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Never Too Small, August 26, 2007 |
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Written by Jeanne Knepper
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Saturday, 08 September 2007 |
NEVER TOO SMALL
Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 13:10-17
August 26, 2007
On March 31, 1789, John Wesley, an ordained minister of the Church of England who had no parish met with George Whitefield to discuss Whitefield’s new practice of preaching to the poor while standing in the fields. Wesley was disturbed by the practices that Whitefield proposed. That night, Wesley wrote in his journal,
I could scarce reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which he set me an example on Sunday, having been all my life (till very lately) so tenacious on every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.
The next day, Wesley reflected that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was “one pretty remarkable precedent of field-preaching, though I suppose there were churches at that time also.” A day later, on April 2, John Wesley “submitted to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining to the city to about three thousand people.” Of his first experience at field preaching, Wesley wrote:
The Scripture on which I spoke is this (is it possible that anyone should be ignorant that it is fulfilled in every true minister of Christ?), “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the broken-hearted; to preach deliverance to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
Are you wondering, why field preaching? It was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, a time when new settlements of workers and miners were springing up near the mines and mills. England had been a country divided into parishes, a church in each. Because the weather was often cool and the buildings were drafty, individual families owned pews with half walls. Inside their pew, they would feed a small stove to keep them, and their children, who crawled around at their feet, warm. All the pews belonged to families, who had worshipped in them for ages. There was literally no place in the churches for the miners and mill-workers. If Wesley was not willing to speak to them in the fields, there was nowhere else they could gather to hear him. Field preaching, then, was the only way to reach these displaced and often poor workers.
From this beginning comes the denomination we now know as the United Methodist Church, but it was not a smooth birthing. Wesley was met with much official condemnation for his choice to carry the gospel to people who had no place in the parishes of his day. What he was doing was irregular, unwelcome, and profoundly disturbing to those who held the power of governance in his own denomination, the Church of England. When asked how he could justify breaking the rules of his church—and John Wesley himself never left the Church of England—he turned to the words of Peter, present in Acts 5:29: “We must obey God rather than any human authority.”
We are a people who believes that God is a God of history, that is, that God is present and active in human affairs in the present, not only in the distant past. This must mean, by extension, that we believe that God calls people to the prophetic role, not just in the past, but throughout history and even now. And, when we are convince that God is at work in the words and actions of people in our midst, it is imperative that we stop, step back, listen, and really consider what they are saying to us.
But there is a problem with prophetic voices: they are generally saying something we don’t much want to hear, especially if we are comfortable with things as they are. Moreover, sometimes the people claiming to speak for God are self-serving charlatans who use religion to feather their own nests and promote super-religious nationalistic or hate-filled clap-trap that would—and does, I think—turn God’s stomach. How then are we to know who is called by God to speak God’s new word to our time?
Did you know that there were many prophets in Israel and Judah, that the role of prophet was an established religious role as historic and as honored as that of priest. Priests tended to the rituals of the faith; prophets spoke the words of God to the kings and leaders of the nations. There were prophetic houses and traditions and families. Kings consulted the prophets and expected them to lead them wisely. Being humans with power, most kings expected that wise prophetic leadership would celebrate what the king wanted to do, would lift up and honor the goodness of the nation. There were probably hundreds of prophets who did just that, prophets on the royal payroll, prophets speaking the words the kings wanted to hear.
Jeremiah was not such a prophet. Nor was Isaiah, or Ezekiel, or, in fact, any of the other prophets that we have collected for us in the books of the Bible. When the people of God considered, after the fact, which prophetic writings were truly the word of God, they turned to the prophets who were not appreciated in their times, to the prophets who made people, particularly people who were in power, particularly p0eople who benefited from the way things were, very uncomfortable. They turned to the words of prophets who never set out to be speakers from God, to the ones that God chose and commissioned as God’s voice in their own time.
