On this Reconciling Ministries Sunday we
acknowledge that reconciling, literally, covers a whole host of sins –
always beginning with our own! At times in our recent past, for instance,
the church has discriminated against and withheld its blessing of marriage
from, slaves, divorced persons, persons of different color marrying one
another. Reconciling responds to whatever the current oppressions by
separation, division, judgment, condemnation. Today we recognize the work
of the Reconciling Ministries Network. The work receives no apportionment
funding, no official United Methodist support. It is our choice to fund it
or not. Please look over the brochure and be moved by the Spirit!
We remain deep in the season of longest
nights and shortest days. We may grow impatient with darkness, our own, the
shadow-sides of ourselves, and the darkness, the dimness, the ignorance, the
invisibility with which we look at the world around us. We may rush to
identify ourselves with the light we think we have found, or the light we
think has found us. Such passages as “the people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light” and “the light shines in the darkness and the
darkness has not overcome it” have long connoted something negative,
something inferior, to darkness. Yet much of the universe is dark. The new
life that forms, -- within us and beyond us, far above us in darkest skies,
far beneath us in darkest seas, -- all forms in the dark. We dare not act
as if we are the only “enlightened ones” with answers for all the dimmer and
duller world.
I got as close as I ever get to a mystical
encounter, with Dr. King at a monastery in Arizona a few years ago. He was
sitting with tie loosened and feet propped up on the desk in his darkened
office, musing on some questions I had brought him. He said all his life,
no matter how successful he had been, no matter how much attention was paid
to him, -- all his life he sat in darkness and gazed into an unsearchable
light. For him the darkness meant identification with outcasts, with those
beyond the pale, on the margins of light. For they could see more clearly
into the light than those in the light all the time could see into the
darkness. Dr. King’s calling, he said, was to visualize life in the light
for those who sat in darkness. How would their life in the light be any
different because they had spent so much time in the dark? And how could he
make their lives visible?
China Galland in the book Longing for
Darkness reflects upon “redeeming darkness,” “a multivalent darkness,”
“the darkness of ancient wisdom, of people of color, of space, of the womb,
of the earth, of the unknown, of sorrow, of the imagination, the darkness of
death, of the human heart, of the unconscious, of the darkness beyond light,
of matter, of the descent, of the body, of the shadow of the Most High.” In
many ways darkness takes on needed symbolic meanings in world religious
tradition and practice. There is this scientific insight as well: “The
world that we see, called the ‘luminous world,’ is now believed to be only a
fraction of what exists.” “The earth is not the center of the universe, the
sun does not revolve around us. Not only are we merely one planet of many
but the galaxy to which we belong, the Milky Way, is only one of an infinite
number of galaxies in what seems to be an expanding universe. This elusive
dark matter that cannot be seen, only felt, as we observe its gravitational
effects on galaxies, is 90 percent of what exists. We cannot see it, know
it, or measure it . . . paradig-matically we have reached the limits of
light! The world is not as it seems.”
Sisters and brothers, we live at the limits
of light. The world is not what it seems to us. There is so much mystery
before which to be humble and silent and barely beginning to breathe in and
out, to absorb and apply, the new seeing, new hearing, new growing, new
changing of our own lives. It is so tempting for us to place our own
identity, our own integrity, our own experience, our own evaluation, at the
center of how we see others. We tend to see and hear largely through our
own eyes and ears, rarely through theirs. We may be acting as if everyone
else revolves around us – at least what we think, for now, is true about us
--our class, our color, our nation, our language, our gender, our
orientation, our religious tradition and practice. That tendency is
addressed in us by the very first word Jesus speaks after John is arrested
and Jesus withdraws to Galilee. Jesus withdraws throughout the book of
Matthew whenever he is threatened or attacked. Jesus does not play hero.
He does not retaliate. Rather, he repents!
He withdraws. He reflects. He prays. He
seeks insight, new understanding, beginning deep in himself, sometimes
including trusted others, always extending to God. Then Jesus, literally,
re-turns. He turns, and turns again, in as many ways as he can. For that
is what it means to “Repent!” To turn in new ways. For the kingdom of
heaven has come so near as to give us the freedom and power to do so. Turn
around! Change directions! Move outside of ourselves! Walk in new
moccasins, so to speak. See through the eyes, hear through the ears, of
another and of as many others as we can! For there is no limiting God’s
creative and creating love. Last night I performed an almost-impromptu
wedding. He is 80, she is 71. They fell in love over 50 years ago! Only he
was married and remained so for 54 years. Last year, after both their
spouses had died, and old friend put them back in touch, and the rest is
history they are making even now!
