The Welcome Table, a sermon preached at Pathways Church, in the DFW area, June 9, 2013, on our 10 Years of Church in northern Tulsa

The Welcome Table

sermon at Pathways Church, June 9, 2013, Rev. Ron Robinson

Thanks for the privilege to be with you today. I have been an admirer and supporter of Pathways from the early conversations in the district and it is particularly wonderful to be with you for the first time this month as you lift up and look at some of the multiple ways church is becoming visible in the world. Your learning and your leadership from this is going to be more needed than ever because of our changing world.

I am a little out of my element preaching like this. Once in our church life a few years ago before we went missional I preached, sermonically,  like this I think 20 some times in a row, but now the preaching and teaching is more fused into the community ministry itself, and we do as much worshipping with others in their spaces as we do just by ourselves, and when we were holding our own weekly worship services we used pretty much a common liturgy, but sometimes not  one at all, focusing on sharing stories of what was happening in our lives and in our community, prayers for all, and eating together, usually with a hymn or two, but sometimes when the Spirit led we might sing 16 hymns all acapella, and then serving together often during the week, sometimes gathering for meal and study or meal and service together three or more times a week. Like a small group ministry, on its own, on stereoids.  

But I am going to be preaching today about church and the religious community I planted and have been a part of in the northern Tulsa area for the past ten years. It has been ten years of radical change, as you will see (flexibility of forms in order to sustain the relationships in order to serve the mission has been one of our core values, all as a response to the fluidity of our culture). I have to confess, though, that we have succeeded so well in that regard that anything I say about us today might not be true about us even by the end of summer. We have already changed so much from the time two years ago when we were on the cover of the UU World magazine. Now we are going through another wormhole, another re-boot, another examination to see if our default settings, so to speak, are still capable of keeping us oriented toward our reason for being---

And that is, helping God’s loving liberating mission to heal our hurting neighborhood. See the double focus is then on healing our neighborhood, something few if any groups of any kind in our area of abandonment are committed to, but also on doing so in the image of the loving and liberating community forming God. So we need to both live in and with our neighbors in service, and in and with the life of God, getting to know both better, letting that guide us.

In our own particular local culture of change this past decade, we are a microcosm of the experiences underway around us. Why we do church as we do is a result not only of the place we are rooted and its realities of poverty, and our own finite resources and yet vision of the Infinite, but also because of the realities of the broader religious landscape affecting us all.

A year ago this month I laid out some of these in a lecture for North Texas Unitarian Universalists. And let me say that your bringing in of different ways church is manifesting itself these days is a good response to one of the realities I sought to depict last June, that we need a broader bandwidth of how we become the church in order to meet people where they are, meet them physically and spiritually, as they themselves are more diverse in the kinds of spiritual relationships they seek and they need in this new culture that has moved, even in our neck of the woods, first into being post-modern, then post-Christian, then post-denominational, and now post-congregational. And yet so much of church manifests itself still in modern, attractional, denominational, and congregational culture that was the dominant default for some 500 years.

By “post” I don’t mean, Lord knows, the absence of any of those, just that they are not as they were, and will not be to an even greater degree, so privileged and dominant in the culture. Church researcher and consultant George Barna in his 2005 book Revolution has captured well the post-congregational world coming at us quickly. Based on his research of what is already happening, he predicts that in 2025, in just a dozen years, that Americans will get their primary spiritual experience and expression in these following venues: 30-35 percent of us will still be in local institutional or organized churches, whereas in 2000 it was 70 percent; 30-35 percent will be in alternative faith-based communities of a wide variety from house churches to marketplace gatherings to new monastic communities to missional communities to recovery groups to pilgrimages to places and major events, just to name a few, compared to just 5 percent who were in 2000; 5 percent will get their spiritual community through family, which is the same percent as in 2000; and 30-35 percent will connect spiritually primarily through the arts and media and culture compared to 20 percent who did so in 2000.  

How will Unitarian Universalism match up in those categories by then? Will we still be limited to congregations in a post-congregational world? If we don’t create a bigger bandwidth of what church is, we will be appealing to a much smaller segment than even we do now. In 1776 our churches as part of what we call Congregationalism were the most prominent religious body in the thirteen colonies, with 668 congregations out of 3228; that amounts to some 20 percent amid 17 different religious groups. I am not sure what our percentage of individuals were then compared to the total of the population then, but it is safe to say it was the most sizeable of any church groups. The impact of our values then upon the culture around us was even greater.

 In 1960 around the time of the merger of the Unitarians and Universalists we were down to 1 member per 1000 Americans,; by 2007 that number had dropped by another 30 percent, down to 0.7 members per 1000 Americans. I believe in the past five years it has continued to drop. In 1960 we were double the numbers of the Foursquare Gospel church in the U.S.; by 2007 they had grown by 80 percent and are now double our size in the U.S. I remember sitting on a plane to Boston with the leader of their house church networks back about 7 or 8 years ago who was flying into Boston to help organize their networks there as they had been for a while branching out beyond their traditional congregations. In 1960, Jehovah’s Witnesses were only three-tenths of one percent more numerous than we were in the U.S.; since then they have increased their share of the U.S. population by 177 percent and are some ten times our size. One group in American religious society, the Church of God in Christ, increased by more than 700 percent during that time period of 1960 to 2007.  (Rodney Stark, in The Triumph of Christianity).  Unitarian Universalism has its years when it does grow overall compared to a previous year, with usually that growth coming in the largest getting larger, but after years of decline beginning in the Sixties, we are now I believe basically back to the numbers we had at the time of merger.  

