March 18, 2007, Fourth Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 32; II Corinthians 5:16-20; Luke 15:11-32
Last Sunday evening Eleanor Zue gave a presentation about her peace-
making trip to Israel and Palestine. President Jimmy Carter used the word
apartheid recently to describe how Israel is treating the Palestinians, and some
people complained that was too strong. I want to complain to President Carter,
too, only unlike the others I feel apartheid is far too weak a word. Eleanor was
quite understated in her talk—it was as gentle as she always is—but the
photographs she shared and the Palestinian stories that she relayed were not gentle
in any sense.
She also told stories about the suffering of Israelis, but there is a principle
of compassion that says when you have to choose whether to stand with the
suffering oppressor or the suffering victims of oppression, it is better to stand with
the victims.
My great-grandfather was a newspaper publisher in northern Ohio before
the Civil War and gave his paper’s support to the Copperheads, the southern
sympathizers. They looked at the slavery issue and saw that the slave-owners
were economically dependent on their slaves. What is more, the slaves were their
rightful property that should not be taken away. The Copperheads sympathized
with the suffering of the slave-owners who were threatened with the abolition of
slavery. I am sure they were aware that there were two sides to the issue, with
suffering on the side of both the oppressor and the victims of oppression. They
chose to stand with the oppressor. But if you ask yourself where Jesus would
stand, or where the principles of compassion would have you stand, it is with the
slaves, not the slave-owners. Stand with the victims, and from there you can try to
help end the oppressors’ suffering as well, first by helping them cease to be
oppressors.
The images that haunted me on the way home from Eleanor’s talk related to
the walls that the Israelis are building. They are building walls on the Palestinian
side of the line, and they are demanding that everything be cleared away for one
hundred and fifty feet into the Palestinian land. Farms, ancient olive groves,
homes, hotels, even a large school that brings together Israeli and Palestinian
youth—the walls are devouring them all, dislocating some, destroying others
forever. The walls are shutting off the ability of Palestinians to travel freely,
splitting families, choking communities, robbing them of their livelihood. Driving
home, the injustice of it burned in my chest and ached in my bones.
And the clincher, what really pierced me with its poignancy, was that our
name is all over those walls. Not only is the United States paying for them with
all our aid to Israel (the number one recipient of US foreign aid) but our name is
literally on those walls. Graffiti covers the Palestinian side. One photograph
showed a section that asked, “USA, why are you doing this to us?”
As I drove home, I asked myself why indeed.
I noticed that as I drove through the Tucker Hill covered bridge, I did not
have to stop for a checkpoint. I did not have to show papers or wait for hours in a
holding chamber as Palestinians often do. I did not have to fear being turned back.
As I stopped at the lonely intersection with Route 132, I did not have to worry
about a roadside bomb or suicide bomber attack. As I crossed from Thetford into
Strafford, I did not have to contend with a huge impenetrable concrete wall, nor
did I have to wonder if bulldozers had leveled my home while I was gone. I was
safe. I was free. I was secure. The only thing disturbing my peace besides my
own thoughts was the internal combustion engine I was driving.
And that, in a nutshell, is why our name is on those walls in Palestine. It is
why our name is on the graves of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi children. It is
why melting polar ice sheets have our name on them, and Pacific Island nations
that are submerging under rising sea levels.
Palestine and Iraq and the global climate all suffer so that I may drive my
inefficient pickup truck in peace. The whole world suffers the oppression of the
United States so that the United States can be safe and free to consume all the
resources our hearts desire. Most of us go about our comfortable American life
and say nothing about killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people to support
it, and say nothing about keeping other nations or our own workers in poverty, and
say nothing about the military and extreme bullying by which we get our way. We
see climate changing around us and still we keep silence about our complicity, our
guilt, our sin.
And so, as the Psalm says, our body wastes away. “While I kept silence,” it
says, “my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night
your hand was heavy upon me; my strength dried up as by the heat of summer.”
Is America’s body wasting away? Think of the word corruption. The Latin
root means to break apart. In English it means to decay or decompose, as well as
meaning what our national governmental bodies are full of. Think of Congress.
Think of Enron. Are we wasting away?
