God’s People in the World: Equipped to Be God’s People in the World

Scripture: Genesis 12:1-3; Matthew 5:13-16

We’ve spent the last few weeks focusing on our Arlington Temple mission statement (can we say it together one more time?  The mission of ATUMC is to be a welcoming community called by Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit, and equipped to be God’s people in the world.)  Today we are on the last piece of that statement.  We’ve talked in the past few weeks about what it means to be a community that is called out from the rest of the world and welcomes anyone else who God has called out to be part of it; we talked about how we open ourselves to the Spirit’s empowerment to be good news for people who need good news.  Now it’s time to talk about just what that good news looks like: what it means to be God’s people in the world.

If we go back far enough in the Bible, to Genesis 12 which Ernie just read, we discover that the idea of being God’s person in the world is one of the oldest themes of Scripture.  Abraham, arguably, was God’s first person – not the first person God made, of course; or even the first person who God judged to be righteous, but the first person God really chose, the first person God entered into that kind of special relationship with, where if you will be my person I will be your God.  God chooses Abraham – actually Abram, at the time, because God hadn’t given him his new name denoting his new identity yet – and God tells Abram that he will be blessed, that his family will be blessed, that his allies will be blessed and his enemies cursed.  Out of all the people on earth, Abram is “called out” from among them for a different, godly purpose.

And that chosenness means Abram has a job to do.  His job is to leave the place he knows and go out into the wider world, and as he does this, we learn, not only will he be blessed, but all the families and nations of the earth will be blessed through him.  We see this promise take shape as Abraham’s descendants form the nation of Israel, God’s collective people, who are charged with being an example of justice and covenant faithfulness and a blessing to the surrounding nations, though this did not always happen quite as planned. But from the beginning of the story (our story) being God’s person was never just about what’s in it for me – but about what’s in it for everyone else around me.

And yet for God’s people over the rest of the story, the details of what that looks like tend to vary a lot.

Some of God’s people are prophets.  They have a special connection to the mind and will of God and speak truth to power in creative and bold ways.  Some of God’s people are priests.  They make sure that God is worshiped and honored appropriately to maintain the special relationship between God and Israel.  Some of God’s people are kings and government officials, responsible for organizing society in a just way.   Some of God’s people are shepherds, or farmers, or other ordinary people who show hospitality and generosity and courage and who show grace to each other and to those who live among them.

All of them are part of God’s story.  From the very beginning, there has never been just one way to be God’s person in the world.

I’ll tell you one way I’m trying to live out this mission these days.  If you’ve seen me on a weekday in the past couple of weeks, you may have noticed that I’ve started wearing a clerical collar.  I’ve been in ministry full-time for over seven years now, but until now, I have never worn or owned a collar.  I’ve been thinking for a while now about changing that.  I think I never wanted to be seen as that formal; I thought it might make me less approachable, like I am trying to set myself apart as a holy person rather than a regular person. I also admit there is a certain comfort to some anonymity out in the world, where I can mostly go about my daily life without worrying that someone is judging me on how well I live up to my job description.

But on the other hand, I began to realize that maybe I could actually live out this call more faithfully and fruitfully if people knew.  Not just here, at church, but if people out in the neighborhood and community around us could look at me and say, “Hey, there’s a person who could listen to me and pray for me, because I’m really going through something right now.”  Or, “There’s a person I could ask a question I have about God.”  Or even, “There’s a person I could tell why I think the Church is terrible” – maybe there could be some healing in that.  I can’t do these things when I’m anonymous.  It’s early, but I am giving this a try.  This is one way I am claiming anew what it means for me to be God’s person in the world, in this specific way that I am called.

Not all of us are called to wear a collar, of course.  But all Christians are called out of the world around us to form this thing called the church, the Body of Christ, God’s people.

A few weeks ago we heard Andrew talk about his ministry of peacemaking through listening to people’s experiences and beliefs and working for interfaith understanding.  That is something that is not just a job, but a call.  Others of you do that work of peacemaking and peacekeeping as diplomats, and that’s a call.  Still others of you work as doctors, or teachers, or for nonprofit organizations that are doing good in the world in some way, and that’s a call.  Or maybe you are in a job where you know you are using your God-given gifts to provide necessities of life or make life better for people in some way.  Any of those things might be part of what it looks like to be God’s person in the world.