We know about life, as the song says, “To
everything -- turn, turn, turn / There is a season --turn, turn, turn / And
a time for ev’ry purpose under heaven.” Another song: “To turn, turn, will
be our delight, / till by turning, turning, we come round right.” We find
ourselves constantly asking ourselves, as persons and as congregation of
faith, what time is it now in my life? In our life together? What new
thing may God be revealing to us even now, -- to us who live by revelation!
Which proves equally offensive both to the conservative and to the liberal
parts of us, according to world religionist, Huston Smith. Conservatives
are offended to hear that “our” faith, whichever one, is but one “revealed”
faith among many. God is like one river who feeds many wells. Liberals are
offended to hear that faith has to be “revealed” at all! Why must faith
transcend rationality? Scientific analysis and understanding? Which is why
United Methodists live faith with at least a “quadrilateral” of resources –
scripture, tradition, reason, and experience!
How are we called, in our situation,
especially in our “downtownness,” to be as “fishing for people?” Casting as
broad and as deep a net as we possibly can? Which was the only kind of
fishing then. Remember Peter’s miraculous catch of every last kind of fish
in the sea? We do the sporting, God does the sorting. “We pray to be
outreaching, embracing, accepting, reconciling, / Restoring to right
relationship, growing together and with You.” Repenting, returning,
reconciling, restoring to right relationship. That is what God, in Jesus
for us, already has done, is doing again even now, and is calling on us to
do, right here where we are, among people who are right here, with us and
all around us. Reconciling is our whole way of faith, our whole way of love
and of life itself. The God who makes all things new reconciles all people
to God’s own self. “In Christ,” says Paul, “there is a new creation!
Everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is
from God, who reconciled us to Godself through Christ, and has given us the
ministry of reconciliation!” Nothing, nothing, nothing human is alien to
our God. God is, now and forever, part of us, each and all.
To come back to Dr. King, how do we live in,
how do we work with, the darkness in which we find ourselves? And the
darkness which we find in ourselves! What is most deeply buried, repressed,
unknown, unhonored, within us as well as among us? What might we learn to
visualize, to imagine, to see again in new ways? And how might we
visibilize, cause to happen, that which we have imagined, in us, through us,
among us, around us? The current Reconciling Ministries Network “Flashnet”
e-mail list (to which we may subscribe through the brochure) includes a
meditation by Rev. Irene Moore, an African-American and a lesbian, called
“Martin Luther King Jr.’s Expansive Dream.” For Dr. King justice was not
just an issue for any particular person or group of people. It was a human
issue. Those who work for justice work for the very redemption of all. And
justice work often has to begin in our own most immediate and intimate
relationships, justice for persons, justice for families, as it extends to
the world.
For what we may call “political” issues have
grave personal, pastoral consequences for those who are made poor, for
instance, undereducated, without child care or health care. These are not
token but tragic matters.
Faith played a profound role in the justice
work that Dr. King did,” says Moore. “He argued that any religion that
professed to be concerned with the souls of people, but not concerned with
the economic and social conditions that disempowered them, was a false
religion. True religion, he contended, must involve itself in the situation
of all who are damned, disinherited, disrespected, and dispossessed – and
that includes not only people of color, women and the poor, but also LGBT
people.” Moore recalls Hemingway on how the world breaks us all, but some
of us grow strong in those broken places. “God wants us to grow strong in
our broken places – not only to mend the sin-sick world in which we live,
but also to mend the sin-sick world we carry around within us. . . . We are
foolish if we think we can heal the world and not heal ourselves.”
And what might this healing look like? How
might we begin to visualize and to visibilize it? For the world and for
ourselves? Moore closes with Dr. King’s words – “If we are to have peace on
earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our
loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and even our nation
. . . It really boils down to this. All of life is interrelated. We are
caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of
destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. . . I
cannot be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.” Sisters
and brothers, let us so say, in the whole name of God, to ourselves, to
others, and to this huge hurting world, -- I cannot be what I ought to be
until you are what you ought to be. Amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
