[5-19-03]

For the closing worship service at the conference of the Presbyterian Health, Education and Welfare Association, held this past January in San Antonio, TX, the Rev. Trina Zelle was the preacher. Her sermon was mentioned by many as one of the high points of the event, and we're happy to share it here.

Thanks to Bobbi Wells Hargleroad, editor of Church & Society Magazine, for permission to reprint this sermon, with a few minor editorial changes.

If ...

Isaiah 58:6-12

It's good to be back here in the hill country, my favorite part of Texas, with all the green. This area is not at all like the high desert of El Paso where I used to live and my children grew up. In my opinion, this is where you find the true heart of Texas - friendly, with a wry sense of humor, willing to give you the shirt off their back because that's what neighbors do here - even neighbors you just met two minutes ago. The lushness is kind of biblical when you think about it. Come down here in the springtime and you might think you've stumbled onto that Garden we've been trying to get back to for thousands of years.

You know, the bible is filled with the color green. Deep garden greens punctuated by silvery olive trees. Rippling fields of spring wheat. Pale grapes ripening on the vine under a hot middle eastern sun. But despite all that green in the bible, most of the Bible's action takes place in major cities. Metroplexes like Houston and Dallas, San Antonio and Jerusalem. Along borders that separate First and Third Worlds, like El Paso and Laredo and Brownsville. Tyre and Sidon, Caesarea Philippi. Ramallah. Nablus.

It goes way back, this biblical urban tradition, but I'll only go as far back as Moses - a city boy himself - who leads the Hebrew children out of a huge slave city to freedom. And although they take a forty year hike in the wilderness, within a couple of generations of that exodus, most of the bible's heroes are city boys and girls...

City folks like most of us, when you think about it. Oh, we might listen to country music and pine for simple country days - forgetting the hailstorms, failed crops and disease. We say we want to get away from it all, but our lives are filled with chasing after it all. Here. In the city.

Isaiah's message is for city people too. He's talking about the ruined city of Jerusalem - Israel's own New York. As King David learned once upon a time, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. But now David is long gone to his grave and his once great city is little more than smoking piles of rubble. Its former inhabitants live in captivity in another large city far away. They have to strain to remember how things used to be. When life was normal. Uneventful and boring ... and good.

But now, at last, Isaiah is bringing comfort. The end is in sight. They're not only going home, but their homes are going to be restored. As good as new. However ...

There's something of a catch in the message of comfort Isaiah brings. Because these exiles are going to have to do more than click their ruby slippers together to get back to Aunty Em's kitchen.

The message of comfort Isaiah passes on to them is the opportunity to work. In the city. For the city. "To fix what's broken; to repair its ruins so people can live in them again," he tells them. "That's what will bring you the joy that's been missing from your lives all these years."

And there's something else. There always is - you can count on it. "Before you can begin this repair work," Isaiah continues, "you're going to have to prove that you're in it for more than yourselves."

"First of all," - you can just feel him warm to his subject can't you? "First of all, you're going to take the needs of the poor into consideration as you make your rebuilding plans. What poor you ask? Only the ones you used to either exploit or ignore back home during the good old days."

The poor that Isaiah is referring to are the am ha'eretz, the people of the soil, who were considered so utterly lacking in value that the conquering army didn't even bother to carry them off for forced labor. People so poor that the exiles probably didn't even notice as they themselves were led weeping and wailing from their once beautiful homes and prosperous country.

You see, the exiles who were carried off from Israel to Babylon had been at the top of the heap in Israelite society. The ruling class. The skilled professionals. The Babylonian king was no fool. He only wanted people with a track record; people who could produce. People who could build a society from the ground up if they set their minds to it. The Babylonian king and God had this in common. They both knew who could get the job done. From those to whom much is given, much is expected.

And so when God causes this foreign king to release his captives and send them home, God's plans for them are huge - far more than they had dreamed of or asked for. Because God doesn't want them to restore things to the way they were. God wants them to make things better than they had been before. For everyone, not just for themselves. Because to restore the past with all of its inequalities and injustices - only prettier - is not God's notion of doing a new thing. It never has been and it never will be.

Now, unlike the assembly instructions that came with the bookshelf I bought at Target a while back, God's instructions here are pretty straightforward and easy to understand. Perhaps because of God's use of two words that go together as surely as please and thank you; salt and pepper; Hank Williams Jr. and Monday Night Football: If and then.

