Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/stephenphelps/)
Watch the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr.’s Sermon on Psalm 23 and Luke 8: 40-55 as he explores seemingly minor details in the text that, upon further investigation, hold surprising spiritual power and significance. [youtube: video=”9C8BROd6zs0&feature=youtu.be”]
The stories of Elisha are tucked away in a few chapters of 2 Kings, where most Christians never tread. Perhaps we heard them in Sunday school, but since then, they have been locked in a cabinet. Now, suddenly, this dusty old box bursts with a word like one of the best-loved gospel stories, the feeding of the multitudes. Here is the heart of the story: Food for all.
This is how our work will unfold. Through studies and practices in the sciences, the arts, and the religions, we will become more open to the mystery of God and to the manifestation of the many. This is how we will keep learn to speak the language of Jesus, to love the One, and love the Many. Learn to be one for all.
But just as we must learn to use our body to serve others, and finally give it over to death, so must we always be learning of money not just how to use it wisely for our own ends, but how to let it go freely, to serve others not at our direction, and to build up a body gathered under the great ideal of love and able to pass its gospel to a new generation.
Riverside, our crises have arrived. There is the seemingly external crisis of climate change, which many deny; and the crisis internal to the church, namely, to hear together one word why Riverside must exist for a whole world; one word, deeper than all our differences. This word is very near. How will you hear it?
Christian community has an urgent role in this history. On the one hand, no church can magically separate itself from the spiritual disease of the wider society. If we could, we would be a cult; we would not be God’s love for a whole world, but against it. Jesus saw this. Stay here in the city, he told his disciples. Here in the church we already have the laboratory set up to help with civilization’s great test.
Nothing is as beautiful as union and unity of mind. Nothing compares with being one—provided each individual is honored and respected. Each individual! Inside that little word, you can hear the matchless value it declares—undividable, must-not-be-broken, I am somebody, an individual. Yet individuals long to be not set apart. We seek unity, community, love, peace—a new heaven and a new earth. The matchless value in the hearts of all peoples in all times is that we may be one.
We make war for oil. The only security our wars buy this homeland is the security to keeping pumping oil and gas into our cars, factories, and homes. We are willing to frack the foundations of the earth and pour millions of gallons of toxic chemicals into vaults of the earth in order to get our fix of fossil fuels. For the sake of oil in the Middle East, our leaders will not challenge Israel to treat Palestinians justly. Food supplies and prices are threatened the world over as we turn food into gas for our cars and drive farm soils to ruin in a deluge of petrochemicals. Racism, the bastard of American slavery and many other evil fathers, is finally one more means by which the privileged keep economic benefits for themselves. Hoarding power is the motor inside the chariots of empire—and empire craves oil, coal, and gas to fuel the engines of wealth. Mass incarceration, wage stagnation over the last 40 years, the gutting of clean air and clean water regulations; an unjust, unaffordable health care system, rotting infrastructure, crumbling public education and the destruction of democracy—all these evils are driven by the unregulated desire of power to get more power by whatever means necessary. Climate change is nature’s blunt instrument to respond to systems which are fundamentally irresponsible. Capitalism, if unregulated, is simply sin. And the wages of sin is death.
The single great question of human being is this, How may I become who I am to be? How may we become who we are to be? All other questions are either that question dressed differently, or less important questions. Why is our becoming the only great question? Because awareness of the possibility that we may become greater than now we are is the only way we show that we know we have been created in the image of Creator. Apart from human awareness in all the known universe, there is no becoming.
We are taking time this Lent with each of the temptations of Jesus. One Sunday, we felt after what can happen when, like Jesus, though we hunger, we wait upon the Lord to receive what is given, and do not take just what we think we need, but our soul waits in silence. Last Sunday, we searched out what can happen when, like Jesus, we see the kind of power we can have over others, but let it go, through simplicity and honor and truthfulness. We felt how the burdens of self-defense and its anxiety and anger can fall away when the gift of trust in the power God supplants our power complexes.