As we begin our three week sermon series on “Lessons Learned from Other Religions,” I thought it might be helpful to clarify how we use the term “universalist,” and why I am specifically a Christian.

Meaning #1: Our own Calvinist heritage, following the logic of predestination, came to believe that God had preselected an “elect” that were destined for salvation, with everyone else called into being predestined to fail. Christian Universalists rejected this notion, believing that if God offered salvation through Christ, then it must be universally available. In this way, I am a Universalist. Today’s Unitarian Universalists spring, in part, from the Christian Universalist heritage, though that movement has moved away from a specifically Christian understanding of the divine.

Meaning #2: Last summer’s controversy over Rob Bell’s book Love Wins centered on this meaning of universalism. Many Christians believe that everyone who does not believe in Jesus in a specific way (sometimes even saying a specific prayer!) is destined for the pits of hell. Now, ignoring debates about the existence or character of hell, or who specifically gets to decide what form of belief in Jesus qualifies, we face a larger question about the kind of God we worship. Could a loving God send advocates for peace and justice, compassionate and self-sacrificing individuals who happen to have been born into non-Christian cultures, to hell? I couldn’t worship a God that I thought could send the Dalai Lama to the pit. In this way, I am a Universalist.

Meaning #3: Despite being a Universalist in the two prior senses of the word, I do not actually believe that all religions are equally “true,” which would be the case if I was the kind of Universalist meant in the third definition. Some religious systems are hard-wired from their founding to treat women as second-class humans and seem unable to evolve past this primitive belief. They’re wrong. Some religious systems claim that a single tribe or race has a preferred status with the divine. They are wrong. At least one highly public religion in the US is marked by violence and slavery if countless reports are to be believed. It is wrong.

Since the various religions make mutually exclusive truth claims, they cannot all be true. That is simple logic. Now, the same logic says they could all be wrong. I just don’t happen to agree. I believe there is some truth in any religion that moves humans toward compassion, selflessness and creativity, that is, in any religion that helps us transcend our baser fear-driven instincts. And I believe that the truth of compassion, selflessness and creativity was embodied in Jesus, the man from Nazareth, who was the Divine Mystery we name God in a way beyond our understanding.

Like other traditions, the Christian heritage is filled with humans, a messy unruly species! Our own history includes episodes of violence, the oppression of women, seriously wrong-headed thinking. Yet, despite it all, the message of the Hebrew prophets and the teachings and example of Jesus refuse to fit into our easy categories. They call us beyond ourselves just as they did 2000+ years ago. I may learn from other religions, but I believe in Christ.

During the next three Sundays we will respectfully engage three other religions, learning what we can that might help us on our Christian path. This week we look at Islam. I look forward to seeing you.

Blessings,
Pastor Gary

Of course, actually, what we celebrate this Sunday, a couple of days behind that actual date, is Epiphany, and epiphany does not mean light. It actually means an appearance or manifestation of the divine, and this is what we celebrate as we close out Christmastide. Jesus as the opposite of darkness, of ignorance, of death. Specifically it is timed to celebrate the arrival of the wise travelers from the east, the three kings of tradition, and so is connected with the gospel to the Gentiles, the idea that the light of Christ is available to all people, not just the Hebrews, and so we are once again wrapped in this archetype of light as goodness.

There is a certain discomfort for many of us, if we are truthful, with this whole light equals good theme. For one thing, it fails to account for those who are not blessed with sight. Might, for their purposes, we refer to Jesus as the sound of the world rather than as the light of the world? After all, our ancient stories tell us that God spoke the world into being. Then there is the great problem of race, for as humans have evolved and adapted to their contexts, some have developed darker skin, and yet, throughout the western, and by western I mean northern, context, white is good, and therefore black is bad. We refer to someone who is evil as having a black heart, the good guys wear the white hats. The damage done by this equation, white equals good, black equals bad, this damage is real, is still a knife through the soul of countless people. Just last weekend a political candidate said in a public context “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” Today, still, racism plagues our nation. So the whole Jesus is light is good thing, you know… must we be politically correct all of the time? Maybe not, but we can try…

The ancient equation of light and vision equaling knowledge and divinity obviously had much to do with agriculture. It shows up in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, in which the philosopher escapes the world of shadows and sees what is real. The Romans used the equation when they called Augustus Caesar “light from light,” language the early Christians would co-opt in an act of defiance. In modern usage the word epiphany has come to mean that aha moment, might we call it a moment of enlightenment, coming full circle back to that ancient equation. So be it. I surrender. As sensitive as I want to be about how our language unintentionally harms, I cannot undo thousands of years of human history, so we land back where we started, at this feast that celebrates the appearance of the divine in the person of Jesus. And that is reason to celebrate.

Maybe, just maybe, there is something we can still rescue from this language of light. I want you to think for a moment, those who are old enough to have driven a car, I want you to think back to a long car trip, at some point in your life. You’re driving for hours, and slowly, ever so slowly, it gets darker. At once it hits you: it is dusk and you are driving without your headlights. This rarely happens these days, it’s nearly impossible to drive with the lights off, but back in the day…

Dusk is one of the most dangerous times to drive, and partly because you don’t always realize that you can’t see. On this feast of the Epiphany, maybe we can, just for a moment, reflect on the many ways our society is in a spiritual dusk. They don’t know what they don’t know, or more accurately, they can’t see what they can’t see.

The good news of our salvation includes this truth: together, we can see more, just as two in the car see more, especially when your passenger turns to you and says “it’s getting kinda dark.”

We have a box full of spiritual flashlights that have been passed on to us from the Hebrew religious tradition, from Jesus, that have had their batteries and bulbs changed and been taped back up by the generation of Christians that have gone before us. The box even contains a couple of flashlight, weird and foreign looking, that we’ve borrowed from other cultures and faith. Those flashlights include some of the most basic things that define us as Christians. To be a Christian is to pray, this is a flashlight. To be a Christian is belong to a covenant community, another flashlight. To be a Christian is to give a portion of your income for the common good of that community, a flashlight. To be a Christian is to study the Word of God, that’s that really big flashlight… I hope you don’t wait to bring it out until there is a spiritual hurricane.

The practices of the Christian faith, not the label Christian, but the things we do, these are the lights that reveal to us the divine, that take away our ancient fear. They are not perfect, there will always be the dark, and mystery isn’t always terrible and scary. We don’t need perfect light! The late Beat poet and Buddhist Lew Welch wrote “Seeking perfect total enlightenment is looking for a flashlight when all you need the flashlight for is to find your flashlight.”

