Reflections

   O Lord, you have searched me and known me … Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.                                                                                                                                             Psalm 139

   Years ago, when he served as U.S. Senator from New Jersey, Bill Bradley told a story about his father, Warren. Mr. Bradley spent one year in high school but still managed to work himself up to a position as president of the local bank in the small, Missouri river town in which the family lived. This was during the Great Depression, and then as now, countless families were struggling to keep up with their mortgages and hold on to their homes and farms.

   In his story, Senator Bradley said that it was his father’s greatest source of pride that during that awful time, he never foreclosed on a single property.
    I imagined that was possible seventy or eighty years ago because the local banker knew his clients, the homeowners and farmers whose mortgages his bank held. He must have known well, in deep ways … known their stories and the stories of their families. When a crisis arose, the banker called upon that great well of stories to discern the best possible solution to the issue at hand.
   You can almost imagine the conversation between Mr. Bradley and his clients. Banker and farmer sitting across the table from one another, committed to finding a solution that met the needs of both people. The banker’s what can I do to keep you on your farm balanced with the farmer’s what do I need to do to stay on it.

  Conversations like this seem to be in short supply these days. Solutions to problems become more elusive because the parties involved are too often disconnected from one another’s lives. The mortgage on a farm is less likely to be held locally; and the shared stories that made resolution possible in Warren Bradley’s world have no place in our world.

  It occurs to me that communities that take the time to share stories, especially the deep stories of our lives, the stories that speaking to meaning and value, these communities understand that simple organic truth: we are connected to another, bound up in one another’s lives, and our well-being as individuals is entirely dependent on our well-being as a people gathered in neighborhood, community, nation and planet. When that sense of interdependence begins to fray, things fall apart.

I spent three years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho, in southern Africa. One of the many things I found remarkable about village life there was the sense that people were bound together and that their survival depended upon their willingness to give up something of their own for the well-being and wholeness of their neighbors. They did not always like each other, but they knew they needed each other.

  People rooted in one place for generations have a sense of that. It certainly not ideal in every way, but those of us who are more transient can benefit from the practices that hold village life together: the understanding of shared well-being, of connection and mutuality; the commitment to a common good. They remind us of the deep commonalities that link us together. As a church, we need to find more and more ways of sharing our stories … in worship and in fellowship, in prayer and in study.

  The beautiful words of the Psalmist comfort us with the knowledge that we are deeply known by God. They also challenge us to think that God not only promises closeness and presence, but that the resolve of God is for us to be closer to one another as well.

And Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.’                                                                Luke 1.47

Most of us know the nuts and bolts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Through ghostly visitation and a hard, painful look at his past and future, an embittered miser is shown the true meaning of Christmas.
But there is a short, wonderful interlude in the Scrooge narrative that often gets overlooked amid the procession of ghosts and graveyards that has a much to say about grace than anything else in the book. And grace – the unmerited, welcoming love of God – is really what Christmas is all about, after all.
You may know it, but bear with me. Bob Cratchit and his family are preparing for their Christmas dinner. Despite their impoverished circumstances, they seem in a festive mood. Bob, ‘his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed to look seasonable’, comes home from church carrying his young son Tim on his shoulder. Tim is a crippled, as we all know; he walks with a crutch, and his legs are supported ‘by an iron frame.’ As they come into the house, Mrs. Cratchit, like all watchful parents asks how her child comforted himself in church: ‘And how did little Tim behave?’
‘As good as gold,’ answers Bob, ‘and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple; and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.’ ”
What a remarkable thing: to see in your own infirmity the potential for divine revelation. Imagine how different the world would look to us if we were able to see it through the same lens as a crippled child.
It strikes me that the grace in Tim Cratchit’s reflection lies in his willingness to see beyond the physical limitations of his world, his family’s poverty and his own handicap, beyond the pity others feel for him, to embrace the possibility that God may work through him in ways that exceed his expectations.

The reality that God redeems the world is at the heart of the Christmas story. Our response to that promise of redemption should be a faith rooted in an open-hearted willingness to see God so deeply and graciously inhabiting our lives and circumstances that every moment, every circumstance contains the promise of renewal, restoration and redemption.

It’s the wrong holiday, of course, but Tim’s theology pulses with the hope of resurrection.

  Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as  yourself.            Luke 10.25-27

  We know the bones of the story. A young man asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus responds by asking him to consider what he knows of scripture. The young man knows that he must love God will his whole self and love his neighbor as he loves himself.
  All well and good. But like many ambitious students who want to impress their professors, the young man goes further. Who is my neighbor, he asks. Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan, the story of a traveler stopping by the side of a road to help a wounded man.
  On its surface, of course, it is a great story of compassion and hospitality. A man lies bleeding on the roadside, robbed of his money and possessions, ignored by other travelers, among them religious leaders. He is finally helped by a stranger, who bandages his wounds and takes him to an inn and pays for his lodging until he has recovered.
  There are other levels to the story, of course. Many of you will know that the wounded man was a Jew and his rescuer a Samaritan. Jews and Samaritans, in a general sense, despised one another.
  Jesus’ audience would have been shocked and scandalized to hear a Samaritan portrayed in such a positive light. Imagine a German stopping to help a beaten and bleeding Jews on a street in Munich in 1938. Or a native South African stopping to help an Afrikaaner at the heart of Apartheid era violence. Or imagine yourself driving along a road on our southern border today and seeing a young Mexican mother and her children sitting on the roadside, exhausted and dehydrated after days in the dessert without water or food. At any of these points, the challenge of the parable confronts us.
  Who indeed is our neighbor? The people we choose. Or the people God chooses for us? The people yearning for healing and companionship that God places in our path.   
   Jesus intended to shock and to confuse his listeners with this story; perhaps even to offend their deeply-held sensibilities enough to invite a change in perspective.  
  The parable has great power to empower the church to look at our ministry and mission in new ways, because the Good Samaritan is not simply a story about how to live with compassion, but a story that challenges us to look differently at the world in which we live and with the people with whom we share God’s world.

