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June 22, 2008
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Genesis 21:8-21, Romans 6:1b-11, Matthew 10:24-31
Life in the Body: Playing Our Part by Part
Life in the spirit, in theory, may be very sweet. Life in the flesh is a mess!
Our theories of life hardly ever turn out in practice. Practice is one long
improvisation.
Like jazz! Julie observed of one piece we listened to on the way home from
annual conference yesterday: Drums and the Wurlitzer organ just don’t go to
together! Such is both the evocative and provocative challenge of jazz.
Its goal is not for trumpets to sound like saxes, or drum sets like acoustic basses.
Jazz is paradox -- unexpectedly peaceful coexistence of oppositional elements!
On occasion, as in life, tentative creative tension in jazz breaks forth into blatant
contradiction. But overall, in the end, jazz thrives on patient respect and
resilience, on compassion and care for cacophonous moods and moments of life.
Our Artown concerts begin with jazz and blues a week from Tuesday. Then comes
a concert of ragtime piano – followed by harp and vibes – from Bach to Brubeck!
Then folk trio, then swing band, then rockabilly! Concluding with folk chorale,
Afro-Latin funk, and brass quintet! Truly, you can get most anything you want
at “Sweet Vibrations”—as well as at “Alice’s Restaurant!” Such variety, such
diversity, clearly provide the spice of our lives! According to trumpeter-bandleader
Wynton Marsalis (coming to Artown this year!) improvisation demonstrates conflict
played out and worked out among us. Each player has such differing things
to say and to do -- playing their own solos and riffs, probing at, bouncing off
one another – truly allowing life’s music to lead life’s movement.
So we are called to embrace all the tensions and contradictions in scripture this
morning as insightful for our lives. Those who are joining the congregation
today – thank God! – are renewing baptismal vows and inviting us to renew with them.
Baptism never gets old. It is the mark of creation itself, the waters that
were before anything else came to be. Janis Siemon, whose completed life we
celebrate tomorrow – amidst feelings that for some of our more life-filled friends
the end of life as we know it must always come much too soon – loved the words “Morning
is broken, like the first morning!” So we are baptized into new life every
day – with every awakening. In our Words for Meditation this morning –
We wake up inside Christ’s body, where all our body, all over, every most hidden
part of it, is realized as joy in Him, and He makes us, utterly, real, and everything
that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in Him transformed and recognized as whole,
as lovely, and radiant in His light, we awaken as the Beloved in every last part
of our body!
Wow! What a promise, what a hope – that baptism is a daily way of living our
deaths! Of allowing each day, each moment, each event and relationship, to
become as life-filled as we can possibly bear – before we let it go and let it be.
God surely can take the “mess of our flesh” and use it in ways we never imagine.
God even takes and uses this “joint custody struggle” between Abraham’s two relations
with Sarah his wife and Hagar her African maid-servant and their sons Isaac and
Ishmael. Even though God remains true to the promise to Sarah, God does not
abandon Hagar or accept the inevitability that if Isaac is to “win,” then Ishmael
somehow must “lose” – even his life! God does not see the lives and
deaths of children as pawns for power struggles or rewards for righteousness!
Though next week’s story of Abraham and Isaac reveals God’s “learning curve.”
Beginning with Cain and Abel, we people of biblical faith have to wonder why even
(or especially?) within families, there seems to be such a need for only one survivor,
or one inheritor, or one beneficiary of promise and blessing, or one way to
salvation -- or even today, one superpower in the whole world! The promise
of God, even the promised land of God, is big enough for both – and for all!
No one need be disinherited, dispossessed, disenfranchised or disempowered from
the full promise of God. Every one belongs equally. Even Isaac and Ishmael
come together to bury our common “father” Abraham. We who are of Abrahamic
descent today belong in creative collegial family relations – as some are working
to offer in our community even now. Arabs and Christians and Jews have
not always been at conflict and war – though various national interests exploit
that. We are parts of the body together, and illness arises when parts are
divided.
Jesus and Martin Luther King tell us the same thing (and Chautauqua picks up the
theme this week) – we are together in life – even as disciples and slaves – even
as the children of former slaves and the children of former slave-owners.
