Phil Kniss: Hallowed and human

November 1, 2009
All Saints Day 2009
Revelation 21:1-6a

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This service is more about song and scripture and silence and symbols,
and less about a sermon . . . so I will be brief.
Though brief, some words are necessary, because . . .
if we celebrate All Saints Day,
without thinking clearly and carefully about what we are doing,
it can be hazardous to our spiritual health.

The reason it can be hazardous,
is that on All Saints Day we walk a tightrope,
between the divine or holy,
and the human or earthly.
We walk the rope with a balancing pole in our hands,
wobbling between these two realities.
If we’re not careful we fall off one side or the other.
We need hold the two together simultaneously.
On All Saints Day we celebrate both the hallowed and the human.

The church has a history of falling off the rope, on both sides.
The Reformation in the sixteenth century
was an attempt to get back on the rope.
Because the church had come to venerate the Saints so much,
that it bordered on idolatry, and magic.
They were not like us. They were holy.
Icons and statues became the object of people’s worship.

So Protestant Reformers,
including the first Anabaptist reformers,
participated in a radical cleansing of the sanctuaries,
ripping the icons off the walls and burning them,
pulverizing statues of the saints,
and essentially stripping the worship spaces,
destroying all the religious art they could get their hands on.
Thus falling off the rope on the other side.
They scorned these reminders
of the saints who had gone before them,
to the extent that they failed to see themselves
as part of a larger stream of Christian history,
and they missed out on the spiritual benefits
of remembering and honoring the faithful ones
who have gone before us,
and whose lives still have the power to teach us.

So here we are in a Mennonite congregation,
as spiritual descendants of the icon-destroying Anabaptists,
trying to walk the rope between the hallowed and human.
_____________________

When we celebrate All Saints Day at Park View,
we reject the notion that the saints we honor,
both the saints of old—St. Paul, St. Peter, St. Francis—
and the recent saints of our own community—
Ruth, Bob, Mary Florence—
were fundamentally different from any of us.
We honor them, precisely because they were just like us.
They were our friends, our neighbors, our fellow church members,
who lived ordinary human lives
that were hallowed—made holy—by the grace of God.

That’s why we do All Saints Day here at Park View.
We celebrate the hallowed grace of God
revealed in the very human lives
of those who have gone before us.
We call them to mind.
We name them aloud.
We honor them.
But we don’t make them special.
We don’t put them in a holier place than we are.

We need heroes of the faith, of course.
Heroes inspire us, push us to greater heights.
But in a celebrity-driven culture,
we are too quick to make other people larger than our lives.
We tell our children over and over that they are special.
But if we’re not careful,
we soon have them convinced,
that they inhabit a world
somewhere above those who are not special.

I hate to burst the bubble,
but none of us are special.
Unique, yes. Loved, yes. But not special.
We are all, everyone of us, cut from the same mold.
That mold being the holy, divine image of God.
We are all human beings with a hallowed imprint.
We are daughters and sons of God,
and we are children of the earth.
Hallowed and human.

That’s why we celebrate this day.
It’s not about our holy ancestors and their great accomplishments.
It’s not about us, and our potential to be great.
It is about the wonder, the mystery,
of God’s choice to put God’s own holy image
into the likes of us human beings,
and then to dwell with us.

In Revelation 21, at the end of the service today,
we will hear these words,
which should cause us to fall on our faces in gratitude:
A voice came from the throne of God,
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
God will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them.”

Our calling on earth is not to strive to reach God in heaven.
Our calling is to receive, in deep gratitude,
God’s striving to be with us,
God’s desire to make his home with us.

It is not our striving that creates saints, past or present.
It is not our doing that brings together the hallowed and human.
It is God’s design, and God’s doing.

And for that, in amazement and wonder, we,
“Sing with all the saints in glory,
sing the resurrection song!”

—Phil Kniss, November 1, 2009




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Barbara Moyer Lehman: The call and challenge of mutual care

October 25, 2009
1 Thessalonians 5:12-22

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Sitting at the table on the stage at the front of the sanctuary with the worship leader and song leader, and sipping tea with them, Pastor Barbara Moyer Lehman used a conversational tone to talk about what it means to offer mutual care in the context of a "community of communities." 1 Thessalonians 5:12-22 was the text that she referenced, but she also called upon those sitting with her and in the congregation, to explore mutual care. The challenge at the end of the sermon was to reach out and get to know some new people and practice caring for each other.



