RESCAN

1983-01-01·Sermon

ANGELS WE HAVE HEARD ON HIGH John M. Buchanan

Luke 211-20 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
December 25, 1983 Columbus, Chico

"Are we going to have church on Christmas Day?" it is a question I was asked
frequently during the past several weeks by all sorts and conditions of humanity:
by those whose attendance is seasonal at best ard for whom the concurrence of
Christmas Day and Sunday presents a kind of ecclesiastical double whammy: by
the regular church-goer who has been at least once and frequently twice on each
Sunday in Advent, with the Bach Oratorio last week and the Candlelight Service
last night thrown in for good measure, and for whom going to church this morning
feels ike the fourteenth inning of a baseball game that should have ended an hour
earlier - i.e, the activity is still wonderful but enough, after all, is enough. It has
been asked by both youngsters and their parents who disliked even contemplating
an interruption of the morning festivities around the tree and who have taken with
the proverbial grain of salt my well-intentioned suggestions that a late morning
break from the action might even make the day more interesting. And with just
as much skepticism as we used to feel when told that the castor oil would do wonders
for us if it didn't kill us on the way down. And in fairness the question has been
posed by members of my own household who I do not ordinarily like to quote, but
who, in this instance, probably spoke for many with the tough but realistic ~ “Well
all right, but you're not going ta preach are you?"

The news, as is usually the case, is both good and bad. The bad news is that
I'm going to preach; the good news is - net for long.

As a matter of fact some of the reluctance inherent in the questions about
whether we should even be here is well founded. No less an authority than John
Calvin - Il am sure you ave tired of hearing preachers tell you ~ said that the creeds
of the church should be sung, not said. What he meant is that music is a far better
medium in which to express the essentials of faith than rational discourse, Every
preacher knows exactly what that means and so, I believe, do people who listen
to sermons. The fanciest homily on the incarnation doesn't approach, in terms
of truth and beauty and power, a simple verse of "Silent Night, Holy Night.”

I found an essay the late Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1933 - reprinted in an
anniversary edition of the Christian Century last fall. The title, "A Christmas
Service in Retrospect," Neibuhr wrote:

"Y went to church in the cathedral on Christmas Day. It is one of the
few days of the year on which I am able to attend church without preach-
ing myself. On that day I prefer a Hturgical church with as little sermon
as possible. It's not that 1 don't like to hear anyone but myself preach.
I merely dislike most Christmas...sermons, Only poets can do it justice...”

Those who protest muc’ preaching on this day, therefore, are in very good
company. Something of th. poetry and beauty is lost when we become too cerebral
about it, And some ui the plainness and ordinariness gets lost when we encase
it in too much theoioyy,

OP ye
ce

~2-

The meeting between young Mary and her elderly cousin Elizabeth is a highly
stylized encounter, painted thousands of times, memorialized in the heavenly beauty
of J. 5. Bach's "Magnificat." Mary's hymn ~ "My soul magnifies the Lord" is one
of four interesting canticles in the opening section of Luke's Gespel, And many
believe that it was used liturgically by the early church,

It is beautiful poetry and it contains a clear expression of the remarkable
idea of God's passion, God's partisanship, The birth of Mary's son is presented in
a way that seems to advocate the cause of the downtrodden. You don't have to
read between the Hnes: there is no attempt to disguise the partisanship. With talk
like "scattering the proud and pulling the mighty from their thrones" in the air
it was no wonder King Herod was interested in eliminating the baby as quickly
as possible.

One way to deal with this perplexing and disturbing hymn is to transpose
Hterally, to see the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the vehicle of social upheaval and
revolution, And, in fact, the downtrodden, the poor, the oppressed have always
read themselves in this text. It is no accident that the Virgin Mary is adored and
venerated with extraordinary passion in countries where poverty and political oppres-
sion are the norm. You can't read the Bible, after all, from the perspective of
@ Foor person and not be interested at least in a day when "the hungry are filled
and the rich are sent empty away.” You can't hear these words from the perspective
of a political prisoner - Lech Walesa for instance - and not be interested in a day
when the mighty are pulled from their thrones. I have been told that there are
places in Central and South America where to read Luke 1:38-56 is regarded as
a subversive act. And it doesn't take much imagination to feel and understand
what the Magnificat means to the El Salvadorian peasant, absolutely poor, powerless,

working a plot of ground owned by a land lord who now Hves in a condominium |

in Miami Beach, whose acn has been murdered by government troops, trained in
the United States. You and I have to work at it, and it is not easy for us, but we
must understand that this Advent text means something altogether different when
it is heard in the context of Third World poverty and political oppression,

