White Meeting House Blog

A tongue-in-cheek website called Book in a Minute Bedtime stories tells the story of PD Eastman’s little bird that does not get properly imprinted, Are You My Mother, like this:
A Little Bird:  Are you my mother?
A Bunch of Animals that Aren’t his Mother: No
His Mother:   Yes.
The End.
But of course there’s more to that discovery.  There is that indubitableness of  mother; that certain je ne sais qua about a mother.  It’s not just that the bird asks his mother if she is his mother — he exclaims  “You are my mother.”  I suppose it is easy to read the point of that story that there is something mysterious and supernatural between a mother and her baby and that that is what we celebrate in that book and what we should be celebrating today.  Now, perhaps men shouldn’t be pondering on this point, but if motherhood, and indeed, any human relationship marked by the qualities we reserve for mothers, whether or not they are always and every where instantiated then it is because a particular relationship has taken on those qualities.  Certainly when a child is born the relationship between the mother and child is asymetrical.  The infant, having little if any opportunity for reflection on his or her relationship with the mother, cannot have the same depth of feeling the mother has, whose pregnancy has been marked by all sorts of opprotunity for reflection, who has, in most cases created this child in her own loving relationship with another partner whose love will also be forever tied up in their relationship.  Despite the anti-abortionist position, a fetus is not a a person, and an infant, not a child.  Those things that allow for the little bird’s exclamation take more time.
II. Christology

Jesus’ question to the people gathered about him was reflective of this reality.  His answer is not to be read as though he were anti-Mother’s Day.  On the contrary, his question gets at the heart of the little bird’s exclamation.  The question,  “Who is my mother?”  is not a dismissal of his mother standing out in the crowd, but an inkling that motherhood has more to do with a relationship based on that which affords us the basic confidence in life, than it does with biology.  When Jesus suggests to the gathered crowd that his mother and his brothers and sisters are whoever does the will of God, I suggest to you that this is what he means.
Sadly, for many Christians, who embrace a kind of exclusive Christianity where personal salvation is the utmost importance,  this story is taken as proof that the saved out not really intermingle with the unsaved.  I know from experience that these words in Mark have sometimes been used not to build up the family, but to tear it down. Such thinking stands in complete contradiction to the gospel of Jesus.  I heard these kinds of words spoken at a funeral recently.  The excuse given for such harsh treatment of one’s fellow citizen and family member, is that to do otherwise is to go against God’s will, and to risk one’s reward in heaven.   I cannot see how, given all the stories we have of Jesus,  anyone can suggest that Jesus’ main point would be to “gain future rewards at the expense of present relations.”
III. Theology of Mother’s Day
So what is going on in this story from Mark?  Mother’s Day may not be a Christian holiday, but it does provide the church on opportunity to reflect on relationships in general and “mother-type” relations in particular.  Here’s what I want us to reflect on:  We properly try not to anthropomorphize God — that means that we try not to speak of God as a human being.  But this is not to say that our language about God is somehow given to us from above, or that our language about God has no rootedness in our human world and our very humaness.  The only way not to anthropomorphize God is to be intentionally theological — is to know what you mean when you pray to “Our Father,” as we do in the Lord’s Prayer or to the “Mother of us all,” as I ask us to do when we baptise children.  And what we mean is that in our best relationships, in those about which, when we reflect on them, we can see important things in new ways and be brought by them to higher creative interchange, we are aware of something that is, to quote the great English Essayist, Matthew Arnold, “a righteousness not of our own making.”  To be able to name a relationship a “mother-relation” or a “father-relation” is possible because we know, based on our connection and our purpose with the ultimate reality, what such a relationship should be.  In other words, the ultimate relationship and the directionality of our understanding is with God and from that ground of all becoming and creativity, we can then name what a mother or a father ought to be.  Note that it is an asymetric analogy.  Because we know what mothers are from our experience of that One who is pure and excelling love, does not mean that we know who God is by our experience of mothers, no matter how loving they may be in our lives.
