What I Learned In School

 

This is the text of a message given at the First Congregational Church of Rochester on July 15, 2024, only 11 days after the death of our beloved pastor, Paul Ray. 

We are the Prophets

 This was written several weeks ago and a lot has happened since then. There is no way to forget our communal loss and like Ruth last week, I had to decide whether to change up everything to acknowledge and honor Pastor Paul. As it turns out, I didn’t have to. This message didn’t change much because what Ruth said last week – her challenge regarding keeping alive our heritage of freedom rooted in Christ and passed on to the generations that follow us fit right in with both Independence Day and what Paul left us as his legacy.

 I’m going to start, however, not by talking directly about either of those things, but  by talking instead about gardening.

 In theory, gardening is pretty simple. You poke a seed into the ground and wait. Occasionally that’s enough, but sometimes it isn’t. Often the seed needs more than benign neglect. It needs water, sunshine, and nutrients, not just once, but all along the way until the flower comes, or the tomato, or whatever it is you’re growing.We have to hang out in the garden a lot. If it doesn’t rain, we water the plants. If it gets too cold, we cover them. If bugs show up, we get rid of them. We weed. We get dirty.

 Well, Jesus said the kingdom of God was like a garden, too.

Mark 4: 2-8

. ² He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said: ³ “Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. ⁴ As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. ⁵ Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. ⁶ But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. ⁷ Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. ⁸ Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.”

 Obviously, because this was a parable, Jesus wasn’t really talking about growing crops. He is illustrating a good example of what He does want us to do, however. He wants us to grow the kingdom of God and we want to do it not only because that’s what God has asked of us, but because we can visualize what a world with more of God in it might look like – a world with more justice and peace and generosity and forbearance. A world of cooperation and caring. A world that loves and where everybody grows in God’s good soil. This is the world Paul Ray saw and tried to show us for many years. So, I want to talk about how we might start working toward that today.

 Many of you know that, in 2022, I went back to school. I started college the first time in 1969, but never finished, went on to live a life but got tired of kicking myself for not finishing college, and decided it was about time I did.

 But I had another reason, too. You see, I’d spent a lifetime growing a faith that would sustain my life, a faith broad enough to provide a bridge over tough times and bright enough to enlighten the good ones. But by the time I approached 70, it felt like that faith had been imprisoned in a box and was pushing against the sides with nowhere else to grow. I kept asking questions and wasn’t getting answers.

 Going to school was a way to escape the box, to step outside faith’s traditional boundaries and look at it not from the inside, but from the outside. To see what we, as Christians, look like to people who don’t think like we do. So, I’ve ended up with a Philosophy degree, but what I really learned is a lot bigger than that. I learned what a world that needs God wants from us, and I learned it not from my curriculum or most of my professors, but from intelligent and thoughtful young people who, it turns out, wanted the same thing I did.

 This is what I learned.

 I learned that today’s young adults are looking for exactly what we are – a life based on what is worthwhile, beautiful, and true – but they don’t know where to look. It’s easy to point a finger at them and say that they can’t find it because they spend too much time on their phones, but we’re not telling them anything they don’t already know. They know they’re losing connection with other people but don’t know how to get it back. They retreat into their phones because they don’t feel safe because their world is moving far faster than they can keep up with. When we’re being honest, we feel it too.  

 But the world is not going to slow down. Nothing is going to disappear the internet or any of the other technology that tugs at us. Today’s adults need technology to function in this world. They can’t drop their phones in the garbage and walk away any more than we will abandon television or cars or live without air conditioning just because our grandmother did.

 

Young people know they are living in a chaotic, runaway world and like fledgling plants, they have been uprooted. I first realized this when I was taking a class about the Protestant Reformation and there was quite a bit of discussion about the Bible. When we were discussing Martin Luther’s attitude about the Old Testament, one of the young people raised her hand and asked what the Old Testament was. She had never heard of it. And she wasn’t the only one. She had not even the basic understanding of the Bible. It’s not that her faith had withered or been stolen – she had absolutely no basis from which to form one. And some of these young people had been raised in the church and they still lacked basic understanding of the Bible and often of God.

