Sermon: Sunday, November 25, 2012: Reign of Christ Sunday

Texts:   Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 and Psalm 93  •   Revelation 1:4b-8  •   John 18:33-37

Grace and the peace that passes all understanding be with you, my brothers and sisters, in the name of Christ our King.  Amen.

As we gather at the end of this Thanksgiving weekend — days filled, for many of us, with travel to see family and friends; tables filled with extravagant food and drink as a reminder of the abundance with which we are blessed, even in these trying financial times — I am feeling truly thankful for events taking place far from Chicago.  When we gathered a week ago for worship, we were praying for peace in Gaza.  The following day a handful of us took part in a peace rally downtown that drew thousands of people here in Chicago as similar events took place around the world.  On Wednesday, as families in the United States prepared to take stock of their lives and give thanks for their many blessings, a ceasefire was negotiated between the nation of Israel and the leaders of Hamas, the party in power in Gaza. After seven days of fighting, two hundred Israelis and Palestinians were dead and over a thousand had been wounded. While the ceasefire is holding for now, a more lasting peace is still far off on the horizon.

The conflicts in Israel and the Palestinian territories are being fought on lands that have seen the rise and fall of the most ancient of nations, the first being the Mesopotamians who inhabited what is now called Iraq.  The Mesopotamian empires gave us cuneiform, the first form of writing.  They were amazingly complex politically, religiously, socially.  Now they are gone.

The Mesopotamian empires passed officially into history when they were conquered by Alexander the Great as part of his crusade to conquer the world.  This began what historians call the Hellenistic Age, which lasted until 31 BCE when the Egyptians were defeated by the Romans at the Battle of Actium, prompting their queen, Cleopatra, to commit suicide – famously re-enacted 2000 years later by Elizabeth Taylor.

The Roman Empire should be more familiar to us, since it serves as the backdrop to the gospels and the life of the early church.  When we hear the stories of Caesar Augustus and King Herod, we are hearing tales from the Roman Empire.  It was hostile to the early church, and was the cause of many Christian martyrs… until the Emperor Constantine, who in the fourth century made Christianity the religion of the Empire.  That was reputedly good for the Christians, but didn’t do much for the Roman Empire, which fell about 100 years later to Germanic invaders.

I could go on and tell you all about the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which held together for the most part for three hundred years of so.  Somewhere in there you’d hear the story of a scuffle in which a monk named Luther played a bit of a part, leading to a deterioration of the Empire and the formation of smaller nations: Austria, Prussia and the like.  That left room for the rise of the British Empire, which prided itself on being the most extensive empire in the history of the world, boasting that the sun never set on its lands.  By the early years of the twentieth century the British empire counted over 450 million people in its territories and holdings.

The wars of the twentieth century brought that empire to a close however, and began what TIME/LIFE publisher Henry Luce called “The American Century.”  Historians mark the American Century as beginning with the Spanish-American war and reaching its peak during the fever pitch of the Cold War during the 1980s. From 2003 until just about this time last year the United States had troops on the ground back in Mesopotamia – or Iraq.  The costs of that war, along with the one in Afghanistan, has left our country with tremendous debt and has eroded our ability to maintain and expand the social infrastructure that creates growth and prosperity – which has prompted many around the world to remark that the American Century is now over.

So many beginnings and so many endings, and each time the same story: empires built on the spoils of war, empires crushed by failure at war, empires called into being and replaced, over and over again.  Where do we suppose it will end?

When you tell the story of our human history, when you hear the bloody tale of nations and wars, it is enough to make you run for cover.  In the face of the stormclouds of war, we wonder if there are boats sturdy enough to carry us through the storm and safely to the far shore.  In a world of violence we naturally look for sanctuary.

Well friends, we need not look far.  This sanctuary in which we sit is both safe refuge and sturdy transport.  In fact, and I’m sure you know this already, but the area in which you are sitting – what we call the nave – get its name from marine terminology.  Can you hear the similarity between the words: nave, navy, naval?  The intent, when our mothers and fathers in the faith named their worship spaces, was that we would remember that God has acted to provide safe refuge from the destructions of life.  Like Noah’s ark that carried a remnant safely across “the thunders of mighty waters” [Ps. 93:4], this sanctuary is God’s gift to us as we make our way in a violent world.

Later this morning we’ll hear from Lyn Westman who works with Mercy Ships, an international Christian ministry that brings medical aid and assistance to some of the poorest people and nations in the world — a ministry that takes the shape of this sanctuary quite literally.

