a meditation by Carrie Eikler
Part of our prayer service for those affected by the natural disasters in Myanmar and China
A couple of months ago, my mother called me in the morning with some shocking news. On their quiet farm in fertile lands of Central Illinois, they woke up to the bed shaking…the room shaking…the ground shaking. My brother felt it in Chicago, too. Deep beneath the earth in southern Indiana, an earthquake began that was felt throughout the surrounding states. That Sunday, I stood up in this congregation during our joys and concerns and I remember giving thanks that no one was hurt, and giving thanks that earth sometimes reminds us that she is alive, and unpredictable, in ways that shake us up, but do no human harm.
But then three weeks ago, on May 2nd, we hear of the deadly cyclone that ripped through Myanmar, the country formerly known as Burma. Numbers begin trickling in on the dead and wounded. Then the numbers came pouring in. According to the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, official government sources are reporting 78,000 people dead, 56,000 people missing, and UN numbers estimate that 2.4 million people were affected by the cyclone. To make matters worse, international aid communities have been running up against resistance from Myanmar’s military regime, making the distribution of aid slow and arduous. And as if to add insult to injury, the cyclone comes immediately before what is known as “hungry season” in Myanmar, the time between May and November when the rice surplus is at its lowest, and before the year’s yield comes in.
On May 12th, an earthquake reading 7.2 on the Richter Scale, shook the Sichuan province in Southwest China. Upwards around 10,000 people are believed to have perished in the quake. Those who have survived, whether or not their homes were destroyed, are sleeping on the streets, because reports of possible aftershocks have left people terrified of being indoors.
In light of these events, I found it much more difficult to read the text for this week from Isaiah. Depicting the people of Israel as oblivious to God’s care, they believe that God has forsaken and forgotten them. But God speaks as a mother, saying ‘Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child in her womb?...I will not forget you.” I find this to be a beautiful image, being a mother myself. But if God does not forget, then why? Why do these things happen? And not just these isolated incidences, but why tsunamis, hurricanes, why do babies die, and tyrants prosper? It opens the flood gates for asking why these happen, which naturally lead us into asking why did God make this happen, or at least “allow” this to happen?
Some of us have clear answers on these big questions of God’s place in human suffering. Some of us would rather move from the question of “why?” to asking the question “what?”: What are we to do about it? What can be done? What were the circumstances that made a bad situation worse, and what should have happened? Generally, I feel more comfortable in this territory. It’s easier for me to think about active responses. But I think when I jump too quickly from “why” into “what,” I feel like we disregard the questions that we all are feeling. It’s like sitting with someone who has lost their loved one, and immediately trying to fix the problem. I remember reading in seminary about being with people during times of crisis and death. The author, whose teenage son was killed during a robbery, reflected on his experience and other stories he heard about people who suffer devastating loss. He said that when people ask the question “Why?”—Why did my son die? Why did this happen to our family?—we really weren’t looking for the answer, as if a single answer could exist. We were just needing to voice the question as a way of getting our minds around the reality of what happened.
Of course there are simple things we can and should do in the immediate time after a devastation, if only give money, but we miss something if we don’t ask these questions. Even if our questions seem so far from what we generally think about God and suffering, it can only enhance our relationship with God, and possibly prepare us more fully to be the servants we are called to be. If we took quickly jump from why to what, we don’t give ourselves time to pray, to be angry, to dialogue with God and each other, simply to grieve. It quickly helps us move over the hard question of God’s presence in the disaster.
And it is dwelling with the question of “where,” of asking about God’s presence, that I have found to be most helpful. While I will ask “why” these things happen, and “what” can I do to help the situation, I have a meeting place by asking “where” is God in these circumstances, in these tragedies.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Burned by the Church
sermon by Carrie Eikler
Acts 2:1-21
Pentecost
I have never been one for what you would call the “hallmark holidays,” and even on this 100th anniversary of the first Mother’s Day, I’ve always considered Mother’s Day a “Hallmark Holiday.” Generally I’ve cynically viewed them as simple advertising schemes to get us to buy things, hallmark cards at the very least.
And it seems to me like new holidays pop up all the time. Such as “Sweetest’s Day,” an autumn version of Valentine’s day. I guess it exists to help the economy get through the slump between the Fourth of July and Halloween. I’ve wondered if all these hallmark holidays work so well in our American culture because we have very few true celebrations deeply engrained in us, celebrations that bind our collective experiences as a people, beyond being simply consumers.
It’s not that don’t I think we should give thanks to our bosses on Boss Day, or secretaries on Secretary Day, or even fathers on Fathers Day. But I’ve wondered, “why do we need a special day to appreciate someone?” and does buying a card and balloons really mean that much? So to my mother’s dismay, I rarely have given her anything on Mother’s Day, except maybe a hug or a phone call. And I can honestly say that I don’t expect Sebastian to give me anything on Mother’s Day, other than his daily hugs and snuggles.
But I can tell you, I was pretty excited the other day when Torin and I were with my mother downtown. Torin bought be a $10 belt I was eyeing at a vintage store and as he presented it to me, he smiled and said “Happy Mother’s Day.” I clapped my hands like a kid at Christmas who gets her first bike. One more time, my bubble of superiority was humbly busted.
As I have grown with my mother over the years I’ve come to understand our relationship as one of dynamics. Dynamics of a child growing into a personality that will be hers for a lifetime; dynamics of a teenager seeking independence; dynamics of a college student who thinks she knows everything; dynamics of a woman who somehow discovers that she is more like her mother than she ever thought she would be, and now looking to her for advice on being a parent.
