Stories come in visual form as well. If you look at this photo that recently was shot at the Riverside Dog Run in New York City, an interesting story emerges. In it you see how living in a multicultural society, we must be careful not to hear what we want based on our perceptions and misperceptions, but rather to carefully listen to what is said. This photo comes from Time Out New York.

Segregation is the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.
--- Martin Luther King, Jr.

When I was a little girl, and Dr. King was assassinated, I humbly, at 9 years old, felt God calling me to pick up his mantle to dismantle racism in America. I was not sure how I would do it, but all of my professional life I have worked on this issue—at Kodak in Human Resource management and in ministry. This has been a year when I have been purposeful about teaching—inside and outside of Middle Church, about the importance of multiracial, multicultural congregations as testimony to God’s Shalom. I say our churches Rehearse the Reign of God.

I have preached sermons about multiracial life on Sundays, and we held a conference here at Middle in April at which some 80 congregational leaders joined us to learn about how to grow these important congregations. I spoke at our denominational national convention—The General Synod—and at The Spirit of Wholeness in Christ Conference, a conference planned by the Racial Ethnic Staff Units of the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Reformed Church in America. Over 500 adults and some 50 youth attended this conference, born of a consultation that I did while still on staff at the Alban Institute. It was great to see it all come together! I also spoke at the Unitarian Universalist Convocation in DC earlier this year; they have already booked space at our 2008 The Power of Stories: Building Multiracial, Multicultural Congregations. My book of that title will be published in April.

I am telling you that this is my passion, and that my work in and outside of Middle converge for me in exciting ways, as I think of people catching the vision of a time now when life is on earth as it will be in heaven.

Here is a composite of a sermon I preached at Middle Church, my speech at the General Synod, and my speech at The Spirit of Wholeness. I hope that what I write here gives you a window into my heart, and my hope for Middle Church as a leader in the movement toward Multiracial/Multicultural Congregations. Recall that to whom much is given, much is required. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be your pastor, and to help us lead this movement.

I was scanning the paper today and noticed that there is almost as much to do about the last Harry Potter book coming out this July as what is happening in the stock market. Will Harry live? Will J.K. Rowling kill him off to fulfill the prophecy in book 5? I think stories really fascinate us. I know I love a good story, don’t you? I am not as much drawn to the fantasy of Harry Potter as I am to really good stories about survival against the odds, stories about love that conquers all, stories about people who are different making a way together. If you can combine all of that together—even better! I like Amy Tan novels of women of strength in cultures in which that is not expected. I like the poor boy/rich girl story of the Titanic. I like the updated Romeo and Juliet story better known as Westside Story. It is my absolute favorite of all time. I want to be Rita Moreno when she sings…a boy like that who’ll kill your brother, forget that boy and find another, one of your own kind, stick with your own kind…” And I want to be Anita when she corrects her.: When love comes so strong there is no right or wrong, your love is your life. And then she and Tony sing—There’s a place for us--hold my hand and I’ll take you there…such a great story!!

Stories—fiction and non-fiction--shape us, and we long to hear them because they do. One writer, Margaret Krytch, says that stories make us want to complete them. Another, James Loder, said that stories transform us—there is a moment in time in which the plot itself pulls us into it and changes us forever; he called it the transforming moment.

I am a fan of the psychologists who say that our lives are living texts. I say it this way: we are storied selves. We hear stories about us from our families, our teachers and our friends. We hear stories about gender, and birth order, and responsibility and respect. We hear stories about us in the culture: Black people don’t golf, Asian people all are good at math, Latinos and Latinas like red. We read stories about ourselves in history, some true and some not as true. All of these stories shape us, and our job as we develop is to edit and redact those stories. To find our own narrative voice to make meaning of the stories. Development is about story weaving—making a narrative whole out of the stories that shape us.

One of the stories that shapes us is the story of God’s relationship to God’s people. That story has a beginning and a middle and an end, as well. In the beginning, God. In the beginning God. In the beginning, John says it differently, the Word. Formless void. Let there be light. God calling the world into existence in the beginning. You know the story.

In the middle, God creating for God a people. I will be yours and you will be mine. Go. Take your things. Find a land. Be the Grandpop and Grandmom to a folk. Faithful God. Unfaithful people. Wisdom, prophets, a New Covenant. You know the story.

Son sent into the world to live a human/divine life. Changes the story with new preaching and new teaching and healings. Has power over demons, loves across borders—women and foreigners and sinners are called into the community, called into ministry. You know the story.

In the end, well the end has not been written, but what carries across is God made us, God loves us, God keeps coming to show us who God is, even comes to be with us so we can really get it. God pursues us, we run, God pursues us again and again, God welcomes us home when we get tired of running, tired of resisting, and God is coming again to claim us. It is a fantastic story—it is our script for life, isn’t it?

