20100613.1601

I was privileged to deliver a short sermon at the Church of the Village this morning. The text of the message--more or less--appears below; as with any address, the presentation deviated a bit from what was written, and I do not recall everything I added in.

If there is a central message to the lectionary texts,(1) it is likely that we cannot depend upon a blind performance of tradition. Just because we have done a thing a certain way in the past is not in and of itself a reason to continue to do it.

That is not to say that there is nothing of value in the past. Even today being a young adult service has precedent; an older Book of Worship calls the second Sunday in June "Student Day."(2) We are as we are in large part because of who and what have gone before us. God loves us, just as He loves those who precede us, and so it follows that the past cannot be all bad.

This is a good thing for me. I have long studied things that happened before me, and I would hate to think that I have spent my years in vain. And that includes (and here I look at you, Pastor Rivera) my time poring over Chaucer.

Certainly, there is much to be taken from the past. But even those like me who make their livings studying what the past has to offer do not do so in a vacuum. Rather, we look at how what has been applies to what is. I love the literatures of Old and Middle English, yes, but I am glad that my scholarship about them is not conducted in them. They do not do what I need a language to do, and so I use newer tools.

The readings call upon us to do the same. They exhort us to follow the path God has laid down for us, regardless of if it is in the face of our enemies.(3) They tell us that even the boundaries of normal social propriety can and should be laid aside in favor of humble service to Christian teaching.(4) And they tell us that to rely upon the protection of forms, to align ourselves with tradition and even law simply because "it's the way things have always been done," is folly (5); we can, following I Kings, adhere to the letter of the law but wholly miss its spirit, and so fall into grave, grave error.(6) A sinner who acts with sincere humility when presented with the veritable presence of God is better in the sight of God than one who holds to the proper social forms without apprehending the feeling and the animating principle behind them.

All too often, we cling to the rites and rituals, the methods and manners, that we have been taught without examining them. We do not look at ourselves and our actions to see whether or not they serve the ends that we are called by Christ to serve. And we cling so, we thus fail to look at ourselves, because it is comfortable to do so. It is familiar. And as human beings, we seek familiar comfort.

In doing so, we point up our own imperfections.

None of us is what we are called to be. All of us fall short of it in some way. If for no other reason than that we are limited beings, constrained in our bodies and capable of perceiving only a minuscule portion of the glorious, wondrous creation in which we are placed, we cannot attain all tat which we are encouraged to be. We cannot even clearly know what it is, but can only at best make educated guesses as to the nature of it and adhere to it as best we can.

Even then, we inevitably fall short of it. We hunger. We thirst. We tire. We are pressed by all the demands of our bodies and the many communities in which we exist. Thus, we lose track of the path we choose to follow--a path we can only hope and pray is the right one.

Sometimes, we find out that such paths are indeed not the right ones. Some of you have read things I have written--including this--and called them into question. You were right to do so, as I now realize. It took me a while to realize that I was wrong; I was wrapped up in my belief in my own rightness and so did not consider other ways. I failed to look at myself and see if what I was saying was really what I believed, and if what I believed was what I knew I needed to believe.

In doing so, I erred.

But I am forgiven.

I am forgiven as the woman who washed the feet of Christ in the home of the Pharisee was forgiven.(7) I am led in the ways of righteousness in that I seek, as the Psalmist, to be so led. And I am led thus and forgiven thus because I have done as we are called by Paul to do (8); I have looked at what the old ways call for, found that I had been adhering to them for no better reason than that they are as they had been, and turned away from them.

All the advancement, all the improvement that we have seen throughout the history of humanity has arisen from an examination of current circumstances, an evaluation of them, and a decision to retain what is good and correct what is not. For example, having temperature control and indoor plumbing is better than not; the latter, I know from listening to those who remember not having it, was opposed. It was thought that an indoor toilet was unsanitary and wrong. I like not having to go to an outhouse when it's twenty degrees outside.

More seriously, as recently as ninety years ago, women in the United States were not eligible to vote. That changed when people realized how foolish it was to disallow people from governance who are governed by what is supposed to be a representative society, and that men's and women's voices have the same value.

Less than sixty-five years ago, the African-American servicemen (and it was only men in combat then, something which has also begun to change) who enlisted in the armed services of the United States were still not allowed to serve alongside their white brothers-in-arms. This changed when a man from Missouri signed an order because he recognized that the color they all bled was the same shade of red and the colors they bled for were the same red, white, and blue.(9)

Less than sixty years ago, schools were divided based upon the color of their students' skins. That, too, ended with the recognition that separate is never equal.(10)

Less than fifty years ago, the law in fully thirty percent of this country prohibited people from getting married to those whom they loved if those others had different "racial" origins, a prohibition based upon the mistaken notion that humanity was meant by God to be divided. That changed when the Supreme Court looked at such laws and recognized how antithetical to what the United States is supposed to be they were.(11)

In each of these, people looked about themselves and saw that the way they were living, the laws they lived with and adhered to for not better reason than that they were the ways things had been done before them, were wrong. They were out of line with the spirit of kinship and love for one's neighbor that Christ calls us to dwell within and act alongside. And they were changed and made more nearly perfect than they had been before.

There is, though, a long, long way yet to go.

Even though there are times when we stray further from the path of righteousness when we change our behavior, there is NO WAY TO IMPROVE except that we make the attempt. We know that we are not perfect now. We know that we are not yet living in the way that God would have us live. We know also that we cannot grow closer to it unless we change what we are doing now.

We have to stop treading over and over again the paths that we know do not work.

My thanks to Pastor Hector Rivera and the young adults of the Church of the Village for their review of and insights about this sermon during its drafting.

(1) The General Board of Discipleship website's "Lectionary Planning Helps for Sundays" discussion of the third Sunday after Pentecost asserts that "the Scriptures in the lectionary are generally chosen NOT to relate to one another."

(2) Methodist 145.

(3) Psalm 5:1-8.

(4) Luke 7:36-50.

(5) Galatians 2:15-21.

(6) I Kings 21:1-21.

(7) Luke 7:48.

(8) GBOD.

(9) McKeeby.

(10) "Even Hand."

(11) Grossman.

Works Cited
General Board of Discipleship. "Lectionary Helps for Sundays." GBOD.org: GBOD, 2010. Web. May 23, 2010.
Grossman, Joanna. "The Fortieth Anniversary of Loving v. Virginia: The Personal and Cultural Legacy of the Case that Ended Legal Prohibitions on Interracial Marriage." FindLaw: Thompson Reuters; May 30, 2007. Web. May 23, 2010.
Holy Bible. King James Version. Grand Rapids, MI: World, 1989. Print.
McKeeby, David. "End of U.S. Military Segregation Set Stage for Rights Movement." America.gov: US Dept. of State; February 25, 2008. Web. May 23, 2008.
Methodist Church. Book of Worship for Church and Home. Nashville: Methodist Publishing House, 1965. Print.
"'With an Even Hand' Brown v. Board at Fifty." Library of Congress: Library of Congress; August 10, 2004. Web. May 23, 2010.