![Picture](/uploads/5/3/1/4/53145165/published/img-20160812-143255620.jpg?1521457454)
Peter JB Carman
A Sermon offered at
Emmanuel Friedens Church
Schenectady New York
March 18, 2018
Reading: Jeremiah 31:31-34
I. This Week in Schenectady
I am very grateful to our youth for your parts in our worship service this morning. Some of you have been regulars here a long time. Some of you probably feel like you are pretty much brand new. And yet you were all willing to jump in, help out, do your best to make worship real, and take part as leaders. Thank you! Some of you may feel like this congregation is very old and traditional, has always been here, and you wonder where you fit. But I say to you that Christianity—and I am talking about that real thing that grows out of trying to follow Jesus, trying to live our lives that are a joyful adventure with God—Christianity is you and me. And our Christian faith is always having to start from scratch. Faith is a recipe that can only be made from scratch—and it needs fresh ingredients—human ingredients—you and me ingredients.
Some folk say that you as youth are the future. I say to you that this week we all know, both for this congregation and for this nation, youth are the present. We were reminded of that this week as hundreds of thousands of high school and middle school students, with or without the permission of their schools, took seventeen minutes to call the nation to accountability about the gun violence of which youth are so often the victims.
It’s been a busy week in Schenectady. Yesterday we had a great gathering of the church’s elected leaders on the Church Council, in the Bodden Carman living room. Angela Keller, our moderator, has said some about it, so I won’t go into details on everything. But there were certain words that jumped out at me through the course of our gathering. One word was joy. There was a sense in the room of the importance of creating and finding joy together in our common life. Another word was a phrase, from Marilyn Bisgrove: A community of friends. Marilyn was putting into brief words what many of us long for in a church family—the sense of mutual care and love that comes from Christ but has to be lived out in real ways among us very human individuals in the present. “Welcome” cannot be just a sign at the door. And love when it is just an idea becomes dry and dusty until it blows away.
Love that isn’t lived isn’t love. Faith that isn’t written on the heart is dry duty, and while there is nothing wrong with a little sense of duty, conviction needs some depth. But I am convinced that God is creating a new deal, in this place, a new sense of community among both people who have known each other for a long time and relative newcomers like myself….
II. An Ancient Promise
Thousands of years ago, the prophet Jeremiah, writing in the very worst of times, offered words of promise looking forward to a new deal between God and God’s people. At the time, Jeremiah may have thought that God’s people were just one little group—one very small nation. Today we know that all the nations, all over the earth are God’s people. But we also know that God still chooses to relate to us in these smaller communities—one congregation, one struggling city, one nation’s youth.
Jeremiah didn’t say that things were suddenly going to get easy. He didn’t suggest that people could get rich quick if they just said the right words. He didn’t offer twelve new rules or seven old doctrines as the path to success. Instead this is the message he brought:
[S]ays God: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know God," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest… for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
We live in a time when it seems like more and more folk have lost their way, we have as a people lost our moral compass. I am not talking about forgetting the rules about decency or respect or truthfulness! I am talking about knowing down in our bones what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s loving and what’s hateful.
Now, we actually know that the notion that there was ever a golden age, in America, when we knew right from wrong, is a myth in many ways. The picture postcard of the church in the valley was a white church, and the black church was left out of the frame. There were no women on the trustees or the deacon board of that mythical mystical postcard church.
I know we didn’t know, because as a young pastor I served a very progressive church full of good people—where there the first woman ever had begun to serve on that trustee board, and the men were doing everything they could to freeze her out—although they would never have admitted it, even to themselves. So, the golden age past is in the eye of the beholder.
Any way you slice it, it is apparent that today is a good time to revisit that ancient writing from the prophet, that ancient and yet still fresh promise. It is the promise of a new deal between humanity and our maker. It is a promise that points to the moment when we will finally get it, the moment when we finally can feel and perceive the law, the torah, the law not of force but of justice and love—the words carved into our hearts, written upon our collective heart. It is the promise that we will finally get our compass back —get it back or get it for the first time ever—however you want to look at it.
III. You and Me in Community
Emmanuel Friedens Church, this is about you and me. For in this difficult time, these ancient words from a long-ago parchment are about why it is worthwhile for this church to exist, to offer love, to offer a place to grow and be.
We do not exist for the sake of institutional perpetuity. God protect us from becoming such a thing. Christ have mercy.
We do not exist to be perfect, and we do not exist to be purveyors of false promises. God protect us from deceiving ourselves or others. Christ have mercy.
We are here, together, to proclaim that promise of a new deal between God and humans and creation. And we may have trouble finding words for it sometimes, so we do the bulk of our proclaiming more with the quality of our lives, our openness, our welcome, our very being as a community of friends.
