"Story, Ceremony, Community"

Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Sunday, January 23, 2021

Based on *Nehemiah 8. The people reclaim their communal heritage.

*incarnational translation below

According to the SPC Strategic Issues Team, it was five years ago, in January of 2017, that a Congregational Assessment Team for SPC began a church-wide story-telling process to surface the unique strengths of this congregation. Over the course of two months, the Congregational Assessment Team held focus groups with every established group within the congregation, as well as open sessions for all congregants not affiliated with a particular group.

About 95 people participated.

The Congregational Assessment Team asked people to recall an “only at SPC moment” – an event, practice or memorable moment that represented to them the best of SPC. The team asked participants to identify what made that moment special or unique, and what made it possible. Then participants shared their “only at SPC” moments with each other and reflected together on what they had heard.

The Congregational Assessment Team synthesized these stories into a model of organizational culture developed by Edgar Schein. The model depicts an organization’s culture as a tree, in which the branches represent the visible, tangible expressions of a culture; the trunks represent the values that give rise to those tangible expressions; and the roots represent the (usually invisible) core beliefs underlying those stated commitments or values.

Based on your stories of “only at SPC moments,” the Congregational Assessment Team presented three trees representing three core SPC values for your evaluation: Radical Hospitality; Holistic Spirituality; Engaged Compassion.

The response, I am told, was dramatic. Literal tears, as you witnessed the sacred stories of this congregation mirrored back to you in written form, documented for posterity … and for the purpose of calling a new pastor.

This is who we are! these trees proclaim to the world. This is who we want to continue to be!

A year and a half later, when I saw these trees, I wept too. What an amazing group of people! What an inspiring set of values! And now here we are, five years, a pastoral transition, and four COVID waves later, like the ancient Jews returning home from exile, ordaining and installing new church leadership whose job it will be to help us reclaim the powerful SPC heritage described in these trees, and to discern together which direction to take that heritage today.

The challenge for our incoming leaders is that there are an infinite number of ways to live out these core values. While we may all affirm them, we also all have different ways of expressing them. I know for sure – and I have heard from many of you – that I, as the pastor, have very different ways of expressing these values than my predecessor did, even though I embrace each one wholeheartedly.

As other new members join our community and other new leaders emerge to guide us, they, too, will have new ways of expressing these values. Thirteen youth in our confirmation class will consider how – and whether – they wish to express these core values from their own unique perspective. A 100% staff transition will employ new personnel to assist us in implementing these values, again with their own unique perspective. Even those among us who have been here for forever might shift their thinking over time about how to express one value or another.

The particular sacred stories connected to these trees are a snapshot of perspectives on the SPC experience in a moment in time, with the hope that at least part of what has been captured – most importantly the core values, themselves – will stand the test of time.

This hope of sacred stories expressing core values that can build and rebuild community time and time again is what drives the people of God in our Lesson from Nehemiah today.

Fifty years they have languished in exile, far from home, far from the rhythms of sacred ceremony that had helped them make meaning in all moments of their lives. Now they are back, pulling themselves together – as individuals and as a community – trying to rebuild, with much debate about how to do it, some of it bitter, all of it heartfelt.

The good news according to the Book of Nehemiah is that they are figuring it out! Not once and for all, but time and time again, they are figuring it out. Reclaiming their sacred stories, reclaiming their sacred ceremonies, reclaiming their identity as a community rooted in the core values of their ancestors, carried forth to the present moment, in the place they call home.

So must we.

Just keep talking, our own Ed Zahniser reminds us, when it comes to conversations about God, when it comes to conversations about community in God. This is not grade school but the Big Time.

It feels daunting, to be sure. Not a single one of us has ever led a community of faith through a global pandemic. Which is why we rely not only on the sacred stories and ceremonies and conversations of the SPC community expressed in the trees but also in the sacred stories and ceremonies and conversations of our ancestors in the faith reflected in our Scriptures. Slogging through two years of COVID has been really awful. But we get some perspective on this moment we consider the fifty years our biblical ancestors spent slogging through exile. They made it through, and we can, too. Through these words we do hear a Word of Hope!

But rarely is a good conversation just talk, as Ed concludes. Ceremony matters too. With these words of hope, today we ordain and install five new and seven returning leaders. This is your calling now: Lonce Bailey, Lynn Coddington, Emily Gross, Mary Anne Hitt, Robert Tucker, Adam Ware, and Carolee Youngblood, as it is mine, as it is the calling for us all: in the spirit of Ezra and Nehemiah and the elders of ancient exiles returning home, let us strive to figure out ways to gather the people so no one is left out, let us strive to glean wisdom and hope from our sacred stories in SPC and our Scriptures, let us strive to guide the community in practices of sharing and caring, let us strive to cultivate ceremonial practices that ritualize our core values, let us strive to share the secret until it’s not a secret, just common sense, and above all, at the end of the day, let us grab every chance we can find to throw a really big party for no particular reason at all.

Let the church say, Amen!

Nehemiah 8, selected verses

On the day we now know as Rosh Hoshanah, the Jewish New Year,
all of the people gather together as one in the open square.
No one is left out.
The people ask Ezra to share with them Torah,
the stories of their ancestors,
including the stories of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt,
and the journey of the people through the wilderness
to the land of promise and plenty.

So Ezra stands on a wooden platform,
with the elders standing beside him,
and begins to tell the stories of Torah.
The people are eager to hear these stories, the stories of their ancestors.
The storytelling lasts hours and hours! From early morning until midday.
The elders move about among the people,
making sure everyone understands the meaning of the stories.
The people are moved to tears.
Ezra encourages them to go home for the midday meal,
making sure that those who have more than enough to eat
share with those who do not.

The next day, the elders gather to glean wisdom and hope from the stories of Torah
as they reclaim their heritage and discern which direction to go next.
They latch on to a story about a ceremony that is supposed to occur
during the first month of the year, the month they happen to be living in.
This ceremony, called the Festival of Booths,
is a ritual re-enactment of their ancestors’ journey through the wilderness.
The people “Go out to the hills and bring branches of
olive, wild olive, myrtle, palm, and other leafy trees
to make booths,” – or tents – as a symbol of the tents their ancestors made
for their journey through the desert.

The elders decide to restore this ceremony for the people,
as a way of connecting their own recent journey
from exile to the land of promise and plenty
with the journey of their ancestors
from Egypt through the wilderness.

The ritual turns into a big party: a festival that lasts seven days,
concluding with a sacred ceremony on the eighth day.

*”Incarnational translation for preaching seeks to recontextualize biblical texts so that they say and do in new times and places something like what they said and did in ancient times and places” (Cosgrove and Edgerton, In Other Words: Incarnational Translation for Preaching, 62).