Phil Kniss: In Praise of Reverence

November 29, 2009
Luke 21:25-36; Jeremiah 33:14-16

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Have you ever noticed how many worthy causes
have their own official awareness month?
Almost every disease,
and almost every important issue has its own awareness month.
And we can appreciate most of them, I think.
But maybe it’s getting out of hand.
Did you also know there was an official
Squirrel Awareness Month?
a Potty Training Awareness Month?
a Mold Awareness Month?
a Workplace Politics Awareness Month?
a Caffeine Awareness Month?
and yes, an Accordion Awareness Month?

Recently a humor magazine spoofed this trend
by proclaiming December “National Awareness Month.”
to address “our current epidemic
of complete and utter obliviousness.”
It was supposedly sponsored by the
American Foundation for Paying Attention to Things.

After I had a good chuckle, it occurred to me.
In their attempt simply to be funny,
they were being profoundly theological.
They captured perfectly a key message of Advent.
The reality of Advent is that
we really aren’t being attentive enough.
Advent is our annual wake-up call to “Be alert!”
This is the main thing we emphasize
every year on the first Sunday of Advent.
Be alert!

You may want to take a look in your Bibles at Luke 21,
our Gospel reading today.
I see in this passage, at least eight different ways
Luke records Jesus saying the same thing: “Pay attention!”
Scanning down the page, beginning around v. 28,
I see words and phrases like,
stand up . . . and
raise your heads . . .
Look . . .
see for yourselves . . .
see these things . . .
Be on guard . . .
don’t be caught unexpected . . .
Be alert at all times . . .
You might say Jesus was proclaiming
National Awareness Month in Palestine.

Awareness of what? What is Jesus asking us to pay attention to?
Well, it all depends on your perspective.
Depends on what you’re looking for.
If you fixate on all the terrible things taking place in the world—
and the Jewish people in first-century Palestine
had every reason to,
what with being occupied
by a brutally oppressive foreign regime—
if you fixate on the terrible events in your world,
that’s what you will notice,
that’s what will fill your senses, your awareness.
And Jesus gives fair warning that it’s going to get even worse.
Notice v. 25 and following.
There will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars.
On earth, distress among the nations.
Roaring of the sea and waves.
People will faint from fear and foreboding.
The powers of heaven will be shaken.
And in v. 34, people react with
self-indulgence and drunkenness and worrying about life.

But if, instead of fixating on the awful circumstances,
instead of practicing worry and fear,
you choose to practice hope,
if you pay attention to God’s redeeming work in the world,
you will notice something else.
Jesus says in v. 28, “Stand up! Raise your heads!”
There is no reason to cower, to bow down in fear.
“Look! Your redemption is drawing near.”
And again in v. 30: “See for yourselves. The winter is ending.
The summer is already near.”
V. 31: “The kingdom of God is near.”
Be alert! At all times.

Advent is a season for renewing our hope.
We celebrate the first Advent—
the coming of God in the flesh
to an oppressed and weary and sin-filled world—
that coming, that Advent, has already happened, and we rejoice!
We are still the beneficiaries of that first Advent.
Because the Redeemer is still with us.
Immanuel.
God is still present with us in the midst of our messy,
earthly, broken existence.
God is here now, to save and redeem.

But we also anticipate another Advent.
A second coming.
A further, and more complete redemption.
And that’s the good news we proclaim every year
on the first Sunday of Advent.
Which we already sang about: “Christ will come again.”

But even while we wait on that final redemption
at the end of all time,
there are continuous Advents in our world today.
Christ comes anew, and comes daily,
to save and redeem us in this world.
But we might miss it, if we don’t pay attention.

The signs of redemption are often pretty subtle.
In our text, did you notice the difference in the nature of the signs?
You can’t miss changes in the sun and moon,
and international turmoil,
and tsunamis and the like.
The signs that cause fear and foreboding are obvious.
They’re right out there.
But the image Jesus chose to give us hope?—
a fig tree, with leaves just beginning to sprout.
That’s the kind of sign we can walk by every day,
and never see it.
That’s why there’s these urgent commands:
“Lift up your heads. Look! See! Be alert!”

Paying attention is a discipline
to be practiced, and learned.
And it doesn’t come natural,
especially living in the times and the culture that we do.
_____________________

Earlier this week, a new insight came to me.
At least I think was an insight. You can be the judge.
It came during our morning prayers in the office on Wednesday.
We were reading Psalm 96.
The psalm is a call for all peoples of the earth,
all nations,
to be reverent, to revere God.
To paraphrase, the psalmist is saying,
“The Lord, who made the heavens, is great beyond all gods.
Bow down.
Give honor and glory.
Ascribe to the Lord, O you tribes and nations,
attribute to the Lord all that is good and beautiful.
You nations, bow down and tremble and worship
the only great and majestic God.”

And I found myself thinking,
“Oh yeah, right, like that’s going to happen.
All the peoples of the earth
suddenly getting humble and circumspect.
Suddenly practicing reverence,
bowing down to one greater than themselves.”

Reverence is a lost art in this world,
at least in many cultures of the world—
cultures like ours that are highly industrialized,
militarized, capitalized, individualized.
We’re too proud to be reverent.
We’re too self-sufficient to be reverent.
We’re too focused on our own needs and agenda—
individually, yes,
but especially as a nation.

