Second Sunday in Lent,
Sermon: Weldon D. Nisly
TITLE: “If any become followers” – living the
disarmed life
THEME: “The pursuit of love”
TEXTS: Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16 God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah of
new life
Romans 4:13-25 Abraham’s faith remembered
Mark 8:31-38 Take up cross…give up life…
Loving and merciful
God, we hear you call each us by name and call us “beloved.”
We come in faith to
be made your disciples on The Way with Jesus.
You speak to us of Jesus’ suffering love and Jesus speaks to us of
giving life to have life. Show us how to
be faithful vulnerable persevering people for living these days. God it is our sincere
desire to embody Christ in our lives for your world today
and for all eternity. Amen.
The Lord be with you.
And also with
you.
I don’t usually
begin with a story, but today I cannot resist.
A young pastor was nervously preparing for his first Sunday worship with
his new congregation. He checked and
double-checked everything to make sure every detail was in place. As the worship was beginning he went to the
pulpit for the call to worship and wouldn’t you know it the microphone wouldn’t
work. He began to panic and said,
“Something is wrong with this microphone.”
And the people responded, “And also with you.”
Sisters and
brothers, something is wrong – terribly wrong in our world. There are those who think something is wrong
with us or with me. Why would anyone go
to
The Apostle Paul
unequivocally told the early Christians that they were called to be “fools for
Christ’s sake” and that the wisdom of God exposed the foolishness of the
world. “For the message about the cross
is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it
is the power of God” (1 Cor.
To cut through the
illusion and see what is wrong we must as always be rooted in scripture. We must be biblical people holding the Bible
in one hand and the newspaper in the other hand. Together as faithfully as we know how, we
live a disarmed life in a world that best knows an armed life. That’s how foolish Christ and the cross are
for us.
In the Genesis
story, God made Abraham and Sarah fruitful and gave them new life, even in old
age. God names them and makes a covenant
with them for all future generations.
God says, “Walk with me and I will make of you a great nation – a great
people.”
And so they did – wherever
God led.
In this land from
Ur up toward Haran before going on to Canaan and
Egypt, journeyed Abraham and Sarah led by God.
In this land God blessed Abraham and Sarah as the Mother and Father of
this portion of God’s people. In this
land now live the only remaining people speaking Aramaic, the language of
Jesus.
This
The gospel for this
second Sunday in Lent is the fulcrum of Mark’s gospel. This center of Jesus’ life in chapters
Between these two
encounters of healing blind eyes, Jesus tells his hearers three times that
ahead of them is a cross. A cross! Who would be fool enough to take up a cross?
Yet here Jesus
gives the first of three predictions of his Passion to come. Jesus’ Passion is as certain as we in the
church will come to Holy Week and Good Friday by living the Lenten journey. We cannot get to the resurrection without the
cross.
Peter reacts like
we do to Jesus foretelling his death and resurrection. He rebukes Jesus for saying such an foolish and dangerous thing.
But Jesus severely rebukes
Peter. “Get behind me, Satan! You are setting your mind not on divine
things but on human things.” Peter,
says Jesus, you want to do it the world’s way.
But God has another way for me and for you.
The verb “to
rebuke” used by Mark is a strong word meaning to confront and condemn. Mark also reports Jesus “rebuking” demons to
exorcise them.
There is a great
gap between who disciples want Jesus to be and who Jesus really is. The good news is that Jesus confronts that
gap and calls us on
What is that
way? It is the way of the disarmed
life which is the way of the cross.
If
any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves
and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life
will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the
gospel, will save it.
That word at the
heart of Jesus’ life disturbs us as much as it did Peter. We do not want a cross and we do not want to
die.
Sisters and
brothers, Jesus is not speaking about death, he is speaking about the only way
to have true life. This is not the way
of death. It is the way of life. We do not take life, we give life. It is the disarmed life.
It is providential
that this very morning in our adult study of Walter Wink’s The Powers That
Be, we face chapter 4, “Breaking the Spiral of Violence.” This chapter is the heart the book and Wink’s work. It is summed up in the opening and closing
sentences of the chapter.
When the Powers that Be catch the merest whiff of God’s new order, they automatically mobilize all their might to crush it….When Jesus said, “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it” (Luke 17:33), he drew a line in the sand and asked if we would step across – step out of one entire world, where violence is always the ultimate solution, into another world, where the spiral of violence is finally broken by those willing to absorb its impact with their own flesh. That new approach to living is nonviolence, Jesus’ “third way.” (pp. 82, 97).
We stand at that
cross and crossroad of decision this very day. We do so perhaps as starkly as
we have ever known. But it is not an
unknown place to our ancestors in the faith.
