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July 22, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Amos
8:1-12, Colossians 1:15-20, Luke 10:38-42
“Mind & Body,
Heart & Soul: Fixing & Fitting It All Together”
Please find the sense of palpable joy in Bishop
Shamana’s blog from the conference website about her time with you, with us as
one of her congregations! The activist artistry, or artistic activism of this
congregation enables and empowers us to express, as we are commanded, love of
God with heart, and soul, and strength, and mind; and – what? Our neighbor as
ourselves! Art for us, like action for us, connects the inner and outer self,
the inward and outward journey to which each one of us is called. Not that we
keep perfect balance. I know for me AA means “Activists Anonymous!” My name is
John – I am helpless to do nothing about it! I need to be told: Don’t do
something, stand there!
This gospel is up close and painfully personal
to me. Activism, social justice, has been part of my calling for nearly forty
years of ministry now. Much as it wears me out, it also gives me grace to go
on. This week I got a little comeuppance by that grace. In the same way if
someone asks me for money and I have it, I’m very apt to give it, so if someone
asks me for time and I have it, I usually give it. Given a choice, I’d much
rather say yes than no. So I look in my little black Cokesbury book – You
know, the one with our founder John Wesley pictured reading his Bible while
riding on horseback! No wonder we got the name “Methodist!” A method
for every waking, wandering moment.
So when I was asked by the Latimer Art Club
portrait-painting class to sit for three hours Wednesday afternoon for a
portrait, and I could not find anything else in my book, I said yes! Don’t
move, don’t talk, don’t do anything, just sit there! Three hours. A major
“learning experience” for me. Julie started telling me long ago, my mind rides
hopelessly beyond my control. I cannot even catch it, much less stop it. Given
who I am and what I do and where I do it, my heart and soul get pretty
exercised, too. But I have to work at making much good use of this old body.
So if anyone else wants to paint this modest model, check with my book!
One of my mental games, you know, is inspired by
Buzz Lightyear of “Toy Story.” He is always headed for “Infinity, and beyond!”
I’ve adapted it to “The Trinity, and beyond!” We who are baseball freaks find
the diamond a more perfect form than the triangle. Methodists practice a
“quadrilateral” of faith – based on scripture, tradition, reason, experience.
Our membership vows pledge our prayers, our presence, our gifts, and our
service. I see seasons of the church year in the natural year -- winter as
creation, spring as redemption, summer as baptism/sanctification, fall as
communion/sustainability.
In Christ we are renewed and set free, healed
and made whole. Surely the Christ Paul here rhapsodizes needs little assistance
from us: the very image of the invisible God! First-born of all Creation – in
whom (by the name of Wisdom) all things are created! Expressing God’s own
irresistibleness – even to thrones, dominions, rulers, powers! Head of the body
– as well as mind, heart, and soul! First to rise from the dead – reconciling
even powers of death in service of life! Bearer of costly grace – willingness
to suffer and sacrifice for and with others!
In Christ no one is worth more than another. No
one is worth less than another.
So how are we any different for knowing this
Jesus? For daring to name him our Christ – savior, lord, liberator, leader?
How do we account for so much excuse, escape, denial, avoidance in us? So much
ignorance and illusion? What difference does Jesus, do we his body make? What
is there to show for our faith? If we were arrested and charged with following
him, what evidence would convict us? In the words of this translation, how does
he lead our own “resurrection parade?” Overcome our fears of defiance, defeat,
death and despair? How do we take up our spaces, our room in Christ with places
for all? Who fixes and fits, holds and keeps together every last broken and
dislocated piece of the universe! Every people, every thing, every animal,
every atom! All because he will not withhold himself but pours himself out for
us always.
We live in an inter-faith time, an inter-faith
setting. It is time to trust the Trinity to survive another 2000 years without
limiting ourselves by it or to it. Reach out! The local Muslim community
invites us to pot luck on the last Saturday of each month. The local Hindu
community invites us to celebrate with dinner August 1 the first Hindu prayer
ever to open the U.S. Senate. Two weeks from today we remember the Holocaust
and Jewish-Christian relations -- as well as our bombings of faiths and cultures
of peoples at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Next Sunday our sisters and brothers of
St. Thomas celebrate 100 years as a church.
