[3-28-02]

The Rev. Sheila Gustafson, preaching on March 17, 2002, at First Presbyterian Church, Santa Fe, New Mexico, explored what questions the church must ask if it is "to be authentically engaged with the world as an agent of transformation -- as leaven."

She explores whether now, six months after September 11, "as the world begins to ask what might be done to eliminate -- not only the means to perpetrate such horror -- but motivation for engaging in it, is it not time for the Church in America to reclaim its identity as part of an international movement committed to following a Lord interested in radical repentance, reconciliation, and restoration?"

"THE BREATH OF LIFE"

By Sheila C. Gustafson

First Presbyterian Church, Santa Fe, New Mexico
March 17 -- The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:6-11

On a feeling level, it doesn't seem like the right week to confront Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones but, because this is an anniversary week, perhaps it is time again to evaluate what the scripture has to say to us in the context of that shattering national experience. It doesn't necessarily help that, unlike the very real images in the debris of the World Trade Center, the images in Ezekiel are metaphorical.

Ezekiel was a priest who lived through the attack on his own city, Jerusalem, and the death of his beloved wife, before being carried off into exile in Babylon in 597 B.C.E. Prophesying at a distance and before learning of the fall of Jerusalem a decade after he had been forcibly removed, he warned that the people of Judah were increasingly losing touch with the divine source of their life and vitality, and bringing down upon themselves the purgative wrath of God. They had gone so far as to place idols within God's temple, and through their apostasy had thoroughly violated their part of the holy covenant between God and God's people. In the second of Ezekiel's visions he saw God's glory leaving the Holy City to its fate.

Dislocated to Babylonia, along with his upper class compatriots, they were forced to work with their hands to rehabilitate a hot and ruined plain into housing for themselves. Ezekiel listened to the despair and depression of the exiled Jews, to their homesickness and powerless anger. Despite the hopelessness which surrounded him, Ezekiel refused to give up his faith in God's ongoing concern for Israel. The last two visions recorded in the scroll of Ezekiel show the re-constitution of the multitude from the valley of bones, and, finally, the restored land of Judah, flowing once again with milk and honey.

In our scripture for today we find the earliest reference to the concept of resurrection in the Old Testament. Ezekiel describes his third vision in terms of an interactive experience. Instead of just passively seeing a re-enfleshing of the dried up bones of an earlier and more spiritually vital people of Israel, Ezekiel envisions himself engaged in a dialogue with God in which God asks him if these bones can live. When Ezekiel turns the question back to God -- "O Lord God, you know."- God instructs him to prophesy to the bones. What an image! Every preacher knows what it is to preach on occasion to a "dead" congregation, but surely Ezekiel had the toughest challenge of all time in trying to liven up a pile of bones -- a metaphor for how hopeless and unresponsive the exiles had become.

There is a great rattling as the bones come together, and are re-sinewed and fleshed into bodies, but there is no life in them. God instructs Ezekiel to prophesy again. He is not to address the corpses this time, but to prophesy to the breath -- to the ruach in Hebrew, the pneuma in Greek -- to the wind, to the life force, to the God given spirit -- which is to re-inhabit this dried up, dispirited population and remake of them the people of God. This event is not to be understood as a series of individual resurrections, but rather as the re-enspiriting of an entire people -- an infusion of hope which will engender restored faith in God's promises on the part of the house of Israel. As at last the multitude rises to its feet, God says, "I will put my Spirit within you and you will live."

The New Testament premise is that the Church shares in the same covenant promise as the people of Israel, a promise freshly interpreted and secured by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Church also shares with the people of the Old Covenant the ambiguity of living, simultaneously, in the present "evil age" (as the scripture calls it) and in the promised age to come which was inaugurated in Christ's earthly ministry -- the ambiguity "of belonging", in the words of Alexander McKelway, "to a God it denies, of claiming the Spirit in the midst of a deadly, spiritless existence." (Note 1)

For the Apostle Paul the dilemma of the Church, even in its earliest manifestation, is that it cannot determine, once for all time, which agenda it is going to follow -- the agenda of the world (living kata sarka -- according to the flesh) or the agenda of God as mediated to us through the eternal Christ (living kata pneuma -- according to the Spirit). In the 8th Chapter of Romans, Paul writes of the deadliness of all that the world's agenda (the fleshly agenda) implies -- self absorption, the effort to control, the failure to understand the importance of the give and take of relationships - this in contrast to the life-giving agenda of the Spirit. The very essence of the Christian commitment sets aside the world's agenda, and endeavors to establish a community claimed by Christ and inhabited by Christ's Spirit. One of the identifying marks of such a community is that it lives out its life in continuation of Jesus' earthly way, (Note 2) and is prepared to accept that it will be perceived by the world as Jesus was perceived -- as prophetic, as disruptive, even as subversive.