On my mother’s side: dynamics of raising an overly energetic little girl; testing the balance between trust and protection; biting her tongue when she wants to give her daughter a sense that she has won an argument, while not being afraid to reign in on her daughter’s attitude when it gets out of hand; and delicately observing and venturing into the places where a little mother’s guidance might be helpful, hoping that she’s not overstepping the line. After all, her daughter is now grown. Her daughter is now a mother.
My mother is a source of frustration, and she is the closest thing that reminds me who I am, where I come from, and the source of my life. It is a dynamic relationship indeed. It keeps us leaving and returning, embracing and relinquishing, loving and gnashing teeth.
I was talking to a friend from seminary the other day. She is getting ready to pack up her apartment in New York for the summer to live with friends in Ohio. As we talked she was looking around her room at the boxes half filled (or half empty, depending on your perspective). She was looking at the systems left unmanaged, and the work yet to do. Her mother is what you might call a pack rat. She never got rid of a single thing, and many days and weeks my friend has spent at her mother’s house trying to find a system in the chaos, helping organize and discard.
My friend has always known this trait was passed onto her. And ask we talked on the phone that evening as she struggled with this inherited dysfunction, she sighed and said “It’s all my mother’s fault.” We kind of giggled at that, knowing that it would be a wonderful world if all our problems could be blamed on our mothers, or fathers. And in a way, that world of blame is a world we live in.
But it also seems a bit more complicated to me than simply assigning blame. On one hand we recognize the power family dynamics and family systems play in constructing who we are. We seek ways to console ourselves that it is not all our fault that we are messed up, that we need therapy. But then we have other voices telling us that we don’t need to be victimized, that we can change anything about ourselves we might not like-from our looks, to our attitude, our financial situation, even sexual orientation—if we just try hard enough, believe enough in ourselves, if we just become the little engine that could.
I don’t know where it all lies, ultimately. Somewhere in the middle I suppose. So today we recognize mothers, whether we celebrate the wonderful relationship we have, or if it allows us to confront the dark side of our maternal relationships. Maybe we can make a hallmark holiday one of celebration and redemption, depending on your need.
The religious calendar this year lines up nicely with the Hallmark calendar, so today we also celebrate Pentecost, we celebrate the formation of Mother Church. Fifty days following Passover, all Jews would gather to celebrate the Feast of Weeks. This is the day, fifty days after being liberated from Pharaoh’s Egypt, that YHWH gave the law to the Hebrew people at Mount Sinai. It was a day of rest, of reading the Torah, telling stories, and having celebratory meals.
So it is very likely that this is what these Galilean Jews who had been close to Jesus had gathered for in our story today. For rejuvenation, for learning—sharing stories and celebrating God’s nurturing spirit by eating and fellowshipping. I’m sure they welcomed this time, after their teacher had died, went missing, showed up again alive, and then magically transcended into the heavens – poof. A good reason to remember where you came from, who your family is, maybe try to rest a little.
But it wasn’t just locals who were in Jerusalem for the celebration. Our scripture today gives a whole laundry list of nations who were present, all varieties of peoples and languages. It sounds as if they were probably celebrating with their own people—Galileans with Galileans, Elamites with Elamites, Pamphylians with Pamphylians, and so on. But as they celebrated, the group of Galileans had the most peculiar thing happen to them.
Now I’m sure there are many accounts of what happened on that day. I have often pictured images of fiery tongues—and I mean, real tongues, like the iconic Rolling Stones logo—these sorts of tongues flying out of the sky, licking the hair of each of the disciples. I can’t imagine what it really must have looked like, how other people perceived it. But as in any such group recollection, the salient points tend to surface over time and find their place in the "official" retelling, and that retelling is what we have here, in the book of Acts.
What happened, whatever those tongues really looked like, is that out of chaos, there was unity without uniformity. Out of pandemonium, there was understanding without squelching the different voices. The Holy Spirit, the Breath of God and the Heartbeat of Christ, made herself present to her people. The Holy Spirit fashioned a clarity expressed in a beautiful diversity of language and understanding. What emerged that day, was the Birth of the Church.
A beautiful image. Bizarre…but beautiful. But since the two millennia since Jesus walked on earth, it seems like that excitement of the spirit has been washed out. Instead of small groups gathered to fellowship, and learn, and celebrate, it can’t be denied that Mother Church has taken ugly and deplorable twists and turns. Nancy Bowen, our Hebrew Scriptures professor at seminary is a Methodist woman originally trained as a mathematician before pursuing doctoral work in Biblical Studies. Nancy had the dubious task of teaching Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, to Quaker and Church of the Brethren seminary students.
For peace-loving Brethren and Quakers, who often look to the gospels for their scriptural link to religious life, and the gospel of peace as foundational in our lives, our questions of the Hebrew Scriptures and its seemingly violent and vengeful God were well grounded. And Nancy anticipated all of the questions and critiques each semester . She would start her Introduction to Hebrew Scripture class recalling the conversation she once had. A man had asked her, like some strange pick-up line, “So, what’s a nice girl like you doing in Old Testament?” She smiled at him and said, “I’m in it for the sex and the violence.” I’d like to think that I’m as quick witted.
But she would continue that line of conversation with us. She said she could predict many of our concerns we brought with us about the teachings and the images of God in Hebrew Scriptures. She acknowledged that it’s theologically challenging to read some of these scriptures, particularly coming from the background many of us came from. But she warned us about the all-too-easy trap to fall into, the trap of separating the God of Hebrew Scripture from the God of the New Testament—saying that the God of the Jews demands obedience while the God of Jesus expects love. She helped us think through the many ways this misconception has damaged Christian and Jewish relations, and easily manifests itself into harmful anti-Semitism.
