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A Sermon for Judson Memorial Church
April 29, 2007
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Not In Jesus' Name
Ancient Testimony: John 10: 20-31
A good friend of ours, a man of substance and means, came to visit. We have known him and known of his many accomplishments - ACLU, law reviews, National Public Radio, the only person we know who had a pied-à-terre in New York; you know, a person with the "larger" credentials - for over 30 years. As people like to say, "We go way back." He wanted to know which neighborhood Chinese restaurant we had chosen as our favorite, and he wanted to have dinner there. When we said that our favorite neighborhood restaurant was Vietnamese, he became very troubled: "People in New York have favorite neighborhood Chinese restaurants, not Vietnamese." He refused to go to our Vietnamese restaurant.
I was amused by this interaction in the same way that I am amused by today's text. In it, Jesus is in a public tiff over his credentials. It is yet another text on whether he is the Messiah-long-awaited or not. It is part of the sheep cycle, where Jesus uses his love and leadership of the sheep as his singular credential. The crowd wants their Messiah the way most people have their Messiah, the way their parents and neighbors had their Messiah. Jesus says he comes in the name of God, but these people think he doesn't, so they end the conversation by stoning him. To the crowd, he is unprecedented. And they don't like it.
Gertrude Stein has a famous quip about precedents, which goes like this: Declare a precedent and you can do anything you want. She was speaking of modern art, but I have stolen her quote on many occasions when I wish to talk about organizational life. If you can rephrase your motion the way the Music Man rephrases his - by standing shoulder to shoulder, foot to foot, elbow to elbow, in a pose resembling that of the town statue at the middle of town - you will win arguments. If you can tell a congregation that you are following in their great legacy, and doing things the way they have always done things, you will probably have your way as their leader. Sorry, Howard: I use you often. "Howard did such and such by saying this and that." Consider the argument won. People love precedents. They love Chinese food. They love their Messiahs within their Messiah box and not outside of it. Even very open, liberal people love precedents. Without them the world is a scary, open future, where maps and guideposts disappear. Never ask people to do a brand new thing; instead, ask them to do something in the deeper name of the deeper way their forbears originally did it. That's how you win arguments.
Jesus declared a different approach, an unprecedented one. He took care of people. He fed them, healed them, and drove out their demons. No one could find those actions in their Messiah handbook. Many Jews thought that the Messiah would bring them the political and social and economic freedom they had long been denied. By the way, many of these texts from the book of John are anti-Semitic in the sense that they pick out the Jews to pick on them. There were probably many non-Jews who also thought Jesus was an unprecedented Messiah.
Today I want to do a kind of pliers' sermon: I want to pry open the words "In the Name of Jesus." The things that have been done and are being done in the name of Jesus are being done in the name of the triumphal Messiah, the one that wins, the one that puts us on top or at least in the column that says "right." Consider war. Consider border protection. Consider the great city on the hill, a precedent-setting description of America.
Before we get boring and binary again and talk about the way those other folks misuse the name of Jesus and the way we use it right (you know, for peace, against war; for sanctuary, against exclusion, etc.), let's elaborate on the term, "the name of Jesus." Unfortunately, we are all precedent seekers. We are all trying to say that what we do is in the right name of Jesus and what they do is in the wrong name of Jesus. We so hope to be able to do the right thing in the right way. If Chinese is what other folk do, then please help us to get in line and be a part of the group.
To act in the name of Jesus is to take care that care is taken with people.
Jesus says he is Messiah because he feeds the sheep. He declares a very different category, summarized in the Golden Rule, and then in a whole series of feeding and nourishing behaviors. He says you'll know authenticity if there is love present. When two fish and a loaf of bread feed 5000, you'll have a sign of Messiah. Anything less than active love is inauthentic.
We face a very interesting question in our sanctuary movement. We have a chance to stand with a family where one person has a criminal record. He did time for using drugs. He did that time 11 years ago. He is about to be deported, leaving behind four children and a wife. He is not what we have been unceremoniously referring to as a "poster boy" for our tiny, new, young movement. The conversations all week about presenting this man to one of our member congregations have been fascinating. "Let's wait for a poster boy so the media won't kill us." "How can we leave a person in trouble this way when we have said we would do sanctuary?" "He did his time."
I happened onto a conversation with some public relations types last night and discussed this issue. They gave very interesting answers. You know what they said, right? "Just spin it right." I think I know what that means, in my terms, but I have no idea if it plays with the American public. The cynical approach would go like this: People want to give sanctuary to families who they think are just like them. You know, perfect. Victorious. Well put together. Like Jesus. The good boy Jesus. The one who, if he got stoned, deserved it. Probably didn't have his stuff together. That ancient myth that when bad things happen to people, it is their own damn fault. This is the dark, fearful side. Based on these fears, we would wait for a poster family. No priors. Gorgeous children. Smiles on their face, even though they are about to lose everything. The heroic All-American, or would-be All-American. We stroke those who vote by identifying them with the good guys. In this picture, the name of Jesus would be invoked triumphantly: In the name of beautiful and sweet Jesus, we show you this beautiful and sweet family, and knowing that you also are a beautiful and sweet family, we hope you will help them.