Paul is realistic enough to recognize that the Church has been deeply infiltrated by the agenda of the world -- he, after all, founded and briefly tried to pastor the church at Corinth! Since each human being carries within us the struggle of choosing between the values of our culture and the values of the Rule of God, and since churches are made up of human beings, it stands to reason that the struggle continues on a wider scale within the life of individual congregations as well as in the Church at large. Not only does the world's agenda infiltrate, so does the agenda of nation, race, class, and economic group, until the Church becomes a microcosm of the world's divisions. Then, to avoid conflict, either the Church waters down the claim of God until it becomes bland enough to be tolerable to all but the touchiest of its members, or the Church itself divides into ghettos of people of like mind, like privilege, like politics. Preachers become what the biblical Prophets called "palace priests," speaking the easy words which their congregations want to hear.

Through the ages, theologians have acknowledged the Church's struggle to be authentically engaged with the world as an agent of transformation -- as leaven, in the biblical metaphor; and have also confessed the Church's temptation to withdraw from the fray to become a sinecure of comfort and a means to discourage individual, but not systemic, immoralities.

Augustine spoke of the small faithful church being invisible within the larger, and less faithful, visible church. Calvin said that the true church exists where the word is preached and heard, and the sacraments administered and received. Karl Barth allowed as how the church is only intermittently authentic as the Spirit is present within it. He said that the church is like an electric sign, which becomes alive and visible only when the Holy Spirit, like electricity, lights it up. (Note 3) Unfortunately, too often, the image his words bring to mind is one of those flickering neon signs where some of the letters are no longer illuminated and a different message is being flashed to the world than the church had intended.

Episcopal priest Robert Capon decries what the Church has allowed the culture to do to it:

The Good News is no longer good news, it is okay news, he writes. Christianity is no longer life changing, it is life enhancing. Jesus doesn't change people into wild-eyed radicals anymore, he changes them into nice people?

If Christianity is simply about being nice, I'm not interested.

What happened to radical Christianity, the un-nice brand of Christianity that turned the world upside-down? What happened to the category smashing, life-threatening, anti-institutional gospel that spread through the first century like wild-fire and was considered (by those in power) dangerous? What happened to the kind of Christians whose hearts were on fire, who had no fear, who spoke the truth no matter what the consequences, who made the world uncomfortable, who were willing to follow Jesus wherever he went? What happened to the kind of Christians who were filled with passion and gratitude, and who every day were unable to get over the grace of God? (Note 4)

In the wake of the terrible events of September 11, churches of all denominations across the United States offered the much needed comfort of faith to a nation which reeled in shock and horror. Churches appropriately named the evil of those who would perpetrate crimes against humanity; and, in the cities and suburbs and towns around the epicenters of the disaster, did the overwhelming pastoral work of memorializing the dead and caring for the survivors.

If American churches also became, in places, purveyors of the American Civil Religion, indistinguishable from chapters of the Rotary Club or the VFW, perhaps it was understandable for a time. But now, six months later, as the world begins to ask what might be done to eliminate -- not only the means to perpetrate such horror -- but motivation for engaging in it, is it not time for the Church in America to reclaim its identity as part of an international movement committed to following a Lord interested in radical repentance, reconciliation, and restoration?

There is no rational person who would suggest for a moment that what happened on September 11 was justified in any way, shape or form. But to ask the question of how we as Americans might live in the world differently than we did before the terrorist attacks is a legitimate question -- and one which is at last being raised in the main-stream media as well as in religious journals and publications.

In the weeks before the terrorist attacks, I was disheartened to read an article on the competition among network and cable news outlets in our country. This article mentioned, almost casually, that the viewing public was disinterested in international news to the extent that, if a news program mentioned more than two foreign stories in any given broadcast, people changed the channel. In an extensive interview with Charlie Rose, CBS anchorman Dan Rather verified that information and went on to express his own unhappiness with his network's obsession with ratings which prompted them to reduce news accounts from foreign countries to the bare minimum. It says something, does it not, about the extent of our disinterest as a people in what is going on anywhere outside our own borders that we cannot tolerate more than six or seven minutes worth of information about anyone but ourselves? It seemed to come as a huge shock to many of us after 9/11 that not everyone in the world thought we were wonderful. A first step toward understanding the world around us, its promise and its threat, could be taken if we did nothing more than show an interest in how people are living in other countries and how they are affected by the activity of U.S. business interests, and what our government decides.

