February 8, 2009
Race Relations Sunday
Isaiah 40:21-31
21 Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
22 It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
and spreads them like a tent to live in;
23 who brings princes to naught,
and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.
24 Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows upon them, and they wither,
and the tempest carries them off like stubble.
25 To whom then will you compare me,
or who is my equal? says the Holy One.
26 Lift up your eyes on high and see:
Who created these?
He who brings out their host and numbers them,
calling them all by name;
because he is great in strength,
mighty in power,
not one is missing.
27 Why do you say, O Jacob,
and speak, O Israel,
"My way is hidden from the LORD,
and my right is disregarded by my God"?
28 Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
29 He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
30 Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
31 but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.
Psalm 147:1-11, 20c
1 Praise the LORD!
How good it is to sing praises to our God;
for he is gracious, and a song of praise is fitting.
2 The LORD builds up Jerusalem;
he gathers the outcasts of Israel.
3 He heals the brokenhearted,
and binds up their wounds.
4 He determines the number of the stars;
he gives to all of them their names.
5 Great is our Lord, and abundant in power;
his understanding is beyond measure.
6 The LORD lifts up the downtrodden;
he casts the wicked to the ground.
7 Sing to the LORD with thanksgiving;
make melody to our God on the lyre.
8 He covers the heavens with clouds,
prepares rain for the earth,
makes grass grow on the hills.
9 He gives to the animals their food,
and to the young ravens when they cry.
10 His delight is not in the strength of the horse,
nor his pleasure in the speed of a runner;
11 but the LORD takes pleasure in those who fear him,
in those who hope in his steadfast love.
Praise the LORD!
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
16 If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel! 17 For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward; but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission. 18 What then is my reward? Just this: that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel.
19 For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. 20 To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. 21 To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law) so that I might win those outside the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. 23 I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.
Mark 1:29-39
29 As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. 30 Now Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. 31 He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.
32 That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. 33 And the whole city was gathered around the door. 34 And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.
35 In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. 36 And Simon and his companions hunted for him. 37 When they found him, they said to him, "Everyone is searching for you." 38 He answered, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." 39 And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.
A Stranger on a Bus
When I was an actor and playwright in New York in the mid-eighties, I lived in an apartment on the fifth floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights with two cats. My home was one eight foot by twelve foot room with a small bathroom that included a sink, a toilet and a shower. I had a hot plate for cooking and a little half-refrigerator. I began to write plays using legal pads and cartridge fountain pens. I would write four to eight pages a day, then type them on an old Smith-Corona electric typewriter, revising them as I went. I wrote six full-length plays in as many months. Almost immediately I got an agent and a staged reading of one of my plays. It was the happiest time of my life till then.
The experience of writing those plays was one of some outside power flowing through me. I was very much a beginner at this faith business at the time, so I found it very difficult to put into words. It seemed to be about perspective. I wrote about my friends, gave them different names, put them in different situations, and it seemed they took on a life of their own, became whole new people, people other than the real friends on whom they were based. And I came to love them, all of them.
One night, during the time he was writing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy suddenly burst into tears at the dinner table in front of his whole family. His wife asked him what was wrong. He said, “Today I killed Anna.” That was how I felt about those characters I was creating. They were like beloved children. I knew what they were thinking, what they wanted, and yet how tragically limited their perspectives were.
The artist enters into the perspective of the creator. Isaiah entered into God’s perspective and saw humankind as nothing much more than grasshoppers, her empires as nothing more than ant colonies, wiped into non-existence with the brush of a toe. Our current economic woes, the ecological crises we face, the war and rumors of war, all of these things will pass into dim obscurity, and all of us will be forgotten, having lived in a span of time no longer than a millisecond in the billions of years of the universe’s majestic life.
But at the same time, the artist enters into the love the creator feels for his creation, as did Tolstoy when he created his beloved Anna. When you read that book, you fall in love with Anna as she makes a terrific mess out of her life and breaks the hearts and the trust of many people. I read the book on the F train from Brooklyn to New York when I was working a survival job at Telecharge, the Broadway ticketing company. Packed like a sardine into the train, I sobbed when Anna died, completely unaware of the four people who were pressed against me. From the perspective of the other characters of the book, Anna was a sinner in every way, a wife who betrayed and dishonored her husband and a mother who abandoned her children, but from her creator’s perspective, the situation was much more complex. All the characters, including Anna, were fully human and fully lovable, caught up in forces far larger than they, forces they only dimly understood.
