One Job. Reverend Dr. Benton J. Trawick Grace Presbyterian Church June 24, 2018

Transcription

1 One Job Reverend Dr. Benton J. Trawick Grace Presbyterian Church June 24, 2018 If you ever want to amuse yourself for a few minutes, to laugh at the sheer comedy of human error, go to your internet browser, type the words, One Job, and treat yourself to the photographs that will come up. You ll see images of the boneheaded blunders that people have made while completing tasks that should be utterly self-evident. Like the installation of this sign, warning that the road curves up ahead. You had ONE JOB. And you failed. 1

2 Or there s this odd message, which I can only assume is an abbreviation for Step on the Pedal. If you weren t sure of the spelling, all you had to do was look up and to the right. ONE JOB. Or this utterly awful playground installation. YOU HAD. ONE. JOB. Sometimes you have to laugh. But sometimes, you must also be serious. Sometimes the one job that a person has, the one job that must be done, is a sacred trust, a job with everything riding on it. A blunder, a failure to do the one job isn t fodder for a funny internet meme. It can be counted in lives. A parachute packer has such a job. YOU HAVE. ONE. UTTERLY CRUCIAL. JOB. Having such a job entrusted and then failing to do it. that plays out as a human tragedy. 2

3 So, I m pondering this week what it really means to have ONE JOB. One crucial, one sacred job that means everything, that places the absolute welfare of others in our hands. And that led me to our new testament scripture readings for today. I would argue that Matthew 7:12 speaks of our one job, our singular calling, as Christians. It is taken from Jesus instruction to his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount. In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law AND the prophets. This do unto others as you would have them do unto you is no mere aphorism, not a serving suggestion, not a greeting card slogan; rather, it is a solemn charge. Jesus presents it as the distillation of scripture to its simplest instruction, the summation of both religious law and prophetic correction, the kingdom fit into a nutshell: orient yourself toward the concerns of others and make their needs as urgent to you as your own. If you do this and do this earnestly and do this always then you will treat others ethically and justly. This is the law AND the prophets. In other words, you have ONE JOB. Continuing that theme, in Matthew 22 a lawyer, a religious scholar, is testing Jesus, as religious scholars do: Teacher, says the lawyer, which commandment is the greatest? It s an intellectual snare, you see: pick any one and you leave out nine. What say you, Jesus? And Jesus responds with immediacy and clarity: You shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets, they go together, inseparably. Again, the distillation of our duty: love God above all and neighbor as self. ONE. SACRED. JOB. Paul gets in on the act in Galatians, 5:24 you ll forgive me, this gets repetitive. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, Paul writes: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love as you would be loved. Treat your neighbor as you would be treated. It will lead you unfailingly to justice, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, hospitality. Again, neighbor love is the irreducible distillation of the law. ONE JOB. 3

4 Now give people a law and we will immediately try to parse it, qualify it, test its limits, wiggle out of it. In Luke chapter ten, another lawyer comes to test Jesus (remember how they like to do that?) and the lawyer says, just who is this neighbor that I am to love? And the implied question hidden beneath the question is, who is NOT my neighbor? Answering with a parable, Jesus responds that neighbor love has no limits. He describes a Samaritan, a hated foreigner who would be the subject of the historical animosity and prejudice of the Jewish nation, as the one properly demonstrating neighbor love. The villain, in other words, is made the hero of the parable. Who acts as neighbor? The one who sees need and acts in compassion. The one who loves neighbor as self no matter who and no matter what. ONE JOB. And finally, to Matthew 25, the parable of the sheep and the goats, which recounts neighbor love as the one standard to which believers are to be held and the one criterion upon which we will be evaluated or judged. When the Son of Man comes in his glory, Matthew writes, all the nations will be gathered before him, and he will judge the inheritors of the kingdom of God. To those at his right hand, those judged to be faithful and righteous, he will say, I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me 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. For as you did it unto the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me. 4

5 ONE JOB neighbor love, especially the care of the least. It is the distillation of the law, it is the distillation of the prophets, it is a calling without limits, it is the standard to which we are held as people of faith, and it is the criterion against we shall ultimately be judged. Now here, our thoughts must turn to where your thoughts may already have turned which is to our nation s sinful, shameful treatment of those entering our country illegally, a topic that has dominated headlines and conversations this week. 5