And she reminded us: The Hebrew Scriptures is a story of a people who struggled to understand their place with God and narrates their struggle over thousands of years. Our New Testament is only a snapshot of the early Christian story, a story of only about one hundred years. If the entirety of the Christian story from Christ to the present day was written down, if future generations read what the Christian Church believed their God demanded of them over two thousand years--the Crusades, the Inquisition, condoning war and slavery—what might they think of us and our God. We might see that our Christian ancestors have not always worshipped a God of love, mercy, and grace but a jealous, vengeful, and violent God. Maybe our stories are more similar than we think.
I think it is that part of the Church’s story that has led many people to question the place of Christianity in the world, leads people to reject Mother Church and abandon faith, at least, abandon the Christian Faith. In this and many other ways, people have felt burned by the Church, abandoned by their Christian Faith. This has certainly happened to me, and surprisingly, I wrestle with it every single day.
It began in college. Now, I know many religious conservatives will blame higher education for corrupting our youth, that liberal arts will bring downfall of our Christian society. But it wasn’t only my education that led me to question faith. I considered myself to be a very strong Christian that entire first year, standing the tests of classes in sociology and philosophy, even one the inner lives of animals. I was still a strong Christian, believed all the right Christian things.
No, it wasn’t until I worked at a Church of the Brethren camp in Virginia that I began to get angry. It happened when the groundskeeper of the camp told me that he was my superior, not because he was older, but because he was a man; when he told me that my purpose in life as intended by God was to find a husband, have children, and submit; when he told me that women should never preach.
And then it snowballed. I began to see it all around me what the church had done in history, what it was doing even now, at home and abroad. Hand in hand with governments decimating cultures, spilling blood or at least washing their hands of it. And I thought, if this is the church then it is not for me. I am disowning my mother, my Mother Church.
And yet, I could never totally leave it. I still felt pulled to justifying God in some way. I was among the countless who identified themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” In many ways I still saw the divine in the world around me so I realized I wasn’t abandoning God, just church. But it wasn’t even that, because I still was involved in Brethren communities, I still went into Brethren Volunteer Service. And there I connected with Catholics who were active in social justice as well as deeply cultivating their spiritual lives. But it wasn’t an amorphous “spiritual but not religious” type of faith. It was faith in the restorative power of Christ. It was faith that there was a holy spirit of God that moves us from beyond what has been, into a future that can be different. And somehow, in the midst of that, I found myself coming home…to the church. I wasn’t the same, I’m not the same, by any stretch of the imagination. I couldn’t, and can’t, believe some things that had been assumed you must believe to be Christian. But somehow I found my way home.
Are we victims to the distasteful forces of our Mother Church? Or can we simply change the course of our history by our own efforts? I’ve never quite known how to deal with this question, how to bring it to the language of the church and to our lives of faith. But recently I heard Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso speak about her work with young families and what she said found a powerful resonance in me. She often works with couples who, after abandoning the church for whatever reason, seek her counsel when the have children. They want to return, to somehow be part of a religious experience with their children.
But many have found certain aspects of the institutional church so distasteful, certain experiences as children that turned them off. “Many times we have bad experiences with particular religious traditions, but that is not the best of the tradition,” she said. “We need to look to the best of the tradition…and [these traditions] give us this language that allows us to speak [of God].” What she tells them, is that while there are things about the tradition that have rightfully given bad impressions, they themselves are part of the tradition too. She said that you are not just a descendent of your tradition, you are also an ancestor. (“The Spirituality of Parenting.” Speaking of Faith, National Public Radio. April 3, 2008)
We are not just descendents of our church, but we are also ancestors, creating and molding and directing where we will go and what we will become. Today we celebrate the birth of our church, knowing that tongues of fire are needed in our lives. But I think we already have the fire present. What we may lack is the perception to know that it is the Spirit burning us to move.
There is the fire in our belly, and it burns us with anger when we witness a justice system that is so blatantly skewed against those who are not white. There is the fire in our hearts, when we burn with excitement and enthusiasm when opportunities come our way that we feel called to. There is fire in our souls, when we burn with mercy and confession and compassion as we watch the death toll from cyclones in Myanmar rise in the hundreds of thousands. There is fire in our minds, when we burn with wisdom as we see with new clarity, new perspectives, new realities.
We too quickly pass it off as simply anger, or excitability, or emotion, but I think that burning is the fire of the Spirit, compelling us to wake up and to see the best of what God gives us through the Spirit: unity, passion, mercy, peace, and forgiveness. The face of the emerging church has each of our faces in it. How people see the church will be how they see those of us who profess to be followers of Christ. We are not simply descendents of our tradition, we are also ancestors giving birth to a new relationship between ourselves and our God, between ourselves and the world. It is a relationship of dynamics. But I think if we are to live in the story of the Pentecost, we must recognizing that the fires we feel in our lives are the fires that renew, because they are the source of our frustration…and the source of our life together.
Acts 2:1-21
Pentecost
I have never been one for what you would call the “hallmark holidays,” and even on this 100th anniversary of the first Mother’s Day, I’ve always considered Mother’s Day a “Hallmark Holiday.” Generally I’ve cynically viewed them as simple advertising schemes to get us to buy things, hallmark cards at the very least.
And it seems to me like new holidays pop up all the time. Such as “Sweetest’s Day,” an autumn version of Valentine’s day. I guess it exists to help the economy get through the slump between the Fourth of July and Halloween. I’ve wondered if all these hallmark holidays work so well in our American culture because we have very few true celebrations deeply engrained in us, celebrations that bind our collective experiences as a people, beyond being simply consumers.
