Sermons

Horses on Parade: V

John Wilkinson                               Third Presbyterian Church  September 11, 2005                             Exodus 14:19-31

Well, here we are. Welcome, and welcome back if you’ve been away for a while. Here we are, and there is so much to say. First of all, welcome to those who may be visiting with us this morning. We are glad that you are here, and we hope that you will return. If, perhaps, you are looking for a new church home, we would encourage you to explore this community of faith. Get to know us. Today, by the way, is an especially good day to get to know us. It is Rally Day. Our festivities continue following worship this morning. Please follow the ministers and the choir out the East Avenue doors to the front lawn. There you will find lunch – hot dogs and good things to go with them. You will also find a ton of literature about life at Third Church – program information, volunteer opportunities, course schedules for members and visitors alike. Bob Eames will offer a church tour at approximately 11:45, meeting under the Meigs Street balcony.

A very special word of thanks to Roxanne Boyer and the Congregational Fellowship Committee for their hard work on Rally Day, and to Janet Jones-Brower for pulling together the information fair, and our sextons for their cheerfulness and diligence.

If you cannot wait for Rally Day to volunteer for something, please note the volunteer form in the bulletin. The list of opportunities represents some short-term needs. And by all means wear a nametag! We continue to seek ways to enhance connections as a church community, and the Board of Deacons are working diligently in that effort. I would like to ask all members of the Board of Deacons to stand for a moment. Thank you. During Rally Day, if you’ve not met your parish Deacon, or if you just want to see a real-life Deacon up close, please introduce yourself. And welcome back to the choir. Lovely to see you as well.

We are certainly aware that even with the festivities of Rally Day, we gather with a certain solemnity. It seem difficult to grasp that four years ago on this date, incomprehensible acts of violence and tragedy happened in New York City, in Washington, in Southwestern Pennsylvania. We will remember those events more directly this evening, in a 7:00 p.m. ecumenical service with membership and leadership from four East Avenue churches. I would encourage you all to be present for what will be a moving and meaningful opportunity to remember and to pray for peace. This service had been planned for many months, and in light of happenings in the past several weeks, we’ve determined also to include prayers and music for victims of Hurricane Katrina, and to receive an offering for hurricane relief.

As you might imagine, we are thinking in many directions about how we may respond to this current disaster. We’ve begun to receive an offering, and will continue to do so. If you would like to give this morning, envelopes are available in the pews. Our initial effort has surpassed the $7000 mark. Becky D’Angelo-Veitch has shared what children and families will be doing. We’ve mentioned this evening’s service. What more may we do? The response is not yet clear; what is clear is that Third Church has the resources – human and otherwise – and the call to respond. Thursday evening, Rod Frohman, fresh back from sabbatical, along with RAIHN director Erica Vera, attended the Rochester religious gathering. That may be one avenue of response. Only now are the national groups with whom we typically collaborate beginning to ask for supplies. We will monitor that as well. There will no doubt be longer-term responses. I would invite you to think creatively and prayerfully. Write me a note or send me an e-mail. And if you are interested in providing some organizational leadership for this, why don’t you note that on the sheet in the bulletin and drop it in the offering plate as well?

That would seem to be enough for now, except, again, to say welcome, welcome long-timer and newcomer, believer and seeker, welcome to a new season whereby together we will seek together to be faithful in the world and the body of Christ to one another. Let us pray.

Eternal and gracious God, we remember this day. We remember all those whose lives were lost four years ago, all those who offered aid, all those who continue to mourn. As we remember, we pray also for an end to war and the ways of war, an end to violence, for reconciliation between all your children. We remember all those whose lives were lost in these past days all along the Gulf Coast, for those who mourn, for those who now must re-build their lives, for all those providing aid near and far, for governmental entities and their response. Wherever women and men and children are hurting, loving God, be present to comfort and uphold. Wherever women and men and children are hurting, loving God, allow us to be as agents of your healing touch and loving presence. And now, as we gather in this place, open your word unto us, and transform us with the power of your truth. For we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

***

Ministers generally dread sermon titles. A title can be so clever that the sermon cannot live up to it. A title can be chosen months in advance, so that by the time that the actual sermon rolls around it has no resemblance to its title. Alternately, a completed sermon, even a pretty good one, struggles to find a worthy title. I have a friend who finally gave up on the idea altogether. His title for this morning will simply be “September 11, 2005.”

Here, the other 51 weeks are up for grabs, but for this last four years and for this morning, we are stuck with “Horses on Parade.” I will tell you why I think we should be stuck with it a while longer, anyway, but first a little background.

You will remember four years ago – just 2 days before things changed dramatically. Rochester had been experiencing a kind of civic outdoor art exhibit – Horses on Parade – that included large, fiberglass horses painted creatively and placed throughout the city and county. And we had one, Horse Chess-nut, painted by Sandra Gianniny, standing proudly out front near where the tent is this morning. It was a conversation starter for members and visitors alike. And more to the point, it let the community know that we were here, and very interested in the life of the community as well as what went on inside our walls.

Horses on Parade was for me, and remains, a wonderful reminder of what I like to call the “public church,” a church called to live in the world, in the messiness and complexity of the world. I believe that. We believe that. Horse Chess-nut reminds us of that, as, perhaps, does our Rally Day party on the front lawn.