But in just comparing religious bodies from 1960 to now, we miss out on a lot because by far the fastest growing groups in terms of percentage of members to the population were groups not around in 1960. They have not had to have the kind of radical discontinuity with the past that is necessary to grow in the new cultural and competitive context (See Lyle Schaller’s book on Discontinuity and Hope). A world where in a given week now 65 percent of people in their 70s and above are in a congregation; but for baby boomers the number is 35 percent; and for Gen Xers it is 15 percent and for Millenials, some of whom are already at 30 years old, it is just 4 percent. (see Mike Breen’s Launching Missional Communiities). And the numbers aren’t changing as people get older.

The take-away is that no matter how good we get at what we have been doing we won’t change those numbers much at all, especially without the massive resources required to be competitive in trying to attract and keep people—that’s why the large can keep getting larger. But it is also why the small, with a big vision, and large risk-taking, can thrive by changing the competition, changing the scorecard as missional church author Reggie McNeal describes it. And it is why the middle-sized will probably have the hardest most anxious time, depending on which way, toward which vision, they seek to grow, up or down, often being pulled in both directions.

I think these numbers tell us we have to get good at two things: we have to get good at breaking out of our ruts that develop so quickly, our dominant molds, our prevailing modes; and we have to get good at not caring ultimately about all those numbers I just detailed, numbers about us and other churches. For living in a world where the concerns of our church and other churches or faiths or beliefs are our major environment and focus is like living in the Holodeck of the Enterprise, like living in The Matrix, like living in the American Dream’s Consumer World Entertainment Marketplace Empire that shapes our sense of self and reality, like Narcissus of old focusing on his image in the pool—it is a false world that will use us up. Those church numbers do reflect a reality calling us to face new challenges, but the answer to that challenge does not lie in seeking to change the numbers about us, but about our commitment to changing the numbers of the suffering around us, which is the way we also, by the way, heal the suffering within us.

Which brings me to the number we at The Welcome Table spend most of our time thinking about and working on…..a 14 year life expectancy gap between our zipcode and others in our area. In light of those numbers we do not seek to become the best, biggest, brightest church in our community, but the best church for our community, building it up, brightening it.  If we have to change in order to change the lives of our neighbors, we do it. This reality also guides why we believe church exists—not ultimately to bring people of like minds or like values together, not because we have a message or principle about religious ideas to convince people of, not because thinking rightly necessarily changes the world.

For while my faith and theology undergirds and guides all that I have done and seek to do, in our new world it isn’t where I personally, or communally, seek to first connect with people. Not with shared ideas, not with thinking, not even with shared spiritual practices such as worship, but in shared mission. As a Christian, I don’t need more Christians. As a Unitarian Universalists, I don’t need more Unitarian Universalists. What I need more of are neighborhoods and lives of an abundant and serving spirit.

I was taught that the common worship service on Sunday was “for company”, it was a way of attracting people by publicly broadcasting our message, week after week, and then we had to work to get them to stay and get involved. Adding church worship to their busy lives was hard enough that it was almost impossible to get the majority to then get involved with running the church, and then especially to add in serving the world outside. Now I look at putting the world outside first, meeting people for the first time in service there, and inviting them to then enter worship and study as a way to grow in the spirit in order to serve others more deeply, or to find out from them how their worship and study was energizing and shaping their service. I would rather have more serving community with us than worshipping with us.

 While Churches used to be places for people’s believing then behaving then belonging,  now it is the reverse--people seek belonging, learning to behave, also in the sense of behavior, of common practices, of shared actions, which then end up opening up for growing and sharing beliefs. We seek first to be the church in relationship, in action, in mission with others for others, trusting that the space that creates is where belief can best be grown and shared.

That hasn’t, however, always been the case here. We started out, ten years ago, in a very different place and path.

In some ways we began in Weston, Mass. in 2002 during the annual convocation of the Christian Churches within the Unitarian Universalist Association when during worship and on my knees with hands laid on me by ministers and those in attendance I was commissioned as an evangelist; this coming just two months after I had been officially ordained by All Souls Church in Tulsa and was serving as a hospice chaplain, the first of my bi and tri vocational ministries as church planter. So the idea was to create another congregation in our UU Christian tradition, to be message-oriented primarily. Such a church, like many churches, could be placed practically anywhere you could attract enough people around the message to operate an organization to perpetuate that message. The goal and work then was to attract those people to achieve that purpose. Get more people to think like me, to value what I value, and the world would be a better place. Of course, in our world today, with the reputation church has, church is not only the only place to accomplish that goal; it might not even be the best place.

The concerns of any particular local piece of that world, especially a place where it needs to be better in the worst way, so to speak, was not the concern. Just creating an institutional expression of these religious values was mission enough; and the place I was in at first, a fast growing suburb without any progressive religious institutions, seemed the kind of vacuum where just enough folks could be found to accomplish that task.

We started as a group of nine, half of whom had not met one another and one whom was supportive but only came to lend moral support, on Jan. 6, 2003 on the Day of Epiphany in our living room, and each week after that one place or another or day or another. First we were named Epiphany Church and met in homes then motel banquet rooms and at Panera Bread meeting room, then in our own rented space in a small commercial strip; our first public worship was Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday 2003. We had 25 people on that first Easter;  it is probably the most we have ever had for worship in the past ten years. The Sunday after Easter we had three people.

We could have stopped then, like so many church plants dying of a premature birth and inadequate leadership and limited resources and in a culture that didn't fit with us. For we discovered soon that culture trumped theology and message in many ways and people in our area wanted and were getting new churches the way they were getting new box stores, fully stocked and operational and geared to them from the day they opened. As a grassroots non-funded parachute drop church plant in such an environment, we didn’t have the resources for the vision of church we sought. Being different theologically wasn’t enough.

