Did you catch it? Did you catch who it is that Jesus commends for his understanding and spiritual maturity? "One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing ... "
(YOUTUBE - sermon starts at 39:00)
But wait a
minute, I thought the scribes and the pharisees were Jesus' mortal enemies, his
foils in our gospels as he put down the ways of old and inaugurates a new era. I
thought the scribes and the pharisees were legalistic and narrow-minded, prone
to heap burdens on people, and to miss the deeper meaning of God’s holy
laws?
Two comments are
required:
1. Anti-semitism,
much of it justified by a partial reading of our New Testament scriptures, is
one of the great scourges of human history, and the fact that we are seeing a
resurgence of it in our times is as sad a commentary as I can think of on
the state of our life together. The Anti-Defamation League logged a 57
percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2017, compared
to the previous year — including bomb threats, assaults, vandalism, and
anti-Semitic posters and literature found on college campuses. And in my Facebook feed this week, one of my
lifelong friends posted a photo of temple his neighborhood of Irvine desecrated
with hate speech spray-painted to the walls. We Christians owe a special
responsibility, to our Jewish friends and to our common life, to condemn
unequivocally all such acts, wherever they take place, including in our own midst.
2. The second
point is more general - this habit of putting people into categories is a very
dangerous habit. On the one hand, we can’t function without categories of
some kind. But to take these categories of our own making and to harden
them, to sanction them with divine attribute, is idolatry, pure and
simple. "If your God," I once heard someone say, "If your God likes all the same people you
like, and hates all the same people you hate, you have turned yourself into
your God."
*****
The Jesus
portrayed in our gospels is a prolific buster of categories. He does not
traffic in prejudices of any kind. He takes people as they come and is quick to
defy the expectations of even his closest confidants. Why, in just the last two
chapters of Mark's gospel, Jesus has encountered a range of characters. He has
shot down the rich man who wants a shortcut to heaven, his own disciples, James
and John, who want positions of privilege in Jesus' administration, the chief
priests of the temple in Jerusalem, who believe they have a corner on divine,
and some Herodian authorities who try to trap him with a trick questions.
But along this
same path, Jesus finds people who he embraces for their faithfulness and
understanding, and these faithful come from all walks of life. There is no predicting by any categories who
Jesus will embrace. There is the blind
beggar, Bartimaeus, an outcast at the lowest position of society, and today there
is this scribe, a learned and educated man.
And Jesus commends people, irrespective of their station in life, when
they embody the deeper truth of God’s love for all people, and to these people,
without discrimination, Jesus says, "you are not far from the kingdom
..."
*****
Perhaps you
have heard it said that the Greatest Commandment can be easily remembered by the
shape of the cross ... “You shall love
the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength”
(vertical), and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (horizontal).
On this day,
All Saints Day, we celebrate people who have lived cross-shaped lives. We recall
to our memory those who have exemplified the faith, people who loved God with all
their heart and mind and strength, and people who have loved their neighbors as
themselves. These people
show the way for us, reminding us that we, too, believe it or not, can be
saints, too.
This is one of
the earliest origins of the Protestant Reformation, a rebellion against the
Catholic tradition of venerating the saints. I want to be careful not to caricature it, because Catholics, too,
understand that all people can be saints, but there were traditions and
practices in the medieval Catholic Church that recognized as saints only those
who had been elevated to a certain status by the hierarchs of the Catholic Church. Protestants rebelled against this tradition,
because they knew that this human system, like any human system, was vulnerable
to corruption and abuse, and because the knew that there were “saints among us,”
that there were ordinary everyday people who were saints, as well.
We call this
process “sanctification,” and we understand it as an ongoing process, not an
election to high office. It’s a process
by which some people grow more and more loving through the course of their lives,
they grow closer and closer to God, they grow closer and closer to their
neighbor, they fashion their lives after the example of Jesus, they take on
cross-shaped lives.
No matter what
life throws at them, they grow in grace, they reach out with love, they don’t
hold grudges, they don’t presume themselves to be superior. Like a fine piece of silver, whether they are
being polished to a fine lustre, or whether they are put through the fire and
hammered on the anvil of life, they come out of the process more loving, more
holy. They are being
refined.
