Incarnation,
sermon to UU Church of Galveston, TX, Dec. 2, 2012, First
Sunday of Advent Rev. Ron Robinson
Readings:
Ancient: “There will be
signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among
nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.26People
will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the
powers of the heavens will be shaken.27Then they will see ‘the Son
of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory.28Now when
these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your
redemption is drawing near.”
29Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees;30as
soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is
already near.31So also, when you see these things taking place, you
know that the kingdom of God is near.32Truly I tell you, this
generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.33Heaven
and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.34“Be on guard
so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and
the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly,35like
a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth.36Be
alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these
things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”
Contemporary: ‘So what
does it take to make beloved community happen? I really believe that it begins
with a place. I’ve preached relocation all my life because the communities I’ve
been a part of have been abandoned. Everybody left, so I called them to come
back. But my real concern is for the place. If the church is going to offer
some real good news in broken communities, it has to be committed to making a good life possible for people in the place
where we are. If you care about a place, you’ll care about the kids in that
place. If you don’t care about the kids, they’ll knock out your windows. But
the kids in our neighborhood don’t knock out our windows. If the church is
going to offer some real good news in broken communities, it has to be
committed to a place. One of the first things we did when we came here was to
put in a sandbox and build a jungle gym. We made sure there was a field for
kids to play ball.
“When you’re committed to a place, you also care about the beauty of the place. The flowers around our place are important. Every summer the children come running to ask me if they can take some flowers home with them. They don’t have pretty flowers at home…Shared beauty makes people want to share life together. You don’t have to tend your flowers in a neighborhood very long before you have something to talk to your neighbors about.
“It may sound simple but I think you’ve got to have neighbors you talk to and get to know before you can love your neighbor as yourself. That’s why community development has been so important to me all these years. The church can’t organize the perfect community. If people aren’t drawn by the cords of love to a vision of beloved community, you can’t force it on them. But we can organize for justice. We can develop a community so that there is a place for people to know one another. That’s the work God has given us to do. Only God can send the rain, but we can till the ground by committing to a place and making sure people can flourish there. That’s the first thing the church has to do if we’re going to interrupt the brokenness of society.
“As we commit to our communities, we also need to learn how to see them as economic places. It’s not enough to just move into a place, plant some flowers and be nice to your neighbors. All of that is good, but that won’t address the brokenness of people’s lives because the structures of the community are broken. People need work, good housing, education and health care. So the church has to invest its resources in developing the community. We also need to use our influence to get businesses and government to invest in the community. ..I wish churches spent more time thinking about how their members could love one another and share a common life by working together as a community. Part of the reason our churches are so individualistic is that we just accept the economic systems of our culture without question. We assume that the people who can get the good jobs should go wherever they have to and the people who can’t get the good jobs should just take what they can get. But churches that want to interrupt the brokenness of society ought to be about creating jobs in the community and giving neighbors an opportunity to work together. If we take our communities seriously as economic places, we’ll spend more time thinking about creating good work than we spend thinking about more relevant worship styles or bigger church buildings.”---John Perkins, “Welcome Justice”
“When you’re committed to a place, you also care about the beauty of the place. The flowers around our place are important. Every summer the children come running to ask me if they can take some flowers home with them. They don’t have pretty flowers at home…Shared beauty makes people want to share life together. You don’t have to tend your flowers in a neighborhood very long before you have something to talk to your neighbors about.
“It may sound simple but I think you’ve got to have neighbors you talk to and get to know before you can love your neighbor as yourself. That’s why community development has been so important to me all these years. The church can’t organize the perfect community. If people aren’t drawn by the cords of love to a vision of beloved community, you can’t force it on them. But we can organize for justice. We can develop a community so that there is a place for people to know one another. That’s the work God has given us to do. Only God can send the rain, but we can till the ground by committing to a place and making sure people can flourish there. That’s the first thing the church has to do if we’re going to interrupt the brokenness of society.
