Somewhere in the Middle (Sermon notes)
February 3, 2013 | Cheryl Pauls, President Canadian Mennonite University

• We’re all always somewhere in the middle.
• Somewhere between Christmas and Easter, or else Easter and Christmas. Between life and life.
• Always somewhere in the middle between needing more of this and a whole lot less of that. Somewhere too between joy and sorrow, and learning to love more deeply & release more generously.
• And even when we’re at the top of our game we can always be sure that we’re also at the bottom of the pack in some other dimension, so in all – somewhere in the middle.
• Sometimes we’re in the middle of a good thing that’s caught on…a good thing that opens a way forward between poles of unhealthy disagreement.
• And some days we find ourselves caught in the middle, unable to see how restored hope and opportunity can be awakened without some horrid side effect,
• Or…how we can’t help one situation without being complicit in the harm of another.
• It’s somewhere in the middle that God comes to us and says:
• there’s a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted,
• a time to break down and a time to build up,
• a time to weep and a time to laugh,
• a time to keep and a time to throw away,
• a time for silence and a time to speak.
• With these words God grants us peace when we find ourselves at the middle of a fork in the road, assured that there is a time to go this way and a time to go that way.
• This is not cause to despair, concerned we appear fickle before God.
• For in times when we feel caught in the middle God offers gifts of order, ways to discern where to go next. But those gifts rarely begin with instructions like choose left or choose right.  
• Instead, order emerges as from the middle we listen and receive God’s story of hope.
• Listen now to a part of that story from Jeremiah 29. It tells of the Hebrew people from a place of exile. It calls to an order of hope in the fork that links the limiting strains in their daily conditions and the future they were called to pursue.

Jeremiah 29:10-14

In the middle we raise our voice of lament

• I’ve often wondered this: Just how strange did those words of hope sound to the Hebrew people? What prayer did they need to bring to God in order to receive that hope? I suspect – something less self-serving, less self-righteous, less naming themselves as victims. Still, what did they have to confess and stop believing in order to hear and live in the truth of God’s hope?
• I want to tell you about one way we heard this passage a few years ago at CMU. That year Jeremiah 29:11 was our chapel theme verse, “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”
• We commissioned a painting by Ray Dirks of the Mennonite Heritage Gallery.
• At first we showed him this painting (show brown painting) and asked him to begin his painting on “a future with hope” with similar colours and textures. To some this painting looks like a quicksand of mud – and maybe tells of times when we’re confused, talking past each other, and lacking good language to name what we share. To others this painting is brimmed full of latent hope like rich soil, even though cannot predetermine what the next century – or even the next hour – will look like.
• I find it helpful to imagine the Hebrew people hearing the message of God’s plans for a future with hope, from a somewhere in the middle sort of place – perhaps hopeful, but certainly not clear, perhaps kind of messy, barren and rather pointless.
• Ray’s painting emerged over the course of the year. One day, when the painting still resembled this quicksand of mud, I led a chapel entitled, “on the fat margins, just as I really am.”
• Our focus that morning was an area of acute conflict, confusion and burden, an area in which we as a community, like the communities we came from, yearned for a future with hope: styles of music and culture in worship.
• I described how those planning worship felt as if they were being suffocated in the middle by the fat margins. By this I meant that so many people, too many people, thought they were the only ones who were really on the outside of some fictitious dominant style of worship.
• That day I wore a goofy costume as if it were sackcloth, as if I were dressed to repent and pray in release of my own sin.
• I wore this goofy costume also to demonstrate my squeamishness about many quick fix “solutions” to the music and worship problem – as if there were some easy common form of song.
• Some of those solutions sounded as incoherent to me as these clothes must look to you.
• Let me explain the costume: when it comes to fashion – many people seem convinced that when you dress your day down with jeans, and at the same time dress it up with a business jacket or item of evening wear, you’re ready for anything – all things have become reconciled and whole.
• But I trust you can see that this grand scheme for reconciling all things ancient and modern is quickly shot down with the simple act of putting the formal wear together with sensible shoes on the bottom and the jeanish-garb on top.
• Just so we’re clear: I’m okay with it if you wear jeans and a sports jacket. Just don’t assume it’s the world’s panacea, or that I’m uptight and out of touch with “real life” if I don’t.
• Back to that chapel: I spoke about how easy it is for layers of independent good understandings – those things we see well from where we sit – to become gnarled in misunderstandings and dysfunction when strangers come together. This applies to worship and much else.
• And I suggested that God’s promise of a future with hope gifts us with order, order that begins with a lament of confession. To lament is to say that the world is not as it ought. It is also to admit we don’t know what something reconciled, healthy and whole looks like or sounds like. And, to lament is to let go of our own personal vantage point or outsider status and to wait on a higher authority. To lament is to trust that God will lead.
• To lament means to move off the margins and to walk into the middle, not a middle with no air but one with open breathing space. In the middle we pray and listen for God’s voice.
• And so that day we prayed for a future with hope, hope that in our worship – at CMU and all the places we go – we would not clog up the margins by being quick to name ourselves as excluded aliens.
• I do not know if there are situations causing you as a congregation or as families or any other group to feel or observe fat margins of self-righteous positioning in a world that is not as it ought. Sill I ask you to consider some context in which you yearn for God’s promise of hope, and are willing toyou’re your lamentations before God.
• The choir now will offer two songs of lament. The first text comes from the Book of Lamentations. The second is a recent text that starts from Christ’s crucifixion that recounts all sorts of ways that human beings continue to kill one another. The final line sums up modern day alienation: the most simple and direct way to kill our own kin is simply to leave one other alone.
• Texts of lamentation do not propose a solution. Hope is not found in the words directly. Instead, hope is present in releasing our words to God, and in being willing to wait for God to act.
• Vos Omnes
• Five Ways to Kill a Man

