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July 27, 2008
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture:
Genesis 29:18-20, 25-28, Romans 8:31-39, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Jubilee Joy and Justice: Restoring the Stolen Inheritance
There’s nothing wrong with Dr. martin Luther King’s annual birthday celebration.
I like to point out that on three Americans have had holidays named for them – Washington,
Lincoln, and King – father, Son, and Holy Ghost! The Holy Ghost will not stay
dead buts haunts of conscience and soul. Nor is there anything wrong with
Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. One of our questions this weekend, in
solidarity with “the disinherited” within and among and around us is, how do we
get back our piece of the promise, the dream? But as we recall just where
and when and how Dr. King died, we wonder, do we need another hero? Or are
we ourselves called to become the heroes we need all over the world?
Dr. King was assassinated 40 years ago, standing with garbage workers in Memphis,
TN, while organizing for the Poor People’s Campaign to occupy capitol grounds in
Washington, DC, that summer. His intended nonviolent creative resistance to
war, poverty, racism calls us as strongly today as then. The 40th
year is a biblical one, a generation – a generation wandering in the wilderness
– delivered from bondage, learning to live with freedom, learning to act as community
– no longer of slaves but of sisters and brothers. A generation given a promise,
a covenant – among God’s self, God’s people, and God’s land – led to the edge of
that Promised Land – still waiting. Is that where we are today?
From the first “Gilded Age” now three generations ago – through the Great Depression
and “Hoovervilles” two generations ago – and the Poor People’s Campaign and “Resurrection
City” one generation ago – we find ourselves still in the wilderness of slashed
budgets and “Tent Cities” – here and everywhere. More people living in refugee
camps and shanties than any time in world history! So where do we go from here?
asks Dr. King. Chaos or community? Wilderness or Promised Land?
During this month of Artown, and with a grant from Nevada Humanities, we ask, what
are the connections between creativity and social change? How do we find in
word and song, images and languages, help to cross over from wilderness to Promised
Land? How do we become “free at last?”
Howard Thurman wrote the book Jesus and the Disinherited in 1949.
Dr. King carried it with him at all times. Rev. Dr. Dorsey O. Blake
currently serves as Presiding Minister of The Church for the Fellowship of All
Peoples – a first-ever interfaith, interracial congregation co-founded by Dr.
Thurman in San Francisco, 1944. Dr. Blake also serves as Dean and
Professor of Spirituality and Prophetic Justice at Starr King School for the
Ministry in Berkeley.
Thurman also wrote extensively on the Spirituals under the combined titles of
Deep River and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death. Spirituals
and their derivatives give voice to the disinherited. Ms. Patricia Esters
has the Master of Arts from UNR in Vocal Performance and Choral Conducting.
Her thesis traces African American music from slave chants and work songs
through Spirituals to Gospel. Ms. Esters taught for the Washoe County
School District and is an accomplished vocalist – in Spirituals, Gospel, Jazz,
and Blues.
Thanks to the congregation for the way we received Ela Weissberger and her witness
to the Holocaust last Sunday. What a special opportunity to support the work
of “re-membering” – that is, putting back together in new and lasting ways that
which has been torn apart – which Jesus says our life in him is all about!
For that is the work of forgiveness – not forgetting but remembering – as much,
as far back, as we can bear. Next Sunday we remember Holocaust and Hiroshima.
Joy and justice go together – like peace and plenty, life and love, word and
table, song and dance, Sabbath and Jubilee. If we are strongly and deeply
committed to one, the other will follow from it. I tried to say at the
Community Meeting this week on homelessness and housing, the same is true of
“services and systems.” If we are committed to services, we find we must
deal with systems as well. It’s the insight of the story of people who
begin to find wounded bodies floating in their river. One by one they
rescue and bandage them up. Bodies keep coming. Someone asks, why
don’t we go upstream? To see how and why so many are being wounded in the first
place? Dr. King said of the Jericho road, go beyond being “good
Samaritans!” Ask why there is so much crime there to begin with.
