Sermon for The Second Sunday of Lent - March 8, 2004

 
The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
March 8, 2004

 2 Lent - C
Genesis 15: 1-12, 17
Philippians 3:17--4:1
Luke 13:22-35


       Frederick Buechner reminds us that "when a child is born, a father is born. A mother is born too, of course, but at least for her it's a gradual process. Body and soul, she has nine months to get used to what's happening. But for even the best-prepared father, it happens all at once . . .
      "On the other side of the plate-glass window, a nurse is holding up something roughly the size of a loaf of bread for him to see for the first time. Even if he should decide to abandon it forever ten minutes later, the memory will nag him to the grave. He has seen the creation of the world. It has his mark upon it. He has its mark upon him. Both marks are, for better or worse, indelible.

       "All sons, like all daughters, are prodigals if they're smart," Buechner adds. "Assuming the Old Man doesn't run out on them first, they will run out on him if they are to survive, and if he's smart he won't put up too much of a fuss. A wise father sees all this coming, and maybe that's why he keeps his distance from the start. He must survive too. Whether they ever find their way home again, none can say for sure, but it's the risk he must take if they're ever to find their way at all. In the meantime, the world tends to have a soft spot in its heart for lost children. Lost fathers have to fend for themselves.

       "Even as the father lays down the law, he knows that someday his children will break it, as they need to break it if ever they're to find something better than law to replace it. Until and unless that happens, there's no telling the scrapes they will get into trying to lose him and find themselves. Terrible blunders will be made -- disappointments and failures, hurts and losses of every kind. And they'll keep making them even after they've found themselves too, of course, because growing up is a process that goes on and on.

       "And every hard knock they ever get knocks the father even harder still, if that's possible, and if and when they finally come through more or less in one piece at the end, there's maybe no rejoicing greater than his in all creation.

       "It has become so commonplace to speak of God as 'our Father' that we forget what an extraordinary metaphor it once was." (Whistling in the Dark, pp. 47-48)
       That is the Gospel according to Frederick Buechner. And it is, I believe, the Gospel, the good news of a loving God who creates us and who calls us into a future that is unknown to us and who lets us go it on our own when we have an itch to do it that way, as we always do, and who shares with us the knocks we receive as we do it and waits for us to find our way home again, if ever we will.

       It is our story. And it all began thousands of years ago, with Abraham.

       Mark Twain said that he once spent $25 to find out his family's history and then spent $50 to cover it up! But an old rabbi said that remembering the family story is what being a person of faith is all about. "When a Jew says, 'I believe,'" the rabbi explained, "what he really means is, 'I remember.'"

       On Passover, the youngest son in each Jewish family asks, "What makes this night different from all other nights?" And the father replies, "On this night, we remember. We remember our story. We remember the story of our family, the story of the nation God is building for us. We remember how we were born and who we are and who we are called to become. We remember our father Abraham, how in faith Abraham said 'Amen' to God's promise of a child and a future even when he could see no evidence of their happening. And we remember how Abraham's 'Amen' was counted to him as righteousness, and how God provided the child and built a house for Abraham and his family. And we remember how God let Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all his sons go their own ways, because God is a wise father who knew that 'whether they [would] ever find their way home again, none could say for sure, but it was the risk he had to take if they were ever to find their way at all.'
       "And so, son, on this night we remember. We remember how the children of Israel -- our ancestors, our fathers, and our mothers, too -- we remember how we ran out on the Old Man and later found ourselves slaves in Egypt, and how, because of his promise, God led us out of there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. And we remember how, if God had not led us out of Egypt, then we and our children and our children's children would still be slaves in Egypt.

       "And we remember that even as God laid down the law to us in the wilderness, and as he laid it down time and again after that, he knew that we would break it trying to lose him and find ourselves. He knew that we would make terrible blunders -- disappointments and failures and sins -- and that we would suffer hurts and losses of every kind. But it was a risk God had to take if ever we were to find something better than law to build a life on. And we remember how even in the Promised Land itself every hard knock we ever got as we tried to go it on our own knocked our Father even harder still.

       "That's what makes this night different from all other nights," says the father to the child. "We remember who we were and who we are and where our hope lies."
       Where is our hope? Today it's the hard knocks we're taking in Iraq, and in Haiti. Two and a half years ago it was 9-11. Before that it was Columbine and Oklahoma City and Vietnam. And before Vietnam it was Korea and World War II and World War I, the sins and failures and disappointments and hard knocks of our lifetime all now fading back into the void of the past. Except that we can read history, of course, and so remember. And read history we must if we are not to be doomed to repeat it.

I returned last week from a wonderful vacation in Mexico with our son Aaron. My Mexico reading was They Marched Into Sunlight, David Maraniss's account of interrelated events that occurred on October 17 and 18, 1967, in different parts of the world. During that two-day period, just after my thirtieth birthday, two companies of the United States Army First Infantry Division were ordered into the jungle forty-four miles northwest of Saigon where they were supposed to lay down the law to the Viet Cong. But "pouring on the steel," which the hawks were calling for at the time, didn't work on that day. The soldiers were met by a highly organized ambush, and those who could still walk retreated to their base with over a hundred dead and wounded. During those very same hours, half a world away, Richard and Lynne Cheney, along with lots of other students at the University of Wisconsin were having their studies interrupted as students protesting the Vietnam War suffered their own casualties at the hands of Madison police who were sent to knock a few heads and clear the buildings of protesters. At the same time, in the White House, Lyndon Johnson and his advisors were trying to figure a way out of Vietnam and into a second term, and the President was wondering why kids don't just obey their elders any more and why in the world the world was coming apart at the seams on his watch.

       All of these were events I lived through, but as I read overlooking a tranquil Caribbean Sea from a balcony, blessed by the absence of newspapers and TV, I sensed that they were events in danger of becoming a part of a vague and fading past.

