Sermon: Sunday, March 31, 2013: Resurrection of Our Lord, Easter Day

Texts:  Acts 10:34-43  +  Psalm 118:1-2,14-24  +  1 Corinthians 15:19-26  +  Luke 24:1-12

In the name of Jesus, our life, and life abundant.

Earlier this past week I found myself downtown for a rally and a planned civil disobedience action in response to the city’s decision to close over fifty of the district’s schools.  I was part of a contingent of clergy representing many different denominations who were asked to participate in a sit-in that blocked traffic in front of City Hall long enough for the hundreds of teachers, custodians and cooks who were losing their jobs, along with the thousands of parents and students demanding that the city reconsider its decision, to be seen and heard.

As I waited on the sidewalk, obediently lined up in front of a downtown bank from which people were coming and going, carrying out their business as usual, even as the streets were packed with protestors, news vans, and mounted police officers, a reporter with a hand-held camera approached me and asked, “are you really a priest?”

“A pastor, yes,” I replied.

“Can I talk to you?” he asked, and I consented.  Part of the point of the demonstration was to get our side of the story out, and I’d come to the rally equipped with talking points I was ready to share if asked.  I was ready to tell this reporter that I’d recently learned that there are 800 disconnected youth in Logan Square and 1,600 in Humboldt Park — youth who are neither in school, nor employed.  That means that there are thousands of young people in the neighborhoods immediately around our church building this morning who are falling through the holes in the safety nets of our community.  I was ready to say that I see no point in closing schools for lack of students when we know that we are losing children to the streets.  That I am more interested in how the city plans to go after our lost and prodigal youth than in how it plans to shutter the doors and windows of the very institutions that offer them their best chance at a future different from their past.

I was ready to say all of that, but those weren’t the answers to the question he asked me.

The reporter asked me what faith I am, and I said, “I’m a Christian.”

He said, “we haven’t seen many Christians in the streets since Vietnam, and those were mostly Quakers.  Then came Occupy, and now there’s all these social justice Christians.”

I nodded, waiting for a question I could fill with my answers.

He said, “I guess I’m just cynical.  The rich just keep getting richer and the rest of us are getting screwed.  What do you say to people like me, to the cynics?”

There was the question, and it didn’t call for my talking points on public school closures.  It called for a statement of faith.  What do we say to the cynics?

I kept my eyes open, but internally I wrapped my eyelids around my heart and whispered a silent prayer, “oh Lord, help me get this right.”

I took a deep breath and said, “Cynicism is a luxury our children cannot afford. They cannot wait for us to recover hope for the future, they need our action now. History has given us more than enough evidence to support faith in the power of the people, acting together, to turn back the forces of money and power and to find for ourselves and for those who follow us a better way of sharing life together, of being a community.”

At least that’s how I’m transcribing my blurry memory.  I didn’t have much time for word-smithing.  I probably also said, “umm” once or twice.

A more reliably eloquent voice addressed this same theme on Good Friday in an article published at the Huffington Post.  The author was none other than Parker Palmer, whose name I’ve invoked from this pulpit more than once, and whose writing has fed many of you, individually or in small groups here at St. Luke’s. In his post, titled “An Upside-Down Easter Meditation,” he writes,

Years ago, I stumbled upon a little book by Julia Esquivel, the Guatemalan poet and social justice activist, titled “Threatened with Resurrection.”  Those few words had a huge impact on me.

I’d been taught that death is the great threat and resurrection the great hope.  But at the time I found Esquivel’s book, I was experiencing the death-in-life called depression.  Her title jarred me into the hard realization that figurative forms of death sometimes feel comforting — while resurrection, or the hope of new life, feels threatening.

Why? Because death-in-life can bring us a perverse sense of relief.  When I was depressed, nobody expected anything of me, nor did I expect anything of myself.  I was exempt from life’s demands and risks.  But if I were to find new life, who knows what daunting tasks I might be required to take on?

