Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 18 Sept. 8, 2013
Luke 14:25-33
25Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, 26"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. 27Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 28For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? 29Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, 30saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.' 31Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. 33So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.
Having run completely out of plausible excuses for putting it off any longer, as soon as my Labor Day cook out was over, my new diet and exercise resolutions went into force. I'm back at the gym, working with a trainer who only need to add a thick German accent to be a character in a WWII movie and I'm eating things that look and taste like they grew in the back yard.
And here is the thing, you completely change your life and your schedule. You go to bed with aching muscles and you wake up with stiff joints and then you look in the mirror and there is no change. You step on the scales and you might have even gained weight. If I were a supernatural theist, I might assume that God hates me.
Ah, but folks, here is the bitter pill: a meaningful transformation of personal health requires a change of life..... it demands that you live in a different way, if not every day then virtually every day.
If you are an alcoholic and you want to save your marriage, your career and your health, stopping drinking on Mondays will not accomplish your goal..... it will just make Monday's more detestable than normal.
Now, I'm just two minutes into this sermon and I've already lost half of the audience because most of you are just thinking about what advice you are going to give to me about how to lose weight. This is the most amazing phenomenon.... You can publicly state: I have a trainer and a nutritionist and I am on a program of exercise and weight loss and I promise that I will hate anyone who tries to give me any advice about how to do this until the day I die..... and I very nearly mean that.... And you watch.... There will be a couple of folks here who still cannot resist.
Now, what would actually help? Someone offering to come walk with me, or ride a bike with me..... but you see, liberals, progressives, intellectuals..... we fall prey to the belief that having an opinion, writing a column, talking about something is tantamount to having done something. And I'm going to be the last one to say that public testimony is nothing..... it is a whole lot of what I do. But honestly, several of you have been in the hospital or have been seriously ill..... which was better, when I came by the hospital and visited you or when Mark Kapustka showed up at your door with her homemade chicken pot pie?
I'm with ya. I really do care. I really do want for you to feel better and to recover your health. Jim and Debby Baugh will bring you a casserole.
It's like this very tense build up to a new war with Syria: I've published a column against military strikes in Syria in the Springfield NewsLeader. I've posted opinions about it on line. I've even stood on a street corner holding a protest sign. And I would do all of those things over again..... bearing witness to social justice is an important part of our prophetic role in the world. However, doing social justice makes bearing witness have some gravitas.
Four of the most unpopular words you can say around liberals are: We are raising money. We want to be self-congratulatory for having informed opinions. We want to pat ourselves on the back for not being like those ignorant war mongering hawks who just don't understand the implications of international conflict. But I propose that also make donations to help give aid to the war refugees.
There are currently two million Syrians who are fleeing from the violence of the Syrian civil war and most of those two million Syrians are children. Don't just be informed. Do something. Don't just be mad. Make a difference.
Our viewers and listeners who are still connected to a denomination, I can tell you that for all of the things that main stream churches do wrong, a lot of their relief agencies are still really trustworthy organizations. Lutheran, Methodist, UCC, Disciple, Catholic, Church World Service and others, all do excellent work in getting resources to the people who need them.
We are not connected to a larger church body and so we will give our aid through the United Nations fund for Refugees. I wish that I could make dinner for a bunch of refugee families myself but I can't, so I am going to host a $25 a plate dinner at my house tonight for some friends and I'll send that money to refugee relief so that someone else can feed the refugees. There are very few of you who could not do something similar. It is not enough to wish for peace, to believe in justice or to hope for mercy..... we are moral actors on the stage of life and we must not stand idly by.
We recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington for Jobs and Justice.
What made that event so effective a half a century ago was not just Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech. He had delivered most of the parts of that speech in a dozen other locations. What made that one different was that he delivered the speech in front of a half a million marchers on Capitol Hill. There were enough people visibly standing together in front of the halls of government demanding that they be heard.
That march did finally get the ball of great social change rolling but it was preceded by dozens of less successful marches. Some, I'm sure, were failures. The single largest reason that our government seems to ignore what the majority of people believe and want about attacking Syria, about gun control, about domestic spending, food labeling, higher education costs and even the tax code is because we do not stand together, speak together, demonstrate..... we are, and this is a hundred times more true of liberals, we are ferocious individualists and individuals are very very very easy to ignore.
Some of us went out and stood on a busy street corner yesterday holding signs expressing our opposition to bombing Syria. There were just a few of us. I'm certain that there were demonstrations all over America but the numbers are not large enough to make many legislators believe that this issue might affect their re-election.
There are two kinds of capital in politics: votes and donations. Liberals will never win on the donations front and that is more true today than ever before. Let me tell you something..... you remember the famous trial of Jack Abramoff who was sentenced to prison for illegal political fund raising.
Well, now, with the Supreme Court's "Citizens United" decision, everything Abramoff did that sent him to prison is now legal. The deck of government influence is stacked in favor of the people who can make six and seven figure political donations. All most of us have to influence government is our vote and if you are never seen to be a voting block then your vote is very nearly meaningless.
Among those of us who see how the system is rigged against the poor and the middle class, cynicism becomes almost our only holy sacrament. We can hole up in a book store or a bar and feed one another on the hopelessness of our times..... corporations control the government and between the two of them our food is being poisoned, our environment is becoming toxic, higher education is unaffordable and health care costs and impossible.
What I can tell you is that none of that would be true if we would lay down our instincts to judge one another and reject everyone who disagrees with us on any one point. None of these things would continue to be true if we applied the principles of labor unions to the entirety of our lives. If we organize, cooperate, support one another, work with one another, then Monsanto doesn't get to own the food supply, GE and General Dynamics don't get to own the Pentagon, and conservative state legislators don't get to take the right to vote away from the poor and women don't have to be subjected to humiliating and unnecessary procedures in the management of reproductive lives.
There has been nothing like the famous Jobs and Freedom march on Washington, not simply because we have not had a Martin Luther King, Jr. to help us dream but because we simply have not been willing to take our convictions to the point of action.
There have been hopeful signs. The Occupy Wall Street movement last year showed some hope.... Not much came of it but it did show that some young people were waking up to realize just how much the system is being stacked against them.
It has not received the news coverage that it deserves, but pastors and the NAACP in North Carolina have been organizing protests every Monday for the past several months with a couple of thousand people every week, showing up to protest the changes in voter restrictions that are blatant attempts to keep hundreds of thousands of poor minorities from voting in North Carolina. They have not effected a change in the legislature just yet but I think that they have a chance.
A couple of months ago, when Texas legislator, Wendy Davis, stood on her feet for an entire day in a filibuster to protect Planned Parenthood in Texas, the capitol was filled with thousands of supporters who cheered her on and who made it impossible for the conservatives who were trying to take freedom and rights away from Texas women to successfully mount an effective challenge.
Of course, they still got their way in the next legislative session but they made a hero of Wendy Davis and we have not heard the last of her. This week, in Illinois, Democratic legislator, Joseph Lyons, proposed a bill that would require all women to have and watch an ultrasound before receiving an abortion. Fellow Democrat, Kelly Cassidy, proposed an amendment saying that, in the interest of gender equality, all men should have to have an ultrasound prior to getting a prescription for Viagra or Cialis..... because a hand held ultrasound wand looks pretty different depending upon who is holding the handle and who is about to get it inserted.
Kelly Cassidy will only be successful in Illinois if the people of Illinois stand with her for women's rights. No one brilliant speech, no clever amendment, no one day of protest will accomplish any change in the things we complain about when we are feeding our cynicism. Only self-sacrifice, cooperation, unity, and consistency can win. Now you have to decide how badly you want it.
