Acorn Sunday

*Preached at Grace North Church November 17, 2002.*

Those of you who see me at church usually see me in my dog collar and a pair of kakhis, but the truth is that every other day of the week, I am strictly a jeans and T-shirt kind of guy. I have about four pair of jeans, but I have about fifty T-shirts. I collect them, for most of them say something about who I am or how I experience the world. Recently I moved and decided it was time to weed out some of these shirts. It's embarrassing to admit to myself just how much emotional attachment I have to some of these ratty old shirts, but the truth is, it was much harder than I'd anticipated to throw some of them away. None of the criteria I came up with for which I was going to discard stood for any length of time.

I was going to throw out all those that had holes, but as soon as I came across the Wegman shirt of the two dogs kissing I knew that criterion would never stand. The Wegman shirt STAYS until its last thread is shredded. I came to a similar crisis when I came across a gray shirt depicting two hands in chains with the chains falling away. Underneath the picture is a quote from St. Paul: "Christ has set us free." At first I thought, no problem, it's ratty and faded. So I put it on the trash pile.

But, wait a minute-I LOVE that shirt! I took it back and held if for a while. What was my attraction to this shirt? The picture is unremarkable. And the quote from St. Paul? Heck, I don't accept St. Paul as an authority on anything except perhaps on creative mythmaking, why would I want a shirt sporting a quote from him?

The truth is that this quote, regardless of its source, speaks of a truth that has been profound for me in my life. Jesus sets me free. But what does that really mean? Why is it that these simple words move me so deeply that I couldn't even throw away a lousy T-shirt they were written on?

To set free is to liberate. Liberation is a powerful image. For the Jews it conjures up memories of the exodus. For African Americans it triggers a much more recent memory of the civil rights era. But most of us are not a people who has ever known bondage; for us, the liberation of the gospel can seem remote. How is it, exactly, that Jesus frees us? What are we set free from? How does following this way of Jesus that we talk about actually liberate us?

Jesus liberates us by turning the world upside down. This startling worldview that Jesus taught changed the lives of everyone he came in contact with. People of privilege in his society hated him, and the new worldview he taught. But the marginalized and the dispossessed, they loved him, for he recast the universe in a way that they had never known. Jesus presented a crazy, surreal model of reality that either threatened or liberated, depending on who was listening.

In this bizarro world of Jesus:

-The weak were considered just as vital to the community as the strong.

-The poor were held in equal esteem as the rich.

-The unimportant were given the place of honor.

-The guilty were trusted and even given positions of responsibility.

-The distinctions between "us" and "them" were disintegrated.

-The small were considered just as great as the powerful.

-The outcast were embraced and drawn into the circle of community.

Despite the objections of the religious authorities of the time, Jesus claimed his own authority as someone who had had an authentic experience of God, and fearlessly preached the reality he had glimpsed. What he saw shocked the religious leaders of his day; for he beheld that there were NO criteria for admission into God's Community.

There are no laws you have to keep; no rules you have to follow; no beliefs you have to accept; no creed you have to recite. To adapt a quote from Woody Allen, "90% of salvation is just showing up." For Jesus, the most precious things in all the world are not money, or respectability, or power, or even holiness. For people think that these things are in short supply and so they hoard them. Instead Jesus treasured friendship, kindness, community, loyalty, and love, and all of these things are given freely and cannot be hoarded. In Jesus' bizarro universe, to be powerful, you must eschew all power; to be holy, you must utterly discard any notion of perfection; to truly live, you must be ready to die. It's a crazy, kookoo, upside-down vision of reality that rocked the world of Jesus' contemporaries.

This kind of vision could rock our world, too, if we have the ears to hear. It was radical then, and it is radical now. As Gandhi pointed out, "Christianity is a wonderful idea, too bad it has never been tried."

But you know, you CAN try it. The only thing you have to do to live in Jesus' bizarro world is to live "as if" it were already so. It is an act of faith, and it requires a leap of imagination to enter.

But, you might protest, isn't it a little crazy to live so out of synch with consensus reality? Isn't it dangerous to be THAT counter-culture? Heck yeah--they killed Jesus for it, after all. So it's not easy. You can't live in two worlds at once. Your world-view has die and a new way of seeing has to be born. You have to be willing to look at a homeless person and see Jesus himself; you have to reach out to those whom you have prejudice toward or are afraid of, and embrace them; you have to forget notions of "us" or "them." This is not easy to do, and yet, as Jesus tells us, "Unless a seed falls to earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."

Abraham was asked to pull up roots and leave his kin and move from the prosperous city of Ur to some backwater called Canaan. The Israelites were called to walk by faith into the promised land, so moving to a new land is not an unusual image in the tradition of Judaism that Jesus is so firmly rooted in. Jesus, likewise, invites us to leave behind us the world we live in now with its judgements of who is important and who is not, and its standards of what is acceptable and what isn't. Instead, he asks us if we will join him in a new country-he asks us to set up residence in the Community of God.

None of this is easy, of course. Walking the way of Jesus may cost you everything, especially your "respectability." But it is a GOOD way. And if enough people can live "as if" they were in the Community of God, it may be that we can actually bring it about. With every person who decides to follow the way of Jesus, we are one person closer to making the Community of God a reality for all peoples. As the Tao Te Ching tells us, if you

Cultivate these things in yourself
you will have true goodness.
Cultivate these in your family
And goodness will increase.
Cultivate these in your community
And goodness will catch on.
Cultivate these in your nation
And goodness will overflow!
Cultivate these in the World
And goodness will fill the Universe.

It is impossible? Of course it is. But don't let that stop you. Democracy and walking on the moon are just as impossible. The way of Jesus IS impossible so long as money or power or authority or prestige or privilege are your guiding lights. But it is not impossible if love is allowed to lead.

For love chooses to believe impossible things and then lives as if they were so.

Love holds as important those who can do nothing for us.

Love looks at the outcast and sets her at the head of the table.

Love elevates the valleys, and brings the mountains low.

Love can see world peace in a T-shirt.

Love discards every shred of power given to it.

Love loves no matter what anyone else says about it.

Love looks at this acorn, and sees the mighty tree that will result from it.

Love believes the impossible, simply because it chooses to. Because THERE IS A BETTER WAY.

The famous medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart, in his writings, relates the story of a little burro. All day long a little burro labors, he tells us, sometimes with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries about things that seem to bother only burros.

And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting than physical labor. Once in a while a kind monk comes to her stable and brings a pear, but more than that, he looks into the burro's eyes and touches her ears and for a few seconds the burro is free and even seems to laugh, because love does that. Love Frees.

You can choose this freedom for yourself. More than that, you can offer it to others every day with your smile, your generosity, your attention. There is more than one world you can live in. You can live in the corporate America of dog-eat-dog, or you can live in the bizarro world of Jesus, the Community of God. But nobody gets there by default. You have to choose. But if you don't choose it today, don't worry. You get to choose every time you get out of bed in the morning. Let us pray.

Jesus, thy radical vision of the world seems unreachable, impossible, a pipe dream. And yet, in this church, we'd like to give it a shot. Help us to support one another as we falteringly attempt to walk the path you illumined for us. Help us to value love over fear, freedom over rules, togetherness over respectability. Help us to throw caution to the wind, propriety out the window, and the baby out with the bathwater. Help us to die to the rat-race, so we can wake up in the world where the lion lays down with the lamb, where no one is demeaned or outcast, and where everyone-everyone-has a seat at thy table. For we ask this knowing how crazy it is; and because we know that the crazy are welcome here, too. Amen.