Another thing that carries across the Sacred story is God’s Spirit or the Spirit of Christ. You hear the Spirit in the story of creation, hovering over the deep. You hear the Spirit in Ezekiel’s vision, blowing together the dead bones, re-inspiring the people of Israel to life. You hear the Spirit in the baptism of Jesus: This is my son, the beloved. He pleases me! Listen to him. And we hear the Spirit in the story of Pentecost, at the birthday of the church.

I love the story of Pentecost because of the wonderful drama in the story. There is a sound of the rush of the wind, you can almost hear the rush in the Hebrew word for Spirit, Ruach. There is the fire landing on all the people. And the best part of all is that the people gathered here the good news of God’s love in their own language.

The Story of Pentecost is what I would call a border story. First of all, the people are gathered there from all kinds of places. There are Parthinians, Medes, Elamites, people from Egypt and Cyrene. All kinds of places. And then there is the reason they are in Jerusalem. All these Jewish people from all kinds of places have taken a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the Jewish holiday Shavuot. This is a holiday on the 50th day after Passover, hence the word Pentecost for 50 days. Shavuot has several meanings—it is about making a grain offering. Sometimes it is called the Festival of Weeks because seven weeks are counted before the holiday. It is, maybe most importantly, the celebration of God giving the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai after Israel was freed from slavery in Egypt. So, Pentecost is a border holiday because it is on the border of Christianity and Judaism. Passover is to Easter as Shavuot is to Pentecost. When the Spirit came that day in Jerusalem, those were culturally diverse, devout Jews gathered there. They did not think they were creating a new religion. They were receiving the Spirit of God in their hearts like they had received the Law of God in their hearts. The emerging church was having a border experience: old covenant and new covenant; law and spirit; many voices and languages and one message of the good news of hope. All at the same time, on the border, la frontera, of a changing faith community.

I like Pentecost because it is a border story—a border holiday. And I like the fact that all of those people heard the story of God’s Amazing Grace in their own language. That was one of the gifts the Spirit gave that day. On the border of a new thing, they needed the Spirit. We need the gift of the Spirit that helps us to share the good news with the diversity in our midst, in whatever cultural language they speak, by any means necessary. I call that the Pentecost Paradigm. In order to hold together diversity, we need the Spirit in the midst of us. The Pentecost Paradigm means that rather then diversity causing confusion, like at the Tower of Babel, God’s Spirit creates communion and understanding so that we can be self conscious and careful to make sure all the people are held together with a Pentecost moment. Multiracial, multicultural churches like ours have a critical need for the Pentecost Paradigm. And the world has a critical need for multiracial, multicultural congregations that rehearse the Reign of God here on earth, as it is in heaven.

I feel like I am preaching to the choir a bit here. You know all about borders, that is why you are here. You are what I call border people. You live on the edge of culture, and class, and race and context. You are border people, committed to a multiracial, multicultural, antiracist future. You are border people—in multiracial families, or in communities that are culturally diverse. You may need some support to get there, you may need some skills to get there, you may need some help to get there, but you are committed to that future, NOW, the future that Father Virgilio Elizondo says is mestizo, or you would not be here. You are border people—one writer calls us edgewalkers. God has called us to these borders, to the frontier, la frontera, just like Jesus was called to the border—to cultic borders, to religious borders, born in a border town with a border mentality. Being the body of Christ is about borders.

Which brings us to another episode in the Biblical story about Spirit and about borders—to Paul’s letter to the church at Rome.

Listen to this story…

1  Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we ^F17 have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access ^F18 to this grace in which we stand; and we ^F19 boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we ^F20 also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Paul is a border person. He is a Jew, not only that a Pharisee, a Jew among Jews he says. He is a Roman citizen, entitled to all the privileges of the Empire. And then Paul has a close encounter. He is knocked off his horse and blinded by the light and has a conversion. Paul, chaser and persecutor of Christians BECOMES a Christian. He is still a citizen of Rome. He is still Jewish; he does not renounce is heritage or his religion. He adds a new understanding to his religion. Paul is a border person.

And Rome is a border town. It is a seaport, and all kinds of people live there. The church that Paul starts is a multicultural, multiracial church. There are Jews and Christians in that church, probably from all classes and many contexts.

In the text today, Paul writes to the church in a Pentecostal way. In other words, you can hear his Roman-ness, his Jewish-ness and his Christian-ness in his speech. You can tell that he is writing to a diverse audience. Paul is—listen for this—multivocal in his writing. He is speaking in many cultural voices so he can reach his multicultural audience.

