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Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
This morning’s sermon is about who we are going to be as a church after the election of the 47th president of the United States. Two things will remain: We will be incarnational, connected, face to face, neighbor to neighbor. And we will live by the Jesus principles, emphasizing the reality of community, over personal preference for unity. That is the idea I will unpack this morning.
Community is what we will be because it is who we are people of the Resurrection who know that the bad thing is never the last thing; and that every person we’ve ever met, or ever seen made by God and loved by God. If you are, and they are, then we are community. We are God’s people.
That is where we’re going this morning, but before we do I wanted to share with you how I, personally, move toward this election, and probably through it, without letting anxiety overwhelm me.
“I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help to come? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. He will not let my foot be moved and he who watches over me will neither slumber or asleep. The Lord shall preserve me from all evil. He shall keep me safe.”
And so, “I lift up my eyes to the hills…” and I invite you to do so as well. Read. Mark. Study. Memorize. Inwardly digest Psalm 121. I think you will find it more profitable and preferable than watching cable news.
And so, to the sermon. I begin by asking you to look around the room. You will see that we are in the midst of community. What you see is that it is not a curated community. There are no barriers to entering this community, no applications to fill out, no exams to pass. The only criteria is that somehow God has lead each of us here today.
It’s important to recognize then, that this uncurated community was singularly and providentially assembled by God alone. And what that means is community is more important than unity. If you want unity, join a club; If you want unity, join a political party; If you want unity, join a crew team. All good things, but within each unity is necessity. At Epiphany the only necessity, the only reality is that God has led us all here to be one community.
And when we gather to worship, we become an outward and visible sign of our Trinitarian God. Jesus, the 2nd person of the Trinity, came into creation to articulate that the ultimate unity is God, and humanity is the community in which this unity dwells. Or, as it is written in the Gospel of John: “and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us” (Jn 1:14).
And that is true today in this church, and it’ll be true on Wednesday, and it’ll be true one year from now, and it’ll be true five years from now, and forever and forever, AMEN.
We are Jesus people. We are an uncurated community, which means we are a completely inclusive community, which is to say here there are no outsiders here. “Othering” is anathema, that strikes against the one thing we know about God, the one thing we know above all else, that God made everything which means there are no insiders or outsiders in the Kingdom of God.
And so, we can argue over things… politics, policies, philosophies. We can even argue over scripture, we can argue over what we think to be right and what we think to be wrong, but when we scrape down to the very bottom, down to the very core, to the foundation, we find that there is only one bedrock reality: it as a relationally irreducible God, that is all love. It is love strong enough to hold community in unity irrespective of what people think or believe or say.
Love is bigger than the limited imagination of humanity, which is why we choose to be people of the Resurrection, who know that the bad thing is never the last thing, because when we get to the last thing, when we get to the bottom, to the bedrock, we find ourselves standing upon the love of God; and there is nothing stronger.
And if that is true right now, then it’ll be true on Wednesday, and it’ll be true one year from now, and it’ll be true five years from now. The foundation holds.
Now with that in mind we come to our actions, how we will be, no matter who is elected the 47th president of the United States. The principles are simple, or should I say simply Jesus’ principles, for they are principles that support the reality of community over the preference for unity.
The first – hope beyond what can be seen.
The second – practice our discipleship.
The third – care for neighbor.
And fourth – speak with courage.
Hope, practice, care and courage.
These Jesus principles empower us to resist forces that threaten the dignity of any and all children of God. They are principles of our faith, proven across time to drive out the darkness that bubbles up when leaders seek to divide and repress the children of God. And we will not stand for it because we stand upon a foundation of love.
We begin with hope. The apostle Paul captures it well, writing: “Hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what can be seen? We hope for that which cannot be seen, and we wait for it patiently” (Rom 8:24-25 / para). Hope lives out there, just beyond our site lines, in that space where imagination commingles with the eternal love of God. Hope is out there, pulling at us with the magnetism of awe and mystery and goodness. But it is a slow draw that we must wait for patiently.
What do we do while we are waiting? Jamie in her sermon last Sunday gave us a clue. She asked: “How do you get the Carnegie Hall?” Practice. Practice. Practice. That is what we will do here at Epiphany irrespective of who the 47th president is. We will practice our Christianity.
That’s what it means to be a disciple, a follower of Jesus. It is to practice living our life as Jesus would if he lived in your body, with your job, with your family, with your personality. To be a disciple of Jesus means living our life as Jesus would if he had my life or your life. And that is both easy and it is hard but either way, it requires doing the work. As Jamie said last Sunday practice requires showing up, and doing the work. And doing the work as a Jesus follower happens right here.
Your presence matters, not only for your own formation, but for the support and the love that you share with everyone else who gathers here as a community that reflects the unity of our God. And that’s not going to change because of who the 47th president of the United States is.
As disciples of Jesus, we become the kind of people who care for other people when we are not thinking about where we’re doing. We become people who simply love our neighbors because that’s what Jesus did.
The policy a simple. It’s the golden rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” We train here to do this habitually, but we are also actively looking around the world, asking ourselves: Who is being pushed to the margins? Who is being used as a tool by people in power to reinforce fear, so as to keep the syncopates within their orbit docile and dominated?
“Othering” is the tool of the fascist, to divide and conquer, telling the lie that it is only by their will that unity is obtained. Unity at the expense of community is the lie of the dictator, and that has no place in the Kingdom of God irrespective of who the next president of the United States is.
Which brings us to the necessity of speaking with courage. That is the final Jesus principle that will not change irrespective of who the president is. We will remain people of hope, who practice following Jesus, by caring for one another and speaking truth to power.
Now what speaking truth to power doesn’t mean is knowing all the facts, or even having all the right information all of the time. What it does mean is that we always lead with love. We always speak inclusively. We speak on behalf of the disenfranchised. We speak in favor of equitable justice. We speak with the words of Jesus.
And I can assure you that anyone who is speaking about division and repression, seeking to “other” someone else, is not speaking the words of Jesus.
And so, with hope, practice, care, and courage, we will stand upon the firm foundations of Jesus, irrespective of who the next president is. Together we lift our eyes to the hills, and know from where our help comes. It comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. God is our firm foundation.
I encourage you, no matter what happens on Tuesday to continue to gather in this place; because the gathering of people into community at Epiphany is an outward and visible sign of the love of God. Epiphany is an uncurated community, held together not by the unity of our will, but by the love of the God which is bigger than anything we can ask for or imagine.
So, we lift our eyes to the hills because it is there that we will find the help we need today, tomorrow, next Wednesday and forever more. We are children of God. This is who we are no matter who becomes the next president is. For the love of God is our firm foundation.