Celebrating
God’s Call and Dream: An Alternative Inaugural Address
University
Congregational United
Seattle,
Washington
In our recent national elections, a great deal of
attention was paid to the role ‘moral values’ played in voters’ decisions. As President Bush is inaugurated, what ‘moral
values’ do Christians need to remember and celebrate? How do these values call us to live as
faithful Christian citizens?
This service of worship addresses in a joyful,
prayerful manner the call of God over the centuries – and how that call of the
God who is still speaking comes to us this day.
I am about to create new heavens and new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating;
for I am creating Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.
I will rejoice in Jerusalem and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
The people shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and someone else inhabit;
they shall not plant and someone else eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord –
and their descendants as well.
Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
Listen again: I ‘am creating’ (Isaiah 65.18) ‘new heavens and a new earth’ (Isaiah 65.17). And in that earth, ‘the people shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and someone else inhabit; they shall not plant and someone else eat’ (Isaiah 65.21-22; emphasis added).
Some time ago, while leading a delegation to Mexico and Central America, I came to know a Mexican strawberry picker. Never will I forget her words to us: ‘Our children, she said, ‘go hungry, because this land which ought grow beans and corn to feed them, instead grows strawberries for your tables.’
Her voice will never leave me. It rang in my hears as I read this text: ‘The people shall plant their fields and eat the fruit of that labor; they shall not plant and another eat.’
This farm worker of Mexico is the voice of millions who labor harder and longer each day than you and I can imagine. Yet, their children do not eat the fruits of that labor. They are locked into poverty. For many, poverty means death. Someone else eats the fruits of that labor. Someone who has purchased it in a sweat shop or a field or a Wal-Mart, or someone whose mutual fund has grown in the soil of cheap labor or other forms of economic injustice.
We live in a world in which – according to a United Nations report – 225 of its citizens have wealth equal to 47 percent of all humankind. We live in a nation in which the average income for a corporate CEO is 407 times that of the lowest paid worker in the company. We live for four more years with a president whose policy decisions, ideology, and theology all push toward increasing that soul-shattering gap between the rich and the impoverished.
Who are we, the economically privileged of the world, whose wealth depends upon systems that impoverish others?
Who are we in this story?
Here, the pathos of the situation stuns. For we do not live out who we are. We live, not by intent or will, but by virtue
of the social structures that shape our lives.
We live in complicity with economic brutality. Our everyday lives, and the public policies
and social structures that govern them, contribute to the life-threatening
poverty of many. This is the data of
despair. In it we could drown. Drown in denial, hopelessness, or overwhelmed
exhaustion, hiding our despair about public injustice behind the mask of virtue
in private life. This is the terrible
temptation to forget who – in truth and by God’s saving grace – we are
and why we are created.
Listen closely: We are friends of God, empowered by God to receive Her love, and to live that justice-making mysterious and marvelous love into the world. ‘Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.’ ‘Love’ in the biblical sense, by its very nature, seeks justice. Justice is the love language of the Bible. Where economic injustice exists, love seeks to dismantle it. And love in the biblical sense is political. That is, it means engaging in the processes that shape the terms of our life together. Life was breathed into us for a purpose . . . we were given a lifework . . . to receive God’s love, to love God with heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love neighbor as self. We are here to let God work through us, in us, and among us to bring freedom from all forms of sin – including economic injustice, ecological destruction, and warfare – that would thwart God’s gift of abundant life for all.
Soul-searing, deadly injustice is not the last word, in this moment or forever. The last word is resurrection, brutal death transformed into life – ways of living that deal death to many who are impoverished by them transformed into ways of living that nurture life, especially for the vulnerable.
We, the people of God, are to proclaim in our words and in our very lives this Good News and to participate in it. For Christians, this is our vocation as Christ’s body on earth today. Where we give up, in hopelessness and despair – be it subtle or overt – we are forgetting who we are and our purpose in life.
Finally, recall this: God does not call us to such absurdly difficult paths without also empowering us to walk them. God’s justice-making power is breathed into us as the very presence of God’s self, the Holy Spirit. That spirit brings into us, as community, ‘bold undaunted courage,’ (the words are Martin Luther’s) – courage more powerful than any other force on earth.
May we never forget who we are in the story unfolding on this good earth now under the Bush administration. We are filled with God in order to receive and live into this beautiful and broken world, that justice-making, peace-building, earth-healing love.
Weldon D. Nisly
Blessed be the Lord God of
Israel,
for God has looked favorably on this people and redeemed them.
