SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY

Jeremiah 17:5-10

Psalm 1

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Luke 6:17-26

Prayer of the Day: Living God, in Christ you make all things new. Transform the poverty of our nature by the riches of your grace, and in the renewal of our lives make known your glory, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals
   and make mere flesh their strength,
   whose hearts turn away from the Lord…..

Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,
   whose trust is the Lord. Jeremiah 17:5,7.

The most direct reason I can give for not being a progressive is that my faith is in Jesus, not progress. Now let me unpack that for you. I have nothing against progress per se. Furthermore, I am thankful for what I believe most of us would agree represents progress. Polio vaccine is a great advance over the iron lung. Brown v. Board of Education is a great progressive advance over Plessy v. Ferguson. The ball point pen is an improvement over the quill and fountain pens. But I also believe that progress is tentative, uncertain and easily reversed. Witness the dismantling of USAID, the threatened dismantling of the department of education and the reversal of numerous regulations implementing civil rights hard won by the work of lawyers, legislators and community organizers from the 1940s to the present. Progress is a fragile thing. Once made, it can easily be unmade. Trusting it is a dicey proposition.

There is also, I believe, a degree of arrogance in self identifying as a progressive. It presumes that we know what progress is and that any person of good will can recognize and advance it. That presumption becomes particularly lethal when one’s perception of progress is entangled with religion. There is a line in an otherwise fine hymn in our Lutheran Evangelical Worship that sends shivers down my spine. The hymn celebrates the role of saints in the church and the various ways they fulfil their baptismal calling. The first line in the second verse is the one that gives me pause:

Some march with events to turn them God’s way;

some need to withdraw, the better to pray;

some carry the gospel through fire and through flood:

our world is their parish, their purpose is God.

“Rejoice in God’s Saints,” Text: Fred Pratt Green; Music, Music: C. Hubert H. Parry, published in Lutheran Evangelical Worship, #418.

Do we really know which way God is turning events? Is God’s purpose in history so crystal clear that we can with certainty align ourselves with it? The missionaries of the 19^th century who rode the waves of colonialism into Africa and Asia did so with the firm conviction that the advance of “Christian civilization” into the lands of “heathendom” was “God’s way.” Make no mistake about it, they were persons of good will and intent. Many of them left behind family, possessions and comfortable lives to do what they believed to be God’s mission. The tragic consequences of the church’s partnership in the ruthless exploitation of colonized lands and peoples are all too evident today and constitute a dark episode in the church’s history. Lest we be tempted to look down our enlightened and sophisticated noses at these ancestors in the faith, we ought to be mindful that the next generation will likely see with a clearer eye the consequences of our own well meaning efforts to do God’s will. What blind spots, missteps and unintended results will they uncover?

The prophet Jeremiah warns us that “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?” Forty years of ministry have taught me how difficult it is to distinguish between a principled stand on an issue of importance and a stubborn need to be right. It is not always easy to distinguish between a desire to achieve a goal that furthers the mission of the congregation and the need to have something under one’s belt that counts as “success” in doing the work of a church perceived to be in decline. The confidence, trust and respect given the pastor of a congregation can easily go to one’s head. There is sometimes a fine line between ministering to the needs of another person and feeding those of your own. So, too, sincere efforts to bring needed change to society in the political realm are often sabotaged by ignorance, self interest and prejudices to which we are blind. What we imagine to be a push in the direction of progress frequently turns out to be fueled by self interest and destructive in its results.

But the prophet has more to give us than this dire warning. Jeremiah assures us that blessing follows all who trust in the Lord. Those words do not come easily from the prophet’s mouth. Jeremiah witnessed the conquest of his beloved country, the destruction of its holiest place and the loss of land it occupied for over five centuries. His was the task of speaking a word of hope and encouragement to exiles living as prisoners in the land of their conquerors. He saw first hand how human leadership, patriotism and religious conviction can be distorted in ways that lead to destruction. Jeremiah knew well that what the human heart deems progress often leads to catastrophic consequences.

But Jeremiah also knew that God’s judgment upon our misbegotten striving after progress is not God’s last word. While undue confidence in human endeavor brings curse, God responds to curses with blessing. Blessing followed a world plunged into violence so severe that it took a global deluge to curb it. Blessing found Sarah and Abraham, the wandering nomads, refugees and aliens living in the shadow of empire. God’s blessing to them endured and was passed on through the lives of their flawed, self seeking descendants. God blessed the descendants of Abraham and Sarah once again as they lived under the curse of slavery, making of them a free nation. Blessing followed Israel into exile and on its subsequent journey back to its homeland. The God who blesses can be trusted to continue blessing. But as it was in Jeremiah’s time, so it may be today. Blessing may lie on the other side of judgment. Perhaps we need to see everything we consider progress stripped away before we are able to recognize the better hope God has to offer us.

I don’t mean to say that we should give up on the United States, cease our efforts to advocate for justice or resign ourselves to the demise of democratic norms. These days are calling for even stronger witness and action on behalf of the most vulnerable among us and throughout the world. As disciples of Jesus, we need to keep doing what we have always strived to do, though, as Saint Paul would say, “do so more and more.” I Thessalonians 4:10. I believe, however, that what we do needs to be grounded in something bigger than restoring America, saving democracy or achieving any other goal we count as progress. Our witness and work needs to be to and for the reign of God-which is not the endpoint of our own notions of progress. The reign of God is so far beyond our comprehension that even Jesus could speak of it only in parables. The most we can say is that it consists of God being “all in all.” I Corinthians 15:28.

“All” is a very expansive word. It means that there is no person, place or thing God would exclude from the fabric of God’s new creation. The way of God does not always comport with our view of progress-which often comes at the expense of persons, animals, ecosystems, relationships and communities we neglect or deem expendable. God’s power is God’s patience. I think the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, captures something of what God’s way of establishing God’s reign entails.

“The sheer force of things lies in the intermediate physical process: this energy of physical production. God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”[1]    

By contrast, we who call ourselves progressive are impatient. We think we know what the final project looks like and we want it finished soon. I can relate to that. When I was young, my father tried to interest me in building model cars. His aim was to teach me to follow directions, focus on detail and develop a sense of how automobiles work. For my part, I wanted to get the job done and the model on my shelf. Invariably, I ended up with left over parts. These I simply swept into the trash along with the packaging. The finished product, once painted, looked enough like the picture on the box to satisfy me. But God will not be so rushed. The persons we deem obstructions to progress are essential pieces of the patchwork quilt that is God’s new creation. God will have no left over parts, even if it means the project takes longer and must be halted, reversed or even torn down in order to include a part that we in our haste for closure have neglected. That may not look like progress, but it surely is grace.

Here is a poem by Jacqueline Woodson speaking on behalf of some casualties of progress, parts left out of American history, American opportunity and the American Dream.

February 12, 1963

a country caught

between Black and White.

Source: Brown Girl Dreaming (c. 2014 by Jacqueline Woodson, Pub. by Penguin Press) Jacqueline Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, but grew up in Greenville, South Carolina and Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of over thirty books for children and young adults. Her honors include the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Newbery Honor. She received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement, the St. Katharine Drexel Award and the Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers’ Literature. You can find out more about Jacqueline Woodson and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

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[1] Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality (c. 1979 by The Free Press) p. 346.