“As we commit to our communities, we also need to learn how to see them as economic places. It’s not enough to just move into a place, plant some flowers and be nice to your neighbors. All of that is good, but that won’t address the brokenness of people’s lives because the structures of the community are broken. People need work, good housing, education and health care. So the church has to invest its resources in developing the community. We also need to use our influence to get businesses and government to invest in the community. ..I wish churches spent more time thinking about how their members could love one another and share a common life by working together as a community. Part of the reason our churches are so individualistic is that we just accept the economic systems of our culture without question. We assume that the people who can get the good jobs should go wherever they have to and the people who can’t get the good jobs should just take what they can get. But churches that want to interrupt the brokenness of society ought to be about creating jobs in the community and giving neighbors an opportunity to work together. If we take our communities seriously as economic places, we’ll spend more time thinking about creating good work than we spend thinking about more relevant worship styles or bigger church buildings.”---John Perkins, “Welcome Justice”
The First Sunday of Advent is like the new year of and for the church. It
is like living in a perpetually counter-cultural time zone. I know for many
this is all strange. It gets stranger when you add in what’s called the
lectionary, the way different parts of the Bible are connected to each week of
the church year, in a rather thematic and seasonal way. These readings, like
our ancient one today, are read and commented upon in churches across
denominations as a way of also stressing the unity of the church. And before I
get too heretical, this is not something completely foreign to Unitarian
Universalism. Some of our churches have been following this liturgical year for
hundreds of years, and a part of the core group that helped to create what is
called the Revised Common Lectionary for the liturgical year was the UU
Christian Fellowship, the national group founded in 1945 that employs me as
Executive Director.
I will add that I think Advent has become somewhat more popular in culture
and to others than just radical Christians in some respects, even especially as
the culture has marginalized it. As the Consumer Christmas Season is started
earlier and earlier, all because corporations can’t wait to push their markets
on us, and we can’t wait to get started checking off our longer and longer
to-do lists connected to Christmas, this ancient practice of commemorating
Advent is being embraced anew, because it is a season precisely for and about
Waiting, a season for Preparation, a season for lifting up the story of divine expectancy,
pregnancy, a season of focusing on our vulnerabilities, our fears, our risky
journeys and what is being born anew in surprising ways and places---there is
something about it that keeps calling to us, even as the new holy holidays have
emerged and begun to take hold of us, like Black Friday and now Gray Thursday
and Cyber Monday and even Giving Tuesday.
Against all this, there is something intriguing and deeply
soul-satisfying about this season of four Sundays beginning today that
culminate in the really mind-blowing experience that the church’s Christmas
Season begins, not ends, on Dec. 25, a phrase we put out each year on the portable
sign in front of our community center and that confounds our neighbors and
those passing by.
Let me say that this particular Advent the lectionary leads us to some
strange places. More Mayan calendar December than Christmas December. That was
a very apocalyptic reading from Luke for today, this start of the new church
year; more reminiscent of endings than of births. It certainly isn’t very
Christmasey as you will see reflected in holiday ads or made for television
movies or even most Christmas songs and hymns. And maybe that is why it is
really resonating with me this year, the year of waiting not for the birth of
Messiah as much as the start of the Great Sale, as much as the PowerBall News,
as much as the Fiscal Cliff. I think I am ready for a little “fainting from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers
of the heavens will be shaken.” Luke is trying to be reassuring though, that
what others see or would see as the ending, the collapse of the Marketplace
Empire and society, the ending of the way the world just is, should not
frighten those for whom the Angels will appear and say Be Not Afraid, for a
child is born unto you. Another way is possible and is here and is coming. Just
like the parable of the fig tree; as soon as you see the first small sprouts it
is as if summer in its full blown glory is already here, all it takes is a
small act of love and creation; the bud on the tree is at its most vulnerable
at that point, but have faith, for it is in that condition of being most
fragile that the power of the Sacred is revealed most fully. What might seem to
be everlasting, all the markings and making and truths of the Empire, will pass
away, but not the words that bring hope to the hopeless, connection to the
disconnected, though they are just words, fleeting, it is they and not the
great statues and temples and palaces and armies, or our big box stores or big
box churches, that will last. Beware which mission you are on. The more I
contemplated that strange Advent message from scripture for today the more
heartening it was. I think I am ready for Christmas to once again be a shocking spiritual message, now as it was on the first Christmas.
