Time to Return (9.18.22)

Time to Return
Luke 2.8-20 and I Kings 19.3b-13

Summer of 1997. I was working at PASSPORT camp in their 5th summer of running camps. The movie of the summer for that camp staff was Contact with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. First a couple of people saw it, then a few, until eventually the entire camp staff went to the theater together to see this spirituality-science-wormhole travel film together.

If you haven’t seen the film, I’m about to ruin the ending for you. But it’s been 29 years, and those of you who weren’t born yet can stream it online and laugh at what our movies looked like three decades ago.

Jodie Foster’s character is a scientist who has spent her career trying to make contact with life on other planets. Finally she hears a signal, works to build a ship that will take her to the signal, and she has this surreal experience on what appears to be a beach a lot like one from her childhood. She insists that she was gone for approximately 18 hours and recorded the whole experience. However, the people watching from outside the machine, say her pod merely dropped through the surrounding structure and landed in a safety net, and her recording devices show only noise. 

She’s crushed, and everyone around her insists that what she experienced–a real encounter in a real place with a real lifeform from another dimension, did not happen. But privately, two people look at the footage and realize although her recording device did only record static, it inexplicably recorded 18 hours of it, so her funding is extended to continue her research.

How do you explain a 4 month blip? How do I drop back into a pulpit after a life-changing season? I was stunned this week by how normal being in the office felt. As though no time has passed at all. So I am tempted to tell you everything–as though to prove to myself what I did for my 18 hours and not 18 seconds. But I don’t really have words to explain what I’ve experienced, and I think it will take time for me to process much less describe it all.

I’m a little out of practice when it comes to stringing words together in long, logical, meaning-making ways. And to be quite honest (and if you know me, you know being quite honest is pretty much the only way I know how to be in this world) I really haven’t missed the forced rhythm of making meaning week after week. Some weeks I can’t make sense of any of it. Some weeks just want to sit and be quiet and not offer more words to an already noise world.

And so, for 17 Sundays in a row, that’s exactly what I was able to do. To let my body wake when it was ready. To eat brunch or go for a walk or read a book or sew or explore a lovely garden with my family. And there is a really big part of me that wanted to stay in that space–the resting space, the quiet space, the mostly anonymous space, the unhurried and unneeded space. But sabbatical came with both a time limit (for me, 17 weeks) and a deal (you have to go back). Those Lilly Endowment people are clever that way.

As I have thought about my own returning, I have played in my imagination with these two pretty well known scripture texts that you’ve heard today–those unsavory shepherds and Elijah in the cave. Because returning is not a “business as usual” process.

The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told. While Mary pondered these things in her heart.

The shepherds–low in the societal class system, low in the economic structure, known for sneaking onto land that wasn’t theirs to graze but grazing anyway, uneducated, disrespected, looked down upon, largely ignored. This is where one of our most famous images of the Christmas season takes place.

Shepherds, watching their flocks by night, encounter the heavenly host and travel to see the baby Jesus. The ignored and disrespected are the first ones in on the miraculous tale of the Divine entering the human timeline in baby form. And just like that, after being welcomed as honored guests by the heavenly host and the Creator of all time and space, after being not just seen but valued and invited into a cosmic secret, they have to return. 

The sheep are waiting. They may well have been left on someone’s field who will wake up in the morning and claim them for himself. They have to return to finish their job. And so they return, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

How do they return to what has been and bring with them what they have experienced, I wonder. What does that returning look like?

Oh, but it’s Elijah where I truly find myself in scripture this morning…

What do you do when you’re not quite ready to return?

When you’ve been tended to by angels

And held safely while you rested

But it still isn’t enough? You’re craving more. 

You find a cave.

And you crawl inside.

And you hope to stretch out that resting time just a little while longer.

You hope maybe no one will miss you and no one will come to find you!

Elijah whines, “I’m the only one left to do these things for God…”
Maybe someone else will pick up the work outside
that feels like way too much to take on.

God lets Elijah rest for awhile.

Even orchestrates the rest and provides not just safety but nourishment.

Until it’s time to return.

And when it’s time to return, the sound of sheer silence comes to Elijah,

And he knows.

He knows he must prepare himself for a holy encounter

So he wraps a cloth around his head and walks to the entrance of the cave.

And only after that 40 days and 40 nights does the Divine voice ask:

 ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’

It’s time to return.

Now I haven’t exactly been zealous for the Lord, and I certainly haven’t even considered murderously slaughtering 450 false prophets. I mean, if I could snap my fingers and just make 450 false prophets disappear, would I be tempted? Do I get to make the list of who the 450 are? No, no, no. I don’t want to align myself too closely with the story of Elijah. 

But I get some of Elijah’s anger. I have a lot of rage in me about religious leaders and political leaders who, to me, appear to be prophets of a false god or false prophets of a true God. Maybe that works both ways. So I get that Elijah’s craving for rest isn’t really so much about a people he serves as it is about a climate and moment in which he is called and feels like he’s been handed an umbrella in the midst of a hurricane and expected to survive.

