June 19, 2016
Hymn: "In Christ There Is No East or West"
Text: Galatians 3:23-29
Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.
So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.
INTRODUCTION
Friday was the first anniversary of the terrible shooting in the Emanuel African American Episcopal Church in Charleston, which took the lives of nine parishioners at a Bible Study. And a week ago, a hate-filled man entered a bar in Orlando, a safe place for the LGBTQ community, and opened fire, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others.
Thursday, on the Sojourners website, Jim Wallace observed:
Just as black Americans felt unsafe after Charleston, LBGTQ Americans are feeling unsafe now. The club served as a safe space for an LGBTQ community that too often feels unwelcome in our pews. It is important for Christians, evangelical Christians in particular, to stand up for the safety, humanity, and dignity of LBGTQ people -- human beings bearing the image of God. This should wake us all up and cause a re-examination of Christian conscience and compassion in our treatment of all LBGTQ people.
Let us observe a moment if silence and prayer for those who lost their lives – or their loved ones – in these horrific acts of violence.
<Silence>
Jesus calls us to love, but the world is full of hate. What difference does it make? What difference can WE make in the face of this hatred and the violence it spawns?
Let me offer a few thoughts this morning in response to three questions, questions that emerged as I reflected on this week's news, and the Scripture reading from Galatians:
- How can we learn to love one another?
- Who is an "Other?"
- What does it mean to be "in Christ" in these troubled times?
Learning to Love
On Thursday, reflecting on the first anniversary of the Charleston Massacre and the agony of the Orlando Abomination, Jim Wallace observed:
Hate always creates fear. Love always reveals the face of God."
Hate can define us: "WE are good: you are evil!"
Hate can distort us: "We want what we want when we want it."
Hate can destroy us: "If I kill off enough of THEM it will make the world safe for US."
Our world seems filled with hate. Hate and love stand poles apart. And, as people of faith we are called to find the Way to love, the path to reveal the face of God.Jesus calls us to love one another … "Just as I have loved you," he said. This wasn't, and isn't, some sweet, quiet hazy adoration. No, the kind of love Jesus called his followers to adopt was more radical than that.
The love of Jesus for his followers included calling them to leave their homes and families and become an itinerant band, living off the hospitality of others, teaching and healing in strange, sometimes inhospitable places.
Then there's that story in Mark where he told a rich young man who wanted eternal life to "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." (Mark 10:21) Not sweet and hazy!
Here are some other examples of how Jesus loved the disciples:
- He called them by name;
- He invited them into the close container of community;
- He exposed them to a wide variety of people, well beyond their comfort zones;
- He sent them out in pairs to work together, but honored their individuality;
- He corrected them when they strayed but kept them in community;
- He forgave them and nurtured their healing; and
- By his death, he set them loose to keep on growing.
For many of us, learning to love happens in our mission group, where accountability is an important dimension. That's one important place ibn our life together where God's call to serve the greater good in some small, committed way. We show up regularly; we work together; we support – and disappoint each other. As we work and pray together, we learn something about trust and forgiveness. And we learn that even though each of us is different, we CAN belong to the same small group hat is a contributing part of the larger faith community. It isn't always easy, but as we come to know and trust each other we learn about how to love one another.
Who IS An"Other?"
Jesus calls us to love one another. But who IS an Other? We all have built-in prejudices. I grew up in the far West, in Washington State, where my grandfather had been born before it became one of the United States. The prejudices we know today around the name of the Washington DC professional football team are pale by comparison to the stereotypes that colored the thinking about Native Americans I was given as a child. That thinking characterized Native Americans as crude, violent, unskilled… scary!
Of course, I didn't know any Native Americans, so it was hard for me to check that out. And that was the way "we" (the culture) wanted it: They were a visible but unknown example of being different, and therefore an easy target for prejudice and a seedbed for hate. They were certainly "other," but I wasn't learning much in Sunday School about them as an "other" to love.
