Advent 2 Sermon Series 2
The Rev. Aron Kramer Advent Sermon Series II Sunday, December 9, 2007
In the absence of Christ, what emerges?
The city is where we work out our corporate life. The city is the place where we witness the emergence of Christ in ways we could only scarcely imagine. The city is the place where the poor and wealthy walk the same streets. The city is where the oppressed and the oppressors live. The city is where darkness and light wage an eternal battle. Christ set himself towards Jerusalem, towards the city so long ago, to go there and to be killed, but he was not just killed in the city. In the city, Christ was resurrected, in the city Christ ripped the curtain of the temple, blowing the box of the limitations that religion and authority had set upon God. It was in the city that Christ’ resurrection happened; it was in the city that the apostles began their work. It was in the city that Christ began to emerge.
Fred Burnham, an Episcopalian I have had the pleasure to meet on a couple of occasions wrote a paper about Network Theory and Church Leadership, it is a phenomenal piece of writing and I wanted to share part of it with you:
“The attack on September 11, 2001 left a gaping relational vacuum in lower Manhattan. But that relational vacuum did not last long. Thousands of souls rushed in to fill it. The first and most startling feature of life at Ground zero in the early days was the absence of any centralized authority or control. Droves of highly skilled people from every walk of life showed up at ground zero. Joe Bradley, the first crane operator on the site, describes his exhilarating experience: ‘I walked up West Street and saw a crane. There was a guy who gave me the keys and dispatched me out. No orders! No money! No services! Nothing! Just volunteers trying to help. I ran into a fire chief who said he’d like to clear a debris field three feet deep with heavy iron on top. I turned around. There were four or five ironworkers there. They asked if I had a crane, and I said yes. So they said they’d like to work with me. So I had a machine and a crew. Like a miracle, 25 firefighters showed up right then with tanks and torches. Then we had a mission. So we went to work. No supervision, no foreman, we worked as smooth as you can imagine right through the night. I have never seen so many people pull together. One unit, one thought. We were going to rescue a survivor.’”
I find this story inspirational. Sure it was a crisis of epic proportions, it was something that people responded to admirably and heroically, but they responded in a way that revealed what the true nature of humanity is. We are a relational people, we seek to live together, we seek to know one another and live in community. We are a relational people who desire more than anything else to be in relationship with one another. We have the ability to organize in ways that do not require one person telling us what to do. We have gifts and abilities that are unique and similar all at the same time. God has given us these gifts, and in the same way Joe Bradley got the keys to the crane he operated, we have been given the keys to unlock the potential of this place, of the Garden. We have been drawn here not just because it is a nice building, not just because of its worship, not just because of its location; we are been drawn here because of God’s call to engage our gifts and skills in the community that lives in the heart of downtown Minneapolis. We are here not because this is wealthy parish; we are here not because we are so perfectly living into what it means to be an institutional be everything to everyone kind of Church. We are here because this unique and growing community has been called to participate with God and we all, I hope, are willing and seeking to find out how we can put our own gifts to work in this place.
We are not unlike ants in that sense.
OK, before I go any further, let me say there is a caveat here, we’re smart, ants are stupid. We have an intelligence that ants can’t even dream about. We are complex and intricate beings that create complex and intricate patterns in our lives. But, that does not mean we cannot learn anything from ants. One of the most amazing mysteries about ant colonies is the question of how they form an ant colony. How do worker ants know to go get food? How do worker ants know to fix and clean up the nest? How do worker ants know to clear out the dead bodies of their colleagues? It comes down to two simple things: neighbors and neighborhood. Ants are able to determine the amount of pheromone trails left by other ants and can determine by those trails if they need to help with the nest, help with food or help with bringing out their dead. That is being a neighbor the ants learn from the other ants in their colony what aspect of work they are most needed for. Ants also run into other ants from different colonies, and it is these interactions that define and form the colony itself. It is these interactions that allow the ants to solve problems and regulate itself effectively. In a sense the neighborhood the ants live in is the most important factor that determines the shape and form of the ant colony. The local interactions and their actions locally create a global effect that is greater than even the ant colony itself.
So what, you might be asking, so what about ants and so what about 9/11. Read again the Isaiah reading. Read again the vision of the holy community, the wolf shall live with the lamb. The leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. It goes on and on, and it, to me, tells a story of the emerging community God is calling us to live into. We are a relational people, we want to be in relationship with one another, contrary to what our world, and our media, our politicians want us to hear. We want to be together, we want to eat together, we want to solve problems and address the issues of the day together. In one sense we could re-write this image of the holy emerging community from Isaiah like this: The Taliban will live with American politicians, al Qaeda will be close to the conservative Christian right. Muslims and Christians and Jews shall eat together, Iraqi’s, Israelis, Americans shall celebrate, living joyfully in the knowledge of God. You get the picture.
