Acts 15:3-9 "Moving Out of Scare City - Draw the Circle Wide

         There is nothing like a good church fight!  Sides drawn!  Cloak and dagger! Below the belt!  It is an experience that has the potential to bring out the very worst in people.  And I know if you go back far enough in the history of our little church, you will find that this congregation has its share of “church fight” skeletons in the closet and knows firsthand how gut wrenching those conflictive times can be. 

         They begin with a few people who are increasingly displeased or feeling slighted over something.  Sometimes that “something” is – face it - peripheral – like how the altar is arranged or where people sit or what new songs are being sung. 

         Sometimes, however, the source of the conflict deeply jolts our understanding of the Gospel message and its inclusive nature – like who we welcome and who we do not exactly snub but make to feel they are not like the rest of us and would be happier worshipping elsewhere – maybe an African-American man or a lesbian couple or someone in a wheelchair. 

         First there are the parking lot conversations and backroom grumbling. 

Then, under the radar, with a bit of nattering here and “pick a little, talk a little” there, the lines are drawn, and sides are taken.  And there the disagreement may smolder – sometimes for years – unless it undergoes some good old-fashioned conflict resolution. And when that happens, the Holy Spirit to free to once again do its nudging and guiding and pointing the way out of Scare City and into the light of all the church is called to be.

         Church fights, of course, are not a new phenomenon.  They have gone on since the very beginning of the church itself.  The passage from the Book of Acts that we just read is a testament to the fact that conflict – deep and potentially divisive conflict - has been part and parcel of the institutional church since its inception over 2000 years ago. 

         Let’s take a look at what was happening to the newly formed Christian church in the Holy City of Jerusalem.  Even that early on, church members had very different perspectives on who was “in” and should be welcomed into the fellowship and who was “out” - and on what basis someone who was “out” could be “in”.

        In order to understand the origins of what had become a hotly contested conflict, we need understand its historical context.  Because Jesus was first and foremost a Jew as were all of his disciples, the early church that formed after his resurrection and ascension was composed entirely of Jews.  They all came from a common background steeped in the same religious rules and regulations governing worship, purity, and sanctity. 

         However, as the decades went by, more and more non-Jews – foreigners - Gentiles we call them – were drawn to the church.  That fact should not be surprising.  After all, Jesus had commanded his earliest followers to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth – and they had taken him at his word.  The result was an assortment of pagans being baptized.  This new church was spreading rapidly – which would seem to be a good thing.

         However, as one blogger I read this week noted: “More and more Gentiles (i.e. non-Jews) became Christians. When this happened, however, some Jewish believers, especially those from a very strict and traditional background, did not find it easy. They had various religious, cultural and racial prejudices to overcome.”

        Our Scripture passage tells us that certain people – perhaps newly baptized Pharisees - were teaching that, in order to become a full-blooded Christian, a male had to be circumcised.  These teacher evangelists strongly believed that it was not enough to simply put one’s faith in Jesus.  Certain Jewish customs and traditions needed to be obeyed because, they felt, the Jesus movement was really an offshoot of Judaism.  In other words, these teachers were saying that, when all was stripped away (no pun intended), you needed to look like us in order to be one of us.  “You have to circumcise the pagan converts,” they vociferously reasoned.

         Our blogger continues:  “(The teachers in question) did not mind Gentiles becoming Christians but felt Gentile believers should start following Jewish laws and customs, including male circumcision. It was as if they were saying, ‘As long as you Gentiles become like us and do everything the way we do, then fine. We will accept you.’”

         To circumcise or not circumcise:  That was the question.  It was a difficult one to answer too and struck at the core of who these Jesus followers believed themselves to be as a community. However, in this case, the differing perspectives did not stay in the parking lot or backroom very long before they became a full-blown controversy – a church fight.

         The result was a Council made up of apostles and leaders assembling in Jerusalem, the Holy City.  As our reading says in “The Message” translation, “The arguments went on and on, back and forth, getting more and more heated.” And they were heated because everyone – on both sides – was so sincere.  The teachers were not trying to cause trouble.  They were deeply committed. 

