'C'  //  Pentecost 15  //  9-2-07  //  Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church

Scriptures             Jeremiah 2: 4-13      Luke 14: 1, 7-14

 

A true story.

In 1957, a 24-year-old man sat in a Jackson prison, with little hope left in him.  For one evening the year previous, in Flint, he had borrowed a car and run over and killed two young people while in an alcoholic blackout.

Alcoholism. He was chronic that way. Even beyond the deaths he had caused and the double manslaughter conviction handed down to him, inside himself he could not find a passage to life.

Yet, each week this young man decided to show up for a recovery meeting brought behind bars by long-sober alcoholics with a story to tell.

Which was a good thing, he thought. For the inmate did not feel he had a story to tell. He never uttered a word at these weekly meetings ... for a year. Though he never missed a single one.

Finally, he got up the nerve to speak – after a meeting, to one of the outsider speakers bringing the recovery message inside.

All he wanted to say was, "Thank you". Thank you, for showing up every week without fail.

But as soon as he got this simple phrase out of his mouth, the speaker raised his hand and stopped him.

"Whoa, buddy," he said. "That's not how we do it here. If you are truly thankful, then pass it on."

And so he did. That young man – the first ex-con to be hired by the Department of Corrections by the state of North Carolina, and until recently a warden and designer of prison rehabilitation programs there – has been passing it on ever since. Sober. To this day – fifty years later.


Pass it on. Hand down, or hand over. The ten-dollar word: Traduce.

 

All descriptive of a word we derive from the Latin. The word we generally translate as tradition.

A life-force to contain? No. A set of rules to maintain? Not really. Authentic tradition is a movement of the Spirit – a handing down of life – that conveys the best of a community's memory. So that the next generation may, out of its abundant context, convey it to the next, as well.

May in turn pass it on. No charge. No conditions. No exceptions.


On their best behavior, great spiritual traditions describe themselves as movements ... pilgrimages ... journeys ... ways. All words communicating relationships-in-process. Indeed, the Apostle Paul speaks often of salvation as a process, rather than as a one-time event.

Many of us, at one time or another in our lives, have encountered so-called traditions that are more definitive, and less descriptive. More like a funnel, and less like a flower.

"Jesus is the Answer": Remember that popular phrase? Question is: Well … what was the question?


Jesus saved his strongest responses for those who thought they had The Answers, thought they were uniquely privileged in life because they had The Answers, and thought they were uniquely entitled to dispense The Answers. To quote an engineer acquaintance of mine, these are the ones who forget they are a pipeline, and think they are the well.

In today’s gospel, "The description of the dinner party … makes me glad to have missed it."¹ Luke understates the scene. He writes – simply – "The guests chose the places of honor.” But there were only a few such places ... and there were so many such guests. Chaos!

At this table gathering, we get the impression that the energy is focused not on passing the food, but rather who might be passed over. Not on how all would be served, but on what a chosen few "deserved".

Ernest Campbell – pastor of First Presbyterian/Ann Arbor two generations ago – calls this eternal emphasis on deserving-over-serving a theology of entitlement.² A theology of entitlement: tradition not as life to be handed down, but as a "place of honor" to be clung to for dear life.

Sometimes, I think we should change the symbol of our country from the Stars and Stripes to the shopping cart. It’s a great symbol, really – a symbol of got; a sign of getting: “Got” … “Getting”: Those gutteral, Anglo-Saxon words of hording, rather than humbling; of taking in, rather than passing on. And, as any who have made even a temporary dwelling in the non-tourist areas of the Two-Thirds World well know: We Americans got a lot. 

Where is the public dialogue that even entertains the idea of passing on even some our superpower ways to other countries, while we assume a lower place at the table? Such a proposition may sound strange to our ears. But have we ever entertained the notion, much less entertained such dialogue?


I believe there is a climate the church is called to create in the face of our reflexive, consumptive, addictive culture of entitlement. A climate that begins with consciously, intentionally assuming the lowest places of the table – beginning with each other. With nothing expected in return except that the banquet of the kingdom be passed on to those ordinarily shut out from it.  

Such is humility: A word I personally define as knowing we have more sources from which to receive than from which to give. Not from which to take, but from which to receive. Humility strips away all the false pretenses of congratulating ourselves for hitting a triple when all along we were born on third. As Jeremiah ironically puts it today, this sense of entitlement brings about "things that do not profit.”

And so the prophet carefully jogs his people’s memory – and ours – of that formative metaphor of Jewish and Christian peoples everywhere: exodus. Luke, in fact, uses exodus as a defining metaphor for Jesus’ ministry – the Greek exodon, to describe Jesus’ departure from the popularity of his transfiguration to the solidarity of his crucifixion.

The memory of exodus. Of being shown a way out of the imperial oppression – or, simply, the mindset – of Pharaoh’s Egypt … the kingdom of Judah … the Roman Empire … and a superpower called America. The oppression that comes from assuming and submitting to the choicest places, over and over and over again, at the world’s banquet table.

 

 

 

We hear the well of the Lord speaking through the pipeline of Jeremiah today with these concluding words: "My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water."

Cisterns cracked like our own, perhaps. Cracked, from our own pressurized attempts to hold on for dear life to the water with which we then wash our hands of the weary and hurting world around us. Our cisterns crack. When we see ourselves as the well rather than the pipeline: They always do.

Does traditioning the church entail frantically storing the water of life given to us, and letting it stagnate in cisterns of our own making? Or does traditioning the church lead us to trust in the abundance of God's living water, that life may freely be handed down to all who thirst?

Traditioning the church. It is not only humble, it is downright radical.  Humble: from humus, the soil. Radical: from radix, as in radish, meaning “root”. For arising from the soil and feeding the roots, Jeremiah’s God, “the fountain of living water”, awaits. A wellspring of grace around which we are all equally honored to drink and to feed … and to enjoy.

 

 

Let us give thanks … by passing them on.

 

¹Christine Pohl, “Risky Business”, The Christian Century, August 15-22, 2001, p.16.

 

²Ernest Campbell, sermon at Bible Conference at Massanetta Springs Conference Center, Harrisonburg, VA, summer 1981.

 

Benediction ...

Where are the life-giving roots of our Northside tradition located? Are they found in attracting those with a sense of entitlement to assume self-selected places of honor? Or are they found in attaching the least of our conditions in inviting those with the greatest of needs to sit at the banquet of our Lord in our midst?

Only a tradition of Exodus that transforms deserving into serving can be a tradition worth passing on.

Let us give thanks to our God ... by doing exactly that.