Obviously this approach has precedence. We don't advertise soap with ugly people; we advertise soap with beautiful people. Plus, victory over difficulty is an All-American theme. When Americans are not victorious over life and other nations, we think we have done something wrong. Obviously, we hired the wrong PR agency. How dumb of us.
There might be another way. It might have fewer precedents; although, watch me, it might also have the deeper precedent of the hidden, misused name of Jesus. It might be the feed the sheep approach. We might say that not only does our sanctuary family have priors, but also the President has priors. The President conquered his addiction problem and so might our family have done so. In fact, we might hint at the reality of the American family, which is that a lot of families have priors. Not just addictions, but other kinds of priors. It might be that my immigrant grandfather who stole the horse in Tannersville wasn't so much un-American as American. In other words, we don't have to name the name or send a message to the media with certainty and morality. We might go to a deeper truth. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God - and that's what is amazing about the name of Jesus, that it covers the fallen and the shaken as well as the splendid and the strong. The deeper truth is not just scriptural; it might also be patriotic. There are a lot of Americans not quite making it. Some of them don't even have health insurance. Rather than blaming the poor for their poverty or the uninsured for their un-insurance, we might feed the sheep.
I don't know about you, but I have been fascinated by the Corzine accident. It's a terrible thing. Note how people distance themselves from his pain: "He should have been wearing a seat belt." Ah. Yes, that is true. But I don't think that's how Jesus would approach him. Punishmentalism is often how we hear the name of Jesus. It is not who Jesus said he was. It is rather what those who stoned him wanted him to be.
This notion of taking responsibility for things is surely important. We have to find the best family on behalf of the other families. We have to worry about getting the right PR agency. We feed sheep by being strategic in the way we set out the grain. Anything less is just stupid. But when we do things in the name of Jesus, there is a little grace present, too. We love people who forgot or refused to fasten their seat belt.
We also become a little less judgmental about our own failures to create the country we want or to be the people we want to be. I hope some of you read Garry Greenberg's article about "Manufacturing Depression" in a recent Harper's. He does a very interesting critique of anti-depressants and begins with a joke on himself. He was sure he had a minor depression and just wanted a few pills. Lo and behold, the psychiatrist determined that he had a major depression and needed big help. Greenberg responds as follows: "Why wouldn't I have a major depression, my country is being ruled by thugs, the calamity of capitalism is made more apparent every day, environmental cataclysm is edging in from the wings, the brute facts of life brought on by death and illness of the people I love, my own creeping decrepitude…?" All of those things can't possibly belong to him. Don't you just want to take him out for a canoe ride? Or some ice cream? In other words, might there not be a strategy, in the name of Jesus, known as Lighten Up?
Lightening up becomes harder the more time we spend inside the PR machine or the advertising machine or the spin machine. I think of Eudora Welty's definition of advertising as sticking pins in people to teach them to buy the things they don't want. I think we've had some pins stuck in us about national success, which dates back to Jesus' self-definition in John. I don't know that most of us really want it as much as we think we do. I think more Americans could live without being number one than we might think. We have an All-American lightness, too - which for me is exemplified by a tandem slogan to Welty's about a bookstore in Montague, Massachusetts: "Books you don't need in a place you can't find." I like that kind of enigma. I join many others in heading to just that kind of place: a place that is beyond my clawing need for something that I don't really need; a place that is just a little mysterious, a place I can't quite find.
In all the terror of the Virginia Tech shooting and its aftermath, the picture that scared me the most was a young woman putting on make-up over her tears so that she could talk to the press. She reminded me of the great folk wisdom: "If you insist on going out with and loving a married man, just remember not to wear mascara."
Public relations take us into a very strange world. It is a world on steroids and wearing make-up. It is what kids call "made up." Jessica Lynch is the latest subject of an army fiction. Way too much of our lives are subjects of fiction. "I am so confused about why they chose to lie," said Lynch. Her story, first inspirational, was then false. The war reality is too hard to comprehend, so we put make-up on it. When we start to love the phony more than the real, very bad things happen; we easily get what is done in the name of Jesus wrong.
I hope we can "spin" our sanctuary movement to be one of grace as well as success. I hope it can be done in the name of Jesus, as a fairly simple act of feeding, without a lot of other stuff attached to it.
A final story. I was walking in the woods in a very funnily named State Park in Rhode Island. Some of you may know it. It is called Purgatory Chasm State Park. Something very unusual happened. I noticed that next to all the outdoor fireplaces and picnic tables there were stacks of beautiful firewood. It was dry; it was cut in that artistic way that a good splitter knows. There was enough for a night long of fires for sure.
Abundant, clean-cut firewood, given for free, by the state, in a park. I just couldn't believe it. Part of me was judgmental: why did people have to be so mollycoddled in a park setting? Couldn't they gather their own sticks? What about children? Couldn't they be taught to find good wood? Now they'll think wood comes out of the sky the way chicken comes out of Styrofoam packages. But another part of me just wanted to stay all night and light a fire. A gift had come. It wouldn't warm the world, but it would warm the night.
Do you mind if I say an authentic Christ is here, in a little light and fire, stacked next to a table? Could our sanctuary movement be that? Could our lives be that? Could we settle for a minor depression instead of a major one? Could we imagine a pried open coffin, where something unprecedented might be possible? A people fed and warmed? A world where those who preferred Vietnamese could eat it, without judgment, and those who preferred Chinese could do the same? I hope so.
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