It’s not that don’t I think we should give thanks to our bosses on Boss Day, or secretaries on Secretary Day, or even fathers on Fathers Day. But I’ve wondered, “why do we need a special day to appreciate someone?” and does buying a card and balloons really mean that much? So to my mother’s dismay, I rarely have given her anything on Mother’s Day, except maybe a hug or a phone call. And I can honestly say that I don’t expect Sebastian to give me anything on Mother’s Day, other than his daily hugs and snuggles.
But I can tell you, I was pretty excited the other day when Torin and I were with my mother downtown. Torin bought be a $10 belt I was eyeing at a vintage store and as he presented it to me, he smiled and said “Happy Mother’s Day.” I clapped my hands like a kid at Christmas who gets her first bike. One more time, my bubble of superiority was humbly busted.
As I have grown with my mother over the years I’ve come to understand our relationship as one of dynamics. Dynamics of a child growing into a personality that will be hers for a lifetime; dynamics of a teenager seeking independence; dynamics of a college student who thinks she knows everything; dynamics of a woman who somehow discovers that she is more like her mother than she ever thought she would be, and now looking to her for advice on being a parent.
On my mother’s side: dynamics of raising an overly energetic little girl; testing the balance between trust and protection; biting her tongue when she wants to give her daughter a sense that she has won an argument, while not being afraid to reign in on her daughter’s attitude when it gets out of hand; and delicately observing and venturing into the places where a little mother’s guidance might be helpful, hoping that she’s not overstepping the line. After all, her daughter is now grown. Her daughter is now a mother.
My mother is a source of frustration, and she is the closest thing that reminds me who I am, where I come from, and the source of my life. It is a dynamic relationship indeed. It keeps us leaving and returning, embracing and relinquishing, loving and gnashing teeth.
I was talking to a friend from seminary the other day. She is getting ready to pack up her apartment in New York for the summer to live with friends in Ohio. As we talked she was looking around her room at the boxes half filled (or half empty, depending on your perspective). She was looking at the systems left unmanaged, and the work yet to do. Her mother is what you might call a pack rat. She never got rid of a single thing, and many days and weeks my friend has spent at her mother’s house trying to find a system in the chaos, helping organize and discard.
My friend has always known this trait was passed onto her. And ask we talked on the phone that evening as she struggled with this inherited dysfunction, she sighed and said “It’s all my mother’s fault.” We kind of giggled at that, knowing that it would be a wonderful world if all our problems could be blamed on our mothers, or fathers. And in a way, that world of blame is a world we live in.
But it also seems a bit more complicated to me than simply assigning blame. On one hand we recognize the power family dynamics and family systems play in constructing who we are. We seek ways to console ourselves that it is not all our fault that we are messed up, that we need therapy. But then we have other voices telling us that we don’t need to be victimized, that we can change anything about ourselves we might not like-from our looks, to our attitude, our financial situation, even sexual orientation—if we just try hard enough, believe enough in ourselves, if we just become the little engine that could.
I don’t know where it all lies, ultimately. Somewhere in the middle I suppose. So today we recognize mothers, whether we celebrate the wonderful relationship we have, or if it allows us to confront the dark side of our maternal relationships. Maybe we can make a hallmark holiday one of celebration and redemption, depending on your need.
The religious calendar this year lines up nicely with the Hallmark calendar, so today we also celebrate Pentecost, we celebrate the formation of Mother Church. Fifty days following Passover, all Jews would gather to celebrate the Feast of Weeks. This is the day, fifty days after being liberated from Pharaoh’s Egypt, that YHWH gave the law to the Hebrew people at Mount Sinai. It was a day of rest, of reading the Torah, telling stories, and having celebratory meals.
So it is very likely that this is what these Galilean Jews who had been close to Jesus had gathered for in our story today. For rejuvenation, for learning—sharing stories and celebrating God’s nurturing spirit by eating and fellowshipping. I’m sure they welcomed this time, after their teacher had died, went missing, showed up again alive, and then magically transcended into the heavens – poof. A good reason to remember where you came from, who your family is, maybe try to rest a little.
But it wasn’t just locals who were in Jerusalem for the celebration. Our scripture today gives a whole laundry list of nations who were present, all varieties of peoples and languages. It sounds as if they were probably celebrating with their own people—Galileans with Galileans, Elamites with Elamites, Pamphylians with Pamphylians, and so on. But as they celebrated, the group of Galileans had the most peculiar thing happen to them.
Now I’m sure there are many accounts of what happened on that day. I have often pictured images of fiery tongues—and I mean, real tongues, like the iconic Rolling Stones logo—these sorts of tongues flying out of the sky, licking the hair of each of the disciples. I can’t imagine what it really must have looked like, how other people perceived it. But as in any such group recollection, the salient points tend to surface over time and find their place in the "official" retelling, and that retelling is what we have here, in the book of Acts.
What happened, whatever those tongues really looked like, is that out of chaos, there was unity without uniformity. Out of pandemonium, there was understanding without squelching the different voices. The Holy Spirit, the Breath of God and the Heartbeat of Christ, made herself present to her people. The Holy Spirit fashioned a clarity expressed in a beautiful diversity of language and understanding. What emerged that day, was the Birth of the Church.
A beautiful image. Bizarre…but beautiful. But since the two millennia since Jesus walked on earth, it seems like that excitement of the spirit has been washed out. Instead of small groups gathered to fellowship, and learn, and celebrate, it can’t be denied that Mother Church has taken ugly and deplorable twists and turns. Nancy Bowen, our Hebrew Scriptures professor at seminary is a Methodist woman originally trained as a mathematician before pursuing doctoral work in Biblical Studies. Nancy had the dubious task of teaching Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, to Quaker and Church of the Brethren seminary students.
