:: EVERGREEN CHRISTIAN CHURCH ::

We have finished weaving the basket to hold our life sentences which will help shape the theological foundations of our faith in God through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. Our hope from the beginning has been to help us hold together our intellect and our emotions, our minds and our hearts, as we live with a reasoned and passionate faith in God in this postmodern, postchristian world. The goal has been to help us be a compassionate and lively community of God-centered, Spirit-filled, Bible-informed, grace-imbued followers in the way of Jesus Christ in an age of the dumbing down of faith.

In other words, we are seeking a robust religious experience in the midst of a strong and caring community in a messy, messy world. Our world is a world of individualism which runs counter to community and me-ness which runs counter to we-ness, resulting in fractured and fractious disintegration of human and religious life. It is a world full of knowledge and very short on wisdom. The disintegration is marked by polarization in almost all fields of human endeavor. We need to find again a center from which to think, behave, relate, serve, and hope. And that center is where we find our life sentences. That center is where we find our identity. That center is where we find our healing, strength, courage and integrity. In a word, the word (as I have been saying from the beginning of this series) is the word that gives life. Life to our own death marches. Life to our community. Life to our families. Life to our relationships. Life to our world. That word is Jesus Christ, for it is Jesus who invites us to life...abundant life, worthwhile life, meaningful life, and ultimately eternal life-a sharing in the life of God. The sentences I now offer are the ways I believe we can begin to access this dimension of life and avoid those ideas which lead away from life.

1. We must once again begin to live by symbols. With symbols we cannot plow the ground, begat children, move machines, or build bombs. Symbols do not possess this kind of efficacy. But they do meet another need, one as powerful as sex and as insistent as hunger. They meet the need to live in a world that makes sense. We cannot live by bread alone. As important as the bread we eat are the symbols we live by!

2. Any Christian community that eschews or ignores art, beauty, symbol and ritual is bankrupt in the time of crisis and mundane and powerless in the time of prosperity. We need to be called back in our religious experience and practice of Christian faith to mystery, to symbol, to sacrament, to enchantment and wonder, and to longing for the absent. The speech writers for President Bush recognized this in the speech they wrote for him to present from New Orleans in the midst of a terrible crisis and tragedy. They mostly used symbols of the absent to speak of hope and meaning for the present.

3 We need to once again function, all of us as individuals and our church as a community, with the grace of Christian humility, not Christian triumphalism. That is why the cross atop our sanctuary is slanted as a sign of humility rather than upright like a flagpole of triumph. Any church that believes it can tell all, say all, understand all, and possess all-nail down God and life-into a manipulable package deal of cheap grace, does not understand that their default is not simply theological, it is ethical. It is ethical because it is cruel. It is a cruelty that can only emerge from a hard self-righteousness. "I am right and everyone else is wrong!" It is cruel to rob life of its desires, its longings, its limitations, its humility and its mysterious awe. It is ultimately dehumanizing which is one of the great ethical issues of our day. A church of absolute certitude and lock-step thought inevitably ends in a hard and dangerous self-righteousness, the sin Jesus condemns on every page of the gospel. Self-righteousness is the impenetrable iron gate which bars us from the life Jesus seeks to give.

4. The fundamentalism of religion today-whether to the left or to the right-that is blindly fanatical is a danger to our world. Religion is not necessarily a good thing. There can be both good and bad religion and a great portion of the bible is about bad religion and freedom from it. It was a great part of the ministry of Jesus. Many people only have enough religion to make them serious but not to make them funny. Many people have only enough religion to make them hate, not enough to make them love. They have only enough religion to make them fearful, not enough to make them secure. They have only enough to make them anxious, but not enough to make them courageous. They have only enough to make them accusatory, not to make them forgiving.

They have only enough to make them hard, not enough to make them gracious. They have only enough to make them propagandists, not enough to make them mutual conversationalists. They have enough religion only to make ideologues, not enough to make them open-ended in the search for God's truth. This is why John Roberts, the supreme court nominee and all the senators on the committee agreed together...we do not want an ideologue as the chief justice of the supreme court. Religious fundamentalism in any of its forms-whether Islamic, Jewish, or Christian-is a danger to the health, peace and survival of our world.

5. This church or congregation will make known the invisible God by the shape the life of the congregation takes. God's invisible but incarnate presence is mediated through the shape of the community's life-in food shared, beauty experienced, forgiveness offered and received, architecture built, rituals performed, tears cried, joys celebrated, gestures expressed, parties held, art observed, worship enjoyed, people loved, justice delivered, and grace extended. What kind of God does our congregation reveal? Open, accepting, loving, caring, forgiving and supportive? Or grim, unhappy, judgmental, closed, fearful, and mean-spirited?

Vera and I were talking about her poetry this week. I asked her to read one of her great poems as the conclusion to today's sermon. It gets at these life sentences: Let us shape our life by the life-giving symbols of our faith (baptism, communion, cross, resurrection, life). Let us shape our life in the humility of mystery, sacrament, wonder and hope. Let us shape our life in the grace of humility rather than the pride of tiumphalism, in the love of Jesus not the hard righteousness of the Pharisees. Let us shape our life in open searching in the journey for truth, not the closed fanaticism of fundamentalist religion. Let us shape our life in the image of the life-giving, gracious and loving God. And so to Vera's poetic admonition entitled "Another Kind of Love."

Victor L. Hunter

Pastor, Evergreen Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)