First, using images from Roman culture, Paul reminds the church that they have peace with God through Jesus Christ, who is Lord. Not Caesar, who called himself Lord. Paul wasn’t talking about the Roman Peace that soldiers reinforced with swords and shields. Paul was talking about peace with God but using language that spoke to those in that context.

Second, maybe thinking about his Jewish audience, Paul talked about having access to grace, which would have reminded the Jewish people about having access to the temple through the priest. Now all the people, Jewish and Christian had access to God through the Jewish Rabbi Jesus. This is a letter that reflects the Pentecost Paradigm; it is multivocal, which means it uses many voices to share the good news.

Then Paul goes on to tell the church that they can not only boast in the hope of sharing the glory of God, but they can boast in their sufferings, because suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope and hope does not disappoint because God’s love is poured out in their hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Let me stop--suffering produces hope? How exactly, you might be thinking, does that work? Is Paul thinking about the kind of suffering in our body that produces hope, like training for a marathon? I don’t know. Is he talking about the kind of suffering that the people were enduring under Roman rule? Could be. But just maybe he is talking about the kind of suffering the people are undergoing….being together in a multicultural context! It is a wonderful experiment, but it is not easy! Just think about it. When you are in a monocultural place, you know what to expect. The music is what you expect, the liturgy is familiar, the rituals are what you have come to expect. In a multicultural place, ANYTHING can happen. One week there is gospel singing, the next week some high church anthem. Sometimes you have no Jesus being preached, and sometimes you have TOO much Jesus being preached. You come in the door and there may be dance or there may be drumming. There could be hip-hop music with young people moving to the beat or there could be spoken word. What is happening with that? One group is getting the worship they want and you have to wait your turn. The social hall one week is full of food from your experience and the next week, you are eating something you would NEVER cook at home!!

And that is the kind of thing that was happening in the church at Rome. And that meant Paul had to do some negotiating. Each week, someone was calling him saying, I don’t like that song, and someone else was saying, thanks for picking that hymn! Then someone would send him an email saying, I can’t believe you preached that sermon and then someone else was writing, great job! Paul had to teach that congregation that when someone gets what they want, that means someone else is not getting what they want.

You may not know it, but the Jewish people had been kicked out of Rome for a season. When they finally came back, the Gentiles had already established new ways of doing ministry, and the culture was shifting; they were tense with each other! The associate minister had moved on. The gospel choir director had resigned. People were afraid of the changes and wondered what would happen next. It was hard enough to be in a shifting church, then the Jewish folk came back and brought their culture with them. It was more than a notion!

This would never happen at your church, I am sure, but let me tell you that in some congregation somewhere, the people are gossiping, they are criticizing, they are ostracizing, they were complaining. Again, not in our churches, but in SOME church, the folk are jockeying for power, playing games of us versus them. Why? Maybe because they are annoyed at change. Maybe because the culture was shifting. Maybe because they had to share old sacred spaces with new people. Maybe because they were, like we are, grieving the loss of former staff or policy or culture.

The Jewish Christians at Rome came back to a church that had changed around them. New rules, new people, new customs, new culture. And Paul was not saying, “Get over it!” He was saying, “The love of God in our hearts poured out by the spirit ought to shape the way we suffer through it, in hope of sharing in God’s Glory.” He was saying, before he got to some tougher language, “We suffer along with each other, we endure each other, we persevere with each other because we hope in the glory that God is revealing as we become more fully the children of God.” “All of creation,” he says later, “is waiting for us to become who we are—the children of God!” “Love one another,” he says later in the letter. “Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Bless those who persecute you.” What he means is, “Bless those who are on your last nerve. Put up with the failings of the weak.”

This multiracial, multicultural experiment, while clearly in the center of God’s will for humanity, is really hard stuff. That is why of the over 300,000 Christian congregations in America, only 4% of them are multiracial/multicultural. That is why David Chaves’ congregation study shows us that 90% of us worship in congregations in which 90% of the people are just like us. That is why David McAlpern and his colleagues at Fuller Seminary suggested that monocultural churches were the best way to grow the church.

It is work! And keeping everyone happy will make any pastor pull out his hair, OR cut off her dreadlocks! Yet, if we do not rehearse the Reign of God in our congregations, who will? If not us, who? If not now, when? Paul is telling the church that the love of God poured out in our hearts is the key to reconciliation. We suffer one another because we love God and God loves us. We can endure one another because the Spirit enables it. We hope in what God is doing—making us family, making us community, making us glorious, because we know that it is just there, right before us, ready for us to grab! We hope because we want to be faithful, because God is faithful.

