Now is the Time

Deuteronomy 26:1-10
Philippians 3:7-14


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

October 21, 2007

I wish to speak with you this morning in the power of the moon. One of the great gifts of Celtic Spirituality to Christian civilization is that its poetic soul always rises on images from nature. The power of the moon is as vital to the spirit as is the power of Christ, and when Celtic Christianity transformed the warrior culture of Ireland mid-way in the first millennium, it did so in a language alive with nature. So in the ancient still fertile tradition of Celtic Christianity I wish to speak with you this morning in the power of the moon: the mystery of new light coming out of darkness.

It was an Irish Catholic dancer and artist – she had red hair -- who first introduced my soul to the power of the moon. I want to share her inspiration. “Duncan,” she said, “when you first see that thinnest cuticle slice of the moon in an early evening twilight, say a prayer for what you want God to do with you next.”

These little births have followed me for years: spiritual seeds planted in the early nighttime sky bringing forth, over time, night and day, without my will or power, some bright and shining fullness.

When the hopes of the human heart are implanted in the natural cycles of the cosmos faith says, “God’s will be done” and it is so!

There are many moons pulling on the tides of history. As the tide is changing in this church as indeed it is changing in our world, we may pray that in the slow and steady power of the moon, God may do in us, next, God’s bright and shining will. Many moons ago such prayers were made and fulfilled in the lives of those who made Rockville United Church and its community ministry.

I know many of you love and revere the history of this church. Many of you have made your life’s sacrifices and joys this church. And while many know it better in detail than I, I wonder if you grasp in scope the unique and powerful vision that gave RUC its last 40 years.

When the moon was shining brightly over the Hudson River in New York City in October of 1967, we students at Union Theological seminary, staring out of our leaded windows through the gothic lace tower of Riverside Church, did not know that such a church as RUC existed or was possible. I count it as a failure of my faith that I could not even have have hoped that such a church was happening. And so nearly a whole generation of us, who were so inspired by the progressive waxing hopes of a new age, left the church as dead and gave up on the waning institution called the Christian Church.

Many of – not all – the theological stars of my generation worked the other side of the street, taking a walk on the wild side. But RUC worked both sides of the street. RUC stayed faithful to the ancient, the original, life-form of the Christian Church, the congregation. Like the Synagogues of Jesus’ time, like the house-gatherings of Paul’s early churches, RUC believed in and nurtured the only real body of Christ we ever know – the worshipping congregation.

So many of us were willing to leave the body of Christ in order to follow the prophetic call of Christ in the world. We heard, as RUC heard, the call of Christ in the war on poverty, in the war on war. We felt the power of God in the movements for freedom, as did RUC.

But inspired members of my generation left the church behind because of what we saw to be “the suburban captivity” of the Christian Church. We abandoned the church to the conservatives and the fundamentalists because we felt that the church itself would not really integrate black and white, would not really yield woman their rightful place, would not risk losing power to the poor, and could not, as a church, stop a war.

The unique genius of RUC, as I see it, is that it didn’t allow the suburban captivity of the church to get it down. RUC did, on the most local level, what progressive people of faith did on a national scale – it created a separate wing.

A separate wing was what Dr. King did. When he failed to make the Baptist Church the body of Christ answering Christ’s call to racial justice he created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It was not the church, but it wasn’t the NAACP either. When Bill Coffin and others couldn’t get mainline Protestant Churches – at the local level – to stop the Indo-China War, he created, with others, Clergy Concerned about Vietnam. It wasn’t the Church but it wasn’t unrelated, it was an extension, it was a wing.

God is always creating wings, especially when the body of Christ is held in captivity. You can read the history of God’s wings in the names of organizations that take up the leading edges of God’s will. There is a cross in the Red Cross – coming out of the Civil War and the C.S.C. The Christian Sanitarian Corps. There is a salvation offered by the Salvation Army, when no church itself would march into the slums of industrial England. There is an Easter hope in Easter Seals. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, of course, use wings of Churches to get young people out into the glories of nature. And you just can’t say enough about the WCTU, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, because who but angry women could tell the local church men to sober up, and mean it!

