Readings FIRST LESSON The first lesson is from Invitation to Holiness by James C. Fenhagen SECOND LESSON The second lesson is from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 4, verses 14 through 21 “The Spirit of God is upon me, And Jesus rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then Jesus began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
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This Week's Sermon Date: January 24, 2010 Title: Getting Down to the Business of Justice Message Delivered By: Rev. Dr. Joe McMurray A woman once had a dream, in which she spoke with God about heaven and hell. Though she’d always been a person of faith, she didn’t know whether or not she believed in heaven or hell. So this dream was particularly relevant for her. Even in the dream, she knew she was unsure what she believed. On the day she met God in her dream, God said to her, "Come, and I will show you that hell does exist." They entered a room where a group of people sat around a huge, delicious-smelling pot of stew. Everyone gathered around was famished—they looked desperate as if they had been starving. Each person held a long metal spoon with a small wooden handle. The spoons were very long. In fact, they were so long, each person could only barely reach the opposite side of the huge pot of stew they sat in front of. The spoons were so much longer than their own arms, they could not use them to get the stew from the pot into their own mouths. Whenever they tried to shorten the distance by grabbing the spoon in the middle instead of by the wooden handle, they would burn their hands on the hot metal. The suffering was terrible. People were wailing, crying out for help. Their misery was palpable. Yet there was nothing they could do to feed themselves. "Come, now,” God said, after the woman had observed for a long time, “and I will show you that there is a heaven." They entered another room, and the woman was surprised to find a situation identical to the first. There was the huge pot of stew but a different group of people sat around it. They held the same long metal spoons with the small wooden handles. However, everyone seemed happy—even joyful. They were conversational with one another. Their spirits were bubbling with excitement; their voices were raised in laughter and in song. It was obvious these people were not starving at all. In fact, they seemed well-nourished and content. "I don’t understand this," said the woman. "Why are they so happy in here when they were so miserable in that other room? Yet everything seems exactly the same." God smiled and said, "Well, it’s not exactly the same. You, see … in here, the people have learned to use their spoons to feed one another." _____________________________________________________________ Will you pray with me? God, we ask your mercy upon all who are starving for your spirit of goodness and grace. Help us to be nourished and filled by the unconditional love you offer to us. May we recognize your nurturing love and be generous as we dispense that love to others who also yearn to know and be loved by you; for the kind of love you offer to the world is unending and unlimited. And may my words and all of our thoughts be filled with honor and praise to you. Amen. When Jesus was about to begin what would become the first stage of his ministry, he not only soundly proclaimed what that ministry would be, but he invoked the spirit of the Prophet Isaiah in doing so: “God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.” Jesus grounded his ministry in the Scripture—which, in many ways, was even more important to his community then than it is to ours now. Jesus embodied the spirit of the great prophet to announce that his would very clearly be a justice ministry; so that despite “justice” being an unpopular theme, particularly for those in positions of power in his day, Jesus would challenge that power . . . Jesus would challenge those who claimed that their authority superseded all others, especially when that authority invoked God’s name but was not used in the best interests of God’s people. As a person of faith, it was important that Jesus ground his work in the Scriptures. As you know, many would accuse Jesus of being a blasphemer; of worshipping false gods; of working with the powers of evil. They did not know how else to interpret the apparent dichotomy between his superhuman power and his devotion to God. Still today, many, who also happen to follow the Scriptures, bring hope to the oppressed, nourishment to the hungry, healing to the sick. Yet when they are not following the strictest orthodox traditions, no matter how contrary some of those proclamations may seem to God’s gift of unconditional love, they are labeled unworthy, and are accused of bearing false witness. … because they dare question an authority that places self-righteousness and hypocrisy ahead of loyalty to God and service to God’s people . . . We must do the same as a church. We are a different kind of church—one that includes and invites, even though ours may not always be a popular ministry. We question supposed voices of authority that lead us away from ministries of justice, particularly when we understand justice as our calling. James C. Fenhagen speaks of our calling as “vocation.” Each of us has a vocation, and collectively, we claim a calling in this gathered community. Though we may disagree from time to time, our calling becomes our mission, our goals and our truth as we answer God’s beckoning to us. Fenhagen says, “Sharing in the ministry of Jesus involves living in the world as an expression … as holiness … the holiness we see in Jesus” that was shown to us through his compassion toward suffering, his passion for justice, and the great attention he placed on healing and forgiveness. So that when we enter in relationship with Jesus, when that relationship is authentic, we allow ourselves to be like Jesus, despite our penchant for getting in our own way. Let’s talk about justice for a few minutes. When we think of justice, generally, we are prone to think about it in its broadest terms. For example, widespread oppression or the domination of people by governments or those who wield authority or power is something that clearly comes to mind when considering issues of justice. We think of people without the means to provide their own well-being, particularly in terms of adequate employment, housing, food, running water, or clean clothing. This is a justice issue. We think of children who live in hopeless poverty without access to good education and proper daily nourishment. And not only children who live in poverty: the fact that 80% of the Haitian people live in poverty is a justice issue.
