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September 24, 2006
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Proverbs 31:16-25,
30-31, Psalm 1, James 3:13, 17-18, Mark 9:30-37
“And the Wisdom
to Grow the Difference”
Thanks for taking us back in the pulpit – I’ll try to make up for lost time!
And thanks for releasing us last weekend and a weekend last month for the United
Methodist Women’s Schools of Christian Mission – great organization, great
events! We taught, preached and performed “A Single Woman” -- the mighty story
of first US Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin -- a sure embodier of this proverbial
tradition of capable women’s wisdom we hear about in Proverbs 31! Only Proverbs
attributes this wisdom to “a capable wife” -- and Jeanette was never that! Can
we imagine a man visionary enough, outspoken enough, passionate enough, active
enough, courageous enough for her? As she moved through leadership roles in
social service, suffrage, politics, civil rights, and every peace-and-justice
issue we can name over a 92-year lifetime?
Women of biblical wisdom cannot be defined exclusively by any one relationship.
Our wedding coordinator Sue Roberts makes that richly clear to each couple who
come for our congregational ministry of wedding and marriage: In United
Methodist wisdom, every woman is strong-spirited, free to choose, the equal of
any man! Is that right? So much more than “capable,” every woman is,
as Proverbs suggests, trustworthy, positive, hardworking, skillful,
undomesticated, well-organized, bold in such decision and action as buying and
growing land!
Women of biblical wisdom are self-developing,
self-valuing, outreaching, generous, prepared for challenging times, respectful
of quality, entrepreneurial, infinitely resourceful! Such women are able to
“laugh at the time to come,” for they are already secure in their own relations
with God! They are already deeply invested in the common good and the public
life of the people! These women believe and practice that what is good for all
belongs to all! They sound like any number of women of this congregation we
might name! Can I get a witness??
Biblical wisdom such as Psalm 1 lifts up this morning lies in a sense of the
vital importance each one of us has in God’s sight – the vital difference God
invites and enables each one of us to make! It is a sense of each one of
us in our own way planted and rooted and growing in God – like trees by the
waters, by the Truckee! – yet creating a life together more enduring than the
sum of all our parts. Huge trees like redwoods stand so well for so long
because their roots become interconnected, interrelated with one another.
It matters where we stand and whom we stand beside. Where we stand and who
we stand with will determine what we see, what we think and feel and care about,
what we speak out and act upon. This congregation, like that tree, has not been
moved!
We helped start St. Paul UMC -- and stayed by the Truckee! We helped start
South Reno UMC -- and stayed by the Truckee! And by the grace of God and
the patience of Ira Greene – and no matter how many tax “assessments” they throw
at us! -- someday we will be not only a “downtown church” but also a “downtown
congregation!” Fully reflecting our interconnected, interrelated,
comfortably entangled roots with all those around us! And when any
big tree like that falls – we will find -- before long new shoots of new trees
burst forth from the fallen trunks! Connectional, relational life never
ends! Want to see the full promise of “life everlasting?” Just look
around – just look all the way around!! That life is in you, that life is
in me, that life is in “them,” that life is in us.
I took my title this morning from Reinhold
Niebuhr’s life-giving and life-sustaining “Serenity Payer” – at the heart of
self-help and recovery work all over the world – probably the most widely-prayed
of any prayer in history. Please say it with me -- “God grant me the
serenity / to accept the things I cannot change; / courage to change the things
I can; / and wisdom to know the difference.” Only I substituted “grow” the
difference for “know” the difference – because biblical wisdom thrives in
children and other living and growing things. According to the letter of
James this morning, wisdom and understanding are not only what we know.
They are also what we grow -- what can be seen as nurturing fruits and healing
leaves in the goodness of our lives as what James calls “works done with
gentleness born of wisdom.” There is a gentleness born of wisdom!
Gentleness, peaceableness, deep connection and
abiding relation, are not particularly popular in our world and our culture
today – have we noticed?? It seems we are being -- with all our personal
technologies, all our computerized worldviews -- more and more individualized,
isolated and insulated from one another. May that mean, thereby, we are more
apt to be exploitable in our ignorance and in our fear of each other? Because
when each one of us gets reduced to worrying only about our own little piece of
the world – even about such “good causes” as our own health and well-being, our
own family and neighborhood, our own properties and possessions, our own incomes
and investments – then may we not tend to focus on fighting just for our own
rights and interests? What happens to the common life, the common good, the
common wealth? We tend to become more tolerant, less vigilant, about any
injustice and violence done in our names to protect our prestige and privilege –
whether we always like or ask for it or not -- at home and around the world.