Much of the theology being written teday makes us uncomfortable, [t is called
Liberation Theology. Sometimes it sounds like Marxism. Sometimes that is what
it is. And sometimes it is the honest attempt of faithful Christian people to bring
the Gospel of Jesus Christ into dialogue with a culture characterized by injustice,
grinding poverty and hopelessnesa7A The government of El Salvader, to which we
are heavily committed, either cannot stop, or does not wish to stop the wanton,
systematic slaughter of its own people by Right Wing death squads: 20,000-30,000,
including priests, Archbishop Oscar Romero, American Aid officials, labor organizers,
people who attend the wrong meetings, talk to the wrong people, and, of course
four American nuns, When the relatives of the 36,000 victims hear the Magnificat,
they don’t need help identifying the proud, the mighty. And what we can't seem
to understand is that to those peopie socialism, Marxism if they know or even care
about them, aré mot threatening ideas, but appear to he hopeful alternatives to
being murdered. * The tragedy, the continuing tragedy is that we who know best
about human dignity and freedom have simply conceded the struggle for the hearts
of people to the Marxists in far too many places.

Kl Gul ih

We must listen, We must try to understand what is happening in Chile, Argen-
tina, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, One of the Liberation Theologians
Jose Miguez Bonino, an Argentine, put it this way: "God has chosen sides- he has
chosen to liberate the poor by delivering them from their misery and marginality,
and to liberate the rich by bringing them down from their thrones." Bonino makes

me very uncomfortable. He is a Marxist. He is also a Christian, {Theologians
in Transition, p. 172)

Now four observations:

One ~ We don't have to agree with that, but in that we're all starting from the same
text it would be foolish not to listen to it, to pretend that it isn't there.

Two - “We can't resign from the middle class." Harvey Cox, a Harvard Professor,
said that, by the way. Cox rather likes Liberation Theology but is honest enough
to acknowledge that he is who he is, namely a comfortable teacher at a very comfor
table institution,

Three ~ The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not a "Five Year Plan for Redistributing the
Wealth." It is not about economics essentially, but about humanity in dialogue
with God. It is not simply spiritual - nor is it simply political.

Four - What the Gospel will do, if we bring anything more than superficial interest
to it, is force us to be honest about ourselves and to identify some of the myths,
the half truths, by which we are living. nt ene ee pee
When that honest self examination happens we usually discover that we're
not as comfortable, at ease, well off, as we like to think we are, Left to cur awn
devices we don't ordinarily come to these conclusions: It's the artists, the poets,
the writers, who keep raising the issue, questioning our myths. The Wasteland,
T, S. Ehot called our culture. Erich Fromm, in the classic The Art of Loving wrote
"Happiness today consists in ‘having fun.' 'Having fun,’ lies in the satisfaction of
consuming.-.The world is cne great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle,
we are the eternally hopeful ones - and the eternally disappointed ones." (p. 73)
Gertrude Stein said it with tongue in cheek, "When we get there there is no there
there.” One wonders if the parents who have engaged in physical battle in the aisles
of toy departments all over the country to buy thelr children a Cabbage Patch
doll find that “there is no there there when you get there." In her memoirs, Simone
de Beauvoir wrote "I think with sadness of all the books I have read, all the places
Thave seen, all the knowledge I've amassed. The promises have all been kept. And
yet I realize with stupor how much I was gypped.” (Hans Kung, Does God Exist?,
p. 693) And John Steinbeck whose nevel The Winter of our Discontent was presented
on television last week, wrote about the emptiness and dryness of the American
dream of riches and power and security.

i. eek be else

Mary's hymn contains God's word to us because you can't receive a gift unless
you have some room in your life for the gift, can be pleased and delighted with
the gift, in a sense need what the gift represents. If you already have it all, the
exchange will be only as significant as the flower the little girl gives to the visiting
dignitary who, in one motion, receives, smiles, says a polite "thank you” and hands
it over to an attendant whose job it is to carry the unneeded gifts. You can't educate
someone who already knows it all. The miracle of learning happens somewhere
close to the acknowledgement of ignorance. In fact, a good education is always
at least in part a humble acknowledgement of the existence of beauty and truth
bigger than one which I do not own and can never fully own, and which I will always
need. You can't love someone so full of herself or himself that there is no need
for love to touch and no emptiness for love to fill.

"I heard Alice gasp and she poked me, ‘I don't think it's very nice
to burp the baby Jesus,’ she whispered, 'as if he had colic.' Then she
poked me again. 'Do you suppose he could have had colic?’

"I said, 'l don't know why not,’ and I didn't. He could have had colic,
or been fussy, or hungry like any other baby. After all, that was the
whole point of Jesus - that he didn't come down on a cloud like something
out of ‘Amazing Comics,’ but that he was born and lived.,.a real person."

