Isaiah 12 | Luke 21:5-19
Jeremy Richards
On one hand, Jesus’ teaching from Luke 21 sounds pretty apocalyptic – wars and insurrections, earthquakes and famines, good people being slandered and hated and even executed. On the other hand, it sounds like the evening news. Nations are rising against nations. civil unrest is a common theme across the globe – governments are being toppled, there are corrupt elections, our own country is in the midst of an impeachment process. Global warming has, indeed, led to famines and other natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis. So Jesus’ teaching doesn’t sound too outlandish.
To be alive today is difficult, just as it has always been difficult, no matter what time in history you live in – from the days of Jesus, until now, until he comes again. As Sam tells Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring, its dangerous business walking out your front door. After predicting all that will come upon his disciples, which seems a far cry from Good News, Jesus tells them, “By your endurance you will gain your souls.” The question, it seems to me, is, how do we endure? How, in the light of all the social injustices and the wars and the school shootings and natural disasters, do we endure?
I grew up with an understanding of Christianity that was strictly spiritual. Jesus came to save our souls from hell. Of course, we should be nice people. Primarily so that people would be drawn to us and ask why we were so kind and gentle and loving, and then we could tell them that we were kind and gentle and loving because God was angry and mean and vindictive and was going to send them to hell if they didn’t sign off on a set of beliefs and say a prayer. At which point, if they signed off on the beliefs and said the prayer, God would transform into someone who was also, now that you were on his side (and I use “his” intentionally), also kind and gentle and loving. Does that sound familiar?
That summary of my upbringing is maybe a little harsh. There was a real belief that accepting Jesus as your lord and savior would bear fruit, that God working in you would lead to transformation, but all that was secondary, and had nothing to say to systemic injustices, to poverty, to all the -isms we’re familiar with. I wasn’t taught, as a young Christian, to critique capitalism or second-guess the American dream in the church I grew up in.
I don’t think I fully knew what social justice meant until I landed in seminary, but, boy, did I learn fast. My seminary, or at least the students I fell in with and the professors I came to admire were utterly committed to faith in action, to the kingdom of God coming to earth as it was in heaven, to fighting the unjust powers and principalities that keep the oppressed oppressed. Which is all very good, is essential, I would say. I still believe these things very, very much.
Buuuuut it was a bit of a pendulum swing. I think my professors had a more wholistic understanding of the Christian life, but for us students who grew up in the world of personal salvation and saving souls, those three years in seminary were pretty reactionary. Anything that spoke to one’s personal spirituality or implied that God might actually care about your particular struggles was rejected as too individualistic, and totally missing the point of the Gospel. Our favorite passage was from Luke 4, where Jesus, quoting Isaiah, proclaims, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus didn’t come to save your soul, he came to release the captives and set the oppressed free.
And so I arrived here, at Grant Park Church, a little over 3 years ago, ready to do what Jesus did – to dismantle racism, to crush homophobia, to trample the patriarchy.
It didn’t go quite the way I expected. It turns out, setting the oppressed free and releasing the captives is very hard work. It turns out there are systems in place and ideologies established that a brand new pastor of a small church in Portland, Oregon, is virtually powerless to change. Straddled with my own student debt, I wasn’t exactly sure how to bring good news to the poor who line the streets of downtown. If I was honest, I could have used some good news myself, at least as far as that student debt went. And all these things I couldn’t do seemed wildly more realistic than “proclaiming…recovery of sight to the blind.” I didn’t learn how to cure blindness in seminary.
More than all that, my attempts to do all these things I thought I was supposed to do were wearing me out. I had nothing to pull from. I didn’t know how to pray or have any kind of personal connection with God, for fear that doing so was too individualistic and missed the mark, as if seeking God’s help was somehow selfish – how could I, a cis, straight, white, middle-class, educated man ask God for anything?! Didn’t I already have everything handed to me?!
But there was no denying it, my well was running dry. I wasn’t, as Isaiah says, joyfully drawing “water from the wells of salvation.” After a few months, I ran out of things to talk about in my sermons. I’d used up all the novel thoughts I’d learned in seminary and was now left to speak out of my own experience, my own thoughts, my own spirituality. But the problem was, I didn’t have much spirituality to speak of.
