill Road and Morse Road.  At the ground-breaking, which I’d taken to calling a mud-breaking, I reminded all of us gathered for the worship service that this is a Christian ministry.  Not Christian in the unfortunate, but not uncommon sense, of having to follow a certain set of rules, of which is included a command to “do good;” to provide shelter for the homeless. Not Christian in the ubiquitious centering of thought on the winning of heaven and immortality and not Christian in the unfortunate presentation of Christian acts as designed to win people for the church.   But definitely Christian in the sense that the Habitat’s activity concentrates religious interest on one of the great ethical problems of social life, and does so with feet on the ground and without any preconceived notion about what people need, in order to deal with their problems.
One of the healthy things about Habitat for Humanity is that it tries to engage in the ethical problems of social life in an empirical way — meaning that it does not assume what the best solution is to a problem, but meets the problem where it is lived and seeks to engage others in working on alleviating them.  An empirical method of solving problems does not try to put dogma to the rescue, does not try to argue that the solution to societies ills lies in claiming Jesus as your Lord and Savior, for example.   An empirical Christian social action is not a program to get people into the pews, but to get people off the pews and addressing real life problems in intelligent ways.  Empirical ethics embodies Rauschenbusch’s notion that the consciousness of God and the consciousness of humanity blend completely.
Millard Fuller, who is the founder of Habitat for Humanity, wrote that “Religious life and action are central to a full-bodied faith and certainly to a theology of the hammer.  Unfortunately, many people act as if Jesus had taught that the first and greatest commandment is “thou shall go to church.  And, the second is like it:  Thou shall try to get others to go to church.”  His approach to ministry together is explicitly not a modern day evangelism method whose ulterior motive in doing good is to win souls into the church.  He is concerned to discover community outside the church.  He is convinced that this common discovery transforms people — and he doesn’t care if you call it zen or salvation or fana, the Islamic doctrine of annihilation.
It seems that Jesus was this way too.  For the one who reads the gospels through the lens of Rauschenbusch’s and Fuller’s theology of the hammer, there can be no doubt that Jesus had serious issues with the religious insitution of his day.  Clearly we don’t know what he would have thought about today’s church.  But we can surmise that because Jesus’ criticisms of the temple  swirled around concerns with practises that broke social contracts, like regressive taxation,  discriminatory  standards,  and burdensome ritual his issue was not with the idea of people coming together to worship.  We can surmise that to the extant that salvation gest lost in fearful concern that it be salvation and not zen or fana, Jesus thought we were missing the point.  To come together in worship is one thing, and a good thing. But to replace the act of coming together to worship, with the commandment to worship in this way, was to lose the importance of community, and thereby lose any sensitivity in dealing with the social problems of our day.
I find much in the Letter to the Hebrews troubling for its seeming obliviousness to this point.  I do appreciate its effor to convey that we are brought together, not to recite rules, but to “consider how to stir up one another to love and to good works.”  It is troubling to me that this simple, important message, which we just read, is often lost in the letter by this basic confusion — a confusion which blurs that simple message and misleads.
Let me reiterate what that basic confusion is in the context of our reading from Hebrews.  For the author of the letter of Hebrews, Jesus was the High Priest — the one who “passed through the heavens” in a surpreme act of sacrifice, and who through his sacrifice is now able to save.  But the important thing to realize is that this was language used to explain Jesus’ continuing significance, a significance despite the fact that he was dead and gone.   People continued to talk about Jesus as the one who somehow is still relevant, still powerful, still important — that the activity of Jesus still goes on.  And so they borrowed ritualistic language that people had already used in their day to express this importance.  Over time, that language became separated from the original understanding of the words as expressions of the continuing relevance of Jesus, and because the content of what one had to believe in order to experience the contemporary relevance of Jesus.  This, however is terribly and tragically misleading.  The result of this kind of language which the author of the Letter to the Hebrews employed regularly, has been a church that turned first to doctrine as a way into the experience of Christ.  The result, of course, is that this experience is markedly different than the liberating experience of Jesus in one’s own place and time that compels someone to seek to establish God’s kingdom by righteous life and action in the shelter of a community of people seeking out of their experience God’s kingdom.
Let me conclude with a story related by Millard Fuller in his book, The Theology of the Hammer.  It’s about a from a speech by a friend of Fuller’s named Dick Fernstrum.

