07/01/2012 ~ Proper 8 ~ Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time ~ Fifth Sunday after Pentecost ~ 2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27; Psalm 130; Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15, 2:23-24 or
Lamentations 3:22-33; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43 ~ COMMUNION SUNDAY ~ Joe Also Preaches at North Guilford.

Great Is Your Faithfulness

“Your favor, O Yahweh, is not exhausted, / nor has the compassion of God failed. / They are new every morning; / great is Your faithfulness.” — Lamentations 3:22-23.

You may have read in the newsletter or heard me say that the New York Conference of the United Church of Christ has elected a New Conference Minister, the Reverend Mr. David Gaewski.  David has, for 15 years, been a Conference Minister with the Maine Conference and will assume the duties of our Conference Minister on August 13th.

In most aspects, searching for and electing a new Conference Minister is a little like searching for and electing a new pastor.  The one minor difference is in a local church a pastor designate will lead a service of worship and give a sermon and then it comes time for the pastor to be elected.  After the pastor has done this, the church will take a vote to determine if that pastor will be called.

A Conference Minister designate does not lead worship or offer a sermon at a Conference Meeting where a vote will be taken.  But a Conference Minister designate  does give an address to the Conference before the vote is taken.  Is there a difference between a sermon and an address?  Yes.  An address is much, much longer.

Now, rumor has it that we pastors excel at being long winded.  So, giving an address is probably not a burden for us.  But, since I’d like to pass on some of what David said and, as suggested, an address tends to be long, I will offer but a small piece of what David spoke about.  (Slight pause.)

It was, he said, in the neighborhood of 100 years ago when three of his four grandparents sailed past the Statue of Liberty and found themselves stepping ashore at Ellis Island.  They came to the United States determined to make it, to establish a life here by whatever means they could devise.

In a real sense, like many other immigrants who came to these shores, they brought nothing with them, their life savings having been spent just on getting here.  So, in the words of David, they brought nothing with them other than a pocket full of dreams.

Two of David’s grandparents were economic refugees.  The other two were political refugees.  Not one of them spoke a single word of English when they arrived.  Polish was the native tongue of each grandparent.  Some went to their grave speaking only at best broken English.

All together these two couples had seventeen children, many of whom died before they reached the age of majority— adulthood.  The roots of this family were planted in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Today David has twenty-three cousins spread out from the aforementioned Bridgeport to Rochester, from Maine to Los Angeles, from Atlanta to New Hampshire and from Syracuse to Long Island.  Also, at least one cousin has made the reverse trip, gone back across the pond and now lives in southern France.

Among these relatives are counted an Episcopal priest, a Catholic evangelist, an early gay rights advocate, ardent Republicans, passionate Democrats, nurses, engineers, photographers, poets and, of course, there is one who happens to be a United Church of Christ Conference Minister.  These, he said, these family connections, are the roots that ground him.  These are the roots— roots which have wound up negotiating many diverse paths— roots of an immigrant family who arrived here with a pocket full of dreams— roots from which spring David’s own dreams.  (Slight pause.)

Historians speculate that as few as 400,000 people crossed the Atlantic in the 200 years known as the 17th and 18th centuries— the 1600s and the 1700s.  From 1836 to 1914, however— a span of less than 100 years, over 30 million people— and that 30 million counts only the Europeans, not people from other places— over 30 million people migrated to the United States.

I think one of the things our modern brains have a hard time understanding is that the vast majority of these 30 million people left their homelands and, for the most part, never saw either their place of birth or their close relatives who remained in their native land ever again.  They left everything behind.

Once here, that was it.  There was no going back.  Regular travel was less common then and certainly something done largely by the wealthy, by people of the upper class, by people of means.

It has often been said we are a nation of immigrants.  Perhaps more importantly we are a nation of immigrants who largely arrived here with little else than a pocket full of dreams.  And just as happened to the family of the Rev. Mr. Gaewski, often the ones who arrived here worked very hard at turning their dreams into reality.

There is, needless to say, a different term, for some reason rarely used by people when referring to hard work.  Hard work means being disciplined.  It takes discipline to tackle hard work.  And, to used yet a different term, to look at hard work and discipline in a slightly different way again, it means that a person who works hard is faithful.  (Slight pause.)

And these words are from the work known as Lamentations: “Your favor, O Yahweh, is not exhausted, / nor has the compassion of God failed. / They are new every morning; / great is Your faithfulness.”  (Slight pause.)

