November 2, 2008 Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost, All Saints and Reformation and Reconciliation Sunday
Day
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 46; Micah 3:5-12; Matthew 23:1-12
If you thought you detected a little anger in the voice of the Psalmist and
Micah and Jesus today, you were right on all three counts.
And who can blame them? Who does not get angry sometimes to see evil
prosper? Who does not feel anger at the injustice of a system that enables greed-
driven CEOs to go through a financial crisis they created with little personal pain,
while millions of innocent middle and lower income people suffer hardship?
Who would not feel anger to see those who have caused terrible damage to our
society still treated by our society as the greatest among us, retaining all the
power and privilege and special treatment that their greed has bought them?
The prophet Micah felt angry in such a society almost three thousand
years ago, Jesus felt it in his society almost two thousand years ago, and we feel
it today. If part of the role of the church is to afflict the comfortable, we have
some serious afflicting to do. It is not acceptable to continue an economic
system that is so unjust. The church needs to offer a critique as clearly and
powerfully as Jesus did in his day and Micah in his. We need to go to Dick
Devor’s course on the prophets in January and hone our own prophetic voice so
we can say with Micah, “Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of
the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with
blood and Jerusalem with wrong…because of you Zion shall be plowed as a
field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins…” Sign up for Devor’s class
today, future Micahs of America! We need you. We need your energy and your
voice to lead us away from an economy of greed and violence to God’s economy
of mercy and justice and peace.
But afflicting the comfortable is only part of our calling. We also need to
comfort the afflicted.
The Psalms often comfort the downtrodden with the hope that God will lift
them up and put down those who oppress them. And this is the comfort Jesus
seems to be giving when he says, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and
all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
But there is one huge difference. In the vision of the Psalms, those who
are lifted up by God to the holy hill get to dwell there. They get to be the ones
with the power and privilege of prosperity. The vision of Jesus is radically
different.
The difference comes when Jesus says, “The greatest among you will be
your servant.” When he says, “All who humble themselves will be exalted,” he is
not talking about a reversal of fortunes where the lowly get lifted on high to rule
over their former oppressors. With Jesus, those who are exalted need to turn
right around and head back down to their humble serving. Even as they are filled
with wealth and power and worldly greatness their job is to keep lowering
themselves, to empty themselves, to serve.
Again and again Jesus stressed this. It forms the core of his teaching. He
modeled it himself on the cross. To a rich young ruler he said, “Go, sell all you
have and give it to the poor, and follow me.” To his disciples he said, “Those
who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake
will find it.” And perhaps to say the same thing in a more comforting way, Jesus
said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will
give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and
humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
The great society in Jesus’ eyes is not where oppressors are humbled and
the poor are exalted, nor is it where everyone is equally exalted. In the great
society Jesus envisions, everyone is humble, everyone is a servant of everyone
else, and we give the anxious, exhausting pursuit of exaltation a rest.
This humbleness is neither the false humility of the powerful and proud,
nor the forced humiliation of those who are downtrodden. Carter Heyward is a
prominent professor emerita at Episcopal Divinity School. She recently wrote in
Christian Century magazine that “Genuine humility is a gift from God…which
enables us to see ourselves as God sees us: sisters and brothers, each as deeply
valued and worthy of respect as any other….Humility is the root of our
compassion, our ability to suffer with one another, because we know ourselves as
spiritual kin to everyone. No one is beneath us—or above us—in God’s world.”
Heyward says that humility is to know the truth that Jesus knew, that “both he
and his adversaries belonged to God…that he was neither more important to God,
nor less, than his neighbor.”
In a time when the world is deeply polarized and estranged, Wall Street vs.
Main Street, rich vs. poor, conservative vs. progressive, what will it take to break
down our divisions and see ourselves as God sees us, humbly loving and serving
our neighbor as our self?
My mother grew up during the Great Depression. Her father was a classics
teacher at the Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He was not terribly well-paid
but he had a job and the Academy provided his family housing and meals at the
dining hall. At my mother’s grade school in Exeter there was a bully who ruled
over all the other children. You could always see him coming because he had a
very colorful, unusual patchwork coat. One day he came over on the playground
and bullied a friend of my mother’s right in front of her. My mother was filled
with righteous anger like the prophet Micah, and she reached out and grabbed at
the boy to make him stop. With a mean laugh, he jerked away and when he did,
his coat ripped.