         In the midst of the debating and arguing, the Apostle Peter rose to speak his mind about who was “in” and “who was “out”.  I like to think that, before he uttered a word, he remembered all the times he had known Jesus to embrace and engage with those not like himself – foreigners with different customs and cultures. 

         I like to think Peter remembered the stories he heard about the Magi from mysterious Eastern lands who searched until they found the baby Jesus, and the small children Jesus surely played with in Egypt after his refugee family fled King Herod. 

        I like to think Peter remembered coming upon Jesus sitting by a well and having a lively conversation with a Samaritan woman or a debate at dinner with a Syrophenician woman or healing a leper from a foreign land. 

         I like to think Peter remembered these times when he spoke up at the Council. “God, (he said) who knows people’s deepest thoughts and desires…made no distinction between us and them, but purified their deepest thoughts and desires through faith.” 

         No distinction between the circumcised and uncircumcised.  No distinction between those who look like us, act like us, think like us – no distinction between us and those who are racially or ethnically different from us, who are politically motivated in a different way, or who are theologically distant.  In the church of Jesus Christ, Peter proclaimed, we are one.

         Peter, of course, did not come to his perspective lightly.  Although he was the top gun in the new church, knew Holy Scripture backwards and forwards and the rules of his Jewish heritage inside and out, he still struggled with these questions.  In fact, in an earlier chapter in the Book of Acts, we can read about a vision the Peter had. 

         As Methodist pastor Bri Desotel wrote, Peter “is praying one day, fasting and praying, and he has a strange vision: three times, something like a sheet comes down from heaven, covered with every kind of animal; and three times, he hears a voice from heaven saying, “Get up, kill and eat.”  And Peter thinks it’s a test, so three times he refuses; “No, Lord, I know the rules; I have never eaten anything unclean, and I’m not going to start now.”  Finally the voice from heaven says, “Do not call unclean what I have called clean.” It’s as if God says, “Listen to what I’m saying now. It’s a new day, and I’m doing a new thing.”  

         And so, Peter came to realize that the old ways were outmoded.  They were no longer useful, nor did they have a purpose.  He shared his perspective with the Council in Jerusalem and established a precedent that we are still challenged to follow. 

         There is no “us” and “them”.  In Jesus’ church, the world is one.  There are no walls.  There are only bridges. We are called to embrace, engage, or at least be curious about and respect, those who are different from us.  We “in here” have a responsibility to those “out there.”  Those “out there” are part of our church family too. 

But are we building walls to shut them out – or are we committed to building bridges to bring them in?

         Let’s face it.  In spite of Jesus’ strong message of inclusion that Peter re-emphasized, we all – you and I - prejudge other people.  Not that we get up in the morning, look at ourselves in the mirror, and say, “Today I am going to be ageist or sexist or racist.  Today I am going to be less of a Christian than Jesus would want me to be.” 

         But we prejudge anyway.  We second-guess why people cannot pay their electric bill or their rent or why anyone would be so undisciplined as to run out of oil in January.  Many of us do not want to get too close to someone who is flamboyantly gay - or exceedingly butch.  We are not sure how we feel about the man who smells like the gutter he came from or the woman whose basement harbors rats amongst the garbage and detritus of her broken and unhappy life. 

         And yet, Peter tells us – as he told the Council in Jerusalem: God shows no favoritism.  That we are one is God’s dream for the world.  Therefore, as Christians, we are challenged not to partition people into categories of goodness and worthiness.  We are challenged not to erect invisible fences.  We are challenged not to create barriers because, when we do, we retreat into Scare City.   Fences and barriers become signs that fear overpowers us.  When we build our walls and stockpile our resources, we create not more freedom, but our own prisons – and prisons for those around us.

         Let me tell you the story of Mariana.  She is a 16 year old native from Columbia who, along with her sister, are starters on our son, Padraic’s, high school soccer team in Boston.  Mariana and her extended family – seventeen in all – were off to the White Mountains one weekend for a glorious late-summer family tradition of hiking, swimming, and staying in the cabin they always rented. 