We are called to resist all those who would limit our beings and meanings in life
to this “mess of the flesh,” these limits of our bodies -- with all characteristics
of our creatureliness. Jesus invites us to spread the whisper, the rumor,
that deeply rooted as we are in our bodies, that is not all we are! We need
to proclaim from the rooftops that every one of us is invaluably and inviolably
made of God and of infinite value and worth – Jew, Christian, Muslim – all of the
faith traditions, all of the nations and races and colors and conditions and ages
and languages of life. God who sees the fall of each sparrow knows every soul
– every part of the one body, every piece of the whole soul shared by us all.
I bring us greetings from the 160th session of the California-Nevada
Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church – concluded just yesterday in Sacramento.
This congregation has been part of 140 of those sessions! Our connection is
life in the personal body writ large enough to include some 350 congregations in
seven districts – embodying vast geographic as well as demographic, cultural and
faithful variety and diversity -- Bayview, Delta, Fresno, Golden Gate, Nevada-Sierra,
San Jose, and Shasta districts. Who knows how many nations, races, ethnic
groups, gender-identities, languages, of all ages! Represented by one bishop
and spiritual leader – these past eight years the Rev. Beverly J. Shamana – retiring
this September, in her last session as our bishop.
As always, she called us to be as fully embodied as we are made to be – to live
with and to love one another at all of life’s improvisational intersections of body
and soul. Conference session began with a full litany of tribute to the life
and work, the need and care for every last part of the body! (Hope to get
a copy.) We may recall last summer Bishop Shamana spent a Sunday of Artown
with us – connecting worship and the arts, celebration and creativity – in our life
together and in the lives of each person made in the image of our common Creator!
Our conference space was surrounded by huge paintings of worship in the African-American
tradition by a member Jones UMC, San Francisco. Our time throughout conference
together was punctuated with poetry readings! (Including Richard Drath reading
Chesley’s reflection Katrina and New Orleans!) Our space and time both were
enriched by gourd art -- not only by Bishop Shamana but also by her sisters and
her mother – who were there to share in her honoring. We were all offered
shards of broken gourds to write our “blessings” to the bishop.
Each day featured an “artist in residence” among us – one a painter, one a potter,
one a weaver – and one a dancer from Reno, Dr. Martina Young, who led us all into
worship here last summer. Bishop Shamana said several times how her Artown
highlighted her last year. Martina led us periodically in movement – to welcome
the gift of creativity with outstretched arms – to receive our own gift into the
pit of our being – to reach out to offer our gift to a neighbor – and to take our
place in the larger church and community of those creating our lives, making them
up, improvising as we go – making “message” out of this fleshly “mess!”
Bishop Roy Sano represented the Council of Bishops – thanking Bishop Shamana for
“changing the landscapes” of our lives through invitation always to embody the tensions
and contradictions of our life and love – always to be full partakers of both word
and sacrament, poetry and prophecy, art and action, mystery and ministry.
The same bishop creating such inspired and imaginative gourds also stood on the
steps of the State Capitol with 200 others of conference Friday noon – vigiling
in prayer and testimony for a new, just, and inclusive policy of immigration for
all the parts of our emerging body in conference, state, nation. We could say this
morning that Hagar and Ishmael are archetypal refugees fleeing for their lives.
God seeks them out and becomes “sanctuary” for them.
The bishop preached on “Shall We Dance?” – after which Martina offered a powerful
dancing of the word that life is such a spirited fleshy mess of living and dying,
wounding and healing. She danced to the improvised accompaniment of a jazz
quartet – repeating great themes of life and death – but in so many fine-tuned and
nuanced ways. Just before Bishop Shamana preached, we sang “Lord of the Dance.”
She reminded us that in her first conference with us eight years ago – coming into
a body that often felt divided and conquered by our differences and disagreements
– she offered a medieval dance (whose precise name escapes) done publicly, through
the streets – in a rhythm of three steps forward and one step back. We are
always moving forward on the full promise of God – even as we know our moments of
falling back. The dance in the streets today might be conga line or hip-hop,
she acknowledged. But Jesus is still the dance leader. And the dancer
is still the disturber of peace! Amen.
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