The other is from A Christmas Memory, a gem of a short story by Truman
Capote ~ which does for me what an angel is supposed to do,

1 was introduced to it by a member of this congregation who shares it with
others each year. In it Capote reflects on the Christmas observances in a large
and eccentric and poor Southern household. The story is told from the perspective
~ and memory - of a seven year old boy. It involves his 63 year old cousin, referred
to as "my friend": “...a woman with shorn white hair, wearing tennis shoes and
a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress." The women is mentally
a young child. The two make fruitcakes together, collecting the pecans, shelling
them, pooling meager resources to purchase the precious ingredients, including
a frightening trip to a sinful “fish-fry and dancing cafe" for a quart of whiskey.
The fruitcakes will be sent to an interesting gift list which includes President Roose~
velt, the Baptist missionaries in Borneo and Abner Packer, driver of the six o'clock
bus to Mobile,

Christmas is modest enough for the two friends: each receives an assortment
of small gifts, hand-me-down clothing, a subscription to a religious magazine. For
years they have made and given each other kites. On Christmas Day, after the
gifts have been opened, off they go for a private celebration, flying the kites.

*The wind is blowing, and nothing will do till we've run to a pasture
below the house where Queenie has scocted to bury her bone (and where,
a winter hence, Queenie will be buried, too). There, plunging through
the healthy waist~high grass, we unreel our kites, feel them twitching
at the string Hke sky fish as they swim into the wind. Satisfied, sun-
warmed, we sprawl in the grass and peel Satsumas and watch our kites
cavort. Soon I forget the socks and hand-me-down sweater. I'm as
happy as if we'd already won the fifty-thousand-dollar Grand Prize
in that coffee-naming contest.

“My, how foolish I am! my friend cries, suddenly alert, Hike a woman
remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. 'You know what
I've always thought?’ she asks in a tone of discovery, and not smiling
at me but a point beyond. ‘I’ve always thought a body would have to
be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when
He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored
glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don't know it's getting
dark. And it's been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all
the spooky feeling. But Q"ll wager it never happens. [ll wager at the
very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That
things as they are’ - her hands circles in a gesture that gathers clouds
and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone ~ ‘just what
they've always seen, was seeing Him, As for me, I could leave the world
with teday in my eyes,"

me very uncomfortable. He is a Marxist. He is also a Christian, {Theologians
in Transition, p. 172)

Now four observations:

One ~ We don't have to agree with that, but in that we're all starting from the same
text it would be foolish not to listen to it, to pretend that it isn't there.

i. eek be else

~2-

working a plot of ground owned by a land lord who now Hves in a condominium |

Kl Gul ih

-2-

Christian hope is an Advent theme and it is predicated on a doctrine which
was forged in one of the bleakest parts of the Christian story ~ the time after Jesus,
the first generation of the church. Christians were being persecuted intensely.
They were powerless in the face of the Roman authorities. They were nothing
but a nuisance the empire had decided to eliminate. And so when they gathered
to contemplate their own grimly apocalyptic future, they recalled the ancient Jewish
promise of the Day of the Lord, the restoration of the Davidic monarchy when
the king would return. And they recalled the words of Jesus about the kingdom
of God coming in the world: and they articulated a doctrine about the second coming
of Christ on the clouds which shortly became a problem for them and which has
confused Christian people ever since,

When interpreted literally the image of the second coming they left for us
has stimulated countless folk to gell all their belongings and stand around waiting
for the end of the world. They were doing it in Thessalonica and some folks are
still doing it. The fact that the end didn't come - didn't come as even Jesus said
it would, caused the writer of the fourth Gospel, for instance, to suggest that Jesus
Christ has already come again: that there is a second coming whenever God's spirit
is at work in the human enterprise,

Now because of the excesses of the Hteralists who are waiting for the end
of the world, we don't pay much attention to the doctrine. And that's too bad because
it is where the hope in Christianity is located: not that Jesus is going to descend
on clouds and gather all the folk who belong to the right church and consign the
rest of us to hell, but that Jesus Christ will keep showing up ~ will not abandon
human history ~ but will keep appearing as a hopeful, redemptive possibility: an
energy, if you will, an impetus in the direction opposite from the way things are
going, the direction of healing, and reconciliation and hope.

What it means today is importants; namely that we can count on a redemptive
possibility in even the darkest valleys. Sometimes we may not like the farm it
takes. Sometimes we may not recognize it. We may deplore the methods of the
protestors - but they raise the issue of Hfe and hope for us. We can't expect God
to intervene to save the human race, but we can look for Ged in the frustrations
and impatience and deep love of good people who are saying to one another now,
“let's get together and talk about this" instead of quaking in terror, people who
gathered in churches and townhalls and schocls last Monday to share their deep
concern for their country and the whole human race.

