It's been a long time since I posted anything here. Maybe this is a start. This is the sermon I preached at the Annual Meeting of the Northwest Wisconsin Association of the United Church of Christ, the last for which I will serve as Association Minister.
Exodus 16:10-20, 2 Corinthians 9:6-12
I've been feeling a little like Job lately. As I look back on it, I’ve had a heck of a three or four months. It started at Thanksgiving when I cooked for my family at my house for the first time in years, leaving the Saturday after that for a week in Cancun with friends, coming back from that to assist at a three-day workshop and then to go down immediately to De Forest for a staff meeting from which I came back to find that Rhonda, our wonderful secretary and my good friend had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We barely had time to get used to her diagnosis before we found that she would have not the four to six months that the doctors originally thought, but a mere couple of weeks left to live. Rhonda died on January 15, and her funeral was on January 21. It was a very difficult month for her family, for everyone in the Association, and for me. February 3, we welcomed our new secretary, Mimi. February 5, I learned that my uncle had died, and I flew to Ohio on the 16th to visit with my family and to preach at his memorial service. I flew home on the 20th.
Except I didn't get to come home.
I got stuck at O'Hare airport for two days, while Eau Claire was snowed in. We did actually get all the way to Eau Claire on one of those days, but we had to turn around and fly back to O'Hare because there wasn’t enough visibility in Eau Claire for us to land. When I did finally get back to Eau Claire on February 22, I had 12 hours before I had to turn around and go back to Minneapolis to fly to Florida for the first-ever Co-Active Summit -- a fabulous conference on transformative change. My whole family gathered at the Summit, which was put on by CTI, which trains people to be co-active life coaches and leaders.
Even my 82-year-old mother surprised us all by deciding the day before the conference to fly down and join us. So all of my siblings, most of their spouses, and my mother gathered with 400 other leaders from 22 countries around the world at this wonderful and energizing and amazing Co-active Summit. During the conference, my sister began to get ill, and when she flew home on that Sunday, she did so with a very high fever. The next day she went to the hospital, and the following Thursday, she was moved to the intensive care unit. On Friday, she was put on a ventilator and sedated. She stayed that way for a week. That day, that Friday, I drove to the town where she lives and where I would stay for ten days, both to support my mother and to do whatever I could for my sister and her family. She was finally taken off the ventilator after a very scary week. When I came home just under two weeks ago, exhausted, I declared I had had enough.
Enough. It sounds odd to say it over and over. Enough. Enough. Enough. “I have had enough!” When I say it that way, it's bitter. It's frustrated. It's a little intense. When I look to the skies, and cry out, "I've had enough!" like Job, "enough" sounds like "too much."
And that's really what we're saying, isn't it? When we shake our fists to the sky, when we say "I've had enough," we're really saying, "Stop it now, God, I've had too much." We can have too much. And too much, in cases like this, never feels very good. Too much is a burden. Too much weighs heavily on us. Too much stoops our shoulders, knots our necks, wrenches our hearts, twists our guts, and makes us irritable and stressed and over burdened.
I am happy to report that my sister went home from the hospital, and that she is recovering, little by little. We are grateful for that, and my family is grateful for the many prayers that people who found out about this from other people, from Facebook, or from me prayed for her and all of us. We know that it was the prayers and healing love and energy from people all over the world that made the huge difference in my sister's recovery.
One of the amazing experiences I had at the Summit in Florida came during a workshop called "Coaching That Moves You." The leaders are firm believers in the power of coaching people while they are moving. Part of the three hour workshop, to which we had been asked to come in exercise clothes, was a version of a spinning class. Spinning is 45 minutes of indoor bicycle riding with varying resistance to simulate going up and down hills, racing flat out, or just continuing to move in some way.
The twist that these leaders employed is something that they call Image Cycling. They use music and projected photographic and video images along with vocal coaching to move you to a different place during the experience. During the whole progression of the summit, this workshop was during the portion called “The Ascent.” We were moving from a starting point in our weekend that they called “The Compass,” climbing towards a summit, from which we would take a leap into the future of transformative change. During the ascent in this workshop, we cycled up a long, long hill, adding resistance on resistance on resistance until my legs were pushing so hard that I didn't know if I could keep on going.
