Last weekend was one of the rare ones when I found myself preaching twice, before markedly diferent congregations in services with intentionally diverse aims and visions. I began the journey toward the weekend with lofty intentions--I would prepare and preach distinct sermons from different texts for the student service at Wesley Memorial UMC in Charlottesville and the youth night of Rocky Run UMC's revival in Dinwiddie County.

On Saturday morning, however, when it became clear that I'd be tailgating at the Foundation and attending UVA's Homecomings football game against Duke rather than staying home to work on sermon #2 (an encouraging call to action based on Jeremiah called "The Prophet in the Well"), I began framing the following message, titled "Mind the Gap," for both churches. The complete work is posted here, with sections specific to one congregation or the other highlighted and labeled. The differences between the two services may mean that this isn't exactly one unified, coherent sermon, but perhaps readers will nevertheless find it interesting in toto. Read at your leisure (yes, I know how LONG it might seem), and click 'Comment' below to share your thoughts.

1 From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. 2 The people quarreled with Moses, and said, "Give us water to drink." Moses said to them, "Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?" 3 But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, "Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?" 4 So Moses cried out to the Lord, "What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me." 5 The Lord said to Moses, "Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. 6 I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink." Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. 7 He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, "Is the Lord among us or not?" --Exodus 17:1-7

The people of Israel are an ungrateful, unfaithful, stiff-necked lot. Graciously given freedom from the bonds of slavery by the One whose covenants with Adam, Noah, and Abraham had set them apart in the first place, they lacked the foresight and faith simply to follow as God had directed. Their graven images made no sense. Their grumbling against Moses and Aaron and against God was pure selfishness. It was their own fault that they wandered through the desert for forty years before stepping foot in the promised land of Canaan. The story of the Exodus is one of failure and punishment.

I think that’s the way we explain passages like this one most of the time. It’s the clear and easy way of reading a text such as this. If we read the story of the Hebrew people’s flight from Egypt through the eyes of Moses, their sometimes brave, oftentimes weary, leader, it seems like all these people can do is complain. No effort on Moses’s behalf is enough. None of the gracious provisions God has provided for the journey are able to satisfy the greed and the longings of the people for very long.

That’s the easiest and most intuitively sensible way for us to read the words of the Exodus. The writer of the story reminds us again and again that the Israelites are imperfect folks, given to fits of doubt and sin that threaten to compromise their special place in the story of human salvation. But we need not scratch too rigorously beneath the surface before we discover another way that we might approach this story. We might see the people here camped at Rephidim and grumbling with Moses as unfaithful. We might, on the other hand, see them as human.

When we put ourselves in the shoes of the Israelites to walk a mile or two, asking Moses for water to drink and questioning the intentions of this God who’s brought us through so many trials only to have us die of thirst in the middle of the desert starts to seem like a pretty reasonable, natural thing to do. Even at this point, relatively early in the journey, we’ve already endured the wrath of Pharaoh, who made our life of slavery immeasurably more difficult after Moses instigated us to rise up against him. We’ve fled Egypt fearfully and been saved from sure destruction at the hands of our enemies only through a miracle at the Red Sea that we still can‘t completely understand or wrap our minds around. We’ve danced for joy and praised the Lord with beautiful music and much relief. But we’ve also worried that the food will stop dropping from heaven at any moment, that we’ll get lost in our travels and never make it home, that all this is not what it appears to be; it’s too good to be true that we who were born to a life of nameless slavery could somehow be a people destined to military and political greatness. We’re faced with the task of bearing and raising our children on the run. When one or many among us get sick, we must care for them while we continue moving. There’s little relief from the scorching sun and the burning anxiety. We never know what foe or hardship the next moment will bring. We’re uncertain, insecure, vulnerable.

And here all we’ve done is to be honest with ourselves and with Moses and with God. We can find no water in this forsaken place where we’ve camped, so we go to Moses, our “fearless leader,” and tell him to fix it. Instead, he chastises us for quarreling with him and testing the Lord. So we respond with the lingering, unanswered question that’s been present in our minds and our conversations for so long---- “Why did you bring us out of Egypt in the first place? Was it so that you could kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” Was this whole plight merely one man’s ego trip gone overboard? What was Moses really up to, anyway? Did he have ulterior, even evil, reasons to keep us weak and weary? And how, exactly, was this so different from our days of slavery in Egypt?

