03/11/01 "Jerusalem, Jerusalem!" 01/07

Scripture: Genesis 15:1-12; 31-35

Luke 13: 31-35

" Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you that kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you refused! So be it! Your house is forsaken. And I tell you, you will not see me until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’ "

Luke 13: 34-35

There were two more school shootings last week, numbers 6 and 7 in the past 24 months, which makes one shooting every 3.4 months. The causes of this violence are predictably complex, from the immaturity of the prefrontal lobe of the brain in 15 year olds to the unendurable pain of being picked on, bullied and ridiculed, to the examples in the cultural media of how to deal with such frustrations, by killing one’s tormentors. Some people shrug off these events as statistically insignificant, others read them as signs of deep trouble in our culture. In any case they compel us to question our society and culture, and that is a good thing to do even at the best of times, without such ugly events to lend urgency.

Our denomination, the UCC, asks us to observe this Sunday as Health and Welfare Sunday, and they sent me a lot of material in the mail to help our observance. Let us therefore agree to focus on the challenges of public welfare, health, and social justice and look at the information they want us to see. Before we begin, however, I want to assure you that I do not recite these facts in an accusatory mood. It is hard to hear bad news, and harder if the bearer implies subtly or explicitly that we are responsible for it in a special way. I make no such assumption or accusation; indeed, I think we are the best hope for meeting these challenges and so invite you to an exercise in reality by which we shake off any complacency and let God energize us again to meet the challenge.

The Local Church Ministries Office of the UCC wants us to remember the slave ship Amistad and commit again to the vision of justice and compassion exemplified by the First Church of Christ, Congregational, in Farmington Connecticut, which in 1841 sheltered the black slaves who escaped on that ship, and eventually raised the money to enable them to return to their homes in Sierra Leone, West Africa. This is an inspiring story of Christian conscience and compassion. Those Congregationalists were fervently pledged to the cause of the abolition of slavery, and while it might seem odd to us that anyone could ever have supported slavery, abolitionism was an unpopular and even dangerous position, and many Christians opposed it. Many Christians believed slavery was acceptable; thank God for those who disagreed and stood to be counted!

The Justice and Witness Ministries Office of the UCC wants us to take note of "Twin Scandals." That’s how they refer to the absence of welfare and health for many of our citizens. The twin scandals are poverty and lack of health insurance, especially on the part of children. Here is some information they give: 1 in 5 people (20%) in the average soup kitchen line is a child; 36 million of us live in poverty (20%). It is no secret that our economy still leaves many people behind as we rush to prosperity; and it is no secret that our health care system is not caring for many who need care, and is in any case approaching a crisis that I have heard compared to the utilities crisis we are now in. Would you have believed six months ago that PG&E and SC Edison would now be on the brink of financial collapse and that we the taxpayers would be paying billions to stave off catastrophe? The physicians I talk to are not alarmist, but they are alarmed. One of my former students, voted "Physician of the Year" in Sonoma County last year, has just announced she is quitting the practice of medicine because the Managed Care Organizations have made it impossible for her to make a living at it. She has taken an MBA and is going into business! She is at the height of her powers as a pediatrician, a brilliant graduate of Stanford, and this precious talent and training is being jettisoned by the system.

Finally the California Council of Churches wants us to "Reclaim our Faith" and "Overcome an Old Heresy." The old heresy is the "heretical underpinnings of the hate movement," the imagined justification for anti-Semitism and racism in the Christian faith, as misinterpreted by hate groups. Their package included a sermon by my friend Frederick Borsch the Episcopal Bishop pf LA describing in brief but appalling detail the murder of James Byrd Jnr who was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck somewhere in Texas, because he was black, and the murder of Matthew Shephard, who was beaten, bound to a fence in the open country and left to die of exposure, because he was gay. He also told of Bufford Furrow who drove down from the Nisqually Valley in Washington to Granada Hills in Southern California in a car full of guns and ammunition, went into the North Valley Jewish Community Center and opened up with an Uzzi on Jewish children. He said he intended this as "a wakeup call to America to kill Jews." Borsch tells us that in 1999, 1962 hate crimes were reported in California, 60% motivated by race, 22% by sexual orientation, and 17% by religion. That 17% seems low to me; I wonder what role religion played in the other categories of hate crimes.

