Here, as clear as a full moon in a cloudless sky, we are provided with three models for us to follow as we seek to transform injustice into justice yet again.
First, in Romans, and in his characteristic direct manner, the apostle Paul writes several maxims for doing good in the world. All are based in love, involve prayer and laughing and appreciating beauty, and then finally end with feeding hungry people and offering a drink to those who are thirsty. Sounds to me like a very healthy way to live life! Sounds to me like a faith of action…loving, feeding, quenching thirst, doing good…inspired by a God of verbs.
In the gospel passage from Matthew we see a dramatic turnaround response from Jesus, as Peter is called first “Rock” and then, in the next breath, “Satan.” In between those two extremes, Jesus quietly admits only to his closest friends that he is Messiah, intimating that it is his life and values and actions they must emulate in order to experience the Divine, in order to know God.
Words, attributed to Jesus in this passage, that have often been used to condone violence and martyrdom are in fact, not that at all. When Jesus talks here about love and sacrifice, he is marking the truth that Alfred North Whitehead also marked when he noted, “peace is the gift of largeness of self in which the good of the self is identified with the good of the whole.” In other words, explains process theologian Bruce Epperly, “…when we let go of the small ‘self,’ we awaken to the grandeur of the Greater Self, the Divine, in whom we live and move and have our being. We see our lives, then, not as matter of holding to what we have but of [our very lives] being our gift [back] to God…” Thus the connection of love and sacrifice is not so much about a bloody cross, as it is about following the lead of Christ who regularly got himself out of the limelight precisely so that his gifts could be offered unencumbered to God in service to others.
This philosophical foundation which led Jesus to be a model of living love by getting himself out of the way and focusing on the needs of someone else, well it is not a new philosophy at all. The same is found hundreds of years before and dozens of pages prior in the Hebrew scriptures. We see it in the familiar story of Moses and the burning bush. But I don’t want to talk this morning about the bush. Nor do I want to focus on the many iterations of God’s joke of a name…I Am, I Am who I Am, I Am who I will be, and so on. The bush and the name of God are simply the prologue and epilogue of the story, and interesting as they are, they can distract us from our purpose today.
The heart of this biblical story is found in the verbs that the author uses to describe God… observing, hearing, delivering… God first observes the misery of God’s own sons and daughters who are held captive by an oppressive Egyptian empire. Gerald Janzen, author of the Westminster Bible Companion, writes that a faith that is truly biblical tells this story with the conviction that “Every cry, with the individual throb of suffering it expresses, is falling, cry for cry, not on deaf ears, but on the [very] heart of God. If God is hidden, God is hidden within the suffering…” God observes and God hears the suffering of God’s beloved, not just 3,000 years ago, but today as well. The love of God doesn’t stop there. God delivers, which is another way of saying that God’s listening—God’s hearing and observing the suffering—always leads to God’s action.
But before God acts, there is another verb worth noting. Up on that lonely mountain, God assumes the role of host and invites Moses to be a guest. The oft-perceived transcendent and unapproachable deity asks Moses to take off his shoes. Again, Gerald Janzen notes, “Yes, it was holy ground, high up on that mountain, far beyond the wilderness, far away from home. But it was also someplace where God could talk to Moses in such a way that his life, and the life of his people, would never be the same…Taking our shoes off on sacred ground is a familiar idea, but so is ‘kicking off our shoes’ and getting comfortable. In those days, inviting someone to take off their sandals was a sign of hospitality…[and so] Moses finds himself in a presence that is unfathomably sacred, a presence that invites him to be at home…Moses now finds himself a guest of God.” And as a guest of God, this comfort in removing shoes becomes also a challenge from God to Moses…a challenge to feel what his own soles—what his own soul—might feel there on that mountain. God’s invitation to Moses is nothing less than to enter into the heart of the sacred, to feel the pain of God’s sons and the oppression of God’s daughters…to feel what God feels…and then to work with God to deliver God’s children to life.