We consider those suffering from life-threatening illnesses and conditions; they fail to receive adequate or affordable health care or access to much-needed treatment, medication and services because they are held captive by corporate structures whose primary purpose is to acquire profits by keeping affordable remedies outside our borders. War is a justice issue; racism and homophobia are justice issues; the continued oppression of women and the disparity between wages because of gender is a justice issue. Yes, these are among the most obvious. These are the no-brainers. These are the capital “J” Justice issues we hear about and talk about every day. And yet, I must tell you that we struggle with other justice issues right here in our own church community. Have you ever considered kindness or fairness a justice issue? Have you considered unjust criticism or apathy a justice issue? Have you considered integrity, or truth or honesty as justice issues? These are the small “j” justice issues. Let me explain what I mean. When I was young, probably starting in the sixth grade, for some reason I fell out of favor with most of my classmates. I became one of the undesirables. I was not popular, partially because I didn’t conform to what almost everyone else my age was doing. And partially, I was not popular because I felt different—because I was different. There was no description for the likes of me. I had gifts and talents that were not required—these particular gifts and my particular style were atypical and therefore I was shunned by my peers. This was just the age when socialization was key; it was important to be accepted and celebrated for who you were among your peers. Just the opposite happened with me. For the next several years, and all through high school and most of college, this became my norm. There was a lot of personal pain associated with these circumstances, and as a result, I was emotionally scarred. During those years, and for many years after, I blamed my parents for not instilling in me those survivor instincts of self-assuredness, self-pride, and self-certainty. I blamed them for not teaching me about self-esteem, self-confidence and being happy with who I was. Years went by before I grew out of the blame game. But I still struggled with these issues from time to time. Not only that, but in my years in ministry, I found hundreds of others like me—people who had backed away from their God-given gifts and talents and learned to blend into the background so as to avoid the feelings of self-consciousness, embarrassment or that sense of not belonging. And by those actions, myself and others like me became poster children of our self-fulfilling prophecies. We became, in a way, a social Diaspora, a people in exile, scattered by the winds of separation and marginalization. Some of us grew out of these experiences and many are better for it. But even for those of us who have learned how to socialize, to claim our ground and to speak up for ourselves, there are still those moments when we return to the times of isolation when we feel we are the loneliest people in the world and that no one can possibly understand what we’re going through. I will admit to you today that there are still times when I let things get to me, I listen too closely at the ridicule others direct at me, I let the petty injustices people so easily commit permeate my mind and my spirit. And I’m also forced at times to listen to the petty injustice others bring that is directed at other people. I spent a good part of last week listening to this. I listened as people came to me and told me what judgments other people had made about me, things I supposedly said or did to others that offended them or made them uncomfortable. And I listened as people griped about others in the church with whom they had problems or issues but were unwilling to go directly to those people to hash out their differences. There were people who questioned how I could possibly thank others for their work when there were “more deserving people” to be thanked. There were people who came questioning others’ qualifications rather than embracing their gifts, offering congratulations and wishing them well. And then it all came clear. I referred back to the quotation from Macrina Wiederkehr’s A Tree Full of Angels that I used in Quest this week: "There is a table to which we are invited each day. It offers us trees and stones, sunshine and stars, eagles and angels, roots and water, joy and sorrow, earth and fire, flesh and blood, storms and memories, words and silence, spiders and webs, night and day, death and