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September 23, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Jeremiah
8:18—9:1, 1 Timothy 1:12-17, Luke 16:1-13
“Balm Not Bombs:
Heart-Breaking Profits, Heart-Broken Prophets”
Anybody here got two trillion dollars? That’s about what we’ve spent of
resources, not to mention blood, on this war. Where are the prophets like
Jeremiah among us spilling out our guts in prayer and agony over this war?
Where is our sense of failure that we can do nothing to stop it – no matter
what our position on it? Listen to him: His joy is gone. Only grief
is upon him. His heart is sick. All he can hear is the cry of the
poor. How can it not break our hearts? For Jesus says our hearts are
where our money is, and look at where our money is!! So where is
God? Why are we not being held accountable?
Why are we not being shown some alternative to the deadly path we are on?
Is God no longer with us? Driven off by our false images and foreign
idols? By our vast accumulations of wealth? Harvest is past.
Crops are in. But we are not rejoicing. We are not saved. How
can the harvest not be a source of joy? A sign of salvation? Only
when we do not share it, when we do not glean it for all who need it. The
hurt of the people has become the ache of the prophet.
We only know the hurt of our people. We only
know how to mourn. Dismay has taken full hold of us. Is there no balm, no
soothing, no healing to be found? Are there only bombs? Devastating,
destroying? Why can no one stop us? Why can no one heal us? Why are the needs
of our people so neglected? What more can we their prophets, their voices,
their advocates do? How much more can we pray and agonize? How much more water
is there? How many more tears? That we might weep and wail day and night for
our slain and neglected?
Does this grief of Jeremiah touch any
responsive chord in us? Do we find ourselves weeping with him? Wondering what
else we can do? Why it is so hard to keep caring, keep trying? When we fear no
one else going with us? Venturing where our grief has led us? I hear
Jeremiah’s words. I see the figure broken in grief on the bulletin cover. I
think how many of us have much to agonize over – in our own and family lives,
among loved ones and friends, in workplaces and in communities, for nation,
world, and Earth. I know we need all the help we can get – with praying, with
agonizing, with losing, with grieving. I know it sounds strange, but these may
be gifts of the Spirit we all need now.
I am stunned but heartened all the more at
recent revelations of the agonies of Mother Teresa. She always seemed so called
and contented to offer her life for the poor in the streets of Calcutta. We may
read her book soon in Adult Class. She writes these words to Jesus at the
suggestion of her confessor –
Lord, my God, who am I that You should
forsake me? The Child of your Love -- and now become the most hated one – the
one – You have thrown away as unwanted – unloved. I call. I cling. I want –
and there is no One to answer – no One on Whom I can cling – no, No One. – Alone
. . . Where is my Faith – even deep down right in there is nothing, -- but
emptiness and darkness.
Can we hear her? Can we feel her? Can we
identify with her? Are we with her?
We’ll come back to some thoughts about Mother
Teresa and us at the end of the sermon. Meantime, interfaith groups and peoples
all over the land are preparing for a day of fasting and prayer on “Columbus
Day,” October 8, to end the war. May we join with them if we choose? May we
open our sanctuary that day and invite in who will to fast and pray with us?
May we open our council meeting that night with breaking our fast and rejoicing
that God is yet with us? That our very praying reveals God is there? That we
are still searching and finding our way?
If Jeremiah connects for us balm and bombs, healing and hurting, Paul’s letter
to Timothy here connects praying and paying, caring and costing ourselves the
nice, quiet, peaceable life any one of us would prefer to a life of prophetic
grief. I just heard the testimony of someone who sought a little
compassion and comfort from a friend over her grief and despair about the war
and about the witness to ending it she tries to make every week. Her
friend wondered why she didn’t just think more positive thoughts? Find
something less stressful, more rewarding?
Paul says the first thing is always to pray –
in every way and for everyone we can! We have to believe there is POWER in
prayer – supplication, intercession, thanksgiving, and all forms of prayer.
Power especially for rulers and governments to rule well – so that we might go
quietly about a simple life of humble contemplation! But if rulers and
governments are NOT ruling well -- are not even ACTING as if they were God’s own
powers and principalities – instituted by God for the good of all the people,
and accountable to God for the good of all the people – then we are NOT entitled
to our simple lives of humble contemplation! If we’re going to pray, we’re
going to pay for what we pray for! If we’re going to care, it’s going to cost
us SOMETHING – if not our lives.
God is in this prayer life for the good of all
peoples everywhere. Governments and their leaders under God are not meant to be
the enemies of the people (as self-serving so-called leaders so often portray
government today). Rather, governments are meant to be of us, and by us, and
for us, and with us in every way! Governments are meant to be advocates for the
people! Guarantors of the people’s common good and common wealth! We are
actually hearing the opposite of that from candidates – saying there is no
“common good” anymore! When governments and their leaders do not do serve the
well-being, the salvation, of all the people, we who pray have to change those
governments. We who pray have to pay. We who care have to act whatever the
cost. God, says Paul, wants everyone saved! Everyone to know we all
come from one source in God – by whatever name we call “God,” by whatever way we
pray. Praying is paying the cost of our caring. We need all the help and
“mediation” we can get!
