| ||||
|
Things change. Have you noticed? Strangers move into the neighborhood. Your best friend moves away. Your father dies. The little girl who used to sit on your lap grows up and leaves home, or becomes seriously ill, or assumes a life you never imagined. The Church you are part of today is not the Church you grew up in. You change. Your college blazer has shrunk. You move to a new town, perhaps to another country. You remember as a boy jumping off the garage roof like superman, with a towel for a cape; now you have trouble walking down the stairs. An old friend dies, and you noticed that every person in this morning's obituaries was about your age. You're sixty-six years old, you can still count, and the psalmist reminds you that as a rule you have seventy years coming to you. More change ahead. Have you noticed? If so, you probably have an idea of how the disciples felt as they ate their last meal with Jesus. Their friend was going to die, and he knew it. And they knew it. Things were changing, for them and for Jesus. With Jesus gone, what would happen to them now? What would happen to their hopes for their world? They had hoped that their friend would change Israel, make it better. They hadn't considered that he might leave them. They had hoped that he would become the ruler of a new kingdom, bringing peace and justice to their tired and rotten world. Now he was going to die, and they were troubled and afraid. And all he had to say to them was, "Trust God. Love me and love God. I leave you with my peace. That's my parting gift, my own peace, peace such as the world cannot give. The Holy Spirit will remind you of this after I am gone, so set your troubled hearts at rest, and don't be afraid. Come on. Let's go. It's time to leave." Change, troubled hearts, fears, hopes, dreams, death: what are we to do with them? "Trust God," Jesus says. "Peace. You have my peace. Set your troubled hearts at rest, and don't be afraid." It was a world with similar troubles and fears and dreams on August 28, 1963. "I have a dream," said Martin Luther King, Jr. I know the date well; it was the day our son Aaron was born. "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.... I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," a day when "the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood," a day when "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers," a day when "every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." Martin Luther King's dream of forty-one years ago is as old as human history. "I have a dream," St. John said to the Christians of the first century, who were struggling with their troubled hearts and their fears and hopes just as Martin Luther King was with his is 1963, and just as the disciples were with theirs the night before Jesus died. "I have a dream of a heavenly city," he said, "a dream of a New Jerusalem where there will be no temple, because the Lord himself will be the temple. And the city will not need the sun or the moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God himself will give it light. The gates of the city will never be shut, and there will not be any night there, nor anything foul or unclean, and the river of life will flow through the city from the throne of God. By the splendor of the light of God the nations will walk, and the leaves of the trees will heal the nations, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and the nations will live by his light." This ancient dream was recorded by John in the Book of Revelation nineteen hundred years ago from his exile on the island of Patmos in a world that was as troubled then as King's was in 1963, as troubled as the earlier world of the disciples, as troubled as our own today. Episcopal priests don't preach much from John's Revelation. Maybe we don't know what to do with it because we don't know what to do with dreams, don't know what to do with dreams of a new heaven and a new earth, with visions of a world delivered from turmoil and war, from racists and criminals, from muggers and psychopaths and pushers - and also delivered from preachers and sermons, because in John's dream we'll all be so close to God, and God so close to us, that we won't need choirs or preachers to try to make God seem close, because God will be among us. Dreams like John's seem like so much "pie-in-the-sky" to us. We, after all, are modern, sophisticated people, gifted, able, resourceful, educated, enlightened people who take responsibility for the present, people who know how to get things done. If Detroit or Denver or Colorado Springs is broken - or Baghdad, for that matter - we'll fix it. We have a moral duty to do something now, a duty to make changes for the better. So many of our sermons, my sermons and those of others, are exhortations to action now, rather than invitations to wild dreaming about tomorrow. Jesus commands us to love one another as he has loved us. But how are we to do it? Well, by doing, we say. By going to where the problem is, by taking food and medicine and other needed things. And by fixing roads and changing governments and passing laws and raising taxes. By going to war. Most of us in 21st-century America have been conditioned to believe that we are bundles of untapped possibilities who have the potential to devise a new heaven and a new earth ourselves; we have only to live up to our potential! But deep down we know, don't we, that that's simply not true. As Karl Barth once said, much of the reason we come to church is to leave that illusion behind, if only for a while, to leave behind all the things we do all week, because we know them to be "possibilities somehow exhausted." Because the human possibilities for transformation of the world are simply inadequate to the world's need for transformation. All we have to do to confirm this is to look around us - whether it's through photographs from Iraq, or through visits to Haiti, or just by looking out our own front doors - all we have to do is look around us to see that we have exhausted our possibilities for human potential. And that's depressing news to a people who believe we can fix it. No matter how much better we try to make it so, the world as it is never seems to be the city of the dream. We still need lights in downtown Colorado Springs, and locks and guards for our gated communities. And Downtown Denver, even with better padlocks and more police, is still downtown Denver, the same old world. Millions on every continent still go to bed every night without enough calories to sustain life, while others of us have calories to spare. Many within our own borders go to bed without the assurance that someone loves them. No matter how many Habitat houses we build today, there is still a need for more tomorrow. No matter how many sick people we treat in Haiti this year, the lines to see the doctor are just as long next year. No matter how many people we serve at Westside Cares this week, the need is just as great next week. And even if Iraq were stabilized tomorrow, there remain Syria and Iran and North Korea, not to mention our fellow Episcopalians and heaven knows who else, to confront the day after that... ...and my preacherly exhortations to you - exhortations to duty, to reform, to crusade and liberate