Point one about missional church is that before you can talk about the
church you have to talk about the world, the place, and how it shapes the
mission which calls forth the church in the first place. And so let me talk
about our place, which is one of those places John Perkins describes as an
abandoned place, a left behind and left out place, just a few miles from the
cool, trendy, popular, full of options, highest life expectancy places. We live
in the 74126 zipcode right on the northern edge of Tulsa with part of our
service area in the city of Tulsa and part of it in an unincorporated community
called Turley. Our zipcode has a per capital income of about $13,000 a year, a
life expectancy that is 14 years lower than the highest area just six miles
from us, an area that has a majority of poor blacks and poor whites and an
increasing percentage of poor hispanics, an area that white flight in the 60s
and 70s caused the population to drop, caused us to have 40 percent of our
currently vacant houses to be abandoned, not for sale or rent anymore, where
just a few miles from downtown we can’t get pizza delivery, where several
schools have been closed and if you take a neighborhood and look at where the
children go to school you will find about ten different destinations, where the
post office has been closed even though our residents do not have the computers
and internet access that were blamed for causing the post offices to close, and
who don’t have the transportation available to get to the remaining post
offices, and there are no UPS or FedEx stores on our side of town, where 60
percent of folks say they can’t afford healthy food, and there are very few
possibilities of buying healthy food even if they could, and 57 percent say
they run out of food, where our food pantry we operate gives out some five tons
of food each month to growing numbers, where our population is growing both
older and younger at the same time, under 18 and over 60, getting more
vulnerable, where property values keep going down even as you spend more and
more on your house.
And yet, in part because it is where my wife and I grew up, meeting in
kindergarden, we think it is a great place to live, a place whose spirit and
strengths belie the statistics and the stereotypes that make people afraid to
even come visit, even come work with us. Though we are getting people to move
across the country to be with us. Harkening back to the Advent season and
story, our place, and places like ours, are the new Nazareths, that part of the
ancient Israel and Roman Empire of which it was said, “Nothing good comes from
Nazareth.”
Advent is when we let the truth sink in that surprising love, peace, joy,
and hope can come into the Nazareths of the world, of our lives. Nazareth was a
small village living under the cruel oppression of the Roman Legion, with its
farmland taken over and its peasants displaced by the Empire’s construction of
the new larger cosmopolitan city of Sepphoris a few miles away. And yet how
many today know of Sepphoris compared to Nazareth. This is the essence of the
classic theological concept and scriptural story of Incarnation, of the
embodiment of the Sacred, not only that Spirit and World transform one another,
that the Word is made flesh, so to speak, but that the particular flesh, the
place and people and condition into which God is born is the polar opposite of
where the Caesers come from. As some of my missional church companions like to
phrase it now: God pitches God’s tent in the neighborhood, the tent cities, the
urban slums, and not the palaces and gated communities. The stories celebrated
in Advent, in Christmas are stories of the powerless and helpless being lifted
up as blessed and through which true wisdom and real strength come.
Incarnation, moreover, means that the Ultimate Reality is not simply something
of the mind or the heart or the spirit separate from the messy realities of
existence, particularly not something separate from community, from
relationships. Whatever Message we are interested in must find a home in the
world, and our very Message must grow and be shaped from the World and its
severe needs, and the stories of Advent and Christmas challenge us about where
and with whom that home should be.
Just six years ago our small church was about to make a very big change,
one that would result in a lot of change in our neighborhoods, although in the
past five years conditions and outcomes where we are have gotten both better
and worse at the same time. Six years ago we were celebrating Advent in our
1800 square foot rented building that proclaimed itself as a church space,
having restarted there two years before after an initial start in a fast
growing suburb, and in that space we sought to attract people to come to us,
for worship and education and occasional meals and from where we then would go
out into the neighborhoods to do clean up and help as we could interest people
at the local school and in conjunction with the local community association.