But it’s also totally possible that your job, whatever it happens to be at the moment, does not directly represent any sort of grand divine call.  Maybe you don’t have one, for instance, whether that’s because you are looking or because you are retired or because you are unable to work.  Or maybe you do have one, but there’s just nothing that seems very divine or purposeful about it, but you have it because you have to pay the rent.  None of that diminishes your worth or value as God’s person.  I think this can actually be a hard concept to grasp, especially with our American-dream kind of cultural idea that any of us can do anything.  I once talked to someone who wasn’t happy in his job, but what was eating him up more than the mind-numbing work itself was the fact that he didn’t really know who he was or what he was worth outside of it. God never intended our ability to be God’s people in the world to be dependent on our employment status.

But that same person I knew, who did not see himself doing God’s work through his job, lived for going on mission trips.  He traveled with church groups doing disaster relief work and he painted houses.  And he laid tile.  And he talked and listened to those homeowners who were watching the ruins of their lives be rebuilt.  Every this person came back from a mission trip, he was alive again for a while.

Like most of us, of course, he couldn’t actually just quit his job and go on mission trips all the time. But that’s OK.  It’s possible that our particular ways of being God’s people in the world may come not first and foremost from the work we do for money, but through however we spend the rest of our time – teaching English as a second language, raising money to build wells with your Rotary club, volunteering at your kid’s school, serving dinner at the Homeless Services Center.  Maybe one of those things is how you are using the gifts and resources God has given you to build up God’s Kingdom on earth.  Maybe God has given you a passion for some cause and when you work for that cause you are being good news to someone who needs good news.

Then again it’s also possible that being God’s person in the world might have less to do with what we do and more to do with how we do it.

In the Sermon on the Mount, in the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells the crowds listening to them that their job is to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  Wait – that’s not exactly right.  He tells them they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  He doesn’t really give them a job.

Jesus knows that if people are salt, nothing can stop them from being salty.  Wherever they go in the world and whatever they do in it, they will do it saltily.  Those Galilean peasants probably didn’t have a lot of choice in the work they did, but they could share what they had with someone else in need.  They could set an extra place at the table for the foreigner traveling through.  They could forgive someone who didn’t deserve forgiveness, and break the cycle of violence by refusing to take revenge.

Salt doesn’t exist for itself.  If they were salt, they were salt for others.

Jesus knew that if people are light, then their light can’t help but shine.  Wherever they go and whatever they do in the world, they will do it shinily.  The people listening to this sermon didn’t have a bunch of time after work to spend volunteering, but they could bring a meal to a sick or grieving neighbor.  They could treat someone who everyone else looked down on with dignity. They could raise their children to be compassionate and just and brave.  They could pray for their neighbors and their communities.

Light doesn’t exist for itself.  If they were light, they were light for others.

And Jesus knew that if they were, people would take notice.  And they would know then that these were not just any people, but God’s people.  And through them, then, they would know something of God.

But you know – the truth is, I sometimes need help being salty and shiny.  It doesn’t always seem to come as naturally as Jesus seemed to think it should.

So we come back to our mission statement, which says that our mission is to be equipped to be God’s people in the world.  In other words – we can do this better with some help, which we can both find and give – here.

I think a lot of it has to do with being reminded.  We come here and we are reminded of what it is God asks of us.  We sing together and the words of those songs stick with us after we leave.  We study the Bible together and all of a sudden understand what God wants from us in a new way.  We learn how to pray and we create space to hear God’s call and we help each other understand what kind of work, paid or unpaid, big or small, God might have for us to do.  We share opportunities to do some of those things, and we help each other carry them out.

It is good to gather together.  It is good to be God’s people together, for a time, and to pray and laugh and sing and learn, to challenge each other and welcome each other and show grace to one another.

But then we go out as God’s people in the world – each of us in our own unique way – that the whole world might be blessed as God works through us.

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God’s People in the World: Empowered by the Holy Spirit

Scripture: Luke 4:14-21

We are spending these last three weeks of September focusing on our mission as Arlington Temple, taking our mission statement piece by piece.

Last week we started with a welcoming community called by Christ, and we talked about how to be the church means to be called out of the world and set apart from it, while also acknowledging that everyone who comes in those doors to form part of this community is just as welcomed and called by Christ as we are.  Today is part two: empowered by the Holy Spirit.