God will break in, Christ will come again and it will be personal. One of
my favorite writers Frederick Buechner said in an interview recently, "Listen to
what's happening in your own life...to experiences that somehow, even if you can't
say hew ~ seem either to illumine, or to be Wlumined by, religious truth. Pay special
attention to those times when you find tears in your eyes, even if you don't know
why the tears es there. Listen to your life." (Christian Century, 1/83)
aed suppose the most common, nearly universal response to Advent is a kind
of surprise, This year is no exception: "Don't tell me it's here already! Why it
was just Labor Day." We're not ready and that's just the point. We never are. and
one of the reasons is that the very event which documents our hope in history -
the birth of Jesus - has become such a warmly sentimental holiday: all nostalgia
and focusing on the past. The thrust you see, is meant to be the future.

~2e

Sometimes bread is more than bread. Thus, the traditional Jewish prayer,
even more ancient than the Celtic: “Blessed art thou, O Lord, our God, King of
the world, who bringest forth bread from the earth."

Sometimes bread is more than bread. Sometimes, most times, it is quintessen-
tially the food we need to live. (Tet me tell you more about bread than you probably
wished to know. It's production fas consumed most of the attention of most of
the people who ever Hved. Bread represents civilization, Wandering, nomadic
people don't eat much bread. Manna in the wilderness is a great, life-giving miracle,
because you don't have the capacity to produce bread if you're on the road the
better part of forty years. Anthropologically speaking, the manna the children
of Israel ate in the wilderness was a lab exercise in the kind of life they could lead
in the promised land if they promised to settle down and plow some fields instead
of wandering around the desert, living in tents. Bread means civilization,

There were bakers in wealthy households in the ancient world and they were
good at their art: they experimented with ingredients, baking methods, shapes
and sizes. But for the vast majority of households in the ancient world, baking
bread was what you did, most of the day, every day, day in and day out, as long
as you lived.

The dceugh was made from wheat flour and water, supplemented by whatever
other cereal meal was available. In Canaan the people learned to crumble and
knead a piece of yesterday's bread to provide leavening. Baking could be as simple
as a heated rock and the flat round cake covered with hot ashes, or as sophisticated
as a kind of convection oven made of an inverted earthen jar. The loaf was ordinarily
an 18 inch disk, like a small pizza, Three per day ~ was the basic diet. One of its
major functions, from the beginning, was to convey other food into the mouth,
an edible utensil, a practice we have all seen our youngsters try on occasion.

Even in antiquity bread is celebrated for its power as a symbol. The Old
Testament employs a variety of images - the bread of idleness, bread of deceit,
bread of tears, breads of adversity. And then, one time, one of them drew all of
that meaning together and gave the world something it has never yet been able
to stop pondering. Jesus said: "I am the bread of Hfe; he who comes to me shall
net hunger.”

He had fed a large crowd of people with a few loaves of bread and a few
fish, The next day part of that same crowd had followed him. They became uncom-
fortable when he wondered out loud about theix motives. For their part, they re-
vealed those motives clearly and impatiently by saying: "What work do you perform?
Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, He gave them bread from heaven,"
Translate that: "How about some more of that bread, Jesus?" And he said, ",..the
bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives Hfe to the world."
And they said, "Lord, give us this bread always," and he said, "I am the bread of
life,"

it is not accurate to conclude from this that Jesus didn't care about bread
which is bread. After all, he had provided a substantial meal the day before. And
I believe, only someone who knows about and loves the look and smell and touch
and feel and taste of good bread, has the ability to use it as a metaphor for something
else. My guess is that the one who called himself the bread of Hfe, knew and loved
and was something of an expert on that less august bread which fills the air with
its bouquet, and the sight of which is an insistent reminder fo the needs of the
flesh which, on measure, are among the creator's better ideas.

A faith that is powerfully life-giving and life-affirming is expressed not so
much in acts of private piety but in personal acts of courage when we take a stand
for life: when for instance cur political and economic positions are corrected by
our faith and mot vice versa and we take a strong stand, get involved, give of ow
selves. The PBS special "Chemical People” was essentially asking concerned folks
to love and affirm life enough to get invovled in combatting the epidemic the deadly
epidemic - of alcohol and drug abuse among the young. To take a stand for life
in your community might mean doing that, getting involved in ome of the many
follow-up ventures here in Franklin County. Or it might mean asking elementary
questions about how poor people are fed and housed in our community; and affirming
life by working for justice and fairness and compassion. To make a faith commitment
~ on the side of Hfe in our city might mean learning about the facts ~- not the stereo~
types ~ but the truth about the system of public welfare and food stamps and utility
bills, and how many people will be without heat this winter; or about health care
and the plight of the elderiy poor,

And it might mean looking clearly and carefully at our own lives and focussing
on the opportunities each of us has every day, even within the context of our relation-
ships with spouses, children, friends, colleagues, to "move out of death to life by
loving..." That is the highest order of business for the church: to be the place
where God's love in Jesus Christ is so fully experienced and expressed between
people that they know, now and then, what it means to move from death to life,

it is not simple and it certainly is not easy. As a matter of fact love is very
risky business. C. S, Lewis said that beautifully in a paragraph I'm tempted to
read at every matriage: “Love anything," he wrote, "and your heart may be broken..."
But the alternative, namely to risk nothing by loving scunds strikingly Hke death
in the midst of life.