And so, I came to realize out of sheer necessity, that maybe there was something to personal, spiritual experience. But I had learned enough in seminary to know I must be careful – religion that’s removed from the lived realities of the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, and the marginalized is not the theology of Jesus. I still believed this, and I still believe it today. It’s just that I also came to realize that theology removed from personal spiritual experience is equally problematic. In the words of Richard Rohr, “Theological training without spiritual experience is deadly.”[1]
This is what my sermon today hinges on: the way that we think religion is one or the other – either personal spirituality or social action/good works – but we rarely understand it’s both. We all know Jesus’ teaching that the most important commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength, and that the second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself. We all know that, but, the truth is, we’re very tempted, in reality, to only focus on one. The social justice warriors think that if they love people it’s the same as loving God, and the pious and devout think that if they go through their spiritual regimen of church attendance, Bible reading, and prayer, they have no need to worry about the social realities of the world, because God is interested in people’s souls not their bodies.
But these two commands – love God and love your neighbor – are not the same. They are inextricably linked, you cannot do one genuinely without the other, but they aren’t the same. You can’t breathe without inhaling and exhaling, they both are necessary for life, and yet they are surely not the same. You can’t ignore all that pesky exhaling and just inhale indefinitely. You have to exhale too. You need both to breathe. So, also, do we need to both love God and love our neighbors. I grew up thinking it was all about signing off on a set of beliefs, which I thought was the same as loving God, and I left seminary thinking it was all about rallying against injustice, which I thought was the same thing as loving my neighbor. But neither was really love. Neither, on its own, was enough.
And so, as I felt my well running dry only 6 months or so into being your pastor, I started to think maybe I should make my own spiritual wellness a priority, and I had a sneaking suspicion that maybe being spiritually healthy would actually contribute to my ability to minister to people in tangible ways. Like, maybe my outward actions should flow out of my inner spirituality?! Like, maybe that’s what 1 Corinthians 13 is all about?!
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
See, I hadn’t been wanting to do good, social justice work out of love, I was doing it out of guilt. I was wanting to do it because I wanted to be the “woke” pastor who showed everyone that God cared. The problem was that I didn’t care, not really. Or, at least, I didn’t care about others as much as I cared about myself – about my own success and reputation.
So I had this revelation that spiritual and social, soul and body, inner and outer were related! Surely this was a new and novel idea. But then I came across Richard Rohr’s organization, the Center for Action and Contemplation. Action. AND. Contemplation.
Ok, so at least one person had beaten me to the punch. No, it turns out, like, a lot of people already know this. Like, it’s a very common theme in the Bible, and in Christian history.
For example, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous 14th century monk, says, speaking of contemplative prayer (love of God):
…let me tell you what this discipline will do for you. It will change your heart. It will make you so kind and dynamic in loving that when you stop doing it and mingle with the world again, coming down from contemplation to converse with or pray for your neighbor, you’ll discover that you love your slanderer as much as your friend, and that you love any stranger as much as a relative—in fact, sometimes you’ll be more partial to your enemy than to your friend.[2]
Love of God leads to love of neighbor.
Inner leads to outer.
This week I read an interview with Helen Prejean, a nun dedicated to abolishing the death penalty. She wrote a best-selling book called Dead Man Walking, which was made into a movie. At one point the interviewer asks her…[Read question from The Christian Century Nov. 6, 2019 article, p. 29].
“True spirituality in Christianity, using Jesus as the prism, always flowers into compassion and justice. There is no separation between spirituality and social justice.”
We live in a world where Jesus’ word from Luke 21 hit close to home – where there are wars and rumors of wars, insurrections and natural disaster, unjust policies being passed in our courts and shootings in our schools. Seeing a world apparently hellbent on destroying itself, or, at least, humans hellbent on destroying themselves and as much of the world as they can in the process, could easily lead to despair. How do we resist? How do we stay strong? How do we maintain the fight?
The question remains, how do we endure?
“Make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict…by your endurance you will gain your souls,” Jesus says.
“With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation,” Isaiah says.
For those of us who are Christians, our strength comes not from ourselves, and not from our circumstances, but from the living God revealed in Jesus Christ. God is the well from which we draw. “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty,” Jesus said to the Samaritan woman in John 4. “The water that I will give them will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
Inner leads to outer.
“True spirituality in Christianity, using Jesus as the prism, always flowers into compassion and justice,” Helen Prejean says.
How do we endure? We stop seeing spiritual and physical, personal and social, souls and bodies, as opposites, but see them as complimentary. We inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale.
[1] Richard Rohr, The Naked Now, 30.
[2] The Cloud of Unknowing, 63.