Sermon: Blessed to be a Blessing
July 28th, 2019 Rev. Betsy Perkins
First Baptist Church, Delavan WI
Scripture passage: Genesis 12:1-3
A headline jumped out at me this week as I scrolled through my Facebook feed – it was shared by an American Baptist pastor. The article was titled “The God of Love had a really bad week”! (Diana Butler Bass, CNN.com, July 20, 2019)
It jumped out at me because it felt like I finally found the words to express the heaviness I was feeling deep in my heart, a sadness in my soul. I had been carrying a weight around for several weeks that pressed down on me. It was not new, I’ve felt this weight before when disturbing things happen in the world. The last time was when the policies of family separation came to light and stories of children, infants, toddlers, teens, separated from families and held in cages or transported under the cover of darkness to facilities hundreds of miles away. Yet somehow our souls can become numb to things that should disturb us. If it doesn’t affect my daily life, I can close my ears, and turn my head, and convince myself that someone is taking care of the problem.
In recent days, I have been disturbed once again by reports about the deplorable conditions in detention centers in the US and how immigrants fleeing difficult situations are being treated. Lawmakers tasked with oversight have raised voices of concern. The UN Human Rights commission visited – this is an organization that monitors conditions of refugee camps around the world to watch for human rights violations and the inhumane treatment of human beings. The USA has long participated in this work and prided itself on defending the rights of displaced peoples. Yet this organization issued a statement condemning the appalling conditions in which human beings are housed within the United States – people forced to drink out of a toilet, babies sitting in diapers that had not been changed in days, 10 year olds tasked with caring for 2 year olds, having no access to a shower for weeks on end – not in a camp in Bangladesh, not in a detention center in Syria or Sudan, right here in the United States! The God of Love had a really bad week.
Adding insult to injury – literally – was the stream of insults coming from our nation’s leader against a small group of our country’s elected leaders – all women of color. These were insults that clearly violate EEOC guidelines – the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that defines what is acceptable and unacceptable conduct in a workplace. HR professionals and leaders of a wide array of American institutions, from schools to Fortune 500 companies, admitted without hesitation that inside their own institutions anyone who told someone else to “go back” where they came from would face disciplinary action or termination. (Ronald Brownstein, CNN.com, July 23, 2019) The disrespectful language did not remain in the twitter world, but was then taken up by hundreds of Americans in a rally in Greenville, North Carolina. The God of Love had a really bad week.
A survey of churches in Greenville, NC last Sunday after the rally showed that in churches predominantly filled with people of color, the pastors had made last minute changes to their sermons to address the hurtful and hateful rhetoric in their community. On the other hand, the pastors of churches predominantly filled with white Americans were nearly silent. One white pastor, whose wife had been in attendance at the rally as an employee of the facility that hosted the event, and who had been disturbed by the palpable sense of anger in the crowd – that pastor explained that he did not bring up the subject in church because he knew several church members would have been part of that crowd. The God of Love had a really bad week!
The author of the article by that title, asks the question: what made it possible for those who would have once sung the song Jesus Loves the Little Children, all the children of the world, to now join this hostile liturgy to chant “send her back”? “How did they get there?” she asks. Diana Butler Bass, the author who wrote the article, has a PhD in religious studies and has written 10 books on American cultural and religious trends, including her most recent, titled Grateful: the subversive power of giving thanks. She concurs that many agree that the phrase “send her back” is racist, sexist and un-American. Yet she explains that it is also an expression of a certain view of God that has begun to shift the teaching and priorities in far too many American churches. She writes, “I do not feel shock. I feel grief. I do not recognize this Christianity, even if the faces in the crowd were familiar.” “We came to this point slowly,” she points out, “perhaps imperceptibly, hymn-by-hymn and sermon-by-sermon, one theological step at a time.”
Dr. Butler Bass explains how the God of Love has not had a particularly good run over the last few decades, from the culture wars of the 80s to the terrorist attack of 9/11, the God of Love began to look like a loser. To retain members, many churches began to embrace a sterner, more militaristic, defender God; a God that thunders against unbelievers and the decline of law and order. This has happened before in our history, in the time when many church-going folks used the Bible to defend owning slaves, or when those who came to this land seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity viewed the freedom and rights of the native peoples as an inconvenience. We are still caught between these competing visions of God: the God of the Master versus the God of Love. Dr. Butler Bass diagnoses the heart of the matter: that many white Christians have a God problem.
