Every time we come for communion we take up at least two works of
this Holy Spirit the psalmist prays to stay with us, the work of memory,
the work of hope. Memory is the forgiving work of the Spirit. Jesus does
not even hold his death against us. Don't let anyone else hold his death
against us! And don't let us hold his death against anyone else. Let's
just all stop killing him over again.
Jesus' first act in resurrection is to breathe the very Spirit of
forgiveness of sin and of debt, a Jubilee Spirit, upon the disciples
holed up in a room out of fear. Carter Heyward admonishes us, forgiving
is not forgetting! That's much too easy, too tempting to say. Some part
of us often does not forget and comes back to haunt us some way. Rather,
says Heyward, forgiving is re-membering, as Jesus asks us,
Remember me, -- as much and as far back as we can bear. It is piecing
back together in new and life-giving ways all that has been dis-membered,
destroyed and deadened in us.
Often it is, with our Words for Meditation and Daniel Berrigan's Call
to Worship, a speaking with and for the dead, for the specific dead,
such as Sadako in the story we just heard with the children; and for the
general dead, such as all those who died in and after the bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all who die as civilians in war more and more
since then, some 70 percent of all casualties now! It's hard to imagine,
hard to believe and accept, but we are told our government now is not
even keeping track of civilians who die in Iraq. As Berrigan says, the
dead see and suffer it all. They want, for our sakes, to be speaking
their language with us, "filling us in - filling us in." . . .
But we will not learn from them.
So memory is the forgiving work of the Spirit. Hope is the
advocating, the voice-giving, work of the Spirit! Jesus says plainly to
his followers that he will send them an advocate, a counselor, and
clearly he means it as one who will represent them in court! Jesus fully
expects that our active witness and service for him will get us in all
kinds of trouble! We will need voice and comfort, as surely as the many
voiceless we can think of and name for ourselves. I am glad to say I
went for fingerprinting this week, so I can do marriages here, and none
of the charges stuck! But there are no guarantees. Three more nuns went
to prison for us just last week, for their active witness against our
nuclear madness.
Daniel Berrigan, for instance, and his brother Phil, who died in this
past year, both priests, are the kinds of prophets, the kinds of "Nathans"
from this story, that drive the "nations" nuts! For when we
speak out and act on these issues of voice for the voiceless, sisters
and brothers, we do so as the church, hard as it is to be heard as the
church in our time, little as anyone cares what we think. We do so as
people of faith. We do so politically, yes, in the same indirect sense
that Jesus was given political death, execution as treasonous king, for
what he said and did.
But we do so prophetically! We speak out as prophets and not for
profit! Those who speak out for profit, as so many do, get huge bribes
and good press! Those who speak out as prophets often get, what? Spurned
and ignored, at best, stoned, harassed, arrested, detained, imprisoned,
and even killed. Do we wonder that Nathan prophesies so artfully? So
that David's anger is roused, not against him, but against the straw man
in the story? We who would be prophets need much richer imaginations.
The poet says here, we dare not "speak normal / words in the normal
/ order." All war, all violence, are first fundamentally failures
of imagination. Jonathan Schell enjoins us, only imagination may save us
from nuclear annihilation! We are not good at creating weapons we do not
then use.
Before I go any further, I have to confess. I had one of those deeply
humbling experiences late last night. I was still working on the sermon.
My mom was here for much of the week. I'm glad for that. I did my first
wedding here yesterday. I'm glad for that. So I'm typing away last night
on the computer, saving carefully as I go. Suddenly I hit something by
accident and lose everything! Julie tried for an hour to get it back. If
it shows up in your cyberspace, please send it home where it belongs!
So what we are getting now is the best I could do arising very early
this morning. Clearly the other is not what I was meant to say and/or
not what you were meant to hear! The experience brought back to me that
old aching question we face with any sudden death or loss: Where does it
go? Where does the life go? Here one moment and gone the next. Who knows
where the life goes? Much less what else that life might have had to say
to us?