Now, a quick side trip from Sinai to Ireland. Towards the end of June, when John and I were enjoying a lovely long day in the Irish town of Kildare, we visited the Roman parish church named in honor of St. Brigid. You may recall from your reading that Brigid is known for her activism on behalf of the poor. Stories about her consistent generosity and courage are legendary. One such story has her, as a young woman, waiting in the carriage for her father to broker a deal for her marriage. You see, he is trying to get rid of her, because Brigid keeps giving away her father’s considerable riches to the poor and the needy. While she waits for him outside, a homeless person wanders by and asks her for help. Brigid immediately reaches to the floorboards and grasps her father’s golden and jeweled sword, handing it to the person in need. When her father returns, he is not one bit happy; thus begins Brigid’s tenure at the local monastery! Her life journey eventually winds around to locate her as the founder and abbess of the Kildare monastery. To this day, Brigid is a revered model of generosity and justice, especially in response to those who are in need.
So, back to the Roman sanctuary in Kildare that bears Brigid’s name. In this modern, sunlight-filled sanctuary, is found the world’s largest Brigid’s cross—made from long folds of white silky material, and measuring at least twenty feet across. I was dazzled by the artwork that surrounds it in this sacred place. Colorful glass sculptures and mosaic backdrops play with the sunlight as it streams through windows high up the walls. The sanctuary reminded me of our own here in Redlands—contemporary, welcoming, artistic; with simple, clean lines; a place where learning and growing are second nature.
While still breathing the inspired air of Brigid’s parish church sanctuary, we ventured outside and around the back of the building. There, out of the way of most tourists, was a large dark teal green plastic vat with a spigot at the bottom. It sat on a couple of bricks and boards, and stood out against the whitewashed church wall. The vat was the kind of container that football teams fill with water and pour all over their coaches in the wake of victory. Or like the kind you take on family picnics on holiday weekends. This large vat caught our attention. For on it, in big blocked capital white letters, was written, “Holy Water.” Now, I must say, that as lifelong Protestants, and low-church Protestants at that, John and I found this immensely funny! Yet, when I thought about it more, it made perfect sense. In this place, which honors Brigid as an activist for justice, of course people who follow in her footsteps would need lots and lots of holy water for inspiration and nourishment!
In this week just past, when we have honored in our country the 88th anniversary of women’s right to vote and the 45th anniversary of the civil rights march on Washington and Martin Luther King’s stirring “I Have a Dream” speech, we are called to pause, to notice, and to respond. Last Sunday before worship, I learned from more than a dozen of door-to-door visitors you had spoken with the day before. You were eager to tell me how you had answered your door, to find a stranger wanting to know your position on Proposition 8, the proposition that seeks for the first time in California history to write unfairness and inequality into our state’s constitution by legislating that gay and lesbian people who love one another may never marry. One after another of you told with joy of how you had shocked the visitors by telling the truth: that their voice is not your voice, their bigotry is not yours, their limited vision of the gospel is just that: limited and excluding of God’s abundant grace. I admit to feeling very grateful for your courage.
Now, a week later, I call on you, on all of us, to take that courage to the next step in this upcoming campaign season. We here at Redlands UCC who know something of the miracle of God’s abundant and inclusive love, are being invited to campaign for the rights of our gay and lesbian members and friends. But I do not only call on us to participate on their behalf in this campaign to defeat Proposition 8, but I call on us to participate for our own integrity as a congregation.
Today we are invited to do good, to follow in the ways of Christ who put self aside for the benefit of others. Today we are invited to be guests of God, to take off our own shoes and feel with our souls the pain of our sisters and brothers. Today we are challenged to act and thereby to know more deeply a God who also observes, hears, and delivers. No sitting around…not this God…and not us.
Ultimately, friends, each of our scripture lessons today remind us that doing good is not about who we are, but about who is with us in our journey of doing good. And today, we are assured, not once or twice, but three times, that it is God who goes with us—nourishing us with a vat full of holy water—as we seek to transform injustice into justice yet again.
