When you pray, don’t pour out a flood of empty words, as the Gentiles do. They think that by saying many words they’ll be heard. 8 Don’t be like them, because your Father knows what you need before you ask. 9 Pray like this:
Our Father who is in heaven,
uphold the holiness of your name.
10 Bring in your kingdom
so that your will is done on earth as it’s done in heaven.
11 Give us the bread we need for today.
12 Forgive us for the ways we have wronged you,
just as we also forgive those who have wronged us.
13 And don’t lead us into temptation,
but rescue us from the evil one.
14 “If you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you don’t forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your sins. (Common English Bible)
“Seventy Times Seven: A Celebration and
Commission of Valley Christian Church,” Week Three
One of the hardest things for about experiencing the pandemic is that I had my call to solo pastoral ministry—something I hope to spend the rest of my career engaged in—rekindled by y’all right in the midst of the second wave, when there were no vaccines or any other conclusive remedies on the foreseeable horizon. Even in the best of global circumstances, moving your family cross-country for a new ministry is still accurately characterized as a leap of faith, albeit a genuinely joyful one.
And that is what I spent most of the pandemic doing after the stay-at-home orders were lifted: moving. Moving here, moving into a new home, a new office, a new pastorate. And I kept moving, kept pushing myself to try to be as productive as possible in the face of an utterly exhausting process and a pandemic I was trying to protect myself and my family from at all costs.
The cavalry did eventually arrive. As a practicing physician, Carrie was one of the first ones vaccinated, but even after Alabama’s vaccine rollout expanded in early February to include active clergy, it took UAB another seven weeks to finally get me on their books for an appointment. But eventually the day arrived, and I spent my fifteen minutes getting jabbed and then waiting to ensure I experienced no anaphylactic reaction to the vaccine.
Those fifteen minutes were an unexpectedly and profoundly spiritual moment for me, and I wrote about it afterwards on Facebook. This is how I ended that post:
Maybe it is time for me to stop going and pushing against all my fears, all my ambitions, all my creative power, and be just a bit easier on myself for having made it this far with my family and with our health. In stead of trying to deliver myself, and relying solely on my own power to do so, today was the time handed down to me to stop and turn myself over to be delivered—by faith, my science, by legions of people who have gone before me to make this antidote possible, and by the lifegiving majesty of God made manifest to me this afternoon, deep in the heart of the city built upon iron.
I owed—owe—a debt to the people who came before me to make this vaccine possible. But I also believe I owe a debt to the future, to make that world as safe as possible by being vaccinated. I am protecting not just myself but all those who meet me in the future. I owe it to them. We all do.
This is a new sermon series to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the planting of Valley Christian Church by Birmingham First Christian Church, and especially as a new minister, having been in Birmingham for scarcely eight months, I am especially grateful this week to follow the words of another of my predecessors, one who has been a beloved member of Valley for many years and a member of my search committee, Rev. John Gregory.
In April 1951, seventy to eighty members of Birmingham First were, with the congregation’s blessing in the form of seed money and a sterling silver communion set, sent forth to establish Valley as the latest Disciples of Christ congregation in the Birmingham area. Valley’s charter membership would swell to over one hundred twenty, and the records of the congregation’s founding have been meticulously kept in our archives. We have spent these past two weeks unpacking Valley’s origin and evolution stories found in those archives, and today I would like for us to take a step back and consider more broadly how we live today indebted to both our past and our future, the past versions of the church and the future versions of the church.
The Lord’s Prayer that we find in the Sermon on the Mount is a useful springboard for this, I think, because it can just as easily be translated as “forgive us our debts” as “forgive us our trespasses” that we use each week in worship. Consider our version the debt-averse version of the prayer.
Yet, just because we may be averse to taking on debt does not mean that debt is completely unavoidable. We are indebted to past generations of Valley that have bequeathed to us assets more vast than is typical for a church our size. I hope we can do right by them by not allowing ourselves to be tempted by a mentality of scarcity, because it would not be true to our experience as Valley.
