The Letter of James: Sustaining and Nurturing Community
Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
January 27, 2008
James 3:13-4:11; 13-20
Daniel Romero, who served for many years in our Southern California Conference, UCC, shares this story about an encounter he had with a young boy while visiting a cathedral in El Salvador: "The boy immediately began feeling and touching me, and I soon realized that he was blind. In a very adult-like manner, he said to me, 'Do you know if I will be safe here?" I searched for a reply, and finally answered, 'I can think of no safer place than the house of God.'"
Concludes Romero, "As I reflect on that exchange with a frightened child, I am convinced that the house of God should be a place for all God's people to feel safe and free - an all-inclusive, secure, accepting and liberating space."
How does that sound? I think it sounds pretty good. But does it ring true in your experience of church... this church? Is this an inclusive, secure, accepting, liberating space - community - for you? Certainly that is our goal: to be a community that lives out, demonstrates, embodies, God's extravagant welcome, a community where, in the words of my Petaluma colleague, Blythe Sawyer, "everyone has a place at the table and second chances are given out without a second thought." But talk is cheap. I have heard countless stories over the years, many from you, about churches that were places where there was more wounding than healing, more finger pointing than hand holding, more exclusion than inclusion. We talk about creating community, but again, how are we doing?
That was James' question of the churches he knew... how are we doing? And although he loved the church, he had some doubts, he had some concerns. I mentioned some of them last week. The people in the church said they loved Jesus, but they persisted in speaking badly about each other, slandering each other, judging each other unfairly. Church life was poisoned by envy and selfish ambition. Time and time again, people embraced the ways of the world instead of the way of Christ. The poor were ignored, the widows suffered. Actually, in some perverse way, I find it comforting that the Christians of the first century church were just as weak and sinful as me! James worried that this church he loved was at times not safe, not accepting and nurturing and liberating. And he wanted people to know that when it came to church, it really wasn't about you and you and you - or about me and getting my needs met. It was about us, about our life together as a community, as brothers and sisters - family - in Christ. "But the wisdom from above (not wisdom that comes from the world), is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace." That was his hope, his dream, for the church he loved. Again, how are we doing?
A while back I came across a portion of a poignant memoir written by Gene Cheek entitled, The Color of Love. Cheek describes his early life in the 1950's with an alcoholic, abusive father, and his parent's subsequent divorce. He tells how when his mother, a white woman in North Carolina, developed a relationship with a wonderful, generous black man named Tuck, Gene's father used anti-miscegenation laws to ask the court to send Gene to a foster home because his mother was clearly "unfit" to raise him. He describes the experience of going to court as a 12-year-old in 1963 and learning that he was to be taken away from his mother and Tuck and sent to live with strangers. He writes, "A part of me that had been dormant had surfaced. A hardness had been shaped by watching Dad drink himself into abusing Mama and me. My softer, finer nature had been forged into hardened steel - ground and polished - into a razor's edge." Cheek, after enduring so much as a child, developed a hardness of heart, a hardness of the soul, that would manifest itself throughout his life in painful and destructive, and often self-destructive, ways.
Hardened hearts and souls... not exactly uncommon in the world in which we live. Did you see the comments of comedian, George Carlin, that were widely distributed on the internet? Always a master with words, here is some of what he said: "The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways but narrower viewpoints. We spend more but have less, we buy more but enjoy less... We have more knowledge but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine but less wellness. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much but love too seldom, and hate too often. We've added years to life but not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We've cleaned up the air but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. These are times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships, fancier houses but broken homes."
It would seem that you don't have to suffer the trauma of a Gene Cheek in order to develop a hardness of heart and soul. It is so easy to give in to harshness and indifference, believing nothing can harm us if our hearts are impenetrable. As Simon and Garfunkel sang so many years ago, "A rock feels no pain and an island never cries." And so we learn to see the world cynically and with suspicion. "Nothing ever changes and none of them care about me anyway." How easily we push each other away, even those closest to us, finding reasons that only reinforce our estrangement from each other.