Oliver Wendel Holmes famously commented on the essence of why we celebrate Mother’s Day, “Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.” When we celebrate the constancy of a mother’s secret hope, it is not because mother’s provide for us the best model of such hope, but because that hope is modeled after the hope which springs from the root of all our being — from our loving God whom to know is to know how our human relations should be structured.
Jesus explicitly teaches in our reading from John today that that structure is relational.  “We need to stay attached to one another.”  This is the most important part of that passage.  And yet how  often this simple and organic imperative is overlooked in favor of the introductory verse, “I am the True Vine and my Father the Vinedresser.”  When that becomes the point of the passage, we miss the relationality of the simple farmer’s analogy and the passage tells that relatively new story of violence at the center of the gospel.  We cannot be the vine, but by sacrificing a few limbs, we can please God.
But violence was never at the center of Jesus’ gospel.  Relation was.  A real relationship works as a refiner, a pruner, because the quality of the relationship leads the creative interchange between the related ones, to higher ground.
And so it is that we hold up and celebrate those mothers who have prunes us to be better people.
IV.  Truth Personified
Last month the United States Congress unveiled the bust of Sojourner Truth in the Capital Building.  She is the first Black Woman to have a memorial in the halls of federal government.
Truth was born into slavery in New York State. In her childhood she was ripped away from her family and sold into bondage with different enslavers. She was beaten, brutalized, and forced to labor in unimaginable conditions. She fell in love, but her husband of choice was stripped from her and she was forced to “breed” with another man. She had many children, but as an enslaved woman she had no parental rights and endured having them forcibly removed. When the state of New York began gradual emancipation Truth sought her own freedom and the liberation of her children.
But her own freedom was not enough. Through her quick intelligence, her unbending moral courage, and her tireless labor Sojourner Truth became one of the nation’s most powerful abolitionist voices and women’s rights advocates.
She is perhaps most remembered for  a speech before an audience of mostly women in Akron, Ohio, in the mid 19th century.  In that speech, she challenged the status quo that held that women could not vote because women were too fragile to engage in public life.  She said:

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place, and ain’t I a woman? … I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me — and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear the lash as well — and ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen most all sold off to slavery and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me — and ain’t I woman?

I was reminded, as I was learning about this new memorial, that Sojourner’s bust is not the first memorial of a black woman proposed for Washington, DC.  In 1923 some southern senators proposed, in a moment noted, even in a time of great racial perversity, for serious offense, a national mammy monument on the mall.
The monument was eventually defeated by, several Black women’s organizations, one of which is responsible today for the Sojourner Truth memorial.  Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a professor of political science at Princeton University, writes that:

Because of their efforts, instead of a monument to the mythical figure of a happy, faithful, feisty, loyal black woman slave, America will today memorialize a dedicated, serious, freedom-fighting black woman. In commemorating Truth the nation invests in remembering the deeply human and complicated stories of the lives of black women.

Let us continue asking that greatest of all questions:  Are you my mother?  Because as we ask it, we clear away the chaff of our relationships and come closer to that which sets us free.  Amen.

The cover of Newsweek last month announced, that Christianity in America is dead. Of course, another major news magazine figured this out 40 years ago, when it announced, quoting Friedrich Nietzsche that God is dead.
It turned out that that since that first publication 40 years ago, religion in America stopped its decline and began to change, and to change in a way that Newsweek today takes as normative. What exactly that change was that happened between the bookends of those two dramatic announcements has been subject to a great deal of debate. It seems that it had much to do with modernity and with the strong influence of technology and secular progress. On the one hand, the mainline Protestant churches, which saw their pews full of people in the 1950’s faced a major decline as modernity picked up and Christian theology and worship remained entrenched in its pre-modern doctrinal slumber. The people who filled the pews knew that religion as their churches preached it could not make sense of the successes of modern life. The intellectual disconnect was too much, and people left in droves. And they did not leave to go to other churches. They simply became part of the new category – un-churched. There was no place for these Christians seeking answers that made sense of their new world and its new, demytholgized and scientific viewpoint.