God has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of the servant David,
as God spoke through the mouth of holy prophets from of old,
that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of
all who hate us.
Thus God has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors,
and has remembered God’s holy covenant,
the oath that God swore to our ancestors Abraham and Sarah,
to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies,
might serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness
before God all our days.
And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
for you will go before God to prepare God’s ways,
to give knowledge of salvation to God’s people
by the forgiveness
of their sins.
By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
We have just lived through an election season. Or should I say we have just survived an election season?
Now on this inaugural day in the other Washington it is important for us to be together here today to worship God and remember who we are.
The sweatshirt I am wearing comes from Sojourners, one of the prophetic voices of faith in our polarized land. On the front of my sweatshirt it says Not just politics. Just politics. In our electoral landscape we are desperately in need of a politics of justice rather than the politics of injustice which is the politics of our time, especially this electoral season.
Yet more than having survived an electoral season, we who are called Christian have just lived and worshipped our way through another season of Advent-Christmas-Epiphany.
Our struggle for survival in these seasons is overshadowed by the struggle for survival that Jesus knew and that people in the ancient biblical land of Iraq know today.
As Christians we know that Jesus has come into the world as the way of peace. One of the prophetic biblical witnesses to this is Zechariah’s song praising God for the promise of peace that comes in Jesus.
Here again the final verse of Zechariah’s song:
By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet
into the way of peace.
One of our greatest questions today is who will ‘guide our feet into the way of peace?’ I believe that Jesus is God’s truest guide to peace. Will we in the church let Jesus guide us into the way of peace?
One of my dear friends who was with me in Iraq, Jim Douglass, likes to say that ‘the most faithful follower of Jesus wasn’t even a Christian. It was Gandhi.’
We have a
bumper sticker at our church that says: When Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies,’ I
think he probably meant ‘Don’t kill them.’
To take Jesus seriously is to be a peculiar people who are committed and empowered to love our enemies. As Christians we should be known as ‘Enemy lovers’ not enemy killers. As a follower of Jesus, I know of no way to love someone and kill them.
To let Jesus ‘guide our feet in the way of peace’ is to refuse to be silent and to stand with those who suffer most, particularly where the suffering is inflicted in our name and in the name of God.
Martin Luther King, Jr.,
said, ‘A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands
of inner truth, [people] do not easily assume the task of opposing their
government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move
without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within
one's own bosom and in the surrounding world.’
To love our enemies means to wage peace and refuse to wage war. War kills. I have seen it in action. I have seen the death and destruction of war in action in Nicaragua in the 1980’s when I was there with Witness for Peace. I saw it in Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams in the first weeks of the war in Baghdad, in March 2003 as we lived under our own bombs.
During the war our Christian Peacemaker Team joined Voices in the Wilderness to form the Iraq Peace Team “Getting in the way of war”
To not be silent and to be in solidarity with those who suffer is to ‘Get in the way of war.’ It is to be with the Iraqi people. It is also to be with those who live on the street outside our church. Some of the most enlightened insights into what this election season meant were spoken day after day this fall by our homeless friends around our church. Every one of them know that their lives and many others have worsened over the past few years and that their destiny is tied up in an inverse relationship to our nation’s wars: the more that war is waged the worse their lives become.
There many stories from Iraq that I would like to tell you on this day as when we as people of faith hold in tension whether Jesus or the White House will “guide our feet in the way of peace.” Let me share just two brief but powerful words from two of my nurses who cared for me during my recovery from an accident in Iraq during the war.
When I was in intensive care feeling like I could hardly breathe with pain, a young nursing student came and gently washed the blood off my hands. Before she left she said, “We have to be friends around the world. We can’t let it up to our nation’s leaders who wage war. As friends we will make peace.”
The afternoon I was to be released from the hospital, my primary nurse, Hamid, came and asked if he could talk to me. I knew this time he was not coming to ask me about my pain. I asked him what he wanted to talk about. Hamid quietly asked me, “Will you take a message back to America for us?” I said, “Hamid, what would you like me to tell people at home?” He said, “Tell them that we love Americans but we hate American aggression.”
I could tell you many more war and peace stories from Iraq and from Jesus who “guides our feet into the way of peace.”
In these days we need Zechariah’s prayer of praise and promise of peace to linger in our hearts and minds and mouths so that they become our life and faith and hope.
