Ecclesiastes 3:1-13 & Matthew 25:31-46
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2016. As the Counting Crows once sang, it’s been, “A long December and there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last.”
It’s a low bar. Last year brought us wild weather – massive blizzards, record heat, drought or flood (depending on where you were), earthquakes (and cracks in our houses…in Oklahoma!), huge melts in the polar ice cap, the warmest month on record – a Zika outbreak, the Broncos win the Super Bowl (that’s for Amy Ward), a long list of lone gunmen, terror attacks, bombings, drone attacks, civil wars, and oppression. The Olympics in Rio (Michael Phelps & Simone Biles), President Obama visits Cuba and Vietnam and Hiroshima, Harambe the gorilla, Hamilton the musical, Chicago Cubs the World Series champs, Pokemon Go, Dallas shootings, Terence Crutcher, the images of Syrian barbarism and the overwhelming suffering of refugees, an attempted coup in Turkey, Standing Rock, Russian hacks, Brexit happens, Trump happens.
Paragons of music like David Bowie, Merle Haggard, Prince, Sir George Martin, who produced the Beatles for cryin’ out loud, Glenn Frey, Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire, the inimitable Leonard Cohen, pop superstar and underappreciated AIDS activist George Michael, soul singer Sharon Jones and local legend Leon Russell. Authors like Harper Lee, Umberto Eco, Pat Conroy, Jim Harrison and Anita Brookner.
Sports figures like local favorite Dennis Byrd, sportscasters John Saunders and Craig Sager, Hockey legend Gordie Howe, renowned Tennessee basketball coach Pat Summit, Sunday mornings at Wimbledon fixture Bud Collins, baseball’s Joe Garigiola and golf icon Arnold Palmer.
Actors and entertainers like Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, Zsa Zsa Gabor, George Kennedy, Abe Vigoda (who had been rumored dead multiple times before), actress and transgender activist Alexis Arquette, Alan Thicke, Patty Duke, Florence Henderson, Garry Shandling, Kenny Baker, who spent hours inside an R2D2 costume and, in the waning days of the year, Carrie Fisher, whose role as Princess Leia helped fill my young life with jedi dreams…and then, just 48 hours later, her mother, Debbie Reynolds. And, of course, icons like Elie Wiesel, Gwen Ifill, Phyllis Schlafly, Nancy Reagan, Antonin Scalia, John Glenn and Muhammad Ali, who all shaped the world in serious ways, even if they were ways we didn’t like.
Those are just the so-called “famous” deaths, there are also the ones that have marked our church lives – Dorothy McKee, Kathyrn Williams and Dorothy Terebesy as well as those in our own families and among our friends, like Steve Cranford, who was a monumental figure in this church and the social justice life of Tulsa. 2017 finds many names and faces alive now in our hearts.
A hell of a year. And many of us bid it a less than fond farewell last night, signing “Ol’ Lang Syne” like we were yelling, “Bye, Felicia”, dismissing 2016 like getting a telemarketer off the phone. Just go away already…I don’t want what you’re selling! But lest we get too caught up in the “2016 sucks” wave, we’re actually wise to admit that perhaps it’s not the “worst year ever.” I mean maybe 1941 in this country was a little worse…or 1939, the stock market collapse and the Great Depression…or 1492, the year that Spanish Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella killed, converted or expelled roughly half-million Muslim inhabitants as well as expelling the Jewish population, all before sending Columbus to the so-called “new world”, beginning centuries of colonization, conquest and catastrophe. Then maybe we’d also consider 1348, when the black death took hold in Europe, killing almost a third of the population in 18 months. Or maybe this humdinger – 72,000 B.C., when there was a volcanic super-eruption on the island of Sumatra in present-day Indonesia. It exploded with the force of 1.5 million Hiroshima-size bombs and left a layer of volcanic ash approximately six inches thick all over Asia with traces as far as East Africa. The skies darkened and global temperatures fell killing off all but an estimated 3-10,000 of what are our ancestors…all of us descended from that small group.
I’m not saying things aren’t troubling, I’m just saying that trouble’s been around a long time. It was around about 30 years into the life of Jesus, when the cultural, religious and political lines seemed to all intersect into chaos and turmoil, and the last thing that any of his followers expected came to be visited upon Jesus, the one who was supposed to be the messiah who would kick out the Romans and take up his throne. Or maybe it is best seen 30 years earlier in the faces of Mary and Joseph, defying all the social norms to bring this baby forth into a world where very little in the way of comfort or safety was promised…no NICU, no lights for jaundice, no vaccines or formula or disposable diapers. And, according at least to Matthew, a King Herod, eliminating the perceived threat to his position and power by killing all the firstborn sons. The question is still relevant – is there anything more dangerous to the vulnerable than a leader with a fragile ego and too much power?