Immediately he collapsed on the ground in tears. My mother shifted from
being the angry prophet to the compassionate comforter, and as she tried to
soothe him, she heard him explain between sobs that his mother had sewn every
stitch of that coat, and every day as he went to school she said, “You be careful
of that coat.” They had no money, they were always hungry, and she worked so
hard—if his coat was ruined, what would they do?
There on a grade-school playground in the Great Depression, two who had
exalted themselves in different ways were suddenly humbled together, and in
that reversal, my mother, acting as humble servant, saw their oneness, saw the
truth Carter Heyward observed in her article, “how utterly common all humans
are in the need for love, justice, compassion, health and dignity.” She learned
also what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow expressed: “If we could read the secret
history of our ‘enemies’ we should find in each person’s life sorrow and
suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” Humility disarms hostility. Humble
service puts an end to polarization.
The biggest employer in Thetford, Pompanoosuc Mills, has laid off
fourteen workers. This week American Express laid off fourteen thousand.
Whether it turns out to be just a great recession or the next great depression, we
are entering a time when suffering will be rampant. Our society will be asking
where to go from here, what changes to make. We will have a new administration
in the White House. People may be ready to listen, even to a perspective as
radically different as Christ’s.
That perspective is not completely gone from our collective memory.
Many of us still can hear President Kennedy saying in his inaugural address in
1961, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for you
country.” The idea of servant leadership, of humble service, may not be so far
gone from our public life that we could not recall it if the prophetic voice of the
church would rise again.
Nor is that perspective gone from our collective spiritual life. Millions
today are hearing Jesus’ teaching in the worldwide lectionary on the greatest
among us. And though millions more are not part of a church, there are other
voices that speak to them. One of the most popular today is the 13th century Sufi
poet Rumi. Rumi writes of self-emptying and humble loving service in a way that
is as Christ-like as anything in the gospels. Jesus said, “Those who try to save
their life will lose it, but those who lose their life will find it.” Rumi wrote about
the spiritual journey:
I died as a mineral and became a plant.
I died as a plant and rose to animal.
I died as an animal and I was man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Jesus said, “Love your enemies, do good and lend, expecting nothing in
return…give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken
together, running over, will be put in your lap; for the measure you give will the
measure you get back.” And Rumi wrote:
Love is recklessness, not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed….
Having died to self-interest
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.
As followers of the way of Christ, we are called to do just that—to pour
out our love completely, to empty out, giving away everything God gives us.
Where is the comfort in that? The comfort is that when we are lowly, God will
lift us up on high; when we are empty, the Holy Spirit will fill us up again; when
we have gone from Christ’s table and spent all we gained, we can come back
weary and find rest, we can come back hungry and find the plate and cup refilled.
All scarcity is answered here with abundant life.
This abundant life does not come through greedy grabbing or hoarding. It
does not come through revenge, pulling others down so that we may be exalted.
It does not come through filling ourselves with our own anger or power. It comes
through our humbling ourselves and crying to God as the Psalm does, “ O send
out your light and your truth; let them lead me.”
Martin Luther wrote during the terrible struggle of the reformation, “ Did
we in our own strength confide. Our striving would be losing.” He wrote, “ Let
goods and kindred go, this mortal life also.” Luther knew that those who empty
themselves and let God fill them are truly the greatest among us.
The way of emptying and dying to self-interest seems weak and foolish,
but it opens us to receive the greatest power in the universe, the power by which
lowly and humble people have changed great empires in the past. This is where
the prophet Micah’s power came from, and as he said, so we may say if we take
Christ’s path: “As for me, I am filled with power, with the Spirit of the Lord, and
with justice and might, to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his
sin…”
Let us pray in silence, emptying our hearts and minds so that the Holy
Spirit may fill us with power and with the guidance we need to know how to
serve in this time…
Sermon 11/02/2008