“For surely I know the plans I have for you.” says the Lord, “Plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”
 
When I first agreed to be with all of you this morning, I confess that I thought I was agreeing to help you to finish a year of celebration of 250 years of Presbyterian presence here in Princeton. After all, if one reads the history in your bulletin, there is plenty to celebrate. As I’ve talked with Presbyterians here over the past year, I’ve heard remarkable stories of the ways in which you’ve chosen to carry out your celebration. You’ve worshipped together, and planned lectures and concerts together. There have been pulpit exchanges between Muriel Burrows and Dave Davis, men’s fellowship, picnics, combined events for your young people, and the women have created these beautiful banners. Perhaps most significant in the minds of most with whom I’ve spoken, you’ve agreed to commit together to mission, taking on a habitat project together, and made trips to the gulf coast to support our sisters and brothers there in the wake of Katrina. You’ve planned a family oriented, inter-generational civil rights tour of the deep south. You’ve worked together to support Witherspoon’s vision for the Robeson house just a few doors down from their church.
 
Perhaps most importantly, it does seem to me that you’ve honored the call extended to you by Brian Blount a year ago on world communion Sunday to deepen your fellowship around our common communion and to share honestly and deeply with one another about the moments – both healthy and hurtful – that have defined your shared history.
 
And now, we come to what many of you, like me, thought was going to be the end of that year of celebration. Perhaps many of you believed that when the year ended, life would go back to normal, and each of your congregations would settle back into the routine and the busyness of your separate congregations. Some of you are probably justifiably a little weary in the wake of all the added strain of so much planning and work together over the last year. “Give us a few good stories, Rick,” you might have been thinking as you came in this morning, “let’s appreciate our work together and then give it a rest.”
 
Well, my friends, the call this morning from our Gospel text is a little more challenging than that. We have work to do, and we are called to do that work together. I would suggest to you that Jesus’ call to his disciples, and to all of us this morning, is to be the church of the “out there” and not the church of the “in here.” I suppose that those of us who know something of the troubled history of relationships between Witherspoon, First and St. Andrews Presbyterian churches might feel a little vindicated by the argument that was playing out between the disciples as they walked through the Galilean countryside. Even as Jesus is trying to get the disciples to understand the suffering that he will experience as he will be tried, convicted, beaten and hung on a cross among common criminals, the disciples are arguing with one another about who among them is the greatest.
 
Perhaps our God will always have to struggle to help us to put first things first, and to understand the lesson that Mark illustrates so beautifully in the text before us this morning as Jesus places a nameless child in the midst of the disciples and insists that following his way is about servanthood of the least valued, the most underappreciated and marginalized in his community.
 
My friend Jim Atwood, a retired pastor who lives near Washington DC, tells the story of a woman who entered a jewelry store intent on buying a cross. As they looked at the display case together, the clerk asked the woman, “Do you want the plain one, or the one with the little man on it?” What a painful recognition of the condition that has prevailed since the time of the disciples. Even as Jesus is calling us to the way of the cross, we’re looking for the path to get there without the little man on it.
 
Sisters and brothers, this morning we have a choice to make, just as Jesus called his earliest disciples to a similar choice. Most of us in the room could choose to avoid suffering, to isolate ourselves from pain, and to hide from injustice. We can choose, this morning, to go back to our sanctuaries at Witherspoon and Nassau Churches and focus inward, avoiding all of the ways that the people of God are suffering in the world today. We can, if we desire, choose to be the church of the “in there” and leave to others the tough work in the world of the “out there.”
 
“Surely I know the plans I have for you.” says the Lord, “Plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”
 
What would it look like my friends, if instead, we embraced Jesus’ insistence that the new reign of God, the Kin-Dom, the blessed community that God desires for us is built not on stature or security, not on privilege or power, not on comfort or accommodation to the dominant values of our culture, but rather on the simple idea that our first, last and only commitment must be to act as servants to the least among us in the world today?
 
What if the Presbyterians of Princeton NJ agreed now that this year has been practice for who we are called to be in the world? What if we genuinely believed that the salvation of the world comes not through the building up of empire but through the humble servanthood that insists that the first shall be last? My friends, if we really believe all these stories about Jesus, if we are convinced that following Jesus’ humble model of serving even the little children is the way to go, then we better get busy. The big question I hope is on all of our minds this morning as we come to this place to celebrate a history in which Presbyterians shaped the earliest and most formative moments of the history of this nation is whether we have any intention at all of being such radical opinion shapers today.
 
We know the values that the leaders and decision makers in our country would have us embrace today, and they are antithetical to everything we say we believe as Christians.
 
Our leaders would have us believe that security comes at the point of a gun or a missile, or through pre-emptive strike or shock and awe, or threatening utter destruction that forces complete capitulation by anyone we identify as a threat, and let’s be honest, we’re increasingly told the entire world is threatening us. That language may work for political leaders who are using fear as a tool to get themselves re-elected, but it has little to do with the gospel message preached by the one WE say we follow! My current favorite bumper sticker, gracing the back of my own car, is the one that says, “When Jesus said to love your enemies, I think he probably meant, ‘don’t kill them’.”
 
Security comes with a new world order of economic domination, we’re told. We can only be secure when we’ve constructed an economic paradigm of global domination in which the world is divided into those of us who are beneficiaries of the global economy and those who will be the servants of that economy. “Not so,” says our Jesus of the cross. Instead, our Jesus insists that we will find our security only when we have become the servants of the “least of these,” even the nameless children among us, when we throw our lot in with some two-thirds of the world’s population today who are barely hanging on, clinging and grasping for survival on the edges of the global economy.
 
