15 On the day the dwelling was erected, the cloud covered the dwelling, the covenant tent. At night until morning, the cloud appeared with lightning over the dwelling. 16 It was always there. The cloud covered it by day,[d] appearing with lightning at night. 17 Whenever the cloud ascended from the tent, the Israelites would march. And the Israelites would camp wherever the cloud settled. 18 At the Lord’s command, the Israelites would march, and at the Lord’s command they would camp. As long as the cloud settled on the dwelling, they would camp. 19 When the cloud lingered on the meeting tent for many days, the Israelites would observe the Lord’s direction and they wouldn’t march. 20 Sometimes the cloud would be over the dwelling for a number of days, so they would camp at the Lord’s command, marching again only at the Lord’s command. 21 Sometimes the cloud would settle only overnight, and they would march when the cloud ascended in the morning. Whether it was day or night, they would march when the cloud ascended. 22 Whether it was two days, or a month, or a long time, the Israelites would camp so long as the cloud lingered on the dwelling and settled on it. They wouldn’t march. But when it ascended, they would march. 23 They camped at the Lord’s command and they marched at the Lord’s command. They followed the Lord’s direction according to the Lord’s command through Moses. (CEB)
“Behold a New Thing: The Tribal Church,”
Week Six
It
could not have been more painful. She
had been working on her car’s brakes when suddenly, the car’s jack buckled, and
the entire thing came crashing down on her foot. After her doctors assessed the nerve damage
to her foot, she asked them to amputate her leg below the knee.
Yet,
thus began a new calling for her. Her
day job, amazingly, enough, was as an occupational therapist for paraplegic
persons at Washington University in St. Louis, and she put all of her
professional skills and ingenuity to work on her recovery, and on her very
public attempts to reassure others who had had recent amputations. This work culminated recently in her posting
a time-lapse video to Youtube of her building a prosthesis with Lego bricks
from her childhood.
The
LegoLeg, as she called it, was not functional enough to walk in, but she is
able to stand and put weight on it. Her
new goal is to build a LegoLeg that she can walk in. And from her home in St. Louis, she has begun
to move the hearts of thousands of people, simply because she found a brand new
use for a childhood toy: to stand instead of sit, and to one day walk instead
of not.
We
tell ourselves churches must look a certain way and beat ourselves up when they
don’t. But the church is what I imagine
a child must be like—as Tina Fey puts it in her memoir Bossypants, yes, you can teach a child manners and dress her up in
embarrassing little sailor outfits, but at some point, that child is going to
be whatever she is going to be (and, ironically or no, that very line reflects
the wonder and splendor of the divine name itself from Exodus 3: I Am Who I
Am).
And
that’s kind of what it is like for us, you know? Lots of people would say they know what we should
look like—they want to tell us which little sailor outfits to dress up in—but
at some point, this church is going to be whatever this church is. And after being here as your pastor for
nearly two years, I have found the closest thing possible to describing what
this church is, and what we can become: a so-called tribal church, ministering
to a missing generation of believers.
This
term comes from a 2007 book of the same name by Carol Howard Merritt, a
Generation X evangelically-raised Presbyterian pastor and author. And we will be basing this new six-week
sermon series on this book, as we look at what exactly a tribal church is, and
what it can truly do. We have now spent
five weeks on this book and on this sermon series, and we have arrived at the
final installment, whose theme is “nurturing spiritual community.” Carol writes in this chapter:
The aging congregation in Rhode Island
that I pastored had a steady stream of dying members. Each time I buried someone, I soon got
another call about a dear friend in intensive care, or a kind man who had just
passed quickly and quietly. Intense
waves of grief washed over the family members, and as I sat with the loved
ones, I longed to have someone sit with me.
In the midst of this, I had an early
miscarriage. I felt life and hope drain
out of me, but I still didn’t have the support that pastors need in their own
periods of sadness, denial, and bargaining.
I said goodbye to a couple of close friends who moved away, and could
not find much strength to fill the void…
It was a dark year in my life, and I
stumbled and tripped all the way through it.
I didn’t know how to ask for help, and when I did, I had the terrible
feeling that somehow needing it was the wrong thing. I figured that other pastors must have gone
through the same things, but talking to others in the denomination about my
weaknesses made me feel…well, weak.
Carol
writes these words in a chapter about her discovery of moving prayer—literally,
praying while moving. And for her, it is
one significant way in which spirituality gets nurtured. And it makes sense to me on a personal and
religious level as well—personal because I’m this fidgety young thing who doesn’t
always sit still, and religious because of stories like this from Numbers.
Numbers
might just be the most underrated book in the Bible. It is sandwiched between two legal
masterpieces—Leviticus and Deuteronomy—and is known primarily for documenting
the first-ever census of the Israelites.
