9.25.16
Rev. Anna Woofenden
The Garden Church
Readings: Micah 6:6-8 and Acts 2:42-47
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On Tuesday evening, we met for our first Leadership Table meeting, the group of people who regularly sit around this circle and want to continue to come together to discover how we can make church together. Bree led us off with an exercise for our introductions. She took a ball of yarn and started off by introducing herself and saying why she was there, and then tossing the ball of yarn to the other side of the circle. Then Connie introduced herself and shared why she was there and then reached across the circle and gave the yarn to Stefan, who after introducing himself tossed it to Jedi, and so on. After all of us had spoken and each had a piece of the yarn in our hands, we looked at the web that had been created—beautiful gold threads weaving their way back and forth across the circle.
Then Bree invited us to notice how we are all interconnected. Referencing back to the prayer we pray each week in worship:
Living into your vision of more heaven,
Here on earth,
And naming our place in Your interconnected web of life,
We name our prayers to you.
And then she invited Peter to raise his arm really high, and then Nora to take her string across the circle, and Nancy to change places with Sarah, and as each person moved, we all noticed. We noticed how we all felt the movement on the string, the tug, the reverberations, as we are all interconnected.
Recognizing our interconnection and allowing the awareness of it to change our actions, change our hearts, is one of our core values here at the Garden Church, and leads us into this conversation today about who we are as a community as we make church together.
This week is the second in a three part series on what it means for us to make church together, to be church together, to cultivate church together. Each and all of us have the opportunity to be Cultivators, coming together to nurture and be nurtured by this community, to make and be church together. We have three markers of being a Cultivator, of making church together.
They are: Pray—our spiritual commitment, Pledge—our commitment of resources, and Participate—our commitment of our gifts and time and engagement. Last week we talked about prayer—or our spiritual commitment—and committing to regularly pray on our own and together as our hearts and lives are changed by commitment to regular practice.
As we move into talking about pledging—how we use our financial resources and how we financially support making church together—I invite us to think of it in terms of a practice that changes us, and in terms of acts of justice. Being a Christian, being part of spiritual community, gives us the constant opportunity to transform and change, our selves and the community we are part of. Including our relationship to money. Being part of a spiritual community can be what re-orients our relationship to money, positions, and things. As we increase our awareness to our interconnection and our commitment to love God and love neighbor, this actually leads to changes in what we swipe our credit card for and how we prioritize our giving.
This passage in our readings today from the Book of Acts about the founding of what we now know as the “Christian church” gives us a place to start as we too are discovering what it means to be church together. Last week we focused on the idea of prayer, this week, let’s turn our attention to this idea of sharing all things in common… I know, it sounds a little overly idealistic, like I’m suggesting we all move out into the woods and have a commune together. But I think actually this radical call is both available, and necessary within our current context here and now today, in the middle of the city. It’s the invitation to move beyond only our own needs and to be in community together. Because the truth is, we are all interconnected, and the choices I make have an impact on others.
Being part of community together is the constant reminder that we are all tied up in each other’s well being, and can change our priorities and re-orient our connection to each other and to money.
Our passage from Micah asks: What shall I bring before you, God? What makes God pleased? And it’s not all the things, all of our money, all of our position that pleases God, it’s our changed hearts, our transformed actions, our doing of justice, loving of mercy and compassion, and walking humbly with our God. Being part of a church together reminds us every time we gather of God’s deep truth that we are all tied up in each other’s wellbeing. Hearing and seeing God’s truth regularly together combats scarcity, and breaks down consumerism. God’s truth invites us to look honestly at our collective societal sins, and then it’s the voice that is constantly assuring us that “there is enough, there is enough, there is enough, enough and some to share.”
When we put our attention to this awareness of our interconnection, life can suddenly become more complicated. Because choosing to follow Jesus, choosing to live lives of faith, is more than just adhering to a set of beliefs; it is an invitation to an entirely new way of living in the world. And this life calls us to care about the things that Jesus cared about: Seeking justice. Rescuing the oppressed. Living a life of love and transformation. When the Lord walked on earth, he mixed all sorts of things up when it came to people and wealth and possessions. Those words of the Magnificat, Mary’s Song, that we heard just now in song, turns things upside-down as the focus goes from things and wealth, to people and relationships, as the powerful are brought down and the lowly lifted up, as the hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent away empty.
