AMERICA - LOVE IT RIGHT John M. Buchanan
Luke 9:51-453 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
duly 3, 1983 Columbus, Ohio

When the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face
to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him, who went
and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him; but
the people would not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusa~-
lem. Luke 9:51-53

Why do you suppose the people of that village were unwilling to help Jesus
get to Jerusalem? The classic answer is that it was a Samaritan village and Samari-
tans didn't recognize the authority of Jerusalem and its temple. They didn't help
because they thought he was going to the wrong city fer the wrong reason, Thai's
the classic answer. I've always thought, however, at least part of the reason was
that the people of the village smelled trouble - real trouble - ahead. It was that
"setting his face to go to Jerusalem" business. It was precisely the purposefulness.
He meant it. He was going to the economic and political center of the nation;
the place where religion, culture, politics, justice were housed and practiced. It
wasn't simply the next city on the itinerary: it was THE city, to which one never
goes simply by accident. The people of the village sensed that and wanted nothing
to do with it.

You can almost hear his friends protesting: "Why Jerusalem, Jesus? Why
take a chance? What can you accomplish or experience in the city which you can't
accompHsh or experience in GaHlee? They followed him, of course, but with a
degree of amazement, bordering on terror.

The decision to go to Jerusalem was perhaps the most important decision
Jesus ever made. The Gospel writers know that and, accordingly, devote a full
one half of the narrative to the events which took place during the one week he
was in the city. In terms of his ministry, the decision to go to Jerusalem was the
turning point. It ended up costing him his life.

The decision is important philosophically as well, because it forever defines
the lacus of the Gospel as the world. It forever signifies that following Jesus is
a very werldly activity: that in tension with personal piety, there must always
be the public declaration, the confrontation with the city. The fact that Jesus
"set his face to go to Jerusalem" means that there is counterpoint in our discipleship;
that following Jesus will mean singing hymns and praying, and also saddling up
to go to the State House, the Congress, the court room.

Jesus did not go in order to run for office. The acquisition of political power
had no appeal to him whatever. When it was offered to him, he declined it. In
point of fact, whenever religious institutions, and particularly religious zealots,
end up actually having political power, the human race is in for a lot of trouble
- witness, for instance, the Inquisition or the Ayatollah. But to suggest that Jesus
was apolitical: that religion and politics, religion and economics, religion and justice
don't mix, based on his life is, at best naive, and at worst, self serving. He went
to Jerusalem because it was the Capital: the political, economic and religions
soul of his people. He went precisely to confront the systems: to make his claim
on the souls of human beings in the very place where other institutions make that
claim. What happened there was not an accident of time and place; it was the
result of his intentionality. What transpired was the highest and holiest traditions
of God's people.

~2e

The account evokes powerful images out of the past, primarily that marvelous
creation story in Genesis 2 which we heard earlier. God fashions a man out of
the dust of the earth, Hke a potter, an artist, and breathes hia own breath into
the man and the man lives. The breath ~ which can be translated "spirit" or wind
which hovered over the formless void before creation; the divine energy which
exists before anything else exists,

Jesus, in this incident in John's Gospel, breathes on his disicples and gives them
new life just as God animated the lifeless human form he had constructed out of
dust. Jesus gives them his spirit, his life, in the act John calls, breathing on them.

God, the Bible seems to be saying, is something like that mysterious and powerful
breath. The late Paul Tillich was enormously helpful in teaching that God may
be described as "the ground of being": the very essence of life itself, One of the
major hurdles for modern American Christians is a very basic Biblical way of talking
about God. God, in the Bible, is not a passive idea, or a concept, ora proposition,
but a power, a dynamic energy seething with potentiality and promise. God, in
the Bible, is not thought about so much as experienced - in the Bible the question
"What is God like” is answered by telling what God does. "Who is God?" We start
out answering that question like this ~ "God is a supreme.being, infinite, all powerful,
omnipotent." The Old Testament, on the other hand, answers the question "Who
is God?" like this: "God is the one who brought us out of Egypt." The word "God"
in the Bible points, not to a philosophic thesis, but to the power which is behind
and in and through all life. God, I would propose, is that which distinguishes life
from death. God is life, energy: the force that turns the primal chaos into order:
the power that takes the shapelessness of the void and fills it with mountains and
galaxies and oceans teaming with living things. God is that mysterious force which
shows itself in the astounding fact that single-cell amoebas actually live; the myster-
ious vitality in gorillas and sharks and whippoorwills and Homo Sapiens. In the
Bible God is the force which makes us hunger for and need one another and in the
hungering and needing assures that we will celebrate the goodness of life and guar~
antee its continuation. This God who lived so fully in Jesus is the very breath of
life,

There are important implications here. The first is that God is that which gives
life to everything that lives. As basic as-that sounds, the unfortunate truth is that
Christian people have often been persuaded to act as if life were a cosmic mistake,
an accident that slipped in the back door of the world as it were. It has its origins
in Greek dualism apparently which held that tangible, created matter, was hopelessly
despoiled, dirty, and evil; that holiness is a product of avoiding getting one’s hands
dirty in life. What the Christian Church has always been tempted to do is take
the idea of the Spirit - the breath of God - and turn it into same ethereal, other
worldly idiom. But it means life. God's spirit is what makes life ~ Hfe. Rather
than denying it, avoiding it, cloistering our religious rituals away from it, we people
of faith are called to affirm it, to be in it, to love it and enjoy it for all we are
worth,

One who helps me do that is Lewis Thomas, Director of the Sloane Kettering
Cancer Clinic, columnist for New England Journal of Medicine and author. In The
Medusa and the Snail he writes about the public reaction to the much publicized
"test-tube babies."

