When the people set out from their tents to cross over the Jordan, the priests bearing the ark of the covenant were in front of the people.

This was a turning point in the lives of the People of Israel, a turning point in their history, not the first, nor the last, but a turning point nevertheless.

Not only were they no longer slaves in Egypt, but now they were no longer just wandering throughout Sinai, now, at last, they would have a home.

This was the day when they crossed into the promised land and I’ll let Paul worry about explaining how that sort of thing happened with those of you who are working your way through the Bible with him, the holding back of the river waters, an echo of that Red Sea experience, I don’t understand the physics of it at all, but I do understand one thing in the story: they were led by the Ark of the Covenant, the container that held the word of God.

And I want to be precise here, they were led by the Word, not to the Word.

And what do you think of when you hear the phrase Word of God?

I’ll get back to that question, but first let me state the obvious: I love words.

I don’t always use them well, I sometimes have abused them, but I have always loved words. I drive the Confirmation groups crazy each year because I am always telling them to break a word down to its roots and figure out what it really means, not just the usage that we give it, and to track it to other words. And so words such as Communion and Communication and Community and Common and Communist all relate to one another in our faith.

I love words and I love following them where they lead me, because I know that John described Jesus as the Word become flesh and so as I track the words down, I find the living Word who calls me forward, to follow him.

So I have to tell you about a word that I heard this week with which I was unfamiliar, the word was “Meta-story”. And the person who used it Paul and I met on Tuesday, he is Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and he was encouraging us to find our place in the Meta-story and he said that most Americans are far too self-centered to do so. And I thought at first, well, OK, I know the Mets story it started in the early ‘60’s with Casey Stengal and really picked up steam in ’69 with Tom Seaver and those guys, but then it was explained to me that it wasn’t the Mets-story that we are supposed to find our place in, but the Meta-story.

Disappointing.

However, no one explained what a Meta-story actually was, I figured that everyone else was brighter than I am, which may indeed be true, and so I went home and looked it up on line, I followed the word.

It took a while, I had to sort through the town of Meta, Missouri, which sounds like a lovely place, 610 feet above sea level, they have a population of 249 people living in 123 housing units, and it’s about 1/3 of a square mile in size, but I couldn’t imagine that Bishop Hanson wanted us all to move there, and find our place there, they don’t seem prepared for such an influx of people, so I looked further.

Although I never did find the word – hyphenated or not – “meta-story”, I did find “meta-language”.

Meta-Language is language that is used to speak about language, it is the jargon that makes sense out of the subject, diagramming sentences would be an exercise in Meta-language and as a broader generality, Meta-anything would be that thing one level higher.

And I do remember, from College Philosophy course, the word Metaphysics, the study of questions that are unanswerable to scientific observation, analysis, or experiment

So a Meta-story is one that allows us to talk about and make sense out of a story that cannot be reduced to mere science. And I realized that the Bishop was right, the only way that the story of my life was going to have any significance at all, was going to be within the meta-stories of my family, and this Church and our denomination and God’s people in the world. Only as I study and absorb and assimilate those big stories, those stories that are one level up from the details of my daily life, only then can I begin to see lasting and transcending meaning in the activities and thoughts of my life.

Which is what today is about as we celebrate the place that some of us hold in the Meta-story of Clover Hill.

When I read the gospel lesson, where Jesus both compliments and complains about the priests, telling the people to listen to what they say but not to imitate what they do, I thought about our story and the stories of other Churches.

We are called to listen to other congregations, other denominations, other faith traditions, but we are not called to imitate them any more than they should imitate us because all of us find imperfect ways to serve.

The Clover Hill story, our meta-story is shaded by geography, we are close to New Brunswick and so we have always had this strong connection to the seminary.

Your reputation is wide-spread both in our denomination and increasingly, outside of our denomination, as you continually follow God’s leading in non-traditional ways.

