Homeland security

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
Psalm 14
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10

With the end of the Soviet Union, on Christmas Day, 1991, many in the world heaved a sigh of relief.   Here in the United States, it felt as though a great threat had been lifted, and there was hope that a new, peaceful, world might emerge.  The internet and the globalization of finance and commerce would tie everyone together, and we were going to lead the way.  Other nations would look to our expertise in business and technology; they would adopt our democratic institutions and norms.   Our military would intervene here and there as needed, to reign in the occasional dictator who got too big for his britches, or restore order where civil conflict raged out of control.  But we would have no rivals.  Here in North America, surrounded as always by our oceans, and friendly neighbors newly integrated with us into a single market, we would prosper and live without fear, at least where foreign enemies were concerned. 

This was the dream that came to an end on September 11^th, 2001.  On that day a new word rose the top of the lexicon of American political speech, the word “homeland.” Though the word itself wasn’t new, national leaders started saying it frequently, and using it in a different kind of way.  And every time we heard it, it was a reminder of the fear of that terrifying day.  Because even if we did not lose friends or family members on September 11, many of us lost something else.  We lost the belief that massive political violence against innocent civilians was something that could only happen far away.  Even those of us who lived relatively secure lives, and generally felt protected in our homes, and workplaces, and the streets of our towns, lost our sense of invulnerability.  

I was one of those people.  I was eating breakfast in the kitchen of the apartment I had just moved into with Meg in Emeryville, when the radio said that hijacked planes had hit the Towers and the Pentagon.  And I felt an great sense of dread.  I didn’t know what it would mean for the future, but I knew that it wouldn’t be good.  Like someone in a dream, I put my tools in the truck and drove off to a gardening job, but at lunch I had to quit and go home with flu-like symptoms.  The news had literally made me sick. 

The human body and spirit are resilient, and I got better in a couple of days.  But it’s hard to say that collectively we’ve made a full recovery.  After fifteen years of “War on Terror”, we still feel vulnerable than ever, and it’s clear that Muslim extremism is not the only threat: economic anemia, simmering racial tension, and egregious inequality, rampant gun violence, and the unmistakable onset of climate change call us to profound soul-searching about what it really takes to make a homeland, let alone a world, that is truly secure.

It’s a spiritual crisis, not unlike the one that Jeremiah talked about in the 7^th century BCE.  The mighty Assyrian Empire had long ago dismembered the northern kingdom of Israel, but the southern kingdom of Judah remained defiant.  Although the Assyrian army invaded Judah twice, it failed both times to capture Jerusalem.   And then, quite unexpectedly, over a few short years in the 620s and 610s, the power of Assyria melted away.  Suddenly Judah enjoyed a degree of national independence it had not known for over a hundred years.  Her kings took back some territory, the priests and scribes made some religious reforms, and the court prophets began to say that the tide of history had turned, that Israel’s God was pleased with her again, and the peace and security of the days of David and Solomon would return.

But Jeremiah saw something different.  He saw that the modest religious reforms had not brought the nation back to its covenant with God.  They did not cease practices, like human sacrifice, derived from foreign cults.  He saw that the people did not carry out the social justice commanded in the law.  Jeremiah cried out in pain and anger at the apostasy of Judah, and said it was the pain and the anger of God.  Far from thinking that God was about to restore Israel’s greatness, he saw a wave of destruction coming from the north.   

Jeremiah lamented for his poor people, because God had already made a judgment against them that could not be revoked.  And in Jeremiah’s vision, the consequence of Judah’s evil doings would be worse than military defeat.  It will be worse than the loss of the homeland.  “I looked on the earth,” he says, “and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.”  This is a vision of the undoing of the creation of the world.

History proved Jeremiah right about destruction from the north.  A new empire rose out of the ruins of Assyria, and in a few short years that empire would take Jerusalem, destroy the temple of Solomon, and carry the last king of David’s line away in chains to Babylon.  And in the loss and trauma of exile the prophets and sages of Israel began to re-think what it would mean to come home.  Some Jews would indeed eventually go back and repair the walls of the holy city, and build a second temple, bigger than the first.  But the hope of restoring Israel as a national entity would from then on always be in tension with hope of a different kind. 

