This week has been a trying week on the souls of many in our nation. Indeed, many people around the world have found it difficult to watch and to understand the election process in these United States, and yet they are watching and they want to understand. They want to understand because they know something that we don’t. They know what it’s like to have a foreign power with influence over their lives.
There are certainly foreign powers that attempt to influence our lives all the time, but there is so much more of the world that turns on the value of the U.S. Dollar than we have any notion of understanding. Even in our weakest moments, we have more power than most do in their strongest moments. That’s not to say that the economic power we hold on the world stage is shared equally – and we could argue all day about whether that is fair and just – but it does lead me to share one of my favorite election year memes.
“Do not let your allegiance to the donkey or the elephant make you forget that you belong to the lamb.”
Now I have to say, that is a pretty loaded statement. For one it acknowledges that we have allegiances other than God – and all of us do – and for another, it acknowledges that God’s claim on our lives is not limited by our allegiance to God (or lack thereof). If we “belong to the lamb,” then our allegiance to anything but God must either be an expression of God’s claim on our lives or else they are a complete rebellion against God.
I’m not normally a fan of describing the world in a polarized dichotomy, but there are times when we must, as Jesus said, “Let our yes be yes and our no be no.” That doesn’t mean that we need to have an unyielding and ungraceful application of faith. It means that everything bends like light through a raindrop around the reality of God and God’s love for you and me and all of creation together!
There’s more that can be said about our ownership by the lamb, but for the sake of clarity, I’ll just make the obvious connection that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb who took away our need for sacrifices and replaced it with a call to live and love sacrificially. Jesus “owns” us because of what God has done through him.
We do like to talk about God’s “ownership” of us in the church – and sometimes we forget that it doesn’t stop with us – but it’s really just a way to describe faith as a gift. God’s “ownership” is a way of reminding ourselves that salvation is a gift. We can’t earn it. We can’t repay God for what God accomplished on the cross. We can’t set a scale on who deserves it and who does not. We can only celebrate it, be changed by it, and respond to it over and over.
The story of the Potter’s House reminds us of the broader implications of our faithful response to God, and it’s clearly a little more transactional than I’ve described. God’s response to the faithfulness of God’s people is what Jeremiah describes in the building up and breaking down of the clay. Of course, Jeremiah’s message was received by a people in chaos whose nation was actually crumbling. It seemed only natural for them to view things in terms of God’s retribution and blessing, and I think we could benefit from hearing the warning and the promise that it carries for us as well.
I also think that we need to view God’s warning and God’s promises in light of our faith in Christ – a faith that transcends religious nationalism, for Jesus came not to proclaim a nation but a kingdom. I know that you all know this. In fact (and I know how much we all miss singing this together, so I don’t mean to rub salt in a wound here), our old hymns and traditions remind us over and over of the hope we have in the Kingdom of God. Every Sunday we say it in the Lord’s prayer. Almost every Advent we sing, “Savior of the Nations, Come” and in that hymn we move from celebrating Christ’s birth to proclaiming “Boundless shall thy kingdom be”.
Traditions like these are important, especially in times of greater stress when nothing seems to make sense. That’s one of the reasons that “tradition” one of the key elements for making sense of things found in Bishop Michael Curry’s book, Love is the Way. In this book, he has a different question for each chapter, and today I want to share with you his answer to the question, “How do I find the energy to keep loving when the world seems to be going the other way?”
Bishop Curry begins with memories of his grandmother and the lessons he learned in her kitchen as she demonstrated a tradition birthed from slaves and sharecroppers needing to “make do” with hardly anything at all. One thing he makes clear is that “making do” is not simply about making the little they had seem like it was enough. His stories are so much better than my summary, but he essentially says that “making do” is all about taking what seems like scarcity and serving it up as an abundance of flavor, and sustenance, and even an expression of life lived in fullness with God.
Now, I don’t know about you, but if his grandma’s Collards can do that, I want some! The thing is, it’s not the food that does the transforming. The food is just a vehicle for what he describes as a way to “take an old reality and create a new possibility.”
In order to do that, according to the good Bishop, we need three main ingredients: tradition, imagination, and God.
Again, he doesn’t mean falling into traditions that we blindly follow because it’s what we’ve always done. He means the type of traditions that give us a base to understand the world in good times and bad. He also means the type of experiences that we learn from by making mistakes while standing on the shoulders of others. In the words of Bishop Curry, “When we look for guidance on how to live a life grounded in and guided by the way of love, we don’t need to start from scratch when there is wisdom from people of faith who have struggled and yet made do.”
