Words for Meditation

June 13, 2004
John Auer, Pastor

Scripture text:  1 Kings 21:1-21a

 

"Red Power: It’s the Land, Stupid, and the Birthright!"

Probably everyone has a history of listening to music. Growing up I heard mostly Broadway musicals and my father’s taste in jazz. Through high school the only artist whose music I bought for myself was Ray Charles. In college I added Nina Simone. After the Peace Corps I collected Creedence Clearwater Revival. Finally I found Rahsann Roland Kirk and was hooked. I have been buying used albums by the ton ever since, a little of most everything. I remain the same kind of listener that I am singer: loud and enthusiastic! Please try sometime to hear Ray Charles’ duets, of "Porgy and Bess" with Cleo Laine, and of love songs with Betty Carter. And for our seasonal theme, Shades of Red, on "Dedicated to You" Ray cut the songs "Ruby," "Rosetta," and "Cherry." If you could hum it, Ray could play and sing it. My favorite quote from him over the years is, "When I sit down to play, most folks don’t know where I’m coming from. But give me just a few minutes, and I’ll find them!" Sounds like good evangelistic advice to me.

Ah, yes! The biblical text! Thanks for reading it so corporately and so well! The reason I gave Naboth’s lines to "Children and Youth" may be obvious. He says twice, in effect, you have no right to ask me to give up my ancestral inheritance!

In political-campaign terms, it’s the land, stupid, and the birthright that goes with it! Throughout the Bible God’s covenant always lies with both the people and the land, -- a "promised land." As we leap forward by faith into "progressive" and "downtown" ministries and mission, I will ask us to connect "promised land" with the Jubilee image of the church as what John Pairman Brown calls a "liberated zone" in the midst of occupied territory. (I ask again how might we "mark" such a zone? Haven’t had response to my suggestion of four outdoor church flags – United States of America, United Nations, Earth, and Rainbow.) Conflicts over everyone’s promise of access to land, -- of a piece of the action, a stake in the game, -- seem to be killing us globally, in the Middle East and beyond. All for a sense of inheritance: land and birthright! Because, as we said just last week, the Holy Spirit makes us all, all the earth, "heirs of God" and "joint heirs with Christ."

But we suffer much closer to home. We "suffer" our own youth and children. We suffocate them with burdens of debt and destructiveness. Perhaps we reveled rightly in rituals of national pomp and pageantry this past week. State funerals are about as close to honoring royalty as we come. Ronald Reagan had become for us a sort of "high priest" of American state. I saw as well, and I confess I long for, the passing of an era, and the opening toward a new and much different future, -- a future that honors the land and the birthrights of all children everywhere. There’s a political cartoon by Robert Toles I have been saving and referring to off and on since 1987. Every once in a while I imagine it is obsolete. Yet listen to it again today. It’s entitled "The Reading of the Will," by a teacher in front of a class –

Dear Kids,

We, the generation in power since World War II, seem to have used up pretty much everything ourselves. We kind of drained all the resources out of our manufacturing industries, so there’s not much left there. The beautiful old buildings that were built to last for centuries, we tore down and replaced with characterless but inexpensive structures, and you can have them.

[That wouldn’t happen in Reno/Sparks, would it?]

Except everything we built had a lifespan about the same as ours, so, like the interstate highway system we built, they’re all falling apart now and you’ll have to deal with that. We used up as much of our national resources as we could, without providing for renewable ones, so you’re probably good until about a week from Thursday. We did build a generous Social Security and pension system, but that was just for us. In fact, the only really durable thing we built was toxic dumps. You can have those.

[That wouldn’t happen in Nevada, would it?]

So think of your inheritance as a challenge. The challenge of starting from scratch. You can begin as soon as – oh, one last thing – as soon as you pay off the two trillion dollar debt we left you.

Your parents

P.S. We’re not dead. We’re enjoying our pensions and Social Security.

Suffering Star Wars! Give us a break.

"Red Power," power of Holy Spirit, the Holy Shade of Red, is power that is not arbitrary but accountable. It is not power over others but power with others. It is not this exercise of Ahab and Jezebel’s power over Naboth, just because they can! Just because it is the "divine right" of kings and queens, the privilege and the perk of position. It is this power, in them and in us, that cuts to the quick of so many lingering hatreds and wars. As King Ahab sees it, all he wants is the convenience of the vineyard next door for a vegetable garden. Just a little Manifest Destiny and Eminent Domain. He makes what he is sure is the fair and generous offer of a better vineyard or its value in money. What Ahab cannot see, cannot put himself in the position, in the perspective to see, is that to Naboth, as to most ordinary everyday people throughout history, his land is his life! His identity and his vocation! His link to the earth! His source of God’s gift and God’s calling to him, and therefore his only resource, -- for a life and for a living!

We, you and I, are part of the self-professed most powerful nation on earth, with all of our privileges, all of our perks. Unless and until the most powerful, the Ahabs and Jezebels of this world, learn to appropriate and to appreciate the positions and the perspectives of the Naboths of this world, -- to see through the eyes, to walk in the steps of indigenous and impoverished peoples all over the earth, starting right where we are, -- we will never become as safe and secure as we think we need to be. We need to become more invested in security all the time, --in what Eisenhower would today call out "military prison industrial complex," -- precisely because of what Dorothee Soelle calls "Polycratic fear," named for a king in Greek mythology who knew he was doomed by too much good fortune! We fear because we know, in our hearts, we do not deserve to possess so much more than any- and everyone else in the world. We are living off land, off resources, that do not belong to us only but also to God, and to all of the children of God. We are living on borrowed time and space.