We just don’t do reverence very well at all,
because reverence and self-centeredness cannot coexist.
Reverence requires the ability to see beyond ourselves,
far beyond.
Reverence is the capacity to see the divine,
the transcendent, the wholly other,
and to bow before it in humility.

Then as I reflected on it, I suddenly had this realization
that the ability to be alert, to be attentive,
is directly connected to our ability to be reverent.
I can’t be deeply and truly attentive,
without also being reverent.

Being attentive, and being reverent,
both require shifting my focus from self to the other.
They both require humility.

I cannot be a good attentive listener, for instance,
if I’m always forming my next sentence in my head.
I cannot really enter into the beauty and wonder of creation,
if I’m focused on how I’m going to use it or manipulate it.
I cannot enter into a reverent encounter with God on Sunday morning,
if I get hung up on whether this or that style of music pleases me,
or whether I could have done as good a job reading,
or playing the piano.
Reverence and paying attention require that I set aside, for now,
my agenda, my needs,
and worship the God who is being revealed in the other.
_____________________

Many of us have in the last few years,
gotten more connected to the homeless in our community,
through the HARTS program, or OCP, or just on our own.
And we’ve all heard it said
that we can see the face of Jesus in the poor.
That sounds great, sounds lofty.
But it takes work. It takes discipline. It takes practice.
It’s easy for me to say I see Jesus in their face.
But do I really?

Because until I can look deeply into the eyes of my neighbor
who happens to be homeless,
or mentally ill,
or chronically intoxicated,
and have a genuine sense of reverence, instead of pity,
I haven’t seen Jesus.
Even the most pitiful and derelict of us human beings
still reflect, in some manner, the divine image within us.
If we are human, we reflect the image of God,
however subtle, however blurred.

If I look at a desperate human being,
and only feel pity, or revulsion, or disgust,
I’m still focused on myself,
because I am comparing my situation with theirs,
my worth with theirs.
I may even have genuine compassion, be moved to tears.
But if all I can feel is sorrow,
I am not being attentive.
I am not being reverent.
I am not seeing Jesus in their face.
And I won’t, until I look into their eyes
and are moved to worship the God being reflected there.

That doesn’t come easy, I grant you.
But neither does it come easy
to live in a world where the sun and moon are changing,
the nations are in an uproar,
the powers of heaven are shaking,
and then to walk by a fig tree,
and notice, with gratitude, that new leaves are sprouting.

We live in an anxious world.
People are paralyzed with fear.
Fear of terrorism, fear of the flu, fear of big government,
fear of Islam, fear of climate change,
fear of the stock market,
fear of . . . you name it.
God calls us, in the midst of this fearful world,
to not be like those around us,
who according to Luke 21,
faint from fear and foreboding.
We are called to another way of living.
We are called to practice reverent attentiveness,
to notice the signs of God’s redeeming work,
to notice the signs that God’s kingdom is sprouting up.
And give thanks!

And to do this, we must practice stillness . . .
more often than our frantic schedules allow us to.
We must practice silence . . .
more deeply than our media-drenched culture allows us to.
We must practice gazing . . .
longer than our eyes—having been trained on momentary glances—
allow us to.
We must practice sustained thought and reflection . . .
longer and more deeply than our brains—having been shaped by
constant multi-tasking, sound-bytes, and catch-phrases—
allow us to.
We must seek and find freedom
from that which prevents our paying full attention.

Because what we see at first glance, is not all there is.
God’s promise of redemption is more sure,
than any threat of annihilation.
Even the prophets in the Old Testament
were sure of God’s promise to redeem.
In today’s reading from Jeremiah, we heard it said,
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord,
when I will fulfill the promise I made
to the house of Israel and the house of Judah . . .
I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David;
and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land . . .
The Lord is our righteousness.”

I suspect there’s been no time in recent memory
that it’s been so easy to point here and there and everywhere,
and see the signs of destruction and violence and oppression.
We have every right to do that.
But that is not our calling.
Our calling is to see the kingdom of God breaking in to our existence,
to see our redemption drawing nigh,
to look for, and see, with all due reverence,
God’s face in the poor, in our enemies, in our sisters and brothers.

The temptation we must fight, with all due diligence,
is the temptation to be overwhelmed by the evils around us.
Evil is not hard to find.
It’s all around us—in front, behind, beside, under, and over us.

There is a wonderful old Celtic prayer
that is the perfect way to defeat that temptation.
This prayer reminds us that it is not evil that surrounds us,
but Christ.
The prayer says,
Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ under me, Christ over me,
Christ on my left and my right.
And that same idea found its way into a Navajo prayer,
which was adapted and put to music by David Haas.
A song we have sung numerous times.
I invite us to sing it once again,
in STS #16.
Peace before us, peace behind us,
peace under our feet.
Peace within us, peace over us,
let all around us be peace.

This is a prayer for attentiveness.
In each verse, we are called to notice, with reverence,
the peace, the love, the light,
and ultimately, Christ himself,
who is before and behind us.
Who surrounds us completely.
Let’s sing this as reverently, and confidently, as we can,
as Karen, and the Mast family, lead us.
Join in on the sign language, as you learn it.

—Phil Kniss, November 29, 2009



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Phil Kniss: This Isn’t Your Grandmother’s Stewardship Sermon!

November 22, 2009
Genesis 1:26-31; Matthew 25:14-30

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This is not your grandmother’s stewardship sermon!
No offense intended to your grandmother . . .
or mine, God rest her soul.
No offense intended to any of you who are grandmothers.