It takes imagination to build upon their struggles and ours, but it also takes imagination to see beyond our shared history and into a brighter day. Bishop Curry uses Moses as an example, quoting Walter Bruggerman who once said that, “the moment of liberation didn’t actually begin when Moses told Pharaoh, “Let my people go.” And it didn’t begin when the plagues eventually forced the Egyptian slave masters to give up. Or when God parted the waters of the Red Sea and set the slaves free. No, the freedom movement began the moment Moses talked to God and began to imagine the possibility of a world without slavery.”
Imagination. Possibility. Hope. These are words that are essential to the task of “making do” when it seems we have nothing to go on but the love of God and the realization that things just aren’t the way they could be.
That’s why all of it falls apart without recognizing the presence of God in our midst. For this final ingredient, Bishop Curry acknowledges something that makes me feel a special kinship with him. He’s not very good at math. His mother is. His sister is, too, but he just didn’t get the “math gene,” and neither did I.
The thing that even he and I know about math, though – just like in a recipe that you learn as much from instinct as you might from repetition – is that any variable can change the outcome. For us, as people of God – as those who belong to God through Christ Jesus – we know that God is the fundamental variable that holds the equation in harmony like the hands of a potter molding clay. Even more, we know that turning to God and recognizing God’s involvement is the way that we become open to the possibilities that already exist!
You see God is always working in us and through us to take the “givens” of reality and create new possibilities for lives filled with love that build us up and glorifies God. As I’ve said before and will again, it’s not because God can’t do it without you. It’s because God doesn’t want to do it without you!
There’s one last reflection I’ll share with you that I pulled from the cesspool of the internet. It has to do with the great opportunity that some of us missed this Halloween. It’s not a direct quote, but someone posted the idea that instead of lamenting over what we could not do we could be coming up with new traditions based on the old. The children in families that made special dinners, held scavenger hunts, and left surprises on the doors of their neighbors are not going to look back on 2020 as the year they could not go trick or treating. They’re going to say, “Hey remember that year we did all that cool stuff?”
The same opportunity is set before us with each new day as we seek to be built up by the hands of God even as we seek to be the hands of God who is building up the person beside us! Let us, then, approach each new day building on the traditions of our elders, imagining what liberation looks like for all of God’s children, and turning to God again and again and again as the source of life and love. There is no other way. Love is the way! Amen.
There are certainly foreign powers that attempt to influence our lives all the time, but there is so much more of the world that turns on the value of the U.S. Dollar than we have any notion of understanding. Even in our weakest moments, we have more power than most do in their strongest moments. That’s not to say that the economic power we hold on the world stage is shared equally – and we could argue all day about whether that is fair and just – but it does lead me to share one of my favorite election year memes.
“Do not let your allegiance to the donkey or the elephant make you forget that you belong to the lamb.”
Now I have to say, that is a pretty loaded statement. For one it acknowledges that we have allegiances other than God – and all of us do – and for another, it acknowledges that God’s claim on our lives is not limited by our allegiance to God (or lack thereof). If we “belong to the lamb,” then our allegiance to anything but God must either be an expression of God’s claim on our lives or else they are a complete rebellion against God.
I’m not normally a fan of describing the world in a polarized dichotomy, but there are times when we must, as Jesus said, “Let our yes be yes and our no be no.” That doesn’t mean that we need to have an unyielding and ungraceful application of faith. It means that everything bends like light through a raindrop around the reality of God and God’s love for you and me and all of creation together!
There’s more that can be said about our ownership by the lamb, but for the sake of clarity, I’ll just make the obvious connection that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb who took away our need for sacrifices and replaced it with a call to live and love sacrificially. Jesus “owns” us because of what God has done through him.
We do like to talk about God’s “ownership” of us in the church – and sometimes we forget that it doesn’t stop with us – but it’s really just a way to describe faith as a gift. God’s “ownership” is a way of reminding ourselves that salvation is a gift. We can’t earn it. We can’t repay God for what God accomplished on the cross. We can’t set a scale on who deserves it and who does not. We can only celebrate it, be changed by it, and respond to it over and over.
The story of the Potter’s House reminds us of the broader implications of our faithful response to God, and it’s clearly a little more transactional than I’ve described. God’s response to the faithfulness of God’s people is what Jeremiah describes in the building up and breaking down of the clay. Of course, Jeremiah’s message was received by a people in chaos whose nation was actually crumbling. It seemed only natural for them to view things in terms of God’s retribution and blessing, and I think we could benefit from hearing the warning and the promise that it carries for us as well.
I also think that we need to view God’s warning and God’s promises in light of our faith in Christ – a faith that transcends religious nationalism, for Jesus came not to proclaim a nation but a kingdom. I know that you all know this. In fact (and I know how much we all miss singing this together, so I don’t mean to rub salt in a wound here), our old hymns and traditions remind us over and over of the hope we have in the Kingdom of God. Every Sunday we say it in the Lord’s prayer. Almost every Advent we sing, “Savior of the Nations, Come” and in that hymn we move from celebrating Christ’s birth to proclaiming “Boundless shall thy kingdom be”.
Traditions like these are important, especially in times of greater stress when nothing seems to make sense. That’s one of the reasons that “tradition” one of the key elements for making sense of things found in Bishop Michael Curry’s book, Love is the Way. In this book, he has a different question for each chapter, and today I want to share with you his answer to the question, “How do I find the energy to keep loving when the world seems to be going the other way?”
Bishop Curry begins with memories of his grandmother and the lessons he learned in her kitchen as she demonstrated a tradition birthed from slaves and sharecroppers needing to “make do” with hardly anything at all. One thing he makes clear is that “making do” is not simply about making the little they had seem like it was enough. His stories are so much better than my summary, but he essentially says that “making do” is all about taking what seems like scarcity and serving it up as an abundance of flavor, and sustenance, and even an expression of life lived in fullness with God.
Now, I don’t know about you, but if his grandma’s Collards can do that, I want some! The thing is, it’s not the food that does the transforming. The food is just a vehicle for what he describes as a way to “take an old reality and create a new possibility.”
In order to do that, according to the good Bishop, we need three main ingredients: tradition, imagination, and God.
Again, he doesn’t mean falling into traditions that we blindly follow because it’s what we’ve always done. He means the type of traditions that give us a base to understand the world in good times and bad. He also means the type of experiences that we learn from by making mistakes while standing on the shoulders of others. In the words of Bishop Curry, “When we look for guidance on how to live a life grounded in and guided by the way of love, we don’t need to start from scratch when there is wisdom from people of faith who have struggled and yet made do.”
It takes imagination to build upon their struggles and ours, but it also takes imagination to see beyond our shared history and into a brighter day. Bishop Curry uses Moses as an example, quoting Walter Bruggerman who once said that, “the moment of liberation didn’t actually begin when Moses told Pharaoh, “Let my people go.” And it didn’t begin when the plagues eventually forced the Egyptian slave masters to give up. Or when God parted the waters of the Red Sea and set the slaves free. No, the freedom movement began the moment Moses talked to God and began to imagine the possibility of a world without slavery.”
Imagination. Possibility. Hope. These are words that are essential to the task of “making do” when it seems we have nothing to go on but the love of God and the realization that things just aren’t the way they could be.
That’s why all of it falls apart without recognizing the presence of God in our midst. For this final ingredient, Bishop Curry acknowledges something that makes me feel a special kinship with him. He’s not very good at math. His mother is. His sister is, too, but he just didn’t get the “math gene,” and neither did I.
The thing that even he and I know about math, though – just like in a recipe that you learn as much from instinct as you might from repetition – is that any variable can change the outcome. For us, as people of God – as those who belong to God through Christ Jesus – we know that God is the fundamental variable that holds the equation in harmony like the hands of a potter molding clay. Even more, we know that turning to God and recognizing God’s involvement is the way that we become open to the possibilities that already exist!
You see God is always working in us and through us to take the “givens” of reality and create new possibilities for lives filled with love that build us up and glorifies God. As I’ve said before and will again, it’s not because God can’t do it without you. It’s because God doesn’t want to do it without you!
There’s one last reflection I’ll share with you that I pulled from the cesspool of the internet. It has to do with the great opportunity that some of us missed this Halloween. It’s not a direct quote, but someone posted the idea that instead of lamenting over what we could not do we could be coming up with new traditions based on the old. The children in families that made special dinners, held scavenger hunts, and left surprises on the doors of their neighbors are not going to look back on 2020 as the year they could not go trick or treating. They’re going to say, “Hey remember that year we did all that cool stuff?”
The same opportunity is set before us with each new day as we seek to be built up by the hands of God even as we seek to be the hands of God who is building up the person beside us! Let us, then, approach each new day building on the traditions of our elders, imagining what liberation looks like for all of God’s children, and turning to God again and again and again as the source of life and love. There is no other way. Love is the way! Amen.
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