It just seems to me that I encounter a lot of frightened, cautious, hardened hearts and souls these days. It happens in casual conversation, certainly when I listen to AM talk radio, read the newspaper, or watch and listen to talking heads on television; and sometimes even when I look into the mirror. Am I sounding too negative? Perhaps I worked on this sermon too soon after Green Bay's loss in the play-offs. Too negative? Or do you see it also - this epidemic of hardened hearts, ground and polished to a razor's edge?
Which brings me back to James. He is not afraid to critique the church, but if you listen he also has great hope for the church: mercy, good fruits, a harvest of righteousness sown in peace. But how do we get there?
Today in our Annual Meeting we are going to talk about a lot of institutional things - important things to be sure, things that will impact our future as a church, but institutional things. But the things we discuss and the votes we take really won't mean much unless they deepen and enhance our life together as a community. Because this life, this community, is what we offer in a world of hardened and fearful hearts. You see, we have a story to tell, an important story: a story of divine forgiveness and mercy and grace; all of which have found concrete expression, have come into our lives and into our world, in the life of Jesus. It is a story of life-giving and transforming power. And James' challenge to the first century church and to our church, is to dare to believe and live that story, indeed to bring that story to life in our life together.
So again, how are we doing? Are we becoming that safe space spoken of by Dan Romero? When the world looks at us, does it see a community of forgiveness, of mercy, of hope and love, where seeds of righteousness are daily sown in peace? Here, does the world see an alternative to hardened and frightened and wounded hearts?
You may recall this old story. A man got lost while driving on an unfamiliar, back-country road. Then, while trying to read his map, he drove off the road into a ditch. Though he wasn't injured, his car was stuck in some deep mud. So he walked to a nearby farm to ask for some help. "Warwick can get you out of that ditch," said the farmer, pointing to an old mule standing in a field. "Yep, old Warwick can do the job." The man figured he had nothing to lose, so he and the farmer and mule made their way back to the ditch. The farmer hitched the mule to the car, then with a snap of the reins he shouted, "Pull Fred! Pull Ted! Pull Warwick!" And, really quite easily, the mule pulled the car out of the ditch. The man was amazed and grateful. He thanked the farmer, patted the mule, and then had to ask, "Why did you call out all those other names before you called out Warwick?" The farmer grinned and said, ' Old Warwick is just about blind. But as long as he thinks he is part of a team, he doesn't mind pulling."
"As long as he thinks he is part of a team..." I've talked about being a place, a safe community, of forgiveness and mercy and grace, but it takes more, so much more, than just preacher talk. You might say it takes a team, it takes us. We cannot offer or receive forgiveness and grace unless we are committed to providing the kind of environment where forgiveness and grace can be learned and practiced, embodied and lived through our encounters with one another. In the words of L. Gregory Jones, of Duke University Divinity School, "At the heart of the Christian faith is the proclamation of God's forgiveness in Christ. But this proclamation cannot be heard, much less learned and lived in isolation. We all need the gift of others who will patiently and lovingly bear with us through time and nurture in us patterns that help thaw our hearts and heal our memories... Hard shells of bitterness, anger and despair do not disappear magically... But faithful Christian communities provide powerful holding environments for us to learn...they are lights, shining into the darkness of our personal and collective lives."
Hard hearts need not always stay hardened, but again, it takes a community willing to do some work, to make some changes, to share the light. In the words of another pastor, "Great congregations form where people with dizzying variety of backgrounds and experiences take an interest in the mystery and the mess of each other's lives. Such a community of togetherness enables us to be better people than we could have been if left to our own devices." A radical concept in a world that seems to believe that I am just about all I need. Folks, it takes a team.
Finally, I return to Gene Cheek and his hardened heart. He closes his memoir of an adult life marked with so much pain with these words: "This book started as an act of vengeance. I wanted revenge on those - long since gone - who brought pain to my family and me. But it changed from revenge to understanding and finally to forgiveness. I can't pinpoint the exact time because it moved over me like the changing of a season, slow and deliberate. It wasn't until this process was near the end that I even noticed, but I am grateful for it." My hope and prayer is that some day, each of us might be able to say much the same thing, as we look back upon our shared life in this community, this place, we call church.