Sermon: January 24, 2010

I am a member of the Sojourners network, so I get daily emails including a prayer for each day. I begin by praying the prayer of the day for Friday:

Break our hearts, Lord, break our hearts. For the lives lost in Haiti, each one loved by you, break our hearts. For those who have lost family members -- sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers -- break our hearts. For those who have lost homes and belongings, who sleep on the streets, break our hearts. For the crippling poverty that afflicts millions of Haitians, break our hearts. For our complicity in the sinful structures and systems that lead to oppression and injustice, break our hearts. For the state of your creation -- groaning for redemption and restoration -- break our hearts. And then put us back together so that with peace, humility, and your perspective, we might work toward seeing your kingdom on earth. Amen.

I come this morning, maybe you do too, seeking a broken heart. I can’t remember a more heart breaking couple of weeks for awhile. For a few days I think I just tried to keep it from getting inside me, From Haiti to Home it’s been so overwhelming, but the past few days I want to be more than numb to it, so I ask for my heart to be broken open to feel it.

When Jesus steps up to read in that church in Galilee and gets the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, he reads from his people’s love story with God, repeating the tale of a child of the family who will come and suffer with the people and how that suffering servant will bring hope in the binding up the broken hearted. It’s an intimate story of family like the ones you know.

I’ve been sitting at my father’s bedside in the hospital for alot of hours this week as his very being decides whether this is just another one of those golden age episodes or the last page of the story. As I sit and try to assure him that he won’t be alone, no matter what, I remember our life together. I picture his big strong hairy arm around me as a child. I can feel him at my back as I sat in front of him on the tractor when he first taught me to drive. I remember he and mom sending me off to find a life away from home.

As he faded in and out of dilerium, often seeing and then reaching for things that weren’t visible to me, I’d ask him, “Dad what’s going on?” and he’d say I better talk to the electrician and make sure the job gets done right or I better get the irrigation set in the corn or he’d say it was time for harvest, his favorite time of year. I’d say, “Dad I’m taking care of all of that and the corn looks real good.”

There’s something very profound about caring for your parents, especially at the end of life. It’s about family. The moral implications are minimal, unless there’s neglect. It’s just what we do. It’s kind’ve like the implications on the face of the Isaiah story, who wouldn’t give good news to the poor if they had a chance or bind up the broken hearted? That’s what we do. Until...Well, until it becomes bigger than just our family. What do I mean?

Well I happen to be the family representative when it comes to end of life decisions. I was feeling pretty confident about managing Dad’s care until the doctor started asking bigger questions: like do we have an “Advanced Directive?” Do we have a “Do not resusitate” contract that tells us all when to try and prolong his life and when to let him go? That kind of question moves us into a different realm. And it wasn’t that just that it suddenly hit me that Dad was on the edge. It also became clear this wasn’t just about our family taking care of him anymore. We had made a social contract.

You know, it used to be that we did what we could do in the medical world and there was only so much care and technology available. Beyond that capability it was time to die, but now...we can go way beyond. And now, we have decided, we can go way too far. It has forced us as a people to raise questions about dignity, about what we really want for life and our loved ones, about the costs we all bear together, about who benefits from the costs and who can afford extraordinary treatment and who can’t. When the doctor asked me on Friday, if we wanted to put in a feeding tube, this was a heart breaking choice that couldn’t be more personal, but it was also a humanity-rending choice and it couldn’t be more social.

That’s what social contracts do. Advanced Directives are covenants we sign before the time of trial. They allow us, when we are in crisis, to bring together our best moral selves to care for who and what we love most in covenant with the greater good. Without Advanced Directives of many kinds we will be tempted when we find ourselves in the midst of distress, emergency, personal threat or the leverage of a bad economy to abandon our best intentions to fear or greed. I don’t yet know if we made the right choice for our father, but I do know that we don’t make these choices alone, we make them only in covenant with all of you, our greater family, to honor the values we cherish and share. When we sign the Directive we become moral beings.

This is very personal to me and so it becomes the lens through which I see this story of Jesus from Luke.

Since this is the first sermon of Jesus in Luke’s story, the People of the Scroll must’ve understood the content was absolutely central for any who would live the Jesus Way:

I will preach good news to the poor
I will proclaim release to the captives
I will tell the blind to see
I will let the oppressed go free
I will say to the powers “This is God’s Acceptable Year.”

If you are committed to living the Jesus Way, this is your Advance Directive. And it’s instructive that this sermon isn’t even on the radar of most Christians. Indeed one of the books most read by American Christians in recent years is “The Purpose Driven Life.” There are hundreds of scriptures quoted in that book but this one isn’t even mentioned. Luke says authoritatively this is the starting point for a purposeful life driven by the Divine. What’s your Directive? What’s mine? What covenant will you consult when you face a world teetering on the edge? Because in the crisis, your personal belief about what’s right or fair or best or just defaulting to the world’s way of doing things won’t cut it. What will we do when it comes to choosing between the feeding tube to prolong this tired out way of life a little longer or standing for something fundamentally more Godly and full of hope.

I’m saying accept this as your Directive. Sign on to it. Your life and the life of the world depends on this. We are people of the Scroll. I apologize for the wimpy scrolls we are offering you this morning, we couldn’t find enough sheepskin to go around! Take the slip of paper if you will and write these words on it now:

Proclaim the Acceptable Year of the Lord.

