February 2, 2025

Running in Circles

Have you ever said to someone, “Man, what a day; I feel like I’ve been running around in circles all day long!”?  Have you ever stopped to consider what it means at an existential level to be running around in circles?  It means you’re going over and over the same territory all the time, which means you are not being exposed to anything new or different, which means you’re closed off from a good deal of what’s out there to experience in the world, and from a good number of people with whom you might otherwise be relating.  What circles do you run in?

Jesus had a little circle of followers; they were all Jews.  And they all lived in the Jewish state of Israel.  It was kind of a circle within a circle.  But Jesus’ way of running in circles wasn’t like our way.  We go ’round and ’round, repeating patterns of thought and following the tracks we’ve left before, like the wheels of a car going around a racetrack, each revolution of the wheel is a repeat performance.  But that word revolution is a two-edged sword.  It comes from the Latin re, meaning back, and volvere, meaning to roll.  A revolution is a rolling-back.  Have you ever been stuck in the snow?  The problem is that your wheels just keep spinning in the same place.  In order to get unstuck you need to roll the car back out of that rut to get it in a different place.  Jesus was a revolutionary.  He turned things around, and did so in ways that sent him and his listeners outside the carefully laid tracks of established thought and well-worn prejudices.

Our scripture reading from Luke this morning picks up where last week’s reading left off.  Jesus had just wowed the congregation with a brilliant one sentence sermon that left them all in awe.  Then he turned things around on them.  He said, “the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah . . . yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.  There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”  Like a true revolutionary, he was rolling them back out of their circular thinking; telling them that foreigners were regarded above Israelites in those sacred stories.  They drove him out of town to throw him off a cliff.  Trying to roll back people’s way of thinking and get them out of the ruts formed by the circles they run in is very risky business.  It can get you run out of town, or worse.

And so it is with a certain degree of trepidation that I make the following suggestion: the church is not simply a safe, comfortable retreat from the world – a place where you can be supported by your friends, confirmed in your opinions, and comforted in your trials.  The church is a place of revolution.  It has been from the very beginning.  A case in point?  Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth.

You and I are fond of those words from 1 Corinthians 13: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. . . . Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. . . .”  We hear these words at just about every wedding.  In fact, I have read them just about every time I’ve done a wedding.  They are magnificent.  What most of us don’t take time to notice are the words that lead up to these glorious thoughts about love.  Paul makes it clear that he is responding to some serious conflict in the Corinthian church.  There were various groups within the church (different “circles,” if you will) each claiming a separate leader.  They were proud, each one thinking they were the smart ones who knew what was right and what was wrong.  They were divided about sexual relationships, marriage, taking one another to court for perceived offenses, observance of ritual purity laws, fairness in food distribution.  It seems they couldn’t find enough things to fight about.  These were the kind of ruts they were running around and around in.  And it is into this mess that the Apostle Paul sends this missive about love being kind, not jealous or boastful, arrogant or rude.  Paul is being a revolutionary.  He’s trying to shake them up, roll them back out of their tracks.

The church was founded on the words and ministry of a revolutionary figure, and founded as a place of revolution.  This is a place where normal patterns of behavior, standard operating procedures, accepted social consequences, and natural human instincts are rolled back, and every action, every conversation, every point of view, every decision is subjected to a higher standard, a standard that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” and “never ends.”

Phillip Yancey tells the story of a revolutionary.  He was a French friar named Abbé Pierre.  “Born into a noble family,” Yancey writes, “[Pierre] had served in the French Parliament until he became disillusioned with the slow pace of political change.  After World War II, with Paris still reeling from the effects of the Nazi occupation, thousands of homeless beggars lived in the streets. Pierre could not tolerate the endless debates by noblemen and politicians while so many street people starved outside.

“During an unusually harsh winter, many Parisian beggars froze to death.  In desperation, Pierre resigned his post and became a Catholic friar to work among them.  Failing to interest politicians or the community in the beggars’ plight, he concluded his only recourse was to organize the beggars themselves.  He taught them to do menial tasks better.  Instead of sporadically collecting bottles and rags, they divided into teams to scour the city.  Next, he led them to build a warehouse from discarded bricks and then start a business in which they sorted and processed vast quantities of used bottles from hotels and businesses.

“Finally, Pierre inspired each beggar by giving him responsibility to help another beggar poorer than himself.  The project caught fire, and in a few years an organization called Emmaus was founded to expand Pierre’s work in other countries.”¹

Abbé Pierre came to realize that trying to do things the way they’ve always been done leads inevitably to getting the same results.  He had to roll back the thinking of his time and organize the beggars.  He had to become a revolutionary.  That’s the model for the church.  Pot-luck suppers and rituals of worship are comforting, but they are not our “meat and potatoes.”  We are revolutionaries, or we are nothing.  That’s a scary thought.  It means we are constantly being pushed and pulled out of our ruts, out of the circles we run in.  It means we’re likely to find ourselves a bit lost at times, in unfamiliar territory.  I think that’s where we’re supposed to be.

The author, educator, and commentator, Steve Zeitlin points out how the revolutionary kind of circles can lead us to where we need to be and how terribly important it is to get a little lost in the process.  He writes: “Stories move in circles, they don’t move in straight lines.  So it helps if you listen in circles because there are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home.  And part of the finding is the getting lost, because when you’re lost, you have to look around and listen.”²

That’s it!  That’s the value of getting whacked up side the head like the congregation in the temple did when Jesus told them they weren’t as special as they thought they were, or like the Corinthians did when Paul wrote to point out the ruts they were stuck in.  It can leave us a little disoriented.  And a little disoriented is maybe where we need to be in church, because then you’re forced to look up from the track in the road and pay attention; you’re forced to stop and consider what truly matters and what truly does not.

So here’s my revolutionary whack up side the head for this morning (and I hope it doesn’t get me run out of town or thrown off a cliff).  Listening to Nowell and Mike at the annual meeting last week, I realized that they are considering and putting out for your consideration some different notions about our way ahead as a church.  So I’m throwing my hat into the ring and suggesting the following: What if we totally rethought our structure as a congregation?  What if we tried not having a traditional pastor, but instead strengthened what has already been developing here, which is for all the members of the church to be pastors to one another?  What if we occasionally had members of the congregation lead our worship or offer a message from their own hearts and experience?  Listening to Mike and Nowell last week at the annual meeting inspired me to think about what marvelous thoughts and words of inspiration could come from any of us.  Could it be that our budget issues might lead us out of a rut and into a revolution?  And, speaking of revolution — that going back to get unstuck thing — this is actually an old model.  It’s how the early church formed, and it’s how many churches were organized in the early days of our nation.  It’s how the Mormons and many “house churches” function today.

This morning we’re going to come to this communion table as individuals, and as a body — the body of Christ.  There are no privileged places in this act of communion; everyone is a priest, everyone is a servant.  What we reenact in this ritual is part of a story that’s very symbolic and even a little confusing that, if you’re lucky leaves you a little lost and therefore wakes you up.

Well, that’s my revolutionary thought for this morning.  As I said, I hope it doesn’t get me run out of town.  What I hope it does is start a conversation.  And who knows where that conversation might lead us?  Maybe we’ll lead each other to a place none of us have ever considered going.  But it is my firm belief that we will be guided on our journey by love, a love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” and never ends.

¹ Phillip Yancey, Searching for the Invisible God, Zondervan Publishing, 2000, pp. 239–240.

² Because God Loves Stories: An Anthology of Jewish Storytelling, Steve Zeitlin, ed., Touchstone, 1997, p. 85.