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Back to Sermon ArchivesMarch 29,
2009
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Micah 6:8, 4:1-5, Hebrews 5:7-9, John 12:20-33
“Reverent Submission, Irreverent Response: Suffering
S**ks!”
As Holy Week approaches us ready or not – and the light at the end of the
tunnel of Lent is clearly a runaway train! – We are tempted again to make
personal in our own lives the suffering of Jesus we know lies ahead. We
are tempted even to rationalize and to glorify suffering – as if all of it were
from God or at least useful to God and therefore redeeming to us. I don’t
know about you. But I am tired and very impatient with suffering anywhere
in this world – especially the many forms of it that are involuntary and
avoidable. I am tired of such sufferings as war, violence, poverty,
hunger, many diseases – we could name more.
Rather than make the sufferings of Jesus strictly personal between him and us,
I invite us to see and hear Jesus in the sufferings of everyone everywhere.
Of necessity we may begin with our sufferings and those closest to us. I invite
us to let Jesus call us to join him and to help him end and transform as much suffering
as we possibly can. I am motivated by the kind of priesthood this letter to
Hebrews describes for Jesus. Unlike most priests, Jesus does not get the office
passed to him by lineage through ritual. Nor does he specially study for it.
Jesus’ school is the one we call “hard knocks.” We share his all-too-human
“prayers and supplications,” his “loud cries and tears.” He directs them to the
one he thinks able to save him from death. Jesus is not saved from death –
any more than we are -- nor is he spared the last suffering!
Hebrews says Jesus is “heard because of his reverent submission.”
“Reverent submission” jumps out at me! It sounds like the glorious
self-denying way we settle for seeing our sufferings and those of others –
especially when we can do nothing. We pray for our stoic strength to
submit to our sufferings -- reverently!
I say too many “reverent submissions” are met with “irreverent responses!”
Such as the response of the cross! Therefore “suffering s**ks!” (Can
we say that in church? I don’t want to be controversial! We could say
“stinks” if you like.) I do not pretend my own “suffering” (with systemic
arthritis) compares to many others. But I find little if anything very redemptive
about it any more. I would not wish it on anyone else. And I sure wouldn’t
want the worse suffering of many others!
Women may be more attuned to the sufferings of children as well as their own.
Child abuse and domestic violence remain endemic to us. We must not repress
them. Here’s the way author Alice Walker impatiently hears the usual (male?)
preaching of suffering –
I grew agitated each time he touched
on the suffering of Jesus. For a long time my agitation confused me.
I am a great lover of Jesus, and I have always been. Still, I began to see
how the constant focus on the suffering of Jesus alone excludes the suffering of
others from one’s view. . . . I knew I wanted my own suffering, the suffering of
women and little girls, still cringing before the overpowering might and weapons
of the torturers, to be the subject of a sermon. Was woman herself not the
tree of life? And was she not crucified? Not in some age no one remembers
but right now, daily, in many lands on earth?
Many lands on earth – starting with our own! -- riddled and ripped, for painful
example, with automatic and military weapons. Our hearts went out to Oakland
again last week. And some of those weapons allegedly are sold at gun shows
in Reno! That’s us! There’s another show coming up just in time for
Holy Week! And they are always just before Christmas as well!
The first two Christmases I was here, I stood out in front of the Convention Center
during the gun show with a signed saying “Christmas + Guns = ????” I found
I could not do that any more.
But I still don’t get it. What’s up with our fearsome fascination with
these mighty instruments of death and devastation? Nor do I get the national
strategies that commit us to more and more violence toward people that somehow,
some way. some day we – and our children! -- have to learn to live with! What
do we propose? To occupy and incarcerate the whole world. What if Micah
means it? What if God really does expect justice, kindness, humility of us?
What if nations really will stream to the mountain of God – to take part in God’s
ways and God’s paths? God really will judge and arbitrate, negotiate, even
reconcile among us – both mighty and distant nations! And we really will beat
our swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks. We really will not
bear arms against another nor train for war any more! None of this will happen
unless we see and hear and imagine it first! What if prophecies really
are made to come true?
That is why Joan Chittister in our studies for Lent calls us to a
contemplative kind of witness and action. She wants our prayer life
informed by a breadth of consciousness and identification -- with a depth of
compassion and solidarity. She begs us to ask not only what is
“technically possible” for us to do in relation to others and to the earth --
but also what is “morally appropriate?” What will enhance the lives of children
and other living things? That, she says, is seeing the world as God sees
the world! For to God EVERYONE is a child of God!
Let us, in prayer, ask ourselves “why” we do what we do – or are about to do?
What “long-term effects” will it have? What will it cost “the values we hold
most dear?” She bewails that all of “the elders of this society, our experts
and consultants, our economists and elected representatives” – all of our so-called
“brightest and best” – do nothing to end or transform the sufferings of the masses
of peoples. Who will challenge this culture – especially all the casual violence
of this culture -- if not we who hear the prophet’s cry?! If not we who will
see, and will say: The culture starts with us – at our local levels, with our personal
plans?!
As I think Alice Walker also said, we have got to become the ones we are waiting
for! Nobody else can do this work for us. A friend of ours who’s a syndicated
Chicago columnist, Bob Koehler (www.commonwonders.com), attended a recent Peace
Alliance conference with 400 people from 40 states and 10 countries. He
heard a worker with maximum security prisoners who tells the prisoners, “You are
the ones who will save humanity.” Not what most prisoners are accustomed
to – is that right? And are we not in need of hearing that as well?
How much we might mean to the world? To the suffering? We who have
been so imprisoned, so intimidated and immobilized by things as they are?!
