November 9, 2003
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture:
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, Ruth
3:1-5, 4:13-17, Psalm 90:1-12, Mark 12:38-44
"Circle and Cycles: Living the Time and the
Times of Our Lives"
Does anyone else admit to remembering the rap song of the 1985 world
champion Chicago Bears? "We didn’t come here lookin’ for
trouble. We just came to do the Superbowl Shuffle!" My preaching
feels like that sometimes. I don’t come here looking for trouble. I
just try to go where I am led to go, putting these texts from God in the
fullest possible contexts of our lives and our life together. Or maybe
my preaching is like the weather in Chicago: If you don’t like it this
week, come back next week. It’ll be different!
It came to me a little after the fact: In the context of Veterans
Sunday, we could hear these texts about Ruth, Naomi, and this
"widow’s mite" as stories of "Widow Warriors." I
got to thinking about great widows I have known in congregations we have
served. Marjorie Keenleyside, retired librarian, twice-widowed, I think,
who called herself now "married to the church," stands out. In
her eighties, small to begin with, sometimes unsteady on her feet,
deeply convicted and opinionated, Marjorie would "pray" at me,
or whomever else upset her, with much sputtering of words, clenching of
fists, and stomping of petite feet. She did not always "get her
way." In fact, she was graceful enough to draw new conclusions from
her experience. But she always had her say. I always imagined when she
started talking, God sat right down and listened.
I was just home for the 91st birthday of my mother. She
really wondered what she had to live for after my father’s death four
years ago. She nearly wore me out with her whirlwind schedule of friends
and events. The last night I was there we went to the opera. You guessed
it: "The Merry Widow!"
Biblical widows seem to be those who will not quit, who will not give
up, on themselves, on their families, on their faith communities, on
their God. They hold us true to the best of our promises. They refuse to
be left out. The stories of biblical widows seem to be of creative
persistence to get what they need to get, to do what they need to do, in
the end, by whatever means necessary, even as Naomi and Ruth scheme to
bring Boaz into their lives. For the widows of biblical culture seem to
be most neglected, most marginalized. They seem to have least to lose.
They endure, in Paul’s terms, to the end. They say with mythical boxer
Rocky Balboa, "I just want to go the distance!"
Theirs is such a good word for this time of the earth church year.
Just three Sundays from today, we start Advent all over again! Thomas
Cullinan calls this quality "staying power," "long-term
courage," "creative patience," "patience that knows
how to go on and on until the end appears – to hang on to the vision
until it is possible to be creative with it, and not to give up one’s
vision just because things seem to be hopeless." Cullinan says,
"The New Testament writers had a special word for this: ‘hypomene.’
It meant ‘patient endurance,’ the ability to be poised to do what
needed doing even though all the going seemed to be against one –
staying power – desperately needed – and very few people have
it."
If there really is a season to everything and a time for every
purpose under the sun, then November, with All Saints Sunday, with
Recognition of Elders and Veterans of War and Peace, with harvesting and
Thanksgiving, and what used to be called Sunday of "Christ the
King," with its rather imperial image of Jesus coming again in
glory to judge both the quick and the dead, to which I propose the
alternative "Coming of the Cosmic Christ, " – November is a
time to grow up! A time to grow old, and love it! A time to mature, in
all things. To grasp the full graces of wisdom, of reflection upon and
insight into all of our shared experience.
The elders, the veterans of life, are those who know what time it is
in our lives, not only in our lives as individual persons, but also in
our life as a species together: The time of our life is always the time
to live! To get on with it! "The time is always right to do
right," Dr. King would say. It is getting to be towards November in
the life of our species as well. It is time for us to start harvesting
our collective experience. The psalmist reports how long our Creator God
has been about bringing forth life: Long before the mountains emerge, or
even the earth is formed! A thousand years in God’s sight are but as a
day or even a watch in the night. We individual humans are lucky to
become elders at all, to live threescore years and ten, or even
fourscore. The wisdom of the elders is that we learn to number our days!
