As I asked our Vacation Bible School to pray when we opened this week
– "All God’s Children Got a Place in the Choir!" All
God’s Children Got a Place in the Church! All God’s Peoples Got a
Place on the Earth!
As we approach Independence Sunday, and think of it as a national,
therefore a "political" holiday, a celebration of popular
freedom, we may ask ourselves how religion in the "prophetic"
tradition always is called to bear witness to the "political"
powers. That is what is meant by Jesus here "setting his face to go
to Jerusalem," city of God for so much of the world, and seat of
all of God’s powers. If we follow Jesus we speak with such different
understandings, of true power as "solidarity," and of true
freedom as "liberation."
Paul here addresses the Galatians around the issue of circumcision,
whether it is a necessary precondition, a passage, through formal
Judaism, before a person may become a Christian, which is to say, in
effect, before one may become a "citizen" of the
"kingdom," the new reality, the new way of being and living,
for individual persons and for whole peoples, God has revealed, and is
yet revealing.
Paul seems to be saying the freedom of the gospel undermines all
current assumption and action of faith in our lives, and sets us free to
pursue a freedom of living, thinking, speaking, acting that may well be
scandalous, if never quite so scandalous as the cross itself, to all
settled ways of seeing and doing things, and may well land us in
trouble, and even in jail.
The paper this week reports that a "Freedom Center" is one
of the cultural institutions chosen this month to occupy ground zero in
New York City. The developer says the organizing principle will be
"looking at different parts of the world transitioning from tyranny
to freedom." One hopes it will lead to looking at ALL parts of the
world, in recognition that even, or especially, those of us who take our
national "freedom," as well as our personal
"liberties," most for granted may well have the most to be
revealed and confessed about ourselves, -- at least about how others may
see us.!
Jesus and Paul would appreciate one potential exhibit is called
"Freedom Beyond Bars," a walk through prison cells such as
were inhabited by, Susan B. Anthony, Mother Jones, Dr. King, Nelson
Mandela, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Vaclav Havel, -- even Eugene Debs? Someone
rightly suggests the center should start with "conversations all
over the world" about what belongs in a "freedom" center.
I invite us to ask ourselves that, given our biblical understanding of
freedom as "liberation," during the next week. I’d love to
hear what we come up with.
Salvation as liberation means helping each one of us find who we are
before God, how we freely reflect the creative freedom of the Spirit
beyond all worldly constraint and control, and then helping us to
identify and resist, each in our own ways, those forces of "unfreedom,"
of bondage, even of habituation, which may be keeping us repressed
within and/or oppressed without. I am remembering in that light a UM
clergy friend named Dow Kirkpatrick, who died not long ago. One of his
books looks at contemporary meanings and movements of
"liberation" in light of John Wesley’s concept and practice
of "sanctification," of living by the fullest possible grace
of God and going on to as much "perfection" of our lives and
our life, individually and together, as is possible in this world!
As part of the General Board of Global Ministries, Dow would do
"mission in reverse." He would spend half the year talking
with "base" or "grassroots" Christians in Latin
America, listening and learning how they found God acting and leading
through their history. He would spend the other half conducting "encuentros,"
weekend "encounters," with North American congregations
wanting to be and to act in greater "solidarity" with sisters
and brothers everywhere else. Dow was convinced what was happening
through the "third world" was a "biblical
revolution" among everyday ordinary folks like you and me hearing
the word of God in their own languages, in their own settings and
contexts, for the first times in their lives and their histories, and
responding out of the promise of freedom, of liberation, which, in the
essential forms of "exodus" and "resurrection," are
dominant themes of God’s witness throughout the Bible!
June 27, 1954, fifty years ago this day, the United States government
orchestrated a coup d’etat in Guatemala. We ousted the freely elected
president Jacobo Arbenz, -- who had begun democratic reforms, improved
education, labor rights, and just distribution of land. The result was
decades of military dictatorship. Undoubtedly, Guatemalan troop leaders
were trained at our own infamous "School of the Americas." (www.soaw.org) Fittingly, as Jesus here
rebukes disciples who want to reduce the Samaritan village to ashes,
anthropologist Beatriz Manz’s book about this period is entitled, Paradise
in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror and Hope. 36 years
of civil war claimed the lives of 200,000 Guatemalans, most of them
civilians.
One who survives remembers, "The practice of kidnapping and
torture began after the coup, and land for the peasants was taken away.
People started to speak up about it, and they were called communists and
terrorists as a justification for killing them. The space for debating
politics closed up." The space for debating politics closed up –
Please think about that. Next week we will talk more of connecting
"citizenship" and "discipleship." How are we to keep
public space open for all of the people, not only
"politically," but even "prophetically?" Especially,
what is our role in that as a "progressive" church doing
"downtown" ministry?
Bishop Dom Helder Camara of Brazil, also long-held in U.S.-backed
military rule, used to say, "When I feed the poor, they called me
saint. When I ask why they were poor, they called me a communist!"
When will we learn that for people with faith in the biblical God
embodied for us in Jesus and in his body the church, economic
well-being, economic freedom, economic justice -- equal access to the
resources God has created, provided, for all of God’s children
everywhere, -- are fundamental, non-negotiable, both to our witness and
to our service in this community and in this world? According to CIA
documents, the coup against Guatemala served as a model for further
interventions in the region. Nicaragua and especially Haiti lie
devastated today. Cuba, which has taken economic freedom with a
"biblical" kind of seriousness, feels always threatened.
