​30 August 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
13 Pentecost
 
God said to Moses, “Remove the sandals from your feet,
for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” (Exodus 3)
 
            What has been sacred in the past? And what is sacred to us today? In these turbulent days, these are questions that I believe are essential to our survival as a nation and as individuals.
            The story is told, of some pilgrims who arrived late one the day at the Santuario in Chimayo in northern New Mexico. Because the hour was so late, the doors of the church had already been closed, so that the pilgrims could not enter to collect some of the sacred dirt from the pocito, or small hole, in the floor of the tiny chapel from which comes the healing dirt for which the santuario is famous.
            Deeply disappointed, the pilgrims went in search of the priest, Fr. Julio, to see if he would not give them some of the sacred dirt. When they found him, to their astonishment he said, “Oh, just collect some dirt from one of the hillsides nearby. It’s the land itself that is sacred, not just the dirt that comes from the pocito.”
            It was the land itself that was sacred. Hills made sacred by generations of people, both native and Hispanic, living and dying there. A landscape made sacred by countless pilgrims whose footsteps had tread upon it in search of healing and wholeness.
            Just what it is that makes something sacred is hard to pinpoint, isn’t it? There’s no checklist for what makes something sacred—it just is. Moses encounters a bush that is burning, not unlike the fires that consume more and more of western America each summer—except that in this case, the bush is not consumed. And a voice speaks to him from within it, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” A bush made sacred by fire.
            So what is sacred to you? For what would you remove the shoes off your feet, in reverence for its holiness?
            In New Mexico, we are deeply conscious of sacred landscapes. Chimayo. Chaco Canyon. The Four Sacred Mountains of the Navajo. The Sandia, or holy day, mountains that preside over our life in Albuquerque.
            But it is not only landscapes that are sacred. Values are sacred as well. Values of truth, of human dignity, of both the rights and the responsibilities of human freedom.
            We are locked as a nation in a battle over what, if anything, we hold sacred. And in figuring out where each of us stands in that confrontation, we might do well to reconsider Moses’ own life-changing encounter with the sacred.
            In the first instance, Moses reminds us that the sacred is not of our own making. It confronts us, admonishes us, requires our attention. Moses was not in the hills looking for anything more than to tend his flock of sheep—and yet there was this bush burning with fire, yet unconsumed, and he had to turn aside to see this great sight.
            And so, the sacred is beyond our manipulation. We can try to distort it, to adapt it to our ends, or even to deny it. But the sacred remains, holding us accountable to its demands. As God says when Moses tries to pin down in human terms exactly who it is he is encountering, “I am, who I am.” It’s a bit like that phrase, “It is what it is,” that we use when there is simply nothing more to be said about something so patently obvious. Except that, in this case, “I am who I am” transcends a surrender to the inescapable (it is what it is), with the impenetrability of the ineffable (I am what I am).
            So if the sacred is not of our own making, and is ultimately beyond our manipulation, then it is also the criterion by which human affairs and conduct are to be judged. I, for instance, would hold sacred the democratic principle first articulated in the 4th century B.C.E. by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who said that “Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects.” That’s the conviction in which I was brought up; it is the conviction upon which my love of country is based; and it is a conviction which is astonishingly contradicted by the current situation.
            Despite its power, however, the sacred is not something that can be taken for granted. It is actually quite fragile. One misplaced development can spoil an entire sacred landscape. One ill-advised law can gut a sacred principle of justice. What we hold sacred cannot therefore just be in the background of our minds, like winter coats hanging unused in the closet, but must be kept front and center in our consciousness where we can protect it, be guided by it, and be accountable to it.
            And so, in this moment of intense national debate, I pose this question today: what is sacred to you? What will motivate you in this time of deep distress to respond to the voice that comes to us in our own day: “I have observed the misery of my people … I have heard their cry. I will come down and deliver them from their taskmasters.” Amen.

​Women's Equality Sunday
 
Following in the Midwives' Trail
 
In the name of the giver of life who calls us to work for justice.  Amen
 
I'm willing to bet you know that this week the American people are celebrating the passage, ratification, and enactment into law of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.  And so are we, today, in worship. 
 
Today, purely by chance, we have a happy convergence of the scripture assigned for the day and the moment in our national lives which we now celebrate. 
 