But our debt extends beyond exclusively the previous generations of Valley. We have, collectively and individually, benefited from a way of being the church and a way of being the United States that gave us unfair socioeconomic advantages. That made it easier for us to amass our assets. We owe a debt to the past because we benefited—and continue to benefit—from it unfairly.
And that means we also owe a debt to the future church, to be the best stewards we can of both our material and spiritual resources that will in turn be handed down to future generations. I want to say this very clearly: I already see this commitment at work a great deal here. When we work on things like transforming our outdoor property into a true community space with the walking trail expansion and a picnic shelter, we are committing ourselves to leaving behind things for the community to enjoy and appreciate even after we ourselves are gone. It represents an act of faith that what we do will continue to benefit those who follow in our footsteps.
Yet we do even more than that. I was not the one to come up with the outreach component of our seventy-times-seven anniversary theme, which has already yielded a significant amount of aid for Greater Birmingham Ministries. That came from you. You were the ones who said, “We need to do this as part of our anniversary celebrations.” And we did. We are.
Anniversaries are wonderful moments for multiple reasons—they are of course opportunities to celebrate our story, but they also function as pivotal moments, moments to ask, “What do we want our next seventy years to look like?” In the heart of this sermon series, this is that pivot—we have been celebrating our past, and I want us to also celebrate our future.
Believe it or not, the Lord’s Prayer is a perfect springboard for that as well. It falls smack-dab in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, right at the halfway point. As Father Albert, my favorite professor in God School, told me, the way Matthew documented the Sermon on the Mount was not remotely coincidental. He entirely intended for the Prayer to be at the very heart of the Sermon.
I would take that image one step further—imagine the Sermon itself as the profile of a mountain.
On either side of the mountain’s profile, like in a drawing, are slopes upward towards a peak at the midpoint. Imagine the Lord’s Prayer as the apex of the Sermon on the Mount. It contains, in the most distilled form, that which we are to turn to God for in our lives. Including the forgiveness of debts—or trespasses.
Part of forgiveness, whether of financial debt or emotional or spiritual debt to someone you have wronged, is the liberation that comes after to do what is right and what is best. That is what I hope for with each of us—in our own personal lives and as a church. Once we acknowledge that we are indeed indebted to both our past and our future, we ought to be able to live in the freedom of knowing that we, in Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 7, have been bought for a price. The debt is a shared debt, one that our Creator wants us to make good on by following God’s Son Jesus Christ.
I realize that may sound counterintuitive, especially if you are like me and have a visceral reaction to the thought of indebtedness. But the beauty of grace is that we are not judged on the divine equivalent of our credit scores (sorry, The Good Place). We are judged on how we live out our faith so that others also experience the freedom and liberation that comes from being set free by a God who loves them and wants nothing more than to see them flourish.
I return to that whenever I feel overwhelmed by my own indebtedness,
and my own limitations in making good on that debt. I cannot go back in time
and thank Jonas Salk for not only curing polio, but by refusing to patent his vaccine,
so that like today, as many people could be vaccinated as quickly as possible.
I cannot go back in time and thank the brave Kurdish and Turkish smugglers who
spirited my relatives out of a genocide and ultimately to safety in the United
States. There is so much I cannot do to directly address my indebtedness to the
past, and I cannot change that. Maybe you feel that way too.
We cannot just wave a magic wand and erase our debts to the past. But what we can do, what I think we must do, is acknowledge the reality of those debts and then rely upon our faith to point us on a path into the future that builds upon the array of good that we have done, and learns from the bad. In this way we acknowledge our debt to our past, while striving to lessen our debt to the future, all as a way of doing right by this present moment, the present generation of the church. We owe a debt to the future church, the church that will be called to address spiritual challenges we may not even be able to imagine today, and by creating the best possible conditions for that future church to flourish, we pay down our debt to them.
The story of Valley Christian Church that we are celebrating has spanned seven decades so far. As much as we owe to that story, consider what we owe to our future, the story that has yet to be written but what we hope will be as rich and memorable as any.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
May 2, 2021