“Citizenship/Discipleship: To Whom Do We Pledge Allegiance?”

If and when we get around to giving the first annual Citizen Disciple Award for this Sunday, I nominate Cameron “Citizen” Crain.  He is running for State Senate against a 7-term incumbent who has not been opposed for 20 years – is that right?  He gets the award for cosmic/comic courage alone.

As to the Michael Moore film, I say see it, so we can talk about it if we want to, just as I said about Mel Gibson’s film.  This film is just as “slanted” in its way.   One question is do “slanted” films have a place?  Do we serve a “slanted” God?

Liberals can sound just as “fundamentalist,” as if God could have only one uniform, universal, univocal way of being/seeing/speaking, as anyone else.

As of today we have spent a year being congregation and pastor together.  One of our issues has been what I call “prophetic” religion, religion that tries speaks to speak truth to power, irrespective of party label, in behalf of God’s commitment to the last and the least among us.  I think we are, as a species, inherently religious and political, just as we are both spiritual and sexual, for instance.  When the church or faith communities let go of our share of responsibility for the public life of our state and nation, the vacuum is filled, largely by politicians and, especially today, by corporations, -- many of whom own their own politicians!  Religiously as Protestants, and politically as Americans, we are creatures of Reformation and Revolution -- born to rebel and resist against gross concentration of power and disenfranchisement and oppression of people.  What is Independence/ Interdependence Sunday but celebration of our right and need to act politically on our beliefs?  To be represented for who we are?  Not who they want us to be.

Independence is a strong part of us.  Brando died this week.  In addition to an early tough film we don’t hear much about, with Brando a paraplegic, I think, “The Men,” set bitterly in a hospital for wounded soldiers, Brando played the independence leader of Mexico in “Viva Zapata!”  And he got off the classically American, even western American line, in “The Wild Ones,” when asked in a bar 

full of bikers, “What are you rebelling against?”  Brando answers, (Everybody now!), “What you got?”  But interdependence is just as strong.  We know how by the time we finish in the bathroom and eat breakfast, not to mention get to work, each day, we already have consumed, without paying the social cost for them, products from 20 different nations.  We are a lot more interdependent than we like to think.  And for us, Jesus becomes the very means to our “interdependence” with Creator God, before whom, without Jesus, we’d have barely a leg to stand on!  So I don’t know exactly what Grass Valley poet Gary Snyder means in our Call to Worship by pledging allegiance to “joyful interpenetration!”  But I like the suggestive sound of it, and I hope it’s part of our continuing discovery as partners together in this congregation and community.     

The question between us as congregation and pastor may be, have we had about enough of each other already?  Or have we only begun to fight?  Some had had enough of us even before we got here!  I hope at least in a year we have established our own independence.  We are ourselves, not anyone else.   But I’m like Roger Clemens.  You got to knock me out in the early innings.  I only get stronger the longer I pitch!  Which means the longer we come to know each other – It takes time! – and to know our situation and of all the prospects it holds, -- Such as being like a “progressive” tree, rooted in both past and future, planted downtown by what Revelation calls “the river of the water of life, . . . flowing . . . through the middle of the street of the city. . . . The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations!”  We, the Church, for the healing of nations!  .

So are we on the right track?  Are we headed towards where we want to end up? If not, who cares how well we travel together?  Especially on this Sunday of Holy Baptism as well!  The questions we just answered for the children can only be heard prophetically, even politically – “Do we renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of our sin?  Do we accept the freedom and power God gives us to resist evil, injustice, oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?”  Are we headed towards where the children, the grandchildren, of our future need us to be?  How safe and secure, -- which means how just and peaceful, -- a world are we leaving to them?  How are we preparing them by risking ourselves to live as equally and as respectfully with as many of this world’s peoples as possible?  As well as to live as gently and as caringly as we can with all the earth?  Very source of our interdependence?

This Paul sure can preach, -- can’t he?  A Roman citizen, -- and he still ends up in a Roman jail!  What is it about how he preaches?  How he prays?  How he practices what he prays and he preaches?  God is not to be mocked, he says here, -- We will reap what we sow!  Especially if we sow weapons and violence.  For Jesus says, if we live by the sword, by the gun, by the bomb, we will die by them.  If God, for us, is fully and freely in Jesus, -- and if Jesus means what he says and does, -- then our souls, the souls of our church and our nation, are way up for grabs!  The Bible is not our God.  The Church is not our God.  The Nation is not our God.  Only God is our God, -- and God is alive! Still a mighty mystery to us!  Revealing God’s self, -- God’s will, God’s word, God’s worship, God’s work -- for us on the way.  The only “fix” we have on God is Jesus!  Crucified!

The God we know in Jesus is revealed to us even now by the Holy Spirit!  That is what this season, this time of Earth Church Year, is all about:  The Spirit is our loyal comforter, yes!  But also our legal counselor!  Our personal sanctifier, yes!  But also our social sustainer!  Our joy, but our justice, -- our life, but our love, -- our peace, but our plenty, -- our faith, but our works, -- our baptism, but our communion.  Remember when Jesus stepped through the locked door last evening of Easter Sunday?   He showed us the signs of his suffering peace, and breathed the Spirit of forgiveness on us!  For us to expand and extend to the world!  A fresh start in life for all people!  We are sent into all the world, beginning right where we are, the heart of downtown Reno/Sparks.  We promise to all we meet what we promise to the one whom we baptize today:  You are a gift to us!  It will take us the rest of our lives, and yours, if ever, to find your whole meaning!

