Sermon Text: “Bringing Justice to Victory”

Bishop Mary Ann Swenson preaching at the Memorial Communion / Opening Worship of the Western Jurisdictional Conference at First United Methodist Church of San Diego, California on July 18, 2012. Photo By Patrick Scriven.

Sermon Text from Bishop Mary Ann Swenson, originally appearing on the California-Pacific Annual Conference Website.

Matthew 12:15-21

NRSV

When Jesus became aware of this, he departed. Many crowds followed him, and he cured all of them, and he ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah: ‘Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. He will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick until he brings justice to victory. And in his name the Gentiles will hope.’

The Message

Jesus, knowing they were out to get him, moved on. A lot of people followed him, and he healed them all. He also cautioned them to keep it quiet, following guidelines set down by Isaiah: Look well at my handpicked servant; I love him so much, take such delight in him. I’ve placed my Spirit on him; he’ll decree justice to the nations. But he won’t yell, won’t raise his voice; there’ll be no commotion in the streets. He won’t walk over anyone’s feelings, won’t push you into a corner. Before you know it, his justice will triumph; the mere sound of his name will signal hope, even among far-off unbelievers.

There is something about a congregation’s annual stewardship drive that tends to focus a pastor’s thinking, and therefore writing. Hear these words from the finance campaign letter of a historic First Church:

• “Methodism thinks of the church as having a responsibility not only for the individual life but also for the character of civilization…Growing numbers of us are coming to recognize the importance of the Christian church. The church makes possible the public worship of God, religious instruction for children, a Christian rite for the solemnization of matrimony, a Christian service for the burial of the dead, a pastoral ministry in time of need.
• The church keeps alive a sanity, a moral standard, a faith and hope without which today’s world would certainly and quickly succumb to the forces of evil, unreason and destruction.
• The church combats cynicism, defeatism and despair. It rejects utterly the idea of the inevitability of war, believing that ‘with God all things are possible, even peace.’
• It feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, cares for the sick and the morally wounded. It seeks to overcome evil with good and to bring about the reconciliation and healing of the nations.
• The church under God is the hope of the world.”

The year was 1948, the church was First Church Evanston, IL, and the pastor was Dr. Ernest Fremont Tittle, who died a year later and was eulogized by, among many others, the New York Times, citing the national impact of his preaching, especially his pacifist preaching throughout the recent world war.

• It is worth noting he was Georgia Harkness’ pastor, and the inspiration for her hymn, “Hope of the World.”
• But now sixty-four years later, lifting up the church as “the hope of the world” in today’s violently complex global context feels, on the one hand wildly romantic and idealistic;
• on the other hand, it often feels like the only true hope we might cling to.

That dynamic of hope in the midst of uncertainty and conflict would be very familiar to the people for whom Matthew was writing:

• We know that Matthew’s writing was a re-working of the gospel of Mark, and that both of them were dealing with the after-effects of the Jewish uprising against the Romans, which led to the destruction of the Temple and the scattering of the Jewish people.
• For Mark, this meant both opportunity and necessity to reach beyond the broken Jewish community to write to the Gentiles, people who had no history or relationship to the authority of the Torah.

This evangelism, this hospitality to those outside the original Jewish-Christian community is a kind of DNA at work in Matthew’s writing, although it took a different direction:

• After the loss of the Temple, the Jewish community was not only physically broken, it became theologically fragmented, because the Temple, which had been the force for centering and ordering the life of the faith community, was now gone.
• One of the scattered groups was in Antioch, and they had become followers of Jesus; they affirmed Jesus as the new center for interpreting the scriptures and ordering their lives—
• but their argument “did not carry the day” with the mainstream network of synagogues—their legislation did not pass! (New Interpreter’s Study Bible, 2003, Abingdon.) • So they found themselves at odds not only with the imperial power of Rome, but also with their own faith community.
• Matthew’s gospel is therefore written as a “counter-narrative” that teaches them how to live a “counter-cultural, alternative” existence in the context of these competing and dangerous forces. (ibid)
• For them, to be a Christian disciple was a third way through the dilemma of a broken world; for them, Christianity was indeed “the hope of the world,” And to be hope for the world meant to be open to the world—at the core, to be hospitable to everyone, Jew or Gentile.

To be the Hope of the World in any age is to recognize first of all the gap between what Scottish philosopher David Hume called the Is and the Ought:

• The “is”, is the world as it is, in all its broken, beautiful, flaming despair and glory;
• For many, that’s all there is, and we are to play it out as it is: there is no potential for change, no chance it could be any different; in other words,
• there is no hope for transformation.

But we hold, as Dr. Tittle proclaimed, that God reveals in Jesus a reality that ought to be, that there is not only a chance but the call through Christ to join in creating and welcoming the kingdom that God desires—that is, to be disciples “for the transformation of the world.”

Our brothers and sister whom we remember tonight were just such disciples, and brilliantly so:

• They not only lived but led us through that tension between Is & Ought;
• Because of them, we know the credibility of transformation.

We have already heard some of the witness of their lives and ministry, but let me add just a few more example here:

• I found it to be perfect justice, another little in-breaking of the kingdom, that on the very same morning that Bishop Kelly went to heaven, after spending so many of her final years traveling around the country tirelessly preaching health care for all, the supreme court vindicated the plan for national health insurance that same day. (By the way, she went to heaven on John Wesley’s birthday!)
• And I remember when Ed Paup and a group of us traveled to Guatemala, and he saw the plight of the people there following their experience of being torn apart by war, that he went back with his daughter Wendy, who was moved to learn Spanish and became transformed in her own life-vocation calling.
• And I remember when I moved to California and spoke to Bill Dew about Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles; he told me that a young Monsignor Mahoney had joined Bill in the cause for justice for migrant workers in Northern California years before.
• And I think of the stories of Mel Wheatley as a young pastor in Fresno, moving into the home of a Japanese-American family to protect them from vandals after the family was ordered to an internment camp. Or as a pastor at Westwood, breaking down racial barriers by exchanging pulpits with Holman Church in 1964, in the time before the Watts riots.