But we continued to be open to where the Spirit would lead us, would need us, and so it was through many "deaths to what we had been", through many steep learning curves. We began with a change in that cultural environment, moving from a place of accumulating wealth and accumulating people, with demographics of people with college educations,  to a place of poverty and declining numbers of people, with few who had been to college.  

In September 2004 in a re-start we moved to the unincorporated area of Turley, OK and the far northside of Tulsa in the 74126 zipcode; it was mostly because of the cheap rent, was halfway point for some of our leaders at the time, who lived miles from one another,  and was the place where my wife and I grew up and were moving back to. Still at first we were promoting ourselves as Epiphany Church and meeting still on Sunday mornings, then on Sunday evenings, still primarily focused on offering worship and study, and food, and when we could doing things out in the neighborhood like planting flowers, and cleaning up streets; then because Epiphany was a word that few in our area seemed to know, and because we were becoming more informal, like a house church in public, we became called The Living Room.
In January 2007, with a core group of six to eight people and about a dozen in worship, we made our big missional transformative move; we had just lost our biggest financial contributor from our original group,  but we felt called to serve our community and its severe needs of abandonment. We had talked among ourselves, particularly with the growing percentage of people who lived right around our space and came for the community and food I think and then the worship, and we talked with others outside of us about what they felt the community around us needed. More People who believed like us was not on the list. Neighborhood Pride, spirit, safety, healthy food, cleaner environment, sense of a community, better animal control, better schools, these were tops.

So, with fewer people and less money, we took a leap of faith and paid more and rented a four times larger space across the street and  opened up not billed as a church, but as a community center soon with library computer center clothing room food pantry health clinic and gathering space, in which we created space to worship amid the space we gave away for the service of others, rather than having a separate worship space, and we also worshipped during the week and travelled to other churches to worship with them on Sundays, UU churches and others.  

The center was called A Third Place Community Center and started embodying the concept of third spaces where people of great differences could come together for the common good, especially in an abandoned place of the Marketplace Empire, with people left behind and left out, in the lowest life expectancy zipcode in our greater area. We were still then known as either The Living Room Church or sometimes as just Church at A Third Place but we were shifting from church as a What to church as a Who. 

My take-away: As we failed at what we thought we wanted to be, we became what the world needed us to be.

In 2009 we completed the missional move by creating the separate non-profit A Third Place Community Foundation to connect with others and partner with them for renewal in our area, and to be the organizational wing of our mission, while as church we became organic, incarnational, even smaller so that we could keeping dreaming and doing bigger things. Which we did the very next year.
In summer 2010 through our nonprofit we bought the city block of abandoned homes and trash dump and transformed it into a community garden park and orchard, and called it The Welcome Table, named after the demonstration garden spot across the street we had put in as partners with the local United Methodist Church on their property loaned to us—where we have now a native wildflower plant preserve--and named after the hymn of that name which our children loved to sing when we worshipped, especially when we worshipped outside at our garden spots.

Then At the end of 2010 through the nonprofit we bought the original Methodist church building which had been the largest abandoned building in our community for several years. To tie in with the garden, we called the community center project also The Welcome Table. And so when we moved into it our church/missional community became also The Welcome Table.
In our new space, the oldest church building in our area, we have been expanding our food pantry and have a community art space, and crafts space, and more room for our community events we throw like our free holiday parties that have grown in leaps and bounds.  We are now leading the way in getting a new seniors group going in the area, and are trying to put together a coalition to buy and use for the community the Cherokee Elementary school that has been closed, another source of abandonment just as is our recently closed postal service, the closing of another of our civic groups, the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

When we moved to the old church building we worshipped on Sunday morning, though could also worship at the gardenpark or at our garden we had put in at the nearby school, since abandoned, or wherever our mission might take us. We had a main gathering that would start at 9:30 am with ingathering and sharing of lives and news, then move at no designated time into a study and sharing time often watching a progressive Christian video or discussing selections from books or bible study, then also at no designated time moving into worship time for communion and prayers, which might at times be interwoven into our common meal time which always follows. This gave people options to come into the group for any or all of the rhythms, including those who join us from other churches after their worship or who come for the meal time together only and may join us for worship or study if we are still engaged in it. Our motto was worship is more party than program. Pretty much everything was multi-generational.
By this time we had developed a series of ways to describe the vision  we sought to live into, failing, but seeking.

Church is something we become, not something we attend. And Church has four pathways of becoming: the first is growing mission, serving the least of these as neighbors; the second is growing in community relationship with one another in order to better serve others; the third is growing in discipleship, or personal growth, in order to better offer our gifts to our community so it can offer itself better in service to the world; and the fourth is worshipping, where we refresh our souls for the service of the world. We also seek to follow and promote the 3Rs of community development outlined by civil rights and missional church leader John Perkins: calling us to Relocation to abandoned places, Reconciliation work, especially ethnic reconciliation in our two mile service area which is predominantly African-American,   and in the Redistribution of goods and The Common Good. To do this work in community we look for Re-locaters, Returners, and Remainders, those who have stayed; each has particular gifts need by the group.

For covenantal practices we have held out the vision of daily prayer, weekly worship, monthly spiritual accountability, annual retreat, lifetime pilgrimage, and daily acts of random kindness beauty and justice---small acts of justice, as Mother Teresa said, done with great love. As a church we don’t have a board, bylaws, budget or our own building space, and we ask people to donate to the non-profit foundation whose board has both our members and others.

