Crossings

Number 4:21-28; John 14:25-31

A Sermon Preached by Donald Mackenzie

August 7, 2005

University Christian Church – University Congregational UCC - Joint Worship Services

Seattle, Washington

Let’s ponder for a moment the substance of these two readings and then see how they might encourage us to find the energy to do what Jesus has exhorted his disciples to do as he leaves them. The piece from Numbers is probably not very familiar. We don’t read often from this book precisely because it is mainly a book of numbers, a book of statistics. This particular passage tells of the packing up of the Tent of Meeting, their place of meeting and worship, as the Israelites are preparing finally to leave Sinai after 40 years and head for the Jordan River and prepare to cross over into the promised land. What they must do, and what we and everyone must do under similar circumstances is take the external realities that have held us and nurtured us and convert them to inner, spiritual realities, memories and hopes that continue to nurture as we continue to try to find our way. The Tent of Meeting therefore moves from the physical reality of external space to an inner reality that travels with the Hebrew people as they move toward a promised but still uncertain future.

The more familiar passage from John reassures us that God is with us. This assumes the truth that we forget this, we as human beings. God was in Jesus but Jesus assures us that God is now in us, each of us as we constitute the community Paul called The Body of Christ. We are now all a part of the One. This spiritual truth is essential not only to Christian spirituality, but also of Jewish and Islamic spirituality. This is monotheism at its core: No matter what, God is with us because we are inseparably a part of God. This means that God will provide for our needs and will guide us toward this promised but uncertain future. These words are words not just for today, the first Sunday after the departure of a pastor; they are words for each of us as we greet each new day of our lives. How is it that we draw on the gifts that held and energized us yesterday, and find ways to make them continue to be useful to us today? How is it that we find the energy, the vision, the hope to move forward? How is it that we see challenges as opportunities, community as a source of vitality and love, traditions as guidance, tomorrow as recreation, rebuilding, healing, crossing the river? These are the questions are they not, that come to us, often without words, each morning as we awaken? Most of the time, we do get up, get going, dig in.

But there are moments when we can’t or we don’t. It is those moments and all the moments like them that call for ministry. And ministry calls for pastoral and theological leadership. Once, some time ago, a student at Princeton seminary was lamenting the fact that life is so full of problems! I remember saying that without problems, there would be no need for ministry, no need for the church. Our problem in life is to learn to cooperate with God’s purposes, to learn to do God’s will, to learn to do what God wants us to do. That we have difficulty with this is hardly arguable or surprising. We need help finding our way in this divine context, and we need help helping each other too. That’s where pastoral leadership comes in.

But life is even more complicated than that. The path toward cooperation with God’s purposes is stunningly complicated, littered with blessings and curses, successes and failures, hopes and fears. In the midst of the joys of life, we also have demons, curses. These are realities of human experience and they are so complicated that they are a never-ending source of material for stories, for novels, for films for conversations we have with each other. I remember such a conversation at a party about twenty-five years ago speaking with a woman about some current novel then—perhaps something by John Irving. Somewhat jaded, she dismissed it saying that she had decided to stop reading since all novels seemed to be about the same thing anyway. I was too young and much too inexperienced to say anything, but I was stunned by the loss of vitality and hope suggested by that remark. But beware, since she is us. We forget and lose hope in facing the challenges that ironically are simultaneously the source of our vitality. William Faulkner said it best in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “We forget,” he said, “those old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pride and pity and compassion and sacrifice.” The path toward God and God’s purpose’s can be rocky and rough, tangled and frustrating filled as it is with error, and the need for forgiveness and redemption, the need for growth. That’s what a pastor does ideally: provides opportunities for the growth of the human spirit toward God and God’s purposes, opportunities that includes experiences of the need for forgiveness and the possibility always and over and over again for redemption—for being remade continuously out upon life’s way.

So here we are between yesterday and tomorrow. What does it mean now for us to be here and how can we make the most of it? I have three suggestions for you and, of course, for me too as I face my own “in-between-times” every day as each of us actually does. First, what is good about our experiences never actually leaves us. We just have to be sure we find ways to make these good experiences accessible to us. We do it by remembering, we do it by drawing on stories such as the one from Numbers where we find descriptions of transitions that can encourage us to move forward. Second, through prayer and hope we can remember that God is always with us and that God accompanies us on every journey, every experience, every moment of life be it blessing or curse. Third and finally, keep some focus phrases before you, before you as individuals and before you as a congregation. When you get up in the morning and look in the mirror, say to yourself “I am a child of God.” When you greet each other on Sunday or at other times during the week, say to each other, say, “grace to you and peace” as a way of conveying this important sense of remembering and holding God’s presence. And when you are together or are thinking or remembering your sense of community, say to yourselves, “God is a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. We are preparing to take the next step toward God’s glorious future.”

So that’s where we are here on August 7, 2005. You have invited us, you University Christian have invited us not just for summer refuge and extraordinary hospitality in our time of disruption; you have, as it turns out, invited us to share in the depth of your experience of losing a pastor and continuing on without her to discern the future of the ministry of this church. Be assured that this has happened countless times before and God has always been with us providing for our needs.

Our hope is to worship here with you through Sunday, September 4^th. Then on Sunday, September 11^th, we invite you to come to our sanctuary and see what has happened and join us for worship where we will observe both the depth of September 11^th and also prayers of thanksgiving for each other and prayers for strength and courage for the road ahead. So thanks be to God for all of our blessings and for each other as we accept the great privilege of being and living together in these wonderful yet difficult times. Amen!