Sermons

It is great to see you again! The last two Sundays I was with my son John and seven other Reservoir friends in India. I’ve spent the last two weeks jet-lagged, and my memory of our trip is something like third part on the plane, third part eating, and third part sitting in traffic! It was exhausting, but a really beautiful time too. Our team from Reservoir was with our partners in Asha, who work for community empowerment and transformation in the slums of the great city of Delhi.

I am so grateful for this you all’s support in making the trip happen. Even though we go to Asha as learners for all they can give us, I was also really proud of all that the Reservoir community has to offer in this partnership. We brought an audiologist from our community, Daniel Hendrix, who hearing tested dozens of people and fitted a number of them with hearing aids. We had a psychiatrist, Dr. John Peteet, and a social worker, Amanda Proctor, meet with many slum residents so they could advise Asha on building out their community mental health resources. We had one of our physical therapists Dr. Jean Peteet developing a train the trainer model for pushing much-needed women’s health exercise into Delhi’s slums. So many doctors – Drs. Lucas and Justina Oliveira brought soccer balls and music and wise mentoring to Asha’s children’s groups and college students. And Cate Nelson – with her joy and presence – led many children’s group sessions that my son John and the rest of the team helped facilitate as well.

You are a really talented congregation, and it’s a joy to see those talents shared with the developing world’s urban poor. When I wasn’t sleepy, I was beaming with pride the whole week!

I mentioned, though, that we partner with Asha not so much for what we have to give them, but for what they have to teach us. One memory that captures this is a home visit some of us had in a slum called Mayapuri. Mayapuri is sandwiched between India’s largest scrap metal junkyard and a busy set of freight train tracks. It’s dirty and crowded and a hard place to live, but Asha is present not with pity but with empowerment. We had just met a woman who ran two small business from her home where she sat on a mat, because she’d lost her legs in an accident on the rail line. With loans she’d earned through Asha’s financial inclusion program, she’d set up a tea shop and a clothes-mending business, both of which were making her money.

And then we visited the home of a thirty-year old mother named Largee. She lived with her family in one room tucked against the railway tracks and told us that with the noise and the lack of sanitation or cooking, and the water that got in all the time, it was a really hard place to raise a family. But as we spent time with her, her courage and will to survive inspired us. One of our team members, a fellow mom, asked if it would be alright to pray for her, and she welcomed that. Another bent down and touched her foot, an Indian symbol of honor and respect, and said how moved we were by her courage. She was shocked by that but she smiled.

And I thought, in moments like this again and again, this is why we’re here. We’re seeing the face of God and the presence of Jesus in Largee, the empowered mom with the will to survive; in Suman, the joyful young woman who’s working to become a social worker and participate in the uplift of her community; in Sonab, the student who despite all the ways she’s been diminished has hope and determination for what her life will become, in Shiv, the leader who takes pride in organizing the slum neighborhood he himself grew up in.

I bring teams from Reservoir to be with Asha in Delhi’s slums because it is hard and disruptive – it profoundly breaks my rhythms of life, and helps me stop and notice where I’ve been going. And I go because I see God afresh there and am reminded of the spiritually rich, relationally rich – more purposeful, less lonely life I am made for.

The old word for this kind of journey to recenter our lives and meet with God is pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is a journey we undertake to a place we consider sacred, where we hope to find God. Pilgrimage is a break from the rhythms of our ordinary life, to discover what’s missing or disordered in our lives as we’re living them now. Pilgrimage is is usually something we do with others, not alone.  It’s a walk we take that we hope will help us learn something we need to know, to find something spiritual, something internal, we need to have, to center ourselves in more hope and more truth.

And pilgrimage is a pretty good metaphor to the six-week season I’m about to invite you into, so it’s our topic today.

Pilgrimage is an important part of most ancient faith traditions. And in our Jesus-centered tradition, really in the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faith traditions too, it goes back as far as the great father of faith, Abraham.

I’ll read a first century midrash – or creative reflection – on Abraham’s long pilgrimage. It’s from a New Testament letter called Hebrews, and it goes like this:

Hebrews 11:8-16 (CEB)

8 By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was going to receive as an inheritance. He went out without knowing where he was going.

9 By faith he lived in the land he had been promised as a stranger. He lived in tents along with Isaac and Jacob, who were coheirs of the same promise. 10 He was looking forward to a city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

11 By faith even Sarah received the ability to have a child, though she herself was barren and past the age for having children, because she believed that the one who promised was faithful. 12 So descendants were born from one man (and he was as good as dead). They were as many as the number of the stars in the sky and as countless as the grains of sand on the seashore. 13 All these people died in faith without receiving the promises, but they saw the promises from a distance and welcomed them. They confessed that they were strangers and immigrants on earth. 14 People who say this kind of thing make it clear that they are looking for a homeland. 15 If they had been thinking about the country that they had left, they would have had the opportunity to return to it.16 But at this point in time, they are longing for a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore, God isn’t ashamed to be called their God—he has prepared a city for them.