We are a community. We are family. We need to try to, in this season of Spirit coming, in this season of love poured out, suffer on the way to the promised land with hope in our hearts. These may be our Churches, these may be our homes, but they first belong to God. Jesus turned over those tables in the temple. We like to tell ourselves that it was because of the money being exchanged inside. Dr. Brian Blount helps us to see that Jesus’ temper tantrum was because the church was failing to be a house of prayer for all the nations. We suffer—the Greek word we know is the word for passion—we passionately suffer and struggle and pray and talk and fuss and make up and fall down and get up—we suffer on the way to hope in God’s soon coming Reign. We make our congregations, our fellowship, our relationships one to another what Blount calls a pocket of resistance to the cultural stories that lie to us.

That is right, some of the stories that shape us are lies. The story of race in America is a lie. There is only one race, the HUMAN race, yet race is still, for psychologist Robert Carter, the most salient divisive factor in American life. There is only one race, the human race, yet the Race in America stories where we live, how health care is provided, how much money we make, where we can go to school. Race in America, a false story, even stories congregational life. It defines us, it undermines us, it makes us suspicious, it makes us fearful. The church, by and through God’s Spirit, can and must Re-Story race!

And how do we do this—how do we re-story a centuries-old American icon? How do we re-story the way racism and colorism—by that I mean the ways white and bright and light become positively valued and black and dark and brown have negative values in our culture—how do we, the Church of God in Jesus Christ—re-story that?

Well, we go back to the beginning. The first Church was that gathered crowd on the day of Pentecost. All the people heard the good news in their own cultural language. God’s Spirit empowered a linguistic miracle. The disciples were newly able to speak in and be heard in the languages of the others gathered. What can we learn from this miracle?

In order to re-story race and color in America, we need to:

Develop a border consciousness. Theologian Eric Law would call this the consciousness of the Beloved Community. Only by God’s Spirit can this happen. It is that we develop an empathy, a genuine care and concern for the otherness of the other. We walk a mile in their moccasins. We find empathy for the other because we search deep and discover the otherness of ourselves. When did I feel left out? When did I feel power down? Where has my journey, my story, had turns in it that left me feeling disenfranchised? Our own otherness, our own sense of being the stranger is strength as we see to develop a border consciousness.

Learn some new languages. We need to become multivocal. We need to be conversant in the language of the other. We need to become culturally competent. To be sure we might need to learn Spanish in this country, or Mandarin, or English for some of us. But I am not just talking about those kinds of languages. I mean the cultural language of the stranger in the midst of us. We need to learn how young people talk, listen to their music, read their magazines, watch MTV and BET. Be a student of their culture—be culturally curious and listen and learn. We need to break bread together, so we can know each other’s foods and rituals.

Go deep, get naked and come clean. I worry about how you hear this, but it is what I mean. If we are going to re-story race, if we are going to re-story color, if we are going to rehearse the reign of God in our congregations, we need to come down off the surface and go deep. Get real, be honest. Show ourselves and be willing to take the risk of being seen. Receive the other for who they are. Make a safe space for sharing and talking and listening and struggling. We need to confess together the ways that race and class and fear and suspicion have shaped us as individuals and as congregations. We need to, in other words, share some stories at the table of fellowship. We need to share our stories, listen to stories, and let those stories change us, shape us. They will do that. We are changed in relationship with each other. Stories shared honestly re-story our identity, if we are open, and vulnerable and real.

Develop leaders. We cannot do this work alone. We need other leaders in our congregations and in our contexts to story this new vision with us. Howard Gardner says leaders tell compelling stories that wrestle with the current story in the minds of others. Leaders—you, me, young people and old people who show potential, need to be trained to bear the vision of the Reign of God. That means real training in managing change and conflict. That means deep theological grounding and study. That means leadership development. That means you mentoring and teaching. That means creating a book list—reading literature from other cultures, seeing movies together that provoke conversation and dialog. That means creating communities where leaders can mentor one another.

The end of the story God is writing with us has not yet come, but we know how the story goes. God loves us, God pursues us, God is coming to claim us, God wants us close by. In the meantime, we who are the body of Christ in the world emboldened by the Spirit of Wholeness must keep so busy working for the kingdom, we ain’t got time to die, like the old Negro Spiritual says. Sweet Honey in the Rock sing:

We who believe in freedom will not rest until it comes. We who believe in freedom will not rest until it comes.

Amen. May it be so!

Love, Jacqui

THE PENTECOST PARADIGM: A DEVELOPMENTAL MODEL OF
DIVERSIFYING CONGREGATIONS
(Click on the image for a larger view)

Past messages from the Senior Minister
Sermon Audio Recordings & Podcasts
Worship Calendar
Worship Bulletins
Care & Counseling