My first exposure to Habitat was when a group of eleven of us from First Presbyterian Church of Sarasota Florida, went to Immokalee, Florida, to spend a week working on a Habitat house.  . .  The house we were to work on was the last in a row of six on a new street.  The block walls were up, the trusses were set, and the plywood was on the trusses.
The newest Habitat family on the block was the Perez family, right next door.  They had a bunch of little kids — there must have been five or six of them.  Each morning as we began to work, out came the Perez children . . . .They were constantly underfoot and always eager to help.
As far as I was concerned, the presence of the children was unsafe, annoying and an interference we didn’t need.  It didn’t occur to me that by their willing presence they were trying to express gratitude for their home . . .  to me they were just in the way.
On our last day, we finished the roof.  I was one of four people nailing shingles.  I put down my hammer to get another package of shingles. When I returned I found this little boy up on the roof.  I told him to move away, to go back down; he was interfering with my work.  But he didn’t so I told him again — rather rudely, I suppose.
A co-worker said, “He only wants to help you, Dick.  Why don’t you let him hand you the nails?”  So I did — but still not very cheerfully.  I told him that if he could do it right and he obeyed me, he could help.  I showed him where to squat and how to get the nails out of my nail apron and hand them to me one at a time as I placed the shingles.  I was still being quite crabby, but he was very agreeable.
As we began, I said to him, “If you’re going to be my partner, I’ll have to know who you are.  My name is Dick.  What’s your’s”  He looked up at me with his round dark eyes and a big smile and said, “I am Jesus.”

The conclusion should not be may we see Jesus in one another.  The conclusion must be, instead, may we discover through feet on the ground ministry together, through community solving community problems, real blending of the consciousness of God and the consciousness of humanity.  Amen.

Today’s gospel reading relates a story about one of the three possible ways people can respond to Jesus.  In the preceding story, people respond to Jesus and his disciples’ ministering to them with enthusiasm and with welcome.
But today, we hear from those who are incensed by him and from those for whom his ministry threatens a way of life.  Today we hear about the fearful reaction of some leaders to what Jesus says and does. Their fear, like all fear is irrational.  It leads King Herod to wild speculation:  Is Jesus the  reincarnation of John the Baptist?
Most of the reading is a flashback, designed to answer that last question affirmatively.  King Herod is convinced Jesus was John the Baptist returning to haunt him for Herod’s having executed him, unjustly.  John had condemned Herod for marrying his own  brother’s wife, a clear breach of relational boundaries. Herod was upset by John’s truth-telling, and afraid of him as result.  When Herod’s wife, at an opportune moment, asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, Herod easily complied.  Each had their own reasons.  But in the end, each needed John silenced.  The flashback story is a recounting of how John had been unjustly  executed. It is also a way of saying Jesus is not John returned from the dead.
More importantly,   it is a way of saying that the issues of breached community thatJohn addressed, will not go away.  John’s message and Jesus’ were the same.  The blunt force of the prophets bears up through time and under pressure because the message is not special to the prophet but instead inheres in the very idea of the community of which these leaders are stewards.  And that message is that something basic has gone wrong.  John argued the people must repent and turn from the imperial direction of unlimited desire and power accumulation to something he called the Kingdom of God.  Both Amos and John, and now Jesus, in plain words, argue that something basic has gone wrong in the human relationship; something has gone wrong with our common sharing of the magnitude and bond of love. Steps must be taken to restore the broken relationship.