         However, this year was different - and would turn out to be world-shattering.  Border patrol agents were invoking a little-used federal law from 1946 that allowed them to stop and conduct searches without a warrant on vehicles within 100 miles of the border, including the coastline, searches that would be unconstitutional elsewhere. They had set up a checkpoint on Interstate 93 and were asking for identification. That law, by the way, includes all of New Hampshire and large pieces of the northern New England states, including Maine – leaving us vulnerable – or well-protected, depending on your viewpoint.

         Mariana and her family including their 12 year old brother were herded from their cars.  The men were separated, and all were taken to a processing center in Vermont.  They were found to have overstayed their visas.  The women and children were released within a couple of days, the men after two weeks.  All of them – kids and adults - will be deported unless an immigration judge decides otherwise.

         Mariana and her family did not stay in the US because they were criminals or drug dealers or intent on raping young white women.  Some would say that they have no right to be here.  Others would say that we cannot judge what we do not know.  We do not know what it is like to live in a country characterized by a lively drug trade and constant gang wars. We just know that it was enough to make Mariana’s family to decide to remain under the radar - but illegally – in the US.

         What we do know is that Mariana is a top student taking Advanced Placement courses.  She is driven to excel and is passionate about going to college and caring for her family. What we do know is that she is required to wear an ankle bracelet now to monitor her whereabouts. 

         What we do know is that, although border patrol workers cannot use racial profiling, they can rely on their suspicion of who is part of a given community (those who are “in”) and who is not (those who are “out”). As one agent recently interviewed on an NPR report acknowledged, “We know this area well enough to know who belongs here and who does not.”  What we do know is that Jesus engaged positively with and embraced the foreigner, the ones we label “them” – and calls us to do likewise.

         Now I tell you this story not to say that Mariana and her family should be above the law.  After all, we are a nation of laws – which is what, in the end, makes us great.  And Mariana’s family agrees – according to an article I read in the Boston Globe.  But I tell you this story to urge you to reflect on the ways we build walls and prejudge people and the ways we retreat into Scare City.

         So – the essential question for us in our little church is this:  How do we break down walls, draw the circle wide, and embrace those who are “out there”? 

         Certainly a place to start is the suggestion of one blogger I read this week.  He writes:  “I've found it a humbling exercise to ask what categories of people I spurn as impure, unclean, dirty, contaminated, and, in my mind, as far from God…What is my modern equivalent? Greedy executives, lazy welfare recipients, (Republicans?  Democrats?) How have I distorted the….egalitarian love of God into self-serving, exclusionary elitism?

What boundaries do I wrongly build or might I bravely shatter? To name our prejudice is the first step to understanding them.

         Another concrete step would be to remain ever vigilant about, and responsive to, occurrences in our communities, in our nation, in our world that breed distrust and build walls between “us” and “them”.  Part of this step would be to reflect on the significance of the story of Mariana and her family – for our nation but more importantly for ourselves as followers of Jesus.  After all, I wonder if Joe and I would have been stopped as well driving home from Canada on those same roads as we do each summer?  I think not – unless people with gray hair were being targeted.

         Certainly being “one in Christ” is easier said than done.  As Desotel wrote, “It’s not enough to say: we are one in Christ – no more than it’s enough to say, I’m not prejudiced, or I love everybody, or we are all people of sacred worth. Words are easy; words are cheap. Living into them is the hard and humbling work of a lifetime. We need to commit and recommit ourselves, again and again, to the challenge of the gospel – to the promise that God’s love does not follow our rules, that God’s grace isn’t limited by our small imaginations – but that God, who crossed the divide between heaven and earth, who crossed the divide between death and life, is still crossing lines….today.”  And God is calling us to do the same.

         The Gospel message challenges our church – this church –to be “out there”, affirming in every way we can, over and over again, that our faith family extends far beyond these four walls.  That is the only way we will stay out of Scare City – to embrace the abundance of gifts of the whole human family, to be courageous enough to obey when we hear God calling, and to have the faith enough to follow when God challenges our assumptions and prejudices.

         As this new hymn suggests:

Go make a diff’rence. We can make a diff’rence. Go make a diff’rence in the world.
We are the hands of Christ reaching out to those in need, the face of God for all to see.
We are the spirit of hope; we are the voice of peace. Go make a diff’rence in the world.