We say to Hunter Harlee this morning, as we say to our Youth Group and sponsors for their Mission/Mystery Trip this week: We are willing, -- as parents, as family, as friends, as congregations and whole churches, -- to make this journey with you.  To walk this walk of the Spirit with you.  I know from this first year together as congregation and pastor, we differ some on what we mean by “spiritual,” as well as we do by “political.”  For me it is related to what we find as the biblical life and work of the Holy Spirit, -- who was in the very beginning with God, creating; leading out of bondage; giving law as the base of community; enduring in exile; encouraging through the prophets; anointing Jesus to bring new life to the poor, the weak, the disinherited, and the imprisoned; pooling the gifts and resources of the early church; anointing, healing, baptizing, sending, throughout the Acts of the Apostles.  The Spirit makes Jesus present in us!

This means, as Paul says here about circumcision, nobody has to change to get into the church!  We are acceptable just as we are.  There are no second-class citizens here, -- no second-class disciples.  Anyone who tries to tell us there is only one way to get to God, Paul says, is just trying to make their own way look good!  They are picking and choosing what parts of the law, and the Book of Discipline, to follow and to enforce. But once we get into the church, we will change, -- most likely in ways we never imagined.  For God is making all things new!  New occasions teach new duties!  As Lincoln (in our Words for Meditation) said to the Congress in 1862, we as North Americans are still a new people.  Just a few hundred years.  While Iraqis, for instance, are 7000 years old!  We still have a lot to learn.  Even from Iraqis!  God of the Bible often tries to reach us through those we call “enemy.”  Lincoln says “we must think anew and act anew!”  No more of the same old wars.  “The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just.” 

Sr. Joan Chittister adds, following Proverbs, as true for 2004 as for 1776, “If the people speak and the king doesn’t listen, something is wrong with the king.  If the king acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people.”  And in our way of being a people together, “we are our government!”   Historian Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States) points out what a difference between asking soldiers to die for our country, and sending them off to die for our government!  Yet we, the people, are our government!    We are, as in the baptismal vows, responsible – capable of response.  We are the people, -- accountable for what we are asked to do, and for what is done in our names.  Especially for dividing people into “friend and enemy,” “good and evil,” “saved and damned,” “winner and loser.”   The equal right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is our responsibility.  “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it!”  (The Declaration of Independence!)

“Citizenship/Discipleship: To Whom Do We Pledge Our Allegiance?”  “Citizen” Tom Paine uses “patriot” for the Brando-like rebels resisting imperial rule.  (There was much less Brando-like political elite as well!)  And Paine points beyond independence to interdependence: “My country is the world.  My countrymen are mankind.”  What does Methodist founder John Wesley say?  “The world is my parish!”  The Cross, argues Paul, sets us free from all such need to divide and conquer, to occupy and exploit.  “It is not what WE do,” warns Paul.  “It is what GOD is doing, and God is creating something totally new, a free life!”  Luke here gives us the picture of Jesus, us, and “free life” – which may not look all that “independent!”  !

Jesus sends us “like lambs into the midst of wolves!”  We take nothing with us, but relinquish our illusion to be so “independent,” so self-enclosed and self-sufficient, and recognize how “interdependent” we are!   How much we need the help of our friends, of strangers,   (Blanche DuBois says opposite Brando’s Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar named Desire” – “I depend on the kindness of strangers!”)  Dare we say, we need enemies, too?!  How much more “spiritual” can we be, than to support ourselves by nothing but the grace and mercy of God?  Jesus sends us always in peace: “Peace to this house!”  We look to share peace with all others.  Which means we will have to share justice, share gifts and resources with them, -- eating and drinking what they provide for us!  That is the life of baptism, the life of communion, the life of the Holy Spirit. The harvest is all around us, all over downtown, -- if we will but open and offer ourselves!

William Stringfellow, great Protestant and great American, once dreamed he was a bishop sending out workers to practice “the witness of mere presence” --

I would tell them that they were to go, probably in pairs, into the city and just live on whatever means of survival prevailed in the block or neighborhood to which they were sent; they would have to live, in so far as possible, as those to whom they were sent.  I would instruct them that upon their arrival they should do only one thing: knock on every door.  Most doors would not be opened, at least not readily.  But when a door was opened, the missionaries would say: “We have come to be with you because God cares for your life, and, because God cares for your life, we also care for you.”  Period.  There would be nothing more – no invitations to join the Church, no programs to offer for people or their kids, no rummage to give away, no groups to join or meetings to attend, no gimmicks, no concealed motives, and no hidden agendas.  There would be just the bare announcement of God’s love and the freedom which that love gives people to love each other. . . . First of all, the Church must simply be in the world, sharing in and caring eloquently and honestly for the life of the ordinary world – or the life of any person – just as it is.  (Free in Obedience)

I saw Sam Song, full of cancer, doing that just this week, going from room to room, knocking on many doors, announcing God’s love, at the Progressive Care Center in Sparks where he lives.  If Sam can do it in his way, under his circumstances, how can we help but each find our own way of doing it?   

Just as we are.  Without one plea.  O Lamb of God, we come.  We come!  Jesus sends us out with so little because we are worth so much.  Even so much more than we know!  Because who we are is all that Jesus needs us to be.  Just as we are!  Amen. 

Rev. John Auer