First United Methodist Church of Reno

¹ Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my

spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. ² He will not cry or lift up his voice,

or make it heard in the street; ³ a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will

not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. ⁴ He will not grow faint or be crushed until he

⁵ Thus says God, the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out

the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who

walk in it: ⁶ I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand

and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, ⁷to open the

eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in

¹ The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want. ² He makes me lie down in green pastures;

he leads me beside still waters; ³ he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s

sake. ⁴ Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your

rod and your staff—they comfort me. ⁵ You prepare a table before me in the presence of

my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. ⁶ Surely goodness and mercy shall

follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD my whole life long.

Today is being celebrated all over United Methodism as “Peace with Justice Sunday.” Like the differences that remain within our denomination, though, I’m sure that just how this day is celebrated will be very different from one United Methodist Church to the next. As you can plainly see, I’ve chosen to wear a rainbow stole this morning in honor of one more courageous decision made on behalf of justice and equality just recently: the California Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday morning that overturns a state law that allowed only heterosexual couples to marry.^¹ Last year we embraced and proclaimed the fact that we are a Progressive Christian Church. In point four of our Eight-Point Welcoming Statement,^² we have declared that…

…we are Christians who invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable (including but not limited to)…those of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

I hope that means that, one day, we may also come to claim ourselves to be a Reconciling Congregation.^³ So I stand here in support, not only of the California Supreme Court's decision, but in support of our GLBT sisters and brothers at this pivotal time in our history. We should be public about our witness and the time and place, at least for me, is now. A quote from Mother Teresa that I came across this past week – and now is mounted on my office door – seems to have put this in context for me; she says:

We know only too well that what we are doing is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. But if the drop were not there, the ocean would be missing something.

And long before Brother Martin used the phrase, William Gladstone (Prime Minister of England in the late 19^th century) rightly noted that “Justice delayed is justice denied.”^⁴ Now is the time.

It’s Peace with Justice Sunday, and I’m also encouraged by at least one stance that our church took at our General Conference earlier this month. The session adopted the petition submitted by Methodists United for Peace with Justice to the United Methodist Social Principles, along with an addition proposed by the General Board of Church and Society. We took out the problematic phrase about a “just war” that had been added in 2000 and added a reference to Christ's teaching for disciples, and that we all needed to work within the framework of the rule of law. We unequivocally stated that we were in opposition to “unilateral first/preemptive strike actions and strategies on the part of any government.”^⁵

It’s Peace with Justice Sunday and on March 18^th Barack Obama gave a speech on race in Philadelphia. I do not, and will not, stand here in the pulpit to advocate for the election of any particular candidate for public office, but I find that it is a rare moment in American history when a public figure (let alone a leading candidate for the presidency of the United States) speaks openly and honestly about racism. Not that Obama was one to publicly address racism before this speech, unlike his former pastor, The Reverend Jeremiah Wright – and this isn’t a reflection on Obama as a viable presidential candidate, but on the entrenched and all-to-often hidden racism within our society. All of that will not suddenly disappear even if Obama is elected president. Sadly, many white people have supported Obama, in part, for his ability to “transcend” race, meaning his ability to transcend his “blackness,” as if being black were something anyone needed to “transcend” – a racist notion in and of itself.
In his speech in Philadelphia, Obama squarely addressed white racism in America, referring to it as “a part of our union that we have not yet made perfect.”^⁶ I find his opening remarks just as compelling as what followed. He began, by saying:

I chose to run for president at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren. This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own story. . . . It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional of candidates. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.^⁷

He spoke of racism systemically as an institutional legacy of slavery and segregation, and that it continues to influence our politics, our economics, our education, our employment, our judicial systems, our families, even our personal and psychological health. He tried to get his, largely, white audience to understand the anger of some blacks from an earlier generation, like his former pastor, The Reverend Jeremiah Wright,^⁸ who had experienced, daily, the oppression of racism and segregation.

