Yesterday
afternoon at four, eight human beings and one small dog set out from the front
door of St. John’s to make a procession through the streets of Petaluma. Chanting litanies and canticles and psalms, we
walked to the community garden between the Cavanaugh Rec Center and the ball
fields at McNear Park, where we read scriptures and said prayers and sang hymns
and chants, and made a sacred circle dance, to bless the garden and the people
who tend it. This is our second year doing
this, reviving a Christian tradition that goes back to the fifth century, of
going out of the church at this time of the year and processing around the
neighborhood to pray for its health and well-being, and especially, for
temperate weather, and the fertility of the earth, and an abundant harvest.
To
be honest, a month or so ago I had decided that, as much as I enjoyed last year’s
event, and would like to repeat it, I just had too much on my plate. But that was before Francis Frazier came to
talk to me about the Community Resilience Challenge. This is a grassroots campaign that’s been
going on this spring, with the majority of events happening this weekend. It aims to inspire thousands of Sonoma
County citizens and groups to take actions to save water, grow food, conserve energy, reduce waste and build community. And as Frances and I talked about how our
church might participate in this effort, it became clear that the Rogation
Procession and blessing of the community garden was the very thing to fit the
bill. But not only did we decide to
repeat last year’s event—we expanded on it.
To generate more goodwill and participation from the community, Frances
got her son Miguel to truck his handmade mobile wood-fired oven onto the community
garden site, and we invited the gardeners to join us after the blessing ceremony
for a potluck pizza party, courtesy of St. John’s Episcopal Church.
It
was my job to plan the liturgy, and as I went to work on it I ran into a
familiar problem, the problem of how to pray and worship in public as a
Christian. The Bible, the Prayer Book,
and the hymnals of the church give us a wealth of beautiful material for a
service like this. We have litanies and
psalms, canticles and parables that beautifully express a sacred vision of the
wholeness of the world. In texts that
blend images of wild nature, human husbandry, and the realm of the divine, they
speak profoundly of our faith in the goodness of creation, our gratitude for God’s
merciful providence, and our desire to be restored to unity with all. But
this language is unmistakably religious—Biblical and Christian.
And
when I imagined our neighbors at the McNear Community Garden, and the sort of
people who would feel drawn to participate in the Community Resilience
Challenge, I worried that this language might offend. It turns out I worried about it too
much. There was only one person who was
not a member of our congregation who came to the church for the procession. There were only a couple more who joined us
for the ritual at the garden, and if our Christian prayers made them
uncomfortable, they were too polite to say.
There were a few folks working in the garden when we got there, and they
kept a respectful distance while we did our religious thing. But when the prayers were over they came and
joined us, and others arrived in force. And
it was then, in breaking handmade wood-fired gluten-free pizza crust together, that
we found a joyful common ground.
It
turns out our neighbors could take care of themselves. They did not take part in our religious
activity, and so our religious language could not offend them. And yet they seemed genuinely glad that we
had come. Our singing, in particular,
came in for several appreciative comments.
One fellow, who had continued preparing his beds all the while our
ritual was going on, came up to me after it was over, and I’d already removed
my vestments, and asked if I would bless his seed potatoes before he covered
them with soil. So I grabbed my holy
water and started sprinkling, while speaking an impromptu, non-sectarian
potato-blessing prayer.
Yesterday’s
experience got me to wondering about why it is I feel I have to be so careful
about other people’s feelings when it comes to practicing my religion. If you think about it, if we had been a group
of Buddhist monks or Native American elders who had come to the community
garden to bless the site and what goes on there, our neighbors might have
regarded us with curiosity, or thought we were kind of quaint, or mysterious.
But they also would have felt tickled, and maybe a little honored, that
this exotic little tribe thought enough of what they are doing in that place to
come and perform their traditional ceremony.
But
then again, it is no secret that ours is not just one religion alongside other
religions. Our Bible states that clearly
again and again, and there are plenty of our fellow Christians who keep
demanding, even in this secular, multi-cultural and pluralistic age, that
nobody forget it. And for some of us
that’s an embarrassment. We want to be
liked. We just want everyone to get
along. We think of ourselves as the good
guys, and don’t care to be tarred with the brush of the conquistadors and
witch-burners, the religious bigots and theocrats and fundamentalists.
The
Bible does say that God is one, is universal. But it also says that the great creator of all
the worlds has a particular purpose for this one. And in order to bring about that purpose, God
intervenes in this world in particular places and times. God speaks and acts
through particular persons, a particular family, one particular nation. And so the Bible give us, not myths about divine
beings, but human stories—the stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Moses
and Miriam, David and Bathsheba. It give
us the words of the prophets, who speak to specific events in the economic,
political, and military fortunes of Israel, as moments of decisive importance
to God. And this strange way of thinking
about how God relates to the world is, of course, what gets us to what the New
Testament says about Jesus.
As
Christians we say that Jesus is the particular and personal revelation of who
God really is, how God really acts. But
our circumstances today force us to ask whether this necessarily excludes the
possibility that God acts in other places, in other persons, in other true and noble
paths to the higher kind of human life. And
what we are coming to is that what other people think and believe is not really
any of our business. If they are
redeemed by Christ, as we believe, it would hardly do to force that redemption upon
them in a way that does violence to their cultures and their consciences. It would not be consistent with the teaching
and example of him who said “The one who would be great among you must be last
of all and servant of all, for the Son of Man came not to be served but to
serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
We
say that Christ is ascended into heaven, and he is the universal Lord. But his Lordship is hidden in God. How he exercises it, and in what way it is
universal, is beyond us. It is not like
the rule of the powers of this world. All
we are responsible for is the
particular calling that the man Jesus of Nazareth has on our lives. And that is something we cannot respond to in general
terms. Christ calls us to be faithful as
unique persons with our own families and histories and gifts: in this
particular community where we encounter him in word and sacrament; in the
context of the particular place that we, as Episcopalian Christians, occupy in
the cultural, political, and religious landscape of Petaluma, California in the
year of Our Lord 2 Thousand Fifteen.
And
that means practicing our religion without the consolation of being approved of
by our neighbors. It means letting go
even of the satisfaction of damning them for all eternity if they don’t. It means letting go of any expectation that
they will join us, but seeking common ground with them even as we remain rooted
in our own particular calling, knowing that if there is any trace of coercion
or manipulation in the way that we relate to them, they will sniff it out and
shun us like the plague. It means going
into the world as Jesus prayed we would, as those who don’t belong to the
world, but who seek the world’s salvation that can only come from God.
It’s
a demanding dance, so Jesus does two things for us before he goes up to heaven. Today’s gospel lesson tells us that he makes
a prayer, a prayer that we will be protected from the Evil One, who is always
trying to turn our dance with the world into a war. And he makes a promise, a promise to send us
the Holy Spirit to teach us the steps of the dance.
He
makes a promise
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