Abraham had a hometown. He had a family and friends. He had a religion and community in which he was raised. Presumably, he apprenticed into some way to make a living. He had his family home he could live in and inherit when his parents died.

But he sensed there was something more, that the life he’d settled into as he’d grown up wasn’t complete. Best as he could tell, God had something different for him. So he took a walk, he emigrated from his homeland and lived as a stranger, as an immigrant in someone else’s land, looking for God, looking – Hebrews tells us – for the life God was building for him.

Sarah traveled with Abraham. They were married, so they were going to be in this together. But Hebrews says Sarah was also on an inner pilgrimage. She was sure that God meant for her to have children. That was part of the great hope Abraham and Sarah each had for what God was building. But as year after year went by, and no children came, Sarah had to dig deep and hope for more.

Their child Isaac and their grandchild Jacob took up this life of pilgrimage too. They lived in tents rather than houses because a mediocre life of less than their destiny wasn’t good enough for them. They knew God had more.

These famous patriarchs and matriarch of faith are the father and mother of all of us who dare hope for what we’re sure God would want for us, even when it isn’t clear how that will happen. They’re the father and mother of all of us who know we need to keep moving, even though we don’t know where we are going.

Hebrews says in the long run what we get when we hope for a full life in God is we get a home. We get security and fulfillment, in this life or the next. And in the present we can know God is proud of us, and we have whole hearts that know we haven’t settled or compromised.

But in the present, we get disruption. People who are looking for more from God than we have within us right now have to break the rhythm of our lives sometimes and live like strangers. This second word in Hebrews that’s translated “immigrants” here is often translated “pilgrims.”

Now some of you have literally become strangers and immigrants in your lives. You or your parents wanted something different than your town and life of origin provided, and you left your home, left your country to be where you are today. You immigrants in our congregation, you have all our admiration and respect, because that kind of lifelong pilgrimage might lead to something better for you or for the generations to follow you, but I know it also often means a life of not being fully at home either where you come from or where you’ve gone. And it’s hard to feel like a stranger. So immigrants in our midst today, God bless your bold journey. May you and your children find a deep sense of home among us. May your journey be blessed.

And others of you who are here are not immigrants but resonate right away with this text. Some of us who are here have for a long time been looking for something in life we don’t yet have, but we think it’s our lot to keep hoping and to keep trying. So if that’s you, God bless your hopes today as well.

But even if this isn’t you, for all of us, though, times and seasons of pilgrimage of some kind are a core part of a life of faith.

What is pilgrimage? Pilgrimage is a journey, exterior or interior, to a destination, known or unknown. It can be a literal trip, where we travel somewhere and hope that in the travelling or in the arriving we will learn something new, or in some way meet God.

And pilgrimage is a break with our settled, regular life. It’s delaying gratification. It’s choosing to give up some short-term good we have for a longer-term but not fully known or experience “great” that we hope to find.

A scholar whose work I follow recently described an experience of pilgrimage she had that I want to tell you about. Her name is Christena Cleveland, and she’s visited this church a couple of times before in years past. She wrote recently about a time after publishing her first book, when she’d been on tour. And her life as an author and speaker and resource for churches had exposed her to so much racism and misogyny in churches that had just worn her out. She was exhausted and coping as best she could.

When she was asked to fill-in as the lead professor on a study tour to Brazil. And while there for a month, living in beauty of Northeast, seaside Brazil and immersed in Afro-Brazilian culture, she realized she was on pilgrimage. She had the freedom to notice just how much her life wasn’t what God meant for her, and had the chance to start to step into more hope and healing that had been eluding her.  

Here’s one of her quotes about experiences like this. She writes:

Pilgrimage is about longing, consciousness and intentionality. Pilgrimage is about noticing where we have been and where we have been broken, beaten and bruised.  Pilgrimage is about acknowledging that part of us is perishing and that we’re seeking new life. Pilgrimage is about looking for hope, healing, beauty and truth.

Three words: longing, consciousness, and intentionality. Which she breaks down further as these three things:

1. noticing where we are perishing,
2. seeking new life, and
3. specifically, looking for hope, healing, beauty, and truth.

