"Getting to Yes"
October 21, 2007: 21st Sunday after Pentecost, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.UnitedChurchontheGreen.org

Scripture

Luke 18:1-8

"May God take these words and make from them a holy word for us today:"

Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said: "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, 'Grant me justice against my opponent.' For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, 'Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'" And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to you chosen ones who cry to God day and night? Will God delay long in helping you? I tell you, God will quickly grant you justice. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"

"Friends, God is still speaking to the world. May our hearts be open to listen and respond. Amen."

Sermon:

You're sitting down with friends, enjoying a perfectly good dinner together, some laughs, perhaps a glass or two of wine, when it happens, almost by accident. At a lull in the conversation, somebody brings up a story from the week's news—Congress' failure to override the President's veto of the bill extending the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the circular testimony provided by judge Michael Mukasey at his senate confirmation hearing, the latest outrage in our war on Iraq, pick one. Around the table, folks almost hold their breath, hoping that what's about to happen won't.

But it does. Inevitably, somebody else lays out another story—the disastrous and yet seemingly completely predictable collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market, warrant-less wire-tapping, even Idaho Senator Larry Craig's brush with the law. And that does it. Suddenly the stories come pouring out, all the painful stories we don't really want to talk about but which nonetheless lie undigested in the pit of our stomach. Each ugly headline seems to drag another out of us along with it, entwined like those little plastic monkeys in the barrel—climate change; the Jena Six; secret CIA prisons; school shootings; the rise of the prison-industrial complex; inadequate health care in this, the richest nation on earth; the obscene gulf between rich and poor in our own state; the continuing and continually ignored crisis on our Gulf Coast; rampant corporate greed; deepening anti-immigrant sentiment; the mercenary abuses of Blackwater USA; looming conflict with Iran; the reinvigorated specter of nuclear war; and a government, our government, that seems hell-bent on defending an on-going policy of torture by denying and redefining it away.

Almost against our will, we feel ourselves dragged down into a deepening spiral of fear, frustration, anger, powerlessness, shame... and then, soon enough, silence. Deep sighs, and then an uncomfortable silence settles over the table for a space, before some brave soul volunteers that really, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is yet another movie sequel that doesn't live up to the original, a topic the rest seize upon with relish, and relief. And all those other things, having exploded once more, but still unexamined, they get stuffed back down into our guts to linger there like an untreated infection, undermining both our piece of mind, our spiritual health, and our will to act to make things better. If I were a psychologist, I'd say most of us are struggling these days with a sort of low-grade depression. But since I'm a pastor, I'll use the theological category: despair.

Jesus tells us a story about a woman who should have been mired despair, a widow. Widows, of course, along with orphans and immigrants, are paradigmatic of powerlessness in the Hebrew Bible, a characterization imported into the gospel narratives, as well. In the overwhelmingly patriarchal society of First Century Roman and Jewish Palestine, women's lives were defined almost entirely in relation to the men in their lives, husbands, brothers, sons. Unless she were very wealthy, a widow, a woman without those connections and thus having no recognized position and no advocate in the world of men, would have fallen almost completely through the cracks of that society. She would have no legitimate way of supporting herself—though, as we know, the worst sort of work is always available to the poorest of the poor. Were she to fall pray to abuse or exploitation—almost an inevitability, given her situation—that same situation allowed her no legal recourse whatsoever. The law, like the judge in our story, cared not a whit for her. Women's testimony was invalid in court, something a First Century audience would have known full well. So given all that, given insult heaped upon indignity piled upon injustice with no real hope of relief, it's a wonder the widow in Jesus' story didn't just sink down into the dust to die.

But she didn't. Though, as a widow-woman, she wasn't supposed to be seen, much less heard, she got up every morning, got dressed, and got herself down to the courthouse to plead her case. Though she was supposed to take a back seat to men in all "important" matters, the widow marched right up to the judge's desk and demanded the justice she was due. Justice! When the bailiff put her out, she stood near by the door, telling the passers-by about the injustice she had suffered and the unwillingness of the system to help her. What did she care if they thought her crazy? Justice! At the end of the day, she followed the judge home. She had to jog to keep up and like to have choked to death on the dust, but still she managed to lift up the cry: Justice! When that didn't work, she took up a position opposite his house, right there on the nicest street in town in full sight of his neighbors, and night and day she shouted and sang and wept and wailed for Justice!

When the judge had her thrown in jail for disturbing the peace and being a public nuisance and blocking a public thoroughfare and undermining public confidence in the government, still she didn't shut up. She pleaded her case to the other prisoners and prison guards and police officers, who soon took up her cry—Justice!—until soon, the judge wasn't facing just one tiny whiney widow-woman, but a full-scale revolt. "Enough!" he roared, "Enough! I have no fear of God and non respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out!" Justice!

Friends, it is no wonder we feel sick to our stomachs when we survey the national scene today, for in this country today we face our own unjust judges—unjust judges and generals, senators and cabinet secretaries and CEOs, attorneys-general and vice-presidents and presidents—men and women who seem neither to fear God nor have any respect for people, particularly the widows and orphans and immigrants, all the very "least among us," whom God has commended to our care. Headline after headline, scandal after scandal—It seems we have an epidemic of the very sort of "false shepherds" the prophet Ezekiel called out in his own country in his own day:

(Thus says the Lord:) Ah, you shepherds of the nation... You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but you have ruled them with force and harshness (from Ezekiel 34:2-4).

Pleading piety all the while, many in leadership today have, in the famous words of the prophet Amos, bought the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, seeking to profit even from the sweepings of the wheat (Amos 8:6). The prophet Jeremiah faced the same sort in his day, leaders who "treated the wound of [the] people carelessly," playing fast and loose with issues of national security and with the truth, saying "Peace, peace" when, in fact, there was no peace to be found in a nation about to be torn apart (Jeremiah 8:11).

