Sunday, January 29, 2017

The Controversy of Memory

Passengers aboard the "St. Louis." These refugees from Nazi Germany were forced to return to Europe after both Cuba and the US denied them refuge. 25% of them later died in concentration camps.
January 29, 2017
Micah 6:1-8
1   Hear what the LORD says:
          Rise, plead your case before the mountains,
          and let the hills hear your voice.
2   Hear, you mountains, the controversy of the LORD,
          and you enduring foundations of the earth;
     for the LORD has a controversy with his people,
          and he will contend with Israel.
3   “O my people, what have I done to you?
          In what have I wearied you? Answer me!
4   For I brought you up from the land of Egypt,
          and redeemed you from the house of slavery;
     and I sent before you Moses,
          Aaron, and Miriam.
5   O my people, remember now what King Balak of Moab devised,
          what Balaam son of Beor answered him,
     and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,
          that you may know the saving acts of the LORD.”
6  “With what shall I come before the LORD,
          and bow myself before God on high?
     Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
          with calves a year old?
7   Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
          with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
     Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
          the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
8   He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
          and what does the LORD require of you
     but to do justice, and to love kindness,
          and to walk humbly with your God?

Sermon: The Controversy of Memory
“Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates; like a tomb which rejects the living. If anything can, it is memory that will save humanity.”

Elie Weisel, Holocaust survivor and writer, spoke these words in his Nobel prize acceptance speech in Oslo in 1986. This person whose horrific memories you’d think he would want to forget, reminds us that remembering is essential to salvation, even if those memories are terrible.

It’s interesting how those who have suffered the most terrible harm are fixated by memory. Miroslav Volf, a theologian whose father was tortured for his peaceful Christian beliefs in Yugoslavia, has written a great deal about memory. He echoes Wiesel’s idea that memory is linked to salvation, and goes one to say that it’s not enough just to remember our history. We have to remember it rightly, thoughtfully, without malice or re-victimization.

Hear, you mountains, the controversy of the   
LORD:
“O my people, what have I done to you?
             In what have I wearied you? Answer me!
 For I brought you up from the land of Egypt,
             and redeemed you from the house of slavery;
             and I sent before you Moses,
              Aaron, and Miriam.
 O my people, remember
 remember now what King Balak of Moab devised,                               
 what Balaam son of Beor answered him,                   
 and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,    
 that you may know the saving acts of the LORD.”

This well-known passage of Micah is all about remembering. Though we like to say the last half-verse of it, that part about what God wants us to do (namely justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God), we can’t get there without first remembering.
There is no justice without memory.
There is no kindness without memory.
There is no humility with our God without memory.

And what was it they were to remember exactly? A couple of strange naming places: Shittim and Gilgal, and a couple of fellas named Balaam and Balak. What memories lived for these Jewish folk in those names?

Shittim is, most obviously, the place where they crossed the Jordan to enter the Promised Land. It was their last campsite before knowing home. But it had a much more negative side: Shittim was where the people of Israel committed idolatry through Balaam’s trickery. He “instructed Balak to put a stumbling block before the people of Israel so they would eat food sacrificed to idols.”[1] The result was the death of 24,000 people.

Gilgal doesn’t exactly conjure up warm-fuzzy memories, either.  Yes, this was were the wandering people of Israel ceased their wandering, and celebrated their first Passover in a settled land, where they ate the produce of that land instead of the manna of the sojourner.

And yet, even that place had a darker history to it: the prophets warn against it strongly. Amos and Hosea both name Gilgal as the capital of great evil and idolatry. Ultimately, it was a place of failure for those people who longed to find home: “failure to consolidate the conquest; failure of the monarchy; and more specifically the failure of the northern political program.”[2]

So why is God insisting that the prophet Micah, whose name means “who is like the LORD” and who was a laborer from small-town Moresheth-gath twenty-five miles from busting Jerusalem, urge these people to remember such painful things? Why not just leave it at redemption from slavery, and Moses and Aaron and Miriam? Why did God have to bring up all those uncomfortable places and people associated with deception, idolatry and death? Why would anyone want to remember such things?