At some point during this climb, one of the leaders simply said to all of us, "you are enough." You are enough. You. You are enough. I don't recall, in my entire life of being the last one chosen for sports and games, the one lagging behind the family on hikes, the one who never quite kept up with all the sports and all the physical stuff, being told, "you are enough." I came from a long experience in that area of never having been enough. To hear those words while I was engaged in cycling my heart out, was a powerful experience that moved me beyond measure.
This is something I've known in my head, of course, for years. In seminary, we had to read Paul Tillich's sermon called "You Are Accepted." Tillich reminds us that even when we feel completely unacceptable, we are, in fact, accepted. You can't help but read scripture and see over and over that we are enough. We see it in Genesis 1 when we read that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. We see over and over in the Old Testament as God reaches out time and again to his people, offering them new ways to be in covenant. We see it in the gift of Jesus Christ. We see it in Jesus's stories, parables, and teaching. We see it in his healing. We hear it when he says "The kingdom of God is within you." We experience it when we read in Jesus’ baptism and the Transfiguration of the heavens opening and the voice from heaven saying "This is my beloved child, and who I am well pleased." We know it in the Incarnation and in our knowledge of ourselves as the body of Christ. If Jesus is enough, if Jesus is beloved, and if we are the body of Christ, then we too are enough, we too are beloved.
On the last today of the Summit in Florida, I was privileged to hear Lynne Twist, the author of a book called The Soul of Money, speak very movingly of her work with the Pachamama Alliance and the Achuar people of Ecuador. Lynne Twist used to be the director of The Hunger Project. She helped to raise awareness of a combat hunger in 47 countries around the world. She knows a great deal about fundraising, a great deal about poverty, about need, and about what people can do to combat hunger, poverty, and need. She knows about sufficiency. She knows about enough.
Lynne spoke of a time in about 1970 when she was able to hear Buckminster Fuller speak in San Francisco. She says
It was at that point that Lynne began to build an understanding of the idea of sufficiency, which she is careful to distinguish from abundance. I have heard, and I'm sure you have heard as well, many sermons on abundance. We like to talk about abundance, about God’s abundance. We say over and over again that we have more than enough, that there is more than enough to go around, that God continues to pour out resources upon us. And that is true.
What is also true, however, is that abundance thinking can be difficult for people who truly live in situations where resources are scarce. When people are fighting every day for food, shelter, warmth, and the basic necessities of life, it can be difficult to live in a place of abundance. It can be possible, however, to live in an understanding of sufficiency. It is different to believe that there is enough then it is to believe that there is way more than enough. When we believe there is enough, we can begin to understand that there are enough resources inside us to meet the needs that we have. When we come from an understanding of enough, we understand our possessions differently. When we come from a position of enough, we look around at what we have, at our own abundance, and understand that for most of us what we have is at least sufficient to meet not only our needs, but the needs of others.
Too often, we live with an understanding of and a belief in scarcity. Scarcity thinking has a way of lying to us. Scarcity thinking keeps us believing in what Lynne Twist calls the three great toxic myths: "there's not enough," "more is better," and "that's just the way it is." These myths keep us paralyzed with inaction, bound by myths of insufficiency, and leave us unable to see the resources that we do command. The truth is there is enough.
The two lessons that we read today from scripture are two understandings of sufficiency. In the lesson from Exodus, we read about the power of enough. The people are wandering me in the desert. They are hungry. There is no food in sight. The God who has brought them out of Egypt promises that there will be food sufficient to the day. God says gather as much food as you can eat in a day. Gather enough for you and your family. Don't gather more than you need. Don't try to hold it over until tomorrow. Don't hoard and save your resources. Gather what you need, leave what you don't need, and have enough. Those who try to gather more than enough find that it rots. In that case overabundance is not what is called for. Enough is what is called for. They will have enough.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul talks about giving. He talks about giving freely, cheerfully, openly. As God has provided the people with every blessing, Paul says, "so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work," he lets them know that their sufficiency is, in fact, abundance. They don't need to hoard and save for themselves. By giving they will increase the harvest of their righteousness. By giving they will be enriched. By giving they will bring forth a ministry which supplies not only the needs of the saints but also overflows with thanksgiving to God. The Corinthians have enough for everyone. The people in Corinth are enough, for themselves and for God.