In light of our texts for this morning, the experience with my
fleeting text reminds me how close to the edge we live all the time,
consciously or not, of what can be certain and known to us, what can be
taken for granted by us. We may learn in such moments of loss how hard
it can be for us to discern which assumptions, which expectations we are
"entitled" to in Iife, and which we are not! In other words,
just how much of our lives, and our life together, can we be certain of,
can we control? And how much do we live with as mystery? As revelation?
As "God is not done with us yet?" Where so often we are the
last to know, to grasp what is going on, with us, much less with anyone
else. . . .
From the time of our Exodus, our liberation from bondage in Egypt,
God calls upon us as Israelites to live by trust in a covenant of
relationship with God, as we do with one another. We are called to
covenant, to constant negotiability and infinite renewability, rather
than contract, where if we miss that payment, they can take away our
car. We are called both in our most personal relationships, among family
and friends, such as our covenants of marriage and/or holy union, and in
our more general relationships, such as to be "neighbors," a
very important "office" according to Jesus, and fellow
citizens, another lost art, to one another. We just heard Walter Wink
say in our study how organized nonviolent direct action really is the
exercise of good citizenship and "democracy" at its best!
"Covenant" is to acknowledge among us a different
way of being together, a different way of doing things. It is a way of
mutuality, not of hierarchy. Jesus says in the context of "serving
communion," among others the greatest may lord themselves over
their subjects. But among you the greatest shall serve. I am among you
as One Who Serves! In covenant, each and every party has equal access to
and clear role and responsibility to participate in all decision-making.
This is especially true in the deciding of matters of life and death, of
judgment and mercy, of the giving and taking of life and of hope, the
beginning and ending or radical changing of any relationship.
Living with that kind of intentionality before we act, and with that
kind of accountability after we act, really does require a nearly
endless process of conversation and negotiation. That is what life in
committed relationship is all about! After all, again, covenant is
essentially unenforceable but by free will! What is it but the bare
exchanging of words - I give you my word, you give me yours. The
giving/receiving of promises based on trust.
A much older veteran of civil rights work in both the south and the
north, Emma Tiller, whose written up in Studs Terkel's book Hard
Times, once told me in my youthful impatience to act instead of just
meet all the time, when I was doing some field work while in seminary,
"Child, I learned a long time ago, freedom is one long
meeting!" Never again have I taken for granted even the longest,
most apparently fruitless and feckless of meetings, the kind we church
folks can do so well! I never forget that some have struggled, suffered,
and died for the chances of others just to meet, to meet in a
life-serving, life-giving, life-changing way. Freedom is all about
everyone's right to participate, everyone's right to decide.
The biblical books of Samuel the Prophet are all about this open
tension and even conflict between covenant way and the more worldly way
of doing business by hierarchy, where those few at the top lord
themselves over all others. According to Samuel, we the people are
always in danger of weakening in our commitment to live by covenant, our
willingness to be responsible and accountable for our own lives and our
life together. We want someone, some king, some worldly power, to take
charge of us, -- even if, as Samuel protests, such concentrations of
power, and of the wealth to dictate such power, surely will lead to
oppression, to violence, to corruption, to war. Even to the arbitrary
bombing and invading, occupying and incarcerating, of whole nations of
peoples.
I need not list for us all the nations our nation has invaded or
bombed since we dropped the then-ultimate "weapons of mass
destruction" on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Especially on Nagasaki,
since there were at least nominal "military targets," as I
understand it, in Hiroshima. We have invaded or bombed at least twenty
nations since then, some of them more than once, and some of them over
long periods of time. We really, honestly are talking about a 12-year
war on Iraq. Thank you for helping us collect health and school kits for
the children there. My "bottom line" question, in light of
this text, is, When was the very last time we the people of this nation,
through our elected representatives, our advocates, declared a formal
state of war with another nation? December, 1941. Everything
since we have done, more or less, by executive fiat.
