Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

Preached by Winton Boyd on Sunday, June 27

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Sitting in the hospital after the birth of our first child, we had too many visitors with too much advice. Almost all of our friends who were a bit older joked that while our little boy was cute, “wait til he’s a teenager.” One couple who visited stood out – Elgin and Sally. Parents of 7 children themselves, they simply said, “enjoy each stage. Each stage is beautiful in its own way.” Not only were their words positive and encouraging, but they seemed to endorse that while raising children was a universal experience, ours would be uniquely beautiful and uniquely ours – and they were right.

Struggling to stand up after finishing my first marathon in Chicago in 2000, my children kept telling me how cool it was to see the lead runners as they waited for me. “Wow Dad, you should have seen them, they were so fast!” I, on the other hand, placed about 15,000th out of 25,000 runners. Clearly this experience of finishing a marathon was not unique, but the exhilaration and delight was totally mine …

Sitting in a circle of about 10 people in a Bedouin camp in eastern Israel in 2005, I was amazed to be among Germans, black South Africans, Native Americans, Palestinians and a Pilipino. I listened to their stories of yearning for freedom, fighting oppression, longing for truth and hoping for a better life. I sensed in their hope to be known and remembered a universal human longing – particular to each of us, shaped by our own circumstances, yet shared by humans around the world.

We live in both the particular and the universal…

This summer we are preaching through the Phoenix Affirmations, 12 affirmations of progressive Christian faith. Today’s affirmation is we celebrate the God whose Spirit pervades and whose glory is reflected in all of God’s Creation, including the earth and its ecosystems, the sacred and secular, the Christian and non-Christian, the human and non-human.

For too long Christians of all stripes have focused so much on the particularity of the Christian faith that we have entirely neglected the universality of it. A progressive Christian faith holds a creative tension between many sources of inspiration. In the world of faith that shaped me, the primary source of inspiration was the Bible and maybe nature as it pointed back to the Scriptures. In the liberal world I came to inhabit as an adult, the bible was thrown out while nature, secular, and religious philosophers, and people steeped in the ways of the mind took precedence.

In the progressive church today, we hold on to the ancient while we embrace the poets of today, we celebrate Jesus while we listen with eager ears to the voice of Buddha, Jewish mystics and atheist commentators – to name a few. In addition, we cherish wisdom from all corners of humanity while also remembering that the non human world speaks to us of God. It comes out in relationships with animals, and profound experiences with rocks, the ocean, the stars, and the Wind.

One clear example for me centers around the cycles of our lives.

The ancient church has long held to a liturgical cycle rooted in the life of Jesus, the life of the church and the experiences of others in the bible. Along with the lectionary cycle of readings from the Bible for Sunday worship, this liturgical cycle – beginning with Advent, moving through Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter day and Easter season to Pentecost and the season of Pentecost – was created to teach us about the faith in a systematic way. While we do not observe the lectionary readings in this church very often, we usually follow the liturgical cycle and find it helpful in our pursuit of the Christian faith. We have a few tensions around wanting to sing Christmas music during Advent, we might quibble a bit with the darkness of Lent, and we rarely really focus much on the season of Pentecost – but it is a useful tool in our faith journey.

A few years ago, an evangelical leader suggested that we might re –do the liturgical cycle to lift up the life and teaching of Jesus – but tie it less to the ancient liturgical cycle and more to the cultural cycle we live. In his re-write, the church needed to pay special attention to what he called “cultural high holy days” which included Christmas Eve (definitely not advent), Valentine’s Day, Super Bowl Sunday, Easter, Memorial Day, July 4, Back to school in September and Thanksgiving. His point was that these are the days families and friends gather, these days shape our calendars and vacations and spending. While I don’t remember his biblical cycle and how it connected to this – I thought it was brilliant that he said “let’s work with what is, not what we think people should know.”