Do you know the state of being Parker Palmer calls “death-in-life?”  Have you lived with death beside you, inside you, beckoning to you with promises that everything could be easier if you would just stop believing that things will ever get better?

I know you have.

Do you know what it means to be dead-while-alive?  To be numb to the possibilities of your one, unique, singular existence?  Have you lived with defeat as your mentor, with denial as your coach, whispering to you that you’ll never be more than you are?  That you, that people like you, never get to have more than this.

I know you have.

Do you know what it means to be left-for-dead?  Not quite dead, but assumed to be headed there, and too fast for anyone to do anything to stop it.  Have you come up in one of these neighborhoods where children are funneled from classroom to street corner to prison, and left there for decades, for lifetimes?  Do you remember the human beings left for dead at Guantanamo? Have you seen, do you remember the images coming out of Haiti, out of Uganda, out of Afghanistan?

I know you have.

What do we say to the cynics?  To the ones who know the story of the empty tomb, the resurrected life, God’s “YES” to the world’s “NO,” but struggle to believe?  What do we say to the ones who still show up with their cameras, hoping for a story to reignite their hope for the world, despite all evidence to the contrary? What do we say to each other, year after year, as we take our places in the pews on this Spring morning as the earth comes back to life?

We say, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!”

Parker Palmer continues,

Sometimes we choose death-in-life (as in compulsive overactivity, unhealthy relationships, non-stop judgmentalism aimed at self or others, work that compromises our integrity, substance abuse, pervasive cynicism, etc.) because we’re afraid of the challenges that might come if we embraced resurrection-in-life.

Sometimes we choose death-in-life because we’re afraid of the work that comes with choosing life-in-life.  Because we know the pain and exhaustion of crawling back out of that pit of self-negation.

Sometimes we choose death-while-alive because we know that having expectations for ourselves, setting goals more daring than any we’ve yet achieved, rising above the expectation of mediocrity inherited from a culture selling the promise of quick fixes, but banking on slow failures, means working harder than we’ve ever worked before.

Sometimes we accept left-for-dead because to acknowledge life in a body, in a congregation, in a neighborhood, in a people, in a nation, in a continent, in our precious, fragile planet for God’s sake, would mean acknowledging that there is a crisis happening right now, and that we have an ethical obligation to act, because there is still life in these dry bones, in these bruised and broken bodies!

In the gospel of Luke, the women come to the tomb ready to embalm Jesus’ dead body with the spices they had brought, but they are met instead by messengers who ask them a question they were not ready to answer:

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

The planet is not yet lost to us.  The nations are not beyond all hope for peace and prosperity.  The prisoners at Guantanamo are still alive, if temporarily forgotten, and the youth in our neighborhoods are still hoping someone will see in them a brighter tomorrow than the streets have to offer.

And you, you are alive, today, now.  You are not just workers. You are not just consumers. You are not just observers.  You are not the leftover dreams of generations past.  You are not the names they called you, or the fears that drag you down from the inside.  Your heart is beating, and your lungs still fill with air enough to cry out:

“Alleluia, Christ is risen!”

Parker concludes,

“Every religious tradition is rooted in mysteries I don’t pretend to understand, including claims about what happens after we die.  But I know this for sure: as long as we’re alive, choosing resurrection is always worth the risk.  I’m grateful for the people and experiences that continue to help me embrace ‘the threat of resurrection.’  My Easter wish for everyone is the ability to say “YES!” to life.  Even when life challenges us, it’s a gift beyond all measure.”

Messengers standing amidst the graves declare, “he is not here, but has risen.”  You baptized people of God, you body of Christ in the world, you do not dwell with the dead.  You are alive.  You are rising.  You are a new creation, being made new today and every day.

Amen.

Sermon: Sunday, January 27, 2013: Third Sunday after Epiphany

Texts:   Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10  •

• Psalm 19  •
• 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a  •
• Luke 4:14-21

Official photographic portrait of US President Barack Obama (born 4 August 1961; assumed office 20 January 2009) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s been almost a week since the President’s Second Inaugural Address, and pundits are still talking about it.  Some are saying that the President is finally coming out as a liberal.  Some are saying the President’s agenda has been, and remains, staunchly centrist.  Some suspect that his words and his actions will not match up.

