"WHAT ARE WE YEARNING FOR?" , AUGUST 1, 2010

Hosea 11:1-11
Luke 12:23-31

Our Call to Worship this morning from Paul's Letter to the Colossians, includes a a verb that changes everything in our lives. Whether because our parents saw us as the Center of their Universe, or the constant barrage of ad campaigns in our culture that promise you are THE GREATEST GENERATION, you can HAVE IT ALL, Just DO IT, GO FOR IT, we have conceived of everything as objects, our possessions. Our Lives, our parents, our children, our job, our school, our church, our friends, everything has become a reflection of us, as if we were the center of the universe and everything, everyone revolved around us. Paul directs the Colossians to “Be SUBJECT to one another, as is fitting in the Lord.” What a simple and dramatic shift, from the cosmos revolving around us, to acknowledging the reality of others and making ourselves in relationship to their universe. Be Subject to one another.

The parable of the Rich Fool, is not that he cheated, or lied, or stole. He worked hard and did what was expected. He planted and watched as the rains and sun came, and the crops were full and plentiful. But late at night, when planning his future, he did not thank God for his blessings. He never acknowledged the life giving nutrients of the sun, or the gentle rains providing moisture, or the fertile earth, or the workers who shared in the planting, cultivating and harvest. He never saw the pests or insects that were kept from his bounty. The Parable of the Rich Fool is that when alone, he saw himself to be all alone, and rather than speaking to God, he talked to himself. I have more than MY barns can hold. What shall I DO with all I POSSESS. I KNOW, I shall tear down MY barns, and I shall build Myself Bigger ones.

ATHEISM is believing there is No God. Choosing to believe only in what we see and touch and taste, smell and feel, what we can control, what we can make for ourselves. The Classical Philosopher Descartes reasoned : I Think , therefore I Know that I AM, I Exist within my own Reality. ATHEISM denies the reality of God, thereby making ourselves into our own God. But even among those who acknowledge and confess faith in God, there can be a PRACTICAL ATHEISM, of living as if we worship God at 9:30 Sunday mornings, then go about our business the rest of the week.

What is the center of your universe? What do you yearn for? This circumstance the Gospel of Luke is relating is of siblings arguing over an inheritance. Who gets what, and is there fairness in the dispersal, but this denies the more basic reality, that we are siblings, sisters and brothers sharing in our identity from the one who has died. How different, if we begin by naming what we have in common in the love for our parent, our shared memories, and all that each of our lives meant to them; than if we work out our sense of loss in what was taken from us in their death, by dividing their stuff.

Several years ago, a member of the Church sent me an email following the Annual Congregational Meeting. There have been numerous visual changes and measurable outcomes. What do you believe are the Church's greatest non-tangible needs? In essence, our barns are full, everything this congregation has discussed or imagined, for the last Century has been fulfilled.
The roofs are dry, the masonry strong, there is good and ample drainage;
We replaced the center of the Church creating spaces for the community and access for all;
We corrected the problems with our Sanctuary, adding lighting, centrality, gorgeous musical instruments, and have raised up children to be adults who lead us;
We have had our lives changed by prayer in the midst of Cancers, illness, war and prison;
We have created and served at food pantries, clothing with those in need, providing for elders;
As far away as SubSaharan Africa, Haiti, Malawi and Madagascar, we have changed the world of others.
We have listened to the pain of those who have been abused;
We have made the resources of our church available to all who desired to believe.
The Non-Tangible is always that we are human, so we divide ourselves from one another, that by experience, by politics, by friendships and commitments we are separate, unique. We separate ourselves by our brokenness. We fail to realize how brief our time of life, how fragile our relationships, how powerful our words/even our shadow.

A group of successful business leaders sat down with me one evening, they described that with great efficiency we have harvested the “Low-Hanging Fruit”. There have been presenting issues, that have been cared for and responded to. But the task before us, was to identify, where on the tree should there be branches, flowers and buds for future fruit, that had not yet ever borne? How do we nurture, what we know in our hearts ought to be, and because earlier circumstances bruised the tender shoot, because of neglect for other concerns, for what ever reason, had never developed?

Every time I approach Skaneateles from the West, I have this quaint, nostalgic, heart-warming feeling. At the Top of the Hill, before descending into the Village, you see the Church set at the Center of all that is. Poking up from amidst the trees, with the lake, and stores and businesses, schools and homes, we are the Church in the Village. Yet, the world around us has radically changed. We could be isolationist, and imagine the world does not reach us, that this is a Stress-Free Zone, a Place Apart, the Anglicans stay on their side of the street, the Catholics to the North and Pentecostals outside the Village to the far East, but we have a Calling, a responsibility to witness and to lead. Where churches across the country and around the world have consistently been burying their members three times as fast as baptizing new ones, quietly gossiping about divorces and rarely recalling that that room was once used as the Bride's dressing room. We AS The Church in this place and time have continually married 20 and 30 and 40 couples each year, baptizing nearly the same number, and thankfully, while many of our new members have been beyond infancy and confirmation, and some have surpassed the Century milestone, we have had so few mortal passings as to treasure the life of each, giving them back as a gift to God. We now are known for Music and Mission, for Marriage and Baptism. We are far and away the largest of Churches, which is not reason to raise our fingers as being No. 1, but rather responsibility, because we have the ability, to subject ourselves to the needs of others.

There is a rich maturity to Hosea's Prophecy. This is not the Book of Genesis, where all is created new, pristine and pure. Not Moses' Books of Law, trusting dependence on God in the wilderness. This Word begins with horrible, painful, ugly intimate circumstance of betrayal. While claiming to be a family, Hosea's spouse seeks satisfaction of desires and pleasure from everyone else but Hosea and is unable to commit. The Lord's anointed so despises his own children as to name them: Soon to be Punished, Not to be Pitied, Not my Children. Yet, beginning here, the story evolves with Hosea making decisions for the rest of his family. As objects, unloved, reflections of the one at the center, he distances himself from each, institutionalizes them, and tries to put them away. But God cares. God yearns to love. No matter the brokenness, no matter the betrayal, no matter how separate and divided, wounded and inhuman, we have ever been to one another, there is still in each of us (from God) the yearning to forgive, to be made whole.

What is the Non-Tangible? What is it we yearn for? To continually become the Body of Christ in this place and time. Not only family, not only of shared lineage and ancestry and residence, but yearning for forgiveness to be whole. That is both a challenge to us as The Community of Faith to live as we claim to believe, and to reach out.

There was a time, a generation ago, when to marry outside the faith, was not for a Christian to marry a Muslim, or to marry a Buddhist, or Jewish, but often persons were excommunicated for marrying outside the faith was to wed someone who was Catholic, or Pentecostal, Episcopalian, or God help us a Methodist! We have come a long distance in acceptance of one another, I am never clear whether this has been because of what we have forsaken or what we have reclaimed. I hope the latter, to choose to see in one another a conviction and commitment and faith, and to consciously subject ourselves to the needs and desires of one another, as is fitting in the Lord.