“The Promised
Land Is, There Is No Promised Land, ... and Here We Are!”
Am I the only one not wearing a mask today? When All Hallows Eve falls this
early in the week, we are given extra time to prepare for All Saints Sunday
– faith speaking to all the fears of our lives! Most fears are of death,
and of dying. We humans are such self-conscious beings – the very
self-consciousness of the universe, we think! We experience death not once
but many times – death by war, death by violence; death by pain, death by
suffering; death by loss, death by grief; death by sin, death by separation;
death by ignorance, death by exclusion; and more. You name it, we
all-too-human beings may fear it!
Once in a while, we stop to honor the powers
of death in our lives! We learn from other cultures. There is a Dia de los
Muertos, or Day of the Dead, celebration today, 2 to 8 pm, at Parklane
Mall. We learn to live a little more lightly, brightly, playfully,
prayerfully, with death. We dress up boldly, as witches and demons and
ghosts -- What the Book of Common Prayer used to call “Ghoulies and ghosties
/ and long-leggity beasties / and things that go bump in the night!” We
take time to hide from ourselves, and from all our fears – behind scary
masks and frightening jack-o-lanterns – beating our fears at their own
game! Making friends with our fears! Offering candies and sweets not to
“trick” us! Making friends even with death – with the dead who still scare
us the most! Calling them out, seeing and talking with them – showing we
are not afraid.
Lighting candles for them! Helping our dead
follow the wandering of their souls – Some much further to wander than
others and needing more light! Allowing their lights to shine anew in our
lives! From their vantage point of “the big picture,” they help to show US
the way – to live out our lives, as fully, as freely, as faithfully, as we
possibly can. “Days of the Dead,” All Hallows, or All Souls, and All Saints
Days, invite us to show our dead how we best remember them – by their
pictures and books, their symbols and signs, the favorite flowers and foods
of their lives. We are invited to bring pictures, mementos, of “all our
saints” next Sunday! We will name those gone before us – in family, in
church, in world – whose life and witness, faith and works, help us keep on
keeping on.
Our Prayer Group at Thursday noon remembers
families of the dead for at least a year thereafter. Some of us send cards
or make calls to others on or around the anniversaries of deaths in our
lives. Pastor John Emerson offers meetings on living with loss and with
grief. Death is powerful with us. In fact, we affirm, were it not for God,
death would be the very last word about life! No one avoids or escapes
death in the end. Is that right? Our faith lies in resurrection, not
immortality – though some of us hold our illusions of that! Death even
serves to remind us – in our return to earth, at least, thereby in the
eternal sight of our God! – we are, at last, equal in every respect! Death
is no respecter of persons! No matter how much we may love life -- and how
well and how long we may live – death comes, in the end, as a friend, who
brings us relief and release.
Every time I try to sit with a person or
family through dying and to death, I know all over again how much I have yet
to learn – about seeing all of life as a gift, including death – and helping
others, including me, receive the deaths of loved ones as part of the gift
of their lives. We are invited to celebrate the completed life of Vivian
“Vee” Davis in our midst, this Saturday at 5 pm. Someone has said “the
communion of saints” means there are no private deaths. Tom Joad says at
the end of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, maybe we don’t just have
a soul of our own, but more of a piece of a big one!
For me it is this ultimate and inevitable
equality of the gifts and the worths of our lives – both as whole persons
and as whole peoples – that inspires what we may call “messianic hope” for
the church and the world today. Much as we know death is unavoidable, we
know just as well there are lots of avoidable deaths! Just imagine if we
could eliminate those deaths human agency, personal and collective, helps to
cause – if we could change the circumstances and conditions of life for all
those most vulnerable to avoidable death – and specially for the 30,000
children a day who die out of our world that way. That is for me what it
means to live as if the Messiah, whom we call the Christ, has come – the
Promise of God fulfilled! The earliest church, the “Jesus movement,” has
been called “a discipleship of equals” practicing “a solidarity from
below!” A discipleship of equals, a solidarity from below. (Still sounds
like the UN to me!)
The “Faith” page of the paper featured an
article yesterday on what is called a “Messianic Congregation” for Jews who
believe Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah. For me the question is not why
Jews or those of any other religious tradition do not live as if Jesus were
the Messiah – since they never have claimed that is true for their lives.
The question is why we Christians, who have claimed that is true for our
lives, go on living as if the Messiah had not come – even as if never
expected he or she ever would come! If Jesus is the Messiah for us, how
come so many of us are living as if Jesus had never lived? Or died? Or
lived again as the promise and passion, the presence and power, that put us
in touch with God in such a way that we, too, can live messianically! Can
live out the so-called “kingdom of God” within us and among us! What are we
waiting for? What more can we possibly need than Jesus has already given
us? Where are the fruits of our labors? The evidence of our faith? If we
believe we have crossed over into “the promised land,” what happened to the
promise? Why have we kept and hoarded so much of it just for ourselves?
