Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 17A, September 3, 2017; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of hope, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

The other day a parishioner observed that in my preaching, I seldom make explicit connections between scripture and our contemporary political situation. I don’t name names. Do I need to? I trust you to make connections if I stay close to our sacred texts and tell you what I see there. I want you to make the connections – they’ll be deeper and truer that way.

What I see in our scripture readings today is a treasure trove of inspiration for this Labor Day weekend. And that’s good, because as far as I can tell, we need it! I want to focus our attention on some gems in each of our three scripture passages, starting with our Torah story of Moses’ encounter with the burning bush, or, more accurately, the thorny shrub. But I want to back up and remind you about what had happened with Moses before this divine encounter.

As an infant, Moses had been saved from death and raised in Pharaoh’s household – a household of power, of wealth, of privilege, that benefited enormously from the forced labor of others. When Moses grew to adulthood, he became angry about the oppression of the Hebrew people. He encountered an Egyptian beating a Hebrew and, seeing no potential witnesses, he struck down the Egyptian and hid the corpse in the sand. The next day, he tried to break up a fight between two Hebrews and they rebuffed his efforts, one of them asking, “Who made you a ruler and judge over us? Are you going to kill me like you killed the Egyptian?” When Pharaoh heard about it, he sought to kill Moses, but Moses fled to the land of Midian. In exile there, Moses defended some sisters from shepherds who were harassing them and preventing the women from watering their flocks. Their grateful father thanked Moses (whom the women described as an Egyptian) by inviting him for dinner and giving him one of his daughters (like you do). Moses’ wife, Zipporah bore a son that Moses named Gershom, which means, “I have been a stranger in a foreign land.” An exile from Egypt, living in Midian, a Hebrew child growing up in Pharaoh’s house. Moses knew about not fitting in. And he knew about hope.

Later, Moses was driving his flock to the rear end of the wilderness (that’s the polite way to say it) when an angel of the Holy One appeared to him from the middle of a thorny shrub, described literally as stupid with fire without being consumed. And Moses said, please let me turn aside and see this great vision. As usual, the word for please doesn’t get translated. Was he asking his flock to please slow down? Was he begging himself to please stop long enough to determine that the fire wasn’t devouring the bush? How long would that take?

Moses heard his name being called, and his response was not “I’m here” (ani poh in Hebrew, a response a student might make to a teacher’s roll call). Moses responded, hineini, “here I am” – behold me. Moses’ response, hineini, is a Hebrew word that conjures up complete physical, spiritual, emotional, and moral presence and attentiveness, holding nothing back. This story is about a time when Moses felt called by the Divine to be fully present, and then to act in a large way, much larger than intervening to stop personal or interpersonal violence. This story is about a time when Moses felt drawn to stop institutional and cultural violence. He also felt utterly ill-equipped, by the way, and the assurance that he received was that the power of the Holy One would be fully present also, holding nothing back. In most rabbinical commentaries, the disclosure of the Divine Name (I AM WHO I AM) conveys a future tense and can even be translated, “I WILL BE WHAT TOMORROW DEMANDS.” [1]

If responding to a call to stop institutional and cultural violence feels too much for you today, our reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans offers us instructions for stopping interpersonal violence. There’s nothing new here – Paul is offering a summation of the teachings of the Torah and the Prophets, which were also the teachings of Jesus. Genuinely love your neighbor, love the stranger in your midst, and love even your enemies. Here’s how you do it: separate yourself from what is harmful, hold fast to what is morally worthy, outdo one another in showing honor, serve the Lord, which is to say, be governed by Love. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer, give to all who are in need, those members of your community, and those who are strangers. Bless and do not curse those who persecute you. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty but associate with the lowly and do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not, I repeat, do not attempt to avenge wrongdoing. Take care of your enemies’ hunger and thirst. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Notice what Paul did NOT say: Tell those who rejoice to calm down. He didn’t say: Tell those who weep to get over it. He didn’t say: Live in harmony with one another when you’re having a good day. Nod and smile through tribulation. Pray only when you need something. He didn’t say: Enjoy the suffering of your enemies, because they had it coming.

Paul is just as clear as he can be, and probably the only phrase in this passage that needs some explanation is the part about heaping coals. Paul quotes the Book of Proverbs: “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink, for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” The idea is not that your offering of food and water in response to your enemy’s hunger and thirst will set their hair on fire. The metaphor is about the pain of your enemy’s remorse that will result in your enemy’s conversion to Love. What if they don’t convert to love? Paul says, “let the Lord (of Love) take care of that.” Just keep doing the next right thing. Paul knew something about hope.

It can be hard, can’t it? It’s easier if we stick together. The gift of participating in a loving community like this one is that when any of us feels our individual zeal flagging, our energy or courage ebbing instead of flowing, we can stop and rest a while, without shame, and let others shine on our behalf. [2] My wife, Joy, likes to think of loving community as being like a rich, sturdy cloth, a tapestry with threads woven over and under one another, with color and length variations, imperfections and inconsistencies that together create strength and beauty.

If responding to a call to stop interpersonal violence feels too much for you today, our reading from the Gospel of Matthew offers us instructions for stopping personal violence. Stop trying to save your own life. Those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for Jesus’ sake will find it. Life and soul are the same thing here – wanting to save your own soul or life force will result in losing it, and nothing is more valuable than one’s spirit of life. What is Jesus telling his followers to do? Some of you know the Rt. Rev. Barbara Harris teaches that taking up a cross means voluntarily picking up and carrying a heavy burden, taking on an instrument of oppression, on behalf of another, for the love of God. Now, that is foolishness to secular people and scandalous to pious people, but that is how you lose your life for Jesus’ sake and how you will find it. You pick up and carry someone else’s burden. That is how you will see the Son of Man coming into his realm.

I think Jesus was saying, overcome the temptation to keep your heads down, not to cause trouble, try to get by, stay safe. Jesus was offering hope that life could be rich and full – that everyone could have enough to eat; that military and economic power did not have the last word; that healing and freedom are not only possible, but are God’s deep desire. Jesus was saying, if you want to experience fullness of life and love, pick up a burden on behalf of another – something that involves considerable risk.

This is difficult for those of us who want to see results, who want to know that the burdens we pick up are “worth the effort,” who want to know that the risk is not dangerous. It can seem foolish and difficult to hope for something better, to believe it is possible for people to be fed, and freed, and healed. But following Jesus is foolish, and difficulty and danger are unavoidable aspects of the work.

In Rebecca Solnit’s book, called Hope in the Dark, she retells the anecdote of a woman who was part of the Women’s Strike for Peace, the first great antinuclear movement in the US, credited with ending above ground nuclear testing, the fallout from which was showing up in mothers’ milk and baby teeth. The woman had felt foolish and futile “standing in the rain one morning protesting at the Kennedy White House. Years later she heard Dr. Benjamin Spock – who had become one of the most high-profile activists on the issue – say that the turning point for him was spotting a small group of women standing in the rain, protesting at the White House. If they were so passionately committed, he thought, he should give the issue more consideration himself.” I’ll end with a passage from Solnit.

She writes, “Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away a stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin at the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

“… hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky… hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope…To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable. Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.” [3]

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