LORD, WHEN DID WE SEE YOU...?

“LORD, WHEN DID WE SEE YOU….?”

            The Gospel lessons over the last three weeks have been the three parables from Matthew 25, which are the Waiting Bridesmaids, the Parable of the Talents, and the Parable of the Last Judgment. This Sunday’s lesson was the Parable of the Last Judgment, where the Beloved of Humanity gathers all the peoples of the earth at the end of time for the final judgment.  The story in Matthew 25:31-46 calls him the “Son of Man,” but the word for “man” in Greek is “anthropos,” from which we get our word “anthropology.”  So, it is easy to make “Man” to be “humanity.”  In this time when the toxicity of patriarchy is so clear to us all, I want to change the “Son” part to what it really means:  “the Beloved.”  So, it is the “Beloved of Humanity.” 

            It is important to note that these three parables are the last stories that Jesus tells the women and men disciples before he is betrayed, arrested and executed.  He begins with the parable of the waiting bridesmaids, who have to make a decision when the bridegroom is delayed.  Half of them stay awake and keep their lamps trimmed and burning, and we get the powerful gospel song “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burnin” from this story.   The next parable is the Talents, where the master goes on a long trip and distributes talents to his servants to use in his absence.  Two of the servants use their talents and make more, but the third is filled with fear and hides his talents.  When the master returns, he is delighted that the two have multiplied the talents, but he is greatly irritated that the third has hidden his talent.  This is a strange and quirky story, and it has so often been used as a defense of capitalism and making money. 

            In these final teachings, Jesus seems to know how the meaning of the Parable of the Talents will be twisted, so he uses the third parable to tighten it up and to make it clear what the talents are.  He talks about the Beloved of Humanity gathering everyone for a final judgment, drawing on an image from Daniel 7.  He uses a metaphor of goats and sheep for the peoples - putting the sheep on the right, and the goats go on the left.  One of the unanswered questions here is whether this is “stage right” or “house right” – it obviously will make a huge difference!  He tells the goats on the left to go into eternal punishment because they did not feed him or clothe him or offer him water or visit him or care for him when he was sick.  The great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr reminds that there is great surprise for everybody in this parable.  Those who are sent away are astonished, and they ask the Beloved: “When did we see you hungry or thirsty or naked and not tend to your needs?  Lord, if we had seen you in this condition, we surely would have served you!”  The Beloved replies that when they did not serve those in need, they were refusing to serve Him. 

            We should also note that those who are blessed in this story are just as surprised as the “unrighteous.”  Niebuhr calls this the “surprise of the righteous.”  They also ask the Beloved:  “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or in prison and serve You?  We don’t ever remember serving You.”  And, the Beloved replies:  “Whenever you served those in need, you were actually serving me.”  Here Jesus is emphasizing that what he wants are compassionate hearts and compassionate acts.  The talents that he is leaving for his servants to use are compassion and love and justice and mercy.    We should recall once again that this is the last teaching of Jesus to his disciples.  It is as if he is saying it one more time, one more time, one last time – these are the talents that I am leaving you, this is how you should live your lives.  If you remember nothing else, remember this last teaching:  just as God has been compassionate with you, so you should be with one another. 

            In these days of confusion and individualism and self-seeking, we would do well to remember the parable of the talents and this parable of the last judgment which tells us what those talents are:  feeding those who are hungry, giving water to those who are thirsty, clothing those who are naked, visiting those in prison, and caring for those who are sick.  This is who we are;  this is how we will experience Jesus.

CALL TO WORSHIP FOR NATIVE AMERICAN TRADITION

CALL TO WORSHIP FROM NATIVE AMERICAN TRADITION

(FACE EAST)

L:  From the East, the direction of the rising sun, we receive peace and light and wisdom and knowledge,

P:  We are grateful for these gifts, O God,

(FACE SOUTH)

L: From the South comes warmth, guidance, and the beginning and the end of life,

P:  We are grateful for these gifts, O God,

(FACE WEST)

L:  From the West comes the rain, purifying waters, to sustain all living things,

P:  We are grateful for these gifts, O God,

(FACE NORTH)

L:  From the North comes the cold and mighty wind, the white snows, giving us strength and endurance,

P:  We are grateful for these gifts, O God,

(FACE UPWARD)

L:  From the heavens we receive darkness and light, the air of Your breath, and messages from Your winged creatures,

P:  We are grateful for these gifts, O God,

(FACE DOWNWARD)

L:  From the earth we come, and to earth we will return,

P:  We are grateful for Your creation Mother Earth, O God,

ALL:  May we walk good paths, O God, living on this earth as sisters and brothers should, rejoicing in one another’s blessing, sympathizing in one another’s sorrows, and together with You renewing the face of the earth.  Amen.

