The Converted Community

The names of other gods got worked into the Hebrew religion. How’s that for the most boring sermon lead in ever? The names of other gods got worked into the Hebrew religion, for example the Canaanite word El, which we find not only in titles like Elohim and El Shaddai, in place names like Bethel and Israel, but also in people’s names like Daniel and Michael, names that in the original Hebrew spoke of the person’s relationship to God. But the oldest name for God seems to be Yahweh, a name connected with Israel’s time in Egypt, connected with the Midianites. You see, that wicked revolutionary Moses lead his small rag-tag band of slaves out of Egypt, and in the process Moses came to know the name of the God of Abraham, of the Patriarchs. In Hebrew it is something like the letters YHWH, and we have interpreted this ancient unspeakable name, this name without vowels, as Yahweh, and we dare speak it, we sophisticated modern folks who don’t believe that names have magic.

This ancient name, Yahweh, has been interpreted into modern languages. We refer to God as “I AM,” or maybe as “I AM WHO I AM.” This is a statement of being. But while I was in divinity school, some scholars suggested that in ancient times it could just as easily have been read “I AM BECOMING.” Because of complexities of tense and case in ancient Hebrew that are far beyond my understanding, these scholars argue that the verb is progressive. God is not static, God is becoming. And when I first heard this I thought “well all right then… this is a theology I can deal with, this is a God I can love.” Not the static scary god concept we stole from the Greek philosophers and tried to shove down on Yahweh, nope, this was a living God. “I AM BECOMING.” Well God, so am I, through your grace, so am I.

 

I like progressive verbs a lot. There are denominations much like ours in history and outlook in several other countries, combinations of Reformed and Lutheran traditions, and one of these sister denominations is called the “Uniting Church.” Try that one on for size. After all, are we really a “united”church? Who are those folks down the street? I love the UCC, but I’d be the first to vote for a name change. The Uniting Church of Christ. We’re still doing it, still working to unite in love, love of our Triune God, love of God’s creation, love of one another…

 

So the first thing I want to do is to totally blow up the title of this sermon, the title provided with this otherwise amazing program on evangelism. Not the “converted” community, oh no… the “converting” community… we’re a work in progress!

 

But what does this converting community look like? And are we actually doing anything that would call for a progressive verb. The answer for most Mainline Protestant churches would be no, no progressing, unless you consider dying a progressive action…

 

Yet we have made a decision, we have decided to be a living church following our Living God. We are progressing, and we’d sure like to know what that looks like… what does a dynamic alive church look like?

 

I’ll tell you what it looks like: it’s a mess. Things don’t always start precisely on time, as much as that drives me crazy, and the flowers aren’t always in the same place they’ve been in for the last forty-five years, though I might wish they were, and the babies don’t always make it to the crying room, drowning out the absolute brilliance of my sermon… okay, maybe the babies should cry, in fact a few adults might want to join in. And all of this is because a living church is filled with people and is relational and people are not static, we are messy and complicated and amazing. There is something that happens when we come together, something transcendent in which you plus me becomes more than just us… it’s at the heart of our theology… “two or more gathered in my name”… all that stuff about the church and the Spirit. It’s holy chaos! At our best we are as constant as the wind, which is to say we’re not, which is actually kind of amazing!

 

We are made of super-strings and atoms and quarks, relating to one another, bonding and breaking and re-combining to make, to create… life! Even our mind develops in relationship. Think about how the infant creates a sense of self: there is the “me” which I know only because I come to know the “not me” that I can’t control, the “not me” that determines when I stop feeling hungry and poopy, and there’s the self that develops to mediate between “me” and “not me”, to look back at the “me.” We’re each a little triangle of relationships, constantly moving. No wonder we understand God as relational, no wonder we see in God the dynamic relationship between the God who is source, who is creator, and the God who is incarnate, is redeemer, and the God who is sustainer, is Spirit.

 

Relationships, all these relationships. How in the world am I supposed to preach to you about relationships? By definition they can’t be captured in words if they are at all alive.

 

Maybe we can think about our relationships as a covenanted people by thinking about the relationships of the early church, that might be a starting point. First, there were those who knew Jesus, and I don’t mean that in the modern “do you know Jesus, brother?” sense of the word, I mean as in the people who heard him belch and saw him scratch himself. Some of those people had even given over their lives completely, had become not only followers in the metaphorical sense but also followers in the literal sense, followers of the “put on your sandals and pick up your walking stick and leave your family behind” variety. The Judean religion was fragmented, the followers of Jesus weren’t the only weirdoes, but they were pretty weird. They stood outside of the norm, socially, economically, religiously. Some of you might know what that feels like, to be in the world but not of the world.

