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‘C’ // Pentecost 20 // 10-7-07 // Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian
World Communion Sunday, with Peacemaking Offering
Scripture Lamentations 1:1-6 2 Timothy 1:1-14
Psalm 137 Luke 17:5-10
As If
As anyone who has attempted to learn our language – or another – knows, ours is a most idiomatic tongue.
Take the two word expression of the sermon title. In recent years, many a University of Michigan student, e.g., has been heard to exclaim, “As if!” Meaning, in our sound byte culture, “As if I would!” or “As if that is true!” Either way, “as if” serves as a dismissive exclamation, questioning or negating something asked for or said.1
Last Sunday, I encouraged us to overcome any dismissive “as if!” attitudes we may harbor toward the strangers at our Two-Thirds World gate. On this World Communion Sunday, let us recognize as well that more and more of our world community are saying the equivalent of “as if!” when it comes to interactions with we Americans.
In a New York Times column last Sunday titled “9/11 Is Over”, Thomas Friedman cites the fact that “the United States has lost millions of overseas visitors since 9/11 – even though the dollar is weak and America is on sale.” He quotes the president of the Travel Industry Association: “‘Only the U.S. is losing traveler volume among major countries, which is unheard of in today’s world.’”
Friedman adds, “Total business arrivals to the United States fell by 10 percent over the 2004-5 period alone, while the number of business visitors to Europe grew by 8 percent in that time.”
Why this unique decline? “The travel industry’s recent Discover America Partnership study concluded that ‘the U.S. entry process has created a climate of fear and frustration that is turning away foreign business and leisure travelers and hurting America’s image abroad.’” Friedman mournfully concludes, “Those who do not visit us, don’t know us.”2
Now, hear the cries of the author of Lamentations today, grieving the Babylonian exile: “How lonely sits the city/that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become,/she that was great among the nations! … all her gates are desolate,/her priests groan … Her foes have become the masters, her enemies prosper.” Exile then … exile now. Thomas Friedman may be on to something.
Ours may not be the suffering of the Babylonian captivity, but have we not become captives of our “War on Terror” ways? Since 2002, we’ve held ourselves hostage to Iraq; tomorrow, it could be Iran. A recently retired CIA official tells investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, “(The current administration is) moving everybody to the Iran desk. They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002.” Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski adds that, if our country was to attack Iran, Iran would intensify its efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, “and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”3
Oy vey. The biblical story of exile from the world community – more than with Judah of old, an exile of our own making – speaks to us as never before. In the refrain of today’s Psalmist, “By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and we wept when we remembered Zion.”
We need to weep. We should weep. And the American public is weeping. Unfortunately, longtime UN weapons inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter notes, we seem to be weeping because we are losing in Iraq. Not because the war is wrong.
“As if!” Iraq, Iran, and more and more the developed nations seem to be assuming this attitude in response to our military-industrial-Congressional complex controlling our country’s foreign policy. (President Eisenhower, let us note, was coerced to drop Congress from his oft-quoted phrase.)4 “As if”, they are saying to us, we would engage, much less imitate, your ways!
How to wage peace, then, from within a nation that believes it is at war? In a land where the majority of our citizens seem to believe that someone else has something else we really need to survive?
It’s a spiritual matter, really. It’s as if, as musician Glen Campbell once remarked about his own alcoholic life, what we want would be what makes us happy. It’s as if.
Anxiety, for a wistful horizon. Weeping, for a remembered Zion. Fear of the future … mourning for the past.
In the pregnant gap between past and future: Perhaps we who would be American Christian peacemakers might have Good News to share. Perhaps we who would be American Christian peacemakers may be called to humbly bear the gospel privilege and burden of teaching fearmongers and mourners alike how God’s kingdom present beckons us all.
God’s kingdom present. The Pauline writer in 2 Timothy today instructs us, “(R)ekindle the gift of God that is within (us). For God does not give us a spirit of cowardice,” he adds, “but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline. Do not be ashamed … but join with me in suffering for the gospel.”
And suffering it is for us, to share the Good News of God’s kingdom present in the midst of a culture of the erstwhile faithful who cry out for more power and more things and more faith. “Increase our faith!” Jesus’ disciples say to him today. God help them! I can imagine our Lord here muttering to himself a version of The Serenity Prayer before responding to his grasping and groping disciples with these longsuffering words: “If you had the faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”
So perhaps – just perhaps – the height or depth or breadth of our faith matters not. Perhaps – just perhaps – it’s whether we use it at all!
