There is SO much to celebrate and
wrestle with in the lessons assigned for this day: together they form a theological and ethical
cornucopia for a preacher – a spiritual smorgasbord for those with eyes to see
and ears to hear – a feast filled with only the finest blessings of grace. Each of our readings is rich unto themselves:
+ The poet
Isaiah sings a song of God’s strength and reassurance in the midst of human
travail and the Psalmist backs him up with a chorus of thanks-giving; the
apostle Paul improvises creatively on a theme of radical inclusivity so that
the evangelist St. Mark can bring it all home with visions of women and men
being raised from sick beds while demons flee and festivals are prepared for
even those living on the fringes of society.
+ Are you with
me? These are stories and songs about real people being restored to the
fullness of joy and the vibrancy of hope.
And like I said, individually they stunning, but joined together
as a whole – embraced in mutuality like a choir when its cooking or a
gumbo after the sausage infuses the onions, tomatoes and peppers with its magic
and the garlic saturates the chicken – ooh la la!
+ Alors vous avez quelque chose de sacré qui peut nourrir le monde – then you have something sacred
that can nourish the world – n’est pas?
This morning
I want to share with you something of the promise, beauty and foolishness of
such a sacred feast as it pertains to our upcoming sabbatical. Not just MY
sabbatical, mind you, but OUR sabbatical because that is how it has been
designed: it is to be for us a shared
feast of rest and renewal – for both pastor and people – a banquet
steeped in the foolishness of Christ’s grace and saturated with a spirit of
holy playfulness.
It will be
upon us in 82 days (who’s counting?) And as much as I am ready for it to begin,
I want you to be ready, too. Ready and excited – ready and engaged – ready and
hopeful. Believe me,
I’ve heard stories from church council and other lay leaders over the past two
years about previous clergy sabbaticals you’ve endured: how you received a set
of marching orders to complete while the pastor was away or how wonderful it
was for your beloved clergy but how you just held on by your finger tips until
his return.
This
sabbatical is to be different. It is to be a shared time of playful renewal for
both you and me. And when we wrote the grant to the Lily Foundation for Clergy
Renewal, they made certain that an integral part of our planning involved you –
the congregation – the community of faith. Because like all of God’s children,
you need Sabbath and sabbatical as much as I do. The first lesson from the
prophetic poet Isaiah speaks to this truth.
Chapter 40 begins
with those agonizingly tender words we proclaim during Advent:
Comfort, comfort ye my people, speak of peace thus saith the Lord. Comfort
those who sit in darkness mourning under sorrow’s load. And it keeps
getting better and better: Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has
it not been told to you from the beginning?
The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of
the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is
unsearchable. He gives power to
the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even
youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall
renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall
run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
In Isaiah’s time this love letter was first shared with those
living in the exile and bondage of Babylon. Many had been taken away in chains
from the holy city of Jerusalem in 587 BCE and witnessed the destruction of the
first Temple. Scholars note that some of these captives were eventually treated
reasonably well; those from the royal family of Israel’s King Jehoiachin
apparently received food rations and modest housing arrangements. Others were kept in harsh refugee labor camps.
What’s more, by the time the captives were set free some 70
years later, they knew they would be returning to a city devastated by war.
Jerusalem had not been rebuilt but left in ruins by the conquering army: there
was no Temple, there were no external gates for safety and the once bountiful
fields and vineyards lay now fallow and overrun with bramble.
For them this return would have been heart-breaking because
they would recall the Temple’s former glory when they saw it in ruins. They
once harvested food from fields now barren and bleak. And they had given birth
to families who were now dead or missing or still in exile. To the most
vulnerable and fragile refugees, God makes a promise: You shall RENEW your strength. You who have
waited upon the Lord, YOU shall mount up with wings like an eagle, YOU shall
run and not be weary, YOU shall walk and not be faint.
That closing metaphor was one the old timers would have
remembered with joy: it comes from Exodus – the story of God’s liberation of
the people from their oppression – and recalls the celebrations the Lord asked
of Israel to mark their freedom.
The Lord called
to Moses from the mountain, saying, ‘Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob,
and tell the Israelites: You have
seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought
you to myself. Now therefore, if
you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession
out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly
kingdom and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the
Israelites.’
The return to covenant living and all its festivals for the
elderly is one of the promises of the passage. For
those of us who are not
refugees – or elderly or simply young or middle aged but forgetful and human –
this promise is an assurance of pardon. It tells us that we too shall be
forgiven and renewed from our sin because that is God’s nature: All who return to me, says the Lord, all who
are weary – all who are faint – all who are exhausted and powerless – you too
shall mount up with wings as the eagles.
For “have you not known? Have you not heard? Have you not understood
since the beginning of time… that all who are tired and weary, all who are
heavy laden shall return to me that I may give them rest?”
+ Our sabbatical is to be a time of rest – an extended season
of Sabbath, if you will – a celebration of renewal and returning to the heart
of God’s grace.
+ During those four months that Dianne and I are away doing our
thing, we’ve planned some truly restful celebrations for you. There will be two all-church outings to
Tanglewood to take in both Dianna Krall in June and Wynton Marsalis in
July. Carlton will lead some preparation
conversations for you about these concerts so that you’ll know what to expect
and how to get the most out of them.
So as prelude to this sabbatical, I want to give you a taste
of what we’ve got cooked up for you. As
my musical colleagues come up into place, let me describe and then ask you to
enter into, the creative promise of our shared jazz sabbatical. We’re going to
take the beautiful contemporary hymn by David Haas, “Deep Within” – a song
about God’s eternal promise to renew and love us from the inside out – and
share it with you in three ways.
