Sermon for Friends Congregational Church
“God’s Redemption is Living in Peace”
Delivered by Reverend Dan De Leon
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Psalm 8; Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
I bring you greetings of joy and peace from the South Central Conference of the United Church of Christ. This weekend was a first for me. I attended the South Central Conference of the UCC annual meeting in San Antonio. And it began appropriately enough: We gathered around a meal and then worshiped together. We were in a huge conference room of a hotel, hundreds of us: clergy, lay persons, seminarians, and even one table of youth representatives from churches all over Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Needless to say, we were a mixed bag. And the woman who greeted us in the name of Christ reminded us of our diversity. She got in the pulpit at the front of this giant room and started off with a laundry list that sounded like something out of last week’s Pentecost story. She said, “We are Evangelicals, Congregationalists, Christian and Reformed. We are African American, Hispanic, Caucasian, Chinese, and everything in between. We are former Catholics and recovering Baptists. We are from the dirt roads of Friona, from the Mardi Gras streets of New Orleans and from Aggieland in College Station” I was seated next to Tamara, Deb, Anne Wehrly and a few other folks who hail from here, so at that point you heard a definitive ‘whoop.’ So, at that moment I thought, “Great. My first experience of a South Central Conference Meeting of the UCC begins with the candid reminder that I am a recovering Baptist in a room full of Aggies. God help us all.”
It was a spirit-filled occasion, and I was humbled and deeply inspired by our surroundings. At the altar was what I viewed as a piece of artwork: a postmodern sculpture of the Pentecost fire with a round, silver, quilted background that gave it a kind of industrial appearance. On the far side of the room there was a banner made by two women from one of the churches that celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the UCC. It had three faceless children holding hands on the bottom of the banner, one obviously Hispanic, another obviously African American and one obviously White. And these children wore t-shirts that said, “Past, present, future.” On my side of the room was a red banner that welcomed us to the 44th annual meeting of the South Central Conference. And next to both of these banners were white screens that displayed the words to our hymns that we would sing in worship: old hymns, newer hymns, familiar hymns and not-so-familiar hymns.
In the worship service we officially installed our new conference minister, Doug Anders, and then we shared communion…all of us…together…united in one spirit. And coincidentally enough—I thought you would want to know—we closed the service by singing what hymn? Hymn #391 from the New Century Hymnal: In the Midst of New Dimensions. The hymn has five verses, so Tamara, Deb, Anne and I felt like we were dismissed from church five times in five minutes.
I share this with you because I feel that, as your pastor, I need to keep our flock informed about the workings of our conference, and because I also feel that we need to be united in our own worship with our sisters and brothers of the South Central Conference who are a part of this United Church of Christ. But I also share this with you so that you can see how amazing our denomination is, and how blessed we are to be a part of such an unmistakable UCC conference.
While this conference was going on, I had the Scriptures for this morning swimming in my head. So, Saturday morning when we reconvened in the huge conference room, I was thinking of Psalm 8; about how we are a humanity redeemed by God and made just a little bit beneath God in the grand scheme of Creation, and about how we are called to embrace that redemption and live in harmony with one another. And I was remembering the Proverbs, about how Woman Wisdom was present before any of this world came into being, and about how Woman Wisdom celebrated and danced with God at the creation of all things.
Those were the Scriptures I was pondering when the first order of business came up: the budget. We all received a piece of paper with a bunch of numbers on it that may as well have been hieroglyphics to me. But it was explained that we were being presented a deficit budget for the upcoming year, and that we were about to vote on this budget. The guy at the podium directed our attention to a red box at the front of the room that had the UCC-patented comma inscribed on its lid as an opening. He said, “This is our coffer. It’s to assure that we won’t have a deficit in the upcoming year. It already has several hundred dollars in it from random offerings that you have made since registration yesterday.”
I heard this as miraculous joy, but I think it fell on deaf ears for some people in the room. One guy stood up and made a motion for us to form an Ad Hoc committee to devise and implement a plan for securing this deficit by 2008. Another guy stood up and made a motion for everyone in the room to give $100 bucks, whether out of our pockets or via our local congregations, to take care of the deficit problem. And all kinds of discussion ensued.
So, I sat there arms crossed and lips pursed as I witnessed what I felt was the antithesis of the Scriptures that were floating around in my mind. The fervor with which some of these folks were talking who held the microphone that was going around the room was so boastful that I thought, “Are we beneath God or are we trying to elevate ourselves miles above God?” No pun intended, it was a taxing experience. And as I sat there listening to the hour of debate over proposals for how we were going to take care of the deficit problem, I thought about the night before—about the tongue-in-cheek comment that was made about some of us being recovering Baptists. In that moment, I felt like the environment was doing nothing to nurture the recovering Baptist, because I honestly felt like I had been transported back to one of those Sunday afternoon deacon meetings that lasted sometimes for 5 hours. And I felt like Woman Wisdom was doing what most women do behind men holding microphones in our world: shaking her head.