I had already heard of the sociological study
called “Bowling Alone” – how more of us may be bowling all the time, but how we
are doing it “on our own!” Without the teams and leagues that used to connect
and relate us. This week I heard about “Fantasy Football” – how each player
follows their own individualized statistics made up of the individual
achievements of the pros each week – so that teams, per se, are no longer
important! I don’t know by my own experience, but aren’t “I Pods” like that as
well? They break down our loyalty to groups and albums and even concerts into
just the individual songs we happen to like?
They say, similarly, that the fast-growing
churches -- like the fast-growing “big box” stores! -- are those that bring
everything to us for our convenience and basically leave us alone with our own
private experience of God in worship -- without really asking anything back of
us! Well, I am glad our connectional and relational United Methodist Church
does not leave us alone – I mean, it never leaves us alone! Of course, it hurts
to be reminded by a letter from the District Superintendent this week that we
are behind in our apportional, which is our connectional and relational giving
for the common life of the church. PLEASE help us respond to that call as we
move into the last quarter of the year!
But it helps to be reminded – as we were at a
gathering of conference clergy this week -- how positively the general church is
seen around the world by those who struggle for liberation and justice and the
lasting peace – because United Methodists and the general church have struggled
alongside them. It helps to be reminded how much and for how long we are able
to offer emergency and disaster relief – through UMCOR and other efforts --
precisely because we do pool our resources and work together. And to see in
action recently how quickly we may respond to calls from our Bishop and Ministry
Staff, for instance -- asking to bear public witness to our conference wisdom
that we are “Diverse in Geography, Diverse in Culture -- United in Christ!”
Thanks again to those who were able and willing to sign onto and to stand for
our request that CBS not air the “Survivor” series that pits us against – not
for – one another.
And let us be mindful this morning of sisters and brothers in the All Saints
Episcopal Church of Pasadena as they resist an order from the IRS to cooperate
with an investigation into their internal communications and financial records.
Why? Because they had the audacity to offer a public witness for peace,
not war, in preaching and worship the Sunday before an election! Are we
not just as “suspect” – I hope?! Thank God we connect and relate to an
organized UM movement of costly discipleship -- inviting us to give and to risk
ourselves fully and freely for a common life and a common good.
As the rector of All Saints said with visible
support of the congregation, the church in biblical wisdom cannot help but
“criticize any public policies that demean or destroy any member of the human
family. “Our faith demands that we say without fear or intimidation that every
human life is sacred and in God’s eyes and heart every human life is precious.
Because these responsibilities are required by our faith, they are therefore
constitutionally protected.” I am wondering how might we show our solidarity
with this brave congregation?
Hear again what James says to us -- and how
different he may sound from the dominant messages of our culture and world
today! “The wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to
yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or
hypocrisy.” That is so like what we try to say to couples who come to us to get
married – that they are entering not into a “contract” as of to protect their
own interests! They are entering into what biblical wisdom calls “covenant” –
to build the common interest, the common life and good. And covenant is the
never-ending, never-endable process of peaceable communication –
giving/receiving of words – of promises and vows. Covenant as God practices it
means, everything is expressible and arguable, negotiatiable and compromisible,
confessable and forgiveable (except perhaps repeated violence!), repentable and
infinitely renewable – whatever it takes! And the word to all the world
is, so long as we are talking, we are not fighting – or are fighting only with
words – which unlike other weapons we can take back!!
Yet the United Methodist Women’s text on
peacemaking which I was asked to teach says “hypocrisy” (and I learned more of
“hip-ocrisy” this week, when I dislocated an artificial one for the eight time!)
-- hypocrisy in our culture is not merely a sin but a required way of life! How
else can we possibly rationalize and justify the extravagant amounts we spend in
willingness to destroy the lives of others and life itself? I think the
military budget just passed for next year is $469 billion!! While at the same
time we keep going to worship, being “Good Christians,” offering prayers, giving
money, and doing charitable works? Yet, James assures us, “a harvest of
righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.” How to increase our
“sowing,” our spending on justice and peace? Putting our money, as Jesus might
say, where our mouths and hearts are?
Jesus here tries to stay incognito, underground, and out of “the news.”
