Epiphany 2 A - 16 Jan 2011

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. James Michael Dowd, OHC
RCL – Epiphany 2 A – Sunday 16 January 2011

Isaiah 49:1-7
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
John 1:29-42

A Prophet in our Midst

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This Sunday, I am quite mindful of the fact that, as a nation, we are celebrating Martin Luther King Day and have found myself thinking back to 1986, when Martin Luther King's birthday first became a national holiday. At the time, I was working in Virginia, at what shall remain a nameless company, and they refused to make Dr. King's Day a company holiday. Many of the employees were not pleased with this and expressed their anger to management. This was not received well, we were all accused of just wanting another day off, and they told us that if we called in sick that day we had better have a doctor's note or there would be serious consequences to pay. It became clear to me in that moment, that the managers responsible for that decision had not really “internalized” the message of Dr. King!

Several of us were having lunch one day in early January, talking about this, and I'll never forget one of my co-workers approach to this dilemma. Cathy was one of the secretaries in the office and said that she really could not afford to lose her job, so she wasn't going to call in sick, but she would take a vacation day that Monday – which would then be deducted from her two week vacation – because Dr. King deserved at least that much respect from her. She said that she would stay home in the morning, read her Bible and read some of Dr. King's speeches. And then, in the afternoon, she had plans to work with a church group that ministered to poor children. So much for just wanting another day off! But then she added one more point when she said that what we really needed to do was to pray for all those managers who were so misguided. After all, she said, they are also God's children and just needed a little extra help. It seemed to me that she had “internalized” Dr. King's message.

Her response to all of this so impressed me that I have hoped to internalize Dr. King's message as much as she had, and more importantly, to learn to live that message throughout my life. Cathy's statement that Dr. King deserved at least that much respect from her is the piece that made the deepest impression on me. I have thought about that over the years and have wondered why that particular sentence was so memorable to me. Finally, this week as I was preparing the sermon, and, in particular, thinking about our reading from the Prophet Isaiah, I think I have come to understand why that notion was so important to me. And to explore that notion, I would like to talk with you about the reading from the Prophet Isaiah.

To refer to this reading as being from the Prophet Isaiah is a bit misleading. In fact, this reading is taken from the Book of Isaiah, but is from that section of the book that is referred to by Scripture scholars as Second Isaiah. This Isaiah most likely lived about two hundred years after the first Isaiah and is thought to have been modeling himself on the original.

The passage that we heard this morning is a beautiful description of this second Isaiah's call from God, in which he says that “the Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mothers' womb he named me.” And that the Lord formed him “to be his servant” so that God could give his servant, this Prophet, as “a light to the nations, so that God's salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

And this passage, I think, tells us a great deal about the nature of a prophetic call. A true prophet is one that holds up the light to the nations of “God Among Us” and invites all of God's creation into the gift of God's salvation. A true prophet is one that speaks to his or her own people, in the context of his or her time. But true prophets also speaks to all of humanity across time. And this is one of the reasons why I so love the Book of Isaiah. For the first thirty-nine chapters we have the original Isaiah proclaiming God's Word and calling the nations to the light that will be called Immanuel. Beginning in chapter 40, which, again, takes place approximately two hundred years later, we have a second prophet being called forth by God to once again call the people to return to God's saving ways; and issuing the invitation from God for all of humanity to enter into God's way of salvation. Both Isaiah's dealt with specific issues of their day, while both also speak to all of God's creation throughout the course of Salvation History. This is why the prophets get, deservedly so, our respect. And this is why, I believe, Dr. King also deserves our respect, and why Cathy's comment resonated with me so many years ago. This man was different. He was not just the heroic leader of a political cause, he was one of God's greatest gifts to America, a prophet raised up in our midst, named Martin.

The Prophet Martin certainly spoke to the people of this country in the mid-Twentieth Century, communicating first with African-Americans and then reaching out to European-Americans, refusing to believe that we could not all be one. His insistence on equality for those children of God who had been systematically left out, was not only a call for justice for African-Americans, but was also a call to repentance and salvation for European-Americans. And on that front, though much work is still necessary, much progress has been made. And in doing so, both African-Americans and European-Americans were brought that much closer to a realization of the Kingdom of God. But the Prophet Martin also speaks to our generation and, undoubtedly, generations to come, both here in the United States and across the world about the eternal issues of justice, non-violence and love.

