Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent, Year C, December 6, 2015

C Advent 2 OL BFC 2015

Isaiah 57:14-21; Luke 1:68-79

December 6, 2015

I am not sure who I might vote for in upcoming elections for Republican and Democratic candidates for President of these United States, but if Bernie Sanders should happen to win the Democratic nomination I think his broader appeal will have been achieved in one, singular moment.  Before one of the debates, Sanders was asked by CNN’s Rachel Maddow, “What is the largest misconception people have of you?” 

Sanders responded, literally, tongue in cheek, “People think I’m grumpy.  People think I’m too serious.”  Sanders then smiled wider than I have ever seen him and said, “But I have seven beautiful grandchildren and they are the joy of my life.”  In a moment, I thought Sanders dispelled his greatest weakness—that he is a joyless, grumpy man, with no connection to younger generations.  Therefore, he is electable. 

Truth told, there have been a number of articles written about Sanders and why this 73 year-old grandfather has wide, intergenerational appeal.  Senior Politics Writer for Elite Daily, Jonathan Haltiwanger, believes that millennials strongly support Representative Sanders because he is saying the things they have believed all along:  1) Sanders believes we must speak to the issue of student debt and has introduced legislation to make college free;  2) Sanders believes that inequality is immoral and bad for the economy;  3) Sanders has focused on the need young people have for jobs and thinks it is ridiculous that, instead, we focus millions on mass incarceration of young people;  4)  going along with 97% of the climate change scientists in the world, Sanders agree with the wide majority of Millennials to say that climate change is real and it is our fault;  and, finally, 5) Sanders believes with 73% of millennials that same-gendered marriage should already be legal.[1] 

Again, this is not stumping for Bernie Sanders.  I certainly have a number of foreign policy issues with Representative Sanders that give me pause, but it is informative that the demographic we have such a difficult time bringing into mainline churches is giving wide support to a 73 year-old grandfather.  I would argue they do so because they believe Sanders is invested in not only the present but the future of their world.  Millennials experience Sanders preparing a way in their world. 

Prepare the way of the Living God.  What are we preparing for?

In a liberation song that probably pre-dates the Christian movement, the priest Zechariah sings of a political and economic reversal for the Jewish people initiated by the same God who has historically delivered the people so that the people may serve God in a community life marked by wholeness and justice.   This song uses language tied very closely to the Psalms using idiomatic phrases which relate a people in need whom God is liberating and freeing by, quoting Zechariah’s song, “having their feet guided on the way of peace.”  God is both liberating the people from domination by their enemies and freeing them for service to God in their promise to covenantally love their neighbors.  As early Christian scholar, Richard Horsley puts it, “In sum, [this] is a song about God’s liberation of [the] people from subjection to their Roman domestic rulers so that, as God fulfills the covenant to Abraham [and Sarah], they can serve God by maintaining covenantal justice among the people.”[2]

Zechariah sings the song.  John the Baptizer, the Immerser in the River Jordan, that wild-eyed prophet, is the child of promise who bears the burden of incarnating the fulfillment of his father’s song.  Remember that this is a prophecy sung about a man who is beheaded.  John the Immerser does not win.  He does not carry the day.  Even his followers do not raise up armies to overtake the one who beheads him, Herod, or meet the military force of Caesar and the Roman legions with an even greater force.   John comes into the world demanding that covenantal justice from client king, Jewish collaborators within the religious hierarchy, and occupied and oppressed people alike.   This is what he does.  John prepares people to live out the Exodus story to suggest that they are liberated and free and no longer have to participate in the violent and death-giving story found all around them.

And Christians, in looking back on his life, say that he is the promised child of Zechariah’s song.  Don’t you find that curious?  Isn’t that exactly counter to the way the world works?   Maybe if he had won a few battles on behalf of the Jewish people?  Carried out a few key assassinations?  Begun a well-timed rebellion or revolt?  Then his name could have gone down in Jewish and Christian lore as someone who headed off the Romans for a time.   Instead, John the Baptist prepares for something else.  As our children sang for us today, John the Baptist prepares by not eating the Roman meal, the bread and circuses, to keep the people entertained and unprepared for the way of peace. He eats bugs for lunch, the locusts and wild honey provided by the Creator of the Universe, the Living God.  John is not preparing the way for a military campaign.  His Source of Power is not located in Rome or Jerusalem but actively walking as a pilgrim in the wilderness, along the banks of the Jordan River.

