Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from December 5, 2004

“Roots and Shoots”

Rev. Thomas Ratmeyer

Scriptures:

Isaiah 11:1-10    

Romans 15:4-13 

Have you ever, or maybe I should say:  When was the last time you have used the sermon time to read the bulletin?  You know—catch up on parish notes, maybe enjoy reading again the words to the anthem, or check the calendar in the back to find out if your committee is meeting this week?

Well, normally, I might not be so thrilled if the parish notes turned out to be more captivating than my sermonizing, but this week, let me encourage you to keep it open and in reach so we can look at it together.  After all, in the past couple of weeks, there have been news in the very order of our worship, and none of us is completely accustomed to the new order yet.  So let’s have a look at it.  Open your bulletin. I want to point out just two basic things. 

One is that there are now chapter headings over the different parts of worship.  “God’s People Gather”,  “Proclaiming the Good News In Word and Sacrament”, “God’s People Respond”.  They help us understand the storyline of our encounter with God.  They help us understand better why we do what we do in what place.  I think of worship as one big X.  In the beginning, we come from all kinds of different places.  Everything is something else on their mind.  Some of us are pretty preoccupied, others feel pretty empty that particular morning.  We come from everywhere.  But then, as we gather, as we go through the call to worship, for example, we come closer together.  We are in unison by the time we speak to the glory of God.  Gloria Patri. 

Incidentally, many churches proclaim the Gloria Patri after encountering the mercy of God after confession.  We don’t confess.  Have you ever thought about that?  We don’t confess in worship.  I would love for us to think about why that is, maybe in a Lenten study or something.  But, anyway, by the time we encounter God’s word, the good news in word and sacrament, we’re all in the same place.

That’s the second part I want to make.  The sermon has moved.  The sacrament of communion has moved to the middle of worship.  All of a sudden, there is something that follows that.  There is a response.  Art Miller, our own Art Miller, not the playwright, gave me once a way of knowing a good sermon.  He said when he leaves the service and gets in his car and hits the first red light, if the conversation at that red light is about the sermon, it was a good one.  I have my own definition of a good sermon.  A good sermon is when the preacher lifts up the scripture to the light.  A bad sermon is when the preacher puts himself or herself in front of the scripture and casts his or her shadow on it.  What is a good social justice sermon? (As if there was any Christian sermon that wasn’t a social justice sermon...)  Well, the preacher lifts the scripture up to the light and it becomes a magnifying glass through which you see the problems of the world more clearly.  Consequently, the light gets bundled and focused through the magnifying glass and you start a fire.  A social justice sermon without a little bit of fire is not a good sermon.

                Why do you come to worship?  One of you told me, “I miss it I haven’t come for several weeks.”  Another person told me, “This is my one hour a week where I leave the spouse home with the kids.”  Sometimes, you said to me at the end, “You gave me something to think about.”  Another person says, “It’s definitely the music, the hymns of the season.”  “It keeps me on my toes,” I heard someone say, “and it motivates me to care about others.”

“Worship transforms” is what we, as worship leaders, like to think.  It is true, even if such a transformation doesn’t always have rapture-like drama to it.  We Congregationalists in New England don’t do rapture all that well but we do transformation.  That you go from being overwhelmed to being able to breathe, and think a little more clearly; that you find you heard something in the worship that enables you to go back to a situation in your life which you didn’t know how to handle before, and tackle it in a new way; that you made a new connection with a person sitting next to you and find your day is a good day because of it; that you were able to offer up a prayer concern that previously sat inside you like a hard-to-digest meal, but is now shared with the family of faith and so much lighter because of it; that you find in the sacrament a new beginning; or that you simply come to worship because you want to be closer connected with the divine reality that you may not be able to name—but that is out there.  Such is the currency of our transformation.  It’s not a hundred-dollar bill every week, but it’s no change either.

When we come to a worship service, it means that we allow our personal string of life (and string of thought and feeling) to be woven into the fabric of a community of faith, a net that becomes more and more intricate, more and more beautiful,  until no one who wants to accept the support and embrace of that community can slide through the holes any more to be left behind or left out.  We come to serve God and do it by serving one another, and find, often enough, that we ourselves are being served.

Paul, the zealot turned apostle, and Isaiah, the prophet of the Hebrew scriptures, both chime in on our conversation about worship.  The prophet reminds us that what needs transforming is not just our day-to-day experience of life, but even our very hopes as well.  “You hope too little,” he says, “Your hope does not even touch the magnitude of God’s transforming power.”  Then he gives us the scripture that we have seen depicted in the art of Sunday school classrooms, and on the covers of illustrated bibles, children’s bibles, that is, because we delegate it to the children to dare to hope on a scale that defies even the laws of creation, or the laws of nature—but isn’t that the same:

“The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.  The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.  The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.  They will not hurt of destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”

No wonder we call it the new creation, because even what God has done in creation will be transformed.  Do you think the transformation extends to Godself?  Do you think God is being transformed, too?  I do!  I think God chose to be a God who would be transformed throughout God’s relationship with us.  God even chose to be in relationship with us.  God even chose, in defiance of the rules in the handbook of how to be an omnipotent God, to give us free will.  It may have been a mistake but it turns out to be a very dynamic relationship.  Just think of the different evolutions, the different generations in our relationship with god, sort of like the different generations of a Volkswagen Golf, or the different program versions of AOL and PowerChurch. 