and do - crumble to dust in my mouth. Or would, except...except that the dream, the vision, is not a dream of what we are doing, but of what God is doing. If, despite our best human efforts, the world is still the same old world today that it was yesterday, then what is to keep us from falling victim to exhaustion and cynicism and despair? What is to keep us from falling victim to troubled hearts and fear? Only the promise of God, only the peace of Jesus. This is the faith of the Church: that the New Jerusalem, the new heaven and new earth, will be raised up, not by us, but by God. It is the peace of God and the hope of Easter that sustain us and save us from exhaustion and cynicism, from fear and despair. That's why we come to church - to nourish the hope, to sustain the vision, to retain and participate in the dream. To talk about building for the coming century is fine, as far as it goes. But that's to talk about short-term goals. History, real history, belongs to God, not to us. The future, real future, is in God's hands, not ours. And, as Martin Luther King knew, the arc of history is long, much longer than our three-score and ten years. Our life is the peace Jesus leaves us with, our assurance the vision John has - that history is in God's hands, not ours; that the arc of history, though long, bends toward justice, as King also knew. And as John knew. And Jesus. Our assurance is that the One who makes all things new is building the city, that God himself will be our light, and that all flesh will see it together. In God's time, not in ours. Well, then, why bother? If all our efforts crumble, what good are all our good works? If, despite our best human efforts, the world is still the same old world, and if it is God, not we ourselves, who is building the New Jerusalem, then why do anything at all? Because. Because it is good to do so. Because it is of God to do so. Because, in the world as we know it now, we still have to deal with the question of what kind of people we want to be. Because our works are evidence of our faith, evidence of what we really believe. "What good is it, my friends," St. James asks, "for someone to say he has faith when his actions do nothing to show it? Can that faith save him? If someone is in rags with not enough food for the day, and you say, 'Goodbye, keep warm, and have a good meal,' but do nothing to supply his bodily needs, what good is that? So it is with faith. If faith does not lead to action, it is quite dead. But someone may say, 'One chooses faith, another action.' To which I reply, 'Show me this faith you speak of with no actions to prove it, while I, by my actions, will show you my faith. It is my actions that show you my faith.'" And my hope. And my dream. James says that doing love as Jesus does love is the only religion worth practicing, precisely because it is no religion at all, but simply the love of God made flesh and blood in the world as it is now. But it is faith in God's vision, faith in God's dream, faith in God's promise, which powers the doing and brings the peace of Jesus. History is in the hands of God, not in the hands of emperors, not in the hands of presidents and generals, and it was the faith of Martin Luther King, Jr., and of John as well as of Jesus, that in God's time there will be a day when all God's children will have shoes, a day when we will live in a New Jerusalem "where we will not be judged by the color of our skin but by the content of our character," a day when "the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood," a day when "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers," a day when "every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain made low, the rough places made plain, and the crooked places made straight, in a city where the gate is always open and there are no padlocks on the doors, and there will be need for neither sun nor moon, for God himself will be our light and our peace, and there will be no night, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." This is the peace Jesus leaves us with. This is the dream Jesus leaves us with. This is the faith Jesus leaves us with, his faith, the faith of the Scriptures. This faith, a faith not in ourselves but in God's promise, is the energy that drives our action and the hope that sustains our lives. In her little book called A Simple Path, Mother Teresa, a Christian, included a quotation from Gandhi, a Hindu, which sums it all up. "Act," said Gandhi, "but do not seek the fruit of your action." Life and peace come, Mother Teresa and Gandhi remind us, when we let go of "results." Life and peace come when we act, but let go of the results of our own short-term acts; when we let go of our fears and set our troubled hearts at rest in the long-term assurance that change, even the change of death, is in the hands of God; when we rest in the long-term assurance of God's promise that while the arc of history is long, it bends toward justice and peace. So what about the short term? What about today at home, and tomorrow at Westside Cares, and next week at Habitat for Humanity? What about the coming year in Iraq, and every day in the Church? If, despite our own efforts, the needs in every place are just as great tomorrow as they are today, why does it matter what we to do in the short term? What are we to do when someone we love gets sick or dies? What are we to do when someone leaves home or is mugged on South Nevada? What are we to do when we don't create the New Jerusalem in Baghdad next year, or even in Colorado Springs? What are we to do when fellow Christians assault the Body of Christ? Well, each of us has to answer that question for himself, according to his faith. Each of us is still left with this question: "What kind of person do I want to be in the world as it now is ?" How we answer that question reveals either the peace and the dream we choose to live with or the fear and troubled hearts and nightmares we choose to die with. There is a sign on the wall of the children's home of the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta that is entitled, "Anyway." It's a word about faith and action, about the faith and love of Jesus, about the peace and hope that come from resting in the long-term promise of God. It's a word about the kind of world we dream of and the kind of people we want to be. Here is what it says: People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. What you spend your years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you've got anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. The people you love may hurt you. Love them anyway. Do good anyway, love anyway, because that is the peace Jesus leaves us with. That is who we are. It is the faith we have and the dream of which this Holy Eucharist is a foretaste. This is the first and great reason to do it. And the second is like unto it: When you enter the open gates of the New Jerusalem and there, together with all flesh, see the glory of God yourself, you'll be pleased you were part of the building, pleased you were part of the arc that bends toward justice, and not part of the problem. You will be pleased you were part of the peace, not part of the hell. And so will God. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |