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Responsive and Responsible People of God
A sermon preached by the Reverend Dr. Stephanie J. Nagley at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Bethesda, Maryland, June 18, 2006
Thomas Friedman, in his book The World is Flat, begins his exploration of our new world writing: “No one ever gave me directions like this on a golf course before: ‘Aim at either Microsoft or IBM.’ I was standing on the first tee at the KGA Golf Club in Bangalore, in southern India, when my playing partner pointed out two shiny glass-and-steel buildings off in the distance, just behind the first green.”
Christopher Columbus was looking for India and stumbled onto America. He found the Indians and made them his slaves. Friedman journeyed to India to understand how the people of India had become the outsourcing force of business. Friedman found India and thought that many of the people there were Americans – having taken on North America sounding names and accents. Columbus returned to his king and queen reporting that the world was round. Friedman returned home and in a late night whisper confided to his wife, “Honey, I think the world is flat.”
As I think about what Jesus had to say about his world I think he always knew that, in Friedman’s words, the world is flat. Jesus kept pushing the boundaries of his world and insisted on diversity and inclusion. In a sense, he outsourced his ministry to the farthest reaches of the land. He could have been a good follower of the ways that had always been but instead he preached a radical creativity. It was radical because what he preached, the sermons about love, inclusion, peace and mercy, drew from the beginnings of our relationship with God. It was creative because he preached a new way of taking those early teaching and responding to the present circumstances of the world. As examples, he preached the inclusion of women and children. He practiced getting past religious superstition by touching the leper, healing the woman with a hemorrhage, and giving sight to the blind. Jesus knew what was important to hold on to and what was important to let go. He knew the dance of tradition and change.
The church sits in a world that is flat. And, so, the church is ever caught in the tension of trying to hold on to its identity rooted in the traditions and beliefs of our ancestors and needing to move and change in response to the present day. The world challenges us in many ways. We are challenged in the ways we transmit information, in the ways we need to receive information, in the ways we seek to be together as a community. Web sites, pod casting, other technology and message delivery systems are critical to helping us let people know we are here and we are relevant to their lives.
Relevancy, that’s our challenge. We have so much to say and to give and to be that is important. It would be irresponsible of us, as the people of God, as the followers of a visionary Jesus, to not question our beliefs and our practices and to shy from seeking better ways to bring Christ to the world.
As we go through these next years together our task is to respond thoughtfully to the tension of being the church in a world that is flat. What we hold on to and what we let go of is critical if we are to be a viable and life-giving church. We are meant to be the radically creative followers of Jesus.
There are at least two pillars of the church that guide us in our journey. The first is that we are a church where everyone has a place at the table. And the second is that we are in the business of developing responsive and responsible people of God. With those pillars to help us we can think about the shape and nature of our worship, our Christian formation, our outreach, our stewardship, all our programs in a way that helps us remain relevant in a world that is, as Jesus knew all along, flat.
We are sowers of the seed and to the sower is the task of being both hopeful and patient. There are those in the world who will not always see the inclusive, radical creativity of Jesus as a good thing. There have been those who have tried hard to button down, seal off, lock up the will and truth of God. And those who have tried to do that are on both sides of the religious equation.
But God being God will have the Spirit do as it will. I believe we’re in a time when we are seeing just what the will of God’s Spirit will do. The Southern Baptists just elected someone who is dancing on the edge of letting the Spirit of God do what it will. The walls of the Baptist convention are being shaken, if not broken.
I’m not convinced that we will hear the party line of the Southern Baptist be anything other than proclaim the inerrancy of the Bible, but I do think that there are those in the Southern Baptist convention who will begin to explore a more inclusive road for the involvement of all God’s people. The new leader of the Baptists says that he still believes in the teaching of his denomination but it’s just that he ‘isn’t mad about it’.
I think so called liberals are tired of fighting with so called conservatives. I think both sides are beginning to realize that there’s more at stake than ideological idols. And I think that leaders on both sides are weary of being angry.
The sowers of the seed know that anger doesn’t get us anywhere. We’re here to sow and tend the garden, ever mindful that God’s Spirit is up to things we can’t even begin to understand. And if we read the sacred story carefully, if we understand and look at the story from the balcony rather than the orchestra pit we will see a God who is trying mightily to include the wild patchwork of creation and make a whole cloth out of all there is.
Ours is to throw the seeds out there, the seeds of God that are the seeds of mercy, inclusion, and just plain wild, indiscrimnant, untamed love, to throw them out and tend them. Ours is to remain steadfast to our mission of cultivating such a crop and let God or the Spirit be in charge of how the seeds grow and the moment when it is right for the harvest.
This is not a ‘come what may’ crop tending that you and I are involved with. On the contrary we are to care very much about the mission that we are on and the way we see God’s love growing. We have to fight the fights of inclusion and love where those fights present themselves. So this is not a ‘whistle while you work’ and ‘don’t worry about tomorrow’ kind of tending the garden. This is a tending of our mission and a deep concern for the mission that we are called to tend.
We are the people of God, a God who calls us to let the Spirit do what the Spirit will do, and to be ever open about where that Spirit will take us. We are the people of God who dedicate themselves to the tending of their lives as responsive and responsible people of God. We are the people who God calls to live into and are committed to both the promises and the challenges of a ‘flat world’, a world where everyone finds a place and there is a place for every one. We are the people of God ever exploring, ever discovering the new world.
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