Toppling Temples, Towering Trees: Is God Up to the
Challenge?
I’m not great at jokes. So when I hear a good one, I try to tell it
again as fast as I can. The person who told me this one this week will
correct me if I get it wrong. A pretty wealthy guy on earth asks God
what he can take with him to heaven. No, says God, there’s nothing you
can take with you. But I’ve worked really hard and been really good,
says the guy. Well, says God, OK, whatever you can get into a suitcase.
So the guy fills his suitcase with gold. When he gets to the pearly
gates, Saint Peter says, no, can’t bring anything with you. But I got
God’s permission, says the guy, just what I could put in the suitcase.
OK, says Peter, but I’m curious. What did you bring in the suitcase?
The guy opens it and shows him. Pavement? says Peter, You brought
pavement?
With Jesus, with the community of Mark, writing this gospel some
seventy years after Jesus, we know a little something about toppling
temples, World Trade Center towers, symbols of our dominant values, we
assume will stand forever. We can also, if we want to, know a little of
towering trees, trees of this meditation by Gary Gunderson. (Have I
asked before if we know about Julia Butterfly Hill? Would we like to
invite her to talk about two years of living atop a towering tree? What
temples of trees have to teach us?) What matters with giant redwoods is
not so much what goes on at the top, challenging God, as in the dirt,
whom we grow next to, whose roots are entangled with ours. In this month
of harvesting wisdom of the s/ages, giving thanks for the saints, the
elders, the veterans of war, peace and life in our midst, we know we are
part of a fabric of roots, only a part of the whole. "We, too,
spring from the roots of those who precede us."
The ending of the earth church year still takes us by surprise! Are
we ever really ready for the endings of things? Of lives? Of
relationships? Of jobs or of work itself? Of friends? Of homes? Of
communities? Of congregations? Is transition ever easy? Journey into the
unsettled? Unknown? Two weeks from today! The journey begins again. The
venture, the Advent-ture. Full of loss and gain, grief and hope, sadness
and joy, love and pain. You name it! Such a mixed bag of life, and of
living. The only thing certain is change! Only the changing things are
certain. Our God is the One Who Makes New. God does very well with the
challenge of change, thank you, and seems to need no defense or
protection from change from us, who seem so determined to cling to the
status quo.
Especially from us, who do not know our gold from our pavement! I
sent this letter in response to a Gazette Journal article on the
front page this week: "Even as we ‘target’ certain homeless
persons for ‘banishment’ from downtown, perhaps we could also
declare this Wednesday ‘Heart for the Homeless Day’ in the Reno
area. It is the day the Reno Area Alliance for the Homeless takes its
annual ‘count’ (required for federal funding) of all those sleeping
outdoors, moving from motel to motel, and/ or receiving services from
the many wonderful groups and agencies doing this vital work for us all.
"Wednesday is also the day the Reno City Council, 1 pm, [I plan
to attend. Please join me if you can!] moves closer to keeping our
promise to provide safe, secure, comprehensive central facilities for
homeless persons and families. Homeless persons are not ‘they,’ not
‘aliens’ to the rest of us, who happen to be well-housed for the
moment. ‘They’ are a part of ‘we.’ The homeless reflect a
globalized economy, a militarized foreign policy, and a sanitized city
paved with streets of casino gold! "Some say we need a new name for
the ‘chronically homeless.’ How about ‘human being?’ Especially
in this season of national Thanksgiving, we know in our heart we are one
people with many lives." I might add, we know our roots tangle with
all we grow next to, "rootless" or not.
I give thanks for this brave, resilient, hopeful, determined
congregation. Like a tree that’s planted by the Truckee, the vital and
ever-changing Truckee, we say we shall not be moved! And I wonder if
that’s not what our Capital Campaign is all about: Toppling temple, or
towering tree? The abiding and costly call to become more deeply, more
definitively invested in the downtown of this particular "new
Jerusalem" and city of our God. Our desire to be a real player at
table with all other downtown-investors, private and public, so that the
life and the love, the justice and the joy of our God for all persons
and all peoples might find at least some presence and power, some vision
and voice, with, for, and among us all.
How might we so visualize, symbolize, and actualize this campaign as
to put it behind us, for God’s sake? For God’s city? This is not the
part of ministry and mission that I do best. I am asking for all the
help and support you can lend me! I give thanks as well for such
potential colleagues in this endeavor, even this struggle, as the
newly-formed Truckee Meadows Conscious Business & Community Network,
meeting here last week, and again on December 5, and the Nevada
Shakespeare Company, doing a one-person drama with us December 4 and
considering space in our building. We are as strong as whom we are part
of.
We have to ask of ourselves, this week and next, all the time we have
left in this year, what does it take for us to become more a part of
both civic and cosmic creating and healing, and less a part of
destroying and harming? Especially in the harsh light of all that
"Jerusalem" suffers and stands for in today’s world! Home to
three great monotheistic traditions of faith in a God who promises
justice and peace, yet tearing apart with conflict cloaked in
confessions of faith! If we are not active parts of seeking solution,
taking risk, making sacrifice, with and for one another, then we are
passive parts of the problem in docile denial. Before we start round the
circles of life, the cycles of seasons again, what does it of us take to
create, redeem, sanctify, and sustain a just and safe future for all?
