Sermon Text: Joel 2.28 Title: "The Pouring Out"

Preached: October 25, 1998

How would you describe a church? Any church, pick one. My first church, Midway Manor was a little red brick building with a white wooden steeple. There was an old white farmhouse next door where they did Sunday School until I was about 8. Then they took it down and put up a red brick Christian Education wing. Central Moravian Church looks like a big white courthouse with copper green trim. When I lived in Maryland, St. Paul's Moravian Church looked like what it would become, a multi-purpose building. Now they have a new modern brick sanctuary attached to it. And Tremont Terrace Moravian Church is an urban version of Midway Manor. That's what the buildings looked like. But wouldn't you rather describe the church by its people?

Midway Manor was a community of families -- so, the church was a community of families, young to middle-aged. Middle middle class, no one was really poor, but no one was terribly rich either. Enough, but not too many children. St. Paul's was upper middle class, and lots of families, but so filled with military folks that it was an always changing congregation. Central had folks from many classes, but was dominated by an affluent, educated leadership -- lawyers, doctors, judges, Bethlehem Steel executives and Lehigh University professors. There were lots of kids but you never saw them. Tremont Terrace, on the other hand, had no doctors, no lawyers, no corporate executives, just a bunch of single moms, blue collar workers and, a whole bunch of nurses, more than ten percent of the congregation were nurses.

But that doesn't tell you a lot about them either... Midway Manor, in the sixties and early seventies, was a completely Caucasian crowd. Every once in a while you'd see a vaguely Mediterranean face. Central is almost as chalky as Midway manor, but does have a few staunch, brave, determined people who were not melanin-impaired. St. Paul's, 20 miles east of Washington DC was about a third black, in the early eighties. And Tremont Terrace was, by the time we left, ninety percent Caribbean: Antiguan, Bajan, Trinidadian, Jamaican, Kittian.

Yet, still, though I have talked about four churches, I have not really described them at all. For I have only talked about what they looked LIKE... to really describe a community of faith, a family of God, I believe we need to talk about what they looked TOWARD. For the vision of a church is not the way it looks, but, rather, the vision is how it sees, what it sees, what it is looking for. You need to describe a church by what it is looking for, for the church cannot be a church without a vision.

Sometime in the fourth or fifth century before Jesus was born, a cloud of locusts descended on the tiny nation of Judah. They did what locusts always do, they ate every kind of plant life they could find. The land looked like it had been devastated in a war. There weren't too many prophets in Judah in those days, but one of them, a man named Joel, saw an image within the devastation. He looked at the army of insects and saw an army of humans, he saw the devastation of a years crops and saw the devastation of the day of the Lord. But he also saw how the land would return to fruition and he saw a promise of hope.

Somewhere in what he saw, Joel imagined a time when God would prepare the people for difficult times by blessing them with a very special gift. The people would receive a vision -- not just a vision told to them by a prophet -- they would receive it themselves, all of them. The littlest child, the oldest senior, the richest the poorest, the insider, the outsider, the men, and the women. Instead of a cloud of bugs, God would pour the blessing of his spirit over the land. And everybody would have a vision.

Sometime in the 1960s, into the seventies, downtown and west Oakland began to look like an army of locusts had descended. But these locusts, instead of eating the leaves from the trees and the wheat from the fields, ate away at the homes and the businesses. People moved, stores closed, buildings sat vacant, and the locusts moved on. They effected the whole city, and even effected the people of God. We could easily imagine, in reading the first couple chapters of Joel, that the prophet is predicting our time.

Now, I could outline my theories about what happened in Oakland in the sixties. I could pick out people to blame, and assign sin to those who contributed to the flight and the blight. But it might be better to take a lesson from Joel: to call for general repentance and turning toward righteousness, and then to preach vision. For in the midst of tough times, the people of God need a vision, a big vision together, and little visions from everybody. {Read Joel 2.28f} What visions, what dreams might be necessary to lift us from the despair of our own plague of locusts?

Someone among us might dream a big dream. Someone might have a big vision of a church filled with lots of people, from many diverse places, with a strong mission to the community and an important mission to the wider church. That's a really big, far off, kind of vision. To see that big vision, it may be necessary, in fact we know it will be necessary, to focus on lots of little visions, seen by every person out here. Lots of visions, seen by lots of people -- for after all, that's what Joel suggests for Judah: lots of visions seen by lots of different people.

Some people may have small visions of hospitality: they may see ways that we can welcome people better, or ways we can make allowances for people who are just learning how to worship, or ways we can show people our best side when their with us, or ways we reach out to people who are different from us in -- race, nationality, class -- ways we can become comfortable with each other.

Some people may have small visions of bringing meaning to people's lives: they may see ways of getting more teachers for Sunday School classes, or ways of organizing other study groups. They may see ways of explaining what we do in worship, so that everyone can understand the meaning, and seek the meaning and find the meaning.

Some people may have small visions of a stronger mission for the congregations: they may see ways -- maybe just small ways -- we can get more involved in local outreach; or they may see ways we can do something that the wider church has found difficult to do, like to break down class barriers within the church.

And some visions might even need to be smaller. Like, I see us with four more Sunday School teachers... I see us inviting the people of the Samaritan Neighborhood Center to share worship and events with us two more times each year... I see us wearing name-tags so people who visit will know who we are... I see us smiling at visitors, introducing ourselves, taking an interest in them... I see us often including a personal story in the bulletin about the meaning one of us finds in one of the hymns that morning... I see us teaching the children in our Sunday School to greet and usher and, maybe even, read scriptures...

It does not matter if we dream big dreams or small dreams or minuscule dreams; but we need to dream dreams and see visions: old, young, male, female, wherever we're from, whatever we look like. And when we begin to define ourselves by the vision God gives us, we will begin to live God's vision better.

And then, when someone asks us to describe our church we won't talk about numbers or finances, we won't talk about age or skin color, we won't even talk -- gasp here if you want -- we won't even talk about the beautiful and grand, polished wood and glorious stained glass Julia Morgan auditorium. But we will talk instead about the way we see together, the vision we have together, and small ways we are bringing that vision into fruition.

Let me describe one last church with which I am acquainted. In New York City, on the Upper West Side, the Episcopalians are building a cathedral. It's a large gothic stone building, with a mish-mash of colorful people sprinkled throughout it's small congregation. To build a gothic cathedral, however, they need stone-carving skills from another time, another place. At one point, when they could find no American stone carvers of the kind they needed, they brought in European stone-carvers -- listen here for the vision part -- to train homeless, unemployed folks how to carve stone for a huge gothic cathedral.

As they are learning, they have come up with a new way of earning funds for the church: they take smooth river rocks and carve single words into them. And people buy the words. The words are nouns and verbs. The nouns say: Truth, Love and Beauty and such; but my favorites are the verbs. For they say: Imagine, Hope, Dream. Perhaps we at Oakland First Baptist need to carry a rock with us as we travel our spiritual journey:

"Imagine"

"Hope"

"Dream"