A St. Andrew s Sermon Delivered by Dr. Jim Rigby November 11, 2018

Transcription

1 LESSONS IN LIVING For the Living of These Days A St. Andrew s Sermon Delivered by Dr. Jim Rigby November 11, 2018 Scripture Reading: Isaiah 40:1-5 (The Inclusive Bible) Console my people, give them comfort, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem s heart, and tell it that its time of service is ended, that its iniquity is atoned for, that it has received from YHWH s hand double punishment for all its sins. A voice cries out, Clear a path through the wilderness for YHWH! Make a straight road through the desert for our God! Let every valley be filled in, every mountain and hill be laid low; let every cliff become a plain, and the ridges become a valley! Then the glory of YHWH will be revealed, and all humankind will see it. The mouth of YHWH has spoken! * YHWH represents the divine name found in the Hebrew text. It represents the divine mystery and is not pronounced. Instead, we say God or some other term of reverence. It has been an interesting week to think about preaching and coming before you, because the last time we had a little visit was before the elections. As I went into choosing the sermon for this week, I didn t know how that was going to go, and I thought it was important, because the question I wanted to ask is, What is the purpose of a church these days? Has the Church become like local theatre where it is just kind of an anachronism, something that is from an earlier time we remember from our childhood and youth? Or does the Church have the same prophetic function it has ever had, and is just doing it very, very poorly these days? That is the kind of question I thought we could get something out of discussing, regardless of the election s outcome. Now I don t know about you, when you were growing up in a church assuming you did but the basic political strategy of my church was to stick its head in the sand and call that being bipartisan. It didn t matter who was being discriminated against. This was in Dallas, Texas, during the atrocities of the civil rights days. My church was absolutely silent through that, at least through much of it. See, the problem is it is not just people s opinions, it is people s lives that are being targeted for oppression, for bullying in a culture. When the Church says it is being bipartisan by not weighing in, I believe we are renouncing a very important part of our duty to the world and the function of the Church, the duty of the Church.

2 I always get a laugh when I say I am nonpartisan. So go ahead and get that out of your system, because I know it seems that I am very, very partisan. But if the Democrats ever get in power again, you will see why that is not true. I can t be silent when people are being targeted and bullied no matter who does it. The caravan that is coming up from Honduras; part of the blame goes to Ronald Reagan and that administration, and part of it goes to the Obama and Clinton administrations. Picking on poor people is a bi-partisan activity in the United States. Feeling the arrogant confidence to go into other people s culture and unsettle, displace the people is almost a given. Yet people of the Church are told to be loyal to that enterprise of Empire. To put a flag by the pulpit. To pray for our side but never, never even consider there might be some justice call on the other side. This is very important stuff if the Church is to deserve a future. Jesus taught not to judge, and yet the same very harshly political evangelicals who for the last decades have made the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender persons a living hell those same evangelicals are now excusing anything this President does no matter how atrocious. That hurts the Church. Jesus said to turn the other cheek. There are evangelicals that say, Well, that was before God invented firearms. So, take your Bibles out, scratch out that part about turning the other cheek and say Stand your ground, because that is the new gospel. But think about that. Turning the other cheek was essential to Christianity, and yet a celebration of militarism and bullying has replaced that call. Taking care of the poor was essential; Jesus had an ethic of sharing whatever extra goods you had. If you had two shirts, you share one of them. That has been replaced by Christian capitalism and the statement, "tell it to the hand. Right? If you have problems, if you are poor, if you are not getting medicine, tell it to the hand. And by hand of course, we mean the invisible hand of the market, because we all know that it is the real god that rules this country right now. The shame of it is that if the Antichrist ever shows up, we are not going to need him or her anymore, right? The voices within the Church that have renounced the teachings of Jesus to lift up the Empire of Christendom have betrayed the very Gospel that we are called to take out into the world. When we ask the question, What is the purpose of the Church in our day? I think we have to go back to the original voice that began all of this. I think it tells us that our first duty is to call the people out of their fears, because as long as people are afraid of the stranger, we will be violent. There is a caravan of refugees coming in this direction. There are people of color protesting. There is poisoned water in this country. There are courageous indigenous people that are trying to protect their sacred land and water. Where is the Church in those statements? 2

