Imitating the Lord

Scripture Psalm 146 NRSV   

1 Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord, O my soul!

2 I will praise the Lord as long as I live;
    I will sing praises to my God all my life long.

3 Do not put your trust in princes,
    in mortals, in whom there is no help.

4 When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
    on that very day their plans perish.

5 Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
    whose hope is in the Lord their God,

6 who made heaven and earth,
    the sea, and all that is in them;
who keeps faith forever;

7  who executes justice for the oppressed;
    who gives food to the hungry.

The Lord sets the prisoners free;

8  the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
    the Lord loves the righteous.

9 The Lord watches over the strangers;
    he upholds the orphan and the widow,
    but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

10 The Lord will reign forever,
    your God, O Zion, for all generations.
Praise the Lord!

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It has been a difficult, extremely emotional week even for someone like me who does not watch TV news, so I have not been bombarded with images of the fires and the aftermath of the shooting.  But I do follow print media, and the various newspapers I read keep sending updates and breaking news headlines.   13 dead in a mass shooting.  At least 25 dead in fires.  Paradise is lost.   So yesterday I was at an anti-racism training and toward the end someone said how hard it was going to be to preach hope today with all the terrible things happening.  Someone else pointed out that today the Gospel reading is the story of the widow’s mite.  Our trainer, Sandhya Jha, said “Not me!  I’m preaching on Psalm 146!  That’s going to be hard.”  And I agreed, because that’s what I had chosen, too.  Many of you know that I select the scripture reading weeks or even months in advance.  Back when I chose to do a series on Gratitude in November, and selected the scriptures to preach on, I had no way of knowing what this month was going to be like.   The scripture reading I’m preaching on says “Praise the Lord!” and I sat at my computer feeling more like, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”

And yet - you know that gratitude list I do every day?  Ok, almost every day?  A friend sent me a text yesterday saying “I found out yesterday that I have termites. I was really frustrated. Then saw the news about Paradise. I'm grateful to have a home to have termites.”   And then she began looking for ways she could help the victims of the fires.   Gratitude tends to make us want to do something to express that gratitude.  And in case you missed the announcements - Donations to Week of Compassion for “fires in California” or gift cards in any amount will be helpful.  Some congregations are making hygiene kits to send.   First Christian Church in Chico is an evacuation center and will be happy for any help they can get. 

If I were to give today’s message its full title, instead of what will fit on the top of my blog page, it would be “Ways we show our gratitude to God Part 2:  Imitating the Lord.”   I was kind of thinking along the lines of imitation as the sincerest form of flattery, and flattery is what we do when we find someone attractive in one way or another.  So if we are really attracted to the work of Father Greg Boyle in LA, we might go out and work with gang members.  Or if we are really attracted to the work of Rev. William Barber we might join the Poor Peoples Campaign.  Some of you all worked on political campaigns over the last weeks because you admired a particular person’s stance on issues that are important to you. People who have overcome addictions often work with addicts to help others the way they were helped - showing   So if we are to imitate God because we are grateful for all that, then this is what we have to do:

execute justice for the oppressed;
give food to the hungry.

set the prisoners free;

open the eyes of the blind.
lift up those who are bowed down;
love the righteous.

watch over the strangers;
uphold the orphan and the widow,
bring to ruin the way of the wicked.

Some of those seem pretty easy.  We do feed the hungry at the SMART Center and at Christian Cafe.   We try to help those who are down.  We donate money to  causes that will help the poor.  We collect tomatoes for Selma Cares - to feed families - and hygiene products for the patients in the Selma Convalescent Hospital, who have very little indeed.  We do what we can.  But there are other things we can do, things that aren’t quite so linear as feeding the hungry or singing money to help widows and orphans.  Opening the eyes of the blind, for example, means more than just fixing someone’s eyes.

Ian David Long was 28 years old.  A Marine Corps veteran who had served in Afghanistan.  On Wednesday night he walked up to a bar in Thousand Oaks, California and shot the security guard at the door, then the woman working the desk inside the bar, then 10 more people including a deputy who responded to the call. Then himself.   And the news told us the police went to his house a couple of months back because he was acting out, but not so badly that he had to be sent for psychiatric evaluation.  Some people said, “I don’t understand.  He was such a nice guy.” while others said, “Yeah, he was trouble in high school.”  Some said, ‘Well, obviously he had PTSD and it made him crazy.”  But Thomas Burke, a pastor who served with Long in the same US Marine Corps regiment, which had experienced heavy fighting during their tours of duty, warned against too quickly blaming Long's actions on trauma experienced during war.  "PTSD doesn't create homicidal ideation," Burke said. "We train a generation to be as violent as possible, then we expect them to come home and be OK. It's not mental illness. It's that we're doing something to a generation, and we're not responding to the needs they have.”    (www.cnn.com/2018/11/08/us/thousand-oaks-gunman/)

It’s not mental illness.  It is something we are doing to a generation . . . and we have done it to every generation who has gone to war for us.  We take perfectly nice young people, turn them into killing machines, and ask them to forget all that when they get back without any kind of help at all from the people who trained them in the first place.  I mean, when we “rescue” people from cults there are folks who specialize in de-programming them, so we know it can be done.   If we are to imitate God, we will open the eyes of those who are blind to what’s happening.  We will free the prisoners from the programming that they have been subjected to.  There are agencies trying to help, but so much more is needed.   We celebrate our Veterans one day a year, but how much do we really do to return them to the way they were before, before they were taught to forget about loving each other?  If we are to imitate God, we will find a way to change that. We will lift up our voices to bring to ruin the ways of the wicked until these, our veterans, receive the care they need.  Because it is wicked to take all these nice young people, change them, and then turn them loose to try to make their way back to normalcy on their own.  And if we are not part of the solution, then we are responsible for the problem.

Similarly, in the anti-racism training yesterday, we looked at the various ways even our church by-laws are upholding systemic racism or classism, yet most of us were completely blind to that.  I can tell you, it was not a comfortable feeling to  become aware that white supremacy is alive and well even in the founding documents of our churches.   

If we are truly grateful for what we have received from God, we will imitate the ways of our Lord.  Imitating Christ is not easy.  He did, after all, poke the bear.  He challenged the powers that be to see themselves clearly.  Worse, he spoke revolutionary ideas to the masses and challenged them to see the powers that be clearly.  He looked at the way things were, and saw the way things could be.   If we would imitate our Lord, we would do these things too.  I can pretty much promise that will upset some folks.   Trust me, the clergy folks sitting around looking at our congregational by-laws and the founding documents of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) were quite upset at what we were seeing.   We must take off the blinders.  We must speak truth to power - even to ourselves! - because we, ourselves, are the oppressors when we abide by  documents that relegate some to lesser participation in Christ’s family.

If we are grateful, we will imitate our Lord, whose second greatest commandment was to love our neighbors - all our neighbors - as we love ourselves. The victims and the shooters.  The rabble rousers and the oppressors.  The military/industrial complex and the veterans.  Our Lord commanded us to love everyone, just as he, himself, rejected no one.  All are welcome to come to our Lord.  All are welcome to give themselves to him.  All are offered a place at his table.   It is for us to reach out and make sure that offer of unconditional love, is made known to all.