Suffice it to say, as God in Samuel gives in to the people's wishes
to be ruled by a king, so also in our time and place we the people have
come to accept, to tolerate the radical limiting of our role and
responsibility for the life-and-death deliberations over how we as
nation will relate in covenant and in trust to one another and to the
world around us. I find the issue in this week of remembering
Hiroshima/Nagasaki to be whether we among all the world's peoples
somehow want and intend to pay the cost, call it "terrorism"
or what we will, of living off of the rest of the world? Of
exercising our powers, the might of our insatiable military, over
the rest of the world?
Or whether we as a people, a people of covenant, a people of much
good history and of many good intents, will choose instead to find ways,
beginning with the very demanding, often frustrating and confusing,
covenant of the United Nations - I mean, talk about freedom as one long
meeting! - to rejoin and to live with all the rest of the world?
To share power and resources provided for all by the very creator of
this earth, this world with all of the children and creatures of this
world? Including those of the world's people already living and working
among us here.
In this land of the very best politicians money can buy, we have to
learn, as Nathan is called and sent by God to give even David the chance
to learn, the full cost of concentrating all powers, all principalities,
all the systems and structures of our common life, in the arbitrary,
unaccountable hands of the few. I mean, when it comes to kings and
worldly powers, we don't get them much better than David in so many
ways. He becomes so revered and so respected for his wisdom and his
service that the coming of the messiah can only be of his house and his
lineage! Yet here is David, fully revealed, not of covenant but of
coveting, of claiming by absolute arrogance of power anything and
everything he wants, simply by dint of his privileged position, the
right of his might, -- to steal, live adulterously, lie, kill. In short,
to do what kings and worldly powers do!
And then to cover it up. We know so well, it's always the covering
up! "Do not be disturbed by this," David says to his general
Joab, who has so uncritically carried out David's plot of betrayal
against Uriah, David's most loyal subject-soldier. All wars betray all
promises all ways. In other words, David is saying, "Do not let
this thing appear to be evil in your sight!" Do not trust yourself,
your own perception and judgment of what you see happening right before
your very eyes! Do not seek to trust in your colleagues, your partners
and peers! Rather, says David from on high, place all your trust in me!
I, the king, will render all judgment. I take all authority to decide
good and evil, good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. For this is
the way of all kings, of all worldly powers.
Brothers and sisters, it is not "they" who stand in such
"sin," in such need to repent, to renew, to repair, to restore
right relationship with the world's people. "They," whoever
they are, as kings, as tyrants, as presidents guided by worldly wealth
and powers, -- "they" are just doing what kings will do. David
does come to see himself in Nathan's story. He acknowledges he is
"in sin" and not "in sinc" with the calling of God.
He is forgiven. Yet and still, his dynasty, Israel and the Church,
suffer the awful ambivalence he embodies, even to this day.
And so it is "we," only we the people, as always, organized
not from top down but from bottom up, who stand even a prayer of
rejoining the world in a covenant with all the children of God, -- in a
covenant with Sadako, with all who identify with her true courage and
hope, a covenant of the cranes, a covenant with all of the hopes of all
of our future. I find myself more and more guided by this mantra: Follow
the money, follow the power. Follow the children, follow the pain. I
believe, as we come to know again and again in communion with Jesus,
only out of the pain, the honest confrontation of the truth spoken to
powers, even unto death, death by execution, can hope be raised again!
Camus says, in effect, speaking to so-called "Christians,"
like us: Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being one where
children suffer. But we can reduce the number of suffering children! For
they are suffering us. Whereas Jesus says, suffer the children!
Do not make them suffer us. Most of all, suffer their hope! Every
time I look at the faces of our church children among the palm branches
of hope in the "Hallelujah Arch" above the communion table, I
remember Jesus' words to us on that day inspired entrance into Jerusalem
to die. We find ourselves complaining at all the noise of the children
cheering Jesus for his acts of saving and setting free, healing and
making whole. Jesus responds to us and reminds us, they only are living
out what we have taught them in Sunday School! They are us at our
best! The children are us at our best. Amen.