As soon as I began to think about preaching on part two, here, I wondered if we had made a mistake.  Was it silly to say that it is our mission to be empowered by the Holy Spirit?  If the Holy Spirit is doing the empowering, then how is that our mission?  Maybe it’s better to say that the Holy Spirit’s mission is to empower us.  Then again, who are we to define the Holy Spirit’s mission?  The Holy Spirit can do what she wants.

I eventually changed my mind, though.  I don’t actually think it’s silly to say that our mission is to be a community of people who are collectively and individually empowered by the Holy Spirit.  What we were getting at there, I’m pretty sure, is a recognition that we aren’t here gathered as a community just to do our own thing the best we can.  That if God truly has work for us, we are not going to be people who are dumb enough to try to do that work on our own, apart from the God who called us.  Our mission is to be the kind of community that recognizes our need for God to not only show us what our job is but to help us carry it out – and a community that knows that with God’s help, we can.

So once I decided it wasn’t silly, I did have a couple of questions.  First of all, if our mission is to be empowered, how do we get empowered?  Again, that’s ultimately the Holy Spirit’s job, but what’s our part in that?  And then – empowered for what?

We can find some answers to those questions by going back to Jesus in this passage we read from Luke today.

To set the scene a little, Jesus has thus far in the Gospel of Luke been baptized in the Jordan River and then headed out in the wilderness to duke it out with Satan for forty days.  When that time is done, he returns – “in the power of the Spirit,” Luke says – to the region of Galilee, where he travels around to different synagogues.  One day he is back in Nazareth, the small village in Galilee where he grew up, and he goes to the synagogue there, just as he always goes to the synagogue on Saturday mornings.  There, any adult male is allowed to read Scripture and comment on it, though we are not told whether this particular Scripture passage was Jesus’ selection or part of the rotation; either way, when Jesus gets up to read, it’s from the scroll of Isaiah.  Chapter 61, to be precise.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, Jesus reads, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Mic drop.

We’re talking about mission statements?  This is Jesus’ mission statement.  This is the Scripture that, according to Luke, Jesus uses to frame his entire ministry.  When he finishes, all eyes are on him.  No one says a word.  I imagine that they probably knew, somehow, that what they had heard was more than just another Scripture reading.

When Jesus speaks, he confirms what they already know: “Today,” he says, “this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Even Jesus begins his ministry in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Where does that power come from?  Well, he’s Jesus, Son of God; he’s part of the Trinity, so there’s a pretty strong connection, right there, but human Jesus also needs that connection made explicit.  When Jesus is baptized, we are told that the Holy Spirit descended on him like a dove, and there’s something to that – that every baptized person, by virtue of our inclusion in the Body of Christ, has already been given the power of the Holy Spirit to go out and be in ministry, to do God’s work.

But I suspect that the church universal would be a very different thing if all any of us needed was a one-time empowerment, here, like a steroid injection.  That power of the Spirit has to be taken seriously, revisited, renewed, even contended with.  The first thing that happens after Jesus’ baptism is that the Spirit drives him into the wilderness.  See – the Holy Spirit isn’t always a gentle dove; sometimes she’s a force to literally be reckoned with.  There, in the wilderness, Jesus spends time in the presence of God away from the distractions of human society, he fasts and prays, he has it out with Satan, he reckons with his own temptations and vulnerabilities, and when he returns to Galilee, it is still, or once again, in the power of the Spirit.

So Jesus is empowered by the Holy Spirit in his baptism, but he is also empowered by the Spirit through this time in the wilderness of prayer, discipline, and making room for the presence of God.

Like I said before, God can do what God wants.   My Methodist theology professor in seminary used to tell us about Wesley’s belief in means of grace (tangible ways to receive God’s grace) by saying that if you want to catch the bus, you might be able to wave one down anywhere, but your best bet is to head to the bus stop – i.e. the places where you know you can find it.  Likewise, it’s possible to meet and be empowered by the Holy Spirit anywhere – sitting at your desk, walking around town, hanging out with friends, traveling, at the gym – but if we are really seeking that empowerment, our best bet is to head to the wilderness.