A long-standing and firm tradition of interpretation places the work called Lamentations in the period following Babylonian military assaults on Judah in 597, 587, and 582 Before the Common Era.  In, short, this writing appears in the aftermath of the Babylonian invasions of Jerusalem, the fall of Jerusalem.

The survivors would have wondered whether they could continue to survive as a people.  Leading families had been deported to Babylon; the king’s palace, the Temple, and the city walls had been razed.

A long siege of the city had left many dead, ill, suffering from famine.  Along with overwhelming physical and social devastation came the collapse of the community’s entire theological and symbolic world.

The words of the prophets and the promises to Abraham and Sarah had turned empty, so the questions to be asked were obvious.  Where was God— God who promised to dwell with them in Zion, to be with the house of David forever?  Where was God— God who brought them out of Egypt to the land of promise?  Had God contributed to the devastation of their world?

And still, despite all the turmoil with the fall of Jerusalem and the ensuing Babylonian Exile, given these disasters, the writer makes a stunning claim: God is faithful.  “Great is your faithfulness.”  Why?  (Slight pause.)

I think there are often some pretty sound human truths we tend to ignore and even to hate to acknowledge.  Maybe we just block them out.  Here’s an example of one: life is an experiment.  Get used to it.

We humans do things all the time which have no sure or predictable outcome.  Life is made up of a whole series of risks.  Some work out.  Some don’t.  And, again, we ignore or even to hate to acknowledge the fact that we take all kinds of chances all the time.  Why?  Well, maybe it’s because we are risk averse.  Or at least we like to think we are risk averse.

But the truth is, you take your life in your hands every time you pull out of your driveway, every time you walk cross Broad Street, South Broad Street or North Broad Street.  Put another way, too often we miss the fact that life is precious and frail.  It is only when a loved one— a friend, a relative— is seriously ill or dies that we tend to pay attention to how tenuous our existence is.

Those 30 million who came to these shores were taking enormous risks.  So, when David Gaewski speaks of his family who were immigrants he looks back on familial history and says (poetically) they had dreams.  And yes they did.  And yes we do.  We have dreams.  (Slight pause.)

So, given the tenuousness of life, given the risks of life, what does it mean to say God is faithful?  (Slight pause.)  I believe one of the things it means is not just that God dreams but that rather God dreams right along with us.  But the primary dream God does have is that God will walk with us through life— this dangerous, risky life.

Further, the dream God has for us is one of relationship.  The dream God has for us is that we will dream together and that we will dream with God.  We, together with God, will dream of a life filled with challenges, a life filled with opportunities, a life where each of us and all of us is surrounded by love and support.  (Slight pause.)

God is faithful.  But we also need to understand that the faithfulness of God extends across lifetimes, across generations, across centuries, across millennia.  It is in these terms— lifetimes, generations, centuries, millennia that the true faithfulness of God can be understood.  The Hebrews, after all, built the pyramids, founded a homeland and then were conquered and yet survived.

Which is not to say each of us in our own lifetimes is unimportant to God.  It is to say that the faithful promise of God is a promise of eternal life, is the promise whose climax is found in Jesus.  Amen.

07/01/2012
United Church of Christ, First Congregational, Norwich, New York

ENDPIECE: It is the practice of the Pastor to speak after the Closing Hymn, but before the Choral Response and Benediction.  This is an précis of what was said: “I’m sure most of you wouldn’t think of me this way but maybe one of my problems is I’m too much of a traditionalist.  I heard a weather forecaster on Saturday say, ‘Hey!  The weather for the Fourth of July Weekend...’” and I went the 4th of July Weekend is a Wednesday this year.  But people do try to move things around like that don’t they?  I’m a traditionalist in the sense that I say, “Leave them where they are at.”  We went over 200 years leaving the Fourth of July on the 4th of July on the 4th of July.  That seems reasonable, doesn’t it?  No, I think I’ll celebrate Christmas on December the 29th.  No.  Leave it where it is.  My point is: we need to experience things where they are at.  The lyric in this last hymns says ‘Summer and winter and springtime and harvest, sun, moon, and stars in their courses above.’  We need to experience God where God is and God is all around us throughout the ages, throughout the universe.”

BENEDICTION:
Let us place our trust in God.  Let us go from this place to share this Good News: by God we are blessed; in Jesus, the Christ, the beloved of God, we are made whole.  Let us depart in confidence and joy that the Spirit of God is with us and let us carry Christ in our hearts for God is faithful.  Amen.