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Phil Kniss: It takes a village to read the Bible

October 18, 2009
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Luke 4:14-21

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Here on the table is a wedding gift Irene and I received,
over 29 years ago.
My mother, who has always taken pictures of family events,
and filled dozens of fat photo albums over the years,
went through all her albums before our wedding,
and picked out pictures significant for me—
from birth to just a few months before our wedding—
made reprints,
and put them all in this album with detailed captions.
What she wrote made clear this was not just a gift for me,
but would help Irene discover a bit more about who I am.

In this album are snapshots of me as a newborn,
showing my facial deformities in early childhood,
and photos of my face all bandaged up
after a couple of the plastic surgeries.
There are pictures of me playing with some of my best friends
in my elementary school years,
camping in the Smoky Mountains as a family,
big extended family reunions.
There are pictures
of me as a pimply-faced and stringy-haired adolescent,
including the shot of my 15th birthday breakfast.
The picture shows an empty Wheaties box,
and the mixing bowl in which I ate the entire box full,
to make good on a boast.
They said I couldn’t do it. I said I could.
The proof is in the picture.

Flipping through this album,
is not just about being nostalgic.
It’s about remembering who I am.
Every one of these pictures
sheds light on who I am,
and who the people are that my life has depended on.
It tells me who I belong to,
and who I’m indebted to.
Each time I look at it,
I remember something or someone I had forgotten about,
and my life gets put into perspective.
I get grounded.

It’s kind of like reading the Bible.
As we flip the pages of the Bible, or a photo album,
we see ourselves in it.
We see our sisters and brothers.
We see the community from which we came,
and to which we still belong.
We see our ancestors.
We see God.

And sometimes we come across a picture that’s not very clear.
The old yellow snapshot’s a little wrinkled, out of focus,
the caption is obliterated.
We squint our eyes
look at it this way and that,
but we still aren’t sure what we’re seeing.
We need someone to help interpret it.
Maybe the one who took the picture,
or someone who was there at the time.

Not everything we read in the Bible is in sharp focus, either.
Sometimes the pictures are blurry.
We can’t always tell for sure what happened, and why.
We don’t always know precisely what truth
the author intended to communicate.

So we gather around the open Bible . . . as a community.
Just like a family gathers around a kitchen table
looking at old pictures.
Each one has a perspective to offer,
that helps someone else at the table
understand and identify with the picture,
helps them enter into that story,
and make it their own.

People say it takes a village to raise a child.
I say it takes a village to read the Bible.
Oh, we can read it alone, sure. We must.
But we should not read it
without regard to the community of faith
in which it is grounded, in which we are grounded.
The Bible is the book of the church.
_____________________

Our confession of faith, Article 4, says,
“The Bible is the essential book of the church . . .
We commit ourselves to persist and delight
in reading, studying, and meditating on the Scriptures.
We participate in the church’s task of interpreting the Bible
and of discerning what God is saying in our time
by examining all things in the light of Scripture.
Insights . . . we bring are to be tested in the faith community.”

Reading and interpreting the Bible is the task of the church,
in which we all have an obligation to participate.
This is not a job we delegate to
the preachers
and professors
and theologians.

And this is certainly not a job we can just ignore,
if we want to call ourselves a church.
I have sometimes heard sincere church-attending professing Christians
essentially cop out on this task of wrestling with scripture.
Maybe they don’t understand it enough to appreciate it,
maybe they read things in it that don’t jive with what they believe,
maybe they just don’t feel this ancient book means much anymore,
or that it holds any authority in today’s complex world.
They would rather trust what they experience,
and believe what they can figure out using sound logic.
And the Bible gets pushed to the side,
as little more than a source of some inspirational stories,
some poetic beauty,
and some formal language that sounds great in public liturgy.

My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be.
We would not exist, as a community of God’s people,
without this formational book.
And we could never sustain our life without it.
To deny scripture its central place
in the living community of Christ today,
is like me trying to deny that the pictures in this photo album
are not really me,
and not my family,
and not the ones who gave me life.
This is the book of the living community of Christ.
This is the book of the church.