Not perfect. We will still go into that night, raging or not. There will still be darkness, ignorance, death. But when we need it, Jesus the Christ, God’s light in the world. And what he left behind for us, a handy box of flashlights. Change your batteries, check your bulbs. Turn on the lights of Christian practice and let’s continue our journey through the gloom of winter. Amen.

So, it is one more day, really, as good a time as any to reflect and plan. And so we turn to the classic text of Ecclesiastes, drawn from the self-help books of the Biblical age, a genre that is known as wisdom literature.

Now look, this isn’t a Christian text. Scholars believe it was written no later than the Second Century BCE, that is, one to two hundred years before the birth of Jesus. And there are things in the passage that we have, well at least I have, difficulty reconciling with my understanding of Jesus’ good news. Time to kill? Time for war? Time to hate? Really? I mean, the “Day of the Lord” imagery in the New testament is problematic enough, all cataclysm and violence. But this passage seems to say that everything has its right time. And I dream of a day, I believe our covenant and even the Hebrew prophets point to a day, when war will be no more, when hatred and killing will cease.

But there is a core message to this text we can claim, one that is essential to our lives as individuals and our life as a community. Things change. The farmer doesn’t plant a crop and leave it in the field forever because that would just be ridiculous. She or he planted the crop intending for it to fulfill its purpose and then for things to change, a new crop is sewn. There is, as the Teacher in Ecclesiastes puts it, a time to plant and a time to pluck.

In the same way, there is a time to gather and a time to throw. Imagine where we would be, for example, had the followers of Jesus not been gathered together during his earthly ministry and the thrown out, or at least sent out, into the world.

This season, as we reflect on the ancient texts, maybe we can attend to this matter of time keeping. Maybe we can pray that we keep the right time, that we know when to plant and when to pluck, when to gather and when to throw, when to restore and when to discard. May we be wise keepers of God’s time. Amen.

Here they are:

Family Service: One Holy Night

On this night, and in fact during this entire season we view as unique and holy, much of the world puts its normal routines on hold. We gather with family, even that crazy uncle we’d like to pretend wasn’t related to us. Some will enter Christian houses of worship after many months, sometimes years, away. We celebrate our Savior’s birth, or at least go through the routine of celebrating that birth, even if we give salvation little or no thought for most of the year. We declare this to be one holy night.

In truth, as we will hear later in the beautiful words of Sophia Lyon Fahs, every night a child is born is a holy night, and a child is born every night, making every single night, every single day, every single moment when we are privileged to be alive, holy. And yet, there is something special in the birth of Jesus, something worth remembering all the other nights of the year, something special that is overlooked by those Christians who mistakenly view the Cross as the sole path to salvation. For those who believe that Jesus is the promised Emmanuel, that Jesus is God-with-us in some way beyond our understanding, a tremendous thing happens at Christmas.

Before that first Christmas, that Divine Mystery we name God seemed distant, immense, sometimes brutal. Then, in one act, God closed the immense gap between God’s being and our own. God came to feel as we feel, aching dirty feet, the cruelty we can inflict on one another, but also the soaring beauty of being in creation, the passionate love of parent and child, what it truly means to have friends, even, as Jesus learned with Lazarus, what it means to lose someone we love. God chose to be marked with humanness, to experience our being. And in so doing, the divine marked us with holiness.

Incarnation taught us how to live and changed our place in the order of being. Jesus reminded us that every day is a gift, the God wants us to live full lives now, to build a just and caring world now. Jesus in his teachings and in his life called us to courage, to radical transformation. He called us to throw off the shackles of false values. When God closed the metaphysical gap between the human and the divine, the door to contentment, to joy, to mind-blowing creativity, to life changing love, was opened.

What prepared Jesus the man from Nazareth to take on the navel-gazing leaders of his own religious community? What prepared him to take on the brutal Roman empire, to risk and lose his own life? We can assume from the scriptures that Jesus, the child and the man, was formed in the Hebrew religious tradition.

We know that the birth narratives as well as the one story about Jesus’s childhood are meant as teaching stories, as a way for the early Christians to understand what made Jesus so unique, but they also tell us that Joseph and Mary practiced their faith and raised the child Jesus within a religious community. He is presented at the Temple as a child, is part of a community, makes the arduous trip from Galilee to Jerusalem. As a man we see evidence of this religious upbringing. Jesus, who no doubt spoke Aramaic and Greek, is none-the-less able to read Hebrew, as when he reads the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue at Capernaum. He observes the religious law and exceeds it. His regular prayer life is a sign that he was taught by his parents how to pray. Jesus was so fully grounded in the Hebrew religious tradition that he was able to live it in a radically transgressive and transformative way, in such a way that he could enact a new covenant between humans and the divine.

What Jesus offered us, what Jesus offers us this night as we celebrate his birth, his role as God-with-us, is an alternative to all of the false systems we humans create for ourselves. Tribalism, nationalism, racism… Jesus rejected the false values of both Rome and of the Temple.

Today you are told that greed is good, that self-centeredness is okay. Our extended families have been reduced down to nuclear families, then even further down to sub-atomic families. Wall Street and Madison Avenue want you to believe that if you just buy the right stuff, you’ll be happy. How’s that been working out for you?

You can follow the Way of Jesus, or the way of aimlessness and sin. One leads to life in full, the other to suffering. This night, this one holy night, we remember that God closed the gap, that our Savior was born, and that, marking us with holiness, he offered us a new way. May we all embrace it, for unto us a savior was born, is born, will be born, again and again, out of time, out of place, miracle upon miracle. Amen.

Midnight: Christmas Every Day

I’m a sucker for Christmas movies, as those who are here every Sunday already know. But even I, with my Hallmark card idea of Christmas, occasionally encounter a movie so bad that I cannot sit through it more than once. On that list is a 1996 film called “Christmas Every Day.” Many of you will be familiar with the Bill Murray classic “Groundhog Day.” This was basically the same thing, but with Christmas and a teenager. The main character, Billy, is caught in a time loop, re-living Christmas again and again until he gets it right.

As terrible as the film was, there might be a lesson in it. First, how many of us would get trapped in that loop? Or, inversely, how many of us think we get Christmas “right”? Anyone want to do a show of hands?

