Roger Ray, pastor
January 23, 2010 Epiphany 3a
1 Corinthian 1:10-18
10 Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose. 11For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. 12What I mean is that each of you says, 'I belong to Paul', or 'I belong to Apollos', or 'I belong to Cephas', or 'I belong to Christ.' 13Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? 14I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. 16(I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) 17For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. 18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
Like most of you, I have followed the daily progress of Arizona congresswoman Gabby Gifford's recovery from a gunshot wound to the head two weeks ago. Of the tens of thousands of people who are shot in America every year, Gifford's case has grabbed the hearts and minds of Americans in a unique way, in part because it was such a crazy attack on a sitting member of congress but also because her case was set in a backdrop in which she had warned conservative critics that their militaristic rhetoric could result in an assassination attempt.
While it is tempting to point an accusing finger at Sarah Palin for having specifically put rifle crosshairs on a poster targeting Gifford's congressional district, that would be both morally wrong and it would be crediting Palin with more influence than the half-governor deserves. But that is not to say that she is not a part of the problem.
The motivations of this particularly disturbed shooter are hardly relevant. There is not much to be gained by trying to sort out the logical sequence of thoughts in the mind of a mad man. But we absolutely must look at some of the elements of the environment in which this shooting spree took place.
The law which restricted the private ownership of semiautomatic weapons with huge banana clips of ammo sunset a few years ago, fueling the civil war in Mexico where such things are illegal to sell..... but we supply the criminals in Mexico from more than 6,000 legal sites along our southern border. I cannot imagine a plausible case for a private citizen to own an ammo clip with 30 or more bullets in it. Somewhere between gun rights and gun insanity there is suppose to be a line drawn by a responsible government and that line has been erased.
I have high hopes that Congresswoman Gifford's survival will usher in a new day of intelligent discussion of gun rights and social responsibility in the way that Bill Brady's survival of a gunshot wound he received during an assassination attempt on President Reagan, prompted the original assault rifle ban.
We don't know how much of Gabby is left inside of her brain though we are encouraged by reports of her recovery from Houston where her Astronaut husband, Mark Kelly, is able to both keep her company and finish training for the last mission of our space shuttle fleet. These are larger than life Americans whose plight should help to change the face of politics and political discourse in our nation.
Indeed, it already has, as both politicians and pundits have had to dial back their hostile rhetoric in light of the obvious connection between their words and the trigger of a mad man's gun. Congress took a week off and even after they had reconvened, their predictable vote to repeal health care reform has taken place in a calm, almost embarrassed quiet.
I cannot blame the Sarah Palins, Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of the right for creating a polarized environment of hateful political speech without also seeing that the people who articulate my personal views on the left and my own little journalism contributions as pouring more gas on the flames from our wing of political thought.
The news of the shooting in Arizona came to me one day after I had submitted my last opinion piece to the NewsLeader and so, four days after the shooting, my column appeared with more vitriolic invective than even one of my normal pieces, and I was embarrassed by how insensitive my own language looked in ink surrounded by a world still gripped in horror from this multiple murder and wounding event in Tucson.
Paul writes to this little beleaguered church in Corinth that they should stop arguing among themselves and come to agreement. In some ways, this is one of the most hypocritical and naive things you will read in the Bible from the hand of Paul. Did Paul always agree with his peers? Did Paul back away from an argument? Was Paul a peacemaker in the church?
If you missed a few weeks of Sunday school classes when you were growing up let me turn to the back of the book with you for the answers to those questions: no, no and "heck no." Sorry.... We're in church now so that's as strong as it gets.
Paul was a change agent. A prophet. He confronted governments and religious officials and yet he chided the church for having quarrels. Still, preachers have been trotting this text out to club their congregations into quiet submission for centuries because there is something in us that just feels, that just innately knows, that people in church should love one another and get along even if people don't do that in any other setting in life.
And we have a particular problem with this dilemma specifically because we are a unique sort of church that does not easily fit into the surrounding landscape. We exist to be an alternative religious voice in this city. Our mission is to speak the truth to power which other churches will not stand up and speak and which the authorities would like very much to keep entirely quiet.
The religious majority in this area would love nothing more than for us to pipe down and blend in.... to agree with the majority and not rock the boat. But we have a message of liberation for the oppressed; we have an imperative message of justice for those who keep feeding the institutions of oppression. We have a message of hope for those who have been rejected and harassed by a kind of spirituality with breaks the hearts and spirits of so many people.
The challenge for us is to speak without becoming guilty of the same excesses we have hoped to correct. To discover some means of bringing light without just generating heat.
On the one hand, we have a majority of churches which are so filled with cowardice that they will not say anything about anything that matters to anyone. And we have another set of churches that is unafraid to speak but they are almost always on the pro-war, anti-gay, anti-women, pro-wealthy class side. As Jim Wallis used to say in class at Harvard: The left doesn't get it and the right gets it wrong.
