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May 29, 2005
Rev. John Auer
Scripture:
Genesis 6:11-13, 18-22, Psalm 46, Romans
1:19-20, 22b-24, Matthew 7:21-29
“No More Winners:
We Are All in the Same (Sinking) Boat Now”
[I want to give a minute or two of preaching
time for us to start writing our letters to members of Congress around the
theme, “ONE per cent [of our national budget] is all we need to make a better
safer world.” And if we choose to keep writing during the preaching, the
preacher will be delighted! Let’s try to turn in as many letters as we can
today. We can always write more from home.] [To sign the ONE Declaration:
http://www.bread.org.]
One question of Noah’s part in the creation
story -- How natural is it for us to fear, hate, fight, and kill one another in
the first place? How much trouble does military training have to go to get us
to do this, so often and so well? Will we ever outgrow our complicity with such
training and the orders from which it proceeds? Paul in the beginning of
Romans, especially in this Eugene Peterson version, is very clear: We are all
sinners in one sinking boat! What will “force us to face our complicity in
everyone else’s sin?” Must we forever prove “incapable of living the glorious
lives God wills for us?” Will we ever not just believe but ACT as if we believe
that by God’s pure gift of Jesus, to us and to all the world, we are restored to
“right standing with God’s self?” So that we may stop hating, fighting, killing
each other? How hopeful do we dare to be? To act as if we are?
According to John Tierney, columnist for the
New York Times, “Memorial Day started after the Civil War as Decoration
Day, an occasion for war widows wearing red poppies to decorate graves and
memorials in virtually every town. If a war of that scale happened now, there
would be nearly five million graves to tend. Sixteen hundred [the estimated
number of U.S., only U.S., casualties to date in Iraq] is still too many,”
Tierney admits, “but if the trend continues, Memorial Day may eventually become
a memory itself.” I remember with love the Eve Merriam poem that includes a
child asking, “Mommy, what was war?”
What a living memorial that would be! John
Tierney encourages us this Memorial Day to believe the world is unlearning war.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/28/opinion/28tierney.html.]
He cites a biennial study done by the University of Maryland showing a steady
15-year trend cutting organized violence in half. The claim is, “As people get
richer and smarter, their lives and their knowledge become far more valuable
than the land, minerals, and natural resources they used to fight over.” If so,
it seems we might ask ourselves in the U.S. why we are spending four times as
much on this war as the oil in Iraq is worth?! Military spending per capita in
the world has gone down a third since 1985. Why are we as a nation spending
more than all other nations combined?
I want to be hopeful about this but I don’t
want to be naive. I am tired of pretending that war by any other name or any
other justification is any less war, or is any less driven by those who profit
the most from war, or that my own nation is any idealized exception to the very
same temptation to justify aggression and terror in war as any other nation. In
fact, I would ask with historian Howard Zinn, “Is not nationalism – that
devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary, so fierce it leads to murder – one of
the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
These ways of thinking, cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on,
have been useful to those in power, deadly for those out of power.” And I would
urge as Zinn does the graduating class of Spelman College this year, “My hope is
that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do
something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national
boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.”
Hmmmmm. Wiping out national boundaries . . .
Sounds like a job for a flood! The agony of our propensity to divide ourselves
into armed interests and kill one another has haunted God since before Noah:
“The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that
every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.
And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved
him to his heart.” William Sloane Coffin might have said these words of this
text, “Only God has the authority to end life on this planet. All we have is
the power.”
We, humankind, just one species among so
many, grieve our own Creator to the heart! We can be so destructive! When we
as a species are violent every other species suffers. And when we as a species
are violent the youngest and weakest of our own species suffer most. Noah’s
story reminds us of the logo for Children’s Defense Fund -- the original,
authentic movement to “Leave No Child Behind!” -- “Dear Lord, Be good to me.
The sea is so wide and my boat is so small.” Others have said, the church is
like the ark full of animals during the flood – were it not for the dangers
around us, we could not stand the smell among us!
There are no winners in war any more. Jesse
Jackson is fond of saying, we may have come here in different boats, but we’re
all in the same boat now! And there are no losers among peoples or nations any
more. Every one counts. Every one is precious. Made in the image and
“image-in-nation” of God! None should be lost. Nor any creed, culture,
language, or species itself. The Creator who cared to preserve every animal,
even the heart-wrenching human one, surely is mindful of every last loss today.
I choose to believe there’s a trend against war and violence! It’s the “third
way” embodied by Jesus, empowered now by his Spirit.