We exercise power over but not power with. We think we can be saved and saving others without being shared and sharing with them. Unless and until you and I can get right and do right, the God of all children and all creatures will continue to raise up prophets, in Iraq and every place else in this world, to haunt us with Elijah’s challenge to Ahab this day: "Thus says the LORD: Have you killed, and also taken possession?" Have we killed, and also taken possession? Through occupation? Through incarceration? Have "freedom and democracy" come to mean the freedom to build more prisons and the democracy to buy more elections? I mean, look at our own rates of locking folks up and locking folks down. More than 2 million of us are now in prison in the U.S. One in every 75 of our men, the paper just said! 3700 of us on death rows. Prisons employ more of us than any other business but General Motors and cost $20-35 billion a year!

(Just last week I presented to the local clergy group called "Study Buddies" a lengthy summary of the book the executed god: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, by Mark Lewis Taylor. Writing just before 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, Taylor argues we are controlled, whether we know or admit it or not, at home and abroad, by a "theatrics of terror," by a "Gulag America" and a "Pax Americana" way of thinking and acting with might over right. He says a biblical calling of Jesus and the prophets to the church would lead us to join with other "actors and artists of resistance" to create a public and even liturgical "theatrics of counterterror," – to celebrate what I would call both joy and justice, life and love, peace and plenty, -- not just for some, but for all! Please see the Words for Meditation, today, called "Red Power," on wearing red for "Freedom Fridays" between now and Election Day. And please let me know if you want an email or hard copy of what I presented.)

Look at our rates of campaign spending – hundreds of millions of dollars on this presidential election – since we started electing style over substance, started marketing candidates by image and ideology, -- by how they make us "feel better" about ourselves, even how they help "justify" us over others, -- rather than by how they act, especially in behalf of the poor and needy. And look at our rates of voter participation in every election. In fact, our rates of public participation, period! From 1974 to 1994, according to Robert Putnam’s study entitled Bowling Alone, -- because more of us go bowling but in fewer and fewer leagues! -- 42 percent fewer of us belong to political parties; 35 percent fewer attend public meetings; 23 percent fewer contact our representatives or circulate petitions. We tend to treat campaign financing as we do apportionments: something to get around to if and when we can! In this culture now, political management trumps political membership, -- dollars trump votes, -- every time!

And lest we think we are only talking "politics" here, we are also talking what I call "prophetics!" I don’t know if that word exists, but it ought to! It looks and sounds like "politics." It’s what gets Moses to take on the Pharaoh in Egypt. It’s what gets Elijah to take on Ahab, and all of the prophets to take on the kings of their times. It’s what gets Jesus and the early church killed, executed, capitally punished, in very political ways. But it’s not "politics," it’s "prophetics!" Land and birthrights! In the end, says Elijah, when we steal from others, we "sell out" ourselves! I hasten to add I know many of us come to church for similar reasons of seeking solace and reassurance about who we are, where we stand, what we feel and believe, and even what we do with our lives and relations with others. I know we often wish the preacher would leave us alone and just let us be.

Sometimes I wish I knew how to do more of that or do it better. Sometimes I wish I could just embrace without question all the "feel good" Christianity and pseudo-Christianity so available to us through mass media and even in person.

Just as with citizenship, so with discipleship: More and more people today want to be "spiritual," but not to be exactly "religious," which means, not to take much responsibility for religious institutions and organizations in our lives and our life together. Sisters and brothers, it is a premise of what is called today "faith-based

community organizing" that congregations of all faiths, just like ours, are some of the only places left where the God who works through our common history may find at least some folks gathered each week to care about God’s creation, -- all of God’s children, all of God’s creatures, -- in a spirit of creation, a spirit of communion, a spirit of consecration, a spirit of commissioning into connection with all the earth! I believe deeply we want to be one such congregation for God!

The Words for Meditation also say, through Hildegard of Bingen, "As the flame of a fire has three qualities, so there is one God in three Persons. How? A flame is made up of brilliant light and red power and fiery heat." I close with Sister Joan Chittister, a vision and voice of our own times and places, on the "burning burden" of our churchly promise—

Everyday people that are church-educated go quietly and serenely to factories where we assemble warheads, to laboratories where we increase the megaton capacity of our arsenals, to boardrooms where we vote to increase our "defense" capabilities, to churches where we pray the "Our Father" without discomfort. The role of the Church in such a culture is surely a clear one. It is, of course, to pray for peace, not to cajole God to save us from our own insane sinfulness but to make ourselves receptive to God’s inbreaking in our lives and culture. It is, as well, to be centers where strangers can become sisters or brothers in Christ. It is, finally, to become models of disobedience. Fromm describes the "revolutionary personality" as a person who is independent, who has the capacity to identify deeply with humanity and who has the ability to disobey in the interest of more fundamental values. The prophets, Christ, the early Christians, would understand the role completely. It is up to us to reclaim and recall a conforming world to the burning burden of the promise.

Let the brilliant, the red, and the fired-up church say, Amen!

Rev. John J. Auer

 

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