How to be faithful when days blur into weeks and months.
Well, It’s Blursday, the Upteenth of Meh…Again
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey
Audio from an empty sanctuary and full zoom on a laptop at St. John’s Presbyterian in Reno, Nevada lot on August 23, 2020. Originally given at Lee Vining/Bishop Zoom on July 19
Sermons also available free on iTunes
Looking for the way to be faithful in the world without gathering with the saints
Two sisters were terrors at home, school, neighborhood, everywhere but church. There they were angels because that was God’s house. Well, with the school and church building closed and the parents were stuck with them day after day without any away time or church angel hours.
So they do what parents do when they are at their wits end, they called the pastor and asked her to do put the fear of God in them. So the pastor said, “Let me talk to the oldest.”
The parent handed the phone to the oldest and the pastor quizzed her, “WHERE IS GOD?” and the oldest said, “At God’s house!” The pastor continued, “Ok, No body is at God’s house, where is God?” The child didn’t know the answer but knew she was in big trouble. She froze.
Her sister asked, “What’s wrong?”
The oldest pushed mute and answered her: “The Pastor Can’t Find God! She Thinks We Stole Him!
Where is God is the question of 2020. Since March we have been spread abroad from west to east to north and south. To homes, laptops, phones, tablets, zoom, YouTube, Facebook. And we wonder, “Where is God when God’s House is Closed?”
James Goff had a cartoon in April where the devil is bragging that he closed every church. God is next to him saying, I opened a church in every home.
The wave of blogs virtual worship guides and the stream of emails with requests for rulings about what was real worship or real communion flooded the web, twitter, emails and Facebook posts.
Christians of a certain age will hear the lament in the question from “On The Willows” from Godspell. Psalm 137:4 How can we sing the Lord’s Song in a foreign land?
Rev. Joey Lee, the Executive Presbyter of San (Hos say) says if we complain about lockdown…try being a refugee.
We catch up with the heel grabber Jacob who has just started being a refugee on his way toward Haran. He is fleeing his sheltering home and family support because it is not safe to stay there. From favorite son to refugee. In the desert he found a place to stay overnight. There he found God standing beside him tell him that God is with him and will keep him wherever he goes. Jacob’s named the place, Bethel, the house of God. He fled his house and found himself in the house of God.
For Christians, the answer to the pastor’s question is not a place, but a person. God acts to make sure we know he is not housebound to a place by Jesus or rather Immanuel, God with Us. Where is God when God’s house is closed? As Jacob found out, God is standing beside us. God is Immanuel, God is with us.
God is not housebound. Jacob may leave home, but God’s house goes with him. Psalm 139 has a similar promise most often heard at funerals and memorials. The leaving is magnified in verse:
Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night’, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.
If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night’, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.
God found Jacob in the desert, but this isn’t a story about Jacob’s ladder to heaven it is about God setting his ladder to heaven wherever we are. God is the subject.
Jacob did everything he could to grab his piece of heaven, to secure his place and future. His artful deal swindled his brother out his birthright for a bowl of stew. He tricked his blind father to steal the blessing that was due his brother Esau. He was a heel grabber from birth.
Yet there is a reckoning. Today we find him in the desert. Without family, fortune or future; that birthright and blessing cut off by the fear of that is brother would be angry and vengeful. His scheming for all left him with nothing.
Yet it isn’t just us who finds him, but God. Who gives him the blessing not of his father for his family, but to be a blessing to all the families of earth. God who replaces his birthright with the promise of the birth of offspring like the dust of the earth. God, who builds Bethel, the house of God around the homeless refugee not artful deals of grasping Jacob.
The church is stripped of all of the things we planned, prepared and schemed for over the decades:
- We have been exiled from our beautiful buildings even our favorite pew…
- Eye contact is replaced with far away stares.
- Handshakes and hugs are replaced with video smiles and distant waves.
- In person, even smiles are masked away And in person means double arms length, too far to hug.
- Like a modern day Babel, our chorus is fractured solos, we sing together alone; our unison responses jumbled syllables scrambled by the tech tubes that connect our eyes but not our voices.
- We can no longer receive communion from a neighbors hand but only take it from our own.
- We are in the desert, alone, in exile from all we have gathered and grabbed, stripped of our birthright and blessing.
Sir Winston Churchill is credited with first saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” He said it in the mid-1940s as we were approaching the end of World War ll.
Jacob doesn’t waste his crisis. He recognized that he is a guest of God’s house wherever he is. Not by his own cunning, but by God’s care. That ladder is not a way to heaven as it is an affirmation of that God’s work is going on, even here. Angels are moving cares up to heaven and messages are coming down us. The supply chain is secure delivering even in the desert even though zoom.
And he vows to return to this place where God’s house is. Rev. Joey Lee, also says that when the quarantine hit changes that we been working on for years where made in a weekend. Our tech friendly expansive ministry is reuniting the ex-pats, the homebound, the young, the physically and socially distant, the ones who can’t hear but now can turn up the volume, the ones who can’t walk but now have church delivered, the one who work or play on Sunday morning, let’s not forget this place where God came beside those alone and away from the home. A ladder delivering grace and inviting a connection to God from wherever you are.
Virginia City Presbyterian that still has gas light fixtures because they are not convinced electricity might be a fad, hung a video screen in their sanctuary after a unanimous approval from the session so folks weren’t required to touch and pass hymnals and paper. What a faithful response to exile. When I heard that, I asked my echo what the ski conditions in hell were.
I don’t know what the future may hold, but I know who holds the future. Ralph Abernathy
The quarantine is a forced demonstration that God’s house is not built of our traditions, our schemes and empire building but where people stop to rest and find God beside them. Setting up a ladder to heaven where faith climbs and blessing descends.
We can keep the faithful attitude of how God is present where we are instead of trying to jam God into where we were. We can all be like my mother-in-law Kathryn who lives in the desert of Sedona on House Rock Road. We can set up our house rock and say remember, God is here. God is with us where ever we stop and look for God.
“He’s Always There”
The Lord leads us on
with tender care,
lifting our
burdens to bear
He blesses us
as we pass on,
to what awaits
eternal dawn
Tho we so often
may not see,
He’s always there
and will always be…
J. Paul Horgan “The Poem Painter”
7/17/20 c.