This year, though, I’ve been thinking nearly as much about the parade as the horses. Parades are funny things. Their function is to celebrate and recognize, but unlike a pep rally or a party, their primary form is movement, from one place to another. I grew up watching the big ones, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and the Rose Bowl parade.

I don’t know if you’ve ever marched in a parade. My first was as a banner carrier in a Bicentennial parade. I was appropriately attired in red, white and blue. The first few minutes were exhilarating. The next several hours, not so much. I remember homecoming parades and neighborhood block party parades. I remember taking our children to a Memorial Day parade and explaining what a veteran is, and why it is so important to remember.

I remember marching in the Pride Parade with GLBT friends, and the sense of happiness and solidarity countered so violently by the hateful, profane words of protesters whose judgment of my friends’ lives and by extension my own did little to reflect the gospel they were struggling to represent.

I cannot help but think of Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans – and thinking how I was always happy to be watching and more happy not to be there. And then to juxtapose those happy images with parades of evacuees leaving the city and the grim aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the difficult challenge of responding and the sobering challenges put to all of us about American life and how we are all connected to one another, race and class and every other way.

So with certain exception, I love a parade, as a form of celebration and recognition and movement, from one place to another.

We have been reading through the best biblical parade story there is these past several weeks, the story of the Exodus. You will remember the broad outlines of the story. It begins with the bondage of the Israelite people in Egypt, the birth and unlikely survival of a baby named Moses, the call of Moses from the burning bush – the bush that burned but was not consumed, the confrontation with Pharaoh, the plagues. You will remember Passover, that most central moment in the life and history of the Hebrew people. Finally, finally, Pharaoh relents, and the people begin their Exodus. Pharaoh’s mind is changed, though, and the pursuit begins.

And God travels with the people, as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. God travels with the people – we should remember that.

And you will remember the Red Sea being moved away, and the land now dry so that the Israelites may pass, and now wet, a flood that claimed the lives of the Egyptian soldiers. You will remember as well the ancient rabbinic teaching that as much as God celebrated the liberation of the Israelites, God mourned the death of the Egyptian soldiers. You will remember all that, an epic chapter in the epic of faith.

Walter Brueggemann describes this narrative as the “defining…account of faith whereby Israel is…the object of [God’s] peculiar and decisive intervention in public events…[God is]…the God with power to override the empire through a miraculous intervention that renders the empire helpless and impotent.” (An Introduction to the Old Testament, page 53)

The Exodus story defined us and continues so to do, in biblical story after biblical story, in faith experience after faith experience. We are oppressed, imprisoned, enslaved, broken. Writes Walter Brueggemann: “This drama funds the imagination… and [provides] ground for hope when circumstances on the ground would yield none…” [It is the story of] “the God who enacts exoduses where none have seemed possible.” (Page 58)

It has been this story that has fueled so many dramas of human liberation, and does so now, personal stories whereby people have sought liberation from whatever it was that enslaved them, and communal stories whereby people – African-American slaves in the 1800’s, for example, representing a history and litany of oppression – have sought liberation and experienced it.

All this fueled by the God who said to Pharaoh, “let my people go” and who traveled with the people.

And we must remember always the beginnings of the story, which are more dramatic than any Cecil B. DeMille pyrotechnics. Remember that it was God who noticed the suffering of the people, and who intervened on their behalf, the God who acts on behalf of those with no power, calling an unlikely leader and an unlikely people to an unlikely journey.

The real miracle, therefore, is neither the burning bush nor the set of horrible plagues nor the great wall of water, but rather the ongoing, persistent presence of God, who chooses this covenant people not because they are so faithful, but because they are so oppressed, this God who is a God of justice and righteous and deliverance.

One more parade. Perhaps you experienced “March of the Penguins” this summer. If you did, you know what I am talking about; if you didn’t, you must. “March of the Penguins” is a beautiful and poignant documentary about the emperor penguins of the Antarctic, and their journeys of family and survival. Just watching the movie can make you feel many things, including very cold. There are heart-breaking moments as well, or, as one friend said, “nature is not pretty.” And I did wonder if the filmmakers sought to make the penguins a little too much like we humans. Nonetheless, you will be inspired by tenacious persistence in the face of very long odds, and you will be touched by the bonds of family and community that form in the very rhythms of life and death.

Two images stand out, from many powerful ones. The penguins waddle, mostly, but every once in a while, when faced with a barrier or a long straightaway, they flop on their bellies and glide for awhile. Their movement from place to place is adaptable and inventive and creative. At our best, we are like that. At its best, the church is like that.

And at our best, we are willing to take risks, because from time to time, the long black-and-white column of parade marchers gets lost, and one lone penguin ventures out, and the rest need to decide whether to follow or not. And they do. And they get to where they need to get, whether it’s food, or their mate, or their offspring, or their community, through vulnerable risk-taking.

Our God is a God of exoduses, who notices us and takes up our cause and who calls us into unlikely movements, like penguins on the march or horses on parade, from here to there, from separation to reconciliation, from enslavement to emancipation, from isolation to community, from Egypt to the promised land.

And never because of who we are, but because of who God is, the great “I am,” who invites us just as we are and transforms us into who we are called to be. So we come, we come, this day, this Rally Day, and for the extraordinary journey that lies ahead. We come. Amen.