THE LAND OF HOPE AND DREAMS

BY ADAM FRONCZEK FEBRUARY 2, 2020

Scripture: Matthew 5:1-12. The text of the scripture may be found at the end of the sermon.

A special thank you to the Knox Choir and Earl Rivers and Christina Haan for their music in the Traditional Service this morning, and to Shirley Rout who so elegantly helped this congregation remember and celebrate its musical traditions and enjoy a newly commissioned piece of sacred music. Thanks, too, to the Fresh Spirit musicians, as well as Dave Annett and Kara Hubert, for this morning’s music during that service, and to Mike McClellan, who helped us remember and celebrate the creative work God has done in Fresh Spirit worship.

For the past several months, we have taken requests from the Fresh Spirit congregation of songs they connect with in their spiritual journeys. This week Fresh Spirit included music from rock ‘n’ roll legend Bruce Springsteen…and I’m going to go in a different direction with my opening illustration by citing some words from him.

Springsteen says:

“[The Church] was the world where I found the beginnings of my song. In Catholicism, there existed the poetry, danger, and darkness that reflected my imagination and my inner self. I found a land of great and harsh beauty, of fantastic stories, of unimaginable punishment and infinite reward. It was a glorious and pathetic place I was either shaped for or fit right into. It has walked alongside me as a waking dream my whole life. So, as a young adult I tried to make sense of it. I tried to meet its challenge for the very reasons that there are souls to lose and a kingdom of love to be gained. I laid what I’d absorbed across the hardscrabble lives of my family, friends, and neighbors. I turned it into something I could grapple with, understand, something I could even find faith in…”

If you don’t know much about Bruce Springsteen, the richness of that quote may surprise you. But Springsteen has achieved such great stardom and longevity not only because he’s a tremendous performer, but because he is a great poet. His music gives voice to a particular kind of American experience of work and love and the grind of daily life that has made him deeply relevant for five decades. There is a spirituality to his lyrics, an indication that the raw material of religion is a part of his soul, and you can trace his spiritual life as you follow his music from the angst of his young adulthood to the pressures of middle age and into the seasoned wisdom of older adulthood. He’s given voice to the journey of life.

Spiritual life is supposed to be understood not as a list of rules, but as a journey. A benefit of the Fresh Spirit service is that they get to hear Springsteen’s music. In Traditional Worship, we get to hear wonderful music, too, of a somewhat different nature. But another blessing of traditional worship is the space in which it is held.

Have you ever taken a good look at the ceiling in the sanctuary? I shared with you before that it is intended to resemble the hull of a ship. It’s big, deep, and strong, with room enough for all of us to be guided by the wind, or to row together. Entering into worship we’re supposed to be mindful that we are travelers on a journey through the life of faith, and it’s that journey I want to talk about this morning.

The journey starts in childhood. If it happens the right way, we learn as children that we were created by a good, patient, and forgiving God who loves us, even when we fall short or fail. And we learn and internalize great stories of faith that give shape to life in the world: Adam, Eve, and the Serpent; the Israelites wandering the wilderness in search of the Promised Land; David’s triumph over Goliath; the compassion of the Good Samaritan; the Empty Tomb on Easter morning as Jesus defeats death. These are stories that give shape to life.

As we grow up, we start to ask different questions as our faith matures. Teenagers express doubts about the truth of it all. As young adults and into middle age, we strive for independence and experience disappointments and betrayals and may no longer tolerate a simple, moralistic faith. As we age and experience a growing sense of our mortality, we seek the meaning of our time here on earth, and what might be waiting for us on the other side when God welcomes us home. We share wisdom with children. These are all movements on the journey; as we travel on this ship we call faith they are ports we visit and horizons we gaze at along the journey, hoping we will one day arrive at a place we’ve hoped for and dreamt about.

