Third Sunday of Advent, December 16, 2018, "Love demands that we know"

C Advent OL3 BFC 2018

Luke 1:1-11; 2:1-5; 3:1-3

December 16, 2018

Around 12 years ago at this time, I had just returned home from an emergency delegation to the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where an annual teacher’s strike had become bigger and broader in reaction to rampant graft and corruption.  A movement formed—the Popular Assembly of Oaxaca’s Peoples which occupied the city center of Oaxaca’s capital city.  The federal police were called in and the movement formed barricades around the city to prevent the police and right-wing militias from entering into neighborhoods.  About a month out from our departure, U.S. photojournalist, Brad Will, was killed.  Tourists emptied out of Oaxaca.  We were told that we would be risking our own lives to go on the delegation.  I went because my family is filled with public school teachers and because my heart seems to beat a little faster in southern Mexico.  I thought, if there is going to be a time when I might show some measure of courage, these should be my people.  And so, being either foolhardy or courageous, I went to Oaxaca and had my life changed forever. 

For several days, our Witness for Peace delegation stayed in one of the most active and inspired communities led by the Oaxacan teachers—Zaachila.  My time in Zaachila had one of those beautiful, heart-warming cross cultural stories that only I seem to produce when I travel to Mexico and Guatemala.  I was staying at the home of one of the local teachers and she had given me the bedroom of her oldest son, who stayed with friends for the night.  We had brought our sleeping bags with us, not knowing what to expect when we arrived in Zaachila.   I felt fortunate to not only have a real life bed, but also, glory upon glories, an upstairs shower.  Expecting the worst, I counted my blessings after staying up very late talking to this mother and teacher who wanted to share every possible part of the movement with me.  I would wake up to take a shower.

My bedroom had no door or drape across its entrance, but the bathroom opposite my bedroom did have a large towel draped across the entrance.  When I woke up in the morning, I gathered up my clothes and headed to the bathroom.  I turned the handles on the shower . . . and nothing.  Huh.  Ok, I’ll try again.  Nothing.  No big deal, no shower today, so I’ll just change out of my sweats into my t-shirt and jeans for that day.  Forgetting that a shower in an upstairs bathroom would need time for the water pressure to build, I had all my clothes off when all of a sudden . . . water came streaming from the shower head. 

The rest of the Witness for Peace delegation snickered in laughter as I described what it was like trying to decide what to do next.  Ok, do I make a quick, streaking dash to the uncovered bedroom?  With no shower curtain, how do I now protect my already wet clothes from becoming sopping wet?  I was literally, as they say in Spanish, entre dos aguas.  While trying to explain how funny and embarrassing this was when I got home, Tracy asked, “Why didn’t you turn off the shower?”  I hadn’t thought of that.  A great story ruined by simple logic.  Yeah, foolhardy.

As the first international observers to arrive in Oaxaca and some of the only gring@s remaining in a tourist area like Oaxaca City, we were told over and over again that our presence in the area, particularly in a small community like Zaachila, made our hosts feel more safe and secure.  Our hosts believed that our presence did not allow the state and federal government to act with total impunity.  

Almost every Mexican person we met with in an official capacity had a warrant out for their arrest with active calls on the government radio station for their assassination.  These were people who chronicled human rights abuses, who denounced torture, and called for an end to the corruption in their community, state, and nation.  In Zaachila this was an eighty-year old indigenous woman who, during one of the marches, had scolded the young federal police boys as her own sons.  In Zaachila these were teachers who had bought breakfasts, shoes, and supplies for their students and who now asked the government to provide for these basic student needs as a way of creating the common good. 

For that is why we give power to government, any government, it is to say that we recognize having beautiful parks, paved roadways, and well-funded public schools in our communities provides for “the common good.”  Zaachila threw the mayor of their fair city out because they recognized the way he was selling off their city property to line his own pockets.  The mayor’s form of government did not square up with a government that was providing for the common good.

I always tell folks who return from a delegation or mission trip to make their first presentation to a group from which they are not asking anything.  Because too often that first presentation is filled with embarrassing, touristy stories like one about a shower.  For example, “You should have seen when this happened or that happened or the sunrise as it came over the mountain or the moon in its radiance with none of the false light we have at night!”   I think it is human nature that folks return from a different culture with all the flora and fauna details so vivid in their mind that those details are the first thing that comes out.  We are moved by the details and too often forget the big picture which is so much harder to communicate.

The New Testament gospels, and Luke in particular, try to say something about that big picture by the details given.  Luke’s details function as a backdrop for the entire story.  Lest we think religion has nothing to do with politics, the author of Luke would dissuade us.  “In the days of King Herod of Judea . . . “ 

“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria . . .”

“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, . . . “

          Each one of those political, ruling statements is followed by the hope of a people who witness God actively working in their lives.   In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a man named Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth.  In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus, and responding to that decree are two migrants from Nazareth, Joseph and Mary.  In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, the word of God came to John.

          Luke knew that God’s activity happened within the political matrix of first century Rome.  Scholars use the term matrix instead of context because matrix reminds us that historical people interact with their historical time and geographical place.  It acts upon them.  They act upon it.  To say “context” sometimes unintentionally communicates time and place as static and passive.

Biblical scholars will also tell you that when Biblical writers take pains to include such detail, we would do well to sit up and take notice because the writers are trying to tell us something about the drama that is about to unfold.  To understand the story, one has to know the political landscape and how that landscape affects all the people within the story.  Luke could not make it more clear:  the gospel story takes place within the Roman Empire, in the geographical area ruled by King Herod, and at a time when the religious aristocracy openly collaborated with Rome and its Caesars.  God’s activity is a rejoinder to that Empire—in the days of King Herod there was a man named Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth; in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus and Mary and Joseph went from Nazareth to Bethlehem; in the fifteenth year of Emperor Tiberius, the word of God came to John.  Biblical scholar Richard A. Horsley believes this juxtaposition is the kind of evidence which defines Christianity in the first century—and the definition of Christianity is:  anti-Empire.