All this is to say that through the eyes of the wandering Hebrews, the exchange in our text this morning seems significantly more reasonable than Moses imagines. So then next logical question that I think comes to mind for modern readers of this ancient story is, “Who’s right, the people or Moses?” The answer, of course, is that the Israelites do not inhabit the easy world of a black-and-white dichotomy that we so often want to, and in fact there’s much context and wisdom to be gained from both these perspectives and from countless more.

This morning, it might be enough for us to say that both sides are a little bit right, that the Hebrew people are at a curious in-between place that requires special attention if we are to make sense of this account of their Exodus. They’re at an in-between place; they’re neither slaves nor free women and men. They’re no longer in Egypt, but they’re quite far, geographically and spiritually, from the promised land of God. They’re in the middle of the battle, where critical distance and perspective are hard to achieve.

It’s a curious place that’s not immediately accessible to us. In truth, it wasn’t all that accessible to the Israelites themselves when generations down the line they continued to struggle with this balance between having complete faith that God would provide all that God had promised and taking their own action to ensure the security and prosperity of their communities. This may be something of a universal struggle. It’s certainly something that Christian communities have wrestled with and pontificated over endlessly. And it may just be the English major in me, but I think we can look to a literary device to help us navigate the landscape of this particular in-between place.

You see, there’s a great image that comes to us from the book of the prophet Ezekiel of faithful people bringing themselves forward to stand in the gap, to defend the weak and the poor from the attacks of the predator, to translate the language of politics and religion into a tongue that the entire community can understand and engage, to guard the city against threats of all kinds, from without and from within. On its most basic level, this is an image that the parents and teachers and healers and soldiers among us can relate to perfectly. Throughout human history we’ve elevated to celebrity, even heroic, status the folks who have led and represented us, the ones appointed to speak on our behalf to villains who mean harm, to opposing nations with their own interests, even to God. So this image of standing in the gap is one that resonates quite well with our individual and communal experience.

But in order for us to really make sense of this image, I think we have to step back and consider more fully what Ezekiel’s up to when he presents it to us. Like so many of the great Hebrew prophets, Ezekiel spoke hard words to a chosen, but fallen people. When the Israelites had forgotten themselves and their purpose, Ezekiel told them the truth about themselves, boldly proclaiming God’s judgment and constantly offering the reminder that only through God’s goodness were wholeness and reconciliation possible.

The Old Testament book of Ezekiel reads like a page-turning masterpiece of drama. As the faith of the people rises and falls, so does the outlook of all of Creation. Rebellion from the spirit and laws of God is accompanied by widespread warfare and suffering. Faithfulness is rewarded by peace and prosperity. And yet too often it seems as though the forces of evil will have the day, that sin and selfishness and tragedy will blot out all memory of the promised land. The language of the prophet is urgent and compelling, and he’s at his emotional best in Chapter 22, where he chronicles the social and spiritual sins of Israel and laments the certain consequences of those failures. “The people of the land have practiced extortion and committed robbery;” God declares, “they have oppressed the poor and needy, and have extorted from the alien without redress. And I sought for anyone among them who would repair the wall and stand in the gap before me on behalf of the land, so that I would not destroy it; but I found no one.”

When Ezekiel puts out this call for someone to stand in the gap, it’s not a sentimental or romantic gesture. It’s no mere literary device designed to be analyzed or deconstructed in the academy. Rather, it’s a gritty, guttural cry for someone, anyone, among all the Hebrew people to turn from their pride, from their selfishness, from their apathy, to seek actively and earnestly the blessings of the Holy One. This standing in the gap, you see, is no small task---it’s life-altering, community-building, creation-repairing business. And I want to suggest to you this morning that it’s also part and parcel of our call to model love and service within a community of faith, just as it was for the prophet Ezekiel and for Moses in our Exodus reading.

Now the gaps that you and I are called to fill may not often be as dramatic as the one Moses faces. In the Exodus, there’s a discernible gap between the people of Israel and the God of their fathers, and Moses stands in that gap, not to keep the two sides separate and antagonistic, but to serve as a bridge, shoring up the disconnection and making streams in the desert possible for a parched people. Moses stands in the gap

between his people’s disparate past and their rich future, and he serves an able, if imperfect guide to draw the community together and save the land.

Compared to that, the gaps in our lives that we’re called upon to fill are likely to appear pretty mundane. But they may be no less valuable as models for the new life that we can know in and through Christ. As an example, many of you know that I’m the Director of Youth Ministry across town at the Hinton Avenue United Methodist Church. In the three years or so that I’ve been working there, I’ve come to believe two things without a doubt. One is that I have the best job in the entire world. I get to be in ministry with a group of talented, passionate, faithful young people whose energy and potential needs direction, but can serve as a true inspiration for the entire church.

