With all the force I can muster, I send you blessing and affection at this moment of transition. In the world’s reckoning of time, we are crossing over between decades. The year of our Lord 2020 has found us. Are we ready for all that lies ahead in the next decade? Surely not. We were not really ready for the dramatic shifts the last ten years carried.
We saw our lives migrate more fully into digital spaces. Smart phones, social media, online propaganda. We were not prepared. This migration did not heal our ancient wounds; we are still lonely at a systemic level. Our society has become more fearful, anxious and depressed. Can you feel this tension, the widening distance between our hopes and lived experiences? I can feel it in my bones each time I read another article I know was written just to get me mad or scared. And even knowing this does not fully inoculate me to the effects, because I find myself more angry and scared than I should be. I can see it in the vacant eyes of people taking one more selfie video to post for promised dopamine hits of approval. Any bread or circus to distract us from what we cannot bear alone.
This digital consolidation of reality has resulted in our loss of connection to place and people. Just last week my family was on the roof of the observatory at Griffith Park. Sunset, gorgeous sky, glittering city. And most people looking down at their screen, bumping into the very real bodies also looking down at their screens. Everyone was somewhere else putting on a digital show for some other unseen audience. No one was really here with one another on this rooftop. We have become profoundly disembodied, cut off from ourselves, one another, creation and God.
Look around you right now. Who is beside you, behind you, within touching distance? The very fact that our community practices are deeply embodied is itself a miracle we miss most Sundays. We are truly here together, exchanging sighs and joys beyond language, sharing smiles and embrace that for many might be the only human contact they receive all week. Tell me this isn’t the work of God’s people?! Of course it is. Could it be this simple? The beginning journey, yes. To have finally found a community where you can begin to take off the layers of armor and posturing. Where you can be fully present as fully you. Come on! That is proximately heaven.
Our social and ecological location matters to how we live out our faith.
So a bit more about my social location. I live at the intersection of Claremont and Los Robles. I sort of know some of my neighbors. The further a house is from my own, the more obscure the people become. But knowing any neighbors at all is itself a miracle. Our modern lives are designed to isolate us from the very connections that make us whole. Many of us are strangers to our own lives. This is not good, lō tōv.
And yet… We are not abandoned to this isolation. Our church community exists as a counter-factual to the systems of this world. This miracle of belonging arises from the heart of God, most viscerally known in the witness of Jesus the Christ. Our lostness, loneliness, listlessness, these are the illusions. The Big Reality is our fondness, our togetherness, our aliveness. Our work is not to make this true, but to believe that God has already made it so. Our church does not have a set of mission strategies to save the world. The church is God’s mission, God’s plan. Seems risky.
More personally, I do not have a ministry. I have only a life (Peterson). I pray my life has more congruence with the best version of the story God is trying to tell through me and my people. So I commit to live my life in view of God and God’s people, such that struggle and service are given bodily witness. I will keep being honest about what I see and know, and also what I cannot see and do not understand. All I ask is that you do the same, by the power of God.
For many of you who are newer here, you seem to share a response I had when I first found this church community three years ago: gratitude and hope. God I am grateful for this church.
You know who are often the most cynical people ever? Pastors! We have seen it all. Heard it all. Felt it all. This vocation can be brutalizing, and vulnerability a liability in most church communities. I could tell you stories, but most of them I can only write after I have retired. Or over coffee where no recording devices are present. But truly, it is difficult to sustain a living faith while navigating the politics of church life. But somehow I continue to be surprised by this church’s generosity of spirit. It was what drew me here in the first place. There was a sincerity to the people I kept meeting, a willingness to trust God and one another with the future. You are all so quirky, so unexpected, and so compelling.
I told the deacons last year about a midnight epiphany I had. You know those, when you are about to fall asleep and disparate ideas come together in a new way or with new language. I told the Board that I conceived of my work, and our purpose as such. Become the best version of yourself. Then give yourself away. You do know that this is the way of Christ? In fact, the note I wrote down that night was titled “The Jesus Way.” Jesus being the best version of God’s love and presence embodied in human flesh. And then that very goodness shared with the creation whom God so dearly loves. For God so loved the world that he sent Jesus. And God still loves the world, and continues to send Christ’s church, you and you and you.
As James Rebanks wrote about his own vocation as modern shepherd and writer, “This is my life. I want no other.”
A little bit more about why I am so grateful to be your pastor. I believe we are uniquely constituted to resist the temptations and pitfalls that other churches and Christian communities will break under in this next spiritual season. That bears repeating, so let me slow this part down because it is super important.
Right now we are experiencing the collapse of what is known as Christendom. Fancy word for a culture steeped in the language and practices of a certain faith tradition, regardless of the sincerity of those convictions. As someone who grew up in various expressions of Christianity, church, denomination, style, I can say with true authority that cultural Christianity is buckling under the weight of its idolatry. In all honesty, many of the most popular expressions of Christianity look absolutely nothing like the way of Jesus. The center will not hold much longer.
I spend insane amounts of time each week reading and studying the Bible. I love it, the way it witnesses to the complexity of human experience and consistency of God. The good and the bad. The more I learn, the more I find is illuminated. I also spend a lot of time praying. For you all, for my family and myself. For our neighbors living close to the bone, sleeping under tarps and tents. This prayer and study is a core part of my identity as a pastor. And it all continues to lead me to this place of honesty.