It doesn’t have to be the real wilderness.  I’m not even talking about something like finding God in nature, though we might, of course, do that. What I do mean is that if we want to be empowered by the Spirit, if our mission is to be empowered by the Spirit, we have to make room in our lives for the Spirit to move.

We have to sweep away the distractions.  We have to spend time in prayer and listening for God’s voice.  We have to let the Holy Spirit talk to us through the words of the Bible.  We have to go to those literal or metaphorical places where we know God’s Spirit is at work.

Where are those places for you?

Maybe, even – we have to ask for it.  Holy Spirit, empower me.  

Don’t forget, though, that our mission is not just to be individual people empowered by the Holy Spirit but a community empowered by the Holy Spirit.  It means something different, I think, for the Holy Spirit to be working within us and working among us.  Both are necessary, both are good: but let’s not get so stuck on our individual time with God that we forget to make space for the Spirit to move among us in community, as we worship together and take communion together and study the Bible together and pray together and serve together.  Do you show up for worship each week expecting the Holy Spirit to move?  (If not, what would it take for you to have that expectation?)

We go out to be God’s people in the world, but does our ministry in the world truly begin in prayer and in seeking the powerful presence of God?

Now that leads us into my second question – empowered for what?

For Jesus, the answer was explicit: The Spirit of the Lord was upon him to empower him to preach good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, release to the prisoners, and freedom to the oppressed.  This, we could say, was Jesus’ own very special way of being God’s person in the world.

I don’t know if we’re necessarily all called or anointed or empowered for all of the exact same things Jesus proclaimed here through the words of Isaiah.  Though we should all aspire to be like Jesus, we are also not Jesus.  But I think we can think broadly about how we, as followers of Jesus, make his mission our own as God’s people in the world.  How does your life proclaim good news to the people who most need good news?

Being empowered by the Holy Spirit was not and is not an end in itself, just so that we feel good and holy about ourselves.  The power that the Holy Spirit gives us is to drive us out in mission that is part of God’s bigger mission.  The power that the Holy Spirit gives us is the power for our lives to become good news to others.

Is your life good news to someone who needs it?

Next week we’ll talk more about what it means to be God’s people in the world, though you have already heard a few very different examples.  But what’s important to remember is that we aren’t God’s people in the world by just going out and doing whatever we think seems good, on our own.

We’re God’s people in the world by going out and going into the places God leads us, eyes and hearts open to the work God has for us, fueled by the power that God gives us to do things that we might not otherwise have been able to do.  We can’t be good news on our own because even if we do, that’s not God’s good news.

So that’s why our job and our mission is to be not just a community of people who gathers together on Sunday, not just a community of people who sing some songs and study some old book, not even just a community of people who do good things in the world, because any group of people can do those things.

But we seek to be a community of God’s people, empowered by God’s Spirit to do God’s work.

That will be good news to the world around us.

God’s People in the World: A Welcoming Community Called By Christ

Scripture: Romans 15:1-7

We spent this past summer with the church of Acts.  We talked a lot about what it meant to be a church on a mission, to be set on fire, to follow where the Spirit leads, and to share the good news of the Gospel in words and in action, and now I want to spend a few weeks as we move into the fall getting a little more specific – about our own mission, as the church in this time and this place.

This is our mission statement, which we came up with as a congregation around two years ago now (let’s say it together): The mission of Arlington Temple United Methodist Church is to be a welcoming community called by Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit, and equipped to be God’s people in the world. 

Over the next few weeks we’re going to take that piece by piece, and today we’re going to start at the beginning: our mission is to be a welcoming community called by Christ.

There are actually two parts in there, at least (I don’t know, maybe we could break down the whole thing) but I want to start with the second of those – what it means to be a community that is called by Christ.

The word for church in Greek, ekklesia, means “called out.”  Whereas we so often fall into the trap of thinking about church as a place we go to, perhaps an organization we belong to, the early Christians had a sense that church was comprised of people who were called out of the world around them and set apart from it.  In last week’s reading from Romans we heard Paul’s idea of what Christian life in community should look like: Loving one another, rejoicing and weeping together, helping one another in our need, showing hospitality to strangers, persevering in prayer, blessing our enemies, and doing our best with God’s help to overcome evil with good.  There’s this sense in Paul’s writing that the church community does not just look like any other community; that the way we live our lives together and apart is fundamentally distinct.  We are “called out” by Christ to be something different.