         That is what your financial commitment to the ministries of this church allow us to do – make a difference in the world by teaching our children what it means to be “out there” breaking down rather than building up walls and barriers, by encouraging one another to reflect on the meaning of ministry in the 21^st century, by bringing the Good News of Jesus, the news steeped in inclusiveness, affirmation, and drawing the circle of acceptance wide instead of narrow – bringing that Good News to all the world, so that God’s dream for humanity will become a reality. 

         That is why we put so much emphasis on an annual stewardship campaign.  It is not because your Council wants to guilt trip you into emptying your pockets to pay the oil bill.  It is because your financial commitments are the leverage we need to lead our church out of the darkness of Scare City and into the light of God’s dream.

         It took a church fight amongst the apostles and teachers long ago in Jerusalem to decide to build bridges instead of walls.  My prayer is that it will take only a pledged commitment from each one of you to do the same as we together – upheld by God’s grace and affirmed by God’s blessings – as we together strive to draw the circle wide.         

         

Isaiah 41:10-13 Moving Out of Scare City: Overcoming Fear

         Last week, we began our sermon series entitled “Moving Out of Scare City.”  We talked about the dark, forbidding, and brooding shadows that characterize that part of town.  

         What part of what town, you might ask.  Well, Scare City is where we hang out when we live our lives wanting more, more, more because we are scared that someday we will not have enough, enough, enough.  Scare City is where we reside when we wonder if we have all we think we need clenched tightly in our fists – enough friends to turn to in our loneliness, enough money to cover our essential and discretionary expenses each month, enough guns to protect us, enough of all the toys and material things we are sure we must have to make us happy and, more than happy, secure. 

         Scare City is where we set down roots if we conclude that we will never have sufficient resources – finances, friends, faith.  Scarce City is where we skulk around in the darkness, hiding ourselves “in here” (whether that be the church, a job, or some other place of escape), hiding ourselves from the world “out there” in all its brokenness and all its need. 

Scare City is where we can not help but live our lives in fear – fear of others taking what we have, fear of ourselves giving away too much.

         Fear is as old as the world itself and takes many and varied forms.  There is agoraphobia (fear of being in situations where escape might be difficult or that help would not be available if things go wrong), arachnophobia (fear of spiders and scorpions), arachibutyrophobia (arachi-bu-tyro-phobia - Fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth) – and that is just a few that begin with the letter A.

         And yet, just as fear has been around for eons, so God has been telling us this since the very beginning of time: “Do not be afraid”.  God has been tweeting out that message through myths and stories, through Christmas angels, through the ancient prophets. 

         As we just read, Isaiah – that man who was God’s mouth piece  so long ago - declared to the Israelite people over and over again:  “Be strong, do not fear.” “Do not fear, for I am with you.” “Fear not, for I have redeemed you.” “You will have nothing to fear.”

         And believe me, the Israelites had a lot about which to be fearful.  When Isaiah spoke his words of comfort and security, they lived on the edge of uncertainty.

After all, they had been shipped off in exile to the backwaters of the Babylonian Empire, left to sing their songs and hold on to the vestiges of their religion in a foreign land.  Once again, they were refugees – a people with no place to call home. 

         You see, the Babylonians, basing themselves in today’s southern Iraq had claimed the world stage under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar.  They had destroyed the southern kingdom of Judah.  They had laid waste to the Holy City of Jerusalem. 

         And perhaps the worst part was that the Temple, where the Israelites believed with all their hearts that their God permanently resided, was a pile of rubble, and in 586 B.C., God or no God, the most important people in the community were hauled off into exile, leaving only the likes of the widows and orphans to fend for themselves in a land that was no longer easily farmed and yielded next to nothing.

         And yet, to those in exile (and I like to think those left behind in Jerusalem might have heard the whispered words as well – if only as a distant echo), the old prophet Isaiah told the people time and time again:  “Do not be afraid.” In spite of all the terrible things that have happened and will likely happen, do not be afraid.”

Those are wise words, and I think the prophets and the angels are still whispering them to us – even us, even today. 

         And heaven knows we need the comfort those words can provide, perhaps as much as the ancient Israelites did.  For surely we too live in scary and uncertain times. 

