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October 7, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Lamentations 1:1-6, Psalm
137, Luke 17:5-10
“Solidarity II:
Putting the ‘Word’ Back in ‘World’”
Just imagine, following Lamentations here, how lonely our city would be –
without 32 percent of our population – and probably a high percentage of our
work force and our school children! As represented by the Spanish-speaking
community. Talk about those who sing in a foreign land. We are not
expected to recall that Labor Sunday our title was “Solidarity: Putting the
‘Union” Back in ‘Communion’.” For All Saints Sunday it will be “Solidarity
III: Putting the ‘Sin’ Back in ‘Saint’.” It’s all about solidarity!
The second act of the Spirit who sanctifies and sustains. There is no
sustainability for our endangered world today unless all humans acknowledge, we
are the endangering species! We are all in this struggle to preserve
the creation herself and the lives of all creatures in her.
The more we go to war, the more we spend on
weapons of mass or of mere destruction – in our national life, in our own lives
– the less chance of saving this planet, preserving this Earth. We saw this
week in Ken Burns’ film series “The War” what World War II meant to that
generation. Everyone’s life revolved around the war effort. Everyone gave all
they had. That is what the Earth must come to mean to this generation! To all
generations until we get it right. When we are invited to fast and pray
tomorrow for an end to the war in Iraq, we are fasting and praying as well for
an end to all wars as “Wars upon Earth” herself.
Putting the “word” – the word of God, the word
about Life – back in “world” is insisting upon the sacredness, the God-givenness,
of all creation of all creation and of every creature in her. This
includes every human creature – with documents and without. Believe it or not,
there was a time – as we glimpsed anew with first pictures from outer space – of
Earth before nations and kings, before borders and flags, before guns and walls.
This is a time to remember how “given,” how contingent, how fragile we are.
This is a time to remember, we are all in this together! What happens to
any happens to all. As Paul says of the church as a body, every part
matters. Every part makes a difference – especially the painful and
problematic parts. When any part suffers all suffer. When any part
rejoices all rejoice.
The “word” in and about today’s “world” is, there is no escape, no avoidance, no
ignorance. There is no remaining in ignorance or isolation, no exclusion,
no exception. No state, no people can escape the common fate. We
“nation-states” have had a great if not altogether constructive run in history.
But we may be the dinosaurs now. Something much newer and different is
afoot. We do not know what it is yet. It is only now being revealed
– 192 nations and counting in the UN. It is only now coming into creation.
We see ourselves dimly at best. At least, it is time for us to give up trying
to re-make the rest of the world in our image.
It is time again to respect every nation, every
people, every tribe, every person as made in the “image of God” who makes all --
by whatever “God’s” name. It is time for our nation-state to learn from the
mission work of our “nation-church,” if you will. The longer we stayed in “the
mission field,” the less we knew why we were there. The more we knew there is
as much for us to receive as to give, as much to learn as to teach. At last we
understood, we did not “take God” to anyone anywhere else to Africa, Asia, Latin
America. God was already with “them” wherever, whoever they are. And God was
not taking from them but giving to them – even as God was trying to give to us
through them and refused.
Acknowledging such reciprocity in all the world
is what the World Communion Sunday offering for “Crusade Scholarships” is all
about. Please give generously.
Leadership in the world is not a prerogative but
a privilege; not a right but a responsibility. Leadership cannot be enforced
but only offered. Immigration policy is so much more than a law to be
enforced. Ultimately, immigration policy is a people to be received and served
like any other. For all immigrants are here to stay! We can run from them, but
we cannot hide! Twelve million people, my brothers and sisters, are not “going
back” – especially not “54” – the number arrested in ICE raids here last week--
at a time. People come here for jobs. But as the song says, our work is so
much more than our jobs! And our life is so much more than our work! What
makes us think it’s any different for everyone?
Every last person made of God -- meaning
everyone! – is entitled -- just for being made, for being a person -- to a
work! Entitled to a calling expressing their gifts! Entitled to a life – a
belonging to family and to community!
You have to know all you can of her to
appreciate my dear old friend Ms. Marjorie Keenleyside – whose antique vase from
Guatemala adorns our communion table this morning. Ms. Keenleyside in her early
eighties already had outlived two husbands and God knows how many pastors –
Congregationalist and Methodist and in “merged” church – before I became her
pastor in 1981 in Chicago. She had by that time “married the church” as she
liked to say. She ran the church Thrift Shop her mother had founded in the
thirties. She ran the Coffee Hour with its separate and not very equal tables
for adults and for children. (Oh, the Coffee Hour stories to be told – of any
congregation! Like Christmas Pageant stories!) She ran the set-up and serving
of Monthly Communion. She ran the Red Cross Sewing Group every Monday morning –
where her pastors were expected to stop for coffee – and for an earful about
whatever provoked Ms. Keenleyside Sunday.