This story of Mary and Martha allegedly pits
parts of ourselves and our faith community over against one another – one who
serves the body, one who serves the soul; one who fits the traditional role of
women, one who breaks free of it all; one who is activist, one who is
contemplative; one who stays home, one who is in the world; one who tends more
to emotional matters, the other to intellectual. We know all the ways we can get
divided and conquered in and between and among ourselves. It is our creative
challenge to be more “both/and” than we are “either/or” – more “paradoxical,”
contrary and contradictory, than “orthodoxical.”
Amos lifts up this image of “a basket of summer
fruit.” Let us ponder the fruits of this busy summer of Artown for us. Special
thanks to all who have attended, promoted, served hospitality – and who will
help evaluate and start over again! We marvel at the “alphabet soup” of peoples
and groups we work with – ARP (A Rainbow Place), ART (Ageless Repertory
Theater), HP (Holland Project), LAC (Latimer Art Club), MCT (Missoula Children’s
Theater), WARC (Washoe Arc) , YAW (Youth ArtWorks). So how do we “acronym-ize”
Hank Sosnowski? And now in a week comes old reliable IHN (Family Promise)
again! We wonder, are the fruits of our summer ends in themselves? Or
foretastes of what is to come?
Amos grows impatient with how differently God
and we see the same image. Art truly lies in the eye and ear of the beholder!
Mary and Martha are partly about giving ourselves perspective, time and space,
both to know God and to do God. Our culture is so frenzied with doing without
knowing. It could be argued the church is so sedated with knowing without
doing. But even the ways of knowing are paradoxical, contrary and
contradictory. God always “grasps the big picture,” we always “sweat the small
stuff.” God always sees consequences, intended and otherwise – where we see
only successes, fleeting and otherwise. We are trapped in moments of “winning”
or “losing.” We see nothing else.
Amos has no time for our so-called traditions of
worship and commerce. We pretend to observe the Sabbath – with its promise of
rest and renewal, reparation and restoration for all. But our actions betray
our obsession with returning fast as we can to greed and exploitation of
others. We trample the needy. We ruin the poor. I read this week about New
York City (who wants to be source of all presidential candidates!) – in
Manhattan one in ten persons is worth a million! The average apartment sells
for $1.3 million!
Yet a few miles away the Bronx is the poorest
urban county in the nation. 1.5 million schoolchildren and families live below
poverty line. More families are in homeless shelters than were 25 years ago.
The slow-fading “middle class” of us is so stressed out on credit and debt we
dare not speak out to question or oppose anything if it might cost us our jobs,
our homes, our vacations to do so. Even we religious “not-for-profits”
compromise our prophetic voices for fear of losing our “status!”. So there is
famine in our land, not yet of bread or water, but of the words of God! We all
live in fear of saying and doing who we claim to be.
“Precipitous withdrawal” is all in the news
now. It was never a very big issue with us men while making love! Now making
war, it scares us men to death. It smacks of losing! We try to tell ourselves,
if we broke it, we have to fix it. In reality, there is no way of our fixing
it. All we can do is stop breaking it! Paul says in this translation “fixing”
and “fitting” must work together. Our daughter grew up speaking dialects of the
city. She would say she was “fittin’” to do things she was “fixing” to do. So
much art is fitting things back together in new ways.
I remember H. Richard Niebuhr’s book The
Responsible Self. When we try to see things as “either/or” – good or evil,
right or wrong, all this or all that – we try to “fix” things according to how
we see them. But all things are not “like us!” How do we let ourselves see
the “both/and” of things? Contradictions, ambiguities, differences of position
and of perception? Since where we are determines what we are able to see!