Whatever you think about President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address, one thing on which I think we can probably agree is that it can’t be easy, picking the words you will use to define your term as a public servant.  People watch and listen with close attention to try and gather signs about what kind of leader you intend to be, what kind of agenda you will pursue, and how it will effect them and those around them.

Leaders, standing in the gap between the world they have inherited and the world they hope to build, often turn to the past to find sources and resources to affirm and legitimize their agendas.  President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address began:

Each time we gather to inaugurate a President we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional — what makes us American — is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

It is a carefully crafted piece of rhetoric.  He begins his remarks by invoking the Constitution, our nation’s foundational document, and by doing so the President suggests that whatever he says next should be understood in light of that document’s purposes and promises.  Then he says, “we recall” — again, placing whatever he says next in the past, as if it is already accomplished — “we recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names.”  In this era of diversity-awareness and multicultural education, that may sound like just one more bit of politically correct rhetoric, but I don’t think that’s true.

Because, in fact, it has always been an open question in the United States, and it remains so, whether or not we will imagine ourselves to be a people defined by something other than race, religion, or ancestry.  Indeed, our country’s history is the story of an unfolding identity.

Built with the forced labor of enslaved people.  Fueled by the unpaid and unrecognized contributions of women.  Always receiving new immigrants from every land, but struggling to integrate them without forced assimilation.  “American exceptionalism” has always been a hotly contested term.  Are we a land full of people who consider themselves exceptional by virtue of their race, gender, and national origin; or is there some other characteristic that makes us exceptional?  In his Second Inaugural Address, the President has reached back in time to our foundational documents and sifted through history to make the claim we need to hear here and now, that we are exceptional because of our conviction — however poorly executed — that we are each equal to one another, and that we are born with undeniable rights to life, freedom and self-determination.

Consider the parallels between the public inauguration of our President, observed earlier this week, and the events recorded in Luke’s gospel that we’ve read this morning.  Jesus, having been tested in the wilderness, has returned to Galilee and has begun to preach in the synagogues where his message has been well received.  So he returns home, to the place where he grew up, Nazareth.  On the sabbath, as the congregation gathered for worship, Jesus stood up to read — assuming the role of a teacher and preacher — and he reaches back in time to one of the community’s foundational texts, the book of Isaiah.

The book of Isaiah, written to comfort a community in exile, was the perfect choice to read to the Jews during a time of Roman occupation.  It was scripture that spoke to their circumstances.  It was a document whose purposes and promises seemed crafted for people just like them, people hungry for hope and longing for freedom.  Think about the way those of us born and raised in the United States hear the words, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  It’s like a mantra.  We know these words by heart.  They are a part of our national identity.  That’s how these words might have sounded to the Jews in Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth, “good news to the poor… release to the captives… sight to the blind… the oppressed go free.”  Familiar words of comfort for people grown accustomed to the status quo.

Then Jesus does something to change the meaning of those words.  As he finishes reading from this ancient, foundational document, and the people look to him to see what will happen next, Jesus reinterprets its meaning, saying,

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

These words, drawn from our foundational document, scripture, are not simply words of comfort.  They are not just assurances of God’s favor.  They aren’t even promises that God will someday act to free God’s people.  These words from the past mean something for the present.  Something for us, here and now.  That’s what Jesus seems to be saying to the people.

Imagine, for centuries people had been reading these words from Isaiah

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me…”

and yet they had assumed the “me” being referred to was someone else, someone yet to come, someone in the future, or maybe someone in the past.  But, definitely, someone else.  Good news, release, recovery, freedom — those were all in someone else’s hands.

But Jesus takes words drenched with time and wrings new meaning out of them for the present moment.  These goods, God’s promises, aren’t meant for other people some other time, they are meant for all people, here and now, and it starts with me.