Ms. Keenleyside lived in a perpetual, prayerful
state of outrage! Diminutive as she was, she had a way of fussing and fuming,
spitting and sputtering, shaking her fists and stomping her feet – not only
startling children but summoning God’s own self from whatever task to turn and
pay full attention to her! She all but finished a PhD in times few women were
finishing college. She specialized in Spanish literature and spent time in
Guatemala. She was librarian at Central Y College when World War II ended.
Trustees of the college tried to limit enroll of Jews and Blacks on the GI
Bill. (Talk about an “entitlement” changing the world!)
The president and a remnant of faculty,
including Ms. Keenleyside, quit and founded Roosevelt University. She was
deeply set in her ways of right and wrong, which meant legal and illegal as
well. She was a strict observer of “law.” Our congregation discussed and
debated joining the “Sanctuary Movement” of that time in solidarity with and
support of political refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala – whose government
wars on their own indigenous peoples were trained and equipped by our
government. Ms. Keenleyside virulently, vitriolically opposed our joining
– until one morning she knocked with unusual restraint on my door to say she had
dreamed the night before that someone she met and knew from her days in
Guatemala knocked at her own door to ask for safety and shelter. Marjorie
found she could not refuse her friend. The “political” and prophetic
suddenly got very personal and pastoral for her.
Today, we may see by the “Pledge” in our Words
form Meditation, there is a “New Sanctuary Movement.” (www.newsanctuarymovement.org)
We are invited to consider our pastoral and our personal and pastoral response
-- informed by our prophetic and even political discernment, insight and
wisdom. It is endorsed by our General Board of Church and Society. Our local
Bishop Beverly Shamana supports it. Retired pastor Phil Lawson – brother
to the legendary Rev. Jim Lawson who trained Dr. King and others in nonviolence
and active resistance to injustice – is helping to organize this movement in our
conference.
Maybe we want to invite the Lawson Brothers to a
day like the Bishop’s day with us? What a chance to join God to say something
new and different about how biblical people, people of biblical faith, see the
world, the Earth, the creation herself – even as we see, with Jesus, the mustard
seed – which is far from a “little faith” but a whole lot of faith! Just ask
anyone who knows what a struggle faith is – not only to find and receive it, but
to live by and act upon it!
Do we know we will make a difference? We never
know which mustard seed will take root and grow – any more than which snowflake
will break the branch or which straw the proverbial camel’s back. But with
these apostles asking Jesus “Increase our faith!” we know there is more to our
lives in faith that we are “getting” yet. We plead with Jesus, expand us,
enlarge us, enrich us with new connection and new communion, new sanctification
(saintliness) and new solidarity. Even let us be “uprooted” where we are stuck
and re-planted where we can be fruitful. Let us be aware of how much work there
remains to do – even as slaves in from the field. Do not let us live only for
ourselves, even only for our nearest and dearest loved ones, our families and
our friends, just our own workplaces and communities. Remind us that like
creation, salvation also is not for us alone but for all of us together!
There is always more vision for us to grasp, more work for us to do, more faith
for us to trust, more risk for us to take. Even on World Communion Sunday, we
declare we are not content to sit down to rest and to eat our own meal unless
and until everyone has a place at the table! And there is food for us all.
We will come in from the field, put on our aprons, keep serving – for that’s who
we are! Even as we are reminded this week of the Amish community in
Pennsylvania after the murders of their children a year ago, forgiving the
murderer and reconciling with his family – not because they liked or even were
ready for it. It’s just that in Jesus they knew who they were and they
knew what they had to do.
With Jesus we know when it is time to say, “You have heard it said of old,” and
when it is time to go on to add, “But I say unto you!” It is time for us
to look again at the “law” in light of the “gospel.” To wonder, to
question, to analyze, and to challenge. To think and to act outside every
box. To take a “God’s eye” view of the world, a perspective on all of the
people, all of the children of God. A perspective based on position – on
where we stand and who we stand with.
For if we who follow Jesus -- greatest
law-breaker, law-changer in history – do not stand with those outside the law,
who will? If we do not stand with those lamenting the loss of their city --
their livelihood, their family, their community -- who will? If we do not
stand with those who sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land, in a foreign
language -- who will? If we do not practice “open hearts, open minds, open
doors” -- who will? If we do not go on to add “open borders, open orders
(ordinations), open arms” -- who will? Will you? Will I? Will we? Amen.
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