More recently, however, I have been paying attention to the cycles of the season – fall, winter, spring and summer. One year I tied the liturgical cycle to the seasonal cycle. One year we held ‘seasonal retreats’ and had seasonal poetry readings. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen our program life shaped by the opening of the gardening season, and ending with the Harvest Brunch. What I have discovered in myself and in others is that this seasonal cycle – more than the liturgical and more than the cultural ones – seems almost innate to so many people. We feel the lightness of the world in spring, we experience abundance in summer, darkness in winter. Exploring these themes within our walk of faith is both exciting and helpful. It helps tie our faith to our body, to the world around us, to the creatures that inhabit our surroundings.

In the end, what I love about the progressive Christian faith is that all of these influences, and so many more, help shape and define our faith. My sense is that our contribution as a congregation to the progressive Christian tradition is our willingness to be led by creation, multiple faith expressions, the wisdom of science and psychology and the beauty of the poets — and to reflect on how they inform and enrich our Christian experience.

An author and friend who I admire deeply has written about his own struggle with Christian language. Reflecting on a 30-year journey and his changed relationship with Christianity, he writes,

“My squeamishness(about the Christian faith today) has little to do with any fundamental change in my beliefs. I still understand myself as a Christian and many traditional Christian understandings still shape my life. But…I find it hard to name my beliefs using traditional Christian language because that vocabulary has been taken hostage by theological terrorists and tortured beyond recognition…I would be lost in the dark without the light Christianity sheds on my life, the light I find in truths like incarnation, grace, sacrament, forgiveness, blessing and the paradoxical dance of death and resurrection. But when Christians claim that their light is the only light and that anyone who does not share their understanding of it is doomed to eternal damnation, things get very dark for me. I want to run screaming out into the so called secular world, which is I believe, better named the ‘wide wild world of God’ – where I can recover my God given mind.

“Out there, I catch sight once again of the truth, goodness, and beauty that disappear when pious Christians slam the door on their musty, windowless, lifeless room. Next to a Christian eclipsed by theological arrogance, an honest atheist shines like the sun. Next to a church profaned by its exclusion of ‘otherness’ a city of true diversity is a cathedral.” (Parker Palmer, The Promise of Paradox)

I suspect his words ring true for the experience many of us have had. The quickest way to uncover that in ourselves is to gauge our reaction when we hear some traditional concepts come out of the mouths of those we find exclusionary – wonderful, useful, powerful words like ‘evangelism, salvation, grace, discipleship, and others. Words that in the context of their biblical use are NOT exclusionary, not weapons towards those who believe differently. But we live in our time and it our place and we know how these words have been co-opted.

The same writer I just quoted, Parker Palmer, coined another very useful phrase – “standing in the tragic gap” – living between reality and possibility, between what is and what could and should be…If we are willing to actively “hang in there” with (others) holding unresolved tension between reality and possibility and inviting something new into being – we have a chance to participate in the evolution of a better reality.” (Promise of Paradox)

Maybe as progressive Christians, this is what we do – hold the space and live in the tension for an ever more creative understanding of faith. We bring our whole lives to bear on the universal truth of faith and the particular path called Christianity. Living as agnostics, as Zen Buddhist Christians, as Gardener Christians, as Christians in progress, lovers of culture and lovers of faith, as people of faith in a world torn apart by faith – we stand as witnesses to both reality and possibility. We hold space for ourselves and others who need space to make sense of the craziness of their lives; who need and long for the experience of grace (even if they don’t call it that); who find in our love incarnation – a concept hard to explain but easy to know when we see it; and who will benefit from our collective willingness to point to a light in the darkness.

Texts for today

Matthew 7:12 — So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

“Not one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what he desires for himself” (40 Hadith of an-Nawawi 13, Islam).

“Wound not others, do no one injury by thought or deed, utter no word to pain thy fellow creatures” (The Law Code of Manu, Hinduism).

“Do not do to others what you would not like yourself” (The Analects 12:2, Confucianism).

“If you do not wish to be mistreated by others, do not mistreat anyone yourself” (Counsels of Adurbad 92, Zoroastrianism).

“Having made oneself the example, one should neither slay nor cause to slay. . . . As I am, so are other beings; thus let one not strike another, nor get another struck. That is the meaning” (Dhammapada, Buddhism).

“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18, Judaism)