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Sermon 01/22/2006
Follow and Change ~ by
Tom Kinder
January 22, 2006 Third Sunday after Epiphany
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont,
UCC
Psalm 139; Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Mark 1:13-20
Today we are both taking in new members and holding
our Annual Meeting. It seems like a good day to
reflect on what it means to be part of this church,
part of this membership, whether officially members
or not.
We can begin where we began this morning with
Psalm 139 and the hymn, “I Was There to Hear
Your Borning Cry.” We can begin with a God
who knows us more intimately than even our parent
or spouse, a God who loves us more faithfully,
tenderly and unconditionally. The Psalm says,
“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high I cannot attain it.” God’s
love is so great we cannot even begin to approach
it with our intellect.
And yet part of what it means to be a member here
is to experience that love through one another
in a mysterious, miraculously powerful love that
comes from beyond us and flows through us to one
another. Many people feel something like this
when they sing “I Was There to Hear Your
Borning Cry.” Many cannot sing it without
crying themselves because they are moved by the
love of children they have seen be baptized and
grow up to be confirmed here.
Last week two people spoke during Joys and Concerns
about the power of this loving community. Both
had been confronting a life-threatening situation
recently, and both felt the power of our love
uphold them and comfort them in it. God’s
love searches us out no matter where we go, no
matter how dark the night around us. To be a member
here is to experience that love not only mystically
in our solitude, but embodied in the company of
this membership as it reaches out to us or walks
with us or sits beside us.
Wendell Berry tells a beautiful story of the Port
William membership, his fictional Kentucky community.
It is entitled “A Jonquil for Mary Penn.”
Mary is a young farm wife who wakes up one morning
feeling a fever coming on, but it is plowing time
and she doesn’t want to be a burden or worry
to her husband, Elton. So Mary gets up and does
her chores and makes breakfast and gets Elton
out the door. Then she collapses on the couch,
worrying about the essential daily work she is
not getting done, but too sick even to build a
fire to warm herself as she lies there shivering,
feeling forlorn. She falls asleep, and wakes up
to find a fire going, and a kettle steaming on
it, and the house work done. Her beloved neighbor
is sitting on the rocker beside her, humming a
hymn and doing needle work, embroidering a beautiful
yellow jonquil. It turns out that Elton had stopped
by the neighbor’s house to say that he was
worried about Mary, and a circle of care had closed
around her while she slept. The story ends with
her drifting back into a comforted sleep, her
body still sick, but her troubled mind healed.
That story is fictional, but a true story like
it happened to Valerie Miller. She was in the
hospital many years ago, at a difficult time in
her life when she was feeling alone. She woke
up from surgery to find Lilla Willey sitting beside
her holding her hand. When you are part of a membership
like this church, you lie down forlorn in the
darkness of your trouble, and you wake in the
light of our loving care.
The last verses of Psalm 139 pray, “Search
me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know
my thoughts. See if there is in me any wicked
way, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
This is another part of what it means to be a
member here. It comes as a response of gratitude
to the love of God we find here. Jesus gave us
images for this. He said the realm of God is like
treasure hidden in a field. When you discover
it, you go and sell all you have so you can buy
that field. Or the realm of God is like a merchant
in search of fine pearls. On finding one pearl
of great value, the merchant sells all his other
pearls so he can buy the one.
When we find a church community where we experience
something like the love of God’s realm, we
are willing to make sacrifices to be a part of
it. One of those sacrifices is giving up all the
other fun or relaxing or rewarding things we could
be doing on Sunday morning. Another is giving
our talent and energy and money to help the church
flourish. But another is that we open ourselves
to God’s grace, which means opening ourselves
to change. “See if there is in me any wicked
way, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
Today we heard the story of Jesus beginning his
ministry and calling the first disciples. The
message he was preaching was this: “The time
is fulfilled, and the realm of God is at hand;
repent, and believe in the good news.” The
good news was that the realm of God’s love,
joy and peace was here within reach – the
realm in which the powerless are exalted and the
poor are cared for, where the sick are healed,
where all who are oppressed are lifted up, the
realm of not only justice, but mercy and forgiveness
is here for us now. If you believe that, or if
you experience it, then the other part of his
message is worth the price – the part about
repenting.