No, John shouts, “Prepare the way of the Living God!”  “Pre” a word meaning beforehand and “pare” to cut off or trim.  John advocates taking some action beforehand in getting ready for the future.  Cut off the excess baggage.  Detach yourself from the violent and death-giving system.  Trim that which will not only make you unhealthy but does damage to a life of wholeness and righteousness with your neighbor.[3]  Do this so that your feet might be guided into the ways of peace.  John does not win.  He is beheaded.  Why is the gospel, the good news, written this way?

Once again, tragedy strikes our country and we are surprised.  My colleague, Rev. Maren Tirabassi, with these tragedies in full view, wrote a beautiful poem using Scripture from Isaiah 40 that was part of our Communion Hymn for today. 

Comfort O comfort, my people
speak tenderly to San Bernardino
as to Colorado Springs

as to so many places,
saying that there can be an end
to the gun violence.

In this country that glorifies
this wild-westerness wilderness
that turns away
from straight talking,
prepare the way for God.

Every restriction to gun purchase
should be lifted up
and the second amendment
should be brought down.

The culture of independence
and revenge,
of vigilante and rogue cop,
of arming school teachers
and admiring movies
about super heroes and renegades
should be made plain.

But first we will cry out,
for the fragile lost lives
blown away like the dry grass
of California —

fourteen people
whose banquet has ended,
whose lives are cut short,
whose families
need the words of God
that we seem to be repeating
again and again and again —
Comfort, O comfort.[4]

The UCC pastor from Sandy Hook even wrote a beautiful letter that appeared on the UCC website which asked us all to observe December 10 through December 14 as Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath.[5]  If someone would like to lead that observance out, I have the website listed in the printed versions of my sermon. 

And it is good and right that we do, to prepare the way.  We take some action beforehand to get ready for the future.  Even President Obama has indicated that we will not be terrorized and we need to come together to search for answers.  Prepare the way.

But here’s the thing.  We continue to be surprised.  And there is a broader narrative, a bigger picture.  We keep pursuing violence and war halfway around the world, in the longest wars we have ever known, and we pretend that it is not somehow a spiritual practice that gets into our bloodstream. 

Last week Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who advanced through intelligence positions in Iraq and Afghanistan, called the Iraq war a blunder that led to the formation of ISIS.[6]  Last year, former British foreign secretary David Miliband conceded that the Iraq War created ISIS.[7]  I feel like I am using this phrase way too often in my discussions with people, but if we continue to see the whole world as a nail why would we think that law enforcement, people who feel like they have been dissed, mistreated, or bullied in their lives, would not have some people who rightly think that the best way is to go around carrying a hammer?  We must get ready for an endless war on terrorism and terrorists such we use our hammer to create more and more terrorists through the billions we are spending on war.  As Episcopalian priest Grant Gallup wrote, “[W]e must prepare for an endless war on terrorism and on terrorists.   And so we have done so, and are prepared indeed to destroy all life on the planet if necessary, to save it for the market, for capitalism, and to keep it from choosing socialism or home-rule or independence or the Religion of the Prophet, or any way but our own way.”[8]

I don’t know about you.  But as a person of faith.  I’d like to use my hammer to pound out something else.

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan told then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that if there ever was an alien race that waged war against the planet, he was sure that their two superpowers would form an alliance to fend off the attack.  That statement could not be more prescient and frightening as the two superpowers of the United States and now Russia come together to fight those places and people in the world who sit on natural resources desired by our two countries.  The “alien race” has become the poor and disenfranchised of countries where we have skin in fossil fuels.  And every day our preparations for war are creating immigrants, refugees, and enemies on a daily basis.[9]  We get what we prepare for.   