In my trips to be with the good people of Asha, I find – as I did this month – that far from home, I notice aspects of my life in Boston that are broken – ways I’m too busy to live wholeheartedly, ways that my overscheduled, overdriven life has cut me off from others, sometimes even cut me off from my own thoughts and heart. Ways that when I do notice the state of my heart, I don’t like all that I find there.

But immersed in Asha’s neighborhoods where people are living out hope, joy, generosity, simplicity, and empowerment and transforming their communities in the process, I find myself with more hope and vision for what my life back home can look like.

Travel can often be at the center of a pilgrimage. When I was first preparing to travel to India a little over two years ago,  a friend gave me advice that surprised me. I was preparing for all that I might learn about the slum communities of Delhi and the work of Asha there, but my friend told me to pay attention to what I’d learn about myself, and what I’d notice in my family, who were travelling with me. I hadn’t expected that. But he knew that travel often provided an opportunity for longing, consciousness, and intentionality – for noticing where we are perishing, and for seeking and starting to find new life.

Physical journeys are special times and they cost us something, and the cost and novelty help us focus. They also break our rhythm and help us pay attention. A physical journey, a literal pilgrimage, can help us attend to our inner lives.

So these travel pilgrimages have their place. Abraham, after all, travelled across the Ancient Near East. There is literature of pilgrimage in the psalms from the ancient Jewish tradition of going up to Jerusalem for the high holidays. Like the Hajj to Mecca for Muslims, or Christians that go on the Camino in Spain or to other so-called holy sites.

But travel pilgrimage can cost a lot, a lot of time and budget. And we can’t all drop what we’re doing and fly to Jerusalem, or Spain, or Brazil, or India, or wherever it is we hope to find new perspective and life, whenever it is that we need it.

So thankfully, church tradition has supplied an annual opportunity for a type of pilgrimage that doesn’t involve going anywhere involved, and it’s the season we’re about to begin, which is called Lent.

Lent is related to an Old English word for spring, since this season takes place during the start of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s the 40 days before Easter, when churches have traditionally invited people into pilgrimage.

It’s a time to break our ordinary rhythms, a time for longing, consciousness, and intentionality. Lent is a time to notice where we are perishing, to seek new life, and to specifically look for hope, healing, beauty, and truth.

The great Jewish mystic Abraham Heschel called all of faith “not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.” I love that line, that faith is an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Faith involves noticing where our hearts are lonely or empty or broken. Where our lives are stunted or have fallen off course. And faith is a conscious longing and directing of our hearts and lives toward hope, healing, beauty, truth, and love.

I don’t know how your heart is lonely or empty or broken. I’ve heard from some of you around this past week’s news that one of the world’s larger Christian denominations rejected the full inclusion of LGBTQ Christians – that was heart-breaking for many of us. At the same time, the world’s largest Christian denomination and our country’s second largest Christian denomination are both embroiled in scandals of sexual abuse and assault – and don’t show any real signs of righting the ship. So perhaps churches have broken your heart. If so, as one of the pastors at Reservoir Church, let me say that it is an honor and joy to me that you are here today, and I pray this community holds your trust well and always honors you with dignity – that it certainly our intention.

But I know you have all manner of other stories today of how your hearts are lonely or empty or broken, or how your lives are stunted or have fallen off course. These may be mild things, they may also be quite serious. There’s a range, I know.

But God is with us. The divine, Heschel says, rings our hearts like a bell and is waiting to enter our empty perishing lives. The God at the focus of Sarah and Abraham’s faith is building a better city and wants to stir hope and vision in us as we walk there together.

This lent, we’ll pay attention to these things, we’ll take this walk together.

We’ve called this season of Lent other names at other times because we’ve made it into a season to ask God for big things for our church or to ask God for big things that we personally want. And there are times and places for doing that, and we’ll do that again in other seasons. But this year, our pastoral team really felt led to celebrate lent the way our tradition has given us. Because while churches have screwed up all manner of things, this season of Lent is a gem and we think a keeper.

Typically, three things have been part of this tradition:

One, it’s been a season of fasting. This is maybe the one thing people know about Lent if they don’t anything else. That there are people who give something up for lent – don’t eat meat or skip a meal on Fridays, or don’t drink alcohol or eat sweets, or stop watching netflix, or whatever.

The point of this is to break our rhythm in some specific outer way to break our rhythm internally as well. This is the noticing how we are perishing part of our Lent. Again, you can stop eating food, in different forms, here and there. Or you can fast some form of social media or entertainment, or try something creative like fasting from criticism or complaint or something. But I encourage something tangible, and something that might open up some time in your life. Because in giving up a short-term, known “good”, the goal – as in pilgrimage –  is to make space for a longer-term, unknown “great.” To notice the state of your heart and life, and any way in which you’re perishing or longing for more.