Which, I mean, is cool and everything, but it doesn’t really hold a
candle to a plague of locusts, you know?
Numbers is so underrated that I’m willing to bet that its most famous
passage is something most of you know, but had no idea that it came from
Numbers: it’s the prayer “May the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord
deal kindly and graciously to you, may the Lord make His face to shine upon you
and give you peace.” It’s Numbers 6, but
I didn’t know that until I took an Old Testament class in college.
But
anyways, Numbers 9. Everything between
here and Exodus 20, when Moses is given the Ten Commandments—so, the second
half of Exodus, all of Leviticus, and the first nine chapters of Numbers—all of
it takes place at Sinai. It’s a pretty
big intermission on the journey to the Promised Land, and you can imagine that
after such a lengthy—and meaningful—break, that setting back out on the trail
again wasn’t the easiest thing to get up and go do. You lose inertia and momentum, and that ups
the degree of difficulty substantially.
And
so in Numbers 9 (the more I say it, will anyone start to get that Beatles song,
“Revolution Number Nine” stuck in their head?), God intervenes to dial that
degree of difficulty back down. He
manifests a supernatural phenomenon to guide the movement of the Israelite camp—a
cloud by day, and fire by night. And
this supernatural cloud and fire guides the Israelites from point to point by
settling at wherever they are to encamp for the night, and staying there until
God tells the Israelites to break camp again, at which point it would go on
ahead to the next point.
Now,
I’m not sure exactly how well this divine GPS navigation system worked—after all,
it took the Israelites forty years to traverse a patch of land that Google Maps
says should take you only about five hours to drive across (yes, I actually
looked up how long it takes to drive from Cairo to Ramah. Now you have some idea of how your pastor
spends his day of sermon prep). Yet
still, it was, and is, miraculous nonetheless, God-Garmin or not.
And
compared to the Sinai narrative—where all of this legal code is handed down to
Moses and the Israelites basically in one place and in one fell swoop—this is a
gradual revelation of God’s presence. In
other words, God works both ways. God
can overwhelm us in a singular instance of wonder and splendor, and God can
also guide us bit by bit and piece by piece.
Because
this is not the only time in Scripture when God uses supernatural phenomena to
guide people somewhere. It is how, in
Matthew’s Gospel, He uses the Bethlehem star to guide the Magi to the birthplace
of Jesus in Bethlehem. It’s the exact
same sort of thing—God sends a divine manifestation that moves and guides a
people to a promised destination. For
Moses and the Israelites, it is the land that they shall call home. For the Magi—and for us—it is to the Christ
child whom we shall call Savior. In both
instances, God uses the gradual journey to lead us to something far greater
than ourselves. In other words…God works
both ways.
Which
means that the church must work both ways as well. I worry that far too often, we treat bringing
someone into the church, or to the point that they want to be in right
relationship with God through Jesus Christ, as the finish line, the objective,
the target to aim for. The evangelist
Billy Sunday once famously said that the best thing that could happen to
someone is to die immediately after converting to Christianity, because they
had just achieved all they needed to.
And
that can’t be how a tribal church operates.
A tribal church isn’t just there for the mountaintop moments, those fleeting
instances where God’s grace and presence overwhelms us to the point of being
called to Christianity. A tribal church
must be there for all the moments that come after as well. A church that is only in it for the
born-again experience is acting like a fair-weather friend: there for when
things are at their best. No, a church
must be more than that.
And
that is the best way I can come up with, after six weeks of preaching on this,
to define what a tribal church looks like to me. I know many of you have asked, and this is
the best answer I can give: a tribal church creates a tribe around a common
cause and belief—the existence of God as taught and embodied by Jesus—and then
cares for that tribe in sometimes the most basic of ways, but ways in which its
members can be cared for in no other way, and that is why I think most tribal
churches are intergenerational, theologically diverse, and increasingly
creative.
A
young woman who had just endured an utterly painful, life-and-limb-altering
experience had elected to nurture a community around a common cause through the
internet, and the result was, well, a new prosthetic made of old childhood
toys. And the attention it received
after going viral contributed to the building and growing of another community,
an online tribe of people.
Behold
a new thing, indeed.
For,
just as God creates in us a new thing when we finally say “Yes!” to His call,
so too do we then, in turn, create in others new things as well. It’s a divine chain reaction, a God-inspired
ripple effect that affects not just us, but our entire tribe. For just as there was no way of knowing for
most of the Israelites just exactly what God had in store for them after the Exodus
out of Egypt, so too are we allowed to be amazed and inspired anew at how God
guides our spirituality in the desert as well as on the mountaintop, and on the
path as well as at the destination.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
July
7, 2013
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