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to understand and apply.
That’s why we need to work so hard at it.
That’s why we need to study its original
context, intent, and audience.
And even when we have a pretty good picture of what was said,
and what was meant,
we still have to figure out what it means for us.
And there is often more than one way to look at it.
More than one meaning might be arrived at.
So we need to get together and struggle through it.
With the Holy Spirit’s help,
we need to fight it out, in a healthy way,
to argue, to struggle, to ask, to probe, to listen,
until deeper understanding comes.

But we never have the luxury of pushing it aside,
and saying it’s a nice book, but it doesn’t really speak to us here.
This is the book that is read in community,
tested in community,
and given authority in the community.

And when I speak of community,
it most certainly includes the table-sized community.
In fact, when the people of God gather in mutual covenant,
when they know each other intimately,
when they share their lives with each other regularly,
when they have diverse perspectives, but deep unity,
through Christ, in the Spirit,
when they are committed to speak honestly and openly,
and stay in the struggle no matter what it takes,
then that is the place, I would argue,
that is best suited to do good biblical interpretation.

That is also the way of our Anabaptist tradition.
God’s word and will are not proclaimed to us from on high.
Truth is not handed down to individual believers
by an authority figure.
Discernment is the task of the community, at all levels.

So if we are a community of communities doing this discernment,
then the communities also need to stay connected to each other.
They need to be aware of, and listening to,
and testing the discernment happening at other communities,
and at other levels of our communal relationship.

Each little table group doesn’t do their work in isolation,
and then declare their version of the truth the final word.
One community’s interpretation is referenced with,
and accountable to,
the interpretive work of the larger community of communities.
_____________________

We heard two stories from the Bible this morning.
And they were both stories about the Bible,
about how it functioned in midst of a community.

In Nehemiah 8,
there was a grand reading and celebration of the book of the law.
This was after the people had mostly returned from exile in Babylon,
and rebuilt the walls of the destroyed city.
Nearly 50,000 people were there,
most of whom had lived in Babylon for many generations,
and had completely forgotten who they were as a people.

So the newly rediscovered book of the law, the Torah, their scripture,
was brought out and returned to the people.
But they didn’t pass out 50,000 leather-bound pocket testaments,
and say, now go home, read it, and obey it.
They did not have the 50,000 people give their email addresses
so they could send out an inspirational verse-of-the-day,
every day for the rest of the year.
They did not even have the resident expert, Ezra,
just read it and preach to them about what it meant.

Ezra, and twelve other people, six on his right, and six on his left,
read the text out aloud to the people, for six hours.
Then those 12, and 14 additional helpers, Levites,
worked with the people in making sense out of what they heard.
All these interpretive assistants are listed in Nehemiah 8 by name,
all 26 unpronounceable names.
We skipped those verses as an act of mercy for our reader.

Exactly how the 26 did their work, we don’t know,
but the text implies that they fanned out among the people,
and worked in smaller groupings,
worked together at the task of interpreting and discerning.
In any case, it wasn’t a private reading for private inspiration.
It was the combined work of the whole people,
a people moved by the Spirit of God,
to seek the word and will of God together.
And the result was so powerful,
that 50,000 people spontaneously fell on their faces . . . and wept.
The emotion of remembering and reconnecting
with something deep within them that they had lost,
was simply overpowering.
_____________________

And in today’s Gospel reading,
there was also a powerful and emotional moment
when the scripture was read aloud and interpreted,
in the midst of a local community.
This time it was Jesus reading, in his hometown synagogue.
He stood to read from Isaiah,
and then sat down, as was customary,
to give his commentary on the text.
It was a nine-word commentary,
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
And they were all amazed at his gracious words.

But then he started to say other things,
started spelling out some implications of scripture,
that pushed the edges of the community,
namely, that God might care just as much about the Gentiles . . .
well, that was more interpretation than they wanted to hear,
and they turned against Jesus.

But Jesus was dealing with scripture according to their tradition,
that is, reading it amidst the community,
and then engaging the community with the meaning.
Like any good Jewish rabbi, stirring up a good argument,
as to what the sacred text means for us, today.
That’s just the way the Bible was read.
_____________________

How different than the way a lot of us read it.
Reading one inspirational verse a day,
like a daily vitamin pill, for a spiritual energy boost.
Or reading it to reinforce what I already believe,
or to prove someone else wrong.