But I say it somewhat playfully, to give you fair warning.
If you came this morning expecting a typical late-November,
Faith-Promise Sunday sermon on tithing—
Or if you came expecting a little talk
that your grandmother could have given you,
tenderly encouraging you
to be just a little more generous
in your tithes and offerings to the church,
but certainly won’t be asking for an arm and a leg,
or for your life-blood, or anything—
well, then . . .
this might be a good time for you to slip out discretely.

I really don’t favor teaching tithing, per se.
I practice tithing.
For all 29 years of our married life
Irene and I have faithfully given our 10 percent, or more,
of gross income to the church,
and that’s not likely to change.
But as a teaching principle,
“tithing” is a very flimsy foundation
on which to build a theology of stewardship.

Yes, the Bible repeatedly talks about the tithe
as an arrangement to support the worshiping community
and to care for the needy among them—
the Levites, widows, orphans, foreigners, and the like.
Giving back 10 percent was seen as both reasonable and practical,
and it was done as an act of joyful worship.
Nothing has changed, to make that practice
any less reasonable, valuable, and worshipful today.

But—and this is the single point of my sermon today—
Our Christian calling is not
to return one-tenth of our resources to God.
Our Christian calling is one of “whole-life stewardship.”
We owe it all . . . arm and a leg, and life-blood included.
If we don’t believe that,
we have a very small view of God, indeed.
_____________________

Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow, in his book,
God and Mammon in America,
says the relationship between our faith and our finances
is far more disconnected than we think.
We have engaged, he says, in compartmentalization.
Keeping our faith in one compartment,
and our finances in another,
is expedient.
It’s convenient for us.
We fall back on our usual economic habits—
even if those habits are ethically sound—
but we don’t have to do the hard work
of making our financial decisions
ones of real spiritual discernment,
especially discernment that involves
our faith community in any way.
For instance, he wrote, “prayer very seldom leads a person
to buy one brand of automobile rather than another.
It just makes us feel better about the purchase after the fact.”
Even teachings on stewardship in church
might remind us to be responsible in our handling of money,
but they rarely spell out what responsibility actually means.

Tom and Christine Sine were in our community a couple weeks ago,
spending time at EMU.
I had the privilege of sitting and visiting with them for a while.
Tom is best known for his book Mustard Seed Conspiracy
that came out almost 30 years ago now.
He and his wife continue to travel the world
on speaking tours.
Their core message is calling the church to practice
“whole-life faith” or “whole-life discipleship.”
The primary sin of our society, that has also infected the church,
is that of fragmentation.
Our social lives and relationships are fragmented.
Our spiritual lives are fragmented.
So naturally, our theology gets fragmented.
We need the healing, restoring, shalom-bringing kingdom of God
to break into this fragmented world,
and fragmented life we live,
and make things whole.
_____________________

Emphasizing a rule like tithing makes a lot of sense
in a tightly-connected religious society
like the people of Israel who needed to have a mechanism
to ensure just and equal sharing.
So the rule of the tithe,
by ensuring that Levites, widows, and orphans were cared for,
helped strengthen community that already existed,
helped maintain shalom.

But in our fragmented world, and fragmented faith communities,
I wonder whether always pushing for the tithe
might have the opposite effect.
Instead of building community,
could it reinforce fragmentation?
Many already think “going to church” once a week
satisfies what God requires in the church compartment.
Haven’t we also been taught to think that if we can manage somehow
to meet the biblical standard of righteousness,
in this 10-percent compartment,
then we have succeeded in doing what God requires of us,
in terms of our finances.
How we spend the other 90 percent isn’t even on God’s radar,
and certainly shouldn’t be on the church’s radar,
if they’ve gotten their 10 percent.

How it is we’ve gotten so comfortable seeing our money,
and how we use it,
as being in a completely different category
than other moral and spiritual issues.

Most of us probably believe that in some way, and at some level,
the church, our faith community,
has good reason to care about
how we relate to our spouse,
how we treat our children,
how we behave ourselves sexually,
how we show love to our neighbors,
even how we do justice in our business.
But we don’t really believe the church has anything to say
about how we spend our money,
as long as we are being generous with our tithes and offerings.

I wonder on what biblical basis we ever came to the conclusion
that money is not like other moral and spiritual matters.
Does how we spend our money say any less about our faith,
than how we treat our bodies, and our relationships?

If we really believe that faith and finances are connected,
shouldn’t we find ways to love and care for each other in the body,
in terms of how helping each other be good stewards
of our material and financial resources?
_____________________

We do have a God-given responsibility to be faithful stewards.
And this responsibility is all-encompassing.
It was given to us on the sixth day of creation,
as we heard in the scripture reading.
God said to humankind, “This is all very good.
The plants and trees, the beasts and birds.
Now I’m giving them to you to take care of.
Have dominion over them.
In other words, they are your domain of responsibility.
They’re under your umbrella of care.
I trust you with them.”
All good gifts of life, dear brothers and sisters,
all good gifts of life come from God,
and they are given to us not to own and manipulate,
but to care for with the same love and affection
that God their creator has for them.

Jesus reinforced this mandate in his parable of the talents,
in the other scripture reading, from Matthew 25.
One faithful servant is given five talents—a whole lot of money—
and he exercises good stewardship.
He invests it wisely.
He doubles on his investment.
He returns it to his master.
And of course, he receives a reward.
The second servant is given two talents—still a lot of money—
and he also is a good steward.
Doubles it, returns it, gets his reward.
The third servant gets one talent—still a heap of money.
But he is not a good steward.
He buries it in the ground.
When the master returns, the servant gives it back the way he got it.
And the servant is severely punished.

