Sermons

Horses on Parade IV

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  September 12, 2004                                Luke 15:1-10

I promise that this will be the last Olympics reference for a while, until, that is, I make another one. As I have said before, I love the Olympics, and I love this day. Rally Day, we call it, the day when we’re all back and everything kicks off.

You should have seen this place this past week, and even yesterday. Dining Room Ministry volunteers preparing a meal to serve to nearly 100 of our neighbors. Sunday school teachers busy preparing rooms. Volunteers here and there working to spruce up the sanctuary and yard. Youth and their advisors returning from a retreat. Choir members arm-wrestling for seats in the chancel. Welcome back choir, and welcome to Matthew Brown. All that preparation.

And now today, the opening ceremonies, filled with energy and anticipation and hope. This growing, busy place, bursting at the seams with energy in expectation of another program year. To start it all off, let’s do something we very rarely do…we have dutifully filled out name tags. We are sitting this morning according to our parish groups, so that we might be with our neighbors. May we take a moment or so to get up, and with atypical Presbyterian warmth, greet those who are sitting near us? Let’s go to it! Thank you. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

A few more reminders. Thanks especially to the Board of Deacons and the Congregational Fellowship Committee for organizing this day. The important work of those two groups serves as a reminder, and a call for involvement. Several needs are of particular timeliness. Our wonderful Sunday School is in need of several more persons to more completely fill out its roster. Becky D’Angelo-Veitch or Bethany Rague would be glad to talk to you; parents and non-parents alike, veterans and newcomers are welcomed. Also, the Nominating Committee is in full gear preparing its slate of nominees for church office. We are all gifted in many wonderful ways. Perhaps God is calling you, or someone you know, to share those gifts as an elder, deacon or trustee. Forms are available in the red friendship pads.

And following worship, as we spill out on to East Avenue for Rally Day festivities, look for Maryjane Link or Chris Stevens, who will have invitation letters for Spotlight Sunday, two weeks from today. This is our significant effort to invite people we know – friends, neighbors, co-workers – to experience life at Third Church. Take an invitation, please. We will mail it or you can, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to have invited 100 or 200 people to worship with us in two weeks?

If you are a visitor today, or have been checking us out over the summer, I would warmly and strongly encourage you to consider membership at Third Church. Our next membership cycle is October 17 and 24. Please talk to me or Richard Moxley, today or sometime, if you would like more information.

And if you are visiting today and also happen to be a member of the Brighton High School Class of 1954, including in your reunion weekend a visit to Third Presbyterian Church, a particularly warm welcome to you. We are delighted that you are here, and congratulate you and celebrate with you.

Finally, a very brief word about church staffing. We are, as you know, in the midst of a bit of transition. The September Messenger sought to share some details, but an update this morning is in order. The Personnel Committee and others are working very diligently, very diligently, to fill two positions – an associate pastor position (interim for now, to secure someone’s services quickly) to work with pastoral care, membership and fellowship and a director for our youth ministry. Search committees have been identified and we are working with all due dispatch. We hope to have news soon, and, to be honest, few are as ready as I to make an announcement. In the meantime, groups like the Board of Deacons and youth advisors and Membership Committee are doing wonderful things in this transition, for which I, and all of us, are very grateful. That, as they say, would seem to be the news from Lake Wobegon. Again, welcome to you all, and welcome back. Let the games begin, and let us pray…

***

It may be that so many years from now the “Horses on Parade” metaphor will have lost its impact for a Rally Day conversation, kind of like Rocky VII or the umpteenth installment of the Survivor series. But not quite yet. It seems difficult to believe that this would be my fourth Rally Day, which makes it more than three years since the Horses on Parade project. You remember it, do you not? A combination of public art and civic boosterism and metropolitan whimsy. My notion then was that it was very important, and appropriate, for this congregation to have a horse on our front lawn. You remember Horse Chess-nut, I am sure. What I suggested then is what I will suggest now, that that horse indicated to us and to the community that we were here, a church open and welcoming, ready to engage the world into which God has called us, ready to be creative and active and alive.

That is no less true than it was on September 9, 2001. On that day, we utilized a metaphor from the prophet Jeremiah, clay in the potter’s hands, to suggest that God was forming us and reforming us and transforming us into something new and wonderful and important, not unlike a work of art, a work of public art.

A year later, the Apostle Paul’s image from the letter to the Romans gave shape to our gathering: “owe no one anything, except to love one another” and “love does no wrong to a neighbor.” “Love” and “neighbor” seem pretty good notions to ponder on a Rally Day, Horse on Parade Sunday, or any Sunday, for that matter.

A year ago, though I am quite sure you all remember without needing to be reminded, we thought about the Epistle of James, who insisted that “faith without works is dead,” a biblical call to action if ever there was one, a kind of theological “just do it.”

This day is about all of those things, and each experience builds on what has gone before. We are like clay in the potter’s hands. We are called to love our neighbor. We are called to acts of faithfulness. This day serves as an affirmation for all of that, a kind of re-commitment Sunday to be the church, each of us and all of us together. A rehearsal of the basic fundamentals of church life, and our role in the life of this place and our role in the life of the world. In-reach and outreach. Worship and education and fellowship, all of which lead to service. A broad Presbyterian commitment to the life of the world and a specific Third Presbyterian commitment to the life of the city of Rochester and surrounding communities.

