I’m not sure when I first heard my father’s maxim that, when it comes to car horns, “not all honks are equal.”

He has developed a personal lexicon, of sorts, to name many of the differences.

Someone ahead of you hasn’t noticed that the light has changed? “Give him a ‘little toot,’” my father will say.

If the truck in the right lane might not realize that you’re moving into its general footprint on the left, my father counsels, “Give ‘em a ‘hey, I’m here.’”

These are two of what he understands to be “short honks” — the kind you might also give when you drive by a friend you’ve spotted walking on a nearby sidewalk.

Then there are the “punitive honks.” Those are longer. More jarring. These are not about a genuine warning, or sense of urgency. They have names like “The Unh-uh,” “The Whoawhoawhoa” and the “NO WAY.” They’re usually “assessed” after a particularly egregious example of aggressive driving by the other person—weaving through traffic, riding your bumper, coming into your lane without signaling, or cutting the line in a merge. The high crimes of the road. My father has never been one to, for example, speed up and give another driver “the look” —he sees that as foolishly asking for trouble — but even so, “punitive honks” are somewhat in that spirit, and now again seem called for.

To be honest, I can’t really say if the lexicon is all that helpful. That’s almost beside the point. More than instructions for using the car horn, it’s more of a world view. But it’s one I was raised on and share.

So yesterday, when I was walking Grace to school, I was instantaneously shocked and appalled when a driver in an SUV “assessed” the most punitive “NO WAY” honk I have ever heard on a driver, someone who had seemingly misunderstood the merge at Putnam and and Mason, and was blocking the right hand lane. To me, a minor infraction at best—we’ve all been there. But clearly, it wasn’t to the person in the SUV. The response was a car horn so long and loud that the person in the offending car hit the brakes, instantly terrified. Every head turned in that direction. A window rolled down. In that nanosecond, I actually wondered what new vocabulary words Grace was about to learn.

And that’s when the cop on crossing guard duty down the street appeared, like the fury of God’s own thunder.

“Whoawhoawhoa, there, guy,” he said to the driver in the SUV. “NO WAY.” (Yes, really.)

I mean…clearly, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Frankly, I wouldn’t know how.

That’s just it. Because stepping back from it a bit, the moment has reminded me that the lexicons we have for what angers or frustrates us, and for what violates our sense of fairness and by precisely how much, are often quite sophisticated and quite deeply-ingrained. By contrast, our lexicons for what delights and strengthens us often are not. We can be strangely inarticulate when it comes to joy and hope.

Maybe the rosy moments are more mysterious to us, somehow. All the more reason to study them more deeply—to find ways to name those experiences, to spot them so that we can be on the lookout for others. I feel like I need to do that more. Or maybe it just shows that what delights us isn’t as central to our actual worldview as it should be. I hope that’s not true.

Certainly, joy is central to the Christian worldview. From Jesus’ own teaching to the church’s ongoing reflection on what it is to be faithful, joy and hope, delight and strength are at the heart of our lives—and of our life together.

A strong faith teaches us to see the world as it is. But important as that is, if faith only teaches us to see the bad, to have words for what’s broken in the world and in ourselves, then it isn’t doing its job. Such half-formed faith hasn’t taught to see the world God has made in all its fullness, or the hope God has for each of us. Because our final hope is in the world that God is bringing into being, and our call is to join God’s work in making it so—to be the people who name what hope, peace, love and justice look like, here and now, even in an imperfect, unfinished world.

God calls us to be people who say “whoawhoawhoa” in the face of wonder, and “NO WAY” in the presence of joyful abundance, generosity and kindness.

As we learn to watch our language, may we be on the lookout for the emergence of that kind of lexicon.

Those are the words worth knowing, worth sharing, and worth writing on our hearts.

See you in church,

Not too long ago, I was flying home from a working trip to Scotland when I caught a bit of the conversation from the row just in front of me.

I’m not an eavesdropper by any means, but we were in that somewhat undefined time at the beginning of a long flight…those few minutes before take off when the main cabin door has been closed, and everything has been stowed, and the aisles are clear, and you’ve found your reading glasses and untangled your earphones, and you are ready to go, but you have not started going just yet.

If you’re a seasoned traveller, then you know that it’s usually at this moment at the start of a flight when you risk taking a gander at the person traveling next to you, and decide if you are going to risk making contact or if you’re just going to blow up your traveling neck pillow and put on that little mask and pretend you’re asleep until they get the message.

