The kind of people who participate

Jean-Marie Pirot (aka Arcabas) The angel of the Lord speaks to Joseph in a Dream

 Matthew 1:18-25

His fiancé is pregnant with someone else’s baby. Joseph’s been made to look a fool. A righteous man, we’re told, with an impressive pedigree, Joseph seems a worthy candidate to parent the Messiah. And let’s be clear. God could’ve easily waited a few months until Mary and Joseph were properly married and saved everyone a lot of trouble.
 
Instead, God puts Joseph in a moral quandary. Heartbroken and betrayed, good guy Joseph will do the right thing – he’ll dismiss Mary quietly, cause as little embarrassment for her as possible, while preserving his own dignity and honor. 
 
Have you noticed how none of our ancestors in faith are ideal applicants for the job descriptions they end up filling?  And the ones who start out looking promising, like Joseph, end up losing something, or everything, for their role.
 
But if our biblical siblings appeared beyond reproach, we might think it was their inherent goodness that qualified them to participate in God’s plans. We might believe God prefers exemplary, upright, heroic types that make God look good.  
And if that were true, then we might presume that humanity is a graded on a scale, and one’s place in God’s good graces can be earned or lost. We might strive instead of rest, compare instead of cooperate, worry more about the virtue of our own souls than the well-being of others, and be tempted to take on God’s role by assuming it’s our job to fix what’s broken in the world. 
 
So, because the way of God is not about us and what we do but about who God is and what God is up to, the cast of characters that populate our scriptures and the great cloud of witnesses watching over us is necessarily comprised mostly of misfits, screw-ups, and the impossibly unqualified – like overlooked youngest sons and ignored foreign women and those with barren, ancient or virgin wombs, incapacitating stutters and colorful rap sheets, all of whom find in their brokenness a new identity as participants with God in healing and redeeming the world. 
 
Gone is Joseph the upstanding, competent, ethical exemplar who holds the reins of his life. This little crisis has ended that guy.  His good-person-ness torn away, Joseph will receive instead the grace of God who claims us nevertheless. When he awakens from his dream, he will be Joseph, misunderstood and misjudged, unable to control his own life or narrative, but claimed by grace, guided by love, brave to trust, and faithful—right up against his doubt, close to his fears, ready to accept what God is giving him and follow where God is leading him.  Joseph will agree to appear to be something that he is not – this child’s father, but he will claim him nevertheless, and in so doing, he will become his father after all.  
 
And so Joseph trades what was for what will be; he will anticipate the future of God by accepting his role in it now.  And Joseph will live a life characterized by grace unearned and forgiveness unmerited, where everybody belongs and nobody is dismissed, quietly or otherwise. 
 
The savior of the world belongs to us all, and first, Joseph, he will belong to you. The angel whispers in his dream. So do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. Love her. Name the child Jesus. Love him.  
 
And the child Joseph will raise will not become an upstanding, good citizen, respected in society and honored in the community, upholding his father’s good name and bolstering the commendable, but a vagabond and a subversive, who dines with sinners, prostitutes and outcasts, confronts corruption and evil, and refuses to totalize or dismiss anyone.  He will be a Savior who rests, and trusts, and lives fully connected to God and to every other human.  And Jesus will open up to us all a reality of redemption, forgiveness and freedom, everlasting belonging that will set the world free.
 
Dear little Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church: for 100 years now, people have been gathering on this spot in the name and presence of Christ, to worship God together, to seek the way of Jesus and be guided by the Holy Spirit, to pray and sing, and listen and respond. To grieve and to celebrate. To raise each other’s kids in love, and bury each other’s loved ones with gentleness. To pour love into the community and welcome in the world’s pain and joy. To learn and to change alongside one another, to mess up and practicing forgiving, to reach out and practice receiving, to take the baton from those gone before and pass it on to those who come next. 

And so for 100 years this little congregation has had our own rotating cast of unlikely characters, misfits and oddballs, flawed people living broken, honest and real lives, trusting right up against our doubt, watching for the in-breaking of God around us, sharing the presence of Christ by being with and for others, faithfully accepting what God is giving us and following where God is leading us.  
That is something to celebrate.
 
Today we lit an Advent Candle for Peace. So this week, we will be watching for, praying for, and living toward peace. The Hebrew word for Peace, Shalom, means “fullness” or “completion.”  So when people greet one another or say goodbye, with Shalom, what they are really saying is, “May you be completed.”  Whenever we join in God’s bringing wholeness and fullness for others, whenever our words or actions say, “May you be completed,” we are making peace. We can literally share in the substance of God’s life, here and now.  We can contribute to others’ fullness, fullness in the world around us, and fullness between us.  We can trade what is for what will be. 

But only if we have our ideas about what it means to live a good life torn away, and receive instead the grace of God who claims us nevertheless.  

God’s love comes to and through imperfect people in ordinary ways, and we are drawn in by God’s mercy and grace, to receive the love of God without qualifications or preconditions. God plunges into this world in the person of Christ Jesus, and by the Spirit pours grace and love through us that feels like courage to forgive, and willingness to listen, and an inclination toward wonder, joy, gratitude and generosity.

 This savior ruins people for respectable, mind-your-own-business living, and pulls us head over heels into a life of trusting, and resting, and hoping, that practices our unbreakable belonging to God and each other, and join in the healing and shalom that God is always bringing into the world. So, like those gone before us, both our predecessors here, and all the faithful from every place and time, we too anticipate the future of God by accepting our role in it now.  
Amen.
 