         What will the stock market do, and how will that affect my retirement?  What will happen to my health insurance premiums whenPresident Trump eliminates the subsidies under the Affordable Care Act?  Will my family go without insurance once again? 

         Will I be safe at a concert, at school, or even walking down the street – or will someone fire a weapon and take me out? And will any of these concerns even matter if nuclear weapons are used to settle a bullying war of tweets? 

         It is overwhelming, to be sure, and certainly enough to turn us inward, to cause us in no uncertain terms to run back into Scare City and hide in the darkness and apparent safety we find in clutching the little we think we have.  Under the circumstances, why would we not retreat into fear-based living?

         But to do so is not living as God meant for us to live.  Living our lives in the perpetual fear of not having enough – enough money protection, hope - is not what God ever had in mind.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this disconnect between us and God, and he also understood fear.  Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran theologian who resisted Nazism in the years leading to World War II.  He was part of a failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and spent his final months in a concentration camp, only to be executed mere weeks before its liberation. 

         Bonhoeffer wrote this  in a sermon in the early 1930’s:  “Fear is, somehow or other, the archen­emy itself. It crouches in people’s hearts. It hollows out their insides, until their resistance and strength are spent and they suddenly break down. Fear secretly gnaws and eats away at all the ties that bind a person to God and to others, and when in a time of need that person reaches for those ties and clings to them, they break and the individual sinks back into himself or herself, helpless and despairing, while hell rejoices.”

         In the end, fear limits our ability to be truly human, as God intended us to be.  Fear limits our capacity to love, to serve, to share, and to live in harmony.  Non-denominational pastor Abri Brancken, in his blog, listed some of the mischief that fear can do:

         Fear causes you to see your problems as bigger than God’s ability to solve them.  It magnifies itself and diminishes the role that God will play if we will let her.

         Fear causes you to resist positive change and allows suspicion to breed within you.  It causes you to seek an easy way – perhaps rather than the right way - out of the uncertainty.

         Fear paralyzes you and causes you to want to control things and people – taking matters into your own hands rather than trusting in God.

         Because of 24-hour news and each broadcaster trying to outdo the others, we are surrounded by messages that inspire feelings of scarcity and fear. What "makes news" heaps images and stories of what might happen to us. Like walking down dark, winding, and narrow alleyways in Scare City, we are encouraged, I think, to move through our lives in fear of what might be lurking around every corner. 

         However, if we are to move out of Scare City, we need to come to grips with the fears that haunt us.  And most of all, we need to face the fear that what we have will not have enough for real happiness and security.  Likewise, we need to face the consequence of that fear – the consequence that we will not risk generously sharing what we do have in service to others.  We will turn inward, doing exactly the opposite of what Jesus taught.

         Of course, there are many ways of dealing with our fear.  Take the man who had been visiting a therapist because he had a fear of monsters living under his bed. The man had been seeing this therapist for quite some time. Every time he would come in the therapist would ask, “Have you made any progress?” Every time the man would say, “No”.

         After months of this same conversation, the man decided to go and see another practitioner. When he happened to run into his original therapist, the therapist asked out of curiosity, “Have you made any progress?”

         The man replied, “Yes, I am feeling all better now”

         The therapist was amazed and asked,  “What happened”.

         The man continued, “I went to another therapist, and he cured me in one session”.

         The first therapist asked, “What did he tell you?”

         The man answered triumphantly. “He just told me to cut the legs off of my bed”.

         I guess that is one way to conquer a phobia, but I like to think that we in the church embrace a more lasting solution.  Bonhoeffer put it simply:  “The overcoming of fear—that is what we are proclaiming here. The Bible, the gospel, Christ, the church, the faith—all are one great battle cry against fear in the lives of human beings.”

         We are the church, trusting in the presence of God in our lives and in the lives of those around us, trusting that we will never go it alone, especially in the midst of fear.  And because we are the church – and I do not mean coming here on Sunday to sing songs and listen to the preacher prattle on – but because we are the church beyond these four walls, we have the power to alleviate fear. 

