MWC Background Over the next weeks our worship services will focus on the seven shared convictions of Mennonite World Conference. About every six years MWC holds a grand assembly. The next one is this summer in Asuncion, Paraguay this summer. The previous two, in 1997 and 2003, were in Calcutta, India and Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Some people from our church were at both Indian and Zimbabwe.
MWC brings together Anabaptist people from around the globe. This movement, which began in Europe in 1525, then spread first to North America, and now around the world. Today, according to MWC's 2006 census, there are over 1.4 million Mennonites and Brethren in Christ folks worldwide. About 550,000 live in North American and Europe (just 52,000 in Europe, where it all began) so clearly the significant majority now live in the southern hemisphere.
MWC is governed by a fourteen person executive committee. Some of MWC's work is carried out by commissions (deacons, faith and life, peace, and missions). It's the work of the faith and life commission that particularly concerns us over these next weeks. For several years they worked at developing this ``shared convictions'' document which you see in the bulletin today. Our world-wide peoplehood, through representatives, was attempting to see if they could craft together a world-wide understanding of what Mennonites believe and practice. It's quite a daunting task. Now maybe it will strike you as so general but I find it, personally, quite interesting to see what they could agree upon together.
The faith and life commission has as part of its purpose to ``determine how MWC-member churches understand and describe Anabaptist-Mennonite faith and practice. They also want to provide a forum for Anabaptist-Mennonites from one part of the world to speak into the Christian faith and practice of Anabaptist-Mennonites from another part of the world, encouraging therefore mutual accountability.
Now this all happened at the rather lofty level of churchly, theological types from around the world gathering together in different forums to try to sort through what they could say together. It's probably quite another thing for us to feel in some ways responsible and accountable to a Mennonite church in, say, Bolivia.
God is known to us The first shared conviction is about our understanding of God, and so, for the rest of my time this morning, I want to think together with you about God. I begin by saying that I feel apologetic in doing so. How can we dare to talk about God? Who am I, of all people, to say anything about God? All I have are mere words and thoughtswhat are they in comparison to the idea of God? So my resources to broach this topic are thin.
The MWC shared conviction states that ``God is known to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Creator who seeks to restore fallen humanity by calling people to be faithful in fellowship, worship, service and witness.
I think it's a pretty good statement. It's Trinitarian, reminding us that we learn of God, know of God in ways wondrous and beyond (as Father); yet too in ways challenging and humanly ``real'' (in Jesus the son); and in ways internal and subjective (the Sprit). The statement reflects the Creator God's long-standing intention to draw people towards God's self, calling us to the faithful practices of fellowship, worship, service, and witness.
My intent is to not dissect the statement. I'll just leave it at that. What I want to do is look at the Jacob story from Genesis and see what we might glean from it about God.
Jacob'sLadder The background for this story of Jacob's dream, where he sees the ladder climbing up to heaven, with angels going up and down on the ladder, is messy.
Remember, Jacob's parents are Isaac and Rebekah. Jacob had a twin brother, Esau, born just seconds before he was born. Esau was hairy and a man of the outdoors, appreciated by his father Isaac. Jacob was quieter and much loved by his mother Rebekah.
Isaac grow old and feeble and calls his first born, Esau into his chamber. He tells him to go, kill some game, and prepare for him a ``savory meal'' so that he can bestow his blessing, the birthright upon Esau. It was the right of the firstborn to receive this blessing. But we remember how Rebekah connives with Jacob to steal the birthright. This he does, disguising himself as Esau, bringing some savory food that Rebekah has whipped up. Jacob gets the special blessing. When Esau returns and finds out that the blessing has already been offered, he is furious. Quite the family dynamics.
Esau begins to plot against Jacob. Isaac and Rebekah both counsel Jacob to get away and to go to the homeland of some of his distant relatives. There he can find a wife from his own people. Esau, seeing what is going down, decides to spite his parents by taking a Canaanite woman as his own wife. It's really an ugly, convoluted story.
So now it's getting late, it's getting dark, Jacob is on the run, and he decides to lay down for the night. He finds a rock. He uses it as a pillow. Soon enough he is dreaming. In his dream he sees the Lord, and he sees angels going up and down the stairway. The Lord speaks to him, and he listens. When the dream is over Jacob wakes up and exclaims ``Surely the Lord is in this placeand I didn't know it!'' Then he erects a pillar, using the stone he had slept on. He pours oil on top of it and calls the place ``Bethel,'' which means ``house of God.''