Well, the man in seat 31B must have felt safe with engaging the person he saw in seat 31A.

Now, since all I saw was the back of their heads, all I can say is that the man in 31B had salt and pepper hair, and the woman in 31A had long red hair that she kept back with an artsy looking silver clip, with an intricate Celtic knot design.

“What brought you over to the U.K.?” asked the man pleasantly.

And the woman opened right up and said, “Oh…I have been over here for three weeks making a documentary, mostly in Ireland, about the Celtic idea of ‘thin places.’”

You see, according to Celtic spirituality, a “thin place” is one where the veil separating heaven and earth becomes especially opaque…especially, well, thin…and it seems as if we can sense God’s presence more easily.

The term has been around in the Celtic world since before Christianity, but it has been part of the Christian experience there for over 1500 years, so it very much names a sense that Christians have had, too.

It speaks to that sense we have of some places as holy ground—and not because something particularly happened there, but just because some places have a mystical quality about them, a spirit or an energy that makes them different than other places.

A thin place isn’t necessarily breath taking or even beautiful…but nevertheless, there is something about it.

All of which is to say, the woman in seat 31A had been over in Ireland, trying to figure out what that “something” was.

I was really delighted to be overhearing all this.

But you know how these things go. The flight attendants started on the pre-flight safety demonstration, and everyone stopped talking, and to my great disappointment, the conversation on thin places never resumed.

Even so, ever since then, I have been thinking about this whole idea of “thin places.”

Because like many of you, I’m sure, I have known places like that…places where it does not seem remotely crazy to say that the veil between heaven and earth has become extremely thin.  Places where the crazy thing would be in trying to deny it.

The concept is not unique to Ireland or to Celtic Christianity, by any means.

Within Scripture, and particularly the Gospels, there is a real awareness of those moments when, somehow, the Kingdom of God draws near…those moments when the veil between heaven and earth seems to be pulled back…and there is a kind of unity within Creation that any of us might know, might feel, or might even touch.

The Hebrew Scriptures talk about the midbar, the wilderness, the place outside civilization where anything might happen…and where revelations from God are decidedly more likely to occur.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus instructs 70 of his followers to go throughout the surrounding towns and preach the Gospel. He tells them, “Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘the kingdom of God has come near you.’”

Likewise, Jesus explains to his followers, when they are turned away, they should wipe even the dust from that town from their feet and keep walking, but over their shoulders as they go, they should say to the people of that town, “Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.” (Luke 10:8-9, 11)

The veil was parted, but you chose not to see.

And yet, I can’t help but be sorry that Jesus wasn’t the man sitting in seat 31B on that airplane, because I think he would have had a lot of questions about thin places for that filmmaker.

It’s interesting to reflect on what it is that seems to qualify as a “thin place” in our world, isn’t it?

Are the thin places really all emerald green and covered with craggy rocks and shrouded in mist?

Surely not.

Do you really need to get on a plane to find one?

Surely Jesus would say no.

He seemed most interested in a very different kind of “thin place.”

He points to that in this morning’s Gospel from Mark.

Mark tells us that out on the road to Capernaum, Jesus overhears a conversation among his followers about who is the greatest—who is the most spiritual—or maybe it’s who has been to Ireland the most.

He responds to that by taking a child and putting it among them, then holding the child and saying, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” (Mark 9: 36-37).

The thinness that interests him is not so much the quality of a place, but the quality of human character…or the quality of a life.

What pulls back the veil is when we enter into the mystery and the vulnerability of one another.

It’s when we recognize that we can choose to be “servant of all” and that the very disposition toward service, even the smallest act of holding a child, can help us enter that mystery.

It’s when we hear the voices of the voiceless, and see the invisible, and hold on to those who are so weak that their lives seem almost to run through our fingers like water.

The thin places Jesus cares about are surely places like Afghanistan and Iraq, or among the refugees from Syria, or in too many places we might name…so many places that, frankly, we should be naming a lot more often than we do. Of course he knows those thin places.

But the claim of the Gospel is actually bigger than that.

The claim of the Gospel is that Jesus also cares about the thin places close to us…the thin place where a single dad heads off to work, expecting to be laid off from his job this week…the thin place we experience on the anniversary of a parent’s death…the thin place we perceive when a happy child seems to have withdrawn and grown dark and closed.