But why was he punished?
Because he failed as a financial planner?
No, because he insulted the master,
refusing to receive the master’s gift of trust.
The master offered his slave something unprecedented,
unheard of in master-slave relationships.
He offered a mutually beneficial partnership.
But the slave refused to recognize the gift,
refused to see how much the master trusted him.
So he buried the gift.
The problem was not that he didn’t double the investment
like the others.
If he had gone out with the same attitude as the other servants,
and made a good-faith effort,
but failed miserably, for whatever reason,
I believe the master would have been abundantly gracious.
But the slave slapped his master in the face.
He spurned this gift of love and trust.

We are living this parable today,
and there is just as much at stake.
What’s at stake is not whether we’re able
to invest and make a profit from what God gives us,
although it’s great if we can do that.
What’s at stake is whether we see the resources we have
as a trust from a generous and loving Creator,
and treat them all as God’s property, under our care.
God never transferred ownership to us.
God still owns the cattle on a thousand hills.
And God owns the hills on which the cattle graze.
But they are all in our hands as a sacred trust.

Faithful servants of God
will care about how they receive and manage this trust.
Faithful servants of God
will find ways to help each other be faithful.
_____________________

Which brings us again to being church at the table.
This is the last of seven Sundays
where we look at different practices of the church—
worship, witness, mutual care, biblical interpretation, etc.—
and ask what difference it makes
if we see the church consisting primarily of
table-sized groups of people in deep covenant with each other.
This grows out of our emerging vision of Park View,
not as a church that tries to do it all as one big community,
but as a community made up of
smaller covenant communities of Christ,
each engaged in God’s mission in the world.

It’s fitting that we end this series with stewardship,
because there is no practice of the church
that is more tempting to keep private,
and . . . more difficult to practice in a large congregational setting.

And stewardship is so central to a life of faith.
It’s far more than money management.
It’s infinitely more than giving tithes and offerings.

All of life is a sacred trust from God.
So every decision we make is a stewardship decision—
how we treat our friends, our family,
how we spend our money,
how we conduct our business affairs,
how we treat the created environment,
how we behave in our bodies—physically, sexually,
nutritionally—
Those are all stewardship decisions.
And they would all benefit
from being brought to the table for discernment.

The table is a place where we can be connected well enough—
like branches on the vine,
like the various parts of a human body—
connected enough to make a difference
and do the hard work of being church,
without copping out and
walking away from those who challenge us.
_____________________

If, after seven Sundays,
some of you have started to worry about this table business,
you can relax.
Next Sunday this table goes back to the Fellowship Hall,
and the pulpit returns to its traditional spot.
Park View Mennonite Church as you know it,
will continue to thrive,
as it is thriving right now in so many wonderful ways.
We won’t be turning our church structure on its head,
and mandate that everyone joins a house church.
We won’t be putting padlocks on the doors
and boarding up the windows of this big church building.

But what I hope I’ve been able to do, however,
is spark some imagination in our body here.
To remind us that church is much more
than a large weekly gathering of individual believers,
facing the front,
where the real action is being carried out by a few experts.
We need each other.
We need to learn how to walk with each other in mutual covenant,
how to be members of each other,
and to take that seriously in our daily lives,
seven days a week.

We are all profoundly shaped by the culture we’re immersed in.
We are deeply and continually being formed by cultural values
that are self-oriented, pleasure-seeking, and materialistic.

So if we want to be formed into an alternative way of living,
if we want to be formed us as disciples of Jesus,
if we want to be shaped into citizens of God’s kingdom,
then the church has a huge job on its hands.
It’s pure nonsense to think we can accomplish that
in an hour and 15 minutes once a week.

I don’t anticipate turning our structure on its head,
but I do hope, and pray,
that each and every one of us who call ourselves Christian,
and call ourselves part of this body of Christ at Park View,
will ask ourselves how we function outside of Sunday morning.
I hope we honestly examine if there is any place where we
are regularly telling the story of our lives to each other.
I mean really telling.
Giving a full and open account.
That’s what accountability is, that we’ve been talking about.
Accountability is never wielded as an instrument of control.
Accountability is deep connectedness.
It is mutual conversation.
It is walking side-by-side,
in support, in compassion, and sometimes in tough love.

And if, upon examination, you realize you don’t have that,
and you desire it,
I hope you make your desires known.

Or if one of these smaller communities at Park View,
upon examination, realizes they are not really being
this kind of church to each other,
that they will begin to experiment with deeper church.
Including, I might add, helping its group members
wrestle more deeply with questions of whole-life stewardship,
including how we worship God with our finances.
_____________________

Generous and creative and trusting God,
you have placed in our hands, for care-taking,
life itself, with all its beauty, its wonder,
its complexity, its abundance.
We receive this gift of trust, in amazement and gratitude,
and we ask for the strength we need to live our lives
with radical love, and radical generosity,
that we might experience the full life that you intended for us.
We come now, with our offerings of money, and ourselves.
Use them to further your kingdom in this world.
Amen.
—Phil Kniss, November 22, 2009



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Phil Kniss: Table Works and Table Grace

November 15, 2009
Ephesians 4, 1 Timothy 4, Hebrews 5, Hebrews 12

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Last Sunday,
when we talked about membership and belonging at the table,
one of our scriptures was John 15: the vine and branches.
Christ the vine, we the branches.
Great image.
A beautiful organic image of the Christian life.
Attached to Christ, and to each other.