Still, with so much accomplished for our community and much to be done for our community by so few, still now at the 10 year turning point we are going to be discerning again how to incarnate our vision of God's movement in and for and with those in our neck of the world; what kind of spiritual community does our community need that we can meet? How grow in covenant and shared leadership and still stay small enough to make big change in the world. How live in that tension of being “a church” or being a part of “the church/the movement”?  Can we still offer the permeable boundaries of community worship and service and study that welcome in folks who are either in other communities or are content with their involvement with us, who might only want to be with us either during the week or only at a more traditional Sunday worship time? Can we embody multiple communities, our own broader bandwidth of being, connected together in a radical way, and grow leaders for each of them? Can we in the next 10 years start or inspire whole new missional communities in other places and ways?  

What I believe is that whatever happens, the life and legacy of The Welcome Table will like all of us ultimately live deepest in the relationships we make, regardless of what form they take or how long they last. Our goal is not self-perpetuation, but giving ourselves away and giving ourselves back to that Great Love, in which we live and move and have our being and share with others for others, especially those most in its need.  

Welcome tables, where the theology of enough and the ministry of mere presence are the meals that sustain us, are both the easiest tables to set, to set up, and the riskiest to set at. But I believe they are also a blessing, one we in our tradition are gifted and called to offer. 

Church Planting/Growth Redux

To pull together a potpourri of older posts on this blog related to church planting and growth issues, here is a link that will take you to a good assortment.

http://progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com/search?q=church+planting

Gems from planting guru Bill Easum and his ministry leaders.
Anti planting attitudes among churches.
The Church Planting 101 link of links from around the time of the Minneapolis GA workshop in 2011
Book Reviews
The Why of Planting: The Inside Out Church and new ways of neo-evangelism
The Questions To Begin Asking
The intersection, or not, of progressive seminaries and planting, of progressive theology and planting.
The basics of Missional: The church not A Church
Tensiion Points around Class and Theology, Children, Jesus, The Importance of Place
And more

Camp Egan Retreat Communion Worship Sunday, May 26, 2013

Camp Egan Retreat Worship, 2013

Call To Worship

Today is the day which God has made:

Let us rejoice and be glad therein.

What does the Eternal require of us?

To do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.

O Lord, let my soul rise up to meet you

As the day rises to meet the sun.  

Be with us in our humble and deliberate beginning of the day

We Come into God’s presence with thanksgiving.

Opening Songs of Praise

Holy, Holy, Holy

Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

For The Beauty of the Earth

Morning Prayers

Prayer of Confession:

Gracious and Loving God, we acknowledge to you, to one another, and to ourselves that we are not what you have called us to be.

We have stifled our gifts and wasted our time.

We have avoided opportunities to offer kindness, but have been quick to take offense. We have pretended that we could make no contribution to peace and justice in our world and have excused ourselves from risk-taking in our own community.

 Have mercy on us, forgive us our sins, and help us to live our lives differently.

We long for peace within and without, for harmony in our families, for the well-being of our neighbors, and help us to love our enemies.

Yet we have too often not made the hard choices that love requires.

Show us how to walk in your path of faithfulness, hope, and love.

Amen.

Words of Assurance:

One fact remains that does not change: God loves all. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. This is the good news that brings new life.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Pastoral Prayers:

Eternal Spirit, we come with hungry hearts, waiting to be filled: Waiting to be filled with a sense of your presence; Waiting to be filled with the touch of your spirit; Waiting to be filled with new energy for service; We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.

Loving Creator, we confess what seems always with us: broken things within us that seem never to mend, empty places within us that seem always to ache, things like buds within us that seem never to flower.

God of everlasting hope and forgiveness, help us to be open to your Presence within us, mending and tending to our aching hearts and to our hurt and wounded land. Help us to listen to others, and empower us to be your hands of action and healing, sowing seeds of compassion and justice into our families and communities and to support all those in need in our one world which you made and called good.

Song: Peace Like A River

Pastoral Prayer

Let us pray for those who weep, and for those who cause their weeping. Hear our prayer, O God. For those who are without food, clothes, and a place of shelter this day and everyday. Hear our prayer, O God. For those who live without hope and meaning. Hear our prayer, O God. For those who live in fear or sickness. Hear our prayer, O God. For those who make gods of things and of themselves, Hear our prayer, O God. For those who are working to serve others this day, Hear our prayer, O God. For those travelling today, Hear our prayer, O God. For those in harm’s way, in homes and on battlefields, Hear our prayer, O God. For those who are finding their way again to love and laughter, Hear our prayer, O God. And for the great mission of God to bless the poor, to pardon the imprisoned, to bring sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to provide hospitality to the resident aliens, to clothe all, to visit the sick, and to proclaim the year of the Lord and end all debts, Hear our prayer, O God.

Lift Up Names For Prayers

Eternal Spirit of Life and Love and Liberation, may we be open to your presence in our lives, in all our joys and sorrows, fears and faith, dreams and disappointments, hurts and hopes, those shared openly with others, and those shared only with You.

Everlasting Hope that holds us up, so that we may go hold others, we give thanks for all that has blessed us, and all that has brought us to this day of Life’s Celebration.

Universal Love, continue to show us the way home to our own true hearts, our duties, and to the service of creating a better world for all. Help us to see anew the sacredness placed right before us, right beside us, right within us.

Deepest Source of All, may our prayers be times of listening as well as speaking. May we be open to what Life yet speaks to us of truth, joy, and goodness.