life, crusts, crumbs, and loves. It is the table that Love prepares for us each moment. It is the table of daily life. Freely we are invited to come and eat . . . Unfortunately, most of us turn away from this table not because we sense our unworthiness, but rather because we are so busy we're oblivious to the invitation." In an exchange I shared with someone yesterday who was very moved by this quotation, we talked about feelings of self-worth and worthiness, which are also, in my view, justice issues. To this person I said: “I don’t believe for one minute, that God does not consider us worthy. Therein lies the difference between what we sometimes feel about ourselves and what God sees in us. “It is always incumbent upon us to look a bit deeper into what God must be seeing, and to operate our lives from that place of grace as well as from a place of humility. I daresay that it’s a lack of self-love that creates all the turmoil in the world. If we do not love ourselves completely, then we cannot love others completely – or God completely, for that matter. Part of justice is how we treat ourselves and others, even in the simplest ways.” Truly, my sisters and brothers, we need to get over ourselves. We need to be very careful how we treat one another; and we need to listen carefully to what we say about one another. Just as we would not handle a newborn baby roughly, we must learn to be tender with one another. I love it so much here at MCC, that I have been willing to second-guess, to over-analyze, to hold myself to a ridiculous standard of self-evaluation and self-criticism because I take too much to heart what people say. I love it here so much that I lose sleep over what I think people think. I love it here so much that I have put myself through torturous hours of needless reflection and second-guessing. Why? Because of fear: I fear that I might do or say the wrong thing and therefore offend someone who, if I look at them the wrong way, would scream bloody murder. But ironically, they would not scream it to me. They would, nine times of out ten, scream it to someone else and then start another round of misplaced anxiety and distress. (And by the way, they do this only because of their own lack of self-respect and self-worth.) Do you understand how ridiculous all this is? When people come to me and say, “Well, so-and-so said you did this.” Or “So-and-so told me you did this,” – so what? If “so-and-so” doesn’t have the to come and speak to me directly, I’m telling you I just can’t be bothered. I have told you often, if you have issues, come and talk to me. But don’t bring me your issues with other people. We all have to learn to speak up for ourselves. We have to learn, as I told you one of the first weeks I preached to you, that triangulation—playing the game of “he said, she said” and putting me or others in the middle is just not part of being in Christian community together. It does not fit. It does not compute. The Scripture says, loosely translated, of course, that if you have a problem with another in community, you go to THAT person. If that person will not heed your plea, you take a sister or brother from the community and go to them. If that doesn’t work, you call the full community to go and make things right. We must stop resisting our own responsibility. We must stop pretending that our actions and our words don’t have consequences. We must understand that we would not for one minute tolerate some of the very same things we say about other people if they were said about us. If I’m having a problem with someone, the first thing I should ask is, “Okay, God, so what’s this problem I have with myself.” Because that’s where I’m going to find the answer. We – all of us – have to stop holding everyone else to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. We have to stop looking for reasons to dislike one another. We have to stop trying to act as though we are superior to others. And if we have real concerns with people, then we musttake it to the source. To do it in any other way is to act unjustly. These are not easy issues to confront. It is never easy to discuss personal issues. My hope is that if I am brutally honest with you about my own shortcomings, you may become honest with yourselves and with each other and can confront the difficulties that you face. In the meantime, my personal goal is to practice the serenity prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; In order to be at peace with others, we must first be at peace with ourselves. May we continue to follow where God is leading. Amen.
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