So here’s where these two readings come together, the reading from Mark and the story from Amos.  Amos was not a priest nor was he a professional religious.   Tradition has it that he worked with his hands. He knew about growing and tending and building. He’s not a philosopher.  He’s not prone to making sermons.  But he is a rare, clear voice about the fundamentals of human relationships. He uses the simplest of tools, the plumb line, to make the point:  What matters is basic.  What matters is that we are true.  When a wall is straight up and down, it is operating according to the laws of nature, and not fighting against it.  It is true.  When a relationship is true — similarly it is not fighting.
We know this — at least we know it in the sense of feeling it — we are authentic, true to ourselves, and true to the community we find ourselves in when all that we do we do to edify, to build up, to allow others to flourish.  We all recognize honesty, truthfulness, fairness, loyalty.  There is nothing fancy here about Amos.
There is one small issue that I need to address — and that is that these qualities Amos recognizes are qualities that are not only relational, they are fundamental.  What I mean by relational, I’ve just tried to express.  What I mean by fundamental is that they are what it means to speak of  God.  This is important because much of at least what I learned about God, and much of what I still read about God, might suggest just the opposite.  We learned that  God was mysterious.  But despite this mystery, we have also been told that God is outside the world, remote and passionless.  We have learned, by implication, that God is without feeling, and all-controlling, and intervenes in the world only occasionally through miracles.
Given that love requires an intimate relationship, one that is based on covenant, promises, loyalty and all the attributes that we experience with the complexities of human love, why have we embraced this God?   How can God be unmoved by our lives and yet still love us?  The idea of a passionless, omnipotent God flies in the face of the clear biblical representation of God as fundamentally relational.  To recognize this is to recognize that Jesus and John and Amos cannot be dismissed as some ancient prophets calling for a new world of socialism.  That’s not it.  That’s not what matters here.  What matters is that we come to see each other in a way that invites the ideas of the other; that digs in to find what the roots of our fears are; that understands that our highest obligation as humans in this world is to see ourselves as each other’s business, as each other’s magnitude and bond.  We are no prophets — we are simply people with a drive to worship in truth.
To be a Christian is to go the way of Jesus in speaking repentance to those in power, trusting God’s power of creative transformation, knowing that the issues are clear and the stakes are high. To pray for peace is to seek justice. To seek justice is to act against oppressive people and systems.  This way is, no doubt, risky; it is nevertheless, to live in line with the magnitude and the bond of love apart from which our lives crooked and tumbling walls.  Amen.

Deuteronomy 10:12-20
It is not uncommon for me to hear from you about the selection of hymns on a given Sunday morning, especially on Sundays where we celebrate a holiday, or on days of special importance because of a momentous event.  Mindful of this (and by the way, I always appreciate feedback.  I won’t get mad because someone doesn’t like my hymn choice.  That doesn’t mean, however that hymns which glorify war, or hymns that use imperialistic language to witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, will be sung, despite a certain sentimentality we may attach them.)  Anyway, mindful of the need to chose patriotic hymns that are appropriate, I open our hymnal to find what I can find for this Sunday, the day after July 4th.  And I am again interested by the paucity of “patriotic hymns,” in our hymnal. When I open any of the contemporary hymnals that I have in my study, I find the same thing. The fresh and exciting hymnal called the African American Heritage Hymnal has 6 hymns listed in its patriotic section.  The Presbyterians have 4,  The Baptists and the Methodists both have 8 patriotic hymns to choose from.  That makes our New Century Hymnal, with 3, clearly on the low side. Is that a good thing?  Or not?
I admit to being a bit frustrated by our hymnal.  Patriotic or not, one of the most eloquently theological hymns to freedom, O Beautiful for Spacious Skies, is essentially missing from our hymnal.  It’s there, but in terribly re-written form.  Only the first verse is attributed to the original composer,  Katherine Lee Bates’.  But even that verse has been tinkered with.  The first phrase, “O beautiful for spacious skies,” to “How beautiful our spacious skies.”  That subtle change, wrecks Katherine Bates’ sensibility.  From the first original words it is clear that her’s is not nationalism, not a mere celebration of “our country,” but the humble acceptance of a gift that is, sadly, often dimmed by human tears, by the daily tragedy we bear upon it, but is made beautiful by God’s grace.  Her thesis is not that this grace is something that we alone, in the world deserve, but a gift nevertheless, worth claiming and worth staking our national reputation upon.  Changing that first phrase, alters the direction of the hymn from a question of the common good, to a question of the comfortable, happy life.  The first is an issue of patriotism as an expression of the gratitude for the moral crucible which is our country and in which human beings are brought to full maturity and democracy allowed to flourish, the second is an expression of thanks for our material wealth, in which the material benefits of this country are celebrated.
My point is not to bash our hymnody this morning.  Instead I want to suggest that the paucity of patriotic hymns in our hymnal today could be because it is difficult to write a patriotic hymn.  A notion which a quick glance through the old Pilgrim Hymnal, from 1931, certifies.  The first hymn is “O God, Hear Thou the Nation’s Prayer.” “O God, hear thou the nation’s prayer; we lift our cause to thee.  We wage the holy war of Christ.  We fight to make man free.”  Of course, we could understand that language metaphorically.  We do experience the moral life as a struggle.  But to call that struggle a holy war, in the context of a hymn celebrating a nation, raises the spectre of idolatry and imperialism that our reading from Deuteronomy warns against.
My point is obviously not about how to write a hymn, but about how we might live best in this land of liberty, this democracy.  Can we celebrate our country in such a way that others do not tremble, in such a way that encourages us to execute justice for the poor, in such a way that recalls our status as sojourners in this world and not emperor? Can we see our life in a democracy as both a privilege and as a responsibility?
Winston Church is famously quoted as saying about democracy that “it is  the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.” I’m not a Churchill scholar, so I don’t know how to read that remark in the context of his philosophy.  It strikes me as a bit flippant. Churchill’s remark makes democracy seem like a suit, that if you’re democratic you suffer to wear. His concept of democracy seems stagnant  — something like a rug that needs a good shaking out, but when clean, dresses up our living quarters nicely.  To me, demcoracy is an ideal, and there is not a single ideal which we can simply try on — it has to be lived.
I am a bit more familiar with the philosophy of John Dewey, one of our homegrown philosophers, and called by some, the quintessential American philosopher.  Dewey spent a good deal of his 50 years as a teacher, thinking about the nature of democracy and the society who lives with it.  For him democracy was a way of life, something much broader than a method of conducting government, much more than a special political form qualitatively different than all the “others that have been tried from time to time.”
Democracy, as a way of life, becomes a means for humans to develop community and in relationship, and mature personality.  Dewey writes, “The keynote of democracy as a way of life may be expressed as the necessity for the participation of every mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of men together; which is necessary from the standpoint of both the general social welfare and the full development of human beings as individuals.”
We may not yet live in a world where the full development of the ideal of Democracy has flowered such that we are no longer moved by racial prejudice or class stereotype.  But democracy as a way of life frees us, in principle, to embrace the belief that “every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his [or her] personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he or she has. ”
Patriotic songs, to be, in this sense, democratic, then, require an ability to invoke a sense of the moral — not the moral high ground of the nation, but of the universal — of the belief in the capacity of every person to her own life free from coercion” free from trembling, free from want, and free to be a part of the conversation, a part of the social maturity — a maturity which is made evident in ways we know are mature.
The struggle to sing a mature, celebrating the high and humble democratic ideals of our country is well illustrated  by the story of Rene Marie.
Last summer, African American jazz singer Rene Marie approached the microphone before Denver’s State of the City address. She was there to perform the time-honored ritual of the singing of the national anthem. But her arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner left residents divided. The melody was the same, but the words she chose were written of James Weldon Johnson’s  “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as “The Black National Anthem,” one of the three patriotic hymns in our hymnal, and one which we sang together last week for our Waterbury celebration of Independence Day.
Marie’s civil rights message, and her devotion to the ideal of democracy, has sadly threatened her career, In fact, it did not take long for state and local politicians to denounce her.
There were some who supported her.  Marc Lamont Hill, a  political commentator said of her actions that she celebrated

