Some
of you know that once a month or so I meet over lunch at B’nai Israel Jewish
Center over on Western Avenue with Rabbi Ted, and Mia, his associate, and two
or three other clergy from different faith communities on the West side of
Petaluma. We had our December gathering
on Thursday, and it was Rabbi Ted’s idea that we might open our meeting up this
time, and invite folks to join us from the wider community, to share our concerns
and our hopes about making Petaluma a place where all kinds of people can live
together in harmony. It wasn’t so long
ago that many of us assumed that this was a goal that most people share, but it
appears recent events in town and in the nation have shaken that confidence. Because people came out in response to our
invitation: from the synagogue and the Episcopal, and Unitarian, Methodist,
Lutheran, and Catholic churches; from the Islamic Center of Petaluma; from six
or seven different social service agencies and community organizations; from
the police department and the city council.
Rabbi
Ted emailed our little clergy group early in the week and offered to facilitate
the meeting, and we gave him the green light, and on Thursday it became clear
pretty quickly that we’d made the right decision. Not just because the meeting was his idea, or
because he was our host. And not just
because he is the most experienced spiritual leader among us. But also because of the moral authority he
had when he spoke of what it means to him and his congregation when people
start talking about of mass deportations, and registries of religious minorities,
and internment camps. And the moral authority with which he can tell
stories from the experience of his own community about attempted arson, and
breaking of windows, and swastikas painted on their building over the
years. And this helped us all put our
meeting in the right perspective—to feel the urgency of this moment, to be sure,
and the need for vigilance and initiative; but also to remember that the
struggle to learn to live together is nothing new. It has been going on for a long time, in
Petaluma and everywhere.
As
St. Paul is winding up his long instruction to the church at Rome, about how to
be a single faith community of Jews and Gentiles, with all the tensions that
entails, he tells them that even though it is not easy, they shouldn’t give up
hope. Because, he says, their being able
to live together in harmony, and give glory to God with one voice, is what the
mission of Messiah Jesus is all about.
It is what God sent Jesus to make possible. It required him to put the interests of
others before his own. So it wasn’t easy
for him either, to say the least, but he gave himself to the task with perfect
faithfulness because he loved us, and had hope that God would find a way.
And
here I think that if you read between the lines you can see that Paul might
also be talking about himself. This
isn’t one of those passages like you find elsewhere in Paul’s letters where he
holds himself up explicitly as an exemplar of imitating Christ, and talks about
all the hardships and suffering he has endured for the sake of the Gospel. But in all his letters Paul writes from the
heart of his own experience, and his own struggles and victories of faith are
never far from his mind. I think this is
one of those places where Paul is speaking of, and to, himself, as much as he
is speaking to his intended audience. So
when he says that the God who will help the Romans to live together in harmony
is the God of steadfastness and encouragement, he’s talking about the spiritual
consolation that has come to him and
helped him at times when his own hope was wearing thin.
Paul’s
encounter with the crucified and resurrected Jesus, a man he’d never met and
used to despise, somehow made him a leader in this unlikely mission; a mission
to create a new humanity, in which there is no longer male nor female, no
longer Jew nor Greek, no longer slave nor free.
This mission has cost him everything, and in particular it has cost him
his religion. Not that he has ceased to
be a Jew, or has converted to a different faith. But his experience of Christ tore down to the
foundations his understanding of what it meant to belong to the covenant people
of God, and to be an heir of the promises made to the patriarchs.
It
was only through the grace of God, and his faith in Jesus, and the signs he saw
of the Holy Spirit at work in the communities to which he was sent, that Paul
could gradually build his religion up again, according to a radically different
design. This was a long, painful process,
and it didn’t help that it made him an outcast and a blasphemer in the eyes of the
people he used to think of proudly as his own.
So if Paul speaks in the name of a God of steadfastness and
encouragement, it’s because he knows that he himself would not have made it
this far without that God.
And
Paul also gives the church in Rome a recommendation for where to turn to find the
encouragement and hope that they need.
It the same place he goes, which is to say the scriptures. He even gives a little demonstration, citing
some of his favorite Bible verses—the ones he knows by heart, and that he turns
to when he needs encouragement to remind him that he is not on some kind of
fool’s errand, but is doing the will of God.
Because the call that Christ has given him to
God’s universal mission of reconciliation is not entirely new. The prophets of the covenant, even as far
back as Abraham and Moses had pointed toward the true grandeur of Israel’s
vocation. But it was in Isaiah that this
vision came into full view. In
Isaiah we read that as punishment for Israel’s sins, God would permit foreign enemies
to come and slash the tree of the Israelite nation and the lineage of David, until
nothing but a root remained. But Isaiah
also promised that from that root a new shoot would come, to rule in the Spirit
of justice and wisdom. And those same
Gentile nations that once came to conquer and plunder, will come to learn the
way of Israel’s God, by which the whole creation will live together in peace.
Maybe
it’s just a coincidence, but we find similar imagery of trees and roots in the preaching
of John the Baptist. Like Isaiah’s,
John’s message is one of electrifying hope: “the kingdom of heaven is near.” But it also contains a warning. John warns the people not to presume that
belonging to some religious organization guarantees them a place in that
kingdom. Neither does being born into
any particular nation or tribe. He says “one
more powerful than I is coming after me.”
But the one who is coming brings a purifying fire. It’s a fire that will spread widely and
indiscriminately, giving life and power to men and women of every language, and
tribe, and family, and nation. It will inspire
them with the wisdom and will of God; but it will also burn up everything in
them that is not of God, everything inessential, or has outlived its usefulness—everything
that does not bear good fruit.
Each
week in church we follow Paul’s advice and turn to the scriptures for
encouragement. And every year at this
time, we go all the way back to that moment where the prophets of the Old
Testament open the door to the New, the time just before the story of Jesus
began. It’s time again to hear the voice
crying in the desert, telling us to turn our lives around because the kingdom
of heaven has come near. It is time to
come out of our churches and sects and to go down to the river to confess our
sins, to pray that God will cut down and sift out and burn away everything in
us that is fruitless. Now it is time to prepare
a way for the one comes to baptize us with Holy Spirit and fire. We go back to this time as if to clear away
all our assumptions and the things we take for granted, all the privileges and
prerogatives of being “Christian,” and strip our religion down to its
foundation: the radical hope that God will come and teach us, and all the
nations, how to live together in peace.
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