You have been identified as a premier teaching Church, a place where ministerial identity is shaped. Up until 1977 you were known for taking young seminary graduates and giving them, essentially, a 3-6 year post-graduate internship where they were able to learn what it means to be a minister and then they moved on to become the great leaders of our denomination. In 1977, of course, you discovered that some ministers are slow learners and so you had to turn your attention to training seminarians, but the question today is where does your individual story fit into that meta-story? What have you done to help Paul hear and respond to God’s call? What feedback and encouragement are you providing?

And another piece of geography that has shaped our meta-story is the cemetery, surrounding us, keeping us from simply following the herd and doing what most other Churches do: building additions in order to serve God better. The context of our meta-story continually forces us to use our imagination and creativity in order to follow God in ways that other Churches haven’t had to. Let me put that into the context of some numbers, for those who want to be physical rather than metaphysical, in the state of NJ there are 131 Reformed Churches, only 30 of them have a larger average worship attendance than we do; only 6 out of the 131 have a larger children’s education program; and these numbers are not reported, but few have a larger or more active youth ministry program.

The Meta-story is that we have done this despite having perhaps the most inadequate facilities to do it all in, we have done this because people have been willing to step forward and provide their energy, emotion, intellect, creativity and faith. We have, because of our context in life, learned to focus ourselves on quality of program rather than construction of facilities. And where does your story fit in that Meta-story?

Are among those who have already sought out Tom Deysher and offered to help with Youth Group? Are you one who has found Michelle Clover and asked what you can do to help with Church School? Are you looking ahead and asking Carolyn Keck what she needs as we begin to put next summer’s VBS program together? Have you remembered to call Mark Levitt and volunteered to work at the Habitat for Humanity House that we are building? Do you remember that Bob Valinski is looking for people to develop our DVD recording program so that it can share our worship with others more effectively? Have you taken the prayer list home and agonized over it with passionate prayer? And have you cornered John Kanach and presented your time talents in order to preserve this woefully and wonderfully inadequate and beautiful building? When the people set out from their tents to cross over the Jordan, the priests bearing the ark of the covenant were in front of the people.

Where are we following the Word of God?

Back to that question I raised earlier, what do you think of when you hear the phrase Word of God?

The easy answer, and the common answer is the Bible, right?

I mean aren’t we taught that the Bible is the Word of God?

Well no.

That is not our understanding of scripture, not in the Reformed, Presbyterian, Methodist, or Lutheran traditions, not in any of the mainline Protestant traditions that today celebrate Martin Luther’s bold insistence that the Church belonged to the Word, not the other way around.

No, the Bible is not, as we have it, the Word of God, there are far too many contradictions, we fail to understand too much of the original context, it has passed through far too many translations to be able to claim no human contamination with the purity of God’s will.

But the Bible does contain the Word of God.

And by the work of the Holy Spirit, working within the Church that God has created, in sermons and in prayers, in discussions and in action, that pure Word can be and is released from all of these words, released from its context and in different times and circumstances God speaks to the people.

And that word leads us.

It doesn’t let us rest, we are not led “to the Word” we are led “by the Word”, and so we don’t ever fully get to the Word, it is always out there in front of us, calling us, changing us, causing us to see and hear things differently than we ever have before. I know that I obsess over words and over our history, our meta-story.

But I also know that you and I are not going to find the meaning and significance of our lives by concentrating upon ourselves. It is only in service to others and with others that we find out who we have been created to be. One last question, and this time I’ll actually give you an answer.

Jesus said The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

Is that the word of God, this quote straight from the lips of our Lord?

No, no it is not.

Not until you and I take it and apply it in our lives.

Not until we serve each other, not until we humble ourselves, not until we confess our own sinfulness and failure, not until we allow others to be great without envy, not until we worry more about the log in our eyes than the speck of dust in the eye of our sister or brother.

But when we take that verse within us and let it deflate our egos and enlarge our hearts, than it is, by the work of God’s spirit, the living Word of God that we can follow as we place our story within the Meta-story, the story that says that God so loved the world. That’s the word of God, perfect and infallible, that’s the word of God for us to follow.

When the people set out from their tents to cross over the Jordan, the priests bearing the ark of the covenant were in front of the people.