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September 9, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Jeremiah
18:1-11, Psalm 139:1-6, Luke 14:25-33
“Shocked and
Awed: The Cost of Winning Unwinnable War/s”
Julie and I went “up to the potter’s house”
once. It changed our whole lives. We were looking for work after serving in
the Peace Corps. It was 1967. Some old friends of ours had been following the
cherry picking into northern Michigan. They stopped to convert an old gas
station into a restaurant and pottery where they made some of what is displayed
on the communion table this morning. They helped us get teaching jobs in the
old three-room schoolhouse there. We were there when Martin Luther King was
killed the next Spring. That was the occasion of our call to seminary. The
potter’s wheel spun deep changes for us. Of course there was this war going on
then, too, that no one knew how to stop.
This war is us. Our children and grandchildren
have been, are now, and are about to be in Iraq as we speak. A grand-nephew of
one of us was killed by lightning in Colorado this week between his second and
what was to have been his third tour. Are there others in direct relation with
the war whom we keep specially in prayer? In this week of 9/11, Rosh Hashanah,
and the endless debating of war and its funding? We are there. This war is
us. We are paying for it, in more ways than one. Maybe we need some hard texts
for hard times.
This is one of Jesus’ toughest messages to us.
It begins with a glimpse of his popularity. Large crowds are traveling with
him. Whatever he’s saying and doing seems to be “working.” He’s successful.
He looks like a “winner.” His disciples and “first church” members must be
feeling pretty good. This could be the start of something big! Yet in a kind
of “good Jesus, bad Jesus” way, by the end of the passage Jesus says things
nobody wants, or can bear, or knows how to hear. He calls into question every
encouragement, every accomplishment, every establishment, every attainment.
Slowly the crowds fall away. Only the disciples remain. They are filled with
self-doubt, distraction, disappointment, even despair. They are wondering how
Jesus could be so wrong about them or they about him.
How do we claim this and all the other “hard
sayings” of Jesus? Even as our culture escapes into another season of all
football, all the time? And even as congressional debates and presidential
campaigns are portrayed as having nothing to do with morality (at least not the
public kind) -- nothing to do with equity, fairness, justice, nonviolence,
reconciliation, community, lasting peace – but only with more “football.”
Listen for all the football terms that are used. It’s all about winning and
losing -- who can be best portrayed a “winner” at the expense of all who look
and sound like “losers.” We just have to say, Jesus is not playing games!
Following Jesus is tough and costly – not comfortable and not popular.
I cannot for the life of me grasp how we got to
this way of thinking. How can being “Christian” or being “American,” being
disciples or being citizens, somehow be all about winning? The Bible was written
by losers, about losers, and for losers! It is the “underside,” maybe the
underdogs, of history. America was settled by losers – by people who could not
make it where they were, who had to seek a new land – although we act as if
every other immigrant class is superior to whatever the current one happens to
be! So how did being Christian or being American become all about domination?
About lording over, looking down on others? As Jesus says here, we always seem
to need a taller tower – a bigger something or other to show everyone how
dominant we really are.
That obsession runs from the Tower of Babel down
through the World Trade Center, and the tower we will defiantly put right back
up in its place! The debate in Los Angeles while we were just there was over
whether to renew its vast expanses of neighborhoods -- or to build
Manhattan-like towers downtown! Moreover, says Jesus, we always seem to need a
winnable war – another chance to prove how controlling we can be. My own mantra
this past week to senators and representatives is, no matter what General
Petraeus presents, we can’t win an unwinnable war! We can’t win a war that was
wrong to begin with.
The cost of trying to win such a war -- “at all
costs,” as we say -- is incalculable and unconscionable. It is incalculable and
unconscionable to the everyday ordinary men and women, children and elders of
Iraq, to their infrastructure and their environment. The cost is just as
incalculable and unconscionable to our own horribly wounded and dead men and
women -- and to what remains of our so-called “stature” in all the world. I
would argue it’s not just this war but war itself that has become obsolete and
unwinnable. Human beings began the practice of war – mythically with Abel and
Cain. Human beings built war into the megalith of fratricidal, genocidal and
suicidal death of the last century. Wars raged totally “out of control.”