God beyond all human naming, yet as close as our breath and beating hearts, we bring today these reflections of our minds, these meditations of our hearts, these prayers of our souls. Now we join in praying as Jesus taught all those who would follow in his radical, inclusive, compassionate and transforming way, we pray,

Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

Song: Amazing Grace

Communion

Prayer

 O God, we gather at this welcoming table open to all no matter what, remembering how Jesus gathered people from all the walks of life, stranger and friend and enemies, gave thanks to you, offered all the bread of life and the cup of blessing and proclaimed a covenant of love for all in your name.  We remember too the wonder of his life, as we remember the wonder of all of Creation given unto us and how all are One, and all lives sacred.  We remember his death and how on the night before he died he still gathered in love to share a meal and the hope for a better world, and we remember all the terrors and the tyrannies that oppress people today. In the mystery of faith in the everlasting Spirit, the triumph over fear,  help us to remember to practice resurrection everyday as we remember all those who have given Love the ultimate trust and the last word and who have worked to create the beloved community of renewed and abundant life. Help us to remember with this sacred and symbolic meal especially all those who are hungry, and may we treat all our meals as sacred and to be shared. Take us, bless us, so that even in and with our brokenness we may serve others and receive Your Spirit.

 Amen.

Song: “I Love To Tell The Story”

Communion Homily: Being The Story

Blessing of Plate and Cup

Jesus said I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me. And they said, Lord, when did we do this? And he said, You did this for me when you did it for the least of these.

Here is the bread of life, food for the spirit. Let all who hunger come and eat.

Here is the fruit of the vine pressed and poured out for us. Let all who thirst now come and drink. 

We come to make peace. We come to be restored in the love of God. We come to be made new as an instrument of that love.

All are worthy. All are welcome.

Passing The Bread of Life and Cup of Hope during Singing of “Let Us Break Bread Together”

Closing Song: “Love Lifted Me”

Benediction:

The Lord bless you, and keep you; The Lord make his face shine upon you, and be gracious unto you;  The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. Amen.

A Place At The Table: A Homily from the Welcome Table, to the Phillips Theological Seminary community

 

 

A Place At The Table

Homily by Rev. Ron Robinson at Phillips Theological Seminary

Tuesday, May 7, 2013 Noon Chapel

Acts 2: 43-47

⁴³Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.⁴⁴All who believed were together and had all things in common;⁴⁵they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.⁴⁶Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts,⁴⁷praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

http://www.magpictures.com/aplaceatthetable/ The official film site link. Go see trailer and film clips that were shown today at Phillips, and find how to see the full film.

Homily:

            One of the things that the documentary A Place at the Table gets right is about the presence of hidden hunger and food insecurity in our land. It is hidden to the extent that many Americans have a television image of what hunger looks like. I just came back from another trip to the Philippines where you can easily see that picture of hunger along the streets. But, even here, it is not that hidden really; it is just that we don’t put ourselves where we will see it.

            I know a woman, 86 years old, all of it spent on Tulsa’s northside, from the days when family structures took care of those falling through the cracks, to the days of the working class structures and union jobs and when people knew how to grow their own food to the more recent days of the neighborhood and family decimation and death of all the places where people met others in shared common life together. She came to one of our community holiday festivals where our group provides free entertainment and food; she watched as we had to go to the store six times during the night; she saw the people of all ages eating everything, including the healthy food, and stuffing pockets and piling plates high to take back with them.

 I saw her, who lived in the midst of these neighbors, see a part of their lives for the first time. In terms of the language of Acts, it was a sign and wonder that changed how she saw the world and what God was calling for in response. It is what teachers see on Mondays when the students return to school. It is what social workers see who hear the stories of individuals and families trying to dig out of holes of all kinds of illnesses, or to put their lives together after prison, and having to rely on the pittance of assistance that is gone in a SNAP. It is what you would see if you go to Warehouse Market at midnight on the first of the month when they stay open two extra hours when benefits kick in for even just a percentage of folks. It is what we see each week during our Food Days. And the truth is that if we held our Food Days everyday, as would be nice; if we continue to triple the number of people we serve each month, if we were serving ten times as many people each month, we would continue to see it. For the documentary is also right that the need is too great and diverse in its causes for non-profits alone, especially those with all volunteers like ours, or philanthropy and business alone, or government alone. But I believe, as they say in the film, that it is possible to make hunger and food insecurity go away in my lifetime.

We begin by creating Acts 2 relationships, where we see that we are all bound together, with mutual relationships, and that to form those relationships we must be with one another, talking or planning or acting not just about the poor but with them, and that the issue of food is bound up with other issues; in our area, for example, it is connected to the lack of sidewalks and street lights and transportation; so that people must often walk for more than a mile to get to a grocery store, taking the store’s cart to carry food back home, often in the middle of Peoria Ave. if it has been snowing or raining, or they are in a motorized scooter.

The film also addresses the problem of the kind of food assistance the poor receive, not just the lack of adequate purchasing power. In fact much of the food one purchases at the local stores in poor communities, or much that one receives through the food bank, through us apart from what we grow in our community gardenpark and orchard, is part of the problem. For high calorie, low nutrition foods are just another addiction that many of our neighbors have, adding to the life expectancy gap of 14 years in our zipcode. Such food, readily convenient especially for folks who struggle so much in other ways that they look for convenience where they can find it, such food contributes to the bad emotional responses, to the short day to day subsistence cycle of lives unable to project a future to live  and transform toward.

