Third Sunday after Epiphany

January 27, 2008

Sermon by Pastor Joy Bussert

The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew: (Matthew 4:12-23)

Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:

Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,

on the road by the sea, across the

Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles—

the people who sat in darkness

have seen a great light,

and for those who sat in the region

and shadow of death

light has dawned.”

From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Let us pray.

Our loving and gracious God, you call us to be your people, in this time and in this place. Give us your grace, that we might be agents of your love in our community, in our home, in the world around us.

In your name, we pray. Amen.

Last Friday I met with our 9^th graders after school to begin the Credo process for Confirmation, exploring our faith in the past, the present, and into the future, how we become the people loved by God that we are, how it will be that we might make the world a better place for future generations. As always, I was reminded once again what terrific young adults we have at Immanuel, how much they have to say, how important it is that we take them seriously.

As we were finishing, another young adult arrived at Immanuel. This time it was one of my daughter Kate’s friends, dropped off at Immanuel which is halfway to our house. Olivia lives on a hobby farm just north of Stillwater where she feeds deer in her back yard, takes care of her horses, and watches over 6 kittens in a barn as well as two dogs named Nike and Milo. She lives close to nature and exhibits a kind of instinctive gentleness toward all of nature’s creatures.

As we came out of church, we both noticed a pigeon on the pavement next to the car that curiously fluttered up when we approached but then dropped down onto the icy pavement. While the car was warming up a bit, it occurred to me that perhaps the pigeon was just weak and hungry from the cold. And so I grabbed a bagel from the back seat and came around the back corner of the car just in time to see a very large bird swoop down and carry the pigeon up and over Snelling and land on the sidewalk in front of the Macalester Student Union.

Olivia, of course, recognized right away that it was a falcon and that it was going to kill the stunned little pigeon. We made it across the street and pulled up along the curb, just in time for Olivia to jump out and shoo the big bird up and away over the top of Macalester. “Just let Nature take its course,” two presumably college students yelled at us. “It’s just the cycle of life.”

“If they were being attacked by a crocodile,” Olivia commented later, “would they want us to just stand there and say, “Let nature take its course. It’s just the cycle of life.”

The little pigeon hopped through the fence and found shelter and refuge in the corner of the brick. We climbed back into our car, called the animal rehabilitation center to come pick up the little scared pigeon, but before we were able to pull away from the curb, we suddenly noticed the falcon perched high up above on the street lamp on the other side of Snelling. And there we sat, feeling utterly helpless as the big brutal creature swept down once again, sat for a moment on the quivering pigeon, dug in its talons, and then swooshed it up and over the top of the red brick building that had been its refuge just moments before until it flew out of site.

A tiny pigeon, a brutal falcon, and a 13-yr-old girl, not yet hardened by Middle School, almost high school, sophistication in the face of what others might consider simply a “survival of the fittest situation.”

The world into which Jesus was born, grows up, and eventually calls the disciples to follow as we have it in the story from the 4^th chapter of Matthew for today was no less of a brutal survival of the fittest “world.” As we are learning more and more each week in our Wednesday morning Bible Study, the world into which Jesus was born not only included the Brutal Herod, it was also a world in which the Jewish people were ruled by Roman occupation of Palestine. Ceasar Augustus came to power in 34 BCE by means of conquest and established an empire, the so-called Pax Romana, that kept the peace, not through justice, but by a system of military coercion, economic control, and public and violent intimidation of the peasant classes. We learned this week that it would not have been uncommon for Jesus as a child to walk down roads lined with crosses which was the Roman method of intimidation sending the message to all peasant folk who passed by “not to mess with us.”

Some scholars have also suggested that because of his marginalized and peasant status, that Jesus as a child may have been denied access to the synagogue. And so in his earliest childhood years at least he would have learned about God not from books, but out in the pasture, seeing God in the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. It would have been no accident that later as he grew into adulthood that he would have been drawn not only to the study of Torah and the Prophets but to Jewish Mysticism honoring a God who would know when even the tiniest sparrow drops to the ground, a God who would have the hairs of all of our heads, of yours and mine, all numbered.

And so it should not surprise us that the first people who Jesus would call would be common folks working along the Sea of Galilee as the story is told in Matthew and Mark where the first 12 are called. In Luke there are 70-some who end up following Jesus including many women in the company of disciples. In any case, these common folk were called to follow in a radically alternative movement to the brutal practices of the holy roman empire, fashioned according to the very best of the old testament prophetic imagination, like Isaiah’s Peaceable Kingdom, disciples carrying not even a staff for protection, trained it appears in a philosophy of non-violence, yet with a radically new vision for justice, peace, and shalom for all citizens, roman, jewish, and gentile, and even for the tiniest creatures of creation. A tiny defenseless band of disciples following in the way of a “powerless love” up against a brutal empire of “loveless power” all the way to the cross.

When I arrived to begin graduate study at Union in New York, I wanted to study what I saw as this prophetic mystic tradition past and present in Christian Ethics. I had paid my dues I thought reading Augustine and Thomas Acquinas and all of that back in seminary. And I had a long list of theologians that I wanted to study now.