I'll leave this story open as the next chapter begins. When I was two and a half years old, World War II erupted, and my father was sent with his National Guard infantry battalion to the South Pacific. He spent four years there, making amphibious landings to take back islands that the Japanese had occupied in their bid to dominate the South Pacific.
We learned to fear the Japanese. Out there in the far West we went so far as to force many Japanese families living on the West Coast to move into "relocation centers," located way out in the desert, so far away that they couldn't help support attacks by Japanese aircraft that people feared.
In the middle of all this, with my father so far away that letters took weeks to arrive, when he had time to write, my grandfather, the one who had been born in Washington territory before it became a state – my father's father – was assigned to serve on the staff of one of those relocation centers, way out there in the desert. I don't remember much talk about it … but my father and his father were gone, and there was a war going on. And there was a lot of cultural support for hating the Japanese.
Then … what a surprise … my mother and I got on a train in Spokane, Washington and went to visit my grandparents in Topaz Utah.
They were living in a one-room apartment in one of the buildings that housed several Japanese families. They were neighbors. My grandfather's work, I learned later, involved keeping records for the families who were there and helping produce a newspaper that reported on life in the camp. I have a picture of him in an office, working with eight or 10 Japanese women who helped with the record-keeping. While my father was fighting the Japanese Army half the world away, his father was living with Japanese Americans who had been forced to leave their homes because of our fear.
Several times while my mother and I were on that visit, my grandfather took me out into the desert to look for arrowheads. Before the war he had authored historical novels, and had a keen eye for archaeological artifacts. One day while we were poking around under the sagebrush I actually found an arrowhead! It was very much like this one that he sent to me after our visit was over.
<Show the arrowhead
I was amazed by the precision of this tiny bit of obsidian, amazed and impressed that the Native American who had made it was so skillful. I can't imagine the time, and the skill, it took to make it, and how important it was to the survival of that hunter's family, who provided their food with a handmade bow and arrows, arrows tipped with handmade obsidian points like this. The story of their survival took on a new meaning once I had this treasure in hand. And this new story helped loosen the grip of the prejudice that had been guiding my feelings. Once we got back to Spokane, it was just a bit harder for me to dismiss Native Americans with the prejudiced critique I had inherited.
But this story of who is the "Other" in "Love one another" doesn't end there. Six years after my father returned from the war, our family moved to Japan! My father, the journalist son of the novelist, was back in the Army, assigned to handle press relations during the Korean War. For me, that meant leaving America before entering the 8th grade and living in the land of those who had been branded as the enemy – even though some of them had been my grandfather's neighbors and co-workers in Topaz.
Moving to Japan as a young teenager was monumental for me. Where many of my classmates were really depressed because they were missing out on American music, and the emergence of television, I found myself fascinated by the way common things worked differently in Japan. Shoes and sox were different (geta and tabi), walls were different (shoji), beds were different (futon), and eating utensils were really different. I practiced with popcorn as I learned to eat with hashi (chopsticks). I remember thinking at the time: "If there are two neat ways to eat, how many other ways might there be?"
As I've gotten older I've come to realize that the insight I got when I moved to Japan is a lesson about God's love for diversity. If there is more than one way to get food into your mouth, and one isn't better than another, then if the One God of all Creation has made humans in God's image, and each one is different, diversity must be pretty important to our Creator.
The challenge for me isn't to figure out how to judge and correct those who are different. No, the challenge for me, and for all of us human beings is to learn how to love what is different.
Hate always creates fear. Love always reveals the face of God. (Wallace)
We can live beyond fear and find the path to love.
As Ann Barnet reminded you two weeks ago:
"A great task of our own Christian community is to overcome our tendency to think in terms of opposites. Reconciliation calls us to an attitude of "Both/And; instead of "Either/Or." Not: Jews vs Christians, men vs women, Black vs white, rich vs poor, abled vs disabled, documented vs undocumented, law vs grace. We are not opposites, but part of the same human family. All of us part of the promise; each of us blessed."
Being "In Christ" Means Being On the Way Together
Getting from hate to love can be a rocky road, but the Way of Christ shows us a path: Love One Another.