 It is also a hard but at times necessary addictive choice, too, because of the choice we force on them between the needed nutrition and the needed calories for daily energy demands. Top chefs like Mario Batali who have been trying to live on food assistance and food pantries have not been able to navigate those choices. If you are at our cornerstore, and have a certain number of items per household, and you have to choose, for example, between lettuce and mac and cheese, you are likely going to choose mac and cheese—it will give you the calories your body needs, especially if you are doing physical day labor trying to make some money each day, or walking or biking for miles looking for work or food or shelter. But, as the chef found out, it is difficult to ever feel full, and the process of trying to find food, prepare it, and eat it is tiring, and meals that become chores are also not going to have any interest, nothing special in them. I wonder how that in itself drives people to seeking flavor in all the wrong places because they aren’t getting it in the daily ordinariness of life. For a growing number of people we take something, our daily meal, that scripture and our Christian tradition, as well as that of many other traditions, says is an act of sacred living, and we take the sacred life out of it. The result? We grow lives without a sense of the sacred, damaged from daily life itself, and we punish them, we put them out of sight and out of mind, and making it easier for them to get access to guns than to healthy food and health care so we can keep them out of sight and out of mind. It is the opposite of an Acts 2 culture; in fact, where the Acts community expands and grows its relationships, our dominant culture is shrinking its circles of common life.

 I know the Food Bank and our folks are aware of this and working on it, and we are getting more and more healthy food items, more vegetables and fruit, if not fully local and fresh.  It is one of our dilemmas, but we say that what we are trying to do is to give what we can, in order to gradually grow in relationships to be able to influence food choices; what we are trying to do is to make it just a little bit easier on a few folks to be able to have a little bit more agency in their lives, a bit more dunamis, in order for it to be easier to make a few more right decisions. When you are hungry it is hard to think ahead, to think straight, to think evenly. Anything we can do to mitigate against that in just a few lives, we believe, makes a difference that affects many. We are becoming a part of an initiative between the Food Bank here and the University of Oklahoma called FeedHope. It is based on cultivating three factors that lead to more hope-filled lives: instilling more of that sense of agency (not just urgency) in lives; providing real pathways for people to take to change once their new sense of agency enables it; and helping them set goals in life for coming through those pathways into a more abundant life.

Where the film leaves off, or leaves out, is where I believe the deeper solution lies. Yes, increase immensely the resources and capacity for food banks and meal ministries and school programs to help take that edge off of hunger and food insecurity. But the real win-win is to get more people growing, cooking, and sharing their own food, from their own homes, own neighborhoods. As guerilla gardener Ron Finley in South Central L.A. says, growing your own food is like printing your own money. It is also taking your own health back into your own hands. It is making blighted communities into beautiful and bountiful communities. It is reminding the world as Jurgen Moltmann says that the opposite of poverty is not property, but the opposite of both poverty and property is community.

To that end, many such groups as ours are beginning the risky and difficult process of getting new generations of people to taste what healthy food is like, to give it a try, and from that to make it as convenient as possible for them to both get it and grow it, through gardens, kitchens, markets, mobile healthy food trucks, neighborhood events, a re-emergence of true  home economics in schools, and yes even in churches of many shapes and sizes and missional communities. So far though these all too often are still located and resourced in places away from communities with the most need of them. You can use SNAP to buy fresh local grown food, and you can use SNAP to buy seeds, but even if you are convinced you can do it (when so much of your life you have seen yourself and been told that you are unable to do anything) and even if you have a place to grow, you have to be able to get to where the food and the seeds are.

What we want our still emerging abandoned trashed out properties turned into a gardenpark and orchard to be is not so much really THE place to come rest and play and grow and connect, but A place to learn and be inspired so that our neighbors will go back to their own homes and own blocks and cul-de-sacs and dead-end streets full of abandonment and do the same right there. Our goal is to create Apostles of Abundance, those who are Sent to the world, Sent back to the world of their own street and home. Not only every school then a garden, every church a garden, but every subdivision and neighborhood a garden. And When that happens every garden itself then will become a school, a civic group, a church, a temple.

That would be a sign and a wonder. We have seen shining glimpses of it already. Come and see.

Jesus' Lost and Found: Coming Alive Again In Community...Sermon given at the 58th Anniversary Celebration of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Philippines, Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental

 

 

Jesus’ Lost and Found: Coming Alive Again through Community

Rev. Ron Robinson, Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship

To The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Philippines on the Occasion of the 58^th Anniversary of the Church.

Text: Luke 15: 11-32

Then Jesus^* said, ‘There was a man who had two sons.¹²The younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” So he divided his property between them.¹³A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and travelled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living.¹⁴When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need.¹⁵So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs.¹⁶He would gladly have filled himself with^* the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything.¹⁷But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger!¹⁸I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you;¹⁹I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.’ ”²⁰So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.²¹Then the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”^*22But the father said to his slaves, “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.²³And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate;²⁴for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” And they began to celebrate.

25 ‘Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing.²⁶He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on.²⁷He replied, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.”²⁸Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him.²⁹But he answered his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.³⁰But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!”³¹Then the father^* said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.³²But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” ’

 Sermon:

Thank you for inviting me back to be with you, and to help you celebrate this anniversary. The story of your 58 years together is one that has inspired me, and my ministry and people.  Your story of relating and embodying God to the people of your communities is about being in right relationship with those around you. 

In Jesus’ time and place, in the ancient world and Roman Empire, there was very little question about how to be in right relationships with others. According to how the world worked, everyone had their fixed place in the Great Chain of Being, their fixed responsibility to others, and preserving that status quo was a divine purpose. The purpose of life, according to the world of the Empire, was to gain honor from others by helping more powerful others to gain honor in the world. Honor to them was about having power over people. Avoiding being shamed and not bringing shame to others was the way you kept in right relationship. First, according to the world, the primary one of honor was the family Father, and then the Village Head, then the Governor, then the Emperor who was treated as God. When the fathers or leaders received shame and not honor, they regained honor, they regained what was considered their right relationship, through fear and punishment, often severely.

That is because of how they thought God acted and should be viewed too.  But then into this world, into this worldview, came Jesus. His stories, like his actions, changed the world by re-imagining and re-defining God and pointing people to a different understanding of what it means to be in right relationships.