Christendom is faltering because it has been sick for some time now. It has become sick in the same way that the Bible describes other systems that have fallen apart. Why do you think we have so many stories of collapse in the Bible? East of Eden is not a physical place as much as a state of mind. The garden is walled off and our ancestors are sent into the wild places. The world fills with violence as the flood waters rise in response. The Tower built to our fears and ego is abandoned as the people are scattered. The wilderness rebellions after the Exodus. The kingdom of Israel splintering and then being exiled. Roman occupation and faint hopes in a militant messiah.
Recently it has looked like an American church more concerned with power and image than love of God and love of God’s creation. And the whole Temple is collapsing in front of us. Every week someone sends me another book or article about how people are abandoning church, losing faith. So much hand wringing. So much fear. So much to confess.
And I simply do not have time or interest in pretending things are otherwise. This is where the public witness of the Church stands. So what are we going to do about it? What contribution will we offer to our neighbors, or city, our families? What story will we tell?
A few years back after another black man was killed by state violence, the artist Lecrae wrote a song in response. It was called “Facts.” It starts with a voice singing the refrain “I will only tell the truth.” It is brilliant music, but also it is brutal language.
Now these people swear they own me, sendin' out threats Told me keep my mouth shut, told me be a Stepin Fetchit I will not oblige to your colonized way of faith My Messiah died for the world, not just USA They say, "Jesus was Conservative" Tell 'em, "That's a lie" No, He not a Liberal either if you think I'll choose a side They say, "'Crae, you so divisive, shouldn't be a black church" I say, "Do the math, segregation started that first!" Hey, you want unity? Then read a eulogy Kill the power that exists up under you and over me. … I was waitin' for the right time to tell y'all how I feel And, yeah, I know that it hurts, but look, it's gon' heal
I listen to this song weekly, because in his words and tone I can hear something I crave. An honest assessment of our condition. One man’s vision of how the church has been held captive to the devil. Ask girls and women what it has felt like to grow up in churches led by men who have abused their trust and their bodies. Their sense of dignity and purpose. Come on, y’all know this. We have to look at it. Name it. Confess it. Ask for forgiveness. We all carry around wounds from broken versions of faith.
You have told me your stories. So many more people would be in church with hands raised to God in praise if not for the hundreds of times that faith was turned into a weapon against their humanity. Bodies that do not conform. Desires that do not comport. Wrong color. Wrong sex. Wrong politics. But are these not the exact people Jesus embraced? Are those not the very parts of us we are terrified to show God or the church, yet the parts of us we crave bringing into the light? This is true for me. This is why I love you all so much, and am grateful each week. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I can be myself in the midst of God’s people. I feel myself embraced by God because you all embraced me with affection that feels real. Feels deep. Feels sacred. Come on. This is the kingdom. Each Sunday we build it, turn it over in our hearts, tell one another by it. We bear witness to the stubborn love of God, who refuses to leave us crumbling under the weight of our own fears and complicit participation in systems of brokenness.
Which brings me to hope. We have a chance here. A chance to build a church community on the way of Jesus. Sermon on the Mount blessed are the losers kind of place. In Pasadena as it is in Heaven kind of place. A community of forgiveness. Of mutual struggle with the impossible demands of faith. The affections of God born in our hearts, nurtured in our gatherings, and shared with all who God loves, which happens to be everyone and everything. For God so loved the cosmos, and you and me. What an extravagance. What a story we get to share.
And this particular community is textured by a multiplicity of experiences, backgrounds and cultures, all joined under the common story of God in Christ making a way where there was no way, breaking the power of Death and releasing us from the slavery of fear. If we can keep it, this complexity is a gift and source of strength. For in a world conditioned on smaller and smaller tribes of exclusion, ours is trying to be a community of embrace.
Which finally brings me to our Scripture for this morning from Deuteronomy 26. This is a passage about communal memory, which asks us as readers to become participants in the retelling and reconstituting of history in the present. Moses places the future in front of them, as well as the past. He pulls time into now, into this moment. When you come into the good land, do not forget how you got here, or where you came from. Bring your offering back into the sacred flow of generosity from which it came, returning it to God and God’s world. And remind one another that God did this, rescued and freed, protected and provided. This deep remembering, none of which is simplistic or nostalgic, will become the bedrock of your joy. For those still stuck in Egypt, the land of narrow possibilities, this remembering will ignite a vision of the future that might sustain the present. It will become the occasion of exuberance.
V’sama-cheh-tah v’chal ha-tōv. You will rejoice at all the good. And not just you, but your joy will be shared, must be shared, with both stranger and friend. Until such a time as the kingdom has arrived in all its fullness. Until then, we keep our eyes fixed on Christ, seeing the world through his gaze, until love suffuses all of our vision and crowds out the darkness of this present age. By the power of the Holy Spirit.
I am glad you are my people, those who help me and one another stay on the path. I end this letter in the sign off I often write to you each personally, that I would be, we would be, this city would be…
less without you,
-Pastor John Jay