To repent does not mean just being sorry and resolving
to do better. That is part of its meaning, but
the Greek word metanoia that we translate as repent
means literally to change your mind. By mind the
Greeks meant not only your thinking, but your
heart and spirit and will. To repent means to
change your orientation from being world-focused
to being God-focused, and to live differently
because of it.
To be a member of this church means being open
to changing ourselves as the Holy Spirit guides
and empowers us to do. One of those changes is
to be more loving toward others. Our bylaws say
that one of the requirements of official membership
is to live in ways that give evidence of Christian
faith. And one of the questions asked new members
during the ritual is if they promise to grow in
the Christian faith.
Nine years ago at Annual Meeting we made a bold
decision that opened us to being changed and to
growing more loving. We voted to undertake a study
of “Homosexuality and the Church and Homosexuality
and the Community.” During that process many
of us listened for the first time to stories of
people who had grown up gay or lesbian in a church
– even in this church – and had never
felt safe to share the truth of who they were.
They felt that the love of the community would
forsake them and turn to hate if they told the
truth. And so as they were ridiculed or called
names at school or slammed into lockers or beaten
up because of the suspicion that they were gay,
they had nowhere to turn for support. They were
shut off from the love of God in their church
community, even though they were members.
Hearing those stories changed many of us. They
caused us to repent – not only to confess
the wrong of the church’s excluding people
based on their sexual orientation, not only to
regret that, but to change our policy here and
become Open and Affirming, and to pledge to work
to end oppression and discrimination whenever
we encounter them.
That leads to another aspect of membership here.
Jesus said to his first disciples, “Follow
me, and I will make you fish for people.”
Part of our calling is to repent and be changed,
but equal to that is this other calling to follow
Christ and change the world around us. God’s
gifts to us here are not for ourselves alone.
We are called to take the love we find here and
spread it to others. Our job is to fish for people
in the sense of throwing the net of God’s
love around them, letting them feel that the realm
of God is at hand. We do this in the hope that
they, in their turn, will be moved to repent and
be changed, and to follow Christ and change the
world. This hope is at the core of the nonviolent
way Jesus teaches us to confront our enemies or
any form of evil.
We face a world that seems on the brink of catastrophe
– the greatest evil we have known in recorded
history. Every month more scientists are releasing
more shocking analyses of the effects of global
climate change. They portray a world of increasing
numbers of hurricanes like Katrina, a world of
more deadly diseases like bird flu, a world of
massive species extinctions, of drought and famine
in places that are breadbaskets today. This is
a world our children or grandchildren will live
to see, or will be among the billions who will
die as a result. The prophet Jonah is raising
his voice, saying, “Forty days more, and
Ninevah will be overthrown.”
To be part of this membership is partly to be
a modern Jonah, sounding a prophetic alarm, trying
to change the world, and it is partly to be citizens
of Ninevah, praying and fasting, opening ourselves
to being changed so that we may live in harmony
with God’s sacred way and not in the ways
of destruction.
To be part of this membership is to live in hope,
even when it seems there is no hope – because
when people repent and change and seek to spread
change around them to make the world more like
God’s realm, we know that miracles can happen.
A spiritual power is released that is too wonderful
for us to comprehend. Even the evil that seems
certain may be reversed. The book of Jonah puts
it this way: “When God saw what they did,
how they turned from their evil ways, God repented.”
God changed the course of nature and saved them
from certain doom.
If we can experience the miracle of God’s
love here on a small scale, then maybe we can
believe in it on a global scale. But if that knowledge
is too wonderful for us, so high that we cannot
attain it, we don’t have to think about it.
We don’t have to understand how God’s
love works. To be a member here is to be invited
to repent and be changed, be changed and follow
the way of Christ, follow Christ and work to change
the world. That process is all we need to do.
We can trust love to do the rest.
Let us pray, opening ourselves to be changed and
to change the world as the Spirit leads us. Let
us pray in silence…
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