Guided Meditation On Oneness

Text:  John 17: 11-19

 

George Tooker, Embrace of Peace, 1988

    Sometimes called the other Lord’s Prayer, today’s Gospel reading from John includes Jesus’s remarkable prayer that we become one just as Jesus and the Holy Parent to whom he prayed were one.  “Holy Father,” he prayed, “Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”

        But before we talk about the oneness we experience in Christ, let’s first admit that unity—a misunderstood and incomplete unity—has often produced disunity.  To pugnaciously proclaim “United we stand; divided we fall” is to envision and perpetuate a partial unity at best.  When a group aims to unite, that unity can be created from energy that opposes another group.  Our group-ness can be built defensively upon suspicions of another group. Parts of the Bible ring with this kind of tribalism, even in the Gospel of John. It’s us versus them alright.

        But not here.  Not in this passage.  And not in the overarching Jesus message.  

        John’s Jesus is God’s gift for the whole world—according to John 3:16.  “For God so love the WORLD. . . .” We cannot love one person authentically unless we love all. To love God, to love oneself, and to love one’s neighbor is one indivisible task, say the other Gospel writers.

        That’s why we at Open Table do not want to unduly emphasize—as cozy as it would feel—the oneness we experience when we gather here.  We rightly celebrate our kindredness and the warmth of this particular fellowship only when we bear in mind that the Open Table must always remain open and that getting too satisfied with those already here is antithetical to our call.

        Furthermore, we live in Christian oneness only when, ironically, we do not limit that oneness to fellow Christians. 

        That’s because if our sense of oneness is based on the way Christ makes all one, then ALL divisions fall away and we see our connectedness to everyone and every thing.  Christian spirituality is not about solidifying Christianity; it’s about increasingly experiencing a uniting Spirit that includes every thing. 

        Some relatively recent versions of Christianity have emphasized individualized salvation that promises an evacuation plan for the chosen few to a gated community called Heaven.  These Christians believe entrance to heaven requires that we believe certain things to be true.

        But originally the saving work of the cosmic Christ was understood as happening by connection, integration, and transformation of families, communities, systems. To reconcile, to reunite in this saving way—at the personal, societal, planetary, and cosmic level—requires an emphasis on belonging rather than believing, which requires fundamental empathy. 

        Compassion, not doctrine, is Jesus’ spiritual path we follow.  And compassionate empathy for the other is at the core of all the great religions’ teachings.  Increasingly we are recognizing that “what we do to others is what we do to ourselves” and “the way we treat the cosmos is the way we treat ourselves” (Newell 123)^[i]

        But, regrettably, our individual lives feel fragmented, pulled as we are in a thousand different directions.  Your thoughts and mine are continually interrupted, our actions are disunited, our relationships are riven, our souls feel drawn and quartered every day, every day—as technology and competing allegiances and undisciplined habits claim pieces of us.  Where do I need to put my energies on this day?  How do I meet tomorrow’s infinite demands?  Who am I really—when I’m parceling out myself in dribs and drabs to so many people and groups and ideologies?  Where’s the unifying center?  

        Likewise, our communal lives are divided because groups of friends and the church itself and the country in which we live and the physical planet on which we depend seem to be breaking asunder. Nothing is more painful than seeing family bonds break, feeling friendships split apart, watching churches implode over silly disagreements, observing a nation polarize as public discourse becomes more extreme and uncivil, observing planetary resources scooped up by some to the exclusion of others. 

        I invite you into a period of guided prayer based on an important theme Karen Armstrong develops in her recent memoir, The Spiral Staircase.  She describes that, during a period in her life when she still self-identified as an atheist, she came to realize while writing a book on Islam that by making “a constant, imaginative attempt to enter empathically into the experience of another” she came to believe that at the heart of all religious teachings is that necessity of giving up our ego, our selfish concerns, to become “sensitive to the needs of others.” Thus the “spiritual human being is born.”

