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Among several important themes for this year, a foremost one will be our ongoing call to build community. You’ve been asked to wear a name tag. I am not a name tag guy, so if I can do it, you can too. It won’t allow you to learn everyone’s name. But if you add one or two more to your mental Rolodex, then it is worth it. But let’s not stop there. In a minute, I want everyone to get up and greet people. Make an effort to seek out 2 or 3 people that you don’t know very well and say hello to them. Let’s do it…Thank you. Some of you liked that very much – if you did, we will do it again in eight years. If you didn’t like it so much, we won’t do it again for eight more years. So thank you, either way! Let us pray. O God, you call us out and you call us together and you give us gifts to serve you and the precious gift of community, the body of Christ. We thank you for a summer of rejuvenation, and we thank you that we gather now in this place for a new season of worship and service. Bless us. Bless our life together. Bless all those who face real life challenges, and allow us to be agents of comfort and hope. We remember those who died on September 11 eight years ago, and we ask your blessing on those who continue to mourn. We continue to pray for Officer Anthony DiPonzio and Tyquan Rivera. We pray for a young girl, Camry McKnight, a School #6 graduate and a participant in our tutoring program, who died yesterday, too young and too tragically as a victim of gun violence. Bring peace, O God. We pray for peace and justice in our hearts and homes, in our church and community, in our world. And we ask you now to open your word to us, and by its transforming power, transform us by its hearing. For we pray in the strong name of Christ our savior and friend. Amen. *** It was a typical summer for movies. You had your blockbuster sequels – Star Trek and Harry Potter. You had several improbable action and violence related hits. You had Sandra Bullock getting herself in several wacky romantically comic or comically romantic situations. And you had “Up,” my favorite. “Up” is ostensibly a children’s movie, which may be why I liked it so much, but like any of the really good children’s movies, it speaks to every generation. In beautiful and creative animation, it tells the story of Carl and Ellie. Carl is shy; Ellie is outgoing. They meet as children, fall in love, marry, and have a wonderful life together, filled with adventure and affection. When Ellie dies, Carl seeks to carry out one last promised adventure, a far-off destination from a childhood fantasy. Their home is threatened by impinging development, so Carl lashes hundreds of balloons – the house floats away, floats up. A young boy, Russell, inadvertently goes along for the ride. The adventure includes talking dogs, a rare female bird named Kevin and enough comic action to entertain many children and at least one increasingly middle-aged adult male. Like life itself, “Up” is funny and sad, poignant and bittersweet, filled with loss and risk and redemption, a tale of aging and companionship and friendship. Whether you see it with kids – yours, your grandkids, whoever – or not, you should see it. And the point this morning is Carl’s choice. A gruff, lonely old man, he could have chosen to either hunker down in his crankiness or give in to his circumstances. He did neither. He chose the adventure of life, to take a massively less-travelled road, and in so doing, discovered renewal and redemption and transformation, and in so doing as well, allowed his transformed life to intersect with other transformed lives, a kind of exponential dynamic that can only happen when you tether balloons to your life and let the winds carry you where they will. It’s back-to-school season. I was such a good math student in high school that I became a minister. But I remember several things about math that I liked, including some from the world of geometry. I liked the concept of parallel lines – lines that would go on forever without touching, without intersecting. I sometimes wondered how we really knew they went on forever. But what I also remember is the notion of intersecting lines. When lines intersect – that point – that’s where something really interesting happens. So consider that point of intersection – in “Up” between Carl and Ellie, or Carl and Russell, or Carl’s life as it was and Carl’s life as it was to become. That is what is happening this beautiful morning – two lines are intersecting, and like “Up,” an adventure is promised. One way to think about the intersection is our lives, like Carl’s, as they are and as they might become. But at an even more profound level, it is the line that is our life intersecting with the line that is Jesus’ life. Both identities – Jesus’ and ours – get defined in Mark’s gospel this morning. Two things are happening as Jesus is traveling with his disciples. The first is a kind of interrogation – Jesus repeatedly asking his disciples about the public and personal perception of his identity. Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am? The Messiah – the savior, lord, the one sent from God. That term, Messiah, either carries outdated meanings or unknown ones, but scholar Pheme Perkins reminds us that it indicates the “unique role played by Jesus in salvation history.” (New Interpreters Bible, Volume VIII, page 622) Peter’s confession is apparently correct, but it receives the silent treatment from Jesus. Yet we are not quite finished. Jesus continues by describing what this Messiah will undergo – a foreshadowing of Good Friday itself. The disciples have no earthly clue what is going on, and Jesus is highly critical of this inability to comprehend. And then he puts a rather fine point on it: if you want to follow me, be my follower, you will undergo the same. “Take up your cross and follow me,” he says. Pretty clear, followed by an alternative mathematics of loss and gain, profit and loss, the worldly ethics of popular culture and the costly ethics of discipleship. Nothing could be clearer – there is risk involved in following this Messiah, real risk. But this is also clear – to participate in his ministry of suffering is to experience his ministry of transformation. Not to be too whimsical about such a risky proposition, but transformation will happen only when we tether our life to his life, and see where the Spirit of Christ will take us. Or in geometrical terms, the truly interesting things happen when the line of our life intersects with the line of Jesus’ life. At that very point of intersection, transformation happens, a transformation that could never happen without the risk, without our taking up the cross to follow. Charles Cousar writes that “what starts out as an innocuous question (about who Jesus is) ends up as a radical and challenging question of the Christian life.” (Texts for Preaching, Year B, page 511) This past July, we marked the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin. Calvin was born in France in 1509. He was preparing to study for the priesthood, but in the first wave of the Protestant Reformation, his father was excommunicated, so he changed to studying law. He was brilliant, and though never ordained, he continued a life of theology and ministry. His great work was the Institutes of the Christian Religion. He led churches in Strasburg, but made his mark in French-speaking Geneva. We will spend some time with Calvin this fall, a kind of Calvin-palooza. The point for us will be only moderately historical –we should know a little about Calvin’s life. We should know a little more about Calvin’s thinking, about God, the church, the world. But we should think even more about where this all takes us – less so why Calvin matters (though that’s important) and more about how Calvin helps us address the big questions of our day. When I am asked what Presbyterians believe, Calvin is our starting point. When I am asked what kind of church Presbyterians should envision, Calvin is our starting point. When I am asked how Presbyterians, and others, should behave in the world, Calvin is our starting point. Calvin insisted on being buried in an unmarked grave; he was not interested in having any kind of religion named after him. So we must be careful. But we should also be mindful that tradition matters, and that we need a starting point, and a roadmap, and though our tradition is not static and we are not bound to it or by it, we are informed by it. So Calvin matters already, in the way we worship, in the way we seek to serve our neighbors, in the way we do church. We will this fall think a little more directly about all of this stuff in light of his 500th birthday. Calvin’s Institutes begin with the affirmation that “All our wisdom, in so far as it is to be true and perfect, consists in two things: namely, a right knowledge of God and of ourselves.” To expand our two morning trajectories a bit, in light of Calvin’s message, is to say that only when we tether our journey to God’s identity will we experience a true understanding of who we are and who we are to be. Or, only at that point of intersection – God and us – could we even begin to understand who we are and who God is. Of Calvin’s affirmation, Stacy Johnson (who preached here a year ago) writes that “this intimate link between knowledge of God and of ourselves…means that the only authentic way to know ourselves is to be in relationship to God – the only authentic way to know ourselves is to be in relationship to God – and that knowing God enables us to see ourselves as we truly are.” (John Calvin: Reformer for the Twenty-First Century, page 13) That is the line of our life, our adventure, our journey, intersecting with the mystery and majesty of who God is. And one thing more. Horses on parade. In 2001, Rochester engaged in a whimsical, imaginative enterprise called “Horses on Parade.” Big fiberglass horses, dozens and dozens of them, painted brightly and creatively, all over town. And we had one – Horse Chess-nut, a chess-playing horse. I have thought about our horse as an affirmation of this congregation as a public church, and have used each Rally Day as an opportunity since then to re-affirm that identity. In this morning’s terms, what that means is that the intersecting lines are never just Jesus and me, or Jesus and you. It’s Jesus and us, God and us, a whole set of intersecting lines, lives connected. I am not sure what the geometrical term is, but my term for it is the church, where many lives connect and intersect with the life of Jesus, and interesting things happen, and transformation happens, as we tether who we are – in community, never isolated – to who Jesus is. Jesus does not ask one disciple to take up his cross. He bids all of us to take up our cross. Jesus does not call a series of individuals into a million little churches or more. He calls all of us into one church, one widely and wildly diverse church, so that a million lines or more can intersect to create something altogether interesting and creative and transforming – for each of us, for all of us, for all the world. That’s one point of our little welcoming exercise, to allow us – physically and spiritually – to intersect with one another, to demonstrate our connectedness in a world that values isolation and individuality. So I am ready. I am ready for a new season of connecting and intersecting. * Attach a balloon to your life and let it float into adventure,
Carl understood.
And you will never be the same. And we, together, this “horse
on parade” church will never be the same. Amen.
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