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Rocky Run United Methodist Church (Youth Revival)

Our weekly Sunday-evening fellowship meals form the foundation for a robust program of youth ministry that includes regular visitation and communion with shut-in church members, planning and leading Youth Sunday worship services once every three months, and exploring our community through photo scavenger hunts and dinners on the town. We’ve gone on retreats that featured caving in the mountains of West Virginia, whitewater rafting on the Nolichucky River in northeast Tennessee, and visiting the National Aquarium up in Baltimore, in addition to the Bible study, group-building, and visioning work that happens over those weekends.

And exactly two months ago today, we returned home from our annual week-long summer mission trip, which this year took us to the Niagara Frontier District of the United Methodist Church’s Western New York Conference. There, we led Vacation Bible School for a mission church in Buffalo’s impoverished Seneca Babcock neighborhood. We were able to say to the children of that community, who too often grow up with little hope, that some people from Virginia love them and love God enough to come all that way to share some of their summer. The VBS was a smashing success----in fact, it was so popular that we almost had to stay in New York because the children and their parents didn’t want us to leave at the end of the week.

While we were in the area, we also helped paint a mural at a nearby Asbury Shalom Zone, prepared and served a free community meal to about 100 people, and struck up friendships with fellow pilgrims that will last a lifetime. We connected with a local youth group for a cookout and pool party, spent an evening exploring the beauty and mystery of Niagara Falls, led the children of our Vacation Bible School on a wild field trip to an area amusement park, and took a day to travel, play, and shop in Toronto.

The trip obviously was great fun, and it was a transformative experience for all of us. It followed similar ones that we’ve taken to Johnstown, Pennsylvania and West Palm Beach, Florida over the past few years. These journeys have become something of a capstone, mountaintop experience for our youth and their adult volunteers. They help to center our goals for fundraising, evangelism, and hospitality, and they’re an essential part of the first thing I’ve learned in my time at Hinton Avenue, which is that I have the best job in the entire world.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The second is that youth ministry is itself an in-between place. The middle school and high school students I work with aren’t children anymore. They have their own ideas and values and goals. But they’re not yet adults either. Their bodies and minds (and sometimes their hair color and body piercings) are changing rapidly. They’re in between the simple faith of a child and the mature assurance of an adult. They’re critical, doubtful, challenging people, searching for answers that transcend the easy Christianity of children’s books and allow them to claim the rich faith of their grandparents as their own.

Those of us who are called to a life of youth ministry inhabit an in-between place not only because we stand beside young people as they ask all these hard questions and undergo all these wild changes, but because we stand between them and the greater church. And this is not to say that youth and young adults are not full participants in the life of the church. I take as a given that any healthy congregation will weave the dreams and vision of young people into its tapestry of mission and ministry to the world. Rather, it’s that we’re charged with the task of passing to the next generation the creeds and traditions of the church. We’re there to help our youth find their voice within the Christian community, and to encourage them to sing boldly the songs they find there.

Those of you who’ve ever lived with a teenager may also be aware that youth ministers sometimes serve as a sort of impartial mediator between young women and men and their parents or families. In our culture, and in many cultures, there’s often a gap of experience and communication between generations. Youth ministry is uniquely positioned to stand in the gap and build bridges of listening and hope.

And it’s a group effort. We’re able to offer the programs and opportunities that we do in youth ministry not only because we have a great group of young people who continually call us all to prayer and action, but because the adult community has found the eyes to see and the ears to hear what God is doing through those youth. And

gradually, in this relational ministry, the gap starts to fade away as we focus together on our common mission to make disciples of Christ.

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Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church (Student Service)

Here in the University community, we are attuned to another sort of in-between place. Local church anecdotes and annual conference statistics indicate that there is a gap within our Church. Even the most effective programs of youth ministry see people leave for college or the working world and find themselves lost spiritually. Perhaps because of a lack of funding and resources, or maybe just due to a lack of effort, churches sometimes have a hard time engaging college students and twenty-somethings in real conversation and ministry. These young adults bring amazing gifts that can bless and revitalize faith communities. And whether we in the church realize it or not, the very future of these communities depends on our connecting with them, opening ourselves up to the possibilities for growth and transformation that these connections can embody.