On the other hand, the evangelical church seemed to take root in their presentation of a “return to a fabled Christian America of yore,” to quote from Newsweek. The rise of conservative Christianity in the United States, and indeed of strictly conservative religion worldwide, had to do with its promise of a new world that was simpler; a new world were the religions’ various rules could suffice, once again; where what the presented by the religious leaders as the most important aspect of a person’s life – their inward friendship with Jesus who would bear them past their troubles to an afterlife of eternal comfort, held much interest for many, many people.
If there was one theme that was persistent through the year with these 6 confirmands, it was that there is another way. That a better world is possible, not by tearing down the old one, but by finding what is ultimately worthwhile in it, doing that not by tearing down every other worthwhile thing in the world that is less than ultimate, but an overaching commitment to that one truth which does in fact serve to make a way where there once was not. If there was one theme consistent through the year for our confirmands it was that religion is less something you put on, like some coat that you fancy in a store full of different coats, and more like something you journey into with a heart and a mind full of questions about the inspiring things of this world and of our common lives together.
We have learned that the word God is reserved for that which actually operates to save is not merely a word for some belief to which you have to assent, against your intellectual nature, in order to be saved.
The most heartening comment I think for any of us to hear, who love this church and who try to walk the way of Jesus without letting that way walk us, who feel deep in our hearts that the love and forgivness that Jesus taught was about a possibility for us that could make our lives and the lives of our neighbors more intersting and less frought with anxiety and trouble, is the comment we heard recently from our confirmands, “I’m more religious than I thought I was.”
So, yes – We are not asking you to assent to something which is not already part of your assent to life. We are asking you to take a risk with your life. That means to strike out on your own, after the good you know to be so and join hands with others in that adventure, to apply your minds to the questions that inevitable address themselves to the honest and the open, and to seek the
To risk your life for the gospel also means to recognize that not all of our life is conducive to a worthwhile life. We are asking you to take the difficult risk and recognize that parts of our lives get stuck and keep jumping back into that hole from which we were just pulled; that sometimes our lives get on the wrong track, like that rich young man’s and seem awfully hard to put back on track.
The point is that no material thing, no discrete act, may dictate whether or not God’s activity is for us or not. As Jesus put it in our reading “You can’t ask me how to live your life.” We are asking you to risk your life for a way that is fluid and changing, that cannot be defined by a set of rules, but which can only be known to the extent that it is worthwhile.
The worthwhile life is just that kind of life which, while not dying in the United States, is finding its expression in little sanctuaries and churches like ours, who seek honesty in expression and worship and unity in diverse ministries, in businesses who are staking their financial success on yardsticks of social justice and environmental restoration, in schools who are open to discovery and excited by the great questions. And by people like you, willing to discover the truth you knew all along and to set your lives by it, like as to a pole star.
Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. You have discovered the truth of that statement for yourselves, and that discovery also lies at the heart of the Christian call to risk your life for the gospel – for a way steadfast against hatred and devaluing, and for bonds of common humanity that build up, that encourage flourishing in right relation with each other and with the world. Keep on asking the questions and living them too! Amen.

Every spring, it seems, our garden plans become more and more grandiose.  This year we are ripping up the sod in our front yard and putting in a kitchen garden — a garden meant to visit just before supper time to put food on the plate and flowers on the table.  So far the neighbors have not complained.  Perhaps when we get the chickens and the goats . . . .!
Anyway, as a result of our new efforts, my attention was pricked when I read the following story about a church in Seattle.
The Georgetown Gospel Chapel is in the heart of one of Seattle’s most economically challenged neighborhoods, which abuts an active Superfund site and that contains several toxic ‘brownfields.’  Being in this city’s most industrial area, the neighborhood also deals with incessant noise pollution from an adjacent Boeing field.  Despite this compromised context and its own financial difficulties, the Chapel stands as an abundant oasis.
