New Testament Reading—Luke 22: 14-18, 28-30
I grew up in a part of Illinois where one could drive down a country road and see barns in various states of repair and disrepair. One could see barns with gravity defying lopsidedness, missing boards, and paint long since peeled off. On the same road, one could also see barns gleaming with brand new metal and paint. They looked polished and clean enough to eat off. My question for each of you this morning is what shape is your barn in? Is it gleaming and standing tall? Is it sturdy and prepared for any storm? Or, is it sagging to one side? Could it use a paint job? Some structural reinforcements? Or, maybe a whole new foundation? I can just hear the coffee hour conversations now. “And, what shape is your barn in? You look a bit saggy to me.”
For many years, Susan Wells and her husband ran a renewal program on their ranch in Montana for burnt-out community organizers and activists. She described the program as being akin to bringing a lopsided barn “back into balance.” When they initially bought their ranch, it had a barn that was in disrepair. “Sunlight and swallows entered at will through broken windows and holes in the roof.” The barn tilted eighteen degrees one way. The main problem was that the slant of the earth had overtime pushed the foundation inwards. The solution was to lay a whole new foundation.
Wells observes that “like that weathered” barn “people also can get knocked off center by sustained pressure.” A family crisis, a trip to the hospital, the demands of a job can all push one off center. Sometimes we might be able to bounce back right away, but at other times “we need assistance to rediscover that place of equilibrium.” This can happen in different ways for different people. Some people just need some realignments and some additional supports, but no matter what, one needs to have a solid foundation, and what Wells discovered is that central to having a good foundation is “simple human caring.” Care is not only what patches us back together from the bumps and bruises of life, it is also what allows us to be ourselves, to reach our full potential, to gain courage, and to take risks. It is what sends us the message that we are valuable and worthy.
While Wells worked with community organizers and activists, I suspect that many people in other fields could identify with some of the burnout problems she saw in residents. She saw people whose jobs had consumed so much of their lives that their work became their only arena for acquiring a sense of self-worth. She saw people whose jobs had consumed so much of their lives that they no longer had time for the simple pleasures of friendship. She saw people who at some point in their lives “began to sacrifice too much and run on empty too often.” When I read that, one job immediately came to mind for me: the job of being mom or being dad.
Wells tells one particularly striking story of an activist named Jean Idell Smalls who was also a mother and grandmother. Idell worked with black teenage girls in the South Carolina Sea Islands to help strengthen their self-image as speakers of the Gullah dialect, an Africanized English Creole language that dates back to slavery. The ranch provided the residents with dinner, and for Idell “there was not a mountain or vista [in Montana] that matched the magnificence of having someone else prepare her supper dinner night after night. Sometimes she would pull her chair into the kitchen so as not to miss a single moment of the work she did not have to do.”
Wells notes that one of the things the ranch did for people who were living lives that led to burnout is that it disrupted the destructive patterns and ruts into which they had fallen. A disruptive intervention was sometimes necessary in order for them to realize what they needed to do in order to get their lives back into equilibrium, to get their barn standing straight again. Thrown into a different context away from work they rediscovered parts of themselves that had disappeared sometime ago. They rediscovered laughter, nature, silence, creativity, and reflection.
The work of the renewal program made me think of a couple of things. First, maybe all of us—regardless of our age—occasionally need to be campers again. When I was growing up, camp was a lifesaver for me. During the school year, I could almost forget how to laugh, but then I could go to camp and rediscover that part of me. The second thing I realized is that church can have a role to play in helping us to keep our barns in good shape. Church can help in practical ways by assisting parents in caring for children, so that they don’t get parent burnout. The childcare offered by our youth group is one example of that. Church can also create camp-like experiences for adults as well as for kids. It may not involve s’mores and hot dogs, but it might involve laughter and storytelling. Moreover, churches can certainly be places of care where deacons and friends can help us get our equilibrium back after an illness or the loss of a loved one.
On another level, church can additionally create a sacred space for celebrating the holy holidays of our Christian faith that renew us. Communion is one of those holy holidays. The early Christians instituted it to celebrate the Kingdom of God. Scholars tell us that the historical Jesus did not start the practice of communion and probably did not speak of the bread and wine at his last supper. More than likely what happened is that early Christians remembered Jesus for having meals of open fellowship and that over time this memory evolved into a ritual practice. At some point, the practice eventually evolved into something akin to a “New Passover” celebration. Whereas Passover was traditionally celebrated to remember the Exodus of Jews from Egypt, it came to have a significance that evoked an anticipated Exodus of Jews from the Roman Empire. The Kingdom of God was the new Promised Land and Jesus was the new Moses.
Communion is our holiday for celebrating the Kingdom. It’s our day to refocus our sights on what gives our lives meaning as Christians. It’s our day to hitch our wagon up to that great dream that pulls us back into equilibrium. It’s our day to take a look at our life’s map and say, “This is where I am now, and this is where I need to go to get back on track for the Kingdom.”
One of my favorite things to do to renew myself is to recall the part of my life story that pertains to what my sense of purpose and meaning in life are, in other words to remember the part of my life story that pertains to my calling in life. Each of us has our own individual calling. Frederick Buechner describes our call as follows. He says, “The place where God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” What is your calling in life? What is your story?
In his autobiography, the former Civil Rights leader and current congressman John Lewis tells his story. During the fall of 1958, when he was a young college student in Nashville, Tennessee, he reached a turning point in his life. His pastor had told him that that night a civil rights organization called Fellowship of Reconciliation would be holding a workshop at their church, Clark Memorial. About this church as it stands today, Lewis says:
There are no plaques, no monuments, nothing to suggest that anything historic happened there. It’s just a little church on a sleepy street lined with paint-peeled bungalows, dirt yards and barking dogs. But from the autumn of 1958 into the following fall, that little building played a major role in educating, preparing and shaping a group of young men and women who would lead the way for years to come in the nonviolent struggle for civil rights in America.
The teacher for the workshops was James Lawson, who would become a prominent figure in the civil rights movement. The idea “beyond any other” that “was the fulcrum of all that” Lawson taught was that of the Beloved Community, the Kingdom of God on earth. For Lawson, for King, for Lewis, and for many others, this was the idea that guided them through the years ahead. Lewis describes his life story as being the story of the path he followed in pursuit of the Beloved Community.
I believe that each us has our own individual call, our own beautiful, colorful strand that is at the core of who we are. I believe that it is at church where we have the opportunity to weave our diverse and different individual strands together into a single garment. And, I believe it is this concept, the concept of the Beloved Community, that weaves them all together into the fabric of God’s will. Let us all celebrate the Kingdom of God today. Let us celebrate it for drawing us together. Let us celebrate it for renewing our lives with meaning and purpose. Amen.