        I invite you to join me in a spiritual exercise.  I invite you to stretch your spiritual imagination and cultivate empathy in this guided meditation:

1.   Begin by imagining that your life is suddenly bound up with another person whom you don’t particularly like or whom you don’t know well, someone you really would not choose to spend the day with. Picture that person. And now imagine that all his or her heartaches and struggles are suddenly yours, that everything that happens to him or her, happens to you, and that you can see into this person’s heart and mind and really know and feel what he or she knows and feels—and likewise, she or he knows your thoughts and feelings. If that happened, how would that change you?  Imagine how differently you would feel and behave if suddenly you had this deep understanding, this intense connection, this oneness with this other human being. 

2.   Next imagine some aspect of nature that you take for granted every day:  the oak tree in your front yard, the creek that runs behind your house, the wasps that are building a nest under the eaves of your house.  If your health and very life were tied directly to this creature’s health and life—how would your actions change? Would you live your life any differently?

3.   Finally, imagine that you are not a separated, individuated being at all but are in fact a unique but integral member of a far greater and eternal reality than you can know.  Imagine that you contribute in essential ways, yet this reality is so much more than what you are and what you can even imagine the totality to be.  This ultimate reality is infinitely loving and life-giving. Imagine being part of all that.  Now don’t just imagine it; consider that it is actually true.  And there is nothing that can ever separate you from being a part of that larger enterprise of love and life.  If you accept your place in an eternally loving universe, how do you regard yourself and your future?    

. . .

        Richard Rohr talks about a “spiritual ecology”—a way to capture the expansiveness of this saving spirituality that is not limited to beliefs or even to practices but an entire system of relationships and an overarching wholeness we inhabit.  He says, “If you live in a fully connected world, you’re saved every day, just by playing your part.  You are grabbed by God; and you belong to this universe, along with everything else.”  Rohr describes his fascination with the Celtic knot, used so often in Celtic Christianity on the island of Iona, the community that, by the way, composed the songs for our new songbook.  Rohr explains the Celtic knot, found on crosses, gravestones, jewelry, is that culture’s artistic expression that “all is connected, everything belongs, all is one in God.  They knew about ecosystems long before we did, but in an even larger way.  ALL was held together inside the divine knot.”  Then he quotes T. S. Eliot (who quotes Julian of Norwich):

        “And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire.”

        Look at the Celtic knot printed in your bulletin.  Look back at the picture on the front of your bulletin: George Tooker’s painting called “The Embrace of Peace,” which seems, to me, a human Celtic Knot.  Contemplate these images of our oneness in Christ.

. . .

        We are learning, you and I, to see our interdependence and wholeness, this oneness within the heart of God to whom Jesus prayerfully entrusted his followers, this oneness which is at the heart of our spiritual quest.

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[i] Newell, John Philip.  A New Harmony: The Spirit, the Earth, and the Human Soul.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011.t

I Have Called You Friends

 John 15: 7-19

         “From now on, I’m calling you friends,” Jesus said in his farewell address.  “You are no longer my pupils or apprentices or servants.  No,  you are the friends I love and am willing to die for. You are likewise that same kind of friend to one another because we are energized and connected by the same Divine Love. So love one another just as I have loved you.  You are my friends.”

         I have 297 friends—on Facebook.  A paltry sum, really, in comparison to the more than 2,000 Facebook friends my nephew Patrick can claim.  Not that anyone’s counting.  Except that apparently someone is.  The grand total of our Facebook friends gets automatically tallied on our Facebook pages for all to see.

         Out of perverse curiosity, I checked yesterday to see if Jesus has a Facebook page.  Well, of course he does!  He has more than 20 pages under the names Jesus, Jesus!, Jesus!!, Jesus Christ, Jesus the Christ, Jesus Cristo, Jesus the Savior of the World, Jesus Christ the Son of God, etc.  There are thousands of FB pages ABOUT Jesus, but these are apparently the ones he personally maintains.  Which is proof enough for me of his omnipotence. I can barely keep up with two Facebook pages: mine and Open Table’s.  But now I’m wondering why Jesus hasn’t friended me on Facebook yet, given his explicit offer of friendship in John’s Gospel. I mean, is he just going to let it go at that?