But then six years ago we were also in the process of moving across the street,
our major thoroughfare, into a 4000 square foot rented space adjacent to a
laundramat and the post office, a space that had been used as an African
American nondenominational Christian church most recently but that like a lot
of our commercial spaces had been vacant for more than a few years. But this
time in our move we weren’t just going into a bigger space, we were going in to
transform it into a community center with a library, computer center, clothing
and used items space, food pantry, health clinic, and meeting space. Only in
small print would you know that it was a church doing it. We became a guest in
our own space given over to others, and our own worship gatherings became not
our primary gatherings but something still important and that we did at times
right in the space where at other times people sat and watched tv and read and
waited to use the various ministries in the Center.
We made this missional move, this incarnational move, turning ourselves
inside out with only a group of about 7 core people; we had no idea if we would
be able to pay the increased rent and utilities, and in fact our worship
attendance which had never been much over 15 or so went down as people stopped
coming as regularly who were only coming for worship and social connection and
not to help us live and discover our faith by mingling with and serving our
neighbors. But as soon as we made the move we became connected with hundreds of
our neighbors each month in ways we had never before. Our partnerships grew, we
started a nonprofit with some of our neighbors to carry on the more
organizational aspects and allow the church to become more organic and more in
depth as a small group, always welcoming of others who wished to join with us
in mission, in community, in discipleship, and in worship, but not putting as
much energy into that incarnation of our mission and values and vision as we
did into being the change agent and presence of hope in our abandoned place.
And then just two years ago we made
another big move with our still small group: we had our eye on a block of
abandoned homes and trash and debris filled yards in our area in a very
otherwise scenic place overlooking downtown Tulsa, and a block that itself was
on the edge bridging our incorporated and unincorporated areas, our
predominantly black and predominantly white, though both predominantly poor
areas. We wanted to buy the block, and transform it into a community space for
gardens and orchard and outdoor events, and we did so at the same time our
government was slashing funds and cutting parks and community centers. We also
at the same time had our eye on what then was the largest abandoned building in
our area, the oldest church building in our area that had been unused for
several years except by squatters and drug users. It was in an area even more
central to the poorest part of our area, surrounded also by abandoned or
rundown houses, and it was 11,000 square foot and would allow us to expand all
of our ministries and reclaim and repurpose what used to be a vital community
asset. And we did so. And still we worship with about 4 to 12 people each
Sunday.
And now our largest abandoned building in the area is the elementary school
near us where my wife and I met, and which was closed two summers ago, where we
had been coordinators for a summer feeding program for kids under 18 and that
was stopped when the school was shut down. Now we have our eyes on it. We have
a chance because of our track record in the community and local committment to
buy the building for a quarter of its estimated appraised two million dollar
value. We are wanting to expand our food programs, partner with others to
create a healthy food hub, put in a senior citizens center that our area lacks,
and use it as an event center and resource center for nonprofits and to offer
G.E.D. classes which we don’t have in our area.
And we have taken lead roles in creating a school foundation for our
struggling high school which was the only school in Tulsa without one to
augment the shrinking funds, and we are leaders in efforts to boost our fire
department, and to see if Turley can become incorporated. Pretty much every
issue and project that someone wants to do in our area they now connect with
us, including the Tulsa Health Department which built a new facility and clinic
in our area replacing the one we had hosted for awhile in our space. And it has
all been done primarily by volunteers; we need some paid staff, but so far
haven’t been able to put together the funds to do so though we are working on
it.
And yet, after describing all that, I want to bring Advent in again, let
its spirit re-orient us and point out that all that I have mentioned is not
really the best things we have done; filling in the gaps of healthy communal
life is important, but it is not our mission and not what we seek to incarnate
and spread among our neighborhoods so bruised and hurting and divided.
