orient towards god

Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost ● October 20, 2024

Becca Love, Guest Preacher © 2024

You can view the full worship video recording at:

https://youtu.be/3wtNDoMNbqs?si=wqKvP4qs54A25ugv

Scripture Readings: 

Corinthians 2:9 (New International Version),

Proverbs 16:9 (New International Readers Version),

Luke 17:20–21 (New International Version)

The texts of the readings are in the worship bulletin linked here.

I think a lot of you know that I’m moving to MA very soon. I’m still going to be an active and present part of Church of the Village, hopefully serving as a lay leader, but I’ll possibly be shifting to an online lay leader role, a position we hadn’t previously imagined for our church. I’ll be *here*, in the midst of our congregation, but in a different way. When I came to COTV four and half years ago, I couldn’t have imagined how much this church would become a part of my life. How could I have known? I thank God for the winding path that got me here and I am grateful for how this church has broadened my understanding of God. 

The winding path that brought me here has been something I’ve thought about a lot recently, because it feels like such a strong reminder of how much I don’t know. Proverbs 16:9 says In their hearts, human beings plan their lives. But God decides where their steps will take them. Friends, I am somewhat of a planner. I am constantly thinking up what is next and how I'm going to get there. This past year has been such a practice in letting go of the idea that I can control everything about my experience. It’s been somewhat awe-inspiring to look at the path that got me here, recognizing God was luring me towards things I didn’t even know were possible. I’d like to share with you a brief timeline, to help illustrate this. 

In January of 2019, I left an abusive relationship. I won’t go into detail but I will say that the period during and shortly after that relationship was one of the most painful and emotionally claustrophobic times of my life. I was harmed, it was scary, and amazingly, I got out. In the process of recovering from that relationship, I found myself in Alanon, a 12-step recovery group for friends and family of alcoholics and addicts. Alanon saved my life and through working with the tools of the program, I found myself reconnecting to the God of my understanding in a big way. That feeling of reconnection turned into a call towards ministry and by the Spring of 2020, I was enrolled in seminary and taking online classes towards a Masters of Divinity. While in seminary to hopefully become a minister, I realized it would probably be a good idea for me to find a church, after about 13 years of not attending. I had seen something somewhere about a church doing glitter ashes for Ash Wednesday, which I hadn't attended because I didn't want to take a train to the city, but on Easter of 2020 I logged into zoom and attended my first Church of the Village service. 

Here I found a group of earnest, passionate, creative, caring, and courageous people, all very human and sincerely building ministry around justice and inclusion and community and sound theological curiosity, even when it got messy. A year after coming here, I dropped out of my seminary program because I had found in Church of the Village what I was seeking from an MDiv degree. My path towards God led me to this community and I was given the opportunity to reorient. 2 years after coming here, I got to preach as part of a Holy Friday service, and have had the distinct honor and joy of holding this mic a few times since then. This is where my story gets current. I began posting my sermons on instagram in 2022 and in 2023, an old friend reached out in response to my sermon on baptism. They said my church seemed really cool, and they asked about coming to visit for service some time. 

When that person walked into the sanctuary a few weeks later, my life changed again and a big reorientation began. A year later, I’m packing my boxes to move to MA, a move I certainly couldn’t have predicted 6 years ago when I felt so trapped in that old relationship. One of the most awful periods of my life eventually led me to something more beautiful than I thought possible. First I found my way to Church of the Village, and then by orienting toward God with all of you, I eventually saw where God was luring me next. How can any of us ever know? How could I have known that a Zoom link I clicked on in 2020 would bring me to this incredible church family? How could I have known that getting on a bus to New York City in 2007 would bring me to all of this? What an awesome thing, to not know, but to be surprised again and again by what we find along the path. In 1 Corinthians 2:9 Paul references Isaiah when addressing the church at Corinth, writing ““What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived” — the things God has prepared for those who love God.” Now, I don’t believe that God only prepares things for those who love God, but I do think that we can find strength and courage for the journey when we turn towards God.  I also don’t mean to say that everything happens for a reason, I don’t think anyone needs to go through abuse in order to find their way to love. But I do believe that God remains available to us through both hardship and joy. We orient towards God, towards community, towards love, towards justice, and then face the unknown, both good and bad.