And I don’t know about you.  But I’d like to use my hammer to craft something else in the world.   

Whose way are we preparing for with our own lives, with our own resources, with our own skills and gifts, with our own commitments?[10]   This is the Second Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of peace.  How are we preparing to have our feet guided into the way of peace?  As I thought about that, and hoped you were not already preparing the gallows for me at the end of this sermon, I asked myself where I have heard of people struggling to make and build peace in our world.  I read material from the Truth Commission in Guatemala and the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa to get a sense for what those countries have learned about building or making peace. 

As people from all over those societies try to build or make peace, the first thing that has to happen, of course, is a cessation of war and violence.  We must agree that we will not take advantage of the vulnerability in coming to the table to lash out, take lives, or score points.  The second thing required, of course, by the very names these commissions hold is that the process of truth-telling must begin.  Only in that truth-telling can healing happen and reconciliation be made possible.   

I know.  I think of beginning those things to end not only wars but the mass shootings in our country and it seems impossible.  Then I remembered what it must have felt like to people in Germany who prayed for the Wall to be hammered down in Berlin, or people in South Africa or Mandela in his jail cell who prayed for something other than apartheid to be hammered into existence, or for those early Civil Rights Leaders who knew that the road was long and hard but the way had to be made.  Prepare. 

So what would truth-telling look like?  I think the leaders of the NRA need to sit across from victims of shootings in places like Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Columbine and listen to the incredible pain of mothers and fathers, teachers and spouses.  This must be done hour after hour, day after day.  So even though those leaders may still end up disagreeing with reasonable gun control legislation, they will never, ever, ever be dismissive of the heartache experienced.  A route, a corridor, a path, a way will be made.  They will prepare the way of the Living God and love their neighbor. 

We must begin truth-telling in Iraq and hold out amnesty, as is done in so many Truth Commissions, only if our leaders are willing to tell the truth.  And they should not only listen to the pain of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria, but also to the pain of our returning veterans as they tell haunting tales of unspeakable acts they may have committed or witnessed so that some of them might finally find healing.  Our former and current leaders must stand face to face with veterans who share what it is like to lose a limb, a friend, their minds.  An avenue, a trail, a track, a passage, a way will be made.  They will prepare the way of the Living God and love God and their neighbor.

While some of these Truth Commissions have travelled this far none of them have contemplated what it might be to then make sure peace is firmly established by distributive justice.  That is on some distant horizon, and God awaits us there.  We must take our hammers and hammer our swords into plowshares in peace.  And I don’t know about you, but I want to use my hammer to hammer out justice.  I want to hammer out justice. 

While others might tell you that the substance of their faith is based on incredible miracle stories found within the pages of Scripture, the substance of my faith is based on the idea that the Living God wills and wishes and wants the healing and reconciliation of the world.   And that this compassionate and merciful God seeks our collaboration in making a path, building a highway, preparing a way. 

Again, I know, I know.  This seems impossible.  There is no viable presidential candidate who is offering a way to peace.  Good thing.  It will take a movement of people who care less about winning than doing the next . . . righteous . . . thing.  I believe such a movement is rooted deep in a faith that the Living God is at work in the world.  And the call from John the Baptist, that prophet shouting out in the wilderness, the guy who ate bugs for lunch, comes across the ages commanding us, Pre-pare.  Prepare the way of the Living God.  Cessation of war, violence, and conflict.  Truth-telling.  Justice.  Let us prepare the way for peace.  Amen.

---

[1]John Haltiwinger, “Bernie Sanders is Saying What Millennials Have Been Thinking All Along,” Elite Daily, June 9, 2015.

[2] Richard A. Horsley, The Liberation of Christmas:  The Infancy Narratives in Social Context (New York:  Crossroad, 1989), pp. 118-119.

[3] Grant Gallup, “Advent II, December 10, 2006,” Homily Grits.  http://rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits06/msg00034.html.

