|
Back to Sermon Archives
January 7, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Isaiah 43:1-7, Acts 8:14-17, Luke 3:15-17,
21-22
“Saddle Up! Time to Go Tracking That Dream
Again”
Poet Frank Horne wrote “Kid Stuff” in the wartime of 1942 – “The wise guys / tell
me / that Christmas / is Kid Stuff . . . / Maybe they’ve got / something there –
“Two thousand years ago / three wise guys / chased a star / across a continent /
to bring / frankincense and myrrh / to a Kid / born in a manger / with an idea in
his head . . . “And as the bombs / crash / all over the world / today / the
real wise guys / know / that we’ve all / got to go chasing stars / again / in the
hope / that we can get back / some of that / Kid Stuff / born two thousand years
ago – “Time to re-mount whatever our own recalcitrant camels -- strap
ourselves down for more long and cold nights, hard saddles and bumpy terrains,
and go chasing our dreams again – especially our dreams for this child, for any
child we know, and for the children of all the world! We leave behind warm
memories of our more private and parochial holidays and set out again to cross
over the barriers and borders that have been devised and defended to keep us
from one another – especially from bearing our gifts of love for one another and
for the world!
Speaking of kings, or magi, or wise guys bearing
gifts long difficult distances to welcome the new in their lives and the life of
the world – this congregation has born its gifts of apportionments in every possible
way, shape and form these past weeks! We have been able to keep our
connectional covenant in full for the first time in several years! Thank you,
and thank God! -- for the life and the work, the service and witness of Christ these
gifts make manifest in the church and in the world! And as if to punctuate
this good news, later in the same week we learned that our Bishop Beverly Shamana
– a very wise woman from the near-west -- will visit us with her manifest gifts
for a weekend of July and Artown this year!
Are we on a roll? We are definitely on
a journey. The beginning of the Epiphany season proclaims, life is a trip!
Life is a hope, a dream to pursue! This is the dreaming season – of deepest
and darkest nights and recesses of ourselves! The season of new years and new beginnings!
The season of Jesus’ baptism! Of his first miracle at the wedding feast in
Cana! Of Dr. King’s birthday and dream! Of Reconciling Ministries --
especially with those left out of the church! Of persons’ and peoples’ histories
– lost, forgotten, neglected, abused . . . .
We have moved from calling our worship by the
Advent words “Make Way for the Image of God!” – to calling it by the Epiphany
words “Made Way for the Image of God!” We are saying the “image of
God” not only is born again – in Jesus and in us all. The “image of God” also
is now alive and well, manifest and at work in all the world – even the very “image-ination”
of God – calling and leading us in ways and on journeys we never have been before!
Or more fittingly even to these magi, these wise guys – the “i-MAGI-nation” of God
– perhaps a brand-new wisdom-meaning of “nation” beyond any other yet seen and practiced
on earth!
God knows we need a new kind of nation!
An “i-MAGI-nation” – more open and receptive to the bearing of gifts of all peoples!
Not only our own but everywhere! No longer “victor-nations” defined
and destined by our own security needs and self-interests – but “servant-nations”
created and called – Isaiah says of Israel – to be God’s own redeemed and reconciled
ones – from every end of the earth -- seeking justice and peace for all! Isaiah
even specifically names peoples in the news today – Sudanese and Ethiopians!
“We’ve a story to tell to the nations,” says the hymn – to all the nations!
“That shall turn their hearts to the right, a story of truth and mercy, a story
of peace and light, a story of peace and light!”
Wherever, whoever we are, how do we stop denying,
we are all in this together?
The Faith Page editor of the Gazette-Journal
invited me to do a column last week in response to the proposition that ours
is a “Christian nation.” I wrote, Faiths cannot be “nationalized.” Faiths
are by nature universal – believable and practicable everywhere. Otherwise
faiths do not become traditions. It’s like Gamaliel advises the council in
the book of Acts -- when they wonder what to do about Peter and John – If God is
in their movement, then nothing we do can stop them. If God is not, then
we do not have to do anything. Faiths can be neither contained nor
controlled by anything or anyone lesser or other than “God.”
This will be the 40th year since Martin
Luther King Jr. broke with safe conventional silence to oppose our part of the war
in Vietnam – appealing to “the privilege and the burden” of those “bound by allegiances
and loyalties” far beyond “nationalism.” Abraham Lincoln once appealed to
“the duty of nations . . . to confess their sins and transgressions . . . and to
pray for clemency and forgiveness.” Terry Arcularius, a regular worshiper
with this congregation, appeals to our collective duty through a letter to editor
addressed in this new year to the people of Iraq – asking, “Will you ever be able
to forgive us for what we have done to you?” How are we able to justify devastation
of their children there in the name of defending our children here? Surely
God’s gifts are for all.
