Tell It In the Light

June 22, 2008

Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew 10:26-39

So I was in the car last week listening to an NPR show that featured an interview with a couple of guys preparing to get married in California in the wake of that state’s decision to honor and give legal sanction to the marriages of same-sex couples. The show’s host asked for listener comments, and I figured it would be appropriate to have a voice from the church giving support to the couple, so I sent an e-mail saying something to the effect of, “best wishes and blessings on the couple.”

From that small well-wishing came an invitation to record some comments for the show on Thursday.

None of which is any big deal, but it did strike me as particularly interesting in the midst of a week in which I was wrestling with a text that invites us to take the sometimes enigmatic teachings of Jesus and try to make them plain for our time.

“What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops,” Jesus tells his followers just before sending them out into the world to share the good news.

While we here at Clarendon do not perceive Jesus’ words of love and justice as a whisper in the dark, the truth is, most of the church has yet to hear them with any kind of clarity. Thus it is incumbent upon us to speak them clearly, and to speak the truth in the light as plainly as possible.

What’s important in this is not that we get in the papers or on the radio, but that words of love and justice get spoken as often as possible in as many ways as possible to be heard by as many ears as can be reached.

Thus the overture from the session at Clarendon – a congregation of only about 70 members – will be heard by the entire Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a denomination of more than 2 million members in more than 10,000 congregations. Moreover, because what we do as a denomination remains news in the broader culture, our voice will be heard in the next few days by millions of people in this nation, many of whom have seldom heard a word of authentic welcome from Christian communities.

All of which is simply to say what we already know: Clarendon Presbyterian Church is a small, rare thing in this world, and one of vital, urgent importance. It’s not us – you or me – who are important in all this, rather it is the gospel message of love and justice that we share.

What are these words of love and justice? And why does it seem that they so often fail to find their way into the light of day?

The gospel story is large and complex, to be sure. But Jesus himself, in Matthew’s account of Holy Week, reduces it to this: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

In other words, life is meant to be a weave of spiritual richness, ethical kindness, and right relationship. Or, in still other words, “do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God.”

We are not the first small community to hear in Jesus’ words an invitation, a calling, a command to push against the bounds of our culture. The abolitionists here and in England heard the quiet urgency of Jesus’ call to love the neighbor – and to redefine neighbor – even when the vast majority of their fellow citizens found Biblical warrant for the status quo in scriptural passages telling slaves to be obedient. Successive waves of feminists found in Jesus’ boundary-breaking ministry with women a powerful calling to insist on the rights of women in the church and broader culture even when the vast majority found Biblical warrant for the status quo in scriptural passages telling women to keep silent. During the height – and, more pointedly, the depths of the Civil Rights Movement, the image of Jesus at the welcome table brought encouragement to fear-filled groups watching churches burn across the South, even as so many powerful voices cited scripture to defend “a way of life” that oppressed millions.

In each case, small groups of faithful people lifted their voices to speak truth to power, and to tell in the bright light of day what they had discerned in the depths of their souls and in the quiet gatherings of their communities.

We stand in that same line of gentle, faithful people – trusting God’s never-failing love and boundless grace as we stand together to proclaim that love for all.

Of course, if we are to stand in the public square and proclaim this basic truth, we ought also stand before the mirror and be truthful with ourselves.

As Yvonne Delk wrote in Sojourners a while back, “Truth is the grasp that we have on the world around us; it is the understanding of who we are and who others are. If we are to boldly proclaim the good news, we must be armed with the authority of truth. This requires a clear analysis of our political, economic, and social situations and our personal conditions. If the diagnosis is not deep enough, not full enough, we will heal the wounds lightly. We will cry "peace, peace" when there is no peace.”[1]

That is why we begin worship in confession in our tradition. It reminds us that we cannot get from here to there but by the grace of God and by responding to that grace. We cannot get from the world as it is to the world as it could be except by the grace of God and by responding to that grace. We cannot get from our lives as they are to our lives as they could and should be except by the grace of God and by responding to that grace.