Exactly what it is we are called out and set apart for is something we’ll explore as we get farther into our mission in the next few weeks, but we have to start with this idea that we are here, that we form this community, because God wants us here and has a purpose for us here.

Now, I’m sure that those of you who are here this morning are here for a lot of different reasons, not all of which may be that you felt this strong sense that God was summoning you out of bed and down the hill to 1835 North Nash St.  Some of you may be here out of a sense of duty to someone else, some of you may be here looking for some comfort in a familiar rhythm or for a sense of groundedness and community in a new place, some of you may be just trying it out, and furthermore there’s nothing that says you have to come back next week (though I hope you will!)  But we can acknowledge that and still believe that God has a purpose for us as a community, and that no matter who you are, where you’re from, how much money you have, or where you are on your faith journey, God has a purpose for you here as part of the Body of Christ.

And that’s why I believe being a community called by Christ is fundamentally connected to being a welcoming community because if we believe that Jesus has called us here, that God has a purpose for us here, then we have to at least hold open the strong possibility that Jesus has also called whoever else might walk through those doors on a given morning.

This morning’s reading is from a few chapters later in Romans, where Paul is talking about a conflict or conflicts in the community.  Namely, some in the church who think you shouldn’t eat meat (in Corinthians, a similar conflict revolves around whether you can eat meat that has been sacrificed to idols, but it doesn’t specify that here); some say you should abstain from wine; others disagree about whether Christians should observe the Jewish calendar with its sabbaths and holy days.  All of this presumably has to do with the fact that the Roman church is made up of Jewish Christians and non-Jewish Christians who don’t know what to do with one another.  Paul’s advice is not to make these ultimately small differences bigger than they are; there is room in the Body of Christ for Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, vegetarians and omnivores, teetotalers and those who drink responsibly, Yom-Kippur-observers and not-Yom-Kippur-observers.   Better to sacrifice our own need to be right for the building up of a brother or sister in Christ, Paul says.  And then he sums it all up: “Welcome each other, just as Christ has welcomed you.”

Christ has “called out” the Jewish Christian and the Gentile Christian alike to form this new, set-apart community that loves, shares, rejoices, weeps, prays, blesses, and overcomes evil with good.

I don’t think we need to be enmeshed in conflict for this message to apply to us.

Writer Paul Achtemeier calls this passage Paul’s “plea for tolerance”[1] but I hear it as more than that.  Once on a visit to the Holy Land while I was in college, our group visited with Archbishop Elias Chacour, a Melkite Christian priest who runs a school for Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Druze children (Druze is another small religious minority in the Holy Land.)  He works to promote interfaith relationships and understanding, but he criticized all of the talk of “tolerance” he hears these days.  “I don’t tolerate you,” he said.  “I welcome you with open arms.”

I likewise hope and believe that Jesus does more than tolerate us, but welcomes us with open arms.   And since we with all our different backgrounds, colors, gifts, struggles, doubts, and journeys have already been welcomed with open arms by Jesus, our job and our mission is to do the same for each other.

As I’ve become acquainted with various churches, for longer periods of time or shorter, once thing I’ve become convinced of is that you can’t fake welcome.  You can have fancy gifts that you give all first-time visitors and not be a welcoming church.  You can have a quasi-professional parking lot team with vests and cones like I have seen at some larger churches and not be a welcoming church (which is not to say that isn’t impressive or sometimes necessary.)  The quality of our welcome is rather about who sits with who, who has coffee with who, who feels like an insider and who is made, usually unintentionally, to feel like an outsider.

I remember talking to a friend in seminary about why she chose to keep going to a particular church that she visited.  “Yeah,” she admitted, “the music is OK, and the preaching is OK, but it was the one place where people really seemed to care that I was there.”  That’s welcome.

The other thing I’ve realized is that every church thinks they are a welcoming community.  Sometimes when you’ve been part of a community for a long time it’s easy to become blind to certain things that just are the way they are, and to not see things the way a new person might.  A colleague of mine talked about one church she served where for coffee hour people gathered around one long table that had just enough seats for all of the old-timey regulars.  I don’t think this church would have said they didn’t care about visitors.  They simply didn’t see it.