For peace-loving Brethren and Quakers, who often look to the gospels for their scriptural link to religious life, and the gospel of peace as foundational in our lives, our questions of the Hebrew Scriptures and its seemingly violent and vengeful God were well grounded. And Nancy anticipated all of the questions and critiques each semester . She would start her Introduction to Hebrew Scripture class recalling the conversation she once had. A man had asked her, like some strange pick-up line, “So, what’s a nice girl like you doing in Old Testament?” She smiled at him and said, “I’m in it for the sex and the violence.” I’d like to think that I’m as quick witted.
But she would continue that line of conversation with us. She said she could predict many of our concerns we brought with us about the teachings and the images of God in Hebrew Scriptures. She acknowledged that it’s theologically challenging to read some of these scriptures, particularly coming from the background many of us came from. But she warned us about the all-too-easy trap to fall into, the trap of separating the God of Hebrew Scripture from the God of the New Testament—saying that the God of the Jews demands obedience while the God of Jesus expects love. She helped us think through the many ways this misconception has damaged Christian and Jewish relations, and easily manifests itself into harmful anti-Semitism.
And she reminded us: The Hebrew Scriptures is a story of a people who struggled to understand their place with God and narrates their struggle over thousands of years. Our New Testament is only a snapshot of the early Christian story, a story of only about one hundred years. If the entirety of the Christian story from Christ to the present day was written down, if future generations read what the Christian Church believed their God demanded of them over two thousand years--the Crusades, the Inquisition, condoning war and slavery—what might they think of us and our God. We might see that our Christian ancestors have not always worshipped a God of love, mercy, and grace but a jealous, vengeful, and violent God. Maybe our stories are more similar than we think.
I think it is that part of the Church’s story that has led many people to question the place of Christianity in the world, leads people to reject Mother Church and abandon faith, at least, abandon the Christian Faith. In this and many other ways, people have felt burned by the Church, abandoned by their Christian Faith. This has certainly happened to me, and surprisingly, I wrestle with it every single day.
It began in college. Now, I know many religious conservatives will blame higher education for corrupting our youth, that liberal arts will bring downfall of our Christian society. But it wasn’t only my education that led me to question faith. I considered myself to be a very strong Christian that entire first year, standing the tests of classes in sociology and philosophy, even one the inner lives of animals. I was still a strong Christian, believed all the right Christian things.
No, it wasn’t until I worked at a Church of the Brethren camp in Virginia that I began to get angry. It happened when the groundskeeper of the camp told me that he was my superior, not because he was older, but because he was a man; when he told me that my purpose in life as intended by God was to find a husband, have children, and submit; when he told me that women should never preach.
And then it snowballed. I began to see it all around me what the church had done in history, what it was doing even now, at home and abroad. Hand in hand with governments decimating cultures, spilling blood or at least washing their hands of it. And I thought, if this is the church then it is not for me. I am disowning my mother, my Mother Church.
And yet, I could never totally leave it. I still felt pulled to justifying God in some way. I was among the countless who identified themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” In many ways I still saw the divine in the world around me so I realized I wasn’t abandoning God, just church. But it wasn’t even that, because I still was involved in Brethren communities, I still went into Brethren Volunteer Service. And there I connected with Catholics who were active in social justice as well as deeply cultivating their spiritual lives. But it wasn’t an amorphous “spiritual but not religious” type of faith. It was faith in the restorative power of Christ. It was faith that there was a holy spirit of God that moves us from beyond what has been, into a future that can be different. And somehow, in the midst of that, I found myself coming home…to the church. I wasn’t the same, I’m not the same, by any stretch of the imagination. I couldn’t, and can’t, believe some things that had been assumed you must believe to be Christian. But somehow I found my way home.
Are we victims to the distasteful forces of our Mother Church? Or can we simply change the course of our history by our own efforts? I’ve never quite known how to deal with this question, how to bring it to the language of the church and to our lives of faith. But recently I heard Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso speak about her work with young families and what she said found a powerful resonance in me. She often works with couples who, after abandoning the church for whatever reason, seek her counsel when the have children. They want to return, to somehow be part of a religious experience with their children.
But many have found certain aspects of the institutional church so distasteful, certain experiences as children that turned them off. “Many times we have bad experiences with particular religious traditions, but that is not the best of the tradition,” she said. “We need to look to the best of the tradition…and [these traditions] give us this language that allows us to speak [of God].” What she tells them, is that while there are things about the tradition that have rightfully given bad impressions, they themselves are part of the tradition too. She said that you are not just a descendent of your tradition, you are also an ancestor. (“The Spirituality of Parenting.” Speaking of Faith, National Public Radio. April 3, 2008)
We are not just descendents of our church, but we are also ancestors, creating and molding and directing where we will go and what we will become. Today we celebrate the birth of our church, knowing that tongues of fire are needed in our lives. But I think we already have the fire present. What we may lack is the perception to know that it is the Spirit burning us to move.
There is the fire in our belly, and it burns us with anger when we witness a justice system that is so blatantly skewed against those who are not white. There is the fire in our hearts, when we burn with excitement and enthusiasm when opportunities come our way that we feel called to. There is fire in our souls, when we burn with mercy and confession and compassion as we watch the death toll from cyclones in Myanmar rise in the hundreds of thousands. There is fire in our minds, when we burn with wisdom as we see with new clarity, new perspectives, new realities.