What Leontine preached and what Bill and Ed and Mel poured their lives into, is that when we propose the transformation of the world, what we are talking about, what we are doing, what it comes down to, is accomplishing justice— and doing so in a particular way.

So let me say a word about justice, starting again with Matthew:

• Matthew’s disciples of Jesus were at a double-disconnect; as people of Israel, they were disconnected from both their heritage identity and economic well-being by Roman power, which made them servants in what had been their own land and country:
• they lived with the very real, practical consequences of injustice.
• They were also disconnected from their community of synagogues, because they found in Jesus a new and different way to interpret scripture, and from that, how to be in relationship to God and neighbor.
• The living presence of God in Jesus, and the post-resurrection spiritual presence of Christ, together formed a new religious compass for living in the world,
• And that compass pointed beyond the current reality, toward a kingdom defined by justice.

Today we too live with conflicting understandings of how to live, what we are to aim for:

• Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University and the author of, “The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation.”
• When he speaks of the bible, it is not the Old and New Testament, but the key documents of American history; he includes in this ‘bible’ not only the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,
• but also the Gettysburg Address, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
• Writing just two weeks ago on July 4th in the Los Angeles Times, he points out that

“One of the great debates in U.S. history has concerned the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Which is preeminent? And what does each value? In 1863, in the famous “four score and seven years” opening of his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln calculated that the United States was born not in 1788 with the Constitution’s ratification but [earlier] in 1776 with the declaration. He then went on to state, in perhaps the most momentous sentence in U.S. history, that this nation is “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

• He goes on to bring the question into focus: “Is America dedicated to equality, or liberty?”

I believe that in the tension between these two, justice either rises, or falls:

• If liberty is preeminent, then it is indeed every man for himself—and I use the old form of that because it is an old way of thinking.
• If liberty is predominant, then the answer to the ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper” is No;
• Instead, me, myself and I, and the freedom to be so and do so trumps your need, your well-being, and your claim to equal standing with me.

This is individualism raised to the absolute.

• And a culture rooted in the absolute freedom of the individual is a culture that breeds injustice, because the taproot of injustice is inequality.
• And let it be said plainly: we are not all born equal…
• Spiritually equal yes, equal in the eyes of God, yes, but not in the circumstances of health and food, of economics and opportunity.
• These inequalities, spread wide and grown deep, in this country and around the world, are the foundation of pervasive injustice;
• And the current lust for unfettered liberty is strengthening that foundation and deepening that injustice, and that begs for transformation.

To repeat Dr. Tittle: “Methodism thinks of the church as having a responsibility not only for the individual life but also for the character of civilization…It feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, cares for the sick and the morally wounded… The church under God is the hope of the world.”

That hope is the hope for food, for health, for justice, for equality, for all;

• and in the eyes of God, all means all. 
  
• Only that is equality—when all stand equal;
  
• only then is justice brought to victory.

Bishops Wheatley, Dew, Paup and Kelly lived in that hope for justice, and embodied that hope;

• they saw not only the injustice and worked for equality, but like the Matthean community of early Christians,
• they recognized in Jesus a powerfully alternative way to transform the world—a different way to bring equality into the world:

‘Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. He will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick until he brings justice to victory. And in his name the Gentiles will hope.’

The language of Isaiah that Matthew uses—the Jewish bible he quotes for his broken synagogue readers—includes the language of victory and triumph,

• but not the kind of victory they have seen and suffered and know too well:
• the victory of triumphant Roman military power, the use of force to destroy, the conquering that magnifies injustice.

Instead, it is the victory of the crucifixion:

• “Those who would save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and the gospel’s, shall save it.”
• It is the victory not of the sword, but of the broken bread: take and eat, for this is my body given for you and for many, for all…
• It is the victory of the incarnation itself, because by becoming fully present with us, God establishes an ultimate and perfectly inclusive equality, and that is the hope of the world.

This is more than just an alternative way, it is a paradoxical way:

• Reinhold Niebuhr said it like this: “If God is love, rather than power, then it follows that God gains victories by pain, rather than by force.”
• Several years ago, Shirley Guthrie put the grit into this truth with her article in Theology Today; let me close with her challenging words:

“All cheap and easy talk about a God of sovereign power who is in control of a world in which there is so much poverty, suffering, and injustice is obscene. All self-confident talk about a powerful church that has the mandate and the ability to change society with this or that conservative or liberal social/political agenda, or with this or that evangelistic program is increasingly absurd in a disintegrating church that cannot solve its own problems, much less the problems of the world. The only gospel that makes sense and can help is the good news of a God who loves enough to suffer with and for a suffering humanity. And the only believable church is one that is willing to bear witness to such a God by its willingness to do the same thing.” (Shirley Guthrie, “Human Suffering, Human Liberation, and the Sovereignty of God,” Theology Today, April 1996, p. 32.)

This is the suffering love of Christ-like leadership to which our friends bore witness in their lives and ministry, devoted to bringing justice to victory. Thanks be to God for their witness, their journey, and their victory through Christ.

Amen.