And that brings me to the events that occurred in Tucson eight days ago. In the aftermath of the murderous rampage in that shopping center, all kinds of nonsense was spewed forth by both the right wing and the left wing media and politicians. But, thus far, I have read little commentary on the greater issue that drove that rampage and any number of other rampages that are carried out day by day throughout the United States.

So while early speculation has centered on the mass media and a few politicians, I would rather like to look at our American culture as a whole, because it seems to me that our culture needs some examining. Everywhere we Americans turn we have been taught that violence is the answer to all of our problems. We imagine ourselves as always wearing the white hat of the Western, while whoever is the “other” wears the black hat. Therefore, it is acceptable to eliminate that “other” by any means necessary.

We have so embraced this notion that we have made violence and the weapons of violence into our own American golden calf. In our foreign policy, on-going war has become the norm and simply shifts from country to country at the whim of a few people. In our judicial system, the response to violent crime is to match that violent crime with more violence in the executioners chamber. In our medical clinics, the response to an inconvenient pregnancy is to abort the child. In our homes, the response to difficult economic situations, addictions, and other family problems is an unprecedented level of violence against mostly women and children. Even in our entertainment, when ostensibly we are relaxing, the level of violence on television, in the movies, in video games, and on the Internet, is sickening. With all of this violence, both legal and illegal surrounding him, is it any wonder that a psychologically disturbed loner would open fire on a group of people that included children and old women?

We are not isolated individuals living in a vacuum. If we claim to be Christians, then part of that claim is that we are all of one body – Christ's Body. When one fails, we each receive an F. When one is suffering, we are all in pain. The media cycle seems to have turned again and we are desperate to label the perpetrator in Tucson as a “nut.” Well, if that is true, then we are all “nuts.” While individual responsibility is a real and important thing, the environment in which we live has consequences. The hand that fails to reach out in a gesture of love and acceptance is felt as a slap in the face. That slap is multiplied exponentially in an environment in which violence is not only tolerated, but often lauded as good.

We Americans seem to want it both ways. We want to claim that we are a Christian nation and yet, so often, it seems that Christ is not the one we worship. Rather, violence and the tools of violence are the false gods that are worshiped by many in our country.
For example, within a few days of the violence in Tucson, the Gun Owners of America, a special interest group dedicated to the “protection” of the Second Amendment, put out this statement to ensure that no politician would stand up for any type of sensible gun control:
“These politicians need to remember that these rights [to guns] aren’t given to us by them. They come from God. They are God-given rights. They can’t be infringed or limited in any way.” (The New York Times 1/14/11)
God given rights? The Prophet Martin would often reminded people of what the first Prophet Isaiah had to say about what God's people should do with their weapons and their ways of violence:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more. (Is 2:4)

If we truly desire to be a nation of Christians, we might be well advised to take the teachings of the Prophet Isaiah to heart. And we would also be well advised to take the teachings of the Prophet Martin to heart as well, who told us:

I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things...as maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization.
(“The Power of Non-violence” delivered at U.C. Berkeley 6/4/57)

There is only one way to change our world, our civilization, and that is to follow Jesus. My guess is, like those first apostles, Jesus is inviting each of you, in your own circumstances, to come and see where he lives. Jesus lives in each and every person – friend or foe, ally or enemy – all those women and men we are to call sister and brother. He lives in each of our hearts and calls us day after day to live in peace with him in the persons of each of our brothers and sisters. He calls us to smash our idols of violence and the tools of violence, and to worship the one true God of Justice, Prince of Peace, Spirit of Love.

And how do we do that? Well, it seems to me that the way Cathy spent that first Martin Luther King Day is a good way to begin: Pray for your perceived enemies, read your bible, study holy texts, work for peace and care for the poor. May God give us the strength to do just that.

AMEN.