Jeremiah didn’t want to be a prophet. Our text tells us, he responded to the call, to God’s call, with the words, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” In saying this, he was so much in the tradition of the people God has called in the past: Moses responding, “You don’t want me; I stutter. Take my brother Aaron.” Amos arguing, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees.” But the Lord told Amos, “Go, prophecy to my people Israel.”
Jesus was acting like a prophet when he confronted the religious leaders of his time. When he healed a woman who had been crippled for years, when he healed her in the synagogue, on the Sabbath, he was breaking the rules. Women were not supposed to enter into the company of worshipping men. The very act of receiving this woman into this space was a challenge, a breaking of tradition. But it was more than that. The religious community itself had contributed to her brokenness. Do you remember, religious people often argued that people were poor, or blind, or crippled because they had sinned, because they were, in their very essence, displeasing to God.
Jesus healed on the Sabbath because he could not, and we should not, compartmentalize and separate worship of God from actions that set captives free. The community, by believing that the woman’s crippled condition was a manifestation of sin, had contributed to her injury. When Jesus confronted the callousness of the faith community, he began to restore her dignity. He also took a step towards healing the brokenness of the community itself, which also needed to be healed, of false judgment, of segregation, of being willing to treat her with less compassion and with less dignity, than they had for their beasts of burden.
God is a God of history, actively calling men and women to speak and act for justice, for healing, for restored dignity, even today. And we, we who might think of ourselves as “Only a little church,” we have been called to take some small part in the living out of those choices. We do that in multiple ways. We are a Reconciling Congregation, actively proclaiming that people are welcome here regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation. We proclaim our commitments in other ways as well. Last spring, our Administrative Council considered a request to host a special service of ordination, a service ordaining Roman Catholic women to the diaconate and to the priesthood, here, at University Park. We decided—you decided, through your administrative process—that we were willing to host that service. As it turned out, the service took place elsewhere, at Zion United Church of Christ in Gresham, on Saturday, July 28, 2007. It was one of several services ordaining 9 Roman Catholic women to the priesthood that have happened in North America this year. The mission of Roman Catholic Womenpriests is to spiritually prepare, ordain, and support women and men from all states of life, who are theologically qualified, who are committed to an inclusive model of Church, and who are called by the Holy Spirit and their communities to minister within the Roman Catholic Church.
On Friday, August 17, the Oregonian ran a story about the ordination of Toni Tortorilla, a woman who lives here in North Portland, a woman who has felt a call to the priesthood since she was 5 year s old, a woman who has tried in many ways to live out that call within the structures of the Roman Catholic church before finally concluding that God was indeed calling her to the priesthood, a woman who was ordained at the service on July 28. On August 23, Archbishop John Vlazny wrote to readers of the Catholic Sentinel, saying in part,
My main purpose in speaking up now is to assure you that there was no ordination of a Roman Catholic priest at Zion United Church of Christ in Gresham on July 28. Even though Catholics were involved, the claim that it was a Catholic ceremony is wrong. . . Any person who claims to have been ordained by a Catholic bishop, priest, or deacon without the proper authorization from church authorities not only is making a false representation of the facts but also by such an act leaves our church community.
John Wesley, in his own belief, died a member of the Church of England, and yet we who are United Methodists look to him as the founder of our denomination because he chose to ordain ministers to take communion to his flocks in the colonies, because he chose to do irregular and unauthorized ordinations. Toni Tortorilla is, in her belief, a Roman Catholic, and at this point, an ordained Roman Catholic priest, someone seeking to reform her own tradition from within. We cannot know now how history will treat the ordinations that are happening now, and here, but we can decide, as one small church, whether we are called by God to participate in this movement of the Spirit. Last Sunday, the Administrative Council of University Park UMC decided unanimously to make our sanctuary available once a month for worship services that she will lead.
When Jesus healed a woman who had been persecuted and crippled by the attitudes of her faith community, her first response was to stand up straight and began praising God. Still there in the synagogue, we might note that she began to take leadership by claiming her own identity as a daughter of Abraham. And the crowd rejoiced at the wonderful things that Jesus was doing.
May it ever be so. Amen.
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