|
Back to Sermon Archives
February 8, 2004
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture
Isaiah
6:1-8, Luke 5:1-11
"Caught in the Act, -- Putting Out into the
Deep"
What an honor for us as congregation to be associated with
Cameron, who both acted and directed; Jeanmarie, who both acted and
wrote the script; Julie, who made the costumes; and the Nevada
Shakespeare Company production of "A Single Woman," the life
and work of pacifist, suffragist, and first US Congresswoman Jeanette
Rankin of Montana. The play made its world premiere in Fallon last night
and will be presented as a Senior Ministries Forum here a week from
Tuesday, 10 am. Please come if you possibly can. Talk about a scout and
a guide! One who finds the way, often out of no way, and then shows the
way, offers the way, for others to follow as well! Just follow Jeanette
Rankin!
Scouts are specifically those who are sent on before others, before
the main body of people, perhaps even before what we call "their
own time," to explore the unknown, new territory, uncharted waters,
perhaps even places where people, nations, never have gone before!
Imagine Jeanette Rankin, in 1916, as the first woman anywhere in the
whole world ever elected to a position of national leadership! And
imagine her as the only person in Congress to oppose the entry of the
United States into either world war! Imagine her pleading with the women
and mothers of all the world to stop turning over each new generation of
young people to the state to send where they will to kill other young
people. What does it mean, what does it look like for us to be as scouts
and as guides in a world so conflicted and conquered by violence and war
as our world is today?
What does it mean for us here and now, as we just said in the Prayer
for Scouting Sunday, to teach "that the world is our great
home?" "To build character?" "To see our
responsibility to those in need?" To encourage one another "in
genuine patriotism and vital faith?" To help our young people as we
help ourselves to "increase in wisdom and stature," and in
favor with God, creator of all, and with all people? Talk about the
unknown, new territory, perhaps even places where we as a church, we as
a nation, we as a species, we as a world, never have gone before! Have
we ever been in such need of sensitive scouting and gentle guiding in
our midst? Have we ever been in such need of new ways of hoping and of
investing in young people here and all over the world?
As with the young Jeremiah and with Jesus’ first preaching in his
hometown last week, where they promptly ran him out and tried to kill
him, precisely because he claimed to have come to lead them and guide
them in ways they never had dared go before, so also with Isaiah and
with Simon Peter and the others this morning, we find ourselves
confronting such radical challenge and change to all we have been, all
we have done, all we have taken for granted and even resigned ourselves
to forever. We find ourselves confronting both a confession of who we
are and a conversion to who we may yet become. We find ourselves both
called out of all that has grown so familiar to us and commissioned into
such a future, plunged into such a depth as we can scarcely begin to
imagine.
"Confrontation" is hardly word enough to express this
encounter Isaiah imagines with God "in the year that King Uzziah
died." What is there about the deaths of pivotal persons in both
our private and public lives that may leave us opened and exposed to new
encounters and new opportunities? How is it that God so often seems to
use, not to cause but to use, to make the best of, the deaths of others
to show us new ways to life? What turns in our lives do we associate
with the deaths of family or friends? With the deaths of President
Kennedy or Dr. King? With the deaths of Pearl Harbor, of Hiroshima, of
Birmingham, of 9/11? What might cause us in such times to imagine
ourselves summoned and subjected before that most radical
"otherness" we call "God?" That "holy of
holies?" Most merciful and most mighty? For whom there is in Zulu a
word meaning "the One bigger than big?" The One who is bigger
than big!
How can we help, especially in such moments of loss and grief, but
feel what is called "survivor guilt?" That sense of being
"sinner" that transcends any and every particular sin to leave
us awestruck if not terror-filled at the costs of being human? That
someone we love and look up to, or such random and innocent ones, have
been taken from us, from the world? While we, who seem to ourselves to
be so unremarkable, even unworthy, undeserving of being spared, are left
to go on with our lives? Now, as well, to go on with our lives in the
names, for the sakes of those who have gone before us? "Woe are
we," we may well exclaim with Isaiah! "We are lost! We are
persons of unclean lips, -- of unready, unwilling, unable witness and
service! And we find ourselves lost among others who also are lost,
unclean, -- unready, unwilling, unable as we are! Yet we are the ones
who are summoned, here and now, to appear before God. We are the ones
subjected to hearing God’s word. What is wrong with this picture of
us? How could we never have seen ourselves this way before?