In that same prophetic spirit, ask yourself: Are we in the United States today caring for the orphans and widows? No. Are we defending the rights of immigrants among us? No. Are we promoting shalom, that is, health and wholeness? No. Do we value persons more than money? No. Are our efforts in the community of nations bringing peace? No. Are we living up to the best within us as a nation? No, no, no, no, no, no!

Ugh. See, there it is—I'm feeling it now—that sick feeling way down deep when we finally face facts, when we allow ourselves to acknowledge the obvious sinful situation in which we find ourselves in this country today. When I open up and really go there, despair grips my heart. I know, I know, I know it's bad, O God, I say to myself, but what can I do? I'm only one person. And what can we do? We're only one church. You know we're pretty good people, and you know we've tried. We've preached and prayed and protested and petitioned. We've supported good candidates for office, and voted for them, and then written them once they're there. We watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart every night, but nothing seems to work. Nothing really changes. It's just putting a new coat of paint on a burning building. We've tried, O God. What more can we do?

And the word comes to us: More. No one ever said transforming the world would be easy. But we are not powerless—that is a lie we can no longer afford. Because, friends, remember, together we are powerful. Together we have already changed the world. Remember the struggle:

Remember our forebears in faith who faced the soul-crushing evil of slavery. It took almost 175 years—and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears--after Samuel Sewell wrote his abolitionist tract, The Selling of Joseph, before that "peculiar institution" was finally abolished in our "land of the free." And remember the slaves themselves. Remember our ancestors here at United Church who took up the cause of freedom on behalf of the Mende captives of the slave ship Amistad. It took three years of planning and plotting and fundraising, a former president of the United States, and a victory before the Supreme Court to win that freedom. And remember the captives themselves. Remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church movement in Germany in the 1930s, who risked imprisonment and worse to stand against the idolatry of runaway nationalism, and fascism. And remember those millions who died in the camps.

Remember our mothers and fathers, who marched for more than a decade, enduring ridicule and threats and violence to expand our definition of civil rights. And remember the countless victims of racism. Remember our aunts and uncles, our sisters and brothers who refused to let our government wage an immoral war in Vietnam unchallenged. And remember the soldiers who died in the Big Muddy. Remember the union workers who didn't know their place and the uppity women who left the kitchen behind and the gays who flaunted it, and remember the price they paid so that we could be where we are, and who we are today.

And remember that little old widow-lady in Jesus' story for us today. Remember her strength of purpose, her pestering persistence, her absolutely impolite insistence that she deserved justice, her hope-beyond-hope that though the judge was indeed unjust and the game rigged against her, another world was possible, a world of more justice, more peace, more compassion, more life—the world she in fact helped to create by her efforts. God bless her, she refused to be to go quietly. She refused to go away, to just lie down and die. She refused to take No for an answer, though we need to remember that she was told No for a long, long time before she got her Yes.

I was fortunate enough to hear the Rev. Kenneth Samuel, pastor of Victory for the World United Church of Christ, preach at a conference a couple of years ago. Ken is African-American, and Victory is a large mostly African-American congregation right at the foot of Stone Mountain, Georgia, literally in the shadow of that idol to the Confederacy. Ken and his congregation know a thing or two about the struggle for racial justice in this country, and about hearing No. And at our conference, the annual gathering of our United Church of Christ Coalition for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender concerns, Ken characterized that struggle something like this: If you are going to work for justice, you have to be willing to hear No a lot, but not accept it as the last word. He said, you've got to go through:

No

No

No

Not today

No

No

No

Not a chance

No

No

No

No, thank you

No

No

No

No one's home

No

No

No

No openings today. Try back tomorrow.

No

No

No

Now is not a good time.

No

No

No

No one's here to take your call right now. Leave a message at the tone

No

No

No

The number you've reached is no longer in service

No

No

No

No

No

No

No

No

YES!

Ken continues to work to bring more Yes into the world, and he continues to pay the price. When his congregation at Victory voted several years ago to join the United Church of Christ—we with our wild-eyed historically white liberal notions of being Open and Affirming to all God's children, even the gay ones—they lost almost a third of their nearly 5000 members. It seems that no matter who you are, no matter where you are on life's journey, there's always more to do.

And, friends, we can do more. I know things look bad just now, bad enough to make us angry and afraid, bad enough even to shame us into silence. But we must do more, we must use the power we do have and join protest to prayer over and over again and until things change because frankly too many lives hang in the balance. The world must change. It will be difficult, slow going, to be sure, just as it was for our forebears—to believe that it was any easier for them or any harder for us is to do their memory a disservice. But God's promise to us is that with faith and hope, with perseverance, with God and with each other, another world is possible. Because, past all the Nos the world can muster, past all the crosses the world can raise, God alone has the last word. That's what we see in Jesus who was dead and is alive, a word of life for the world. That's the Yes we're working toward.

So, what are we going to do? Are we going to slink away to nurse our bleeding hearts? Are we going to whine and moan and try to just wish it all away? Are we going to sink into despair? Or are we going to join the struggle anew, join that widow-lady down on the courthouse steps to demand the abundant life for all that is our birthright as children of God? In his letter to the Philippians, Saint Paul urged that church to trust that the God who began this good work among them will bring it to completion for their good and the good of the world (Philippians 1:6). I believe with all my heart that that promise is still good for us today, and that if we stand on that word, stand firm and stand together with one another and with all God's little ones, even the very least among us, the outcast and despised, we shall not be moved. But the world will be. Together, we will get to Yes.