“Lord of the church, you call a broken people around your table: in times of disagreement, teach us to listen, loosen us from prejudice and bind us to your way of forgiving grace; through Jesus Christ, who stands at the heart of our gather. Amen”
(Shakespeare, Steven. Prayers for An Inclusive Church (NY: Church Publishing, 2009) p.35)
Ahhh (relaxed sigh), Labor Day weekend. One last picnic outing, perhaps a pep rally to kick-off the football season. Time to put away the summer white and store the boat; dust off the autumnal colors and open the school backpack. As Campus Missioner, this is the time of year that I’m meeting many new faces on campuses in our diocese. As I work with our peer ministry teams to welcome newcomers to our campuses, it’s interesting to observe the tensions between the unbridled bravado of new independence marbled with the yearning to belong. In conversation with college students about the possibility of participating in a ministry fellowship, we listen to their ambivalence about wanting to continue to explore their spirituality while also avoiding too much commitment or responsibility to a particular religious tradition or denomination – an very customized consumerist mentality made ubiquitous in our affluent, post-modern cultural of commercialized individualism. In one sense, since the changes of the 1960’s, this dynamic isn’t new… and, it’s not just common among new college students. There are many adults around us, perhaps here with us this morning, that are searching for a way to reconcile their deep longing for community with their suspicion and criticism of organized, institutionalized ‘religion.’
For me, this is also the one year anniversary of my relocation to Kansas – it was this weekend last year that I arrived after my across half the country (from Santa Monica, CA) and spent the first few nights in my new home. Reflecting on this first year here, of what has essentially been my first year of ordained ministry in our church, I realize how I’ve struggled with, and continue to pray about, my own desire for independence and control amid the demands of an intimate, personally interconnected reality called the church and the challenging, counter-cultural Christian call to more just and compassionate community.
Labor Day. Emerging from the harsh working conditions of the industrial revolution in the late 19th Century (over 130 years ago) was the labor union movement and as well the origins of the national day of remembrance, imagined by some organizers as an antidote to mitigate the exploitation of common laborers by an economic system seemingly bent on maximizing productivity and profit for some at the expense of humanity and decency.
Typically, this weekend many people will give vague consideration, if any, to the economic and political systems, and the vast numbers of lowest-wage laborers, that yield the material wealth and comforts we’ve come to take for granted. However, since our harsh awakening in 2008 to the card-house nature of large portions of our capital markets constructed in haste and greed out of deceptive and manipulative speculation with ‘our’ savings, some folk have begun to re-examine shared (or not) assumptions and expectations about morality and ethics in pursuit of our capitalistic commonwealth.
Through today’s assigned lectionary readings, what might the Spirit asking us to consider about our common labor and wealth? In each of these, we could mine for wisdom about our relationship with money. However, I’m hearing a call to consider the economics of our relationships with each other – our relational commonwealth – and to pay closer attention to the costs of conceit, the wages of the sin of selfish separation, the diminishing dividends of rampant individualism. Ezekiel is offering social critique to a people in exile, laboring under Babylonian rule. Jesus, a manual laborer, is instructing his expectant and emergent group movement about how to counter-culturally cultivate new community. And, Paul, who also labored in communities to fund his mission, is emphasizing the moral and ethical behavior necessary for shared salvation and live together the body of Christ. In all three readings, we’re being called to invest in personal repentance and share reconciliation in order to grow collectively wealthy in love. At the heart of it, the Spirit is calling us to labor together with and in Christ.
And shared labor this is. This is hard spiritual and emotional work we’re being called to collectively. Many of problems are rooted in our selfish lusts and individualism: the illusion that we can make it on our own; our belief that we’re entitled and empowered as autonomous individuals; our desire for gains without regard for the costs to others; and our distancing and separation from people who we don’t like, don’t agree with, and/or with whom we’ve had disagreements. We’re being told that the solutions to our problems will come from realizing that it’s not all about “me”, minding the good of the whole, and mending broken relationships 1-on-1, as small groups, and as communities… all with God’s help.
Ezekiel expresses God’s desire that we be sentinels for our communities – keeping watch for threats to our common good and calling each other to task for corrective actions. Paul recites some of the commandments helpful to healthier communal life, reminding us not to obsess over possessing what isn’t really yours to begin with and to avoid obsessive individual indulgences. He reminds us of the greatest rule of life, to love one another as God loves us. And Jesus, the exemplar of how to demonstrate godly love for each other, implores us not remain passive about issues that divide us, but to actively confess transgressions and honorably confront social challenges with the intent of liberation of all parties from guilt and sin without embarrassment or shame so to restore dignity and right relationships with the divine assurance that when we’re re-unified, any two or more of us, his heavenly presence and power is with us.
“Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” (Matt 18: 19-20)
As we relax on the Labor Day weekend, let’s enjoy that there is biblical support for the power of personal refreshment and renewal… but also remember that the overarching message/gospel is about mitigating selfishness and living in charitable love together as one united family, caring collectively for the health and well-being of each other as we are created and blessed by a relational God.
When we gather in here for worship, while we might walk in the door feeling like individuals – perhaps proudly independent, lonely, or lost – most everything we say and do in our liturgy reminds us that we’re in a divine relationship together in Christ as organs and systems of one unified body. We can gently surrender parts of our obsessive “self” we join our voices in song to ‘collect’ ourselves anew. We can reconsider our interdependence as we hear the words of our ancestors and wonder together what this means to our community today. We can affirm that we’re not laboring alone as through our creeds, prayers, and hymns are the words ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘our’, emphasizing that we’re in this together. And, we come to our Lord’s table remembering that Christ labored for all of us, particularly offenders, those who were outcasts and not considered likeable by the cultural conventions of the day, and called us all to a forgiven, restored incorporated unity through his very body and blood.
Breath Restless into Me
(Loder, Ted. Guerrillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1981) pp 106-7)
Thank you for all I forget are gifts, not rights.
Forgive me for all the grievances I remember too well.
Save me from the self-pity,
the self-seeking,
the fat-heartedness which is true poverty.
Guide me, if I’m willing (drive me if I’m not)
into the hard ways of sacrifice
which are just and loving.
Make me wide-eyed for beauty,
and for my neighbor’s need and goodness;
wide-willed for peace-making,
and for the confronting power with the call to compassion;
wide-hearted for love and for the unloved,
who are the hardest to touch and need it the most.
Dull the envy in me
which criticizes
and complains life into a thousand ugly bits.
Keep me honest and tender enough to heal,
tough enough to be healed of my hypocrisies.
Match my appetite for privilege
with the stomach for commitment.
Teach me the great cost of paying attention
that, naked to the dazzle of your back as you pass,
I may know I am always on holy ground.
Breath into me the restlessness
and courage to make something new,
something saving, and something true
that I may understand what it is to rejoice.
AMEN
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