Could anything be more important than that right here, right now, in September 2004? A commitment to the stewardship of the vision of this congregation, whose future is surely interesting because of the roots of our past. A continuing commitment to openness and hospitality and growth, even. An expanding generosity to support that grand vision. A commitment to be the people of God for such a time as this, and a willingness to trust the abundance of God to take us wherever the spirit of God wills, and a willingness to be as followers of Jesus and to engage with reckless abandon his story, and to discover its implications in the living of our days.

At some point, the Olympic metaphor breaks down, unless we are willing to pay attention to the peripheries of the conversation. Most athletes do not make it to the Olympics, and most Olympians do not depart with hardware around their necks. Most do not appear on the David Letterman show or on a Wheaties box. Most do not earn lucrative endorsement deals. Most athletes compete for the joy of competing, and live on the peripheries of gold medal glamour.

To live with faithfulness in the story of Jesus is to agree to live on such peripheries. Luke’s gospel reminds us that Jesus’ audience was a cable-access kind of audience. Few watched and fewer cared. As he spoke with tax collectors and sinners, the religious and political authorities observed with disgust. We need to remember that Jesus did not hang out with a gold medal winning kind of crowd. By the arbiters of “true religion,” Fred Craddock tells us, Jesus’ crowd was “unsavory and repulsive and socially disruptive.” And not only does Jesus speak with them, he breaks bread with them, true table fellowship. (Interpretation Commentary, pages 183 and following)

Jesus knew the nature of the gossip. He heard the voices of criticism and condemnation. But he also knew with crystal clarity the nature of the vision. His was not a theology of prosperity or a theology of triumphalism, despite 2000 years of efforts to make it otherwise.

And so he told a story, a story to the peripheries. 100 sheep and one of them gets lost. An acceptable business write-off, is it not? One misspelled word on a list of 100 – 99% is not bad. But Jesus would reverse the entire dynamic, and by so doing, reverses every dynamic that would make the periphery the center, the least the greatest, the merciful and the persecuted and the peacemaker children of God and blessed by God.

Alan Culpepper reminds us of the scandal of this story: the Pharisees and the scribes would have been reminded not only that their own practice was misguided in its condemnation of sinners, but that their own righteousness, their own tidy, neatly defined religious practice, brought God little joy and rather served as a barrier for true faithfulness and true discipleship. (New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume IX, page 296)

The story cuts both ways for us, as it so often does. Where in the audience are we at any certain moment. Are we the religious authorities or are we the sinners? Are we the 99 or are we the one? Are we called to be welcomed into the fold or are we called to do the welcoming?

For the Jesus story, for our story, the answer is never either/or, but always both/and. Who among us has not felt, if only for an instant if not for a life-time, like that one sheep, who has wandered away because of a choice or an experience or a consequence? And who among us has not felt that extraordinary joy: a shepherd leaving the 99 unattended, and therefore in wilderness jeopardy, and going off until the lost one is found, and that lost little sheep is lifted up on the shepherd’s shoulders and is taken home, home, and there is so much honest rejoicing?

And who among us, having such an experience, has not wanted to share it? That is the dynamic we must remember on this Rally Day. We must program into our program the lost sheep as well as the found. In our worship and education and fellowship we must remember that at any given moment every possible dynamic is present, and that our own individual experience changes from point to point, from season to season.

Our outreach is driven by this as well, but even then, we must be open to the possibility, the probability even, that as we serve a meal or tutor a child, that we, giving our time and energy, might be the lost sheep in that relationship.

If you have not been to the Genesee Country Village recently, do so before the current exhibit closes. Quilts. They are extraordinary for their beauty and precision, and these quilts are particularly extraordinary because they reflect the artist’s craft and care from more than 150 years ago.

I could not help but think about this Jesus story as I entered into the world of the quilt maker. The bringing together of disparate pieces, of turning random pieces of cloth, peripheral pieces of cloth, leftover pieces of cloth, “lost sheep” pieces of cloth, into something beautiful and extraordinary and useful.

And I could not help but think that’s the kind of church we are called to be, whether we are living in the moments when we would be as finest cloth, or whether we are living in the scrap pile.

We must remember: Once we were formless clay but now we have been formed into a beautiful vessel. Once we were no people but now we are God’s people. Once we were a single, solitary scrap of fabric but now we have been pieced and patched into something exquisite. Once we were lost sheep but now we have been welcomed into the fold of God, by the good shepherd. Once we were lost, but now we are found.

That is who we are called to be and that is what we are called to do. A quilt making, horse parading, sheep gathering church.

That call did not change three years ago, but it was given new focus. And it is given new focus each new day. As soldiers die in Iraq, 1000 now. As children die in a Russian school. As we remember what happened three years ago now in southwestern Pennsylvania, in Washington, in New York City.

How the world has changed is not always clear. What is clear is the need to remember, the need to hope, the need to work for the things that would make for peace in our city, our nation and the world. We remember, we remember and articulate deep hope, we remember the profound implications of the one whose passion for us would track us down until we are found, until all the world is found. Amen.