What is God’s Word to Us Today?

Amos 5:21-24; Micah 6:6-8; Luke 19:41-44

 

A Sermon Preached by Donald Mackenzie

October 17, 2004

University Congregational United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington

 

“And what does God require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness

and to walk humbly with your God?”  Micah 6:8b

 

            This sermon is the first in a series of three sermons on faith and citizenship anticipating a vitally important national election on November 2nd. The problem we will be addressing in the series is first the relationship between faith and the fact that our democracy is slipping away. The honest and vigorous debate between liberals and conservatives over which approach to government is better has dissolved into something far more extreme and dangerous. On the right we have an attempt to move us toward a plutocracy, that is government by the wealthy driven in part by people whose very conservative Christian faith is a visible driver. On the left we have people who have apparently been asleep while this has been happening. The consequence is that our constitution and the idea of government by the consent of the governed has eroded.

Second, it is slipping away because we moderate and liberal and conservative citizens have not been paying attention. Those who have been paying attention are far more extreme than the rest of us.  But this not paying attention reflects something going on in the culture.

Here are some of the ways that we as a culture stay on the surface.  We intellectualize, that is, we live solely out of our thoughts and try to keep our feelings at bay.  But thoughts cannot move us—feelings move us. On the other hand, we don’t use our minds enough. We let other people do our thinking for us.  We do not think critically about what our leaders are telling us.  To truly think critically, we must organize our thoughts with our feelings to get that important balance between mind and heart. In the French film, Intimate Strangers, a woman seeking psychotherapy accidentally finds herself in the office of a tax lawyer.  He tries to persuade her that he is not a therapist but she won’t hear it. As the film continues we realize that she is the healthy one having a much better integrated heart and mind and he who lives almost completely in his head is the one in need of healing.  At the midpoint of the film we see the first break in his intellectual façade.  He is in his apartment dancing to the music of Wilson Pickett singing “At the Midnight Hour.”  He is beginning that process of finding that balance. Why is this so hard?

Some of the reason for all of this is the chaos that drives us from morning ‘til night.  When we get up in the morning, often we are not thinking about how we can lovingly contribute to community, to family, to friends.  How can we? We are wondering how we will survive another day; how we will get our work done, how we will get the car fixed, the teeth cleaned, the bills paid, the children’s education paid for, the parents needs met, all this without tipping over the edge.

God ‘s word to us is to think carefully about the difference between living on the surface and getting beneath that surface to the places inhabited by love and the consequences of love: compassion, cooperation, forgiveness, reconciliation, justice. Both Amos and Micah have these messages.  Both were concerned about the religious practice of sacrificing animals at the temple as an example of living on the surface.  This is the appearance of religion.  It is thin and superficial.  For Amos the return to substance was conveyed this way:  “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness (meaning a way of responding effectively to God’s call to cooperate with God’s purposes) like an everflowing stream.”  Micah’s words are our text for today: “do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God.” Both prophecies illustrate the tension between the intense human desire to remain on the surface of life, that place where we are not changed and where we might feel safe and secure even in the midst of pain and unpleasantness, the tension between that and the equally strong pull toward healing and the substance of life that brings that healing: love and the consequences of love:  compassion, cooperation, forgiveness, reconciliation, justice.  The words from the prophets are loud words.  Still we have difficulty hearing them.

            Likewise the expression of sadness in the gospel reading helps us to see what happens to us as human being when we remain on that surface.  Destruction in one of its infinite forms comes to us all because “we didn’t recognize God’s moment when it came.” God’s moment is love.

            Not recognizing God’s moment can come in a variety of ways. Sometimes that moment is the moment when a small crack develops in the wall that holds our morality, our sense of how our actions and the actions of our country contribute to the common good. I asked Ed Wenk to identify the moment when this crack developed during his time in Washington DC. For those of you who do not know Ed, he was Science Advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and briefly Nixon before moving here to be a Professor of Engineering at the University of Washington.  He is also a futurist, one who thinks about the consequences of today’s action for life tomorrow.  Ed Wenk was one of the principle authors of our policy on children.  When I asked Ed to identify a point in his experience in the White House when our democracy started to erode, he identified it as the moment when President Nixon having given his public support to the supersonic transport project and then having been told privately by his then science advisor, Ed David, that the project was not economically feasible, told Mr. David to sell it to congress anyway.  Mr. David resigned.  For Ed Wenk this was a corruption of science and contributed to an attitude that practicality and self-interest supersede ethics. This attitude has helped over time to magnify our sense of living in a superficial place because we have lost that sense of rootedness in a morality that holds and contributes to the common good. The results have been chaotic.

             This chaos prevents us from asking the important questions:  what am I saying yes to that keeps me from saying no to what’s wrong?  And, what am I saying no to that keeps me from saying yes to what’s right? Because of this, even the most faithful among us ends up worshiping a god of something other than love. Again, how can we help it?  But, the truth is that when we do get a glimpse of God, the idol we have been worshiping looks pretty thin and superficial. But how do we get that glimpse?

            That glimpse that has inside it the possibility of healing and love is accessible through only one door and that door is marked “truth.”  And the difficulty with that is that it is very hard to be asked to tell the truth and know that a consequence of that is that we will be changed. Telling the truth about ourselves and about our world is the doorway from the superficial to the substantial.  It is through this door that every novel and film of any consequence passes and it is through this door that the practice of ministry beckons us. For example, the truth about ourselves is that we are imperfect.  We make mistakes, we don’t all have the same gifts and we are always vulnerable to forgetting that love is everything. At the same time, there is another truth.  We are beautiful people, made and loved by God and because God is always with us, we have everything we need for this incredible journey we make through life. Likewise, the truth about the world is that we have a long way to go before life on this planet resembles God’s dreams for it.  There is rampant injustice, corruption in leadership, loneliness and isolation, violence domestically and publicly, poverty and homelessness, unhappiness and pervasive anger, almost total lack of concern for the future and an individualism and consumerism that is truly consuming.  This is not the world we want for ourselves or for our children.

            During this campaign season there has been a lot of talk about freedom, freedom as an American virtue, freedom as something to protect at all costs, freedom as something that America has to offer the world. Freedom is certainly a democratic virture and it could be offered to the world. But true freedom is always a consequence of the wise use of love and its consequences:  compassion, cooperation, forgiveness, reconciliation and justice.  At the moment, we as a nation are not free.  We are in exile, a kind of estrangement or imprisonment.  The exile we are experiencing is characterized by a kind of numbness that is the result of living life so completely on the surface that we have lost touch with the depth of the substance of live, which from a Christian point of view is defined by love.

            God’s word to us today is a wake up call to stop living so much on the surface, come home from exile and through some deeply needed spiritual practices and social action, find healing for ourselves and for our world.  I thank you for struggling with these important themes. Amen.