         The ministries that we do here – the ones we can only do with your financial support - from teaching our children about service and caring to preparing Thanksgiving baskets to filling Heifer Project banks matched by Missions – these ministries say to the world that we in our small church with its big heart are here to proclaim that fear does not have the last word and that Scare City is a place where we will never lay down permanent stakes. 

     We are here to proclaim that life is for living abundantly and with open hands, not grabbing and clutching at what we think we need.  We are here to proclaim that by trusting in God and the God-given power we all possess, we have the potential to transform both ourselves and the world. 

         We are here to proclaim that we will not live in the fear of not having enough but rather will live with an abundance of faith that we have more than enough and so we can unclench our fists, open our hands, and share more of what we have. 

         We are here – not to do away with fear because that will never happen – but we are here to proclaim, as theologian Frederick Buechner once noted that “undergirding all we fear, are ‘the everlasting arms,’ spoken of in Deuteronomy, that are there to hold us up in the times when all we fear seems to break around us.” 

         We are here to proclaim that we are the church, and we trust in the abundance of God’s grace and the power of God within us to live generous lives.  We are here to proclaim that we are the church and have faith that God will strengthen, support, and sustain us always.  We are here to proclaim that we are the church and each one of us is called to contribute to the resources we needto strengthen, support, and sustain our ministries. We are here to proclaim that we are the church, and we know that fear freezes and faith frees.  We are here to proclaim that we are the church, and we are moving out of Scare City.

        

          

         

Genesis 11:1-8 Moving Out of Scare City: The Myth of Scarcity

         The tower was gigantic and was constructed from carefully crafted bricks and mortar.  It reached upward as far as the eye could see until it was lost in the wisps of cloud that scuttered by overhead.  No matter the time of day, no matter the position of the sun, the tower cast a dark, brooding, and forbidding shadow somewhere across much of the land. 

         The tower I am referring to, of course, was the one written about in the passage in Genesis that we just read – the Tower of Babel as it is famously called.  However, in spite of its notoriety that has come down through the ages even to us, it was not a real tower that was actually built sometime in the ancient past.  You see, the story of the tower was never meant to be taken literally.

         In fact, the story is in the part of the Bible that most reputable scholars call “pre-history.” It comes at the end of the collection of stories that attempt to explain the origin of everything and just why the world is the way it is – from the creation of the earth to the beginnings of suffering and sin, to the formation of different languages, to the constant interplay of God’s judgment of, and grace toward, all humanity. 

The story we read is the last significant one before the saga of Abraham, which marks the official beginning of the history of the Israelite people.

         We might also categorize this story as mythology.  However, that term has gotten a bad rap over the years with people believing that a myth is simply a tale that is untrue. 

         Yet, I side with theologian Frederick Buechner who wrote, “The raw material of a myth, like the raw material of a dream, may be something that actually happened once. But myths, like dreams, do not tell us much about that kind of actuality. The creation of Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Oedipus- they do not tell us primarily about events. They tell us about ourselves.  In popular usage, a myth has come to mean a story that is not true. Historically speaking, that may well be so. Humanly speaking, a myth is a story that is always true.” 

         The question for us this morning then is this:  What does this story of the building of a tower reaching all the way to heaven tell us about ourselves?  And, more importantly for us right now, how does this story begin to point the way for us out of Scare City?

         To answer those questions, we first need to put this tale into its Biblical, pre-historical, and mythological contexts. So – here goes…

         Imagine a fantastical time long ago and far away. The great flood was over, and a rainbow had arched across the sky.  The earth felt washed clean as it most assuredly was. The animals had marched off the ark two by two (or maybe as trios now) and gone their separate ways.  Noah and his family had also emerged, tremendously glad to see the sunshine after being cooped up in a large boat with a bunch of four-legged creatures of all sizes and shapes, not to mention all the birds flying about, a now dirty and cluttered ark that had protected them all from the torrential rains that had lasted forty days and forty nights. 

         The first thing Noah and the kids did when they had put their sea legs behind them and warmed themselves in the sunshine was to build an altar to God (Good thinking on their part!) as a way to thank the Holy One for her protection and safe-keeping.  The next thing they did was to figure out where to settle, lay down roots, and start farming the land. 