[4] Maren Tirabassi, “Reflection on Isaiah 40 for San Bernadino,” Gifts in Open Hands, https://giftsinopenhands.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/reflection-on-isaiah-40-for-san-bernadino/.

[5] Materials can be found here: http://decembersabbath.org.

[6] Matter Ferner, “Former Military Chief:  Iraq War Was A ‘Failure’ That Helped Create Isis,” HuffPost Politics, November 30, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/iraq-war-isis-michael-flynn_565c83a9e4b079b2818af89c.

[7] Tom Porter, “Iraq War Created ISIS Concedes David Miliband,” International Business Times, August 10, 2014, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/iraq-war-created-isis-concedes-david-miliband-1460557.   Lydia Wilson has written an incredible piece for The Nation which reflects that ISIS fighters resist the characterization our country’s leaders and media make of them.  Wilson found the people she interviewed to be effectively war refugees who needed to latch onto something in their hopelessness.  “What I Discovered in Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters,” The Nation, October 21, 2015.  http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/.  

[8] Gallup, “Advent II.”

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 28, 2015

B Proper 8 BFC 2015

 2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27

June 28, 2015

           

          All of my children have been given names that reflect the deep meaning and legacy I hope is imbued in their lives.  Jacob is named after the “one who contends with God and humankind” hoping he will enter the struggle with courage and is the name of the first “Mulberry” who was born in the United States, his family brought here to this continent as an indentured servant.  Sophia is the name for Divine Wisdom a sign of female strength, creation, and work hoping she might know herself as a person of wisdom, strength, creation, and divine work.    That she might be a Divine Architect in her world.  Abraham, well, you can guess.  Abraham is named after the Abraham Lincoln Brigade which fought against fascism in Spain and for the 16^th President of the United States, in hope that he might be a person of courage and resolve.  He was born in Princeton, Illinois, the preaching home of Owen Lovejoy, the great Congregational abolitionist, credited with believing in Lincoln’s character enough to get him the Republican nomination.

If you are going to be an Illinois native, as I am, the advent of the 4^th of July is about a return and remembrance to all things Lincoln.  So about ten years ago, when the Abraham Lincoln Museum opened up in Springfield, Illinois, I knew there would be a weekend when I would load Jacob, Abraham, and Sophia in the car, and take the hour trip to enculturate them in the angels of their better patriotic nature.   At the time I was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals:  The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, a gift sent to me by my aunt for my birthday and signed by the author.  Lincoln was and is indelibly etched on my heart and my brain.   

I grew up in a town where Lincoln practiced law and two sites are marked in Metamora where the famous Lincoln-Douglass debates took place.  When the movie Lincoln showed up in theaters some years ago, my brother went with the other New Berlin, Wisconsin, high school history teacher to see if Spielberg “got it right.”  Both of them were Lincoln lovers, debated each other about which of their small hometowns had more Lincoln lore than the other.  So when Spielberg had Lincoln mention our hometown, Metamora, twice, Andy stood up, pointed to his colleague, and said, “There it is.  Cased closed.  There it is!”  Lincoln runs in our veins.

So, again, it only made sense, in celebrating the 4^th of July about ten years ago, that I would load up everybody in the car on Friday and make the trek to the Abraham Lincoln museum in Springfield.  There was an Abraham Lincoln impersonator there, greeting people and taking pictures with families.  Two movies with some great special effects for the sons and some period dresses for the daughter seemed to make the trip enjoyable for everyone.  Except me.  I wanted to hear his words, those words which seemed to have been wrought from the suffering and sacrifice of his life and the time, those words which did not claim innocence nor claim righteousness.  Oh, there were snippets and tablets with whole speeches.  But I wanted to hear those speeches which openly used religious language to define the difficult times but did not use that religious language as if he was the only person with the authority, character, or power to use that language.      

In the book, Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin makes mention of the overflowing, youthful optimism that was America—how that optimism shaped whatever public debate or issue that came before the country.  As one reads Lincoln’s words, it would seem, Lincoln did not share that youthful optimism.  He wonders aloud what God has in store for the nation, calls forward a remembrance of suffering, death, and mortality, and from that memory asks for character in our living. 

