In our first home, Stacy and I had a very tiny concrete patio in the back of the house that was bordered by a flower garden. But it was tough to keep the flowers and plants looking healthy, because the sun didn’t offer much light in its daily jaunt over the little patio. So, with a lot of water and even more TLC we were able to make for a pretty beautiful flower garden. And when I say ‘we,’ I mean ‘Stacy.’

I’d been talking with a guy in our church who was into organic farming, so I got the bright idea that I would grow tomatoes in our flower garden. I bought the tomato seeds, I cleared out a small section of the flower garden and I planted the seeds. Pretty soon the plant started to grow, so I put up a trellis to encourage the little plant. And grow it did. That tomato plant grew up beyond that trellis and past my head. But there weren’t any tomatoes on the thing. I waited for weeks for this eyesore of a weed to yield a green bud, but nothing. My green thumb was only good for tomato bushes, not growing tomatoes. So, after many more weeks of waiting with no sign of a tomato, I threw up my hands and decided to uproot the thing. Growing tomatoes just wasn’t my gift.

When Stacy and I moved into the home where we currently live, we were walking around the backyard. And we looked off into this remote corner of the yard and found this ugly, green plant that looked more like a bush than a plant. It came up waist level, and it was kind of tilting to one side like it had never recovered from a violent wind or something. So, I looked this thing up and down and couldn’t find a bud or a flower or anything anywhere on it. And I asked Stacy, “What is this thing.” She said, “It’s a lemon tree. The people who lived here before must have planted it.” And I thought, “Great. Here we go again.”

Here we go again: The relenting sigh of complacency. The white flag of yesterday’s passion gone dry. The utterance of indifference.

Here we go again. Do you ever say that to yourself when the alarm goes off in the morning? How about when you’re doing the commute to work or you’re walking to class or you’re pulling into the parking garage? Do you say, “Here we go again,” when the coffee maker starts to percolate or the shower comes on or the microwave beeps? I look at the repetition with which my 23-month-old son is fed fish sticks, applesauce and cheese, and I think, “Kid, if I were in that seat, I wouldn’t be eating so aggressively; I’d be saying, ‘Here we go again!’”

That may be how we respond to the mundane routines we sometimes go through, but church life should never be reduced to the reaction of “here we go again.” I’m not talking about the little quirks that a particular worship service might have, like a hymn you aren’t familiar with or a piece of your communion bread falling on the floor or some salt-and-pepper-haired preacher using KISS, Batman and Star Wars in his sermon illustrations. I’m talking about how so many in the church have passively uttered the words “here we go again” so much in a service of worship that they can’t even hear themselves saying it anymore. I’m talking about how the frustration of the human heart and mind over what is being preached and taught in the church has given way to the loud voices of antagonism, authoritarianism and fear, and all we’re left with, sitting in our chairs and church pews, are the faint whispers from our souls of “here we go again.”

What’s baffling to me is that so many people of faith in our society can live six days a week sharing an understanding that we’re supposed to help each other out and love each other. But come Sunday morning, those same people can sit through a worship service that is completely void of any mention of justice or equality or servant living or even love. What’s worse is that the same folks who uphold justice, equality, servant living and love six days a week will sit through a sermon that preaches the opposite of those virtues. They’ll sit through a service that uses the Word of God as a pulpit to justify injustice, inequality, exclusion and hatred.

William Lloyd Garrison was a pre-Civil War-era white sympathizer who wanted to see slavery abolished and he produced a paper called The Liberator. The Liberator spoke out against slavery in bold, inspiring ways, and whites and Blacks alike read this paper and started uniting around its cause simply because someone was articulating what they believed in their hearts to be just and true. So Garrison took his liberating words to the streets and started holding rallies where he essentially preached out in the open for all to hear.

One day when Garrison was holding one of these rallies, he got word that there was a runaway slave in the crowd who had escaped from a southern slave state to gain his freedom in the North. So, Garrison called out to the crowd, “If there is one among us who has found his freedom in this region, let him come forward and speak a word about his liberation.”

The man in the crowd was Frederick Douglas, and he did come forward. He got up on this wooden stage and for the first time in his life, he spoke freely, publicly and truthfully about his experiences. In that speech, which would be his first of many, Frederick Douglas said, “I stand before you a robber and a thief. I stole these hands, these feet and these limbs from my master. I stole this body from my master and I fled north. I left my master, who was whipping a slave woman. She was tied to a pole, enduring lash after lash from my master. And as he whipped this woman, my master held a Bible up in the air and exclaimed how it was just to punish her because the Scriptures said so.”

Here we go again. What’s incredible is not how often the Church uses Scripture to endorse anti-Semitism, sexism, and the oppression of gays and lesbians. What’s incredible is how often people buy it. We’ve given up on even uttering the words “here we go again,” in our world. We don’t even have the energy left to roll our eyes at this stuff, let alone do anything about it. So the world becomes a herd of broken people longing for acceptance; longing for some kind of purpose for their lives; longing to be loved and to love. People start to feel sick to their souls, and they’ll take whatever kind of healing they can get. They’ll accept any kind of truth they can get, even if that truth contradicts what they know in their heart to be just and right and true.

This world, this world we’re living in right now, is the same world that flocks to Jesus in today’s Scripture we hear out of Luke. This same world that we hear about today is longing for healing and truth, and they come like a herd to Jesus, and one by one they are miraculously healed from all of their sickness. But the true miracle that the disciples witnessed in that moment, and the true miracle that we now witness as we hear this Scripture together today—the true miracle is in Jesus’ words, not his actions. See, while Jesus is giving the world exactly what it wants in the moment, he takes the time to speak the truth. Jesus is being swarmed by the sickness of the world and he looks up at his disciples and speaks out of all this chaos: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven.”