He cares about the thin places where we don’t know what to do, and about the thin where we do know what to do but we don’t know how.

And yet part of the challenge of being in those kinds of thin places is that because we’re in our own “thin place,” we don’t feel much sense of connection to others in their thin places, wherever those might be, near or far.

That’s understandable, I suppose, and yet the Gospel is here to remind us that to get wrapped up in that kind of inner focus can be quite precarious for us.

Our reading this morning from the Epistle of James gets at that, I think.

He writes, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” (James 4:8)

And to James, this involves a fair amount self-examination because our own motives, our preoccupations can be so murky.

James reminds us, for example, that we can fall so easily into praying for what we want, without really asking ourselves if we want the right things…or if we’re trying to discern what it is that God wants and coming to terms with the larger wisdom of that.

James is tough on us in this regard, and yet, I know that in my own prayer life, when I find myself in a thin place, it is easy for me to start telling God how to fix things instead of listening for God’s word.

Instead of trying to bring myself closer to God, I too often pray that God will do what I want.

When that happens, it’s important to try to remember the more fundamental affirmation of our faith, which is that in prayer, the veil can be been parted…that God is closer than we think…that we aren’t called to go hunting high and low for God so much as look for he is standing in plain sight.

“Draw near to God,” says James, “and he will draw near to you.”

Sometimes in the moment when the thin place is most frightening, most wild, most strange, it is possible to perceive God more deeply and more clearly: the hospital bedside can become a green hill with craggy rocks of Ireland—a place where the beauty is not physical but nonetheless washes over us…a place where we experience the nearness of God.

It is that nearness of God that defines the thin place.

If the documentary filmmaker on the airplane could visit our church, I think each of us would have a story to tell that would belong in her film.

Notice the thin places around you, the precariousness of life for so many of us, and you will find God present there. Abundant there. Life-giving there.

That’s what it is to live the Gospel.

Don’t get me wrong: someday I’d love to go on a trip to Ireland in search of those thin-places, where the wild landscape meets the passionate sky, and the fog of mystery rolls in, right on cue, and the veil that separates earth and heaven will be miraculously thin.

But this morning, we’re reminded that, as Christians, we look to the one who parted the veil in all times, and all places, and in the name of reaching every human heart.

Jesus says: “Whoever wants to be first must be the last of all and servant of all,” (Mark 9:35).

He reminds us that as we enter the thin places of this world, seeking to serve one another with love and a commitment to the greater good, there he is in the midst of us, the veil is parted, and his Kingdom is come.

Amen.

Dear Friends of Second Church,

The other day, I was thinking about the last time I went “church shopping.”

It was almost exactly fifteen years ago, when I moved back to Connecticut after several years away. I had just started as an English teacher at Kent School—still one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.

It didn’t take long for me to get involved in the local United Church of Christ congregation there, and that church remains my spiritual home in many ways—it’s where I served as a deacon, where I first regularly attended Bible study, where they threw a square dance in my honor to help me with tuition, where I was ordained, where I performed my first wedding, etc., etc.. It’s the place where Melinda, the person I still consider “my pastor” is serving.

But you know what? It almost didn’t happen.

You see, on the Sunday I decided I would finally go “check out that church at the north end of town,” I pulled into the parking lot…a little bit late, so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone, or give my name, or otherwise get caught like a fly in their web. I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into, and I wanted to make sure I could get myself right back out. I eased into a parking spot, nose out for immediate departure.

And that’s when I saw the old Volvo.

Parked right by the church’s sign was a decrepit old Volvo with faded blue paint—the kind of car that your nephew with the wild streak drives while in college.

The back was covered with bumper stickers. Bumper stickers for Presidential candidates who had been knocked out of the primaries…three elections ago. Bumper stickers for causes that were scarcely even causes, anymore, and others that seemed to presume knowledge of outrages I’d never heard of. Bumper stickers that obviously disagreed with one another, and were meant ironically, but in some way I found obscure. Bumper stickers I agreed with, making me wonder if I needed to reevaluate some of my opinions. And in the back window, there was a UCC shield…just in case I might mistake the car’s owner for a random visitor.

And I took that all in, there in the parking lot, with the organ inside the church already playing the first hymn, and I thought to myself, “Is that what this place is?” “Do I have to agree with all that, somehow, if I’m going to go to church here?”….”Good Lord, what if that’s the pastor’s car?”