You might well ask, "What does baby Moses have to do with the 19th Amendment and the struggle for freedom and justice from which that amendment emerged and to which its passage led?"  But that very question arises from a misreading of the scripture we just heard.  Moses' name doesn't even appear until the last sentence of this lengthy passage. 
 
If I were determining section headings for the Bible, the one I would give to the passage we just heard is "The Midwives' Tale".  For that is what it is:  a tale of two birthing women birthing freedom for their people; a tale of their allies in the struggle for life, the struggle for freedom; a tale of two Hebrew midwives--Shiphrah and Puah--who are summoned by a Pharaoh fearful of losing his power; fearful of losing his reign. 
 
Of what is that Pharaoh afraid?  He's afraid of babies--babies not yet born; babies not yet even conceived.  Babies--boy babies--whose very existence threatens that Pharaoh's power.  So Pharaoh calls Shiphrah and Puah to his throne room and orders them to kill boys born to Hebrew women .
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You and I, we know that two midwives could not possibly attend to all the births of the burgeoning Hebrew population without some help.  Likely Shiphrah and Puah, in turn, summoned their assistants.  But the order they gave--or maybe the request they made because what they were asking was tantamount to treason-- was not "Kill all the boy babiesl" but "Let all the babies live."  How could they do otherwise?  They were life-givers.
 
It took that fearful and somewhat dimwitted pharaoh some time to figure out what was going on.  When he did, he summoned those midwives back to his throne room and demanded to know why they had disobeyed him, why they had let those Hebrew boys live. 
 
But those Hebrew midwives were two clever sisters.  They looked that fearful (and quite angry) Pharaoh in the eye and said, "...the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them."  They managed--in the words of Ralph Ellison--"to change the joke and slip the yoke" by playing on the pharaoh's prejudices and thus obscuring the subterfuge. 
 
Giving up on the midwives, the Pharaoh turned to his base--the Egyptian people--and fanning their fears, ordered them to throw every boy born to the Hebrews into the Nile.
 
What is remarkable about this Midwives Tale is that their life-giving, life-saving work does not end when they leave that throne room or even when they have cut the cord that binds baby to mother.  Their work--their vocation--if you will--of bringing to life is taken up by wives and mothers and sisters and neighbors and friends and allies--women without whom Moses would not have lived to lead his people to freedom.
 
A woman, a Levite woman--an Israelite by blood if not by location, marries and takes the risk to have a child.  She gives birth to a son and, like the God she worships, she sees him and observes that he is good---good but hardly safe.  When she can no longer hide him, she puts him in a basket and places that basket holding her precious baby boy in the reeds beside the river Nile.
 
There, by the river's edge, Pharaoh's daughter discovers the baby.  She's got things figured out.  She knows that's a Hebrew baby.  And nevertheless she persists.  She rescues that baby.
 
The story doesn't end with the baby saved from the water.  A sister--the baby's sister(her name is Miriam)--joins the life-saving work of the midwives by offering to take the baby to a Hebrew woman (his  mother) to be nursed. 
 
You and I know that Moses' story does not end there.  It took years for it took years for the Israelites to gain their freedom;  Moses to even catch a glimpse of the promised land;  it took years for the people of Israel to find their home.
 
Like the people of Israel, you and I, and the women and men whose work we celebrate today know freedom doesn't come overnight; justice is not obtained in a moment. 
 
The call for women's right to vote in this country was first issued in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention.
 
Between that moment and the passage of the 19th Amendment which we celebrate today, hundreds--likely thousands--of ordinary women (and some men too) buttonholed neighbors and friends, visited barbershops and beauty parlors, wrote letters and lobbied legislators, marched in parades throughout the country, and at what is now known as Black Lives  Matter Plaza protested a President who seemed deaf to their cries for justice--a protest that landed many of them in jail.  Mothers and daughters, teachers and students, black women and white women, Asian women and indigenous women and their male allies all working for the right to vote to be extended to all.  And then, on August 18, 1920, the youngest member of the Tennessee legislature cast his vote for the 19th amendment thus sealing the deal. His mother made him do it. 
The 19th Amendment, however,  did not lead to full citizenship for all.  Many Native Americans were not granted citizenship until 1924.  It took even longer for Chinese and Japanese Americans to gain the right to vote.  Black Americans in the South experienced virulent and often violent voter suppression before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally secured their right to vote.    And still there was not liberty and justice for all.
 