Then we may feel less compelled to “fix” one another and a little more invited
to “fit” ourselves together with one another as closely as we can. We can do so
only by loving others as we do ourselves! By knowing and loving the “other” in
us as well as we do the rest of ourselves
Ironically, this gospel tells us, knowing and
loving God is a waste of our good busy productive horseback-riding,
Bible-reading time! It’s like that Sabbath to which Amos says we pay lip
service but from which we withhold our full service of mind and body, heart and
soul. Mary, Martha and Lazarus are more likely a small faith community than a
blood family. There is no mention of their parents, or of any spouses or
children. In the early church women studied scripture equally with men. They
could be teachers and preachers, local pastors and traveling evangelists – just
because they were baptized in the name of this Jesus we call the Christ – who is
no respecter of anything else about us but that we are! And that we know and
love God with all that we are and all that we have.
Yet the church then quickly becomes compromised
and institutionalized -- limiting itself in early times as we do now – when, for
instance, we deny ourselves ordinations based on sexual preference and practice
alone. Or the Pope tries to tell us the “only true church” has to deny
vocations to well over half its members! I’ll tell you what I told the Pope –
“Pope, the apostolic succession is as the apostolic succession does!” No way
Jesus, even Peter, even Paul, is leaving anyone possible out! Fearful disputes
break out in the early church as to whether women have to stay in the kitchen
with Dinah/Martha, or can sit at the feet of the rabbi with Mary. Jesus is
clear about this: Mary stays right where she is -- loving God, hanging on God’s
every word – no matter how much other “work” there is to do. Prayer, study,
worship, witness are “work” of God’s people.
At Annual Conference a year ago we celebrated
the 50th anniversary of full clergy rights for women in the United
Methodist Church. Bob Olmstead co-edited the book of recollections published at
that time. The first in a series of occasional papers called “On the Way:
Visions of the Whole Gospel” just came out this year. Kristin Sachen wrote it,
here’s a copy to look over, and you can get one from Bob electronically –
BobOlmst@aol.com. This passage affirms going back to our roots in
listening to God, knowing and loving God for ourselves – no matter all the other
good and busy and needful all other pressures on our lives –
Serving the church these past seven years
through the United Methodist Committee on Relief brought the change that led me
through my wilderness. I laid down so many practices that had once been
nourishing – preaching, pastoral care, providing the sacraments, teaching,
walking daily with people of all ages in their faith journeys. I rediscovered
who I was underneath the robe. I tasted again what it is like to sit in the
pew. I found a rhythm guided by something other than Sunday morning – an
unpredictable rhythm based on breaking news of disasters and war in the world.
I discovered how big the world really is and how many United Methodists there
really are. I found sustenance in ecumenical settings, challenge in urban
living, and unlimited opportunity to exercise my gifts for administration. I
felt the power and the limits of money. I experienced teamwork in ways I hadn’t
thought possible. I saw our church at its best and, I am afraid, I saw our
church at its worst. I met myself as a child of God in the midst of other
children of God. I found the church.
Amen? As our Bishop would ask. And we will use
Kristin’s witness to help us follow-up our Capital Campaign with Mission
Project/s – we welcome your help.
The question of Martha and Mary is not who
serves and who doesn’t. All of us are called to serve! Dr. King says, anyone
can be great because anyone can serve. Jesus himself is among us as “one who
serves.” The question is how all of the forms of service, of action upon our
faith – mind, body, heart, soul -- fit together for the good of God? How do we
know and love God completely? Wholistically, as we say? And our neighbor as
ourselves? If we are to remember and reclaim the early faith for our church
today, we need to abandon all hierarchies of power come down from on high, from
all CEOs and commanders-in chief. We need to forego some activist distractions
of everyday life, whereby we often preoccupy ourselves against any deeper
conversion and change. We need to sit at the feet of Jesus again, get down with
everyday people, subvert our elevated elitism by nurturing grassroots of hope
from below.
And if you will turn with me to the last
paragraph of our Bishop’s blog about her visit here, we need to say together –
Way to go Reno First! Sing on people of God! Dance on, play on, paint on,
march on, carve on, preach on, lead on, craft on, glue on, pray on, and on . . .
and on . . . God loves a creative giver! Amen.
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