For many, the Christmas season becomes a frenzied half-delusional rush to check off an ever-growing list of to-do items, to meet every possible social obligation lest we should give offense, and to make enough purchases to keep the CEO’s of major retailers and the generals in charge of Chinese prison factories in Rolexes and Bentleys. A slightly exaggerated picture, no doubt, but pointing toward the truth.

Even a terrible movie can teach us a lesson. “Christmas Every Day” reminds us that Christmas is about relationships, and particularly about one special relationship, the relationship in which that Divine Mystery we name God closed the gap between that utterly transcendent eternal infinite and the human. That relationship, as imagined by the authors of the two birth narratives, begins with a visit from an angel.

The Bible, God’s Word for those who choose to follow Jesus, contains a mix of poetry, self-help, fiction and history. It is not only the story of who we have been, how the ancients made sense of our relationship with our Creator. It is also a story meant to give shape to our future. It is a story meant to give shape to our lives, if only we will let it.

What shape will your life have? Will you be a patient and faithful servant, like Simeon of Jerusalem, who waited patiently for the birth of the messiah, present in the Temple when the infant Jesus was presented, Simeon whose words, now called the Nunc Dimittis, are repeated in nightly prayer by Christians around the world? Will you patiently wait on the Lord, doing the work of the people of God, as did the elderly prophetess Anna, also present in the Temple when the infant Jesus arrived.

Maybe your story will be a story of faithful service, certainly the shape of the stories we imagine for Mary and Joseph, swept up in God’s plan of salvation, maybe not always understanding their role, but always taking the next step, doing what was expected. We certainly see in the stories of Jesus’ childhood and in his adult life that they raised him with strong religious training. They take him from the backwater of Galilee to the metropolis of Jerusalem as a child. They certainly teach him to pray, and he does so constantly. No doubt he spoke both Aramaic and Greek, but he has also been trained in Hebrew, as we see when he unrolls the Isaiah scroll in the synagogue. Joseph and Mary faithfully raising the miracle baby…

Then there is John the Baptizer, the cousin of Jesus, seemingly the first major prophet to emerge in the Hebrew tradition in several centuries. Like John, will you be a catalyst, opening the eyes of those around you, opening the hearts of those around you. Will you be the noble voice in the wilderness, modern day locusts and honey for your diet as you change lives through the love of God?

Then there is the shape of a life we see in Jesus, a difficult but not impossible shape, for Jesus life is marked by being in God. This state of being, described by Friedrich Schleiermacher as “perfect Christ-consciousness,” is not beyond the reach of we mere humans, for we are not mere humans. We are marked with divinity, infused with holiness. This world has seen many who were clearly vessels for the love of God for this miraculous creation. Will you let go of what is false, embrace every moment, and love as God loves, being in God?

Every path that acknowledges our utter dependence on that from whence we came, that attends to the Divine Mystery, is a path to holiness. You are but one piece in a glorious history, in a glorious creation. Like a puzzle piece in the big picture of creation, you will find your right place in the context of community. You path unfolds before you every day, the gentle and sometimes not so gentle movements of the Spirit call you to that path. God moves to as every day, God’s grace pours out upon us, shaped by that moment when God became one of us.

Every day, the call to covenant community. Every day the call to find the shape of your life. Every day the movement of God’s grace. Every day. Maybe that terrible movie was right after all. Maybe it is Christmas every day! And may it always be so. Amen.

Christmas Morning: One More Day

I have found myself in an uncomfortable position in recent weeks. You see, I take seriously the charge to thinking Protestants to take the Bible seriously, but not literally. To be sure, there is plenty of history in there, and truth of a sort that can’t always be verified. But during this Christmas season I have asked many of you to look afresh at the two birth narratives and ask yourself what it is we are supposed to learn from them. You see, Mark and john are silent on the subject of our Savior’s birth, and Matthew and Luke disagree on most of the details. Luke is trying to record a history, albeit through the lens of Paul’s theology, and he doesn’t know the geography of Judea and Galilee at all. Matthew is busy trying to prove that Jesus is the new Moses with authority to create a new covenant, and reshapes the entire story of Jesus’ earthly ministry to that end. But we are so used to the mash-up version of the story, the one that has both Luke’s journey and manger and Matthew’s wise visitors, that thinking about the text feels like a betrayal of sorts. It’s not, but it feels that way.

So this morning, I’m not going to ask you to choose. If you like Jesus born in the family home in Bethlehem then fleeing to Egypt, okay. If you want the census and the manger, that’s cool. And if you want to mash-up the two stories, go for it. Every version of the story is trying to get at the same thing anyways. Each in its own way is attempting to explain how Jesus the man from Nazareth was unique, how his arrival on the scene represented God-with-us, the Divine Mystery we call God present with us in the person of Jesus, not only the Divine partaking of humanness, but humanity being forever marked with holiness.

Whichever story you choose, for Mary and Joseph, for the shepherds, the next day, as the sun rose, it was one more day. One more day of grinding poverty at the dge of a sprawling empire that had no interest in God. Yet the stories we use to understand what happened in Jesus are marked not with desperation, but with fidelity.

Jesus, presented for circumcision at the appointed time. Jesus, taken on a pilgrimage to the Temple when he was twelve. Jesus taught to pray, and though he no doubt already spoke Aramaic and Greek, taught Hebrew as well, so that he could read the sacred scrolls in the synagogue. In a world, in a time, that had other values, other preoccupations, Mary and Joseph were faithful. They had other options. They chose God. And they shaped the infant that became the boy that became the man that taught us how to live, that offered us freedom from aimlessness and sin, that defeated death itself. Daily fidelity, small acts of faith, one day at a time.

The day after the baby is born. One more day of hard work, of breast-feeding, of sleepless nights. For Herod one more day of fear that his corrupt kingdom would be supplanted by God’s just and caring realm.

One more day. Today. One more day. Tomorrow. A day to study God’s word in scripture, as Jesus did. A day to pray, as Jesus did. A day to love your Creator and this amazing creation, as Jesus did. One more day.

The day after the baby is born. One more miraculous and holy day. Amen.

Brother Jesus, you came to us in love, closing the gap between the divine, the quantum swirling mysterious Creativity that calls the world into being. You shared in our humanness, and marked us forever with your holiness. In your life you taught us how to be fully human, how to align our lives with God’s great purpose, how to boldly proclaim God’s just and caring realm. In your death you showed us how to come to our own ends, and in your resurrection you taught us that the forces of sin, evil and death will not triumph. But this day, this holy day, we recall the various stories your followers used to understand how you came into the world, unique, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Bless this gathering, reminding us always that we are people of the promise walking along the Way, together in love. Amen.