But like any good metaphor, it can be misused.
We could see it as an excuse to be passive in our Christian life.
If all life flows from God to us through the Vine,
all we gotta do is hang on and enjoy the ride!
Just let God do the work of growth and transformation.
There is some truth in that way of thinking.
All life is a gift of the amazing grace of God.
We are powerless to create life, to make growth happen.

But to think we have nothing to do
in this God+human equation
is just sloppy thinking.

So today, our scriptures complete the picture.
We just heard excerpts from three different letters
written by the apostles to the early church.
They were trying to steer the church away
from this sloppy theology
that had God doing all the work for them.

Remember that line
from the letter to the church in Ephesus:
But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up
in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.
We must grow up into Christ.
That’s worded as a command, an instruction.
So we have a choice in the matter.
We wouldn’t be instructed to grow,
if we had nothing to do about it.

And from 1 Timothy?
Train yourself in godliness, for godliness is valuable in every way,
holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.
Paul was writing to his apprentice Timothy.
He said, “Train yourself in godliness.”
That’s a pretty bold statement.
We can train ourselves to be godly?!
Like an athlete trains to be competitive? Interesting.

And from Hebrews 5?
God will not overlook your work and the love
that you showed for his sake in serving the saints, as you still do.
From the letter to the Hebrews.
Okay, so God clearly does produce the results,
the life and growth.
But God does not overlook the effort we put in.
Sounds like our work is a prompt, as it were,
for God’s action.
And the apostle goes on to say a couple verses later.
Be diligent. Don’t be sluggish.
Imitate the heroes of the faith.
They took risks. They acted with courage. Imitate them.

And in Hebrews 12
it says discipline—whether painful or pleasant—
yields the fruit of righteousness
to those who have been trained by it.

See, the apostles are calling all members of the church
to engage in a continual spiritual workout.
To exercise.
To train.
To strengthen their spiritual muscles.
This is literally what is being said here.
The Greek word in these scriptures,
when it says to train, to exercise discipline, to work,
is (in English letters), G-Y-M-N-A-D-Z-O.
It’s the very same Greek word used in gymnasium, gymnastics.
Greek-style athletics were well-known
to the churches getting these letters.
They knew what the apostles meant when they said,
“You want the glory of victory? Work for it!”

Yes, it’s the abundant grace of God that
produces the growth in muscle mass,
but our workouts with the barbells
have something important to do with it.
It’s not cheap grace, that’s for sure.
_____________________

Knowing that diligent, disciplined training is involved,
makes it obvious why being church at the table is so important.
Athletes working together maximize their training potential.
As someone who enjoys bicycling,
I know that my average speed on a bike is consistently faster,
when I’m out riding with even one other biker.
In a larger group, I’m even faster.
In a gymnasium,
when people lift barbells, free-weights,
they often work with someone else,
called a spotter.
The spotter has at least two important functions.
They cheer on the weightlifter, help them push on beyond
what they can lift alone.
“Come on, lift! You’re almost there.”
They also protect the lifter.
When the lifter hits the limit, just before muscle failure,
the spotter prevents injury,
helps to catch the barbell, let it down slowly.

That what it’s like to work at spiritual growth at the table.
We function as mutual trainers,
spiritual spotters,
helping each other stay focused and disciplined,
pushing each other toward more growth
than we are capable of alone.
That’s what church at the table is all about—
helping each other, through Christian practices,
to be formed into the people God called us to be in Christ,
to be trained for godliness.

This kind of training simply won’t happen by osmosis.
You won’t get it just sitting in a pew.
You can listen, in rapt attention, to words from a pulpit (or table).
And I can preach till I’m blue in the face.
My words might help you think.
But they won’t help you do the heavy lifting.
We need to be in smaller communities of people
who will go to great lengths
to support and encourage our growth,
who will call us to account,
who will push us to the next level.

Training, at the table, creates an opening
for the grace of God to do its work.
There is no need to debate the relative merit
of works and grace.
We need both works and grace at the table.
We put forth the effort, by God’s grace.
We exercise.
And God’s grace produces the growth,
it completes our work.

Craig Dykstra has written on Christian practices.
He said,
“Practices of the Christian faith...are not...activities we do
to make something spiritual happen in our lives . . .
They are patterns of communal action
that create openings in our lives where the grace, mercy,
and presence of God may be made known to us.”

This is what table-sized church needs to focus on.
Your Sunday School classes,
small groups,
spiritual friendships,
wherever you gather with 2 or 3 or 20
in intentional, covenant relationship,
this is the task we are to be engaged in:
creating openings in our lives
for the grace of God to enter, and to do its work.
_____________________

So what are some examples of practices at the table?
I could go on and on into the afternoon
talking about any number of Christian practices
we could engage in at the table
that would result in our spiritual growth.
I’ll mention just a few.

Some of these we’ve already covered in this sermon series,
like the practice of worship—
of sharing both the word, and the bread and cup,
and celebrating Christ’s presence in our midst.
or like the practice of witness—
whereby we let our common life be seen by others,
where we openly give witness to the gospel,
and let others witness us living out the gospel
in our particular communities of Christ,
or like the practice of biblical interpretation,
where all participate,
or the practice of mutual care.

