“Revolutionary Fulfillment: Life, Liberty, and the Purfuit of Happineff”
A couple of start-up points about
independence –
1) Please pick up one or as many as you
can use of these brand-new directories called “Your Guide to Locally Owned
Businesses and Community Organizations.” It’s published by the Conscious
Community and Business Network, which we have supported from its inception,
and subtitled “Keep Truckee Meadows Wild and Independent!” (www.livingdirectory.net/CCBN)
2) Today and tomorrow please spend time reading these excerpts (“Words
for Meditation”) of a speech to college graduates this year by “Granny D”
Haddock. She’s a “Jeanette Rankin” of our time, now age 90, who really
walks her talk. Five years ago she walked from California to the nation’s
capitol to call for an end to the system of corruption called “campaign
finance.” (www.grannyd.com).
It fascinates me how much talk of
“ending” injustices – ending homelessness (www.endhomelessness.org),
ending hunger (www.bread.org,
www.hungernomore.org), ending disease, ending pollution,
ending poverty (www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/endofpoverty),
even ending war (www.peopleforpeace)
– is in the air right now! Our biblical faith is what we call
“eschatological.” We do believe in the “ending” of things as they are! We
may differ on both the meanings of the ending, and the means by which we get
there. But we cannot escape the prophetic instruction, some of it from
Jesus, to live as though “the ending” were near. What if that means, as
John Dominic Crossan puts it, not the end of the world --so commonly
construed in self-serving justification for doing nothing to improve the
world! – but the end of evil -- of injustice, of domination, of oppression
and exploitation in the world!
Let’s read together the last five lines
of “Granny D’s” words to the graduates – “We must take our responsible and
loving place at the table of power . . . Our old revolution against
oppression and unfairness is never concluded. It is a joyful revolution.
If you will put yourself fearlessly into it, keeping always an open mind and
a tolerant heart – for those are the true flags of justice and freedom! Let
those lofty banners signify your life now and onward to the last day of your
long, happy, meaningful, and love-filled life.” Sounds pretty radical –
until we read the founding documents of our nation! Until we read the
founding documents, biblical and otherwise, of our faith and our church!
Even until we read the founding documents of Methodism, created about the
same time as our nation!
Comedian Stan Freberg is coming to Reno
this fall. In his History of the United States he insists on
pronouncing the original spelling “the purfuit of happineff.”
It is a revolutionary pursuit if we keep it in context – if we seek it not
just for our own lives but for our life together with all other persons and
peoples. Remember, the Declaration of Independence begins with reference to
“the Course of human events,” not only North American ones. It calls upon
“the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and evokes “the opinions of [hu]mankind.”
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness” remind me of John Wesley’s three dimensions of grace as may be
found in The Hymnal section entitled “The Power of the Holy Spirit” – “prevenient,”
“justifying,” and “sanctifying and perfecting” grace. First is “life” as
“prevenient grace.” It is the gift of existence itself – over which we
have no control, we cannot earn or deserve it -- yet without it nothing else
is possible -- hence the important saying, where there is life, there is
hope! God is the only giver of life. The gift of life goes before us.
(This story of finding Rebekah – how it all seems to fall into place as
“God’s plan” – hints at that -- though it is also a tortured tribute to the
ongoing system of patriarchy!) Life as prevenient is not the
narrowly-defined “culture of life” -- caring so much for life before birth
and life after death but so little for life in between birth and death. It
is that very power to give life -- the freeness, the fullness, the wholeness
of life -- power to make all things new, found in us as made in the image of
our Creator.
Second is “liberty” as “justifying grace”
-- the liberation from sin that Paul portrays here as that which blinds us
to the mystery of our own selves. We are so often our own worst enemies.
We are not who we think we are, not who we say we are. We are full of
conflicts and contradictions, so that we do not understand our own actions.
We don’t do what we want to do but often the very opposite. Look at the
effect of our war in Iraq! No matter what we may think of it, we cannot
argue that it has turned out very differently than we intended. The road to
disaster, we know – Paul knows! -- is paved with our good intentions. That
is precisely why we need some kind of life under law! God, free us from our
good intentions. Free us from defining ourselves over against those who
differ from us. Help us expand our sense of ourselves, as connected to you,
to others, and to all your creation. Help us live by laws of shared
governance in ways that we may accept the imperfectness of our own beings,
as well as those of all others.
Third is “the pursuit of happiness” as
“sanctifying and perfecting grace.” It is the struggle to do the best we
can with all we’ve got, in conviction that God is not done with us yet! Nor
is God done with anyone else – including our “enemies” -- yet! Nor is God
even done with creation itself yet! We are still discovering new places and
species in our universe. We are still discovering diversities and
complexities of our own species! While we may never reach perfection,
there is nothing quite so exciting, so exhilarating, so encouraging, so
ennobling as what John Wesley calls “going on” to perfection! Standing
for, living and working for, even risking and dying for, the highest of
hopes and the wildest of dreams – even against the greatest of odds. Just
try the “peace vigil” some Monday at 5:30 PM!