The pastor, being human and all, was hurt to think that this trusted friend, wise elder, had so little respect that he would sleep during the sermon. Then, being human and all, this hurt turned to anger. He decided to take the bull by the horns, not always the wisest choice, but one we sometimes make. So during the sermon one Sunday, after Wallace had dozed off. The pastor said quietly “Those who want to go to heaven, please stand up.” Everyone stood up, except Wallace, from whom a gentle snore could be heard. The pastor motioned for everyone to sit back down. Then he said “And if you are damned to hell,” and he slammed the pulpit and roared out “please stand up!” And Wallace sprang up to his feet, fumbling for his hymnal. Jaws dropped, eyes got wide, and finally Wallace, noticing that the organ wasn’t playing, looked around, and realized he was the only one standing. He turned back to the pastor and said ‘Well pastor, I told you when we called you that I was going to stick with you, and it looks like you and I are the only one’s on our feet, so where is it we are going together today?”

Where are we going today, indeed! For many Christians, Jesus saves purely through his death. Torture and execution, demanded by an angry God unwilling to forgive without payment, are the key, and so these Christians refer again and again to the cross, and while Christmas is cute and fun, it is easily commercialized, because it is a fluffy sort of holiday with no real bearing on salvation. It is nothing more than a prelude. For that matter, the things Jesus does and says during his earthly ministry aren’t that important either.

For other Christians, and I include myself in this group, blood sacrifice makes no sense, nor would I choose to worship a god that was so spiteful. For me, and for many, the salvation we experience in Jesus comes both from his victory over the forces of empire, evil and death itself, and it comes from his life and teachings. It is Emmanuel, that is, Jesus as God-with-us, God-for-us, that carries the power to save. And so, during this Advent season of preparation, we are using as a central image a path, a way with direction through a world of aimlessness and sin. This second week of Advent we focus on the traditional theme of peace. So what, I ask you, is the Christian path to peace?

Now I have to confess to being a bit sappy. Despite all of the extra work, the frantic nature of this season, I love Christmas. And one of the reasons I love Christmas is the Christmas movies, no matter how cheesy. Most of you may have a limit to how many Hallmark movies you can watch about families down on their luck, orphans and widows and folks who have lost what is called the “Christmas” spirit. I have no limit. I can watch them again and again, and I am guaranteed to weep at the appropriate moment. I love the idea that, as the saying goes, “the wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, goodwill towards men.” I love the shepherds on the hillside, the lovely manger story, and so I prefer Luke over Matthew’s dead toddlers any day of the week. But truthfully, my happy clappy happily ever after Christmas peace is a little naïve. The “can’t we all just get along” version doesn’t have much sticking power in a world filled with humans, because we humans are far from perfect, and sometimes we’re downright wicked.

What, then, is the peace of Christ? We say it, but what is it? We know what it is not, it is not the peace of Caesar. This is important, because the early Christians intentionally co-opted the language of the Caesar cult to position Jesus in opposition to Augustus and his successors, so it is fair the contrast the Pax Christi and the Pax Romana. The Pax Romana did, for a time, bring a halt to the wars that plagued the Mediterranean basin for centuries. But it did so through brutal oppression, it was a peace of force. It benefited Rome itself, and offered some protection for those few offered citizenship. But for slaves and non-citizens, for those who dared oppose the emperor, there was the ultimate sanction. You were beaten to a pulp, stripped naked, then left hung on a cross to slowly die, a process that sometimes took days. The, as a warning sign to others, your corpse was left on display. If that’s the Pax Romana, you won’t mind me saying, it wasn’t very “pax-ful.”

Of course, we have some challenges in the Pax Christi as well. For example, “peace on earth, goodwill towards men” is a terrible translation, and not just because it forget women and children. A more accurate translation, the one you’ll find in modern texts, is “peace among those whom God favors.” Even Jesus doesn’t promise us peace, instead promising that the choice of salvation would pit siblings against one another, would divide parent and child. This is a peace we want? Not so much!

And yet, there is a peace we find when we choose to follow Jesus, albeit not one that fits a fluffy Hallmark movie notion of peace. The peace we find in Christ has nothing to do with the outward circumstances of our life. To be sure, if we follow scripture, if we love and forgive and sacrifice, if we turn our backs on greed, resentment and violence, our outward lives will be more peaceful. But the real peace of Christ, the real Pax Christi, is an inward peace found in knowing that you have aligned your life with the purpose of your Creator! It isn’t bucolic shepherds frolicking with lambs under a starry sky, but it is a kind of peace.

In fact, if we look at today’s lesson from the Hebrew scriptures, a passage from the unknown author of the second portion of the Book of Isaiah, we get a clue that the peace God promises is an active peace. The prophets had been proclaiming for some time that peace required justice, but something else is going on in our passage. The author is part of the Hebrew community in exile in Babylon. She or he imagines a day of return, a herald who announces that it is time to return across desolate and rugged terrain. The prophet announces a major construction project. Make a level super highway through the desert. Fill in the valleys, flatten the mountains and hills, turn the rugged wasteland into fertile river plains. This peace is active, maybe even violent in its call for some serious terraforming! The exiles see a path to peace, a path to restoration, but they also know it is going to take some work, it is going to literally change the lay of the land.

It is Isaiah that Jesus reads in the synagogue, and it is through Isaiah that we can come to understand the Pax Christi. The path to peace is found in the life, teachings and victory of Emmanuel, God-with-us, even this Jesus, our Christ, our Messiah. But it is not sappy happy clappy. It is an active peace found in aligning yourself with God’s great purpose. Maybe somewhere under all the frantic commercialism, under the pressures of the holidays, even under the formulaic movies on the Hallmark channel, we can find peace. We can choose peace. Amen.

Our lives hum along,
the hum of dozens of electronic devices,
the capacitors of our lives holding us captive,
the hum of our tires on the road as we zip about,
free to drive and trapped in our driven-ness.
Our lives are musical,
the music of ringtones demanding,
interrupting our concentration,
the music of jingles designed to fuel our need,
the squawking heads of desire.

Amidst all this noice,
this captivity and squawking,
you come,
Our Savior and Our God.

