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Back to Sermon ArchivesAugust 10, 2008
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Genesis 37:3-4, 17b-28, Romans 10:8-9, 14-15,
Matthew 14:22-33
Dead Dream/er/s Walking: Children of One, Siblings
of All
Please see in the bulletin these Olympic Sundays poems (attached) from the “Democracy
Movement” in China remembered most for the repression at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
If there are significant and substantive changes for the betterment of the peoples
of China today (and I for one would not like to be governing one of every five persons
in the whole world!), they owe a lot to the visions and voices of prophets and poets
– many of whose works, some of whose lives, do not survive.
As Joseph is known for prophetic dreams, so are these poets. Sometimes words
alone fail us – as in the scintillating cinematic images and actions of the opening
of the games. They were literal poetry in motion. So is Jesus.
Such “miracles” as his walking on water put into image and action what cannot be
captured in words alone. I hope we will keep these poems before us these weeks
– their images corresponding to the actions of the athletes. And I offer as
ending to the sermon a contemporary example of such poetry in action for justice
and peace.
Genesis reads like one long dysfunctional family story. Most of it’s
sibling rivalry – beginning with Cain and Abel – ending perhaps with the sons of
Joseph – Ephraim and Manasseh. Their grandfather Jacob finally has learned
enough by all his own painful experience with ‘sibling wars” that he is able to
give them both the one and same blessing – sign of the one and same origin,
flesh and blood, of us all! Meantime, and as tragically as
nonsensically, little love and lots of blood is lost between Ishmael and Isaac,
Esau and Jacob, Joseph and his brothers.
Reconciliation, at last, – even if by exhaustion! – provides the only antidote for
our dysfunctionalities: We stop lording over and trying to fix one another.
We accept that we are all children of God, siblings of one another – all extreme
difference and all infinite variety. Come to think of it, similar sibling
rivalry besets Jesus and his disciples and insinuates itself into the Church ever
since! Who knows what motivates Peter taking off on some extravagant response
to Jesus!
Mostly the problems stem from projecting anger at our parents and/or our God onto
our sisters and brothers, our colleagues and friends. I mean, who are the
brothers really upset with in this story? Jacob, whose name now is “Israel”
(yes, our dysfunctionalities infect us as nations as well!) “loved Joseph more than
any other of his children!” That’s pretty clear and direct. Joseph was
child of his dad’s “old age” – the pride of persistent prowess! He still has
Benjamin to go! As if to flaunt his prejudice, Jacob/Israel makes Joseph
the “parent’s pet” and gives him this special “long coat with sleeves” -- which
means Joseph cannot perform any manual labor in it! So Joe finds plenty of
time to loll around like royalty -- and to dream – even to write poetry? As
if to rub it all in, Jacob/Israel – knowing already the brothers are not so kindly
disposed toward Joe – sends him out to check up on their work and report back on
them to him! Thanks, Dad!!
Any wonder they are so tempted to do little brother in? Who would they be
trying to hurt most? Happy to say there is some honor even among sibling rivals.
Reuben and Judah who knows how “pure” THEWIR motives are??) remember the fate of
Cain – that Abel’s blood cries out of the ground against him the rest of his restless
life. The brothers as sons know in their hearts Joseph’s death would mean
Jacob/Israel’s death as well. So whether to Ishmaelites or to Midianites,
they sell Joseph off for less than Jesus brought Judas, and take dad the
bloodied-up coat – the sight of which as good as kills him, too.
Maybe because Jacob/Israel had to live so much of his own life as if he were dead
to his brother Esau -- and now as if Joseph his favorite were dead to him – Jacob
becomes the one brave enough to stand up, to challenge, to wrestle God to a standstill.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow warns, if we fail to wrestle with God – if we fail to face up
to our own demons and responsibility for our own lives -- we are likely to murder
a sibling (or more!) instead. How much killing yet today is done in the name
of a God more likely to be blindly obeyed than openly questioned?
According to Rabbi Waskow, “If we refuse to speak truth to power, says the story,
we will end up speaking lies or silence to the powerless–and doing murder.
If we refuse to see clearly, truthfully, the world our parents have bequeathed us,
says the story, then we will be unable to make the world we want to make.”
Unable to make the world we want to make! Did we watch the Olympic festival
Friday night? “One World, One Dream?” In the stadium called “the bird’s
nest?” Where newness of life is laid and hatched and nurtured? And did
we wonder if even a moment what a world we might make if all that energy, beauty,
precision, skill, discipline, courage were put at the service of the world we want
to make? At the service of life more than the service of death? Just
asking . . . .