Twenty years ago, the Chapel faced a decision of whether or not to pay two-thousand dollars to repair their lawn’s sprinkler system.  They decided instead to tear out the sprinkler system and the lawn.  They turned the church property into a large garden that could nourish the broader community.  Its beautiful produce is free for the taking, supplementing the diets of the economically stressed neighbors.  The chapel’s rainwater reclamation system helps to water the garden, saves on the utility bills, and prevents storm water from running into the adjacent, salmon bearing Duwamish River, carrying chemicals from lawns, industries, and leaked oil from cars.
Among the many ministries provided, Pastor Hedman offers his skills to the community as a certified master gardner and a composter.  He and Chapel members help build gardens for neighbors and provide them with seeds and gardening/composting training.  They also host a recreation/tutoring/mentoring program for children and youth — one that  introduces dozens of young people to basic Earth-care principles and activities.  The Chapel has ‘adopted’ their street.  Not only do they keep it litter free, but they’ve also distributed hundreds of tree seedlings to residents there.  The trees greatly enhance beauty, air quality, and habitat for other creatures.
Inside, the community is lessening its contribution to global warming.  By changing every light in the sanctuary to an energy efficient compact florescent lightbulb, and investing in better insulation and energy efficient appliances over time it has reduced the amount of energy consumed by 75 percent.  Savings each year are estimated at three to five hundred dollars, not to mention the prevention of sixty thousand pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.  First the Chapel used their savings to reimburse the intial costs of the retrofits.  Now it donates the money to help retrofit a local Christian camp and financially strapped member’s homes and neighbors’ homes.
The Chapel also serves as a repository for publicly accessible documents related to the cleanup of the Superfund site, empowering neighbors to work with government agencies and local business to help carry out the process.
The story seems fitting.  On this first Sunday after Easter, the common lectionary has us reading  Psalm 133 which is acclaimed for the way it redefines the world to an order we know is our better order; to define communities where it is indeed pleasant to live together. The Psalm may be short, but it is powerful because we know that the question for which it is an answer is true: we do not live together as one — but how deep that longing is to live with more green around us, with less noise and groundwater pollution, with more beauty.  We do not live in ways that empower each one, but how deeply we long to live in ways that let each feel an important, contributing member of society.  We do not live simply so that others may live, but how true we know it to be that our insatiable, material wants gained only by the lives of others half way around the world are ultimately unfulfilling.  Here is a church who is living and making the truth of their existence together as a pleasant blessing, like the oil on Aaron’s head running down his beard and in doing so have re-defined their world from a world of economic hardship and ugliness to a world of full of interesting opportunities, hope and good food and good fun.
I do not mention this story because I think that we should dig up our green lawn and plant a garden — though if someone wanted to talk about it, I, for one would not be averse to the conversation.  Make your life a quest, and don’t give up till you find what you’re looking for.  The conversation, in other words, is a conversation about discovering the kingdom of God, again.  About discovering that the goal of the quest is to be on the quest, again and again uncovering and planting God’s New World in the front yards of our lives.
When we hold our Ministry Fair next Sunday we do so, lifting up a major tenet of our life together:  each one of us is the Lord’s servant and that the sphere of each one’s activity is nothing less than obedience to the call to serve the Kingdom of God, to be on the quest for God’s New World.  This basic tenet implies that this New World is a shared responsibility — that the church never departs so utterly from its task as when it teaches that the leaders are the church, drawing distinctions which relieve the great body of people from seeing ways of living together in unity.
When we voted last January to try out  newly developed by-laws, what we actually voted into place was not so much different from this basic tenet according to which we were already operating.  What I mean is that we had already moved away from the old model of church life where committees or departments met on a regular basis and made sure that everybody knew what the leaders were doing.