But it’s clear that such wings have a life span. To be new and free and on the edge enlivens and moves the body. But it is fragile, and really quite weak.

And while the metaphors get difficult it’s clear that recently RUC wisely decided it was time to fold its wing, CMR. Or to let its wing fly away, if you will. The crisis ahead for CMR is what will its spiritual body be. The crisis ahead for us, at RUC, is where will our wings take us?

The suburban captivity of the church is always lurking out there. My guess is we can leave that to the shopping mall mega churches that seem to know exactly how to disguise the body of Christ as a consumer success!

As Rockville United Church was an unknown sliver of light to this seminary student 40 years ago, so may it become again with an equal amount of vision and sacrifice, of faith and courage, as was shown in 1967.

Over a thousand years before that the spirit of Christ took wing in a whole and holy new way in the spirit of one young man named Patricus. Captivity was everywhere in the 900’s. To him, Patricus, the Christian Church that he knew was hopelessly captive to the Empire. Patricus’ father was a well-educated Latin speaking “Anglo” on the Island of Britain, a post in the original evil Empire, Rome. And the Church of Christ, such as it was in England, was fully captive to the Roman Empire. But in a harrowing example of just how radical and free the will of God is, young Patricus was himself made captive to an even worse power. While rejecting the boredom and emptiness of his father’s, Latin-Christian-Anglo faith, Patricus was literally kidnapped by pagan Celtic warriors from Ireland. The young boy was taken from home, brought to Ireland, made into a slave, stripped of all clothing, sent out into fields to shepherd sleep.

And there under the many moons of his many nights of captivity Patrick, with no hopes but hope, with no church but prayer, without a friend in the world but God, brought forth a vision of Christianity that transformed the warrior Celtic Chiefs into the poets and priests that pacified Ireland, created male and female monastic orders that sponsored life, art, learning, even allowing priests to marry. Eventually the great Arab and Greek texts of Western civilization were saved in the Irish Monasteries of these Celtic Christians.

And so I want to speak with you in the power of the moon. In the power of the moon that Patrick looked at month after month as he lived hopelessly captured by a warrior cult. By the power of the moon that softened the spirits of the men and women who would eventually hear the voice of Saint Patrick and begin to create a new body of Christ with wings, wings that included nature and women, wings that extended peace without war, wings that saved learning and love. Wings that would flash by moonlight, for a long time. Because I think you agree that now is the time for Rockville United Church to spread its wings again as one, both hearing the call and being the body, in the name of Christ.

And so this sermon has followed the ancient Biblical formula: Look to our history, and then turn to God, anew, in gratitude. And then this sermon follows the radical turn towards the future found in the words of St. Paul, “Forgetting what lies behind…” strain and press forward, considering all loss gain if it obtains our life in Christ.

And so as we have a past, gratitude and giving, we have a future, a goal, a prize and a willingness to give all. And so, in the power of the moon, in the power that commits early slivers of light to prayer I want to meet with you. In the power of the new moon, I want to meet with you.

I researched it. There is a new moon January 8th, 2008 at 11:37. In the early light of that moon, I want to meet with you Friday night, January 11th at 7:30 to talk with you about my inspirations for the new light mission of this church. Because I believe that God brings light out of darkness, just as I see, we see, the moon grow in the power of light, I want to meet to make my influence known about the future missions of this church. There is a new moon February 7th at 3:44. So on Friday night February 8th, I want to be in a second home, somewhere in Rockville, meeting with you to tell you what I see and what I discern could be God’s will with you and the future of Rockville United Church.

There is a third new moon on March 7th at 5:14am, and so in yet a third location on Friday night, March 7th – in the power of a third waxing crescent moon, in the power of our history, in the resurrection faith, I want to talk with you. We will have attained our ninth month by then, we will be approaching a year: it will be time – now is the time – to bring forth our new light. Amen.