 

These first followers were Judeans, and Judeans were already considered a bunch of weirdoes out there on the edge of the empire… uptight, never going with the flow. Weirdoes relating to other weirdoes, Judean follower of Jesus, Judean followers of his crazy cousin knee-deep in the Jordan, Pharisees and Essenes and Sadducees and Zealots with their scary knives. And all of these relating to this massive empire with this massive army that was willing to crucify you if you got out of line, that crucified thousands, leaving their stinking corpses up there for all to see, a warning sign. We’ve already got an incredibly complex inter-play, relationships on top of relationships. The first followers were asked to have Jesus-inspired relationships with one another and with this myriad of Judaisms… to teach and to correct and to love.

 

But Jesus didn’t stop with the Judeans. He healed and taught Gentiles as well. And that was another big and complex category… and those folks didn’t even believe in God, or at least didn’t believe in a way approved of by the Judean hierarchy, so how were they supposed to believe that Jesus had been sent from God? How were the followers of Jesus supposed to relate to these folks, who didn’t even follow the same customs? How were they to do business with them and eat with them and…

 

And then some of those strange people started making their way into the Jesus community, and that was amazing and oh so sweet and exactly what Jesus wanted, but wait… they didn’t know the stories or teachings… and some of them weren’t Judean!… How were they going to teach them and change them and what happens if in the process they change the community a little too?

 

Then there were the social norms of the Empire itself, the brutality of polite society. Everyone accepts everyone else’s gods in this empire, live and let live and all that, except those hard-headed Judeans who keep revolting over religion… What is wrong with them? And then they ignore social convention and break bread together across ethnic and class lines. They keep mixing up the groups, and their economics… well don’t get me started. But they heal and teach and love, even if you’re not one of them…

 

The early church was a cauldron of change. Old systems no longer worked, the idea of an independent Israel / Judea with mighty armies and a mighty Temple filled with a huge bureaucracy that lived off the labor of the community… well between the prophets and the armies of Babylon, Persia, Alexander the Great and Rome… that dream was gone and there needed to be a new dream…

 

Relationships and change and progressive verbs. A little peace and quiet and security would be nice. Can I have a little Twenty-third Psalm time, a little bucolic idyll by the flowing stream? Well, yes… and no. That stream is moving and that grass is growing and there’s a storm cloud over the hill. Alive! Me and you and our relationship to everything!

 

If things do not stand still, if God refuses to stay still, if life and relationships do not stand still, how are we to find our way? Maybe we don’t! Maybe the idea that we’re trying to get somewhere is part of the problem. I feel a little like Mr. Miyagi… “Only do Daniel-san!” As a surfer I was never trying to get anywhere. There were these amazing waves and this beautiful ocean and the exhilaration of riding in and the exhaustion of paddling out. I related to the other surfers to see who’d get the wave, I related to God’s creation, that amazing sea…

 

How do we live in this maelstrom, this cauldron, how do we relate to one another, how do we relate to those folks out there, how do we relate to this creation? Maybe we find our answer in the Book of the Prophet Micah. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God. These are action verbs…

 

We relate to one another and it is beautiful case. God is the God that is becoming, we are the community that is becoming…

 

I’d like to close by revisiting the story of Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch, found in the eighth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. An angel showed up and said to Philip, “Dude, get up and take the road down to Gaza.” So he did. And on the road was an Ethiopian Eunuch who worked for the Ethiopian Queen, and he was riding in his chauffer-driven chariot reading the Book of Isaiah. And Philip approached the limo and said to the Ethiopian “Do you understand it?” and the Ethiopian said “No.” So Philip got into the chariot and explained it all, explained that Jesus was the one foretold, explained Jesus to the eunuch. And the eunuch believed, right then, he believed. And he said to Philip “I want to be baptized!” An early church miracle, a foreigner, someone unclean, an outsider, believed! That angel sure knew what she was talking about! So Philip immediately responded… “come back to Jerusalem, we have a guest book and some name-tags and we’ll be starting a new member class in the Spring and then if you still want to be a follower of Jesus we can discuss your membership.”

 

Or maybe that’s not how it goes at all. Becoming … now! Doing … now! Loving … now! Walking … now! We are, right now, blessed and called and in amazing chaotic relationships. Thanks be to God!