By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
We know that the
whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the
creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan
inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
(Romans
8.23)
How could any Christian read this passage and relate to the rest of creation with anything but reverence and a sense of solidarity? Here is Paul, 2000 years ago, so identified with the created universe that he could hear and feel earth’s pain. Here we are, 2000 years and centuries of scientific study later, seemingly content in our alienation from the rest of creation and incapable of hearing the groaning or feeling the pain.
Is it that we do not even notice the beauty? the flowers, the night sky, the sunsets? Mt. Rainier hanging like a jewel in the sky? How is it that we think ourselves the masters of technology when we have invented nothing so awesome as photosynthesis? We have come not even close to developing technologies that Earth has applied for eons: like changing our bodies in order to adapt to new conditions or mutating in order to make ourselves immune to diseases. Earth seems to be much smarter than we are; yet we degrade her.
The degradation and destruction of our Earth defies reason and flies in the face of our Christian faith. This quote from Paul is one of many we could site as reason for Christians to approach Creation with reverence and awe, Instead, of walking lightly on Earth out of reverence and awe, we leave huge footprints that destroy and devalue.
We pollute rather than protect water. According to recent studies, clean water is
so scarce that every second hospital bed in the world is occupied by someone who
became ill because of polluted water. We
have fouled the air and soil so badly that the global chemical cycles that
regulate key ecosystems processes are unable to function effectively; they are
sick. We don’t have to go far to find
examples. Consider the ‘dead’ water in
the
We don’t seem to learn from Earth that we cannot continue
to produce toxic chemicals that we are not smart enough to know how to get rid
of once they are manufactured. One would
think that the evidence of Native women in the Arctic feeding toxins to their
babies through their breast milk, would be enough to
wake us up. These woman are thousands of miles from
the toxins found in their breast milk.
Several months ago we learned that the lettuce you and I eat – lettuce
grown with irrigation water from the
Earth has the capacity, the genius, to heal herself. But we humans have been so destructive and greedy, that we have now ‘fixed’ it so that Earth does not have enough time to work her magic. For billions of years throughout Earth’s evolving, major destructions occurred – to the extent that as much as 80% to 90% of all species were extinguished. Yet, Earth healed herself and experienced a resurrection. The new life that emerged was more beautiful and complex and awesome than anything that previously existed. Such self-healing cannot happen today. We are destroying faster than Earth can respond and adapt and invent.
Now, in this time of government relaxation of protections, we can expect Earth to suffer more degradation in the name of jobs or the economy. These next four years of an administration that thinks the economy trumps all other values offer us Christians great opportunities and great challenges. If we could but acknowledge our interdependence and solidarity with the rest of creation we might be able to face those challenges and seize opportunities to heal rather than destroy. Our salvation and redemption, Paul tells us, are tied up with Earth’s. We might still be naïve enough to think that Earth is a mere spectator to human redemption. Not so, says Paul. Earth and humans will enter into triumphant glory and freedom together.
Earth’s redemption and ours depends on us humans assuming our responsibility to be the voice of Earth. We must speak out, cry out with and for Earth. This is one local congregation that speaks out, perhaps not loudly enough or with more timidity than Earth deserves. All of our churches need to speak out. Churches can do so much more than they have been doing. Let each of us resolve to speak and cry so loudly and clearly that others cannot avoid hearing and feeling what we hear and feel. This should not be difficult for us because Earth is in agony and therefore, so are we. And it should not be difficult because our scriptures require nothing less; our God expects nothing less; life can thrive on nothing less.
Isaiah 10.1-3
Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees,
and the writers who keep writing oppression,
to turn aside the needy from justice
and rob the poor of my people of their right,
that widows may be their spoil,
and that they may make the fatherless their prey!
What will you do on the day of punishment,
in the storm that will come from afar?
To whom will you flee for help,
and where will you leave your wealth?
(Isaiah 10.1-3)
As we sit here . . .
As we sit here – citizens of a once-proud and mighty nation that treasured above all else its commitment to the civil and human rights of its people and those of people everywhere around the world . . .
As we sit here – citizens of a country that went to war not once but twice in the last century to free people of other nations from tyranny and despotism, including people who were seized and thrown into concentration camps without benefit of either charge or trial . . .
As we sit here, hundreds of people have been seized and are being held in the custody of our military or that of the Central Intelligence Agency, people whom the government of this country ‘does not have enough evidence to charge in courts’ but has nevertheless locked away in undisclosed locations.
As we sit here, our government has undertaken planning for the lifetime detention of some suspects who will never be charged but who are deemed a danger to the security of this nation and its people and on that basis alone will be incarcerated indefinitely.