And when we sing patriotic hymns, as we
do today, let us not only flash on images of soldiers dying in all of our
wars. Let us also flash on images of those who have lived for justice and
peace. Many have been just as stressed, just as threatened, just as
opposed, even just as attacked. Let us lift up the courage of both and of
all. Some day, we will let go our pretenses and our defenses, our privileges
and our protections. Some day, we will come to accept our common origin in
one Creator, who makes us to be one body with so many parts, one world with
so many peoples. Some day, we will learn just to let people live!
Let us hear the global context of these
familiar words -- changed only to speak in the “first person,” as we say --
since responsibility for these words begins with each one of us, in our own
time and place – in our own nation, age, language, gender, class, color,
condition in life -- and in the questions and challenges of right relations
of justice and peace, facing us all as people of faith in the God still
going before us -- still making and showing our way out of no way –
We hold these truths to
be self-evident, that all of us are created equal,
that we are endowed by
our Creator with certain unalienable rights,
that among these are
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness –
That to secure these
rights, Governments are instituted among us,
deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed –
That whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the right of the
People to alter or to abolish it,
and to institute new
Government, laying its foundation on such principles,
and organizing its power
in such form,
as to them shall seem
most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will
dictate that Government long-established
should not be changed for
light and transient causes;
and accordingly all
experience hath shewn, that we are more disposed to suffer,
while evils are
sufferable, than to right ourselves by abolishing
the forms to which we are
accustomed.
But when a long train of
abuses and usurpations,
pursuing invariably the
same Object evinces a design to reduce us
under absolute Despotism,
it is our right, it is our duty,
to throw off such
government and to provide new Guards for our future security.
Jesus seems always asking us, in effect,
what are we waiting for? Why do we not dance when we hear the flute
playing? Why do we not mourn when we hear the world wailing? Or even our
own souls? Not only do we reject the judgmental view of John that sees only
destruction and despair for us to flee from! Only one kind of “ending.”
But then we reject as well the joyful view of Jesus that sees also new life
and new love for us to participate in! A whole “other” possible ending!
What are we waiting for? What more do we need of Jesus? How do we justify
such a sense of our powerlessness, our paralysis, to account for the hope
that Jesus puts in us? For the trust we say we put in a living and loving
God?
Jesus comes down hard on traditional
leadership here -- whether of church or of state. We tend to become so
elitist, so cut off from the base of the everyday lives of our people. We
tend to become so exceptionalist, so certain that God is approving us and
rewarding us for something that makes us superior to everyone else in the
world. We tend to become so exclusivist, so convinced of our own
righteousness, of our own tight circle of loyal advisors, who refuse to put
questions or challenges to us. Who refuse to give us the chance to confess,
to see ourselves in larger context, to offer ourselves anew to God who is
with us.
Jesus calls us out of our frozen fears in
our frozen pews and our frozen lives to what Dorothee Soelle calls his own
“liberated spontaneity!” His risenness! Jesus’ own life for us in this
moment! Jesus own life for us in our time, in our place, here, now, in our
lives! Jesus’ life in our own questions, our challenges, our choices, our
decisions – to which we can only respond for ourselves, but to which we may
choose to respond in the community of others for whom things as they are,
business as usual, no longer satisfies or sustains us. That is the ongoing
work of the Holy Spirit -- to make Jesus so present, so powerful to us, to
make Jesus so filling and freeing of us, so satisfying and so sustaining to
us -- that we may choose to follow him, over and over again -- through every
defeat and disappointment, every disaster and despair -- in radical response
to new life and love, for others and for the whole world, God is offering
right here and now!
When Jesus here invites us to his “rest
-- ” his yoke that is easy, his burden so light -- he is speaking of his own
“rest” in God, and in the “rest” of creation itself. This is the Sabbath,
the Pentecost, the Jubilee “rest” of God – on the seventh day, in the
seventh year, in the seven times seventh year – the “rest” that breaks all
our cycles of built-in oppression and exploitation -- whereby the rich get
richer and the poor end up in debt or in death, in prison or at war. The
Jubilee promise of Jesus is made flesh when Jesus preaches his very first
sermon on “good news to the poor, liberty to the oppressed.” It is embodied
in the life of the Pentecost church, the earliest church, the church of the
Book of Acts -- where each gives to all so none stays in need. Jesus the
very child of God does not come just to put a few band-aids upon an old
ailing system. Jesus says no new wine into old wineskins! No new patches
on old garments. We can do better than this!
Somehow it sounds like Jesus -- and it
sounds like the church of Jesus, the body of Christ -- facing any imperial
power, from Rome to our own day, that mistakes itself for God – saying,
“whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is
the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” Tomorrow is called
“Independence Day.” There is much to honor and to respect about the
struggles of all peoples and all nations to become both free and fulfilled.
(Speaking of independence globally, we remember, in just sixty years the
United Nations has grown from 50 to 192 -- and counting! Independence is
much more than an “American” dream.) Might Jesus well be saying to us this
day that all of the nation-states and their governments -- with all of our
prisons and all of our wars – have become leaky wineskins and worn-out
garments? That the people of God need to move from national to universal
loyalties and allegiances? That what we live and love and long for is not
only “Independence Day” but the Jubilee “INTERdependence Day,” the day when
all peoples truly unite in one body of many parts – each with a vision, each
with a voice, each with a vote – each with a “vita” – a life under God for
all of God’s children?! Just asking. Amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