We too quickly pass it off as simply anger, or excitability, or emotion, but I think that burning is the fire of the Spirit, compelling us to wake up and to see the best of what God gives us through the Spirit: unity, passion, mercy, peace, and forgiveness. The face of the emerging church has each of our faces in it. How people see the church will be how they see those of us who profess to be followers of Christ. We are not simply descendents of our tradition, we are also ancestors giving birth to a new relationship between ourselves and our God, between ourselves and the world. It is a relationship of dynamics. But I think if we are to live in the story of the Pentecost, we must recognizing that the fires we feel in our lives are the fires that renew, because they are the source of our frustration…and the source of our life together.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
A Guiding Absence
sermon by Torin Eikler
Ephesians 1:15-23, Acts 1:1-11
Eastertide 7 (Ascension Sunday)
When I was about five years old, my father took me to the mall. That was a little bit unusual since he was busy at work most of the time and it was my mother who took us out on errands. It was a special day, and I was very excited … for about twenty minutes. After that, I grew tired of marching from store to store, trying on clothes and shoes and waiting while dad tried on things. Behaving yourself, after all, is actually quite boring.
At some point while my father was in a dressing room, I wandered off to do some exploring. I hadn’t gone very far before I came across one of those circular racks of clothing, and I realized that it would make an ideal hiding spot. So I crawled under the clothes hanging on the rack (jackets I think) and sat in the empty space at the center waiting to hear my father call me.
I don’t suppose that I was there very long – waiting is boring wherever you do it – but when I came out, I couldn’t find my father. He wasn’t in the dressing rooms. In fact, the dressing rooms had disappeared. As I began to look for dad, I noticed that the store had filled up with men dressed just like he was. I rushed around calling his name looking for a familiar face among all the strangers and getting more and more frantic until, finally, I woke up.
Okay, so it was just a dream, but it was so real to me at the time that even lying in bed in my own bedroom wasn’t enough reassurance. It wasn’t until I climbed out of the top bunk, crept through the dark house, and opened the door to find my father asleep in his usual place that my heart beat and my breathing slowed down. Even now, I still carry a little bit of that sense of his absence somewhere deep down. Without it, I probably wouldn’t remember the whole thing so clearly. And, I think, it all happened because he shaved his beard the day before…. Strange, isn’t it, how powerful it can be when our expectations don’t keep pace with the changes around us?
That’s part of what makes the story of Jesus such a fascinating one. Throughout his time on earth, throughout his ministry he was always one step ahead of all the expectations. People expected him to be a prophet like John, and he proclaimed himself the fulfillment of prophesy. People expected him to be the messiah who would restore the Davidic kingdom to Israel. He proclaimed a kingdom growing not out of military power and dominance but out of compassion justice and led by not by a king but by a servant. People expected him to fulfill the promise he offered while he was among them, yet he allowed himself to die an ignoble death. No one, not even his closest friends and followers, expected him to rise from the tomb.
Even after he appeared among them several times, their imaginations did not grasp the fullness of his vision. He walked with two of them for much of a day - talking with them and teaching them as he once had – and they did not recognize him until he sat and broke bread with them. Again, he came and stayed with them for forty days. For forty days he taught them about the Realm of God, and still they did not understand. When he told them that the Holy Spirit would be coming to them in a few days, they expected that this would bring the restoration of Israel – a new type of kingdom perhaps, but a kingdom none the less. Again, he confounded them saying, “It is not for you to know the time … that the father has set.” And, ascending on a cloud, he went before them into the presence of God just as he went before them to Galilee – just as he went before them into death and new life – just as he led them throughout his time on earth. But, even then he did not leave them alone, for he had blessed them with the Spirit to help them find the truth, and he promised them power to come.
A couple of weeks ago, we got the movie Finding Nemo from the library to watch with Sebastian. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s a brief summary…
Marlin and Coral – a pair of clown fish - are expecting a large family (she has just laid over four hundred eggs), and they are looking forward to raising their children in the family anemone. But before the eggs can hatch, a predatory fish devours them and kills Coral in the process. When Marlin returns to the nest, he finds that just one egg remains – the egg that becomes his son Nemo.
As Nemo grows up, he comes to resent the over-protective parenting style shaped by Marlin’s trauma, and finally challenges his father’s authority by swimming away from the reef into the open ocean where he is captured by a scuba diver. The rest of the movie is filled with the many mis-adventures Marlin has with Dory, a forgetful parrot fish he meets along the way, as the two of them try to find and rescue Nemo. Eventually, as you might guess since this is a children’s movie, Marlin and Nemo are reunited and return to life on the reef as two very different fish.
While Finding Nemo is full of strange characters and is a lot of fun to watch, what struck me this time was a comment made by Dory. At one point, Marlin was reminiscing about finding Nemo in his egg, and he mentions that he promised never to let anything happen to him. Dory replies, “Hmmn…. that’s a strange thing to say. If nothing ever happened to him then nothing would ever happen to him…. Not much fun for little [Nemo].”
I suppose that line stood out to me this time in particular because I am now caught up in the struggle to balance Sebastian’s safety against his own need to explore and experiment. I certainly don’t want him to be hurt, and yet he has to learn by trying new things for himself. And so, I find myself standing by, the parental watchdog in my head on alert, as he struggles to climb up on the couch - or tumbles down the hill when it’s just a little too steep - or walks down the alley to the edge of sight and then just a couple of steps beyond. I even let him toddle off across the store in the mall though for some reason I feel compelled to trail behind him stealthily so that I can be there when he realizes that he is on his own.
