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The Wicked Good People of God Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 9, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Leviticus 19:9-17 I Peter 2:1-10
Novelist Carolyn Chute and her husband Michael live in a cabin at the end of an unpaved road in rural Maine. In the yard are “stacks of old tires, a rusted bedstead, a pen full of Scottish terriers and an assortment of well-used vehicles. A bumper sticker on Mr. Chute’s pickup reads, ‘School Takes 13 Years Because That’s How Long It Takes to Break a Child’s Spirit.’” Ms. Chute’s first novel was The Beans of Egypt Maine, one of the many books I own but have not read. With the upcoming publication of her fourth novel, she and her illiterate illustrator husband were featured in the arts section of the New York Times this past Tuesday. Reminiscent of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, the Chutes are pictured looking deadpan into the camera, each holding a favorite firearm instead of a pitchfork. Ms. Chute is especially fond of her AK-47 because it has a gas piston that dampens recoil. “‘It’s very gentle,’ she said to the reporter, ‘very soft.’” “For most of the time she has been working on [her latest] book,” the article continues, “Ms. Chute has also been greatly occupied with an organization called the 2nd Maine Militia [or as it is known by Mainers, “Your Wicked Good Militia”], of which she is founder and, as she says, ‘secretary of offense, or offensiveness.’”(a position ready-made for me when I retire to Maine!) According to Ms. Chute, the 2nd Maine Militia is a no-wing organization with a membership that is “‘very right, very left and very shy.’ At the first meeting in the mid-90s, she explained: ‘We had libertarians, greens, guys in camo, white supremacists, hippies off the land, anarchists, people from Communist organizations. All these people were people that someone had tried to take something away from. They all knew something was wrong.’” My mind leapt to the church and the Wicked Good People of God on the Hill: a no-wing organization with a membership that is “very right, very left and very shy.” Well, maybe not so shy…but we have Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, greens, unreconstructed hippies, ex-Marines, socialists, capitalists, conservatives, liberals. According to Augustine when we consider the church’s aggregate image—when we behold this disparate gathering of humanity as a whole—it appears to be a corpus permixtus: a mixed body containing, as he says, overt sinners or as we will sing in two weeks, “wheat and tares together sown.” It resembles, in light of the second meaning of aggregate and the metaphor borrowed in 1st Peter from Jesus, a rock. Neither the rock nor the hard place of diversity makes for an easy existence! “The [2nd Maine Militia] mostly got along except that for a while [after 9/11]” Chute admitted, “it became necessary to have separate meetings….” The same necessity has pressed itself upon the wicked good people of God throughout the church’s history--the self-appointed good separating themselves, for the most part, from those judged to be wicked; or, in the case of the 2nd Maine Militia, the white supremacists taking their leave of the greens and the hippies and the Communists. The problem with the decision to separate is at least twofold. First, you know as well as I that even so-called homogeneous congregations—the gathering of those who left years ago to begin the First Reconstructed Church of Holiness and Love--end up at odds sooner or later because, well, the wicked and the good is in us all. You cannot leave the human condition behind! Again Augustine writes, “…we ought to know that we are all wicked in some respect. I tell you even good people are in some way or other wicked, just as wicked people are under some aspects good. From this it follows that the authentic church cannot be easily defined.” Therefore it was Augustine’s belief that the coexistence of the good and the wicked should be accepted [in this time before the kingdom comes] lest the unity of the church be destroyed. The second problem for the separated is that communities made up of likeminded people have likely become that way by separating themselves from the mixed crowd Jesus was more prone to save from life without God in the world than the righteous. Of those who felt it necessary to separate themselves from the 2nd Maine Militia, Ms. Chutes says, “We kind of saw less of those guys after that.” This is why the definition of sin that most describes our experience of it within the human community is, in a word, separation. To repeat, the wicked good people of God are a mixed body of believers who might as well stay together until Jesus comes again to separate the sheep from the goats. If some feel they must separate from the corpus permixtus before then, well…we will kind of see less of those guys until the kingdom comes. A second thing about the 2nd Maine Militia that calls to mind the wicked good people of God is the fact that it assembles regularly. Sometimes it gathers in a hired hall but “more often it assembles in the woods behind the Chutes’ home where the members shoot at cans and other targets, talk about what’s wrong with the world and dine on potluck.” The dining on potluck part goes without saying, though I suspect the militia has outdone us in the consumption of baked beans. As for shooting at cans and other targets, to the outsider the church seems to do a lot of nothing when it gets together: we talk about who is supposed to shake hands at the door or count the offering, drink enormous amounts of