Eight and a half years ago, I stood in the pulpit of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Eau Claire and preached for the first time to the Northwest Association as you gathered for worship. At that time, I invited us all to dream. I invited us to dream of a church that was vibrant and thriving, of the church and association and the conference that brought forth a vision of the reign of God. I invited us to dream together.
As I have traveled this Association, as I have sat with you in church basements and sanctuaries, offices and parlors, fellowship calls and classrooms, I have heard your dreams. As I have met with church councils and search committees, with visioning teams and concerned church members, with pastors and lay people, I have heard your dreams for the church. I have heard powerful dreams of new and exciting futures. And I have heard a lot of dreams of past glory. I've heard dreams of just getting back to the way things used to be.
One of the powerful things I learned from Lynne Twist is the experience of her work with the Achuar people in Ecuador. This is the people to whom she was led in a dream quest led by a shaman. They are a people who dream, a people to whom dreams are vitally important, but people who know the power of dreams to shape reality. Lynne and her colleagues were the first people from outside their culture with whom the Achuar people had contact.
Lynne's colleague, John Perkins, heads an organization called the Dream Change Coalition and has worked for many years with indigenous Amazonian peoples. Over and over again, they have told him that the job is to "change the dream" of the modern world. The current dream, they tell him, is a “dream of more – more factories, more companies, more freeways, more houses, more money, more buildings, more cars, more everything. These wise elders and shamans point out the dream is now becoming a nightmare rippling across our great earth, and wreaking havoc” (Twist, The Soul of Money, p. 180).
This is the dream that needs to change. Often we think we can just change our actions, but when we try to do that, we just keep aligning our actions with our old dream. We have to change the dream. For the world, Lynne Twist, says, we must create and call into a being an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet. She asserts that this dream is so nourishing that it transforms the very fabric of your life.
Change the dream of the world. That’s all. Just change the dream of the world.
I am captivated by this idea. I am particularly captivated by the belief of the Achuar people that the dream of the world can be changed in one generation.
And I’m really captivated with how this idea of changing the dream resonates in me when I think of the church. What if our dream were truly consistent with the dream Lynne and the Achuar people speak of – to create and call into a being an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet? There’s not a single thing in that statement that is not aligned with what we in the United Church of Christ have been talking about for years.
So what needs to change in order to change the dream? First of all, we must move from scarcity thinking to sufficiency thinking. We know that many of our churches are experiencing declines in membership and finances. Some of them dream of being once again what they used to be. This is scarcity thinking. Sufficiency thinking might say that we have enough resources here and now – in the hearts of our people; their ability to allocate their financial, personal, and spiritual resources to our work together; and their desire to know and share the love of God – to take our part in changing the dream of the world. And when we can do that, we can change the dream of the church.
All of you gathered here today are enough. You are enough together and you are enough individually. There are about a hundred of you here today. It took 200 people in the 14-17th centuries to bring about the entire Renaissance. Surely the 100 people here can change the dream of the church in Northwest Wisconsin. What will you dream? What will compel you? What is the dream that will move you forward? Who do you want to be as the people of God in this place and time? Where will you take your stand?