It’s Peace with Justice Sunday, and I’ve come to believe that Jeremiah Wright was unfairly treated by much of the media, to say the least.^⁹ Some have called it a “media lynching.” I had the good fortune to listen to all of Wright’s speech given at that NAACP dinner on Sunday, April 27^th – oddly enough, CNN covered it without interruption.^¹⁰ I found it compelling. I wish that I could share it in its entirety with you (you can look it up), but his central theme, oddly enough, I believe, is something that we’re trying to do here at our own church. He said:

In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as being deficient. We established arbitrary norms and then determined that anybody not like us was abnormal. But a change is coming because we no longer see others who are different as being deficient. We just see them as different. Over the past 50 years, thanks to the scholarship of dozens of expert in many different disciplines, we have come to see just how skewed, prejudiced and dangerous our miseducation has been. … I believe a change is going to come because many of us are committed to changing the way we see others who are different.^¹¹

…many of us are committed to changing the way we treat each other: the way Christians treat you, the way straights treat gays. We are committed to changing the way we treat each other. And we are committ[ed]…to changing the way we mistreat each other. … And many of us finally are committed to changing this world that we live in so [that] our children and our grandchildren will have a world in which to live in, to grow in, to learn in, to love in, and to pass on to their children. We are committed to changing this world that's God's world in the first place, not ours. And I believe we can do it.^¹²

We can rightly question Wright's public affirmation of Louis Farrakhan, who is known for being anti-Semitic (though Wright is not), or his attributing the creation of the AIDS virus to the U.S. government as a means of genocide against people of color, but, at the same time, many African-Americans of Wright's generation lived at a time (1932) when the Tuskegee Syphilis study was conducted, and 400 poor black men were unwittingly used in government experiments. This incident wasn’t even made public until 1992. And let’s not forget, by the way, that more notable pastors like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and John Hagee have said that 9/11, AIDS and the disaster created by Hurricane Katrina were God's judgment on homosexuality and on the United States for tolerating it. So I find it odd that nobody has called upon the Republican presidential candidate to disassociate himself from John Hagee for his “anti-America” comments.

Today is Peace with Justice Sunday, and Wright's jeremiad against his own nation for its injustice is nothing new. In his fourth of July speech of 1852, abolitionist Frederick Douglass had similar words to say about his nation:

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.^¹³

Something similar happened during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, when The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that America was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He was attacked for being a Communist sympathizer, and preachers who agreed with him were harassed by the FBI.

To some extent, then, the Black church has become the conscience of America, and certainly of American Christianity. The Black church appreciates the freedom and opportunities that we’re all given in this country, but it also has first-hand experience with its idolatry and bigotry. The Black church tells us that religion must be prepared to speak out against injustice, or risk being misled by the false gods of money, power, and the prevailing culture.

Today is Peace with Justice Sunday, and if we’ve learned anything at all we must know that you can’t have one without the other. What’s more, as that renowned Jewish rabbi, scholar, and peace and Civil Rights activist, Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “We are commanded to love our neighbor; this must mean we can.”^¹⁴ So I don’t think that it’s overstating the fact to say that without justice there can be no true peace. And yet even when we can, more or less, agree on what we mean by the word “peace,” we may still disagree on how to get there. Is it right to use violent means to achieve peace, or – if not violence – what about coercive or deceptive means? Do the ends justify the means? Things may be calm, quiet, and apparently “peaceful,” but if there is no justice, peace doesn’t truly exist. If some are prospering, while others are not – possibly even at the expense of others – then there is no shalom. And just how long will it take us to finally realize that even if war is used to “rescue” an oppressed people, there will be no shalom since enemies are hated, harmed or killed – and innocent people always seem to be getting in the way?

Shalom is a holistic, all-encompassing well-being meant to exist throughout all of creation. A shorter, perhaps easier to remember, version might be Perry Yoder's definition of peace – that shalom simply is when “things are as they ought to be.”^¹⁵ Things are not as they ought to be when some prosper and some do not, when some do harm or cause the death of others, when some deny basic human rights to others, or when some have to work long hours for little pay so that others simply can buy inexpensive goods. In each of those situations there may not be open conflict, nevertheless, there is no shalom.

Today is Peace with Justice Sunday, and might we begin to see justice, not necessarily as something that another person deserves – as punishment or reward – but as the one thing that we all need? Jesus’ way of delivering justice was to look to those actions that would redeem us, restore us, and reconcile us – to each other and to the larger community. Seen through the eyes and actions of Jesus, then, Biblical justice consists of delivering the poor from their poverty and the oppressed from their oppression, of stopping violence, and restoring those who – for whatever reason – have been excluded from community.^¹⁶

This is Peace with Justice Sunday, and we must realize that things are not “as they ought to be.” For as Dr. King continues to remind us, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And if shalom really does mean having all “things as they ought to be” and justice truly is “giving us all what we need rather than what we deserve,” then maybe the way we’re called to live is simply through “seeking the well-being of another.” To offer peace with justice, then – indeed to love any human being – is to ask the other, “What do you need today? What can I do for you today that would provide for your well-being – your shalom?”