Sometimes, I wonder if we liberal Christians in particular do call on whatever faith in God we have been given. Sometimes, I wonder if we are striving instead – not unlike the terror warriors – for a life we justify externally, rather than enjoying life eternally from a life lived internally.
For I am coming to believe that the only way to offset the “as ifs!” of our distant, defiant neighbors – as well as the “as ifs!” of our closer, defiant leaders – is to live as if the kingdom was already present.
To live as if the kingdom was already present: Is that wishful thinking? I believe that’s hopeful thinking. I believe that’s Jesus thinking. “Repent,” he begins his ministry, “for the kingdom of God is at hand.” He knows the kingdom already is, for us to live into.
Fear for the future? Mourn for the past? The kingdom already is, for us to live into.
“As if!” No. To live as if.
To live as if – regardless of how we may think or feel. The mustard seed is enough. For, as Jesus teaches us, it’s not a change in our perception that changes the ways we do things. It’s a change in our doing that changes the ways we perceive.
“Do”: That’s the simple word of action Jesus uses today, and five times. And he uses “commanded” and “ordered”, as well. Hmph. I, for one, would like to hold out for “suggested”. I wonder if we postmodern doers don’t do the kingdom into being, because we who would luxuriate in all sides of an issue and straddle all posts on a fence just don’t do commands? I wonder …
In my experience, acting as if the kingdom was here in our midst – and it is, if we but live it out – is what disarms the “as ifs!” of hostile forces in the world, near and far, every single time. For nothing upsets fear more than acting “as if”, based as it is a mere particle of faith. Acting as if: Not simply by doing random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty, but by waging peace with God in an extreme makeover. Not simply by being antiwar and marching, but by being pro-kingdom and acting.
And by praying, but not for more faith – God help our pious pretensions! Let us pray instead for discernment and courage and strength while we act on the modest yet sufficient faith we have been given. In the words of the Quakers, we pray and we move our feet … or our hands, or whatever we have to move. Rather than act prayerful, let us prayerfully act.
As she so often does, Barbara Brown Taylor puts it well when she writes the following in Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith:
By the time I resigned (as a parish priest), I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty. I trusted God to be God even if I could not say who God was for sure … this understanding had the welcome effect of changing faith from a noun to a verb for me … There was (now) the unscripted encounter with the undomesticated God whose name was unpronounceable.5
“‘As if’ I would act!” … or, “I will act as if.”
Which will it be for us?
I pray it will be the latter.
Soli Deo Gratia. To God alone be the glory.
Amen
Benediction …
The following is a benediction often given by the late Alabama-bred African-American evangelist and prophet the Rev. Dr. Clinton Marsh. Dr. Marsh was a beloved Moderator Emeritus of the General Assembly of our denomination and a lifelong peacemaker who I had the privilege to meet in our work in the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship.
And now, I am supposed to say to you, “Go in peace.”
But how can I say, “Go in peace,” when you are going out into a world where you are insecure, whether at home or on your neighborhood street.
Out into a world where race is set against race and ethnic cleansing is a name for genocide?
Out into a world where people are hungry and homeless, while their governments squander billions of dollars on instruments of destruction they dare not use?
Out into a world where every night millions of mothers watch their children sink into a hungry slumber, only to awaken (if they awaken) to another hungry tomorrow?
With a world like that out there, how can I say to you, “Go in peace?”
But I dare to say, “Go in peace,” because Jesus says, “I give you my peace.”
But remember, he who says, “I give you my peace” also says, “If you would be my disciple and have my peace, take up your cross and follow me!”
So I dare to say, “Go in peace!” – if you dare!
2Thomas L. Friedman, “9/11 Is Over”, The New York Times, September 30, 2007.
3Seymour M. Hersh, “Annals of National Security: Shifting Targets: The Administration’s plan for Iran”, The New Yorker, October 8, 2007, p. 41.
4Shea Howell, “Waging peace”, The Michigan Citizen, September 2007. A review of Scott Ritter’s Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Anti-War Movement.
5Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (Harper San Francisco, 2006), pp. 170-71.
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