There are things which need to be said. There are columns which I need to write. There are things which are so wrong that we need to show up and demonstrate on major roads holding signs in our hands..... or at least stand on the steps of a cathedral holding candles as the state prepares to execute a prisoner.
Silence is not an option. Just going along to get along is not an option. I've quoted these modern proverbs so often you should be able to say them with me..... only dead fish always swim with the current..... the middle of the road is only for yellow lines and dead armadillos. I feel obligated to remind the pastors of our local churches that Jesus of Nazareth was not nailed to a cross for being a moderate.
Sometimes, I have noted, that people will respond to some of my newspaper work with some really hateful entries on the NewsLeader blogs and if I can avoid responding in kind, if I can calm myself down enough to make several attempts at engaging them as rational adults, they will drop their swords and enter into conversation. Now, it is not my nature to respond patiently and with kind entireties. My gut level reaction to an unwarranted insult is to be just as rough in response. And, I can honestly say, after years and years of experimentation... nothing good ever comes from that.
Now, the people who already agree with me will enjoy a good zinger but that is not speaking the truth to power.... That's just painting moustaches on dangerous dogs. On the one hand, standing up and fighting is at least showing the courage to not just lie down and play dead. I am deeply disappointed by the majority of churches, which, during times of great moral crisis, appear to be doing the best interpretation of a cadaver that they can possibly do.
We've taken Bob Marley's song, "Get Up, Stand Up" as an anthem for our movement but in light of the attempted assassination on Congresswoman Gabby Gifford, I think that there is another step we need to talk about.
Yes, have the courage to break out of silence. Be willing to take sides. Be willing to push back against the majority, to change the status quo and I think we can cut ourselves some slack for not always doing it in just the right way as we have tried to get our legs under us in the progressive movement.
But even though Paul had made people so mad that they wanted to kill him almost everywhere he ever went, when he caught word that the people he loved....
Church members whom he had lived with, shared meals in their homes and cared about, that these beloved people were arguing with each other..... some would get mad and leave the church or, even worse, stay and try to cause trouble for everyone else.... Paul just knew that was wrong.
He had empowered them to stand up to their occupation government, to traditional religion and, in many cases, to their own families, but he still needed to see them standing together and that is no easy task.
Still, I believe that is the task we must also face.... Perhaps we must face this task with more earnestness than any other church. We have dared to ask the hard questions of our faith and now we must also dare to show respect to those who reach different conclusions.
I would like to remind you that a couple of years ago we took some time to study the biographies of some of the great religious leaders of the modern age.
We studied how Gandhi found the courage to stand up to the British Empire and to challenge the morality of colonialism everywhere, but he did so with a deep commitment to peace. Most churches are in hiding. They don't confront the issues because they don't want to rock the boat. Revolutionaries challenge oppression but they provoke armed revolt in the process. Gandhi had the courage to stand up to oppression but he also had the courage to love his oppressors and to withstand beatings, starvation and imprisonment.
He never approved of violence but rather offered his own life as a sacrifice for peace. Martin Luther King, Jr. was inspired by Gandhi's example and in the civil rights movement in America, King would spend days in worship and preaching with demonstrators, concluding in their being asked to sign a pledge of non-violence before they took their march into the public square.
They knelt on sidewalks as police dogs and fire hoses were turned on them. They suffered insults, beatings, imprisonment and many were murdered but they did not take up an armed revolt. Father Daniel Berrigan once said that in the fight with evil, we must sometimes bait the trap with our own flesh. That, men and women, may, in very fact, be our challenge.
John says that Jesus gave his disciples a new commandment.... That they love one another. I'm going to split the difference between Jesus' one commandment and Moses' 10 commandments and I'm going to utter five pastoral suggestions:
In order to speak the truth in love I believe that we should resolve to -
- Don't be petty. Ending a friendship, leaving a church, or ignoring another person should never be done lightly or for reasons you would not be willing to have publicly displayed on the front of your house.
- Use respectful language. We need to be careful about saying things for shock value or just to knock other people off of their comfort.
- Determine to listen to those who disagree and try to understand their beliefs.
- Look for common ground. People who defend abortion rights are not really murderers and people who oppose abortion are not women haters. We have common ground in avoiding unwanted pregnancies and we could spend our lives in that arena without ever fighting about the extremes.
- Disagreements are bound to happen but we should be people who decide in advance of any argument that we are going to be the first to forgive or the first to apologize, whichever one applies the most. Reconciliation should not be just a nearly dead church word.... It should be something we work on all of the time.
Most of the time I stand up here and encourage you to be people of prophetic courage. Today I'm complicating that by saying that you, and I, should also strive to be loving in the way that we are courageous. It is easy to love the poor whom we help. They are grateful and unjudging. Now we must learn to forgive those who do not believe that they need to be forgiven. To tolerate those who are not yet ready to tolerate us. To bring light into the darkness and healing where there is brokenness and unity where there is division.