It’s not always easy to find a healthy balance, especially since Sebastian can’t imagine some of the realities I’m trying to help him learn … no matter how many times I try to explain. It seems that the only way he will learn that kicking the train track makes the bridge fall apart or that tipping his spoon lands the food on his lap instead of in his mouth is by doing those things again and again and again.
Perhaps Jesus was doing a similar thing all along – raising the disciples from infants in faith and understanding. Explaining, time and time again, what the Realm of God is like using all sorts of different stories…. Teaching about how to minister to others and who to reach out to…. Helping them grow in confidence by sending them out to try their hand at the work in pairs and by themselves…. And, finally, giving them a spirit of wisdom and power so they are ready to step into a new role when they finally face his physical absence.
Yet, that doesn’t quite fit. It’s revealing in some way, but it gets in the way in others. Jesus may have been helping prepare the disciples to continue his ministry, but they never really struck out on their own. Before the coming of the Holy Spirit at the festival of Pentecost, they waited together in prayer and praise at the temple in Jerusalem. And, as the text for last week said, Christ was always in them and they in Christ.
The wisdom and revelation they came to share as well as the power they received for their work flowed from Christ’s presence with them in spite of his absence from their sight. And, until he left them, they could not reach maturity in their faith. Until they received the Spirit to clarify and inspire their understanding of the truth Christ – until they stepped into the roles of teachers and healers – until they accepted the power given to them and began to do the work themselves without relying on Jesus voice and touch they were still as children, experimenting, exploring, and returning to their rabbi for help.
Over the course of their lives before and after the ascension of Christ they did grow up in faith, but that maturity led them to become a body of faith rather than individual believers – a body of which Christ remained the head. Yes, … Christ remains the head. Though the body changes and grows as some pass on and others join the church, Christ is still the head – guiding and directing the work of the body. And, just as he went ahead of the disciples, he goes ahead of us, calling us to come and follow him.
Through the work of the Spirit among us Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians is fulfilled. For how can we live and love as [Jesus] did, except through the mysterious gift and power which he give through his Spirit, so that we become his face, his hands, his heart and body? And so we are given “a spirit of wisdom and revelation” as we come to know our Rabbi more fully. The eyes of our hearts are enlightened by the light of the world, and we come to know the hope to which we have been called and the power that has been granted to us to carry on the work.
And we must carry on the work – the ministry of Christ to all humanity, for the world and all who live here still stand broken and hurting. It often feels overwhelming when we look out at all that needs to be done. So many are longing for a healing and loving touch in their lives. Yet, when we look inward, we feel the guiding touch of the absent Savior and find the strength and power we need to follow.
It is in the times when we find that we are the hands and feet of our God that we feel Christ there with us, for that unique presence is recognized most clearly whenever and wherever the ministry of feeding, healing, and reconciliation is reenacted. In those moments our spirits quicken with love. And just as we begin to reach out and hold on or open our mouths to speak, he disappears again. Poof, he’s gone – gone on ahead, beckoning us ever onward into life.
If you have experienced such a moment, you know the power of meeting Christ in another. Perhaps you echo the words of the disciples at Emmaus: “Were not our hearts burning within us [as we talked together]...?” If you haven’t felt that ineffable presence, don’t worry. We are all waiting….
Ephesians 1:15-23, Acts 1:1-11
Eastertide 7 (Ascension Sunday)
When I was about five years old, my father took me to the mall. That was a little bit unusual since he was busy at work most of the time and it was my mother who took us out on errands. It was a special day, and I was very excited … for about twenty minutes. After that, I grew tired of marching from store to store, trying on clothes and shoes and waiting while dad tried on things. Behaving yourself, after all, is actually quite boring.
At some point while my father was in a dressing room, I wandered off to do some exploring. I hadn’t gone very far before I came across one of those circular racks of clothing, and I realized that it would make an ideal hiding spot. So I crawled under the clothes hanging on the rack (jackets I think) and sat in the empty space at the center waiting to hear my father call me.
I don’t suppose that I was there very long – waiting is boring wherever you do it – but when I came out, I couldn’t find my father. He wasn’t in the dressing rooms. In fact, the dressing rooms had disappeared. As I began to look for dad, I noticed that the store had filled up with men dressed just like he was. I rushed around calling his name looking for a familiar face among all the strangers and getting more and more frantic until, finally, I woke up.
Okay, so it was just a dream, but it was so real to me at the time that even lying in bed in my own bedroom wasn’t enough reassurance. It wasn’t until I climbed out of the top bunk, crept through the dark house, and opened the door to find my father asleep in his usual place that my heart beat and my breathing slowed down. Even now, I still carry a little bit of that sense of his absence somewhere deep down. Without it, I probably wouldn’t remember the whole thing so clearly. And, I think, it all happened because he shaved his beard the day before…. Strange, isn’t it, how powerful it can be when our expectations don’t keep pace with the changes around us?
That’s part of what makes the story of Jesus such a fascinating one. Throughout his time on earth, throughout his ministry he was always one step ahead of all the expectations. People expected him to be a prophet like John, and he proclaimed himself the fulfillment of prophesy. People expected him to be the messiah who would restore the Davidic kingdom to Israel. He proclaimed a kingdom growing not out of military power and dominance but out of compassion justice and led by not by a king but by a servant. People expected him to fulfill the promise he offered while he was among them, yet he allowed himself to die an ignoble death. No one, not even his closest friends and followers, expected him to rise from the tomb.