One of the oddities of being in church is that all kinds of different people are on the journey with us. There’s only one sermon preached on any given Sunday, but it’s heard by all of you, and you come into the room with a striking variety of experiences—our experience of church is as varied as the number of people in the room. Each of you bring your own story with you. This very morning, you could be having one of your best days—perhaps you awoke well rested and feeling blessed, ready to come to church and be stretched and challenged. Or maybe already this morning, you’ve had an awful fight with your spouse or your children and keep replaying it in your head. Maybe you’re terribly worried about a loved one who is sick, or are grieving a friend you have lost, or are troubled by a hungry person you encountered on the way here. These are just a handful of the ways we show up to church.

God’s Word has an amazing way of giving value to every one of our experiences—they are all a part of the journey of faith. We hear that in the voice of Jesus speaking to us in our struggles and giving us something to hope for: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” These words invite us to bring our true selves and our real struggles before God and pray about it.

Church also reminds us that it’s not “all about me”—there are hundreds of others here with us in the boat, people sitting to your left and right or across the room. God miraculously attends to each one of us, to members of our family of faith who did not come to worship today, and to God’s children around the world. So many of them exist this morning in circumstances we can hardly even imagine.

The brilliance of Springsteen’s poetry is that he sums up in just a few lines what its taken me paragraphs to try and say. My favorite song of his is a lesser known one called Land of Hope and Dreams. In it, he describes the very journey I’ve been talking about—the journey through a hardscrabble life in hopes of arriving at the promised kingdom of love.

Springsteen’s chosen image, rather than a ship, is a train:

“Grab your ticket and your suitcase Thunder’s rollin’ down this track Well you don’t know where you’re goin’ now But you know you won’t be back Well darlin’ if you’re weary Lay your head upon my chest We’ll take what we can carry Yeah and we’ll leave the rest Big wheels roll through fields where sunlight streams Meet me in a land of hope and dreams…” (Springsteen, Land of Hope and Dreams, 2012)

The verses of the song (like that one) tell the story of that first part of church I was talking about—each person makes a decision, even if by accident or fate, to come along this journey of faith, to accept its risky unknowns, to bring what we can carry and leave other things behind; to find people along the way who we can lean on and count on. If we make the choice to go on the journey, we do it all in pursuit of an amazing promise of the Gospel—a promise God has in store for us—a promise I believe is about this world as much as the next one, a promised land of hope and dreams.

Then in the chorus of the song, Springsteen reminds us that the greatness of the journey is that we’re all on it together:

[Well] this train, carries saints and sinners This train, carries losers and winners This train, carries whores and gamblers This train, carries lost souls I said this train, dreams will not be thwarted This train, faith will be rewarded This train, hear the steel wheels singin’ This train bells of freedom ringin’

Bells of freedom ringin. Not enslavement, and not a feeling of being trapped or stuck in your life, but bells of freedom ringin’—for everyone. It’s a vision of what it means to be on life’s journey in a community of friends where everyone belongs, where merit or wealth or resume gain you nothing for all you need is who you are; it’s a journey where you don’t need a ticket at all. That’s the last line of the song, and the only one that is overtly theological: “You don’t need no ticket; you just get on board; you just thank the Lord.”

In our Annual Meeting today, you’ll get a report of what happens in this community, week in and week out and every day between. We do God’s work here and we do it far from perfectly. There is always more to be done, but we’re on the journey together. In the Annual Report, we told the usual information about the happenings around our church, but more importantly, we spent the last year collecting pictures of the faces involved, and we showed you a lot of them.

My hope and dream for us is simple: that in the ceiling of this church, the poetry of a song, and most of all in those pictures of the Knox’s children of God the young and old faces alike, that you will find yourself swept up in God’s journey, that you will know that you need no ticket, that you will get on board, and that you will thank the Lord.

Amen.

MATTHEW 5:1-12 NEW REVISED STANDARD VERSION (NRSV)

THE BEATITUDES

5 When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

5 “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 11 “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.