|
Back to Sermon ArchivesNovember
9, 2008
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-18, First Thessalonians 4:13-17a,
Matthew 25:1-13
“Oil’s Well That Ends Well: Title Written before
Election Day”
This wonderful congregation is as much a “mixed bag” as our nation was shown to
be this week! One of our many agonizing beauties is how we never get altogether
in one time and place! We were made up of more members in the past.
But we also had a much higher of those in worship every Sunday -- almost as if that
was our mission! Now there are as many ways of mission as there are persons
– and we are everywhere doing everything all the time! I wanted to assume
that many of us were out working precincts last Sunday. I was advised it’s
likely that as many or more of us were out hunting!
Then just yesterday, our range of being and doing was a least as wide and crazy
as these wise and foolish bridesmaids saving and spending their oil. Some
of us did the Trustee Work Day at church and parsonage, some the Drop in the Bucket
Food Distribution. Some of us set up for the Holiday Bazaar, some attended
District Council on Ministries. Some of us took part in a 50-year renewal
of wedding vows, some in the baptism of Floyd Johnnie Brown held at home for medical
reasons. Some went to Fernley to help repair homes, some attended the retreat
of Sierra Interfaith Action for Peace. And even today, some of us are
off to San Francisco to surprise Michael Stephenson on his 50th birthday,
some are planning to join in post-election day worship at Bethel AME Church.
So for those who could not be here last Sunday, or who kept thinking all week of
more saints and elders, more “veterans” of both peace and war, to remember and
to celebrate, we give thanks again today for all who have gone before us to show
us the way. They show us the way out of fear and hiding from one another –
a way into the wondrous mix of creation and culture, color and creed, class and
condition in life we have become as a nation and people. We lift up our
elders and the “eldering” of us all. With the death of my mom, for
instance, I became at last the “elder” of my family of origin – a distinction I
gladly postponed all I could.
Elders do not have to hide who we are any more. We are forever falling apart,
or falling asleep, or just plain falling – can I get a witness? “I am always
falling down, but I know what I can do! I can lift myself up, and dust myself
off, and dance in a world brand new!” We elders know all too well how full
life is with implausible options and impossible choices. We want, as a 19th
century mystic puts it, to “choose everything!” We do not “want to be a
saint by halves!”
We know we live in times of searing incertitude. Times call us less to the
forceful giving of answers than to the fragile living with questions. Ours
are times of constant discernment and delicate commitment. Peoples of faith
– no matter our rapturous lapses into thinking we know God’s will -- forever return
to questions like Joshua’s (and Bob Dylan’s!) -- Whom do we choose this day to serve?
We know we gotta serve somebody. That is our nature – a people of witness
and service. So who and what is it going to be? Cotton or silk, whiskey
or milk, caviar or bread, floor or bed, devil or Lord – Gotta serve somebody!
Gotta live with a holy kind of impatience for God to be fully revealed and fulfilled.
We no sooner savor a moment of some satisfaction – such as the election might be
for some. Then we have to get on with the next phase of this nonviolent revolutionary
upheaval we call the Kingdom and Kin-dom of God! Such questions of whom we
serve are especially ticklish for us because Joshua asks them at times of conquest
– when we are most tempted to think that after 40 years we have earned an ultimate
triumph. Tradition gives us image of “Christ the King” coming to conquer the earth
two weeks from today! Somehow to take all the “saved” away with him, and to
leave all the “damned” to the Democrats –
No! That’s not quite the way it is. Though I have to say how
heart-stricken I am for same-gender couples who married in good faith under
constitutional law of the state of California – only to find that intimate civil
and human right denied them again on the basis and imposition of religious
tradition. It causes me to wonder how those of us holding the limited oil
of ecclesial credibility are called to preserve and sustain it. Lest we
end up in darkness of our own dogmatism.
Joshua’s question tempts us to reduce God’s cosmic promise of land to a
parochial one. Only those of one faith will prevail -- and maybe not even
all of them! Or to reduce it to a national promise – as if all the rest of
the world is destined to follow the lead of one certain party or country.
We are tempted to limit vision and voice to only one promised people -- only one
promised land.
What does it mean for us to cross the Jordan on strength of a promise of that
God will drive out all the native peoples before us? Maybe the Amorites,
mentioned here, are coming home at last -- those who feel they were never quite
in the land -- or were driven out long ago. It may not be time for the
Advent announcement – “Those who sat in darkness have seen a great light.”
But at the very least -- like the flickering lights of the bridegrooms here –
many this week so desperately praying to keep hope alive in our system and
nation have received an encouraging breath. How hard it is to keep the
promise once we think we have reached the promised land. We think we have
brought God’s wild promise under our own constraint and control. How to
stay steadfast and loyal to God? While we take root and grow where we are?
As this congregation has done.