In Bible study this week, as we read from the Gospel of John, we heard Jesus telling the religious folks of his time that the reason they were upset by his teaching and uncertain where his authority came from is that they did not know the God who sent him. They could not recognize the Son because they did not know the Father. (Jn.7:28, 8:19) Do we really know God? Would we recognize Christ in this world?
Our scripture reading this morning was brief, but it shows us a picture of who God is: the LORD is a God who blesses. In the creation story in Genesis 1, no sooner has God created a man and a woman than God blesses them. Moments after humanity comes into existence, God gives us a blessing. It is a blessing with a purpose, with a task, a responsibility: “Be fruitful, fill the earth, take charge of creation, be responsible for it.” Humanity was blessed with the hope that we would bless and care for creation.
As you know, things fell apart. Rather than blessing one another the first humans take what is not theirs, and the first son murders his brother. Things fall apart again when rather than giving blessings people begin to do wicked things to each other. The corruption and violence get so bad that God tries a fresh start with the one family, Noah’s family, whose hearts were in the right place. After the devastating flood, humanity fills the earth once more but the pattern repeats itself again and again.
So God changes up the strategy for blessing all creation. God picks an unlikely couple – a man with no land and a woman with no children – Abram and Sarai. God adopts them as his children and out of love for them, God blesses them. And again, it is a blessing with a purpose. Through them, all peoples of the world will be blessed. As God works through this family, over many generations, God continues to chose the unlikely ones to bring the most blessing to others – Joseph, the younger son who was a victim of human trafficking; David, the teenager whose only job qualification was that he knew how to use a slingshot; Ruth, the woman who was so poor she has to glean grain from a field to care for her mother-in-law; Mary, a young, peasant girl.
We worship a God that blesses, and that has a special love for those who are poor, weak, vulnerable and displaced. The writer of Deuteronomy lays out the Law, those guidelines that enable the people of Israel to reflect the image of the God who loves them and will enable them to fulfill their responsibility as ones through whom God will bless the world. He concludes the words of the Law with this declaration: For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords… He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you. Therefore, you too are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were once foreigners in Egypt. (Dt.10:17-19)
In Leviticus 19:33 instructed the people, saying, “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”
When I remind you of Old Testament Law, I have not forgotten that as people who have put our faith in Jesus Christ, and received His gracious gift of forgiveness and salvation, we no longer have to live under that old Law. Rather, we have been given an even higher command, the Law of Love. To love others as Christ has loved us; to love our neighbors and to even love our enemies. We cannot even claim the name of Christ if we do not love. John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, wrote a letter to Christian believers to say that “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God and God in them.” He warned, “If we boast, ‘I love God,’ and go right on hating others, thinking nothing of it, we are liars. For we cannot love God, whom we have not seen, if we do not love others, whom we have seen. The command that Christ has given is this: whoever loves God must also love others.” (1Jn.4:16-21)
We follow a God who blesses, a God who defends the weak and poor and displaced, a God who shows mercy and compassion and forgiveness, and a God who asks us to do the same. We worship a God of Love!
Diana Butler Bass concludes her article with these words: “For whatever reason, western Christianity has a hard time sticking with a God of love….But, as a minority of white Christians know, and the majority of Christians of color never need be reminded, the God of love is always hanging around, the brown-skinned Jewish rabbi preaching about the poor being blessed and the broken-hearted comforted. Love your neighbor as yourself. Do unto others. Let the little children come. Faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love.”
Let us stick with the God of Love. Let us reject the siren song of hatred and lies and insults, and seek the healing of our souls and the healing of the soul of our nation. Let us tell our leaders to reject divisiveness. Let us use our voices to speak words of love. Let our service and our actions speak to the world of our love for others – as we feed children, as we show compassion to the homeless, as we send one of our own, one we love, Lisa, out to share love with children in Honduras.
And when the God of Love has a really bad week, may our hearts be broken by what breaks the heart of God. May we recognize our error, repent, and seek forgiveness, and start to live in love again, allowing God to bless all peoples of the earth through us. Before our closing song, let us pray together the prayer of confession that’s printed in the bulletin…
PRAYER OF CONFESSION
God of all mercy, we confess that we have sinned against you, opposing your will in our lives. We have denied your goodness in each other, in ourselves, and in the world you have created. We repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf. Forgive, restore, and strengthen us, that we may abide in your love and fulfill your purposes, through our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Closing Song: “Let There Be Peace on Earth”
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