We’ve talked about those already.
So let me talk about one that’s a little harder for us to do,
or even talk about.

What about the practice of moral and ethical discernment,
and speaking the truth in love to each other?
It’s apparent that the apostles assumed this would be happening.
But our culture does not approve of
this way of interacting with each other.
We value privacy and individual freedom,
much more than being formed in community—
especially if formation means we sometimes
call a community member to account for personal choices.

I just heard a good story about this from Lawrence Yoder,
who happened by my office on Friday.
He was telling about a small group he and Shirley were part of
in California years ago.
A certain husband in the group was talking about his struggle
to keep his hours at work under control,
and how difficult it was for him to leave at 5:00,
rather than stay and get just one or two more projects done.
And he said it was taking a toll on his wife and children.
Whereupon another member of the group leaned toward him
and asked him directly,
“Which is more important? your job or your family?”
“Well,” he said, “both are important to me.”
But the answer wasn’t accepted.
“Which is more important? your job or your family?”
The man hedged again.
“But . . . my job is the way I provide for my family.
They need me to be working.”
It was asked a third time.
“Which is more important? your job or your family?”
Finally, the man said. “Well, my family is more important.”
“Then you need to leave work at 5:00, and go home to your family.
Is it okay if I call you at work at 5:00 every day,
and ask if you’re ready to go home?”
“Well, yes. That would be good.”
Then a third man piped in and offered to help.
“I’ll call on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
and you call Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

See what was happening there?
This was a man in spiritual training. As are we all.
And this was a workout. His friends were being his spotters.
Helping this man push just a little harder.
Exercising his muscles.
I doubt they kept calling him at 5:00 forever.
Once those muscles got developed,
he could lift that weight easily without the spotters.
And I’ll bet he in turn was able to help support
the other group members with the weights they were lifting.

The more we share our lives with each other at the table,
the more we can encourage real spiritual growth.
But that kind of hard work is not possible
in casual group relationships.
It takes a deeper level of love and trust and covenant
that we have with only a small number of people.

But it doesn’t just happen.
Anymore than muscle development happens
sitting on the sofa pushing buttons on a remote.
We must be intentional about spiritual growth.
We need to plan for it.
We need to organize for it.

Several times I’ve been invited to participate in a discernment group.
Again, just recently,
when someone needed to make a momentous decision
concerning a job,
and was trying to discern God’s call.
This person shared the journey that brought them to this point.
And the rest of us around the table listened.
We asked questions.
We prayed.
We affirmed.
We cautioned.
But we did not tell them what to do.
Individual personal responsibility is not taken away,
when we open our lives to the discernment of a group.
We engaged in a communal practice of spiritual discernment.
We exercised our spiritual muscles,
and helped the person exercise theirs.

There are many other Christian practices made more effective
when we exercise them in mutual training,
with companions at the table.
Like the practice of sharing resources,
considering what we have—our money, property, time, talents—
as not our own, but gifts from God that we share.
Our ability to share is magnified,
when there are others that participate in the sharing.
Resources are passed back and forth between us,
and shared beyond us to those with greater need.

Or like the practice of observing Sabbath rest—
not just weekly, but daily rhythms of work and rest,
or even annual Sabbath practices.
We honor the Creator,
by resting and allowing others to rest from work,
and taking time enjoy God and God’s gifts.

Like the practice of peacebuilding and justice-seeking
in the name of Christ.
Like the practice of healing and forgiving
in the name of Christ.
Like the practice of being with the poor.

You know, anyone can do good works,
be a server, be a helper, be a missionary.
But can we build meaningful mutual relationships
with those who live in a world outside our own,
with those who inhabit a very different social space,
who are different economically, culturally, religiously?
That takes some spiritual muscle.
The kind that we need spotters to help us develop.
To urge us on.
To keep us from injuring ourselves or others in the process.

Maybe the one slogan to take from here this morning, is
“Spiritual growth. Don’t try this at home. Alone.”

Let us commit ourselves to have relationships in the body of Christ
that are robust enough
to engage in this kind of mutual spiritual training.
that strong enough to withstand the strain
that inevitably is part of growing new muscle.
No pain, no gain, is the saying in physical training.
I suspect spiritual training is no different.

And let us commit ourselves to the kind of practices
that create openings in our lives for the grace of God,
that make possible this collaboration
between our spirit and God’s spirit
that produces growth.

Turn to Sing the Story #39. A song by John Bell and Graham Maule
Speaks to a collaboration between Christ and ourselves.
Christ calls. We answer.
And then it becomes Christ in us, and we in Christ.

Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?
Will you go where you don’t know and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown? Will you let my name be known,
will you let my life be grown in you and you in me?

—Phil Kniss, November 15, 2009



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Phil Kniss: Church Membership and the A-word

November 8, 2009
John 15, Matthew 18, Romans 12, and Hebrews 10

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All these scriptures we just read are about
belonging to God to and to each other in the body of Christ.
They say, in different ways, that being members of the same body
makes a difference in how we live, and how we relate.

Membership Sunday is one of my favorite services here at Park View.
It’s church at its best, I think.
It’s always a joy to welcome new people into covenant with us.
But the heart of that service are their faith statements,
which are personal, often profound,
and always deeply moving.
Those are sacred moments in the life of our church.