Now we approach a new year, a somewhat arbitrary line in the sand perhaps, but also traditionally a time to make resolutions for the next 365 days…resolutions about our habits, or lack of habits, or getting in shape, or that damn 10, 15, 20 pounds that we can’t seem to shake, there is another pull, at least for me, that is tugging at my soul. As my colleague, Rev. Lillian Daniel once said at General Synod, the governing meeting for the national UCC, in the middle of another debate on another sensitive issue that was going to result in a really finely crafted set of words…”We used to be a group of revolutionaries,” she said, “Now we’re a group of resolutionaries.”
See, it’s not a resolution I’m looking for. I have little interest in saying, even loudly, that we need to “get together”, or “build bridges”, or give to the ACLU or Planned Parenthood, or write a letter to our legislative leaders, or make a really great post on Facebook. I’ve done all those things and will continue to do them. But that’s not what I’m looking for in 2017. The saying used to be, “The revolution will not be televised.” Now I think it needs to say, “The revolution will not happen in Congress, or at a non-profit, or on social media.” The revolution will happen only in our own hearts.
The word “revolution” is defined like this:
- the action by a celestial body of going round in an orbit or elliptical course OR
- a sudden, radical, or complete change, a fundamental change in the way of thinking about or visualizing something
I am not suggesting that we resolve to do anything, but that we engage ourselves in what I believe to be a natural orbit, a return trip for the celestial body of faith, which has drifted away but is coming back. There is, after all, as scripture and two-part harmonies remind us, a time for everything as we turn, turn, turn. Now more than ever we must be clear about our own values and, because it will increasingly become an act of resistance, we must then engage with people whose traditions are not ours, but who share in those core values like compassion, hope, grace and justice. In this time when the push to segregate and isolate will be so strong, we must be a moral voice reaching out to the “other”, making the metaphor of God’s wide arms a reality in our spiritual and social life. That’s the revolution I’m talking about.
This will mean that we need to ask hard questions and make courageous changes – first of all with ourselves. For one of the things that we ought to reclaim as we enter this revolution is that we are called not only to love our neighbors as ourselves, but our enemies, too. (Yeah, I know. Sometimes Jesus is a real pain in the tush.) We are taught by Jesus that the judgments we give will be the judgments we get, that no one can serve two masters, that not everyone who cries, “Lord, Lord” will find the kin-dom and that we are far better off building our houses on rock than on sand…though sand is quicker, and easier. So we read the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the story of the foreign woman at the well, the account of healing the Roman centurion’s servant because of his faith, and the treatment of the woman accused of adultery and ask ourselves how it is that Jesus wants us to be in the world? We engage our scripture and tradition and make our focus actually following Jesus, not just idly praising him. And we remember that Jesus didn’t promise us easy…in fact, he told us that bad things were coming, and that we’d be cursed at, handed over to the authorities, brought before kings and governors because of his name. He told us that when we were afraid of being targeted, afraid of persecution or deportation, losing our healthcare, our rights or our loved ones, this was precisely the time for us to bear witness to the better world that is possible.
I want you to know this morning that we need not invent this revolution – it is happening. A bus full of nuns is driving all over the country seeking justice. Women’s mosques are opening, with a dedication to connecting to the Quran as a source of gender empowerment. A Moral Monday movement is calling on legislatures in North Carolina and elsewhere to live up to the biblical values of caring for the poor and the sick. Evangelical pastors are declaring from the pulpit – “we’re all queer.” The #blacklivesmatter movement is expressing a spirituality, connecting itself to the famous quote of Emma Lazarus – “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” The orbit is nearing and we need to join in – turning old values into new habits, turning our hearts away from the polarized, binary, “us versus them” mentality that keeps us ranting about things with too small a vision. It means embracing what John called to us to do from the Jordan…to repent, which means to “turn around”, to set aside the ways we have bought into the very systems we decry, for we have all been a part of the empire and it is in us, like racism and sexism and homophobia have been coded into us. We cannot purge those things using the very same paradigms that placed them in us in the first place.
This is the start of the season of Epiphany in the church calendar. It’s the acknowledgement of the mystery of incarnation, God in the flesh, the strange way that we say that Jesus is God but isn’t God, which some Christians see in the visit of the Magi to the manger and others see in the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. And in the 8 weeks of epiphany to come, we will ask ourselves some hard questions, and maybe even get a little offended from time to time, for where else should we get offended but in the place where the Gospel is supposed to be proclaimed? It can be offensive to realize that God does have a plan and the plan is us. Ouch.
It’s a new year. There is a time for everything, and now is the time for us, as faithful people, not to shy away from the trouble in front of us, or acquiesce to it, but instead to embrace our roots, to change first our own hearts, to look to be a sanctuary for people on the edge, perhaps literally, to examine our own privilege and paradigm and the ways that we have embraced the very empire that we seek to push against, and then to speak up and speak out, to pray and love and resist, to be salt of the earth, leaven in the loaf and the light of the world.
May it be so.