But it doesn’t end there, because this sanctuary is not only the boat that carries us across the waters, it is also the far shore to which we are headed.  You see, it appears that God has something far more grand in store for us than sheltering us from the wars of one world, only to drop us in the conflicts of whichever empire is coming next.  No, instead God has lifted us out of not just one nation, but every nation, and made of us an entirely new people.  You heard it in the reading from Revelation, “to [God] who loves us and freed us… and made us to be a kingdom.”

This is very difficult to imagine, that God is lifting us out of our many and varied backgrounds and creating something new, a new body, a new family, a new kingdom, a new nation.  It’s something so new, that we struggle even to find good words or symbols that can teach us the meaning of what God is doing.  But we try.

Let’s imagine then that this sanctuary in which we gather is not only a nave, not only a ship, but that it has, and does and will carry us into a new way of being in the world.  Let’s imagine together what it might be like to disembark from this ship and enter into this new land on these imagined shores.  It’s as though we’ve arrived at Ellis Island, having left the old country behind us – except the nation that we are about to step foot in is not the United States.  It is, as Jesus speaks it to Pilate in today’s gospel a kingdom “not from this world.”  Something brand new, difficult to imagine, but for which we have been given signs.

So if this were an Ellis Island experience, the first thing we would have to worry about is immigration.  Having weathered the storms of life, of war and of death, we might wonder whether or not we would even be granted access to this new and promised land.  What might we look to in the sanctuary to teach us about the immigration policy in God’s new nation?

We HAVE been given a sign and a sacrament to teach us something about who is welcome in this kingdom, and it is baptism.  These waters marked entrance into the kingdom for each of us.  These waters, the tears of God, are an open door for everyone.  We wash babies and we wash the aged and dying in these waters, and in both cases the water is a gift, not a right or an entitlement.  This is the immigration policy in God’s new nation: come one and come all, there is plenty of room.

Now that we have entered into this new land we are refugees and immigrants.  So, like all refugees and immigrants we have some very basic necessities that we must attend to: what will we eat and how will we support ourselves?  We might be concerned, seeing how immigrants in those nations we have left behind us were often made to fend for themselves, but soon we discover that there is a new kind of economic policy in the kingdom of God.  Here there is a table filled with rich foods and life-giving wine, and even better, there is room at the table for everyone.  However much we may eat at this table, there is some left over.  Even better, we are given legitimate employment right away, as we discover that our job now is to share the food and the blessings of this table with those who are still hungry for the gifts of God!

Now that is no easy task.  If fact, it is a job that could consume all our time, yet we make time in this new nation to return for basic citizenship classes.  As I understand it, when people arrive in the United States we require about 16 hours of instruction before you sit for the test that determines whether or not you get your green card or your naturalization papers.  We teach you basic history, the Constitution, the pledge of allegiance.  But what about the new nation?  Here we do NOT sit for a test.  I suppose we have a Constitution of sorts, but it is a much grander one – it is the Word of Life, read aloud among the people and then proclaimed from the pulpit.  It is not fixed in time, but instead it is a living Word that constantly rises to reveal the truth of our lives to us.  It is Scripture, surely, but more than that it is our living Lord, Jesus, who “came into the world to testify to the truth.”  We have basic history lessons that we learn, they are our creeds, they are our way of remembering the story of those who came before us in faith, who made their witness to the world about the freedom of life in the new nation.  We have our pledge of allegiance, but we call it the Lord’s Prayer, and instead of talking about ourselves and our promises, we use our prayer to recall to one another who God is: the one who creates, the one who saves us from the time of trial, the one has made us into one body, one family, one kingdom, one nation, one new thing for which we are still looking for words.

Look around the sanctuary friends, it is filled with familiar signs each of which is actually a clue to the kind of king Christ seeks to be in the world and in our lives.  We even have a flag!  Where do you suppose we place it?

Why front and center, of course.  It hangs above our altar.  Do you see our flag?  It is the cross of Christ – the evidence of God with us throughout all the wars, all the violence, all the deaths in our lives, great and small, and transformed into life by the God who does not leave us ever, and who gives us to one another, across lines of race and nationality, across lines of hatred and hostility, and says: you are now family to one another, you are my family.

Our lessons this morning describe for us an awareness of God’s kingdom that is always with us.  Daniel remembers that “all peoples, nations, and languages should serve [God].” [Dan. 7:14]  John of Patmos, speaking in that strange apocalyptic language says, “every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of earth will wail.” [Rev. 1:7]  Wail because we someday, surely, will finally come to know what has always been true: that it is God who is the Alpha and Omega [Rev. 1:8], the beginning and the end.  The nation that has always existed and will never fail.

