The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 27, 2009
The Reverend Fred Taylor
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As a former member of St. Mark’s, I am happy to be here this morning. Before coming here in the late 1990s I was a long time member of the Church of the Savior, an ecumenical, mission-oriented church with a significant historic connection to St. Marks’ which I will describe in a moment. After a very meaningful sojourn at St. Mark’s I returned to the Church of the Savior.
I am pleased to be part of the teaching team of an upcoming Christian Education class that you have heard about from my partners, Kitty Donnelly, Emily Guthrie, Karen Getman. Our vision for the course comes from awareness that while we are living in a time of enormous pain, suffering, and fragmentation, this is also be a time of radical possibility. And this is our chief aim – claiming the possibility. Our political and spiritual fragmentation causes tension and the temptation to tune out. But will we as individuals and as the Church slide into resignation, cynicism, despair, and even worse, a religious cloister to avoid the needs, or we be watchful, alert, and hear the call to a radical possibility?
To help us work with this duality, let me suggest a distinction to guide us. This is the distinction between mini story and mega story.
Regardless of our circumstances every human being exists in both the mini stories of day to day reality and mega stories that stretch across a much longer, wider, deeper horizon. From time to time things happen that put us in touch with the mega story and for a moment we are transformed. We think differently. We see and hear differently. We feel differently.
Such a point came last November with the election of Barak Obama. Many people said they couldn’t believe it – a black man elected President in this country with its long, long history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and persistent racism. That night we remembered our American mega story penned by Thomas Jefferson “all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”
But there was more. The election was about change, a change away from the rich few getting richer and a growing poor getting poorer. That night many of us wondered maybe the door is opening toward a fairer America, a more level playing field, one that will begin to pull together for a sustainable future for all. That night we thought of our mega story written on the statue of liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses longing to be free.” On that night dancing in the streets as blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians cheered in common, we were in touch with our powerful mega stories as a people.
Now ten months later we are painfully in touch with the mini story of whether or not we can work out the details of meaningful reform of health care and environmental protection and on and on.
This is the same situation we find in today’s Old Testament text in the 1lth chapter of Numbers. This is a classic mini story which occurred not long after the height of Israel’s great mega story when God and Moses had led this people from slavery in Egypt to freedom at the Red Sea. Exodus 15 describes the scene of celebration: “Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them: ‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.”
From this high moment of dancing on the beach, the scene in our text in Numbers 11 shifts to Israel plodding its way through the wilderness. The people are tired, frustrated, beginning to doubt their mega story which gets lost in their preoccupation with their mini stories.
It was the same for Moses. He was into his own mini story. Moses complains to God that his leadership responsibilities were unbearable given the orneriness of the people God has given him to lead. God responds to Moses by instructing him to bring together the recognized leaders of the various family groups so that he could give them a share of the charisma with which he had endowed Moses to equip them to help keep the people moving in a common direction.
As this was occurring, two characters named Eldad and Medad for some reason don’t bother to join the others at the tent of meeting outside the camp but they receive the spirit where they are and immediately begin to speak with charisma inside the camp. A lad carries this news to Moses at the tent of meeting. Moses’ assistant Joshua urges Moses to stop them. Moses replies, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit on them.”
This event fits prominently in the mega story of the Bible. We come to this theme again on the Day of Pentecost in the book of Acts when all present are infused with the Holy Spirit. The Apostle Paul picks it up in describing the church as like a living body of diverse contributing parts, all essential to the health and power of the body. Centuries later Martin Luther drew on it in his teaching of the “priesthood of all believers.” In its founding the Church of the Savior embraced the same vision in describing itself as “all crew, no passengers.” This became an integral piece of its mega story.
The same image became one of the building blocks of the St. Mark’s Church that arose in the l950s when the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington called on a young priest named Bill Baxter to close a dying Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill at 3rd and A SE. At that time much of the neighborhood white population was leaving for the suburbs who were quickly replaced by African American families many of them recent arrivals from the South seeking better jobs and better education. The St. Mark’s membership had dwindled below the capacity to support itself. By in large it did not identify with the new population of Capitol Hill. The Bishop invited Bill Baxter to give the church a decent burial. Instead Bill Baxter recruited three strong women from the Church of the Saviour, Verna Dozier, Vera Pierce and Jan Hoffman along with some other adventurous souls who wanted a church of the future rather than one defined by the past.
The resurrection of this church under the leadership of Bill Baxter, Verna, Jan, Vera and some of you here in this room comprises a St. Mark’s mega story. This story belongs to everyone who identifies as part of this fellowship. When you involve yourself here in this church you take on this story as your own – all crew, no passengers. The mega stories of both St. Mark’s and the Church of the Savior is the vision of a life giving community which spills over into abundant life in the world. The name for this mega story is “community” in which the world’s divisions of rich and poor, well educated and poorly educated, black and white, male and female, gay and straight, insiders and outsiders fall away. In the name of Jesus Christ the arms of such a community are open to the people within and the people without.
Our Christian Ed class, Roll Away the Stone, intends to pull us toward and equip us to enter more deeply into the dialectic between our mini stories and mega stories and to help us see possibilities for living creatively in the tension between suffering and radical possibility.
