February 28, 2010

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”


“See your house is left to you.” The version of the Gospel we read today differs from many other versions which add another word at the end of this sentence. “Your house is left to you desolate,” is the most common, but other translations add “abandoned, forsaken, vacant, waste.” “Your house is left it you” is actually the literal Greek which does not have an added modifier. Nothing else is really needed. The implication is clear. Without God, without the one who comes in the name of the Lord, we are left to our own devices, out of the relationship to the one who is the source of our life, alone, bereft, desolate.

The Bible is not shy about criticizing the religious; in fact much of the story of the bible is about the religious failing to recognize the holy, to distinguish the sacred from the profane, sacrament from desecration, and just who it is that is worthy of worship, that is favored by God. The bible is the story of a failure on a fundamental level to understand the difference between being a blessing and a curse. Often it is exactly the religious who imagine themselves blessed and to be a blessing whose house is in fact cursed and desolate. It is exactly religious people who make the proclamation that we all need God, who perform the sacred rites, and hold the keys to the heavenly Kingdom, who throughout history have killed and stoned and rejected the prophets God has sent to show the way. It is exactly religious people who in the name of God have oppressed to poor, and slaughtered the innocents of so many cultures around the world. It is exactly religious people who rather than a loving embrace have brought a sword and used the Gospel as an excuse to expand their own territory, power and dominion.

It is exactly the religious people who will offer up Jesus to be crucified. It is God in Christ who, in this feminine image, like a mother hen longs to gather her people under her wing, but they would not. Now in this Lenten Season as Jesus is on the road to his passion, we are called not to blame some other religious people. We are called to look deeply into our own roots, into the legacy and tradition we have inherited and help to perpetuate. We are called to repent of our own failure to recognize the One who comes in the Name of the Lord, and call him blessed.

The roots of this failure to truly understand blessing and recognize the One, go back a long way. God says to Abraham in today’s lesson, “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess. . . . To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.” That is a lot of territory. It includes a great deal more than what is present day Israel, all the way from the Nile to the Euphrates!” And there is absolutely no thought at all about the people that were already living there! In much of the biblical story, the other inhabitants of the land are just so many obstacles in the way and their worship and culture are vilified and demonized to justify their complete annihilation. In another place God tells Abraham that he will be a blessing to many nations, but practically speaking this promised dominion and the annihilation of whole peoples does not look much like a blessing! At the very beginning of the story of the faithful, the message of blessing gets drowned out by the reality of violent domination. Can this really be what God was calling Abraham to, or is God simply used in this story to justify conquest?

There are certainly others stories, and alternative visions that run throughout the biblical account and into our own Christian heritage told by prophets and saints, but this dominant image of conquest remains a powerful overarching theme. Let’s move ahead in the story to the expansion of European Christian nations in the 15th century around the world and the missionary fervor that came along with this expansion. Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull at this time that justified the acquisition of non-Christian lands and even the extermination of the peoples living in these lands if they did not receive the Gospel. A series of declarations around this time have come to be known together as the Doctrine of Discovery and they draw their metaphorical strength from none other than a comparison to Abraham, the call to be a “blessing” to the nations justifying the forced mass conversions of peoples and cultures in the name of civilizing the pagans or of that didn’t work, their wholesale slaughter.

Just so you do not think this is ancient history the influence of this Doctrine of Discovery can be traced throughout our own legal system and our own history in relationship to the First Peoples of this land. According to the Doctrine land really belongs civilized Christian nations. At the foundation of our legal system is the fact that our land was really taken from the British not the Native Americans. In most of our treaties with the First Peoples of this land they are treated as subordinates lacking true title and equality among nations.

Our own version of Manifest Destiny is directly related to the theology that draws on the Abrahamic story. As Americans we believe that we are called by God to be a city on a hill, we are a blessing to the nations, we have been given this land by God, and we are destined to occupy it from sea to sea and that somehow gives us the right to annihilate everyone that stands in our way. Even the most well meaning Christian missionaries in our history who opposed the slaughter, enslavement and forced evacuation of tribal peoples, saw themselves as bringing civilization to the natives, and in their most charitable and paternalistic nature, they knew what was best for them. They were after all a blessing to them.

In 2006 The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues called for Pope Benedict XVI to revoke the 15th century papal bulls collectively known as the Doctrine of Discovery. The Episcopal Church became the first Christian denomination to repudiate the doctrine at our convention last summer and now a Quaker Indian Committee of Philadelphia, inspired by the Episcopal decision, has also disavowed the doctrine and voiced its support for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In their statement they said, the committee “renounces the Doctrine of Discovery, the doctrine at the foundation of the colonization of Indigenous lands, including the lands of Pennsylvania. We find this doctrine to be fundamentally inconsistent with the teaching of Jesus, with our understanding of the inherent rights that individuals and peoples have received from God, and inconsistent with Quaker testimonies of Peace, Equality, and Integrity.” Now our friend David Bell, has written a paper on the subject in his attempt to persuade the Disciples to take a similar stance.

What are we to make of this?

Our current generation judges the action of our predecessors and we imagine now that we understand something our ancestors were not able to see, in their own historical and cultural context. How will we be judged in future generations who look back at what we imagine to be the best of intentions, our best attempts at following Christ, our efforts to be a blessing? How will our efforts to proclaim the gospel, to be in solidarity with the poor, to be good stewards of God’s creation, to be ambassadors of reconciliation, to worship and give thanks to our God – how will these efforts be judged by future generations?

