"Follow the Verbs"

“Follow the Verbs”
Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS
October 9, 2016 - Luke 17:11-19

Seven years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a two-day preaching workshop with Anna Carter Florence, who is, hands down, my favorite living preacher.

The workshop was on a new thing Carter Florence had been working on as a preaching professor: preaching the verbs. She talked to us about how she had been working with her students on going through a biblical passage and highlighting the verbs, and then using that as a starting point for the sermon. She demonstrated and walked us through several passages over the course of our time together.

I’ve been to a lot of workshops and classes on preaching, but no other practices have stuck with me quite like preaching the verbs. When I get stuck? I follow the verbs. When a passage seems all too familiar? I follow the verbs. It’s really easy to do. I use it for my personal Bible study and for sermon preparation. I’ve used it when teaching classes and when praying. And we’re going to use it this morning.

I invite you to get out a pew Bible so we all have the same translations and look up Luke 17.

11 On the way to Jerusalem he was passing along between Samar′ia and Galilee. 12 And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance 13 and lifted up their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” 14 When he saw them he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. 15 Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; 16 and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. 17 Then said Jesus, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? 18 Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19 And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

Now what you might not realize until you've follow the verbs on a lot of passages is this: this passage has a LOT of verbs. It’s action packed. You can really see the flow of the passage and the intensity of the activity when you pull out those verbs. Dr. Karoline Lewis wrote earlier this week about the flow of these verbs. She said, “See, return, praise, worship, give thanks, get up, and go. What if we imagined….that this could be the rhythm of faith?” (http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=4726)

The rhythm of faith. Verbs swirling, coming together, moving us forward into new life in new ways. The rhythm of faith.

You know, sometimes I think that, for too long, some parts of the Church had a problem with focusing too much on one verb: BELIEVE. “Do you believe in God? Do you believe that Christ died for your sins? Do you believe in the virgin birth, the resurrection of the body, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the life everlasting….?”

I think beliefs are important. They shape our worldview. We are all influenced tremendously by our beliefs, whether or not we recognize it. And I do think it’s important for every person of faith to wrestle with their own beliefs. You know, the creeds can be a good way to do that. A good place to see what others have professed as their own experience of the Holy...and then start teasing out our own story of who God has been for us.

Believing is an important verb. And there are also many other verbs in our sacred text.

Two weeks ago, I attended Leadership Institute at Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, KS as a part of my participation in the Next Generation Leadership Initiative for the UCC. I will own, up front, that this is not a conference I would have chosen to attend on my own. CoR is so big and the culture of Johnson County so different than Manhattan….it was hard for me to set aside my skepticism as I drove across I-70. I did my best to stay open and listen for the voice of our Stillspeaking God in this very different place.

CoR is the largest United Methodist Church in the world. But what’s more astonishing than their size is the rate of growth. The church is only 26 years old. They were planted by the wider UMC back when Leawood was mostly fields and just starting to grow. They sent a young pastor named Adam Hamilton to make something out of nothing. They first worshiped in a funeral parlor - kind of a strange place for new life to break forth, right? Until, that is, you remember that Christians follow the one who brings forth life from death again and again. And then a church named for Resurrection meeting in a funeral parlor makes perfect sense.

At their first worship service, people sat on uncomfortable folding chairs in this funeral parlor and Pastor Adam said to them that God had big plans for the church. Adam said, “Look, it’s not that I’m going to be the best pastor, though I’ll try, and it’s not that we’re going to have the best facilities, but this church will be great because some of you will decide to live as people of Resurrection.”

From the beginning, CoR has had an intensity that flows not just from its lead pastor, but from that pastor’s very real encounter with Jesus. The verbs at CoR come from a sense of purpose that is deeply rooted in creating a Christian community where people who are non-religious and nominally-religious become deeply committed Christians.

At CoR they don’t define “deeply committed Christians” by a set of beliefs. Instead, it’s about verbs. Most specifically, it’s about discipleship. It’s about supporting, equipping, and empowering people as they encounter Jesus and then try to live as followers of Christ.

In order to become a member of CoR, people are asked to make serious commitments of their time and energy. They commit to five serious verbs: worshipping each week, learning in a small group, serving in the church and the wider community, financial giving and working towards tithing, and sharing the good news of what Jesus has done for them with the wider world.

Some of this sounds pretty familiar to us, right? Some of it may feel a little different or be expressed in slightly different language. One of the things that struck me from my time at CoR was just deeply anchored the whole culture is in JESUS. I’ll admit it. I go into a place with an average worship attendance of 12,000 and a pastor who’s been there since the beginning and I wonder, “Is this all be about Adam Hamilton?”

But you know what? It’s not. I mean, yes, the things that have happened at CoR in terms of the tremendous growth have a lot to do with Adam’s excellent leadership, but his leadership is rooted in a profound and genuine commitment to following the way of Jesus. In the beginning, the folks at CoR asked themselves three questions when they were trying to determine their purpose: 1) why do I need Jesus? 2) why do I need the Church? And 3) why do I need this church?

I think for many in our church questions 2 and 3 might be easier to answer than question #1. And maybe you’re not super Jesus-y. Maybe you follow Jesus because he points the way to God and that rootedness in God or the Spirit or the Source or Love with a capital “L” is your thing. That’s okay. But I do think it’s not a bad idea to wrestle with this question: “what has Jesus done in my life?”

Or to put it another way that might make some folks feel squirmy….how has Jesus been my salvation?

That’s what today’s story in Luke is all about. Salvation, healing. Now when I say “salvation” I’m not necessarily talking about eternal life. Nothing in today’s story is about eternal life. It’s about life here and now. Salvation is about finding a cure for what ails us…..and that’s always changing. I don’t think of salvation as a one-time thing. It’s something that happens again and again and again. It’s the new thing that God is doing when we feel hopeless. It’s the will to get up again when we’ve been knocked down. It’s the softening of grace when a relationship has been damaged. It’s a moment of justice even in the midst of unjust systems. It’s water and food and blankets after the storm. It’s kindness and basic human decency in the midst of a violent culture.

Salvation isn’t static. It’s active. It’s ebbing and flowing, moving and changing, now and not-yet.

For the nameless Samaritan who was one-of-ten healed, salvation was rooted in his experience of Jesus. This experience of salvation was so great, he couldn’t keep it to himself. He was moved to action. Follow those verbs and we find that he turned back, praised God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself before Jesus and said, “THANK YOU, JESUS!”

It’s intense. It’s maybe even a little uncomfortable for those who don’t enjoy really big public displays of emotion. But sometimes the verbs are just like that. They get under our skin, calling us outside of what society considers to be proper. Sometimes the verbs won’t let us go. They propel us forward, outward, inward, upward, downward as we stumble, fly, fall, run to follow Jesus.

May it be so.