God thoughts What kind of things might we say about God given this story? What kind of God thoughts can we have? Can we think about this strange story and hold our belonging to the world-wide family of Mennonites in our hearts at the same time?
A writer I'm appreciating these days is Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopalian priest and professor who lives in rural Georgia. She offers the suggestion (among many others) in a recent book (An Altar in the World) that we can learn of God, and commune with God, when we observe the practice of getting lost. Jacob stands as an example of really getting lost.
Look at him. He's deceived his brother and his father. Primary relationships in his life are in shreds. He's on the run. He doesn't have a friend to spend the night with. The best he can do is to camp out. He may not be literally lost but he's figuratively, for sure, as lost as you can be. But the great thing is this: that in the middle of his ``lostness,'' and his wandering, this is where Jacob encounters God. He's amazed that it happened, he can hardly believe it, but he can't deny it. ``The Lord is in this place,'' he must have shouted.
There's an old lesson here, that we should not grow weary in repeating. God meets us at surprising times, in out of the way places, even when we are lost. For Jacob it happened out in the wild, out in nature, in the dead of night, and in a dream.
You know, when we are lost, off the normal beaten path we usually take, our senses are heightened, we have to be especially alert. There's a nervousness, an edginess, in the air. You can no longer just count on the familiar to guide you through, you have to call on other resourcesingenuity, making do, finding a way, discovering some expression of creativity that had been locked away, unseen for a long, long time. I think that it is in those times that we can experience God's guiding, leading hand.
Glena and I don't grow too tired of remembering the time in (now) Burkina Faso when we are driving at night to a place we had never been before. The ominous clouds were gathering. We were driving a rural dirt road. Our car was experiencing mechanical difficulties. We stopped and sputtered our way along, hoping and praying that we would make it to our previously unknown destination. There's something about allowing yourself to go out on the skinny limb that is invigorating, it's a place where you might end up saying with Jacob, I wouldn't have believed it but God was in this place.
Our lives can get so ingrown and predictable. We turn God into a small, manageable deity, able to appear in our lives once a week just before noon. This is where we can know God, when we all sit obediently in benches and listen politely while one person pontificates from the front, or when we altogether open blue books to sing from them.
But the fact is, God is a whole lot bigger than that, and is hardly constrained by these walls and windows. So we have to rid ourselves of any notion that we meet and known and learn of God best within these confines. Of course, I dearly want people to come to church but more than that, much more than that, I want our hearts and minds to be sensitive to the experience of God across all the days of the week, across all the places where our lives travel. In the lazy cafes, walking through the peach orchard, at a picnic by the river, in the beauty shop, in our dreams (like Jacob), alone in a car listening to the radio, on a bike ride, while cruising the internet, at the theatre, while sitting in a park, at the gym--our world and our lives are full of opportunities to discover that God was in this place, to our great astonishment!
Maybe this is something our third world brothers and sisters know a little more intuitively than we do. It's a stereotype but there's some basic truth in it, that we tend to be a little more in our heads, and our education and wealth and position in life insulate us from the rawer edges of life. People in the global church have a lot to teach us. They live closer to nature, closer to death, closer to poverty, closer to war, closer to the precipice, and so live in a day to day more dependent on God, more ready to sense God in the daily happenstances of life.
But we can live conscientiously that way too. We don't have to always take the same path We can chart a new way. We can expose ourselves in our reading and listening to ideas or musical expressions that we haven't paid attention to before. We can literally and purposefully try to pay attention. Just try sitting by yourself outside somewhere, or even in your house and become quiet and still. Listen, smell, observe, think, notice. We can train ourselves to be more attentive to God.
Jacob, in the middle of his lost state, paid attention. And in his dream God revealed God's self to him. And what did he learn. He received the promise of blessing, that in time he would receive land, the symbol of blessing. Jacob received the promise of God's presence, ``I am with you,'' the Lord said. And he received the assurance of deliverance, that he would in time reach a safe destination where his worries and sorrows would be no more.
We can experience and know God too. We have to let go of narrow understandings of God, that allow God only to show up in prescribed ways and times, all right within our own choosing. Let's rather live always on the alert for God's inbreaking into our lives. Let's be willing to let ourselves go, let ourselves get lost, so that we can experience God's surprising presence. Then we too can know the joy of saying, wasn't it amazing to know that God is actually in this place!
