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Questions on the Way to Cross
IV: “What Do You Want Me To Do For You?” Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 6, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Leviticus 26:1-13
Two years ago on April 1, two years ago when the world seemed like a very different place-before the twin towers fell and the economy collapsed, before Afghanistan was ours and bin Laden escaped us, before terrorism redefined our nation and a war preempted more than we have been willing to admit--two years ago the sermon title was "What Is It You Want Him To Do for You?" and the text was the thirty-sixth verse of Mark's tenth chapter. Our petitions then involved our individual needs in the first place and, in the second, our need for the healing of relationships. Both could have been the focus of the gospel's proclamation today and likely, had they been proclaimed again, few would have noticed the repetition! Yet when I sat down to listen for God's Word anew in these same words of scripture, when I sat down to say the prayer I would pray on behalf of us all if Jesus were asking me what I thought we wanted him to do for us now, the single petition that crowded out all others was simply, "Make the world safe, dear Lord. Make us to lie down in safety." That James and John were heard to say, following Jesus' third prediction of his death, "We want you to do for us whatever we ask," that they asked Jesus for inclusion in his glory without subjection to his suffering, makes me think our own petition may not be too far off the mark of Mark's story. People in every land and in every season have asked God for safety--even as in our time people have sought God's protection on both sides of the divide in Chechnya and Bosnia and Northern Ireland and Ethiopia and Columbia--making us merely latecomers to the common human cry. In response, the Bible would have us believe, from the time God chose a people to the coming of Jesus Christ to the giving of God's Spirit, that God has heard this cry. "I will grant peace in the land," says God to the Hebrew people, "and you shall lie down, and no one shall make you afraid." But what does the gift of God's safety look like? On the one hand, the left hand I believe, you would have to admit that safety seldom has been the lot of God's people in biblical times. Beginning with the Israelites' oppression in Egypt, their battles for the land promised, the wars of the kings, their exile into Babylon, the Roman destruction of the Temple, the crucifixion of Jesus and the persecution of the early church, God's promise of safety and so the meaning of human security apparently was not in human hands! Unless on the other hand, the right hand now, the Bible was to be read and understood with Billy and Franklin Graham as your only theological guides. Then you begin to hear something quite different vis-à-vis God's will for human safety and security. There is, in these pages, what is known as an apocalyptic world view that, once assumed, makes a person prone to see the world in stark relief: light verses dark, good verses evil, right verses wrong. Fundamentalists across the board have this in common while the rest of us are given to more complex distinctions. For them, the light has come into the world, saving them and making them privy to God's will; but materially the darkness still threatens and must be defeated. While we may continue to beseech God for security in the triumph of good over evil by way of his terrible swift sword, God has given the defeating of evil into resolute human hands. Suddenly the question is no longer, "What is it you want me to do for you?" asked of us who were made to trust our lives into the hand of him who is asking. Rather we ask one another in the darkness: "What are we to do to secure the world in his name?" With that question, we have entered the arena of ethics. Not coincidently, the root meaning of ethics is "dwelling or stall," and so stability. Ethics has to do with the stability and security necessary if one is going to act at all in the world. Ethics is concerned with what holds human society together, providing the stability and security indispensable to the living of human life. Christian ethics begins with the belief that the clue to what God is doing in the world to make and keep human life human, the clue to what God is doing to stabilize and secure human creatures such that we may live the life that has been given us by God to live: that clue is found in scripture and supremely in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet here is the turn we do not want to take. Because we have been given a vulnerable human life to follow rather a set of propositions and prescriptions and absolutes concerning what we are to be and do as followers of Jesus Christ, the security we seek as those who would dwell in the world in faith appears not to be the security we are given or the security we would devise. Back to the left hand, I am afraid to say! To wit, it is no mere chance that though the Lord God said to the Israelites in the wilderness that they would lie down in safety, the horizon presented them with nothing but threatening enemies. And though Jesus said he would leave us with peace, the early church knew nothing but persecution. It is as though God were placing those he loved most squarely in the way of risk and death. What does this tell us about who we are to be and what we are to do as witnesses to love's vulnerability in a world that threatens to undo us? Turning to our text, to the disciples' request for safety at Jesus' side in glory, we find that they are promised the very thing they have asked to be spared. "The cup that I drink," Jesus says to his clueless band, "you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized." Meaning what? Meaning the safety God intends human beings to know between life and death will be hid in rejection and suffering-literally in going under; meaning that the sort of dwelling, the sort of ethical reality we are to inhabit, is bound to the destiny of him who has no place to lay his head until it is laid upon a cross; meaning that the witness of Christ's church is witness to Jesus Christ only as she seeks to be a demonstration of this dwelling, this ethic in the world. September 11th took from us the illusion of security that our boarders and two oceans had allowed us for generations. For a moment it seemed this nation had been given the strange gift of confronting the illusion of our nationally bounded security. Instead, we chose [without choosing] to read our current history apocalyptically. From that reading, it followed that we must act preemptively, believing our secure dwelling--which is to say our ethics, that which makes human life human-depended upon the swift restoration of our nationally bounded security, depended upon the elimination of the evil that made us insecure. This is what nations do in the world. It also follows that we think victory in Iraq to be the beginning of an answer to our prayer-the beginning because though we will have knocked one off evil's long list, in so doing, we likely have created many more now eager to have at us. My friends, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God reveals our human lives paradoxically secured by One who alone trusted in the God who continually called Him out to the place where God alone is trustworthy: to the cross. If the central claim of the Christian faith is that God has chosen to dwell in human flesh-vulnerable to every terror without and within and ultimately vulnerable to death on a cross, then the kind of dwelling [read ethics] to which we are called is precisely the insecurity we have known more acutely since 9/11. It is the dwelling with those whose hunger and hopelessness and anger and oppression define our dwelling in the world in a way they did not before. Therefore, wars waged to eliminate our vulnerability to a humanity broken, angry, threatening, even death-dealing, wars waged to return us to a state in which stability and security are defined by invulnerability, is not the dwelling, the ethics, the life we have been given by God to lead in Jesus Christ. National politics do not follow from this conviction, I know, but the church's witness does. And our witness by way of Christ's life, death and resurrection looks something like this: whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. The answer to what we have asked of him [greatness, glory, safety, security] resides in our vulnerability to the most vulnerable. We can barely imagine what security might have looked like in the world had the world's richest and most powerful nation chosen instead to dwell in some degree of vulnerability with the least of these…if our leaders had been given the imagination and foolish courage to allocate 75 billion dollars to feed poor children, to develop agriculture in the desert, to build hospitals and fund health care for those at greatest risk, to teach adults to read. This is for faith-based community to do, say the politicians. No doubt it is, but it is also the ethic we must require of those who order our common life. For while we watch the war, the least of these are the ones whose prayers our ethics are choosing to deny. The nation will no doubt go on acting out of its unquestioned apocalyptic worldview, with victory justifying the turn we collectively have taken. But amid the noise of the crowd eager to crucify him who threatens its way of seeing and securing its future, Jesus has invited those who would follow him to a simple meal. At his table on this day, when the sounds of war are not quite distant enough for comfort and dear ones we know and love are in danger, may we taste the love his suffering and death alone secure. For the hour will soon be at hand when, begging his pardon, we will return to the darkness wherein we must with his disciples, once again, deny him and betray him and flee from him, lest the world suspect we are his. Amen |