“Getting the Led Out: Rooting
for Kids & Animals on the Hi-Lo-Way”
I remove my stole, sign of my ordination, to
preach this morning, out of respect for my colleague the Rev. Beth Stroud.
Her orders to preach in the United Methodist Church were removed by a jury of
her peers in Eastern Pennsylvania this week. Beth is a lesbian who told
the truth about herself and the woman she loves. All of us who preach
in the United Methodist Church are “Spartacus” this morning. When any
one of us is silenced for being faithful to who we are and telling the truth
about it, all of us are at risk.
At the very same time I plead with us this morning
to support the United Methodist Church, our spiritual home on this journey of
life into faith, in the most obvious, visible, even sacramental way we can,
by once again paying our share of apportionments in full by the end of the year.
That is a massive challenge to us this year. As of today we still owe
$41,000. But it is not an impossible challenge. The capacity to
meet it will be gathered in this sanctuary on this day. May each of us
do all we can, that our own identity and vocation as a congregation may be sustained,
in our local community, in our conference, and throughout our denomination,
and the world we all serve in God’s name.
We are on a mountainous journey of “natural
highs” this Advent season. All of yesterday the church was a wondrous
bustle and flourish of sights and sounds and smells and touches and tastes of
the season. Thanks to all who were here! We were decorating with
greens inside and out! Rehearsing the children’s pageant! Setting
up for the women’s craft fair and auction! Reading through the next Shakespeare
production! Celebrating one 50th anniversary of a wedding
and one brand-new marriage. Even meeting with two families letting go
of and burying loved ones this season. I am not exactly a disinterested
or dispassionate observer, but this congregation seems alive and well, awake
and alert, and taking care of God’s business this season! Is that right?
These texts this morning lift up both vision
and voice for God. God would have us see that God’s people are not just
about numbers and winning and being successful. We are about being faithful
in hard and challenging times. We are about a remnant, a faithful few,
a live shoot growing out from the presumably dead stump of Jesse, defying all
worldly logic and law. God’s people are about all the gifts of the spirit
– all the wisdom and understanding, all the counsel and might, all the knowledge
and fear of, respect for, the Lord, that we can get from all of the people of
God, -- and especially the gifts of the Spirit we get from the people of God
on the outside and on margins – like John in the wilderness here.
For God is attuned to the poor, and God will
judge with righteousness all those who may seem so “unrighteous” to us, and
God will decide with equity, not for the strong, the high, the mighty, but for
the meek of the earth! And God will not take, and not keep, as we say,
any prisoners, but will see that we all get our due, mercy for those who need
mercy, judgment for those who need judgment. For in all things God is
determined to show us, we are all in this together! Wolves and lambs,
leopards and kids, calves and lions and fatlings, cows and bears, lions and
oxen, children and asps and adders – God is no respecter of persons, nor of
the powers we think we hold over one another. All are equal, all are acceptable
in God’s sight, and little children, the youngest, the freshest, the newest
among us, will show us God’s way. For God is beginning all over again,
and none will be hurt or destroyed on all of God’s holy mountain. For,
thanks to the children, and to the child born of Jesse, through Mary and Joseph,
in Bethlehem, once again, “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord.”
Speaking of powerful animals, presumable enemies
living only in fear, I read this week – “Conservation biologists call big predators
like bears, wolves and mountain lions ‘charismatic carnivores,’ a term that
reflects the love/hate nature of human attitudes towards those powerful creatures.
We cuddle with stuffed bears and turn lions into noble cartoon characters or
steadfast marble guardians for our libraries but if you see one in the wild
it’s usually been shoot first and ask questions later. Lions and tigers
and bears (oh my!) can, after all, eat you.”
But, author Chip Ward, assures us, “That rarely
happens. In the United States and Canada in the 1990s, 29 people were
killed by bears. During the same period, 250 were killed in dog attacks.
You are twelve times more likely to die of a bee sting [Help us, Jane MacDougall!]
than a bear attack. In the entire history of America, only one person
was killed by a wolf, a rapid one at that. While hiking in or near wilderness,
you are 40 times more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a mountain
lion. And yet our fear of top carnivores is as primal as our admiration
for them.” I add, that may apply to some persons and peoples we are apt
to demonize, too, and to fear out of all proportion to our faith.
