Sermon: Phoenix Affirmation 6
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Sermon: Phoenix Affirmation 6: Going Upriver
Once when I was a kid, my family went with my cousins’ family for a picnic in the Alaska woods. There were 4 kids in my family and 5 in my cousins’ so when we were together there was always plenty of fun and at least a little chaos. We were next to a river with a steep bank. Most of us kids were doing what kids do when you’re next to a body of water: throwing rocks and sticks in it. My littlest cousin Roger was down there with us. I think he was around 2 years old; just a little punkin in diapers, a bit clumsy. I didn’t see it happen, but I bet when he tried to throw a stick he had trouble letting go and his little roly-poly body rolled down the riverbank, and plop! He fell in and started to float away. The rest of us did the best thing we could think to do: Scream for help! In about half a second, my Uncle Jerry, normally a very calm and placid fellow, was streaking past us down the riverbank like Superman—I mean he was practically flying—and he dove in the river and fished out his baby. He climbed out with Roger, whew! No harm done. I’ll never forget seeing Uncle Jerry a little later sitting down, taking off his big logger boots and his dripping socks, wringing out his socks, and putting the socks and boots back on again, calm as you please, as if pulling a baby out of the river was something he did every day of the week. There’s an old story about babies in the river you might have heard before. Some people were enjoying a lovely picnic by the river when they saw, of all things, a baby in the river, squawking, sputtering, clearly about to go under for the last time. These were good people on this picnic, so of course they jumped in and saved the baby. No sooner had their heart rates returned to normal than another baby came into view, coughing, about to drown. Then another, and another. Now the whole picnicking party was frantically diving into the river to pluck these babies out, one after another. They’d just get safely to shore when another would appear. It was horrible! Suddenly one of their group got out of the river, dropped the baby he had saved on shore, and instead of jumping back in to fish out the next baby, he started to leave. In a hurry! The rest of his friends yelled at him, “Where are you going? Can’t you see that there are still babies in the river that need us to save them?” What do you think he said? “I’m going upriver to find out who is throwing these babies in the river so I can try to stop them!” That story, in a very simple way, shows us the difference between charity and justice. Charity is seeing someone in trouble and doing what you can do right then and there to help them. Fishing babies out of the river. Justice is going upriver to find out who or what is causing the problem in the first place and doing what you can to stop it. Which of these things are Jesus-lovers supposed to do? Charity, or justice? Justice, or charity? Both, of course. With or without the support of others. Here’s what the Jesus-lovers are not supposed to do. Go on with the picnic and pretend there’s no babies in the river, figuratively speaking. Can you imagine us cousins seeing Roger roll into the river just keeping quiet about it until Roger was lost? Or can you imagine my uncle hollering down at the screaming kids, “Pipe down! I’m busy right now.” Or can you imagine him strolling down, asking which kid it was, and deciding not to bother getting wet because he had two other sons and Roger was just adopted, anyway? Of course not! That’s not what loving families do. When you follow Jesus, your family suddenly gets really, really big. It’s not just the people under your own roof that you care about any more. Not just your own cousins, even. The whole world is your cousin, and especially the little, helpless ones. We don’t just sit daintily on the riverbank eating brie and strawberries while helpless children perish before our eyes. Do we? Of course not. That’s not what Jesus-lovers do. We try to help. I know if I reached under my robe and pulled out a bony little kid who was starving, you’d fall all over yourselves getting the kid something to eat. You’d give him the whole plate of whatever has been prepared for us for coffee hour snacks, and you’d take him to the grocery store and buy him a week’s worth of food at least, and you’d drive him home and make sure there was someone there to cook the food, and you’d check up on him next week. I know you. I know you would do these things if I produced a starving child right now. There are no starving children under my robe. Just one overfed middle-aged woman. But I am aware that there are starving kids who don’t happen to be in this room right now. I’m going to say a number: 854 million. That’s a big number. A mind-numbing number. That’s how many hungry people there are in the world today, give or take a million. Here’s another number: 16,000. That’s how many children die every single day because of hunger and hunger-related diseases. One every five seconds. That’s ugly. That’s a river chock-full of babies. Now, I know you. I know you Jesus-lovers. You’d like to save every one of those babies. Your gut tells you that they are a part of your family, and you’d like to fly down the riverbank like Superwoman and plunge in and gather those