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November 11, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: 2
Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17, Psalm 145, Luke 20:34-38
“Solidarity III:
Putting the ‘Sin’ Back in Saint”
You remember me? Used to preach her on
occasion? There’s so much “testimonial talent” (“homiletic hubris?”) to this
congregation, I just try to keep out of the way. So here we are in November –
“dreary November in our souls,” says Ishmael to begin Moby Dick --
celebrating the saints and elders – the “older and wiser” than we – our veterans
of war, peace, and life. We aspire to the awesome scope of their vision of
life as they approach the “Big Picture” of God! It is a month of
thanksgiving and praise for the gifts of creation at harvesting times.
Next Sunday we offer up gifts of thanksgiving celebration for the “What a
Friend” campaign to support and grow the ministries and mission of this
congregation.
The next night comes Church Conference as we celebrate the past year and
challenge ourselves to the next. Then come Thanksgiving Eve and Day.
Before long “the Day of the Lord!” That ending of this given time of our lives,
this liturgical year! The appearance of not so much a death-dealing
“Christ the King” as a life-loving “Christ the Kin” – in whom all are as family
and friend! Family and friends, says Jesus, love with a love that lays
down our lives for each other each day. It is a quality of love we only
learn from those who (like saints and elders) “remain” and “abide” in love over
time. It is a love of relating back to God who first loves us – who breaks
into our lives in the midst of our bondage and oppression and commits to a
solidarity and a sustainability with us that are not based on anything else
about us other than that God loves us!!
Speaking of saints and elders, thanks for the
chance for us to be “home” for my mother’s 95th birthday! She
attributes it to the “wee bit of Scotch” born into her, and the “wee bit more”
she adds every day – not! We laugh at and with our saints and keep them in
perspective – as per a column in The Catholic Worker --
One has to keep a sense of humor in times
such as these. . . . How easy it is to forget that holiness is not all somber
and grim, as is often presented in some pious tracts on the lives of the saints
or those holy cards depicting the venerable one rolling his/her eyes heavenward,
or with forearms crossed over their chests, just below the collarbones. . . . We
can’t quite put that look together with mirth, playfulness, or the Servant of
God laughing first and foremost at him/herself. It strikes us as indecent, the
improper lack of gravitas befitting his/her role as someone to imitate. In
short, it is conduct unbecoming the canonically correct!
Saints are those who rise, by grace, to faith’s
occasions – not only to believe but to pray, to contemplate, to study, to
choose, to act, and to reflect upon actions. Saints manage not to sell
themselves short in, nor to cheat themselves out of, experiencing life.
Rather, they allow themselves as much as they can possibly take in and bear – of
awareness and consciousness of God and of the world God loves so much as to be
suffering for us even now.
The world may become so intimidating, so
overwhelming to us, in this and each generation, that we want to opt out of it
-- go into whatever our favorite form of oblivion and denial. That’s why it is
so tempting to get trapped in the “dead-end” of “end times” – of “Left Behind”
thinking and acting – as if everything has been taken into the hands of a God
who is going to destroy creation and most of us anyway! Why should we be
responsible for our world and accountable for our lives? In fact, missionary
Janet Lewis told us recently, a key pressure on Israel now is militant
Christians who seek “Armageddon,” catastrophe, for the world!
Saints often are those who serve God by
indirection – not indiscretion but indirection! Saints do not set out to shape
the world according to their faith. Rather, they allow their faith to be shaped
in response to conditions and needs of the world. Their faithfulness (faith in
action) does not get imposed from above, so much as it gets insinuated – like
salt, like leavening, like light – from below. Remember what we heard in the
All Saints Gospel last Sunday? Blessed are we who are poor, who hunger now, who
weep now, when people hate and exclude and revile and defame us? But woe to we
who are rich, who are laughing now, when all speak well of us? We are to love
our enemies, do good, bless, and pray for those who hate ad curse and abuse us –
turn the other cheek, give our shirt as well as our coat – to everyone who begs
from us! Do I hear a, “much easier said than done?” Amen!
Saints know deeply within us that we are being
held to impossible and undoable standards. We are being entrusted with the very
hopes and dreams of our God! Yet we learn to laugh at ourselves, to take
ourselves a little less seriously (certainly than others take us!), and to offer
ourselves anew each day in the question -- Well, how can I mess up God’s hopes
for me by trying again today? It is precisely because God is in it! God is
with us! Our lives are only offerings! We sow the seeds as best we can. But
the increase is not up to us! Only God alone can see how it’s going to be. We
hang around hoping to catch a glimpse!