But the reader or the writer who enters the mind of the creator understands those great forces, the winds of history and politics and economy and culture that blow people this way and that.
Isaiah tells us our creator God who sees us as nothing much more than grasshoppers also knows each one of us by name and passionately loves us. He sees how limited our perspectives are, and lets us know through the prophet that he can be trusted to fulfill his promise.
Paul entered into the mind of God through Jesus Christ and was thereby able to tell the self-righteous and self-centered congregation at Corinth that the freedom they insisted they had a right to was but one dimension of the great thing God was doing, and that he himself willingly shed all his rights and privileges as a child of God in order that the mission of God might be more fully served. Paul understood the forces that shaped people into Jews, Gentiles, slaves, free people, women, men, oppressors and oppressed. He was a character in the story, but he had the mind of the author. He even describes himself as something of an actor:
20 To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. 21 To those outside the law I became as one outside the law… so that I might win those outside the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.
Paul is describing the way in which a Christian person seeks to see others as God sees them, not only outwardly, but inwardly, not alone but in the context of their culture and history. Paul saw himself as the servant and agent of a great force, a great power sweeping into the world. He has offered his body, the body of a character in the story, to carry the Spirit of the story’s author.
Today is Race Relations Sunday in our Disciples’ calendar. Last Wednesday night elder Sig Langschultz asked us to imagine an undocumented immigrant as someone in our family or someone we worked with before we considered legal questions of rights and abuses. In a way, she was asking us to enter the mind of God, to take the label off of people different from us, and see them as God sees them, as his beloved, amazing and extremely complex creations.
What if Tolstoy had become a character in his novel and visited Anna early in the story? Many people don’t realize that authors often begin writing their stories with only a vague idea of what is going to happen, that the characters often take on a life of their own and make choices that take the plot in surprising and unexpected directions. If Tolstoy had come into the story, warned Anna about her choices, it certainly would have changed the story. But even Tolstoy might not have known exactly what she would end up doing.
What if God entered human history as a character in the very story he was creating? This is in essence what happened in the person of Jesus.
In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is an ordinary human being who offered himself as a vehicle for God to come into the world. Jesus, a character in God’s story, became the vessel for its author. There’s a wonderful Joan Osborne song:
What if God were one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on a bus
Trying to make his way home?
Entering the body of an ordinary mortal who has to sleep and eat and die, God became a character in his own story. If you think about what it was like to be Jesus, to see everyone around him as God saw them, to see the world as God saw it, to be challenged to communicate God’s point-of-view using only the actions and words available to any ordinary human being, I think you will begin to understand what is asked of you as a follower of Jesus.
As characters in God’s story, we are dearly beloved. God sees us and our little plans and desires, understands the pitiful limits of our perception, and nevertheless loves us as passionately as Tolstoy loved Anna, even when we blindly follow some dark path to ruin. And if God so loves each one of us, does he not also love everyone else, all the other characters in his story, even as we clash with them in politics and wars and social and economic struggle? And does he not see that the only real problem we all have is that we don’t see as he sees, we don’t know as he knows, we don’t do as he asks?
Through Christ, God offers us, the characters in the story, the opportunity to receive the spirit of the story’s author, to become in the flesh the author’s presence to all the unknowing and unbelieving characters in the story, to see them as they truly are, his beloved creations, full of desires and hopes and dreams and worries and fears and demons and disease, lost in the darkness and brokenness of an unfinished creation.
The Spirit of God is the Spirit of an artist. The God of Israel is in the creation business, the business of taking raw and imperfect materials and making them something new and wonderful, making Peter’s sick mother a healthy and willing servant of God, making people broken in body and spirit new and whole, making a dark and miserable future into a shining joyous hope, making life, and not death, the end of the story.
And just so is the work of the Christian, and the work of our congregation, is the work of that same artist. It is the work of finding the beautiful under the ugly and releasing it. It is the work of creating loving community out of suspicious, lonely, even hostile individuals, the work of creating heavenly movement out of demonic inertia. It is the work of the life-giving God.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment