The Gift of Mission

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Sermon March 18, 2012

Fourth Sunday in Lent

Isaiah 61:1-4; Matthew 21:12-17

In the year 1999, on the cusp of a new millennium, in the Season of Lent, churches in the United Kingdom embraced an advertising campaign designed to encourage lapsed churchgoers to return to the pews for Easter Sunday. They wanted a campaign that would grab the attention of a fickle public, that would shake them out of their religious complacency and inspire them to a renewed commitment to the faith of their forebears.

Church leaders worked with an organization called the “Churches Advertising Network” to develop a marketing strategy. They settled on a poster for their outreach. An outline of Jesus was inked in black on a deep orange-red background. It was adapted from a famous photo of Che Guevara, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary who was a leading figure in the Cuban revolution and other Latin American liberation movements.

The poster was plastered over billboards and bus stops and subway stations throughout the British nation. And although we did not have Facebook or Twitter or Youtube at the time, the poster “went viral” on the internet in this country, as well.

“Meek. Mild. As If,” the poster says, under the picture. “Discover the real Jesus.”

Did it get your attention?

There was backlash, as you would imagine. It was “grossly sacrilegious,” one commentator declared. And in the Season of Lent, in the year 1999, on the cusp of a new millennium, the debate raged on throughout the UK over what was and was not an “appropriate” image for the “real” Jesus.

Church leaders and the campaign creators defended the poster. “Jesus was not crucified for being meek and mild,” they said. He challenged authority, they said. He was a revolutionary figure, they said. Even more revolutionary than Che Guevara, they said.

And the controversy raged on.

As much as they defended the poster, church leaders and the campaign creators were quick to point out that the revolution of Jesus was purely non-violent. He did not, in the end, take up arms against his oppressor, even though others in his time did. And even though others in his time wanted him to. But as non-violent as Jesus was, they insisted, the real Jesus really was anything but “meek and mild.”

Our Scriptures say the same thing.

Our Call to Worship this morning shares the message of Jesus in the first sermon he ever preached. You could, I would argue, call it his “mission statement.” “The Spirit of our God is upon me,” Jesus says, “because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of our God’s favor.”

And of course Jesus is preaching from the same Scripture that is our Old Testament reading. It is Isaiah’s prophetic witness from the 61^st chapter, a text in which Isaiah inspires the people of God to rebuild their Jerusalem temple and indeed their entire nation after a period of crushing exile in Babylon. But, Isaiah cautions them, as much as God is urging you to rebuild, make sure you do so in a way that honors God’s covenant with “the least of these” in your community. Make sure you comfort those who mourn. Make sure you display the glory of your God. Make sure the poor and captive and infirm and oppressed are ever before you as your barometer of social justice.

And of course this Scripture is most emphatically not fulfilled. 500 years after Isaiah’s proclamation, when Jesus comes to preach his very first sermon on Isaiah’s text, the Jerusalem temple has been restored as Isaiah has said it should be, but it has been on the backs of the poorest in the land. With human bodies literally built into its walls because Herod the Great’s timeline refused to yield to their fundamental need to rest and he ordered the workers to just keep building around those ones who had fallen behind.

500 years after Isaiah’s proclamation, when Jesus comes to preach his very first sermon on Isaiah’s text, the Jerusalem temple has indeed been restored as Isaiah said it should be, but the elite temple hierarchy is as corrupt as ever, and they are deluding themselves into believing they are keeping their people’s identity alive through their collaboration with the imperial violence of the Roman Empire. 500 years after Isaiah’s proclamation, the temple has been restored, but the very rules and regulations of that temple keep the poor and the captive and those with physical ailments and those who are oppressed from entering through the temple gates. The very people who serve as the barometer of social justice in the kingdom of God are kept from entering the temple of God. And remember that they believed God’s physical presence literally resided in that temple. And so they were literally kept from God.

500 years after Isaiah’s proclamation, Jesus is furious. “Today this Scripture from Isaiah is been fulfilled in your hearing!” he declares. Finally! And then he thrusts himself into the heart of that same temple in our Gospel lesson from Matthew, where he over-throws the tables of the money-changers and drives out the religious pilgrims who have bought into the system of economic exploitation that thrives at the Temple and condemns the collaboration between the elite religious establishment and the Roman imperial domination that controls every aspect of their lives.