In this call to worship which we used at Oakhurst, I am reminded of how far ahead Native Americans have been of Anglos and others in regard to environmental issues.   One of the early Anglo arguments to justify the taking of land and life from Native Americans was that they let the land lie fallow and refused to develop it.   The rapacious and unchecked capitalist spirit ran over everything, including the people who lived on the land.  That spirit obviously continues and seeks to strengthen its destructive ways.   Developers in metro Atlanta destroy 50 acres of trees a day in our stunning destruction of the earth in order to get money.   As we watch the environment make a huge pivot in response to our Western-driven desire for more and more stuff, we can hear the echoes and the current calls for re-orientation and change in Native American life.  There is little doubt, except among those like Roy Moore and his ilk, that unless we change and re-orient our relationship to the earth and the environment, we will all choke and drink and eat and smash ourselves to death.   Many scientists and educated observers believe that it may be too late already.  Would that we had listened, or even now would listen, to a different cultural point of view!  No romantic, guilt-driven acknowledgment of Native American life, but rather a sense of a life-saving orientation toward humanity and toward the earth and its creatures.

            In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” written in 1785, Thomas Jefferson ruminates on whether other cultures really have equal humanity to that of Anglos.  Not surprisingly, he does not think so.  He is fairly certain that those of African descent will never be human beings equal to Anglos, but he wonders a bit about the equality of Native Americans.  He does not believe that those who were here when the Europeans came are currently equal to the Anglos, but he opines that he does not yet have enough scientific evidence either way to say whether they ever would be.  That sense of entitlement, that sense of the ownership of equality has plagued all of us for so many centuries in the colonizing of peoples and lands by Europeans and in the struggles of the American experiment.  Perhaps it is time to recognize that if there is some group who is not “equal,” it is the Anglos, it is those who created “race” and used that idea to do all sorts of terrible things to those who were deemed outside of the circle of humanity.

So, let us all consider these proverbs from the Native American tradition, as we gather for Thanksgiving this week.

“When all the trees have been cut down,
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money.”
—Cree Prophecy

“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was
loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our
Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.”

FINDING MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE

“FINDING MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE”

            There is a legend in Decatur where I live that there was a loose boundary at the Dekalb County courthouse square between the Cherokee and Creek Indian tribes.  There would obviously be skirmishes around those boundary lines, but it was also a place where diplomatic, economic, and political exchanges could be made.  In this Decatur square is also a monument (erected in 1908) to the Confederacy, which both the Decatur City Commission and the Dekalb County Commission have now voted to remove.  Also in this same Decatur square is a “cannon” monument, a “relic of the Indian Wars of 1836,” erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1906.  It celebrates the defeat of the Creek Indians and the beginning of the Creek Trail of Tears, driving them out of Georgia and Alabama.

            I’m thinking about these things as I contemplate Native American Heritage Month now in progress.  As a boy growing up in the segregated South, I drank the Kool-Aid on many issues, and the history of Anglos and Native Americans was one of those issues.   Watching double feature westerns at the movies on Saturday afternoons in the segregated movie house as a boy in Helena, Arkansas,  I was frightened to the depths of my soul by the Indians of the West.  They were portrayed as being so savage that I could not imagine why any white person would ever go West, and I could not understand how any white person ever survived their savagery.   Those portrayals were part of a larger story that were the narrative of the manifest destiny of Anglos to take the land.  

            As Robert Frost put it in his poem “The Gift Outright,”  which he recited at the inauguration of John Kennedy as President in 1961: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”   The “our” in this poem are not Native Americans but Anglo-Americans.  In my young adult years I discovered this poem, and I loved it because of its connection between life and land, of its connection to the idea of the “city on a hill” image from John Winthrop’s sermon in 1630 as the English approached Massachusetts on the ship Arbella. Then I encountered Dee Brown’s book “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West.”  My eyes began to be opened on yet another front to discover the powerful racism that I had learned (and had believed) from good white people.  It was yet one more part of a huge turning in my soul, in which I became aware of my captivity to the power of the prince of the air, to use the powerful metaphor from Ephesians 2:2.