Today’s wars are aimed as much at civilians and noncombatants as at armies. In
fact, we cannot tell who is “army” and who is not. Wars specialize in “low
intensity conflict” cynically seeking to win “hearts and minds of the people”
while holding them in perpetual dis-ease and dread.
It is demeaning and dehumanizing to think war is
what will “win” us to one another. When we try to raise our children by fear,
by domination and control, we quickly learn they do not stay little very long.
What we do unto them when they cannot fight back they will do unto others when
they can. They do what they know. Thus we perpetuate cycles of towers and
wars, violence and fear, domination and control. As Jeanette Rankin told us in
Jeanmarie Simpson’s play, “We can no more win a war than we can an earthquake.”
The only “winner” in war today is war itself – and those who make huge profits
from destruction and so-called “reconstruction.” But there is some good news as
well! We human beings started war. We human beings can stop it. Not the
generals, whose business is war. Not the presidents, who hide behind it. WE
can stop it.
Yet listen to Jesus about what it costs us. Our
love for him, our trust in him, our willingness to follow him must be so great,
so challenging, so compelling, that in comparison it will seem we “hate”
everyone and everything else in our lives. “Hate” is the word Jesus uses. For
one whose only commandment to us is to love, “hate” must be chosen with all
deliberate care. It is our relationship with Jesus that “dominates and
controls” all of our other relationships! Though Jesus would not use those
terms. He would more likely say our relationship with him “subverts and sets
free” all of our other relationships! We have to let go even of our own lives
– of all else that gives us meaning -- our plans, our careers, our vocations --
our security, success, retirement, fulfillment. It all belongs to Jesus!
What is Jesus’ “bottom line” to this passage? “None of you” (starting with the
preacher!) “can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions!”
If we want to line up with Jesus, we’ve got to put everything else on the line.
I hope it helps to see and believe ourselves to
be as living clay, living earth, in the hands of a loving potter, loving
creator. We belong to a potter who will not let us go – will not give up on us
-- will not call us “finished,” unless and until we reflect the creator’s
highest, brightest hopes for our createdness. Our potter goes on gently,
patiently working with all us “spoiled vessels,” us much-less-than-perfect
humans – in ways that seem “good” to the potter. Surely those “good” ways are
not the ways of violence and war, domination and control. Surely there are
alternatives -- other ways, other options, other choices, other hopes. Surely
we as the clay can be “turned out” much differently than we have been.
Surely with this coming of each “September” in
life, each new “program year” – the wondrous return of the choirs, Homecoming,
revival of youth group and Sunday school, nominations and choices of leadership
for all of our structures and actions, raising of stewardship funds to make
mission and ministry happen, reports to and from Church Conference – October
29! Surely we can follow the spirit of Rosh Hashanah – this Thursday -- the
traditional “Days of Awe” for sustained reflection upon our own lives and
relations, radical (that is, deep-rooted) self-examination and self-evaluation –
Nobody else can do it for us! Nobody else can know us, and God in us, as we do
ourselves. These are days of repentance, changing direction, and of renewal,
finding new ways – until the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the day of
at-one-ment – placing ourselves once again wholly and trustfully in the hands of
the potter.
Sisters and brothers, it’s all about “God is not
done with us yet!” God is not done with anyone yet, anywhere in this world! We
speak only as those who choose the Church as a way of following God in Jesus.
Yet we know we are not fixed and static in this. We are living believers in the
living Word of a living God to a living people through a living Lord who sends a
living Spirit upon us each day, every moment of each day! Who turns our lives
and life together inside-out and upside-down all the time! And we are only one
faith tradition among so many! All of our human faith traditions are being made
new all the time – even in spite of ourselves! God is not done with the world
yet -- nor even done with God’s self!
God’s words to Jeremiah here are not just directed to individual sinners – in
the hands of an angry or otherwise God! – but to nations and to kingdoms!