In the Scripture verse we have from Hebrew Scripture this morning, King David is confronted with suffering, death, and mortality.  Saul, his predecessor to the throne, is dead and so is Saul’s son Jonathan.  David had a unique friendship or relationship with Jonathan, one that surpassed his love for women.  For the first time in the glorious empire that he has created and is beginning to create for Israel, David is plunged into the suffering, death, and mortality of war.  “How the mighty have fallen,” David says, “and the weapons of war have perished!”  This is not the young David who strides before the Israelite army to slay Goliath, who believes God is with him to the absence of all others.  The youthful, indefatigable innocence of David is lost, destroyed in the cost war has exacted on one of the people closest to him.  David’s romance with warfare has died with Jonathan.  War’s glory has ended.  David is in grief.  He must now grow up.

In contrast, we seem to be a culture forever bound to our innocence to define us as a nation.  In the terrible tragedy of 9/11, our nation was offered a chance to mature and pay attention to why terrorists might target icons like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon but, for the most part, we chose to collectively bury our heads in the sand and ignore our history. 

Some years ago I organized an event at the local church I pastored titled, “Voices of Peace”, a collection of Christian voices dramatized to remind us that peace making and building is a part of our faith tradition.  As I researched different Christian voices within our own country to include in that presentation, the clarion call, the repeated critique was that America needed to give up its innocence, its understanding that it was without or with less blemish among the nations. 

I believe one of the best Christian critiques of American culture is done by theologian and scholar, Dr. Cornel West.   West believes we are a culture that avoids suffering and death at all costs, a suffering and death that would call into question our conformity, complacency, and cowardice.  If we do not deal with the systems of death in our history and present—systems like racism, materialism, and militarism—we end up with a Peter Pan mentality and a Disneyland sensibility.  Death and suffering, when engaged, West believes, bring about a maturity and a sensibility that move us to call into question the evil that is within us.  But in a death denying, death ducking, and death dodging society, we grow old, we grow powerful, and we grow rich, West says, but we never grow up.  Unlike David, we never seem to grow up.

 The sun is always out in America, and that’s not real, and therefore not healthy for us or the rest of the world.  The analogy Cornel West most often uses is ex-patriate Henry James’ reference to America as a hotel civilization.  We are obsessed with convenience, contentment, and comfort.  The lights are always on.  We can avoid the suffering and death.  We leave the hotel room with towels on the floor of the bathroom and the bed unmade, and we return with fresh towels on the rack, the bed made, and mints on the pillow.  We have no idea at what cost to the people who cleaned the room, whether they are being treated with dignity or fairness.  We leave with it dirty and we return with it clean.  It is all about our convenience, our contentment, and comfort—Cornel West says, “How adolescent!”[1]

Almost every candidate for president, including the brother of the president who brought us this war, admits that entering into war in Iraq was wrong.    We had a moment in our nation’s history when we could have used the “catastrophe” of war for a confrontation with death and critical reflection about our place in the world.  We are using every form of death ducking, death denying, and death dodging tactic to refuse to engage this war.  We are morally numbed, powerless and avoidant of the death.  Shock and awe was beamed into our television screens like a fireworks display, as if we were an audience to its glory and beauty with a refusal to print any pictures of the grotesque and ugliness caused by that modern warfare.  For many years we were forbidden from seeing the caskets draped in our national colors as they made their way home.  These Iraqi, Afghani, Pakastani people are God’s children, they were made by the same Creator of the Universe, fashioned by the generative forces of the world.  What happened in Fallujah and Haditha and what is happening in Guantanamo Bay and Syria are morally wrong, sinful, dreadful.  Now we are never quite sure of the numbers of dead killed by remote, clean, at no-cost-to-us drones that fly overhead and wreak collateral damage.  We think we can leave the room a mess and expect it to be clean when we return. 

