|
Back to Sermon Archives
July 1, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture:
2 Kings 2:9-14, Galatians 5:1, 13-15, Luke
9:51-62
“Dismantling: Self-Indulgence and the Freedom
That Sets Us Free”
A word about the picture on the front of the
bulletin. It’s not your usual Independence Sunday depiction. It appeared in
the Chronicle Magazine a few weeks ago – part of a story on the Dominican
Sisters of San Jose struggling stubbornly to change their life and work together
as faith community to meet changing needs and possibilities. Here they are
working out with batons on their lawn to “76 Trombones” from Music Man!
Personally, I would put them up against any parade in the world this Fourth of
July -- and like their chances!
As the elder prophet Elijah’s mantle passes to
the younger prophet Elisha in this story, so all over the Annual Conference
today; in fact, all over the United Methodist Church today, mantles are shifting
from one pastor to another! Listen! Can we hear them? Especially when the new
appointment date of July 1 falls on a Sunday! Listen for that one huge SWOOSH
of mantles shifting! There’s an always-touching moment at annual conference
when this scripture is read and one of the retiring clergy places a stole on the
shoulders of one of the entering clergy. Julie and I are pleased to return for
our fifth year appointed to you!
It’s hard to remember how young we are as a
people called “North Americans.” We are so little experienced as the nation who
promised so much in a time ideals of independence and national liberation were
born. It was a time not unlike these years since World War II. The number of
self-determining states in the world has
skyrocketed (O say can we see?) from a mere
fifty to nearly two hundred. More struggles for liberation – both of nations
and within them -- go on all the time! We may even be causing one in an Iraq
that will be partitioned into separate states.
When we grow too complacent about liberation –
that of others as well as our own – we are reminded “liberation” is much more
biblical than the “freedom and democracy” we tend to think is God’s gift to the
world through us – ready and want it or not! Liberation is always a process,
often a struggle. Just because the United States liberated itself from British
by no means meant that all of its citizens were liberated! Some of us are not
in all ways yet! Liberation always acts as if we are without freedom, or just
got it. It has to be won again and again.
No matter how young we are as a nation, we seem
to be growing old and tired of our way of being in the world today. So is the
world growing tired of us. It is a form of what Paul calls “self-indulgence” to
think all our relations have to be driven by our self-interests and
self-protections – as if in fact some “divine rights” has passed to us. We act
as if might makes right us -- Again, just look at our military spending! We are
the mightiest, therefore the rightest – with a burden to save all the lesser
unfortunates.
This burden of feeling that we alone have the
“freedom and democracy” everyone else needs to get from us is leaving us
worn-out and cut-off in the world. Allies distance themselves from us. We
openly scorn and reject international treaties and realms of accountability.
This is an arrogant, self-serving freedom. It is not the freedom through love
to become neighbors and slaves to each other! -- for which Christ sets us free.
The more we bite and devour each other, warns Paul, the more we risk getting
bit back.
We Americans in this past generation seem most
at ease with “freedom from,” libertarian freedom to be left alone to do our own
thing – especially left alone by “the government!” Candidates of all parties at
every level seem to run against the very institutions and practices we find such
pride in observing this week. We are no longer seeking “freedom for” each
other, communitarian freedom -- freedom for responsibility and right relations
with those who share our nation and world. Aren’t we in a mode of reaction and
retrenchment, of fear and frustration with one another? Hiding behind walled
borders and gated communities?
This has serious implications for the way we
heed the biblical mandate to welcome the stranger in our midst. How can we
resolve immigration, for instance, without engaging conditions that cause it?
How can we insist on a “Jubilee” way of justice and joy, of equal opportunity
and comparable result for every age, color, class, condition, and so forth –
without backtracking on historic commitments to options for integration and full
inclusion? These questions about “freedom from” and “freedom for” invite us to
imagine and create arts of “covenanting.” We need to be in constant process of
liberation, of seeking peace through justice, by negotiation toward some kind of
“third way.” For example, this day, the “third way” between strict
“independence” and strict “dependence” is an always negotiable, debatable,
forgivable, renewable form of “interdependence.”
We said last week that the elder prophet Elijah
might have been looking for that – even without knowing or naming it. He had
tried “fighting,” – just slaughtered a slew of rival prophets! -- and it did not
work. Now he was fleeing or ”flighting,” and it was not working. The third
way of dealing with enemies is making them “friends!” It is the much more
imaginatively and creatively challenging way. Yet without it, as Elijah bemoans
last week, we end up “no better than my ancestors!” We perpetuate same old
cycles of weapons and wars, violence and vengeance.
I say let’s be imaginative and creative enough
to dream of a world where there is more trust in and more willingness to risk in
these sisters of San Jose with their batons marching across our bulletin covers
than in all the armies and armaments now biting, devouring, consuming this
earth! Before all, through all, and after all, war is such a failure of
imagination! It is such a failure of the creative spirit we find in Bishop
Shamana’s book and celebrate with her next Sunday in Artown and all the arts!
We need such whole new ways and means of expressing ourselves.