Last week Pastor Alexis reminded us of the clarity of what God has asked of us: simply do justice, love kindness, and humbly walk with your God. Simple in theory, sure, but we know the human experience can be a little more complicated. As such, we as a church have come together over the past year to write out our vision for the future, our hope to move towards God in various ways. It is a big deal that we as a Church have taken the time to try to identify what we believe, knowing that this is a compass, not a roadmap. This is where we believe God is luring us and we will courageously move in that direction, not knowing what lies between here and there. And we have stated that that means orienting towards kin-dom justice, towards dismantling oppression, towards radical inclusivity, and towards the flourishing of life in the here and now. Kin-dom justice is a move away from Kingdoms or even Queendoms, resisting hierarchies of power but rather building a community of KINship, a KIN-dom of heaven. 

Here is a section from our recently developed vision and mission statement: 

Church of the Village UMC is a beautiful and intentionally diverse community,

whose doors swing wide open to embrace spiritual seekers within and beyond

Christianity. Church of the Village is called by the God of Life to dismantle

oppression, build kin-dom justice, and actively work towards the creative

transformation of ourselves and this world. We aim to create a radically

inclusive space with courageous vulnerability where all can experience and

testify to the presence of our expansive, uncontrolling, and loving God.

We are invited to constantly orient and reorient ourselves toward God. And I believe this will, over and over again, turn our focus toward each other. Toward our neighbors. Toward love and beauty and justice. 

In one of my favorite books, ‘On Beauty and Being Just,’ the author Elaine Scarry makes the argument that beauty can move us to defend and work for justice and that justice itself can be beauty. I believe that Scarry’s use of the word beauty could easily refer to God. If God is love, and justice, and compassion, then surely God can be beauty. I’m talking about the messy, awe-inspiring, challenging, humbling, life-giving, incomprehensible kind of beauty that can be found in God’s many manifestations, including right here, in our midst. What happens in the midst of this congregation, in all its locations, is beautiful. It moves us toward justice and the kind of love that breaks down empire. Sometimes it’s hard, and sometimes we are faced with challenges that feel nearly insurmountable. I am not naive to the reality that we are a church facing many transitions, we always have been. It’s part of our design, not a defect. Elaine Scarry writes in ‘On Beauty and Being Just’ “There is a willingness to continually revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty… At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering. Beauty requires us to ‘give up our imaginary position as the center…” I believe Our work is not to wait at the center of our own lives and see what comes to us, but rather to look towards God, towards justice, towards our community, and then orient towards that path of beauty. 

Another one of my favorite books is “The Argonauts,” by Maggie Nelson. The book covers a period of significant transition in the author’s life and the life of her family. The name “The Argonauts” references a Greek myth about a boat called the Argo and its crew, the Argonauts. Maggie Nelson got this title from an essay by the philosopher Roland Barthes who wrote ‘the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like the argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name. Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”

When we reorient towards God it is like we are renewing and redefining our vows, and becoming new in our love and our faith and our trust again. We are given a compass that points us towards justice and love and each other. And also we are complicated humans! At times we might lose our temper, misjudge situations, and make decisions that turn out really different than we imagined. Things will work out in ways that are both better and worse than we could have ever imagined, placing us in situations that we didn’t even dream were possible. And amazingly we are given the opportunity to turn towards God in all of those  moment. To locate the source of loving compassion and choose to move towards it. We can find renewed courage and faith, even when on shaky ground. I can’t even say that I know with certainty that I completely trust God at all times. I do know with certainty that I *want* to trust in God all of the time. That I “want” to have a closer and more constant contact with the God of my understanding. Another quote from the Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes, addressing her child, “I want you to know, you were thought of as possible- never as certain, but always as possible- not in any single moment but over many months, even years… [we] deeply, doggedly, wildly wanted you to be.” Friends, almost nothing is certain in this life and at the same time nearly everything is possible. My faith urges me to believe that God is always orienting me towards good, and that I in turn am invited to do what I think will orient myself towards God. Our deep and dogged, wild wanting helps us shape the kin-dom of God and orient ourselves toward courageous justice. 

I don’t know what exactly lies ahead but I know that I want to be drawing ever nearer to this kin-dom of God we are dreaming of together. Like Jesus says in the book of Luke,“The kin-dom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, for behold: the kin-dom of God is in the midst of you.”Whatever shape that takes, I can find courage for the unknown journey by constantly orienting myself towards God, towards love, and towards community, trusting that I am never alone and that abundant life awaits.