
In
some ways, our movement from the States to Canada has paralleled our
congregation's movement from this historic building to a new
location. It's loomed ahead of us for many years — overlapping
years — the very first time we attended this congregation a little
over four years ago, there happened to be a meeting after the worship
service about whether or not the building should be sold to a
developer. Feelings at that meeting were running deep and strong.
In part, these were connected to memory and past disagreement over
previous congregational amalgamation in the GTA — something that,
at the time, I had no awareness of and even now only share
second-hand. But my ignorance of the specifics met my passion head
on — and passion won out. I'd really enjoyed my first service
here, encountering all of you, and I was worried it would be lost
before I could become a part of it. I remember — that first
meeting — speaking up and saying that, as a denomination, Community
of Christ can't be continually closing churches; rather, we need to
be continually refilling empty pews.
That
was my introduction to all of you. Experience has helped cure my
ignorance and in the intervening years, I've come to see how
burdensome a wrong-sized building can be to our community, as we
sacrifice all our efforts and inheritance into simply maintaining and
heating it. As, I believe, most all of you, I've come to look upon
the move as an opportunity and a potential blessing.
And
yet, this future — while ever more inevitable — has remained
filled with uncertainties. For years the exact date of my move was
completely uncertain and out of my hands. We had all our paperwork
filled out and submitted. We had gone and done everything from
getting new copies of birth certificates and college diplomas to
getting fingerprinted for our FBI background checks. We had the
immigration points and knew our applications would be approved, and
yet for nearly two years we had no way of knowing when they would be
approved. The approval could come at any time “like a thief in the
night.” (And even after the first approval came, and we were asked
to provide health records and have final medical checks and new
fingerprinting and new FBI background checks, we put back into
another period of waiting for a final approval that might come at any
time).
The
congregation has found itself in remarkably similar circumstances
since approving the developer's offer to purchase the building. We
have a future idea that we will be leaving this building, but we
don't know when precisely. We only know that at sometime in a
future, on a date outside of our control, the developer will be ready
to take possession of the building and will give us 90 days notice to
vacate. Meanwhile, while we're trying to plan for the future, we're
obliged to live in the present. And in the present we do have this
building along with its many expenses — and simultaneously we lack
the principal from the sale of this building, which has prevented us
from finding and making a new home for ourselves.
As
I had been with my immigration status, so have we all been — as a
congregation — in limbo. We have a vision or an idea of where
we're going, we aren't sure when we will get there. Nor is the
“when” entirely in our hands.
OUR
THEME
Although
this has, perhaps, seemed like a lengthy digression, I think our
story is connected with our theme this Sunday and our scripture
reading. Our theme is “Become a Covenant People” and our reading
is taken from chapter 15 of Genesis.
In
this story we read that:
...the word of the Lord came
to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield;
your reward shall be very great.”
But Abram said, “O Lord
God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of
my house is Eliezer of Damascus?”
And Abram said, “You have
given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my
heir.”
But the word of the Lord
came to him, “This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very
own issue shall be your heir.”
[The Lord] brought [Abram]
outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you
are able to count them... So shall your descendants be.” And he
believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
Then [the Lord] said to him,
“I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give
you this land to possess.”
But [Abram] said, “O Lord
God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?”
[The Lord] said to him,
“Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old,
a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” [Abram]
brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over
against the other...
[And] as the sun was going
down, a slumber had come over Abram, and a deep, dark terror
descended upon him... and there was darkness [and] a smoking fire pot
and a flaming torch passed between the parted bodies [of the
offering]. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying,
“To your descendants I give this land from the [border] of Egypt
to... the river Euphrates.”
The
Lord made a Covenant with Abram whose name was changed to Abraham.
This particular text comes from one of the oldest parts of the Bible.
The author's writings are interspersed through Genesis, Exodus,
Numbers, and Leviticus, and they have a distinct language, voice, and
narrative agenda. However, the name of the ancient prophet who
composed the text is long lost. Scholars have labeled this author
the “J-source” because of the way he (or she) consistently uses
the name Jehovah (or Yahweh) to refer to God. In our reading this
was rendered “the Lord.” I say “he or she” because the case
can be — and has been — made that J-source was a woman. We'll
almost certainly never know either way, but the J-source's interest
in women and the many, many female characters — Eve, Sarah and
Hagar, Rachel, Rebecca and Leah, Tamar to name just a few — may
indicate the ancient prophet who wrote their stories was a woman,
perhaps a noble woman in the Davidic court in the Kingdom of Judea in
the 7th century BC.