What Jesus is doing in our Scripture lessons for today is what those who study social justice movements call “direct, non-violent action to disrupt a corrupt political and economic system.” And it works. And it leads directly to the crucifixion. Which is why the British advertising campaign for Easter 1999 adopted the Jesus-as-Che-Guevara-poster. Which is why Christians who take the message of the gospel as seriously as we take its messenger are still at risk when we experience the Spirit of our God upon us to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.

It is far easier to buy into our popular Western religious imagination that still wants to sanitize who Jesus was and what he said and how he said it. To keep Jesus “meek and mild.”

But . . .

The Madison Square mission clearly states that we are called “to serve actively and creatively as an agent of love, reconciliation, peace, and justice in the community and in the world.” And the gospel message clearly states that we must bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.

And so we must.

The good news for Madison Square is that, as far as I can tell, this congregation already is doing just that. Witness the forty people gathered at City Hall last Wednesday to call upon our elected officials to endorse a Department of Peace at the federal level of government and the ten or more others who told me you were gathering with us in spirit even though you were not able to gather in person. 

Our advertising campaign in the season of Lent has been the bright blue t-shirt and radiant smile adorning our collective “Body of Christ” as we rallied in the heart of our own small San Antonio temple. And no, we didn’t turn over any tables or call the City Hall a “den of robbers.” We simply collected our voices together in a communal lament of the $508 billion dollar annual price tag of violence in our society. $508 billion dollars spent on incarceration, hospitalization, draining our judicial system, and burdening our police force in response to violence. And we asked our City Council members to endorse, instead, an investment in non-violent methods of conflict resolution.

Our advertising campaign in the season of Lent has been the prayers for peace and justice that permeate our worship every Sunday and the prayerful action that carries us from this sanctuary into the world at war with itself, as we live out our mission “to serve actively and creatively as an agent of love, reconciliation, peace, and justice in the community and in the world.”

Of course this was one Wednesday night witness with one really cool bright blue t-shirt is but the tip of the iceberg. But make no mistake. Every witness matters, every act of courage strengthens the hearts of those who fear to speak, every movement toward a more just and equitable society leads us further toward the peace that passes understanding. And with God, no good effort is wasted.

We do not have any idea—yet—what the results of our peace-making, justice-seeking, Jesus-inspiring Lenten advertising campaign will be. But rest assured there will be results beyond anything we can imagine. And rest assured that the peace-making, justice-seeking, Jesus-inspiring Lenten meditation on the Madison Square mission is shaping us in ways we can are only beginning to see bear fruit.

And it will lead to resurrection joy in the end. I promise you. It will.

In the meantime we are here, a little more than midway through the Season of Lent 2012, meditating on a Madison Square mission that just might grab the attention of a fickle public. And shake them—and us!—out of our religious complacency. And inspire us to a renewed commitment to the faith of our forebears. Which includes “to serving actively and creatively as an agent of love, reconciliation, peace, and justice in the community and in the world.” With an advertising campaign in a deep blue t-shirt that says, “Ask me about a Department of Peace.” And through our witness it will be so. Amen.

The Gift of Community

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Sermon March 11, 2012

Third Sunday in Lent

Acts 4:32-35; 5:12-16

It is amazing to me what happens to the community after the crucifixion. And no I am not talking about the resurrection just yet. (Although to be fair the resurrection is truly amazing.)

I am talking about the fact that a group of people who left everything to follow a leader who captured their imagination, only to have that leader tortured before their very eyes in an effort to crush their movement, by all rights should be licking their wounds and going back to Galilee and cloistering themselves in protective shelter from the forces of crucifixion that may very well come after them next.

They are not.

Instead they keep on going. They pool their resources together to make sure everyone has what they need. They preach and they teach and they heal all who would cross their path. Right there in Solomon’s Portico in the heart of the same Jerusalem temple where Jesus overthrew the tables of the money changers just a few weeks before our Scripture lesson from Acts.

As much as we look to Jesus as the author and founder of our faith—and by all means we must look to Jesus as the author and founder of our faith—the truth is that none of us would be sitting here today in this sanctuary of hope if those first century followers of Christ had given up when it got hard. But they keep on going, ministering to the spiritual, emotional, and physical needs of their community, and any others in need of such ministry. Which is, of course our Lenten Meditation on the Madison Square mission on this third Sunday halfway through the season of reflection and renewal. Which is, of course, the part of our mission that mostly happens every day without much fanfare but with dignity and courage and strength and forbearance as we see Christ in one another and bear one another’s burdens and share one another’s joys.

We are, in this mission—as the author of Acts described the first century disciples of Christ, of Acts puts it—to be “of one mind.” Sharing everything in radical community that we trust with our vulnerable spirits, emotions, minds, and bodies. Which may sound incredibly idealistic, of course. And profoundly untrue if you consider that while I do ask you to tithe, the Apostle Peter required his community to sell all their property and give it to the church! And of course we are most emphatically not always in agreement about what we should do and how we should do it. But if you read further in the Book of Acts, neither were they, even though they say they are “of one mind.”

Their Christian community—and ours, I would argue—is something like the life of the four-year-old twin girls named Krista and Tatiana Hogan profiled in The New York Magazine last May. They are joined at the head. Literally “one mind.” Their skulls fused together, sharing what their neurosurgeon calls a “thalamic bridge” that links the sensory input of each one’s brain to the other’s.

In a very real sense Krista and Tatiana “share everything” with one another. As infants, one of the girls would receive a pacifier for her crying, and the other girl would be soothed along with her, not needing her own pacifier. When one of the girls is pricked for a blood test, the other starts to cry, as if she can feel the pain. When the more actively energetic Krista decides to power-slurp her juice, Tatiana puts her hand below her sternum and cries out, “Whoa!” as if she feels the sensation of her sister’s drinking. And Tatiana, who does not like ketchup, will try to scrape the condiment off her tongue when Krista is the one who is actually eating it. They are literally weeping when the other weeps, rejoicing when the other rejoices, anxious when the other is anxious, and calm when the other is calm. Which is what life in the community of Christ is all about.

And they look out for each other. In the middle of the night if Krista is thirsty, Tatiana will walk them both over to a sippy-cup, pick it up, and hand it to Krista, who then drinks from it before they crawl back into bed together. As if Tatiana feels Krista’s thirst as her own and responds. As if Krista’s drink is able to soothe Tatiana’s thirst, as well as her own. Which is what our table of sustenance is all about, is it not?

Okay, so that’s them. What about us?

As miraculous as it is, the union of thought and feeling between Tatiana and Krista is but the most extreme iteration of ordinary human connection. For the past twenty years scientists who study brain activity have noted some pretty extreme examples of human empathy that come close to the experience of Krista and Tatiana. Scientists knew that a brain scan of a person experiencing a physically recognizable pain or joy will fire certain neurons in that person’s brain. But what they did not know until recently is that a brain scan of a person who is simply observing the person experiencing pain or joy will often fire similar neurons!

So, for example, is someone is sticking Mark Marty with a pin while he is playing a particularly difficult piece of organ music certain neurons will fire in his brain to register the pain. And every one of us watching will have the same neurons firing in our brains. Meaning that the phrase, “I feel your pain,” is literally true in ways we are only just beginning to understand biologically. We really are of one mind and body and spirit. In ministering to the needs of one person we really are ministering to the needs of the world. Which is why Jesus goes after the one lost sheep as a way of saving the entire flock. Which is why the simple act of walking with someone through their pain—and not even, as far as you can tell, actually doing anything about it—can be the greatest ministry you can possibly offer.

This is, I believe, what is going on with the first century disciples in the Book of Acts as they figure out a way to make a way out of no way when Jesus is gone and they keep on going, ministering in his name to the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical needs of their community, and any others in need of such ministry. Because they are “one” with one another and with God they have become so fully present in one another’s minds that they literally feel each other’s joys and concerns, that they literally think one another’s thoughts and perceive one another’s visions, that they literally calm one another down and heal one another just by their physical presence with one another. Even if that physical presence is no more than “Peter’s shadow.” They share a “thalamic bridge” of grace and insight into one another’s lives that borders on the miraculous, allowing them to minister to the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical needs of their community, and any others in need of such ministry.

