Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
June 22, 2008
Ephesians 4:1-6l; 25-32
Tom Long, New Testament Professor, noted preacher, talks about a little church, the Antioch United Methodist Church on Maryland's Chesapeake shore. Long and his wife have a place on the shore where they go every summer and stay for a month or so. They worship at the little Antioch church when they stay at the shore. He says it's kind of a bittersweet thing. Because, it's a very faithful church but it's a dying church – few members, average age about 80. He says he doesn't know how long they will be able to maintain the church. They were finally forced to put a dead bolt lock on the front door but they were so worried that people couldn't get in that they hid the key for the lock under a rock by the front of the church. They wrote the word "key" on the rock so people would know how to get in. He says every year though they get themselves together for the annual Peach Festival. The people in the church all come and they make crabcake sandwiches, peach cobbler and lemonade. Since he and his wife have been worshipping there for all these summers they always pitch in and help. He said last year it was hot and he had been working all morning making those crabcake sandwiches, so finally he decided to take a little break. He got himself a glass of lemonade and as he came around the corner to the church yard, there were all these people sitting under the shade of the trees. He could tell there were people that were local and people that were from out of town. Many different ethnic, racial groups were there, young and old, from different walks of life. They were all sitting there under the trees eating their crabcake sandwiches and cobbler and talking together. He said, "I don't know why, but when I came around that corner, it just struck me that this, this is what Jesus was talking about, when he spoke of the kingdom of God."
It's a wonderful vision, a wonderful hope, and it's a vision and hope echoed by Paul in our text for today: "Therefore I, a prisoner of the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." I have told you before, Paul was really a mystic. He is calling us to a new world, a new creation, a whole new way of being with one another.
And it sounds so good, so appealing, but sadly, it seems to me, it is not a vision, a hope we have seen much in our country or even in our community in recent years. And I have to wonder, what has happened to us? When did we get so angry with each other, so suspicious? I mean, have you listened to AM talk radio lately? I listen for ten minutes and I want to wash our radio's mouth out with soap.
A couple of weeks ago I went down to San Francisco. My College Alumni Association sponsored a speech by Lincoln Chafee, a former Republican Senator from the state of Rhode Island. He was talking about his time in the Senate, post and pre 9/11. And he talked for quite a while about the campaign of '06.
In '06 the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, were not going well. There was the exploding deficit, immigration crisis, global warming; lots of important issues out there. The leadership called all the Republican Senators and Representatives together for this big strategy meeting. They were told there were three issues that they were to campaign on that summer and into the fall, these three issues:
#1 Constitutional amendment prohibiting states from allowing gay marriages.
#2 Constitutional amendment banning abortions.
#3 Constitutional amendment banning flag burning
Chafee said, "I really couldn't find anyone who said that flag burning was a burning issue." I asked, 'Why in the midst of two wars, why these issues?'" He was told these are the issues that will activate and energize our base. These value issues. It had worked in 2000, it worked in 2002, it worked in 2004. We’ll try it again in 2006. Chafee told us it was quite simply the politics, not of unity but of polarization, of divisiveness, of fear, of us vs. them, where the adversary is demonized, where any suggestion of unity or compromise is denigrated as weak, spineless, immoral, even unpatriotic. You don't talk to your enemy, you crush them. Wedge issues, designed specifically to push us apart from each other. And in the spirit of nonpartisanship, clearly after the long and recent acrimonious primary season, we learned that Democrats also know how to play this game, with all the hints of racism and sexism, and some Clinton supporters now insisting they will never vote for Obama because of what they did to Hillary. And our own recent City Council meetings in always open, tolerant Sebastopol, have not exactly been the showcase for decorum and civility. I sometimes wonder – do we even have public discourse anymore?
Can we come together to talk about important things, disagree without the name calling, without darkly suggesting disloyalty or immorality on the part of everyone who disagrees with us? Sometimes I think Miss Manners should just take us and hit us upside the head – knock a little sense into us. "You people need to mind your manners! Didn't anyone ever teach you at least to say please and thank you?"
"Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only that which is useful for building up...so that your words may give grace to those who hear...put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander...and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another." Paul knew nothing of American politics in the 21st century. He was writing to churches, concerned about how they could maintain their life together as a community of faith. But can there be any doubt about how much we need to hear his words today and take them to heart?