Forgive us our willingness to be held captive,
and grant us your liberation,
grant us your peace,
for we know you still call,
still call,
always calling us to peace,
to freedom,
to reconciliation. Amen.

You see, things don’t really change. We humans can do amazing things, we can be creative and decent. But no matter how hard we try to respond to the divine, to that piece of us hard-wired to love and to create, we still find ourselves acting small and making a complete hash of things. Wall Street or the Appian Way, it’s about the same.

Yet in the middle of all this misery came Jesus, the cousin of a popular preacher, who himself developed a powerful preaching ministry. But it turned out to be far more than a preaching ministry. It quickly became apparent that God was with this Jesus in some special way, that he had what theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher called “perfect Christ-consciousness.” In a world where pretty much everything bad was contagious, from actual disease to ritual uncleanliness, Jesus became a source of contagious good. Healing poured out of him, the unclean touched him and became clean. Even in his death, he reversed the human order of evil and contagion. There was no worse way to die then to be hung on a tree, ritually unclean and a visible symbol of Rome’s terrorism campaign in the provinces. Yet the cross, that great unclean symbol of shame, became clean, became a source of healing and renewal, through Jesus.

During his life and ministry, Jesus had a pretty simple message. The Creator invites you to live life in full now, to see blessing and wonder, to live beyond yourself, to be more than you dream you can be. Jesus shared this good news:  you can be that amazing creative loving spirit called into being by your Creator. All you have to do is say yes.

It’s a pretty simple message, and a pretty simple choice. Choose to live in a world of aimlessness and sin, or choose life in full. And by life in full Jesus didn’t mean being rich, didn’t promise health. Life in full meant and means life aligned with God’s purpose. Not in that weird God is a puppet-master Rick Warren sort-of way. In the way of creativity and growth and transcendence and love.

I mention this because it is easy to get caught up in the business of doing church. We do church, but we don’t always do God’s mission. God’s threefold mission for the church: To deepen faith through transformative worship, through spiritual practice and through scripture study; to build God’s just and caring realm through prophetic witness, direct and action and caring ministries, and the part of God’s mission for the church we consider this week, to make disciples.

Now, one traditional reading of the apocalyptic called the Revelation to John says that 144,000 males are getting into heaven, and that’s it. Ladies, you’re out of luck, so you might as well get to sinning. And guys, it’s a competition, sort of like a reality show… someone can steal your spot. If that reading is correct, you don’t really want to tell people about salvation through Christ. It’s like the ultimate reality show, Extreme Hoarders: Salvation Edition. But, if like me, you don’t believe in this reading of this rather doubtful text, then why are you not telling people about Christ?

Notice I didn’t say why aren’t you bringing people to church. A covenant community is necessary to follow the way of Jesus, and the form we are most familiar with is church, but this form is changing, new forms are emerging, there have always been forms of church other than American 20th century civil denominationalism. And I’m not talking about corporate consumer mega-church. Tomorrow night in Pastor’s Class, we’ll talk about some of the new church and covenant community models, springing up spontaneously and organically like a spiritual Occupy movement, the Zuccotti park of the pews. Might God grace us with more rebels, more artists, more naïve young folks young people who believe they can make the world a better place, can make the church a better place, and in the process remind us that we were once those young people. But in the interim, know this: sharing the good news of salvation is not about adding new members to this church so we can fill volunteer slots and increase pledge units. If we are a vibrant mission-focused church, that will happen, but it can’t be what drives our evangelism.

No, effectively sharing the Good News of salvation happens for one reason and one reason only. Your life is changed by the act of choosing to follow Jesus. You can feel yourself being sanctified, being made holy, through the action of the Spirit. And you love others, your heart breaks for others, and you want them to have what you have, to have the joy, contentment, to experience the call of the divine. You may want to change the world… that comes next week when we talk about building God’s just and caring realm, but this week we are discussing the personal, the one-on-one, the simple message that life is better with Christ.

I said its personal and I mean it. I’m not in this business for the money! No matter how hard it gets, how stressed I get, how much the world breaks my heart, I find a deep and abiding peace in Christ. And I cannot stand to see others wallowing in misery when they could have what I have. Its personal because, despite appearances to the contrary, I love being alive, and I love this creation, and I love you all, every single knucklehead. How can I not? You are amazing, miracle upon miracle, and you do amazing things. Okay, sometimes amazingly strange things, but so do I. And sometimes we do amazingly loving things, amazingly creative things, we become imaginative co-creators with our Creator. When we are being sanctified there is a powerful holy imagination that can seize us. I want that for you, and you’re already here. Imagine how much I want it for those poor shmoes out there whose entire values system is given to them by this culture of greed and consumerism! They are miserable, playing a game they can never win, in pursuit of earthly security when there is no earthly security, and even if there was, what would that buy us? No amount of Oil of Olay or Hair Club for Men is going to make you live forever.

I want those folks out there to know that God wants them to live a fulfilling life right now, to be transformed right now. That’s why I do this, that’s why I am passionate about helping you become a healthy church, because I think we are surrounded by thousands of people who don’t get it and could, who could know Jesus. Do I seem a little crazy? Good! I am a little crazy, because what I believe is crazy, at least by the standards of the world. Paul knew it. So did that crazy man who cursed the fig tree, who embraced his own death and forgave his executioners. That crazy man who sent his followers out two by two to spread the Good News. God’s realm is at hand. Believe and follow and you will know life in full.

I’m still the analytical scholarly pastor that can explain how complexity science fits into theology, that can argue for panentheism… no I didn’t say pantheism… and yes, I can tell you the difference. I am still the pastor who gets fired up over the vast con game we call the US economy, over our own addiction to cheap Chinese goods, an addiction that is killing us as surely as if we were mainlining heroin. But when it comes to this second mission of the church, I’m not interested in reason. There are people suffering, and I have the ability to help them.

We live in a society where it is perfectly okay to talk about Justin Beiber’s sex life, or lack of a sex lfe, but we can’t tell people what we believe. Who made those rules? Tolerance is one thing, rolling over and playing dead is another.

This church has had no evangelism deacon since I arrived. We do little to tell others about our presence. Let’s fix that! Maybe the folks we tell about Christ won’t fit here. That’s okay. Maybe they will. That’s okay too. Maybe they’ll change us… that’s the scariest idea of them all!