To realize not only how little time any one of us has, but also how
short a time we have been here as a species, how much growing up we have
yet to do, and how little time we all may have to do it.
Sr. Miriam Therese MacGillis, writing about "The Fate of the
Earth," tells us that "hope is a choice." Hope is not a
given, it is a choice, a choice that the elders offer. The universe of
our Creator God has a history of fifteen billion years! If we look with
the eyes of elders upon the past five billion years as being a single
year of earth’s creative process, we see that from its first gaseous
state to the formation of life took the earth eight months of that year!
All of the so-called "higher capacities, such as breathing, sensory
capabilities, reproduction, and self-healing, took place in the last
four months!" Only over these past four months has the earth, so to
speak, become an organism, a living body, so complex as to be
self-conscious! To know how to think about itself! And that is where our
all-too-feeble, too-fragile, too-finite species comes in.
Of all of the "peoples" God has created, we humans, for
better and for worse, ARE the earth, the earth conscious of itself!
Miriam Therese MacGillis says, "You and I are the beings in whom
the earth thinks . . . knows . . . comprehends . . . analyzes . . .
rationalizes . . . judges . . . remembers . . . chooses . . . acts . . .
decides." What an awesome response-ability! For each and for every
last one of us! No wonder we have not known what to do with it. No
wonder the psalmist, in our behalf, bemoans with God how helpless, how
hopeless, we feel as a species, how overwhelmed with all that has been
so entrusted to and so invested in us!
Sisters and brothers, each one of us is, in effect fifteen billion
years old! How can we help but grow up?! Each one of us is irreplaceable
and irrepeatable! The way the earth is thinking in each one of us at
this very moment is unique!
Again, if we look at earth’s history as compressed into a year, we
humans have been around just for one day. Not only are we the youngest
of species, MacGillis observes, "We might still be pre-human!
Except for some great enlightened beings who walked around the planet as
more fully human. But we’ve only been here a day, and we’re very
young!" Literally, with what has happened to earth in just the past
half-hour, even the past few moments, with the astronomical explosion
and expansion of earth’s knowledge and earth’s power, it is as if we
can be present to a brand-new creation, indeed. Hope is our choice, our
only choice. Only we created war on our own species. Only we can stop
it. Only we create war on our own species. Only we can stop it. The time
is at hand.
We honor the ancestors, the mothers and fathers in both life and
faith, who bring us to this point. Because of them we know the world can
be a better, more hopeful, more just and more peaceful place, for
without a just and lasting peace there can be no hope. Without the hope
of the saints, the elders, the veterans, who know the true costs of both
war and peace, we might as well turn over a ticking time bomb to our
children and grandchildren. They say there are no atheists in the fox
holes. We ask many of our veterans to witness and to serve in acts of
unspeakable horror. Then, if they are lucky enough to make it back home,
we offer them few or no ways to share with us what they have seen and
have done. Many of them come home to explode or implode. Alone.
And so we say today, in this month of expecting the end of the world
as we know it, yes, there may be a time for war, as Ecclesiastes says,
but that time for war is past for now. Hear the words of two of our
presidents and veterans. Jimmy Carter: "War may sometimes be a
necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never
a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each
other’s children." Dwight David Eisenhower: "Every gun that
is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who
are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money
alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its
scientists, the hopes of its children." There’s a poet who says
every elder among us longs to be asked the question, "Grandpa,
Grandma, what was war?" What was war.
War has had its time with us. War has had all its ways with us. Two
world wars in the past hundred years, and a world no safer than ever
before. A so-called "defense budget" passed this week of $401
billion dollars! More than twice as much as the combined defense budgets
of all our conceivable enemies. No matter how often we hear it, I
question whether our nation is really at war. Are we as a people really
at war? Our government may be at war. The Congress may be at war. But
are the hearts of the people in this war?
