Always Traveling, Seldom Arriving

Micah 6:1-8

I Corinthians 1:18-31

My family is currently in the middle of a bathroom remodel.  And I am beginning to wonder if it will ever end. 

Twice during this process, we have had to back up and redo something all over again.  First, we ordered the wrong valve for the shower.  (I say “we” but let me just tell you, it wasn’t me).  Anyway, we didn’t realize that we had ordered the wrong valve until the plumber had already installed it.  Then when we tried to install the faucets we had ordered, we realized that they require a different valve.  And so rather than press on to installing the shower walls, we had to order a different valve so that we could do that part of the process all over again.

 

Running the plumbing for a new vanity also proved to be an adventure.  We rebuilt a new subfloor around the new plumbing and then laid the new flooring.  Finally, we set the vanity (which weighed about a thousand pounds) in place.  But when we did that, one of the pipes cracked and began leaking.  And so, we had to remove the vanity, tear out the new flooring, tear out the subflooring, fix the pipe, only then to redo the subflooring, redo the flooring, and set the vanity a second time.

At one point this week I suggested that we just cut our losses and sheetrock over the bathroom doorway and forget that the bathroom was ever there.  (But my wife didn’t like that idea.  So we’ll press on.)

I bet most of you have endured a house project that seemed to go on and on.  It’s not a bad metaphor for life: we want clarity and closure; we want to finish things we started; we want to complete this or that project.  But the work before us keeps stretching out further and further ahead of us.  And we begin to wonder: how long will the work take?  Will we ever get beyond this phase of life to something else?

Or consider a car trip that takes longer than you ever imagined.  "Are we there yet?  How much longer until we get there?"  These are the questions asked by countless children from the backseat during a family road trip.  We're usually ok with the journey.  We just want to know that we'll eventually "get there."

One of the challenges of life is that we seem to be always traveling, seldom arriving.  In our own development, in our family lives, in our education and career - our work is never "done."  Once you accomplish one goal, another set of obstacles and challenges pops right up!  Will our whole lives feel like work?  Will we ever be able to rest and enjoy what we've accomplished?  And how does our faith help us prepare for a life that feels like one problem-solving session after the next?

Micah 6

Micah reminds us that faith rarely feels like an arrival.  The religious life seldom affords a chance to rest on our laurels.  Instead, life with God calls for flexibility and openness to ongoing change and growth.  Right when you feel like you've got it all figured out, says Micah, might just be the time to tear it all down and start over again.

Our reading from Micah concerns a time 700 years before the time of Jesus.  According to one commentary, “Israel was in the middle of a revival.  The temple was crowded.  Giving was over budget for the first time in years, but Micah knew that something was wrong.  Israel was arrogant and uncaring” (Brett Younger).

Our reading imagines a courtroom scene, with God charging Israel with a crime, calling the mountains and the hills as witnesses for the case.  Though God has been generous with them, they have not been generous with others.  God has delivered them from difficulty and secured for them a home.  But Israel has behaved with selfishness and ingratitude.

At first the people assume that they can just make a few small adjustments to the religious life they already have.  “Just tell us how religious you want us to be, Lord!  You name it and we’ll do it.  If you want more calves offered up on the altar of the Temple, just say so.  We’ll sacrifice thousands of rams and pour out rivers of precious olive oil if that will please you.  And if all that isn’t enough, we’ll even offer you our firstborn children, just to prove that we can be as religious as you need us to be!”

When this courtroom scene comes to an end, Micah speaks up to tell Israel that they’re missing the point.  What God wants from us isn’t more religion, better attendance, more ceremonies and more demonstrations of our piety.  What God wants is for us to do justice, to practice kindness, and to walk humbly with our God. 

So here’s the first test for us.  Are we becoming more just?  That is, are we on the side of people who are in pain?  Are we on the side of those suffering oppression by the wealthy and the powerful?  Are we on the side of those who are most vulnerable to the crushing forces at play in the world?  To children and widows, to the elderly and disabled, to ethnic minorities, to those who are poor and unemployed, to immigrants and to those whose sexual orientation places them in the minority?  Are we using our voice, our resources, our time, our energy, our money to come to the aid those who are in pain?  Are we voting for policies and politicians who share these values with the prophet Micah, and with the God of Jesus Christ?

Second test.  Are we practicing mercy and kindness to others?  The Hebrew word hesed is usually translated “loving kindness.”  It carries with it the notion of costly, committed love for all of God’s creatures.  It conveys a posture and an attitude of a willingness to invest our own energies for the well-being of others.  And it is incompatible with superiority, self-righteousness, and me-first attitudes; incompatible with racism, ridicule, slander, name-calling and hate.