         A recent  article in the Atlantic  titled “Is Facebook Making us Lonely?” begins with the horrifying story of Yvette Vickers, an 83-year-old former Playboy playmate and minor movie star whose neighbor recently discovered her body at least a year after the former actress had drawn her last breath. The belatedly inquisitive neighbor found Vickers’ mummified body near her computer, which was still on and glowing greenly in the dark room. The story of Yvette Vickers’ lonesome death went viral on FB. “She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears. . . ; now she [has become] an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship.”  Research later revealed that in months prior to her death, Vickers reached out virtually, not to friends but to distant fans who had found her on the Internet.  The author highlights the story’s irony this way: “Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible.”[i]

         Maybe we have forgotten what people in Jesus’s day knew well, that friendship can determine our very survival. Earlier in the Gospel of John there’s a story of a paralyzed man who had no family or friends to help him reach the healing pool of Bethesda.  So Jesus spoke to him, related to him as a person--became his friend, if you will--and as a result became his healer.  Our own Rosemarie attributes at least some of her ongoing healing to your friendship that has included visiting, encouraging, loving, and praying for her. A New York Times article summarizes recent research on the health benefits of friendship—which statistically increases longevity, improves psychological well-being, boosts cancer survival rates, reduces coronary disease, and promotes brain health as we age. “Friendship,” says the author of one study, “has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships.”[ii]

         One Bible scholar asserts that “making friends was the most important [task for the inhabitants of the communal biblical world]” (p. 190).[iii]  In contrast, Westerners in the 21^st century are increasingly focused less on befriending others and more on networking for success. And when we use the word “friend,” we might mean it more casually and less committedly than did Jesus and his peers.  For us, friending on Facebook happens with a click.  Unfriending happens just as conveniently. 

         Even here at Open Table we are so steeped in our culture’s assumptions about friendship that we may not honor our relationships at church quite as we ought.  We may at times forget we are not a social club.  We are not an affinity group. We are not a civic or political group. We are not a nonprofit organization or business. We do not come together because we share in some strange habit or hobby on Sunday nights.  We are not in relationship because we necessarily LIKE one another. Our bonds lie in a shared friendship with Jesus. Though we do enjoy being together, the kind of love that forges relationships within a faith community is not based on liking one another.  It is based on the selfless love Jesus lived and that we are, with one another’s assistance, are trying to emulate. 

         As mutual friends of Jesus, you and I are also called to befriend the world.  We are called to lay down our very lives for our friends, the friends we know and the friends we’ve not yet met.  While few who follow in the Jesus way of friendship will be called upon to die for another, we are regularly challenged to live for others, often at the expense of our own individual wants and wishes. As friends of the type Jesus means, we hang in there when relationships get frustrating.  We try to think the best of one another. We speak our truth honestly but gently, empathetically, with enough self-knowledge to keep our own ego in check. We care less about being right and more about doing what is right for the other. We see the other’s happiness as essential for completing our own joy. We become friends to the friendless. It’s not easy to love in that way, but we believe that our friendships in this faith community and in the larger world are qualitatively different when they are grounded in the kind of loving friendship Jesus offered.

         What’s harder to wrap our minds around is the idea that you and I are friends of Jesus. A friendship with a person who lived 2000 years ago might feel as phony as those Facebook friendships with total strangers. A friendship with Jesus might sound like a 3-year-old’s relationship to his invisible friend.  But the community that composed the Fourth Gospel was trying to express their experience of continuing to “abide in” the love that Jesus embodied, long after he had lived on this earth. 

         Experiencing God’s-love-in-Jesus did not require the Johannine community to strive harder to love more or better. They instead lived trustfully and mindfully in that environment of love, a love that is likewise already and always available to us, too.  Rather than making spiritual growth into yet another challenging achievement or attainment, the mystical Johannine community said there’s one commandment—to love—and that difficult/effortless commandment both demands our whole lives and releases us into full joy. Written two generations after Jesus and written by one of the communities committed to The Way, the Gospel of John continues to invite new generations of Jesus followers to join an ever enlarging circle of friendship.