Wherever it is, however you connect to it, whatever the dream looks like – know this if you know nothing else. You are enough. Always have been, always will be.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
Exodus 16:10-20, 2 Corinthians 9:6-12
I've been feeling a little like Job lately. As I look back on it, I’ve had a heck of a three or four months. It started at Thanksgiving when I cooked for my family at my house for the first time in years, leaving the Saturday after that for a week in Cancun with friends, coming back from that to assist at a three-day workshop and then to go down immediately to De Forest for a staff meeting from which I came back to find that Rhonda, our wonderful secretary and my good friend had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We barely had time to get used to her diagnosis before we found that she would have not the four to six months that the doctors originally thought, but a mere couple of weeks left to live. Rhonda died on January 15, and her funeral was on January 21. It was a very difficult month for her family, for everyone in the Association, and for me. February 3, we welcomed our new secretary, Mimi. February 5, I learned that my uncle had died, and I flew to Ohio on the 16th to visit with my family and to preach at his memorial service. I flew home on the 20th.
Except I didn't get to come home.
I got stuck at O'Hare airport for two days, while Eau Claire was snowed in. We did actually get all the way to Eau Claire on one of those days, but we had to turn around and fly back to O'Hare because there wasn’t enough visibility in Eau Claire for us to land. When I did finally get back to Eau Claire on February 22, I had 12 hours before I had to turn around and go back to Minneapolis to fly to Florida for the first-ever Co-Active Summit -- a fabulous conference on transformative change. My whole family gathered at the Summit, which was put on by CTI, which trains people to be co-active life coaches and leaders.
Even my 82-year-old mother surprised us all by deciding the day before the conference to fly down and join us. So all of my siblings, most of their spouses, and my mother gathered with 400 other leaders from 22 countries around the world at this wonderful and energizing and amazing Co-active Summit. During the conference, my sister began to get ill, and when she flew home on that Sunday, she did so with a very high fever. The next day she went to the hospital, and the following Thursday, she was moved to the intensive care unit. On Friday, she was put on a ventilator and sedated. She stayed that way for a week. That day, that Friday, I drove to the town where she lives and where I would stay for ten days, both to support my mother and to do whatever I could for my sister and her family. She was finally taken off the ventilator after a very scary week. When I came home just under two weeks ago, exhausted, I declared I had had enough.
Enough. It sounds odd to say it over and over. Enough. Enough. Enough. “I have had enough!” When I say it that way, it's bitter. It's frustrated. It's a little intense. When I look to the skies, and cry out, "I've had enough!" like Job, "enough" sounds like "too much."
And that's really what we're saying, isn't it? When we shake our fists to the sky, when we say "I've had enough," we're really saying, "Stop it now, God, I've had too much." We can have too much. And too much, in cases like this, never feels very good. Too much is a burden. Too much weighs heavily on us. Too much stoops our shoulders, knots our necks, wrenches our hearts, twists our guts, and makes us irritable and stressed and over burdened.
I am happy to report that my sister went home from the hospital, and that she is recovering, little by little. We are grateful for that, and my family is grateful for the many prayers that people who found out about this from other people, from Facebook, or from me prayed for her and all of us. We know that it was the prayers and healing love and energy from people all over the world that made the huge difference in my sister's recovery.
One of the amazing experiences I had at the Summit in Florida came during a workshop called "Coaching That Moves You." The leaders are firm believers in the power of coaching people while they are moving. Part of the three hour workshop, to which we had been asked to come in exercise clothes, was a version of a spinning class. Spinning is 45 minutes of indoor bicycle riding with varying resistance to simulate going up and down hills, racing flat out, or just continuing to move in some way.
The twist that these leaders employed is something that they call Image Cycling. They use music and projected photographic and video images along with vocal coaching to move you to a different place during the experience. During the whole progression of the summit, this workshop was during the portion called “The Ascent.” We were moving from a starting point in our weekend that they called “The Compass,” climbing towards a summit, from which we would take a leap into the future of transformative change. During the ascent in this workshop, we cycled up a long, long hill, adding resistance on resistance on resistance until my legs were pushing so hard that I didn't know if I could keep on going.
At some point during this climb, one of the leaders simply said to all of us, "you are enough." You are enough. You. You are enough. I don't recall, in my entire life of being the last one chosen for sports and games, the one lagging behind the family on hikes, the one who never quite kept up with all the sports and all the physical stuff, being told, "you are enough." I came from a long experience in that area of never having been enough. To hear those words while I was engaged in cycling my heart out, was a powerful experience that moved me beyond measure.