So . . . in light of this series of sermons,
the challenge I leave us with, should be obvious.
If the Bible is central to the life of the church,
then it ought to be at the center whenever the church gathers—
whether as one large community in Sunday morning worship,
or as church at the table.
We are a scripture-shaped community.
And we only come to see how it shapes us,
as we wrestle with it in community.

So if we take seriously our vision at Park View,
of being a community of communities engaged in God’s mission,
then every time these smaller communities gather
to collaborate with God in doing God’s work,
it seems to me the Bible ought to show up in some form.
Regularly, not only when we are explicitly engaged in a Bible study,
or when someone’s doing a devotional.
But whenever we gather.

Instead, it is often, if not usually, absent.
And we suffer from widespread biblical illiteracy, in the church!

We could make a modest start,
by just being more intentional about
letting the Bible show up in our gatherings,
letting it do its work of shaping our community life.

There are a couple Bibles in the church conference room,
that always sit in the middle of the table.
Right there with them is a daily lectionary,
that lists a morning psalm, an evening psalm,
and three other readings for each day.
We use them in our daily prayers, every morning at 9:00.
And I know the Church Council uses the readings
every time it meets to do business.
But that room gets used a lot to conduct other church business.

Is it just silly for me to imagine that it might actually have an impact,
if every time people gathered in that room
to do any kind of church business,
they took time to listen to one of the daily scriptures.

Is it just silly for me to imagine that something good might result,
if Sunday School classes never—ever—had a class session,
without at least once opening the scriptures and reading them,
or if small groups when they gathered,
would always include someone reading scripture aloud,
and others listening, and commenting as desired.
Is it just silly for me to imagine those things?
Or could it be that the Holy Spirit,
the one whose inspiration brought us the scripture,
could be putting those strange thoughts in my head?

God still speaks to us through scripture.
The least we should be doing is listening,
regularly, respectfully, and in conversation with each other.

There’s a John Bell song that says whenever we gather,
it is Jesus who calls us here, to meet him
in the Word . . . and in song, and prayer, and table.
Let’s sing it together, STJ #3.

—Phil Kniss, October 18, 2009



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Phil Kniss: The compelling witness of the living community

October 11, 2009
Jeremiah 29:1 , 4-8a; Luke 10:1-12

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When we talk about Christian witness, chances are,
we are referring to one of two main categories of witness.
We’re either talking about the
public witness of the church to society and the world,
or we’re talking about personally sharing our faith with someone.

Almost any act of witness that comes to mind
could be plugged into one of those two categories.
The public witness of the church includes such things as . . .
church planting and evangelism,
community and economic development,
medical missions,
disaster relief, food distribution,
Christian education,
social service or peacebuilding,
speaking to the government, or to the larger society.
And personal faith-sharing can also include a wide range
of acts of Christian witness:
talking to a neighbor about your walk with Jesus,
long conversations with a friend at a coffeeshop,
showing kindness to a stranger,
correspondence with a pen-pal,
simply speaking freely about your faith with persons you meet.

All of these acts of witness,
when carried out with sensitivity and sincerity,
are important ways to bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I could do two whole sermon series
on public witness and personal faith sharing.

But in this sermon, on the topic of witness,
I will talk about neither one.
Instead I’ll lift up a third, and much neglected,
category of Christian witness:
the compelling witness of the living community of Christ.

I’m talking about a group of people just doing
what a genuine community of disciples of Jesus does,
as they navigate the ordinary challenges of life together.
I’m talking about having the Christian communities we are part of,
whether it’s a community of two or three, or twelve, or fifty,
not being afraid to put our lives on display.
To be more hospitable. To extend the table.
To risk opening our lives to the outsider,
and inviting them in,
for a look around to see what living Christianly,
is all about—Monday through Monday.

This is the flip-side of Christian witness.
As we said, witnessing is seeing.
When we put the ordinary life of our communities on display,
we are bearing witness to the gospel, yes.
But it’s the ones on the outside looking in who are witnessing.
They are seeing, they are eye-witnesses,
to what it means to live as a community of Christ.
That is, if we ever give them a chance to get a glimpse.