In the final analysis, this is the singular truth that we must lift to the light of day. So, as much as I’d like to see the General Assembly act favorably on our overture this week in San Jose, I am trusting the outcomes to God’s grace knowing that the arc is long but it bends toward justice.

God is not finished with us yet – individually or as a church or as a broader culture.

So I’m giving thanks this morning for the couples in California who’ve been able to get hitched this month; I’m asking God’s blessings on them; and I’m asking God’s blessings on us as we try together to lift up to the light of day the small, quiet truth that the love and justice of the gospel of Jesus Christ knows no bounds.

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[1] Yvonne V. Delk, “The Authority of Truth” Sojourners.

Coming for the Sick

Matthew 9:9-13; Genesis 12:1-9

June 8, 2008

First things first: I’m going to brag about my machismo! Yep. Ryan Zimmerman, the Nationals third baseman, went on the disabled list last week with the exact same shoulder injury that I am seeing a physical therapist for these days. That’s right. Me and Ryan Zimmerman – but you don’t see me going on the disabled list now, do you!

OK, so, other than the gratuitous, and, well, let’s face it, rather pathetic self-aggrandizement, what could possibly be the point of that opening?

Well, just this: to remind us all again that each of us is broken in some way or another, and some of us just plain broken down.

I was listening to an NPR report on the recently released Centers for Disease Control survey on risky behaviors of teenagers. The reporter was talking with a group of 13-year-old girls about sunscreen. You can pretty well guess the response: oh, sure, they remember being slathered with sunscreen by their parents just a few years earlier, but now nine out of ten of them don’t bother. Skin cancer, after all, is not a form of brokenness that your average American teenager gives a first thought to, much less a second one.

And I would wax “older and wiser” on that one, but I ought to first confess that most of us just grow older and we keep running hard up against the brute fact that we don’t gain wisdom so much as we gather new information that just keeps reminding us of how much we will never know. As for me, it took several bodacious sunburns – including one on our honeymoon – to get me to pay attention to sunscreen. You would think wisdom would come, but, between physical therapy sessions last week I was out playing two hours of basketball – oh, and driving to my game during those incredible thunderstorms Wednesday evening.

Older and wiser? Not so much. But clearly a bit more knowledgeable about the myriad ways that I am broken and broken down. As I look around the room this morning, I know that many of you share similar aches and pains that come with aging bodies.

Other folks are simply beaten down by life. Some by the poor choices they’ve made along the way; some by a raw genetic hand. Some folks are victims and some are stuck in victimhood. Some have been beaten up by society and some left behind by the economy. Some are born into unbelievably awful conditions of war, violence, famine and poverty. Some are victims of ecclesiastical malpractice, others have loved and lost and lost again. Even those who sit atop power arrangements politically and economically have places of deep woundedness or plain disease – look no further than the aforementioned Mr. Zimmerman to know that even the young, blessed and talented suffer, or no further than Sen. Kennedy and the Kennedy family to understand how the powerful can be brought low by circumstances beyond their control.

We are all broken.

Thus we can all take great comfort in this story from Matthew. For whom did Jesus come? The sick, the broken, the lost – us, each and every one of us.

That is at once the good news of the gospel and the gospel’s great challenge to us.

Good news, quite clearly, because we all need the comfort of one who comes to heal the sick, the comfort of a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul, the renewal of spirit that comes when we “give to the wind our fears.”

The gospel challenge for us lies in precisely the same set of circumstances. Jesus comes to heal the sick – all of them. Not just us.

This story from Matthew compels us to broaden our perspectives, especially when read alongside the incident that follows immediately upon it in Matthew and in the larger context of the promises of Genesis – all families on the earth shall be blessed through this covenant with God.