In his book, Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker Palmer — an author many of us here at St. Luke’s have read together in small groups — writes about the challenges facing our nation and its democracy today.  He writes,

If American democracy fails, the ultimate cause will not be a foreign invasion or the power of big money or the greed and dishonesty of some elected officials or a military coup or the internal communist/socialist/fascist takeover that keeps some Americans awake at night.  It will happen because we — you and I — became so fearful of each other, of our differences and of the future, that we unraveled the civic community on which democracy depends, losing our power to resist all that threatens it and call it back to its highest form.

I love what Parker is saying here, because it convicts me.  When I bemoan the state of American politics and public life, I have my favorite targets.  I love to complain about the power of big money and corporate lobbyists shaping the national conversation about issues from gun control to health care.  I can heap all kinds of scorn on elected officials and their failure to act to preserve the common good.  These are easy conversations, since they perpetuate the lie that all power resides with someone else.  I can be right, without having to do anything about it.

And this is where I think we too often resemble the good people of Nazareth in today’s gospel.  They came to church hoping to hear a good sermon from one of their hometown heroes made good on the preaching circuit.  They expected to hear something from Isaiah, or another of their people’s foundational prophets.  They presumed the message would be what the message had always been, that they were God’s people, that God loved them and was coming to liberate them, someday.

But Jesus said something different.  In his inaugural address to the people who knew him best, Jesus took ancient words of promise and made the bold proclamation that those promises were meant for here and now.  He issued a call to action, saying “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

As we’ll hear next week, when the scriptures pick up right where this week’s story leaves off, this doesn’t go over very well.  Already we can imagine why.  It’s one thing to accommodate yourself to the structures of injustice and comfort yourself with the hope that things will one day change.  It’s another matter altogether to be called into the struggle to bring the world into alignment with God’s vision for creation and community.

But that’s what this is.  Jesus’ inaugural address is a summons.  He has chosen his words carefully, and for effect.  He has spoken them in public and now he will act on them.  His term is just beginning, but we already know how it will end.  People will be drawn out of complacency and accommodation to be part of a movement that is changing the world, still.  It is good news for the poor.  It is release for the captives.  It is new vision for those who need a new worldview.  It is freedom for the oppressed.  It is here.  It is now.  It is happening.

Are you with us?

Sermon: Sunday, November 20, 2011: Reign of God/Christ the King: God’s Politics–“Election Day”

Texts: Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 and Psalm 95:1-7a  •   Ephesians 1:15-23  •   Matthew 25:31-46

It’s been six weeks now that we’ve been talking about God and politics, and I know from the varied questions and comments I’ve received that, for some of you, this has been a strong affirmation of your conviction that Christian faith calls each of us to be engaged in the world as we find it, politics and all. For some of you though, it has been uncomfortable for there to be so much attention given to secular affairs. Talk of politics in church can be dangerous, especially when one party or politician seems to be getting an unsolicited endorsement. Our hope, both Pastor Tim’s and mine, in planning and preaching throughout these six weeks is that what you would hear from us would not be a blanket endorsement of any candidate currently running for office – but that you would hear a strong endorsement of your own candidacy, as the ones God has called to be God’s hands and feet and voice in the world.

As citizens of the United States, we are fortunate to enjoy civil rights for which many in the world are still struggling. We benefit from a separation of church and state that protects citizens from the imposition of religious values or religious laws on the country. This separation is an important safeguard for religious minorities, including those who subscribe to no religion at all. The separation of church and state, however, is not a gag order that restricts people of faith from applying their religious values to the public square, as we have seen time and time again throughout the history of our nation, as people of faith led the way in one justice movement after another. If fact, many have argued that no significant movement for justice and equality in this country has taken hold without the support of religious communities.

So, as we conclude this series today, and prepare to turn our attention to the new year in the life of the church that begins next week with the season of Advent, I want to share a few final voices that are speaking into the gap between faith and public life.