Why? Because he knows how dangerous both his and our calling is. We
as his body – his eyes, his ears, his hands, his feet, his mind, his heart, his
words, his deeds – surely we share his own calling! Surely Jesus expects
us, precisely because we stand in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed, to
spend our lives to make peace and justice! Don’t we sing at the
close of 10 AM worship each week, “What does the Lord require of us? To do
justice! Love kindness! Walk humbly with our God”? Surely
Jesus expects us to be likewise -- as he is, again and again -- “betrayed into
human hands” – inconvenienced, harassed, arrested, even killed. Yet just
as surely to “rise again” -- in God’s unending struggle for connection and
relation, common life and common good, of all of God’s children! But we
still do not understand him. We still fear to ask him what is required of
us. As with the first disciples, I fear our fear is that we “know” all too
well!
So how is it, as Bill Stringfellow and others
love to point out, that the IRS and “Homeland Security” and all those who may
practice surveillance and intimidation against us to keep us from practicing
public witness and action for Jesus and for the faith we share with him – how is
it that they understand the threat and the cost of discipleship so much better
than Jesus’ own friends and followers – then or now? How is it that they really
do expect us to practice that example? Expect civil disobedience and nonviolent
resistance of us? That they will suspect, as Jesus here demonstrates, we are
willing to welcome “the children” – the least and the last, the littlest and the
lowest – into our midst? That we are willing to do for all the children of our
lives – “our own,” as we like to say, but also our stepchildren, godchildren,
foster children, nieces and nephews, school children, friends’ and neighbors’
children -- whatever children we see hurting any way anywhere in this world –
that we are willing and ready and risky to do for them whatever has to be done
to relieve them of their fear and suffering!!
I would say that while James calls gentle and peaceable wisdom born “from
above,” it is also born “from below” – from those who are weakest and most in
need. Yet how much just like us are these twelve who sweat all the small
stuff? Perhaps to avoid all the big stuff? Who argue about their
greatness? Their piety? Their life in the sky by and by?
Remember how in “Jesus Christ Superstar” they sing while the soldiers and temple
guards approach Jesus in the garden to arrest him? “Look at all my trials
and temptations / Sinking in a gentle pool of wine / Don’t disturb now, I can
see the answers / Till this morning is this evening, life is fine. “Always
hoped that I’d be an apostle / Knew that I could make it if I tried. / Then when
we retire, we can write the Gospels, / So they’ll all talk about us when we
die.” Sisters and brothers, Jesus is asking, right here and now – how will
they talk about us when we die? What will our children, our grand-children
say – of global want, global warming, global weapons, global war?
In closing, James and Jesus, our children and grandchildren are asking of us
this morning – where are we putting our lives, and our life together, on the
line for justice and peace? Not in place of but in addition to all our own
struggles with everyday life and living? Nobody doubts all we doing
already -- all it takes just for us to survive and support those we love most
closely, and even just to meet the demands of our own church -- staff, programs,
supplies, and buildings. Those priorities are a given. But
discipleship of Jesus is not an “either/or” proposition. It is always a
big “BOTH/AND!”
It is always a taking on, not only of all, but
often of more than we can bear! Jesus is saying, when we reach the point of
more than we can bear, there we find his help to bear it! It’s both the
personal and the political, the pastor and the prophet in us. It’s the artist
and the activist, the mystic and the mobilizer. God does not create the one in
us without the other. These weeks just ahead are so pregnant with possibility
and opportunity – This Saturday the RAIN Symposium, the Conscious Community
gathering, the Cardboard Box City. Next Sunday World Communion offering, then
National Children’s Sabbath, then CROP Walk..
Jesus is trying to tell us here, with
evangelical urgency, how quickly it all slips away! How quickly his own life is
slipping away! Not so much the “end of the world,” “the last judgment,” as we
like to rationalize it. But just the end of each one of our lives, and of our
tiny pieces of that one big world. That’s what Jesus cares about: how precious
each moment, each person, each life, each act of living is. Jesus would not
have us miss a single good, if costly, thing.
Ellen Bass puts it into a poem entitled “If You
Know” –
What if you knew you’d be the last / to touch
someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example, / at
the theater, tearing them /
Giving back the ragged stubs, / you might
take care to touch that palm
or press your fingertips, / into the crease
of a life line.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase / too
slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal, / when
the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say thank you, I don’t remember /
they’re going to die.
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt. /
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes, / joked
as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt /
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon’s spume / have to
come?
How wide does the crack / in heaven have to
split?
What would people look like / if we could see
them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen, /
reckless, pinned against time?
Reckless, pinned against time. That’ll be us!
Amen.
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