The Way of Jesus blazes a trail out of our misery, offers us a superhighway to our better selves, allows us to live into God’s dream for us. It is an alternative to all the systems we humans make-up for ourselves. It was an alternative in the streets on ancient Jerusalem, of Corinth and Hippo. It is an alternative on Middle Road, in Bay Shore, on Fire Island, even on Pennsylvania Avenue and Wall Street. Sharing that good news with others is one of the three tasks Jesus left his followers, one of the three great missions of the church. As Christians we get our own version of that ancient commandment: Go forth and multiply.

Go forth and multiply. Amen.

We hear on an almost weekly basis that the church is dead. Again, a bit premature. There are many regions of the world where Christianity is still a vital movement that provides meaning in the lives of individuals and cultures. But you could make a pretty convincing case that Christianity is dead in western Europe, and terminally ill in the United States. All forms of Christianity in the United States have been in decline, and only those with particular appeal to immigrants have been able to stave off the worst effects. The United Church of Christ part of what is referred to as the Mainline Protestant movement, and our particular form of Christianity has suffered the most. While we in Sayville might be surviving, an astonishing number of Mainline churches have closed their doors in each of the last two decades, and the current economic crisis isn’t helping. But why? If we are to believe, and we are indeed to believe, that the church is the body of Christ called into existence by Jesus and blessed by the Holy Spirit, why is it in such terrible straits?

Well, if we did an energy inventory in most failing congregations, we’d find that their passion goes into raising funds for the purpose of keeping the doors open so they can raise more funds. Their worship life is a combination of social hour, musical performance and empty ritual. The pastor, terrified that she or he might offend someone, tells the congregation the same thing, week after week. It’s all okay. You’re just swell. Keep doing what you’re doing. Jesus came so you can be a happy middle-class consumer. There may be, in the congregation and even in the pulpit, decent and deeply spiritual people, but something has gone wrong.

These failing churches have abandoned God’s mission for the church. And make no mistake, God has a mission for the church, and it isn’t feeding God’s ego. I believe many things about the divine mystery we name God, but I do not believe God is an infinite narcissist who called the world into being out of need for affirmation and a stroked ego. God has a mission for the church, and it isn’t even about God, it is about us. God calls us to be transformed and to transform others. The mission of the church is to improve lives through the love and the power of Christ. The mission of the church is to improve lives through the love and the power of Christ.

More specifically, we can break the great mission of the church as found in the teachings of the Hebrew prophets and of Jesus and his followers as the following: It is the mission of the church to deepen faith through transformative worship, and through teaching and supporting spiritual practices and the study of scripture. It is the mission of the church to share the love and peace we find in Christ with others by making new disciples. And it is the mission of the church to act as God’s agents in building God’s just and caring realm in this world, combating all manner of injustice and evil, caring for the vulnerable.

Congregations that stop looking inward and re-align themselves to God’s mission thrive. Its that simple. It is my hope that as your pastor I can work with you to help you become the thriving church God wants you to be, for God wants you to thrive. And there is no reason you cannot do so. There is enough talent, there are enough financial resources, Long Island has no shortage of wise Christians and covenant partners, everything is in place for this to be a church that serves God’s mission and thrives, that changes lives through the power of Christ.

And so, this week and for the next two, we will focus on particular aspects of God’s mission for the church. This week we will wrestle with what it means to deepen faith.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that I reject much of the theological framework of the Christian Right. The over-emphasis on a personal relationship with God, the notion that our amazing God is little more than a puppet master manipulating humans, these things I find repulsive, but there is one thing the religious conservatives get right. They expect every Christian to be working to become a better Christian. That pursuit on the part of the individual Christian, in covenant with a Christian community, is met by God with the power of the Holy Spirit in a process we call sanctification, which literally means making holy. The covenant community is the context, the Holy Spirit is the agent, and the result is a holier you. I won’t promise a happier you, but I am not really on board with the world’s definition of happiness anyways. But a holier you is a more contented you.

The religious right will tell you that to become sanctified, you have to work at it. This is what we mean when we say that it is the mission of the church to deepen faith. We begin by having transformative worship. To transform, to literally change shape… it is the purpose of healthy worshiping communities to change one another through worship, to change our hearts. To be fair, at times each of us needs a little spot of familiarity in a changing world, and so there are rituals and patterns that give us comfort, the flow of worship can remain the same, as it has done in some traditions for centuries. But the combination of God’s Word as read in scripture and encountered in the sermon, the prayers and acts of praise in spoken and musical form, the rites of the church when we receive new members, when we baptize, when we re-create the radically open table of salvation in Christ, when we acknowledge our vulnerability by bringing our offerings to God, especially when we give sacrificially, these all combine to crack open our hearts, made hard by a world filled with aimlessness and sin. And it doesn’t stop there. Worship isn’t just supposed to be transforming us. If our worship is only designed to meet our needs, we still are not fully attending to God’s mission. You first question should never ever ever be “did I like it?” Your first question should always be “is it God’s will?” And that should immediately be followed by the question “did this worship experience welcome and was it relevant to those who are visiting who so desperately need to know Jesus?” It’s not about us. We already have Jesus and one another.

If transformative worship is the communal act of deepening faith, then spiritual practice is the personal act. Not every spiritual practice works in exactly the same form for every person, but a life without spiritual practice is a life without sanctification. It really is true, that old expression, you get out of it what you put into it. When you put an effort into personal spiritual practice, you receive countless blessings.

The minimal spiritual practices for a Christian life are praying, offering and sabbath keeping. Jesus prayed. Jesus gave specific instructions on how those who chose to follow him should pray. Healthy congregations have prayer groups, and healthy Christians have personal prayer practices. If you are not praying, and really want to feel the power of God in your life, let me know. I will either work with you myself or match you up with a praying Christian.

Healthy Christians commit to the spiritual practice of stewardship. For all we know about the corrupt system of the ancient Temple, and all we know about how Jesus rejected that bureaucracy, it is pretty clear that Jesus commanded the tithe, in fact, that Jesus expected even more radical giving, above and beyond the first 10% of income that is the tithe. Your offering not only resources the church to accomplish God’s mission, it also acts to sanctify you. You acknowledge your utter dependence on God, you stake your claim to a value system that is not made by humans, does not come from Madison Avenue, Goldman Sachs or your television screen. Your relationships are transformed, with money, with culture, with those you love, and most especially with the divine.