The Apostle Paul says that God is clearly seen in the things that God has made and then he proceeds to judge the surrounding cultures of his time based on his own limited cultural perspective of the way things should be! We see the world through the lens of our own time and culture and there is no way to get around that. We are limited, finite people, we are small and weak vessels into which the universal eternal spirit of God is being poured. Even though Jesus says you cannot pour new wine in old wine skins because they burst, nevertheless that is exactly who we are and what we do all the time. And it is what God does. God always comes incarnate in a particular place and time and we can only know God indirectly through our relation - to creation, yes as Paul says, but not to all of creation, to a particular land and people in the particular time we are now in.

One of the main gifts I think we need to be able to see God is something we used to say at the Campbell Farm. It is part of a list of cross cultural communication skills that we used there. “Tolerate Ambiguity.” Groups often came with a great deal of certainty about who they were and what they had to offer and what they were going to do, and we thought it a good week if they left with more questions than answers as they entered briefly into relationship with the people who lived here on this land.

Zach and I watched the Messenger the other night, a movie about Joan of Arc. It is a perfect example of the ambiguity of revelation. Many of you know the story of Joan of Arc, a national French hero who led the French army against the British again back in the 15 century. She was burned at the stake by the church then and 500 years later canonized as a Saint by the same church. Did Joan really get a revelation from God, or was she just a traumatized woman that carried her obsession all the way through victory, defeat, betrayal, martyrdom and sainthood. Or was she both?

Joan’s revelation from God came as a young girl and grew out of her love of France then under English rule. She was an illiterate peasant and knew little beyond her home, her family and village and the land on which she lived. Her visions grew especially out of her love for her sister and the pain and trauma of the loss of her sister whose death Joan witnessed at the hands of British soldiers. She was convinced that God had given her a vision of a liberated France, and her battle cry against the English is not “Yield in the Name of the King of France,” but “Yield in the Name of the King of Heaven.” She is used as a pawn by the French royal family to gain a military victory over England and then abandoned to the English when her military solution gives way to political negotiations. She is accused of heresy, as well as prideful arrogance, presuming to speak for God, rising above her station in life and, among other things, dressing like a man.

Throughout her life she is constantly seeking priests to hear her confession but when on trial before the English priests for heresy they will not hear her confession. In the end her confession is heard by God himself in the guise of Dustin Hoffman, who visits her in her jail cell. He comes as both accuser and advocate, as she struggles internally with her doubts about the truth of her convictions. Though she is forced to sign a recantation which she immediately tears up, she never really denies that God has spoken to her, but she does confess her own arrogance and pride and selfish stubbornness to God. She is burned, a martyr and a saint, having been confessed.

Like Joan we are all sinful, finite, human beings, place and time bound and yet we receive the revelation of the infinite God. It necessarily comes to us only and always in terms of the land and people that we love and the times and circumstances in which we live. And it comes disguised and distorted as well by our own cultural limitations and perspectives. I believe God was speaking to Joan and yes the message - she always referred to herself as just the messenger - necessarily gets distorted. The calling to see Christ in the poor and suffering, to be in solidarity with the oppressed, results in pitting one group against another and ends in the horror of war and violent conquest. This is incarnation. It is messy and ambiguous and full of uncertainty. It is called in theological terms “the scandal of particularity.” We are all signs and symbols of the infinite and universal in all the incredible diversity of place and time in which we live. And we are also sinners, limited and finite expressions, the sacred mixed with the profane. We all fall short of the glory of God, but, nevertheless, we are called to glorify God. Like Joan we are torn between our pride and arrogance, and the conviction that we are being used by God for some greater good.

Yes, Abraham was called by God to be a blessing. But what if it were not just Abraham and his descendents who were a blessing to the nations? What if everyone, every people from every language and culture throughout the world was to be a blessing? What if in order to have a full revelation of God it takes all of us in all times and places being that sign, for God to be clearly seen in all that God has made. Early Russian Orthodox missionaries wrote back home that they found God already there among the native peoples of Alaska and this made all the difference in the approach the church took. What if our task was truly to recognize God already at work in all the peoples of the earth? What if our task was to stand in solidarity with all those who are marginalized, oppressed, on the verge of extinction, whose voices are silenced and whose witness to the divine goes unrecognized? Who the powers that be call cursed. What if our task was to call them blessed? What if the way to see Christ, this blessed one who reconciles all things to himself is to see - to really see him in all things, and especially in those that are rejected?

Then Abraham becomes metaphor not just for powerful nations in their expansionist agenda. But Abraham becomes metaphor for the remnant of Jewish people, those suffering, for example, at the hands of the Nazi Germany in World War II. In particular, I am thinking of one little girl, Ellen, hiding in the home of a Lutheran family who were part of the Danish Resistance in one of my favorite children’s books, Number the Stars. Here was a blessed home, a home who recognized the children of God and called the one who came to them blessed. The Danish Resistance smuggled out almost the entire Jewish population of Denmark, 7000 people. The promise of Abraham to them was salvation from extinction. And in turn they become a sign to all of us, that God will unite us, already has united us, all in one family as numerous as the stars and the grains of sand, one people from every tribe and language. Just as God numbers each and every star, so God knows each and every one of us. Each and every one of us is a precious unique image of God. God calls us all by name and together we reveal the whole. We come in the Name of the Lord.

I encourage you to go out and find God already at work among the peoples of the earth, discover the holy in all of God’s creation, discover the holy in yourselves and join God in the blessing already begun. David Norwood told me a wonderful story the other day about one of his paragliding buddies, a woman who found a wounded baby eagle. She brought it to an animal refuge in the tri-cities and they nursed it back it health. The other day they released it into the wild again from a mountain top. A group of paragliders joined the bird in flight along with a native elder on the mountain top who drummed and danced and sang prayers to send the bird off. David describes all the colors of the various wings as the paragliders and the eagle took to the skies together accompanied by the music of the elder. Do you see the sacred there? Can you see the One who comes in the Name of the Lord in that story?

Sheri Noah Memorial

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Sheri Noah Memorial

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