        So, in typical migrant fashion, they moved – like refugees, if you will, with no place to call home - and began exploring the grand and brave new world around them.  They set out like spokes on a great wheel, and one branch of the family eventually came to Shinar, a fertile and level plain that lay between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. 

         They decided it would be a good place to live, so they unpacked their tents and set up their cook stoves.  Even though God had clearly directed them to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth”, they figured they could fudge God’s commandment just a bit, multiply among themselves, and hang together in Shinar (Bad idea on their part!).

         No sooner had they set up camp, made a chore chart, and started planting wheat for next year’s harvest than a few of them looked around, nodded their heads, and remarked, “Farming is OK and tents will do, but how much better – and more permanent - would a city be?  It would keep us in – and the riffraff out.  What we need is a tower to mark our presence – and nobody else’s - here in this fair land.” And before you know it, they had mustered up enough creativity and ingenuity to develop a building plan and – with a bribe here and a wink there - railroaded it through the local planning board. 

         When they began excavating the site, they did not find rocks and stones and tar for building as had been common where they had lived before.  However, that did not deter them.  They adapted to their new environment and instead learned how to make bricks out of dirt and clay and even how to burn them – first in the sun and then in specially made ovens – until the bricks became hard and impermeable. 

         And day by day the tower rose higher and higher in the sky until one day God shook his old holy head and queried to himself, “What’s going on down there?  I told them to fan out to the ends of the earth, and here they are just staying in one spot – building a city to protect them from who knows what.  I want them to be one people – living in harmony and not in fear of one another. No telling what they’ll come up with next—they’ll stop at nothing!” 

         And, of course, we all know what did happen next.  Against their wishes, God scattered them to the far ends of the earth. They had to desert the city they had envisioned and the tower they had built.  And for good measure, God also garbled their language until it only sounded like babbling.

         To understand this story in the context of our worship series – “Moving Out of Scare City” – we need to look closely at why these nomads wanted to build such a permanent structure, a gigantic tower, in the first place.  The story outlines three reasons. 

         First, the people did not want to be scattered – even though their desire was in direct contradiction to God’s command to “fill the earth.”  They wanted to stick together – safety in numbers, as it goes.  They wanted to be with their own kind, knowing down to the last grain of wheat how much they needed to prosper.  They wanted to not have to worry about outsiders, not have to live in fear that someday there may not be enough to go around. 

         The tower, you see, was a place to hide – and should come as no a surprise to us.  All of its permanence and strength symbolizes a need we all have – and that is to protect ourselves from uncertainty and from a fear that if others find out what we possess, we will have less – and we may not have enough. 

         Yet, God says no to such fear-based living.  God says no to protecting ourselves from scarcity by building towers and walls to protect us from one another.  God’s plan is for us to live in harmony – with no need for towers to hide in.  God’s plan is for us to trust that there is enough to go around, trust that in our sharing rather than in our hoarding we will find joy.  As Winston Churchill once noted, "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." 

         There is a UCC pastor who now serves a church in California who challenged her congregation to tithe (give away 10% of their income).  She even said that, if doing so did not change their lives for the better, the church would refund their money to the level of their previous year’s pledge.  A few people took her up on the offer.  No money was refunded.  No one went to the poorhouse.  God says no to fear-based living.

         Second, the people built a tower because they wanted to reach the heavens.  They wanted to have God’s ear all the time.  They figured that a lot of bad things had happened – the flood, for example – because they had been separated from God. 

And, as Reformed Church pastor Kenneth Benjamin noted, “And so what better way to fix the problem than to make a stairway to heaven, go right up to God, be in heaven with God, and talk things out!”

         However, though we certainly reach God – wherever God is – through prayer, we find God not at the tippy top of a tower reaching heavenward, but in the eyes of those all around us with whom we share our resources and whom we serve through the ministries of our church.  We find God in the folks who come to us needing fuel assistance or a grocery card to make it to the end of the month, those here in Raymond who pick up Thanksgiving baskets, those in Texas and Florida and Puerto Rico who will use our 16 Church World Service emergency clean up buckets to clean up the mess left behind by the hurricanes.