As Colman McCarthy puts it, not “fight,” not
“flight,” but “friendship.” I choose to believe God’s agenda is our courage to
become brave enough to make peace. But a world still with weapons will not be a
world without war. The psalmist says God “makes wars cease to the end of the
earth! Breaks the bow, shatters the spear! Burns the shields with fire! We
must turn the swords into plowshares, the spears into pruning hooks -- remove
the profit from making any more instruments of destruction and death. Jeanette
Rankin – may her word spread even now -- reminds us, “We can no more win a war
than we can win an earthquake!”
The trend against war is reflected in the
trend toward peoples becoming nations, claiming their rightful place – in the
world and at every table where world-decisions are being made. That’s why the
push is to get these letters in during the next gathering of the “G-8” nations
who decide so much about resources God creates to serve the whole world. Since
the end of World War II the number of nations in the United Nations – who is not
our enemy but our last best hope and friend! – has quadrupled to nearly 200.
Many new nations are wracked with labor pains even now, and still more are in
the birthing. The challenge may not be the number per se, nor even the fact of
nations, but the elevation and preservation of their visions and of their voices
so that every last one is equally seen and heard in the world. The question
raised by Howard Zinn is can there be nationhood, the institutionalizing of
peoplehood, without nationalism? Without all the training in fear and hatred,
fighting and killing of others? We do not need to argue the merits of the UN,
or the EU, or any other example, to see clearly -- the concepts of “union” and
“uniting” face a lot of nationalist reluctance at best today.
“Globalization” so often means “one size fits
all.” I say let the “glottalization” of Pentecost mean “every size gets a
voice!” That’s good church and family practice as well! In our congregational
prayer, we call ourselves “Lovers of diversity with respect for identity, Lovers
of complexity with respect for integrity.” The God of creation pours forth
unending diversity of species, and all that goes with species, as well as
unending complexity of our own species -- still so young, so immature, so
learning, so growing, in all the ways we are meant to go. Yet we are not
calling for diversity or complexity as ends in themselves. We respect the needs
for identity within diversity, for integrity within complexity. It’s a bit
like the sign of the cross – loving the breadth and the scope of God’s infinite
creativity, while respecting the depth and the focus of each person’s finite
createdness.
We are all in this life, this ark, this
church, on this rock -- together! Jesus says here he sees us not so much in
terms of what we say, even what we believe – after all, anyone can be claiming
to speak in his name! – but in terms of what we DO, how we act upon what we
believe. Just saying his name is sand. Doing his name is rock! As the
anti-apartheid women of South Africa used to say, in us you have struck a rock!
They were putting their lives on the line! I was asked after preaching last
week if I take the Bible literally. I made a rather evasive response about
taking the “good news” literally. My more considered response is that I do not
take the Bible literally so much as I take it very seriously. For me it has to
do with the distinction made at the end of this gospel between the “authority”
of Jesus and that of the scribes. Jesus is no fundamentalist, but he is a “foundationalist.”
And the foundation he offers is not just his words but his life!
My sense is that those whom some of us call
“evangelicals” in fact seem to go through the Bible picking and choosing
proof-texts to make and support particular points of their own authority. Those
of us who may be called “liberals” in fact seem to be letting the authority of
Jesus – who says so little about some of the things we fight over so much today
-- speak more for itself -- through the great biblical themes of forgiveness,
love, creativity, justice, peace, community. That’s why Jim Wallis says if we
cut out the sexual references in the Bible we could not tell they were gone.
But if we cut out the social and economic references, our Bibles would fall
apart! I believe we are called to engage in the struggle, in the United
Methodist Church and beyond, for the very soul of what scripture says.
Dr. King used to like to remind us we live in
one ark, one “World House.” Richard Rohr points to our foundation in prayer –
“To pray is to build your own house. To pray is to discover that Someone else
is within your house. To pray is to recognize that it is not your house at
all. To keep praying is to have no house to protect because there is only One
House. And that One House is everybody’s Home. . . . That is the politics of
prayer. And that is why truly spiritual people are always a threat to
politicians of any sort. They want our allegiance and we can no longer give
it. Our house is too big.”
Our house is too big for anyone to be left
out! As the crowds realize when Jesus speaks, the real “authority” lies not in
scripture, not even in his words, but in him! My favorite theologian, Buzz
Lightyear, points us further: “To the Trinity, and beyond!” As we said of the
Trinity last week, “We are a living people of a living faith in a living God
whose living word and living works in a living Christ call us to give living
witness and living service to a living Spirit to the living ends of a living
Earth!” Carol Palleson suggested to me we close by repeating the response we
just sang to the psalm. Please say after me – “Be still and know that I am
God.” Be still and know that I am. Be still and know. Be still. Be. Amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
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