Well, I went inside, more non-committal than ever. The service quickly proved itself to be warm, inviting, thought-provoking, reverent—everything I had hoped I would find in my local church. Even so, I found it hard to relax; I couldn’t stop wondering about that Volvo with its bumper stickers, and when the whole thing would start to get weird on me.

It never did. Or maybe I should say, fifteen years later, it still hasn’t yet. (Turns out, the Volvo did belong to random visitor…apparently a random UCC visitor.)

That Volvo was a funny introduction to what would soon become my home church.

That said, in its way, it was a great introduction to broad spectrum of beliefs, opinions, and commitments that can be found in a United Church of Christ congregation, whether it’s in Kent, or here in Greenwich, or in any number of other places.

We understand ourselves to be communities gathered by God, and not simply by the easy affinities that we use to make community in so many other parts of our lives—same backgrounds, same hobbies, same tastes, same politics.

We embrace that we aren’t all in the same place, even when it comes to our faith. Questions such as what it is to be a good person, what human flourishing should look like, or how to imagine the shape of a world of justice and love are not easy matters to agree on, and we don’t pretend they are, or suggest they should be. We don’t all read the Bible in the same way. Or pray alike. Or interpret Christian traditions with a uniform point of view.

We believe in the struggle of seeking answers to all of those questions—and in the further struggle of trying to work out those answers together.

It’s a remarkable and wonderful way to be the Church, but there is neither a roadmap that tells us how to get to our final destination, or a blueprint that tells us how to hunker down and build it where we are.

Somehow, it’s in the striving that the Church comes into its own, and we each come into our own. Anyway, that’s the UCC’s wager.

As the church’s program year begins again this week, I hope you’ll find ways to become a part of that striving. And some Sunday in the near future, if you see a visitor dawdling in the parking lot, wondering what this place is, and if there’s really room for someone like them among us, I hope you’ll greet them warmly and show them the way in.

We’ve been saving them a seat.

See you in church,

Our denomination, the United Church of Christ, makes a lot of room for questions in the life of faith.

Don’t get me wrong: it makes a lot of room for the answers, too.

But for us, in the United Church of Christ, so much of what it is to be faithful seems to flow from the “question” side of the equation.

We’ve always seen something very important in our willingness to question…to wonder…to explore…to seek ways of understanding that aren’t simply received wisdom, however compelling it might be.

For us, the challenge is to understand the truth as God has placed it on each of our hearts—and to build a community around that searching, and then on the living out of that truth in the deepest ways we can.

It’s a wonderful way to be a Christian, but it puts a lot of responsibility back on each of us to be serious: to be serious about asking the big questions, and serious about living out the implications of the truth as God chooses to reveal it to us.

It reminds us that we have to be serious about loving each other and working together if anything like the Kingdom of God is to take root in our world.

In practical terms, that has meant that our denomination has been at the forefront of a lot of the great social movements of American history—Independence from Great Britain, Abolition, Women’s Suffrage, Civil Rights, Marriage Equality.

Because, of course, those are movements that emerged from a willingness to question…a willingness to embrace a deeper vision of human flourishing, and a call to undertake the hard work of making the world a more welcoming place.

But of course, it isn’t always quite so sublime.

So I was not particularly surprised this week to see on some of the UCC’s online forums that there was a roiling debate about what we ought to call this weekend.

“We used to call it ‘Homecoming Weekend’” said one of my colleagues out west. “But then we felt like that would be awkward for newcomers. What if it’s not your home? Should you come?”

There was a lot of back and forth on that.

“We call it ‘Parish Feast Day,’” said someone else. “Some people find that a little Catholic…” she admitted.

Nobody much liked calling it “Rally Day,” anymore. That used to be a pretty standard term. One person said: “Unless I’m bringing Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump to church, I don’t think people would get it.”

And someone else added, “To me, ‘Rally Day’ says checkered flags and race cars, not church.”

This went on all day yesterday at great length. But you get the idea.

Until finally, somebody said that in their church, they’d started calling it “Re-Covenanting Sunday.”

And my thought was that, well, it’s probably tricky to get that printed on the balloons, but the spirit of that is really quite important.

Because if you read much of our history, you’ll see very quickly that we talk a lot about covenants in our tradition, and the Bible talks a lot about covenants.