There’s a truly wonderful quote there in the bulletin that I might have used as an additional scripture reading for today; it’s from Paul’s letter to the Christians at Rome:

…ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see [God’s] invisible qualities – [God’s] eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.^¹⁷

It is Peace with Justice Sunday…and we “have no excuse for not knowing God.”

As a sea kayaker and lover of nature, I can’t let such a time as this go by without noting, finally, that we also have a role to play to bring peace with justice into this environment in which we live and move and from which we take our very being.^¹⁸ And ignorance of the stunning beauty and yet fragility of nature isn’t just limited to inner-city kids. In an article with the delightful title, “Leave No Child Inside,” Richard Louv has written movingly of what he calls “nature-deficit disorder” – sadly, a growing lack of contact with and connection to the natural world in far too many of our children today.^¹⁹ There are a whole lot of reasons: traffic, the lack of safe places to play, working parents, electronic media, hyper-scheduled lives, and on and on. But, according to Louv,

Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience their neighborhoods and the natural world has changed radically. Even as children and teenagers become more aware of global threats to the environment, their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. As one suburban fifth grader put it to me, in what has become the signature epigram of the children-and-nature movement: “I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are.”^²⁰

It’s Peace with Justice Sunday and we have no excuse. What we do have is a responsibility to care for this earth that God has created so carefully and called “good,” and to leave it in good enough condition that it will continue to point future generations to God. Fortunately, the cure for “nature-deficit disorder” is simple: follow the lead of those inner-city youth and get yourself outdoors, somewhere in the middle of green, growing things. Take a walk, ride a bike, plant a seed, listen to a bird sing. Smell the flowers. Be amazed by the diversity of all that God has created, and the way that God has so intricately woven together the life cycles and environments of every single living thing, providing precisely what each one needs.

Today is Peace with Justice Sunday, and we’ve run out of excuses not to do what we know ought to be done.

1 From a front-page article by staff writer, Bob Egelko, in the San Francisco Chronicle this past Friday:

The California Supreme Court struck a historic but possibly short-lived blow for gay rights Thursday, overturning a state law that allowed only opposite-sex couples to marry.

In a 4-3 ruling that elicited passionate responses on both sides of the debate and touched off celebrations at San Francisco City Hall - the scene of nearly 4,000 same-sex weddings four years ago that were invalidated months later - the court said the right to marry in California extends equally to all, gay and straight alike.

The state Constitution's guarantees of personal privacy and autonomy protect "the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with the person of one's choice," said Chief Justice Ronald George, who wrote the 121-page majority opinion. He said the Constitution "properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as opposite-sex couples."

See: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/16/BAGAVNC5K.DTL&type=printable.

2 The full text of our Eight Point Welcoming Statement is on our website at http://www.napaumc.org/8pts.shtml, but point number four of that statement declares the following:

By calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable (including but not limited to):

believers and agnostics
conventional Christians and questioning skeptics
women and men
those of all sexual orientations and gender identities
those of all races and cultures
those of all classes and abilities
those who hope for a better world and those who have lost hope

5 These additions and deletions are as follows: first ¶ 164 (I) on "Military Service" went unchanged except for adding a call for pastors to be available for counseling with young adults "who are considering voluntary enlistment in the armed services." (It now refers only to those who face conscription.) Thus, this paragraph retains the statement that some Christians believe in some circumstances that the force of arms may be necessary.

Between these two paragraphs 165(C) states the church's unequivocal position that "war is incompatible with the teachings and example of Christ" while 164(I) describes what individual Christians might choose to do. I believe that we can live with this ambiguity.

Under the category of “War and Peace,” and with changes represented by the bold print, the rest of the text, essentially, looks like this:

We believe war is incompatible with the teachings and example of Christ. We therefore reject war as an instrument of national foreign policy. We oppose unilateral first/preemptive strike actions and strategies on the part of any government. As disciples of Christ, we are called to love our enemies, reject the use of violence, seek justice, and serve as reconcilers of conflict. We insist that the first moral duty of all nations is to work together to resolve by peaceful means every dispute that arises between or among them. We advocate the extension and strengthening of international treaties and institutions that provide a framework within the rule of law for responding to aggression, terrorism, and genocide. We believe that human values outweigh military claims as governments determine their priorities; that the militarization of society must be challenged and stopped; that the manufacture, sale, and deployment of armaments must be reduced and controlled; and that the production, possession, or use of nuclear weapons be condemned. Consequently, we endorse general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA

May 18, 2008