Sermon preached at the Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY on the 7th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9B): Mark 6:1-13.
In this morning’s
Collect of the Day we pray:
O God, you have taught us to keep all your
commandments by loving you and our neighbor: Grant us the grace of your Holy
Spirit, that we may be devoted to you with our whole heart, and united to one
another with pure affection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Sprit, One God, for ever and ever. Amen.
“And united to one
another with pure affection.”
Now there’s a prayer
that, as a nation, we need right now.
The prayer is, of course, aspirational.
It is a dream. We know we are far
from being united to each other in pure affection, or, for that matter, any
affection at all.
We can admit that this
has always been so. America has always
been, first of all, a dream. Ever since
these first words were penned:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness.
It is said that Thomas
Jefferson penned these words in the room of the boarding house at which he was
staying in Philadelphia. He wasn’t
alone. His slave Richard Hemings was with him.
Those words “all men are
created equal” were aspirational. They expressed the dream. Maybe that was not
Jefferson’s intent. Maybe he meant a limited definition of “all men.” Probably that’s true, but I also think he was
smart enough to know they were also a dream not yet fulfilled.
We Americans are at our
best as dreamers. Certainly, Christians
are at their best as dreamers, striving to know and share in the dream of God,
but also aware that God has yet more dream to be revealed. That is what the Collect says is “the grace
of the Holy Spirit.”
Our final hymn today
knows about the dream, in the third verse
O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the
years thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears!
Our villages and cities
have never been undimmed by human tears, but that is our dream, as long as we
remember it and are constantly asking, “How can we get there?”
We have a history in
this country, and, really, it’s true in most countries, that we are most united
when we have a common enemy. Think 9-11-2001.
How much better off we would be if we were most united by a common dream.
How do we get to that
place? There is a clue in the same him,
in the second line:
O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,
who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life!
“And mercy more than
life.” That’s an odd phrase, isn’t
it? To love mercy more than life. Life is one of our inalienable rights, the
Declaration of Independence says, so how can we love something more than life
itself?
Katherine Lee Bates, the
writer, knew. For us all to be free—for
all people to be created equal—we each must be willing to give at least a
little. We each must be willing to sacrifice a bit of our own life in what she
calls mercy, compassion for others.
The great truth of the
American Dream, and the only way to truly fulfill it, is through the generosity
of spirit and substance that makes for the common good.
We heard it last week
from St. Paul, put very simply. He was asking for donations to assist those
stricken by famine in and around Jerusalem. He said,
I do not mean that there should be relief for others
and pressure on you, but it is a question of fair balance between your present
abundance and their need . . . As it is written, “The one who had much did not
have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”
Paul was quoting the
book of Exodus (16:18), part of the story of the people of God receiving manna,
the miraculous bread that kept them alive in the wilderness. Again, the sentiment is simple: “They
gathered as much as each of them needed.”
That is the spirit of
mercy. We usually think of mercy as having to do with forgiveness. But it is much more than that, because you
cannot be merciful if you are not open to another, willing to share life with
them at least on a basic level.
Mercy requires
empathy. And in times of great conflict
and division such as what we are in, empathy wanes, even dies. I see bumper stickers that say “F*#& your
feelings.” In that way of relating to
the world, empathy dies, so mercy dies, and any way to the common good dies,
and the dream dies.
One of the things we who
are left in the Christian Church must be about these days is keeping mercy,
empathy, the common good, the dream, alive.
That is simply what it means to be faithful. We cannot follow the course of some
Christians who not only have bought into the politics of division but believe
that it is the only way ordained by God.
I generally don’t like
to say these words quite so bald-faced, but they are wrong. Division is not
the way of God.
You may read today’s
Gospel and think otherwise. Jesus sends
out the disciples and instruct them that if they are not welcomed somewhere, if
folk refuse to listen to them, then “as you leave, shake the dust off your feet
as a testimony against them.”
If you think about it,
it is a very feeble way of making a protest.
And the protest comes due to two things:
a lack of hospitality and an inability to listen. Both of those are acts that keep the division
alive.
Sometimes people will
not welcome our message and refuse to listen to it. All that we can do is move
on to the next one, with sadness and heaviness of heart.
The bottom-line is this:
God keeps dreaming the world into
existence and calling the world to do better, to live with generosity and
hospitality toward others, as much as we can, and to love empathy, compassion,
and mercy for they are the only way either the dream of America or the dream of
God can thrive.
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