The mails served up these three unpalatable dishes during the past weeks, and I thought I might share them with you and ask you to consider what we might do in response. My first impulse is to follow Jesus and weep. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you that kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you refused! So be it! Your house is forsaken." You refused! You refused! Refused to be gathered under the divine wings, refused to turn to God, refused to be instructed; and so your house is left desolate. Actions have consequences, and your refusal means your desolation.

In the context of the times the earliest Christians saw the consequences quite clearly when thirty years after Jerusalem had killed Jesus the Romans killed Jerusalem, burned it to the ground and dismantled its fortifications and its temple. Can you imagine how that event struck those early Christians? Jesus had warned the city, it had ignored his warning and contrived his murder, and now his prophecy comes awfully true; the city is desolated and its temple destroyed.

Jesus probably meant first of all to warn against the violence of the revolutionary Jewish nationalists who were even then preparing the way for the war that would destroy the city thirty years later. Not by violence and force, he says, will you be liberated from foreign oppression, but by spiritual power, by my way of faithfulness to God not by your way of fire and sword. Follow me, not those bloodthirsty leaders who want armed rebellion! That way lies desolation!

And the violence that desolates Jerusalem is still going strong two millennia later. Last week a new prime minister took over in Israel, accompanied by the general assumption that the peace process is on hold, while the chaos and killing goes on. It is as if the controversy between God and the world is focused in Jerusalem. The place of maximum divine revelation, the place where Jesus rose from the dead, that is, the place in the old creation where the energy of the new creation burst forth and touched ground, is also the place where maximum evil in the form of ceaseless violence, fear, frustration, and vengeance slouches forth.

Jesus wept over the city, and so should we. Let Jerusalem stand for the human city as a whole, and then our first move must be to sympathize with the suffering and pain that is there. I believe that a sympathetic sharing in the pain of the city in prayer and meditation releases the spiritual forces of healing upon it. We should pray without ceasing for the coming of God’s kingdom in the city of violence and chaos. We should feel the force of that violence in our souls and cry out to God.

And we should do what we can. The fact that we cannot do everything does not mean that we cannot do something. God has entrusted each one of us with talents, resources and opportunities. Let us be thankful that we are alive and well to do God’s work in this time and place. Let us renew our enthusiasm for the life and work of this church as a vehicle for Christ’s love to the city. Do the little acts of goodness that present themselves as opportunities. There are many ways to serve God in the city; find the way God has prepared for you.

Let me conclude with another, and I hope final, appeal for help for our reading recovery project. We have given 20K to that project over the past nine months, and we are still 8K short of the amount we pledged. They are asking for the balance now. Please help us fulfill our promise to these children of the city; we might weep and pray for them, but we can also share our abundant resources with them. This project is one of the small things we are doing against the great challenge of ceaseless violence and frustration is the world city.

We have a heart for children in this church, our own precious children for whom we give the very best we can, and the children of the city, whom God loves as he loves ours. To them too we want to give the very best we can. Some of us have had the great joy of going to the Bayshore School to read to and with the second and third graders. I reflect as I sit with those beautiful children of the city that the last classrooms I was in were at Stanford University, and on the wonderful richness of life when we follow Jesus. How otherwise would I ever have broken out of the university classroom and found my way to a second grade room in the city! What grace, what joy! How much more interesting the world can be if we can rise out of our rut, and what better way to rise than on the wings of compassion!

So Jesus calls us out of complacency; there is great need out there and fine opportunities to do good. Jesus calls us to compassion, to weep with him over the city and thus be channels of spiritual energy, of love, into the city. Jesus calls us to do the good that lies to hand, the little things we can do, and promises that he will bless those faithful efforts. If we do these things, people will have many opportunities, both great and small to say, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!"

Amen.