As we sit here, a new government has just been sworn into power for another four years – a government that considers certain international rules, those, for example, that deal with the rights and the treatment of prisoners of war, to be ‘quaint’ and no longer applicable in a world under the threat of terrorism.
How has it come to be, that a nation and a people whose very history is that of the struggle to extend what our Constitution proclaims as ‘the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ to every single person in its midst and a nation that more recently has determined that it ought to bring freedom and democracy to the rest of the universe – how has it come to be that we are not regarded around the world as the chief menace to the freedom and well-being of other peoples and nations and considered here at home by a good half of our own populace as having somehow become a major threat to civil and human rights in the world?
How has a nation whose founders etched the powerful proclamation of Leviticus -- ‘proclaim freedom to all the inhabitants of the land’ – come to find itself promoting freedom with the aid of precision bombs and laser-guided missiles, laying waste one of the world’s oldest civilizations and killings its people by the countless thousands?
What has happened to the conscience of this nation?
Where is the moral outrage of its people who, a little more than a generation ago, took to the streets in a continual wave of protests against a war that was seen as unjust and a needless sacrifice of the live of our young but today sits in apathetic silence while a war of even greater political duplicity is being waged in its name?
I do not know the answer to these questions. But I do know this: civil and human rights are not a set of privileges that a beneficent government bestows on its people as a reward for good behavior. Rights are not some gift the government doles out to those who support the party in power or something the government can take away from those it finds reason to label and proclaim unfit or unworthy of its protections. We went through that seventy years ago, with another government in another country that decided it could declare certain people as being unentitled to the rights enjoyed by all other citizens and that build concentration camps where its political dissidents and socially undesirables could be imprisoned. And our nation joined with the rest of the civilized world to declare that government to be anathema. That government was defeated and then the world met – here in this country – to establish a worldwide body that would work to ensure that never again would we have to endure such a travesty on the part of any nation or people. And one of the first acts of that body was to issue a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that all nations, including our own, are bound to respect and uphold.
But we find ourselves saddled with a government in power that believes rights are something only other countries are bound to respect, treaties are agreements other nations must abide by while we do as we please – as we think best, regardless of how others think and heedless of the impact of our decrees and decisions on other peoples and nations – yes, on the planet itself. We have a government that proclaims it is making progress in Iraq as we make widows and orphans of its populace.
And that is why, a half-century after that universal declaration was adopted, a more ancient voice – the voice of the prophet Isaiah – thunders across the millennia and across a pitiable record of human frailty and speaks unmistakeably to us and our time: ‘Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees’ or as one translation of this passage bluntly puts it, ‘Shame on whose who decree iniquitous decrees and shame on those who write them’ – ‘who turn aside the needy from justice and who robe the poor among my people of their right, who make the widows their spoil and the fatherless their prey. What will you do on the day of punishment in the storm that will come from afar? To whom will you flee for help?’
Eternal and Holy One: On this day as we ponder the future of this nation and its role in your world, come close to us with courage, love and reassurance. Come close with memory reminding us that there have been many times when your people were unable to say ‘yes’ to your purposes: the times of Jeremiah, of Jesus, of Martin Luther, of Martin Luther King. Remind us of how you were present each time encouraging, supporting, inspiring, lifting your people to that place where they were able to, once again, say ‘yes’ to you. Come close, O God.
Come close with perspective, reminding us that this world you love so much is still your world, that we are your servants in this place. The future of the universe lies in your hands, and yet, we are capable of working with you, or making your Word known and acting upon it. Come close, O God.
Come close with hope, filling us with a hope for the good things that you dream for us; things with strong moral purpose. Engage us with hope, heart, mind, and soul, and move us to respond as we are able. Come close, O God.
Come close with perseverance. Give us what we need to remain faithful to your cause. Give us what we need to avoid faintheartedness. Fill us with the loving strength of your Holy Spirit that your Word may finally define humanity and redeem it.
Come close, O God.
These are our prayers on this day of inauguration. These are our prayers on this day of reflection of you and your hopes for our public values. Hold us close now, O God, and be with us all along the way of our pilgrimage that one day, the world would be as you would have it. We pray in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.
Cynthia Moe-Lobeda teaches Christian ethics at Seattle University’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies and School of Theology and Ministry.
Weldon Nisly serves as pastor at Seattle Mennonite Church.
Loretta Jancoski is the Coordinator of University Assessment Planning and the Director of the Center for Water and Ethics at Seattle University.
Hubert Locke is professor emeritus at the University of Washington.