The parables that Jesus told, and the way he lived them out, show us how very different his view of right relationships was from that commonly practiced in the culture of his time, and still practiced too often by all cultures in our world today. He saw relationships, and God, not as being about controlling others, but about cooperation and commitment to one another even when we are abandoned and when we abandon others, when we are disappointed and when we disappoint others.  

Jesus said God’s community, God’s family, is like when a father has two sons. Now they are most probably adult sons, and yet the father is still considered their master. The father had almost complete power over the sons. Right away though we find out that this father, this family, these relationships are going to be different from the ones the ruling Empire and culture sought to enforce. The story starts when the younger son goes to the father and demands that he get his inheritance now so he can go out on his own, away from land, away from family, which were the two most important things in life and the way someone achieved immortality. When the younger son did this it was the same as telling his father to Drop Dead.

To those first hearing the story, at this point they would have expected the father to banish or kill his son, with little thought or regret, in order to retain or regain his honor. Instead, when he gives the money to his son, when he actually divides his life, they would have thought him foolish and even more shamed and dishonorable. They wouldn’t have been surprised by what happened; the younger son goes and wastes it all and ends up living with pigs, which were considered an unholy animal; he was even eating what the pigs ate. No one could be more shameful to them. At that point he decides to return to his family but to return to them as one of their slaves not as he was before. As he returns home he practices how he will beg his father to treat him as a slave.

Next, in Jesus’ story, we see the father again. Instead of ruling his estate from inside his house, we see he is out by the road, looking with longing eyes off to the horizon, hoping his son will return. The hearers of the parable expect the father to make the son grovel and beg, and for the world to then be once again in right relationship after the son disrupted it with his behavior and attitude. They got something very different. When the father saw the son approaching on the road, he lifts his long robe and runs out to meet his son, and there he embraces him and kisses him deeply.  The listeners might have expected that from the mother but not the father. Then The son begins to beg his father, but the father stops even that. He tells his slaves to prepare for a party, to kill the prize cow for a feast. He says that his son was lost and is now found, was dead but is now alive. It is clear though that he always thought of his son as part of him, part of the family, no matter what he had done.  It is clear also that In the world’s eyes the father has now lost all honor and respect and sense of himself. The father has disrupted the world’s view of right relationships even more than has the younger son.

To many people this is where the story ends; many church stained glass windows depict this parable and show the father forgiving and embracing the younger son, the way God will forgive and embrace us. But that is only part of the story.

There is another son, the elder brother. We almost forgot about him. He is out working in the field while all this has been going on, the way he has been throughout his life, serving his father, silently doing the thing expected of him, keeping in right relationship. He sees the activity at the house and asks a slave what is going on. He is told that his brother is back and his father is throwing a party. This upsets the elder brother and he stays outside working, feeling betrayed, bothered by his father’s shameful actions and attitudes, just the way those who are hearing the story imagine they would feel. When he doesn’t go into the house, into the place of family intimacy and relationships,his father then goes out to him, too. Another act of shame, not making the son come to him. He keeps going out to others, to listen to them, to let them know they are not alone. The elder son affronts him as never before, tells him of his anger, his jealousy, feeling abandonment by the father who never threw him a party even though he had done everything right for so long. The father says to him that he has always been there with him, that he always will be, that that is what counts, and he goes on to say that all that he has will still be given to the elder son. The younger son will be a part of the family, but perhaps not quite in the same way as originally, but that is not really important, who gets what, who gives what,  not really the ultimate reward of being in right relationship; it is the relationship itself and all its possibilities of a future unfolding that we can’t imagine. When we are in mutual relationships with one another, and with the God of forgiveness, that love is worth more than anything, and in that world anything is possible.

And there is where the parable ends.

 That is when we get to the point of the story about what kind of God God is, what kind of right relationships we should practice. Jesus’ story about what God is like ends with the elder brother standing outside in the field, thinking about what to do next. He, like us, has a choice. He can stay there, away from his family, just another kind of prodigal, cutting himself off from others, alone in his rightness, strong in his sense of righteousness and honor, waiting for others to come to him, pay homage to him, the way an Emperor does, the way God was depicted. Or…Or, he can lay all that aside and answer the call, the invitation to join the party, to be a part of the family, to welcome his brother as a brother, to grow the relationship through participation and cooperation, not through fear and control and conquering. He can go inside and focus his world on the future and what love and justice it might hold, or he can stay outside the party and focus on the past and let it control his future. To Jesus, God is found in the newer and stronger relationship especially because it has been seeded by what the world views as mistakes, bad judgements, selfishness, vulnerability, loneliness, shame.  Jesus walks a very different path of  right relationships than that created by Emperors.

What that means for us today is that real strength in community comes through our covenants, our bonds and right relationships with one another and with our world beyond ourselves and with God, bonds that are like those of a certain father with two sons.

In the United States, our Unitarian Universalist Association was founded by some of the oldest churches in the country, some that are more than 400 years old, and while they were strongly Christian they were still founded ultimately not so much on the creeds they professed but on the covenants that had created them in the first place.  One of our church historians, Conrad Wright, has written that there are several major covenants or relationships that need to be nurtured for a church to be a whole church. [See “The Doctrine of Church for Liberals” in the book, Walking Together]

These are the relationships between a person and church; between church and its elected leaders, including ministers. Also between churches themselves; and between ministers themselves.  These four covenants are our mostly internally-focused covenants of our association helping to establish right relationships and our Identity. They are like the materials of a ship that hold it together and give it, the church, its own particular shape.  But there are two other more externally focused relationships, ones shared by all churches:  one of those is between a church and its world around it, and the other is between church and God. If the first four sets of relationships are what, like a ship, give the church its unique shape, these two broader relationships are like the Sea and the Wind; they are what give the ship of church its purpose, its reason for having its particular shape, and are what sets it on its journey. As they say, a ship may be wonderfully built, but if it stays in its harbor it is not being what a ship should be.