Just asking.
This Reformation Sunday says, We protest!
We are Protest-ants! We are born to protest the ageless tendency of our
leaders of both church and state, both religion and politics, to cut
themselves off from the lives of the everyday people – to become so
exclusive and so concerned with the comfort of their own condition, with
regard for their own reputation. The great reformers, the great protestors
of both church and world – Luther is only one among many – Moses was! Jesus
was! St. Francis was! John Wesley was! Mahatma Gandhi, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Dr. King, Dorothy Day, Archbishop Romero were! Rosa Parks was!
Jeanette Rankin was! Some would say Cindy Sheehan is! Rev. Beth Stroud is
– as we await the Judicial Council ruling on her orders tomorrow! How many
great movements flow through and from some one person standing up for
justice and righteousness’ sake? Or “sitting down” that others may stand up
– as we say of Rosa Parks? And there’s always the temptation to idealize
and decontextualize such “exceptional” folks. Rosa Parks did not just
“happen” out of nowhere. She was what I call “TOP” – Trained (by the
Highlander Folk School), Organized (through the NAACP and local unions), and
Prepared! Ready when her time came! Imagine where so many more, and where
in our own lives do we as well, say with Luther, -- “Here I stand! God help
me, I can do no other”?
Such reformers and protestors do not set out
to start movements, certainly not to found institutions, so much as they set
out to put the church and the state back in touch with the people – who are
the church and the state in the first place – Remember “We the people?” To
get back in touch specially with those excluded and exiled, cast out and
left out of the organized and established communities of their times and
places. Imagine those all around us with no place to “belong,” no place to
call “home.” That is what John Wesley did with farmers and miners, with
prisoners and poor. That is what Martin Luther did by insisting upon direct
access for all the people both to word and to sacrament in the church. One
commentator says, “To be a layperson in Luther’s church was to exist in a
fully privileged state of life!” And that is what “liberation theology” and
the “base community” movement have done for people and for the church in our
own time. The whole world is rising up! Some of us who allegedly have been
through “Reformation” may need to go through it again – while some others
who never did better hope for it soon, or “pass on” -- to irrelevance and to
extinction!
Reformers are radicals – literally, those
who return to their roots – in scripture and in oral tradition. Jesus and
the early church were reformers who never stopped being Jews. Reform for
them was return – not so much going back to the past as letting the past
come forward to us – to the liberating life and work of Moses. In the same
way we are called to return to the liberating life and work of Jesus and the
early church! That’s what Luther was doing – though he did not go far
enough. Jesus confronts us this morning with how hard it is to practice
what we preach! To act upon what we believe – what we say we believe, at
least. To make God’s living Word about life incarnate – promising,
passionate, present, powerful – in our lives and lives of others ours are
privileged to touch.
Jesus comes not to destroy the Law of Moses
but to fulfill it! There is nothing so wrong with what these leaders, these
scribes and Pharisees, are saying. They are quoting and even interpreting
scripture accurately enough. But look at the way they are living, says
Jesus! They are not – we are not! – practicing what we preach! Therefore
we make the Word of God much harder, more challenging, on everyone else than
we do on ourselves! We, like our leaders, tend to cut ourselves off from
the masses of people – isolating, insulating ourselves – living in some
“other” world – even some “gated” community – some “walled” nation – with
our own “privatized” systems of education, health care, transportation,
security, etc. -- Can I get a witness?! We tend to identify ourselves only
with “others” who think and talk and look and act the very same ways that we
do! We tend to stick with the tribe of Levi, “the clan,” if we are priests
– and with our religious “professional” association, “the club,” is we are
Pharisees!
We tend to start looking down on people not
“like us” – as if “justice” were really “just us!” We tend to make
hierarchies of value, whether we mean to or not. We get manipulated, even
co-opted, bought off, by “outside” and “vested” interests who benefit if we
leaders or wannabes get divided against our own people -- There’s always
somebody ready to take our weakness to the bank! So Jesus says we load tons
of tradition and expectation on others – weakest, most vulnerable – mothers
and children! Then we do nothing to help them carry the very load we have
dumped on them. Jesus is warning us here, our calling is always to build
people up – never to put people down! Always to help to set people free –
never to keep them indebted to us! Always to share power with them – never
to lord power over them!