But I invite you to consider a form of fasting this year for Lent. We’ll have a soft start with our evening Ash Wednesday service this Wednesday – the information is in your Events and Happenings sheet. And that’s the day that Lent most traditionally begins. But we’ll start in earnest again next Sunday, when I’ll invite you once more to consider fasting.

The second thing that’s typically part of Lent is that it’s a season to stretch our generosity. This much less famous than the fasting, but it’s another form of giving something up. Of becoming less attached to our stuff, and more attached to God, and really just less anxious, more free.

Lent in our tradition has always been a time of simplifying and letting go, so we remember we aren’t defined by the things or the money or the experiences we accumulate, and we aren’t defined by our debts or anxieties about money.

Early in Abraham’s journey of pilgrimage, at the very time when he has the opportunity to get really wealthy and stop looking for more, he confronts this mysterious priest named Melchizedek and pledges to him a tenth of all his possessions. This is the first reference in the Bible to what’s called tithing, or giving a tenth of our income or possessions to God’s work in the world.

Melchizedek is this almost mythic mysterious figure, so this has been a cool scene for imaginative, mythic literature. The priest Melchizedek shows up in an important way in a modern novel The Alchemist that I used to love to teach when I was an English teacher. The Jesus tradition sees in Mechizedek a forerunner of Jesus as well. A human being who can connect heaven to earth, who can link our lives with the life of God in us.

All to say, pilgrimage always takes a cost, and always involves letting go, and Lent has invited this through choosing more generosity and giving to Jesus in some way.

By all means do this however you like. But while Reservoir Church is not Jesus by any means – we’re very clear about that, we’ll also help us along by launching a giving campaign at Reservoir to encourage new regular givers to this ministry if that isn’t your practice yet. Again, choose another form of generosity if you like, but next Sunday as we start Lent, we’ll share a small way this community’s work can be tied to that practice for you if you like.

So fasting and generosity are about letting go, and then the third hallmark of Lent is about seeking to find more of the divine, more hope, healing, beauty, truth, and love.

Lent is also a season for spiritual formation through intentional, structured, Jesus-centered spiritual practice. Our primary vehicle for this is a themed community exploration that involves a six week Bible guide you can use on your own or in community groups here, and our Sunday services that connect to it. I’ll share a lot more about this next Sunday, but I’m really excited about this year’s pilgrimage. We’ve called it The Wild Places, and we’ll be looking at themes of wilderness and exile in the Bible – times when people notice life is out of control or are confronted with some way in which they are perishing. But also times where this becomes fruitful grounds for learning, for discovery, for encounter, and for the launching of an impossibly hopeful next chapter as well.

We’ll have a guide for you each week, starting next Sunday, that you can use. And we’ll have some neat stuff on Sundays – a Sunday on doubt, a powerful guest preacher from the BU School of Divinity another week, another participatory liturgy developed by our own Ivy Anthony and team, some great stories told by members of our community, and much more.

All to say, our season of Lent gets warmed up some more mid-week at our Ash Wednesday service if you or your community group would like to be there, and then starts in earnest next Sunday. If you call this church your home, we also have one of our quarterly members’ meetings tonight – a potluck from 5-7 (so bring food to share!). And there, apart from a usual update from our Board, our families pastor Kim Messenger will lead us in an interactive meditation of the life of Jesus, inspired by the storytelling materials we use with our young children. Another way to prepare us for this season.

Our real hope with Lent of course isn’t about our specific program at Reservoir. That’s just our attempt to make this tangible and accessible together as a community.

The real hope is a fruitful season of inner pilgrimage for us all, of fasting and generosity that breaks rhythm, that makes space, that helps us see any ways we are perishing. And the hope is a season of pilgrimage in which we can consciously and intentionally seek life in the midst of that, and discover more and more hope, beauty, life, truth, and love.

And so that’s the invitation we wrap up on. I’m going to breeze over the slides and program notes, because I’m not sure I put the words so right this week, but our invitation each day this week is just these two parts:

• to notice any ways our lives are not working, to notice how we are perishing. Not to try to fix it, but just to notice with curiosity.

And

• To say to God that this Lent, we’d like to seek life. We’d like to be on pilgrimage: with the help of this community, and the help of God, to find more hope, healing, beauty, truth, and love.

Let’s pray.

An Invitation to Whole Life Flourishing

Notice any ways your life is fundamentally not working. Don’t try to fix it just yet, just notice with curiosity.

Spiritual Practice of the Week

Ask God each day this week how it is you need greater connection and life. Tell God that this Lent, you plan to be on pilgrimage to find what you need.