         I know it’s possible to extend this metaphor into silliness. Let’s not pretend to be BFF’s with JC.  But the poetry of John captures for us the comfortable intimacy of our mutual friendship with Jesus, which can in turn enhance or deepen the relationship between you and me.

         When I was a child, I attended a big family reunion at which I met for the first time some distant cousins in my mother’s large extended family. I was taken aback at the way these adults I’d never met before seemed to already know so much about my siblings and me, seemed so delighted to see me when they’d never set eyes on me. But I observed the way they loved on my mother, the only one of her siblings who lived outside the county in which they’d all been born and one of the few in the extended family who no longer lived in the state of Georgia.  I saw how tenderly they spoke her name, how eagerly they flocked to her and doted on her and told her children how special she was. “You're Molly’s oldest!” another relative would exclaim while embracing me.  I realized they loved me because they loved my mother. 

         God’s family is like that. The stranger on the street is someone we can love because we already love someone who is a friend to that stranger: Jesus, friend of all.   We are friends of one another when we are friends of God. We are friends when we abide in God’s love.

         Have you noticed how I address you at the beginning of each of my emails to the congregation? Yes. “Friends.”  I have called YOU friends.  Some pastors employ a churchier salutation:  “Dear Congregation” or “Sister and Brothers in Christ” perhaps.  But I have always loved the way Jesus calls his little congregation “Friends”—that simple term of affection.

         Some pastors-to-be are taught that their relationship to the members of the congregation is not primarily one of friendship. I have appreciated the lessons I received in maintaining appropriate boundaries in ministry: not showing favoritism toward some members, not transgressing moral boundaries, not self-indulgently burdening the congregation with my needs, not compromising my values in order to be liked, not becoming so chummy that the congregation sees the pastoral role as secondary to the friend role and therefore fails to avail themselves of real pastoral care in times of need.  You have many friends; you have one pastor.  I want to protect the primacy of that role—for your sake. 

         But I focus less on particular roles I play and more about relationships we build together, relationships grounded in God’s love.  All else flows from there.

         A story is told by John Phillip Newell about how the founders of a new religious community in Scotland visited an established monastery for a three-day retreat in preparation for starting their new community.  A wise old monk was going to teach them all the essential of community life throughout those three days.  On the first day the old monk shambled into the room and said, “Today I have just one thing to say: ‘God loves you.’ Now go away and think about that.”  And he left them to their contemplation.  On the second morning he again stood before them.  He announced, “Today I have just one thing to say to you.  ‘You can love God.’  Now go away and think about that.”  And off they wandered and pondered.  On the third morning, the wise old monk appeared again and said, “Today I have just one thing to say to you. ‘You are to love one another.’  Now go away and live this truth as a community” (122-123).[iv]

         You know, the sermon today could have consisted of these three sentences, punctuated by silence, concluded by action:  God loves you.  You can love God.  You are to love one another.   

Amen.

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[i] Marche, Stephen.  “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely” Atlantic Magazine (May 2012). http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/

[ii] Parker-Pope, Tara.  “What Are Friends For? A Longer Life” New York Times (20 April 2009). http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/health/21well.html .

[iii] Pilch, John. The Cultural Dictionary of the Bible. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1999.           

[iv] Newell, John Philip.  A New Harmony: The Spirit, the Earth, and the Human Soul.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011. 

A Chariot for a Church

Acts 8: 26-40

          Picture this. Out in a desert wilderness two strangers, traveling side-by-side in a chariot, share an ancient sacred scroll into which they are enfolding their own questions and stories.  The Ethiopian’s chariot is, for me, a perfect metaphor for church. Neither a steeple, nor a pulpit, nor a pew speaks to me about the church, ancient or modern, like this particular chariot. Even a baptismal font is not the church’s best symbol—though today’s story culminates in a baptism.  No, my favorite symbol for the church is this chariot. I think our job, new church, is to travel with one another in side-by-side mutuality and love as we hold the scroll between us, share our questions and stories, and mark moments of transcendence and transformation with ritual. Church is primarily, for me, a vehicle for a story sharing community that is moving out into a hurting world and moving into God’s hopeful future.