Hanging out with Jesus changes our relationship with things and money and each other and God and ourselves. Hanging out with Jesus means that we’re going to likely be uncomfortable, we’re going to be asked to look at places in ourselves that need to change, we’re going to be challenged to learn to love in new ways and to be part of seeking and doing justice. As Dr. Cornel West put it so well: “Justice is what love looks like in public.”
“Love (ing) the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and love your neighbor as yourself. (Luke 10:27) means actively changing the way we interact with each other, with money, with things, with the world around us, and reorienting ourselves to the way of God, of justice, of being part of this interconnected web.
And friends, oh how we need this in our world right now. How desperately we need to shift this in our culture today. So much of the chaos and pain we see around us stems back to issues of greed and materialism, needing to accumulate money and power as the economic divide deepens and the distance between people increases. We see how fear and scarcity lead to hoarding and keeping resources all to ourselves. We see how poverty and oppression, racial discrimination, anti-immigration rhetoric, violence and marginalization are fed and reinforced the more we as a culture think that the resources are ours and ours alone.
Kerri Meyer, who many of you met a few weeks ago when she was in town for our preachers retreat, wrote “There is Enough,” the blessing song we sing each week. I asked her why she wrote it and she said:
“I wrote ‘There is Enough’ out of my heart’s response to reading the works of Wendell Berry and out of my own craving for a theology of abundance. These are the words of Creation, of Elijah visiting the woman, of the loaves and fishes, of the community of Acts, and I think of the Kingdom of God. I’ve been without an income, relying on Jen, and we’ve only been scraping by in a place where I swear the economy is weighted in favor of the Empire. I want to be generous and so I have to believe these words. I want to be able to receive generosity, so I have to believe these words. ‘There is enough and some to share’ is the opposite of what the idol of capitalism demands we believe. It’s the motto of another possible world.”
God did not make us to be servants and slaves to the world’s pleasures, and to sacrifice all our rams and oil on the altar. God calls us to this life of doing justice and loving mercy, and walking humbly, because it re-orients everything as we begin to believe and live more and more into these words: that there really is enough, enough and some to share. And so in this second week of our Cultivator Series, on pledging, I invite each of us to think seriously about our own financial choices and giving habits broadly, and also to look deeply at how giving to our church is part of our individual and collective transformation.
There’s no one right way to do this work of re-orienting our lives and choices to justice and generosity, which is why we need to keep coming back together in community and wrestling together, and seeing each other, and seeing God teach us. When one of you who I know is currently living in your car or struggling each month to barely make rent pulls out a few dollars and puts it in the offertory or when another of you writes a very large check when you know the church’s bank account is getting ridiculously low, this is living in interconnection. When we are paying attention to each other’s needs, and genuinely caring about the wellbeing of each other, this is being church together.
Yesterday afternoon I walked a few doors down to Farmer Lara’s house. I had in my hand a check for her, the not-nearly-large-enough stipend we give her every month for the immense amount of work she does to keep our farm running and growing here. And I had a bucket of compostables, extra ready to go on the heap from the juicing I’d done that morning. I got to her house amidst a play date and the kids running around, but she had ready for me the big pot that I’d sent the leftovers of soup home with her on Tuesday along with a lovely lunch-sized jar of soup that she’d made, ready for me to take home and eat today.
As I was walking back over, big soup pot in hand, this sermon and our topic today was present with me. “This is kind of what it’s all about,” I thought. It’s this exchange, this sharing, this interconnection. It’s having enough in the church bank account to be able to write the check, enough time while feeding your family of four to make up a single serving jar to feed your neighbor, enough to make the effort to compost those food scraps instead of putting them in the landfill, enough to walk down the street and give a hug and check-in and make these exchanges.
Committing to covenantal community, to being and making church together, and particularly when we talk about money and pledging, is not about forcing giving or shaming you or reinforcing a culture of scarcity. Being church together is an opportunity to be transformed, changed, and to do our part in the transformation of the interconnected web of community and society as a whole. Making the choices and living in gratitude and trust and abundance, loving mercy and doing justice so that more and more we can look at the world around us and find us all singing together, “there is enough, there is enough, there is enough, enough and some to share.”