Rebert erd interviewed recently about his non-profit Film Lab in the
mountains of Uiah, where he spends most of his time, said: “Do you know what
I learned from Utah, from living my life as I have? That you only keep things if
you're willing to take risks - that you should make the best use you can of places
and time, because with a certain success, a certain refinement in your life, you
lose the very thing you started with, or you think you stand to lose it because the
stakes are so high...so you try nothing new." (New York Times Magazine, 10/1/83)

lose eee love — suffer nothing.” And from the beginning it has been
confronted by its diametric opposite - a Gospel about a God who loves so much
that he gives an only son ~ who lays down his life in love. In philosophic terms
and in the most personal, life centered terms, the Gospel of Jesus Christ calls us
to acknowledge how much we are loved: to love Hfe thoroughly because God loves
it and to decide, to be; to move out of death into Hfe by loving the people God
gives us to love.

In a way that is what we intend toexpressin these financial pledges we make
to our church, That is Stewardship at_its best; not fund raising, but a deliberate
decision to live by loving. We are trying, in many ways, to be a religious community
which takes the imperative to love very seriously. It is not without risks ~ as we

discover when someone steals our equipment; and it is not without inconvenience.

Most of us did not and will not, thank God, have to decide at 32 how to Hive
the last eighteen months of our lives. And the depressed valleys most of us traverse
on occasion, are relatively short. Yet both examples - Tom Dooley's life and Frost's
haunting poem - suggest that each of us must choose to live: that human life, in
all its magnificance, is more complex than the biological systems simply handed
to us by our progenitors; that at the heart of it is a profound and elemental affirma~-
tion to live. Each of us is called by the giver of life to accept the gift, te embrace
the gift, to celebrate and affirm it: to be who we are with high intentionality;
with a bravery Paul Tillich eloquently described as "The Courage to Be."

To make that affirmation - to sieze life as it were - is to move from death
to life; from the biclogical process of deterioration which begins, essentially, at
our birth, to a glorious process of living life fully. It is perhaps the elemental human
task. |

Through history the function of religion and philosophy has been to help people
find the path from death to life. Essentially the human race has chosen four ways
to get there: knowledge, artistic beauty, religious mysticism and finally materialism.
Death is negated and human life celebrated in the high intellectual expectations
of Athens, the romantic art of the Renaissance, the devout piety of the monastery
or in materialism ~ an alternative as old as the hedonist's invitation to "eat, drink
and be merry, for tomorrow we die."

Of the four, our culture returns most consistently to materialism. The consu-
mer philosophy is not only a part of the market economy we are counting on to
save us, it is also a theology - a way of trying to beat back the forces of death
and affirm life. And at first blush it seems like a good alternative. What better
way to affirm life than to indulge my desires, to gratify my needs, to take my wants
seriously?

The trouble is that it doesn't work. In fact, the poets, philosophers and theolo-
gians suggest that as a methodology materialism actually ends up denying life.
T. S, Eliot once said that an apt epitaph for our civilization might be:

“Here were decent godless people
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost goif balls."

Philosopher Sam Keen describes the “official version of the Good Life" with
precision. “Happiness is a new car and a color TV. Security is a perimeter of ICBM's
suurounding all ‘hostile nations;' a large insurance policy, knowing your underarm
deodorant will keep you spring-fresh throughout the day, being well liked, having
a good job....We begin to structure our time and energy to achieve what we ‘desires’
we take jobs, make compromises, and settle down for a long wait, for the arrival
that will bring the reward of happiness we so justly deserve..." (The Pastionate
Life, p. 102)

The logical way to affirm one's own life is to get into one's self - or so it would
seem. The trouble is, it dceesn't work. The more self centered we become, the
less we live. Dorothy Soelle has written a provocative book with the title "Death
by Bread Alone" in which she describes in personal, behavioral terms what that
deadly self centeredness looks and feels like. “Being alone and then wanting to
be alone; being friendless, yet distrusting and despising others; forgetting and then

-4-

In the Soviet Union, at the other end of the political spectrum, the cost is
identically precious. A recent New York Times Magazine feature on life in Russia
contained a fascinating description of Christianity and the church in Soviet society.
Official Marxist policy, of course, is that religion will wither away if left alone.
And so churches are open. Since 1936, however, it has been illegal to teach, hold
classes or discussion groups, or proselytize in any way. And when, in spite of official
atheism, the church continues to appeal to people and attract interest, the state
begins to exact a dear price indeed..."To lure the young away from midnight Easter
services, state movie houses run American films that can never be seen at any
other time; the only showings are at midnight. and for good measure...plain clothes-
men circle the churches letting through the eld and screening out the young. Names
are taken and there are repercussions at schools and places of employment for
those young people caught trying to enter." 00/16/83, "Russia, A People without
Heroes,” David K. Shipler, p. 38)

In terms reminiscent of our texts today, the article tells how, in rural areas
particularly, the state removes children from Christian parents’ custody, under
the guise of protecting the health and welfare of minors.

