Roger Ray, pastor
February 17, 2013 Lent 1
Deuteronomy 26:5-9
5 you shall make this response before the LORD your God: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.
6 When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us,
7 we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.
8 The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders;
9 and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
It has been quite a week for me, traveling in rural Nicaragua since we were last together. I met a lot of interesting people and was a part of some fabulous experiences but I must tell you that while there, I met Jesus, and he's gay.... and only about 4'10"..... and in Nicaragua they pronounce it "Jesus." Jesus was one of our translators who traveled with our team and, I'm happy to say, is one of our newest web based church members along with another of our translators, Jiros. Hola mi amigos! Proxima ano!
In Nicaragua churches basically come in two flavors: Catholic and Pentecostal Evangelical. Jesus and Jarios were both pleased to find out that there is a church where gay people are welcomed and where you can believe in the moral teachings of Jesus without all of the guilt, fear of hell and manipulation of lust for heaven.
What amazed me the most was when Jarios asked me if I had ever read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." Jarios to speak English from a friend he hung out with at the park at night just because he wanted to learn to improve himself and from those conversations in the park, he moved onto reading pretty challenging books, not just Zinn but even John Perkins', "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man."
Our conversations grew to include other translators and some of our Rainbow Network doctors, all of whom had a much deeper awareness of their own history and the ways in which Nicaragua has been little more than an enslaved
agricultural plantation for American interests for most of the past century and a half.
They are not either angry or vengeful.... it is what happened and they knew that we were there trying to do good things. I am also factual about it but I am not there out of a sense of guilt or obligation, but I am factual about it..... I was on the power side of the North America verses Central America competition. I'm not trying to do penance or even the playing field, I'm just trying to do what is compassionate and reasonable in light of our history and their need.
Similarly, though I have invested relatively little time in personal genealogical studies, I am aware that my patriarchal family operated a large slave plantation in southern Kentucky for four generations. Their wealth was invested in land and the evil practice of slavery, or as Stephen Colbert calls it, "our unpaid African internship program."
And even though my family was locked into agricultural poverty for another three or four generations, we were destined to emerge, as a clan of white people born in North America. Again, it is foolish to feel either advantaged or guilty based on gender, race, nationality or any other condition of birth, but it is a fact that the greatest indicator of economic success in the world is still to be born white and male in North America. Those are the facts.... some people celebrate those facts and they feel tremendous fear as the descendants of white Europeans are becoming a minority in the United States and some of us acknowledge these facts and choose to work to create a more just world.
Reciting our history helps us to understand who we are. Our scripture text this morning is very familiar to you if you have ever been close enough to a Jewish family to be around for Passover in which reciting the history of the Jews is a formal annual exercise.
In the late Bronze Age, as the cultures of ancient Syria and Assyria in collapse, nomadic Semitic tribes, Arameans, settled close enough to Egypt to be drawn into their expanding empire and enslaved. There, we are told by the Biblical accounts of Deuteronomy, God found the Hebrew slaves and turned them into a people who would inhabit Palestine.
Every spring, when Jews come to celebrate Passover, their central holiday, they began by defining themselves by reciting their history..... in Jewish homes, the world over, in a few weeks, the youngest person present will ask the formulaic question about what all of these rituals mean and the head of the household will respond in the way that Passover celebrations have begun for centuries: A wandering Aramean was my father.....
I could say, "an immigrant Brit who became a slave owning farmer was my father." Most of you who woke up this morning as citizens of the United States could say something similar because, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "We may have arrived on different kinds of ships but we're all in the same boat now."
Though many of us have had to face ridiculous and unjust discrimination and have been challenged with barriers to education, health care or employment in our lifetimes, still, we must acknowledge that we live in a nation envied by our southern neighbors for both our national wealth and the opportunities afforded to us. And we, who are the inheritors of a nation made wealthy by hard work, sacrifice, courage, ingenuity, and by killing off 90 million Indians as we took their land, through forced labor of both African slaves and children in the 19th century, and exploited women and illegal aliens in the 20th century, now have the opportunity to help to create a more just, sane and spiritually honest world.
The Canadian artist, Bruce Cockburn, was inspired by the theology of one of my Harvard professors, Harvey Cox, as I certainly have been. In search of a more engaged spirituality, Cockburn traveled in Guatemala and in Nicaragua the time of the Disappeared and during the Contra War. His anger at the injustices he witnessed and his determination to see the world changed became the poetry of his Stealing Fire album, now almost 30 years old and still one of the most influential collections of music in my life and, evidently a huge inspiration for the music of U2.
We asked David to sing a song from that album today, "Lovers in a dangerous time," that contains the line that I have so often used to define our ministry, asserting that we will keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. We will not deny our history. We will not hide behind religious mumbo jumbo. Genuine spirituality is in need of the whole truth but we are not destined to repeat our past or to be tied down to the abuses of our ancestors. We have chosen to do a new thing, a good thing, a loving and compassionate thing..... we have chosen to keep kicking at the darkness of slavery, exploitation, oppression and abuse until it bleeds the light of liberation, justice, mercy and freedom. We are, as the Nicaraguan hero, Augusto Sandio, who fought against the US occupation of Nicaragua in the 1930's said, "viven en la luche por la paz." We live in the struggle for peace and you will have to forgive me for believing that this time, we are winning.