It seems time to bring back Elie’s wise words: “It is memory that will save humanity.”

God wants them to remember, especially the painful parts of their history, so they will be saved from repeating them. Because these now-settled people are getting rather complacent with their political and religious corruption, letting priests, prophets and judges oppress the poor. Micah, that country boy, especially pointed out when farmers’ land was being taken by the rich. Injustice reigned, especially among the so-called religious.
Micah’s message was clear: worship without justice is meaningless. God doesn’t want thousands of rams, ten thousands of rivers of oil, or, heaven forbid, a firstborn child offered. God wants what God has wanted since the day Adam and Eve decided to snack on self-indulgence and power: for people to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with their Creator.
Remembering was the first step on that path, because sometimes the only way forward is to look backwards. There’s a reason that Micah described this whole prophetic rant as a “controversy” between God and these chosen people. There’s nothing more controversial than memory.
What we choose to remember, how we remember, and why we remember has everything to do with how we understand the world and our faith. No two people remember the same way, and that leads to contention and controversy.
I witnessed this most acutely in the summer of 2005. I led a group of Protestant and Catholic teenagers from Belfast, Northern Ireland to South Africa to build peace between them, a peace that was deeply rooted in remembering rightly. One day, we gave each teenager a lump of clay. Tell us your story, we said. No other guidance was given.
The first teen did something innocuous enough. Not the second: he angrily mashed his clay into a stone. “This represents a stone like what was thrown at us on Bloody Sunday by the Brits – no offense to you Prods – when we were peacefully marching and got suddenly attacked and killed.”
You can imagine the reaction that got! Teenagers began shouting at each other over who acted first on that terrible, violent day in Derry in 1972. Blame was cast, inherited anger bubbled up, and we leaders feared our year-long peacebuilding efforts were crumbling before our eyes. They weren’t, of course. The Spirit is made of stouter stuff than a lump of clay.
But here’s the thing: none of these kids were alive in 1972. These weren’t even their memories, they had been handed down to them, distilled with greater blame and hatred with each telling. There was no way for these young people to do justice, or to love kindness or to walk with humility without facing these bitter memories.
And they did face them, with incredible courage. It was very painful, but eventually their anger coalesced into one shared voice, angry at only being told half-truths and biased histories. They found their way to reconciliation, to salvation, and that path was paved with memory.
How, I wonder, do we remember? What is our Shittim, and our Gilgal? Those complicated parts of our history we struggle to understand still?
We might call it Miami in June of 1939, when 937 mostly Jewish passengers on the St. Louis ocean liner were turned away, sent back to Europe, resulting in more than a quarter of them dying in the Holocaust.
We might call it the horror of Pearl Harbor in 1941, and we might call it the racist internment camps that followed.
We might call it Memphis in 1968, when hatred tried to kill a movement by killing a man, and failed.
We might call it New York City in 2001, when something broke in our national sense of security, and we’ve never quite recovered it.
And in our own church and family histories, we all have a Shittim, and a Gilgal, places where God is calling us to go, to remember, even if painfully, to find what gives existence meaning, and what God uses to save this world, again and again. 
Do we want to do justice?
Do we want to love kindness?
Do we want to walk humbly with our God?
Then we have to remember, that the saving works of God for all people might not just be dusty pages on an old history book, but realities we partner with God in creating, every single day. Amen.


[1] Numbers 25:14
[2] Hutton, Rodney R. "What Happened From Shittim To Gilgal? Law And Gospel In Micah 6:5." Currents In Theology And Mission 26.2 (1999): 94-103. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials. Web.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Undivided Attention

January 22, 2016
New Testament Reading: 1 Corinthians 1:10-18
10 Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose. 11 For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. 12 What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” 13 Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? 14 I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15 so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. 16 (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) 17 For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. 18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

Sermon: “Undivided Attention”
The forest was my home. I lived there, and I cared about it.
I tried to keep it neat and clean.
Then one sunny day, while I was cleaning up some garbage a camper had left behind, I heard footsteps. I leapt behind a tree and saw a little girl coming down the trail carrying a basket.  I was suspicious of this little girl right away because she was dressed funny — all in red, and her head covered up as if she did not want people to know who she was.