3 I was very lucky when I was in seminary maybe not lucky, maybe predestined if you are Presbyterian but probably not. It was probably the wisdom of a professor, Robert Shelton, who when he was dividing up preachers for us to study he already saw I was a problem child he already knew that if something special did not happen, I was going to be spit out of seminary like a bad penny. So, he gave me the sermons of Harry Emerson Fosdick, who was a Baptist minister during the 30s and 40s. I don t know how much longer he lived after that, but he was the minister that Rockefeller wanted for Riverside Church in New York City when he built it, and Fosdick kept saying, No. And finally, Rockefeller said, Okay, what is the problem here? And Fosdick said, I don t want to tell people that I am Rockefeller s pastor. And Rockefeller looked at him and said, I can tell you that my banking friends aren t going to be too crazy when I say that Fosdick is my preacher, either. So, they decided to make a compromise. Fosdick laid out this church that would celebrate science and not superstition; that would celebrate prophetic political activism and not passive, namby-pamby watching the world go by. He also wrote a great hymn for when that church was finally open, God of Grace, God of Glory on Thy People Pour Thy Power. He was answering that question, What is the purpose of a church? in his day. During the 30s and 40s he wrote a book that was retitled, Will the Fundamentalists Win? The struggle for the soul of this nation was already ongoing at this time when privileged white males wanted to define the terms, and other voices were saying, We want to be heard as well. Fosdick was one of the voices that started that conversation. I will never forget the first sermon of his that I listened to. I went to the seminary late at night because I had procrastinated. I turn on the tape recorder in the empty library and out thunders the first line, No intelligent human being believes in hell anymore. And I turned it off for a second. I had never heard that kind of honesty before! Usually you have to take a minister out, you know, to a bar, and say What do you really think? [laughter] (Which incidentally, tickets are available for sale for that.) [laughter] But I decided I wanted to preach like that! I may be wrong. You may disagree with me, but I am not going to just sit there and play footsie. You will know the best that I can think about something, and then we can disagree as adults. Right? What a brilliant move by the right wing of this country to tell you that religion should not be political. What a brilliant move, since they have got that game covered. Right? But let me ask you this question, When Moses went to Pharaoh and said, Let my people go, was that being political? Of course, it was! When the prophets went to the kings and queens and said, This nation will fall if you do not treat the weak fairly. Was that being political? 3

4 When Jesus and John the Baptist condemned Herod for the affliction of the people, was that being political? Of course, it was. Politics is how we treat other people, and you have to be really powerful to think you are not being political. In the ancient world, there was a king or queen that ruled things. We live in a democracy where we are responsible. For Christians to say that we are not responsible for government, that Jesus is talking about charity, not justice; this renounces the core message of the Sermon on the Mount! We are called not only to love other people, but to love them in a way that makes their life better. So when you pray that God will feed the hungry and clothe the naked and visit the prisoner, and then vote for people that make that impossible, I think it is a very living question whether you are following Christ or not! The Church needs to do a whole lot better in this, and we are looking at one of the early callings of the Church, originally the community of Israel, which is its own story. Go out into the wilderness, it says, and proclaim this new good news for the people. It says, Lower the mountains and raise the valleys. Do you know what that means politically? Because when Christmas gets here and you listen to Mary s song, you d better know this, because when she says that her son is going to lower the mountains and raise the valleys, she is talking about economic redistribution of the goods! This phrase is talking about cracking the hierarchical domination of a nation, and lifting up hope for all people. Now it is a vision. It is a dream. It has never fully come into being in the world, but the people who have that vision in their heart are alive in a way that those of us who have given up are not. Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote, God of Grace, God of Glory, On Thy People Pour Thy Power. The first thing we have responsibility to do is to call each other out of our fears. The second thing is to call each other out of our hatreds, and sometimes it is better to realize we are talking about our limited love, our limited allegiance. When I define myself as an American and don t recognize somebody on the other side of the boundary, I may not call that hatred but it is going to feel like hatred to the person on the other side of that line. A Christian cannot do that. A Christian cannot say My ethics and my duty to my brothers and sisters around the world stop and end at a boundary drawn artificially by the powers that be. During the French Revolution, one of the philosophers said that anyone who believes an absurdity can be persuaded to commit an atrocity. I want to tell you that the complete lack of responsibility of this administration to tell the truth, to simply tell the truth I am not being nonpartisan there look at it yourself. Look at the document of this last week where they are accusing a reporter of manhandling this woman who was trying to take his microphone. In order to manufacture that, they have to go to a conspiracy website. They don t use the video recorded at the event. They use a possibly doctored version that makes it look like a karate chop. You see, that is not okay! 4