PBS showed Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates’ special entitled
"America: Beyond the Color Line" this past week. That topic
applied to our own communities will be the subject of light supper and
panel discussion including our own lay leader Jerry Holloway, also a
week from Tuesday, 6 to 8 in the evening, at Channel 5. We are making
available – just ask us -- a paper by Gates entitled "Are We
Better Off?" It responds to the question, "How have we reached
this point, where we have both the largest black middle class and the
largest black underclass in our history?" We are reading it in
conjunction with viewing Spike Lee’s film about a busload from Los
Angeles on their way to the Million Man March. Black history summons and
subjects us all to confront and encounter what Gates calls "the
twin realities of white racism, on the one hand, and our failures to
take the initiative and break the cycle of poverty, on the other."
( www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/etc/gates.html)
In light of the "sinfulness," guilt and shame, both Isaiah
and Simon Peter experience and express in these stories, a guilt and a
shame we all seem to meet reflecting on our own sense of responsibility,
that is response-ability, for the injustices we find surrounding and
even engulfing us, it helps me that Gates says, "We have to stop
feeling guilty about our success. Too many of us have what psychologists
call ‘the guilt of the survivor,’ deep anxieties about leaving the
rest of our fellow blacks in the inner city of despair. We need to feel
the commitment to service, not guilt." Committed to service, not
guilt. That could describe the hope of scouting and guiding! Committed
to witness and action upon the future, upon who we may yet become, --
not constricted by shame of the past, shame of who we have been, of what
has been done in our names.
Gates calls upon us "to demand a structural change in this
country, the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for the cities." We have
to learn to make "war on the terror," – on the exclusion and
exploitation, the isolation and incarceration, the occupation and
oppression -- so many of our own fellow citizens and human beings, here
and around the world, have been living with, even for centuries, all the
time. We call upon ourselves, as faith traditions and congregations,
including the programs of scouting and guiding chartered and conducted
in our names, to address not only the personal issues of morality and
responsibility, of which there are many, of course, but also the
corporate ones, the ones that play out in the systems and the structures
of our lives and our life together, as ageism, racism, sexism,
heterosexism, classism, consumerism, militarism, nationalism. I hope
there are Scout merit badges offered for the struggles to overcome all
of these! May we work to make all such "isms" into "wasms"
of our own times and places.
Henry Louis Gates goes on to observe, as Jesus is in the process of
discovering quickly and painfully for himself, as all prophets, all
saviors, discover, maybe even all scouts, all guides, -- "Being a
leader does not necessarily mean being loved; loving ones community
means daring to risk estrangement and alienation from that community, in
the short run, in order to break a cycle of poverty, despair, and
hopelessness that we are in, over the long run." This is precisely
what pioneer scout and guide Jeanette Rankin keeps pleading with us all,
-- that we find the new life-giving, world-changing ways to break cycles
of violence and war! In all of these things, we are called to be
cycle-breakers! Called to the work of the Jubilee! In campaigns for
General Conference in late April, and for presidential election in
November, we will be offered many cheap words and quick fixes, many
illusions of solutions, many assurances that if we just shut up and go
shopping, leave leadership to the experts on every law, the exceptions
to every rule, then we need not be challenged, we need not be changed.
We see now where such lesser leaders have brought us. To be
"Caught in the Act" of our title this morning does not refer
only to what Jesus calls "catching people." It has to do with
all such self-serving images and institutions as have turned our public
life into one more cynical marketing venture. We have got to take
leadership in our own lives and our life together. We have got to build
leadership in this congregation and find leadership for us to work with
in our community. Like Jesus with these fisher folk, we’ve got to go
to people where they are working, where they are living, where they are
going to school. How do we relate with workers downtown? With young
people running the streets? We’ve got to meet others and speak with
them in the real terms of their everyday lives. We’ve got to challenge
their resignation, and ours, to things as they are! We’ve got to
believe that life with Jesus, however full of frustration and failure we
might have been, leads us to "put out into deep water" and
"let down our nets again," in new and in differing ways, with
hope and with investment in a decent, dignified future for all people,
young and old, rich and poor, all over this world.
Lord, you have come to the lakeshore
looking neither for wealthy or wise
ones;
you only ask us to follow humbly.
O Lord, with your eyes you have
searched us,
and while smiling have spoken our
names;
now our boat’s left on the shoreline
behind us;
by your side we will seek other seas.
Amen.
Rev. John Auer
Top of Page
Back to Archives
|