Opening our ordinary lives to outsiders does not come natural.
In fact, inviting people into the ordinary moments of our lives
is a radically counter-cultural practice.
We live in a hyper-individualistic culture
that is fragmented and isolated from each other.
Our homes are protective havens for ourselves.
They are not wayside inns for wanderers.

Hospitality is a spiritual practice that is sorely lacking in our culture.
Oh, many of us know how to put on great dinner parties.
In fact, some are downright amazing
in their ability to entertain, to decorate,
and to cook up a storm.
We often say these persons have the gift of hospitality.
They very well might. Or they might not.
Because hospitality is not the same thing as entertaining.
Entertainers create an atmosphere,
put their creative gifts on display for the pleasure of others,
create beautiful art out of their home,
or out of the contents of their pantry.
They put on an event.
But being hospitable is about being open,
especially to the weary one, the sick, or the stranger.
It’s about welcoming the other,
without any pretense,
without a need to make an impression, or make a statement.

There’s nothing wrong with putting out the best sometimes.
I enjoy a well-presented meal as much as anyone.
But why don’t we allow others to look in on
the ordinary spaces of our lives?
Why must we be so private?
Why put the family rooms at the back of the house?
Why keep the curtains drawn day and night?
Why is it socially inappropriate in our culture
to drop by someone’s house without an appointment?
Well, we have to have to time to straighten up,
to dust the furniture,
and give the impression to others
that we always have it together.
Obsession with privacy
not only interferes with our gospel witness to our neighbors.
It interferes with building authentic community
with other church members.
It impedes the healthy functioning of small groups.

Even when we’re with other members of our small groups,
members of our own church family,
we often shield them from seeing into, from witnessing,
the state of affairs in the ordinary rooms of our homes,
and our lives.

I’ve quoted David Fitch before.
He’s a friend, a fellow pastor, one of my seminary profs,
and an author.
In a chapter on what evangelism should look like in the church today,
he wrote that first and foremost,
we need to reinvigorate the practice of hospitality.
He says it’s in our homes and at our tables
where neighbors and strangers get
“a full view of the message of our life.”
If we are not having neighbors in our homes
we are neglecting the core spiritual practice of witness.
It’s in our homes where neighbors can sit around laughing,
talking, asking each other good questions.
Home is where we live every day,
it’s where we converse and settle conflict,
it’s where we raise children.
So when we invite someone into our home, we are saying,
“Here, take a look.
I am taking a risk and inviting you into my life.”
It’s a profound act of witness,
and of allowing our lives to be witnessed.
And it’s radically counter-cultural.

We need to learn how to live
as real, down-to-earth, genuine communities of Christ,
and let that life be seen in the everyday and ordinary,
let it be open to examination,
let is be subject to the scrutiny of our neighbors,
and of the world,
let it be witnessed.
_____________________

The scriptures we listened to this morning,
both from the prophet Jeremiah, and the gospel of Luke,
painted pictures of communities of faith
that went out of their way to invest in relationships with neighbors.

The people of Israel, exiled in a foreign country,
were instructed to act like they were at home there.
Jeremiah told them,
“Enter into the life of that culture and that people,
and seek the welfare, seek the peace,
of the city where you live in exile.
In their peace, you will find your peace.”
See, God’s love and compassion is for all nations.
God chose a people to demonstrate that love,
to embody it in community,
and invite others to experience it.

And in Luke’s Gospel,
a passage I’ve pointed to many times,
Jesus instructed his disciples to go out in pairs, without supplies,
and not just preach and proclaim right away,
but first to live among.
To eat from the tables of those who would receive them.
To stay and make themselves at home.
Learn to know their hosts.
Let them witness your life among them.
And then, proclaim the kingdom.
_____________________

When it comes to witness at the table, as a community of communities,
it won’t be one-size-fits-all.
There is no inherent virtue in being small, as a group.

For some persons, in fact, the point of entry into Christian community
will be in the anonymity of a large crowd on Sunday morning.
But I assure you,
those kind of persons are diminishing rapidly.
To a typical 21st-century American,
the religious language, symbols, and practices
of Sunday morning church, are utterly foreign.
It takes a rare kind of courage to walk into a social situation
where it’s clear to you and everyone else, you’re an outsider.
Just issuing more invitations to church
cannot be the extent of our witness.