One story, in particular, describes the cost of faithfulness, Father Dimitri
Duko was a popular Orthodox preacher in Moscow in the early 70's, When the crowds
of people in his church became embarrassingly large he was removed from his parish
and reassigned to a remote congregation, where he continued to enjoy great success.
In an interview at the time he said: “...the church in our country will always exist
~ because our country has the righest soil for Christianity. Here are suffering and
persecution. It is not those wallowing in luxury who clutch at a straw."

Two years later he was arrested. Five months after his arrest, he appeared
on Russian television to read his confession and apology, "I have seen that I have
yielded to those propaganda voices that are directed at undermining our system.
Irepudiate what I have done..." {p. 90)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred saint of modern Christendam, was executed
by the Nazis a few days before the end of the Second World War. Bonhoeffer saw,
with the clarity of a saint, that the greatest temptation of the modern church exis-
ting in a free society - is something he called cheap grace. He described it in words
that are now familiar, ",...forgiveness without repentance, baptism without discipline,
communion with confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without
the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate." (The Cost_ of

Discipleship, p. 36}

Bonhoeffer saw clearly that the call of Jesus Christ is to nothing less than
total commitment. And that the loss ~ the tragedy - for anything less than that,
is not the church's but the individual's. Bonhoeffer saw that the Gospel of Jesus
Christ becomes an innocuous ritual for all those who cannot abide its serious call
to obedience. "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die,” he wrote. ({p.
79)

1
Ai Wt We cheat only ourselves when we cast the Christian faith in. softer terms.
{* And we miss the point entirely if we think that all God demands of us is a nod of

W .. the head and a few dollars a week. {
Is ee $3 [ly cre AIK, Kanon

-i-

And, as usual, in telling the story, the Bible catches us red-handed...plnning
what can become an obsession with personal immortality on business success, academic
reputation, fiscal security, military power - or even - the fine quality of children
we have concsived, born and given to the world.

Abraham and we ~ need a reminder on occasion: namely that there is one eternal
Ged - the fundamental monotheism of our faith, and that to hang our theological
hopes on anything else is the fundamental human sin.

‘Come now, preacher! We don't do that, really!" Theologian Langdon Gilkey
suggests that when religious hope is gone, everything we do is designed to provide
what religion used to provide - namely our salyation. Gilkey suggests, only partly
with tongue in cheek, that the internal bickering, back-biting, an angling for position
in any corporation or university faculty ~ is, ia actually, a struggle for immortality.

Haven't you ever wondered about the intensity with which some parents urge
on their children ~ on the athletic field or classroom, as if what happens or doesn't
happen there is of eternal significance? Or, felt its pull in yourself?

Before you discard the Genesis incident as a barbaric relic and Abraham as

a potential child abuser, allow the nuances of this story to raise the issue, at least,

of the idols to which we happily sacrifice our children. The sculpture commemorating

what happened a decade ago at Kent State is almost too powerful for us. It reminds

us that there are idols and altars upon which we agree to sacrifice our young: the

idol of ideology, the idol of success, the idol of appropriate behavior or dress and

hair style - the defiance of which sometimes causes parents to turn on their own

children: or the god of drugs and alcohol, Twenty teenagers will die today - because

a we are not honest enough to confront our cultural addiction to chemicals, Part of

\fb . our idolatry is our unwillingness to confront the facts about ourselves, The cost is

Qe? simply the sacrifice of the lives of children. When we allow the text to raise the
v ra tough issues, Abraham doesn't lack so bad after all.

It is an intensely personal story. Abraham had to stand before God totally alone,
and put the priorities on his life in order. I believe this is what the story is about,
finally; not that God wants people to sacrifice their children to prove a point, but
that God's love for us is so intensely personal that we must ultimately confront him
alone, as individuals. We are in relationship: we believe what we believe as a commu-
nity. But ultimately before God we must be who we are, ourselves, singly, alone.

God provides an appropriate substitute sacrifice on this ancient story. Abraham
stood alone and trusted and was given his son, his life, his future, back again. And
they came down from the mountain - father and son - seemingly no different than
when they went up, yet nothing would ever be the same.