Naturally, I stopped to check her out. I asked who she was, where she was going, where she had come from, and all that. She gave me a song and dance about going to her grandmother’s house with a basket of lunch. She appeared to be a basically honest person, but she was in my forest, and she certainly looked suspicious with that strange getup of hers. So I decided to teach her just how serious it is to prance through the forest unannounced and dressed funny.

I let her go on her way, but I ran ahead of her to grandmother’s house. When I saw that nice old woman, I explained my problem and she agreed that her granddaughter needed to learn a lesson all right. The old woman agreed to stay out of sight until I called her. Actually, she hid under the bed.

When the girl arrived, I invited her into the bedroom where I was in bed, dressed like the grandmother. The girl came in all rosy-cheeked and said something nasty about my big ears. I’ve been insulted before so I made the best of it by suggesting that my big ears would help me to hear better. Now, what I meant was that I liked her and wanted to pay close attention to what she was saying. But she made another insulting crack about my bulging eyes. Now you can see how I was beginning to feel about this girl who put on such a nice front, but was apparently a very nasty person. Still, I’ve made it a policy to turn the other cheek, so I told her that my big eyes helped me to see her better.

Her next insult really got to me. I’ve got this problem with having big teeth, and that little girl made an insulting crack about them. I know that I should have had better control, but I leaped up from that bed and growled that my teeth would help me to eat her better.

Now let’s face it — no wolf could ever eat a little girl — everyone knows that — but that crazy girl started running around the house screaming — me chasing her to calm her down. I’d taken off the grandmother’s clothes, but that only seemed to make it worse. All of a sudden the door came crashing open, and a big lumberjack is standing there with his axe. I looked at him, and it became very clear that I was in trouble. There was an open window behind me and out I went.

I’d like to say that was the end of it. But that Grandmother character never did tell my side of the story. Before long the word got around that I was a mean, nasty guy.

Everybody started avoiding me. I don’t know about that little girl with the funny red outfit, but I didn’t live happily ever after.

“The Maligned Wolf” by Lief Fearn retells the old tale of Little Red Riding Hood in the most imaginative way, showing how misunderstanding after misunderstanding, and snap judgment after snap judgment, escalated conflict.  It’s a great illustration of our human tendency towards defensiveness, the quickness with which we perceive slight or insult, and retaliate and how quickly we categorize the world into “us” and “them.”

The church, as you well know, has never been immune to the divisions and conflicts that plague society, and sometimes it seems the deeply held convictions of faith and theology lead to even greater conflict in congregations.

I suppose there’s comfort found in the solidarity of knowing the church as an institution of flawed human beings has never been perfect. This letter to the church in Corinth is a textbook example. What we have here is conflict rooted in religious rivalry for power and control of that small congregation.

Several divided groups are mentioned here as witnessed by those described as “Chloe’s people.” Chloe was probably a Christian woman of great social standing, and her “people” might have been members of her household or business associates. (I think it’s safe to assume they discovered all this church discord while chatting in their parking lot.)

The first group they name are those who claim, “I belong to Paul,” which is clear enough. Then there are those who “belong to Apollos,” who was a popular Christian who spent time in Corinth according to the book of Acts. Then we have those who “belong to Cephas” (the Aramaic name for Peter) and finally, those who belong to Christ. An exasperated Paul responds to this news of faith factioning by asking a question for which the answer should be very obvious: “Has Christ been divided?” Though the nature of religious rivalry may change with different circumstances, theologies and power plays, the answer to that question does not change: no. No, Christ has not been divided.

But goodness, we human beings, especially we Christians, have. It all goes back to the tendency we learned from the so-called Big Bad Wolf at the start of this sermon. When we don’t understand someone, how they look, what they say, how they carry themselves, we have a choice, every single time.

That choice is between curiosity or suspicion.

We can be curious about the “other,” even if that other is someone in the pew next to us with different theological or political leanings than our own. Forget the old adage about the cat, curiosity is holy: it will lead us to ask, to grow, to adjust, to learn. The goal is not to agree with each other through some superficial watering down of who we are; the goal is to understand and value each other, not despite of, but because of, our differences.

