“Where
the Crowds Thin”
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
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Recently,
I found myself engaged in a good conversation with a member of the church who
isn’t sure about the purpose of his life.
This particular man has lived a good life, in many ways an exemplary
life. He is well respected.
But still he wonders about his life’s purpose, as many of us do from
time to time. After listening for a
while, I suggested to him that I think that all of us, all the children of God,
really share the same large purpose. There
really is only one purpose in life though it gets expressed in many forms.
Written before we began to pay attention to inclusive language, the
Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian Church asks, “What is the chief end
(or purpose) of man?” The
answer? “The chief purpose of
man is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever.”
The Session of our church spent a lot of time
together this weekend seeking to discern the path and purpose of our
congregation for the coming stretch of time.
It was time well spent and we are far from finished.
But no matter how long and hard we work, I am not sure we shall be able
to improve on that old but ever-renewing vision: “The chief end of humanity
is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever.”
Envisioning,
or “seeing,” as far as I can tell, is the necessary prerequisite for
glorifying God and for becoming fully and truly human.
I do not so much mean seeing by sight, but by faith.
I mean “seeing” in a soulful, “getting it” kind of way.
If we cannot “see” the beauty of God’s creation all around us in
that deeper way, for instance, we shall think nothing of plundering it for our
own gain or of simply using it for our needs and God will not be glorified.
If we are blind to God’s passion for communities of shalom in which the
needs of all are honored and cared for, then we shall live mostly for our own
advantage and even at the expense of others, and God will not be glorified.
Jesus
understood the importance of seeing. He
seldom told people what to believe. Rather,
he invited them to venture into his vision for life, to come inside his stories,
to share his ministry and to see for themselves.
“Come and see,” Jesus said over and over again to any and all
who wondered about the kingdom of God he kept preaching about and living in
their midst.
What
they saw and what we can see in Jesus is what Harry Emerson Fosdick and then
Martin Luther King, Jr. called creative maladjustment.
Perhaps it is not always a compliment when somebody says of us who
bear the name and mantle of Jesus that we are “well-adjusted.”
Well-adjusted to what? To the
world and its ways of thinking, valuing, and doing that often stand opposed and
contrary to the gospel vision?
Speaking
of his own life of creative maladjustment, King said, “There are some
things in the social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted…I never
intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination.
I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule.
I never intend to adjust myself to violence.”
King was creatively maladjusted to those things and therein God was
glorified in Martin’s life and life on earth for all of us is better because
of his creative maladjustment.
John
the Baptist tells how it happened for Jesus.
“I was there,” he said (I am paraphrasing now; you won’t
find it exactly like this in scripture). “I
was there when Jesus got maladjusted. I
saw the Holy Spirit come down and land on him as if it was a dove.”
When we open ourselves to the Spirit of God, we begin to get
maladjusted. Creatively maladjusted.
When
Jesus went to the synagogue on that fateful Sabbath about which Luke tells us,
and he was asked to read from the scripture, he chose this passage from the
scroll of Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to
bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me
to proclaim release
to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim the
year of the Lord’s favor.”
Well
and good. That synagogue
congregation was proud of its young people as we are proud of ours and how
wonderful it was, they thought, to see Jesus taking an important part in the
church. Except that right then and there Jesus became creatively maladjusted.
He lit the fuse on that dynamite passage of scripture.
He told the people that it was time – then and there – to put skin on
those words he just had read. His
skin. Their skin.
He refused to adjust to their empty rituals that cared mightily about the
forms of religion but abstained from engaging the transforming power of it.
The richness of God’s life and love are for everyone, Jesus insisted,
Gentiles as well as Jews, women as well as men, poor as well as rich, prisoner
as well as free, gay as well as straight, weak as well as strong.
Jesus
was willing “to step out where the crowds thin” beyond business as
usual and where the going can get tough, to be creatively maladjusted so as to
open doors that will glorify God and make life on earth both more wondrous and
wonderful. “To step out where the crowds thin” invites misunderstanding and
loneliness. It is easier to stand
with the crowd, with the status quo, with the past, and with conventional wisdom
than it is to step out where the crowds
thin, where not as many people are willing to go because it asks a lot of
us, because it takes us beyond our comfort, because it requires us to reconsider
our thoughts and to reconstitute our lives.
The difficulties we invite and the slings and arrows we may suffer
when we dare to step out where the crowds
thin are, I think, what occasioned Jesus to say in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed
are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil
against you falsely on my account.”
Listen
to this snippet of a conversation between Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber who were
talking about the evolution of human consciousness and behavior:
The leading edge of evolution (or change
or transformation) can be a pretty lonely place.
How many are willing to step out where the crowds thin, reaching for
potentials barely forming on the brink of the future?
How many have the courage to ask the kind of questions that open doors to
tomorrow? Pioneers of consciousness
always have been few- that just seems to be the way it works.
But if the past has anything to teach us, perhaps it is that those few
have made all the difference. ‘This
hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists,’
Martin Luther King, Jr., declared almost half a century ago.
And the same undoubtedly holds true today.
Radical shifts happen, as he understood, ‘not through the complacent
adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of
the nonconforming minority.’ This
is the spiritual challenge to each one of us, the gauntlet thrown down by a
future that really does depend on individuals changing…” (February
– April 2004 issue of “What Is Enlightenment?”)
I
do not want to romanticize the spiritual discipline of creative maladjustment
for it is inevitably costly, as it surely was for Jesus.
But can you name anyone whose life was more free than his?
Anyone who was more alive?
Filled
with God’s Spirit, Jesus refused to be a part of the “conforming
majority.” He refused to live in
fear. He refused to be tethered to
the past. He always was saying
things like, “In the past you have heard
that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
But I have a new interpretation of the law and I say to you, ‘Love your
enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’”
His life of creative maladjustment is the most beautiful and hopeful
ever lived on earth. I want to call
the church that bears his name, I want to call this
church, I want to call myself and each of you to a similarly beautiful life of
creative maladjustment for love of the world, for love of God.
To
do so inevitably will take us out to where the crowds thin.
So many churches today are so invested in survival that they are losing
their souls, their reason and purpose for being.
Too often we in the church allow ourselves to become beholden to the
cultural mindset that the biggest churches are the best churches, that
popularity is the marker of a church’s success, and so we do things to please
or placate present or potential members that may not necessarily please God.
For
a church of Jesus Christ is called, is it not, to be a circle of transformed
nonconformists who live out on the edge of things, proclaiming in words and
deeds good news to the poor and poor in spirit, release to captives imprisoned
by their addictions or their backgrounds or their own poor judgments or a lack
of opportunity, or perhaps by an ill-formed theology or a rigidity of
conviction. The church is called to
shine a gospel light into the lives of those whose sight has become tired and
faded and jaded, to give the wary and weary and otherwise oppressed the freedom
to experience a new kind of life.
If
we are going to become more and more a church that lives out where the crowds
thin, the vanguard and not the rear guard, glorifying God rather than our own
perceived specialness, then we are going to have to be uncommonly committed,
dedicated, and generous because we may be dividing the load among fewer people
for a while than if we simply pander to the populace.
Ultimately gospel truth and institutional integrity will draw and
attract, but not until the company of the creatively maladjusted ventures out
where the crowds thin and bears its witness.
To
that witness I do call us in the name of Jesus the Christ.
Amen.
Copyright
© 2010 by First Presbyterian Church