And we do, too.

We who are literally joined in one mind to our sisters and brothers in this community of faith cannot help but get up in the middle of the night to grab the sippy cup for our thirsty sister. We cannot help but soothe our crying brother simply by offering a calming companioning presence. We cannot help but lift one another out of despair with the hope and the love we feel for one another can literally. Even when we don’t like the taste of the ketchup our sister decided to indulge!

And we who are literally joined in one mind to our sisters and brothers in this community of faith cannot help but cast a wide and comforting and healing shadow across the entire city of San Antonio in our mission to minister to the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical needs of anyone in need of such ministry. Because “the least of these” Christ calls us to serve are not just Christ himself. They are also our “self.” And by God’s grace we really are “Christ to our neighbor of every nation and race.” Just by being an open and welcoming community of faith bearing witness to the universal and unconditional love of God.

But you already know that. You already alleviate hunger by participating in the CROP walk. You already donate time and money and supplies to Haven for Hope and Christian Assistance Ministries and Habitat for Humanity. You already advocate for peace and pray for peace and practice peace with God and one another.

So let me just remind you of what you already know. And encourage you when it is hard and you’d rather go back to Galilee in a protective cloister that we really are already truly “one” with one another. And we already really truly are already “one” with the resurrected Christ. And there really is truly nothing that can separate any one of us from the love of God. Which is why we joyfully minister to the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical needs of this community, and any others in need of such ministry.

It is already so. May it continue to be.

Amen.

The Gift of Love

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

1 Corinthians 13:4-8

 

“Who do you love?” “Tell me who you love.” These were the words that came out of my mouth as I tried to minister with Mary in her hospital room, as she was crying out in pain in the middle of the night, when nothing else would calm her down.

“Who do you love?”

I was a seminarian, spending the summer as a hospital chaplain in an internship program called Clinical Pastoral Education. And I was terrified. It felt like “ministry training boot camp.” It was one of those situations where we  parachuted into a completely foreign land with no maps and no radios, relying on instinct and prayer and a command to go wherever we were called and to figure out whatever we were supposed to do only after we had already arrived.

On that night early on in the summer, the call came at three in the morning. “We can’t calm her down,” the nurses said when I arrived. Mary—their patient—was writhing in pain, crying out for her children, and just plain hurting. The nurses had other patients to attend. They had given her all the pain medication they could, they had soothed her wounds as best they could, they had done everything they knew how to do. So they called me. And I, of course, was blonde and clueless.

I took her hand. I asked her what had happened. She said she had been in a car accident. That her son had been with her. That he had been hurt but not killed.

And then silence and more cluelessness on my end. More writhing and crying on her end. So I asked her where she hurt, and she told me. And it occurred to me that chaplains are supposed to offer prayer, so I began to pray aloud for each of those places in Mary that hurt. Hoping the prayer would calm her down.

It did not.

Mary still writhed in pain, she still cried out in anger and agony. And I began to panic.

It was then, in my moment of despair, that the words just came out of my mouth. “Who do you love, Mary? Tell me who you love.” And there was no way these were my words because my ability to think had gone out the window. They were God’s words through me. And as I heard them reverberate through my ears I knew they were exactly the right words because they were God’s words. And I said, “tell me who you love, Mary. Tell me who you love.”

Her response was immediate. “I love my children,” she said. And you could tell by the smile that just barely graced her face that she was imagining their faces in her mind’s eye.

“Tell me about your children,” I said, with relief. And Mary spent the next twenty minutes describing their young lives in vivid detail. What they looked like, what they ate, where they would go hiking together in the West Virginia hills. What she wanted to say to them now that they were separated by her accident.

As she talked about the ones she loved her breathing slowed. Her jaw unclenched. Her eyes drooped. And I was relieved. Love had worked when nothing else had. And as I rested her hand back down on the hospital bed and prepared to leave the bedside of a woman who was clearly at peace, she whispered to me, “thank you. I love you, too.”