 Now, at this point, it’s tempting to say that all we need to do is to bring God back into school and into politics – to make God part of daily life. But that ship, as a result of legislation and societal changes, has sailed. Invite them to church, we think, and that will make all the difference. But it won’t. That’s just like poking a seed into the dirt and walking away. To many of today’s adults, church is a superficial form, a dress people put on every Sunday. It’s rules and dogma – lifeless and rigid. They already have plenty of that. Describing salvation to them simply details another way they have failed. Today’s adults want something that lives and breathes, something they can use and someONE who will take their hand and lead them through the maze, then show them how to get home.

 Paul has often said that we are the only Bible that some people will ever read, and it’s true as far as it goes, but in view of this world’s spiritual poverty, we are often the first image not only of the Bible, but of God, that many people will ever see. We not only have to practice our faith in the world, we have to be God to the world. That means we have to be prophets. In Greek, prophesying doesn’t mean telling the future. It means speaking inspired truth. We are to prophesy, to speak from inspiration, in this case, to speak what is inspired by love.

.I remember who I was in 1969, how we used to say that we never trusted anyone over 30. This generation, the one that came to maturity in the pandemic, doesn’t operate that way. They became adults with an understanding that we need each other. I know this because they told me. I know this because they included me in their world when I took the time to listen. I know this because they demonstrate empathy for their fellow humans above any other value. I know this because not one of them said they aspired to personal wealth. They aspire instead to peace, dignity, and common improvement. Their dreams are different from ours. They know they will probably not be able to afford to buy a house or stay in a single job for 30 years. They know they will probably not be able to rely on a government funded retirement. These young people are being liberated from what we came to understand as the American Dream and they are not afraid.  They are going to dream a new dream and they want help.

 Now we know that the help they need ultimately comes from God, but there’s a danger that goes with that knowledge. The danger is being so comfortable in our own faith that we assume what is so familiar to us is accessible to everyone just as easily, and it isn’t. Remember John the Baptist? He faced the same problem. Remember the warning he gave to complacent Jews before Jesus came? He said this:

 “ do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father. ' For I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham".

John is trying to say that our heritage in the church is not what will spread the gospel. This building will not help spread the gospel for someone who has no starting point from which to understand God. Our world is every bit as clueless about God as was Jesus’ and John’s. We need to do what the disciples did. We have to show them.

 So what do we do when just inviting someone to church doesn’t work anymore? We give them what they know they do value. Time. Attention. We listen. We care. We help. We find a way to meet them where they are rather than wait for them to come to us. We encourage. We listen. We help. Of the many things Paul has taught us, he's taught, and more importantly, showed us how to love one another, how to lead with understanding and with an awareness of our common creation. Everybody has their own story we know nothing about and many are lonely. They are confused. They are afraid. But they are listening when we use the language of love. I know this because they listened to me, a 70+ year old lady among fresh faced 20 year olds. They shared and listened and loved me back.

 It’s a new world and new wine needs new wineskins, but it’s still God’s world and He’s still here to shine the way.  It may not look the same as ours, but we don’t have to do anything extraordinary. Just be who we are. If we’re truly following Christ, the words we speak will be inspired by Him. That’s all he wants from us. To follow and imitate Him. This is the goodness we all loved so much about Paul. When we heard him, he sounded like Jesus. In the end, everyone who echoes Christ is a prophet.

 It’s not easy and we might feel like we’re living in a kind of a desert sometimes, but God showed Ezekiel what He can do with a desert:

The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. ² He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. ³ He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”

⁴ Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! ⁵ This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath^[a] enter you, and you will come to life. ⁶ I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”

⁷ So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. ⁸ I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.

⁹ Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” ¹⁰ So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.

