In the last week, 381 people have been arrested at a sit-in in front of the White House. The two-week protest, which has been interrupted by Hurricane Irene, is to urge the President to block the construction of a 2,000 mile pipeline that would bring an oily slurry from the Tar Sands of Alberta to refineries in Texas. The demonstrators are opposed to the pipeline because its route passes through many ecologically-sensitive areas, and because of the destructive nature of the Tar Sands project itself, the largest industrial project in human history, which has strip-mined hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin forest and poisoned millions of acre-feet of fresh water. But their most serious concern is the impact of the project on the global climate. Tar Sands oil is one of the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, producing up to 20% more greenhouse gases than conventional crude oil. Proceeding with the extraction and consumption of this resource, warns Dr. James Hansen, the nation’s leading atmospheric scientist, means “game over” for any hope of stabilizing the earth’s climate.
And so people have been going to the White House to make a statement and risk arrest. Sometimes it happens that a need, an injustice, a threat to peace and order will take hold of our conscience and we realize that it is up to us to do something. Sometimes the proper channels, the approved grievance procedures are not enough. Sometimes we have to show up right where it’s happening and say, “this has to stop.” Bill McKibben, an author and professor and Methodist Sunday school teacher from Vermont, is a spokesperson for the organizers of the sit-in. In an interview after his release from prison on Monday, he described the political power and vast wealth of the interests lobbying for the construction of this pipeline. “We don’t have the money to compete with those guys,” McKibben said. “All we have, the only alternative currency we have, is our bodies. And that’s what we’re using.”
When Moses meets God in the burning bush, God tells him “I have heard the cry of the Israelites and seen how the Egyptians’ oppress them. I have come down to deliver them and to bring them out of that land.” That sounds pretty good to Moses. Moses knows all about that oppression, he cares deeply about it. He’s even killed a man trying to do something about it, which is why he’s on the lam out there in the desert. But then God tells Moses, “Now you go do it.” God’s wants to get involved in the Israelites situation, but it is Moses who has to go there, to stand before Pharaoh and do the talking. No wonder Moses protests.
And no wonder Peter protests when Jesus starts talking about going to Jerusalem. Peter is probably all for going to Jerusalem, but not yet. Not until they’ve gathered an army and trained themselves to fight. Not with nothing but their bodies. Not in order to die. Peter also probably wasn’t thinking about going to Jerusalem to confront the chief priests and the elders and the scribes of his people. He was probably thinking about the foreign occupiers, the real oppressors, the Romans, about how to throw them out, and of course he was thinking about how to do that and still be around when it was done, to mete out rough justice and settle old scores.
But Jesus was thinking about something else. He was thinking about Israel and Israel’s God. He was thinking about the Father in heaven whose children are the peace-makers. He was thinking about the kingdom of heaven, and how it belongs to the poor in spirit. He was thinking about the law and the prophets, and the light to the nations and the city on a hill. And he was thinking about the temple in Jerusalem, and how the worship of God had been reduced to an endless butchery of animals, and rigid enforcement of the rules of ritual purity. He was thinking of the elites in charge of the temple system and how they’d twisted a religion of justice and compassion into one of exclusion and control. He was thinking of how they collaborated with the Romans one moment and plotted violent insurrection against them the next, always seeking their own advantage, only concerned with their own survival.
Sometimes you have to go there yourself. Sometimes you have to go right there where it’s happening and do something to show that it’s not okay with you. Sometimes all you have to use is your body. We are so used to thinking of Jesus’ willing journey to death as a metaphysical bargain between him and God, that we have a hard time seeing it as a human choice, as an ethical response to a historical problem. But today’s story from Matthew reminds us that whatever spiritual benefit may come to us through Christ’s passion, it’s not something he did so that we wouldn’t have to do anything. He went to Jerusalem to carry his cross so that we would know how to carry ours.
But he also knew from the start that on the other side was resurrection. This is extremely important for us to remember. Because Jesus didn’t go to his death because he hated life, or found that the world wasn’t worth staying in. He went out of desire for real life, life in its fullness, which is getting involved in the love, compassion, and justice that are the life of God. "The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet," wrote Frederick Buechner. The mainspring of faithful action in the world is not duty, or guilt, but our joy in being alive. This joy that is not taken away from us when we allow ourselves to be summoned into the places of injustice, suffering, and need, because it is the joy of giving from an inexhaustible source. The teaching of Jesus is that we don’t really know how abundant that source is unless we are freely and joyfully willing to give away that little bit that we think of as ours. To put it another way, you don’t really know what it means to love life if there’s nothing you’re willing to die for.
The last time there was any kind of consensus in this country about what is worth dying for was in the fight against Fascism. We are proud to acknowledge the greatness of the generation that rose up to meet that challenge. But that was 70 years ago, and now there are threats to the survival of our country and our civilization more dangerous than Fascism. They’re not so easy to see, or so easy to defeat. Their causes are complex and it doesn’t help that one of the main causes is the way we all live every day, just going around minding our own business. It also doesn’t help that the crisis is slow in slow in coming. James Hansen first warned the U.S. about the danger of global warming in 1988, and yet people of my age or a little older might still be able to live out our days believing that he and 98 out of 100 of the world’s climate scientists are wrong. We might be able to keep pretending that all the huge wildfires and epic droughts, the killer heat spells and hurricanes and floods and tornados are a run of bad luck, and soon life will return to normal. But our children and grandchildren won’t have that luxury.
So we’ll just have to do what needs to be done, because we love our children, and we want to leave them a world that still has more beauty in it than dread. We want them to have a chance at something more than a grim and relentless struggle for survival. We want them to be able to choose self-sacrifice from the nobility of their souls, not have it forced on them by iron necessity. We love life, we have faith in the God of life, and his power to renew life and redeem it from fear, from selfish grasping, from death in all its guises. So we’ll pick up this cross, and I think we’ll find it’s really no heavier than the ones our ancestors had to bear.
We’ll go to where the world’s deep need calls us, now that it is the need of the world herself for our care and concern. Now we find that we must care for our mother earth as she has cared for us since life began, and there I think we will find a deep gladness, one so deep we scarcely have a language to describe it. We’ll follow the call of Christ to where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger, and there we’ll begin to gather up the shattered pieces of the kingdom.
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