How can he be faithful to a calling that he knows is real

A calling that has shaped and directed the way he’s lived most of his life

But he looks around him and doesn’t see very many people who value or respect or honor the way of living and moving and having your being in the world that he does.

I don’t think killing the false prophets is the answer.

But the hiding in a cave and giving up part? I get it.

I don’t want to just make this all about me

I really don’t, and I hope I’m not

Because it isn’t and never is really just about me

Even though I’m the one with microphones at my lips and a camera pointed at my face

I hope, as the beloved and now late Frederick Buechner always said, “My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally.”

So that’s what we’re doing here when we tell these old stories–mine and Elijah’s and the shepherds and even Jodie Foster’s. We hold out these stories and struggle together to make some sense of them. And I’m struggling right now, in very real time, with microphones at my lips and a camera in my face. How do I hold these stories in all their particularity, believing that somehow, mysteriously and hiddenly, God makes Godself known to us more powerfully and personally through them…

When I see and hear other leaders with bigger microphones and bigger cameras and bigger listening audiences using those same stories to form such opposite conclusions, can I still hold the stories? For a few months now, I’ve just watched and listened at how people of faith respond to the stuff of this world.

I was already on sabbatical with the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas happened.

I was in Nice, in the south of France, when texts from friends started pinging, “Don’t come home. Get a dual citizenship. Stay over there. Roe was just overturned.”

Oh, it’ll be a depressing list if I start down this road, so I’ll fast forward to this week…people who hold the same stories we hold laughing and laughing at shipping asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard. 

My alma mater, Samford University’s newest administration has decided to ban any organization, church, or denomination that affirms LGBTQ+ people. I am no longer welcome on that campus in any official capacity. The church I pastor is not welcome there, either.

Gun violence. Reproductive rights. Immigration. Violence against queer people. Why would I want to leave the cave of sabbatical to step back into all of that???

I know that some of you are struggling with this same nauseating grief as white, MAGA Christian nationalism becomes the dominant voice in the United States for what it means to be church and what it means to love Jesus.

Have I gone too far? Is naming it in the pulpit just too much? Because I think pastors choosing polite quiet for decades is part of how we ended up in this mess.

Let me be clear: I think the Christian nationalists. I don’t think what’s coming out of these churches and institutions and political offices in the name of Jesus has anything at all to do with Jesus, as I know him from the gospel stories we tenderly hold. 

But as I sat in that cave, I wondered…has their interpretation won the day? When friends and neighbors hear that you go to church on Sunday morning, do they pause for just a second and wonder what you mean by that? Are your children and grandchildren interested in identifying with a faith community in a meaningful and routine way? Or has something changed and shifted (in part by being tarnished by false prophets) forever?

Sure, the ones who claim to speak for God do not speak for us.

And sometimes I push back hard and have a lot of fight in me

And I’m very clear about who you in these pews are and who we as
The St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church are.

But I’ve spent a lot of time under the broom tree and inside that cave

The light hurts my eyes as I step back out

And I’m wondering what it means to return

Not to you, my friends

Returning to you is the easy part

But what does it mean to return to a pulpit 

In a robe

As a pastor

In the Christian tradition

In the United States of America

In the year of our Lord 2022?

I’ve found comfort for many years with Fr. Rohr’s language on his theological posture as being “at the edge of the inside.” 

But lately, as I roll those words around in my mouth, the inside of Christianity in America sure does seem to be rotten. Am I still ok with my posture being the edge of something toxic? The edge of something broken? As one colleague put it recently, when you pull a slice of bread out of the bag and see that 80% of the slice is covered in mold, do you still feel good about eating that 20%? You gonna make a sandwich with it and send it to school in your kid’s lunchbox?

I’m getting ahead of myself because next week is when I want us to consider to what I am returning and to what you are committed to seeking as source and center and guide.

For today, I want to stand in my integrity to say that cave has been really, really nice. And I liked it there. And there are so many shows to binge on so very many platforms. And who can garden in the summertime anyway when it’s 100 degrees every day, so shouldn’t I extend that valuable research time into autumn…whenever autumn happens to breeze its way through New Orleans?

But the great wind has passed by
And I felt the earthquake move the ground
The fire raged and did not consume me

And now, in the sound of sheer silence, I know I still hear the voice even if it is silent.

What are you doing here?

That’s where we’ll pick up next week. My sermon title will be: “Returning to What?”

I hope you’ll come back join us. If you are disenchanted with Christianity, disgusted by Christian nationalism, and not quite sure you can hold out hope for another reformation, then JOIN THE CLUB, my beloveds. 

WHAT is this thing we are doing, and how do we do it with robust integrity?

Tomorrow I will send out a google form to invite you who are in the struggle to read with me Do I Stay Christian? A guide for the doubters, the disappointed, and the disillusioned by Brian McLaren.

If, for you, there is no struggle. If you feel rooted and steady and satisfied in how you follow Jesus and can do so without any influence from this current cultural and political moment, then this may not be the study for you. And that’s ok.

But if you’re ready to head for the cave and call it a permanent residence, let’s do this. Let’s have the conversation out loud that so many of us are already having quietly.