Male
or female, covenant is at the core of this, the earliest Biblical
author's text. The central theme of the J-Source is the belief that
the Lord has made a covenant with the House of David and the Kingdom
of Judea. And in writing scripture, this prophet has told or retold
and interconnected stories of covenants the Lord made with humanity
throughout time: the covenant with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses,
and ultimately with David.
In
our reading, the Lord gives Abram a vision of his posterity, as
numberless as the stars. Abram and his wife Sarai have no children
of their own and are already advanced in age beyond childbearing
years. Later on, when she first hears the idea, Sarai laughs aloud.
However, when he first is shown the vision of his posterity as
numberless as the stars, we are told that Abram “believed the
Lord.”
Abram
had a vision of would be — if he covenanted with the Lord. The
vision led him forward, even though he did not know when or even how
that vision would ever be accomplished.
Like
Abram, we are called to enter into covenants with the Lord and
“Become a Covenant People.” But, unlike the ancient prophet who
authored the J-text of the Bible, we aren't fixated on the “promised
land” of the Kingdom of Judea and its borders nor on the geometric
expansion of our own posterity.
As
a denomination, we have felt the call to covenant with God to become
a “Community of Christ.” This is not mere rhetoric. Our new
Mission Initiatives call upon us to make our mission real:
• By
Inviting people to Christ
• By
Abolishing poverty and ending suffering
• By
Pursuing Peace on Earth
• By
Developing Disciples to Serve
• and
By Experiencing Mission in our own congregation
These
are enormous tasks — as seemingly impossible as the vision given to
Abram. But we can achieve them by keeping the vision before us and
remembering we are not called to do everything, but everyone is
called to do something.
As
a congregation, we have likewise sought to discern a vision of what
will be. In our “What Matters Most” workshops, in our
conversations, and in our own prayers, we sought to listen to the
call of the Lord. We have felt called to maintain a dowtown presence
and we long for the congregation to live on and be renewed. But
believe that vision, but like Abram and Sarai before the birth of
Isaac — and like Mike and myself before our landing — we are
uncertain about When and, indeed, How it shall be.
As
I said when I began, I come before you as a herald of good news. In
our immigration process, we crossed a finish line. Last year at this
time, the line was just a distant vision for me. Today, I'm speaking
to you from the other side of the finish line.
But
now that I'm here on the other side, I see it much more clearly. But
I also see that it's not a “finish line” at all. It was simply a
threshold — an important threshold, surely, but a threshold
nonetheless. There were many steps that preceded the threshold, and
I now see that there are many steps in the path that lies beyond.
There are small steps like unpacking, getting our social insurance
numbers, and there are bigger steps like going back, liquidating
everything we left behind in the house in Michigan, renting it out,
selling it, returning here and figuring out every new thing like how
to file tax forms in Canada, to a future threshold a few years in the
future of dual-citizenship. We didn't just become Canadian last
Wednesday. We crossed an important threshold in a much longer
process of becoming Canadian.
When
our church had its origins nearly two centuries ago, the men and
women who came together to become the “Church of Christ” hoped to
“Restore” the primitive Christian church as it had existed at the
time of Jesus and the apostles. But we have come to learn that the
process of the Restoration is not something that is ever complete.
The Restoration is renewed by the act of continually “restoring”
the primitive church in our own lives as we walk forward.
Likewise,
we did not simple become — past tense — Community of Christ when
we changed the name of our church in 2001. We “become” Community
of Christ by continually “becoming” a Community of Christ in an
ongoing sense.
In
our own congregation, we have before us a vision — perhaps many
visions — of our future community after we leave behind this
historic, sacred space. But although the line before us is daunting
and of crucial import, it is not a finish line. It is a threshold we
cross, as we envision and continually re-envision our community in
response to the call of the Lord.
And
so, I would like to suggest that a Covenant People is not something
we can simply become and be done with in the past tense. Rather a
Covenant People is something we must be perpetually becoming.
I think both "covenant" and "community" are at the core of the gospel. This sermon links the two together very effectively.
ReplyDelete