Earth Day

Monday, June 1, 2015

Sermon for Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2015

B Trinity BFC 2015
Romans 8:12-25
June 4, 2015

          Author Dani Shapiro shares about the spiritual practice of writing,

When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don’t want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know — if we know anything at all — is how to write the book we’re writing. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won’t succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt — spectacularly, brazenly — into the unknown.[1]

 Shapiro relates the focus of spiritual practice.  It is not in developing personal perfection, but in a willingness to risk transformation into the unknown, to step in and start. 
In contrast, on a decided focus on the afterlife, Christian spirituality lost much of its grit, practical application, and courage for justice.  We hear talk of the need to develop an inner life separate and apart from an outer life of action and advocacy.  But that split between inner and outer is a fiction that can leave us untransformed and disconnected.  As the African-American spiritual says, “There’s a new world coming.  Everything’s going to be turning over.  Where you gonna’ be standing when it comes?”
In this passage of Scripture from Paul’s letter to the Romans, Paul hops back and forth between inner and outer, blurring the line until we recognize there is no line at all.  He critiques the principalities and powers, the systems and the structures, and relates that the whole system is a system of slavery.  Paul states that people who do not participate in that system, do not benefit from it, are adopted as God’s children, and inherit a spirituality of freedom with Christ. 
          This passage has long been misinterpreted.  Long been misinterpreted because a Greek word has been literally and lazily translated rather than poetically and symbolically translated.   Sin is translated as acting according to “the flesh.”[2]  When all sins are translated as according to “the flesh” it connotes that our intended separation from God has to do with a need to transcend our physical body, its natural sensuality and sexuality. 
          Slavery is an economic and political reality.  And Paul hearkens back to foundational Jewish stories of bondage and slavery to explain what it means to be spiritually rich.  To be spiritually rich is not based in otherworldly, unembodied practices.  As I have stated many times, the Roman Empire was a system based on domination, hierarchy, and slavery.  Rome left its conquered peoples disconnected, rootless, and pitted against one another.  A spiritual life that does not speak to these realities is meaningless.  Sin is then defined as those who are slaves to a system that continues to grind, destroy, and hold power over one another.  As a result, freedom is one of the primary spiritual values for Paul.  Freedom connotes a person, a people, who are not participants in a system of slavery, hierarchy, and domination.  On an inner, personal, and practical level, freedom is about choices, practices and values that are not dictated to us by the wider culture. 
          As Christians, as the daughters and sons of God, we are adopted and connected into communities and families that are not defined by blood, rooted in practices that show us not to be dependent and slaves to systems that rob the world of life, and moved to transcend labels that keep us separate from one another. 
          Today we commissioned missionaries who communicate that kind of freedom with their willingness to imagine a world transformed.  They represent us and interrupt their lives in the hope that we might collaborate with God to bring about a world that now suffers with labor pains.  There’s a new world comin’.   These missionaries will return to us to share with us the signs of God’s activity and presence in the world. 
          My experience has been that missionary trips like these affirm the activity and presence of God in the world.  Though they might be witnesses to immense suffering of people in Tanzania or of the earth in California, they will have strong and unforgettable experiences of the activity and presence of God. 
          But hear this.  Too often we have been sold a bill of goods in Christianity spirituality which indicates that there is a hierarchy of being.  Some people know how to do it.  Some do not.  Some have a gift for spirituality.  Some do not. 
I say that this is a lie!
People in Tanzania, the earth along the coast of California have knowledge we need as well.  And our missionaries are tasked with coming back to share the good news they learn in those places. 
We are born as spiritual beings.  As Paul relates in his passage, the earth too is imbued with spirituality such that it is throbbing with new life, ready for the waters to burst forth from the womb.
We are spiritual beings.  The truth is that no work we do on ourselves or in God’s creation is too humble, too unglorious, too small to join with God in transformation.  We need not be unblemished, perfect, accomplished, or experts.  We do not need the perfect path.  As Paul tells it, in collaborating with God to give birth to a new world, we often cannot even begin to see what that would look like.   We need to just begin, enter into the struggle, to begin to do the little things in the name of unarmed truth and unconditional love.   
          God does not need perfect people on a perfect path.  God needs walkers. 
In 1987, two giants in the work of social transformation came together to have a dialog about what brings about social transformation.  The funding of their conversation was considered so important that it was sponsored by what used to be the United Church of Christ Board for Homeland Ministries.[3] 
Myles Horton founded the Highlander Folk School in Grundy County, Tennessee, one of the poorest Appalachian counties and an area dominated by powerful coal interests. During the 1 930s, at the time of Highlander's founding, the region was being swept by industrialization. Myles and Highlander started their programs with rural workers, who were being displaced from the land and driven into the textile mills, mines, and factories as part of the "development" of the rural South.  
As I began to read his work seminary, Paulo Freire became one of my greatest teachers.  Paulo Freire grew up and began his work in one of the poorest regions of Brazil—the northeast region.  The region has been plagued with poverty, hunger and illiteracy for many years.  The northeast has Brazil's highest birthrate, shortest life expectancy rates, severest malnutrition, lowest literacy rates, and highest levels of unemployment and underemployment. 
Both the rural South and northeastern Brazil were dependent upon powerful economic interests, initially the plantation owners and later the multinationals, and were characterized by sharp dichotomies between rich and poor, powerful and powerless.  
Not unlike the historical Jesus, both men began their movements recognizing a strong need for social transformation.  But where does one start?  How does one begin?  The work of each man relied on making the people who sought liberation the subjects of their own destiny.  This could not be charity work where liberation was handed over to people.  Both men recognized that real liberation had to happen through popular participation and probably could not happen through existing institutions.  Myles Horton said,