babies up and bring ‘em to a safe place. You would. I know you. But you aren’t sure exactly how to do it. Because they’re not here with us, not within the reach of our loving arms. But we can’t let the distance stop us from reaching out. We can’t just turn our backs and pretend it’s not happening. We have to get creative. We have these two responses available to us, charity and justice, and we need to use our imaginations about how we can use both of them to address this problem of a river chock-full of babies in distress. Charity. This we know how to do. I’ll remind you of a few options. When there’s a food drive in the community, no matter who is doing it, give some food. There are hungry people right here under our noses. Politicians lately have been dressing up hunger and calling it “food insecurity” but it’s the same thing. If you’re food-secure, share what you have with the food-insecure. Participate in a feeding program—Streets of Seattle, Super Suppers, or the like. Volunteer at Helpline House keeping the food bank sorted out and supplied. When fall rolls around, walk in the CROP walk or sponsor someone who does. Give money to agencies that are feeding people. Your checkbook extends your reach. Try not to waste food, either by buying more than you need or putting more on your plate than you need. While you’re not going to package up leftovers and send them to Bangladesh, it seems to me like a soul-health thing to be conscious of others in need even while we have plenty and more than plenty. These are all ways to, in the words of the full version of the Phoenix Affirmations, “honor the essential unity of spirit and matter by connecting worship and theology with concrete acts of justice and righteousness, kindness and humility, with or without the support of others.” Justice. Going upriver. This is a little harder because of the complexities of the causes of hunger. And it’s harder to talk about in church because when you talk about justice, you’re almost always talking about politics, and when you’re talking about politics, you’re talking about conflict and controversy, two things we dearly love to avoid in church. And yet, it seems like we just have to brave it--the controversy--because we can’t in good conscience go on having a pleasant conflict-free picnic with each other on the river bank while the river is chock-full of our dying cousins. Seems like we ought to encourage each other to seek justice, even if we can’t all agree on the best strategies. We can scout the territory upriver and teach each other ways to intervene in a system of food distribution that has some of us cousins dying of over-eating while millions of others die of under-eating. I myself am a believer in trying to influence the government, which has a lot more money than I do, to spend more on non-military humanitarian aid to help end poverty in the most impoverished nations. Development assistance is currently at .14% of our Gross National Product. The community of industrialized countries have come up with an international goal of .7% GNP given in humanitarian aid, a goal several countries have reached or exceeded. President Bush proposed $1 billion for the Millennium Challenge Account, a U.N. which addresses extreme poverty, but that has not, to my knowledge been dispersed yet, although it’s about equal to what we have been spending every month on our three-year war in Iraq. Seems like a re-adjustment of our national budget money priorities would be one way of going upriver to effect more justice. It’s not the only way, but the power of our voice in a democracy is a tool we all have that it would be a shame to let rust away from disuse. We have power. Use the Force. Some of us have power as stockholders as well, an idea of which I was reminded last week in the “Socially Responsible Investing” event we co-hosted with Cedars U.U. Stockholders are the owners of publicly traded companies. Corporations don’t have to be conscience-free entities; stockholders can insist that they carry on their business in a just way. I read in George McGovern’s book The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time one example of the uneven benefits of world trade. When Michael Jordan was endorsing Nike shoes, he was making more money annually for his endorsements than the combined annual income of the 22,000 Indonesian women who made the shoes. And the women who made those shoes were still hungry because of their near-starvation wages[1]. Do you own stock? What does the company you own do? Do they pay fair wages to their workers? One tool we have for effecting justice is keeping our eye on what our money is doing and asking it to do justice in the marketplace. Real religion isn’t just about spirits; it’s about bodies. Love isn’t just an idea or a feeling; it’s something you put into action. One of my favorite comic theologians, Swami Beyondananda, exhorts the religious to “be less concerned with the here-after (or, in the case of those who believe in reincarnation, the here-before) and make the world a better place in the here-now…It’s called supply-side spirituality: Be more supplying, and less demanding. For indeed we are not here to earn God’s love, we’re here to spend it!”[2] [1] McGovern, George The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, p. 150 [2] Beyondananda, Swami “Dear Swami” Tikkun January/February 2007, p. 44 |