The message from this morning’s Scriptures is simple. We are redeemed by God. And in this redemption, we share God’s deep joy. But as the Scriptures from John and Romans remind us, we, as Christians, cannot simply leave the joy of our redemption where it is. We are called to respond to God’s deep joy by living together in harmony—living together in peace.
There is a reason, after all, that we are reminded of Christ’s message of peace every time we gather. We hear the words ‘the peace of Christ be with you all,’ and we respond in words and in the action of passing the peace with each other.
Psalm 8 reminds us that we are redeemed by God. We are lifted up from a lowly state so that we can be co-creators with God. You and I share in God’s divine governance of this world. Now, there are some who would say that our moral misdeeds against God are what directly cause the disasters of our world: floods, hurricanes, wildfires and even terrorist attacks. Need I remind us of the public statements of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson right after 9/11 when they said that the terrorists struck us because of the actions of feminists, abortionists, gays, lesbians, secularists and the ACLU?
Psalm 8 also reminds us that we, although lifted up to share in Divine governance with God over this world, we are created a little bit beneath God. Do we honestly think that God cares about our direct offenses against God? Do we believe that God summons the whirlwind when we yell curses against our Creator? Do we believe that God sends a flood when we wave a fist in the face of our Lord? Do we believe that God deputizes terrorists when we make certain moral choices in our lives that affect no one at the end of the day but us?
Friends, ecological and social harmony belong to redemption. Our Creator God can take all the direct hits we think we’re landing on God’s Divine nose, but what hurts our God (and perhaps what angers our God) is how we treat our world and how we treat one another.
When a child says to a parent, “I hate you,” that parent may get frustrated to no end, but that parent goes on loving the child, praying for the child, hoping for the child. But nothing makes a parent weep more than when the child hurts himself and hurts others.
Perhaps the reason why we are living in an age of a “the sky is falling” worldview is because we are convinced that God has had it up to here, and there is nothing we can do to redeem this mess that we have made ecologically and socially. But hear this Good News: redemption is not a conditional thing. Redemption doesn’t come with an expiration date. We are redeemed by God: from the dawn of creation to the final say of eternal life made possible by the outpouring of Christ’s love on a cross. And in our redemption, we share God’s deep joy in this world, and we are called to carry that joy in our hearts so that peace can be made manifest on earth as it is in heaven. Peace right here, right now.
This is Trinity Sunday, so think of it this way: God took from God’s own whole being and offered Jesus Christ to the world. Jesus Christ poured out his whole being on each and every one of us with the gift of the Holy Spirit. So, why should we keep that gift from one another? Why should we hide our whole being from God’s world? Jesus tells us that if you have a light, you don’t hide it under a bushel basket. You hold it high and you let it shine for all the world to see. In these Chicken Little times where chaos gathers around us, we are called to ease the storms by sharing our light with one another.
On Memorial Day, we had packed lunches to enjoy a picnic outside, but the weather was a torrential downpour. So, we grabbed our umbrellas, hopped in the car and decided to go to the pavilion in the park and enjoy our lunches anyway. When we got to the pavilion, however, there was already a large gathering of people. I asked, “Is it OK if we eat at this one table here?” One of them responded, “That’s fine. Go right ahead.”
The gathering of people got larger as we ate, and they were all Latino and mostly Spanish-speaking. Eventually, the guy who initially said to us that it was OK to come in and eat came over to us and struck up a conversation. His name was Henry, and he introduced his 16-month-old nephew, Obed, to Mac. Eventually we got to talking about the occasion for his gathering, and Henry said, “That’s my church. And that guy over by the grill is our pastor.” I asked him what the name of his church was and he told me that it was a long Spanish name that I would probably forget, and sure enough, I have forgotten it. But he told me that the church name was based on Ephesians 2:20.
Ephesians 2:20: Built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.
That’s an authentic enough name for a Christian church. But then I read the verses surrounding that Scripture…
Ephesians 2:19-22: You are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
That is redemption. Redemption is our blessing. It is our light. So, church people, what are we going to do with that light? When God blesses us, will we keep the blessing to ourselves while the disharmony of this world builds up into a violent storm, or will we share that blessing with God’s world so that creation might live in harmony and peace?
When we left the pavilion and headed back out into the downpour, Henry called out to us, “God bless you,” and as if on cue from something other than myself, I responded, “Peace be with you.” When the faces of Christ bless us, we need to respond every day by letting our lives say, “Peace be with you.” When God blesses us, we must respond to each other, “Peace be with you.” So, children of our Lord, “God bless you.” Amen.