Creation was  1.0.  Noah—changing the rules after the flood, and a promise not to do that again—that’s definitely a 2.0.  A promise to Abraham for a people of God that are greater in numbers than stars in the sky:  3.0.  The promised land after the Exodus:  4.0.  Jesus Christ:  well, that’s more than a new generation—that’s a whole new way of counting.  Then the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  Was that it?  How about Martin Luther?  How about Martin Luther King, Jr.?  You get the picture.

But how do we get to the new creation?  Isaiah’s text is so inconceivable to us that there is a danger that it just becomes a cute text we read at Advent time.  Isaiah was just waiting for us to wonder about that.  He says the transformation of all creation comes by way of the transformation of our social relations before it has changed what nature is like.  But the relations of nature is we have to change the way we interact with one another.  The new shoot in the stump of human life and human society, as we know it, is the reign of Jesus Christ, and the reign of Jesus Christ is a reign of justice.

The biblical notion of justice is not complicated.  Justice mans talking about standards of living and not having to refer to anybody who lives below any standards at all.  If  this justice sounds to you like spreading the wealth, then you are right.  But let me talk about spreading the wealth today in a different way, with an economy in mind that counts things other than our material goods.  Paul has been waiting patiently, but he too has something to say about the transformation of social relations.  At the end of his instructions to the congregation of believers in Rome, he charges them to give freely of theirs—not possessions, not assets, not income, not man-or-womanpower; it is to give freely of their welcome.  He says,

“May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”

For the glory of God shall we welcome, not for who the other person is, not for their achievements or the lack thereof, not because they are sinners or saints, not because they are just like us, or because they are decidedly not, not for the purpose to grow the church, but for the glory of God.  Welcome one another!   For whenever someone sticks their head in the door, and finds that he or she is recognized, and greeted, and feels welcomes, then the God whose people we say we are is glorified.

Our denomination, the United Church of Christ, has been looking at its roughly six thousand congregations.  It was no surprise that they found that among us as congregations, we are more diverse and we have a broader range of theology, more ways of worship, and more ways of talking to each other than any other mainline denomination in Protestantism.  The reason is—we take pride in our autonomy as a congregation.  We take pride in the fact that we make all our major decisions on our own, and nobody from Cleveland or Hartford tells us who to call as our pastor or how to spend our money or how to conduct our business.  We like that.  The challenge in that is that it’s much harder for the UCC to have a denominational identity of recognizable face as a denomination of all these different congregations than other denominations do.  If you ask somebody on the street what a Roman Catholic church is, they probably know.  If you ask somebody on the street what the United Church of Christ is, they may well not.  But what the denomination found is that the one thing that we have in common is our commitment to an extravagant welcome; our commitment to a welcome that tends to bridge what divides people.  They figured out that that was worth telling the world about because there are people out there who don’t have a connection with the church, who may well have been very alienated by the church in one form or shape at one point.  But they don’t know that our denomination’s commitment is to welcome them, just for who they are.

So, these ads that are running on TV are just about that.  They say, “Jesus didn’t turn people away.  Neither do we.” It’s very simple.   “No matter who you are, and where you are in life’s journey, you are welcome here.”  This is the sound of welcome as the UCC has put it forth in TV ads that are airing this month.  You may ask, “Why does church have to produce TV ads?  Isn’t that what we have steeples for?”

The Christian church has committed many a sin of exclusion in her tradition, to the point that, now, the extravagant and unconditional-across-the-board welcome for the glory of God cannot be simply taken for granted, cannot be assumed.  Even Paul didn’t assume it for the Romans.  He had to tell it to them.  We cannot take it for granted, either.  We try to have our welcome be intentional and loving.  We try to work on our welcome.  We try to think about how our welcome is expressed—in our language, in the way we do things, in making our building more accessible, and in creating new space.

All the while, our denomination has found out that our extravagant welcome is a message so powerful that some of the networks, namely CBS and NBC, refuse to air it.  God forbid that congregations that proclaim the Christian faith would utter a welcome that bridges all the societal rifts that divide one human being from another, while at the same time, the Executive Branch cites the Christian faith as a reason to deepen those rifts and to make them more permanent than they already are.  This is how I understand the message of CBS but, in order to be fair, I am going to quote them directly.  This is what CBS said:  “Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations, and the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the [CBS and UPN] networks.” (As quoted in the UCC press release, November 30, 2004)

“Jesus didn’t turn people away.  Neither do we.” is unacceptable for broadcast.  I want to make two points.  One is, since when does the position of the administration exclude dissent in the public debate in this country, of all places?  Besides, the ad makes absolutely no statement whatsoever about marriage, one way or the other.  If you feel inspired to express your opinion about the ad, or remind CBS of our First Amendment right to express ourselves, please refer to the yellow insert in the bulletin for further information.

Let’s close the circle.  We talked about worship as a place and time of transformation.   But who is the agent of transformation?  Is it your pastors that preach to you?  Is it your deacons that serve you?  Is it your Spiritual Life Committee that thinks about how worship works?  No, it’s the Holy Spirit.  In Isaiah, it says the spirit of God that moves over the stump, where a living tree has been cut off, and out of this stump grows a new shoot which is the reign of Jesus Christ.  For Paul, it is the Holy Spirit that gives us hope—hope that even our hopes will be transformed.

Let us pray:

Come, Holy Spirit, come.  May your transforming power find us where we are.  May our worship be to God’s glory.  May our welcome be extravagant.  May our missions be manifold.  May our ministries be true to your word, the same word that came to us in Jesus Christ—word that God is still speaking.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.