*****
I want to lift
up just two names, from among the dozens we will be honoring today. Elisabeth Cogdill died this year, and she
spent the last years of her life dedicated to a singular purpose, to see that
the St. John’s Bible – majestic, illustrated manuscripts of the Holy Scriptures
– would make a return visit here to First Church. When I started here three and a half years
ago, Elisabeth was walking with a limp, then she was walking with a cane, then
with a walker, and toward the end she could not walk at all. But through it
all, she was determined to see that the St. John’s Bible should return. Elisabeth Cogdill spent the last years of her
life dedicated to bringing a gift to you, this congregation.
I first met Houston
Burnside, Sr. when I presided at the funeral of his first wife, Tricia, when I
was the pastor of our church in La Mesa. And then, a little over a year ago,
Houston and his wife Connie came to First Church and became an active part of
this congregation. I experienced from
Houston here the same things I had experienced in La Mesa – an unwavering good
cheer, a commitment to support me in my ministry, and a genuine concern for me,
as both a pastor and a person. His concern came genuinely to Houston, because
he had once been a pastor. He cashed it
in to become a professor at San Diego State.
He concluded his true calling was not to wear the fine clothes and
preach from pulpits on Sunday mornings, but to sit in the pews. And in the last year of his life he wrote a
memoir, called “A Pew-Sitter’s Search for God.”
Elisabeth,
Houston and the dozens of other names we will lift aloud this morning, remind
us that we, too, are being fashioned – or at least we can be, if we will allow
it – we are being refined. Life sometimes makes it difficult, but no matter
what life brings, the faithful have ways of coming out on the other end shaped
more and more and more like a cross.
*****
I think this is something intrinsic to our
American character. Our nation was
founded on the principle of religious freedom, and its early life was much more
diverse and multicultural than is commonly thought. Nonetheless, it was rooted in a particular
understanding of the Protestant tradition. The founders of this nation understood
themselves to be Protestants, if not in the dogmatic sense, in the pedestrian
sense – they were “protesters.”
The Pilgrims, the
Puritans, the other refugees from Civil War and monarchies in Europe, they left
because they had found something to protest against. They were clear about what they were opposed
to, oftentimes much more clearly than they were clear about what they were
for. But they were opposed to something,
thank you very much, and they determined that some things were worth fighting
for. This American spirit is an oppositional spirit, and it has much to commend
it. It’s true, I think, for all who come
to the United States – people from across the globe and across the ages intuit
that this is a nation that celebrates that ordinary individuals have a right
that cannot be denied to them. This right – the right to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness – belongs to all people, and we cherish it. Among the ways we cherish it is in the right
of casting the ballot, a practical and a symbolic declaration that we will not
be subject, not to tyrants, or kings, or bosses or politicians of any kind.
Americans are
protesters, and there is so much to commend this spirit. But I want to caution
you that this spiritual inheritance of ours is a double-edged sword. This American spirit can inspire an ethos of
selfless devotion to cause, and we rightly celebrate this down through the
ages, as we do when we celebrate our war dead, and when we honor our veterans,
as we will do next week. It can promote
among us a certain kind of bravery and virtue and self-sacrifice that is worthy
of celebration.
But this
American spirit can also be entirely presumptive of divine sanction. It can encourage the demonization of enemies, it can be
deeply racist, it can abet the dehumanization of people who are different from
ourselves. It is embedded in the origins of our nation, which was built on the
back of slave labor and the decimation of native peoples.
For those of us who are inheritors of
this spirit, this double-edged sword must be handled carefully. Our profound sense of purpose and destiny,
imbued with the dimension of the divine, is a gift, and it makes us capable of
extraordinary self-sacrifice for causes that are greater than ourselves, but it
also renders us, all of us, uniquely vulnerable to the temptation of demonizing
our every enemy, and turning our every fight into a holy war.
And so on this
All Saints Sunday, in addition to the saints among us in this congregation, I
want to lift up to you two people who I would dare name American saints in this
time of great political distress in our nation.