God wants us all to know that Jesus is like an extension and perfection of
Jeremiah. Jesus offers his life – not just in word but in deed. He
ransoms himself -- not only once, in death, but always, in resurrection.
He cancels our debts, he exchanges himself for every last victim of sin – our
own or anyone else’s – that everyone might be free! That everyone might be
free, in part, because governments and their leaders are doing their work under
God – the work of well-being for all of God’s peoples! That we may be free
to live the good life all deserve. Jesus says here that every person is meant
to be -- not so much a person of wealth as a person of worth! In fact,
Jesus says bluntly, we have to choose between God and wealth. We cannot
serve both. When John Wesley says we are to earn all we can, save all we
can, and give all we can, he means that money is meant to serve us – all of us.
We are not meant to serve money.
We know in our so-called “free market” economy
everyone is free to use whatever means to make whatever money off whatever can
be bought and sold. The gaps between rich and poor – wait till we hear Jesus’
story next week! – grow apace. Governments and their leaders are not expected
to look out for the common good, the common wealth. Rather, they are expected
to lower corporate taxes, increase corporate gain, stay out of corporate
regulation, and even privatize or corporatize as much of government -- even of
government war! -- as they can. (There is a new crisis in Iraq right now over
who controls the “private security” forces hired by U.S. government to protect
diplomats and dignitaries on their so-called “tours” of the “war zone!”) In
other words, governments are expected to serve wealth and not God -- who as Paul
says is the Creator of all government – not to mention of all wealth!. War now
is more about wealth -- making it and defending it -- than about any justice or
peace.
What is for this “dishonest wealth” Jesus commends us to use for the sake of the
people? For the sake of canceling debt? Of building relationship,
hospitality, and community? Surely it includes wealth that is made off of
war -- wealth that is made off of any other form of human misery and human
weakness, human disaster and desperation. Anytime we prosper while others
suffer, we are making what Jesus calls “dishonest wealth” in the sight of God
who wants the salvation and the well-being of us all. Who knows how we are
meant to see such wealth in our own state? Wealth gained by the same
casinos who make up our share of state taxes? In a state that ranks near
the bottom in so many ways we could be serving well-being for all! Maybe
the casinos and we both should be using more wealth for more people! Maybe
it’s hardest to see what is closest to us. But surely we can see the grief
caused by war, by profiting off the war – and by the free trade in drugs and
alcohol, prisons and weapons, bodies and sex.
With Jeremiah we have to learn prayer and
agony, loss and grief. How do we learn to see grieving as a gift? Personally
and together? As that which allows us to “suffer” the past, to honor it for the
best it has been? But grieving also as that which frees us for the future?
Giving us courage to start again – even in new and differing ways – no longer
afraid of the worst that may happen? Willing to take new actions, new risks,
for our deepest values and most abiding commitments?
How do we learn to pray for what we know will
give us such grief? How do we pray for the loss of a whole way of life we know
we enjoy at expense of so much of the rest of the world? That is what this
steward loses in microcosm – a whole way of life off of those who owe him! How
do we pray for the loss of a war we know we are fighting for all the wrong
reasons with all the wrong people – even enemies created by the war? How do we
pray for the loss of all lies and illusions about this war and any other? How
do we pray for the loss of all apathy and inaction? The steward in this story
is such a person of urgency, of shrewdness and of action. How can we learn from
those who sense of having so little left to lose in the world gives them a
freedom and courage, boldness and directness, to do whatever has to be done to
keep the well-being of all of the people alive? The steward looks down, not up,
for his help. He looks to the people in need of being relieved and released
from their debts – in need of the Jubilee action of God!
We have to help and support one another in this
painful process because none of us has been “right” about this war in any way
that finally matters. None of us has reached that depth of Jeremiah’s own
brokenness, Jesus’ own ransomness for all the people. The real scandal is not
how the steward acts in this story but how Jesus acts in all history! To set us
so free and to break such cycles of debt and of death as to give us a new way to
be – in relationship, hospitality, community with one another – what truly may
be called here the promise of “life eternal!” There will be no winners of this
war at all. There will only be losers, like Jesus, who find that losing and
being lost are first steps toward finding and being found.
One commentator on this passage says of
Jeremiah only grievers can be hopers!
Coming back to Mother Teresa’s prayer and agony
and claiming them as our own – National Catholic Reporter asks in an
editorial –
What if Mother Teresa’s darkness was a
warning? We made one of the world’s prophets into a celebrity, but ignored her
message and her example. We wanted to believe that she lived on a higher plane,
. . .
But what if she was just like us, saw
problems, responded, and got deeper and deeper into the suffering of others
because there seemed no end to it? . . .
We who by birth and luck live higher on
life’s economic pyramids wish that poverty and its consequences could be
resolved, but it all seems so complicated and predictable, beyond our control.
We suffer the fatigue of seeing things we don’t know how to change without
disturbing the world in a way her wonderful works did not seem able to do. The
question she poses is the starting point everyone can make, however far they
take it and wherever the come out in the end: What is your call here and now,
and what is keeping you from answering it?
What is YOUR call here and now, and what is
keeping you from answering it? What is MY call here and now, and what is
keeping me from answering it? What is OUR call here and now, and what is
keeping us from answering it? Let those who are asking hard questions also say
with assurance, Amen!
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