I’ve said before and I will say again that I think Arlington Temple is one of the more genuinely welcoming churches I’ve known.  This is a place where I do, regularly, see diplomats having coffee with homeless people, and go to church gatherings with people from five different countries.  I love that – it makes me feel like we are living life in the Kingdom of God, right here.

But if we say our mission is to be a welcoming community, then that means we should be constantly trying to make our welcome more like Christ’s welcome.

Have you – especially you who have been a part of this community for a long time – ever tried to look at what we do here through the eyes of someone new?  Certainly some of you have been new more recently than others, and you might have some good insights!  Now seems like a good time to make a plug for the fact that we’re still in need of one greeter for this year, to stand at the door for 15 minutes or so before the start of the service and make sure our visitors know where they are and what to do.  And allow me to also use this moment to make a plug for getting to worship on time – because while I fully sympathize with it being hard to get moving in the morning, I do wonder what it feels like for new people who get here early – and I promise you, it is always visitors who get here early – and no one is here.

If our mission is to be a welcoming community, those are some things we should be thinking about.  How can we do better at extending that welcome that Christ has already extended to us?  How do we say to others, we believe you have a place and a purpose in our community?

And then how do we think about extending that welcome outside and into our community?  Because there are plenty of people around here who might not ever wake up on a Sunday morning and think, “I guess I’ll go to church,” but who God still might want to welcome into Christian community.  How do we let people know that they are here – not just count on them to see the steeple and figure it out – but let them know that we are here, we care about them, and that there is room and a purpose for them here should they ever decide to take God up on it?  How do we communicate better to our neighbors outside those doors that we believe there is work to be done together?

I’ll tell you what, that one is harder.  It means open arms reaching out, and not just receiving.

But that’s why it’s our mission.

We believe that we are called out and set apart to be something different.  And no matter who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, how much money you make or where on your faith journey you are, it would be better with you.  We would be better with you.

We welcome you because Jesus welcomes you, and we welcome you because Jesus welcomes us.

 

[1] Interpretation: Romans, p. 214

Overcome Evil With Good

This passage, which just happened to show up in the lectionary on a week we are in between sermon series, is one of my favorite in the Bible.  It’s actually one of my go-to passages when I officiate weddings.  When couples love 1 Corinthians 13 (“love is patient, love is kind”) but don’t love the cliché factor, I always direct them to Romans 12 instead.  Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.

The truth, of course, is that neither Romans 12 nor 1 Corinthians 13 is actually a wedding passage, in terms of the apostle Paul’s original intentions.  Instead, they are passages about how to live and love one another in Christian community.  They are passages about what sets the church apart in its lived witness.

In Paul’s letter to the Roman church, he has already spilled a lot of ink describing God’s whole, sweeping plan of salvation, and how God’s grace has been made accessible to Jews and Gentiles alike.  Romans is Paul’s most highly theological letter – it reads more like a sermon – but toward the end, here, it’s time to get practical, so here in chapter 12 Paul begins to describe what it looks like to live a Christian life, to live a life in light and in the power of God’s grace.  Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.  Contribute to the needs of the saints, extend hospitality to strangers.  As the biblical scholar Paul Achtemeier puts it, “Grace is not another form of total permissiveness….Grace brings with it…the power to reshape and restructure our lives in a way appropriate for life under the lordship of God rather than under the lordship of sin.”[1]

Somewhere in here, Paul switches from talking about Christian life lived within a Christian community to Christian life lived in the context of the world around us.  Scholars disagree on where exactly that is, but it seems to make sense that when Paul starts on Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse them, that perhaps we are outside the realm of the church proper at this point.  Rejoice with those who rejoice, he continues, weep with those who weep.  Live in harmony with one another…if it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.  This is our lived Christian witness in the world.

Like I said, I love this passage.  I think it is a beautiful depiction of life lived in the reality of God’s grace.

I’ve also been struggling with it a bit in the past few weeks, post-Charlottesville (and maybe even in the general political climate these days.)  How do we live out these beautiful words in the world around us today? In the days after the protests and counter-protests in Charlottesville that resulted in street violence and one person dead, the United Methodist Church took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, and it quoted the last verse of this passage: Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

How we do that, of course, is another matter altogether.

