Let Us Reclaim Tribe and Fire

Beloved of God, grace to you and peace from God our Creator and the Savior of the world Jesus the Christ. Amen.

I wanted to begin my message today by reading a poem by author and poet Danusha Lameris, titled "Small Kindnesses". It goes:

“I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

Over this last week, and in the sermon last weekend, I encouraged you to think about or journal where or in whom you saw God, and how God showed up in your daily lives. I had a sermon where I was going to talk about how I saw God in a meeting with a colleague - how we were planning an ecumenical worship service for our upcoming Canton Days Off, and we are looking forward to seeing how we can bring our traditions together to offer an experience of worship, community, and God for the people who will be there. I was going to talk about how I experienced God in this landscape - in the tall bluffs that command our countryside, or of the waving corn, or of the fog that shrouded the bluffs this morning on my drive. And these things are true - I did experience God in these ways this week, and I commend you for the ways in which you notice the divine in your life. Those experiences are valid.

However, I would be remiss if I did not say that I experienced God in another way. By now, many of you have heard of the shootings that have taken place in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, in the course of the last few hours. I got to thinking, in light of these senseless, merciless shootings that God is showing up in another way: by inviting the Church to repent of its sin of alienation.

Let me unpack that a bit: the sin of alienation is the belief that we do not need one another, that we do not belong to one another - that our thoughts, commitments, and actions are islands unto themselves with no repercussions in wider relationships or society. This intersects El Paso and Dayton in the most egregious of ways: I cannot imagine what it must have been like to have been in Wal-Mart or on the streets at night running for and fearing for my life, knowing that in an instant it could be extinguished. I cannot imagine being in the position of the shooter, believing that other human lives are mine to take whenever I desire. This is the sin of alienation: that we, through the generations of teachings of ideologies, theologies, and systems of power, believe that we no longer need community, or belonging, and we see the ends of these systems of thought in the merciless actions that continue to transpire across our nation.

Our Gospel text for today talks of this removal from one another as well. We hear from the Gospel of St. Luke in the 12th chapter the story of a man who comes to Jesus and asks him to tell his brother to divide the family inheritance. Jesus, who is teaching to a crowd of thousands of gathered people, warns this man against the consequences of greed - that life is more than our possessions. To illustrate this point, he tells the man a parable of a rich man, who has much grain and possessions with not enough room to store them. His soul is worried. What he decides to do is tear down his barns and build larger ones. However, instead of completing his new barns, God shows up and rebukes him: "You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?"

I want to share several insights from this text: Note that "storing up" material goods or economic goods is not explicitly condemned - because the rich man had barns. He had storage for some of his grain - enough to make him rich, in the least. That we condemn the preservation of one's life, and the reliance upon God for enough is not the point of this text. What God is warning against is the all-too-tempting desire for excess - the desire for more, and more, and more. The rich man doesn't have a chance to build his barns - instead, he dies.

I think that that is an important take away: that when, at the end of our lives, we die unto the arms of God and are welcomed into the new heaven and new earth, we don't get to take our earthly possessions with us. We don't get to take our ideologies or our work. I think, however, the thing that we will get to take with us is love. The love we have created, the love we have seen, the love we have made, the love we have experienced. We will get to take with us the things that have built up God's new vision for our world: love, mercy, justice, compassion, and holy anger at the condition of our human spirit when we are our worst selves.

My friends, we gather together on Sunday mornings because we believe that in coming together we see our unity in Christ. We gather together because we believe that our hands, our feet, our voices, and our commitments might actually change something when we leave these walls and these doors. In the wake of El Paso and Dayton, I encourage you to remember in your bones that we belong to one another, and that it is time to use our faith in action. It is in the Church's purview to offer our thoughts and prayers, yes, and to remind people that we love them. But I think times like these are also calling us to act: to have difficult conversations, to demand change that might help our communities and our society better and more wholly reflect the commitments God has made to us as a fellow sojourner: to build up one another, to see human flourishing among us, and to usher in salvation that defeats sin and death.

My friends, today, might we realize that our bodies and our voices are enough. They are enough to begin working for change. They are enough to speak love. They are enough to speak a different way. Even if we begin in fear and trembling, by starting literally and figuratively hand in hand, we are showing our trust in God's promises to us: that every human life is sacred, that no one deserves harm, and that God calls us beloved and to enter into the beloved community. As always - thank you for your ministry, for our community, and for the ways in which we bear Christ's redeeming love to our world, and above all we say thanks be to God.

Amen.