            Wounded Knee was the site of a slaughter of Sioux people by Anglo troops in South Dakota in December, 1890.  It was partly in response to the “Ghost Dance” movement that was sweeping through the Native American tribes of the West.   One of the principal beliefs was that Christ had returned as a Native American and that the end times were near, with Native Americans finally receiving justice from God.   This movement frightened Anglos on many levels, but some Anglo agents advised a cautious approach.  Yet in our usual “shoot first, ask questions later,” approach in both domestic and foreign policy (sound familiar today?), Sioux leaders were rounded up, jailed, and many were lynched.  The final blow was a slaughter of Sioux people at Wounded Knee, including a few men but mostly women and children, and the killing was during the Christmas season in 1890.

             It is reminiscent of the response of King Herod to another messianic vision in Matthew 2.  When Herod hears that a new leader of the Jewish people may have been born in Bethlehem, his response is not caution.  He sends the soldiers to Bethlehem to kill the baby, and while a vision to the baby’s father Joseph enables the baby Jesus to escape as a refugee to Egypt, all the other baby boys in Bethlehem are killed by Herod’s soldiers.  Matthew’s Gospel responds with this quote from the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children…”  The killing at Wounded Knee in the season of this baby Jesus resonates with the same lamentation.

            So, I’ve had to reconsider the narrative of my life and of our life together.   In my formative years,  I severely misunderstood the truth of American history.  It turns out that the savages of the West were not the Native Americans but my Anglo ancestors.  In our consideration of Native American Heritage Month, we must all start here.  More next time, but I’ll close with a quote from Chief Seattle that must be the beginning point, as he addressed Anglos in the area of Washington now named for him:  “We may be brothers {and sisters} after all.”  It turns out that we are, and there we must begin.

ALL SAINTS IN THE LAND OF AFFLUENZA

“ALL SAINTS IN THE LAND OF AFFLUENZA”

            As we pass through All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day, I give thanks for all those saints who have nurtured and challenged me and loved me.  If you have not already done so, I hope that you will take time to name and give thanks for the saints in your life.  Buddy and Anne Hughes became part of Oakhurst Presbyterian when they retired from the PCUSA in the 1990’s, with their most recent position being in Nicaragua.  They quickly became our teachers in the land of “affluenza.”  

            In one of his first sermons at Oakhurst entitled “Affluenza,” Buddy told a story about taking a walk with his young granddaughter in a comfortable, white Decatur neighborhood.  As they were walking, the city garbage collectors were going through the neighborhood doing their work.  As they passed Buddy and his granddaughter, Buddy said “hello” to the man collecting the garbage and thanked him for his work.  After they passed the collectors, his young granddaughter asked him:  “Granddaddy, did you know that man?”  When Buddy said “No,” she admonished him:  “Grandaddy, you should never speak to strangers.”  While he understood her perspective on one level,  he was saddened by her comments, because it meant that the sense of community was broken.  He also noted that it was symptomatic of what he and Anne had discovered had happened in America in their absence:  we had come down with a disease that Buddy called “affluenza.”  Buddy defined it as the power of materialism to overtake us and make us think that we did not need one another.

            We give thanks that Anne is still with us, but Buddy died in 2010.   The Oakhurst sanctuary was filled for his memorial service, and we noted in both joy and sadness the powerful love that Buddy had shared with so many of us.   I recalled a Jewish legend that fit in with my Calvinist sense of total depravity.  Along the lines of Abraham’s argument with God over Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18, the legend indicated that most of us were fitfully captured by the power of sinfulness. Because of this, God’s wrath was great that we had messed up Her creation so much.   Yet, the legend indicates that God lets the world survive because there are forty “saints” whose lives reflect the glory, love, and justice of God.   I noted on that day that someone would have to step up, because with Buddy’s passing, we had just dropped to 39 saints.

            Buddy’s emphasis on “affluenza” reminded me of the idolatrous belief that we have in America in the power of materialism to make us somebody.  It causes us to use people as slaves and to pollute the air and water and land – we are driven by a desire for “stuff.”  It makes us believe that we do not need one another, that indeed we are enemies to one another because we are competing for the same stuff, the stuff that we believe will give our lives meaning.  The drive for less taxes in the new proposal in Congress reflects this belief – the more money we have, the less we will need the community and one another. 

            It is this belief that made us easy targets for a narcissist like Donald Trump.  His belief in his own power and ability has gathered a tribe around him, and we have seen the power of that tribal belief.  He wants to reign over the USA, and our institutions will be sorely tested during his presidency.  He is “affluenza” to the nth degree,” and the question for us is whether we can regroup and build an authentic community based on the values of equity and justice and love.  Right now the tribal view of exclusion, revenge, and wrath seems to be prevailing.  We’ll need more folk to step up like Buddy and Anne and many other saints.  Will we join the saints in marching in?