This new hope sprang from a vision of renewal, not merely of Jerusalem, but of the whole of creation.  Israel began to receive a new vocation for herself, that of leading all humanity home.  Cut off from their land, they found that in repentance and prayer, in justice, compassion, and love they could still take life from the spirit of God.   And in that spirit they found the grace not just to maintain their faith, and survive as a community—they found the source of true security, abundance, and peace.  

  

Every Sunday in church we have an altar call.  It is not an invitation to individuals to come forward and confess their personal sinfulness and need to be saved.   It’s not a celebration of individual repentance and return to the community of God’s elect.  At least, that’s not the main focus.  What we do is invite everyone to come to the altar together.  After we all confess our sinfulness together, we gather at the altar in thanksgiving for what God has done for all of us to bring us home. 

This celebration continues the feasting that Jesus did, when he came to seek the lost sheep of Israel, and sat at table with tax collectors and sinners.  Nowhere in the gospels does it say how many of those sinners changed their ways.  From scattered hints we know that many of them did, but as Jesus himself says, even one is enough to make the angels in heaven rejoice.  And that is what our celebration is about: that God cares enough about that one lost sheep to send Jesus to go and find it.  That one lost coin matters enough to God to light the lamp, and sweep the house, and look under the sofa cushions until she finds it.

Jesus calls us sinners all together for a feast to celebrate the love of that God, and this inclusivity leaves it open for each of us to ask ourselves “am I that one?” “Am I the one for whom Jesus left the other ninety-nine behind to come and find?  Am I the one he is carrying home on his shoulders?”  But it also means we can look at the sinner beside us at the altar rail and wonder, “or is it him?”  “Is she the one?”  That open possibility is what makes this feast a sign of the Kingdom of God. 

Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like a great net thrown into the sea, that catches every kind of fish, the good and the bad.  It is like a field of wheat, in which someone came and sowed some noxious weeds, and the weeds grew up with the wheat so there was no way to pull them out.  And this makes God’s Kingdom a mixed-up kind of homeland, a place where we have to be vulnerable.  It’s not a place we can hunker down behind the walls of our judgements of others, or an exclusive club, where only the people who think and act and look like us belong.  It’s a place where security and health are gifts of the spirit of repentance and forgiveness, the spirit of always being able to begin again.    

            

Following the voice

Acts 9:36-43
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30

Thursday night, or Friday morning, depending on how you look at it, I was awakened by the telephone.  I had been fast asleep and for a disoriented moment I thought it was the alarm.  I didn’t get to the phone in time to answer it, and when I did I saw that it was 2:18 A.M.  I was hoping someone had misdialed but then I saw that I had a new voice message.  So I called the voicemail number and entered my password, with a sense of dread about what that message was going to say.

Well, it turned out that the news wasn’t that bad.  A young woman named Samantha, taking her ailing mother home to Oregon from Southern California, had spent all her money on car repairs and couldn’t go any further that night.  She said her mother was an Episcopalian and they had called St. John’s and gotten my number from the recorded greeting.  They had looked all over town for a vacant motel room and had finally found one, and they wanted to know if I could pay for it.  Some of you may not know this, but the members of St. John’s provide a Discretionary Fund for me to use to assist people in need, so I called her back, and agreed to meet her at a motel next to the freeway at the north end of town.

I’d been reading the gospel lesson for today before I went to bed that night, and as I drove up the on-ramp I thought of what Jesus says about his sheep, and how they hear his voice, and follow him.  And it struck me that this is what that looks like.  There are a lot of reasons why we have an institution called St. John’s Episcopal Church, with an office and a telephone and an answering machine.  There are a lot of reasons why we have a pastor, and a discretionary fund.  But one of the reasons is surely so that when somebody is out on the road in the middle of the night far from home, they can know the presence of the Good Shepherd in a concrete, tangible way.    

And maybe it was just because it was the middle of the night and my mind wasn’t functioning normally, but I felt joyful in that moment and grateful for the privilege of being the one to represent you like that.   Not because I was standing in for Jesus, but because I was one of his sheep.  When that call came at 2:18 in the morning it was the Good Shepherd on the other end of the line.  And I was the one chosen, in that moment, to hear his voice and to follow him.   