         Two Sundays ago we started listing things we as a new congregation have been learning and becoming. We may have thought the children weren’t paying attention, but of course they were.  Soon they chimed in. We listened respectfully when 6-year-old Stella shared that when Open Table began worshiping in this particular space, she arrived here with her family that first Sunday last October expecting a different congregation would be inside. We hadn’t thought to explain to her that we would ALL be moving together to a new worship place. So she was relieved to realize, as she stepped into this beautiful sanctuary, that we were the same church, just in a new location.  As she put it, “I learned we are the church everywhere we go!”  I shared that story last week with the group of UCC pastors who were meeting through a conference call. They loved Stella’s phrase. Someone closed our conference call with that very phrase: “Let’s remember: ‘We are the church everywhere we go!’”  I won’t be surprised if “We are the church everywhere we go” becomes the next slogan of the UCC.  We’ll make sure Stella gets credit!*

         Let’s look closer at that chariot, first to appreciate its most obvious characteristic: its mobility.  Unlike this stationary pulpit, a traditional symbol of the proclaimed Word, the wheeled chariot’s purpose is forward movement. Followers of Jesus are impelled to move out into the world with care and compassion. Certainly Jesus ministered nomadically as he traveled from village to village.  And even reading the Bible or praying, seemingly stationary spiritual disciplines, requires figurative movement, mental and soulful meanderings. Though “going on a journey to find spiritual meaning is nothing new,” Diana Butler Bass suggests that the question shaping 21^st century spirituality is not “Who am I?” but “Where am I?” (p. 178). The Christian journey is just that—“a pilgrimage to the self, and ultimately to God” (193).[i]  The church must itself be able to respond with agility to the needs and understandings of rapidly changing times.  And the times, they are a changin’.

         Culture watchers have observed that Christianity is undergoing a seismic shift the likes of which have not been seen for 500 years.  For Christianity to survive, it must take into account the last century’s scientific theories, technological advances, horrific genocides, globalization, interfaith conversations, and postmodern perspectives that have been chiseling way at the church’s doctrinal foundations.  In response to these perceived threats, Fundamentalists have fearfully transformed their churches into fortresses.  Meanwhile, many postmoderns have abandoned the church entirely.  But some Jesus followers understand that the church is always being re-formed, and it is possible for the church to be faithful to the essence of the Christian faith while incorporating postmodern values of pluralism, ambiguity, shared authority, mystery in tandem with reason, science in concert with art, spirituality in the service of social justice. Many follow in the way of Jesus without claiming Jesus is the only way to a harmonious oneness which is the aim of all spirituality. As the UCC is fond of saying, “God is still speaking.” So some Christians have set out in their chariots.

         Other Christians have meanwhile been stirring together values of intolerance, biblical literalism, and hierarchy, but they will find that this mixture will set up around them like theological concrete.  In yesterday’s Press-Register one local minister invoked the Church’s “immutable moral laws” to condemn homosexuality.[ii] But the one immutable law Jesus named was love.  Our understandings of what is moral do sometimes need to change.

         The forward motion that Christianity needs will come from neither reinforced nor even reformed doctrine but from a revived appreciation for the community of God and the revised version of the Jesus Story, a version actually more authentic to its origins.  Which takes us back to the chariot metaphor.

         The chariot pictures well not only the forward motion of the church but also another important aspect of the church:  its communal quality.  That side-by-side relationship required in chariot riding symbolizes a nonhierarchical type of ministry I admire.  As we return to the passage in Acts, note that the ambiguous status of the Ethiopian makes him a fit symbol of a leveled, inclusive church. 

         On the one hand, the owner of the chariot is the wealthy, literate, and powerful treasurer of an African realm—but he humbly deigns to pick up a hitchhiker whom he invites to travel side-by-side with him in the chariot as an equal. Thus, the Ethiopian levels the power differential.  He even admits to needing help understanding the sacred text of another faith tradition he has been reading.  I would not be surprised if this privileged male were humble enough to stop his chariot and ask for directions if he got lost!  And in fact that is what he’s doing. 

