Divine Subversion

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
February 21, 2010

Divine Synergy
What is it?
When we work together and the Holy Spirit produces an explosion of energy that makes the sum greater than the parts.

Divine Symphony
What is it?
When we come together in harmony and our lives hum together with the beautiful music of unity sung first by the Divine Trinity.

Have you experienced Divine Synergy or Divine Symphony lately?
How about exactly one week ago today in this very room?
We were led in a worship service of Divine Synergy and Symphony.
The young people modeled it for us.
It took planning and practice.
It wasn’t something they did on a whim.
Diosselyn and Karina didn’t just get up in the pulpit and say whatever was on their minds.
The youth planned, they practiced and there was the Holy Spirit right beside them.
An explosion of synergy . . .
A harmonic convergence of disparate voices with one purpose . . .
Beautiful
Awesome
Que bonito!

There is another Divine ‘S’ we want to share with you today.
It, too, was evident last Sunday in the youth service.
Divine Subversion

Who can tell me what subversion means?
Literally “under–turn”
Sub – Latin for under, of course.
Version – surprisingly for me, is from the Latin vertere which means ‘to turn.’

The first image that comes to mind for me is a farmer . . .
A farmer who has to turn under the land for it to receive the seed.
You can’t just throw the seed on top of hard ground.
I think Jesus said something about that.
You’ve got to subvert the earth.
You’ve got to under-turn it.
Flip it.
Mix it up.
Shake it up.

That’s what the youth did for us last week.
They practiced Divine Subversion.
That’s what we should be about everyday as well.

There is a woman who runs a food pantry in St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco.
Her name is Sara Miles.
She and the leadership of that church have taken the food pantry and moved it into the sanctuary.
The sanctuary looks like a farmer’s market on food pantry days.
Baskets of fresh fruits and vegetables surround the communion table.
The people who run the pantry are the people served by the pantry.
They are not called “clients.”

You see the world wants us in the church to act like the world.
You’ve got to establish intake procedures.
You’ve got to “screen”
You’ve got to “test”
You’ve got to “ration”

That’s not Gospel
That’s not Bienvenidos
That’s the world subverting the church.
We are supposed to ‘turn under’ the world, not let the world turn us under.

This food pantry in the sanctuary became so successful that Sara, who organized it, was asked to speak to churches around the country about how to do it.
And as she went around to visit churches with food pantries she saw things like . . .
Ten pastors eating lunch by themselves in a huge, light-filled hall, while below them 200 hungry men, women and children crowded into a shabby cafeteria half the size of the hall upstairs where the preachers sat together.
She saw locked sanctuaries and parish halls, while food pantries were placed in dark, dingy basements and people waited in cramped hallways to have their documents checked.
She heard elderly church members complaining about having to carry the food down into the basement and then complaining that no one comes to church anymore.

And then, as she told the story of how they brought their food pantries into the sanctuary . . .
As she told these other churches how they turned the leadership of the pantry over to the hungry people . . .
The other churches said, “Well you must have some really special hungry people there in San Francisco. We could never do that here.”
They said, “You must have some very creative folks in your congregation. We’re just boring mid-western Grandmothers.”
It was as if they wanted to explain away the power of the Holy Spirit to subvert the world.
Sara said she wanted to cry when she heard these excuses.
She said, “What more permission do they need? Receive the Holy Spirit isn’t enough?”

Whether you know it or not, you are part of a subversive church.
Pastor Alfonso and I get the same reactions when we go out and tell about how we are Juntos en Cristo.
When we talk about how we speak two languages in worship . . .
When we talk about how God has brought us together to be one body . . .
Not English speakers at 11 and Spanish speakers at 2 . . .
No.
Together
Juntos en Cristo
People say, “Oh that’s really neat, but we could never do that at our church.”
People say, “That’s great. Your people must be really patient.”
People say, “That’s takes a special kind of congregation.”
And I say, “Yeah. It does. The Christian kind.”

But I understand.
Subversion is hard work.
Under-turning the world isn’t easy.
It’s hard to change.
It’s easier to remain the same . . .
It’s easier to go along to get along . . .
It’s easier to lay down and die than it is to live . . .
But it is just that kind of subversion that Paul talks about in the passage we read today.
The world gets turned upside down when we serve the Lord.

Today we are ordaining new leaders.
Elders and deacons.
The work of church leaders is Divine Subversion.
Under-turning the world’s influence,
Under-turning the world’s power structures.

Paul says that God will be there to help you.
Always.
When crises come, as Pastor Alfonso says, we are not together in crises, we are together in Christ.

When we get beaten up fighting for immigration reform . . .
When we work all day long and go to bed hungry . . .
When we tell the truth and people don’t like it . . .
When we work for justice and people blame us and accuse us . . .
When we are called by God but ignored by the world . . .
When we are terrifically alive, yet rumored to be dead . . .
When we refuse to die even though we are beaten within an inch of our lives . . .
When we are filled with deep joy even while we are crying our eyes out . . .
When we are living on handouts and yet enriching many . . .
When it appears we have nothing and yet we have everything.

This is our job as Christians, as Christ’s followers.
We don’t make excuses.
We flip it.
We mix it up.
We under-turn it.

Sara Miles, that woman who subverted that food pantry says,
“It takes so little to see God in this world. You just have to open the door.”
Open your door this day to Divine Subversion.

(Special thanks to Eugene Peterson for his subversive translation work in The Message and to Sara Miles for her article "Kitchen Communion" in the Feb. 9, 2010 issue of the Christian Century.)