The words tell us how creatively changeable God can be. One moment God is
determined to “pluck up and break down and destroy.” But God changes as
that nation finds its way! The next moment God is determined to “build and
plant.” But again God changes as that nation loses its way. Jeremiah is
not playing any more games than Jesus is! This is some serious stuff.
Prophetic biblical words are not for waving at others, they are for applying to
us! Others are not God’s problem, we are! Just as God is our basic
problem. As with Jesus we have to hear Jeremiah’s “bottom line” in our
very own lives – “Turn now, all of you from your evil way, amend your way and
your doing.” It is we who possess the most in this world, who use the most
resources. It is we who have the most to give up, the most to change – in
us and, as we change, even to make change in God! (The angels say God has
not been the same since Jesus came into the world!)
Rabbi Arthur Waskow in Words for Meditation
today gives us these questions for a harvesting and sustaining season – “Have
all our hopes and deeds brought fruitfulness, or emptiness?” “How do we
celebrate what good we have wrought and turn from our mis-doings [our
mis-shapings in the hands of the potter!] into renewed joy and dedication?”
This is the season – as we grow through Labor Sunday to World Communion and to
All Saints Sunday – economically, ecologically, and ecumenically – This is the
season to “take in” the whole vision and wisdom of God – to see from God’s “POV”
(as we start the series of PBS previews this week) – God’s own “Point of View.”
Waskow asks us in the midst of history as God sees it, history “from just
outside its own boundaries.”
If we do, he says we will see history is “not a
closed circle to repeat the past.” We are not locked in to the vicious cycles
of violence and war, domination and control. Nor is history “a straight line
into the future.” Ours is not a nation of “manifest destiny,” of inevitable and
irresistible growth and progress – any more than any other nation is. 9/11
deeply disrupts and disturbs that assumption and illusion as perhaps nothing
else can or will. We still have not found a faithful, fruitful, gracious,
global way to respond – a way that is not vicious vengeance.
Rather, history is a spiral, an “always going
back, in order to go forward.” History must always be remembered in a way it
can be forgiven but not forgotten, in a way it can be let go of but not lost.
In that, it seems very much like the potter reworking, reshaping the clay. It
seems very much like the psalmist, in genuine shock and awe at how thoroughly
and completely God searches us and knows us. God comprehends all about us, all
we are thinking, even before we act, even before we speak. God hems us in, says
the psalmist, God gets our back and our front, that which has gone before and
that which is to come – so that we never are able to know ourselves as perfectly
as God knows us. For as the psalmist goes on to say about us, we are “fearfully
and wonderfully made.” We are capable of all the worst as well as the best. We
need God’s grace all the time.
Rabbi Waskow says we “are living in the midst of a great dance of God.” We
are spiral-dancing together “from greater Control to great Community –- from
greater Mastery over our planet and each other to a deeper sense of the Mystery
that calls us to live together.” Wow! Let us ponder that richly in
the days and the weeks just ahead –- in light of the anniversary of 9/11 -- in
light of debate on the war -- in light of the call to self-examination,
self-evaluation, repentance and renewal -- in light of Homecoming next Sunday
and all it means to come back home again as if for the very first time -- to
begin again as if nothing has been held against us – as if our future with God
is fearfully, wonderfully open and inviting of brand-new ways. These are
days to believe there is hope for us.
What does it mean and look like for each one of
us, each relationship of us, each congregation and community of us, even each
nation and world of us, to move from control to community? From mastery to
mystery? From shock and awe to wonder and awe? To dance a new and other step?
To BE “the other step,” as Rabbi Waskow enjoins is! To be part of the great
renewal of all God’s peoples all over this Earth – “Jewish renewal, Christian
renewal, Muslim renewal, Buddhist renewal, Pagan renewal,” you-name-it renewal.
“The world has become an earthquake,” he adds – a hurricane, a flood, a
tsunami, a meltdown. “There is no way to stand still upon it!” “For the earth
itself is leaping. Our only hope is to join the dance.” The dance of living
and loving clay in the hands of a living and loving God. The dance of living
and loving clay in the hands of a living and loving God. The dance of living
and loving clay in the hands of a living and loving God . . . . Amen.
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