The creation of this vision from Isaiah requires humility, an emptying; the vision also requires a place be worked out. The city is that place, and we are those people. The healing, the participating in the creation of a new world and a new heaven can continue in this place with us. We can drop the pretenses that divide us and seek to live into justice and peace described in our Isaiah reading. We can seek to come to know our neighbors and our neighborhood and work to create a community in which people feel safe, feel joy and know that God is at work in the world. We are a relational people and the city is where we must work out our corporate life. The city is where we can see God’s body ripped apart and broken, where we can see the healing effect of God’s body being knitted back together, created into something new. Christ on the Cross is the ultimate vision of God’s decentralization, God’s unwillingness to remain in the Temple. God has torn the curtain of the Temple in two, released Christ from the confines of truth and certainty and has sent Christ free to roam the world, to meet people where they are at and live in them as they live together. There is no clearer image of God’s vastness than in our Eucharistic Feast. Wine and Bread become body and blood. Body and blood are broken up and distributed to each of us and no longer is Christ in one place, but Christ is now in you, and no longer are we together at the end of the worship service, together we go forth into the world, celebrating the new thing God is at work creating.
It is the Communion feast that we live out this sense of emergence I have been addressing these last two Sundays. God has given us all that we need to organize ourselves into the Body of Christ. God is not acting as a mayor or an appointed individual telling us what to do. We are being called to the sidewalks, called to walk the conduits of the city seeking Christ in everyone we meet, seeking to heal, to preach to share the narrative of the Kingdom of God.
In the absence of Christ, what emerges? We emerge, in the absence of Christ this Advent season we emerge to create opportunities for the Kingdom of God to be revealed. In the absence of Christ, we emerge to grow the Body of Christ, to spread the God of hope to all people, to shape and form a community of faith that is not tied to the bounds of Christian institution and Christian regulation. We are here to say that God has exploded; God is no longer confined to one place anymore. Advent is a time when we come to understand that God is not in this place alone, but that God is out there, with those in need, with those who are hurting. God is with the dying, with the suffering, God is a God of the living, not a sanitary God that we must work to keep clean and free from any dirt. In this age of information, in this age of technology that allows so much information to flow so freely, let us begin to share in the knowledge of God, let us begin to pass on that information through the conduits we experience in our daily life. Christ is absent during this time of Advent, God is about to explode, and out of the wreckage, we emerge, proclaiming the Good News and participating with God fully in the revelation of the Kingdom that has come among us, today.
In the absence of Christ, what emerges?
The city is where we work out our corporate life. The city is the place where we witness the emergence of Christ in ways we could only scarcely imagine. The city is the place where the poor and wealthy walk the same streets. The city is where the oppressed and the oppressors live. The city is where darkness and light wage an eternal battle. Christ set himself towards Jerusalem, towards the city so long ago, to go there and to be killed, but he was not just killed in the city. In the city, Christ was resurrected, in the city Christ ripped the curtain of the temple, blowing the box of the limitations that religion and authority had set upon God. It was in the city that Christ’ resurrection happened; it was in the city that the apostles began their work. It was in the city that Christ began to emerge.
Fred Burnham, an Episcopalian I have had the pleasure to meet on a couple of occasions wrote a paper about Network Theory and Church Leadership, it is a phenomenal piece of writing and I wanted to share part of it with you:
“The attack on September 11, 2001 left a gaping relational vacuum in lower Manhattan. But that relational vacuum did not last long. Thousands of souls rushed in to fill it. The first and most startling feature of life at Ground zero in the early days was the absence of any centralized authority or control. Droves of highly skilled people from every walk of life showed up at ground zero. Joe Bradley, the first crane operator on the site, describes his exhilarating experience: ‘I walked up West Street and saw a crane. There was a guy who gave me the keys and dispatched me out. No orders! No money! No services! Nothing! Just volunteers trying to help. I ran into a fire chief who said he’d like to clear a debris field three feet deep with heavy iron on top. I turned around. There were four or five ironworkers there. They asked if I had a crane, and I said yes. So they said they’d like to work with me. So I had a machine and a crew. Like a miracle, 25 firefighters showed up right then with tanks and torches. Then we had a mission. So we went to work. No supervision, no foreman, we worked as smooth as you can imagine right through the night. I have never seen so many people pull together. One unit, one thought. We were going to rescue a survivor.’”
I find this story inspirational. Sure it was a crisis of epic proportions, it was something that people responded to admirably and heroically, but they responded in a way that revealed what the true nature of humanity is. We are a relational people, we seek to live together, we seek to know one another and live in community. We are a relational people who desire more than anything else to be in relationship with one another. We have the ability to organize in ways that do not require one person telling us what to do. We have gifts and abilities that are unique and similar all at the same time. God has given us these gifts, and in the same way Joe Bradley got the keys to the crane he operated, we have been given the keys to unlock the potential of this place, of the Garden. We have been drawn here not just because it is a nice building, not just because of its worship, not just because of its location; we are been drawn here because of God’s call to engage our gifts and skills in the community that lives in the heart of downtown Minneapolis. We are here not because this is wealthy parish; we are here not because we are so perfectly living into what it means to be an institutional be everything to everyone kind of Church. We are here because this unique and growing community has been called to participate with God and we all, I hope, are willing and seeking to find out how we can put our own gifts to work in this place.