coffee, huddle over words in a book as if they were dictated from on high, shoot the breeze while consuming donuts. But it is in the midst of these things that, if anyone is really paying attention, we talk about what’s wrong with the world. That we even know there is something wrong with the world has to do with the book we read over and over again. Its stories will not let us deny the fact that something is terribly wrong with us! We are not ourselves, we say regularly: the good we would do we do not and the very thing we abhor, we do. There it is again: the wicked good people of God who also are assured every time we gather, in Jesus’ name, that we are forgiven…at great cost. But because we have a well-developed understanding of our own sin, we also have a peculiar way of talking about what’s wrong with the world--politically, socially, economically, and ethically. We do this mostly by accounting for the hope that is in us. That hope, we say, is Jesus Christ in whom every separation and all divisions come to an end; through whom all of God’s children become who they are. Every time we gather to talk about what is wrong with the world by way of talking about Jesus—what he said, who he healed, with whom he dined, how he died, why he lives--we begin to notice the tension between God’s promises and human political arrangements. For there is, according to Christian ethicist Paul Lehmann, “‘a vast analogy in things’ that, to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, point to the steady pressure upon the shape of things to come of the sovereign, freeing and fulfilling purpose and power of God.” I do not know--in the larger sweep of history that has been your lot--where you have glimpsed the steady pressure upon the shape of things to come of the sovereign, freeing and fulfilling purpose and power of God. I think of the Berlin Wall coming down, of Nelson Mandela walking out of prison and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that followed. But despite the counsel I have received not to mention the events of this past week in the pulpit, I would be unfaithful today, bracketing party politics, were I to give no account of the hope dancing in the streets throughout the world that surely is the steady pressure of God upon the legacy of slavery in this land of the free. I think, in the words of Charles M. Blow, of “those who knew the terror of being set upon by men with clubs, of being trapped in a torched house, of dangling at the end of a rough rope…of those who knew the humiliation of another person’s spit trailing down their faces, of being treated like children well into their twilight years, of being derided and despised for the beauty God gave them. I think of the black mother and daughter sitting on the floor of a church in Harlem Tuesday night: the mother doubled up in tears, her daughter (who must be all of six) reaching a tentative hand up to soothe her. “To me,” wrote Judith Warner, “she looks like the future, reaching out to heal the past.” To me, I must confess, she looks like the hand of God reaching into human history, looks like the steady pressure upon the shape of things to come of the sovereign, freeing and fulfilling purpose and power of God. Though look at us! Here we are…together again…back in the mixed body of the wicked good people of God but trying not to talk about what is wrong with the world so that we can just get along. Jesus aside, we have been literally inconceivable to each other for the last two years while what is wrong with the world deepens for want of an account of the hope that is in his mixed body. Likely that is why Reinhold Niebuhr so wisely observed that “The revelation of divine mercy in a suffering saviour was not a conclusion about the nature of God at which [people] might arrive if they analyzed the causes, sequences and coherences of the world and deduced the structure of existence from these observable phenomena.” Rather the revelation of the living God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ point us to the steady pressure upon the shape of things to come of the sovereign, freeing and fulfilling purpose and power of God. So when we talk about what is wrong with the world among ourselves, we would do well more and more to talk about him…come to know him better…bury our noses and numbskulls in his Word…shake the dust off our feet and begin to follow. Then perhaps by his grace undeserved might the wicked good people of God become in him who we are: a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that we may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. “The 2nd Maine Militia has been a real learning experience for me,” Ms. Chase said in conclusion. “Sort of like a living novel. I do feel like I’m on Pluto sometimes, just watching how people treat each other….She paused for a minute, looking out the window at the leaf-strewn woods. ‘I love people,’ she went on, but I don’t do well in a system. We’re poor and we lead a very different kind of life. We depend on other people so much. They come and bring us vegetables or whatever, and sometimes they tell us their secrets. They love Michael because he doesn’t look down his nose. If we’re in town, we’ll just sit in the parking lot all day, talking to people. That’s the way we see life: your community is your survival. And if you live in a small community like this, even the people you hate you have as friends.” If you live in a small community like this, even the people who voted the other way you have as brothers and sisters in Christ…likely not just for the foreseeable future but eternally. Thanks be to God for the wicked good people of God. |