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October 14, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7, Psalm
66:8-22, Luke 17:11-19
“The Challenge of
Advocacy: Respecting the Wholeness of Children”
Talk about “exiled to Babylon” – think of this war, in the heart of original
Babylon! Do American troops feel “exiled” there? Do Iraqis feel
“exiled” in their own land? Millions of them have fled to Jordan and
Syria. They are not yet welcome here.
The sheer gall of Jeremiah – to suggest the
people in exile settle in for a long haul. Just “build house and live in them;
plant gardens and eat what they produce.” Don’t try to separate and preserve
yourselves as holier than anyone else. Seek the common good, “the welfare of
the city,” and especially “multiply there, and do not decrease!” When in doubt,
bring more children into the world!
Is this vision such an alternative to what we heard in the psalm last week –
which I know left some of us with deep concern about how nasty the psalmist can
sound? With weeping and wailing over the exile? The impossibility of
singing “our God’s” song in a foreign land? Remember the devastation of
Jerusalem! Set your heart on vengeance! May their “little ones” be
dashed against the rock!
My response to the nastiness of some of the psalms is to reflect even upon my
own sense of powerlessness to effect change – in my own life much less in the
life around and beyond me! And to remember the huge history of those who
have felt powerless – have been repeatedly invaded, occupied, captured, exiled –
for countless generations! And how infinitely more powerless they must
feel!
I say, thank God for the rantings and ravings of
the psalmist – as well as the rejoicings! Thank God for the freedom and courage
to express the full range of what it means to be human – and in relationship
with a “God” whom we are sure has promised us “favor,” justice and peace. Where
are they? What kinds of justice and peace are these? How do we always seem to
end up the victims?
Hebrew scriptures are not afraid to say that the
God who delivers also demands. Hebrew scriptures do not “shill” for God or say
only nice things about God. They just let ALL of God hang out – even as they do
themselves! They know God needs not “PR,” no imaging or packaging or
“spinning,” as we say. God can take care of God’s self! Let God be God – just
as wild and messed up as we are!
Until very, very recently in world history, the
Israelites knew little but victimhood. When the language of prayer is all
you have, it has to express every feeling. It is the power to act upon
feelings that makes such language more problematic.
Robert Alter has published a new The Book of
Psalms. One reviewer observes,
The Book of Psalms is the great oasis in
which a desert people gathers to pour out its complaints, fears, hopes; the
Psalms are prayers, songs, incantations, and perhaps even soliloquies. In them,
the supplicants invoke God as their light, their water, their warrior, their
scourge, their buckler, their rod, and their staff. But these images, these
human metaphors, also expose the frailty of such supplication, since just as God
is conjured into words he seems to disappear: many of the psalms are like flares
sent into the night sky of appeal.
As always in the Psalms, there are two Gods:
the known God, who gives and takes away life, and the unknown God, who may or
may not be amenable to pleas. The certainty of God’s presence and the mystery
of his salvation dance around each other.
On this 16th annual National Children’s Sabbath we find ourselves
asking of all times and places and peoples, how do they treat the children?
Whose children are being dashed against the rock? All over the nation this
weekend and next congregations of all traditions will be saying in their ways
what Jesus means when he says, “as you do unto the least of these [tiniest,
weakest, poorest, least organized of these] my sisters and brothers, you also do
unto me.”
Our salvation, our well-being as community,
depend upon what we do, and allow to be done, to our children. All we really
need ask of any community decision, legislation, action we propose to take is,
is this good for the children?! If we cannot say it is good for the children –
for ALL the children – simply do not do it!
Marian Wright Edelman, founder/director of
Children’s Defense Fund (www.childrensdefense.org)
in our Words for Meditation tells the story of Moses as “another baby adrift in
a small boat.” [The logo for her work through the years includes the prayer,
“Dear Lord, be good to me. The sea is so wide and my boat is so small.” This
year’s theme is “Creating a Safe Harbor of Hope and Health for ALL Children.”]
She says it’s one thing for several well-meaning and committed individuals to
stand for and with Moses under attack by Pharaoh. His nurse-wives, his
birth-family, his mother and sister, even Pharaoh’s own daughter – each acts to
rescue and protect Moses. They “rescue one endangered child,” Marian Wright
Edelman says. And every child is important, and each represents the whole. But
how do we go as well to the source of what is endangering all the children? How
do we stand up to Pharaoh, to the systems of injustice?
Reaching and teaching and serving and empowering
folks one by one is great and indispensable. This congregation does it already
-- at least through Kairos and Ridge House, through Drop in the Bucket and
Family Promise. We want to do more and more, all we can to acknowledge the
God-given humanity of each and every last person we meet. Many of us engage in
direct social service and crisis intervention. Our office workers do it all the
time – though we make sure we always offer each person the gifts of who we are
as a congregation – the gifts or worship and prayer and study and fellowship and
service to one another. We want to build relations of trust and respect --
often with people as different from us as we can imagine. Edelman simply
reminds us – by quoting Rev. William Sloane Coffin – “We are not called to
piecemeal charity, we are called to wholesale justice” – to maximize our efforts
in behalf of ALL the children!
Testimonies of some powerful young women from
Sparks and Wooster High Schools and from UNR at the worship service here Friday
-- in solidarity with those immigrants in our community under attack from our
government – reminded us, if mothers with children born citizens here are
deported, it is the children who suffer! It is the children who are
without vote, without voice, even without vision among us!