But I have to admit,
despite the warm glow Membership Sunday leaves in me,
I have a nagging discomfort afterward.
It has nothing to do with the persons we receive,
and their wonderful expressions of faith.
Those are heartfelt, precious gifts.
My nagging feeling has to do
with what this all means after Membership Sunday is over.
Let me make an honest confession.
Church membership is something I struggle with, considerably.

I struggle because I see a huge disconnect between
what scriptures like these say about being
members of each other in the body of Christ,
and what “church membership” has become in most churches,
including ours.

Membership in the NT was a completely organic metaphor.
The apostle Paul was so eloquent,
in picking up on this metaphor and expounding on it.
In another text, 1 Corinthians 12, he said to the church in Corinth,
“You’re all members of one body.
One of you is a hand.
And another an eye.
But Eye, don’t ever say to the hand, I don’t need you!
And Hand, don’t say to the foot, I don’t need you.
And some of you may be some less respectable part.
But don’t let that bother you.
We also need you to be complete.”

That sounds so right.
And the church today adopts that metaphor wholesale.
But the trouble is . . . that Paul was writing to house churches.
He was writing to people who met in homes, frequently.
Who ate meals together at each other’s tables,
and then broke bread and shared the cup of Christ,
often daily.
Who listened, discussed, discerned, shared resources,
and knew each other’s heart as they knew their own.
People who were, in every way,
members of each other.
Members of each other.

I wonder whether we should be a little more cautious,
a little more humble,
when we apply that metaphor to our experience of church.

In a church of 400-plus members, if we are really honest,
is there any member, myself included,
who is absolutely essential to the life of this body?
Is there any member that, if it became separated,
would inflict a mortal wound to this body?
No. There would be pain of course,
as there is in any loss,
but the body would go on, likely in health and wholeness.

And of course, there’s the vine and branches metaphor.
One vine, Jesus Christ, the source of our life.
And all of us are connected to that vine,
and therefore, connected organically to each other.
The life flows from the roots, through the vine,
and in, out, and through each of us
interconnected and intertwined branches.
It’s a great analogy, and fitting,
when our lives are genuinely connected to that extent,
when they are truly and deeply interconnected.

But, can a congregation of 400-plus different branches,
actually be one plant, in that metaphoric sense?
Does what is happening in one branch,
really have an impact on another branch . . .
especially when that branch always sits
on the other side of the sanctuary?!

These precious, and profoundly true, biblical metaphors,
begin to crumble, I’m afraid,
under the weight of the large, complex, and institutional church,
that we have come to accept as normal for Western Christianity.

Now don’t get me wrong.
I have no problem referring to Park View Mennonite Church
as a “body of Christ.”
I can even talk about Virginia Mennonite Conference as a body.
And Mennonite Church USA.
And ecumenical groups like Christian Churches Together.
And World Council of Churches.

But every step we take away from the table—
and the worship and fellowship
that happens at a table,
with the broken bread and cup of Christ in the center,
and a deep sharing of our lives with each other—
every step we take further from this core function of the church,
stretches this analogy.
It gets a little thinner, and a little weaker.

Take the global church for instance.
Mennonite World Conference met recently in Paraguay.
From all reports, it was much like other assemblies I’ve been to.
It’s wonderful, and glorious, and spirit-lifting,
to worship in this multitude of languages and cultures.
Profound connections and deep conversations happen there,
and we need to keep doing that,
for the health of the church.

But it is oh, so hard to take it home with you when it’s over.
Those persons I worshiped with and sang with
and embraced as my very sisters and brothers,
how am I living with them now?
How am I treating them as I would a sister or brother?
I have scarcely any connection to them whatsoever.

To talk of the global church as a real body with various members,
is certainly true at some symbolic level,
but I think it stretches the biblical metaphor pretty thin.
_____________________

But let’s bring the metaphor back home here, to Park View.
How are we doing at being a body
where we are members of each other?
where the pain of one member radiates through all the parts?
where the gifts of each are seen, valued, and used?
where each and every member is known so deeply
that the body actually functions as a single living being?
where a disease or injury in one member
can be addressed openly and honestly
in a healing and restoring way?
where each member actually shares responsibility
for the well-being of each part and of the whole?

Which brings us to the very complicated, and slippery,
and sometimes dreaded A-word: accountability.
We can’t talk about membership
without talking about accountability.
To be a member of something is, by definition, to be accountable.
What it means to be a member in an organization
is usually very clear and specific.
In a civic club, for instance, you are being accountable as a member
when you pay your dues,
you attend the required number of meetings,
you meet the other specific membership requirements.

But in a living, organic body,
accountability isn’t spelled out as a set of rules.
It just is.
It happens by nature.
Accountability is inherent to life in a living organism.
You never have to instruct any members of an organism
to be accountable to that organism.
That would be like telling the hand,
“Now listen, stay in touch with what’s going on around you!
When the arm moves, you go with it. Okay?”

In a living organism,
belonging and being accountable are one and same.
When we are close, and connected,
there is always action and re-action.
Whenever an action of mine causes a reaction in another,
I am being held accountable.
A young child growing up in a loving family
knows how accountability works,
without ever hearing the word.
Let’s say a two-year-old girl, while playing,
bites her four-year-old brother,
and her brother starts crying and runs away.
Well, the little girl realizes, hey, I love playing with my brother,
and whenever I bite him,
he stops playing with me,
so I have to stop biting him.
That’s natural accountability.