Let me say up front this journey is different from frenetic activity. In this class we will not be talking about “amp-ing” up the human electricity around this place as if you weren’t already busy enough. Rather we want to explore compassion at a deeper level than the “haves” sharing their left-overs with the “have-nots”.
One way we will be doing this is to reflect together on the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead in the 11th chapter of John. In that story Jesus’ friend Lazarus had been critically ill and his sisters Mary and Martha send a message asking Jesus to come and help them. When Jesus arrives, after getting involved in other important matters along the way, Lazarus is already dead.
At first glance this story has all the makings of a story of resignation, of coming to terms with that which we cannot change. All of us can identify with the sisters. We feel numb and resigned, even when angry, in the situations that seem beyond recovery. We look for people to blame or we just weep. In this story, the professional mourners are already on hand leading people in the grieving process.
Jesus interrupts their wailing and asks them to do something utterly strange – roll away the stone sealing the tomb. This is unheard of. By now the body is decomposing and rolling away that stone would unleash an overpowering odor. In our class we will be using the “stone” as a metaphor for thinking about the realities of structural poverty and the structural isolation of the poor.
The stone represents barriers that can’t be moved from the inside of the tomb. Children simply do not have the power to change a poor school system. Poor people cannot change a health care system organized according to the amount of insurance you or your employer can pay. The prison system in the United States has multiplied geometrically from 1975 when 250,000 were incarcerated in state and federal prisons to 2.5 million today with a recidivism rate of 63%. Inmates can’t change it. In each case the larger community has to move the stone.
In the Lazarus story, the community is stunned but they obey Jesus and roll away the stone from the entrance to the tomb. Then Jesus calls loudly into the tomb itself, “Lazarus, come out!” To their amazement, Lazarus hears and waddles to the entrance of the tomb with the linen wrappings of his burial restricting his movement.
Here is an equally important metaphor. The people inside the tomb have real names. Their stories are real like ours. We are not talking about statistics here, but human beings with gifts and challenges. When God calls them it is a call to life. This metaphor tells us that there can be no deliverance, no transformation without the participation of the sufferers. Healing takes place through relationship, symbolized by the calling of the name.
As Lazarus emerges still bound in grave cloth Jesus gives another command to the astonished community, “Unbind him, let him go.”
The image of Lazarus having just heard the calling of his name emerging from the tomb wrapped in grave cloth is a third vital lens for reflecting on suffering and radical possibility. Some very bright kids in bad schools aren’t learning how to read and they are embarrassed by their lack of ability to do so. They hide their disability and year by year they fall further and further behind their grade level. People suffering from years of incarceration or neglect or discrimination don’t quickly trust enough to express all the richness they have within them. They have to experience an unbinding in their new community if radical possibility is to occur for them.
As part of the class we have planned a field trip to give you the opportunity to be in conversation with people in our community who are engaging in this threefold kind of liberation. We are not promising that you will be set on fire to take up a fascinating, worthwhile project. Each person will respond perhaps differently. Our aim is to reinforce those of you who are already engaged with a vision and to lay some groundwork for those of you who want to venture out into new territory. Some of you who take the class may be drawn to advocacy and the work of changing systems. Others may be drawn to direct service in joining an existing project or starting a new one. Still others may see your place of service as providing support, financial, logistical, contacts.
In closing let me add one further thought about mega story. When you go home today, pick up your Bible and turn to the Gospel of Mark. Notice the first verse – with 9 or 12 words depending on the translation – and – here is the important point – no verb. The absence of a verb suggests that this verse was intended as the title of the work: the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.
What this suggests is that the story of Jesus, his life, death and resurrection as told by Mark, was understood as the beginning of a larger mega story. Notice also the strange way that Mark ends chapter 16, the final chapter. Jesus is no longer sealed in a tomb nor is he sitting around waiting to be admired. A young man gives the women a straightforward amazing message: “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. .. go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him.” And after describing the women’s amazement and terror upon hearing this news, Mark abruptly closes. Could Mark be saying that the beginning of the Jesus mega story is complete, now let’s move into the middle of the story – the story of the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit in and through the church.
We think this mega story is what attracted Bill Baxter, Vera, Verna and Jan and a multitude of others to St. Mark’s. This group understood themselves in their vision of the resurrection of this church as a life giving community in the world not as settling for the survival of a church about to die but participating in a larger, ongoing mega story of new creation and new life in the world, of radical possibility in the face of unbelief. Likewise, the Church of the Savior had a vision for Adams Morgan and the evidence of their faithfulness can be seen everyday on Columbia Road and throughout the city in rolled away stones, suffering children and adults, young people and old people hearing their names called, emerging from captivity, getting released from their grave cloths, praising God and loving one another.
For weeks now, Paul and Susan and Loretta have been challenging this church to “pay attention and be alert” to your calling as individuals and as St. Mark’s. Now Kitty, Emily, Karen and I challenge you to join us this fall for two months as we focus with intention on the reality of suffering in our city and world and the radical possibility of its transformation. What is our work? What does it mean to roll away the stone – in our society – and in ourselves? What does it mean to rise up and be alive with hope?