Healthy Christians keep sabbath. We are studying in Sunday School the many forms sabbath keeping might take in our modern culture. For all the modern conveniences that are supposed to make our lives easier, we are more scattered than ever, more overwhelmed. Sabbath keeping can be combined with the ancient and still valid spiritual practice of fasting, from food, yes, but from other things as well. Many Americans, many who aren’t even Christians, have begun to practice “meatless Mondays,” and in so doing calling attention to and taking action about the tremendous toll our over-consumption of meat is taking on our planet, not to mention on our own bodies. Others take media fasts or media sabbaths, where they simply designate some period of time when the computer and television will remain off, when the smart phone will play dumb. Adbusters, the folks that sparked Occupy Wall Street, have been trying for years to get us to refuse to fall for the Black Friday shopping trap. What would it look like if we declared consumer sabbaths? In fact, imagine if you will, what it would look like if we had a congregational practice of making no retail purchases one week a month. How would that discipline nurture your spiritual health? What questions would you be forced to ask about your relationship with money? With stuff? With cheap Chinese made goods?

There are many other spiritual practices, and as we explore other aspects of God’s mission for the church in the next two weeks, we will discover that doing God’s mission has a sanctifying effect, and so feeding the hungry can also be a spiritual practice, and telling others about Jesus can be a spiritual practice, and getting arrested in pursuit of justice can be a spiritual practice.

Finally, a healthy Christian studies God’s Word. Jesus studied and interpreted scripture. I have seen young people get to confirmation class not knowing that a gospel was in the New Testament! Mainline Protestants have become scripturally illiterate, and this must change. The Bible is the lens through which we encounter the world, it is the starting point for our encounter with our tradition. If you don’t own one, buy one. If you can’t afford one, tell me, I’ll buy you one or find someone who will. If you have questions, ask… it’s not an easy book to read. Come to Sunday School, join a bible study, but do something.

If you are part of a transformative worship community, if you are engaged in spiritual practices, praying, giving and keeping sabbath, if you are studying God’s word, you will be sanctified, made more holy, you will be more content. And amazingly enough, churches that do this first mission of the church well, do the other ones well too, for they have stopped navel-gazing, and started engaging the divine.

It is my belief that deepening faith is the essential first step in any church transformation process, is the first step in re-aligning ourselves with God’s mission, is critical to becoming once again a thriving church. Take a chance and you will be rewarded. If you are stuck, weighed down with spiritual lethargy, take the plunge. Deepening your faith is like diving into the cold and blue. You will come awake, you will rise from your spiritual grave. Invigorating and terrifying, and oh so worth it.

What I am asking is nothing small, I am asking you to dedicate all that you are to walking more closely with your creator, I am challenging you to become sanctified, I am asking you to be holy. Sounds impossible. The late British sculptor Henry Moore advised that “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

Moore is partly right. You cannot possibly do it, not alone. And you’ll never get there on this side of the grave. But it is a great and holy task, and God is there, ready for the encounter. May we be a church that others can say acts to deepen faith, of its members and of those who need Jesus in their lives. Amen.

Jesus gave his followers an impossible task. Abandon everything, your jobs, your family, everything, and follow me. Imagine if that had worked. If those first followers had made disciples of all nations, everyone dropping all relations and obligations to live into God’s realm, who would harvest the grain, bake the bread, build the houses? It’s not that Jesus was speaking symbolically, he clearly wasn’t. Just ask Simon Peter, Matthew, Mary Magdalene. Get up meant get up, follow meant follow, and let the dead bury the dead meant exactly that. So with Jesus gone they were faced with figuring out how to live in a way that was faithful to the Jesus Way while at the same time managing to literally live. Paul referred to it as being “in the world but not of the world,” and we have been trying to figure it out ever since.

Maybe it was a little easier in the first years to be “in but not of,” to keep a distance from what was seen as a corrupting the popular culture, the ancient equivalent of a jersey Shore and Real Housewives world. Life was chaotic and those alternatives were not very appealing. The Jesus community formed small groups, and as the movement spread it became more diverse. They kept their distance from sin and temptation, but crossed other boundaries. The rich sat at table with the poor, slaves and masters broke bread together, and those who had followed various Hebrew sects were joined by former pagans who knew nothing of Yahweh before they encountered Christ. But there was a turning point, and it didn’t work out so well.

First there was Constantine’s famous edict of toleration. It didn’t mean completely smooth sailing for the growing Christian movement, there would be other challenges, but finally, in 380 of the common era, Christianity was named the state religion of the Roman Empire, the mighty power controlling portions of Europe, Asia and Africa. And we’ve been in trouble ever since.

You see, Jesus was anti-establishment. He was the original hippy! He opposed the establishment, the hierarchy, of his own culture. Pharisees and law clerks, the self-righteous and mighty, all received heaping doses of scorn. And while he was pastoral with members of the occupation army from Rome, he denounced that empire as well, and it did what all great empires do when faced with an alternative message. It used brutality, and finally murder, to preserve its power. Needless to say, it was a bit of a challenge for followers of this most anti-establishment of the Hebrew prophets, this God-with-us, to figure out how to establish structure within their own communities, and it was pretty much a train wreck when they became the establishment itself. As Jesus might have said many centuries later to his followers, “Dude, you’ve become The Man!” And once Rome collapsed and the Christian hierarchy filled the vacuum, becoming an earthly ruler, well… Paul’s “in but not of” was long forgotten.

For centuries the church has modeled itself on structures in the culture around it, usually with disastrous results. When empires and monarchs were the norm, the church became a kingdom, its monarch bejeweled an wearing a crown. When the decentralized nation-state developed, the break-away Protestant church organized itself in decentralized ways. When corporations and civic organizations rose to prominence after the Second World War, the church became both corporation and civic club. And that is where we are stuck today. Of course, the current model was adopted in an entirely different cultural context than the one we live in today. Folks stayed in the same community for years, stayed in the same job at the same corporation to which they were loyal, and that loyalty was rewarded with a gold watch and a pension. Those days are gone. Corporations are part of the vast criminal enterprise that is our economy, betraying their retirees, looting pension funds, all while enriching their executives and the speculators who drain life out of our economy.

The coat and tie are the uniform of the corporate age, the armor of the warriors of greed, and you will rarely see me wear them, because this is not a corporation or a government or any other form of human institution, this is God’s church. I am not a fan of clericalism, the privilege historically associated with ministers. I truly believe in the priesthood of all believers, allow you as congregants to speak the words of institution, no longer sit in a chair fancier than the lay person who celebrates with me, but I think we give away too much that is symbolic in our culture with our hostility to clergy dress, and so I wear the collar as a sign that my business is God’s business, that I am not an executive or town council member, as a sign that the way we do business here is not necessarily how they do business out there.