Just as my father’s directive has at its core a common vision of what the world will look like when people die with dignity, so this theological directive has at its core a common vision of what the Body of the world will be like when we live with dignity. This common vision in the words of Isaiah is leekroh shnat ratzon l’adonai “The year of the Lord’s favor.” In Luke’s words “The Acceptable Year.” Most scholars believe these refer to the Jubilee Year. And this is of critical importance for people of faith because most have never heard of it and how can we understand the advanced directive if we don’t know the vision at its source?

The vision of the Jubilee year pictures an unbalanced and injust world starting over. In Leviticus 25, it calls the whole community to gather every 50 years and for a year, do no work, gather no harvest, give the land a break and while doing that re-divide the wealth. It assumes that, through the course of human history, a few will accumulate all the land and many will become debtors, enslaved to feed off the welfare of those with power. It assumes that, where money is involved loans will be made at interest rates so high the poor can never repay so they lose their homes and lands. Sound familiar? In the Jubilee, debts are cancelled, indebted servants are freed, land is broken up into smaller parcels again and ownership is re-distributed among all the people with equity. This, for God, is an Acceptable Year.

30 years ago, Haiti imported no rice. They grew their own. They exported rice and sugar to grow their own economy with family-owned farms and farming businesses. Now they import most of their rice and sugar. Self sufficient farms are gone, the countryside is denuded of trees from the masses scrounging fire wood so they can keep from starving. Among the driving forces in Haitian poverty were the embargoes imposed by our government and others in the 1800’s because Haiti was an independent nation formed by a national revolt of slaves and we were afraid if we recognized Haiti, our slaves would revolt. This created massive poverty and into that poverty the World Bank loaned billions of dollars that couldn’t be repaid, then forced open Haiti’s markets so that American corporations could dump cheap sugar and rice and destroy Haiti’s ability to feed itself. Haiti had huge debts and ravishing poverty long before the earthquake.

I tell you the story of the Jubilee and some of the history of Haiti, because without them our faith is impotent. As impotent as a feeding tube stuck down the throat of one you dearly love who is headed to death anyway, as hollow as telling the poor they will be alright without sharing the wealth and power to create an alright way of life. The tragedy in Haiti is enough in itself to overwhelm us, but what breaks my heart is asking the question of Jubilee which is, “Why were the people so vulnerable to the earthquake to begin with?” Our responses as people of faith must be based on those Jubilee questions: in Haiti and at home. They are our advanced directive, with the authority and vision to keep us from doing things in Haiti as simply giving homes to the homeless when what they need is the wherewithall to build their own and sharing our food when what they need is farms to grow their own.

But this advanced directive isn’t just about Haiti is it and it’s not just about land and debt. We’re smarter than that. It’s about imbalance and inequity for any reason, especially created by our value systems, our public policies and the economies of our larger household. It’s about abuse of power and racism, sexism, ageism and any structure of mind or matter that threatens dignity and puts some at an irresolvable disadvantage. It’s about speaking out and showing showing up at places where hearts are breaking because of any kind of marginalization.
It’s time to look at your own scroll again. In the next minute or so I encourage you to inscribe with what’s already there, some way you will preach good news to the poor this week, help the blind see. At least think about it. Debbie and I had never written a letter to the editor before the one that was published in Thursday’s Register Guard. In our letter we said we would be preaching this scripture from Luke this Sunday because we think voting for measures 66 and 67 is preaching good news to the poor and because we believe those who are already downtrodden here will be crushed even more if we rescind the taxes our legislature has already approved. Voting wasn’t enough, we felt called to go public. It seems like a Jubilee choice. What will you do this week?

If all of this is a little overwhelming to you, think of some of the situations around us that, as moral beings, are just plain unacceptable...places where the Acceptable Year of the Lord must be proclaimed?

For instance, are you following news of the Pacifica Forum? I don’t think our 1st Amendment, as one of our people’s most important social contracts, was meant to provide platforms and hiding places from which those who spew words of hate and indignity can stand and by those very words claim violent power over girls, women and people of color. If we are going to keep allowing this behavior in the name of freedom, (and God knows I’m no constitutional lawyer), you and I need to get down to where they hold the next forum and stand alongside the men and women of the University including Katie Dwyer and others of our Wesley Foundation who have risked themselves to suffer with those targeted by this hate and stand firm that this is Unacceptable and we will not be held captive to it. I trust Katie and Warren Light and others to help us learn how to use our voice and our power. To what will you give your voice?

We can’t remain silent in our homes, at church or in our workplaces when such a visible representative of Christian faith as Pat Robertson says the earthquake was Haiti’s punishment from God. If we keep quiet, how will our children know this is unacceptable? How will our community and our world know this isn’t the God in whom we live and move and have our being?

We can’t keep silent as our army uses weapons inscribed with Bible scriptures on the nightscopes our soldiers use to hunt down and kill other human beings. We can’t stand by while the Bank of America, who we bailed out with tax dollars, offers bonuses to its executives in amounts greater than what it would take to completely repair Haiti. We can’t stand by as the children of our streets are infected with HIV when regular testing and clean needles can bring healing. We won’t stand by as more of our Mexican neighbors die in the Arizona desert just trying to flee the pain, partly of our making, and find a better life for their families.

As our world goes through this period of dilerium, like my father grasping for realities that no longer exist, we need to bring out the scroll, review the directive and proclaim a different vision:

Good news to the poor, release to the captives, the Acceptable Year, the Jubilee, for everyone born a place at table, clean water and bred, a mind-set of mercy, a star overhead.

That day in the temple in Galilee when Jesus finished reading, he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Open the scroll, believe it’s true. If you’ve already signed to this directive then there is already a star overhead and the good news is already announced and God’s great love story is already happening today and here and now, in us, and in you.