This is something I've known in my head, of course, for years. In seminary, we had to read Paul Tillich's sermon called "You Are Accepted." Tillich reminds us that even when we feel completely unacceptable, we are, in fact, accepted. You can't help but read scripture and see over and over that we are enough. We see it in Genesis 1 when we read that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. We see over and over in the Old Testament as God reaches out time and again to his people, offering them new ways to be in covenant. We see it in the gift of Jesus Christ. We see it in Jesus's stories, parables, and teaching. We see it in his healing. We hear it when he says "The kingdom of God is within you." We experience it when we read in Jesus’ baptism and the Transfiguration of the heavens opening and the voice from heaven saying "This is my beloved child, and who I am well pleased." We know it in the Incarnation and in our knowledge of ourselves as the body of Christ. If Jesus is enough, if Jesus is beloved, and if we are the body of Christ, then we too are enough, we too are beloved.
On the last today of the Summit in Florida, I was privileged to hear Lynne Twist, the author of a book called The Soul of Money, speak very movingly of her work with the Pachamama Alliance and the Achuar people of Ecuador. Lynne Twist used to be the director of The Hunger Project. She helped to raise awareness of a combat hunger in 47 countries around the world. She knows a great deal about fundraising, a great deal about poverty, about need, and about what people can do to combat hunger, poverty, and need. She knows about sufficiency. She knows about enough.
Lynne spoke of a time in about 1970 when she was able to hear Buckminster Fuller speak in San Francisco. She says
I was riveted by his talk and the distinctions he was making, but the one that changed my life was when he said that for centuries, perhaps thousands of years, we have lived in the belief that there's not enough to go around, and that we need to fight and compete to garner those resources for ourselves. Perhaps it had been a valid perception at one time, or perhaps it hadn't been, he said, but at this point in history – in the 1970s – we were able to do so much more with so much less that have a human family. We clearly have reached a point where they're actually is enough for everyone everywhere to meet or even surpass their needs to live a reasonably healthy, productive life. This moment represented a dramatic breakthrough in the evolution of civilization and humankind, he said. (Twist, The Soul of Money, p. 56)
It was at that point that Lynne began to build an understanding of the idea of sufficiency, which she is careful to distinguish from abundance. I have heard, and I'm sure you have heard as well, many sermons on abundance. We like to talk about abundance, about God’s abundance. We say over and over again that we have more than enough, that there is more than enough to go around, that God continues to pour out resources upon us. And that is true.
What is also true, however, is that abundance thinking can be difficult for people who truly live in situations where resources are scarce. When people are fighting every day for food, shelter, warmth, and the basic necessities of life, it can be difficult to live in a place of abundance. It can be possible, however, to live in an understanding of sufficiency. It is different to believe that there is enough then it is to believe that there is way more than enough. When we believe there is enough, we can begin to understand that there are enough resources inside us to meet the needs that we have. When we come from an understanding of enough, we understand our possessions differently. When we come from a position of enough, we look around at what we have, at our own abundance, and understand that for most of us what we have is at least sufficient to meet not only our needs, but the needs of others.
Too often, we live with an understanding of and a belief in scarcity. Scarcity thinking has a way of lying to us. Scarcity thinking keeps us believing in what Lynne Twist calls the three great toxic myths: "there's not enough," "more is better," and "that's just the way it is." These myths keep us paralyzed with inaction, bound by myths of insufficiency, and leave us unable to see the resources that we do command. The truth is there is enough.