Over time, we have seen our departments meet less, regularly and we have seen the numbers of people engaged in these departments decrease.  As I have witnessed that decreast, I have asked myself:  “Do people want to join this church because they are excited about meeting for business on the first Tuesday of the month?  Or do people come to this church because they experience a need to share in the beauty of worshipand to reflect on how their lives intersect with God’s call be on a quest for a beloved community?  So, what happens if, for you that quest has to do with community gardening?  Then what?  Tuesday night meetings are going to cut it.
Our newly designed by-laws aim to encourage us to identify our various quests.  The by-laws state that we recognize that “God calls its members to use their gifts in ministry to the world.”  A few comments about possible wrong turns this  statement could lead us to make.
First — some have worried that the call to identify our ministries and engage them, might be off-putting for some who “just wants to come to church and worship.” Clearly a valid concern.  It is a concern, however, that is based on the old civic religion model of church where the people who knew the stories, who ‘had faith’ and position came to discuss how best they could give back to the community.  “The church, in this view functioned as a conduit:  it received resources from the most fotunate and directed them toward those in need. ” Insofar as the good is partially served, I have no problem with this model.  But the worry, I think derives from the fact that we have no other theological language around membership that accounts for the longing that drives people here.  The new by-laws want to make a theological statement about our worship life — so much more is at stake than our being a Christian social service agency.
Can we instead see that worship and the world are not so split from each other — that the longing to worship is just this longing to see one’s life in the context of the whole?  To worship, in other words, is ministry.  So,   Does everyone have a ministry?  To the extent that you have walked through those doors more than once, yes — yes, because the longing for God, is a the beginning of your quest, the acknowledgement that are are looking for something, that there is a purpose and that there is a point for you in that purpose.
Secondly — does this mean that we’ll have a hundred different ministries going on?  Yes and No.
Again to the extent that each of us have our own relationships with God and with the journey to understand God and please God, and to the extent that we are Christ’s ambassadors where ever we are — yes — a hundred different ministries.  And I take that seriously.  So seriously, in fact that it made sense to me to incorporate that in our by-laws — that members of this church would be people who professed their ministry in the world.  the Master Gardner, for example, would promise to the gathered on Sunday morning to carry out her ministry as a Master Gardner, to the best of her abilities.  I lost that argument — and can see why.  But it is still important to remember — still important to remember that we come her on Sunday morning as part of our mission and ministry.  We come here to receive the impetus and the inspiration and the encouragement to carry on in our minstries, not just to give our special gifts to the ones needing them.
But of course, we are a church, with a budget and with a public face, and therefore with a variety of ministries that need to be met, day in and day out.  To the extent that your sense of call, your quest puts you here, we now also ask how can your gifts become ministries to the church and to its ministries?  Every year, at annual meeting we vote in a budget.  That budget is more than a spread-sheet with a bottom line on it.  It is our statement of ministry.  These certain things happen here, we say, and therefore we need to pay for them.  The best example I can think of right now, is that we have a budget this year that relies on a certain amount of fundraising.  While our board of finances will tackle the big picture and say we need to hold our traditional strawberry supper fundraiser, we also need to hold several others.  This year two should suffice.  We’ll have our barbeque because that event is important to the community and we see that someday the Stowe Street Arts Festival may be a big, important thing for Waterbury, and we’ll have our tag sale, because we really need another $5K in fundraising after that, and that’s all that will make that kind of money.  Four people cannot do all of this work.  And so they are actively seeking people to be responsible for each of these fundraisers.  Big jobs, yes, but jobs that need to be shared among us over time as we feel called.  Not all are good organizers — but some are fine grunt laborers.  Both are needed.
So next week, we’ll have a chance to review, with the few responsible for the governance of the church, what our responsibilities are.  We also hope that the board members will have a chance to review with you, dreams you might have.  For each of us is the Lord’s servant and our spheres of responsibility are no less than God’s work, here and now.  Amen.