Presentation Sermon
I imagine that
If I were to take a poll
About the cultural issues that concerned you, I would get a wide variety or responses,
A polyphony of problems and complaints and concerns about the direction of our culture.
We might talk about what institutions and behaviors
We should eliminate with the heavy hand of the state;
Others of which we should express
our distinct disapproval and disappointment;
Other problems we should ignore
because we are a church,
the details of such issues
which we know little.
A few suggest supporting reproductive rights;
others find the same representing
A horrifying holocausts.
Some are concerned about the deleterious effects
of the internet, late at night;
Others about the size of our vehicles.
The culture of war for some;
The culture of instant gratification, for others.
But it does seem to be, that there is a war, dividing our country.
A culture war.
You've heard the term;
Two cultures; one ostensibly liberal, bi-costal; and affluent.
The other, theoretically conservative, Midwestern, and middle class.
I'm not sure if there is a culture war.
But there was a time when a few Christians
Began to express reservations
About the culture they inherited from Judaism.
The torah, they expressed, was violent and cruel.
Such a God, could not be the God of Jesus Christ.
A god of war
Could not be
the God of compassion.
A god who routinely afflicted pain upon his people;
Could not be a God who loved his people.
These thinkers wanted to avoid the mess;
The mess of war and pain; of sorrow and fear;
They wanted to unroot the message of justice,
That was found in the stories of a distinct people,
And erase from their memories,
The horrifying depravity of this mysterious God.
The writers, however,
Knew that such solutions were rarely simple;
That eliminating memory wouldnt purify the heart;
That careful forgetting would be a thin anchor for forgiveness;
That ignoring violence wasn't the same as preventing violence.
To place Jesus in the Jewish tradition,
As a historical participant in the world,
Was a way of anchoring the church,
Allowing people to plant their feet and find steady ground,
To have a location, a place, a home.
Those who have no memory,
have no future.
They can't know who to love;
They can't know what direction to go;
They could go right as go left,
Go up as go down;
Follow the lovers, or follow the haters;
You can't go somewhere else, unless you've been somewhere.
Yes, there may be a culture war;
But before you start fighting,
Learn what weapons you have.
Perhaps when you discover what weapons
you've been using,
You can then put them down.
Without memory, the stories that get told,
Are the stories told by the powerful.
Think 1984, the newspapers able to rewrite history,
At the command of an institution
Justified out of political expediency.
But while memory is useful,
We aren't merely called to dream about the past,
And become satisfied with our wondrous traditions,
Letting a self-referring system of beliefs become
A convenient wall from the outside world.
Not only was the savior being blessed and
Made holy before God;
He was blessing the culture around him.
The presentation
places love in culture,
In the smells, tastes and pleasures
The rites and ceremonies
that located him in the world,
the earthy, dusty, watery, world
of our insatiable desires,
our quiet hopes,
for healing, for peace, for rest.
You've heard blanket statements about cultures,
These days its easy to make them about islam,
But its easy to declare with authority,
Cultures that aren't your own.
We, the ones judging, are always more complex;
Others, not so much.
The church, however, steps back fomr making blanket judgments.
Culture is a big word, and a difficult concept
And most of us,
Aren't making exchanges or living in one culture;
We live in several.
We sometimes combine and mingle two or more.
And sometimes the cultures we distrust,
Are the same ones that gave us life.
The same culture that made us skeptics,
Required, first, that we understand faith.
We get our hands dirty,
We become involved the words around us;
The distinction between sinner and righteous itself,
Becomes blurry before our very eyes,
For there is this sense
That grace abounds
That grace abounds so deeply,
grace abounds for the sinner,
grace abounds for the righteous,
grace abounds, enveloping us so completely,
that for the grace-filled, everything is enchanted,
Everything is magic,
Everything is blessed.
Mercy in Islam; blessed.
Compassion in Buddhism; blessed.
The local cuisine, holy before God;
The wickedness we see,
Is not because of cultural tropes or memes,
the mere existence of you tube, capital or myspace,
But because of the power the fear of death has over some of us,
The fear of loss,
The peculiar drive of shame,
That makes people rage murderously
Against the loss of their power,
A deep fear that they will disappear
Along with their world.
That's fundamentalism: a fear that the old world will disappear,
And all that is good about the old faith
will disappear as well.
It's a fear that there is nothing in this new world worth blessing,
And that everything is worth fearing.
That the political challenges we face cannot be won, or aren't worth fighting;
and at the end of our day, there is only despair.
But the church cannot operate from such a vantage point.
Instead of cursing the enemy,
It begins with a blessing -
a presentation of God
To the culture,
A vision that any nation can find
Grace in the liberating
power of a revealing, compassionate love.
The blessing of God was never meant to be saved for the elect;
It was never held in trust by any particular culture;
It requires no secret knowledge to comprehend and it offers none;
The blessing of God could just be our normal ordinary state;
From our the moment you brushed your teeth and smelled fresh;
to the shared work of cooking and cleaning;
From the mutual encouragement for a job well done;
To the sympathy and support of those in sorrow.
The power of this blessing was so that death itself,
Its embarrassing, stultifying, entrapping nature,
But to liberate us from that apprehension of finality
That separates us from living, from being alive, and lively.
So before we make our complaints about this world;
Before we declare that we know our enemies;
Before we make rash judgments upon our brothers, sisters,
politicians and prelates, our enemies and disappointments
begin with a blessing.
Before we complain, we bless;
Before we say "no" we bless;
We bless the world in the morning, at noon and at night;
We bless those who we seek to fight.
This is the gift that we have in the presentation;
That the holy and sacred did not end, anchored in Palestine;
But found itself in the ordinary vicissitudes of
Our daily work.
Was there every a culture war worth fighting?
Or maybe we just haven't paid attention to the blessing.
Robert Brownign reminds us,
THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; 10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.