Finding Our Way (Matt. 5.1-13)

Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

October 15, 2017

 

My father the anthropologist used to say that we’re all interested in two related questions: Where have we come from and where are we going? I wasn’t thinking of those questions when I got out of the car on Sand Island, a small industrial spit in the middle of Honolulu Harbor, but I was thinking of them an hour later. They’re questions of stewardship, broadly speaking. They ask how we are spending our lives.

What we had gone to see on Sand Island was a living monument to the questions of where we have come from and where we are going. It was a 62-foot double-hulled Hawaiʻian sailing canoe called Hōkūleʻa. Hōkūleʻa was built by members of the Polynesian Voyaging Society in the ancient way and she was sailed using the tools available to the old Polynesians; namely, the sky and the sea. Hōkūleʻa was part of the Hawaiʻian cultural resurgence, tying people to their ancestors and a deep sense of what it meant to be Hawaiʻian in time when the culture was being lost and the stories eclipsed. Nainoa Thompson, Hōkūleʻa’s captain wanted to, in his own words, “look to the past to strengthen our future; to bring the technology, wisdom, and values of our ancestors into the present; and to call upon them to help us navigate to a brighter destination. . .”[1]

It’s a beautiful story of indigenous pride, but it is also a story of a people finding their way. In order to know where they were going, Hawaiʻians asked where they had come from and what their resources were. To begin, Thompson and others combed Pacific islands for the old ones who still knew the methods of traditional navigation. These involved reading the sky and the sea. The stars, always fixed in their relation to each other, provided reference points. The sea, changing in temperature and current, offered real-time data. Even the behavior of birds offered clues to the Polynesians who spread across the world’s largest ocean using only their double-hulled canoes. Many will tell you to this day that they view the Pacific Islands as one vast nation made of many peoples who were not divided by the sea, but connected by it.

With this in mind, we were excited to see Hōkūleʻa. She had just returned from a voyage around the world and was in dry dock for an inspection. We arrived just before they closed the gate and a friendly man let us in and showed us around. It turned out he had been part of the crew that had sailed the last leg from Tahiti. We walked up to the canoe and looked at her admiringly while the man told us stories. I was struck by Hōkūleʻa’s smallness. 62-feet long, as I mentioned, but only 20-feet wide. Two hulls banded together with a cabin atop them, which would later remind me of the twin questions of the past and future banded together by the present. And just across the parking lot the beginning of the vast blue Pacific. The man we were talking to traveled thousands of miles across the ocean on this tiny vessel. He spoke of how high the waves were, how bright the stars. As if to underscore the point, he smiled as he said, “We sailed from Tahiti to Hawaiʻi using only two things: observation and dead reckoning.” Meaning the combination of where it looked like they were and where they thought they were. Reconciling the two, the crew found their way across the deepest ocean.

I’ve returned to that image again and again of late because it seems to me that we’re trying to find our way through this moment. A part of this has to do with the convulsions in our country and our politics, a part of this has to do with our spiritual search and the loneliness I believe is growing, and a part of it has to do with our relationship to the natural world and the need to set down our screens and watch the stars, but, in every case, I feel that we may be a bit lost. We may be at sea, feeling the depth of the waters around us, not knowing quite how to make it back home.

I have shared a Hawaiʻian story, but with respect we must name that we are not Hawaiʻian. We can learn from that culture and then look at our own. But if Hawaiʻian people are any guide, and who better to guide us than a wayfinding people, then we might look to our own resources. We might take Nainoa Thompson’s advice and look to the past to strengthen our future, call upon it to help us navigate to someplace brighter.

This is something we try to do in church. We ask where we have come from and where we are going in conversation with our ancestor Jesus and the early communities that formed around his teachings. These are our cultural resources and if we claim them they can also be our reference points and guiding stars. They may also run counter the dominant culture in which we live, which prizes things that the early Christians did not. For example, the earliest Christian communities valued simplicity, sharing, egalitarianism, and peaceable living. Contrast this with our current American culture, which values money, possessions, status, and force of arms. The difference is so great that in order to find our way as people of faith we must go back to the stories of who we are and where we came from. Only then will we be able to read the signs of the present moment and chart a course ahead.