I love my wife Irene.
But sometimes I say something that hurts her or offends her.
There is no need for Irene to impose an arbitrary
rules-based accountability on me to keep me from offending her.
I only need to see the hurt look on her face, or her tears,
and I have just been “held accountable.”
Because I love her, I don’t want to hurt her.

When we are in honest, close, and healthy
communal relationships with others,
accountability is not something arbitrary, or external, to be imposed.
It comes as naturally as living in a healthy family.

If we truly belong to each other,
if we are genuinely members of each other,
then I will gladly, and regularly, give an account of my life to you,
and you, in turn, will be ready whenever needed,
to lovingly ask for an account from me.
Accountability is mutual conversation.
Accountability is honest exploration.
Accountability is looking for deeper truth together.
There is no such thing as true community, without true accountability.

That’s what Matthew 18 is all about, the famous text Shirley read.
This text is often just pulled out and slapped onto a situation
that doesn’t really fit it.
I’m not sure this is a text about institutional church discipline.
Jesus is appealing to his followers
to deal with conflict and sin in the body
in a way that’s natural,
and true to this organic connection we have with each other.

If I’ve been offended against, I will be honest,
and without hostility, simply let the offender know.
If that offender loves me, and loves the body we are both part of,
there will be a positive response to my loving approach.
There will be confession and forgiveness and reconciliation.

But maybe the offender already feels alienated from the body,
and they get defensive, try to deny the offense.
In which case, I am invited to lovingly expand the circle to 3 or 4,
and engage in communal discernment and accountability.
That discernment might shed light on what’s really going on.
Maybe I simply misunderstood.
Maybe I was unnecessarily offended
because I was feeling alienated.
A group of 3 or 4 people
who are part of the same healthy close community,
who are committed to stay in healthy relationship and not run away,
will in almost every case be able to sort through these things.

If that doesn’t work, then the whole community gets involved.
Remember, these were table-sized, house-church-sized communities.
These were the communities the Gospels were first written for.
The whole community, at the table—
small, committed, diverse, inter-generational—
engages honestly and openly with each other
in the struggle to stay in relationship.

If even then,
after the offender has been listened to carefully and repeatedly,
the offender stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the pain
they have caused the body,
and refuses to make amends,
then they are held to account by their own community.
The community is told to relate to them
as a “Gentile” or “tax collector.”
And, of course,
you know how Jesus related to Gentiles and tax collectors?
He ate with them. Laughed with them.
Healed their sick.
And raised their dead.
Plain and simple, he loved them, reached out to them,
sought a way to include them.

There must be accountability with membership.
That’s not the issue.
The issue is when accountability is imposed from a distance,
and not out of a living relationship.
I wonder if it shouldn’t be a principle, in the body of Christ,
that accountability should never be imposed
from any distance greater than the relationship itself.
We should be close enough both to see and to feel deeply
the hurt look on the face, and the tears.

Jesus called for close accountability.
He said, when your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off.
He didn’t say, when another body’s right hand causes sin,
cut off that body’s hand.

I really don’t have this church membership thing all sorted out,
as I said earlier.
I am left with searching questions.
And I invite you into these questions with me.
Come to the table, and let us wrestle with the questions together,
let us seek a more authentic way of being a body.

One of my questions, for instance, is how
eight elders and pastors in a church of 400-plus members,
can ever know enough about the spiritual well-being,
about the beliefs and doubts,
about the hidden sins, the forgiveness and victories
in anyone’s daily walk as a disciple of Christ,
that they can grant or withhold membership in that body.
That’s a lot of spiritual weight on me, and a few others.
Might that be a case of exercising accountability
at a distance greater than the relationship?
Yet that’s just how churches do membership.

And that’s how conferences and denominations
hold accountable their member congregations and conferences.
Votes are cast and counted.
Sometimes by people who never met or spoke to
those they hold accountable.
Now that’s not inherently wrong or unjust
as a way to define membership.
But I think that model comes more from organizational theory,
than from the biblical metaphor of the organic human body,
that Paul chose to describe the church.

Hierarchy has its place, even in the church, I suppose,
but I wonder if we don’t need to be much more cautious,
and more humble,
when we deal with questions of who belongs to the body.

Might there be a more biblical, more faithful, way in the body
to become and to remain members of one another?
Can we bring the question of membership back to the table?
Literally?
So that those who hold one accountable,
are also in deep relationship with that one.

I don’t have it all worked out, how this would operate,
especially as you get more distance from the table.
I’m not precisely sure how this would work
at the conference or denominational level,
though I have some ideas.
But I do wonder whether we, at PVMC,
might be a small enough body to ask the question of ourselves,
and rethink how we define membership,
and how we apply it in this body.
I invite us to the table to talk about that.
We certainly won’t resolve the question today.
But we could begin talking about it.
Using the scriptures we read as our guide.

Now I wish we had an hour for talk-back,
but we don’t.
I won’t even be able to participate in my Sunday School
discussion of the sermon today,
because Irene and I are leaving for Ohio right after the service,
for a family funeral.
But I am serious when I say I want this sermon,
and the others in this series,
to be just the first contribution to a long, extended conversation
in the Park View Mennonite Church body.

But in lieu of a talk-back, let’s do a sing-back.
HWB 420 “Heart with loving heart united.”
When it comes to what church membership means,
this song brings it all together.
Our source in God through Christ,
our deep commitment to each other in the body,
and our commitment to join, as a body,
in God’s mission in the world.

—Phil Kniss, November 8, 2009


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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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