We would like to think that we are citizens of a nation that can never fall, but that is not so.  We are not, in the end, too very different from the Mesopotamians, or the Greeks, or the Romans, or the Germans, or the English.  For that matter, we’re not that very different from the Mongols who created the largest land empire, spanning all of Asia; or the Aztecs, whose society collapsed from the inside as a result of their decadent and conspicuous consumption of the land’s resources.  We are always trying to have it both ways, dual-citizenship if you will.  “For God and Country,” or “pro deo et patria” – ironically, that is the slogan of the Army chaplains.  They who have been called to stand in the midst of war and to be a sign that God is present, even there.

Of course God is present everywhere, in every people, and always has been.  When we gather here, in this place, this sanctuary, let us remember that this is not only refuge from the storm – but also conveyance to the new country.  Let us be very intentional about the words and signs and symbols that we use in this place so that we are not simply pointing to the broken and fading realities of the present age, but instead to the in-breaking and glorious realities of the world that is to come, and that is now drawing close in Christ, our King.

Amen.

Sermon: Sunday, September 18, 2011: Second Sunday in the Season of Creation

Texts: Genesis 3:14-19; 4:8-16  +  Psalm 139:7-12  +  Romans 5:12-17  +  Matthew 12:38-40

One of my favorite musicals of all time is West Side Story. I watch the 1961 movie adaptation every couple of years, and each time I’m caught off guard by how a story that begins with so much hope and romance can end up so sad and depressing. It’s epic in its tragedy. And, of course, it’s based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, so you know the story before you even watch. It’s archetypal.

The same is true of Genesis, that book of the bible that begins with the two accounts of creation in which God makes earth and all its creatures and calls it all good. And not just the “good” that we might use at dinnertime in response to the question, “how was your day?” The Hebrew used in Genesis is rich, sensual, evocative language that gets repeated in the Song of Solomon. Eden is a garden rich and fertile and intensely pleasurable to God and for all of creation. It is a place of so much hope and romance…and so quickly it begins to fall apart.

As we noted last week, the book of Genesis spins myths about creation that convey a memory of the deep inter-relatedness of all that God made. The earth and sea and sky, and all their creatures are related to one another, and to humankind – which God tasks with tending to the care of creation. We are invited to name the animals the way we might name our own children, because they are kin to us, and all of us children of God.

Then the rupture begins. A tree of knowledge. Forbidden fruit. The curse pronounced on Adam and Even, that both will endure forced labor – she in giving birth and he in working the land. But listen again to the final verses of Genesis 3, paying special attention to the relationship between humanity and the land:

Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I don’t know about you, but when I think about how the story of the garden of Eden has been told and taught to me, it always felt like the moral of the story was that Adam and Eve were being punished for disobeying God’s rules and eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I’ve heard plenty of speculation about what that fruit symbolizes, and questions about why humanity was commanded to avoid knowledge, which seems like a good thing. But there was never really much discussion about what “the fall” meant for the land.

“Cursed is the ground because of you… until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

God’s message to the first people seems clear: you have separated yourself from the land in ways that are a curse to both you and the land, and will remain so until you remember that you and the land are one.

Although Genesis is presented as the first book of the bible, modern biblical scholarship assumes that it is a product of the period of time when the people of Israel were in exile. It is profoundly retrospective literature. The kingdom of David and Solomon had divided on itself and been conquered from outside, and all the hope and possibility of the people who had entered the promised land and taken dominion seemed dashed. You can almost hear the teachers and story-tellers responding to the people’s question, “what went wrong?”

In response to that fundamental question, Hebrew scriptures don’t make excuses, or point the finger at their enemies and shirk from their part in the whole mess. Instead, with the words of Psalm 139 on their lips, “where can I flee from your presence?” they took a hard look at their predicament and told an origin story in which humanity’s misery began as it left the sustainable lifestyle of the earlier hunter/gatherer tribes and moved into the world of agriculture and the civilizations to which it gave rise.

So Adam and Eve give birth to Cain the farmer and Abel the shepherd. Genesis says that “In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” (Gen. 4:3-5) So Cain lures Abel into the field and kills him, and for the second time in twice as many chapters, the ground is cursed by human action as God laments,

“What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” (Gen 4:10-12)

The rift between humankind and the earth is played out in an episode of family violence, as humanity continued to distance itself from land, sea, sky and all their creatures, our kin.

I won’t go into all the details here, but there is wonderful biblical scholarship that looks at these stories from Genesis, and the ones that follow, as ancient reflections on the rise of civilization. The movement from tribal life to more fixed agricultural economies allowed for the rise of settlements, then cities, then kingdoms. This meant the need for warriors to guard the wealth that accumulated in such places, then armies to conquer and acquire the wealth of others.

But these scriptures are millennia old, reflecting on a transition that humankind made millennia before that. What relevance could their observations have for us today? What does the theological imagination of a nation of people captive to war, alienated from their homeland, economically dependent on foreign nations, and longing for a return to better days have to do with us, here, in the United States, a decade into the longest war in our nation’s history – having surpassed the Vietnam War almost 16 months ago?

