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June 18, 2006
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Ezekiel 17:22-24, 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, Mark 4:26-34
“Scattered Seed: Never Too Late to Take Root and
Grow”
The Civil War is fighting itself all over again, and again, in the United Methodist
Church. We may remember that our predecessor body the Methodist Episcopal
Church split into North and South factions leading up to the Civil War and remained
so until 1940! This the year the United Methodists celebrate the 50th
Anniversary of Full Clergy Rights for Women of our denomination. The highlight
of this week’s 158th session of the California-Nevada Annual Conference
was Wednesday morning special worship entitled “Courageous Past, Bold Future” –
honoring all the clergy women of this conference – plus retired Bishop Leontine
T. C. Kelly and current Bishop Beverly J. Shamana. Fifteen women now serve
as bishops in our Church -- and one in every five clergypersons is a woman!
The worship included re-enactments of the General Conference debate of 1956 and
of the challenges as well as the comforts clergywomen are met with to this day.
One ventures to speculate that significant resistance to full rights for clergy
women could be found in sectors of the church once resisting full rights for black
members as well. And even now resisting full rights for Lesbian Gay Bisexual
Transgender members of the United Methodist Church. Our own former pastor
Bob Olmstead co-authored this booklet for the occasion, “Recollections on the Way.”
Between now and General Conference in two years, our conference intends to publish
four more papers in a series entitled “ON THE WAY: Visions of the Whole Gospel.”
Once again, the Western Jurisdiction will be calling upon the whole church to live
out a gospel for the salvation/liberation, health/wholeness of all peoples.
Our conference vision states it: “Passion in Jesus Christ – Compassion for all;
Diverse Cultures – Diverse Geography – One in Christ.”
The coinciding of Fathers Day and “Juneteenth” gives us the chance to meet up with
that rare tradition of men, brothers, fathers, even patriarchs called the “Buffalo
Soldiers” – beginning as northern Amer-Afrikan soldiers of the Civil War. Sister
ISHA Echols and members of Ultra Youth! AgriCULTURALArts will be relating this tradition
in 10 AM worship today. These soldiers first carried out the very different
of mission of spreading “good news,” not war – bearing witness to the Emancipation
Proclamation – the official end of slavery in the United States of America -- to
the farthest reaches of the Confederacy – even to Texas! Where “Juneteenth”
is considered by many to be the true “Jubilee” and “Fourth of July.” Nearly
a full two and a half years after the proclamation was issued, it still had not
reached every slave – and some were determined it never would!
Resistance by definition is built into every struggle for salvation/liberation,
health/wholeness. Yet the West of this nation traditionally proves less resistant,
more accepting and more inclusive. While immigration matters threaten to try
our souls anew, we do well to remember that the first non-Indian to explore the
territory of New Mexico was an African, Esteban de Dorantes – even as was the “founder”
of Chicago, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable. Rev. Phil Lawson receiving the
Bishop Melvin Talbert Anti-Racism Award this week reminded us how many slaves escaped
across what was then the Oklahoma border and were welcomed into Mexico. An
early president of Mexico was African.
Lewis and Clark were accompanied by the slave named York. Some 20,000 ex-slave
“Exodusters” migrated from the south to Kansas in the 1870s. 5000 black cowboys
rode cattle trails. 20 percent of the U.S. Calvary in the West was “Buffalo
Soldiers.” No wonder diplomat and author (including the words to “Lift Every Voice
and Sing!”) James Weldon Johnson is quoted,1925, in the Denver Post, “Your
West is giving the Negro a better deal than any other section of the country . .
. there is more opportunity for my race and less prejudice against it in this section
of the country than anywhere else in the United States.” I hasten to add,
it is not for me to say this is was true all the time and in every place.
But it is hopeful for our future. May the West, including Reno/Sparks, keep
bearing witness that the sun sets on more and more inclusive diversity all the time!
What are these scriptural images of Ezekiel and of Jesus this morning – high trees
falling, low trees rising, green trees dying, dry trees coming to life – the smallest
seed of all becoming the greatest shrub, putting forth branches large enough that
all of the bird can make nests there – what are these but images of inclusive diversity?
Of salvation and liberation, health and wholeness? What is Paul describing
here – if not the stony road and bitter rod of those who have come through and out
of bondage – “a way that with tears has been watered?” A “path through the
blood of the slaughtered?” “You won’t see us hanging our heads or dragging
our feet,” say Paul and the “Buffalo Soldiers!” “Cramped conditions here”
– In Amer-Afrikans’ slavery! In women’s kitchens! In Les/Bi/ Trans/Gay
peoples’ closets! – “Cramped conditions here don’t get us down. They only
remind us of the spacious conditions ahead!” They remind us of emancipation!
Of full civil and full human rights! We trust where we cannot yet see – for
God is not done with us yet! We trust in Christ, and we trust in earth.
Sisters and brothers, the earth, the land, the ground make all the difference.