The life and work of the church is meant to be “Kid Stuff” – “cosmic child’s
play made real” for the world, someone has said. How do we reconcile this
or any war with the vision and voice Jesus sees and hears at his baptism this
morning? The Holy Spirit descending “upon him in bodily form like a dove!”
And a voice from heaven, “You are my Son” – my Daughter, my Child – “the
Beloved!” Created and called for Dr. King’s “i-MAGI-nation” of “Beloved
Community!” “With you” – and you, and you, and all my children! – “I am
well pleased.”
Next week we celebrate the renewal of our own
baptisms -- our very own places as named and claimed by God and the universe.
We celebrate renewal of our own covenants to be God’s persons and peoples.
We process and splash in “waters of life” – given and meant for all children everywhere!
If this act of repentance and renewal through baptism chosen in solidarity with
all the people is good enough for Jesus -- who is tempted yet without sin – imagine
(just i-MAGI-ne!) how much better it may be for us to start the year in repentance!
It is said that these magi -- these wise guys
chasing the star revealing the “Kid / born in a manger / with an idea in his head
. . . “-- went home “by another road,” by another way, even a new way of being in
all the world! We are never the same for the “Kid Stuff” we find. In
the same way John the Baptist, for all the “shock and awe” of his rhetoric, points
away from himself to the much different “power” of Jesus for all the world.
And of course the magi leave their gifts there – their gold, their frankincense,
and their myrrh! Like this congregation in the past month, they know they
cannot “take it with them!” They know that their gifts are meant for giving
– for leaving, for letting go, for offering up freely and fully to the witness and
service of a God-child found in this and in any poor family’s home.What keeps us from “saddling up” and “tracking
that dream again,” chasing after that “Kid Stuff” again? The same thing that
keeps us from any new journey – our fears of the known and the unknown as well --
fears not only failure but of success – for we know in reaching our hopes and dreams,
they set off before us again! Richard Rohr says Jesus warns us more against
fear than almost anything else. Since most fear is that of “losing something,”
we have to practice these arts of the magi, these arts of losing, of letting go,
of “releasement.”
Releasing our gifts, as well as our fears, implies
someone to release them to! Jesus offers always to be that person! In
whose presence and passion we find the power to live with all fears! The more
we try to control, the more we have to protect -- then the more we have to lose,
and the less practice we get in releasing – till our fears become all-consuming.
Rohr goes on to warn us, “Unless we become practiced at observing and surrendering
those petty and daily fears, there is no way we will be able to recognize the really
big ones (and really disguised ones) that control our politics, our denominations,
our bank account, and frankly, the world’s future. Mutual terrorism,” Rohr
prophesies, “is the future of life on this small planet, if we do not exorcise this
demon of fear.”
The only way through this kind of fear – in our
own life, in family life, in congregational life, in national life – the only way
through it is through it! Let this be a year of acknowledging fear – of feeling
and suffering as deeply as we can all that tempts us to want to defend and protect
ourselves at all costs! What is it we are most afraid of losing and leaving
behind? Of letting go and releasing? That we might be free to find new
ways home – new ways of being at home with ourselves and with all in this world
– starting right where we are. How do we become more at home with each other
in this congregation? And with those who surround us in ever-widening circles
of larger church and community? Is our reputation, our respectability at stake?
Our manner of living? Our control?
How might we risk learning -- it is through our
littleness that we grow? Through our weakness that we become strong?
Through our emptiness that we are filled? Through our lostness that we are
found? Through our sinfulness that we are saved? Through our fearfulness
that we find faith? Even the faith Isaiah promises to God’s servant-nation
Israel. In words of the hymn so beloved by another of our distinguished African-American
woman bishops, Leontine T. C. Kelly – and ending with an image of the gold we leave
behind – only Bishop Kelly would have this memorized, and would go walking all around
-- preaching it as she goes! --
Fear
not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed,
for
I am thy God and will still give thee aid;
I’ll
strengthen and help thee, and cause thee to stand
Upheld
by my righteous, omnipotent hand.
When
through the deep waters I call thee to go,
the
rivers of woe shall not thee overflow;
for
I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,
and
sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.
When
through fiery trials thy pathways shall lie,
my
grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply;
the
flame shall not hurt thee; I only design
thy
dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.
Those who are saddling up to go tracking the
dream again this year say, Amen!
top of page
Archives
| 