That’s why the children, of course, may lead
us. Remember the song? “You’ve got to be taught / to be afraid /
of people whose eyes are strangely made / of people whose skin is a different
shade / you’ve got to be carefully taught. “You’ve got to be taught before
it’s too late / before you are six, or seven, or eight / to hate all the people
your relatives hate / you’ve got to be carefully taught / you’ve got to be carefully
taught.” Think a moment: Can we imagine children thinking to silence a person’s
voice and work because of the way they love?
Kris Berggren (National Catholic Reporter),
mother of three, author of Advent for Families 2004: The Greatest Gift of
All, gives us these three visionary vignettes –
- A family volunteering as Maryknoll missioners in a barrio near Caracas,
knowing that such poverty was not a choice for the people, nonetheless tried
to discourage a woman begging at their door. They invited her in for
water. She observed some of the few small toys of the daughters Maza
and Sarah and said, “Your children have a lot of toys.” The mother
of the home tells us, “Maza picked a couple up and gave them to her and
said, ‘Why don’t you give them to your children?’ After she left, I just
started to cry. The girls came around me and said, ‘We know, Mom.
It’s hard.’”
- “Another small girl, my 3-year-old goddaughter Siobhan, and I went for
a walk in my neighborhood the other day. She suddenly stopped cold,
did a 180 and ran as fast as her little legs could move back to a tree we’d
just passed, calling back in explanation, ‘I have to hug that tree!’
I saw that this tree was encircled with a bright orange line around the
trunk, marking it for removal due to Dutch elm disease. She spread
her tiny arms as far as she could around the tree. ‘Why did you hug
that tree?’ I said. ‘Because it was sick!’ she answered brightly.’
Mother Earth surely needs comforting, too . . . .”
- “Yesterday as I was cooking dinner, I heard my usually cheerful 9-year-old
daughter, Betsey, crying in the next room. She’d just been practicing
a song she was going to sing a church with her sister and brother, ‘The
Cry of the Poor.’ I was delighted to hear my kids making music together
. . . . I supposed they had experienced some ‘creative differences’ in their
music practice.
“I asked her what was the matter: ‘Nothing.’ Ri-i-i-ight. She’d
seen a sad movie with a friend that afternoon and had filled me in on the
plot involving the death of the protagonist’s brother. So I asked,
‘Are you remembering the movie?’ No. Colds have been going around
our house, so I guessed, ‘Are you feeling OK?’ Yes. Tears streamed
from her blue eyes. She cracked a bit: ‘It’s just something silly.
I can’t do anything about it.’
Now I was hooked. After a couple of more rounds, she relented.
‘It’s about the people in Iraq. I feel like I should be able to stop
it,’ she sobbed. My heart almost broke, too.
“I have become almost cynical about my own ability to effect change in huge
matters like the war in Iraq, so how could I honestly answer this child’s
desire to fix what’s broken, to right the obvious, terrible wrongs of war?
My daughter’s tears and her earnest yearning reminded me that it takes every
one of us to that which we can. Some make grand statements and bold
gestures such as enthusiastically hugging a sick tree, while others quietly
pursue the path of righteousness and compassion in small ways such as sharing
toys or comforting someone who is sad. So I said, ‘It isn’t silly
at all to care about what’s going on there. And you can do something.’
That “something” turned out to be a letter to
President Bush. After which, the mother concludes, “God’s voice is sometimes
smaller than you think.” John the Baptist’s voice is not exactly small
or subtle, as he calls us all to repentance and to new life. But John
speaks for the small, the meek, the lowly, who are without voice. You
and I, sisters and brothers, are called in this season to be as vision for the
visionless and as voice for the voiceless. After all, God’s voice is sometimes
smaller than we think. May the vision and voice of Jesus be reborn in
us this day. What is God seeing, what is God saying, in you? In
you? In you? In each and in all of us? Even in me? Amen.
Rev. John Auer