The prophet Jeremiah puts it like this: “Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.” It seems that not only do we enrich God’s favor in us by being perseverant and steadfast in our faith; we also add power and strength to our faith.

Robert Franklin is President of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, and he’s a pioneer in African American social ethics and social justice. He recalls his childhood, growing up Pentecostal during the Civil Rights movement. The boys in his church were taught a kind of citizenship education that was given to civil rights demonstrators throughout the South. Specifically he recalls his teacher, Bishop Ford.

Franklin says that Bishop Ford thought it was particularly important for young black men to learn constructive ways of expressing their anger. He’d say, “Don’t let your anger be your weakness. You don’t have to stop what you’re doing to fight every racist who comes along to bother you. Outsmart him by finishing what you’re doing, then pick the right moment to deal with the situation.”

That’s sound education. It was appropriate then, and I think it’s appropriate now, if not timeless. Look at the here and now. In the midst of a world that is perhaps as culturally and institutionally divided now as it was during the antebellum period, progressive Christianity serves as somewhat of an oasis. It’s an oasis when it could be so much more. It could be a source for reconciliation in our time. It could be a tree planted by the water that will not be moved.

Robert Franklin says that through prayer and interaction with people, he encountered the Holy Spirit of God. He says, “My encounter with the Spirit helped me realize that God has bestowed on humans the gift of reason and spiritual illumination so that we do not become one-dimensional creatures. Reason and revelation must ever be dialogue partners. This is part of what it means to be created in the image of God.”

A few weeks ago I found a videotape in the narthex, and written on its spine was, “Friends Capital Campaign.” I thought, “Oh, this might give me a glimpse into how the church handled its capital campaign years ago; give me a taste of Friends Church history.” It was a series of interviews of church members, many of whom I recognized. But the one interview that seized my attention more than any other was a 16-year-old boy who said this: “I haven’t been a part of this church very long, but I love it.” He said, “Right now we’re in this capital campaign which I guess means that we’re chipping away at our mortgage so we can have this land and keep our church. That’s assuring to me, because it means that when I turn 17 and if I become an Aggie after that I’ll have a place to go. I’ll have a church home.” Then he said, “Something else that’s really exciting right now is that everyone’s coming together on this. New members, old members; everyone is getting together and talking and getting excited about this process and about the future of our church. It’s encouraging to me that I’ll have a place like this to come to so I can worship the Lord.”

Friends, the church is not a creed or a doctrine. The church is not a building or a belltower. The church is you and I. The church is you and I. And we are trees planted by the water of God’s grace, trying our best to be firmly rooted in righteousness so we can grow progressively heavenward. And our children will see these roots. They’ll see our growth and they’ll want to dig in that rich soil of God’s promises with their very lives because they saw how we were blessed. And nameless parents and singles and college students and other 16-year-olds will come gather with us by the water, and they, too, will take comfort in the shade of our trees and learn what it means to be rooted in righteousness and to grow in progressive faith.

The choice is ours, Church. We can be trees planted by the water, or we can be tomato plants that spread and reach up high, but never yield any fruit. If we stand on our own and fight every hate-filled thought in our world to the point that we too become filled with hatred, or until we just don’t have any fight left in us, then the Church will be that tomato plant. And the world can keep caving in around us with news of division, of oppression, of tyranny and injustice, and we’ll just sit by a babbling brook and think, “Well, here we go again.”

To be that church home of tomorrow that the 16-yeard-old boy was testifying about, we’ve got to be trees planted by the water that won’t give up. We have to be strong. We have to be persistent in our faith. We can’t be afraid of the evils of this world. And we have to be planted alongside one another. We have to be in community with each other, because we can’t do this thing called Church alone. We can’t be God’s Church alone.

Friends Congregational Church may seem like an oasis in a community and in a world that is plagued with division and intolerance; but it will only remain an oasis if we are so smitten with its uniqueness that we keep it just like it is. That’s a tomato plant. But if we really love this gift of Church and we want to be this church for our community and for our world, it won’t be an oasis forever. That means we have to share our thoughts with each other; share our understandings of faith with each other; share the journeys of our lives with each other; and share our progress with each other. Just like William Lloyd Garrison’s invitation let Frederick Douglas’ life begin to speak for the sake of justice and love, our invitation to the world has to be about liberation. We can’t stand at the riverbank and say, “Don’t come here unless you’re clean!” We have to always be inviting people to join us at the streams of God’s living water.

Stacy and I have kept mowing the backyard, and we are meticulous about mowing around that eyesore of a lemon tree. And after a while we got used to that little tree standing in the corner of the yard. A couple of months ago I was raking leaves on the opposite corner of the yard, and I looked up for a second at the little lemon tree, and there it was. I couldn’t believe it. Was that a dot of yellow over there? I dropped by rake and ran over to that little plant and sure enough, there it was: a perfect yellow lemon that shined like a piece of gold was hanging off a branch of the tree. So I picked it, held it up to my nose and smelled it, and my senses started to swim. I knew what lemons smelled like, and I knew what they tasted like, but this was like nothing I’d ever experienced before.

You can call me a city boy, but that’s what hope is. That’s what this church can be. Let’s pray that this place, and all houses of God, can become more than just an oasis. Let’s pray that this place can always be a tree planted by God’s grace-filled waters that people see and never utter the words, “Here we go again.”

Those words aren’t bad. They just need to be seized and used for the sake of God’s will, not against it. So as we leave this place after our congregational meeting today, let’s look out into the world, take courage and say together, “Here I am, Lord, and here we go again. Here we go again.” The Church gathered for worship. The Church scattered for ministry. Here we go again. Amen.