We are as scattered seed. The ones who sow us do not know us as we are known
in Christ and the earth. The poet Gibran reminds us, our children are not
our children – but as arrows shot from the past into the future, our children only
pass through us. We receive the gifts of their lives as fully as we possibly
can. We love them, nurture them, care for them, challenge and comfort them,
as carefully as we possibly can. Then, even as we acknowledge in our children’s
baptisms, we let them go! They come from God, and they go toward God. They
are not finally ours to own or control. Nor are they ours to abuse or to sacrifice
– in any violence or war, in any exploitation or greed. Our children belong
to Christ and to earth. The smallest of all of our children will grow to be
greater than we. We dare not try to control them by force. They will
always “outgrow” us at last – even as the Israelites in their bondage “outgrew”
and no longer feared the Egyptians.
The growth of our children in maturity and in wisdom is irresistible and irreversible
– even as “The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the
full grain.” There is no way to fight our children growing to take their full
and free place in this world. It is long past time for us to stop trying to
deny them and to yield our own interests, investments, ideologies, and institutions
to their well-being. We have got to stop pretending that war and global warming
are inevitable. We have got to stop pretending that only one age, class, language,
culture, nation, color, gender, identity is fit to rule in this earth. The
earth belongs to us all – as we all belong to the earth. We have got to stop
hogging and hoarding our land and resources and let them belong to God again!
Which means let them serve all peoples, all creatures, again – in response to those
who will tend and share the land and resources in ways that conserve and sustain
them. Sister ISHA and Ultra Youth! AgriCULTURALArts work in urban gardens.
Their program is called “R.E.A.L.” – Responsibility. Earth. Arts. Learning.
I invite us to learn, in turn, how we might encourage them and support them.
We have got to keep thinking of Jesus, and of how easily his proclamation of a new
way of seeing and hearing and speaking and doing God on this earth was ridiculed
and dismissed, persecuted and finally silenced – at least so they thought!
But as Jesus says of himself in John 12, when a single seed falls into the ground
and dies to itself and its old way and form of life and of living, it is able to
yield itself more freely and fully than ever to the earth. And with the earth,
the single seed is able to burst forth, take root and grow – in ways and forms beyond
all our imagining! That seed is just the first fruits of all who will rise
from their deaths by denial and exclusion into new life of acceptance and inclusion,
of salvation and liberation, of health and wholeness. Pentecost is the Harvest
Feast -- not just of the Letter but also of the Spirit of the Law – the very Living
Word of God! Harvest is the Jubilee of God – sharing in land and resources
that all may freely, fully live!
Only the eyes of faith, brothers and sisters, are suited to being fathers and mothers
and parents and carers of any and every kind for the children of our lives and our
life together. Imagine looking upon our children as the tiniest seeds we might
hold in our hands. Only the eyes of faith imagine those smallest of seeds
growing into huge trees of justice and peace for all creatures and peoples.
“The eyes of faith don’t despise small beginnings,” Jim Wallis of Sojourners assures
us, guiding us in relation to our children. “The eyes of faith don’t despair
of little things.” Often, as Children’s Defense Fund (www.childrensdefense.org)
puts it (and I would support founder/director Marian Wright Edelman for president
of the United States – in a heartbeat!), we look at the problems that face our hope
for a future of justice and peace for our children, and we pray, “Help us, dear
Lord, for the sea is so big, and our boat is so small.”
We face overwhelming odds as against the mustard seed. Moreover, Jim Wallis
continues, “We live in a rootless age. People are tossed to and fro by every
wind.” If we cannot stand for something, we are apt to fall for anything!
“Those in power know that’s the best way to control people:” Wallis writes, “take
them away from their roots, destroy their knowledge of the past, crush their hope
for the future, consign them to live only in the present.” Do we realize how
purposefully we uprooted Amer-Afrikans from their land, their home, their culture,
their faith? Julie and I had the incredible good fortune to be pastoring in
a mixed congregation with growing numbers of African-Americans of all ages at the
time the TV special dramatization of Alex Haley’s book, “Roots,” was shown over
a period of several weeks in the mid-1970s. The sense of expectancy and intensity
of response of people from week to week were like so many are experiencing with
World Cup soccer matches at the moment. What a testimony the story of “Roots” is
to heroic fathers and mothers enduring against the most hideous odds!
In many ways the power of that experience of recovering a sense of where we have
come from, what we have been through, how “we’ve come this far by faith, leaning
on the Lord!” inspired persons of all national and cultural journeys to look for
and claim their roots. It is never too late for us to take root and grow.
Wherever we are in our lives at the moment, however lost and confused, cut off and
defeated we may feel, God is not done with us yet! This tiny mustard seed’s
worth of faith has created for us God’s “family tree” to which we all may belong,
in Christ and in earth. So many mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers,
have gone and yet go before us – making a way out of no way, calling, urging us
on.
In her Preface to Bob Olmstead’s booklet, Bishop Shamana recalls these words
of songwriter Dorie Ellzey inspiring struggles for women’s rights and for ours –
There are times we reach an
opening / … of a door, a coming through;
and we know the situation
calls for something new.
There are times we cannot
see what lies ahead
but still we know, there is
a life to be led,
a path to follow and we must
go. / And we must go . . . .
AND THE ONES WHO COME BEFORE
US WILL SHOW US THE WAY.
AND THE ONES WHO FOLLOW AFTER
WILL WELCOME THE NEW DAY.
AND THE ONES WHO COME BEFORE
US WILL JOIN IN THE CHORUS WHEN WE DO -- / WHEN WE MAKE IT THROUGH!
Still “on the way,” let us say, Amen!
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