Suspicion, however, will lead us down a very different path. If we choose to be suspicious of the “other,” then we will color our understanding of them, not by asking questions, not by learning of their reality, but like that wolf in our story, by assuming we know who they are, what they think, and what they believe, based entirely on our own limited experience. This path is not a holy one, but the path towards intolerance, defensiveness, and finally, if left unchecked, fear, hatred, bigotry and violence.  We do not grow on this path as a church. Like that wolf threatened with the angry ax, instead, we face death.

And so this essential choice between engaging people who differ from us – both within and without these walls – with either curiosity or suspicion is a choice between life and death. The survival of the church, not just our church but the church universal, depends on us choosing the path of curiosity.

It’s the path Peter, Andrew, James and John took when they left their responsible career paths for the risky adventure Jesus offered them.  It’s the path Linda, Jane, Shan and Kathy take today when they follow Jesus on the adventure of leadership in our church as elders.  It’s the path of the cross, where the foolishness of “us” and “them” is defeated in sacrificial love and irresistible grace.

We have a choice, every time we encounter someone different from us, whether that difference be rooted in age, gender, ethnicity, religion, economics, politics, or even personality. We can choose suspicion, and give way to our basest instincts of defensiveness and conflict. Or we can choose curiosity, rising to Jesus’ holy path of peace, and see the “other” not as a threat but as a blessing in disguise, maybe even if they’re wearing a little red riding hood.  Amen. 

Sunday, January 15, 2017

The Servant Song

"Mystery of Faith" by Tom McGee
January 15, 2017
Isaiah 42:1-9 
1   Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
          my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
     I have put my spirit upon her;
          she will bring forth justice to the nations.
2   He will not cry or lift up his voice,
          or make it heard in the street;
3   a bruised reed he will not break,
          and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
         he will faithfully bring forth justice.
4   She will not grow faint or be crushed
          until she has established justice in the earth;
          and the coastlands wait for her teaching.
5Thus says God, the LORD,
          who created the heavens and stretched them out,
          who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
     who gives breath to the people upon it
          and spirit to those who walk in it:
6   I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness,
          I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
     I have given you as a covenant to the people,
          a light to the nations,
7        to open the eyes that are blind,
     to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
          from the prison those who sit in darkness.
8   I am the LORD, that is my name;
          my glory I give to no other,
          nor my praise to idols.
9   See, the former things have come to pass,
          and new things I now declare;
     before they spring forth,
          I tell you of them.

Sermon: “The Servant Song”

I reckon poets are either the most mad among us, or the only ones sane enough to say the truth as it really is. You can give a dozen poets each an apple and ask them what color it is, and you’ll get a dozen different variations: everything from crimson to cerise to scarlet; the most dramatic among them saying it’s the color of an autumn dusk, or of a child’s cheeks in the snow. Poetry can be maddening in its obscurity, but sometimes, a poem is the only thing to bring sanity.

I say this because it took a poet-prophet, whose poetry we now read in Isaiah chapter 42, to bring words of sanity to an insane time of tit-for-tat, of victory and defeat and glory and despair. Let me set the scene for the day that poet first said these words.

The place was Babylon; the time, well over 2,500 years ago. Babylon was a nice enough place to be if you followed the god Marduk, whose statue was brought down from his mountain of honor and paraded through the city with fanfare each year. But it wasn’t so nice if you were an exile from Judah, the most educated among your people, now found to be the lowest of the low, not even allowed to worship your God, living in a ghetto and raising children who’d never even been to your homeland.

The most exciting event of that time was when Cyrus, the king of Persia, marched into the city of Babylon, overthrew the tyrannical reign of Nabonidus with a single stroke, and announced that those exiles from Judah were finally allowed to return home.

Even the poet who spoke these words of Isaiah got caught up in the excitement, and praised Cyrus as a messiah figure. But then, in that way of poetry, he changed his tune. He began to wax poetic, not about Cyrus the great conquering hero, but about someone else, known only as “the servant.”