This may be a sermon where you hear a lot about my questions and not a lot of solid answers.  I’m comfortable with that.  Hopefully it can be a way of inviting you into the struggle with me.

In Charlottesville three weeks ago, we collectively realized something that many of us might have wanted to deny: that racism – the really overt, blatant kind – is alive and well in America today.  That it’s maybe more alive and well than it has been in a long time.  Of course, even those who gathered to protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue from a Charlottesville park claim that this isn’t about racism – “It’s about heritage,” they say; or “It’s about white people losing their rights and freedoms,” it’s about white America being replaced – but no matter how those arguments might have sounded otherwise, it’s hard to pull off the “we’re not racist” bit when you’re wearing a hood and carrying a torch, or shouting Heil Hitler in the next breath.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, the national conversation has gone in a few different directions: that, for one, while racism in America never went away, people do seem to feel a renewed freedom to express it in overt and blatant ways with the advent of the current administration.  Our president, as we know, has been accused of a certain halfheartedness in his own response to what happened, citing “violence on many sides.”  There was, indeed, violence on the side of both the white nationalist protesters and the “antifa” counter-protesters, and so part of our national conversation has focused on whether that makes these two groups morally equivalent.  And then there has been the question of the statues, as multiple cities around the country have taken their cue from what happened in Charlottesville and either taken or started to discuss plans to take their Confederate statues down; the question remains, what to do with them?  Do we leave them be as part of our American history?  Do we try to contextualize them somehow?  Do they belong in a museum, but not a public street or park?

As we’ve been involved in this national struggle, many of us committed to being on “the right side of history,” some of us probably preferring to stay out of it altogether, my question has been “What is our unique Christian witness in the midst of all this?”  What do we as people of faith have to add to the conversation?

I brought up that question at my lectionary group, my weekly meeting of pastors discussing what we’re going to preach, and one of my friends and colleagues responded that our job is to speak truth.  If it’s the same truth that others outside the church are speaking, such as those protesting white supremacy, so be it.

I hear that, and I agree with it – mostly, at least.  The colleague who said that is African American, and I’m also aware that if I talk too much about my moral struggles over what to say here, that might come across as reeking of white privilege.  As a white Christian, I’m not who the neo-Nazis or the KKK is after.  Maybe because of that, I feel the freedom to have a more measured response to the whole thing, rather than standing up and saying, loudly and unqualified-ly, that racism is evil and that I will fight it.

By the way, racism is evil, and our baptismal vows include a vow to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever form they present themselves, and this is one of those ways, and I did say here the day after Charlottesville.

That in itself is not what I’m struggling with.  I agree with my colleague that church needs to speak truth.  That truth is that all people of all colors are created in the image of God and loved by God.  That truth is that it’s our job as Christians to work and even fight for a world where that is lived out – where that is true here on earth, as it is in heaven.  The truth is that people of color in our American society are not treated as if that is the case.  The thing is, that should be an easy thing to say.

Sometimes the church waffles when it comes to speaking the truth like that in the midst of a national debate and national rancor.  Those of us who gather here and as part of the Church at large may have many different strong opinions on the issues at hand – maybe not whether racism is evil, in theory, but at least concerning the moral equivalence of the KKK and the antifa, and whether our current administration is to blame for all the hate crimes we’ve seen in recent months, and certainly if nothing else about what to do with those statues.  (And certainly, also, whether white privilege is a real thing: I’ve been walked out on during a sermon for bringing that up before.)  And so we might see our job as the church as one of bridging our differences and calling for unity.  We do that a lot, as the church, not just when it comes to racism.  We see ourselves as prophetic by being the moderate voice and calling for compromise.  We don’t want to get involved in “politics.”

The problem is that there’s nothing that makes the middle ground automatically God’s truth, and if our main goal is unity no matter what we’re unified around, then we’re no better than the false prophets of the Old Testament who cried “Peace, peace” when there was no peace (Jeremiah 8).

“Hate what is evil,” says Paul, “hold fast to what is good.”  Racism is evil.  I don’t want to waffle on that.

And yet I am still inclined to believe that our Christian faith, our Christian witness, has something distinct to add to the national conversation.  I am still inclined to believe that we are called to be more than just one more angry voice in a sea of angry voices, though that is not to say there is nothing be angry about, or that anger can’t be righteous.