6 I am not going to talk matters of politics or of policy, because immigration is a complex issue clearly, we cannot simply have open borders, we cannot receive every person who comes, we must, as any nation, have procedures for receiving people and we must have procedures for compassionately turning people away. But as a matter of theology, whatever policy we as a nation pursue must meet the standard of treating others as we would be treated, of loving neighbor as self. By any measure, our nation s present official orientation to the foreigner, the immigrant, the alien in our midst is not gentle, not generous, not loving. It begins with the language we permit ourselves or our leaders to use. To refer to people as animals, an infestation, a scourge, mooches, leeches, bad hombres permits us to lower the standard for our treatment of them, because words reflect attitudes and attitudes govern actions. To judge all foreigners by the actions of a few is the very definition of prejudice. Even to refer to criminals in this way impacts how we treat the prisoner or the person in our legal system. If we de-humanize people then we permit ourselves to treat them in inhuman ways. So, our language matters immensely. Secondly, a policy of zero tolerance inevitably leads to intolerance and intolerance leads to injustice. Zero tolerance and mandatory sentencing on drugs has filled our prisons and destroyed lives and families. To apply that same zero tolerance practice to immigration will have similar results. Legitimate asylees will be criminalized. Zero tolerance removes wise judgment and removing wise judgment removes both mercy and compassion. 6

7 Now to the weeping of infants, a sound which we should be unable to unhear. To separate children from their parents as a deterrent to discourage people from coming to our borders is sinful and shameful. And while we have for the present ended this policy as practice, there remains significant question as to whether all of the children previously separated will be ever reunited with their parents such circumstance is unthinkable. But here is how it happens the family is separated the parent is processed quickly and deported. The separated child remains in our detention system being processed on a different time frame. Once the parent is deported, we do not track where they are. The deported parent has no resources and no recourses to come back, to obtain legal representation, to locate their child. So, what began as a flight from poverty and violence, a desperate attempt to elevate the child to a better life, a safer life, a life of opportunity ends with a broken family and a lost child All of which is decidedly un-biblical. In addition to its unequivocal call to neighbor love, the Bible enjoins us to care intentionally for widows and orphans and the alien in our midst. That exact phraseology is used repetitively widows, orphans, and the alien in your midst. Why? Because those are the classes of people who are most subject to poverty, to hunger, to injustice, to getting left out, stepped on, or ground down. Susan Krehbiel, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance Associate for Refugees and Asylum, reminds us that scripture speaks in at least 92 separate instances of our Biblical responsibility to welcome and love our neighbors. 7

8 Now here I must state the obvious our national policies and practices for immigration are not established by the Bible. Whatever our quotas, whatever our regulations, whatever protections we put in place at our borders those are determined by secular law and not by Biblical injunction. We have a separation of church and state in our nation, we have it for good reason, and the decisions of our lawmakers, not the teachings of the church, determine the immigration practices of our nation. But where the state is unjust, the church must speak. Where the state is lacking in compassion the church must call it to account. If the state dehumanizes or diminishes the dignity of anyone, the church must name it as sin. Which brings me at last to our text from Jeremiah. Here, the prophet has been given an instruction from God: Stand in the gate of the Lord s house, stand in the doorway of the temple and proclaim, Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the Lord. Notice where God has positioned the prophet at the entry of the temple speaking outward to the nation. And God s message to the nation through Jeremiah is this: Do not trust in these deceptive words: This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. Walter Brueggemann says that this verse alludes to words of the Jerusalem liturgy that were endlessly and uncritically repeated. They assumed God s unconditional blessing upon Israel that God s favor rested upon Jerusalem because of the temple s lip service to God. As long as the nation maintained a veneer of religiosity, as long as the temple stood at the religious and governmental center of the nation, Israel would never fail. God is saying, a religion of moral platitudes is no religion at all. A religion of privatized piety without an insistence upon public justice is no religion at all. So, God positions Jeremiah at the doorway of the temple speaking outward to the nation and God calls the prophet to say If you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly with one another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in 8

9 this place, if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt THEN I will dwell with you in this place. God s message through the prophet is, your greatness as a nation is not determined by your wealth, your greatness as a nation is not determined by your military, your greatness as a nation is not determined by the swelling of your patriotic pride, your greatness as a nation is determined by how you treat the least among you. You have one job. And so, to us. These texts are in the Bible. Taken together, they amount to a steady drumbeat of compassion and attentiveness to the refugee, the foreigner, the asylee. And while we in the church do not make the laws, we have a voice with those who do. We can advocate for immigration policies that are reasonable, generous, just, and humane. We can insist on a path to citizenship over family separations and forced deportations. We can educate ourselves on the many complexities of the immigration issue while always defaulting to decency. But if we do not raise our voice, then we may as well be mute, for what we do not condemn we condone, what we do not condemn we condone, what we do not condemn we condone. We have one calling, one mission, one job and neighbor love is Job one. Amen. 9