posted on October 1, 2005 08:45:06 AM new
We gather in this safe little room, in a world with so much death. It overwhelms us, all the death.
In the foreground are the thousands of deaths from the hurricane in New Orleans, and the survivors who are beginning to arrive in Austin for an indefinite stay. We read that the levees failed partly because over 40% of the funds requested for them were diverted to the war in Iraq.
The ironies abound. An illegal invasion of Iraq to liberate them from their oil, while a hurricane wipes out 20-25% of our own capacity for oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has offered to send inexpensive oil to help with our oil shortage, shortly after one of America’s official Christian ministers urged our government to murder him - and the State Department is balking at accepting Chavez’s offer, for fear they may lose face.
So the games continue: the games of politics, one-up-manship, command and control, the illegal war. And the games and political intrigue can almost blind us to all the death.
But we are not blind, and our hearts hurt when we try to wrap them around so many dead brothers and sisters, in Louisiana or Iraq, so many crying, angry and grieving families, in New Orleans or Baghdad. At the moment of grief, the cause of death pales beside the awful reality of death, and of lives of survivors changing in unknown ways as they struggle on. And as we struggle on. My mind called on the words of an earlier preacher, John Donne:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every [one] is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any one’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Humankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: It tolls for thee.
We are surrounded by death this morning, near and far, from causes we can not easily control. This morning, we do not need to solve these problems. We only need to be aware of them, to feel them, to let our hearts and minds reach out to feel that we are all connected, and the loss of so many of our connections diminishes our own souls, our dearest world. We need each other.
Let us be gentle with one another as we begin to grieve our way through the death, all the death. Amen.
SERMON: WWJD?
You’ve never paid so much for gasoline in your whole life, and the prices promise to keep rising, as we’ve lost 20-25% of our ability to produce oil because of the hurricane damage in New Orleans and at its many offshore drilling rigs - and now Saudi Arabia is admitting that it can’t increase its oil production. So some of the rants of people claiming that the world is running out of enough oil no longer seem like rants.
We’ve suffered the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States, with a death toll in the thousands and perhaps tens of thousands before it is through. And one factor in the levees that failed in New Orleans was the fact that tens of millions of dollars had been diverted to fund the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the war we now know to be based on contrived lies manufactured to serve the imperialistic agenda of the neo-conservatives who have taken over America.
The religious and political right are wrong about almost everything they say: on religion, the economy, sanctioning torture, killing over 100,000 of our brothers and sisters in Iraq - everything. And the religious and political left seem either too blind or too gutless to say or do anything that matters, as they have endorsed the war, the transfer of America’s wealth to the greediest of our individuals and corporations. Right now, it seems the platform of the Democratic party can only be “Wouldn’t you rather be robbed by Democrats?” And I’m not sure people would.
Asking what Jesus would do seems ridiculous and redundant!
Instead, I’m reminded of words from the great American philosopher Lily Tomlin, when she said “No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up!”
Many Christians, including all the Christian ministers in town that I know - several of whom have preached here during our January Round Robin - are troubled and embarrassed by the way their religion has been hijacked, both by politicians and preachers.
And the voices from the religious right are never asking WWJD. They are so busy telling you who God hates or wants dead, that you realize this god of theirs really is a god of hate rather than love. And the reason they can’t ask WWJD is because you just can’t turn Jesus into a bigot, or a prophet of hate, or an ally of the rich against the poor.
In fact, when you hear people today asking WWJD, or putting WWJD bumper stickers on their cars, it’s almost always to criticize the direction in which our country is being led: “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” “Who Would Jesus Hate?” They’re rhetorical questions. Jesus wouldn’t bomb anybody. And the people he would be most likely to hate today are the Christians who have created such an ignorant, bigoted and hateful religion in his name.
Ironically, they are a persuasive argument for Unintelligent Design. For no intelligent designer would have designed people so willfully ignorant of science, sexuality or simple human decency. And no Christian deity would have permitted the most vocal Christians of today to drag Christianity into such foul gutters, in the name of Jesus.