Or think about the boom in self-storage units. Did you know that the self-
storage industry is now larger than the film industry? Americans are spending
billions of dollars a year to house the excess hoardings of our consumerism. It is a
form of material obesity, which may seem on its surface to be the opposite of
wasting away, but wasting away is exactly what it is.
Think of the obesity of our military budget and the corresponding
emaciation of our budget for social well being at home for things like health care
or education or essential infrastructures that are wasting away. The victims are
groaning around us all day long.
And yet we keep silent.
Our silence is a little like the silence of the Prodigal Son. In fact, if you
chart the movements of the Prodigal Son away from home and back again, the
story turns out to be an archetype not only for rich kids, but for empires as well.
It begins with the selfish impulse: “ Give me what I want. Let me consume
all the resources I can get.” Then comes the movement away from the source of
our gifts, cutting ourselves off from our parent, or nature, or the workers who
produce things for us, or our home community, and always of course, from God.
Removed from our source and all responsibility we indulge our addictions, we
waste and destroy and eventually self-destruct. Then trouble comes. We grow
obese, we grow sick, a famine hits, a collapse of the stock market, a collapse of the
climate, we suffer, hit rock bottom, we envy the pigs their slop. We suffer in
silence a long time, unwilling to confess the truth of our condition, but finally we
move to remorse, and then to repentance, and then at last we return to our source.
There, by amazing grace, we find that we are forgiven and restored and we rejoice.
That is the way the cycle works for us as individuals. Selfishness leads us
away, suffering and remorse lead us back, and we find ourselves humbled,
forgiven and renewed. It has also worked this way for some nations in the past,
and we would hope it might work that way for America, but there are at least two
problems in our way.
One is, if through our greed we destroy the ability of the Earth to sustain
human civilization as we have known it, what hope is there for our ever rejoicing
in our restoration? What grace can there be for the destroyer of creation?
The second problem is that we are nowhere near the final stage of the
Prodigal Son, the stage of returning to our source. Some of us are beginning to
confess, but as a nation we are still somewhere between the prodigal’s orgy of
self-indulgence and his sober suffering in silence. We seem to be a long, long way
from national confession and remorse.
Those of us who see our nation’s sin are in the uncomfortable and ridiculed
position of the bearded New Yorker cartoon character dressed in a robe and
carrying a sign that says, “ Repent!” The message is no more popular today than it
was when John the Baptist was beheaded and Christ crucified. But is far more
urgent now than in first century Palestine. The damage being done, the suffering
impending is far greater. We cannot remain silent today without our silence
adding to our sin.
I have not seen the film Amazing Grace yet, but I have heard about a scene
late in the life of John Newton, the slave trader turned minister who wrote the
hymn. He has gone blind and we see him weeping. He explains that until he
confessed his sins and spoke his truth he could not weep. Now that he had
confessed it all, he could weep, and though he was blind, he now could see.
We may not be able to see how we will ever reconcile our nation to the
ways of God. We may not be able to see how there could be a new creation even
if we were in the sacred way of Christ. We should not let the lack of vision worry
us. The first thing we need to do is stop our prodigal ways as a nation, and feel the
appropriate enormous weight of remorse for all we have destroyed and oppressed
to gain our self-indulgence. Then, out of that remorse, we need to confess and
repent and return to our sources. We need to see and restore the people we have
made suffer, both the poor and the citizens of oppressed nations. We need to see
what we have done to nature and restore it. We need to see the pain we have
caused God with our violent, unloving society, and return home repenting.
Once we have done that, we can have faith that the Holy Spirit will show us
what our love can do to make of ourselves a new creation and a renewed nation.
We can trust that we will see the way to live sustainably with justice and peace for
all people of all nations.
“While I kept silence, my body wasted away,” the Psalm says. But it goes
on: “I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to God,’ and you forgave the guilt of
my sin. Therefore let all who are faithful offer prayer to you; at a time of distress
the rush of mighty waters shall not reach them.” Then, shifting to God’s voice it
says, “I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go.”
Let us offer our prayer that God’s merciful grace may be true for us and for
America and for all the world. May the rush of mighty waters not reach us. May
God teach us the way we should go from here. Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 11/26/2006