¹¹ Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ ¹² Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. ¹³ Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. ¹⁴ I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’”

 God wants us to be prophets. Like modern versions of John the Baptist or the first apostles, but leading with love. If we do this, we won’t ever have to invite anyone into God’s family. They will come because we show them who God is and they will want Him for themselves. If they need a church they will find one because of the longing in their hearts. God, who raises children from stones and makes bones live, will show them.

 I want to leave you with this:

David, when he wrote psalm 27, bemoaned the evil and confusion all around him. He felt it acutely, just like we do, and didn’t know how it would ever get better, but ended saying, “I am confident of this – I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” This is the goodness Paul Ray saw in the world and its people. This world, just the way it is, is God’s land of the living and we are to both experience and impart its goodness.

 “Look”, God says, “I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” The new thing God brings wears the face of this new generation and there are parts for us all to play. May we, as those who prophesy about His goodness, spend our time hanging out in God’s garden with the ones who will come after us and in the process, not only perceive what He is doing, but engage in bringing about the new world He is raising up through them.

 Amen.

Our Lady, Our Promise

 A couple of weeks ago, I sailed across the North Atlantic from England. It was the end off a month-long adventure that included a study-abroad experience called Royals and Rebels that completed my requirements for a bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, followed by a couple of days in Paris, part of which was spent learning some new cooking techniques, and a week on the Queen Mary 2, which treated me to seven days of nothing by ocean. But when people ask me my takeaway from it all, the first thing on my mind was this - sailing into New York Harbor on a sparkling Spring morning.

After having spent a month studying and talking to Brits about our relative political woes and hypothesizing their contradictions and solutions....well....this. There were nearly 2000 guests on board ship that day, and not since the sailaway party had they all been in one place at the same time until that morning. The top decks were shoulder-to-shoulder as we approached the harbor and all eyes trained on the lady who greeted us on behalf of the United States of America. My companions were citizens of dozens of countries from all over the world, but an unprompted hush came over them all as we looked at her shining in the sun.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 

the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

Send these, your homeless tempest-tossed, to me. 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Everyone there, even if they didn't know the words inscribed under that raised lamp, knew what she stood for. There we were, a ship peopled with privileged humanity from almost every continent, remembering a French gift to an American people who had done something no one had ever done before and are still trying to figure out how to succeed in it over the long haul.

The morning before, a very distinguished British gentleman had challenged me with this: he encouraged me to picture our country twenty or fifty years from now after we, having relaxed our borders, lived in a land taken over from people from everywhere else. Then I saw that he wasn't talking about us, the United States, but about Britain. England, after having been master of the world and maintaining a stranglehold over, in particular, India, is now a startlingly cosmopolitan nation, with a quarter million Indian immigrants settling there in 2023 alone. He was looking around at what he saw in his own country, didn't like it, and assumed we wouldn't either. 

But there was something that distressed gentleman didn't understand. The UK rests on its tradition and history, one rooted in centuries of kings and queens stretching back in traceable lines. This country does not. The United States is what people from other places made it. 

My grandparents, all of them, made a journey across the ocean similar to mine. They sailed into that same harbor, saw that same monument to hope, and made a life here. A good one. And I'm not the only one. Everyone I know is descended from immigrants. It is immigrants who made this country, ones who trusted the promise made by the monument. Consequently, change may not be that by which the United Kingdom identifies itself, but it is at the root of who we in the U.S. are. 

It's not possible for a people from a foreign country who settles here with the intent to share in our heritage of freedom to "take over". They simply become the latest in the unbroken chain, not of kings and queens, but of people who have a dream for something better. Will we change as a nation because we have welcomed them? Of course, but that, too, is who we are. It's our responsibility to recognize ourselves in them, because a striving toward hope is something we share. 

This is the Fourth of July, a time to celebrate independence from tyranny. That, too, is who we are, even when the tyranny comes from within. As long as this great lady stands at the entrance to our nation, we have a promise to keep to the world and there is a world out there counting on it. 

Photo by the author