Systems are the upstream of services. The Gilded Age, the Great Depression
the Poor People’s Campaign, the “Tent Cities” today here and elsewhere – we have
a dilemma of systems as well as services. The question is not only, how do
we serve the poor and the needy? But also, how and why does our system allow
so many to be in such trouble today – here and around the world? Clearly the
services have to come first. As with the story of Jacob, there always is a
crisis at hand to respond to. But crises will overcome us if we do not face
causes as well. Remember, it’s one thing to give hungry persons fish. It’s
another thing to teach them to fish and provide for themselves. But we are
not done unless and until there is room at the pond and healthy and plentiful fish
for all comers!
In effect, Jacob deals with systems as soon as he exits the womb. There is
in place a system of preference to the rights of the first-born son. Jacob
starts out second and has to spend the rest of his life trying to make it up!
First he steals a birthright, then he steals a blessing. The inheritance
of Esau is stolen. In today’s story the inheritance of Leah the older
daughter is at risk. Her father plays the system even better than Jacob
does! The Hebrew Bible takes seriously the birthright, the blessing as
part of covenanting with God. Everyone shall enjoy inalienable access to
the resources God provides equally for the good of all of God’s children.
Anything less or other than that amounts to the stealing of an inheritance, of a
right to access and to success.
That is, an equality of opportunity and a parity of result are built in to the
system itself! No one is to be left out or left behind. The
provision of law for a regular observance of Jubilee means that inheritance,
access, success, shall not be systemically “stolen” from anyone for very long.
Every fifty years there has to be a general forgiveness of debts, a restoration
of the inheritance due every tribe and family. The 12 tribes or Israel,
like the 12 disciples of Jesus, are signs of the fullness and wholeness of
“shalom,” of community to whom every member is precious and indispensable!
Otherwise, we see what we see all over today – the rich get richer, the poor get
poorer. The gaps between us grow – and are passed to generations on end.
Jubilee breaks the cycles of accumulation and alienation.
Rupert Seals pointed out in discussion yesterday, release of the slaves in our nation’s
history was compromised, even subverted by denial of access to land. Filmmaker
Spike Lee still calls his production company, “Forty Acres and a Mule.” We
live in a land of broken promise and stolen inheritance! We need to give it
up and make it up! Civil liberties without economic securities lead to only
a part of freedom. Human liberation begins with but ends in more than personal
liberty. In today’s “global village” there is a governmental “responsibility
to protect.” Dr. King spent the end of his life as a witness to human
rights -- to include in such rights food, housing, income, health care, education,
employment – without which families and individuals cannot survive -- especially
in a system built, as Dr. King attests at cost of his life, on racism, poverty,
and perpetual war.
Systems and causes, crises and consequences are built into these stories of our
earliest mothers and fathers. Under God there is a human right to live and
to have one’s living respected by others. There is a human right to belong,
to be part of relationship. God from the very beginning announces it is not
good for us to be alone! We belong parts of family and household, congregation
and community, nation and all of creation. Birthrights and blessings are about
the human right to be invested in the promise of a future. We are the people
of promised land. Why forty years after Dr. King’s death do we seem surrounded
by so much wilderness, even so much anti-humanness, in all our relations?
Mystic prophet Howard Thurman sees God as “systemic,” God as built-in – to
nature and to creation, to scripture and to tradition, to experience and to
reflection – to slavery and to the Spirituals. There is no place to
hide, no place to get away from God! God is built in to US! God is
forever part of us! God is imaged by us and imagined by us!
Uncontained, uncontrolled by us. Yet God is experienced, God is expressed
by us. We keep running into God all the time – as per these parables.
Everyday life is chock full of God! Overflowing with God! God
popping up in every unforeseen circumstance, every incessant condition!
God is built into creation herself! How does Paul put it? Everything
of God on the line for us! Engaged with our every condition! Exposed
to our every danger! Invested in every child born as God’s own! Can
anyone drive a wedge between us and God’s love – in Christ and in so many others?
No way! No trouble, no hard times, no hatred, no hunger, no homelessness (Can
I get a witness?), no bullying threats, no back-stabbings – Nothing! Nothing
in all of creation! Can get between us and God’s love! Our inheritance
is inalienable and forever! Amen.
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