Being seen

The past few weeks, at Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church, we've had a reporter and photographer hanging around. It's a little bit intimidating to be watched, and even more unnerving to trust that someone else will tell your story in a way that feels true to your own experience of it.  So it's been good for me to let go of control a little bit and let their encounter with us speak for itself, and it's been interesting to see ourselves through someone else's eyes.

Here is what came from their investigation:
Duke Journal of Faith and Leadership

They also linked this sermon to their article.

Mostly what I take from this experience is a renewed sense of enormous gratitude for this congregation, these people, who want with all their hearts to follow Christ and live in God's way of love instead of the way of fear. For all our quirks and foibles, our life together really is grounded in love and hope, and I feel so blessed to be in this with them!

Stories of Life-giving change

So there is this new ebook that just came out, which is filled with creative ideas for renewing the church - ideas that come from the experiences and insights of 50 different contributors from 15 different faith traditions.  A bit of our story from Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church is in this book, alongside so many other wonderful ideas and stories!

 You can get Renew 52, for FREE by following the link.

Read an introduction to the book by David Lose

Finally, here is LNPC's contribution from the book.

Make space for sabbath

byKaraK Root

Our small, 90-year-old congregation has found new life and vitality. Our secret? We’ve stopped having worship services every Sunday. A couple of years ago we made the decision as a congregation to embrace the Sabbath and practice it communally.

Actually, the secret was a process of intentional discernment—exploring the question: Who are we now, and who are we called to be for this time and place? This meant grieving and letting go of the way we were in the past—when the congregation was ten times the size it is now and much younger. But it also meant letting go of all the messages that we’re bombarded with that tell us how we should be doing church in order to be “successful.”

Instead, we asked ourselves: Where is God already moving in and among us? How do we already embody the mission of God here and now? Our new understanding of our identity became centered in worship, hospitality, and Sabbath. We recognized and celebrated all the myriad ways we worship and experience God’s presence—and while sitting in a pew on Sundays made the list, it isn’t by any means the only way. We learned that hospitality is the practice of intentionally living inside God’s abundant welcome, and welcoming others authentically and mutually. But the big shocker for us was Sabbath.

Sabbath, we discovered, is a revolutionary, counter-cultural practice that reorients us to God’s presence and promi- nence in our lives and the world. It helps us notice and remember whose we are—that we belong to a living God for whom resting is part of creating, and whose Spirit is moving in our lives and the world, even when we are too dis- tracted or busy to notice. And Sabbath reminds us who we are—individually and communally. We are created in God’s image, set free to live out our particularity instead of being enslaved and defined by production or consumption.

For several months we read about Sabbath, we retreated with some Sabbath-keeping nuns, and we had lots of discussions about the needs in our busy communities and our own lives. And we asked ourselves: How can our life and faith come from our being and not our doing?

Thus began an experiment of keeping Sabbath as a community, an experiment that has altered us remarkably. On the first and third Sundays we worship on Sunday mornings in all our Presbyterian glory. On the second and fourth weekends we meet Saturday nights by candlelight and harp, and sink into Sabbath rest together. The “preached word” takes many forms, looser in format than the Sunday sermons, and often very interactive. We hold silence each week, two whole minutes that sometimes stretch into eternity, but which have become life-giving. Simple, Taizé- like music is woven throughout the service, and we center our worship around shared prayer (something that has invaded our Sunday morning services as well). Our Saturday worship continues with a communal meal—lingering together around warm food and conversation. Then we go home.

And on Sunday, we spend the day in Sabbath. Here and there, all over the city, individuals and families purposely stopping. The guidelines we give ourselves are to try to do nothing from obligation, to pay attention to the struggle to stop and offer even that as a gift of gratitude, to get outside some, to play some, to do something that gives us delight. To be with others if we’re alone a lot. To be alone if our lives are crowded. To make the day different than our ordinary days. To pay attention to what our souls need. And to rest.

Practicing Sabbath in this way has infected our whole communal life. Our session (church board) meetings are full of worship, we retreat more as a community, we remind each other to rest, we say “no” more, and “yes” more too. Sabbath is continuing to teach us who we are and remind us whose we are. And our one-year experiment has become a way of life for our church community.

t hasn’t always been easy, and we’ve had our ups and downs, but Sabbath-keeping has become a communal rhythm that grounds us, feeds us, and offers respite for our community. It has opened us up to encounter God more candidly throughout our week, un-anchoring worship from Sunday mornings and placing it within our souls and the community instead. It has also expanded our hospitality and our encounter of others. Whenever we have a fifth Sunday, for example, we worship at a nearby county emergency children’s facility, sharing/leading chapel with and for the kids there as our own worship service.

Anxiety no longer rules around here; we’re more settled and joyful. Most importantly, though, I think we’d all say we no longer go to church; we are the church. I suspect that Sabbath has taught us that.

Kara K. Root is pastor of Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, Minn. She has an M.Div. from Fuller Seminary, and is a Minister of Word and Sacrament and Certified Educator in the PCUSA. As mom to two entertaining kids (and two unruly dogs), and wife and proofreader to a wily theologian, she is fully immersed in life. She’s written for Sparkhouse’s re:form curriculum, Homily Service Journal, WorkingPreacher.org, and Patheos. She blogs about ministry and motherhood at “in the hereandnow.”