When people criticize me for not having any respect for existing structures and institutions, I protest. I say I give institutions and structures and traditions all the respect that I think they deserve. That's usually mighty little, but there are things that I do respect. They have to earn that respect. They have to earn it by serving people. They don't earn it just by age or legality or tradition.

As an existing structure and institution, we need to ask whether we get by based on age, legality, or tradition.  Is new birth possible or are we holding on to that age, legality and tradition to stand in a place where we are forever protecting the old order?
Both men quickly realized in their work that the questions and concerns they had were not the questions and the concerns of the people with whom they were working.  For interest and participation, the people themselves had to work out the particularities of their struggle with their particular skills and intelligences.  Their relevant questions had to be brought forward.  Participation was the key with an understanding that once they were able to train themselves and the people with whom they worked not to follow conventional wisdom, a whole other wisdom broke out as they continued their work in the struggle.   But they all had to enter that struggle together.  They had to start struggling.  They had to start working.  They had to start creating.  Just begin.  To express this understanding, both men turned to a poem by Spanish poet Antonio Machado: 

          Wanderer, your footsteps are
          the road, and nothing more;
          wanderer, there is no road,
          the road is made by walking.
          By walking one makes the road,
          and upon glancing behind
          one sees the path
          that never will be trod again.
          Wanderer, there is no road—
          Only wakes upon the sea.

The road, O wanderer, O sojourner, O pilgrim, is made by walking. 
And, really, that is the struggle we have in this day and age is it not?  Not surprisingly, emerging church leader Brian McLaren recently wrote a book recognizing the same relevant issues in the North American church.  He titled his book after Machado’s poem, We Make the Road by Walking. 
Too often, in the North American Christian Church we get to claim we are Christian without any form of participation.  Particularly in the mainline church, there are few demands, if any, put on people who join our company. Once someone assents to our creed they are left frighteningly alone.  Our membership totals are far higher than the people who show up Sunday morning in worship.  Our nominating committees struggle to find people who will fill slots on committees and boards.  Though our committees and boards may do herculean tasks, we do not demand anything of them or expect to hear from them the goals and work they shall do over the coming year.  We become a people fighting for ideas in our community rather than practicing our faith.  Sometimes we not only move to the sidelines but to the judge’s box where we call ourselves Christian for assenting to similar beliefs, we keep score of those who are actually doing the work for social transformation to tell them when we think they have it right or wrong.  The little energy then left in the church is stripped and stolen by an audience that was supposed to be a congregation.  And creation is suffering, groaning under the weight of a world waiting to be born. 
There’s a new world coming.  Everything’s going to be changing over.  Where you gonna be standing when it comes?
The path, the new world, is made by our walking.  So as our missionaries get ready to travel to other parts of the world, I invite all of us to begin as the imperfect Children of God to begin the walking so that a road may be made and we may be birthed into freedom and away from slavery, domination, and hierarchy.  In turn, may our spiritual practices collaborate with God to midwife a new world God now groaning and suffering in labor.  We may not know what the road or path looks like it.  No matter.  God awaits us.  Walkers are needed.  Let us make the road.  Amen. 




[1] Dani Shapiro, Still Writing:  The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life  (New York:  Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013)
[2] sarx is the Biblical Greek word.  This is where literal translation of the Bible misses the mark.  Paul is spending a great deal of his time talking about a world to come, and the thin veil that exists between this world and the world to come.  So the very literal translation of this word is the outer covering of the body.  It relates to something that is surface without much depth or, as I stated above, a thin veil.  I chose to relate it in the Scripture verse as the way the present world works or its values.  Within context, Paul is clearly making a reference to the system of slavery, domination, and hierarchy that is the Roman Empire.  He is referencing the stories of his people in Exodus and Exile to say that the antidote for this slavery and bondage is “freedom.”  We show “freedom” through our inner life by collaborating with God to not choose or making priorities that are slavery, domination, and hierarchy.  And we show “freedom” through our outer work to collaborate with God to transform systems and structures.  Inner and outer are two sides of one coin.  They cannot be separated.  For example, I cannot ask for wholesale change of sweatshop labor and not be concerned about my individual spiritual practices that move me to make just and right purchases. 
[3] Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking:  Conversations on Education and Social Change (Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 1990).

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