I’d like to suggest this morning’s scripture reading as one that might ground us in the wisdom of Jesus. It is the Beatitudes, one of Jesus most beloved teachings, known for the beauty of its poetry and the longing of its vision. The Beatitudes are the first of five major teaching discourses in the Book of Matthew, each of them designed to help us understand who we are and who we might become going forward. Yet Matthew himself is drawing from the past, as is Jesus. Matthew’s gospel, more than any other, references Hebrew literature and tradition, highlighting the Jewishness of Jesus and the long line of ancestors from which he derives. Jesus is setting out on his own way, but he knows where he has come from. His guiding stars are the law, the prophets, and the wisdom writings, which he uses even as he observes where he is and what is happening around him. Part of what is happening around him is the marginalization of different people during a time of empire. He sees those for whom the status quo does not work, for whom religion is a harm and economics a tool of exploitation. And he joins himself with these, calls them his sisters and brothers. The canoe he is sailing has room enough for the ones who have never been invited before. It is a boatload of enemies and outcasts, searchers and skeptics, the bruised and the brokenhearted all looking for a place to belong. Jesus’ message is good news to them; good news that runs counter to the culture.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann writes:

Jesus is remembered and presented by the early church as the faithful embodiment of an alternative consciousness. . .[and] the one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order.[2]

What Bruggemann is getting at, I think, is that Jesus imagines things differently because he has a sense not only of who he is, but who his sisters and brothers are. He knows where he has come from—the deep teachings of Judaism; he knows where he is—surrounded by sisters and brothers on the margins; and this enables him to know where he is going—into a new vision of a beloved community of equals. This is nowhere more plain than in that first discourse in Matthew, the Beatitudes.

When the crowds came to hear him, he sat down, taking the traditional teaching position of a rabbi, and shared with them what his movement was about, who his kin-dom was for:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, he said, for theirs is the kin-dom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, he said, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, he said, for they will inherit the earth. And then he kept going, turning the status quo on its head. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who are merciful, those with pure hearts, those who make peace, and those who are persecuted for these dreams and visions of the way the world could be. These are the ones, he says right after, who are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. And while he didn’t exactly mean the salt of the sea or the light of the stars, his words are a guide for us. If we look to the meek and the mournful, if we look to the poor in spirit and the pure of heart, and if we see who is on the margins and pull them into our boat, this is the beginning of the way.

It brings us back to stewardship, insofar as it brings us back to the questions of where we have come from and where we are going. We have come from way back, from the times and the teachings recorded in our sacred stories. We have come from the law, the prophets, and the wisdom writings. Yet we have also come from Jesus’ creative interpretation of those things and his translation of them through his own life and teachings. And we have come from the earliest Christian communities, which tried to put the Beatitudes into practice with their commitments to simplicity, sharing, egalitarianism, and peaceable living. We go into the future with this past to strengthen us. And it is a future that will need us.

It’s no secret that we live in turbulent times. We are sailing the deep waters, hoping to make our way through. Many in the past year have shared how much this community means to them. We have found safety here and sanity. It’s as much a lifeboat as a sailing canoe. Yet we have also found vision and voice. It’s a place where we dream together of a Beatitudes-based world, where all have what they need and everyone is welcomed in. Soon you will receive a letter that includes a vision of where we are going with regard to programs, staffing, justice work, and education in the year to come. I hope that you will join us in pledging your time, energy, and money to the mission of Circular Church. These pledges help us know what resources we have to make the vision real, to bring it to life in the months ahead. But what I hope most is that our giving will be joyful and even proud because what our time, energy, and money make possible is something that really is different than the status quo. Every week we come here, and for at least an hour or two, the world is almost as it should be. All of us on the canoe, sailing the deep waters together on love’s way home.

After we had spoken with the man for a while, it was time for the crew to go home. We thanked him and took one last look at Hōkūleʻa. We asked how long she would be in for repairs. Not long, he said. And then he explained there were many more places to go.

Amen.

 

[1] Nainoa Thompson, “Mālama Honua: Hōkūleʻa’s Voyage of Hope – Part 4, Right Direction,” accessed online at http://www.patagonia.com/blog/2017/03/malama-honua-hokuleas-voyage-of-hope-part-4-right-direction/

[2] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 88.