By the Rev. Nurya Love Parish

Today we gather to worship God in a time of crisis. The long crisis of the pandemic continues. No one knows if it will get better. The long crisis of a climate emergency continues too. No one knows if it will get better. The long crisis in American democracy continues. No one knows if it will get better. What kind of God do we believe in, that in a time like this we give a relationship with God time in our lives?

You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Yet I speak to you and you hear me because of the God we worship. You are an Episcopal church and I am an Episcopal priest. I am also a friend of your rector. We knew each other in the early 1990’s, back before either of us were Episcopalians. In those days, she was a Roman Catholic. I was a Unitarian Universalist. Neither of us imagined we would become Episcopal clergy. Neither of us imagined a pandemic, a climate crisis, and a crisis in democracy shaping our ministries. Neither of us imagined that one day, we would be here and now.

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus and the Pharisees have a robust discussion about the nature of God in a time of crisis. They were citizens of the nation of Israel, a country recently conquered by the Roman empire. Their political reality was inherently uncertain. In that context as in ours, it was really important to understand what mattered to God. Nations rise and fall, people live and die, but God is our source and our end, Alpha and Omega. God endures beyond time and history. So what matters to God is what matters most.

In this story, the Pharisees are surprised and disturbed by the fact that Jesus and his followers don’t consistently observe customary traditions. They are religious leaders in a time of incredible change and instability. So they care that ancient traditions are preserved. When you preserve the ancient traditions, you do what you can to ensure stability, and continuity. You do what you have always done to honor God. That’s what your ancestors did before you. You want your descendants to do it too.

But Jesus sees things differently. What matters to God, he says, is not the traditions themselves. What matters to God is the WHY behind the traditions. There is no value to God in the observance of a ritual if people don’t get why it matters. What matters to God is the orientation of the human heart, because it is from the heart that all action flows. When the heart is oriented toward God, the love of God flows out into action. The love of God put into action is what God seeks.
Jesus is a different kind of religious leader. He is God incarnate. He sees how far humanity is from God. He wants oneness with God for us too. For that, outward observance isn’t enough. Inward dedication is essential.

James echoes Jesus’ teaching when he says there are two types of religious people. There are the kind that listen to a teaching, then go away and change nothing. Then there are the kind that attempt to carry out the teaching in their lives. That second kind, he says, will be blessed in their doing.

I have been and still am both kinds of these people. I continue to struggle to trust and love God completely. Too often I find myself anxious about tomorrow, concerned about all the things I cannot control. But in the context of this homily I want to tell you about what I learned when as a doer of the word, I followed God’s call to begin Plainsong Farm.

At Plainsong, we grow cultivate connections between people, places and God by tending a place to nurture belonging and the radical renewal of God’s world. We grow food ecologically, we grow community across lines of division, and we grow Christian faith practice. We’re still small and new; we incorporated in 2019, but we’ve been working together since 2014 and I have great hope for our future. In part that’s because young people care about the work we do.

The average age in the Episcopal Church is north of sixty in part because many younger people don’t find our practice of faith relevant. Holy Eucharist helps me center my heart on God. But from the outside it can look like an empty ritual. In an era with so many crises, young people seek immediate relevance. Nothing has more immediacy and relevance than the need to eat. So I thought a ministry centered on food and farming would help younger people orient their hearts toward God. That has turned out to be true.

This is the rational side of starting Plainsong Farm. But I would be lying if I told you that is why I began to work to begin this ministry. I started work on Plainsong Farm because in 2008 whenever I talked about this ministry dream I began to cry. I had learned in seminary that at an earlier point in history, tears were seen by the church as a sign of the Holy Spirit. So I paid attention to those tears. I didn’t understand them, but they came from my heart. It took five more years because I discovered the model for Plainsong in a Jewish farm called Adamah. And by then I was in somewhat of a spiritual crisis. Every time I prayed God was saying to me “Plainsong Farm, Plainsong Farm.” I couldn’t get away from the call. I began to realized that unless I acted, I was at risk of dying without starting Plainsong Farm. And in that case I would face God, and say “I never did that thing I know you wanted me to do.” My heart didn’t want to do that.

Plainsong didn’t start with a plan. It didn’t start with great clarity about what we were doing. It didn’t start with a mission statement. It started with three people, shared core values, a piece of property and the call of God on our hearts. Listening to that call has changed my life. And the reason is that every day for seven years I have had to actively orient my heart toward God in order to find my way. Plainsong didn’t come with a template of historic traditional religious practice. We couldn’t just follow in what people had done before us. We had to ask what God was doing, right now, and how we could serve God, right now. As we did, we were blessed in the doing.

Today’s emergencies – the pandemic, the climate crisis, the state of American democracy – have changed all of our lives. This is a time of crisis, but times of crisis are always times for new beginnings. The people of Israel compiled most of the Bible when they were in exile having lost a war. Followers of Christ wrote the rest when they were being persecuted and killed for their faith. The religious wars of the 1500’s gave rise to the peacemaking concept of common prayer. We inherit the wisdom of Scripture and our traditions of prayer from people who turned their hearts toward God at the worst of times. Now it is our turn. We too are called to bless those who will come after us.

We may be in crisis, but God is not in crisis. God is ever living, ever active, ever seeking the healing and redemption of the world. Will we turn our hearts toward that work?

In the name of God, Father Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.