We in the Wesley community are positioned perfectly to stand in the gap between the Church and the Academy. We’re able to appreciate all the ways that both sides of this divide can and are working together in a common pursuit of knowledge, diversity, and justice. We can testify to our experience that faith and reason, scripture and science are not only compatible, they’re complementary.

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For the Israelites, and for us, the journey from the wilderness of Sin is a long one-- accomplished by the whole community, in stages, as the Lord has commanded. This week and every week, I encourage you to mind the gap, be sensitive to the need for healing and reconciliation and consider the possibility that you and I might be the ones called to repair the wall and stand in the breach, on behalf of the land.

Thanks be to God!

"I don't want to see anybody do anymore goddamn press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don't do another press conference until the resources are in this city. And then come down to this city and stand with us when there are military trucks and troops that we can't even count. Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They're not here. It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country." --New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin

When court order after court order was finally followed in a relatively uninteresting surrogacy case in Florida, the President went to great lengths and even lost sleep in order to sign emergency legislation that would keep a woman in a persistent vegetative state alive against the wishes of her medical decision-makers. "It should be our goal as a nation," he maintained, "to build a culture of life, where all Americans are valued, welcomed, and protected."

When a major American city, however, left unprotected by the millions of dollars being diverted to unjust wars and 'homeland security', is hit by perhaps the gravest natural disaster in the nation's history, he calls it a "temporary disruption" and waits several days to cut short his vacation and attend to the recovery efforts. Long after Mr. Bush pledged to devote his entire administration to recovery and relief efforts in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, his Vice President and Secretary of State remained on holiday, fly fishing, catching the latest comedies on Broadway, and buying snazzy new shoes.

Thankfully, the disaster has brought politicians from both sides of the aisle together. Now, Democrats and Republicans are slapping one another on the back, thanking the President, Congress, and state and local leaders for all their "hard work", while thousands upon thousands of people continue living through hell, with no food, water, medical treatment, or clean way to relieve themselves. On television right now, President Bush is in Mobile, AL being briefed on hurricane relief efforts. Basically, the message of his hosts there is that they're currently formulating plans to move refugees to recently-closed prisons and mental institutions throughout the region. How is it that we can do the necessary advance planning to fight an international war on terror, and fight ruthlessly to extend the life of a single dying woman in Florida, but FEMA is only now planning for the effects of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico?

There is an occasional glimpse of grace in all the chaos. The American Red Cross and the Salvation Army reports millions of dollars in gifts, in addition to the countless people who have donated their blood and time to help. The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) has already raised nearly a million dollars (all of which goes directly to disaster relief), without the benefit of a special Sunday offering. And the American (and foreign) media has been surprisingly proactive in exploring the racial, political, and human dimensions of this disaster.

I could write an essay on this. Probably all of us could. Of course I don't think this tragedy is the President's fault, but I also don't agree with the suggestions of FEMA Director Michael Brown, who has repeatedly described the poor and infirm of New Orleans as "those who are stranded, who chose not to evacuate, who chose not to leave the city." And I certainly don't agree with Mr. Bush's assertion this morning that Brown is doing "a heck of a job" handling the situation.

In his first Inaugural Address, Bill Clinton said, "There's nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America." Here's hoping that vision soars heroically above the selfishness of the day, reconciling a deeply divided people and, most importantly, helping desperate people.

I mentioned last week that a good friend of mine from high school had persuaded me to fork over the cash (a whopping ten bucks, but still . . . ) and join his fantasy football league. I managed to carve out some time beforehand to do some research over the Internet, which served to temper the desire simply to select a team of former Wahoos and hope for the best. So I left the draft, which was in fact a long cell phone conversation very late on Friday night, feeling pretty good about my roster, even though the actual rules of the league are still not entirely clear to me.

Below is my lineup for your consideration. The number in parentheses is the ranking I had given that player for his position on my pre-draft cheat sheet. For some perspective, ours is an 8-team league.

QB--Donovan McNabb (3); Brett Favre (4)
RB--Jamal Lewis (6); Tiki Barber (4)
WR--Marvin Harrison (2); Roy Williams (12); Drew Bennett (8); Santana Moss (19)
TE--Tony Gonzalez (1)
K--Jason Elam (5)
Def--New England Patriots (2)
Reserves--Kevin Jones (RB-7); Eddie Kennison (WR-24)

If you're a fantasy football buff, or even if you're not, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of this lineup. And on the possibility of great running backs from UVA and VPI co-existing for the entire season!