The two lessons that we read today from scripture are two understandings of sufficiency. In the lesson from Exodus, we read about the power of enough. The people are wandering me in the desert. They are hungry. There is no food in sight. The God who has brought them out of Egypt promises that there will be food sufficient to the day. God says gather as much food as you can eat in a day. Gather enough for you and your family. Don't gather more than you need. Don't try to hold it over until tomorrow. Don't hoard and save your resources. Gather what you need, leave what you don't need, and have enough. Those who try to gather more than enough find that it rots. In that case overabundance is not what is called for. Enough is what is called for. They will have enough.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul talks about giving. He talks about giving freely, cheerfully, openly. As God has provided the people with every blessing, Paul says, "so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work," he lets them know that their sufficiency is, in fact, abundance. They don't need to hoard and save for themselves. By giving they will increase the harvest of their righteousness. By giving they will be enriched. By giving they will bring forth a ministry which supplies not only the needs of the saints but also overflows with thanksgiving to God. The Corinthians have enough for everyone. The people in Corinth are enough, for themselves and for God.
Eight and a half years ago, I stood in the pulpit of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Eau Claire and preached for the first time to the Northwest Association as you gathered for worship. At that time, I invited us all to dream. I invited us to dream of a church that was vibrant and thriving, of the church and association and the conference that brought forth a vision of the reign of God. I invited us to dream together.
As I have traveled this Association, as I have sat with you in church basements and sanctuaries, offices and parlors, fellowship calls and classrooms, I have heard your dreams. As I have met with church councils and search committees, with visioning teams and concerned church members, with pastors and lay people, I have heard your dreams for the church. I have heard powerful dreams of new and exciting futures. And I have heard a lot of dreams of past glory. I've heard dreams of just getting back to the way things used to be.
One of the powerful things I learned from Lynne Twist is the experience of her work with the Achuar people in Ecuador. This is the people to whom she was led in a dream quest led by a shaman. They are a people who dream, a people to whom dreams are vitally important, but people who know the power of dreams to shape reality. Lynne and her colleagues were the first people from outside their culture with whom the Achuar people had contact.
Lynne's colleague, John Perkins, heads an organization called the Dream Change Coalition and has worked for many years with indigenous Amazonian peoples. Over and over again, they have told him that the job is to "change the dream" of the modern world. The current dream, they tell him, is a “dream of more – more factories, more companies, more freeways, more houses, more money, more buildings, more cars, more everything. These wise elders and shamans point out the dream is now becoming a nightmare rippling across our great earth, and wreaking havoc” (Twist, The Soul of Money, p. 180).
This is the dream that needs to change. Often we think we can just change our actions, but when we try to do that, we just keep aligning our actions with our old dream. We have to change the dream. For the world, Lynne Twist, says, we must create and call into a being an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet. She asserts that this dream is so nourishing that it transforms the very fabric of your life.
Change the dream of the world. That’s all. Just change the dream of the world.
I am captivated by this idea. I am particularly captivated by the belief of the Achuar people that the dream of the world can be changed in one generation.
And I’m really captivated with how this idea of changing the dream resonates in me when I think of the church. What if our dream were truly consistent with the dream Lynne and the Achuar people speak of – to create and call into a being an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet? There’s not a single thing in that statement that is not aligned with what we in the United Church of Christ have been talking about for years.
So what needs to change in order to change the dream? First of all, we must move from scarcity thinking to sufficiency thinking. We know that many of our churches are experiencing declines in membership and finances. Some of them dream of being once again what they used to be. This is scarcity thinking. Sufficiency thinking might say that we have enough resources here and now – in the hearts of our people; their ability to allocate their financial, personal, and spiritual resources to our work together; and their desire to know and share the love of God – to take our part in changing the dream of the world. And when we can do that, we can change the dream of the church.
All of you gathered here today are enough. You are enough together and you are enough individually. There are about a hundred of you here today. It took 200 people in the 14-17th centuries to bring about the entire Renaissance. Surely the 100 people here can change the dream of the church in Northwest Wisconsin. What will you dream? What will compel you? What is the dream that will move you forward? Who do you want to be as the people of God in this place and time? Where will you take your stand?
Wherever it is, however you connect to it, whatever the dream looks like – know this if you know nothing else. You are enough. Always have been, always will be.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
3 comments:
Yes!
What an AWESOME sermon Jeanny!!
Heather said: that last post was from me. LOL!!!!
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