***
My kid sister was a broom ball goalie in high school. She was awesome at it. So awesome that the team kept giving her nicknames, like ‘Margo Nel-Awesome!’ and, because our last name is Nelson, they even called her ‘Nelson Mandela' for awhile, not knowing who that was, but only that nicknames are cool. So one day after a game, mom heard my sister’s new nickname and asked if Margo knew who Nelson Mandela was. They didn’t do a lot of African history education, even in multicultural public schools ten years ago, so Margaret had no idea. Mom started off her explanation by saying, “well, Nelson Mandela was thrown in prison…” And Margo asked, “so was he a bad guy?”
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was last Monday, and he spent a good deal of time in prison. Was he a bad guy? The local ecumenical theology on tap group is reading German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who even has his own collection of “Letters and Papers from Prison,” so was he a bad guy?
I hope we know enough of our history to realize how often power gets misused, and people protesting unjust laws end up getting punished by those laws before they get amended. That Mandela, King, and Bonhoeffer, were in good company. After all, today’s Gospel reading starts with John the Baptist getting thrown into prison. It may seem like a side comment, thrown away simply for setting up the timeline for Jesus’ next action, but paper and ink were precious in the days these stories first were written down, and no words were wasted.
So John’s in prison, and here comes Jesus, continuing and advancing John’s message, even taking it further, and calling people to follow him. Take that in for a minute. The first guy to preach this way was hauled off to jail, and now the guy John was preaching about has arrived on the scene to proclaim the kingdom of God has come near, one would expect that Jesus will also land in jail, if not worse. I mean, we know he gets the full wrath of the corrupt system, but at the time of today’s story, on the other side of certain things happening, those disciples didn’t know he’d get himself crucified (even though it probably wasn’t terribly surprising, given who the occupying powers were).
Knowing the previous preachers of this movement had been jailed, why would anyone in their right mind answer the call to follow the next guy in line for civil disobedience?
We live in a relatively calm, cool, and collected area. Violence is pretty rare, crime is sort of.. what. Do we even see or hear any crime around here in the village? It’s a pretty comfortable place to live. So maybe this question seems to come out of left field, but just to experiment, I’m going to ask it anyway: What would you go to prison for? In some cities, it’s against the law to feed the homeless in public places. In others, it’s illegal to offer a warm place to sleep without the right zoning and proper permits. If anyone has seen the film “Selma,” there’s a not-very-distant history of our country seeking to live up to the values it was founded on. What would you march for? What would you give up pay for to go on strike about? What would you sacrifice for a greater cause? Some of you already have made great sacrifices, but we know we haven’t made a world which is equally safe and secure for all people even to express their ideas without ridicule. And I mean the big ‘we,’ because it’s all connected somehow.
Jonah went into the middle of the great capital city of Nineveh, right into the deep center of that nation which had sent his own people into exile. Granted, Jonah preached to those people he loathed more than anything just to get God to leave him alone. Jonah wanted to see Nineveh burn, but God wanted to see Nineveh receive mercy. It would be like sending a veteran to ISIL just to say ‘hey, re-read your Qur’an! God is merciful!’ and suddenly the people we call terrorists would set down their guns and receive forgiveness.
When it comes down to it, we’ve already given up a lot of our freedom. Unless I’m the only one here with credit card debt and a mortgage-size student loan to repay. But Jesus comes to say that the kingdom of God has come near, and even though John the Baptist is in prison, he is a freer man than most.
Let me illustrate here a moment: In our conference we have an ecumenical ministry to the local prison. I get to hear snippets of stories from the chaplains who serve there, who meet inmates serving long sentences and get to bring the Good News of love and forgiveness into a place which is organized around punishment. One of those stories is of a man serving time who grew up in an abusive household and didn’t know any better than to think it was normal. This often happens, when kids who don’t know any different think their growing-up situation is just the way life is supposed to be. This man continued the abuse on his own spouse and children until the day he saw his adult child abusing his grandchild and realized how wrong that behavior was. To break the cycle, he turned himself and his child in to the authorities, and although he will be in jail for a very long time, he says he is more free now than he has ever been in his life.
So maybe the question isn’t ‘what struggle would you give up your freedom for,’ but ‘what would you give up for freedom itself?’
Solitude? Lots of folks see independence as the American Dream, but we weren’t created to live isolated from each other. Maybe giving up an ideal of being self-made for the sake of living with others in community is what is needed for true freedom.
Success? I’ve brought this one up before, because it’s so hard to measure and yet we race after it as though it will be the ultimate satisfaction. But without the freedom to fail, are we stuck in chasing after success in a way that leaves no room for learning and forgiving?
Anybody know the song “seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and its righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you, alleluia”? It comes from scripture and might lend a hint to these questions. Jesus came proclaiming that the kingdom of God has come near, and we spend the rest of the Gospel finding out what the kingdom of God is like, where the hungry are fed, the rejects are welcomed, and the sinners are forgiven. Where there is a freedom bigger and stronger than any prison walls, a freedom which cannot ever be taken from us.
This freedom, I think, is what the disciples followed. They caught glimpses along the way, and, like us, they spent their lives finding it in the strangest unexpected places, when they weren’t prepared or weren’t even looking.
I feel like I’ve asked a lot of questions this morning, but this last bunch is my goal: where have you caught glimpses of that freedom? Where has the kingdom of God come near in your life? How have you been reassured that you are enough, that God is enough, that you are loved and accepted and really truly deeply free? Because you are. You are loved. You are free. The kingdom of God is near in this news: God loves you, for Christ’s sake, and will never let you go. There is nothing that will keep God from loving you, nothing that will prevent God from walking beside you, nothing that will make God break God’s promise of faithful compassion and mercy. The kingdom of God has come near. Whether you find yourself in prison or all tied up at work or playing broom ball or stuck in traffic or waiting in line at the grocery store or arguing with a friend or waiting for a doctor or shoveling out from another snowstorm or… you get the point?
After John was arrested, freedom came, announcing that the kingdom of God had come near. And it has. And it does. And it always will, until our final days.
No comments:
Post a Comment