Even in Genesis, in “sibling wars,” Rabbi Waskow allows, “The conflicts are
warlike, but not fatal. Indeed, in each generation, the outcome is a
reconciliation, until the sibling war itself can be extinguished – or rise to a
new level.” The rabbi adds, “It is almost as if God learns from the
mistakes and failures of the earlier saga and starts over to work things out
another way.” So what are we “working out in another way?” Where are
we, with these disciples, trying, at least, to cross over to another side of the
sea? Early in this century, what have we learned from the blood of the
last century? I found myself thinking this week, if Jesus had been in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and Jesus assuredly was, and is! – even he could not
have walked on their waters – for even the waters burst into flames.
So maybe Jacob/Israel the God-Wrestler alone could bring about the blessing that
ended the sibling wars. And maybe that’s what we say about Jesus as well –
that he was such a God-Wrestler – in behalf not only of Israel but of the world
– we are now able, of not yet willing, to trust God to make -- for us and with
us – the world we have longed to make. God has reconciled peoples and
places of all generations in ways, Paul says, that “set everything right between
God and us.”
How do we learn to keep faith with that promise? To trust and to risk that
the dead dreams and dreamers walk? Raised again even from senseless slaughter?
Reconciling us with our own deepest dread – distracting and diverting us from reaching
out always to follow Jesus – as happens to Peter here with wind and waves.
Our culture not only distracts and diverts us but dulls us and drugs and addicts
us as well – anything so that we do not face our dreadings of death.
The work of our dead dreams and dreamers, our “ghosts,” walking on raging and even
on burning waters, is the hard work of reconciling -- to ourselves, to God, to others,
to Earth herself. Our work is to restore right relationship everywhere.
Our children, our grandchildren – in memory of Jacob/Israel – are counting on us.
How do we start out in faith for the other side? (In Jesus’ time, one side
of the sea was Jewish, the other side Gentile.) Just imagine the implications
of going “over to the other side!” Isn’t that treason? Betrayal of traditional
ways of doing?
Can we not think of so many good reasons for us to “stay home?” Stay where
we are? At least stay in the boat? Don’t get our feet wet? Wade
in the water? Risk going deep? How do we know to trust this strange
spirit walking the waves? No doubt, we ARE those of “little faith” – just
as he says we are. Do we begin to know how far even a little such faith in
Jesus will go? Faith of a dead dreamer walking – where no one has walked before?
We’ve just got to start somewhere!
In tribute Dennis Harms and other aspiring boat captains here, I close with this
memory of “living poet” Jim Douglass, a Catholic Worker peace and justice advocate
and activist – author of “The Nonviolent Coming of God” among many books – here
engaging in poetic image and action with compassionate courage:
There was once a group of believers in nonviolence who gathered along a waterway
in the Pacific Northwest. A giant submarine that could destroy all life on
earth was coming. The believers practiced in rowboats how they would blockade
the submarine.
They developed two tactics. A first group of rowboaters decided they would
be towed on a long rope by a leading sailboat. Then as the submarine approached,
they would all let go of the rope. The submarine crew would see them and stop.
That would be the beginning of a larger miracle of nonviolence. This was known
as the mother-duckling tactic.
A second group of rowboaters also had a mother boat, a trimaran. Their
tactic was that the trimaran would run directly at the giant submarine. Then
the blockaders would throw their rowboats into the water. They would jump
into them and row as fast as they could toward the submarine as it came closer.
Again the submarine would see them and stop – the beginning of the larger miracle.
Some observers called this the kamikaze tactic. Others said that name applied
also to the mother-duckling tactic.
In remembering this experience, I think all the people in the rowboats, whatever
our tactics, really had the same faith in nonviolence that Peter has initially in
walking to Jesus over the water.
On the day the submarine finally came, so did 99 Coast Guard boats, which the
government had assigned to protect its world-destructive weapon. The Battle of Oak
Bay, as a reporter called it, was short and decisive. The Coast Guard sank
some rowboats with water cannons, crushed others, boarded the mother ships with
drawn guns, and tied up the believers in nonviolence like pigs waiting for a roast.
The submarine sailed unimpeded to its port.
When Peter became aware of the wind, he got frightened and began to sink.
When we were confronted by the Coast Guard, we also experienced fear and got sunk
quickly. So, a lack of faith?
I remember, too, though, that when Peter began to sink he cried out in faith
to the Lord, who reached out and saved him. I think the real alternatives
were posed in our case, like Peter’s, by the more enduring question of whether to
surrender then to fear, or to realize how totally reliant on love we were to continue
such experiments in faith. “Lord, save us!” was our way, like Peter’s, to
continue in the future venturing out on the water in the midst of great winds.
Lord, -- as we venture, each in our own ways and all together, out on the fierce
waters, amidst the great winds -- save us, as well. Amen.
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