Yes, there is
something gravely wrong in our country and church and world. But it is much deeper than
Gandhi identified
our spiritual sickness as Seven Deadly Sins:
Politics without Principle
Wealth without Work
Commerce without Morality
Pleasure without Conscience
Education without Character
Science without Humanity
Worship
without Sacrifice
These 7 deadly sins have become the American way of life. We in this country, even more, we in the Church should not need Gandhi to tell us what we still don’t see as the spiritual sickness and sin in our culture.
We should not be surprised, especially as followers of Christ, that this way of living creates enormous disparity of rich and poor and of power and powerlessness. Our way of life generates a tragic imbalance and injustice in the world which in turn generates tension and resentment and reaction in God’s world. Why are we shocked when out of this comes chaos, anger and violence?
We live in a nation
of fear. What September 11 did was to
make Americans feel vulnerable and our vulnerability has been turned to
fear.
We live under an
administration who has in their hands the biggest
hammer the world has ever known. And as
Archbishop Carey said recently, “When all you have is a hammer everything looks
like a nail.” Iraq is now the targeted
nail to be hammered to allay our fears.
We will go to war for our fears and blame it on terrorism.
Thomas Merton named
it for us when he said that “the root of war is fear.”
I don’t know of anyone who has said it better than Jim Wallis.
It
is not poverty that causes terrorism, as some claim. It is more complex than that. But poverty and hopelessness are the best
recruiters for terrorism. Until we begin
talking about draining the swamps of injustice in which the mosquitoes of
terrorism breed, we will never find either a moral or practical response to
terrorism (Jim Wallis, “A Moral Response to Terrorism,” 2003 Religious
Education Congress).
We must not underestimate the threat of terrorism. But we cannot eradicate terrorism by ignoring these 7 deadly sins and hammering the children of Iraq over the head with the “shock and awe” of the world’s greatest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
It is not that war is too strong a response to the evils of Saddam Hussein, it is that war is too weak a response. It is weak because it is a response of fear and force that leaves in its wake more suffering, more disparity, more anger, all leading to more terrorism. It is not hard to guess where future targets of terrorism will be directed.
Whether or not bombing the hell out of Iraq
ever destroys Saddam Hussein, we can expect that in its wake will come waves of
more hatred and more terrorism and more fear and more insecurity and more
madness.
We must STOP FURTHER VIOLENCE AGAINST INNOCENCE. We must abandon the illusion that our weapons and war will ever make us more secure. We need to fight terrorism. But we cannot fight terrorism in ways that take out other people’s children.
When MCCers Bruce and Ann Huntworks were in Seattle in January, Ann was wearing a t-shirt with the clear message: “I will not send my son to kill your son.”
"We must be
the change we wish to see in the world" said Gandhi.
Again as Jim Wallis
said recently, “We can’t just name our objections to war with Iraq. We can’t just say this would not be a just
war. The objections are real. This would
not be a just war. We must deal with the
deeper issues and with the nation’s fear.”
Our national
leaders feed the fear of a frightened nation.
Our national policy says that pouring endlessly more tax dollars into
weapons of mass destruction and the pockets of the wealthy will make us more
secure.
Budgets are moral
documents. Budgets tell us where our
priorities are and in whom we place our security. The
It is a moral and
spiritual matter when we prepare for war at any cost by tightening the belts
around the stomachs of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens. It is sin.
And it is the principalities and powers at work “in our name.”
We are in need of
healing. All of us are in need of
healing. That’s what the gospels of the
past Sundays have been telling us and preparing us for. But there is a common sickness in need of
healing in the land today. It is deeper
than politics and deeper than national pride.
A tragic-irony last
fall had our leaders boasting of reconfiguring the
The President, in
the State of the Union address was very effective in telling the nation that we
should be afraid and the answer to our fear is an attack on
Do we really
believe that we can defeat terrorism and allay our fears by bombing
The politics of our
nation is no longer problem-solving. We
no longer ask, “What is the problem and how can we address it?” It is a politics of fear in which most
politicians make people afraid of the problem and then blaming the problem on
your opponent
Saddam Hussein and
Al Quida do pose a great danger to the world. In the face of this great danger we must be
prudent. Or, in biblical language, we
must be “as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves.”
In the face of this
great danger, the president and many Americans, including many Christians, want
something that is impossible to attain.
In the shadow of September 11, Americans want somebody to erase our
vulnerability.
Americans want to
make our vulnerability go away. If
bombing Baghdad promises to do that, we will bomb Baghdad no matter what the
world says. If suspension of our civil
liberties promises to do that, the people of this nation will willingly give up
civil liberties. If more tax dollars to
buy more weapons of mass destruction promises to do that we will spend however
many tax dollars the President demands.
Beloved sisters and
brothers, our greatest task in the face of such danger and such frantic
self-defeating response is at its deepest not a political task but a spiritual
pastoral task. The great spiritual
pastoral task today is remind ourselves in the Church
and country that we can never take our vulnerability away. Not in this world. Not in our human
condition.
Human vulnerability
is part of the human condition. Our
vulnerability is part of our greatest potential for creating a more livable
just world.