~3-

That, however, is not the way the current is running these days. Critics of
the culture observe something called "the New Narcissism" which elevates self-grati~
fication to the level once occupied by public service. And even if you believe that
Adam Smith's free market economic theories are inspired by God, it ought at least
to be accasionally noted that their philosophic foundation is self-interest. Smith
himself, whose ideas originally expressed a vision of eradicating poverty in the
London slums, worried that an economic system based on individualism and selfishness
would ultimately end up celebrating greed and putting an end to any commitment
to the larger community.

That is the moral issue: the theological issue, if you wilk not who should
provide the day-care centers and hot lunches for the poor - the public or private

sector. The moral issue is that when the public sector closes down, the private
sector does not simply take up the slack, because it doesn't want to.

Adam Smith was right. People are selfish. But, as Christians we have been
schooled theologically to call that sin, We have also been given a glimpse of human-
ity which suggests that on occasion we do rise above that. We are not purely greedy.
Last week a Kansas City Chief's football player drowned trying to save the lives
of two young boys. Intrusions of common decency suggest that old Adam Smith
really didn't know the whole truth and that a system predicated on self interest
encourages not the highest in us, but perhaps something significantly lower.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn sees it. Banned from his native Russia, implacable
foe of Marxism/Leninism, Solzhenitsyn was asked recently what he thought the
main moral ill of the West was. He answered immediately: *Selfishness. We hear
a constant clamor for rights, rights, always rights, but so little about responsibility
Phe need now is for selflessness, a spirit of sacrifice, for a willingness to put
aside personal gains for the salvation of the whole Western world." (WSJ, 6/23/83)

He said that, by the way, not in some left wing periodical but on the editorial
page of the Wall Street Journal last week, and as if on cue, a letter to the editor
responded that nobody pays attention to Solzhenitsyn because selflessness and putting
the common good before one’s individual needs is contrary to our right to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness: that community first is socialism.

The faith, I beHeve, has something to contribute at this point. We have more
to offer than the prayer at the beginning of the meeting. We know a secret that
no one else seems to know, and it is that the best happiness is not the satisfaction
of all one's needs, but the pursuit of the common good. We know a secret and that
is that Adam Smith was wrong: that a life devoted to self interest remains empty,
spiritually bankrupt.

Our contribution is a vision upon which Western civilization may depend for
its life. Dr. John Raines, Temple University, commented recently, "The recovery
of our nation’s soul waits for the church to recover the moral vision of the common~
wealth." And long ago, standing on the foredeck of a ship making for Massachusetts
Bay in 1630, John Winthrop told those brave souls that the only way to avoid tragedy
and disaster was to "abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’
necessities,..and always having before our eyes our community..." (R. Bellah, The
Broken Covenant, p. 14)

meh —

What makes all of this more than a flight of theological fancy is the fact that
it has to do with our deepest yearnings, our most urgent needs. Herbert Benson,
physician and professor on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, in a widely read
book, The Relaxation Response, points out that deep breathing is the oldest, most
universally acknowledged spiritual discipline. Ancient people, mostly in Eastern
cultures, knew that to breathe consciously, to reflect on the physical action of
breathing, to fee! the inhalation and exhalation, was to be in touch with the essence
of samething too profound for words. It was to know Hfe ~aliveness ~ in an acute
way. So, breathing techniques are part of meditation and prayer disciplines in
many of the world religions. Benson suggests, that jogging is goad, if only because
it forces deep breathing - which we ought to be doing anyway. We know, intuitively,
that is to say, that there is more to breath than a. ttle whisp of air, We know,
I believe, what it means when stress and worry and fear constrict that apparatus.
We know, without being told that a symptom of deep anxiety is the inability te
take a full breath and that somehow our very spirit is involved in that situation.

One of my favorite authors writes that “Sighs are tears not yet released into
the world" and that "The sound of my own breathing is evidence of God's present
invigoration of my life.” (Robert Raines, The Faithing Oak)

We know, I think, what it means to be breathless: to be depleted spiritually,
Busy, hard working people know all too well what it means to spend everythinig
- physically, emotionally and spiritually - for vocation, family, community, church,
A very wise pastor friend of mine used to say to clergy, or anyone who would listen,
that there is a ten to twenty year period in the middle of life when most of us are
giving out more than we are taking in: to marriage, te children, to community
responsibility, to profession. It is a period of spiritual deficient spending, and
the price we pay for it is very, very high in terms of stress, alcoholism, heart attacks,
and a bundle of personal and relational problems, Most of us, my guess is, know
about spiritual deficits.

Jesus breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit." The Gaspel of
Jesus Christ is good news. Jt is the promise that when we have emptied ourselves,
when we have given everything we have to give, God the life-giver, God the Spirit
who is life itself, will restore and heal and refill and renew and recreate us by breath-
ing again breath of Hfe into us.

No where is that said with more gentleness and beauty than a lovely Appalachian
hymn:
The lone, wild bird in lofty flight
Is still with thee, nor leaves thy sight.
And Iam thine! I rest in thee,
Great Spirit, come, and rest in me, Amen,