Ezekiel
37:1-14; Romans 1:1-14
Pregnant
with God’s Nevertheless
James
Sledge May
27, 2012 – Pentecost
I
suspect there are very few pastors who have not had a conversation like this
one. “Pastor, we raised our children in
the church. We tried very hard to bring
them up in the faith. But now that
they’re grown and have children of their own, they want nothing to do with the
church.”
Or
this one. “Pastor, how are we supposed
to keep our teenager engaged at church?
He doesn’t like Sunday School. He
hates worship. And he thinks youth group
is a waste of time.”
Such
conversations sometimes lead to reminiscing about those days, not so long ago,
when stores were closed and the sports teams didn’t play on Sunday. When I was growing up the schools didn’t
schedule games on Wednesday nights because of Wednesday night prayer
services. It sure was nice when the
culture cleared the table of everything else and said, “The only sanctioned
activity right now is church, and we expect you to participate.”
But
that’s not our world, and in a very real sense, the church finds itself in
exile. Church has been unceremoniously
cast out from the center of culture. Church
is increasingly pushed to the margins and, all too often, to the margins of our
own lives. Some even proclaim that Church
is dying.
The
prophet Ezekiel has a vision where he is brought out and set down in the midst
of a valley, a valley filled with bones.
If we’re familiar with the bouncy, “Dem Bones” song, we may miss the
horror of the scene. It is a
battlefield, perhaps even the scene of a massacre. There was a slaughter so complete that no one
was left to bury the victims. The bodies
were stripped of valuables by those who killed them, then left for buzzards and
other scavengers. Finally, the sun baked
and bleached the bones. There
were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry.
“Can
these bones live?” What a strange question. Of course they cannot. But at least the prophet has the good sense
not to say so to God. “O
Lord Yahweh, you know.”
Last
year a group of conservative, Presbyterian pastors wrote an open letter to our
denomination expressing their fears about where we were headed. The phrase in the letter that caught the most
attention, that became a shorthand term for the letter, said that the PC(USA)
is “deathly ill.”
A
local pastor, Maryann McKibben Dana of Idylwood Presbyterian, recorded a video responds
to this letter. (You can view it at her blog, The Blue Room.)
In it she suggests that the Presbyterian
Church is not dying. Rather, we are
pregnant. The tiredness, the anxiety,
the queasiness are not symptoms of death, she says. They are symptoms of pregnancy, of something
new waiting to be born.[1]
She
points out that the biblical story often features those who are past their
prime and yet surprisingly become God’s instrument for new life. Sarah and Elizabeth are old and barren, but
then they are pregnant.
Jesus
also uses the image of pregnancy and labor, and Paul picks up the pregnancy
metaphor in his letter to the church at Rome.
But in Paul’s version the whole creation is in labor. And we too groan in labor, waiting patiently
for something new to be born. Birthing
this new thing is difficult, seemingly impossible work, but the Spirit helps
us, intercedes for us, lifts us up.
As
with the prophet Ezekiel and his sun-bleached bones, Paul’s imagery connects
with the pain and brokenness of the world.
Paul presumes a world caught up in suffering and brokenness, but he also
presumes that brokenness will not have the final word. Paul has been joined to Christ. He has experienced the suffering and death of
Jesus, AND he has experienced the certainty of new, resurrection life.
Now
I should probably pause right here to say that this is a point where many
modern Christians part company with Paul.
We often think of a hope for heaven, but that is not what Paul
means. Paul is hoping for the birth of a
new world, a world freed from its brokenness.
It’s what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God, a day when things here on
earth conform to God’s will.
And
as Paul says, this new day, this reign of God, this dream of God is not
something that is yet visible. It is a
hope for something not yet fully seen.
It is not a hope for the church’s 1950s glory days. It is not a hope for a day when the church is
once more at the center of the culture. It
is not a hope for America’s greatness. It is a hope for something that we’ve
never seen before.
To
hope for this will catch you up in groaning, in suffering. To hope for this new day is to be pained by
how things are now; by a world threatened by pollution and climate change, by
terrorism and poverty and hopelessness and oppression, by greed that
accumulates wealth with little thought of who gets hurt or left behind.