But of course there were requirements for my degree program. And so one of the first requirements when I got to Union was that every first year student in ethics was required to take a Reinhold Niebuhr seminar. A whole semester on one establishment theologian!

Reinhold Niebuhr before teaching at Union in the 40’s and 50’s had been a parish pastor for 13 years in Detroit at the height of the social gospel movement seeking to change the social conditions for workers in the automobile industry. He became interested in the pitfalls of liberalism, its naïve and optimistic idealism, its confidence in the basic goodness of people, its assumption that simple education was the means to make social change for the better. What liberals did not understand, he argued, was Power with a capital P and the depth of human sin and systemic evil.

“What you need…” a good friend of mine in this seminar told me…(very conservative, his field was corporate social responsibility, we are still friends by the way…) ”What you need….is a 12-step program for bleeding heart liberals.”

“Oh great,” I said, at that time thinking that being clever was the way to win an argument, “does that mean that I would have to go to meetings and sit in a circle and say, “Hi, My name is Joy…and I am a Liberal.”

“Well that would be a start,” he replied. “But more than that what you liberals need to do is work a little bit of humility into your optimistic program…the recognition that perhaps your program however purposeful…just might be flawed or even shortsided.” ….Reminding me of one of the portraits that line the gallery of my imagination, that is one of the most prophetic writers of the last century, British author Virginia Woolf, who said, that each of us goes through life….with a blind spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head….making it impossible for any of us at any given moment to see or capture the whole truth of reality at any given point in history.

On Monday I got up early in the dark and the cold to travel to House of Hope on Summit for the Annual Martin Luther King breakfast all beautifully organized around the Epiphany theme of our text from Matthew of “Answering the Call.” It was another marvelous occasion honoring the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (one of the theologians that I had planned to study in graduate school, and did!) and all that he stood for. There was great music and great theatre about “Answering the Call.” There were local legend awards given to outstanding individuals in the community whose lives of public service had demonstrated the Theme of “Answering the Call.” There was a keynote speech delivered by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, an award-winning journalist, who arrived from Johannesburg just in time to tell her story and illuminate further the theme of “Answering the Call”. We heard the voice of Martin Luther King speaking these words about Greatness projected onto a screen in front of us:

And so, Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important…wonderful. If you want to be recognized…wonderful. If you want to be great…wonderful. But recognize that (they) who are greatest among you shall be your servant. That’s your new definition of greatness. And this morning, the thing that I like about it….by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great. Because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory6 of thermo-dynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. And you can be that servant(from the Drum Major Instinct, Memphis, 1963)

As these familiar words were sounding once again so powerfully across the airwaves, I looked over at the round table just one table over from mine. At that table was a young mother with a little girl (maybe 2, maybe 3 or so with a great afro) sitting on her lap. I had been right behind her earlier coming into the church with busy morning activist types streaming past her. But there she was one step at a time with two children, 5 and 3, bundled up in big snow-suits and books and hats and mittens. I knew something of what it used to be like back before Kindergarten age to bundle up one child and get out the door for a Martin Luther King breakfast and so had a bit of appreciation for this mother’s commitment and desire to have her children know about this significant person in her community’s history. Down the long staircase they moved as children do, holding the hand railing, one step, then another step, one at a time. Then to the registration table. “Anything I can do?” “Nope, I’ve got everything under control.” And she did!

Then to one of the tables for breakfast, hats and coats off, getting eggs and fruit and juice for each of them, finally for herself. And now I watched as she gracefully moved them through the events of the morning, taking little walks if needed, then back taking turns sitting on her lap, coloring with crayons, whispering to them through the presentations, drawing this for them, then drawing that. All the while hoping to hear a bit of the morning for herself.

I never spoke with her after coming down the steps. I couldn’t even tell you her name. She hadn’t come to receive an award or give a speech about “Answering the Call.” But what I observed her doing for nearly an hour and a half… came from the very same “impulse of Love” and commitment to justice for the future as all of the other activists exhibited up on the stage… yet with a quiet grace and anonymous dignity all its own. Those children no doubt some day will have the self-confidence and courage to “answer the call” not only in its public expression but in their quiet capacity to pass on that Love for future generations to come…and that in itself is a form of “answering the Call” for justice and peace in a world so in need of redemption. Then I remembered the more humble words of Martin Luther King who also later said that in order to change things in the big picture we must be confident enough to simply do what we can to “hew a tiny stone of hope out of a mountain of despair.”

The world into which Jesus was born was not much different than our world today. It was brutal. It was cold. It was heartless. Yet disciples were called into such a world to live in both their private and public ministry in such a way that the world might become a little more just, a little more beautiful, a little more loving.

We can let nature takes its course, it’s the cycle of life, after all…

…or we can respond, at the risk of being misguided at times, from the heart.

In the spirit of Isaiah (and paraphrased by Martin Luther King…)

Those who wait on the Lord

Shall renew their strength

They shall mount up with wings like eagles

They shall run and not grow weary

They shall walk and not faint (Is. 40)

And if at times we cannot mount up with wings like eagles, then we can run, and if we cannot run, then we can walk, and if we cannot walk, then we can crawl…knowing that the same one who calls us to a ministry of love in the first chapters of Matthew is the same one who promises at the very end of the Gospel, “ Lo I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.