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March 11, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Isaiah 55:6-11, Luke 13:1-9
“Crisis/Kairos: Time for Praying, Praying for Time”
I urge us to see the movie “Amazing Grace” – while it is near to be seen!
It is not about making music – though the music serves it well. It is about
making justice. It is about reconciling the artificial distinction between
“politics” and “religion” in our lives. It is about committing ourselves to
political ends – in this movie the end of the slave trade in the British Empire
– but by religious means of confessing the same God in and beyond every last one
of us. God saves us in wretchedness, says the hymn. Those who promote
and support the slave trade learn – by grace -- to identify with the wretchedness
of human beings they steal and sell. God loves us even in hatefulness – finds
us even in lostness – gives sight even in blindness – gives life even in deadness
to others.
It is so much easier and more profitable to make a movie about making war.
This movie sees making justice as a loving way of making war -- war on a system
of slavery and a structure of government that seem all but impossible even to challenge
much less to change. It is a movie of encouragement to any who seek a newer,
more just and therefore peaceful world. It affirms all the anguish – all the
debate and deliberation, all the defeat and despair – required to endure faithfully
in the struggle against all the odds. It affirms what I was once told by a
woman veteran of civil rights work -- “Freedom is one long meeting!” It affirms
all the endless recruiting and organizing, negotiating and compromising, speaking
out and losing, regrouping and beginning again. Justice is such an exercise
in prodigal persistence!
Isaiah encourages our persistence – because God is just as persistent toward
us! God invites us to seek while God is present, to speak while God is near.
To let go of ways and thoughts that separate us from God or substitute us for God.
God promises mercy upon our return, pardon upon our repentance. God’s ways
of thinking and doing differ so from ours! We can barely and only imagine
how much more hope and purpose God has for us than we are able to find in ourselves.
For God has been about the work of creation for billions of years.
God knows how long it has taken to get us to this fragile point -- how much further
we have to go as such a new species in the history of the earth. God is as
confident in our return as God is in the return of new life when rain and snow are
poured out and get lost in all the earth. We – you and I, sisters and brothers
– are the return on God’s most precious investment! God “returns” in US!
Our theme of “lostness and foundness” this season guided me through the recent
news story about U.S. Olympic skier Toby Dawson. Dawson was three years old
when he was lost in a market by his mother in South Korea. Eventually he was
adopted and raised by the Dawson family, ski instructors in Colorado. When
Toby Dawson won the bronze medal in freestyle skiing last Winter Olympics, his story
caused dozens of would-be Korean parents to come forward to claim him. Dawson
waited until genetic tests confirmed Kim Jae Su as his biological father.
The two met again just last week. The son was prepared to say in Korean,
“I’ve been waiting a long time, father.” The father responded, “I am so thankful
that he has come to look for me even after such a long time.” Toby Dawson
added, “My life until now has been confused. I looked at my parents, and I
didn’t look like them. Then I also felt if I went to Korea, I didn’t belong
there.
I felt like I was still lost, stuck between two different worlds.” Are
we not in so many ways today “still lost,” still “stuck between two different worlds?”
The world we inherit and struggle each day to change? And the world we are
promised and pray each day to receive? Like so many lost loved ones looking
for one another?
There is such a very fine line between worlds. In our lostness from one
another, there is such a fine line between reaching a point of NO return -- and
reaching a point of return, a turning point! For this season it is a point
of repentance, of giving up old and fruitless ways -- seeking to go in brand-new
directions. It is a fine line between “crisis” -- deepest possible recognition
of the mess we are in -- and “kairos” – “window of opportunity” to get out of the
mess! We show a disturbing capacity to adapt ourselves to the mess, to rationalize
how it happens, to attribute our fate to forces way beyond our control. Or
to convince ourselves that we are unworthy as well as unable of change – deserving
our helplessness.
It takes a lot of courage to make up our minds to go home! And a lot of
grace for us to believe there is a place, a people, a life, a love for us to go
home to!
Isaiah encourages us in these words to the exiles -- believe in God as the one
who is always more near to us than we may have any right to expect. God is
more ready to see us than we are to be seen, to hear us than we are to be heard.
In fact, as “lost” as we may ever have been to God, God never has been “lost”
to us! God has been waiting, watching each day like a prodigal parent
for us to reach that fine line between no return and return. Toby Dawson’s
biological father proclaims, “I went to many orphanage houses only to hear that
they didn’t have anyone like him. They wouldn’t let me come inside and look
for him.” So many things keep us from coming inside to look for ourselves.
So many fears keep us frantically searching both for victims and heroes outside
of ourselves.