And
to hope for this new day is also to be transformed, to begin living now in ways
that conform that new day we await. And that
will alter our lives, our responsibilities, our loves.
But
this new life that God speaks of to Ezekiel, this pregnancy and labor that Paul
and Maryann McKibben Dana describe, are not primarily things that we do. We don’t get ourselves pregnant. That requires God’s presence, the Spirit
moving within us, both as individuals and as a church.
Today
is Pentecost, the Church’s birthday. The
Church is born when the Spirit comes upon the first followers of Jesus and they
become his witnesses. It does not happen
without the Spirit. Without the Spirit,
they do not groan and hope for what is not seen. Without her they cannot patiently wait for
what God is bringing. Without her there
are no labor pains.
Peter
Storey is a professor emeritus at Duke Divinity School. He is a native of South Africa where he
served as a Methodist Bishop in the Johannesburg-Soweto area. And he was also a leader in the
anti-apartheid movement, even serving as a chaplain to Nelson Mandela and
others when they were in prison.
It
was in this fight against apartheid that Storey developed the idea of the great nevertheless of God.[2] This was an awareness that although
pro-apartheid forces wielded violence and repression against those who resisted
white only rule, nevertheless the
Spirit was active, giving life to something new. Even though the white rulers of South Africa
were ruthless in clinging to power, willing to arrest, torture, and even kill innocent
peoples and peaceful demonstrators, nevertheless,
God was on the side of the poor, the weak, and the oppressed. And the Spirit was with them, strengthening them
as they groaned for something new, until it could be born.
At
times this something new must have seemed impossible. Everything was stacked against it. But people like Peter Storey could hope and
work and wait because by the power of the Spirit, the great nevertheless of God was alive within them, and was struggling
to be born.
Most
of us will likely never experience this struggle in the dramatic fashion of Peter
Storey and others fighting apartheid.
But as Christians, all of us are called to be bearers of God’s nevertheless. The gift of the Spirit, which births the
Church, and which animates the Church wherever she truly exists, is much more
than a little warm fuzzy that comes over us now and then. The Spirit is hope and endurance and power
to, along with Jesus, witnesses to God’s nevertheless. Strengthened by the Spirit, we can embrace
the groaning of the world as together we await, and work for, God’s new day that
is struggling to be born.
This
is not work for the timid. To be Jesus’
witnesses is to take on the same sort of risks he did in speaking the truth to
power, in siding with the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable, in offering God’s
love to the outcast, the outsider, and the excluded. In fact this is work that makes sense only when
the Spirit fills us with the hope of God’s nevertheless.
I obviously cannot speak from
personal experience, but I have it on good authority that giving birth is not
for sissies. For that matter, neither is
nurturing and raising children, and I sometimes think that the distance we
males have historically kept from things related to child rearing and child
bearing speaks to a fundamental weakness of our gender, a weakness we try to
hide behind our use of coercive power.
Certainly the ministry of Jesus, which we are called to continue, looks
nothing like the typical male exercise of power. As a devotion I saw the other day said,
“(Jesus) lived in a male body but with a beautifully
feminine soul.”[3] And the Church needs that feminine soul if we
are to groan in labor, if we are to hope for what is not yet seen.
Can
these bones live? O God, you know. Is the Presbyterian Church pregnant? I hope so, and I sometimes think so. But I know with certainty that God’s Creation
is groaning as it awaits the birth of new day. And the gift of the Holy Spirit
is given to us, to the Church, that we might groan with it, pregnant with God’s
great nevertheless.
[1]
Maryann McKibben Dana, “What to Expect When Your Church Is Expecting,” April
26, 2012 in her blog, The Blue Room,
theblueroom.org
[2] Thanks to Clayton J. Schmit for
pointing me to Storey in “Homiletical Perspective,” Day of Pentecost, Romans
8:22-27, Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 3 (Louisville, KY: Westminster
John Knox Press, 2009) 15-19.
[3] From Richard Rohr, “Daily
Meditation: The Maternal Face of God -- May 17, 2012, “ see www.cacradicalgrace.org
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