09aug09

OUT OF THE DEPTHS
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

August 9, 2009

Psalm 130; Ephesians 4:25-52

There are weeks when it is not easy for any preacher to do the work of the art form that we call the sermon. I confess early on that this has been one of those weeks when it has been difficult to focus because when I spent that quiet time, that alone, that deep in my soul time listening for God, all I heard was a great sadness of mine and of many of those I love. The text this week that I cannot avoid starting from is Psalm 130 and in particular that first verse that reads, “Out of the depths haveI cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let your ears hear by cries.” I heard one of those cries out of the depth of one's soul this last week and still it hurts me so.

I have but one sister. I have always felt bad for her, as one girl amongst us four boys. She was never very pretty or talented. No, no, that's not true. She is very talented and very pretty, it just she's my sister. She is four years younger than I and I easily remember the cold wintry February morning in 1958 that she came home to stay with us. If the truth be told, she was always been easy to love, as sisters go.

Her husband died last Sunday. They lived up in Lafayette and had a cabin on a lake east of Martinsville. Her husband Jerry was an absolutely delightful human being, who loved easily and fully, was productive in his work and was one of those guys who actually left the world better than he found it. His death from an extended battle with an abdominal cancer was easy to accept on the physical level. This man had been through excruciating torture in his attempt to win against the disease ravaging his body. He did not fear dying at all. His was a faith that rested securely that there is more to this existence than flesh and blood. But, he got a lousy cancer that pummeled his body and killed him, but not his spirit. He left behind an absolutely great life of loving children, grandchildren, friends and my sister. He died a much loved man, but oh, how great the loss, and the sadness is just crazy deep. I join with the Psalmist in saying, “Out of the depths am I crying to you, O God.”

Here is one of my dilemmas with calling out to God with such a reservoir of pain. I know that God hears. There is no doubt in the essence of my being that God hears and cares deeply and intimately and personally. I used to think that in my crying out and being in the depths of aloneness and despair that God was awfully quiet. But, honestly, now I know better and I know that in moments like now when the pain and sadness is so great, when someone I love is hurting so badly, I have learned how it is that God is speaking so clearly, without reservation, and that the steps I or we are called to take are so very clearly outlined.

Prepare to hear the Good News, howbeit the challenging news, that comes to those of us who claim the Way of Jesus as our way.

There was once an ordinary woman who lived in a small town near Modesto , California. She was not famous, powerful or influential. I do not recall her name. I was told this true story about her by one of the most influential pastoral theologians of our day, Rita Nakashima Brock. Brock has a relatively new book in our library, titled, Reclaiming Paradise ; the folks who attended the Peace Conference last year brought it back with them, and I strongly encourage you to read it.

Rita recounts this story of this other woman that we simply refer to today as a good neighbor. She was friendly, good to her family, and liked by her neighbors. When the United States entered the Second World War, she supported our government, until California Supreme Court Justice Early Warren signed an order requiring all U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry to be interned in relocation camps.

Many of this woman's neighbors were Japanese Americans. She knew them and loved them as her friends. She went to Sacramento and lobbied the legislators. She wrote to the president to try to stop the camps and the government confiscation of property owned by Japanese persons. She could not move the powerful and famous. She was a nobody. Few others protested. As Brock reminds us every major religious organization in the country turned on their Japanese congregants except for the Disciples of Christ. They alone stood apart and protested the government's actions.

It was an ugly moment in human history on many counts. There were a lot of people joining the Psalmist in crying out of their depths to God. In the depths of her anguish this one woman did what she could. She bought all the Japanese-owned farms and homes in her town for a dollar each and watched her friends taken away. It was at the time a horrible protectionist program, which also became a huge land-grab opportunity. But when the camps were closed after the war, when those who survived had no homes left, when their lands were literally stolen by government edict, this woman's neighbors were lucky. She gave her neighbors back their homes and land so that they might live again, freely.

There is another group of ordinary women. A couple of decades ago now, they lived in Argentina under one of the most brutal military dictators. That government was taking its citizens and torturing and killing them. Many died without a trace. The dead were called the “Disappeared Ones.”

Everyone who was critical of the government, who chose to work with the nation's poor and suffering masses, or who associated with someone in those categories, was in danger. These ordinary women watched their daughters, sons, husbands, sisters, brothers and grandchildren disappear without a trace. The cries of utter despair to God were so numerous and it was silent roar of pain.