I always try to encourage others through joint-replacement surgeries
by my own experience of the awareness that we can move from the pain
that destroys to the pain that heals! That is the pain of any recovery,
and most of us are in at least one form of recovery or another! It is
the pain that brings forth new life! Which Jesus says we always endure
before we can "see him again." And seeing Jesus again, and
again, and always as for the first time, is what living and working in
faith are all about! Even on this Sunday before the Coming of the Cosmic
Christ, we would see Jesus again! As if for the very first time.
From the hearing of Hannah’s song of thanksgiving to God for giving
her birth after barrenness, pride and hope after shame and despair, it
seems we could help God most if all of us who are competing, combating
confessions of faith just got ourselves out of God’s way and let God
get on with God’s work! For God loves to reverse all the false
apprehensions and cheap resignations we settle for, claims Hannah. God
loves to break down the bows of the mighty, and to gird up the strength
of the feeble! God loves to pour out the fat and the full, and to fill
up the empty with spoil! Most of all, God loves raise up the poor from
the dust! Our God always hears the cry of the poor! Even when we do not
invite them to meetings about their own fate! Somehow the poor will be
placed with princes, the homeless inherit high honors! That is the
agenda, the project, the "end of God," in both cosmic and
civic creation! Sounds much like Mary’s "Magnificat."
According to Mark, Jesus speaks here in his time of the very same
threat to "Jerusalem" we face in our time. Not only the Temple
but all of the centers, the towers of powers, and principalities, teeter
and totter on brinks of destruction. No wonder the faithful fear for the
end of the world! But Jesus, like Hannah, is speaking of labor pains
here. Above all, when the towers fall, do not be alarmed! Do not panic,
Jesus teaches, in ways we seem to have done, to Afghanistan and to Iraq,
but also to ourselves, with our "homeland security" and our
"patriot acts." Despite all of the quaking and quailing, all
of the fights and the famines, "This is but the beginning of the
birthpangs!" This is but the point of beginning again.
And who will be first among the beginners-again, if not we who
profess faith to follow the one who refused to defend or protect his own
interests? Even from mostly political death? Death that could only be
ordered by occupation of the oppressor? Jesus allowed himself to appear
so invested and so involved in the radical rapture of refusal and of
resistance against "church and state" run amok: He himself
became seen as the threat to the city and to all of its seats of powers!
Better that one, they said, any one, should die, than that the whole
system and structure be challenged and, civically, cosmically, changed,
by the God who is up to all challenges and all changes! God who makes
all things new! Who even brings life, gives birth, out of death. Sisters
and brothers, clearly, it is not Jesus who’s "passing away"
in these times. It’s the church! The church as it has been known in
the "Christendom" of the past fifteen centuries is dead! Out
of whose roots will the new church be born? That is the only real
question. The choice of civilities, choice of cosmologies, lies with us:
Toppling temples, or towering trees? The God of Hannah, of Jesus, helps
us to rise to our every challenge.
There is so much more to say. Maybe I will put some of it on the
website. Sometimes we’ll find there a whole other sermon from what I
have preached! I want to end with two quotations setting the stage, I
hope, for next week, last Sunday of the "earth church year,"
Thanksgiving Sunday, and Sunday of the Coming of the Cosmic (Dare we
add, Civic?) Christ!
The first quote begins the last chapter, entitled "Celebrating
the Victory of God," from biblical scholar and biblical activist
Walter Wink’s irreplaceable and irrepressible book, Engaging the
Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. It is
the one book I recommend to any and every one tempted by cosmic or civic
defeat and despair. For the kind of victory Wink sees of God, as I
understand it, is not so much the "victory over" we all are so
carefully taught by our culture. Rather, it is the "victory
with" I find in the story of the runners in the hundred-yard dash
of the Special Olympics: When one of them falls on the track along the
way, the others stop and go back to get him, so they can all cross the
finish line and end the race, together! That’s "victory
with!"
Walter Wink writes, "How remarkable, that despite its sober
expose of the Domination System, the New Testament is so free of gloom
or quailing before the Powers! From beginning to end, there is only the
note of victory – a victory in the unknown and open future, for the
whole human race and the universe, and victory even now, in the midst of
struggle. There is an absolute and unshakable confidence that the System
of Domination has an end. A new world of partnership, of compassion, of
human community, of conscious awareness of the limits of power, awaits
us. We are to struggle with all our might and courage for its coming,
yet we cannot make it come. The conditions of its arrival are beyond our
control, yet we have a fairly clear idea what they are; and as a
sufficient number of people are attracted to God’s domination-free
order, and commit their lives and fortunes to bringing it about, it will
happen, because it has been happening, and it is happening now."
Maybe it is, as it says in the opening to the old Dickens novel, with
every ending, every beginning again, both the best of times and the
worst of times. Whatever it is, it is our time, brothers and sisters!
This is our time under God! Walter Wink introduces his last chapter with
this quote from the play A Sleep of Prisoners, by Christopher Fry
–
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God,
Where no nation’s foot has ever trodden yet.
The chance to go where no other nation has gone. Amen.
John Auer, Pastor