This war is wrong.  And the longer it continues, the more it indicts us as a people who lack compassion, mercy, and justice.  We are not innocent!  And, as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., said so many years ago, with the violence we see in our country, “Our chickens have come home to roost” in tragic and terrible ways.  We cannot practice war abroad and not expect violence and war to course through our bloodstream in the national narrative at home.

As a church that proclaims in all of its bulletins, newsletters, advertisements, that we are a just peace church, we will need to decide whether that is some schmanzy-danzy title or whether that has something to do with our spirituality.  For spirituality is not about whether we feel or believe in God.  Rather, spirituality is about concrete practices we do week in, week out, day in, day out.  Spirituality says we recognize our own mortality but in between our birth and the death we shall all experience, we will fill our lives with practices that reflect our most deeply held values.  As a just peace church, we need to engage the suffering and death of this war to ask ourselves what we are doing monthly, weekly, daily to stand against this war. 

Perhaps we could sit down with a list of the Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakastani civilians killed in this war and pray for one of them every day.  We could enculturate our children into this practice by praying for one of the children under the age of eighteen killed both home and abroad—to enlarge the hearts of our children and help them grow into the maturity and courage God wills for them.  We could covenant that every week we will take five minutes to read a story about a U.S. family that has lost a son or daughter to the violence and war at home and abroad.  Or we could find pictures on the net of the suffering and death and force ourselves, as Emmitt Till’s mother did, to look at the pictures over and over again until our heart is softened and our will becomes resolved. 

And what will we do together?  How will we be a just peace church in the midst of violence and war that should undercut the very innocence we protest?  Should we put an ad in the paper, decry the war with air time on TV?  How do we practice building and making the peace together?  How do we engage the suffering and death that continues at our hands?

In a letter to the parents of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, Abraham Lincoln related his profound sorrow, having known their son himself.  He ends the letter to them by writing,

In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacredness of your sorrow, I have ventured to address you this tribute to the memory of my young friend, and your brave and early fallen child.

May God give you that consolation which is beyond all earthly power. Sincerely your friend in a common affliction --

A.   Lincoln[2]

About ten years ago, my children enjoyed a visit to a historic museum, but I missed Abraham Lincoln’s words, so often not words of innocence, or triumph, or victory, but words that engaged suffering and death, that questioned why war in the midst of so much death, that wondered aloud if perhaps war itself was a punishment for the collective sins of a nation, for the slavery it practiced, the violence it instilled such that violence in war had become who we were as a nation.  His patriotism did not require his praise but his critical reflection and confrontation with death.  I missed these words of humility, of maturity.  I missed these words: 

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes [God’s] aid against the other. It may seem strange that any [people] should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other [people]'s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has [God’s] own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that [one] by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through [God’s] appointed time, [God] now wills to remove, and that [God] gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to [God]? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bonds[person]'s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."   With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for [the one] who shall have borne the battle and for [their] widow and [their] orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.[3]

I sincerely hope and pray that my children forever remember that 4^th of July and the trip we took to Springfield.  I sincerely hope that just some of those words might be written on their hearts, that I might teach them what it means to be a “just peace” people, that this scourge of racism and war not continue to be our country’s spiritual practice.  I pray that we all might have a blessed, memorable, and meaningful 4^th of July, one that might bring forward our confrontation with death, our critical reflection, and our courage.  Amen.

---

[1] Cornel West, “The 2006 Barry Ulanov Memorial Lecture,” Union Theological Seminary, New York, June 20, 2006.  Also material taken from West’s book, Democracy Matters:  Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York:  The Penguin Press, 2004).

[2] http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/ellsworth.htm

[3] Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1865.  Text made inclusive.

"Actively" Church

I shared with my good friend and colleague, Christopher Grundy, that I believe the United Church of Christ needs to develop designations that help us move out of our "achievement" statuses.  I have become disillusioned and disappointed by the number of UCC congregations that are "Open and Affirming" or "Just Peace" and yet do not use those statements as "North Stars" for further action.