The first is our own Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, an elected leader within the church who has served as the Presiding Bishop for the last eleven years, and who recently addressed the ELCA’s Church Council, also an elected body, for the first time since this past summer’s Churchwide Assembly in Orlando – a highly political gathering. In a speech highlighting the Church’s mission in society, Bishop Hanson stated that ELCA members are “called to be part of God’s reconciling and restoring community” in the world.

“That’s why no matter what political party is in power in the White House, Congress, state houses, legislatures or in local communities, we will first of all affirm the vocation of political service as being a calling from God,” he said, and therefore need to hold public servants accountable. In recent months ELCA members have held public servants responsible, “so that the balancing of budgets and the reducing of debts is not done on the backs of those who live in poverty. That’s why we advocate that there must be a circle of protection around those programs that historically have been untouched when deficits arise and budgets must be reduced. And why we believe it’s a moral issue. It’s a matter of faith.”

I believe this is what God’s politics looks like today. It’s not a matter of selecting from among the (narrow) range of candidates running for office, which one will most closely align themselves with our political leanings or self-interest. That kind of politics vests too much power in too few people in service of too small a percentage of the world’s population. That is, in the language we hear calling to us from the streets, the politics of the one percent.

No. God’s Politics, I believe, is each of us alone and all of us together acting boldly as what we say we are each time we come to the communion rail: the body of Christ, broken and sent for the sake of the world. When Bishop Hanson affirmed political office as a vocation, he was affirming not only the vocation of those who serve as elected officials, but also the calling each of us share to be engaged in the world on political terms as an act of stewardship. To be politically involved is to exercise the measure of power each of us has been given to care for the earth and for one another. Like the servant in last week’s parable, that power was not given to us to be hidden in the ground, but to be shared and multiplied.

Parker Palmer, whom I have quoted more than once over these last six weeks, and whose book Healing the Heart of Democracy I cannot recommend highly enough, speaks to this common calling to build, maintain and protect the common good like this:

Today, in my early seventies, I look at citizenship differently than I did when I was young. Time has stripped me of some of my more specialized roles, and soon enough I will be playing no role at all. Now I see a deeper truth about the meaning of citizenship: in cannot be reduced to the roles we play. Today my definition of citizenship is deep-seated and wide-reaching: Citizenship is a way of being in the world rooted in the knowledge that I am a member of a vast community of human and nonhuman beings that I depend on for essentials I could never provide for myself.

I see now that I have no choice – at least, no honorable choice – except to affirm, celebrate, and express my gratitude for that community in every aspect of my life, trying to be responsive to its needs whether or not my immediate self-interests are met. Whatever is in the common good is, in the long run, good for me and mine.

Both Bishop Hanson and Parker Palmer remind us that citizenship is not about the pursuit of one’s own self-interest, but the recognition that we are all in this together. This is the principle that the prophet Ezekiel proclaimed as he indicted the wealthy for their neglect of the poor, speaking for God and declaring,

I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord GOD. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.

Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep. (Ezekiel 34:15-22)

God’s Politics is not survival of the fittest. It is not rugged individualism. It is not bootstrap self-reliance. It is care for the weakest among us, regard for the despised, compassion for the sick and the suffering, and justice for the oppressed. None of these are private affairs. These are public actions flowing from publicly confessed beliefs. This is politics.

Today, the final Sunday of the church year, is known as “Christ the King,” or increasingly as “Reign of Christ” as a reminder that God’s dominion liberates us from sexist and hierarchical forms of social order. This reign is marked by a different set of values than the ones that rule the world around us. They are the values we heard in Jesus’ stump speech, the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, and as the ones running on God’s platform of justice and mercy, we are called to evaluate the campaign we are running with our lives, separately and together by the following set of values:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ (Mt. 25:31-40)

People of God, candidates, election day is today! It is now, like it has always been. You are voting with your lives. Christ, the servant, is Lord of all. We are the elect, those chosen to proclaim God’s politics until the day when the reign of God is fully realized and all of creation is reconciled to its creator. The Lord is near – Come, Lord Jesus!

Amen.