Now, I can speak only for myself, but as I have already suggested, it certainly seems that the air these days is just filled with hostility. It will be a long summer. Dark clouds of strife and tension hover over so many relationships. One pastor has said, "We are all caught up a society where 'sink or swim' is the password, and where too few are throwing out life preservers." Aren't you getting tired of it? But what can we say? What can we do? How can one person, one church possibly make a difference? Some words of Dorothy Sayers come to mind. She said, "If I were a minister called upon to preach, I would get up and say simply, 'You people know the Gospel. You know what to do. So why don't you go home and do it?'" Maybe a little oversimplified, but she’s got a point. If not us, who? If not here, where? If not now, when?
I have a friend and colleague Pat DeJong, at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, who in the midst of all the controversy over Barrack Obama and Jeremiah Wright, wrote words that resonated with me. Pat said, "I hear an echo of Christ calling, calling us to a broad vision of the world. I hear Christ calling us to engage in acts of compassion and justice rather than stirring pots of suspicion and hatred and into new life and new hope on behalf of all God's children. I hear Christ calling us out of tombs of our own doubts and fears.” In other words," she says, "dare to go home and do the Gospel." Or as I recently heard a preacher say, "Friends, we may have all arrived here on separate ships, but we are all in the same boat now!" And we can swim together or we can sink together.
In his book, The Great Divorce, CS Lewis paints a haunting picture of hell, a picture so powerful, I believe, because it bears such a resemblance to where so many people live today. Hell is like a vast, gray city, Lewis says, a city inhabited only at its outer edges, with rows and rows of empty houses in the middle – empty because everyone who once lived in them has quarreled with the neighbors and moved, and then quarreled with their new neighbors and moved again, leaving empty houses behind them. That, Lewis says is how hell got so large – it's empty at the center and inhabited only on the fringes, because everyone chose distance instead of closeness, chose to be right rather than sort out what was going on between them and perhaps find a middle ground. But how can you escape this hell, how can you have community, or a church, or a country, any kind of civic culture, if all that matters is my way, my point of view, and that I win, no matter what the cost or who gets hurt?
An interviewer once told Fred Rogers of a time he had stopped his car and gotten out to help a turtle cross the road. Two other cars stopped and eventually five people wound up making sure that a malevolent old snapping turtle didn't get crushed on the highway. Mister Rogers told the interviewer that he hoped he would write about that because, said Mr. Rogers, "Whenever people join together to help another creature, people should know about it. We all long to know that there is a graciousness at the heart of creation."
My mind goes back to Paul; back to those people sitting under the trees enjoying sandwiches and cobbler and one another. Could that be our job in these days of polarization and divisiveness and anger? Could we, as a people of faith, be called to model the graciousness which is at the heart of creation? I think we are all looking for, yearning for that graciousness, that Kingdom, however we may describe or define it, and however sidetracked we may become along the way. And in this polarized world, could it be that in the church, this church, there is the possibility of being a place where a force greater than ourselves can draw us back together in an atmosphere of acceptance, trust, love and peace, even when we disagree? Can this be a place where we reject polarization and anger and instead embrace the words of Paul – words that encourage us to look at each other, speak to each other, listen to each other, care for and share with one another? Can this be a place where we plant seeds of love, forgiveness, civility, where maybe we do try please and thank you? That isn’t weakness; it is community
Church really is such a counter-cultural place. For here we keep running into this Jesus fellow who makes possible a different way of relating to each other, this Jesus who gives us a glimpse of the world as God intended it to be. Not a walled-off inhospitable place where people are angry and suspicious and strangers are a threat and people in need are a nuisance. No, he calls us into a world where there is kindness and mercy and care, where we belong together as the community of God, a family of faith, a world where we confront and then make up, where we forgive and are forgiven, where we heal and receive healing, and where we grow in compassion and love, a world where as one pastor said, "We throw a block party smack in the deserted center of hell and fill the place with so much music and laughter, such merriment and mutual affection, that all the far-flung residents come creeping in from their distant outposts to see what the fuss, the light, the joy is all about." Forget the political bandwagon, folks, that's the Gospel!