Is this war a fact of our everyday lives? How much difference does it
make to most of us? The Pentagon, perhaps best candidate for the
"anti-Christ," if we insist upon images of the end of things,
and many of those most in favor of wars do put them in scriptural terms
– The Pentagon, the "pentagons" of the world, seem to me to
be hiring young women and men, mostly of poverty, many of color, to
fight these wars. May these not be seen as wars of, by, and for huge
transnational businesses? Like munitions? Oil? Reconstruction? Private
security? The same interests who build and run prisons at home? Are not
too many of our young people offered only the real-life options of
occupation and incarceration? And is this an irony, or what: The
uniforms worn by our national military are made, for the most part, in
our national prisons?!
Is there anything "defensive" any more about the Department
of Defense? Has it not turned purely offensive? Using young people up
and leaving them, especially the wounded ones, to the Department of
Veterans Affairs, which is trying to make the best of a whole lot of sad
situations? Is it not time we replace the Department of Defense with a
true Department of Peace? Is that not what time it is now? In the
evolution of the life of this earth? Of we who are the consciousness of
this earth? Is this not what we want to leave our children? Our
grandchildren? From whom we borrow the future of this earth? Is it not
time for peace, time only for peace?
Not "peace at all costs," in the sense of compromise with
the doing of evil. But peace as if nothing else really matters. Peace by
whatever means needed. Peace we pursue as these "widow
warriors" pursue their chances at life, as if we have nothing to
lose! Is it not time for us to apply the same standards of testing and
training, courage and commitment, to the waging of peace as to the
waging of war? No less a thinker than Albert Einstein states the
obvious: "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for
war." Can we not let the Pentagon be converted to low-income
housing we need so much more than we do war? At our service to honor the
life of our brother Ray Arnold, a "lifer" in the army and the
air force, Pastor Art Griffen remembered words over the entrance to a
military base: "Peace is our profession." That’s not true,
Art said. "War is our profession. But peace must be our goal."
Peace must be our goal.
A few weeks ago in the Gospel of Mark Jesus encountered a rich young
ruler who met every other criterion to follow Jesus but could not give
up his wealth. Jesus told his disciples the miracle of giving up
everything is like, what? A camel passing through the eye of a needle!
Jesus says this not so much in the way of personal judgment, but as a
statement of fact about every conventional human desire for security and
for status. So here Jesus is today, secretly watching as we come to
worship. His focus is not on all of our ritual, prayer, and preaching.
It is on our giving! (We may learn at Church Conference more of the
"Conscious Living Network" forming in our community. Perhaps
the church is a "conscious giving network!") Jesus here
watches us putting our money into the plate, our treasure where our
hearts are. Suddenly it is as if the camel has passed at last!
All the rich people put in large sums, of course. Then a poor widow
put in two coins worth a penny. Jesus says this is the miracle he has
been waiting for: All the rest of us have been giving of our abundance.
This widow "out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all
she had to live on!" This widow has reached a stage in her life and
faith, the stage of an elder, where she gets it that life is too short
to hold anything back! Ruth, too, gives her whole self, for the sake of
restoring a life to Naomi, a place and a progeny in the ongoing life of
her people. The elders know that all giving is, in the end, giving back,
to the One Who Gives All in the first place. In the end, life is all
about restoration, all about regeneration, all about what my grandfather
meant when he said, "When you borrow something, give it back in as
good or better shape than you find it."
All giving is giving back of what we have been given so fully. All
giving is giving-away of what we have been given so freely. In the
earth, in our consciousness of the earth, in our willingness to be earth
ourselves, we know God as the great and good giver of all. I close with
the prayer poem of Dolores La Chapelle:
We give-away our thanks to the earth
which gives us our home.
We give-away our thanks to the rivers and lakes
which give-away their water.
We give-away our thanks to the trees
which give-away fruit and nuts.
We give-away our thanks to the wind
which brings rain to water the plants.
We give-away our thanks to the sun
who gives-away warmth and light.
All beings on earth, the trees, the animals, the wind
and the rivers give-away to one another
so all is in balance.
We give-away our promise to begin to learn
how to stay in balance with all the earth.
Amen.
John Auer, Pastor