Point Two of missional church, besides place and people outside of your
circle being primary, is that if you are needs-based, you will always be geared
to meeting needs, and those needs will always be there. And you are apt to keep
making things worse because if you forget your focus to love your neighbor, to
relate to them, to let what you do emerge from your engagement first as
neighbor then you will fall into the sin of destroying community in the name of
community. And you will be incarnating the same kind of consumerist culture
value that your ultimate value is in what you do, how many projects you have
going, what your budget and grant levels are, and is not in the very sacredness
of your own being as it forms relationships with the beingness of others.
And so we remind ourselves that we are not giving out food and clothes as
much as community connections, as we are modeling and witnessing a peaceful non-anxious presence, as a
response of radical hospitality and abundance and mercy so that when people
break in and vandalize and steal our things, we remind ourselves and our
neighbors that we have no things that can’t be replaced, nothing that wasn’t
given to us in the first place, and that we seek to find and be in relationship
with those who have hurt us. Our task is to simply live in such a way that it
will give people hope that they too can keep their hearts and hands and minds
open even when their instinct and history is urging them to close them and to
focus on what they don’t have or have lost. Our success is when people stop saying “They
need to…” and start saying “We can or should do…” We learn this from those
without who teach us how to be more generous so we can by the way we live and
respond to events help ourselves and others to grow deeper in love and in the
truth that another way, another world is possible, and yes we have to wait, and
prepare for it in our own lives, but it is also emerging all around us, and we
must glimpse it and point it out for others.
Incarnation then is ultimately not about projects and programs and new
organizations in different places; it is about creating space where people can
live and work and play together deeply. There are a few movements taking root
around the world where people do this intentionally and intensively. They are
called new monastics and new friars. In the book, Living Mission, there are
various stories of young people and families who are relocating or returning to
the urban slums of the world and not starting churches or nonprofits as much as
simply living and working there and modeling peace and health and hope in areas
with very little of any of these. One of my favorite stories is about the
Cambodian young woman whose mother had fled with her as a child during the
worst days of the killing fields, but now as a young mother herself she has
returned to Cambodia from the U.S. with her American husband as part of a group
in the new friars movement, and their mission is to simply live among and love
their neighbors and look for ways to serve; one of the most radical things this
young woman did was simply to breastfeed her children there in the slums where
the other moms had been sold the idea that breastfeeding wasn’t as good and
progressive as using the formula marketed to them, and yet their water which
they use for the formula is unhealthy and their children were becoming sick and
dying because of it. As she simply breastfed and answered questions about it,
and modeled it, and as her neighbors saw her children thriving, they began to
also breastfeed more, and children were being saved because of it. But all the
message sharing from the outside world, all the education from outsiders would
have not had the impact that came from her being one of their neighbors, suffering
along with them when the natural disasters come that hit them more. She, like
my wife and I, are what are called returners; the book Living Mission and the
work it describes from John Perkins lift up the model of connecting those
people of peace who have remained in a poor area all their life, those who are
returning to it, and those who are relocating intentionally to it; the gifts of
these three journeys and the commitment to redistribution of goods and the
Good, and to reconciliation among peoples of differences; that is the road to
renewal.
The key there is people of peace, and that brings us back to this Sunday,
the first week of Advent and the celebration of the first of our weeks to the incarnation of Peace. The remaining weeks of Advent we will lift up the incarnation of Joy, then Love, and finally right before Christmas Eve to Hope
as what we prepare our hearts for each of these during Advent. In places of great scarcity
and loss and change, finding and cultivating and connecting together people of
peace is how we incarnate beloved community that John Perkins was talking about. It is what sustains us for the long haul of relationship building, of our covenant with the world, for promises made, broken, and remade, a community that knows it is not complete, cannot be called beloved, until
it gives itself away to others, especially to others different from itself.
May this Advent Season take us into surprising places and to receive the blessings of peace, joy, love and hope from surprising people. May this Advent Season turn our communities into places of incarnation for the Spirit that continues to wait to be born, ready to shock the world with such simple acts of justice done with great love, acts of generosity and compassion that might not seem like much in the grand scheme of Empires but which carry in them the full vision of the changed world. May this Advent remind us that even we can be the bearers of such Surprise.
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