For Jesus goes from calling the tax collectors – almost universally despised as collaborators with the occupying Roman imperial forces – to eating with them – an act directly contradicting strict purity codes. And, to make matters worse, when he leaves that unclean table he does so because he has been called upon to lay his hands upon a girl who has just died. And, to dig the pit even deeper, before he even gets out of the crowd, a hemorrhaging woman grabs his robe and asked to be healed.

Let’s pause for a second here just to count the ways in which Jesus is running far afield of all of the accepted mores and codes of proper behavior for his culture.

Communing with tax collectors: bad.

Eating with them: worse.

Willing to lay healing hands on a girl: terrible.

Willing to touch the dead: unheard of.

Being touched by an unclean woman: unthinkable.

Turning to speak kindly to that same unclean woman, to offer her a balm, to bring her wholeness and healing: the stuff that gets one killed in these parts.

In this one brief passage, Jesus takes on an entire culture and turns its power arrangements upside down.

It is impossible for us to get ourselves inside the strictures of Jesus’ time, although the misogyny and the racism revealed during the Democratic primaries opens a tiny window. Jesus was not shattering glass ceilings, though, he was tearing down the entire edifice and offering up a radically alternative future of fundamental equality before God.

His actions compel us to examine our own lives and to look with renewed honesty at the hierarchies we cling to, the power relationships we take for granted – especially when they benefit us.

The arc of this passage – from public square to personal hearth and back into public space – suggests that Jesus demands this accounting of relationships in every aspect of our lives. It is not good enough, these stories suggest, to be decent with your loved ones if you are abusive of your colleagues – or vice versa. It is not good enough to be loving and compassionate in one sphere but not in another. It is not good enough to act justly in one part of life and unjustly in others.

Jesus calls us to lives of love and justice and integrity – that is to say, consistency, constancy, wholeness.

Love the taxpayer. Love the annoying poor. Love the dying. Love the suffering. Love, also, the powerful. Love the ones closest to you and most like you; love the enemy, the other, the different.

Of course, when we begin by understanding ourselves as broken, as, in a sense, dismembered, it is profoundly difficult to imagine living a life of constancy and wholeness. How do we keep ourselves together for one another when so much of the time it feels as if we are coming apart at the seams? How do we re-member ourselves?

It is no accident that we regularly repeat in this place the children’s catechism, the call and response of “who are you?”

“I am a child of God.”

“What does that mean?”

“God loves me.”

That is where we begin. Even in the midst of our brokenness, we are beloved. No matter what the nature of that brokenness. Jesus has come for this; for we who are lost but found, blind but see.

You and I: we are beloved. This is a household of the beloved.

Trusting that basic truth frees us from fear. As the author of the letters of John puts it, “perfect love casts out all fear.”

Fear grips us; love liberates us.

When we remember who we are and to whom we belong, we begin to put the pieces back together.

Of course, the cracks and scars remain. They remind us of our constant need for remembering, for confession, for coming back to the source of our being.

Moreover, those cracks and scars and broken places can become places of particular strength in our lives. They say that the place a broken bone mends becomes the strongest part of the bone. What once was fractured becomes a place of strength and power, a place of compassion – of the suffering with that can be the first step on the long journey of restoration.

I can recall many years ago being with a young couple in the hospital in Lexington as they miscarried a pregnancy. I recall saying something to the effect of, “I don’t know what you are feeling right now, but my wife suffered a miscarriage a few years ago; I have been down the path that you are on.”

Each of us has been down our own path of suffering. In the midst of great pain it is difficult to see beyond the darkness of the moment and to feel beloved. But as the light begins to shine for us again, we can either turn away from it, or lift it up so that it shines for others as well.

Leonard Cohen wrote, “there’s a crack in everything; that’s where the light gets in.”

So it is with our lives.

Jesus does not come that we will never experience brokenness; he comes as the light that shines through the cracks and brings clarity to our confusion, illumination to our darkest hours.

So live these days – the only days we have been given – as bearers of the light.