The prophet Micah
and the Martin Luther King spoke the truth when they proclaim for our hearing
that there is no security apart from common security which is a global
security. That is a spiritual reality
that under girds our political crisis.
Our nation’s
weapons simply cannot protect us.
Only a world where all people feel secure will bring us greater
security.
Jesus tells us that
erasing our human vulnerability is impossible and an
illusion.
How can any
Christian not know that vulnerability was the demonstrated way of Jesus to
overcome sin and death in the world?
What in the world does the Eucharist mean if it isn’t to teach us how to
live with Jesus’ way of nonviolent vulnerability?
Amidst all the talk
about going to war with Iraq and every Sunday we come together to worship, to
break open the Word and to break the bread.
Jesus is saying, “This is my body broken for you.” This is me.
This is the way God has chosen to overcome sin and and
violence and death in the world.
Not by being the
greatest military power on earth. Not by
being the wealthiest people in the world.
Not by living in fear. Not even
by bombing the hell out of Iragi children.
Jesus is saying “Do
this in remembrance of me.” Do this so
that you remember my way. It is the only
thing Jesus asks us to do over and over again so that we remember that this is
Jesus’ Third Way. Broken
Bread. Blood out-poured. This is the way God overcomes evil and sin
and death.
America is not only
committing a political and moral tragedy in our war with Iraq and war with
terrorism. It is much deeper than
that. It is a spiritual tragedy and it
is sin to believe that somehow weapons of war will erase our vulnerability.
Beloved sisters and
brothers, I have been in ministry for 30 years and a pastor for 19 years to get
to the place we are this very day. It is
embodied in our peacemaking efforts and in our Vision process in which one of
the most profound and surprising and gratifying things to emerge is a struggle
with what “Becoming a Eucharistic Community of Peace” means for us as a Church
nourished by the bread and wine of Jesus Christ.
In the middle of
one night this week, I awoke with an overpowering urge to celebrate the
communion together this Sunday. The next
day two of you suggested that we celebrate communion today. And so we do again at an unusual but
important time for us.
Here at the Lord’s
Table we are disarmed by Jesus and fed the bread of life. I have long longed to celebrate the Eucharist
every Sunday precisely because it is the only to be nourished in the way of
Jesus to become what we are -- the Body of Christ and a people of peace.
When Jesus calls,
Jesus bids us come and die. Come and die
to the armed life. Come and live the
disarmed life. Come to the Table of
Life. Come so that your fears can be
transformed. Come so that can let go of
all revenge and violence.
Come so that we
have the strength and the courage to go to our sisters and brothers in
Iraq. It is not I alone who go to
Iraq. It is you and it is the Body of
Christ who goes to Iraq. Apart from you
as my beloved family and church I could not go to Iraq with Christian
Peacemaker Teams with the threat of war hanging over all our heads. Our going says that we know and care that
this unconscionable threat hangs even greater
over the heads of Iraqi children.
And so I go
disarmed. I go in peace. I go at peace. I go with peace.
I go in your
name. I go in the name of Christ.
In the middle of
the night I awoke with a song on my heart that I haven’t heard in some
years. Yet it has been a great
inspiration to me. It was sung by a St
Louis Jesuits group. It is “Be Not
Afraid.” The refrain, as I remember it,
is:
Be not afraid,
I go before you always.
Come follow
me,
and I will give
you rest.
I think the first
verse is: (* See below for words to song added later)
Though you cross the barren desert,
You shall not be alone….
[Refrain again….]
This song is on my
heart. It is Jesus Gospel for all of us
today. Thanks be
to God!
Rejoice in God
always; again I will say, Rejoice.
Let your gentleness be known to everyone. God is near.
Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication
with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just,
whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable,
if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise,
think about these things.
Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen…,
and the God of peace will be with you.
Amen. Go in peace to love and serve God.
-----------------------------------------------------------
* Song at end of
sermon sung by John Michael Talbot “Table of Plenty” album
Robert J. Duffy, SJ
1975 New Dawn Music
You shall cross the
barren desert,
but you shall not thirst.
You shall wander
far in safety
though you do not know the way.
You shall speak
your words in foreign lands
And all will
understand.
You shall see the
face of God and live.
Be
not afraid,
I
go before you always,
come follow me,
and I will give you rest.
Blessed are your poor,
For the kingdom
shall be theirs.
Blest are you that
weep and mourn,
For one day you
shall laugh.
And if wicked tongues insult and hate you
All because of me,
Blessed, blessed
are you.
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Endnote: My deepest gratitude to Jim Wallis of
Sojourners for his friendship, vision, and passion in the 30 years I have known
him. Some significant parts of my sermon
were inspired by Jim, especially from his words to the Religious Educators
Conference in
There’s so much
more I on my heart to say but it is not really
necessary. We are in God’s hands. Weldon Nisly