       The very evening I returned from Mexico, however, I was abruptly pulled back to current reality as I watched the 1967 events of Madison, Wisconsin, being replayed in real time just four months ago, in November, 2003. PBS welcomed me home with its report of the free-trade meetings in Miami last November, where protesters of the FTAA were cleared from the streets by head-knocking police in riot gear wielding tasers and billy clubs. And then I remembered the protests and the barricades being erected in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion that I was coming home to in my own little corner of the world as well, and I couldn't help but wonder with Lyndon Johnson if there is a way out of all this. And why don't people just accept what Dad and the bishop and the President and all the other old men say is good for them? And why is the world coming apart at the seams on my watch?

Our other son Ethan spent last fall teaching journalism at a university in Pakistan, and while he was there he wrote an op-ed piece addressing these questions in the Daily Times of Pakistan. The event that occasioned his article was the decision of some cricket players from New Zealand not to attend this year's matches in Pakistan, because when they had been in Pakistan the previous year a bomb had exploded outside their hotel, and they were concerned about that. Ethan believes that their decision was deplorable because, as he puts it, "twenty years of travel have taught me that the world is seamless," and because "the most important thing I've learned [in all that travel] is how safe and even humdrum most places are most of the time," and because, "furthermore, since well before September 11, 2001, it has been clear enough that the West is little safer than anywhere else," a reality Ethan underscores with the irony of the fact that on April 19, 1995, when he could have been in, say, Oklahoma City, he was in Lahore, Pakistan, where no bomb was exploding that day. Bombs explode in Oklahoma City and in Pakistan from time to time. People in Pakistan "live daily with that fact, [so] why shouldn't New Zealanders, especially those who choose a public role as international cricketers, live with it as well?"

       The point of all this is the importance and price of freedom, including the importance of living in hope and not in fear in an insecure world. "Bomb blasts are bad," Ethan concludes, "but national "borders, like all man-made distinctions, are artificial. Power, dissent, danger and moral choices are the same everywhere. So are human beings. Danger is real and regrettable, but no one in this world has a right to complete safety (and be careful what you ask for, because you might get it). Security and freedom are antithetical; we must ask ourselves which we prize more highly."

       Like wise fathers everywhere -- and wise mothers, too -- God values freedom, because even as he lays down the law, God knows that someday his children will break it, as they need to break it if ever they are to find something better than law to replace it. And until, and unless, something better than law is found, there's no telling the scrapes we will get into trying to lose God and find ourselves -- things like wars and dissent and protests, and loneliness in the far countries of life, and all kinds of insecurities. "Terrible blunders will be made -- disappointments and failures, hurts and losses of every kind." And we will keep making them, too, of course, because growing up is a process that goes on and on. And every hard knock we ever get knocks our Father even harder still, if that's possible, but if and when we finally come through more or less in one piece at the end, there's no rejoicing greater than God's in all creation. "It has become so commonplace to speak of God as 'our Father' that we forget what an extraordinary metaphor it once was."

       Robert Capon wonders facetiously why God does things the way he does. "God has dangerously odd tastes," he writes. "God is inordinately fond of risk and roughhouse. Any omnipotent being who makes as much room as God does for back talk and misbehavior strikes us as being slightly addled. Why, when you're the one orchestrating the music of the spheres, run the awful risk of letting some fool with a foghorn into the violin section? Why set up the delicate balance of nature and then let a butcher with heavy thumbs mind the store? It seems -- well, irresponsible. If we were God, we would be more serious and respectable: no freedom, no risks; just a smooth obedient show presided over by an omnipotent bank president with a big gold watch."

       But God is not an omnipotent bank president with a big gold watch. Nor is he an emperor or a president with an itch to send in the marines or the police. God is a father who has sons and daughters whom he loves, sons and daughters who, he hopes, will find the way to abundant life. So even as God lays down the law, even as he gives us Torah to live by in the wilderness of life, he knows that someday his children will break it, as they need to break it if ever they're to find something better than law to replace it. Until and unless that happens, there's no telling the scrapes they will get into trying to lose him and find themselves. Terrible blunders will be made -- sins and disappointments and failures, hurts and losses of every kind. And they'll keep making them even after they've found themselves too, of course, because growing up is a process that goes on and on.

       "And every hard knock they ever get knocks the father even harder still, if that's possible, and if and when they finally come through more or less in one piece at the end, there's maybe no rejoicing greater than his in all creation."

       That's why God values freedom. And it's why we should value it as well, even with all its risk of disappointment and failure and dissent and danger. God gives us the freedom he gives us because there is something better than laying down the law, and that's laying down your life. And that's why Jesus gives us the Cross, because, without freedom, and without the possibility of disappointment and failure and dissent and danger, and without the moral choices freedom entails, we have no way of being fathers and mothers and sons and daughters who can lay down our lives for each other, no way of being persons, no chance of finding our way to a life built on something better than security, no hope of finding our way to hope and to love.

       Bomb blasts are bad. The Law is good. That's why God gave us Torah. The Law is our guide in the wilderness. But freedom is better, because even the Law must be freely chosen if we are to be more than puppets on a string. Freedom -- I'm talking about real freedom here, biblical freedom, God's freedom, the freedom of restraint, the freedom not to knock heads or pour on the steel, moral freedom, the freedom not to do all you have the desire and power to do as well as the freedom to do it -- moral freedom, the freedom God has given us, is the road to something better than Law. And that's why Jesus gives us the Cross, the choice of a way that is better yet, the path of love and hope, the way to the greatest rejoicing in all creation.

       "It has become so commonplace to speak of God as 'our Father' that we forget what an extraordinary metaphor it once was."

      In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.