The first I
have long admired, and I trust many of you have, too. You will know the basic
biography of Jimmy Carter. Raised on a peanut farm, served as a Lieutenant in
the US Navy, then Governor of Georgia and then President of the United States. He is now our longest-living ex-President,
and some people say it as a joke that his “our greatest ex-President,” as a way
of dismissing his time in office. But I have heard Jimmy Carter interviewed
about those terrible, tumultuous days, in 1979 and 1980, when American hostages
were being held in Iran, and our country was tearing itself apart. Jimmy Carter, at the time of his re-election
campaign, was being counseled by his advisors, that he should go to war with
Iran. He was told by pollsters that this was by far the best course of action should
he seek to be re-elected. The American people would rally around him, as they
always rally around their Presidents in a time of war, and the surest path to
re-election was to declare Iran an enemy in battle.
Jimmy Carter resisted that temptation – he could
not bring himself to do so, because he felt a higher calling, which was to protect
the lives of the hostages. And so he was
elected out of office, and the hostages were released the day after his
successor’s inauguration.
Jimmy Carter went
through a dark season, in the aftermath of his political defeat. He didn’t know what to make of himself, he has
talked very openly about this. But he went on the establish the Carter Center, which
is dedicated to reconciliation in times of international conflict. And he dedicated himself to the organization
Habitat for Humanity, and has been personally involved, in one way or another,
in over 4000 house builds. He has continued to teach his weekly Bible Study at his Baptist Church in Plains.
Quite remarkably,
did you catch it a few years ago when he was diagnosed with a cancer of the
brain in 2015? He now appears to be in remission, but at the time the outcome was
by no means clear. I was so impressed by
the matter-of-factness with which he greeted this diagnosis. To one interviewer he said, “I am surprisingly at ease. I’ve led a very wonderful life,
an exciting, adventurous ... existence. So I am surprisingly at ease, much more
so than my wife … I’ll be prepared for anything that comes.”
Jimmy Carter is being refined, and I commend him to
you. Who knows how long he will live,
but pay attention! An American saint is
doing the disciplined, soul-stirring work our forebears called “preparing to
meet your maker."
*****
The other national figure I will lift to you today in fact died this
year. And I trust that you are also
familiar, in broad measure, with the biography of John McCain. A rebellious
youth, then a naval aviator, some five and half years a prisoner of war in Vietnam,
and he returned home with injuries so severe that he would never again be able
to comb his own hair. Elected to the Senate in 1987 and died in office just a
few months ago.
And at the time of his funeral, as people recounted the
highs and lows of John McCain’s life, one episode stood out more than any other
to me. It was McCain’s concession speech on the night in which he lost the presidential
election to Barack Obama in 2008.
As he came out to greet the campaign workers and the
large crowd who had dedicated themselves to his election, he said this:
“My friends, we have come to the end of a long journey.
The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly …”
And at this point, the crowd erupted in BOOS, and McCain
hushed them down.
“A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Sen.
Barack Obama …”
Again the crowd began to BOO and again McCain hushed
them down.
“… to congratulate him on being elected the next
president of the country that we both love.
In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has
been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance.
But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of
Americans, who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or
little influence in the election of an American president, is something I
deeply admire and commend him for achieving.
This is an historic election, and I recognize the
special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride
that must be theirs tonight …
Sen. Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and
for his country. I applaud him for it, and offer my sincere sympathy that his
beloved grandmother did not live to see this day — though our faith assures us
she is at rest in the presence of her Creator and so very proud of the good man
she helped raise.”
What a witness. What a testimony, of someone who fought
the fight to which he believed he had been called, but who, when defeated, did
not presume his to be a divine election.
*****
Elisabeth Cogdill, Houston Burnside, John McCain, Jimmy Carter, people like these are worthy
of our emulation, because through the trials and challenges of their vocations,
they have demonstrated humility, they have demonstrated patience, and they have
humbled themselves in a way that is befitting our Christian tradition.
So I want to encourage you this day, this All Saints Day, to seek to become refined yourself, whatever life may give you. The Apostle Paul put it this way:
“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is
noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is
lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or
praiseworthy — think about such things and the God of peace will be with you”
(Philippians 4:8).
We come to the communion table surrounded by a great
cloud of witnesses, and if we come in a proper and penitential posture, we,
too, will find, that we are being refined.
Amen.
Amen.
"On Being Refined"
Preached at First United Methodist Church of San Diego
Preached at First United Methodist Church of San Diego
November 4, 2018
Mark 12:28-32
Mark 12:28-32
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