  Ultimately, the parable of the Good Samaritan is a word from God that invites us to expand our closely-held notion of who qualifies as a neighbor. No longer can the church afford to assume that our neighbors are those who look like we do, or speak the same language as we do. Or conform to the same way of expressing their faith as well.

  Much has been written and said recently about the decline of the church. The mainline churches have lost our central role as shapers of public morality. We are no longer the first place people go when are looking for purpose and meaning. Some of this decline is our fault. Across the denominational spectrum, churches become too acculturated; the relationship with the worldly culture grew too cozy and comfortable. Part of our decline has been beyond our control, part of a larger movement of history over which we have little control.

  But decline is not always ‘bad’ news. In every crisis lies the seed of opportunity. Someone wiser than me said that; someone who understood that the future of anything worth preserving does not lie in the pursuit of vanity. Or in paralyzing nostalgia for a past that was never really as good as we remember. 

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 There is this grand Congregational church at the center of a town green in Connecticut. It was the founding church of that town; and has been there for nearly 400 years.

 It has a Waterford crystal chandelier, and an enormous Tiffany stained-glass window portraying the town’s founder. Every spring, the graduating class of the local college processes around it. It survives in part by virtue of a generous endowment. It thrives because it has come to recognize that hand-in-hand with its justifiable pride in its historic place in its community’s as well as it current place amid the current struggles of the city’s poorest and most vulnerable residents. For several years, passersby would marvel at the spectacle of the tents and lean-tos erected along the sides of its glorious Federalist façade.

It is symbol both of the decline of mainline churches and a sign of our rebirth. It can be overly reliant on its history; but at the same time look out of its windows and see the demands of a changing world that invite a new vision of neighborhood and community … and so every year the church invited the homeless of the community to make their homes on its side and back lawns.

 Christians make this odd and mysterious claim: God is incarnate in Jesus Christ. When Jesus offers the parable of the Good Samaritan, he merely reminds his church that we are created and called to model that same incarnational love. It might be stopping by the side of the road to attend to a wounded traveler. It may reaching across a counter to provide a meal to a welcome guest. It may be the simple willingness to broaden our sense of community. It may be nothing more than providing a wall to lean on. 

  If we give the time and attention to stories like the Good Samaritan, if we allow this ancient story to reshape our understanding of ourselves not as a community in decline, but as a fellowship prepared to reclaim ourselves as a place of radical love, extravagant hospitality and gracious and open welcome.
  The United Church of Christ is often found of saying to those who gather with us in worship and mission that no matter who you are or where you find yourself on life’s journey, you are welcome in our churches. Our future lies in our willingness to claim the ancient church’s commitment to welcome and hospitality, to embracing Christ’s notion of an expansive and expanding neighborhood that extends to all the fellowship of God’s people. As the new church year begins and unfolds, perhaps in our conversations, our public meetings and private prayers, we can devote ourselves to how we might best look to this ancient story to shape our future together.

   Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.
  To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
   For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.                                                                                                              I Corinthians 12.4-13

Nearly 2000 years ago, the Apostle Paul wrestled with the challenge of an evolving church when he wrote to the saints gathered in Corinth. Like every thriving church in every age, they honored traditions and practices that they had inherited from preceding generations. But as their community grew, people began to recognize that old structures had to give way to new realities.
But not without some hesitation and struggle. Old ways are hard to give up. So Paul writes to remind his beloved people that it is not the form that matters as much as it is the faith that unifies all the diverse gifts and perspectives of the church.
We all have something to give, something to offer, Paul assures the Corinthians; but he reminds them that what we offer should serve the common good, not merely our personal sense of how things should look and how things should be done. The church is one body, made up of many members; and while we bring all that we are as individuals to it, we are unified by one Spirit and one God.

We belong to the Body of Christ. ‘Belong.’ We all say it; but how often do we take the time to really consider the implications of ‘belonging’ to something.
15 times in his letters to the churches in Rome and Corinth, Paul speaks of ‘belonging.’ For Paul, ‘belonging’ is a way of reminding the faithful in those cities that membership in the church requires a certain sacrifice, a willingness to give ourselves over to the faith of the community, and that in common prayer and shared discernment, we might together find God’s vision for the church. It might not always look exactly how we would like, or sound exactly like we want it to sound, but ‘belonging’ assures us that even in those moments of disagreement, we are bound together.
And being bound together and trusting together that God will lead us is the essence of the church.