Sermon for the
Twenty-fifth Sunday After Pentecost
Proper 28 C ~ November 18, 2007
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Beware that you are not led
astray; for many will come in my name and say, `I am he!' and, `The time is
near!' Do not go after them.
+In the Name
of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
hen the People of God came out of exile in Babylon many of them believed that the Age to
Come had arrived. What we call the Kingdom
of God or the Reign of
the Messiah. In fact, the Holy Prophet Isaiah even called Cyrus of Persia, messiah , the LORD’s anointed, because
he freed them to return to Zion.
They rebuilt the Temple,
and they expected the Reign of Perfect Peace and Justice to flower right away. When the Lord
turned again the captivity of Zion, then were we like
unto them that dream. But the messianic kingdom didn’t flower. The same old problems persisted. Greed and arrogance and the prosperity of the
unjust. The ecstasy of their liberation
turned into disappointment.
In a way, we Americans are like them. We came to this New World where we expected everything to be
different. Humanity would make a new
beginning. The sins and exploitation of the old world would not infect us. This kind of thinking is deeply
ingrained in our cultural DNA. We’re
different. We have a chance to be really just. We are humanity’s last, best hope. The trouble is, when it
doesn’t happen, and things go wrong, we become like the people Malachi
addressed: either we get cynical and doubt the justice of God or we look around
for someone to blame, some sinister enemy, someone who wants to subvert and spoil
our new paradise on earth ~ witches in Salem or Jewish bankers or Communists
in the State Department or Indians or women or gays or blacks ~ evildoers, in a word. If we could only root out those damned evildoers, the Kingdom would flourish. The subversives du jour are now the terrorists or Islamo-fascists,
who hate freedom and hate our way of life. Their animus is
inexplicable, mysterious. They want to destroy us and we have to defend
ourselves against them and anything goes. It is a war of the righteous against
evil. The scapegoat enemies change from generation to generation, but it is the
same war.
Last Friday was the 18th anniversary of some little-remembered
casualties in this terrible war ~ the martyrs of the Jesuit University of San Salvador. On the
night of November 16, 1989, uniformed soldiers invaded the Jesuit Central
American University in San Salvador
and murdered its Rector, Vice-Rector and four other priests, their housekeeper
and her daughter. Although spokesmen for Bush I denounced the atrocity, it was
done by his clients, Atlacatl Batalion alumni of Ft. Benning’s School of the Americas. It is pretty clear that
the Jesuits would not have died if the United
States had not supported the right-wing forces in El Salvador. My tax money paid for the bullets that blew
their brains out. No one was ever
prosecuted. (Or rather, the investigating commission identified the killers,
who were immediately pardoned by the legislature).
Now we count the arrogant happy; evildoers not only prosper, but when
they put God to the test they escape.
The temptation is to think that God has forgotten to be
just. Or to take matters into our own
hands and try to destroy the evildoers ourselves, by any means necessary. Each is a mistake. To doubt God’s justice is to abandon hope,
and ultimately to become like those we deplore: cynical, arrogant, and
prosperous. To try to root out the evildoers, however, is what leads straight
to the atrocity of November 16. The people who did that were, no doubt, convinced they were fighting for freedom and
that the priests and their cook and her daughter were agents of the devil.
In this dilemma, I find some direction in today’s readings.
First of all, don’t imagine that any particular project for improving the human
condition is the Kingdom
of God. Not the Return
from Exile, not the City on the Hill of the Puritans , not any of the noble
utopian communities that characterize American history, not the Russian
Revolution , and certainly not the neo-liberal Pax Americana which is no peace at all, and not even the just
struggles of the poor ~ not the labor movement or the co-op movement or he
civil rights movement. I may identify with them, I may go so far as to think
that they help to prepare the Way of the Lord, but I had better not mistake them for the Kingdom of God
itself.
Many will come in my name and say, `I am he!' and, `The time is near!'
Do not go after them.
On the other hand, don’t give up hope that God will act. That
is a promise:
The day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all
evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the LORD
of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who
revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.
Meanwhile, our job is to struggle for justice and to bear witness to the truth.
Witness ~ martyr, in Greek. The one thing we know for sure is that before that
Sun of Righteousness rises for us who, God help us, revere the Name
They will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to
synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors
because of [that] Name.
Neither
world-weary, hopeless cynicism on the one hand nor fanatical, self-righteous Puritanism
on the other, but fidelity of witness ~ the way of the martyrs ~ the confidence
that justice is coming. That truth ~ the ultimate reality of the Universe ~
cannot be separated from justice. One
who lived out this terrible promise in his own flesh, the glorious Neo-martyr Ignacio Ellacuria of San Salvador put it this way:
The struggle against injustice and the pursuit of truth cannot be
separated nor can one work for one independent of the other.
ALLELUIA
THE LORD IS GLORIOUS IN HIS SAINTS
COME, LET US ADORE HIM