In the middle we utter confession to love

• Somewhere in the middle we hear some texts too often, and others not enough. I Corinthians 13 is the word for this day in the revised common lectionary, and so we dare listen for a future with hope through that well-known call to love in ways that cut through noise and clang.

I Corinthians 13:1-13

• Let’s go back to the CMU chapel and the painting.
• As an expression of our prayer of lament, we wrote confessions on the painting. Ray’s painting has become a permanent feature of the CMU chapel and if you’re ever in Wpg at CMU I invite you to come up close to the painting, and take note of the squiggles that are etched into the texture.
• You’re not supposed to be able to read everything that’s confessed underneath.
• But these squiggles of confession are part of the image – think of them as bubbling and gurgling up under the muddy surface. For Ray came and added more paint one night, and out from the surface the face of Jesus appeared. (Show Ray’s painting) The painting is a Christ icon, modeled after an ancient icon. Icons remind us that when we fix our eyes on Christ we learn to see differently.
• The painting is a symbol. It draws us into the memory and the reality of a Jesus who continues to disrupt the world as we know it, a Jesus who continues to burst forth with hope that is ever born again.
• I find the squiggles of the students’ confessions that lie underneath kind of like all the little faces you implanted on the face of Jesus. These faces and squiggles are a witness: reminding us that when we notice others who have been alienated we see the face of Christ, that when we see others through Christ we see them differently, and to the hope we continue to pray for at CMU – a hope are willing to see and receive from God.
• The squiggles and faces – like words of confession – are symbols and seals of truths we are willing to believe and live into.
• Listen now to words of confession in a song – a confession that love is stronger than death – a confession that hope can be received, even when we’re found in the middle of exile.
• Hear and believe those words of covenant with us.

Song of Solomon 8:6-7

• Set me as a seal
• Two students will now reflect on some way in which they bear witness to the hope and the truth that love is stronger than death.
• Scott Feick, David Epp
• When you find yourselves somewhere in the middle, may you release your lament to God and confess to the love that is stronger than death. And may your assurance of God’s faithfulness never fail.
• Amen
• He never failed me yet