Even after he appeared among them several times, their imaginations did not grasp the fullness of his vision. He walked with two of them for much of a day - talking with them and teaching them as he once had – and they did not recognize him until he sat and broke bread with them. Again, he came and stayed with them for forty days. For forty days he taught them about the Realm of God, and still they did not understand. When he told them that the Holy Spirit would be coming to them in a few days, they expected that this would bring the restoration of Israel – a new type of kingdom perhaps, but a kingdom none the less. Again, he confounded them saying, “It is not for you to know the time … that the father has set.” And, ascending on a cloud, he went before them into the presence of God just as he went before them to Galilee – just as he went before them into death and new life – just as he led them throughout his time on earth. But, even then he did not leave them alone, for he had blessed them with the Spirit to help them find the truth, and he promised them power to come.
A couple of weeks ago, we got the movie Finding Nemo from the library to watch with Sebastian. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s a brief summary…
Marlin and Coral – a pair of clown fish - are expecting a large family (she has just laid over four hundred eggs), and they are looking forward to raising their children in the family anemone. But before the eggs can hatch, a predatory fish devours them and kills Coral in the process. When Marlin returns to the nest, he finds that just one egg remains – the egg that becomes his son Nemo.
As Nemo grows up, he comes to resent the over-protective parenting style shaped by Marlin’s trauma, and finally challenges his father’s authority by swimming away from the reef into the open ocean where he is captured by a scuba diver. The rest of the movie is filled with the many mis-adventures Marlin has with Dory, a forgetful parrot fish he meets along the way, as the two of them try to find and rescue Nemo. Eventually, as you might guess since this is a children’s movie, Marlin and Nemo are reunited and return to life on the reef as two very different fish.
While Finding Nemo is full of strange characters and is a lot of fun to watch, what struck me this time was a comment made by Dory. At one point, Marlin was reminiscing about finding Nemo in his egg, and he mentions that he promised never to let anything happen to him. Dory replies, “Hmmn…. that’s a strange thing to say. If nothing ever happened to him then nothing would ever happen to him…. Not much fun for little [Nemo].”
I suppose that line stood out to me this time in particular because I am now caught up in the struggle to balance Sebastian’s safety against his own need to explore and experiment. I certainly don’t want him to be hurt, and yet he has to learn by trying new things for himself. And so, I find myself standing by, the parental watchdog in my head on alert, as he struggles to climb up on the couch - or tumbles down the hill when it’s just a little too steep - or walks down the alley to the edge of sight and then just a couple of steps beyond. I even let him toddle off across the store in the mall though for some reason I feel compelled to trail behind him stealthily so that I can be there when he realizes that he is on his own.
It’s not always easy to find a healthy balance, especially since Sebastian can’t imagine some of the realities I’m trying to help him learn … no matter how many times I try to explain. It seems that the only way he will learn that kicking the train track makes the bridge fall apart or that tipping his spoon lands the food on his lap instead of in his mouth is by doing those things again and again and again.
Perhaps Jesus was doing a similar thing all along – raising the disciples from infants in faith and understanding. Explaining, time and time again, what the Realm of God is like using all sorts of different stories…. Teaching about how to minister to others and who to reach out to…. Helping them grow in confidence by sending them out to try their hand at the work in pairs and by themselves…. And, finally, giving them a spirit of wisdom and power so they are ready to step into a new role when they finally face his physical absence.
Yet, that doesn’t quite fit. It’s revealing in some way, but it gets in the way in others. Jesus may have been helping prepare the disciples to continue his ministry, but they never really struck out on their own. Before the coming of the Holy Spirit at the festival of Pentecost, they waited together in prayer and praise at the temple in Jerusalem. And, as the text for last week said, Christ was always in them and they in Christ.
The wisdom and revelation they came to share as well as the power they received for their work flowed from Christ’s presence with them in spite of his absence from their sight. And, until he left them, they could not reach maturity in their faith. Until they received the Spirit to clarify and inspire their understanding of the truth Christ – until they stepped into the roles of teachers and healers – until they accepted the power given to them and began to do the work themselves without relying on Jesus voice and touch they were still as children, experimenting, exploring, and returning to their rabbi for help.
Over the course of their lives before and after the ascension of Christ they did grow up in faith, but that maturity led them to become a body of faith rather than individual believers – a body of which Christ remained the head. Yes, … Christ remains the head. Though the body changes and grows as some pass on and others join the church, Christ is still the head – guiding and directing the work of the body. And, just as he went ahead of the disciples, he goes ahead of us, calling us to come and follow him.
Through the work of the Spirit among us Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians is fulfilled. For how can we live and love as [Jesus] did, except through the mysterious gift and power which he give through his Spirit, so that we become his face, his hands, his heart and body? And so we are given “a spirit of wisdom and revelation” as we come to know our Rabbi more fully. The eyes of our hearts are enlightened by the light of the world, and we come to know the hope to which we have been called and the power that has been granted to us to carry on the work.
And we must carry on the work – the ministry of Christ to all humanity, for the world and all who live here still stand broken and hurting. It often feels overwhelming when we look out at all that needs to be done. So many are longing for a healing and loving touch in their lives. Yet, when we look inward, we feel the guiding touch of the absent Savior and find the strength and power we need to follow.
It is in the times when we find that we are the hands and feet of our God that we feel Christ there with us, for that unique presence is recognized most clearly whenever and wherever the ministry of feeding, healing, and reconciliation is reenacted. In those moments our spirits quicken with love. And just as we begin to reach out and hold on or open our mouths to speak, he disappears again. Poof, he’s gone – gone on ahead, beckoning us ever onward into life.
If you have experienced such a moment, you know the power of meeting Christ in another. Perhaps you echo the words of the disciples at Emmaus: “Were not our hearts burning within us [as we talked together]...?” If you haven’t felt that ineffable presence, don’t worry. We are all waiting….
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