“Security is based,” our leaders assert, “on our ability to successfully divide the world into those who are with us and those who are against us, those who look and think and act like us and those who don’t.” Friends, let’s admit this morning that while such views may be momentarily attractive to us in a post September 11 world, our God insists that the attraction is illusory and the promised security is fleeting. “No,” our Jesus insists, “the future our God promises is based on crossing the borders of our fear and insisting that we will stand with the dispossessed wherever and in all places they may be.” This is, after all, Mark’s Jesus, the border crossing Jesus, the Jesus who insisted that his disciples defy all they had learned about security and religious purity to cross over to the world of the gentiles and extend the reign of God even to those considered by their religious authorities to be heathen and unclean.
 
Sisters and brothers, we’re told over and over by the leaders and opinion shapers, the power brokers in our world today, that we must just follow their plans and trust the process. My friends, on this morning, I beg you not to be sucked in. Let’s stay solidly in the camp of our God who insists that there is only one way to the kingdom that God promises, one way to the beloved community, and that is the way of the cross. Let’s take the cross with the little man on it, the path of servanthood, the path of entering into suffering with the least of our sisters and brothers around the world. Let’s agree, and recommit ourselves this morning, that Witherspoon and Nassau Presbyterian Churches will insist that together, we will be the church of the “out there” rather than the church of the “in here.”
 
It is ironic, perhaps, that one of the places I saw this kind of commitment best modeled during my moderatorial journeys was in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Cuba. They have had no small amount of practice in standing against the values of the state when called to do so. When I visited there in the spring, Rev. Hector Mendez, the General Secretary of the Church there, told me about the darkest years of his denomination. He explained that there was a period of several decades when the government repression of organized religion was so great that the church was forced to go underground. Congregations met in secret if they met at all, and their sanctuaries slowly disintegrated through many years of neglect. For several years in the 1980’s, there were no students at the seminary in Matanzas.
 
However, faithful Presbyterians found ways to hang on, and as the government slowly opened up to the historic Catholic and Protestant presence following the fall of the Berlin wall, the congregations re-emerged and began to grow. Today, it is one of the fastest growing Presbyterian denominations in the world, with a thriving student body at the seminary, vibrant house meetings, and church structures that are being rebuilt out of the rubble. Even more importantly, church leaders continue to stubbornly insist that they will stand for gospel values, even when doing so may put them at odds with the State. Perhaps there are lessons our own churches might learn from our sister church, particularly about how to stand firm when our government abandons the core convictions of our faith.
 
“For surely I know the plans I have for you.” the Lord said to his chosen people in exile living in exile in Babylon, “Plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”
 
As I’ve talked with Presbyterians here in Princeton over the last few months, I’ve wondered whether some of the lessons you’ve learned in your work and your celebration this year might point the way toward that future. After all, think about what you’ve learned.
 
I’ve been told that the greatest experiences you’ve had this year have been based on the new, deepened relationships you’ve discovered and nurtured as you’ve overcome years of mistrust, the racial and cultural divides, and the busyness of your lives to connect with one another. As I sat with the committee planners for this year of celebration at dinner last night, I saw genuine friendship born of honest work done together in the service of the risen Lord, and I heard stories of new friendships forged as members of Nassau and Witherspoon took on meaningful work together.
 
I see, here this morning, a body of Christ that has relearned what it means to reach out to a world that is suffering. I see the power of your witness in mission in Trenton and on the Gulf Coast. I see lessons learned about bridge-building by lay leaders like Nancy Prince and Ben Colbert. I’ve heard of the excitement that comes through the intentionality you’ve shown about engaging your young people and your older generation together in taking action.
 
There are so many ways in which this experience together appears to be reshaping your congregations, and I have good news for you. As I traveled as the moderator of the General Assembly, one thing that became crystal clear is that the churches that are “out there,” whether they are small or large, urban, suburban or rural, liberal or conservative, or the ones that are vibrant and growing. Those are the churches that are attracting the next generation that is seeking a place to live their faith in the world!
 
Sisters and Brothers of Witherspoon and Nassau, I see, in this group assembled here today, a commitment to overcome the entrenchment and false security of our divisions based on culture, racism and even economic class, and together to create a new kind of community, that beloved community that God sees for us, in which we are all working together to create a world of genuine security for all of God’s people.
 
Friends, we can be the church of the “out there.” We have it in us, even with all of our weaknesses and our faults, to become the servant people Jesus dreamed of with his earliest disciples. Nothing could be more exciting, nor more challenging, or in the end, more critically important to the whole world, than our insistence that we who are followers of Jesus truly believe, and will dedicate our entire lives to, the radical things he lived and taught.
 
One of my favorite poems, Cristopher Fry  - The Sleep of Prisoners
 
The human heart can go the lengths of God.
Dark and Cold we may be, but this is no winter now.
The frozen misery of centuries cracks, breaks, begins to move,
and the thunder is the thunder of the floes, the thaw, the upstart spring.
Thank God our time is now, when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere, never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now world-sized. The enterprise – is exploration into God.
What are you making for? It takes so many thousand years to wake, but will you wake? For pity’s sake?
 
 
“For surely I know the plans I have for you.” says the Lord, “Plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”
 
May it be so! Amen.
 
 
Rick Ufford-Chase
Executive Director,
Presbyterian Peace Fellowship

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