What the World Needs Now
Catherine Zall
The First Congregational Church of Old Lyme
Text: Psalm 139:1-12
July 26, 2020
This meeting house is a special place for me. Over twenty-five years ago when my family moved to Lyme I ended up at FCCOL and over time was blessed with preaching, study and service especially at Koinonia that helped me fall in love with Jesus. And through Jesus helped me get a glimpse into the bigger mystery we call Christ.
So, when I get the chance to preach here now so many years after that first visit, I feel drawn back to the deep roots of faith…to foundational ideas…to what matters most about this journey we call the spiritual path.
The faith journey is, I think, infinitely complicated and mysterious but also in a way surprising simple at its core. What is at the heart of the life of faith?
One word that is often used is love. And that is true enough. But the word love has been so sentimentalized, that we need to supplement it with other words that point at the same reality. One of those is the word scripture uses to describe the fundamental character of God—righteousness.
Not righteousness as we sometimes use it today—self-righteousness. Biblical righteousness is a deeply nuanced word that names God’s shalom building action in the world.
At the heart of righteousness is the quest for Shalom which means bringing all the parts of the web of creation into right relationship
- Relationships of mutual care
- Relationships of peace
- Relationships that bring life
Righteousness is God’s active participation in the world.
Righteousness is not something God has but something God does.
Righteousness is not a static noun but an active verb.
Righteousness is what Martin Luther King Jr. described as active unconditional good will.
Righteousness is not a sentiment or feeling but a way of being.
At the heart…at the foundation…of the spiritual journey is, I believe the call for everyone of us to take up this same work of righteousness…manifest this same love in the world.
A call for every one of us to be part of God’s shalom building action in the world.
A call for every one of us to be an active agent of love.
A call for everyone one of us to experience ourselves as part of God’s great unfolding passion for a world of justice and peace.
For me a faith tradition is one vehicle that seeks to equip us to answer that call. Not the only one, of course, nature, relationships and so much more play a part.
But I think we gather as Christian faith communities, because we find in scripture…in the example of Jesus a vehicle that can equip us…lead us…support us in becoming agents of God’s unconditional love…help us become active builders of shalom.
So, in sermons each week we take one small piece of this vast tapestry of scripture and turn it around in our minds to see what it might tell us about God’s righteousness….to explore what it might tell us about what it might mean to act with love…what insights it gives us into the process of building shalom.
When I first started in ministry and had the chance to preach, I spent hours looking for the right scripture to match some point I wanted to make. Quite a while ago, however, I changed my process. Now I simply look at the scriptures assigned by the common lectionary for any particular day of the year I am preaching and choose one. This process led me to our text from Psalm 139 today.
Scripture is holy because it is alive—it speaks–of course about its own time– but also, I think to our time and more specifically to each of our individual lives.
God is still speaking in many ways but one of them, for me, is through scripture. The goal, I think, is to open ourselves to what is being said—not to hold scripture at arm’s length for academic study but to let whatever it has to say be in deep conversation with our lives and shape us to participate in God’s work in the world.
So, this morning I wanted to share a bit of what I heard when I immersed myself in this beautiful passage from Psalm 139. What I hear here most deeply is a description of the author’s experience of key aspects of God’s righteousness. I hear two key themes.
First, God’s shalom building action in the world is at once universal and deeply personal. God is deeply entwined in the specifics of creation. God’s action and love is for creation as a whole but also somehow uniquely and specially expressed in ways that recognizes each one of us in our own personal uniqueness.
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
3 You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
We are not interchangeable cogs in a giant machine but unique, seen, valued and known in our individual particularities.
Second God’s shalom building action is always at work. We cannot be separated from it—by distance or most importantly by our actions. Whether we put ourselves in heaven or in hell, God’s active love is there. If we embrace it or run away from it, God’s active love is there. If our lives are overwhelmed with darkness of any sort, God’s active love is still there.
8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
10 even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
12 even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
God’s shalom building action begins with a deep knowing of the uniqueness of every fragment of creation. God’s shalom building work has a unitary goal but plays out in ways that respect and even celebrate the uniqueness of every particle of creation. God’s righteousness isn’t a one size fits all…take it or leave it…imposed solution but a customized invitation to wholeness.
God’s shalom building action is not rationed based on worth but poured out lavishly and unconditionally on all of creation in all its various states of order and disarray.
Neither of these insights into God’s action in the world is unique to the author of Psalm 139—we see these same insights over and over through the Hebrew scriptures, the gospels and very clearly in Paul’s most moving letters.
But here is the key—are we willing and able to act on what we hear scripture saying? Does what we hear make any difference in our lives?