If you do this, then that will happen. Depending on how you read it, this constitutes either a promise or a threat.

"IF you feed the hungry and bring the homeless into your house… THEN your needs will be satisfied; you will be as productive as a spring-fed garden - lush and bearing fruit."

But before they can really begin to participate in this new thing God is promising, Israel's exilic community needs to come to terms with its own many sins... The ways they've treated others. The way they've overlooked their own flaws and focused on their own sense of grievance and oppression. The way they've ignored injustice when it benefited them.

It's something we all do - concentrate on our own misfortunes while turning a blind eye to the greater needs of others. And if, like most of us here today, you've hitched your star to a denomination struggling with diminishing numbers, a hemorrhaging budget and internecine warfare, it's understandable. I mean, it's hard not to obsess over all these things. It's hard not to pine for the glory days of our past when our national coffers were full, and there was a red brick Presbyterian church at the corner of nearly every town in America, filled with women who wore gloves and men who wore hats. When everyone just seemed to know that Sunday morning was for church rather than the pre-game show.

The Babylonian exiles would sit by the banks of a foreign river and lament, "If I should forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth," while we sit in our half-empty fellowship halls and quiet offices and mourn what we no longer have - even if it was unhealthy and wrong.

A real-life example: A minister gets a phone call from a former minister of the church he's serving. (His caller was the unlucky one who came in right after the retirement of the proverbial 'beloved pastor' who had presided over the 'golden years' of the church.) After they take care of the business that prompted the phone call, the two ministers, past and present, start comparing notes on this congregation that's still paralyzed by nostalgia for the good old days.

"Good old days!" the former pastor explodes. "I'll tell you what kind of good old days they were. When I came in, I discovered that 110 members of the congregation were charter members of the John Birch Society, including their beloved pastor. That's what their community was organized around - paranoia and exclusion."

We tend to forget that the church's golden age here in the United States was also an era that included McCarthyism, racial segregation, and one political assassination after another. Paranoia and exclusion ... "the good old days."

Like the Babylonian exiles, we mourn both for a world that never really existed and gloss over the very real flaws that did. And, like the Babylon exiles, we don't really have the capacity to imagine things being fundamentally different - just nicer. More compassionate. A kinder, gentler version of the "good old days."

We look but don't see, listen but don't hear, read but don't understand what God has told us over and over again. This old house doesn't need a new coat of paint, it needs to be completely reframed. And we just don't get it. We just don't get it that no matter how hard we try to fix things up; no matter how many houses we build in poor neighborhoods; no matter how many wells we dig in places with no clean water; no matter how many medical clinics we open - if we don't change a system whose prosperity depends on having a poor side of town and a poor side of the border; a system that winks at the pollution of our natural resources so that a few might profit; a system that allows children to grow up without ever eating an evening meal, then we're not participating in God's new thing. We're maintaining an old thing that needs to be discarded.

Including the church as we know it.

As far back as I can remember I have listened to the same old diatribes about the moral failure of the Presbyterian Church, with connections being made between our declining numbers, our big-tent approach to faith, and the positions we take on social justice issues.

I would like to suggest another reason for our decline: we haven't been doing enough of what we're accused of doing.

We give to the poor, but they make us uncomfortable and we don't want them around us so we keep them at arm's length. We advocate for the rights of others, but we have no idea who these people really are or how they live because we never sit down to dinner with them. We sing Spanish language hymns but don't bother to learn the language so we can exchange a few words with the young mother in line next to us at the grocery store and then invite her to our church. We pass overtures but don't back up our words with actions. We're better at talking than walking. In other words, we might be guilty - but not as charged.

So let's look again at what Isaiah is telling the people to do and then let's look at ourselves. It's simple, as God's plans always are. Build a community that includes everyone and is for everyone from the get-go. Don't set up charities that will hand out your leftovers to the poor. Invite the poor into your home; make them one of you. Then you won't have any homeless or poor. Then your society will be safe and secure - because a society is never more safe than its most at-risk member. What you build will stay standing because everyone will have a stake in keeping things stable. And you will be remembered - not as someone who brought back the "good old days," but as someone who attended the birth of a new way of being.