The Gospel lesson for this week is another example of the Good News that we CAN come together and get along. I felt that sense of welcoming diversity last Wednesday when I went to the Seekers Church space during the day and had the chance to greet the mentor of the Palestinian members of this year's New Story Leadership team. This week the team, a talented group of Palestinian and Israeli women and men, are beginning their summer of peacebuilding together. Their work fills our space with lively, hopeful energy.
The New Story Leadership (NSL) approach is a bit different. Their website describes the approach like this:
Daily headlines about Israel and Palestine tell of conflict, controversy and stalled peace initiatives. There is a feeling of exhaustion and a growing sense of futility. Peace seems all but impossible. Yet the search for an answer can and must continue. As former U.S. Special Envoy George Mitchell said, if humans have caused the conflict, then humans can surely solve it. But after so many years of effort by so many people in the Middle East, is there really anything new that can be said or done? NSL claims that there is.
Our answer is contained in our name, New leaders inspired by a New story. New Story Leadership introduces a radically different approach to peace-building, one that does not pretend to solve the historical controversies or mediate between antagonists. Instead, NSL proceeds indirectly, offering a narrative-based program based on four premises that it seeks to demonstrate:
1. Stories Matter.
2. New Stories come from New Voices.
3. A safe space for new stories must be deliberately created
4. New Stories require time to take Shape and Work their Influence:
The NSL program provides these young Palestinian and Israeli leaders with the opportunity to live and work together, researching their own ideas for change, collaborating on projects and presentations, and entré into a growing network of NSL leaders when they return
As I read this with the agony of Orlando shouting at me from the media, I had to acknowledge that we need to take some lessons from New Story Leadership about being on the Way together. NSL speaks of it this way:
Conflicts that persist are fed by stories – stories that endlessly recycle old grievances, inflate differences and inflame passions. Acting as ongoing declarations of war, they are as powerful as rockets or roadblocks in keeping people apart. As long as oppositional communities lack stories of cooperation, no amount of negotiation or appeals to self-interest will work. On the other hand, every true story of common effort, no matter how modest, can grip the imagination of opponents and help them visualize the possibility for a more promising future. These are the stories that NSL seeks to grow, stories that begin modestly and yet can grow, year by year, into resounding declarations for peace.
Every true story of common effort, no matter how modest, can grip the imagination of opponents and help them visualize the possibility for a more promising future.
We know about this kind of leadership. I see it in the lives of Eighth Day, and Seekers Church, and our sister faith communities in Church of the Saviour. It is the kind of active loving that reveals the face of God.
CLOSING
Enough! Here are three things I discovered as I pondered the complexity of the week
In light of the Scripture for this week:
Learning to love
Reflecting on the first anniversary of the Charleston Massacre and the agony of the Orlando Abomination, Jim Wallace observed: "Hate always creates fear. Love always reveals the face of God." Learning to love takes commitment, and patience, and the opportunity to be on the Way together with an "Other."
Who is an "Other?"
An Other is one who seems different, but is part of the same human family. As Ann Barnet reminded you two weeks ago:
"A great task of our own Christian community is to overcome our tendency to think in terms of opposites. Reconciliation calls us to an attitude of "Both/And; instead of "Either/Or." … We are not opposites, but part of the same human family. All of us part of the promise; each of us blessed."
Being "In Christ" Means Being On the Way Together
Getting from hate to love can be a rocky road, but the Way of Christ shows us a path.
"Every true story of common effort, no matter how modest, can grip the imagination of opponents and help them visualize the possibility for a more promising future." We know about this kind of leadership. I see it in the lives of Eighth Day, and Seekers Church, and our sister faith communities in Church of the Saviour. It is the kind of active loving that reveals the face of God.
On this day that our culture calls for attention to our fathers, may we thank them for their love, and forgive them for their fears. As we step out into a world roiled by fear and hatred, may we walk together onto the Way, where Christ shows us how to love One Another.
Love always reveals the face of God.
Amen!