The four internally focused covenants are often the relationships we spend most of our time dealing with; they are the ones that present us with urgent matters; they are the ones we often have conflicts over and the ones we most often celebrate on occasions like this and in ordinations. But if  a church is not grasped by the other two relationships, with the world around it and with God, the church will not be complete, not be church; instead it will become, as Conrad Wright also said, merely a collection of religiously-oriented individuals.

Just like in the parable of the father and sons, the right relationships are all inter-connected.  When we have breaks in any one of the relationships it affects the bonds of the other relationships by putting extra stress on them. But the good news is that when we focus on any of these relationships, like we are doing this week, and make them stronger, especially when we grow in right relationship with the world and with God in the way of Jesus it will also in turn affect each of the others, growing the kind of trust and loving justice that can change the world, the way Jesus did 2000 years ago and the way Toribio Quimada did 58 years ago here, and the way we all can do today and in the years to come.

Redistribution and The Spiritual Life, part 2: Lecture Notes on John Perkins' 3Rs

What would a "truly Christian economy" look like? Those who live in places where the American economic life have abandoned their regions, as money has followed rooftops during white flight and the loss of living wages and the working class culture where one full time job was enough to care for the financial needs of a family, often live with a different view of "unbridled capitalism" than those with the privileges and access to the system. What about a system that has morphed into ownership of property not in the hands of people who live in the area anymore, but who live farther and farther away from the ones who live here, and so there is little accountability to neighbors from "neighbors"? Was an Acts 2 kind of shared possessions economy, as well as a morally-driven capitalist free economy situation, workable only in cultures where peoples were gathered into small communities unlike our global community today? And what does this have to do with the mission of the church and spiritual life? 

Using the metaphor of giving a person a fish to eat, or teaching the person to fish, these questions get to the heart of that often unseen part of the metaphor: what kind of water and environment do we provide for the fish and the angler? 

And, as Perkins reminds us, this is not just about free enterprise and its effects in the world at large, but how has the "baptism of free enterprise" also affected and effected the church itself in North American context especially? How are our churches following more the American Dream than God's Dream is a constant call to discernment by Perkins. 

What role should the church have to mediate in situations of abandoned places and places of oppression and with cultures who have been oppressed through the years as they seek to engage with the forces of free enterprise in order to make up for years of being kept out of the system? Can those individuals do it all on their own? In my neighborhoods the minority owned businesses are struggling because they have chosen particularly to stay and serve their own community, and yet that makes it harder for them economically, and so they often don't have the growing resources to be able to compete on a wider scale with similar companies owned by whites who will come in to get contracts on big projects or to expand into our neighborhoods. It is harder for them than it is for others located elsewhere to comply with all the rules that governments impose to be eligible for projects that are being built here in their own neighborhoods. The irony is that those who seek to serve the poor often are kept poor themselves in the process, while those who leave the neighborhoods of the poor and make money elsewhere are then better able to come back in and make more money off the poor, be it through franchise restaurants versus the neighborhood resident owned restaurants, or various service companies. As Perkins says, there is little even playing field to begin with for centuries, and still little now in reality. How can the church, besides being witness to injustice, help to correct it?

Church as Co-Op Creator is one of the responses Perkins recommends, but over the years he said experience taught his community that direct coops as businesses didn't work as well as coops such as credit unions which can loan funds to idnividuals in poor areas to enhance their own businesses and empower them. Creating businesses that operate primarily in areas that other businesses have abandoned,but are businesses created to meet needs not greeds has been one of the ways in theory to do Redistribution from within a community, instead of relying on Redistibution to come from good or committment from those outside of a community being served. It gives a more local, empowering, and moderate characteristic about Redistributing goods and The Common Good than people think of when they hear the term redistribution. 

These are grander visions than simply giving out food or clothes, for example. But they also can begin with simple growing of relationships, particularly between people who have experience in the free enterprise system and those who do not. Perkins maintains that the vision of Redistribution will drive the means for how to do it; that there will be multiple ways needed. In this way he links all back to the experience needed of Relocation, because he says we ultimately Redistribute ourselves. And one model for personal living is to live simply so that others may simply live, for by doing so we create more within ourselves to be able to give to others. And this, he says, goes for the church too in how it is able to simplify its life for the life of the community beyond it. Look for ways that people living in close proximity to one another can better share life together, for the purpose of growing in relationship and the Body of Christ but with the byproduct of creating more shared possessions. 

Engaging in the vision of redistribution brought many unexpected lessons to Perkins, and it deepended his understanding of the way oppressive cultures tend to keep people impoverished. He learned to focus on economic opportunities that created a sense of agency within people,and not a sense of dependency, and he sees that the resources for doing this need to come from that three-legged stool of more government help, more free enterprise business help, and more nonprofit and church help. About churches, he makes an interesting but illuminating statement as one of his final sentences in this section. In the vision of what will happen when economic justice becomes the forefront of efforts, he says there will be "nurturing churches" as a part of this community development. Notice that it is the churches who are nurturing the people and the neighborhoods in which they exist; their purpose is not to get the people and the neighborhoods to nurture them, flowing into them as institutions, as was the old way in the churched culture, but now the church is found in how it nurtures what is beyond it. 

Questions for Reflection and Responses:

1. How do you, or would you, teach and preach and relate the scripture of Acts 2: 44&45 to a congregation today?

2. What do you think it will take to stimulate business development in and with poor communities, and how might the church participate?