As Paul insists in this passage, our faith is about our practice! We
are called from the limiting rigidity of "orthodoxy,"
preoccupation with "right belief," to what is commonly called
"orthopraxis," -- putting belief into action, into right
relationships with others, relationships just and liberating! Our
freedom, says Paul, is by no means only a freedom FROM others, which
seems often to be the focus of what we traditionally call political
"conservatives" and "libertarians," -- the freedom,
in effect, to be left alone to do whatever I choose to do so long as I
am not hurting anyone else. And in a direct interpersonal sense that may
be true. Left to myself I may not hurt anyone else.
But if I do not practice freedom FOR others, the more usual focus of
"liberals," even (as I might place myself) of
"socialists," -- if I do not use my freedom to "serve one
another in love," as Paul puts it, -- to put love in action as
justice, well-being, equal access and equal security for ALL persons and
all peoples, -- then I am allowing our system of vested interests to run
rampant over the people. The gap between poor and wealthy grows greater,
nationally and transnationally, from day-to-day and from
generation-to-generation. If, in fact, we tolerate such bitterness and
such savagery toward one another, as to tolerate the annihilation of one
another, asks Paul, "where will all our precious freedom be
then?" Our broken world of this morning just wants to know.
To Paul the Galatians have locked themselves into a remote and
irrelevant form of what Bill Kvasniska might call religious
"esotericism!" They do not risk God and themselves in becoming
incarnate, as Jesus does, in the day-to-day lives of peoples everywhere,
and especially of those who need liberation he offers the most. Rather,
the Galatians preoccupy themselves with preserving and protecting God,
as well as themselves, from all the confusion, change and challenge of
the world all around. They may think they are free, but as Krister
Stendhal says in our Words for Meditation,
Freedom is very different from liberation.
Liberation as a term is really meaningful either when we do
not have freedom or when we have just gained it. Freedom is
like manna in the wilderness. It does not keep easily. It
spoils quickly. You cannot put it in the refrigerator and
call it freedom, because freedom has to be won again and
again. And that very insight is better expressed by the word
liberation!
- Paul Among Jews
and Gentiles
Too often we are as the "unfree" leading the "unfree"
to what we call "freedom."
According to this translation by Eugene Peterson, Paul finds "a
root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit,
just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness." We have
to ask ourselves if the God we find in Christ is more concerned with
keeping us free FROM "sinning" than with setting us free FOR
"loving!" Is this cup of our life in faith more half-empty and
running out than it is half-full and renewing itself? Are we more
condemned by "original sin" than we are saved by
"original blessing?" Is life more a problem to solve, to be as
constrained and controlled as we can be, than a mystery to embrace, to
engage with and to expand with? Paul basically says, if we sweat all the
small stuff, we become small ourselves – small-minded, small-hearted,
small-spirited.
We limit the ways we love one another, including the sexual love that
God means to be such a gift. We limit our thinking and feeling, our
capacity to imagine and to identify with one another. We limit ourselves
to "each person for themselves," "get all you can while
the getting is good." We turn "God" into one more symbol
of our supposed superiority at playing the game and at beating the odds.
We limit ourselves TO ourselves, fearing everyone else is against us and
out to get what we have, which we have, in effect, taken from them if
they have-not.
We limit ourselves to thinking the only way to defend ourselves is
add more and more capacity for aggression, invasion, and occupation –
so our well-heeled, bold and visionary leadership in the U.S. Senate
votes without objection or opposition this week, 97 votes to none, a
"defense" budget of $447 billion! How "free and
democratic" is that?! Can we even conceive of that amount? And of
the real "defending" of all human life that money could do if
given to just and to peaceful purposes? Where are the leaders to remind
us that we ourselves may be just as "unfree" in our ways, just
as much in need of God’s liberation, as those we dismiss as "the
enemy"?
No wonder Paul here warns us against "brutal temper," as
much damage as we are capable of, -- while we seem to be impotent either
"to love or be loved," to take Jesus and Paul at their word
about God: "Everything we know about God’s word is summed up in a
single sentence: Love others as we love ourselves!" And that is
precisely Paul’s point: we end up loving only ourselves, and those who
reflect us -- only those who look like us, think like us, talk like us,
act like us, pray like us. We become, in effect, "addicted" to
ourselves, to our style of life, --at the expense of so many others,
--and to all we think it takes to keep us ourselves. We end up, at best,
practicing what Paul sees as empty rituals and "ugly parodies"
of real communion, real interaction, real give-and-take, among all of
God’s wondrous "critters!" All of God’s children, all of
God’s peoples.
Paul calls upon us to look to instead and to follow this Jesus who
lives day-to-day, not even knowing where he will be laying his head at
night! Let us learn to help one another as individuals, and ourselves as
a congregation, to learn, in turn, this very cost of following Jesus
wherever he leads, no matter all the worthy competing duties of family
and home and job and routine in our lives. In Jesus we may find
ourselves truly saved, set free, healed and made whole enough to
practice our commitment to "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors,
" – as well as Open Borders and Open Arms! In Jesus we may be set
free to see and to build on the BEST we can find in all others, -- what
Paul calls that "basic holiness" permeating all things and
people! Imagine ourselves to be free enough not to "force our way
in life," but to believe, with Jesus, in a "force beyond"
all violence, a force of love in action as justice and peace, based upon
full openness and inclusiveness of all "others."
Paul promises us, in Jesus "everything connected with getting
our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls
necessities is killed off for good!" Crucified! The only kind of
"killing" that can possibly do any good!" And it starts
with us. We no longer sweat the small stuff. We no longer worry about
who’s good, who’s evil, who’s better, who’s worse, -- for, as my
mother says, "All comparisons are odious!" "We
have," concludes Paul, "far more interesting things to do with
our lives! Each one of us is an original." There will never be
another life to create just like ours. God throws away each of our
molds! Life is a "once in lifetime" opportunity! So live . . .
So what? So live! So what? SO LIVE! Amen.