Do we get it all right? No way. God protect us from fictional righteousness. God have mercy.
We proclaim we are a community that makes mistakes—that even screws up sometimes. Our humility is based in honest experience with being us. But we remember that ancient promise—that God forgives us and allows us the grace to move forward, seek out our neighbor, try to make it right, call out our family member with love and respect, and come to a new understanding, whatever it takes.
I am so glad to be part of this community, this sign of things to come for humanity. This is a church where we have room for you to be a leader, if you are fourteen years old or ninety-seven years old. This is a church that is committed to being multiracial, even though we sure aren’t perfect at that. This is a church that will support individuals pursuing our consciences, even though I haven’t quite always figured out what makes you tick, or vice versa. This is a church that now offers space to three NA groups, the coordinating group for the area. This is a congregation that shares brunch once a month with whomsoever wants to eat—and does it not as an act of charity but as an act of hospitality because we want to—wants to have some community with our neighbors. This is already a community of friends—wanting to be sure we are doing a good job of inviting the new friends and caring for the old friends. And yet we understand the learning curve is where we live, and we haven’t got it all figured out, being that community of friends.
None of it is perfect, and all of it is good. For the basic reason we exist is not to get saved and not to be perfect! It is to offer a little taste of the promise of a God who has not abandoned human beings to our own devices. God is still real, still speaking, still writing on our hearts. We exist as a community to invite others we care about into community. We are part of the living movement of love that began a long time ago, but is newer today, is still becoming clearer, is being felt within and among us.
None of us lives forever. That belongs only to God. Your life and mine—some days feel long, yes, but some decades are altogether too short. And so here we be. Together. For some part of the journey, our lives have come together, our paths have come to be one in this little community. And for what purpose?
We need to go for it. Go for the joy, go for the truth, go for the outstretched hand. We need to go for it, look within, listen to our neighbor talking, feel the handwriting of our Maker on our hearts.
We need to go for it…have some fun! So, today I herewith make an official declaration on behalf of both Emmanuel Baptist Church and Friedens UCC that we are, really and truly, not opposed to fun—for this too can be the instrument of the handwriting of love upon our hearts.
We need to go for it, take our stands for justice and peace, again and again and again. For successful or no, this too is our testimony to the new thing that God is writing, on the heart of creation itself.
Let’s go for it: risk a whole lot of joy, a whole lot of love. It’s why we are here.
A Sermon offered at
Emmanuel Friedens Church
Schenectady New York
March 18, 2018
Reading: Jeremiah 31:31-34
I. This Week in Schenectady
I am very grateful to our youth for your parts in our worship service this morning. Some of you have been regulars here a long time. Some of you probably feel like you are pretty much brand new. And yet you were all willing to jump in, help out, do your best to make worship real, and take part as leaders. Thank you! Some of you may feel like this congregation is very old and traditional, has always been here, and you wonder where you fit. But I say to you that Christianity—and I am talking about that real thing that grows out of trying to follow Jesus, trying to live our lives that are a joyful adventure with God—Christianity is you and me. And our Christian faith is always having to start from scratch. Faith is a recipe that can only be made from scratch—and it needs fresh ingredients—human ingredients—you and me ingredients.
Some folk say that you as youth are the future. I say to you that this week we all know, both for this congregation and for this nation, youth are the present. We were reminded of that this week as hundreds of thousands of high school and middle school students, with or without the permission of their schools, took seventeen minutes to call the nation to accountability about the gun violence of which youth are so often the victims.
It’s been a busy week in Schenectady. Yesterday we had a great gathering of the church’s elected leaders on the Church Council, in the Bodden Carman living room. Angela Keller, our moderator, has said some about it, so I won’t go into details on everything. But there were certain words that jumped out at me through the course of our gathering. One word was joy. There was a sense in the room of the importance of creating and finding joy together in our common life. Another word was a phrase, from Marilyn Bisgrove: A community of friends. Marilyn was putting into brief words what many of us long for in a church family—the sense of mutual care and love that comes from Christ but has to be lived out in real ways among us very human individuals in the present. “Welcome” cannot be just a sign at the door. And love when it is just an idea becomes dry and dusty until it blows away.
Love that isn’t lived isn’t love. Faith that isn’t written on the heart is dry duty, and while there is nothing wrong with a little sense of duty, conviction needs some depth. But I am convinced that God is creating a new deal, in this place, a new sense of community among both people who have known each other for a long time and relative newcomers like myself….
II. An Ancient Promise
Thousands of years ago, the prophet Jeremiah, writing in the very worst of times, offered words of promise looking forward to a new deal between God and God’s people. At the time, Jeremiah may have thought that God’s people were just one little group—one very small nation. Today we know that all the nations, all over the earth are God’s people. But we also know that God still chooses to relate to us in these smaller communities—one congregation, one struggling city, one nation’s youth.