If we are wrong to model ourselves on the corporate, the civic organizations, Lions Club and Masons, offer no better alternative. They are just as stuck and unwilling to adapt as the church, are just about dead, a land of grey heads in an endless cycle of committee meetings and fundraisers, all the while bemoaning the absence of young people.

Many churches that have tried to adapt have by and large done so by modeling themselves on new cultural powers, the mall and the retail chain. They have turned Christianity into a self-centered enterprise, a consumer product that is all about you, the consumer. Be a Christian and get rich. Be a Christian and know your own, personal Jesus. Do whatever it takes to bring them in the door, manipulate their emotions, pick off members from weak and declining churches, this is the new way, and it is just as corrupting as the secular alternatives. It is no more “in but not of” than a monarch-pope surrounded by gold, wearing satin and Prada.

Funny enough, the answer has been in front of us all along. Right there in the New Testament, in the Acts of the Apostles and the authentic letters of Paul, the ones before that made-up nonsense in Timothy. And what we see is a community that was exactly “in but not of” the world, that was at the edges and that was doing the one thing the church is supposed to be doing, transforming lives through the love of Christ. They innovated and adapted, and most important of all, they built covenantal relations. The churches today that are thriving, that have turned from the endless cycle of decline and despair and have become sustainable witnesses to God’s realm have figured this out.

And so I offer you a description of the new church, one that is not only consistent with progressive postmodern Protestant belief, but is scriptural and successful. Let me say that again. The model of church that is succeeding in these chaotic times, the model of church that looks nothing like the church of thirty years ago, is also far more scriptural.

The church is a group of believers that have made a decision to follow the Way of Jesus. It has nothing to do with being baptized as an infant or growing up in a church or whether your parents are Christians and so you falsely claim the title of Christian, to follow the Way of Christ means to make a decision for Christ. And while Jesus doesn’t give us the clearest instructions on how we are to live in this world, he makes one thing perfectly clear: the only model Jesus gives us is a communal model. To be a Christian is to be in relationship with other Christians, and so the church is a series of overlapping relationships. To be a Christian is to be a member of a church, there is no such thing as a “spiritual but not religious” Christian. Yet more, these relationships are not ordinary every day relationships. Scripture tells us that we become one in Christ in the church, and so we give these heightened God-bearing relationships a special name. We call this special form of relationship a covenant, modeled after the relationship we believe the founders of our faith tradition had with the divine mystery we call God. And so we are in covenant, as Abraham, David and Mary were in covenant.

And so this is the first mark of the church, that it is formed by individuals who have decided to follow the Way of Jesus and have covenanted to do so together and so entered into deep and holy relations with others along the Way. There will always be folks who are at the edges of the community, but it is our job to get to know them, to draw them always deeper into the circle of love, the circle of caring, and the circle of daring, that is our covenant. And if you find yourself out there on the edge, disconnected and okay with a Sunday-only faith, know this: the deeper you move into covenant, the greater will be your reward.

The second mark of the church is this: that its one and true goal is the mission assigned to it by God: to deepen faith through spiritual practice, through worship, through study of scripture; to make disciples by sharing the Good News of salvation through Christ boldly, and to bring those who make a decision for Christ into covenant circles; and to build God’s just and caring realm by attending to vulnerable members of the covenant community while also declaring God’s justice in the world through prophetic witness and direct action, by answering Jesus’ call to feed, clothe, heal and house. Before these great scriptural missions, all else must fall. When any other priority usurps the rightful place of God’s mission, there is no longer a church. It is only in Christ that we exist as a church, only through God that we are redeemed, only through the Spirit that we witness in the world. It is not the mission of the church to preserve its building, as lovely as it may be, for plenty of churches have closed their doors with the building still intact. A friend and colleague posted pictures on Facebook recently as her church’s building was demolished. Nor is it anywhere in God’s mission to keep everyone happy all the time or to meet the demands of gossips and bullies, critics and saboteurs. It is a church when it is doing God’s mission, and when it is doing God’s mission, it will thrive. Churches have survived in deplorable conditions, enslaved and oppressed. In fact, history shows us that the church is always at its best when it is at odds with the aimlessness and sin that surrounds it!

The third mark of the church is this: that it is innovating and daring, a flexible network of believers who are in the world and so interacting with the world, the world of aimlessness and sin that is crying out for Jesus. It is a church in the world, Paul by boat and Paul by Roman road, the council with Peter and the Roman jail, it is moving, every day, making new connections, transforming. The true church is not static, never says thing like “that’s not how we do it here.” The true church says “let’s give it a try,” always just at the edge, daring to serve God, daring, daring, a network of holy acrobats with no net but Christ. The third mark of the true church is change.

Relationship, change, mission: marks of the church, marks of churches that are thriving, marks of churches that are providing people an answer in a culture so desperately in need of answers. My ministry has one purpose only. I am not the purveyor of the Jesus brand, the savior who will restore the church of 1970. I am the one you have called through the grace of God to help you become once again a thriving church, living into the future God dreams for you, and so I have worked tirelessly to help you deepen and renew relationships, beginning with your leadership team, and since I am you and you are me, since we are church together, I have opened the doors of my home and of my heart. I have called you to mission, using God’s will as the test for all we do. You will hear me ask again and again, you will begin to ask yourself, how does this action, how does this project, improve lives through the love of Christ. Numbers are nice, increased membership, a church that is financially resourced to do God’s mission, but God’s mission is the measure. Lives transformed is the true measure of our success. And to make all of this real, we must re-learn how to learn, how to adapt. And so I have been your teacher, not doing for you, but teaching you how to do.

This is God’s church, and it is an amazing place to be at an amazing time. Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ has a long and proud history, and it doesn’t have to end anytime soon. The saints who have gone before us, some of the saints who are still with us, have been bold. It is your time. Be bold. Be the church that God wants you to be, for God wants you to thrive. Not the building, beautiful as it may be, not the history, as much as we are grounded in it, but the dynamic covenant community of God’s mission people, an adaptive network of people on the Way of Jesus. Start changing lives, start now. If you have not done so, make a decision for Christ, and if you need to know more about what that means, what you have to risk to follow Jesus, come see me. We serve an Amazing God, we are God’s church. Amen.