That's what the early church was about too: Excited beyond coherent speech with the new life God had given to each one of them. Eager to live as Jesus' Beloved Community, where the hungry were soon fed and the wealthy thanked God for the opportunity to pass on what they had been given.

It's doubtful that the Babylonian exiles felt blessed, but they were, and so are we. God wouldn't let them stay stuck in their memories of the good old days, just as God blocks our path when we try to return to them. Because God knows we're capable of doing better, which is what this beautiful, broken world deserves... This world that stands in ruins not because of terrorist attacks or foreign invaders, but because too many of us who should know better have lacked the will or the wit to try a different approach when the old one proved inadequate. Yes, I'm talking about us - the true believers - not those "other guys" engaged in the latest hostile takeover bid for the denomination.

And of course there remains the ever-present temptation to take a little time off from the struggle (what we used to call "the Movement") and quietly benefit from the injustices we publicly rail against. Because while we might talk about God's preferential option for the poor, our reality is the world's preferential option for the privileged. We might dabble our toes in the reality the poor are stuck in, but when the going gets tough, we have the capacity to turn around, march right out of there and pass in the world of privilege as one of them. Because that's what we are.

And because such an option continues to exist for us, it's crucial that we not only embrace the new thing that God is offering us but that we somehow cut off all possibility of returning to the old. Like a person addicted to heroin throwing away their needles. Because the old ways give most of us here an edge in society that is hard for even the best of us to ignore when it comes down to us and ours. When it comes to our own flesh and blood - their educational opportunities, their safety -- we snap back to the status quo like a rubber band.

But good news! The Bible tells us that God will go to any length to wake us up: send us into exile, separate us from what we love most, empty out our churches.

Does it have to come to that, or can we learn from the past and work together to make a better future? God's future, where there are no homeless, because we're all living together. Where there are no ruins, because the upkeep of our neighbor's house is as important as our own. Where God's will is done on earth as completely as it is in heaven.

Presbyterian Health, Education and Welfare Association and its member networks have an illustrious history and a great track record when it comes to justice issues, but more to the point, you've been blessed with an even greater opportunity. To develop the kind of agility necessary to deal with the realities and needs of an increasingly desperate world. To create models whose existence does not depend on erratic funding and therefore are not as vulnerable to political attack. To engage in new ways of outreach and collaboration.

To the extent that forces antagonistic to PHEWA and other justice groups are succeeding, they are doing so largely for two reasons. First, because much of what we do depends on the support of the very people who benefit from the world's preferential option for the privileged. Second, because of our own membership in that same group, we have limited imaginations that prevent us from seeing new ways of doing things that could break it all wide open. Earnest and hard-working as we are, by and large our work - even when it attempts systemic change - does not reflect the radical nature of the new thing God is doing.

We're so weighed down by old assumptions about resources and power that we don't perceive the proclaimers of God's new thing out there - out on the edges, jumping up and down, trying to get our attention. Who are they? Only all the folks Jesus mentions in Luke's gospel. PHEWA's primary constituency. The poor. People of Color. Persons with disabilities. Anyone the mainstream dismisses as inconsequential.

And what do you think they're shouting?

Because we don't really listen to anyone but ourselves, we think they're shouting "Help! Help!" If we'd shut up for a minute and listen, we might be able to hear what they're really saying:

"Come join us - we have strengths you've never seen and a resourcefulness you've lost. Your funding's been cut? We'll show you how to do a lot with very little. You've lost your office? We'll show you how to survive on the street. Your possessions and obligations are suffocating you? Let us show you the generosity and the hospitality of the poor!"

And we suddenly realize that all those things we thought made us most effective are the very things that have been holding us back.

Right now, let's let go of all of it, for the next few holy moments anyway - our gifts and graces; our assumptions, anxiety, and ambition - and come to this table. Here everyone is welcome, everyone counts; here all we need to bring is ourselves, to be fed by the One who longs to serve us. For us, this gathered community of God's people, this is where God's new thing begins.

So, come, let us join together in the joyful feast of all God's people. Amen.

Reprinted with permission from Church & Society Magazine, March/April 2003 (93:4). For a full copy of the issue ("What Does God Require of Us? The PHEWA Story," $3 per copy plus shipping), contact the editor, Bobbi Wells Hargleroad, at c-s@ctr.pcusa.org. A one year subscription is $15; a 3 year subscription is $42. Student/Fixed Income subscriptions are $12/$36.