Proper 6A + Hoping in God’s Reputation + 6.14.20 (REV. ALENE)

The Rev. Alene Campbell-Langdell

All Santos, Oxnard

Romans 5, Matthew 10

It was one of the first times that I spent a weekend “inside,” as we referred to volunteering within the prison walls.  I had just participated in a three day retreat inside a maximum security prison in Oklahoma.  Despite the drab, beige walls surrounding us, my new-found friends and I had laughed and joked.  We had prayed and sang together.  We had found our similarities and our common humanity.  Now I was facing the fact that I would walk out of the prison gates back to my “normal” life, teaching in a private school, while my friends would stay behind, locked behind barbed wire and steel doors.  It felt wrong, and I blurted out, “I wish I didn’t have to go.”  My friends grinned slightly, looked me up and down, and said, “I’m sure we can find a bed if you want to stay.” 

Despite our common humanity and our connection in Jesus, past traumas and the way our society enforces crime based on race and socio-economic factors, separated my friends and I that day.  Today, our country is once again facing the monster that has plagued us for the past 400+ years.  It goes by a lot of names:  racism, greed, inequality, injustice, violence, brutality, survivor’s guilt, white privilege, patriarchy.  One of the tricks of the monster is the ways it gets us to identify ourselves with it.  While owning the part we have played in enabling the monster to survive can be a helpful first step towards repentance, it’s extremely important to distinguish between the “sheep of God’s pasture,” who are sometimes a bit lost, and the unclean, rebellious spirit harassing those sheep.  Narrative therapists refer to this as naming and externalizing the problem.  I am not the problem. You are not the problem.  The problem is the problem.  This is important because the disciples are given authority to cast out the unclean spirits, but we can’t cast out people and we certainly can’t cast out ourselves. 

Instead, Jesus calls us to notice the ways the monster, by whatever name it manifests in your life, affects and distorts your relationships, your work, and your sense of peace with God.  In two quick sentences Jesus turns the oppressive economy of his day (and ours) upside down.  “You received without payment, give without payment….   Laborers deserve their food” (Matthew 10: 8,10).  Give freely and expect to receive all that you need in return.  One of the commentators on the Working Preacher this week referred to the “danger of protecting ‘stuff’ rather than people.”  Daniel Berrigan, a priest and activist, is often quoted as saying, “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children.”  The monster has often caused the people of this country to value Target or Macys more than we value the lives of children growing up in fear.   

So how do we find our way of this mess?  How do we find our way into a society that lives into our values of Justice and Equality?  We start by recognizing our place as valued and beloved sheep in God’s pasture.  We remember that the sheep most in need of care is the one who is most vulnerable.  #BlackLivesMatter affirms that the shepherd will find and care for the lost sheep and not just the ones who are safe and protected.  And we are all lost sheep sometimes….

And so we stand in grace, knowing ourselves as sheep, who sometimes get lost, and yet Paul says, “We boast in our hope” (Romans 5:2).  We have the audacity to boast!  Another way to translate that word from the Greek is to be proud of.  Now, as a gay person in the month of June, that resonates.  But what is it that I’m proud of?  Paul literally says we are proud of our hope in God’s reputation, which is another way of translating the word for God’s glory.  God has a reputation for raising the dead.  God has a reputation for delivering his people.  God has reputation for finding lost sheep and bringing them home.  God has a reputation, as the Psalmist says, for being good, merciful, and faithful.  And so, we boast in our hope.  We take pride in God’s reputation of casting out prejudice and bending the arc of history towards justice.  And because of that, Paul says, we even “boast in our sufferings” because suffering produces endurance and character, and so suffering leads us right back to hope.  And this is a hope that will not disappoint because we have already experienced God’s love poured into our hearts.  We know, first-hand, God’s reputation for love.  We’ve felt the love that casts out fear and breaks down oppression.  And we know, in the depths of our being that Love (God’s love) will win.