Centuries later, a descendant of Abraham and Isaac, was on his way to his lonely
destiny. Jesus, on the road to Jerusalem, was teaching a necessary lesson about the
cost of faithfulness. Once again the subject of the dearest human relationships emerged.
"If any one comes to me and dees net hate his own father and mother and wife and
children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannat be my disciple.”

~d—

That's what scared people about Jesus. That's what made Luther a threat
to Rome. Both cared more about the vital creativity of God's living word than
the forms and traditions of the moment. And that is why Christianity always has
the potential to disturb and agitate and tura upside dawn that which is traditional,
Christianity is, in essence, suspicious of its own forms. The Gospel of Jesus Christ
is always a little suspicious of institutional religion.

Both Jesus and Luther desacralized religicus tradition by claiming the sole
sovereigniy and holiness of Ged. God is sacred ~ not Catholic tradition, or Lutheran
tradition or, for that matter, Broad Street Presbyterian tradition. Luther, ow
friend Walter Bouman, at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, likes to remind us, was not
a Lutheran, didn't want a church named after him and assumed that the church
was and always would be ons. Calvin was not much of a Calvinist and Jesus of
Nazareth, we must always remember, never heard the word Christian, but lived
and died as a devout Jew.

Certainly part of continuing the spirit of Luther's reformation today is te
acknowledge the finiteness of all religious tradition, regardless of how precious,

it is and how much we love it. The Ecumenical Movement expresses the essential ye

oneness of a living church which transcends any and all the particular forms it
now happens to take. Pope John Paul II said recently that he prays daily for wisdom
in healing the 500 year old fracture of the church and, Pelikan notes wryly, that ,
Rome regards Luther today not as a "wild boar in the Lord's Vineyard” but as some-
thing of a distinguished alumnus.

ef
ery

weer
v

Certainty Brother Martin's reformation needs now to deal with the unpreceden~
ted explosion of Christian faith in the Southern Hemisphere in Third World nations.
Very soon, most of the world's Christians will he living south of the Equator, in
Africa and South America. And surely the continuation of Luther's reforming ways
will lead us middle class Americans ta handle our own traditions with love and
eclipse. We Presbyterians now cheer when our rate of numerical decline is nat
as great as last year's. We Presbyterians ~ wha provided the political theology
for revolution and an institutional model for the Federal system of government
- can't ever make it into the religion section of Time Magazine anymore, And
we must learn to deal with that: to be as lean as God wants us to be.

We live in a dangerous world. Young Americans died last week - far from
home, on two continents ~ in complex, ambiguous political circumstances. Clearly,
whatever else it means, the world needs leaders with the courage to think new
thoughts, the courage to discard the traditions of the past and find new forms ~
in the Near East, in Central America - which have the possibility of peace with
justice. We are living at the edge of an age which promises vast and profound change:
an almost scriptural age, full of apocalyptic danger and great promise. More than
a century ago James Russell Lowell wrote a poem which seems to fit as never before?

“New occasions teach new duties. Time makes ancient good uncouth.
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.”

A special cormmittee of church members met for six months recently to look
at our mission and published an excellent report which evaluates ovr work in eight
different categories. The conclusion is eloquent and provocative and consistent
with Luther and Jesus. It reads: "We have concluded that the church is most alive
aml well when it has goals to which it is pointing and for which it is willing to be
challenged. We have documented the ways in which the people of Broad Street
Presbyterian Church have responded with faith, hope, love, and support...to accom-

~2-

Luther was summoned to appear before Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of
Spain, at the Diet of Worms. It was there, under orders to recant, that he said:
“T am bound in conscience, held captive by the word of God.,.] neither can nor will
recant anything, for it’s neither right nor safe to act against conscience. Here
I stand. God help me. Amen,” The Diet of Worms declared Luther an outlaw and
heretic and placed a sentence of death on his head. Friends spirited him away
to the castle fortress of Wartburg where, in hiding, he translated the Bible into
German. Historians credit Luther with major impact in the emergence of the German
nation - by giving it its language in this project. He also wrote hymns, one of which,
based on Psalm 46, conjures up images of the Mighty Fortress of Wartburg in which
he was hiding.

In 1825, when it was safe fo return to Wittenberg and his post at the University,
Luther married Katherine von Bora, a former nun who with eight other companions
had left their convent and fled to Saxony. Luther, whe was so earthy much of his
table talk is unsuitable for public discourse today, later referred to the "wagon
of vestal virgins” which descended upon him. Luther and his "Katie" had six children,
They lived in a forty room former cloister and their home was full of people constant-
ly: students, theologians, other reformers, many friends. He wrote a major tract,
or article, or book, every two weeks the rest of his life. He preached regularly,
beligerentiy with great strength. He died at the age of 63, in the village of his
birth, having a few days before said, "God willing that i return to Wittenberg, I
shall eat and drink heartily so the worms will have a good fat doctor of theology
on which to feed."

