Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
April 29, 2012 Easter 4
1 John 3:16-24
16We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us--and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 17How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? 18Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. 19And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him
20whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. 21Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; 22and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.
23And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. 24All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.
Newark, New Jersey's mayor, Cory Booker, was returning home from an interview a couple of weeks ago and noticed that his neighbor's house was on fire. He and his two security guards knocked on the door and evacuated the residents on the first and second floor but then learned that there was another woman on the third floor. They rushed up the stairs and found the third floor entirely engulfed in flames.
His security guards wouldn't let him enter the flames until Booker game them a direct order and they let go of him and he dove in. They were sure that he was dead. But, sputtering for air, with burning embers on his hand, he came out carrying the woman on his shoulder.
Now, you have to know that most folks run from a fire but it takes a person with the heart of a hero to run into a fire. And while I don't want to take anything away from Booker's heroic and dangerous rescue, for a politician, this is almost a made for Hollywood set up.
I think that I would run into a burning building to save someone but I don't know that I would..... I mean, how many of us have ever seen a building engulfed in flames with no professional firemen around? Booker is a hero though this daring rescue has put him in the position of being able to say to the media, "Ah shucks, it wasn't nothin no decent person wouldn't have done."
I don't know if it affects young women as much as it does little boys, but we are reared on stories of heroism and we all dream of being the one to save the damsel from distress, to disarm the bomb, to charge into the burning building to save the baby or to save the world from some mad scientist. We imagined being Spiderman, or James Bond, Matt Dillon or even Mighty Mouse if it comes right down to it though we spend most of our lives playing the parts of Gomer Pyle or Gilligan.
Not that we would wish for more burning buildings or mad scientists but we do wish that we could be in the right place, at just the right time, to be able to say, "Ah shucks, it wasn't nothing no decent person wouldn't have done."
Five hundred years ago a Spanish knight was seriously injured while fighting very valiantly at the battle of Pamplona. The French were so impressed with his courage that they actually carried Ignatius back to his home in Loyola to recover rather than to a French prison. During his long months of recovery he was bored and he asked for some romantic novels to read to help him pass the time. However, there were none available. In those days when the printing press was still a very new invention, books were rare. There were only two in the castle. Once was a life of Christ and the other was a collection of the lives of the saints.
He poured over these texts and, having no wanting for ego, he kept reading about how the saints became saints and saying to himself, "I could do that." He is the only person I know of in history who actually made it his personal goal to live a life that would force the Pope, after his death.... Which is the only way you can be a Catholic saint, you know, you have to be dead. Since he was long dead when it happened so I don't know if he derived any satisfaction from his success, but, about 60 years after Ignatius of Loyola's death, Pope Gregory XV declared him to have been a saint.
In the days of Ignatius those collections of the lives of the saints were very popular devotional books. You can still find some around in the homes of pious Catholics and, in fact, in the early 19th century there was a Protestant version published by John Fox called "The Book of Martyrs" which paid special attention of Protestant evangelists who were killed by the Catholic Church. In the spirit of ecumenism, I have both books.
All kidding aside, what frosted Ignatius about those collections of the lives of the saints is that his fellow Catholics seemed content to read them and considered themselves to be pious because they could recite what these saints of old had done in service of God's Kingdom. Ignatius thought the stories should ignite some passion to get out and do the same thing.... Run into some burning buildings to save babies, disarm some bombs, capture the mad scientist, don't just sit in your room watching Spiderman and reading comic books.
I have often thought of this when I have gone to our local Martin Luther King, Jr Holiday observances.
We march down back streets so that we don't disrupt any traffic flow. We meet in an auditorium and listen to nervous Middle School students reading their essays about Martin Luther King. We give awards to civic groups that have organized volunteers to pick up litter by the highway and we encourage young people to "get involved."
I made myself rather unpopular at one of the planning meetings of the NAACP when I pointed out to the room, "You folks do remember that they shot Martin Luther King because of what he was saying and what he was doing." No one gets shot for writing essays and picking up litter. I thought it was an important historical reminder.... You can imagine my surprise when I got an email from the current NAACP president telling that it was not necessary for me to attend any more of the planning meetings. I have a real gift for making friends.... Though I don't think that's what the committee chairman called it.
We have posters around our building with quotes from Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and Rosa Parks. We have a big poster of that brave Chinese man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square during the 1989 demonstrations. Maybe Ignatius founded the Jesuit order so that he could become a saint but none of the saints and martyrs hanging on our walls did what they did so that they would be immortalized under glass in church hallways and meeting rooms.
Please don't congratulate yourself for attending the church that has pictures of social justice heroes displayed on the walls. Don't think that you have been liberated from meaningless symbolic religion because you have progressive thoughts in your head.
We have put some distance between ourselves and our religious cousins who think that the Kingdom is just in heaven, after you die, pie in the sky by and by. But, come on, the Kingdom is not in your head either. I'm glad we have all gotten past our racial prejudices; I'm glad that at least at this church there is no lingering prejudice around sexual orientation or class, but surely you don't think that the battle is over?
The most famous prayer of our tradition tells us that Jesus taught us to pray for the will of God to be done on earth as it is in heaven...... on earth.... Not just in heaven and not just in between our ears but out there.... In the industrial parks, in City Hall, on Commercial St. Alexander Campbell said that to get down on your knees and pray for anything that you will not then stand up and work for, sacrifice to make happen is an insult to God and a disappointment to ourselves.
The thing that keeps most of us from being saints, from being heroes, is there just aren't enough damsels in distress, not enough burning buildings for us to muster our courage in a single moment for a sudden burst of death defying service. The problem is that real saints and heroes are doing things that require little bits of courage, pieces of self sacrifice, disciplined service day after day.
If being a skinny was simply a matter of forgoing all food for a day then I can tell you that I would be so thin I'd have to jump around in the shower to get wet. The problem is that a healthy diet is a matter of making good decisions almost every day, at every meal.
Being a hero, being a saint, is not a matter of running into a burning building one evening....
It's being willing to open your wallet and buy two hundred dollars worth of food and then standing in your kitchen all day and cooking to feed our homeless friends at Bill's Place. It's walking down the street asking people to sign petitions so we can close down these predatory lenders who are sucking the resources out of desperately poor homes and having people tell you "no," having them slam their door in your face.
It's not just that you are not prejudiced anymore; it's that you refuse to be silent when the office gossip starts up about someone who is gay or whose life is under some kind of puritanical scrutiny. It's when you take a risk and hire someone who has a criminal record or who is just out of treatment. Because it is not enough to wish that those in need will be warm and well fed.
I'm going to say that you don't know what it is to pray, "give us this day our daily bread," until you have just once given all of your daily bread away and you are praying for the next loaf because you don't have one.
The previous form of the 8 points of Progressive Christianity had a line in it that I was sorry to see got edited out in the most recent version. It used to say that we acknowledged that being followers of Jesus is costly. Because, I'm afraid, that your faith is worth about as much as you are willing to sacrifice for it.