          Much like the organization that facilitated my delegation to Oaxaca, Witness for Peace, Christianity in first century Rome may have been politically independent but Christianity was not politically neutral.  We strip the gospels of so much meaning when we demand that they be apolitical.  The gospels are not apolitical and nowhere is that more evident than in Mary’s song where she lifts her voice to line out how rulers shall be thrown from their thrones and the poor elevated.   Later in the story, we learn that for Caesar to gain taxes and tributes from the people, they shall have to be enrolled.  And so Mary and Joseph, who probably had to leave Bethlehem as immigrants or refugees now must return to be counted.  Still later, John the Baptizer’s is imprisoned by King Herod for not keeping his mouth shut.  The gospel of Luke is politically confrontational right from the outset, asking us where we stand politically.  Do we stand with peasant women who sing songs of liberation, migrants who must travel because of the Empire’s economic demands, prisoners who have been locked up for speaking out, or do we stand with the powers that be?  Do we stand with Empire?

          We really have to dispel this notion that Christianity should somehow be politically neutral.  And I remember how hard it was, as someone who changed my major from political science in college and did not do well in economics class, to recognize that my faith was leading me to become better informed about politics and economics so that I could be more faithful.  I know that that gospel is out there, that Christianity is not political, the tempting idea that if we just love one another we do not have to learn global economics and politics. 

          I talked about the idea with several people on the delegation-- that Americans know so little about global economics and politics compared to the Mexican folk we met in Zaachila.   Even the high school student I met during my home stay explained to me his basic understandings of neo-liberal economics and free trade and how those policies affected his community.  “Why,” I asked other members of the delegation, “do Americans know so little about these things?”  Sean, one of the independent journalists on the delegation, suggested that one of the reasons is because Americans, for the most part, profit from not knowing what their country’s policies do to the rest of the world.  Ignorance has an interest, he suggested.  And I think Sean may be partly right.

          Love requires our whole being.  Our soul cannot be splintered into a political self, an economic self, and a spiritual self.  We need to know what neo-liberal economics, free trade, and NAFTA mean and what those policies continue to do to people and the good earth in Canada, the United States, and Mexico.  In a world where growing fencepost to fencepost on big industrial farms was once a way farmers sought to feed the world, we need to now ask ourselves whether that is an outdated missionary model that has imperialist overtones.  For are there not strong people in every country who could feed their communities if they were given the necessary resources and allowed the necessary freedoms to farm their own land?  In a world where two of the poorest states in Mexico have some of the greatest natural resources, we need to ask ourselves whether building roads to get those resources to the ocean where they can be shipped north is loving and fair and just?  For are not the resources of a land to be shared with the people inhabit that land?  Should the Empire or the people decide how the corn, the coffee, or as Jesus related, how the bread and fish should be shared?

          If faith has nothing to say to issues which dictate the poverty and oppression to a people, then faith becomes irrelevant and love and justice are placebos which have no real grit.  Faith dictates that we should know how our Empire provides a difficult matrix for people all around the world.  Some Oaxacans chose to stand their ground and ask for breakfasts, shoes, and resources for the students in their schools.  Other Oaxacans, at that time, 150,000 a year, headed to more northern parts of Mexico and the United States.  Love demands that we know.  Love demands that we know.

          This mother and teacher who wanted to offer me a dry shirt to take with me when I came down for breakfast had a political radio broadcast playing throughout my whole time at her house.  The teacher wanted to make sure she heard any news of the movement.  She had participated in the three major marches, including the pots and pans march where women nonviolently overtook the local radio station.   The mother frequently broke into the chant:  “A people united shall never be defeated!”  (el pueblo unidos jamas sera vencido) On one of the pointsettias in the heavily guarded Zocalo in Oaxaca City was a message that read:  “The voice of the people is the voice of God.”  I took a picture of that pointsettia and have it up in my office to forever remind me of the great courage I witnessed while I was there.  With the Scripture we have before us today from Luke, who could argue with them?

          In the second term of President George W. Bush, a treaty was made that not only included Mexico but sought to include all of Central America, when the APPO leader Flavio Sosa was imprisoned, and living in the town of Zaachila, Oaxaca, with a corrupt and brutal mayor, there was a mother and teacher named Claudia.  In Claudia’s matrix, she believed that peace was possible and that God intended joy for her family, for her students, for her community. 

Where I arrived in Oaxaca as a person for little hope for a new world, a different world, I came away from that delegation with a hope against hope.  No, I did not see any realistic possibility for APPO and the teachers to carry the day.  But knowing Claudia and her courage made me believe that God’s purposes were being worked out.   I think we are often hopeless in our country because we do not know the courage of a Claudia or the resolve of Maryknoll missionaries, or the wisdom of a high school student.  And love, love demands that we know. 

Today we baptized Christa Sofinowski into a courageous congregation.  We asked her to step out in the world, as I know she already does, to be fierce and love fiercely, to not identify family by blood but by those who are entrusted to her care.  We take one of our earliest baptismal formulas from Galatians to say that there shall be no barriers to her love across socioeconomic status, culture and race, gender and sexuality.  Politics is about getting things done in the public realm such that if she has to enter the messiness of it to get stuff done, we want her to do so.  Love demands that she know.  Love demands that we know.  Amen.