         On the other hand, the Ethiopian’s foreignness might have relegated him below Philip’s status and his asexuality as a eunuch would have, according to the Deuteronomic law, prevented him from entering the Temple.  Since the Ethiopian is on a return trip from Jerusalem, it’s likely this man had attempted to enter the Temple to worship Isaiah’s God, whom he’s been reading about in the scroll--but was denied admittance because his sexuality was not “normal.”  Even the Ethiopian’s oddly-worded request for baptism-- “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” suggests he fears, based on past experience, that some rule or prohibition will prevent his type from being included in the family of God.  However, Philip disregards the religious codes of exclusivity. He also does some leveling.  He tells the Ethiopian that God’s realm does indeed include him.   

         The relational aspect of the chariot tells us that the Gospel should come at the invitation of a fellow traveler, not as doctrine or diatribe but rather as dialogue. Jesus’ hopeful way is understood in community and put into practice in community. Reading scripture—or interpreting the texts of our lives—should happen collaboratively. In reading the Bible together we are not so much engaged in a process to see truth in the Bible as we are seeing through the Bible, as if it were a shared lens on the world. You and I see through the Bible together to the world beyond. Church is a Spirit-led community that learns and loves and sees together as our individual lives and our culture are transformed.

         Which brings me to a final observation about this forward moving, relational chariot: it contains a scroll.  Chariot riding is an occasion for a community to read and understand the Jesus Story through an ancient text while moving that story into the future.  During our last book study, one of you asked an important question: “If the Bible requires so much effort to interpret it in healthy ways, why keep reading it?” Another way to ask that question is “Can we still be the Church without the Bible?”  Or, in terms of today’s Bible story, “Must we travel with the scroll? Why not chunk it from the chariot, or find another, or compose our own as we travel?  Can we journey together as a church without the Bible?”

         I don’t think so. I answer somewhat tentatively because I love studying the Bible, so I recognize my biases.  But I think I need both the freedom of the chariot and the rootedness and connectedness of the biblical scroll.  Certainly you and I may bring additional books with us on our journey.  But the church-as-chariot needs the biblical scroll, not to serve as a road map that tells us literally where to go, but to function more like a dictionary that offers us a common language and heritage, as a book of liturgy to shape our worship life, and as a storybook that grounds us in narrative frame that has been richly meaningful for thousands of years.  Individuals can move forward spiritually without the scroll, but if we as a community are to move together in the way of Jesus, we need a shared lexicon and a common story of how others have experienced the Sacred.  Besides, we have permission to argue with some of the Book's perspectives when the Spirit guides us to do so.

         The Ethiopian and Philip see Jesus through a particular scroll that they hold between them: the book of Isaiah written hundreds of years before Philip and the Ethiopian were born.  While our standard Christian gloss on that ancient Hebrew text is to identify Jesus as Isaiah’s “lamb…who opens not his mouth,” that was not the original writer’s referent.  But hundreds of years later the writer of the book of Acts took Isaiah’s well-known poem and engrafted onto it the story of Jesus.  We see how Philip uses the text to connect with the Ethiopian and to bring the text forward into relevance for his time and place. We can do that, too.

         Verse 35 reads: “Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.” Here we often “begin with scripture” but then ask, How does this passage point toward Jesus and GOOD news?  If our interpretations don’t add up to the Good News of God’s love and grace, of reconciliation and resurrection, perhaps our scriptural inquiry is just shoring up unhealthy theology.  One way to keep biblical study focused on Good News, not bad, is through collaborative interpretation.   We need to test the Story’s goodness together.

         Unfortunately, Christianity’s story has not always seemed good. Brian McLaren writes, “The failure of the world’s religions, especially the two largest religions, is to provide a framing story capable of healing or reducing the world’s current environmental, economic, and political crises.”[iii]  As scandalous as it sounds, Christianity’s story needs revision to do just that.  Progressive Christians are retelling the Christian story afresh. 