The writer to Thessalonians calls upon us to
“chill!” Time out! Take it easy! Learn from the saints and elders, the best
of tradition – the veterans of war, peace, and life – those who have put their
lives on the line and touched the full depth of living by faith alone. Do not
“be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed.” Of course, there are “days of
rebellion” now – when those in power, with weapons and wealth, exalt themselves
above every god and object of worship. They take their seats in the temple of
God, and declare themselves even to be God! Do not let anyone else, however
powerful they may seem to be, escape the very same fragile and fragmented human
condition that all of us share. There’s nobody here but us sinners! Saints
without sin are scary and a threat to the rest of us.
That’s why all the question marks on the
bulletin cover this morning. Saints are those on the search, the quest, the
journey of life into faith – always with many more questions than answers, a lot
more uncertainty than certainty. At the workshop preparing us for the “Prayer
in America” special on PBS right after Thanksgiving, I found myself asking of
prayer: How open, expansive, receptive can we be? A presenter said prayer can
lead to dilution, or to dilation. It can close us off or open us up – to God,
to self, and to others. It can lead us to a sense of holiness over others or to
a sense of wholeness with others. It can lead us to try to “fix” others because
we think we have the answers, or it can lead us to “fit” with others because we
are all in the search together. We can fear the loss of advantage we hold over
so many others, or we can find ways to share it – Joyful Alternatives, Voluntary
Simplicity, Fair Trade Coffee, Capital Campaign Missions Committee, United
Methodist Volunteers in Mission – we know the drill!
Prayer is essentially losing the smaller self
kept to ourselves and claiming the larger self found in communion with others
and with the God the ultimate “Other” of all. The challenge of stewardship as
we draw prayerfully (Thank you, Prayer Team!) to the symbolic time of offering
ourselves anew for the life and the work of the church – Prayerful stewardship
is each one of us doing the best we can with all that we’ve got! We help each
other to bring the “all we got” out of us.
Prayer and stewardship join together in opening
and offering ourselves and our resources. Prayer and stewardship both believe
God can do so much with so little from us! Even as we put the “sin” back in
saint as a way to affirm our shared humanness with all others – knowing what
happens to any could happen to any other of us – we also recall what a recent
develop “sin” is in God’s continuing creation of all the cosmos! Just this past
week we saw all over again at how long the creative powers we call “God” have
been at work in the life of the earth – and right next door to our state! A
science story in the paper begins, “The fossil remains of fragile jellyfish that
lived some 505 million years ago have been discovered in the rocks of a Utah
mountainside that once lay at the bottom of a shallow tropical sea!” Human
consciousness, including of sin, is just in our infancy – with so far to go
toward embracing fully loving perception and practice!
That is how Jesus responds to the Sadducees
here. They want to distract or entrap him with questions that reduce the
meaning of resurrection to which of seven husbands a woman would “belong to” in
resurrection -- if each of those she married in life died without giving her a
child? It’s the old “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” kind of
question – Who cares?! Come on, says Jesus, get a life! Ask the questions that
matter. As Jesus might say to us, if you are going to disagree, at least let it
be over right questions, questions of war and peace. Questions of violence and
protecting the lives of our children! Questions of including and affirming all
peoples of God. Questions of cosmic importance.
Jesus says resurrection is but a foretaste of
his return – not off in the future some time to ride in on some fiery steeds of
vengeance to further divide and conquer the world. Does that sound like this
Jesus? But Jesus has already “come back!” His Spirit has so come upon us as to
empower us all to speak and to act in his name, as his friends – those to whom
he has revealed everything from his Father! What more are we waiting for? What
more excuses can keep us from his works of life and of love? Even the fear of
death cannot keep us now -- we are children of his resurrection! Family and
friends of his new community in all the earth!
Let us join Sr. Mary Lou Kownacki in prayer –
O God, be merciful to me a sinner and
understand my weakness, my lack of trust. I lift my heart to a God of
forgiveness, of compassion, of peace. I believe that You are not present in any
act of violence. I believe that every human being is a child of God and that
all nations and religions are embraced by You. I believe that violence ignites
greater violence and that in the long line of history our only lasting legacy is
love.
Our only lasting legacy is love. Amen.
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