I just wish some children confronting their
futures in our world had the language of psalmists available to them! The rates
of desperation and despair and destructive activity among children and young
people of our state are high. We run up against funding for the war when we try
just to reduce the number of some nine million children without health and
mental health insurance. Thirteen million children live in poverty. It seems
we read every week of a shooting of or at children. Nine in every ten of us now
owns a gun – which is nearly triple, the rate of ownership in most every other
nation on Earth! Is that good for the children?
This confronts us with what Marian Wright Edelman calls “the challenge of
advocacy – going again and again to Pharaoh and demanding that he let the people
go, change unjust policy.” Had those individual acts of charity not
happened for Moses as an infant, clearly he would not have had the chance to
grow into the advocate and the organizer who would not give up on Pharaoh or on
all the people until either Pharaoh changed unjust law, or the people broke it.
I often said to my parents – and we go to
celebrate my mother’s 95th birthday this week! – thanks for making me
so secure as a child that I can afford to be at least a little bit foolish, a
little bit risk-taking and law-challenging as an adult. May we raise our
kids, and grandkids, accordingly – at home and in Sunday School!
Children desperately need our advocacy, and
advocacy is a basic work of the Holy Spirit as Jesus sends that spirit upon us.
“Advocate” is the very word Jesus uses according to John on his last night with
his friends. God will send you “another Advocate, to be with you forever,”
promises Jesus, “the Spirit of truth,” to abide with you and be in you. The
Advocate is both our Comforter and our Counselor – in the sense that we need
support before the law for the trouble we get in because we are led by the
Spirit to live out the gospel of Jesus in ways that may have to challenge and
threaten the law. Jesus himself -- all those who followed him then, and many
who have followed him throughout history -- have tried to confront the “letter
of law” with the “spirit of grace,” with the promise of God who is making all
things new – including if not beginning with the law!
So many times Jesus’ acts of healing challenge
and threaten the law. At times he heals or feeds people on the Sabbath when all
work of any kind is prohibited. Jesus teaches that both the Sabbath and the
law, are created to serve the people -- not the people created to serve the
law. When the law no longer serves the real needs of the people in changing
conditions and circumstances, then the law itself must be changed. In the
meantime – we live in the meantime as well as in mean times! -- we must ask of
those arrested under a law that has outlived its service to us, can they
possibly get a fair hearing under that law?
Jesus goes way beyond the law here in healing these lepers – and especially the
one who is not even Jewish but Samaritan! He is under no obligation to
attend to their humanity at all – they are outside the law, the Purity Code.
Much less to respond and to heal them. Much less to send them to the
priests -- so their healing “against the law,” so to speak, could have an impact
on the law, on the system that tried to survive by condemnation and exclusion.
We can be sure the priests will hold it against him. But Jesus is freed by
faith and by grace to respond to whomever he chooses and to do for them whatever
it is they and we -- need done. He is not afraid of being compromised,
contaminated, or condemned by his contact and even communion with those “outside
the law.”
For Jesus – as for Jeremiah addressing the
exiles -- holiness does not require our distinction and separation from others.
Jesus knows nothing that comes from outside of us, from contact with anyone
else, can defile us. It is only what we carry within us, even in our hearts –
our fear, resentment, anger, hurt, suspicion, mistrust – that we cannot bear to
deal with and therefore project onto others to condemn them. Jesus says what we
spread to one another is not uncleanness, not damnation, but wholeness and
hopefulness! We can spread healing and whole-making! Reconciling and
restoring to place in family and in community! Holiness is not to be hoarded
and protected but openly offered and shared!
Even these lepers, says Jesus – as feared and rejected and outcast and isolated
as they have been – and each of us can think of who are “lepers” to us today –
even these lepers carry within them the faith to make them well! There is
power in us to be reclaimed, recovered, repaired and restored! Jesus loves
me, this I know – he touched me and made me whole! He overlooked my fault
and saw my need! He would not let the law come between him and me, or tell
him what God’s gracious merciful love required of him. He became my
advocate – giving me vision and voice and vote and visibility to all -- again!
Jesus only gets thanked by one leper in ten. It’s hard to trust good news in our
lives to be good – especially if we go back to the priests with their vested
interest in controlling the “means of grace” as a way of controlling us!
Priests who see themselves “established” under law and brook no threat from
gospel! Of course, there are good reasons why the Samaritan never
felt part of community to begin with -- as a Samaritan, much less as a leper.
So perhaps the Samaritan had twice as much to be thankful for and could express
at least half of it.
But actually in the life of the church one in
ten is not bad. It may not keep you in the big leagues. But it’s a tithe,
after all. And if we spent even a tenth of our time in worship, in prayer, in
study, in service to others and witness for justice and peace, we would begin to
see the difference. Imagine what we could do with just a tenth of what we are
spending on this war. We never doubt the difference even one person can make.
God who makes many one also makes one many.
We specially lift up the completed lives of great women among us this morning –
First, Sr. Pat Kelly from Carmel of Reno community – perpetual witness to
justice and peace through her stands with immigrants, with prisoners especially
on death row, with victims of torture and of abuse – and through the amazing art
work and greeting cards of the community.
Second, United Methodist pastor Virginia Hilton,
Sacramento, one of the earliest women ordained in our Annual Conference – whose
obituary reads “activist and advocate” who “defied authority again and again
during her life to stand up for what she believed” – “lifetime commitment to
civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights.” To sisters Pat and Virginia we
say, “Presente!” You are with us! You live on in us! You
advocate for us as saints surrounding us with vision and voice.
Even with just a tenth of who we are, what we
have, what we say and do, we thank you! You save us and set us free. You heal
us and make us whole. Amen.
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