In the hills of eastern Kentucky, not far from where we once lived, there is a hidden-away estate called Windswept. If you crawl up the winding grade of US 421 to the wide place in the road called Morrill, off to your left there is a driveway that leads to a lovely stone house. Windswept was owned by a music professor at Berea College; she operated it not just as her residence, but also as a site for music workshops. I probably never would have known about the place, much less gone there, had it not been for my musician brother, who regularly attended Windswept workshops.
I loved to go to Windswept, just to take in the view; the house is perched on a ledge overlooking a broad valley with dramatic vistas. Green hills – Kentuckians called them “knobs”; a winding stream; rocks everywhere. And up on that ledge the winds blew vigorously – sometimes refreshing us from the summer heat, but sometimes sending torrents of water down the hillside. Sometimes refreshing winds, sometimes destructive winds, at Windswept. In fact, I learned that the beauty of that valley was something of an illusion; in that valley the green hills were dying from acid rain, the people were strangling without work, and the roads were so poor that the school bus only managed to arrive a couple of times a week. I learned that the winds of Windswept can be destructive and deadly as well as refreshing and pleasant.
On this Independence Day in America strong winds are blowing. Winds of change, winds of stormy controversy, winds brought by new ideas and by people who differ from the America of my childhood. America is a windswept land, where we can no longer assume that nearly everybody is alike. I have a book of biographies of prominent Kentuckians of another generation; in it there is a page on my great-grandmother, Sallie DeHaven Sterett Moorman. The book says, “Mrs. Moorman, being from western Kentucky, is OF COURSE a Baptist and a Democrat”. Once there was a time when you could say “of course” about us But the winds of change have blown, and now even in western Kentucky they have Muslim mosques and they vote Republican! America is a windswept land, affected by the winds of change. Are these winds destructive or are they refreshing?
I
“Windswept” is the way the prophet Hosea described Israel in the 8th Century before Christ. Changes were coming to the nation. Five kings in twenty-five years. Tiglath-Pileser, the Assyrian general, breathing at the gates of Samaria. Hosea was worried; Hosea cried out about Israel’s precarious perch on the ledge. “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” This is no refreshing wind that Hosea names; this is the storm wind that destroys. Like those hurricanes that hammered Florida last year, the winds that Hosea saw sweeping over Israel would uproot everything.
But Hosea believed that winds destroyed because the people had stirred them up. “They sow the wind, they reap the whirlwind.” Hosea believed that Israel would become a nation swept into the garbage heap of history for two reasons. Look with me at the text:
A
First, Hosea saw that Israel had sown the wind that swept away because they had turned to religion without a commitment to integrity. The people had chosen to think that God would protect them if they ascribed to the right creeds and preached the right principles, but there was no commitment to integrity to accompany all that prattling.
“They have broken my covenant, and transgressed my law. Israel cries to me, ‘My God, we – Israel – know you!’ Israel has spurned the good; the enemy shall pursue him.”
Friends, religion is the easiest thing in the world to promote, if all you do is promote religiosity and do not demand integrity. The woods are full of churches and temples, windy places most of them, where sermons are preached and liturgies performed and songs sung and people announce to the Lord, “My God, we know you!”. But if lives are not changed, if behavior is not affected, then I tell you, it is all sowing a wind which will lead to a whirlwind. The winds of change sweep us to destruction if we invest in religion devoid of moral integrity.
Does it strike you as odd that in our neighboring county, where there are 800 churches, megachurches on nearly every corner, gathering thousands of worshipers every week, yet the murder rate has escalated to incredible levels? One of my parishioners from Takoma Park is Assistant Chief of Prince George’s County Police; I saw his picture in the paper the other day, and, although his face was partially obscured, I thought I could see a tear running down his cheek. So intolerable has the situation become that now – at last – there is a coalition of churches trying to find solutions to the issue. Well, I do not know what all the solutions are, nor can I pretend that we are really any better off in our county, but I am confident that a part of the issue is that we have settled for mere religiosity. We have settled for worship that is more noise than substance, for preaching that is more rhetoric than reality, and for turning a blind eye when our brothers and sisters fail to live out the way of Christ.
“They have broken my covenant, and transgressed my law ... Israel has spurned the good; the enemy shall pursue him.” Can it be that we are a windswept nation because we have trivialized our faith and have separated it from moral integrity?
B
There is a second reason why Hosea believed that Israel would be swept away. He believed that we would be blown away if we equate leadership with material success and not with servanthood. We shall be swept away by winds that destroy if we cultivate leaders who focus on power and on money rather than on service.
God says through the prophet Hosea, “They made kings, but not through me; they set up princes, but without my knowledge. With their silver and gold they made idols for their own destruction.”
I tell you, nothing will more quickly destroy a community or a nation than greedy leadership. I am not speaking just of political leaders. I am thinking of business leaders who set up Enron-like scenarios and run off with millions while employees and shareholders suffer. I am thinking of administrators who create sweetheart contracts for their friends. I am thinking of workers who only half do their jobs – what a contrast this week to read that in the era of security-consciousness, we have border cameras that do not work, transportation inspectors who will not work, and enforcement codes that cannot work! But, again, what a contrast – Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor stepped down after twenty-four years of diligent service, and about her a friend said, “Whatever you gave her to do, even if it was washing the dishes, she wanted to do it well.” Justice O’Connor may be one of a dying breed, committed to service instead of acquisition.