Bill Moyers called the election an “ecumenical catharsis.” I take that to
mean an outpouring of relief and release for all the yet unseen peoples –
peoples made visible by the yet-flickering lights of those who refused to let
them burn out. I really want to savor the time. But here’s what I
mean about holy impatience: I saw the line-up of “economic experts” behind the
president-elect at his first press conference and found myself asking, Where’s
health care for all? Where’s affordable housing? Where’s lasting
employment? Where’s renewable energy? Where’s Head Start?
Where’s justice for immigrants? All of the real economy!
It is so tempting to forget how God saves us and brings us out from perpetual bondage
to every last form of sin and of death. That promise keeps going before us
-- even or especially when we think we have got to the promised land! God
never is done with us yet. The “us” of us, of “Jes-US,” is always expanding.
God is making a way for all of God’s people – not of any one faith or culture, any
one party or nation – but ALL of God’s people. The very last act of Joshua’s
long life and leadership here is to renew the covenant of the people. We remember
who and whose we are, where we have come from, what we have been through, how we
got over, and how we make room for others to join in the promise as well.
If the promise of God is good for any one child of God, it is good for every
last child of God. The bridesmaids this morning remind us of the great
challenge to those who keep cherishing, nourishing, lengthening, stretching
their light as far as they can. Some live by a promised light even in a
promised land. For our light is not always “set on a hill” -- clearly and
strongly for all to see. Our light is as often kept and carried through
deep and dark valleys of death and disease, destruction and despair. We
keep it in dirty deserted streets of the cities.
We keep it on crowded couches, and in cheap motels, and in empty automobiles,
and even on hard cold ground. We keep it in lonely nursing homes and --
recalled with awful honor this week – in veterans’ hospitals. Our light is
kept wherever there is a heartbeat, wherever there is a hope-beat. It is
not easy to keep promise in the promised land. We need all the help,
experience, wisdom, perspective of all the saints, elders, veterans of war and
peace, we can get.
We learn from both sets of bridesmaids this morning – those who keep light alive
and those who don’t. We cannot presume, as half of them do, an eternal supply
of cheap and available oil and all the other resources we take from our children
and from the world. We are all up against the staggering, shattering realization
that here in the “promised land,” we no longer take for granted everything for us
will just keep getting better and better, and bigger and bigger, and cheaper and
cheaper, and faster and faster! Maybe we should not have been asking all those
years, am I making a better life for my children in this promised land? Maybe
we should have been asking, am I helping to bring all the children into the promise?
What if we are not only forgetting the promise of those who gone before us --
the saints? But are neglecting the promise for those who come after – the
children?
I remember the witness of a young United Methodist Woman at a conference some years
ago – calling us to a “collective revolution of the spirit.” She asked us,
please, to “clean house!” To let go of everything wearing us down or holding
us back. She implored us to find bold new ways to proclaim our bold good news!
For her, she said, that meant going in search of “the world my parents raised me
to live in – but a world that does not exist yet!” A world that can only be
seen from afar -- as Moses and Dr. King saw the promised land. The young woman
went on to declare, “It’s the only world I want to raise my children in!”
Wow.
Let us take this pregnant moment among us -- even among the whole world of us.
Let us confess our role among those using up the world’s oil – as quickly and as
heedlessly as in the parable here. Let us confess whatever else we are
using up – as if there were no more waiting upon God’s promise, the bridegroom –
as if there were no more tomorrow for our children, our grandchildren. Let
us be true to the promise of those who come after -- as to the promise of those
gone before. We have to do some grieving these days. It goes with
the territory -- grieving for saints and elders and veterans – whose losses,
absences, damages, changes mean so much to us – and with whom we may have such
“unfinished business.”
Let us grieve the loss as well of such an unsustainable lifestyle. Let us
grieve the loss of the support system – so visible through these years of war and
campaign --that kept and perhaps still keeps us in so much denial. For we
continue our profligate ways at deadly expense to others and, ultimately, to ourselves
as well. I’d like to give the last word to parts of Maya Angelou’s poem “Still
I Rise” –
You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may
trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I rise.
Does my sassiness upset you? / Why are you beset with gloom? / ‘Cause I walk
lie I’ve got oil wells / Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns, / With the certainty of tides, / Just like hopes
springing high, / Still I’ll rise. . . .
You may shoot me with your words, / You may cut me with your eyes, / You may
kill me with your hatefulness, / But still, like air, I’ll rise. . . .
Out of the huts of history’s shame / I rise / Up from a past that’s rooted in
pain / I rise. . . . Leaving behind nights of terror and fear / I rise / Into a
daybreak that’s wondrously clear / I rise / Bringing the gifts that my ancestors
gave, / I am the dream and the hope of the slave. / I rise / I rise / I rise.
And, Amen.
top of page
Archives
| 