Jesus talks about a relationship in which the Shepherd is just as vulnerable as the sheep.  The sheep hear the voice of the Shepherd and they respond to it with trust and obedience.  But the Shepherd also lives by trust and obedience in relation to the one he calls Father.  And that is what makes the Shepherd trustworthy and good.  That is why the sheep listen to his voice and follow him, even when it means waking up at 2:18 in the morning.  That is why they follow his voice even when it means rushing toward the site of a bombing, when there has been a second bomb, and might be third.  That is why they follow his voice even into a burning fertilizer factory filled with ammonia. 

The Good Shepherd shows the sheep the goodness of the Father, whose mind no one knows, and whose face no one can see.  And sometimes that doesn’t feel like enough.  Sometimes we are like those who surround Jesus in the temple and ask, “How long will you keep us in suspense? Tell us now!”  Sometimes we don’t want to live in vulnerability.  Sometimes we don’t want a relationship of trust and obedience.  Sometimes we get tired of listening and following.  We want the complete picture, to have the last word, so we can be in control from here on out, so we can be our own shepherds.

But that urgent demand to have everything settled, that unwillingness to wait any longer for one’s own truth to be vindicated, is what leads to political violence.  When people start to say things like, “The time for talk is past.  We don’t want to hear the other side of the issue,” and “We can’t wait any longer, and will do whatever it takes to get our point across,” then watch out, because you know what’s coming—the missiles are about to fly; the death squads are putting on their hoods; the torturers are getting out their tools; someone is packing nails and ball-bearings into a pressure-cooker.

 But when people are willing to kill innocents, it’s because the cause they are fighting for is already marked for death.  Even if it is a power that stands astride the world, if you know where to look, you can already see the cracks in the foundation.  If you listen closely you can hear the wailing of the mourners, and catch the faint whiff of decay.  The setting of today’s gospel story is the Jerusalem temple, at the annual feast of the Dedication of the temple itself.  The temple was the cornerstone of political and economic, as well as religious, order in the Palestine of Jesus’ day.  And as near as we can tell, challenging the legitimacy of the temple was Jesus’ capital crime.  His enemies had him killed in order to protect the temple.   But by the time the Gospel of John was written, the temple was a blackened pile of fallen stones.

The truth that is so urgent that people are willing to kill for it is a hollow truth.  It bears the mark of death on its heart.  But the Good Shepherd speaks with a different kind of urgency, the urgent love of life.  It is the urgency of Peter rushing off to Joppa to pray for the life of the widow Tabitha.  It doesn’t need to know the final answer, or to force events to a final crisis.  It only seeks to hear the trusted voice, the one that knows who we are, telling us what to do next.  Even amidst the pressing demands of the moment, the sheep of the Good Shepherd walks in peace.  It is the peace of knowing that it is enough to hear his voice and to follow, because the Good Shepherd is one with the Father, who is the indestructible Lord of Life. 

Sometimes we might wish the voice had led us on a different path.  There are times when our pasture doesn’t feel particularly important, or glamorous or rewarding.  Maybe it’s kind of scrubby, and a little dry.  Maybe we have to walk a long way to get to the place where the cool water flows.  Maybe the howls of the wolves at night sound a little too close for comfort.  But if we learn to listen for the voice of the shepherd, I think we’ll discover that even our sheepish lives have about them a certain kind of urgency. 

We may not be called to help the victims of a terrorist bombing, but the world is not short of victims.  We may not be sent to apprehend a pair of armed and dangerous fugitives, but there are angry people everywhere.  We may not be summoned to raise someone from the dead, but there are people all around us who need a prayer and a touch and an invitation to rise.  And none of the people who did those heroic things thought they would have to do them until the moment came and the voice spoke that said “follow.”

And they did follow, and in some cases in cost them everything.  But if we were to say they were mistaken, we would be drawing the wrong conclusion.  Because in a world marked for death only one thing is certain.  Only one thing is guaranteed.  It is that God knows us and loves us and holds us in the hand of indestructible life.  That is all the Good Shepherd needed to know.  He placed himself completely in the power of that hand, and it led him to lay down his life for his friends.  But it also gave him the power to take it up again, a power that he gives to us moment by moment, day by day.  Do you hear his voice?