This servant song spoke of someone who could not have been more opposite of Cyrus, more different than a mighty hero. This servant of the God of Judah and Israel did not march into cities and overthrow mighty armies with a single stroke. No, this servant didn’t even break a fragile, bent reed. They did not burn the opposition with unstoppable fire. No, this servant didn’t even blow out the whisper of a single waning candle flame. This servant did not demand attention and glory, but instead refused to even raise her or his voice.

Just when those folks in Babylon were rallying around the great and victorious Cyrus, this poet, as poets often do, showed them how little of the world they actually understood. Cyruses would come and go; political coups would happen again and again; crowds would be whipped into a frenzy following whoever seemed to be the savior of the day. And the world would remain mostly unchanged in its constant cycle of power, glory and might.

This servant the poet described was not of this world, though she or he was very much a part of it. No, this servant recognized a greater reality, beyond the political power plays and the game of thrones. We call that reality God.

God was and is the main agent in this servant song of the poet. Did you notice how God’s character and actions were referred to 20 times in only 9 verses?

Reorienting the people away from a lesser worldly power and towards the power of God, the poet brought the spiritual sanity that was most needed among the madness of people thinking that one human being (Cyrus) was all-powerful. Again and again, he drummed into their unhearing ears the deeds of this God. Choosing. Upholding. Delighting. Creating. Spreading. Breathing. Giving breath. Calling. Taking people by the hand. Giving people as a covenant. Declaring new things.

This God is concerned with so much more than the particular dealings of any one city or country, and yet this God chooses to be in special covenantal relationship with an exiled, homesick people. This God is the source of salvation, not whatever political figure might be elevated to power at any given time.

But this all-powerful God, who very well could do the unimaginable work of holding the universe together alone, chooses to get help. And that help comes as one of the invisible ones, the very opposite of the proud and powerful: a servant.

Just as the poet made clear God’s work, so he then made clear the servant’s: Bringing forth justice. Not crying out. Not breaking or harming anything, not even a fragile reed, or a single candle flame.  No growing faint or being broken by the world’s brokenness. Again, establishing justice. Teaching. Being a gift to all people, a light to open blind eyes, and a liberator for prisoners.

If there is no God, there is no servant, for the two’s missions are inextricably woven together. And that is the biggest difference between this servant and any other sort of hero figure. This servant doesn’t do these things for the glory or the fame or the power, or even just because it’s the right thing to do. This servant does the good, gentle work of justice because she or he believes that’s who God is.

The essential lesson that poet was trying to get those us weary souls desperate for celebration to understand was this: it’s not about you. It’s not about me, either. Life, suffering, death, worry, victory, joy, hope and fear will consume and pull us in a million directions if we think we are the point of it all. We aren’t. God is.

What a relief this is, friends! If we really believe God is who the poet says God is: the main agent, the main actor in this experiment we call life, then everything else is put into its proper perspective. The salvation of the world is not ours to achieve or argue; it is our gracious God’s. The sorrows of the world are not ours alone to endure; God dwells in the midst of them. The successes of the world do not make one mighty in the eyes of God, but servanthood does.

I think if we could invite the mad poet prophet who spoke these words in Isaiah here today, he would have a similar word for us. I think he would ask us an essential question, one we should never answer lightly or impulsively. 
         “Do you believe there is a God?

And then, I imagine he would say to us, with those piercing poet eyes looking into our very souls:
“If the answer is yes, then why do you live as if you don’t? Relax, friends. Relax. God is God. Still choosing. Still upholding. Still delighting. Still creating. Still spreading, and breathing, and giving breath, and calling. Still taking people by the hand. Still giving people as a covenant to each other, and still declaring new things.”

If this is who God is, then why do you, I, we feel powerless sometimes? There’s much servant work to do in partnership with this God and each other. We don’t have to shout and set the world on fire to prove it’s all up to us. We simply have to do the quiet, tireless work of justice that God has been doing since the foundations of the world, until no one is exiled or imprisoned, and power is shown in being a servant of all, modeled after our Lord Jesus Christ.


Do we believe in God? If the answer is yes, then what are we going to do about it? Amen.