Nothing would be more inconsistent with his own life than to romanticize
this strong figure of history. Luther was a man of his day, a day very different
from our own, Yale theologian Jaroslav Pelikan writing in the New York Times
Magazine earlier this fall, notes: “Martin Luther had beliefs about devils and witches
He could be stubborn and cantakerous and something of a bully." While at first
condemning the exploitation of German Christians by Roman church officials, Luther
later reversed his field and sided with the princes in a German peasant's revolt,
advising the princes to slaughter as many a8 possible. He affirmed Jesus' Jewishness
but late in life became virulently anti-semitic a tragic fact which another German
movement, Naziism, happily exploited. He maintained the sanctity of conscience
and his own right to civil disobedience but later advised obedience to the state
under all circumstances in a way that historians sometimes claim assisted the rise
of Fascism in Germany.

He was far from perfect. But his contributions to the church - and to the
world - were enormous. Lord Acton, a 19th Century, British Catholic historian,
said that Luther's courageous stand at the Diet of Worms was "the mast pregnant
and momentous fact of our history." Freedom of conscience, human liberty, the
sanctity of the individual was being born. We Presbyterians are inclined to conclude
that it teok John Calvin to think it through thoroughly and institutionalize it. But,
obviously, here, in the experience of Luther, this radically creative idea, emerged
for one of the first and most important times.

Luther departed from a 1000 year tradition by suggesting that all Christians
have a vocation ~ not just clergy, a calling to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ.
He got Christians reading the Bible in their own language, singing in church and,
among his greatest contributions was the restoration of marriage and human sexuality
to its rightful and Biblical perspective as a gift of God to be enjoyed. Luther and
Katherine married to express a point - namely that the traditional celibacy of the
church was no more holy than marriage and then fell wonderfully and physically

in love. Professor Pelikan thinks that one of Luther's and Katie's preatest and

oe es

anda

God insists on the struggle. It is a haunting thought! In one of Frederick
Nietzchi's novels a character is talking about why God must die. "God looks with
eyes that see everything. He peers into man's ground and depth, into his hidden
shame and ugliness." And Paul Tillich wrote: “He is God only because he is inescapa-
ble,"

The Jabbok, by the way, is not on the map. The stream - the place -~ is insignifi-
cant. So our Jabboks, the places where God catches up with us, will be remota,
obscure: perhaps not sitting in church at all, but alone, at night, trying to sleep.
Dorothee Seelle, in her book Death By Bread Alone, tells about trying to live through
a period of deep personal darkness. She writes, “I had reached the end of the line
and God had scrapped the first draft of the design for my life. He had not comforted
me as a psychologist would. He had not offered me any of the placebos society
usually prescribes...He knocked me to the ground. Gradually it began to dawn on
me that people who believe,limp somewhat, as Jacob limped after wrestling with
God." (p. 32}

It is God Jacob is wrestling and so we can expect the story to be repeated
for us. "Why are we all limping?" J. Barrie Shepherd asks in a poem based on this

story!

Can it be this love of Ged

must wound us so that it can heal us?

Might this halting hip of Jacob signify

that when we do contend with love, when we
grapple with and finally are transformed by
the power of God's grace we become

more vulnerable, not less:

more likely to get hurt than .

those who chose always to play it safe..."

If we have lived life, we all Hmp a Httle finally. We may not be guilty of Jacob's
crassness and avarice, but if we have lived we know a bit about moral compromise
and expediency. We all limp home finally with the bright dreams af youth a little
faded, with our banners a bit soiled and torn: with failures as well as successes,
in our satchel with our weaknesses as well as our strengths clearly revealed.

lf we have lived life and if, along the way, we have been accosted by God we
will limp a bit. But along the way we will have come to understand that the imp
is a gift - a mark of something wonderful. We will have known that God loves and
accepts us in spite of our failures: that God loves our humanness more than we
have ever been able to love it: that God gives us what we can never earn ~ namely
his grace and love and presence,

The one who learned it first was a distant relative to another who affirmed
our humanity by taking it upan himself: Jacob - distant relative of Jesus - who lived
our life and died our death and showed us God's great love for us and in whose human-
ity you and I are given back our own humanity.

The story doesn't end ~ as all good stories never end. Jacob held on till morning
and then, in the hght of a new day, Hmped across the Jabbok into the promised land
to live the rest of his life as God's chosen; the same Jacob, but with a new name
now and a limp to remind him of that strange night long ago and the incredible thought
which I imagine never left him until the day he died - the idea of God, a God who
loves and cares and accosts and forces us to wrestle through the night. Amen.

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Original file: Sermons/1983/1983 1 RESCAN.pdf