I think there has to be something distinct about our Christian witness in times of national upheaval and national rancor such as this one, and I think that has something to do with love.  On its own, though, that’s pretty vague.  Love can’t just be a slogan by which we define ourselves in contrast to our opponents, the haters.  The uniqueness of our Christian witness has to do with loving our enemies, blessing those who persecute us, living peaceably with all as much as it is up to us, and with God’s help overcoming evil not with more evil, but with good.

But I struggle with what it means to both love our enemies and to hate evil/hold fast to what is good.  Not in theory.  In theory, we can love the sinner, hate the sin.  In theory, we can separate what a person does and what a person stands for from who that person is, who no matter what is a beloved child of God.  It’s just that that’s hard to do in real life.  It’s far too easy to either get judgy and hate the person who embodies that sin (even if you say you don’t) or, on the other hand, to – in the name of loving a person – to get kind of waffly on the sin you claim to hate.

How, as a follower of Christ, am I expected to love a Nazi?  How should I love a member of the KKK?  How do I love them without excusing them?

A little while ago I heard an interview on the radio with a leader of a group called Life After Hate.  This group was formed by, in their own words, “former members of the American violent far-right extremist movement.”  They both welcome people who wish to leave that kind of life and, as they say, to “counter the seeds of racism we once planted.”

You know what was the most surprising thing to me about that interview?  That there are people involved in these movements, probably people on the streets of Charlottesville that day, who don’t want to be that person anymore.

And it made me think, these are people who are not beyond the hope of redemption.  Maybe step one of love, step one of overcoming evil with good, is simply to hold onto that hope for even my enemies.

But, you know, I don’t actually know any Nazis, or anyone in the KKK.  Not in person.  I do know people who might denounce racism, but also say or do racist things, in much more subtle ways than picking up a torch.  It might actually be harder to love such people, because I actually know them.  On the other hand, these may be people who it is not so very hard to love at all – my family, or friends, or neighbors.  How do I make sure, then, that I am still doing the hard work of hating what is evil and holding fast to what is good, still holding on to that hope of redemption?

And then, I have to admit, those people are also me.  I am a white person in America; I benefit, overall, from the fact that people look at the color of my skin and make certain assumptions or feel a certain way because of that.  I was raised learning about the contributions Western societies made to the world, and the contributions white people made to America.  I was raised in a society that judged certain people to be more dangerous than others, certain people to be smarter than others, certain people to be more attractive than others, certain people to be more important than others.  Those instinctive value judgments you are taught in so many little ways to make don’t get turned off just because you know they are sinful.  I still feel fear in certain parts of the city, depending on who I see on the streets around me.  I make assumptions and value judgments that need to get challenged.  My social circle is still whiter than the demographics of the people around me might indicate. As a white person, I still don’t always get it.

The hardest part about resisting evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever form they present themselves is that it’s not always just about speaking God’s truth to other people.  Maybe, even when I want so much to be on God’s side and live in the power of God’s grace – the enemy is also me.

Love, in the end, has to be sacrificial.  If there is any uniqueness to our Christian witness in a time like this, it has to be in the Christ-like love that Paul describes in Philippians as self-emptying.  And sometimes that will mean showing up to the protest and refusing to engage in violence even when others on either side are.  Sometimes it will mean not letting your enemies or opponents become dehumanized, as much as you’d like to put them in a completely separate box from you, a box totally separate from God’s love and grace.  And sometimes it will mean not resisting that painful moment when you suddenly see yourself reflected in those same enemies, and beginning to take stock of your own sin, a little bit at a time, and know that that hope for redemption holds true for you too.

If we are ever to overcome evil with good, it’s going to be with that kind of love.

That’s what God did, after all.  Even though we were sinful, broken, fallen people, God became one of us.  God refused to write us off, to put us in a different box; instead, God loved us.  And even when loving us became a dangerous thing to do, God loved us, even when it meant a cross, God loved us.  It’s only that uncompromising love that holds fast in the midst of hate that can ever overcome anything.

Like I told you, I don’t always know what that love looks like, love that refuses to compromise with evil but never yields to hate.  But I’m going to keep working on it.  And I’m going to keep struggling with it.  And I’m going to ask God to help me.  And I hope you will too.

 

[1] Interpretation: Romans, p. 194