These women went to government offices demanding word concerning their loved ones. Nothing. They were demonized and labeled as crazy stupid old women. So they organized other women in their shared despair. For a long time no one would even give them a place to meet. In the whole country, finally one Catholic Church gave them space, the only religious organization to risk reprisals from the government. No one else would help.

With no information forthcoming, they decided to take to the streets. Wearing white kerchiefs in mourning and pictures of the lost ones in their families around their necks, on a Thursday afternoon at five o'clock, fifteen women walked a silent one-hour vigil around government buildings. No official protests against the government were allowed. But on this day the government left these crazy old women who cried their despair out to God, they left them alone in the streets. By then they were too visible for the government to just kill them. These crazy women felt they had nothing more to lose. They began to be called the mothers of their country, the conscience of their country. Their active presence got international attention to the massive human rights indignities in Argentina.

Women in France, New Zealand and Sweden began to put pressure on their own governments to censure Argentina. A delegation of similarly crazy women from Holland came and marched with them. Women from around the country sent money to help these women in Argentina buy a house and helped fund these crazy women to provide food and shelter for the dependents of the Disappeared Ones. These crazy women toppled a government and brought democracy to Argentina. God spoke in their cries of despair and moved the world peacefully in the way of Jesus, our Christ.

God is never silent; it's just that rarely are we, silent. It is, sadly, most often when we are the most lost and afraid and down and out that we are most open to hearing the sincere challenges of what God would have us be and do. None of us really want to find ourselves in those moments of deepest despair, but I would be so bold as to suggest that it is one of the most productive times in our lives as we find ourselves so very open to what God would have us be and do.

When we find ourselves in the deepest despair because of love, how natural it is to then turn our lives to act out the passion of love for other people and other causes. The courage of the woman in California who stood up for the Japanese while others were in great fear and distress, the mothers of Argentina, acted in great courage to love in the face of fear and hopelessness.

The courage to choose, to be a redemptive, liberating whole-making presence in a world gone mad with greed, fear and violence—that courage rests in our passions, our ability to love, not in authority and power, but in each other and those who suffer under structures that hurt them. For we must go where our hearts lead us. We must choose our people and our God on the basis of what we love, not on what we fear.

We have a job to do, having the courage to choose to follow where God is calling. In addition to finding that courage, we also need to know that we are chosen. God loves God's creation. We are loved by God and the spirit of that gracious, wholehearted love is the life-giving power of the church that names Jesus as the Christ.

We are loved, chosen, before we know it and we are born hungry to know it. Not all of us were born into loving families. About 1.7 million children between the ages of 3 and 17 are abused annually. Much of our population, one in five children, is born into poverty. One in every four daughters and one in every ten sons is molested. The visible incarnation of God's love in our lives may not be obvious. But God's love for us empowers us to search for those people who will love us back, love us into wholeness and well being, and who will work with us to defeat the many injustices and evil realities that surround us in our world.

At its best, this is what the church means, the place where we can find the love of God when our families or societies hurt us. As visible manifestations of the loving grace of God, our commitment to being chosen involves our responsibility and commitment to be God's loving hearts and hands in the world. This loving activity of the church, this incarnate love, empowers us to love passionately and to protest against all that hurts others. Knowing we are chosen, that we are loved by others, and being committed to that chosen-ness is what gives us the courage to choose to live boldly by our hearts and not by our fears.

Our ability to love and be loved, passionately, not sentimentally or nicely but with our whole being, empowers us to stand even when the powers that surround us want to squash back into compliance or even when we are in such despair because so much has already been lost. For in living by passionate commitment to the ways of Jesus of Nazareth we come to know that we have nothing to lose when we love with a whole heart, and both we and our world have so much to gain.

I could not save my sister from the loss of her husband. I cannot feed or house every homeless, hungry person in the world. I cannot stop, on my own, being part of a nation state that prefers to use force and intimidation rather than selfless acts of generosity to get what it wants in the world. Really opening our eyes, you and I, to the environmental degradation that pollution and continuing unchecked population growth is bringing upon our world is nearly overwhelming, to the point of despair and utter continued selfishness.

How can we, ordinary individuals that we are, do anything? The God of love asks us to see reality, but the God of love also gives us the courage. In seeing, we must never doubt as Margaret Mead says, “that a small group of committed, concerned people can change the world.” Indeed, it is all that ever has.

We are called to the courage to choose because we have already been chosen by the love of God.