Sometimes I see those statements as all too often achievements by a solitary individual or small group in a local church that finally carried the day to get their church designated as "Open and Affirming" or "Just

Peace."  The local church then proudly posts these designations on their website, on their blog, and or in their bulletin without any reference to how it continues to embody these designations.  As in many institutional

settings, the description of a church becomes a noun (who they think they are) rather than a verb (what they do).  I am not saying that happens in every local church, but I am amazed by the number of local churches who become "Open and Affirming" never to revisit their growth and development with that identity or designation.

I would love to see the United Church of Christ continue to develop these designations as a rolling horizon, recognizing that we need to continue to grow and develop to be fully "Open and Affirming" and "Just Peace."  So, throughout the year, what has your church done to be considered "Just Peace" or "Open and Affirming?"  These rolling horizon designations

would be about a dialog between grass roots local churches and the national church.  Local churches would share some creative idea they employed and the national church would add it to the list for all other churches to learn by, recognize within their own work, and take hope from.

For example, we could use a model begun in the

Young Christian Workers Movement and advanced in Latin American base communities--see, judge (as to discern), and act.  out of see, judge (as to discern), act.  Celebration was later added to the process as people realized that the process left them with little energy to begin again.  

This is oversimplifying a process that can encourage deep systemic analysis, but here goes.  See:  (Open and Affirming) We could ask and answer how congregations might have engaged issues or communities surrounding the issue of the inclusion of the LGBTQ community.  (Just Peace)  We could ask and answer how congregations have lifted specific concerns about racial justice, violence, or building peace in their communities.  Discern:  We could ask what educational or immersion experiences congregations have used to further understanding of themselves and people not like themselves.  Act:  We could ask what their educational or immersion experiences led them to do in advocacy, pilgrimage, practice, mission, or evangelism (including others in their work or building the movement) Celebration:  We could ask how congregations celebrated the work they did over the course of the year or how they lifted up their identity in joyous proclamation.

Congregations would have to complete each one of these headings to be considered "actively" Open and Affirming or "actively" Just Peace.  The purpose is not to create a litmus test but to get congregations intentionally reflecting on their work, mission, and ministry.  In reflecting publicly, their information creates ideas for others, builds a feeling that a movement is afoot, and gives hope that we are not alone.

I also believe such reflection would make us more articulate as a denomination.  Let me give you an example.  Rev. Michael Neuroth is the UCC Policy

Advocate for International Issues.  He recently wrote a piece titled, "The True Cost of Drone Warfare."  In that piece he did an excellent job of helping us all discern further what it means to be a Just Peace institution/movement by spelling out some of its characteristics:

• Commits itself to working for systemic justice
• Commits itself to deepening friendships and covenants with all God's children
• Commits itself to claiming God's shalom for all
• Holding to the prophetic promise that "peace is possible"

Conversely, what is not Just Peace has these characteristics:

• Dims our hope and imagination for peace
• Blurs lines between civilian and combatant
• Distorts covenants between nations and peoples
• Pushes our nation to a constant state of war

I might look at the "opposites" of what is not Just Peace to offer what is:

• Just Peace lights the way for our hope and imagination toward peace.
• Just Peace seeks out ways to affirm our humanity even in the presence of war.
• Just Peace builds community, coalitions, and keeps covenant that furthers the welfare of people beyond our own races, ethnicities, and nations.
• Just Peace builds systems and infrastructure to make peace sustainable and resilient and undercut the arrogance and appetite for violence and warfare.

I know that Rev. Neuroth uses language from General Synod Resolutions, but he also cogently argues in a way that helps all of us better understand what it means to be Just Peace.  In so doing, I naturally compare and contrast my congregation to the criteria he puts forward.  I become much more articulate for helping my congregation discern how they shall be more Just Peace.  

So what about that idea?  What about deciding how we might become "Actively" Open and Affirming or "Actively" Just Peace using the base community process.  I would love to read the final step of the process--celebration.  How do other congregations actively celebrate their identity and work in way that gives them energy for starting the process all over again?  

I know there is much creativity out their in local congregations.  I would love to see how they sing, dance, and get goofy over their work and identity.  I believe that sharing would give my imagination flight and return the favor in some creative way.