Peoples of the world today, symbolically,
are lining up by the River Jordan to pass into the Promised Land! The
Promise is not good for any if the Promise is not good for all. Jesus is
not the Messiah for any if Jesus is not the Messiah for all. Here on the
edge of the Promise, these “no people” – much less “non-believers!” – it is
not so much about a person’s “belief” as about their “being!” – these “no
people” but slaves in Egypt, pass through the waters of new life – are
“baptized” into full peoplehood in the sight of God! And in the course of
the world! We hear in this story God’s jubilant joy, and justice, at births
of people! God gladly holds back the waters for us to be made new! For us
to “pass over” again into “Promised Land” – lands everywhere, where “no
people” are becoming “God’s people!” Even where every avoidable death is
passing away. God – and the UN! --have been so busy with such “new people”
these past 60 years!
I thought I was going to call for the
resignation today of whoever is really in charge – if anyone is! – of our
government and what it is doing, to world and to earth, in all of our
names. And maybe that is in order. Walter Wink submits, “The ultimate
religious question today should no longer be the sixteenth-century
Reformation query, ‘How can I find a gracious God?’ but rather ‘How can we
find God in our enemies?’ What guilt was for Martin Luther, fear has become
for us: the goad that can drive us to God.” I am just not sure, for all of
its religious rhetoric and retinue, this administration is up to that kind
of reformation.
Yet the work of the church remains
reformation, not resignation! “Resignation” today only seems to commit us
to ever more cynical cycles of death, destruction, denial, despair. Hear
the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, (“Dirge without Music”) –
I am not resigned to
the shutting away of loving hearts in the
hard ground. So it
is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out
of mind. Into the
darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies
and laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
. . .
Down, down, down into
the darkness of the grave. Gently
They go, the
beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the
Intelligent, the
witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve.
And I am not resigned.
The church is about reformation, not
resignation. We are about “prophetics,” and “poetics,” leaving the
“politics” of it to others – God help us! And according to what happens to
Jesus, if we follow him we will find, the “prophetics” and the “poetics” are
a lot more risky and deadly than the “politics!” It is all we can do --
each one of us in our own way, yet all of us together in ways that bring
life to the world and the earth – to live as if Jesus lives! As if Jesus
really is the Messiah for us! As if we really believe that -- and act as if
all the works that he does for justice and peace are among the “greater
works” that he promises we are yet to do in his name! Truly, the works of
reformation – not those of resignation.
So I close instead with “A Prayer for George
Alexander, Jr.” United Methodist Bishop William Willimon, North Alabama
Conference, wrote it this week for Sgt. Alexander, age 34, native of
Alabama, graduate of Chilton County High School, and the 2000th
United States service-person to die in our war in Iraq. All the words that
follow are Bishop Willimon’s words --
Lord Jesus, King of Kings, Savior of
the World, Prince of Peace, hear this prayer for George, son of Alabama,
two thousandth American soldier to die in our war in Iraq. Receive him,
we pray – a lamb of Your flock, a sinner for whom You have died, a
cherished and beloved Child of God – and one who is at peace at last,
because he is with You.
George had an Alabama boyhood, an
Alabama youth, and Alabama dreams. I pray for his mother, for his
family and friends, his church, and all those for whom his death means
not only the ending of his dreams, but the beginning of their lifetime
of grief and loss. Lord, help us to feel some measure of their pain.
Save us from offering cheap consolation or patriotic platitudes in the
face of their loss. Instill in our heard hearts a determination to work
with You for a government in which we shall make peace as quickly and
resourcefully as we make war, a country that loves your righteousness
and justice more than our security and power.
One and Only Way, Truth, and Life,
give us the grace to live by your Word rather than by our weapons. Lord
Jesus, You never lifted your hand against anyone. You refused to defend
Yourself even when unjustly attacked, You resisted violence with peace
and nonviolence, and You never, ever told us that war was the answer for
anything. When will we move from worshipping You to following You?
Seeker and Lover of the Lost, forgive
us our sin of attempting to solve the world’s problems through violence
and war, forgive us of our willingness to once again allow old people
like me to send young people like George to make war on others and to
suffer and die to preserve our privileges, forgive us for loving our
freedom more than Your peace, and for treating Your gift of life so
casually. Give us, in our grief for fallen daughters and sons, an equal
amount of grief for the deaths of the twenty-five thousand Iraqi sisters
and brothers in Christ. Grant us a miracle: that George be not only the
two thousandth young American to die on this war, but also the last.
Judge of us all, I confess that I
have not prayed enough, have not embodied Your truth enough, have not
been critical enough of our political leaders, have acquiesced to the
plans of the initiators and makers of war, rather than to join the ranks
of your blessed makers of peace. In Your name, and in heartfelt grief
for the loss of George, and in bold confidence in Your coming Kingdom, I
pray. Amen.
Rev. John Auer