Third test.  Are we walking “humbly” with God?  Are we open and attentive to God’s voice as we move through life?  Are we open and attentive to the voices of others – especially to those whose voices are rarely heard?  Can we stay loose and curious enough to welcome the insight that comes from the experience of others?  Or have we decided that we already know all that we need to know?  Have we committed ourselves to a cluster of ideologies and values that have so stamped our identities that we’ve imprisoned ourselves in a costume, unable and unwilling to change?

According to the prophet Micah, once you learn the basic rhythms of the religious life, you’re not done.  You still have work to do.  You haven’t arrived yet.  There is the ongoing work of holding up your beliefs and practices to a new kind of measurement: do our lives sing with justice, mercy, and humility in all we do and say?

I Cor. 1:18-31

In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul works through what the good news is all about.  He doesn’t approach this message of God’s love in Jesus’ death and resurrection as a set of easy answers.  It’s not a list of things to believe if you want to be on God’s good side.  Paul sees this good news as a life-shaping story.  Paul sees the cross of Jesus as a living symbol, rich with transformative power both for us as a community and for each of us personally.

So, what does it mean to be people of the good news?  What does it mean to be a congregation gathered around the Jesus who died for our sins?  It means that we are learning to see the whole world differently.  That the living God chose to be among us as one who died becomes for us a bewildering and beautiful new way to live.  That God chose to come among us as a simple Jew who died at the hands of the rich and religious, at the hands of those who are proper and proud and those who are politically powerful – this means that we too become signs of this good news.  Look at us.  We are not famous or powerful.  We are ordinary, flawed, wounded, but beloved people.  And God shows God’s own strength by appearing in our ordinary lives.

Once you hear and receive the basic story of the good news, you still have work to do.  Beginning with our baptism, we begin doing the hard work of asking what the peculiar shape of this story about Jesus’ death means for the rest of our lives.  And we have to do this work all over again from the ground up.  We cannot simply settle for Paul’s answers.  And we certainly can’t settle for the answers of some past Presbyterians, or of our own beloved grandparents or parents.  We will have to do this prayerful work anew.  We will have to read and pray and argue and experiment and think through the meaning of the good news in ways that are fresh and helpful in the face of changing circumstances.

The Apostle Paul reminds us that believing all the right things doesn't give us an excuse to rest.  Welcoming God's love into our lives isn't the end of the journey.  It's only the beginning.  We'll spend a lifetime asking - along with Paul - how this good news of God's love in Jesus Christ might shape our lives and lead us in new directions. 

In the novels of Wendell Berry, set in rural, agricultural Kentucky a century ago, the farmland is as important of a character as the people who work the farms.  Berry’s stories almost always involve the hard work of farming families who inherit or come to possess land that has been neglected or abused.  The rich topsoil has been lost.  The fences and buildings are in disrepair.  And slowly, the farming family, together with their farming neighbors, begin to work the land with a new kind of care.  They know they can’t fix abused farmland in a single year.  And they know that they might not be able to solve the problems in a single generation.  And yet they invest a lifetime of careful and wise farming, loving and productive management of livestock, the gradual repair and renovation of fences and barns – all so that at the end of life the farm is in better shape than when they found it.  There are some of you here who live this way.  There are people here in our wider county who live this way.  They work with joy not because there is some final goal or resting place in sight.  They work with gladness because there is satisfaction in the journey.

If you widen the frame to include our national and political life, we might say that the work of democracy is never “done.”  We never get to sit back and say “we’ve arrived.”  While the worst days of anti-black slavery and segregation are behind us, there is still much work to be done to confess the full beauty and dignity of black lives.  While the Nazi death camps where millions of Jews were murdered are behind us, we continue to fight against anti-semitic and white power movements today.  We continue to fight for the full rights of women, of black and brown people, of working class rural people and immigrants, of those who are gay, lesbian, or transgender.  But that work is never finished and behind us. Yes, we’ve begun the journey.  But we haven’t arrived.

At every stage of development through life, we say to ourselves – is this what this phase feels like?  I thought it would feel different than this, more stable and completed.  At no stage does anyone tell you that you’re finished – not at potty training, not at tying your shoes or learning to eat with a fork, not at simple addition, not at puberty nor at high school graduation, not at your first job or marriage and not even at retirement, if that ever comes.

Salvation is less like an arrival than it is like an adventure or a journey.  The gift of salvation gently resists our desire for arrival, for rest, for safety and security by asking us to take a second look at the joy of ongoing learning and life-long discipleship.  It asks us to value humility, learning, growing, and the risk that all of this involves.  God calls us to work that will not be completed in our lifetimes.  And yet we can live with joy because we do our work as God’s friends, and as friends with one another.