There will be a United Nations Conference held next week in Monterrey, Mexico, on international development. The advanced countries of the world have been asked to consider raising their contributions to foreign aid from an average of 2.2 tenths of a percentage point of their Gross National Product to 7 tenths of a percentage point. The United States of America currently gives 1 tenth of a percentage point of our GDP to foreign aid (half of the 2 tenths we gave in 1990, so this is not about political parties) and is proportionally dead last among the developed nations. At the same time, there is a defense bill before Congress which is asking for a military budget which would be more than the military budgets of every other nation in the world -- combined ($380 billion a year as compared to an aid budget of $10 billion)! I don't think anyone argues that the events of September 11 did not show up critical gaps in our country's defenses, nor that military personnel should not receive a living wage, but voices in the international community are pointing out that improving the quality of life for the peoples of the developing world would be more than just a humanitarian gesture -- it would be a strategic one as well! (Note 5)

If the Church of Jesus believes anything that Jesus taught has relevance for our life today -- if the Church was created here on earth to be an agent of transformation -- is it not time to ask what is wrong with this picture?

I have to say, I'm with the Episcopal priest Robert Capon, "if Christianity is simply about being nice, I'm not interested!" Of course it is important to care for our members, and visit the sick, and marry and bury and baptize, it is important, even, to be nice -- if "nice" means being caring and compassionate to one another -- but surely following Jesus is about more than being a mutual aid society!

"What happened to the kind of Christians whose hearts were on fire, who had no fear, who spoke the truth no matter what the consequences, who made the world uncomfortable, who were willing to follow Jesus wherever he went?" Capon asks.

I don't know. Maybe we have just succumbed, temporarily, to the agenda of the world Maybe we have a faulty connection to the electrical current which is the Spirit and our signs are no longer flashing "Jesus, Jesus" ---- only "us, us."

But I don't believe that! Not in this congregation, in any case. Perhaps we are simply not sure what is needed, what is best, what we ought to be advocating for. I don't pretend to know all the answers, I just know that the questions that we as Christians have been taught to ask are different questions than those I hear being asked in our country at the moment. And I invite you to join me over the next few months in working to discern the appropriate questions for the church to be raising in this context in which we find ourselves; and in paying more attention to what the people of the developing world are saying -- which is going to take some ingenuity, because that information does not come easily through our main stream media -- beginning with following very carefully the outcomes of the United Nations Conference in Monterrey and subsequent conferences which deal with the issues of poverty, oppression, disease, gender, the environment, hunger, and injustice around the world. The next round of adult education classes will offer opportunities to share those kind of observations; the church retreat in April will focus on the "Seeds of Peace."

God charged ancient Israel to be a light to the nations. Jesus charged his disciples to go into all the world baptizing and sharing the good news of the gospel.

Georgia Harkness wrote the words of our final hymn for this morning, among them these from the second stanza:

Hope of the world, God's gift from highest heaven,
Bringing to hungry souls the bread of life,
Still let thy Spirit unto us be given
to heal earth's wounds and end our bitter strife.

Notes

1. Alexander J. McKelway, "Theological Themes --Ezekiel 37:1-14," Lectionary Homiletics, Volume VIII, No. 4, March, 2002, Page 17.

2. Ernst Kasemann, Commentary on Romans, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1980.

3. McKelway, Page 18.

4. Michael Yaconelli, Dangerous Wonder: The Adventure of Childlike Faith, Colorado, Navpress, 1998, quoted in Pulpit Resource, William Willimon, Editor, Vol. 30, No 1, page 48.

5. John Cassidy, "Helping Hands: How Foreign Aid Could Benefit Everybody," The New Yorker, March 18, 2002, Pages 60-66. (A less optimistic view can be found in the March 17 (Sunday) New York Times -- Front Page of the Business Section -- which emphasizes the past failures of the World Bank and IMF.) The New Yorker article points to more recent successes of the World Bank since closer monitoring has been done of the uses of the aid, and focus has been placed on education, health, and basic nutrition. The New York Times also reported (after this sermon was preached) that President Bush announced an additional $5 billion for foreign aid as he prepares to attend the Monterrey meeting -- that would bring the US percentage of GDP to 1.5 tenths of a percentage point.

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