There is
much hand wringing in Churches around the county
about whether we are going to survive.
Actually, in
Nevada we are doing pretty well these days.
But the
Church, as a whole, is aging and declining.
As
Episcopalians we are part of something larger;
so we have to be concerned about
whether there will
continue to be something larger we
can be part of.
So let me
name the problem with the Church.
The number
one threat to the Christian faith is triviality.
If we are
going to survive as a force in this world,
we have to make a difference in this
world.
If we don’t
make a difference, we don’t matter.
If people outside our walls don’t see us making
a difference,
they won’t bother to have a
relationship with us.
They won’t
even think about joining us.
My question
then is: are we making a difference;
or does the Church divert our
God-given lives
into trivialities.?
We Church
folks are inclined to fret
about the trivial and miss the important.
It often
seems that what we call Christian practice
makes our hearts and minds small
and our actions irrelevant to our communities.
We fight
over little things and pay no attention to issues
that affect each other’s lives and
the lives of our neighbors
in the most serious
ways.
In Lent, we
intensify our Christian practice,
which might be a good thing,
or it might be even more intensely
trivial and irrelevant.
We give up
candy or Facebook or doughnuts for 40 days.
Then we
resume our old habits, having transformed
neither our souls nor our society.
The Kingdom
of God does not break in when we are trivial.
Think back
to our lesson from Ash Wednesday.
Isaiah lists
the religious practices, the self-mortifications,
of good religious folks in that day
– the equivalent of giving up
candy or coffee for Lent and God
says it’s all trivial.
God says,
“On the day of your fasting . . . you
exploit your workers.
Your fasting ends in quarrelling and
strife. . .
Is this what you call a fast? . . .
.
Is this not the fast I have chosen:
to loose the chains of
injustice
and untie the cords of
the yoke,
to set the oppressed
free. . . .?”
Biblical
Christianity is clear as a cloudless sky
that we please God by freeing the
oppressed,
not by refraining temporarily from
candy and Facebook.
Right now,
this week, we are working to set children free
from human trafficking;
and to set adults free from being
held against their will
in the sex trade by force
and violence.
Eight out of
nine Episcopal Churches in the Las Vegas Valley
have joined in that fight for
freedom.
Churches from Sparks to Fallon will be in Carson City
this week to testify for the Human Trafficking Bill.
Some of us are riding through the night from Vegas to carson
on a Freedom Bus as a witness against modern slavery.
I believe I
am speaking for God on this one.
I am
positive I have the Bible with me.
If you want
to keep a Holy Lent,
you don’t need to give up your
favorite TV show.
You need to
go to the Nevada Legislature web site and send e mails
to Senator Joe Hardy and Assemblyman
James Ohrenchall
urging them to put a
stop to human trafficking in Nevada.
I hope that
much Lenten practice will come easy.
The next
part may come harder.
We may or
may not like what the Bible has to say.
But if we’re
Christians, we can’t ignore it.
We can’t
pretend it isn’t there.
I call
myself a Christian
and I’ve been preaching Lent I sermons for over 20 years.
The
lectionary hasn’t changed.
But I never
noticed the Old Testament lesson until this year.
There it is
– in black and white -- another lesson about sacrifice to God.
The first
thing the Jews were to do was remember
that they had once been aliens.
When they
were aliens in Egypt, they had been treated badly
by Pharaoh and the taskmasters.
But God had
set them free.
Their offering was a sacrifice of praise and
thanksgiving
for their freedom.
They were to
give back some of the wealth God had bestowed on them.
Then comes
the important sentence:
“Together with the Levites and the
aliens who reside among you,
you shall celebrate with all the
bounty the Lord has given to you.”
“Together
with the aliens who reside among you,
you are to celebrate.”
Our religion
begins in the experience of aliens
who travelled into a strange land
where they worked hard
and were kept poor.
But God
heard their cry and set them free.
Got gave
them a land of their own,
but he expected them to treat the
aliens there
differently than they had been
treated in Egypt.
Lent begins
in a Jewish tradition of sacrifice
that focused on extending
hospitality to people
from other lands, the
non-Jews, non-citizens.
That ritual
act of hospitality expressed a
fundamental rule
of Jewish morality.
Leviticus
19: 33-34 commands:
“If an alien lives among you, do not
mistreat him.
(He) must be treated as one of your
native-born.
Love him as yourself,
for you were aliens in Egypt.”
The well
known golden rule “Love your neighbor as yourself,”
comes from an older rule, “Love the
alien as yourself.”
If we put
these two texts together,
they teach us how to observe a Holy
Lent
in this state of Nevada in 2013.
First,
“untie the cords of the yoke to set the oppressed free.”
Second,
extend hospitality to the alien,
treat the alien as the native born.
So the first
thing modern Nevadans can do
is give up human trafficking for
Lent.
Give up
slavery for Lent and don’t resume it in Easter.
The second
thing is to extend hospitality to our brothers and sisters
from across the border.
I don’t
know how the politics of either one of
those things will play out.
I don’t know
how they should play out in the details.
But the sprit
in which Christians approach
sexually trafficked women and
children
is clear as a cloudless sky.
The Bible
sets it out in black and white.
We are to
set them free.
The spirit
in which Christians greet immigrants
is clear as a cloudless sky.
We extend
hospitality. -- the kind of hospitality to outsiders
that makes them
insiders.
These things
are not trivial.
They matter.
They are as
important as freedom, justice, and mercy.
Some of us
may not like what I am saying.
We may need
to argue about these things.
If so, at
least we will be arguing about things that matter.
We will be
having a conversation the world outside our walls
will find worthy of listening to.
But suppose
we don’t just argue.
Suppose we
don’t just talk.
Suppose we
take action.
What happens
then?
Isaiah
answers:
“If you do away with the yoke of
oppression,
. . . and satisfy the
needs of the oppressed,
then your light will
rise in the darkness,
and your night will
become like the noonday.
You will be like a well-watered
garden,
like a spring whose
waters never fail.”