If salvation has anything to do with healing—which I keep on insisting that it does—you could say the love of God saved Mary in that hour of agony. And if salvation has anything to do with grace in the midst of panic—which I keep on insisting that it does—you could say the love of God saved me, as her fumbling minister. And if salvation has anything to do with a mother wanting desperately to care for her children—which I keep on insisting that it does—you could say the parental love of God that suffers right along with us is imagining every one of our faces in her mind’s eye. What we look like, what we like to eat, what he wants to say to us when he feels so very far removed from us.

If salvation has anything do to with healing and grace and parenting, we can understand why the apostle Paul, himself will insist that while faith, hope, and love are all important, “the greatest of these is love.”

Love is patient, Paul says. Love is kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. It simply wants to heal. It simply wants to love. It simply wants us “to bear witness” to that love.

It is this part of the Madison Square mission statement, “to bear witness, in both word and in deed, to the universal and unconditional love of God as made known through Jesus of Nazareth” that is before us for reflection on this second Sunday in Lent. And it is this part of the Madison Square mission statement that is, in the end, perhaps the most difficult to define. As the old adage goes, you just know it when you see it. You just know it when you experience it. You just know it when you live it. Like in that hospital room with Mary.

Because the truth is that the universal and unconditional love of God is already here, just like it was with Mary and her children. We just have to be reminded of it. We just have to open our hands to receive it . . . and extend it. And I would suggest that we are doing this very thing right now, this morning, as we bear witness to the love of God in the ministry of care and compassion extended by one of our members—Norma Gay—to another one of our members—Nelda Muelker—in the waning years of her life.

Over a decade ago, Nelda was involved in a debilitating accident that left her in a coma for three months. She was eventually transferred to a nursing home, where Norma became her number one visitor and companion these many years. Norma’s witness to the love of God in Nelda’s life became a steady stream of support in a time of suffering and loneliness. To the point that Nelda named Norma as the point of contact for the nursing home upon her death.

Norma has asked that we remember Nelda in our worship today, which I want to do now and also in a few moments in our liturgy for communion. I, of course, did not know Nelda, so I have asked those of you who did know her to share how you remember her. And the smiles on your faces told me all I needed to know. You loved her. And she loved you.

Nelda was truly a beloved child of God. She was a character! She was the church’s “character.” She was a beloved personality who touched your lives in ways you didn’t even realize until she was gone. She took massive notes during worship, and she sat where she wanted to sit, and she didn’t care if it was “your” spot because there are no “reserved” seats in this “open and welcoming” congregation! And she was just plain going to sit where God wanted her to sit! And she loved this church. And you loved her.

And she loved Christmas Eve at this church. And she loved singing “Silent Night” and lighting a candle of hope in the darkness. And she didn’t care one bit when the light shining in the darkness set her scarf on fire, she just kept right on singing “all is calm and all is (most assuredly) bright”! And you loved her. And she loved you. And Norma loved her on your behalf, bearing witness in word and in deed to the universal and unconditional love of God. Until the very end.

And if salvation has anything to do with feasting at the table of grace forevermore—which I keep on insisting that it does—you could say the love of God is saving all of us in this hour as we commune with Nelda Muelker at this table of sustenance, and with all of the saints from ages past and yet to come. And as we invite everyone who is wounded and suffering or just plain lonely to join us for a meal of grace and peace where all are finally loved with the universal and unconditional love of God and where all are finally fed forever with the bread of life and the cup of saving love.

“Who do you love?” God said—through me—to Mary, in that space of deepest pain and suffering. “Who do you love?” God said to Norma, in responding to Nelda lo these many years. “Who do you love?” we may even ask of God. And of course the answer is, “all of you . . . my children.” “And if the Lord puts someone in your path,” Norma says, “You’re derelict if you don’t take care of them.” Which is what our Madison Square mission is all about, in the end.

And we are, every one of us, just parachuting in to this foreign planet we are on. Going wherever we are called to go and help whomever God puts in our path. And the love of God is already there, just waiting to be revealed.

I pray it may be so.

Amen.