black progress, black hope, black pride. But [she’s] also keenly . . . preoccupied with the obstacles that lay in front of us. That’s reflected not just in that moment, but in the broader political moment, where people are celebrating Barack Obama as president. People are excited that the country has moved forward — but people [are] still keenly aware that there are many, many forms of inequality, unfreedom, suffering [and] marginalization that continue to proliferate in this nation. – NPR, July 3, 2009

The interesting thing about this story is that for all of the feedback she received, hundreds of emails, and phone calls, she responded to them civilly, explaining why what she did was not dishonest, and explaining to people the origins of the Star-Spangled Banner.  She says that through it all she learned a lot. She says,
I had some really good phone calls from complete strangers. A lot didn’t expect me to answer the phone. They kind of sputtered for the first few seconds. ‘Well, I just wanted to tell you what I thought about it.’ ‘OK, tell me, I’m listening. That’s when I realized you don’t have to agree, but listening sure does go a long way toward peaceful relations — when people feel they are being heard.”
We clearly live in a time when what it means to be patriotic should be fully examined.  To be a free people means, in part at least, to be able and willing to advance the conversation and so our social intelligence, our social maturity, around matters, even of long held tradition.  And to ask whether these traditions free us, and our neighbors to live apart from fear and anxiety and for a kind of society where each takes care of the other, and where the government  performs its ancient and respected role of encouraging us in our gifts of freedom to use them for freedom.    By freedom, you have been freed.  Do not submit, yourselves or others again to the yoke of slavery. Amen.