I had the pleasure of putting together a workshop for District Leadership Training
yesterday. It was rather rashly entitled, “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More!”
Our purpose was “Stopping the Iraq war and others!” We were made up of participants
from local churches of our district and from Sierra Interfaith Action for Peace.
We all introduced ourselves by our own passions for peace, the work we are doing
now, and the questions we bring to our work. Person after person testified
to how we all learn that peace must begin with ourselves! We must find “peace
with justice” within us before we can seek or see it in anyone else. There
was such commitment to begin in what might be called “little” and “local” ways.
“Little” means to begin with our children and the mixed messages we give them about
doing violence and harm. “Local” means to connect world events with all the
other issues of doing justice and seeking peace in our own communities.
We discovered how “personal” the “political” is for us. We do so much personal
damage to those we ask to fight our political wars, and to their children.
And how political the personal is for us. Much political healing is done by
those who risk learning and speaking their personal truth in public.
That’s what happens for William Wilberforce, leading character in the movie.
For all of his passionate political argument in parliament -- his own raised consciousness,
his awareness of the dehumanizing costs of slavery to us all -- Wilberforce cannot
succeed until he learns to tell his own story, with all of its loss and bitterness,
to another person who loves him enough not to let him abandon his public calling.
The character of John Newton – as a former slaver and author of the words to
the hymn of “Amazing Grace” -- is able by his personal witness to set Wilberforce
free to reconcile faith with politics -- a way of being “in the world but not of
it” – bearing witness to faith in the world but not letting the world control it.
Newton is obsessed with his own confession -- haunted by “20,000 ghosts” of those
whom he personally transported into slavery. As many as two-thirds of them
died on the way. At the same time Wilberforce’s political witness sets Newton
free to make public his personal truth – to name all the slavers, ships, dates and
events of personal horror committed in the name of political freedom.
Newton tells Wilberforce, God is not only in heavy rain but also in gentle drizzle!
We keep looking to find God in earth-shaking signs of proof of God’s presence and
power. We forget about God in what prophet Elijah calls “the still small voice”
that sounds long after the storms and disasters have passed. Imagine how that
“still small voice” still struggles to be heard in New Orleans! Much less
in all the places of invasion and destruction.
Jesus says here we have this need to justify or to rationalize such monstrous
events as Pilate’s attacks on Galileans! Or the tower that falls upon bystanders
in Jerusalem! We have need to see those as acts of punishment upon those who
have earned or deserved it! This congregation, I know, knows better.
But it is tempting to think by our own power and prestige we immunize ourselves
against such bad things happening to us.
Jesus leaves us to finish this story for ourselves. The moral is that there
is no moral! There is only us! What will we do with the unfinished stories
of our lives? Even the stories of Toby Dawson and William Wilberforce.
Jesus insists upon connecting all the dimensions and experiences of our lives --
public and political, private and personal. For we are the experts on who
we are! Jesus asks what makes us think we are any the more or less deserving
than anyone else?! Dust we all are, to dust we are all returning! Why
waste any time or good will trying to decide who deserves what in this world when
we are all in it together?!
The gardener sets an example for us -- interceding for this fig tree threatened
with cutting down. The gardener knows this tree is not producing as expected!
This tree is just taking up valuable space, just wasting good soil! Think
what a new developer could do with that prize piece of property! Yet the gardener
so identifies with this tree to the point of wanting to save it – giving it every
last chance.
We know as disciples Jesus wants us all to be as trees bearing good fruits –
good works of our faith. I don’t know about you, but there are plenty of times
I feel for all my works I am just taking up space and just wasting soil! Does
Jesus here seem to blame the tree? You and me? Figuring out why we deserve
our fates? Or does Jesus encourage us to change the conditions surrounding
the tree? The context of your life and mine – and of every last life in this
world?!
Does Jesus not act with awareness, attention, compassion, identification, solidarity,
and shared struggle with us – whether we somehow “earn” or “deserve” it or not?!
Does Jesus not pick up the shovel and start turning over the soil for us?
(After all, Jesus will be taken for the gardener on Easter morning!) Does
Jesus not start piling up on us what makes the grass grow? “It happens!”
It happens to ALL of us! God dumps – on the just and the unjust alike!
No matter how helpless, how hopeless, how lost, how dead, how blind, how barren
we are even now – What good is God trying to dump on us? What help?
What hope? What new life? What potential to learn, change, and grow?
What old soil – within us, between us, among us all – is God turning over right
now? What is God watering? What is God feeding? What are we thirsting
and hungering for? What are we risking this deadly wilderness journey up to
Jerusalem for? The whole world is dying to know! In our lostness we
are found. Amen.
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