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An Earth-Shaking VisionDecember 09, 2007 Second Sunday in Advent Someone left the little daily paper, AM New York in the cab I jumped into on Friday. Picking it up, I noticed the lead article concerned New Yorkers grappling with religion’s role in the presidential race. It began this way: “For many New Yorkers, the grand cathedrals are their skyscrapers, the local bartender serves as their parish priest, and 311 [emergency line] delivers them from evil neighbors. So as the election season approaches, and with presidential candidates bombarding the public with their piety, most New Yorkers may have a difficult time rendering the right things to Caesar and the right things to God.” [1] This article was prompted by Mitt Romney’s speech from the night before, reassuring Iowa caucus voters that they needn’t fear his Mormonism, that he was a true American and a pious follower of Jesus. Pundits compared it to John F. Kennedy’s speech concerning his Catholicism, which came under withering attack. Interesting bit of local history by the way: Back in 1959, a group of approximately 150 prominent Protestant clergymen assembled down at Marble Collegiate Church on 5th Avenue and 28th Street, then home of Norman Vincent Peale, to discuss the disagreeable potential of an American President beholden to a foreign pope. Peale stated publicly that, “Faced with the election of a Catholic, our culture is at stake.” [2] Kennedy squarely addressed this issue when he spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960 and said among other things: “While this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew -or a Quaker - or a Unitarian - or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim - but tomorrow it may be you - until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril…I believe in an America where religious intolerance will one day end.” [3] Religion has dogged American politics since the founding of our nation, of course. Our current litmus tests are only the most recent manifestations of our suspicions of one another, confusing a checklist of bona fides with genuine competence for leading the world’s most powerful nation. This issue slices every which way. On the right, there’s an embarrassing struggle for the banner “most pious believer,” and on the left, a cynical dismissal of any expression of faith within the body politic. Now, you may think this discussion is way off topic for the second Sunday in Advent. And I suppose it is. On the other hand, it serves as a distraction from having to contend with the wild man, John the Baptist. Sometimes when it comes around to hearing his crazed voice in the wilderness yet one more time on the second Sunday of December, I wonder what on earth that has to do with real life in real time in the 21st century. Of course, it hasn’t helped that our culture has caricatured a locust-eating, burlap-wearing, nut with a sign held high saying, “Repent! The end is near!” It can seem to feed the arguments of those who find the Christian religion, oh, so déclassé. It was very different in John’s day, of course. He was quite the celebrity, what with people having to traipse out into the wilderness to receive his tirade and baptismal bath. He didn’t hang around Jerusalem street corners accosting passersby. No, whoever or whatever he was, he spoke in real time to real people living real lives. He connected with gritty first-century life in Palestine and the people knew that what he said hooked up with how they thought the world worked. He reminded them of the Old Testament prophets like Elijah. And he used language called apocalyptic that spoke of dramatic change occasioned by threshing floors and unquenchable fires, and so on. From centuries earlier, we heard Isaiah speak of dramatic change as well. His beautiful poetry and stirring, unforgettable images speak of a new world, a world where relationships shall be reordered, rearranged, and divisions shall be healed, and there shall be peace. Peace, of course, is a political word. When we say we long for peace, we generally speak of political realities managed by politicians and generals. Isaiah’s words, however, speak to a different order of magnitude, something akin to world-shaking, world-altering events. That’s what apocalyptic language references. It’s hyperbolic, intense, meant to rattle the status quo. Not so long ago, we had a brush with contemporary apocalyptic. 9/11 had an earth-shaking quality for 21st century Americans, especially New Yorkers. On 9/10 life was one way, on 9/12 it was another. Poetry and hyperbolic metaphor captured the days and weeks following. Journalists likened it to one more circle of Dante’s hell, a revisited Mt. St. Helens, recounting when an entire mountain exploded in a violent cataclysm; we heard it was like a nuclear winter, the edge of an active volcanic crater; it was bigger than the Hindenburg; bigger than Titanic; a reverberation of Roosevelt’s “date of infamy” with the attack on Pearl Harbor. It seemed pretty clear to me that one reason so many people showed up at church then was to hear poetry and imagery inside walls like these that spoke to the disorientation caused by the earth-shaking event. We needed words that were commensurate with our experience. The words of our politicians and bellicose pundits certainly didn’t do the trick, and so far our politicians and generals haven’t found the way forward, either. The trite religious appliqués to our political processes today trivialize the larger stakes of our current situation and diminish our understanding of where true earth-shaking power resides. There is a relationship between God’s intentions and our actions, but these are not located in catch-phrases or labels. No, these larger, earth-shaking matters have deeper roots and reach far higher than we generally stretch. Thus, characters like John the Baptist and Isaiah come round to remind us that our God requires a better response from us than we are generally able to muster. God’s ways are disorienting to the status quo and, as Abraham Lincoln eloquently said during our worst national apocalypse, God’s ways call forth “the better angels of our nature.” I haven’t seen too many of those angels on display of late. Nothing new there, of course. But this past week I was reminded that every now and then they do show up and every now and then preparing God’s way in the world actually and for real, does change the world, utterly. The occasion for remembering this came at the dinner I hosted here Thursday night when we heard Eric Metaxas recount the story of William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was a brilliant politician in 18th century England who, after first committing himself to God in his early twenties, committed his life to the eradication of slavery. This is an extremely compelling and important story and I commend Eric’s biography to you. To understand Wilberforce’s accomplishment, it is necessary to recall that prior to the English parliament’s vote to end the slave trade exactly (and only) 200 years ago, human civilization had always taken slavery for granted. There had never been a time without it; slavery was an intrinsic given to acceptable human behavior. Wilberforce was captured by an 18th century version of Isaiah’s earth-shaking vision and he dedicated his life to making it happen. He envisioned a world without slavery and a civilization that cared for the least, the last, and the lost. In Eric’s words, “To fathom the magnitude of what Wilberforce did we have to see that the “disease” he vanquished forever was actually neither the slave trade nor slavery. Slavery still exists around the world today, in such measure as we can hardly fathom. What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world. Included in the old way of seeing things was the idea that the evil of slavery was good. Wilberforce murdered that old way of seeing things, and so the idea that slavery was good died along with it. Even though slavery continues to exist here and there, the idea that it is good is dead. The idea that it is inextricably intertwined with human civilization, and part of the way things are supposed to be, and economically necessary and morally defensible, is gone. Because the entire mindset that supported it is gone.” [4] “Wilberforce can be seen as standing as a kind of hinge in the middle of history: he pulled the world around a corner.” [5] Three days before he died in 1833 he learned at last that the slaves had finally received complete emancipation. This was the beginning of the end of slavery from the mindset of western civilization. We well know that it did not die easily, but Wilberforce was as a linchpin in the world’s transformation. And this because a man was captured by God’s graceful, yet simultaneously earth-shattering vision. He saw a world that was utterly different, one that beckoned from the future God intended. We could say it pulled him forward into a new reality that he helped create. Now, friends, imagine if a roomful of people just like us, for instance, were also captured and sustained by an earth-shaking vision that beckoned from the future God intended. Suppose we were pulled forward into a new reality that we helped create. Tell me this line of thought doesn’t get the juices flowing! And stir the heart. _________________ Previous sermon: This Time for Sure • Next sermon: No Longer Puppets of the Past All past sermons |
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