What the world needs now—I propose—is people who are willing to hear this understanding of righteousness and actively take up the task of partnering in God’s work to shape the world toward shalom.
This is hard. The way we have been shaped by culture and the needs of our own fragile egos make it a challenge to claim our identify as being made in God’s image…hard to pay attention to the Christ within each of our hearts—hard to take this biblical vision of shalom seriously, hard to be dare to imagine that we have a critical part to play in God’s shalom building work.
Like to share an example I am grappling with right now.
As many of you know for the past 14 years I have been working at HHC—this church community was key in our getting started and has been a steadfast partner throughout.
After all these years, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what this work was about…I was quite confident that we were approaching the work of addressing homelessness in the most appropriate way. But about a year ago I encountered a book called Radical Help that gave me a new way of seeing what we were doing. Helped me see how, while we were doing many good things, we had allowed our work to be shaped by the logic of the factory rather than the shalom building framework revealed by our text and so much of scripture.
Radical Help allowed me to see how profoundly we–and much of our social service system–had stopped being about putting the person in the center as a unique individual and had instead become increasingly like an assembly line that doled out a set of well-intentioned by standardized services. We—in addressing homelessness but also in health care and so many other services– had adopted the model of the factory and abandoned the shalom building model of scripture.
While our religious imagination would call us to:
- Search and seek to know people as individuals
- To take the time to discern the thoughts of those we served
- To be willing to search out each person’s unique path.
- To be curious about the bigger picture of all a person’s diverse ways
Across the social service landscape, we had transferred our focus from people to our services…our interactions with people in need had become increasingly transactional. As Radical Help says our focus has become: “managing, handling, treating and transferring”—people in need along a kind of standardized assembly line of pre-defined services. We had designed well intentioned systems where poor people needed to fit in rather than flexible supports that were designed respond to people as individuals. We turned people from unique individuals who we needed to get to know into customers for services and products we designed.
While our religious imagination would say:
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
10 even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
Too often our systems were saying—no traveling to the furthest limits of the sea– if you want anything from us you have to do it our way…on our timetable. We focused on fixing problems but left too little room for supporting dreams. Our systems were often too quick to drop the non-compliant individual rather than offering a right hand that would hold them fast.
Our religious imagination says.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
12 even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
Our systems on the other hand are often too quick to abandon people who entered the darkness of substance use disorder, or mental health challenges or anger or alienation. We too often lost the ability to see the light within that darkness.
Even as we fell into these traps, we did help people—and we continue to need well designed and effectively delivered services—but this book forced me to examine the assumptions and vision that shaped our work. This analysis opened my eyes to see the profound difference between the imagination of the factory and the imagination of God’s shalom building way of engaging creation.
And once I saw, I have started the hard work of exploring how we can keep what was effective but also change to more fully reflect the shalom building approach that so much of scripture points to as the path to life for all of creation.
This is not the place to unpack all the ways I hope we can change. What I simply want to highlight is my increasing conviction that what the world needs so desperately now is people willing to take scripture’s understanding of God’s righteousness…the teaching of Jesus…the spirit of Christ and bring it—however imperfectly—into our lives.
The specifics of the call will differ in each case…the shalom building actions that will be appropriate will differ based on our own particular circumstances. There are so many places—health care, the environment, our political dialogue (or lack thereof), poverty, the growing crisis of loneliness and so much more—where we need responses informed not by the logic of the factory or market place but by the logic of shalom building.
I have come to believe that God’s righteousness is expressed in the world through unlimited, unconditional invitation. God’s passion is shalom but it will not be imposed upon creation by force. God can make all things new but it will not happen without our cooperation. We will need to collectively choose life.
Can this happen? I am at the same time quite alarmed and still somewhat hopeful. Alarmed that we are in so many ways currently choosing death but hopeful because the door is always open and we can still collectively choose life.
I am hopeful because the capacity to hear God’s invitation and the power to partner with God in turning that invitation into reality is present in every one of us. I am alarmed by how little we seem to be listening to that invitation. I am alarmed as I look around and see the many ways we have gotten way off track but hopeful because I am confident that deep in our hearts we know the way.
What the world needs now, I think, is people committed to finding the wisdom, will and courage to turn what we hear in our hearts into the work of our hands. What the world needs now is a reinvigorated imagination that can replace the logic of the marketplace with the seemingly unlikely logic of shalom building.
But maybe to say it as simply as possible:
What the world needs now is love sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love sweet love
No not just for some but for everyone
With God’s help may we each be ever more committed and effective agents of that love.
Amen.