But neither will it be just
inviting people to a small group meeting
in someone’s living room,
or a Bible study around a dining table.
That can be just as intimidating.
Our culture is not accustomed
to this level of openness with our neighbors.
And a church small group can be
one of the most difficult social groups to break into.
Even for other church members who want in.
Which is understandable, and not to be judged.
It takes time to build up the trust needed
for deep openness and honesty.
So it won’t necessarily be in our small groups, either,
where our common life as Christians can be witnessed,
and opened to scrutiny.

But the church, as a community of communities,
is not like, say, a honeycomb, or a brick wall,
where every unit is the same size and shape,
and fits together perfectly, without overlap,
to create the whole.
The church is a whole lot messier than that.
Most of us at Park View are in multiple communities,
communities of different sizes and different functions.
I can think of 5 or 6 I’m a part of.
And that’s a good thing.
The church is multi-layered network
of overlapping communities.
In fact, Park View is
a community of communities of communities.

We need communities somewhere between small home groups
and large Sunday gatherings,
both of which can be highly intimidating and off-putting
to one who hasn’t been schooled in the ways of being church.

In the ongoing conversations about
emerging church and missional church and such,
someone coined the term “third space” witness.
That is,
we create new spaces—neither home nor church—
for connecting with the stranger.
Spaces that don’t carry the baggage of institutional church,
and don’t intimidate newcomers with too much closeness.
Some churches are starting off-site coffeehouses,
community centers, recreation parks, and the like.

See, in creating Christian community
there’s this tension we live with.
The stronger the community,
the more likely connections with outsiders will diminish.
Some of us here could count on one hand
the number of good friends we have
who don’t profess Christian faith, or any faith at all.
So if we want others to witness the everyday life
of a community of redeemed people,
we need to create authentic connections with them.
So-called “third spaces” might be one way of doing that.
_____________________

Well, I’m nearing the end of my sermon
and I’m about to issue an altar call . . . or is it a table call?
And it won’t involve raising your hands,
or walking to the front weeping.

I want to issue a specific invitation and challenge
to every group, every community,
that makes up Park View Mennonite Church.
Or if you’re visiting, any church community you are part of.

I want you and your community,
whether it’s a small group, Sunday School class,
breakfast club, Bible study, or book club . . .
to give some careful thought
to how your life together,
as a community of Jesus followers,
can be seen, can be witnessed by,
those who live outside the community of Christ.
If Jesus really makes a difference in the way we live together,
how might others witness that difference?

Maybe your Sunday School class will decide it has a missional task
beyond the weekly meeting inside the church building.
Or your small group will decide to break the pattern
of only getting together in your living room.
Whatever your community, maybe you could create a third space,
create some occasional events or places,
where you are together, as a community,
but where everyone—
or as Ron Copeland at Our Community Place likes to say—
everyone with a belly-button, is invited.
A back-yard barbecue perhaps?
A neighborhood block party?
Planting a community garden?
Or maybe just some of your group members plan an event
for those with shared interests,
like a Sunday afternoon motorcycle ride, or bike ride,
or a quilting party,
or community sing,
or . . . the possibilities are endless.
Maybe three or four small groups could form a missional coalition.
Occasionally meet as a super-group,
and do something together
where anyone would feel welcome.
Maybe your super-group, or Sunday School class,
would like to take on the mission of re-opening the
Friday night Living Room Coffeehouse this winter,
and find ways to welcome our neighbors into that space.
Maybe just your family, and another church family that lives nearby,
could decide to make your homes places of welcome,
where you invite your neighbors in,
and share your lives with them in some way.

In other words, how will the kind of community life we live,
the table fellowship we share as followers of Jesus,
ever be visible?
ever be witnessed by those who have never known
this way of living.

Talk about it.
Plan for it.
Let us know how it goes.

That’s my altar call.
May the Spirit move among us.
May our lives be a witness, and be witnessed.
And let us walk as children of the light, in the light.

STJ #95, “I want to walk as a child of the light”

—Phil Kniss, October 11, 2009

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