5 I understand when people tell me, I support this president because I like his policies, but I don t like his lying and don t like his bullying. Well why would you have to lie about good policies? Why would you have to bully people if you are going after justice? What is in people s heads? There is a verse that Martin Luther King used a lot. In that whole prophetic movement of the civil rights days, Dr. King wove in and out of scripture so quickly that you don t even notice it. Listen to this; this is our passage today. He said, I have a dream that one day every valley will be exalted and every hill and mountain He is not talking about landscaping, right? You don t get a quarter of a million people in Washington to talk about landscaping. He is talking about politics which is people s lives, their hopes, their dreams. He says, I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted. Every hill and mountain made low. The rough places be made straight and the Glory of God be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. That is not partisan! All flesh will see it, but for that to happen we have to talk about universal human rights. We can t talk about property rights and get to that place. The prophet is telling us to spend our lives as individuals and as a religious community to be preparing the way so this loving justice can enter our world. What a noble life that is, whether we win or lose! How many people in the past lost their whole life to make it possible for us to have this dream? The Church has to call us out of our hatred, and we have to stop celebrating militarism. We can love our troops with our whole hearts, and say that a nation that has eight hundred foreign bases is not a peaceful nation. It is not a nationalistic nation. Now there s this last thing. Some of you will see this coming, and others that are visitors will be thinking, How the hell did I get here? The last thing is this, and it may be the most important point for our time, but it is also the last one people want to hear. The Church has got to call the United States out of capitalism as a world view. We cannot start with property rights and reach human rights. We cannot look at forests as timber and water as a resource and remain sane. These things are beyond values. People are beyond values. To let somebody spend their entire life miserable because they were born without anything in their pocket, and then you weigh them by their property rights so they are worth nothing to you. They have no human rights to you. Can you not see that as renouncing the heart of what Jesus taught? Maybe that is why people are not flocking to us. Maybe because we need to say the message. Just to let you know that I am not completely insane (although I may be), when I was in seminary I used to sneak off into the back stacks of the library and read writings from the first two centuries of the Christian era. What my professors told me was that nobody understood Christianity until Calvin and Luther got here. Now you know that is a crock! Right? This is Clement of Alexandria, who was the first Bishop. See if this sounds like a moderate. All possessions are by nature unrighteous when a person possesses them for personal advantage as being entirely their own, and does not bring them into the common stock for those in need. 5

6 That sounds like Jesus, doesn t it? But it doesn t sound like the Church. Here is another. This is Gregory the Great. In vain do they think themselves innocent who appropriate to their own use alone those goods which God gave in common; by not giving to others that which they themselves receive, they become homicides and murderers, inasmuch as in keeping for themselves those things which would alleviate the sufferings of the poor, we may say that every day they cause the death of as many persons as they might have fed and did not. Now that is very harsh, and sometimes when people look at the God of the Jewish testament, they think that that God is cruel. That God is ticked at religious communities that are not caring for the human beings and for the earth! That is not cruelty! That is what compassion looks like when justice is added! When the prophets condemned gods, they weren t talking theologically. They were talking in terms of life. So when Mars is condemned, they are talking about war. They are not mad at some invisible god, they are mad at the people that have surrendered responsibility for violence! When they condemn Pluto, it is not some strange blacksmith under the earth, it s worth, it s wealth for which we have sold our souls! If you have never read the late writings of Martin Luther King, get ready, because that is not the stuff the people talk about on Martin Luther King Day. This is Dr. King: Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. (Ya think?) With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system. That is prophetic speech. We can t let this planet be poisoned because we are so passive! We can t let other nations be destabilized and millions, tens of millions of people be displaced because we don t want to be unpleasant! Or because somebody has told us we are being partisan when we talk about universal human rights. What could be further from partisan than universal human rights or the survival of the planet or the web of life or the hope of every person for dignity, respect and love? In many of the ancient churches, you would see in the ceiling, the hull of a boat that was upside down. It was a reminder that the Church was meant for times like this. Thunderous times! Chaos and change and unfairness, in hierarchy and abuse. The Church was born in that kind of political turmoil, and in some way, it sails best when it remembers that its true home is that calling, is that journey. Dr. King was the furthest thing from partisan. He said that we came over here in different ships, but we are all in the same boat now. But for that to be true, some of us have got to get our feet off of other people s throats. And both of those things are true. We are family, and some of us are abusive family. 6

7 So, there is a calling that gives the Church life and being, to prepare the way for a love this world has never known, and for justice that this world has never known. And it may not ever know it externally, objectively, but if we are members of that calling, that love and that justice will rule in our own hearts. I want to close with just a verse of Harry Emerson Fosdick s great hymn. God of Grace and God of Glory, on your people pour your power. Crown your church s ancient story, bring its bud to glorious flower. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour, for the facing of this hour. Transcribed and edited by a member of the St. Andrew's Sermon Transcription Project. St. Andrew s Church Loving Progressive Presbyterian Wells Port Drive, Austin, Texas (512) Fax: (512)