+ First, we will celebrate the song’s haunting melody: it aches
with sacred affectionate, so savor its beauty. Beauty is part of what this
sabbatical is all about.
+ Second, we will take that aching even deeper as our vocalists
sing and harmonize together. That, too, is part of this sabbatical’s promise:
recognizing and sharing our gifts in community.
+ And third, Carlton and I - and maybe the vocalists, too – will improvise on his jazz chart. Improvisation, you see, is the respectful playing with both tradition and spontaneity – it is following where the Spirit calls in the moment – it is totally unpredictable and depends upon everyone working and listening together in new ways. And, that too is part of what this sabbatical is all about.
Let this time in music be a prayer for you. Let it be a feast
for your soul if you ache for renewal.
Let it be a home-coming for all who are tired, weary or heavy l
Deep within, I will plant my law, not
on stone, but in your heart.
Follow me; I will bring you back. You will be my own, and I will be your God.
Follow me; I will bring you back. You will be my own, and I will be your God.
I will give you a new heart, a new
spirit within you, for I will be your strength.
Seek my face, and see your God, for I
will be your hope.
Return to me, with all your heart,
and I will bring you back.
Did you get it? Did you experience the three parts of beauty, interpretation and improvisation? Think about that for a moment as I ask the band for their reflections upon what we just shared: what was going on for you? And what about you in the congregation: what was your experience of this jazz prayer?
One of my hopes for our time in sabbatical together is that
we come to trust the promise of God’s rest more deeply and more openly. Our healing, our hope, our continuing renewal and value as a
congregation truly rests upon the Lord – who will renew our strength – as we return
and rest. That is one commitment. The other is this: I hope that we as a
congregation can all learn to become more… playful. Foolish in our trust of God’s grace and
willing to take greater risks in extending that grace to a broken world: that’s
my second hope for this shared sabbatical.
That’s one reason why I wanted the Reverend Bob Kyte to be
our sabbatical worship leader and pastor while we’re away. When Carlton and I
were in a phone conversation with him last week, we talked about our hopes for
this experience. And I said, “I hope and pray that this whole thing will be
enveloped in playfulness.” To which there was first a pause and then a big
laugh as Bob said, “You know playful is NOT a word that most people would have
ever associated with me during my time in ministry.” To which he then quickly
added, “But I am NOW.”
And that’s exactly right: but what we’re doing is not new; it is just
what Paul told us he was doing back in about 50 CE in Corinth. In
another lesson for today he writes: “I have become a servant of all so that I
might share the good news with them. To Jews I became like a Jew, to those
under the law I became as one under the law… to the weak I became weak… indeed
I have become all things to all men to share the blessings of the gospel.”
Peterson’s reworking brings Paul’s wisdom up to date:
I have voluntarily become a servant to any and all in order to
reach a wide range of people: religious, nonreligious, meticulous moralists,
loose-living immoralists, the defeated, the demoralized—whoever. I didn’t take
on their way of life. I kept my bearings in Christ—but I entered their world
and tried to experience things from their point of view. I’ve become just about every sort of servant there is in my
attempts to lead those I meet into a God-saved life. I did all this because of
the Message. I didn’t just want to talk about it; I wanted to be in on it!
That is what all the music is all about – offering those who
have been shut out of grace by religion a way back into its blessings – using a
resource and tool that is all over our culture – music – to share God’s love. Anywhere
and everywhere you go today, there is music playing. So why not use it as a
playful way of sharing God’s blessings? That’s part of what our sabbatical is
all about, too: understanding, experiencing, practicing and playfully playing
more music so that we, like Paul, might enter other worlds, experience things
from their point of view and discover what we have in common.
+ While we’re away Carlton will be leading a conversation in
why we have music in the church. He will lead you in some experiences with
different kinds of singing – and different types of listening – and when he
does this I hope you bring others with you. This would be a GREAT time – a fun
time – to invite somebody with you to church.
+ So many people these days hate and mistrust Christians.
They’ve got good reasons, of course, but they are truly apprehensive. So why not use this summer sabbatical to
playfully offer them an alternative? Be courageous in your playfulness like the
apostle Paul.
You see, we are all more alike than different. We have
obvious differences in race and gender, politics and
body shape, cultural
habits and education; but we’re still far more alike than we are different. And
that means we have hurts and wounds and hopes and dreams that are more similar
than we realize. That’s why Jesus took
his ministry to the far edges of his community – and kept wandering – he knew
people yearned for a taste of God’s feast. So rather than wait for them, he
brought the good news to their communities so they discovered their place at
the table.
Our work with liturgy and music is grounded in that calling,
too: it honors what we hold in common and reaches out to offer grace when so
many other people and institutions are sharing judgment and fear. And as you might guess, there’s a prayer song
from the jazz catalogue that expresses this perfectly: “All Blues” by Miles
Davis. We’ll bring this message to a
close by playing it for you now, but let me call two insights to your attention
about this song.
+ First, it is based on a very traditional blues structure.
That’s one of the jazz traditions – taking the old, old blues and first
honoring it – as Miles Davis does with finesse and verve. And then the
tradition asks you to play with it and make it new – that is another jazz
commitment – taking something old and making it new – and every time he played,
Miles made it new. So listen for how that is realized in this song.
+ And second, Miles didn’t write lyrics for this song. They
came about a year later when Oscar Brown, Jr. worked to integrate jazz with the
wisdom of the freedom civil rights movement.
Brown took what was established and playfully made it something new,
too. So will we…
At the heart of this song is our shared human experience –
regardless of race or any other of our significant differences – it is an
invitation to the feast of God’s grace.
And that, is what this sabbatical invites us to celebrate.
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