I could spend a long time on this item. But it is not my intent just to decrying the greed of leaders. In a sense, we get the kind of leaders we deserve. And so we need to look to ourselves, to our own values, to our styles of life, and see whether we are sowing the devastating wind of idolatrous greed. Several years ago I had participated in a Good Friday service at a church downtown; afterward the host pastor invited all the participants to share in dinner at a restaurant. Frankly, I felt a little uncomfortable just at the thought of banqueting on Good Friday, but, in the name of camaraderie, I went along. To my surprise, we went to one of the most expensive restaurants in the city; and then the conversation at the table turned to “What do you like best, Cadillac, Infiniti, or Lexus?” That just rubbed me very much the wrong way – maybe because I was driving a beat-up old Plymouth – or maybe, just maybe, because I could not reconcile that keen interest in things luxurious with the Christ we had just preached about and who owned nothing more than a robe to gamble over! Do we seriously expect people to follow leaders whose chief interest is creature comfort?
Until we form leaders – and communities – on the basis of service rather than materialism, we are sowing the wind which will reap the whirlwind.
II
But I do have good news today. I do have news of another wind that blows. I have heard another weather report, and it is of a refreshing wind, a wind that will blow away the heat of the afternoon and the dust of destruction. I have news of a rushing, mighty wind.
Do you remember the Pentecost story? Do you remember that it was just a few weeks after Calvary, that the believers had gathered? And do you remember the astonishing things that happened when the wind swept through that room?
“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.”
And then what happened? What came next? That wind swept in lots of things. The ability to cross cultures, the capacity to understand one another; most of all, the power of an impassioned witness. Because God windswept His church, the disciples were empowered to reach out to persons of all nationalities and lifestyles. Winds of refreshing power; like the winds we experienced Friday night, blowing out oppressive heat and stifling humidity and bringing us life. So God’s winds will blow through His church and bring life.
When they signed that revolutionary document on the fourth of July in 1776, they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They knew that those were, in the words of one of their pamphleteers, the times that try men’s souls. I believe that today we, no less than they, are living in troubling and windswept times. But whether the winds are winds of destruction, as Hosea saw in his day; or whether they are winds of renewal, as the early church felt – that lies with us.
We can trivialize by worrying about whether the Ten Commandments will be displayed in courthouses, or we can live the life commanded by those words and thus make a winsome witness to our neighbors.
We can formalize our faith into mindless repetition of familiar phrases, or we can go into the highways and byways, from the Avenue out here to the neighborhoods over there, and reach those who have no faith. The choice is ours.
My wife and I bought a new car the other day. No, it was NOT one of those luxury models. It is a modest little item, but it will serve us. As we were driving it home from the dealer, since it was a warm night, we tried the air conditioning. It did not seem to be doing very much. We began to fiddle with the controls. We found one problem – the vents were closed. Can’t get much air if the vents are closed tight. Sort of like our witness – if you tell no one about Christ, then the message will not get out. The next thing we noticed was that it was set for “recirculate” instead of for “fresh air”; that means that we might get cool faster, but eventually it would be the same old stale air, confined within the car. Sort of like our teaching and our preaching – if we do not open our minds to hear what the world has to say, we may feel very comfortable for a while, but soon we are stale. But it still wasn’t cooling much, and then I discovered the most important problem. There was a button we had not yet pushed, labeled “AC”; in other words, we had done everything right, but we still had not tapped into the compressor, we still had not touched the true source of power. Sort of like our Christian walk – we can set up organizations and we can attend worship and we can do the whole business, but unless and until we have tapped into the Spirit of the Living God Himself, there will be no refreshment.
Windswept. A windswept nation, a windswept church. Destruction or refreshment. Which will it be?
This week a new movie came out. I have not seen it, but I have read the reviews with interest. “The March of the Penguins” has no human actors and no script other than what nature has written. This film chronicles the life cycle of the Emperor penguins of the Antarctic. It seems that when it is time to breed, they march – or better, waddle – some seventy miles from the dangerous waters of the shoreline to a breeding ground, where the eggs are laid. The male birds then put the eggs on their feet and layer their skin over the eggs, for months at a time, standing still, eating nothing, just protecting life. During that time the female birds go back to the shore, eat plenty of fish and krill, then bring some food back for the newly hatched chicks. Only then do the male penguins go off to eat, and the cycle begins again. Impressive as this entire ritual would be anywhere, it is made all the more astounding because the Antarctic winds blow so fiercely that the temperature may go down to 100 below zero. So, when the winds blow, these protecting parents rotate from inside the circle to its outside, and then back inside again, so that all share in the exposure to the winds, but all have a chance for warmth as well.
Is it possible, brothers and sisters, that that is what the church is about? Protecting us while we hatch and until we mature; but then getting us to offer warmth to one another, so that we can survive exposure to the destructive winds?
Is it possible that this is the meaning of this Table? Reminding us that there was one who hung and suffered high against an eastern sky, where the winds of death blew strong. But now He calls us together to await that strong wind that will blow life, refreshing life, into us?
For we are a people who are windswept.