         As Episcopal priest Michael Marsh noted in his blog, “We try to experience God on our terms. We build walls and structures and try to raise ourselves up to God telling God to work within the walls and structures we have built. But that is not how God works. God does not work or act within the walls and structures we have built. Instead, God lives, works, and acts within us.” God says no to looking for her only in the glories of heaven or within the four walls of a church building rather than in the detritus of the broken lives all around us.

         Third, the people wanted to build the tower because they wanted to make a name for themselves.  Unlike the rough-hewn altar they had constructed fresh off the boat in gratitude for God’s grace, they were intent on building a tower that spoke volumes about who they really were:  “We’re cool!  We’re cool!  Will you just take at gander at that tower?  Yeah, we’re cool!”

         As Max Lucado wrote about in his book, God Came Near, and a blogger I read this week paraphrased, “The tower was built for 100% pure selfishness.  The bricks were made of inflated egos and the mortar was made of pride…They built it so someone’s name might be remembered – theirs!  We have a name for that: blind ambition.  Success at all cost.  Becoming a legend in one’s own time.  Climbing to the top of the ladder.  King of the mountain.  Queen of the domain.  Top of the heap.  “I did it my way.”

         We make heroes out of people who are ambitious.  (Granted,) this world would be in sad shape without people who dream of touching the heavens.  Ambition is the grit in the soul (that) creates disenchantment with the ordinary.  But left unchecked it becomes an insatiable addiction to power and prestige; left unchecked it becomes a roaring hunger for achievement that devours people as a lion devours an animal, leaving behind only the skeletal remains of relationships.” 

         Left unchecked, our lives become an unending cycle of more, more, more.  That is how we think we will be remembered – the more money we flaunt, the more hotels we own, the more guns we have, the one who dies with the most toys wins.  But, when all is said and done, it does not work that way. 

         It is like the two Texans who wanted to impress each other with the size of their ranches. “What’s the name of your ranch?” one asked.

         The other boasted, “I own the Rocking R, Bar U, Flying W, Circle C, Box D, Rolling M, Staple Four, Rainbow’s End, Silver Spur Ranch.”

         Impressed, the first rancher responded, “Woooweee! With a name like that, how many cattle do you run?”

         The other confessed, “Not many, actually. Very few survive the branding.”

         As Lutheran pastor James Huebner wrote, “We live in a world that defines success by how much money a person makes, so we have determined that others aren’t as good as we are because they live off government funded programs or sleep in cardboard boxes. We live in a world that bows down to the idols of materialism and convenience so we have bought into the lie that life is all about me being happy and if I’m not happy I can buy things until I am. We live in a world that sees (ourselves) as invincible so we have convinced ourselves that our skill and strength is, at times, greater than God’s.”

         But God says no to making a name for ourselves at the expense of those we walk over to get to wherever we want to be.  God says no to defining our success as human beings by the stuff we have and the lattes we drink and the donuts we eat rather than by the service we give. 

         God says no to towers – towers of power, towers of affluence, towers of influence, towers that permanently protect us from seeing the world’s need around us, towers that keep out the riffraff, towers that cause us to hold tight rather than let go, towers that cause us to live in fear rather than in joy, towers that seal us into Scarce City, casting dark and brooding and forbidding shadows over all the land. 

         Because those dark and brooding and forbidding shadows will be our undoing.  As Frederick Buechner so poignantly noted, “If darkness is meant to suggest a world where nobody can see very well—either themselves, or each other, or where they are heading, or even where they are standing at the moment; if darkness is meant to convey a sense of uncertainty, of being lost, of being afraid; if darkness suggests conflict, conflict between races, between nations, between individuals each pretty much out for himself when you come right down to it; then we live in a world that knows much about darkness. Darkness is what our newspapers are about. Darkness is what most of our best contemporary literature is about. Darkness fills the skies over our own cities no less than over the cities of our enemies.”

         We need to tear down the towers and swallow our fear of not having enough – and instead we need to give away more.  We need to tear down the towers and let go of our “more, more, more” mentality and replace it with “we have more than enough”.  We need to tear down the towers and let in the light, bringing that light to those we care for and share with.  We need to tear down the towers and together begin to move out of Scarce City.