Our remarkably short gospel reading this morning reveals Jesus in passionate debate with the religious establishment during the time of the Roman occupation. Jesus has taken John the Baptist’s message of repentance and has cracked it open for people from every tribe and nation and empire – challenging the established order and its inherent violence. The scribes and Pharisees can’t or won’t acknowledge that what Jesus is preaching is the same message the prophets of Israel had always brought when faith got too cozy with empire, so they ask for a sign to prove the validity of what he’s saying.

Instead Jesus offers the sign of Jonah, who spent three days in the belly of the whale. Remember Jonah? He was a prophet of God sent to call Ninevah to repentance. Jesus evokes the memory of Jonah, and the early church told this story, as a way of claiming that mantle of prophetic critique against the powers of empire… but also as a sign that, as with Ninevah, it was not too late to repent.

By faith, we have to hope that the same is true for us. Our alienation from the very earth out of which we are created has led not only to disastrous consequences for the soil, it has been reflected in and amplified by our warring with our neighbors. Afghanistan, once covered by forests, now has less than 2% forest cover as a result of a decade of bombing and refugees scavenging for firewood. The skies above Afghanistan, once one of the world’s major migratory pathways, has lost almost 85% of the birds which once flew on its winds. The pollution left behind by explosives has proven carcinogenic and is shown to cause thyroid damage. The land, littered with land mines, no longer sustains life.

Truly: “Cursed is the ground because of [us]… until [we] return to the ground, for out of it [we] were taken; [we] are dust, and to dust [we] shall return.” Our violence toward one another poisons the land, and because we are made of earth and return to the earth, everything we do to the land eventually returns to haunt us.

In his commentary on the passages for this second Sunday in the Season of Creation, theologian Ched Myers, who has written extensively on restorative justice and peacemaking, joins the apostle Paul in claiming for Jesus the role of the one who reverses the dissolution of Adam and Eve and their sons, calling Jesus “God’s ultimate countermeasure to the fall.”

Jesus is baptized by John in the wild waters of the Jordan, far from the domesticated ritual baths of Judean cities (3:13-17). The Nazarene prepares for his ministry with a wilderness vision-quest to find out where his people went wrong (4:1-11). His inaugural sermon proclaims the incompatibility of God with the mammon system (6:24), and declares that the smallest wildflower has more intrinsic value from the divine point of view than the grandest civilizational pretensions of Israel’s greatest king, Solomon (6:28f). Jesus symbolizes the ‘retribalization’ of Israel in his naming of the twelve disciples (10:1-4), and directly challenges imperial cities to repent (11:20-24). He enacts the Jubilee principle of the right of the poor to the edge of every field (12:1-8), and communicates with illiterate peasants through stories about the land: ‘A sower went out to sow…’ (13:3). His seed parables envision the kingdom of God not as some otherworldly place and time, but as the reclamation of the very soil upon which Palestinian serfs toil (13:24-32).

Jesus Christ, the sign of God’s solidarity with the suffering of God’s creation, God’s reconciliation for humanity and God’s redemption for the earth, lies deep in the heart of the ground for Jonah’s three days, then rises to proclaim that God’s story does not end in tragedy, but in triumph.

For us the challenge is to take the epic and the archetypal and to apply it to our everyday lives. It is the challenge to think globally and act locally. How do we share the land the surrounds our own homes, our church home? How is violence carried out on the streets of Chicago tied to the violence done to the land beneath our feet and the waters that supply our homes? What sickness are we spreading on the land and reabsorbing into our skin? Where does the oil pulled from the ground to fuel our cars end up, and to what effect? How do we heal the earth and its inhabitants while we continue to carry out a war against our neighbors around the globe?

Genesis, like West Side Story, like Romeo and Juliet, is epic and archetypal in its tragedies. The Season of Creation has a story arc as well, beginning with the forests of creation and then our alienation from the land. Now the story begins to pivot toward hope. Next week we turn to the wilderness as the place of God’s passion and presence, and the following week we remember the rivers as the waters of new creation and we celebrate the baptism of two of our children, Johnnie and Rachyl Lindquist, along with the First Communion they will share with their Sunday School classmates on that day.

As we move from the word to the meal this morning, let’s pray for a deeper communion with the land and all who live upon it. As we consume this bread and this wine, let’s pray for the soil out of which the grain to make our bread and the grapes to make our wine were grown. Let this meal remind us that what we do to the land, we do to ourselves. As we take each step on our way to the communion rail, let’s pray that God will help us take one step closer to home, the good earth of the garden from which we came and to which we are returning.

Amen.