Strengthen the Fainthearted
Written by Gary E. Smith Saturday, 10 December 2005 19:00
When I last preached, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, my sermon spun off in an unexpected direction toward the end, and I found myself leaving off words I had written down, to say instead some things that were on my heart. We began that sermon with a lot of laughter, you might remember, and then some of us ended with a lump in the throat. Just two days before that morning, I told you, I had heard two teenage boys remember their Dad at a memorial service here after their father’s unexpected and sudden death. What can we say in moments like that, I was thinking as they were speaking so eloquently, and then I saw all those classmates and teachers and coaches, literally hanging off the balcony, surrounding this family, not with just the right words, but simply with their presence.
I understood one of the teachings of Christianity better that afternoon, not in some slow building awareness, but in a flash. Bang, it was there. “So faith, hope, love abide,” the apostle Paul writes, and I found myself saying it under my breath, “but the greatest of these is love.” And then the next two words that are seldom cited: “Pursue love.” This room was full of young people, many of whom had never been to a memorial service before, sad, sad faces, plenty of tears, but present, showing up, putting on a good shirt, sitting, singing, praying, however awkwardly, just showing up. That’s where my Thanksgiving sermon ended, and I told you I would be back.
Some years ago I wrote a Christmas sermon intended for those of you who regularly show up here, Sunday after Sunday, and I said then that I wanted to get some tougher words in before all the visitors showed up in the following week, guests who expect a much more “sleep in heavenly peace” kind of message. I thought you could take it then, and I think you can take it now. Call this sermon today: “Confessions of a Unitarian Minister at Christmas.” I was once a minister in the United Church of Christ. I preached from the Bible every Sunday then, even if I have always found a place for a poem or a story to go with the scripture.
But somewhere in my spiritual odyssey I left the United Church of Christ and embraced Unitarian Universalism. I tell people I was converted at one of our annual General Assembly meetings. The truth is that I was converted gradually, as I found myself first on occasional Sundays, and then quite regularly leaving the Christian Gospels behind. I put them down. They did not speak to me as much anymore, then not at all. I felt the Christian faith becoming too orthodox, too exclusive, too literal. My United Church of Christ colleagues, under the influence of the merger with the Evangelical and Reformed Churches, were beginning to wear clerical collars and to read weddings and funerals out of the same little black book. My conversion to Unitarian Universalism came gradually, I have said, and it has felt like just the home I was always seeking, a religion that does not proclaim that truth is something spelled with a capital “T”, sealed for all time. I needed a religion with room for me and my questions and my mystical free thought.
And, as is true with so many who leave the old behind and take up the new, I left ALL the old behind, all of it, maybe a nod at a parable now and then, editing some of Paul’s words for our Benediction, an occasional rant and rave about Jesus as a revolutionary, I put it all behind me, and then small wonder I am left with the rest of you thinking, “Now, what do we do with Christmas?” This is not a question that seems to bother our guests nearly as much, as more than sixteen hundred people will pass through here on Christmas Eve.
So here’s the sermon that began on the Friday before Thanksgiving. Here’s my take on Christmas this year. It begins and ends with love, the central piece of Jesus’ preaching, and why not celebrate that message, and why not celebrate that at Christmas? I read some words from a retired minister lately, all the funerals and memorial services he had conducted, all those hospital rooms, all those visiting hours, all those wakes, all those bedsides. “What did you learn to say in those moments?” he was asked. “Oh, I never learned the right words at all,” he replied. “I learned to make the coffee.”
“Pursue love,” Paul says. And practice love, too, I would say, but I am getting ahead of myself. In the Gospels, Jesus keeps going over it, again and again: “Love your enemies,” he says. “Do to others as you would have them do to you… If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?” The Parable of the Good Samaritan is provoked by a question Jesus is asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”
“God is love,” his disciple John writes, “and those who abide in love abide in God… There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear…” Small wonder then that when Jesus hears people call him “the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the kerygma in which we find ultimate meaning…” he says, “What?”
Jane Rzepka, one of my colleagues, writing in her church’s newsletter last spring, cites “recent scholarly perspectives on Jesus,” and these are her words, “[that find him] a social deviant of the sort we’d do well to emulate, who fully accepted his fellow human beings, no matter how disreputable or marginal they seemed in the eyes of society,” and then she quotes Robert Funk in his book HONEST TO JESUS, “Jesus kept an open table… he ate promiscuously with sinners, toll collectors, prostitutes, lepers, and other social misfits and quarantined people. [He robbed humankind of all] protections and privileges, entitlements and ethnicities that segregate human beings into categories.”
