Proper 5A Hosea 5:15-6:6, Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26 “What Does Your God Desire?”
June is a month of testing for Wild Rose Church. It is a month of testing to see how flexible we are, how resilient we are. No longer can we lean on a prescribed worship time or location. No longer can we lean on the knowledge that our pianist will be here to play for us. No, we are walking through swirling waters now, crossing over to the promised land.
June 1st we worshipped in the Café. This was done in order to allow for small discussion groups on the subject of our beliefs. This Sunday we switch back to a more predictable service, but still with I-pod music. Next Sunday you will all make a pilgrimage to Evergreen Christian Church to be with the Disciples and see what worship in that setting feels like. On the 22nd, we’re back to our regular location and time. Then, on the 29th, we will enjoy Confluence Worship outdoors with music by Haney’s Homemade Jam, the bluegrass band in which Bev Haney plays. Diversity is good. It wakes us up from the doldrums of predictability. It helps heal us from the illusions of security and permanence. A little chaos helps us to see and remember that all that is really important travels with us, and that is love. The rest is window dressing.
What a pleasure it was to sit quietly in the corner of the Café last Sunday while four tables of Wild Roses wrestled with various theological documents to try to articulate for ourselves just what we believe. Many who know of us in the community are aware of what we do in terms of public service, but how many know what we believe and how many of us can articulate that? Here is a synopsis of what the four tables came up with last week:
One table wrestled with the UCC Statement of Faith. They really wanted to know what it meant to be created in the image of God. Some of the concepts they gleaned were that God is inclusive, reconciling, forgiving, loving, non-judgmental and moves us beyond self-interest. Another table, studying some statements made by Stephen Patterson in The God of Jesus liked the statement that “The world can script your life if you let it.” They spoke of how early conditioning teaches us the ways of “this world” but Jesus taught us of a transcendent reality known variously as “the Kingdom of God” or “the Reign of God.”
One table wrestled with my Statement on Ministry and came away believing that inclusiveness is central to the message of the Gospel. A group working with the Eight Points of Progressive Christianity mentioned the importance of searching and questioning over the importance of “certainty.” One group, whom I failed to identify on the eraser board, mentioned an important theme: “How we behave is our testimony.”
As I was sitting closest to the Patterson table, I overheard how drawn some were to the statement that said, “This is what it means to call Jesus the Christ: it is to accept his vision of the banquet and the God who comes with it.”
Today’s scripture lesson is a beautiful illustration of that theme. Jesus is at table with tax collectors and sinners. I think it is safe to say that the label of “sinner” was easily applied by all those who did not consider themselves to be one. Let us recall that the world in which Jesus’ listeners lived was organized into a great hierarchy. At the top was the emperor, then his subordinates such as religious and military officials, local client kings, significant land holders and large scale merchants. Below that one would find a small middle class of merchants and traders. But most of the people in the empire lived at a daily subsistence level. The group made up perhaps 80% of the population. These people were deemed unclean or expendable in their culture. As for the government, it sought to suck up as many of a provinces resources as it could without provoking it into revolt or killing it off together. In Patterson’s words, “Rome slowly siphoned the life out of places like Palestine.”
The shaming of average people helped keep them in their place. After all, who can make trouble except those who believe they have the right to do so? As a psychotherapist and a Christian, I see one of Jesus’ primary functions as being “the great eraser of guilt and shame.” In the words of Patterson, “in Jesus we have come to know a God who renders impotent the power of dirt to keep the unclean outside the human community.”
He goes on to say, “In contrast to Rome’s highly brokered empire, the Empire of God is that place where the means to life are offered freely. Jesus was an itinerant pundit, who by his word and deed called into question the structures of his social world that dehumanized and made expendable so many human beings of God’s own making. Indeed, he brought these expendables back into the human community. They were no longer unclean; he regarded them as clean. They were no longer shamed; he treated them with honor. They were no longer sinners; he declared them righteous and able to stand in the glorious presence of God. Together they created an empire. Not one in which the means to life are brokered from the top down in a complex hierarchy of quid pro quo transactions, but unbrokered, freely offered, like God’s own love to all of God’s children.”
Is it possible that the guilt and shame of the hemorrhaging woman and the helplessness and feelings of impotence of the leader of the synagogue had set a barrier between them and the love of God? Is it possible that through Jesus they came to remember who they really were, the beloved of God? And what did Jesus mean when he said to the woman who touched his cloak, “Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well.”? Probably each of these citizens, the synagogue leader and the hemorrhaging woman, were living in a state of fear and despair. this in effect paralyzes our hearts and keeps us from recognizing our secure position in the Kingdom of God.
What does the God whom you serve desire of you? In each of our readings this morning we hear of a God who desires mercy and not sacrifice. Hosea tells us that God says, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” Jesus teaches, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not on the righteous but the sinners.”
Sinners may be considered those who have through whatever circumstances, removed themselves from God’s love. Sin can be described as a lack of love. In this regard, it is a mistake to be corrected, not an evil to be punished. “Our sense of inadequacy, weakness and incompletion comes from the strong investment in the ‘scarcity principle’ that governs the whole world of illusions.” (A Course in Miracles, p xi). To sit at table with Jesus and the God who comes with that glorious banquet, is to accept Jesus’ vision that we are already clean, whole and loved. And when we believe that, miracles can happen.
Jesus invites the disenfranchised to remember who they are. And he invites the powerful to give up their places in the web of a power-brokering culture and become a beggar like him. This is what the eighth point of progressive Christianity refers to as “the renunciation of privilege.” Privilege is yet another illusion from which we may free ourselves. For in God’s Kingdom there is no dirt and no privilege. Amen.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
