June 15, 2008
(Fifth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 6)
Sarah’s Cynical Laughter
by The Rev. Bruce Hall, Deacon
Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7) •
Psalm 116: 1, 10-17 •
Romans 5:1-8 • Matthew
9:35-10:8, (9-23)
(From
The Lectionary Page)
Summer school has started and once again I find myself telling the story about drowning babies to my Introduction to Social Work class. The most recent version goes something like this:
A group of social workers is having a picnic beside a river when they hear a baby crying as it floats downstream on a small raft. Concerned, the social workers quickly react and jump in, pull the infant out, and soon feel the warm inner glow of having saved another’s life. But momentarily, there is another cry, a second baby appears, and the group once more splashes to the rescue and retrieves another child from the current. While drying off they all became increasingly worried when the cry of yet another baby is heard and, sure enough, here comes another, bobbing and squealing, and the social workers return to the river, all that is, except one who begins to run away from the group. As they pull the third infant from the water, they call to the one running away, “What kind of social worker are you, running away at time like this? There are babies drowning in the river!” “I know” says the other social worker, “I’m going upstream to find out who’s putting them in there.”
It’s not enough to save the babies, I tell my students, we also need to change the state of affairs that has a flotilla of babies interrupting our riverside candlelight suppers. We need to affect change at the source of the problem.
Sometimes we are can be very much like Sarah and doubt that such change is possible. Sarah, when told that, despite her advanced age, she would bear a son—laughed. How reasonable. Her life had taught her about the natural order and what was reasonable to expect in this world and that experience gave little room for December pregnancies. Our own lives may have taught us earlier that equal rights for African Americans and women was too idealistic? That such change, if it came at all would take several generations. Be reasonable, we may have been told; change takes time.
Who would have believed in 1968 that an African-American would be a contender for the Presidency? How many in 1908 imagined that a woman would do the same? At the turn of the last century what family on Kansas City’s west side would have predicted the integration of the Irish people into the broader fabric of American traditions and culture? It is unlikely that many dared to entertain such fantastic dreams anymore than Sarah believed she would give birth to a son. Yet, because of their hope, our nation’s history of social reform has become inseparable from the efforts of faithful Christians to love their neighbor as themselves. From the colonial period until now, outreach to the hungry and disabled, the orphaned and alone, the poor, the oppressed, and the foreign-born, has come primarily from our communities of faith. Empowered by the knowledge that with God nothing is impossible, men and women lived out their baptismal covenant in service to the suffering. Faithful to the command of Christ to “Love one another,” they labored even as many told them their efforts were futile or misdirected. To read the biographies of reformers like Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, or Martian Luther King, one can witness the faithful “boasting” in their sufferings as they fulfilled the work of the church in society.
This is our work, yours and mine. The lessons for today should not be heard as mere history of ancient ancestors or early disciples. Mother Church has chosen and handed down through the centuries the writing of the early church to ever remind us of who we are and what we are to be about doing in our own time. There is little doubt if one follows the nightly news or internet blogs that there remains a great deal in today’s world that needs changing.
Every day across the nation our neighbors struggle to receive and pay for basic medical care for themselves and their families. The patchwork quilt of public insurance programs offers a disjointed and irrational system of health care that succeeds best when reporting attractive corporate earnings that draws in more investors. More than tinkering is in order here. This nation’s healthcare system needs radical healing and the demand for a bipartisan proposal for universal healthcare insurance needs to be raised from the dead. The intolerance and scapegoating of Mexican-Americans under the excuse of immigration reform or national security needs to be challenged for the hypocritical con-game that it is. Hypocritical because while immigrants are threatened, it is our nation that requires a readily exploited underclass to be conveniently at hand to clean our houses, pick up after us at restaurants, pick our produce which we can then buy at a bargain given the labor involve in it’s harvesting, not to mention the well manicured lawns and home renovations done by those “without documents.” Our laws -- laws enacted in your and my name, are increasingly treating many of our neighbors like lepers, casting them out of their homes, separating families while too many people, perhaps frightened by a world that seems increasingly less secure -- look the other way. Good News need to be proclaimed in the face of this intolerance just as it does to those who would ask Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender persons to accept second class status in our society. Dedicated service men and women expose themselves to mortal danger every day and are simultaneously reminded that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is the best their country can do for them right now. In some communities the ability to parent can be legitimately questioned in a courtroom solely on the basis of their sexuality. The civil rights enjoyed by so many to marry, parent children, visit loved ones in the ER, or receive survivor’s benefits are denied and justice aborted. Intolerance and homophobia are sicknesses that need the healing touch of Christ’s followers.
As you entered this cathedral today you passes an altar crowded with candles in memory of each of this city’s murder victims. It was not quite a year ago that a homeless person, Eliseo Mederos, was murdered on the grounds of this cathedral early on a Sunday morning. Like Eliseo, many victims of homicide are Latino or Black. According to the Centers for Disease Control, homicide is the leading cause of death among young African American men reminding us there are demons in our shiny new downtown and as well as any place else, and we are called to cast them out.
But you know all this, don’t you. Nothing I’ve said here is unknown to you. You and I realize that things are not as they could be and we wonder what is to be done. It is here where we are called to act like disciples but instead can be immobilized, as was Sarah, by our doubts and lowered expectations. We have seen evil demonstrated throughout our lives in crime, in persecution, in needless wars and violence. We have experienced evil, some of us brutally, and so we are not unacquainted with our neighbor’s capacity for cruelty.
Every time we are invited to see a better way, God’s way, we may chuckle inside just as Sarah did. I wonder how confident those disciples in today’s Gospel reading were as they set out in obedience to Christ’s charge to heal the sick. Surely they had doubts and questioned how realistic Jesus was being. We may believe the problems that confront us in 2008 are simply too complicated or entrenched to avail themselves of alteration. That the roots of social ills like poverty are not easily fixed or changed is true. What is even more certain is that this country has relied upon the persons such as yourselves to be catalysts of such change and I seen no reason that this should be otherwise.
This congregation has been blessed by God with persons of many gifts. Our many ministries are evidence that God is already working within us to bring the Kingdom home. We have already been equipped for the field in which we are called to labor even if we are only meant to begin the work that our children, with God’s help, will bring to completion. It remains for us TO GO OUT THERE and do the work God has given us to do. We must be ever mindful that we are about something more that simple adjustments in the status quo—we are called to TRANSFORM our communities through the power of the Gospel. Using your prayers and your money—GO. Volunteer for a nonprofit agency (especially the smaller one’s who need your help more than ever) and GO OUT INTO YOUR CITY and proclaim the Good News though your life and work. Pay attention to the news and GO OUT in response to the suffering that God has placed upon your heart. Use the God given skills you possess as best you can in relieving the suffering of those around you. And between now and the first Tuesday in November, PAY ATTENTION to what is being said to you and ask your candidates what they plan to do to better secure social and economic justice in this nation. I know is daunting and sometimes overwhelming to realize all that must be done. It would be easy to expect little and ask for less. But that is not our heritage and it is not our call.
We, like our ancestor reformers before us, believe in a God who can do wonders in this age as well as in the past.