Jeremiah didn’t say that things were suddenly going to get easy. He didn’t suggest that people could get rich quick if they just said the right words. He didn’t offer twelve new rules or seven old doctrines as the path to success. Instead this is the message he brought:
[S]ays God: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know God," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest… for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
We live in a time when it seems like more and more folk have lost their way, we have as a people lost our moral compass. I am not talking about forgetting the rules about decency or respect or truthfulness! I am talking about knowing down in our bones what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s loving and what’s hateful.
Now, we actually know that the notion that there was ever a golden age, in America, when we knew right from wrong, is a myth in many ways. The picture postcard of the church in the valley was a white church, and the black church was left out of the frame. There were no women on the trustees or the deacon board of that mythical mystical postcard church.
I know we didn’t know, because as a young pastor I served a very progressive church full of good people—where there the first woman ever had begun to serve on that trustee board, and the men were doing everything they could to freeze her out—although they would never have admitted it, even to themselves. So, the golden age past is in the eye of the beholder.
Any way you slice it, it is apparent that today is a good time to revisit that ancient writing from the prophet, that ancient and yet still fresh promise. It is the promise of a new deal between humanity and our maker. It is a promise that points to the moment when we will finally get it, the moment when we finally can feel and perceive the law, the torah, the law not of force but of justice and love—the words carved into our hearts, written upon our collective heart. It is the promise that we will finally get our compass back —get it back or get it for the first time ever—however you want to look at it.
III. You and Me in Community
Emmanuel Friedens Church, this is about you and me. For in this difficult time, these ancient words from a long-ago parchment are about why it is worthwhile for this church to exist, to offer love, to offer a place to grow and be.
We do not exist for the sake of institutional perpetuity. God protect us from becoming such a thing. Christ have mercy.
We do not exist to be perfect, and we do not exist to be purveyors of false promises. God protect us from deceiving ourselves or others. Christ have mercy.
We are here, together, to proclaim that promise of a new deal between God and humans and creation. And we may have trouble finding words for it sometimes, so we do the bulk of our proclaiming more with the quality of our lives, our openness, our welcome, our very being as a community of friends.
Do we get it all right? No way. God protect us from fictional righteousness. God have mercy.
We proclaim we are a community that makes mistakes—that even screws up sometimes. Our humility is based in honest experience with being us. But we remember that ancient promise—that God forgives us and allows us the grace to move forward, seek out our neighbor, try to make it right, call out our family member with love and respect, and come to a new understanding, whatever it takes.
I am so glad to be part of this community, this sign of things to come for humanity. This is a church where we have room for you to be a leader, if you are fourteen years old or ninety-seven years old. This is a church that is committed to being multiracial, even though we sure aren’t perfect at that. This is a church that will support individuals pursuing our consciences, even though I haven’t quite always figured out what makes you tick, or vice versa. This is a church that now offers space to three NA groups, the coordinating group for the area. This is a congregation that shares brunch once a month with whomsoever wants to eat—and does it not as an act of charity but as an act of hospitality because we want to—wants to have some community with our neighbors. This is already a community of friends—wanting to be sure we are doing a good job of inviting the new friends and caring for the old friends. And yet we understand the learning curve is where we live, and we haven’t got it all figured out, being that community of friends.
None of it is perfect, and all of it is good. For the basic reason we exist is not to get saved and not to be perfect! It is to offer a little taste of the promise of a God who has not abandoned human beings to our own devices. God is still real, still speaking, still writing on our hearts. We exist as a community to invite others we care about into community. We are part of the living movement of love that began a long time ago, but is newer today, is still becoming clearer, is being felt within and among us.
None of us lives forever. That belongs only to God. Your life and mine—some days feel long, yes, but some decades are altogether too short. And so here we be. Together. For some part of the journey, our lives have come together, our paths have come to be one in this little community. And for what purpose?
We need to go for it. Go for the joy, go for the truth, go for the outstretched hand. We need to go for it, look within, listen to our neighbor talking, feel the handwriting of our Maker on our hearts.
We need to go for it…have some fun! So, today I herewith make an official declaration on behalf of both Emmanuel Baptist Church and Friedens UCC that we are, really and truly, not opposed to fun—for this too can be the instrument of the handwriting of love upon our hearts.
We need to go for it, take our stands for justice and peace, again and again and again. For successful or no, this too is our testimony to the new thing that God is writing, on the heart of creation itself.
Let’s go for it: risk a whole lot of joy, a whole lot of love. It’s why we are here.