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God & Community

God & Community

September 4, 2011

Leverett Congregational Church, Leverett, MA

Lee Barstow

 

Psalm 119: 33-40 
Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes,
   and I will observe it to the end. 
Give me understanding, that I may keep your law
   and observe it with my whole heart. 
Lead me in the path of your commandments,
   for I delight in it. 
Turn my heart to your decrees,
   and not to selfish gain. 
Turn my eyes from looking at vanities;
   give me life in your ways. 
Confirm to your servant your promise,
   which is for those who fear you. 
Turn away the disgrace that I dread,
   for your ordinances are good. 
See, I have longed for your precepts;
   in your righteousness give me life. 

 

Matthew 18:15-20
 ‘If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.’

 

 

I can't tell you how happy I am to be here with you for the next year or so. From what I've learned so far, I think we're a good match, in lots of ways. As I said in the newsletter, there's clearly a lot of heart here, and there's nothing more important than that.

I think we're a good match theologically, too. From talking with some of you, and from reading your most recent vision statement, we share the desire for our faith to be a practice rather than a set of static beliefs. We want to experience our connection with the divine mystery we call God. We want to grow our relationship with God. As one of you said to me a couple of weeks ago, we come here to meet God.

This appreciation for the practical approach to knowing God is part of what called me to be with you. Over the years, I have had experience in different faith traditions, and what I have learned is that the experience of Spirit does not change according to the form of the tradition.

There is only one source of all being, and one truth. Different religions have different names for this reality which we choose to call God. Different religions use different languages and logical frameworks to explain the nature of God, but none of us can ever nail it down. The divine mystery is an ever-changing process we can know but never fully describe. We simply don't have the brains or the words to describe the beauty and complexity and wonder of creation and its creator.

And yet every religion has its own way of leading folks to the divine, whatever name they might call that ultimate mystery. Each faith tradition follows its own path looking for the same truth.

We are here to follow our path toward the truth of God, and how blessed we are for the journey. We have inherited an incredible map drawn for us by Jesus of Nazareth, a map which has been studied over thousands of years of Christian experience and tradition, becoming ever richer with stories and commentary and history.

In this next year or so, we will mine these riches in our journey together, and sometimes we will also draw on offerings from other traditions.

But the path to God is only part of the picture. Equally important is what we bring to the journey and how we walk together.

My older son Taylor learned this lesson a number of years ago during a journey of his own. He made a plan to walk the full length of  Vermont on the Long Trail. His preparations were endless, making sure he had all the equipment he needed for a couple weeks in the woods and making sure it was light enough so he could carry it. He was looking forward to the trip immensely, and I was very proud as I pictured him walking alone for all those miles in the woods.

Taylor had a fantastic time, thanks to all his hard work before the trip and all the walking he did every day on the trail. But what I learned after his return was that the most important part of his experience was the people he encountered along the way. It turned out there was a whole community on the trail… he met folks walking, maybe spent the night with them in a shelter, went separate ways in the morning, and then maybe saw them again a few days later. His best experiences were the ones when they took care of each other. After one new friend hiked out to a store and back to the trail ahead of Taylor, he left some blister cream at a trail marker with Taylor's name on it.

What Taylor also remembered was learning from each other's stories of life on the trail. The story of what happened when a bear appeared on the trail, and the sharing of ideas about how handle encounters with bears in the future. Who had been on the trail longest, and how they managed to clean their laundry. How to stay as dry as possible during days of rain. And on and on.

And so it is for us, on this path… our treasure is in our own stories -- our sorrow and failures as well as our joys and successes; our fears and our doubts as well as our hopes and our faith; our resistance and our stubbornness as well as our willingness and our openness to change.

Our lives are treasures for our own learning, and also for learning from each other. Put all our stories together, and what you get is our community, whether it be for an hour in church this Sunday, or for the years and generations that many of you and your families have shared in this place.

And so we're here to grow together along two trajectories: the vertical one which points to God, and the horizontal one which points to our own lives in the world, to each other, and to all the rest of humanity.

This is what we've been told since the beginning:  our well-being depends on loving God and loving our neighbor. They are inscribed as laws in the Hebrew Bible, and affirmed by Jesus in all three gospels as the greatest commandments.

Some have said that these two dimensions are symbolized in the two pieces of the cross: the vertical member is our relationship with God, and the horizontal one is our relationship with others. They are inter-dependent, and both are necessary. In order to love God, we need to work at loving our neighbor, and likewise, in order to love our neighbor, we need to love God.

Today's scriptures are all about these two trajectories. Let's take a look.

Psalm 119 tells us there is nothing more important than a right relationship with God. The psalmist wrote these verses thousands of years ago, but his words could have been written from within today's consumer society. "Turn my eyes from looking at vanities," he pleads. "Turn my heart to your decrees, and not to selfish gain."

He's got his eye on the prize of right living. Clearly he struggles with it. He recognizes he needs help, as we all do in our life struggles, and he recognizes that the ultimate source of help is Spirit. "Teach me…" he prays, "Give me understanding…Lead me… Turn my heart… Turn my eyes…" He is praying for help in changing his attitudes, his outlook, his thinking.

His example is valuable because our attitude is so critical to our well-being. It is not what happens to us as much as our attitude about it that determines our sense of well-being and our relationship with those around us. How often we need help in the midst of hardship and pain, whether physical or emotional, to fend off self-pity and to look for what we can be grateful for.

The psalmist's answer is to turn to God for help in doing our part. "Teach me [your way] O Lord," he prays, "and I will [follow] it to the end." He knows that a right relationship with Spirit is the foundation of our well-being.

Our Matthew passage deals with the other dimension of the two laws–our relationship with others. It addresses how to avoid making enemies of those who think differently than us. Specifically, Jesus is talking about how to relate to a person who identifies as a Christian but whose behavior breaks the unity of Christian fellowship. There is an awful lot of that going on these days.

As Matthew quotes Jesus, we should do whatever we can to find common ground with those "who sins against us," asking the help of others if necessary, and if we're still not successful, we need to accept them and love them anyway, just as Jesus accepted and loved Gentiles and tax collectors.

Lord knows, we need to get better at this these days, as we despair over the alienation and hatred that seems to get worse in so many places, whether between ethnic groups, between religious groups, between political parties, and on and on.

As we look out on these conflicts and the suffering they bring, it's easy to think it's only happening out there. It's away from our own lives, outside our sphere of influence, way beyond our ability to help. It's certainly true that I'm unlikely to change the worldview of a national figure, or even a neighbor down the street whose worldview differs greatly from mine. But I can be a source of healing by trying to shift my attitude.

In fact, the only change any of us can control is within our own hearts. We can't change others, but we can try to change our own attitudes about them, even just a little, when we want to put up a wall between us.

It's not easy. It's easier to judge others than to try and understand them. It can be downright satisfying to crow in agreement with like-minded friends over the shallowness and shortsightedness of others. We have all done it.

But an amazing thing happens when step back, listen carefully, and look for the common ground. We get a glimpse of a truth that's deeper than any opinion,  an "arc of recognition" that under the skin, under all the desires and beliefs and differences, all human beings are the same. We all have the same essence. And when we glimpse this, healing happens.

We are in desperate need of this kind of healing between people today, and we will turn again to this again next Sunday, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, when we commemorate the tragedy and ask how it bears on our lives and our community.

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So here we are. Pilgrims on a journey. A church family. We come to help each other meet God, to help each other find comfort and joy, and to help each other be a source of healing in the world. And when we leave here, if we can find a new way to open our hearts to God, even just a small way, we will all be a little bit happier.

May it be so for each and every one of us.

Amen.