         Progressive Christians, rather than bemoaning the decline in church attendance and religious affiliation, are instead seizing this moment in the history of the church to unlearn some damaging parts of the story and to rewrite the ever-evolving Jesus Story.  Christians cannot simply chunk from the chariot an unhealthy version of the Jesus Story.  We must reframe the story as some have told it. We must make sure we tell it with compassion and healing and unity.  And we have to add our own stories to the foundational story of Jesus.

         That’s what Kenny did last week.  He wove his own story of hope and love into the Jesus Story.  Now is the time and the church is the place to jettison the misguided versions of the Jesus Story, to unlearn those, but to do more than that, to rewrite that story with words of hope and healing.  Parts of the Jesus story have been distorted to exclude or demean or control, but we can reclaim them for healing and peaceful purposes. 

         I believe Christians can reframe the Jesus story "for the healing of the nations."  Certainly other spiritual paths are also worthy and healing.  Indeed, the exclusive version of the Jesus Story I grew up with no longer works for me.  Yet my appreciation for pluralism in no way diminishes my conviction of the power of the Jesus Story to bring in God’s reign of peace and love.  To me, everything depends on this.  Not just the future viability of the church.  The future of our planet depends on whether or not people can follow in Jesus’s way—whether they attribute that path to Jesus or not.   

         Our version of the Story we tell needs to capture this urgency.  Our planet is in peril, and this is a saving story.  I know of none better.  But I won’t be able to explore it and then live into it without fellow pilgrims. 

         The story we read and interpret together has an urgent, saving, timeless message.  But the story needs to be reframed and carried forward in the communal chariot we call the church. That's what we at Open Table are trying to do.

         Thanks be to God for traveling companions like you! 

*After the service, Stella told me that her sister Chloe may have been the one who came up with the words "We are the church everywhere we go!"  She thinks she started the story but Chloe may have helped tell the story and added the final sentence--as sisters sometimes do.  Stella wanted Chloe to get proper credit.  I apologize for not remembering Chloe's additions to the story. We want to give her proper credit. Thanks, Stella and Chloe!

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[i] Bass, Diana Butler.  Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening.  New York: Harper One, 2012.

[ii] Shields, Bry.  “Who Is It That Really Discriminates?” Mobile Press-Register  (5 May 2012) 1D.

[iii] McLaren, Brian.  Everything Must Change.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007.

REPEAL FEAR AND HATE

On Fifth Sundays at Open Table, a member of our congregation plans an abbreviated service and shares a story from her or his own faith journey. Then we gather afterward for a relaxing potluck dinner.  In lieu of my weekly sermon, I'm posting the address I gave in Fairhope, AL, on Tuesday evening in support of those being injured by Alabama's House Bill 56.  I wish I could share the stories of those who attended this rally and gave voice to the specific ways their lives have been harmed by this bill.

Address delivered at Prayer Vigil for Immigrant Justice in Fairhope, AL, April 24, 2012

          Several months ago a minister wrote an editorial for the Mobile Press-Register criticizing other clergy in our state for—as he put it—trying to make the legal issue of immigration into a moral one.^[i] I respectfully insist immigration is a moral issue. And being neither a legal, political, nor economic expert, I am speaking this evening from a moral/religious perspective.  I am calling on our state legislators to repeal House Bill 56 because fear and prejudice are its origins and its products.  I am calling for the repeal of fear and hatred.

            I’m a pastor. I’m no lawyer.  But I do know that not every law is just. I do know our country and state have at times made laws that favor some people over others.  Existing laws—like HB 56 or the extensive and complicated federal immigration laws—cannot be justified simply by saying “it’s the law.” If we unthinkingly play the “law and order” card, we imply that anyone questioning the fairness or effectiveness of a law is “soft on crime.” Which is to play upon peoples’ fears. 