We are the ones -- the ones lowest on the food and power chains, the ones humble
and closest to the earth! We are the ones who may see in the dark – like
seeds, Jesus says! – who may see in the depth of human despair! Even as
some declared “Earth Hour” last night – and observed an hour of darkness against
global warming.
Who else is going to do it? Who else will forgive the murderers of their
own family members? Bob Koehler calls such witness and action “a primal cry
of the soul, a naked groping for commonality.” Is that not what coming to
Jerusalem – to Holy Week – is all about? Who else but we who hear the
prophets – we who follow the Jesus who chooses suffering not self-defending?
Who will accept what Koehler calls “a greater burden of responsibility than anyone
could be reasonably expected to bear?” Like “Liberian peace activist Kimmie
Weeks, who nearly died of starvation during his country’s civil war, who was
buried alive and rescued by his mother from a mass grave!” Talk about one
who literally follows Jesus’ words – who falls into the earth and dies –
in a way to bring forth fruit!
It is said of Kimmie Weeks, “He is trying to find a way to take the pain and
suffering he’s endured and turn it into gold for humanity.” Let it be so said
of us. Bob Koehler adds, “To reach people in their isolation, to celebrate
them, to love them, whether they are high school students or prisoners in maximum
security [or we might add, standing in line for food distribution, or rebuilding
homes their in New Orleans – we can name so many] – this is the first priority of
peace!”
And so it is the work of this Jesus! To follow him is to sow, to scatter
the best seeds the best way we can – but to leave the increase, the growth up to
God! We do not know the soil where seeds fall – rocky, or shallow, or all
full of thorns. Or even rich and receptive and yielding many times over the
numbers we plant! The harvest is not ours but God’s. We cannot even
tell the good seed from bad – Jesus says elsewhere -- the wheat from the weeds.
If we rush in to harvest before it is ready, we may cut short many promising lives!
We may condemn to death some who will prove, in time, not to blame. When Jesus talks
of seeds, the best of them are so much better than we dare believe! Even the
worst may yet produce in ways we cannot imagine! None of them, or us, is beyond
redemption.
It’s never too late for some seeds to take root and grow. [Seeds, I’m told,
can be saved for millennia – still edible and able to bring forth fruit!]
So it seems with Jesus it’s never too late for a changing of heart – even a cleansing
of heart! A new “heart start,” if we will. [And do we know the same letters
make up the word “heart” as do the word “earth?” What’s that called?
I call it pretty neat!] A new and right spirit to take root and grow in us!
Even between and among us! Even into all of the world. So much is a
matter of timing – of patience, persistence, resiliency – simple endurance
to the end! Whatever the end’s going to be. Is it not like that with
raising children? We do the very best we can with all we have. Then
we spend lifetimes, it seems -- Waiting! Watching! – for them to mature.
The question haunts us all, every nation in these days: How do we set the
example to grow beyond our own ignorance, arrogance, and need for vengeance?
It’s a question as old as Jesus – as old as the history at least of the Jews of
whom Jesus is one. If nothing else in these days, how do we learn, what happens
to anybody in this world happens to everybody in this world.
Jesus, in Micah’s spirit -- in his willingness to suffer and not inflict violence
and death – is by his death “lifted up from the earth” – drawing all people
to him and his love.
Our time under God is here! Where God plants us! Our time under God
is now! Everything in its season, its time, its “hour” as Jesus says here.
Everything in its “kairos,” its opportunity. For even in “crisis,” even in
suffering, we are bound by the promise of God to seek opportunity. What
assumptions about our culture – that imprisons, intimidates, immobilizes – have
to fall into the earth and die to their old forms and functions, systems and
structures? Is that not what Jesus is asking of us -- to die to this world
as it is – to rise with him to a new one? What are we so afraid of losing – as
persons, families, workers, students, spenders, savers, congregations,
communities – that we hold to it more tightly than ever? The more tightly
we squeeze a handful of seeds, the more likely they are to run through our
fingers! Behold! God is doing a new thing! Even here, even
now!
Like these Greeks in the story – outsiders, foreigners, even postmodern believers!
– we, too, “wish to see Jesus” in our time and place. If Jesus is not being
seen here, if Jesus is not being heard here, if Jesus is not being followed and
suffered right here and right now – who is responsible, if not us? We who
say, pray, worship, preach – as if we believe in him?! There is so much more
to Jesus than meets the eye – any eye. So Jesus essentially ignores the level
at which the Greeks want to “see” him – to push all to seem him more deeply.
What anyone of us can see of him – in separation, in isolation – is like that lonely
seed. Jesus says we must give ourselves up! Not give up on ourselves,
but give ourselves up – up to be sown and planted again and again – lifted up with
Jesus to die to our former selves! Even as nations, in Micah’s vision, give
up illusions of power to dominate and to control –to make our own unilateral way
in the world.
Only as we suffer and die to ourselves – doe to being at odds and apart from
each other -- may we hope to be “born again” to a larger identity. May we
hope to be born again to a sense of ourselves as connected, as related to all the
earth. Let choose to be seeds falling into the earth to bring forth much fruit
for the world – beginning right where we are. Let us choose to be seeds of
wheat that make up the loaf. Let us choose to be seeds of grape that make
up the cup. Let us choose to be seeds of life. The hour has come for the changing
of hearts – beginning with ours. Let us seek justice. Let us seek peace.
Come! Let us not be afraid! As we sing --
And everyone neath their vine and
fig tree
Shall live in peace and unafraid.
(2x)
And into plowshares turn our swords
–
Nations shall make war no more.
(2x)
And everyone neath their vine and
fig tree
Shall live in peace and unafraid
. . . .
So be it. Amen.
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