And I am reading this one minute and then the next minute I am reading that Bishop O’Malley will not attend the Catholic Charities Fundraiser this past Friday night because Mayor Menino will be honored, and Menino is in favor of stem cell research and the right of a woman to choose. The event, by the way, was sold out, and raised over $200,000. for the poor and the hungry and the homeless and the victims of violence. And Jesus said, “WHAT?”
And then Jane points me to Peter Gomes book entitled THE GOOD BOOK, where Peter, not surprisingly, goes even further and argues that Jesus’ sense of “inclusion can legitimately be claimed ‘by the poor, persons of color, gays, lesbians and transgender people, women, and all persons beyond the conventional definitions of Western civilization.’”
And I am reading this one minute and then the next minute I am reading that the U.S. House has voted this week for $95 billion in tax cuts, cutting $51 billion over five years from programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and child-support enforcement. And where are the tax cuts going? Probably to some of us. And Jesus said, “WHAT?”
A great line that went by me this week was the observation that Jesus was a peasant with an attitude. I like that. And then I read that “some of the nation’s most prominent megachurches have decided not to hold worship services on Sunday Christmas Day… handing out instead a DVD it produced for the occasion that features a heartwarming Christmas tale.” And Jesus said, “WHAT?”
Jane remembers the NEWSWEEK article about a year ago about the historical Jesus, in which scholars like John Dominic Crossan are teaching that “Jesus was a Jewish peasant, probably illiterate, a compelling itinerant preacher and social revolutionary, challenging the Roman rulers and the Jewish leaders. He may have been peaceful, but he was clearly outspoken… performed no miracles, called for an egalitarian Kingdom of God which would manifest itself not in Heaven, but in the here and now, wanted people to experience God directly, unimpeded by the hierarchy of temple or state.”
And I am reading this one minute and then the next I am reading that the Family Institute or some such organization has turned in enough signatures across this Commonwealth to put on the ballot in 2008 a referendum question on what is supposed to be a civil right, the right to marry. Can you imagine if civil rights had been put on the ballet in Alabama fifty years ago as Rosa Parks stepped onto the bus? I am thinking: wouldn’t Jesus have helped her onto the bus and plunked himself right down next to her? And if petitions had come out to challenge that, wouldn’t he have tipped those tables right over? Which is to say, and Jesus said, “WHAT?”
I am trying to write a sermon about Jesus and the news is telling me of more American deaths in Iraq and politicians who wouldn’t know a “Profile in Courage” Award if it jumped in their lap. I am trying to think about what I want to say about Jesus, and Donald Rumsfeld is on the news, treating us like the fools he thinks we are, tap dancing around a definition of torture and rendition and abuse. And Jesus said, “WHAT?”
This is a Christmas sermon for the regular crowd. We are remembering Jesus in this season, especially in a Unitarian Church. Our great heresy is that generations ago we tried to call the established church back to the religion OF Jesus, instead of the religion ABOUT Jesus that it has turned out to be. Some heresy. Count me in. This Jesus we remember this month may be a sweet little baby, but we need to remember that he grew up to be one courageous insurgent. That’s the Jesus I’ll celebrate.
I said I’d get back to the “pursue and practice” part of love. I happen to believe that is what a religious congregation is most intended to be, a place to practice love, a place to find the Beloved Community, the Kingdom of God, Heaven itself, right here in this lifetime, right here in this season. We come together, week after week, to be reminded of love and to learn how to practice it. We’ll do that today, and we’ll do that next week, when our Adult Choir will sing “the Magnificat,” and I’ll have some things to say about Mary, not exactly the meek and mild character she has been made out to be.
“The precious life that is in you and me is the same in all,” writes Daniel Rhys Williams.
“Rich and poor, wise and simple, strong and feeble, we are joined together by a mystic oneness whose source we may never know, but whose reality we can never doubt.
When one suffers, we all suffer.
When one hungers for bread, we all hunger.
When one tramps the streets in search of work or shelter, we all tramp the streets.
When one defrauds another, we are all implicated.
When one undermines a human life, we all share the guilt.
When one attains the heart’s desire, we are all partners of the joy.
This mystic identity of the one with the many has been glimpsed by all the great souls of the world.
We are each other’s keeper, because the other is but our larger self.
Let a sense of our vital unity with all persons everywhere possess our minds and hearts.
Behold, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, because thy neighbor is thyself.”
Strengthen the faint-hearted, indeed.