We are not unlike ants in that sense.
OK, before I go any further, let me say there is a caveat here, we’re smart, ants are stupid. We have an intelligence that ants can’t even dream about. We are complex and intricate beings that create complex and intricate patterns in our lives. But, that does not mean we cannot learn anything from ants. One of the most amazing mysteries about ant colonies is the question of how they form an ant colony. How do worker ants know to go get food? How do worker ants know to fix and clean up the nest? How do worker ants know to clear out the dead bodies of their colleagues? It comes down to two simple things: neighbors and neighborhood. Ants are able to determine the amount of pheromone trails left by other ants and can determine by those trails if they need to help with the nest, help with food or help with bringing out their dead. That is being a neighbor the ants learn from the other ants in their colony what aspect of work they are most needed for. Ants also run into other ants from different colonies, and it is these interactions that define and form the colony itself. It is these interactions that allow the ants to solve problems and regulate itself effectively. In a sense the neighborhood the ants live in is the most important factor that determines the shape and form of the ant colony. The local interactions and their actions locally create a global effect that is greater than even the ant colony itself.
So what, you might be asking, so what about ants and so what about 9/11. Read again the Isaiah reading. Read again the vision of the holy community, the wolf shall live with the lamb. The leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. It goes on and on, and it, to me, tells a story of the emerging community God is calling us to live into. We are a relational people, we want to be in relationship with one another, contrary to what our world, and our media, our politicians want us to hear. We want to be together, we want to eat together, we want to solve problems and address the issues of the day together. In one sense we could re-write this image of the holy emerging community from Isaiah like this: The Taliban will live with American politicians, al Qaeda will be close to the conservative Christian right. Muslims and Christians and Jews shall eat together, Iraqi’s, Israelis, Americans shall celebrate, living joyfully in the knowledge of God. You get the picture.
The creation of this vision from Isaiah requires humility, an emptying; the vision also requires a place be worked out. The city is that place, and we are those people. The healing, the participating in the creation of a new world and a new heaven can continue in this place with us. We can drop the pretenses that divide us and seek to live into justice and peace described in our Isaiah reading. We can seek to come to know our neighbors and our neighborhood and work to create a community in which people feel safe, feel joy and know that God is at work in the world. We are a relational people and the city is where we must work out our corporate life. The city is where we can see God’s body ripped apart and broken, where we can see the healing effect of God’s body being knitted back together, created into something new. Christ on the Cross is the ultimate vision of God’s decentralization, God’s unwillingness to remain in the Temple. God has torn the curtain of the Temple in two, released Christ from the confines of truth and certainty and has sent Christ free to roam the world, to meet people where they are at and live in them as they live together. There is no clearer image of God’s vastness than in our Eucharistic Feast. Wine and Bread become body and blood. Body and blood are broken up and distributed to each of us and no longer is Christ in one place, but Christ is now in you, and no longer are we together at the end of the worship service, together we go forth into the world, celebrating the new thing God is at work creating.
It is the Communion feast that we live out this sense of emergence I have been addressing these last two Sundays. God has given us all that we need to organize ourselves into the Body of Christ. God is not acting as a mayor or an appointed individual telling us what to do. We are being called to the sidewalks, called to walk the conduits of the city seeking Christ in everyone we meet, seeking to heal, to preach to share the narrative of the Kingdom of God.
In the absence of Christ, what emerges? We emerge, in the absence of Christ this Advent season we emerge to create opportunities for the Kingdom of God to be revealed. In the absence of Christ, we emerge to grow the Body of Christ, to spread the God of hope to all people, to shape and form a community of faith that is not tied to the bounds of Christian institution and Christian regulation. We are here to say that God has exploded; God is no longer confined to one place anymore. Advent is a time when we come to understand that God is not in this place alone, but that God is out there, with those in need, with those who are hurting. God is with the dying, with the suffering, God is a God of the living, not a sanitary God that we must work to keep clean and free from any dirt. In this age of information, in this age of technology that allows so much information to flow so freely, let us begin to share in the knowledge of God, let us begin to pass on that information through the conduits we experience in our daily life. Christ is absent during this time of Advent, God is about to explode, and out of the wreckage, we emerge, proclaiming the Good News and participating with God fully in the revelation of the Kingdom that has come among us, today.
Comments
I have just read The Sower, and been invited to share your blog. Thank you. I read your sermons from Christmas and Advent II. I missed them both. I am so tired and somehow unable to get going. I still want to wash your windows. Maybe next week.
both sermons are wonderful for me. To see Jeff and Kimi and Dorothy shown for their treasure and their broken-ness. They were all of our body, of Christ's face.
I also appreciate your account of your first anniversity of the oreal with Elliot. There is nothing so beautiful as the little quiet parade of little ones on Sunday, headed for your "throne."
I hope it is ok for me to copy some of these words for a friend who thinks the world is meant to have war forever . . .
Thank you for making it possible for me to hear the words that I missed.
peace and prayers,
janE