We say one whenever we receive new members—and at our Annual Meeting: we say the Salem Covenant of 1629, with its wonderful language of binding ourselves “in the presence of God to walk together in his ways”….

From Scripture, the most famous example is probably in the Book of Exodus, at the receiving of the Ten Commandments —this sense of a permanent, binding kind of obligation that unites God with God’s people.

There are other moments of covenant in the Bible, too.

Covenant is how we understand our responsibility to God, and also to one another.

In those moments when we are so full of questions, or when challenges come up that nobody ever imagined possible, it’s the covenants that we are supposed to refer back to, and to use so that we can get our bearings…and remember who God is, and who it is that God has called us to be.

The Bible has a lot of laws, too, of course—613 in the Old Testament alone, according to Jewish tradition.

But covenants are different than laws because they don’t simply speak to the micro-expectations of “…if this, then that…”

Covenants speak more broadly than that. And they speak to the idea of relationship with God. When God speaks in the context of covenant, God says, “Well, you may do this or you may do that…but if what you want is to honor your relationship with me, well, then these are the terms.”

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that our tradition understands marriage and baptism as ceremonies of covenant.

They are moments when we promise things to God and to one another…and not just into the air, or out of a sense of vague hope for the future.

They are promises we make within the context of relationship. A promise to hang in there with one another and with God, under the umbrella of certain terms and conditions.

So I sort of like the idea of “Re-covenanting Sunday,” even though it is a bit of a mouthful to say.

Because I think it’s important for us to do something more than simply re-convene in this beautiful place we love so well.

We’re invited to re-commit to one another and to God, and to think about this whole notion of living within the context of relationships: most immediately, our relationships with each other here, and with our neighbors, and with the world.

Not too long ago, I heard of a church that doesn’t publish its membership directory until a couple of weeks after Homecoming Sunday, because it sees membership as more of a year-to-year thing…as something that needs to be particularly reaffirmed, and not just some sort of general thing you do once and forget about.

Now, clearly, they don’t have as many snowbirds as we do. But I get it.

A marriage wouldn’t be much of a marriage if it were just a short series of promises we made at some point and then promptly forgot all about. And the same goes for a baptism.

These are lovely in their way, but are only the beginning.

And so is our life together as God’s church, gathered in this place.

Our great promise and our great challenge is to understand what it means that we are here now…today…in this moment…and here among these other folks, in the grand pursuit of seeking ways to be faithful to our promises.

According to Mark’s Gospel, it was on the road to the villages of Caesarea Philippi that Jesus asked his disciples, “But who do you say that I am?”

And it’s then that Peter says, “You are the Messiah.”

It’s a wonderful moment, but, of course, it’s not the end of the story at all—far from it.

Because what it means that he’s the Messiah—what it means for him, and what it means for each of those who followed him—that isn’t something that is obvious at all right then, even in the wake of Peter’s crucial moment of recognition.

Jesus points to that. He doesn’t deny the recognition, but he seems to say that following him involves a lot more than just that one moment of insight.

Mark says, “Jesus called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

“For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?’” (Mark 8:34-36).

Jesus is saying that it isn’t enough just to know the truth of who he is—it doesn’t stop there.

He’s saying that to be his disciple is to follow him in a much fuller, much more challenging way.

It is to risk true relationship with him, and to be committed to the work he lays before us.

It is to follow the road wherever it might lead, even as it leads us into places we would never have expected.

Of course, each of sees that work a little differently.

Each of us understands what needs to be done, and the skills we might offer, in particular ways.

Each of us brings our own questions to the work.

That’s a good thing.

Jesus asked a lot of questions, too.

I’ve mentioned before that a UCC colleague of mine wrote a book last year, called “Jesus is the Question: The 307 Questions Jesus Asked and the Three He Answered.”

It’s a very UCC kind of book.

But it reminds us that being the Church is never about simply reciting the answers of the past.

Being the Church is about asking new questions, and about finding fresh wisdom, and sources of new life for ourselves and for all the world.

We find that not only in the great traditions of our faith, but in our deep knowledge that the Holy Spirit blows through God’s people, making all things new.

Being the Church is about re-covenanting ourselves to another season of asking those questions and seeking God’s answers in a new day.

And so, welcome home, Church.

Let’s get to work.    Amen.