We've made progress in the work for justice; we've made progress in t the fight for freedom. Clearly we haven't always gotten it right.  But still we have work to do.  And often we've gone way off course.  But that call for justice--justice for all God's people, that drive for freedom endures here and throughout our world. 
 
It behooves us--we who follow in the footsteps of women and men, ancient and modern, whose gaze was turned to justice to heed the words of a modern day prophet--Tracy Chapman:
 
All that you have is your soul.
 
Hunger only for a taste of justice;
 
Hunger only for a word of truth;
 
'Cause all that you have is your soul.
 
 
 
 
           
 
 
 
 

​PROLOGUE
 
We are in the midst of a global pandemic that is turning the world inside out and upside down. Assumptions we held with such ease only a few months ago about our invulnerability in the modern age to the scourge of contagion have been emptied. Our blindness to the debilitating effect of social inequalities has been revealed. Former confidence in systems of government and economics has been eroded. We are left feeling disoriented, our minds spinning in confusion and anxiety.
 
Seventy five years ago, the world experienced another such cataclysmic disorientation. When the atomic bomb was first exploded on July 16, 1945, at Trinity Site in southern New Mexico, humanity discovered that it had within its power its own destruction. The magnitude of that destructive potential was fully revealed three weeks later, when it was unleashed on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9). About 140,000 people were killed instantly at Hiroshima (about the number who have died of covid in the United States), and another 75,000 at Nagasaki three days later. Thousands more died in the succeeding days, months and years due to the effects of radiation. Never before had such awe-ful power been placed in human hands, and as a result, never again will we be able assume that we will not be the instrument of our final undoing.
 
While these two events have at one level little in common—the one is the result of a natural viral mutation, and the other of the moral dilemma of the human will toward violence—they do share in common the sense of disorientation they produced in the human soul. So it is with that sense of convergence that we enter into this service of “Loss, Mourning, and Resilience,” acknowledging both the terrible losses the human race experienced then, and now; and the tremendous capacity for hope that was still intact even then, and now.
 
SERMON
 
When Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his death, his instinct was to pray that he might not have to undergo this torment. It is a prayer of loss, of fear, and of dread—what is sometimes called his “agony” in the garden.
 
Our prayers during this strange time are also ones of agony. We pray for our own health, for comfort for the dying and grieving, for the safety of teachers and students, for wisdom among our leaders. We may not look out upon a world physically destroyed, as the survivors did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bomb, but we do look out on lives tattered, a social fabric frayed, a future thrown in doubt.
 
And where, in the midst of such angst, do we find hope? This is where the story of the cranes comes in … perhaps you know it already. Sadako Sasaki was two years old when she was irradiated in the bombing of Hiroshima, caught in the radioactive black rain that fell after the blast. Predictably, she developed leukemia a few years later. While she was being treated in hospital, she undertook the task of folding one-thousand paper origami cranes, appealing to a traditional Japanese story that anyone who does so, will have a wish granted.

Stories vary: some say she didn’t finish the thousand cranes before she died in 1955 at age 12; some say she far exceeded her goal. Either way, for her folding cranes was not just a sign of hope, but hope itself. Because hope, you see, is not something we feel—it’s not an emotion we have to try to dredge up inside of us. Hope is something we choose to do. Hope is in the way we live, not the way we feel. Hope is a practice, an act of resilience, despite our worst fears.
 
When John Lewis got up off the pavement of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where he had been clubbed, to march another day, that was hope. When Gandhi fasted for peace in the midst of civil conflict, that was hope. When a mortally wounded midwife trembling in an underground bunker the night after the bomb was dropped rose up to deliver a baby, that was hope. When Jesus turned away from his agony in the garden, and went out to meet his betrayer, that was hope. And when you choose to make what you can of this day, even while you may be shut in or jobless or afraid, that is hope. Hope is the folding of a crane.
 
Because of Sasaki, the origami crane has become a global symbol of hope. Now anytime you see one, its simple elegance and strange complexity evoke not just a sense of beauty, but the possibility of peace. As part of the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, a statue has been erected that depicts Sasaki holding one of her beloved cranes up to the sky. At the base, an inscription simply reads: “This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world.” So if the folding of paper cranes by a little girl could provide such hope in the world, then I leave you with this question: What might you also be able to do, to bring hope into these similarly dark times? Amen.