Just yesterday the newspaper quoted a
timelessly-tired general in Iraq saying of our “enemy” there what could have
been said of any enemy in any war in any place and any time we can remember!
“This is a skilled and determined enemy. He’s ruthless. He’s got as thirst for
blood like I’ve never seen anywhere in my life.,” said Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil,
head of U.S. forces in Baghdad. “And he’s determined to who whatever he can.”
How many thousands of times has that been said in the history of war? Of our
wars? When will we ever learn? . . .
Please! Let us help imagine and create new ways
of being persons and peoples, communities and nations, world and whole earth
together! The Declaration of Independence (which will be read repeatedly in
front of the Federal Building Wednesday beginning 10 a.m.) is our invitation to
give or withhold what is called “the consent of the governed!” Sisters and
brothers, that’s us!! We are called to imagine and create new ways to celebrate
and enact “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – which are richly
biblical concepts and practices! -- in our new times and places. And where our
government becomes “destructive of these ends,” we are called to “alter or
abolish it!” To dismantle it and start over, where we can. To dismantle
ourselves and pass the mantle to others where we cannot.
Imagination must mean for us today
“Image-in-Nation!” It puts to us the question, what are we looking for in and
from this nation we love so much? How do we express grace and gratitude at how
abundantly and affluently, how safely and securely so many of us have lived in
this nation? Is that true of most of us? And how do we confront and confess
the ways our very abundance and affluence, safety and security, not only may
disconnect us from so many others – at home, in prisons, from bordering nations,
and all over the world – but also may obstruct us from the Jesus we call “our
Christ” in this very gospel this morning?!
Jesus here “takes up the cross” of one who is
convicted of blasphemy against the powers of “church” and treason (punishable by
crucifixion) against the powers of “state,” and “sets his face for Jerusalem,”
certain confrontation and definite death. This is what Jesus expects of us as
well. But we have to confess, we are not always ready or willing or able. This
walk and this talk to Jerusalem, seat of all the powers, is not for everyone!
Without being presumptuous, we have to say it is not even for all congregations
of those who call ourselves “Christian,” that is to say, followers of this Jesus
in crucifixion and resurrection!
We are like the younger prophet Elisha who
requests of his elder Elijah “a double share of your spirit.” This may be
Elijah’s chance – like Jesus in his ascension -- to make more of a difference
by disappearing that he could make by all his “appearances” to us. Elijah’s of
course is the cup of the Passover Meal – which mostly likely was the cup of
Jesus’ last supper with his friends. That cup represents the hope of return to
us as disciples and followers -- return in such a form of that “double share” as
we might call the Holy Spirit -- to bring in an age of messianic possibility –
not only for us, not only an “American” century, as we say – for but for all
peoples everywhere – a global and universal new age for all.
Elijah hopes for Elisha -- as Jesus does for us
-- even greater works than his! Works of the freedom for which we are set
free. We are free even to “dismantle” that which is so dumbly repetitive of all
that has failed in the past – including that of our government – for ours is the
“consent of the governed!” In Christ we are free even to take chances and run
risks as prophets for justice and peace – chances and risks that are worthy of
those run by our soldiers for victory in war.
The option to Paul’s “self-indulgence” of
freedom can only be Jesus’ “self-sacrifice” of freedom. This Jesus -- who we
say is in a special way “of God” -- could have had all the powers available –
even those of legions of angels to save him from the cross! Yet this Jesus
chooses the power to die before any power to kill. And that power to die has
proved by faith the most powerful power of all.
We disciples never quite “get it” of course.
Even as Jesus here faces up to Jerusalem, he is rejected by those with whom he
seeks hospitality. What do we say we should do? We are ready to call in the
air strikes, the missiles and bombs – “Lord, do you want us to command fire to
come down from heaven and consume them?” Who do we think we are?? Who do we
think we are following? Sounds like we have not learned a thing in two thousand
years!! There is Paul’s warning again on “consuming” others with weapons and
wars, violence and vengeance.
Jesus knows how that will come back to bite and
to haunt us! We who live by the sword will die by it. I mean, have we
disciples heard a single word or seen a single deed Jesus has offered us? Do
they, do we have any idea what power we could find in him? What greater works
we could do by trusting and risking in his works? Jesus already is focused
fully on the newness of life that only can rise out of death – the newness of
“image-in-nation” that can only rise out of leading our nation to die to all our
illusions of the kind of power it takes for us to fight for this world’s
freedom.
Jesus here is already “dead” to all the
temptations of doubt and fear and external control of his life and his work.
Jesus already, as we say, “lives simply” that others may “simply live.” I think
the “living simply” study and experience some of our congregation are doing is
the gospel as we all need to hear and to practice it. Here is the freedom for
which we have been set free! Not to worry about even a place to lay our heads!
Not to worry about all our busy affairs. Not even to worry about our families
so much! That’s really tough – even our loved ones belong first to God. Jesus
takes away every ignorance, every impediment, every entrapment, every excuse!
That is how free, how liberated we are on this day!
Amen.
top of page
Archives
| 