            I’m a pastor.  I’m no economist.  I hear some folks claiming that noncitizens are taking jobs from citizens, using our resources, evading taxes. But others explain persuasively that immigrant workers are doing the jobs others in Alabama will not do, are creating new jobs, and are paying taxes. They say there’s a net economic benefit to having immigrants living and working in Alabama.  I haven’t done the math.  But I do know that in hard economic times, people often look for a scapegoat to blame for their woes.  Which is often done by blaming a minority group.  Which is to play upon peoples’ prejudices.

            I’m a pastor.  I’m no politician.  But I know that once upon a time in Alabama, Jim Crow laws made it legal to mistreat another person just because of his or her race.  Some politicians in our state, past and present, have pandered to racism in order to position themselves as the protectors of “our way of life.”

            I’m a pastor.  I’m no pollster, policy wonk, or rhetorician advising politicians on how to frame the immigration issue.  But I do know there are folks on both sides of the aisle who are paid to do just that.  According to an article titled “How the Right Made Racism Sound Fair—and Changed Immigration Politics”^[ii] we learn: “In the decade since the September 11 attacks, there has been a steady increase in language that frames unauthorized immigrants as a criminal problem. References to ‘illegals,’ ‘illegal immigrants’ and their rhetorical variants now dominate the speech of both major political parties, as well as news media coverage of immigration.” 

            This trend was evident in a recently televised interview with a sponsor of HB 56 who spoke in seemingly coded language. For instance, the senator mentioned the “threat of terrorism” while discussing the immigration issue as if associating migrant workers in Alabama with the terrorists of 9/11. He speculated on the number of immigrants who might be violent criminals. He complained that “very large liberal groups” from “out of state” are opposing HB 56, which sounds similar to charges segregationists once used against “outside agitators.” And in this legislator’s assurance that Alabama is “taking the lead” in the nation’s headlines on immigration, I heard the echo of the old battle cry for states’ rights.^[iii]  

            I’m a pastor.  I’m actually less concerned about laws that are on the books than about the laws written on our hearts (to use an image from Jeremiah 31:33).  

            I believe within the human heart is written a universal law of love, and it should be the source of all other laws. Of course we need objective, effective laws for protection and fairness. Specific to this topic, we need legal reforms to support a logically consistent and comprehensive and just policy regarding our national borders.

            But the public’s discourse and the politicos’ rhetoric on the topic of immigration in Alabama is charged with fear and prejudice. Where is compassion?  Where is faith? I want to believe our leaders are not using this issue to grandstand. I want to believe that HB 56 was founded upon a sincere if mistaken desire to protect Alabamians. I can appreciate that impulse. But an intention to defend some does not require that we offend others. We can fool ourselves into thinking we’re doing something out of love for those for whom we bear responsibility when in fact fear or ego may be the driving emotion—or we may act out of a selective love for a particular group of people, which is really prejudice, not love. Defense of my rights, property, safety, and freedom does not have to come at the expense of kindness to strangers, appreciation for difference, and compassion for the most vulnerable.

            I’m a preacher. I’m no political speaker.  So I remind you that Jesus said the greatest commandment, the most important law in his tradition, was love.  Jesus—who was not a legal citizen of the Roman Empire he inhabited, whose parents illegally crossed a border into Egypt to protect their child, who continually traveled as an adult into different territories, who was eventually executed as a criminal—this Jesus urged his followers to start from a place of love.  If we have made laws grounded in genuine love for all, everything else will follow. 

           Let’s repeal fear and prejudice!

           Que el amor de Dios sea con ustedes.

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[i] Johnson, Rusty. “Morality vs. Immigration:  It is Not Un-Christian to Deport Illegal Trespassers” Mobile Press-Register (8 January 2012) 14A.

[ii] Thompson, Gabrielle. “How the Right Made Racist Rhetoric Sound Neutral and Shaped Immigration Politics” in ColorLines: News for Action (13 September 2011). http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/09/how_the_right_made_racist_rhetoric_sound_neutral--and_shaped_immigration_politics.html .

[iii] Video Interview with Alabama Senator Scott Beason.  “Capitol Journal.” Alabama Public Television (13 April 2012) http://video.aptv.org/video/2223977276  (Begin at minute 22.).