Sermon: Maturing as church
Thirty years ago
King Ahab – in this case, the Moderator of the United Church of Canada and the majority
of commissioners to the 31st General Council left the halls of
Laurentian University in Sudbury where they were meeting. They walked through the rain towards a tipi
erected nearby. Almost 200 First Nations’
leaders and people were gathered there around a sacred fire. They were waiting to see how the General
Council of the United Church would respond to their request a year earlier for
an apology for the ways they had suffered over many generations at the power of
the Church, because of the way the Church had understood and acted out their
calling from God.
Arriving at the sacred
fire, the Moderator spoke these words on behalf of General Council and the
whole of the United Church:
Long
before my people journeyed to this land your people were here, and you received
from your Elders an understanding of creation and of the Mystery that surrounds
us all that was deep, and rich, and to be treasured.
We
did not hear when you shared your vision.
In our zeal to tell you of the good news of Jesus Christ we were closed
to the value of your spirituality.
We
confused Western ways and culture with the depth and breadth and length and
height of the gospel of Christ.
We
imposed our civilization as a condition of accepting the gospel.
We
tried to make you be like us and in so doing we helped to destroy the vision
that made you what you were. As a
result, you, and we, are poorer and the image of the Creator in us is twisted,
blurred and we are not what we are meant by God to be.
We
ask you to forgive us and to walk together with us in the Spirit of Christ so
that our peoples may be blessed and God’s creation healed.
The Apology did not
and does not fix everything. It doesn’t
make everything right. It doesn’t
absolve of guilt. But neither does it entrench
guilt, nor require perpetual self-flagellation.
What it does is open
the door to a new future, by inviting new relationship, dialogue, learning and spiritual
growth. And that seems to be
happening.
The United Church
and First Nations people have been in dialogue about all kinds of things over
the past thirty years, as equal partners in conversation. The Church shared in, and supported the Truth
and Reconciliation Project. The people
of the First Nations have a place at the table, and the Church has learned that
there is a table to sit at with others – instead of a throne from which to
dominate others, or an altar on which to sacrifice the best part of both ourselves
and others.
Sitting at the table
we’ve learned things like humility and confession of sin, truth and
reconciliation, and restorative rather than retributive justice. We’ve learned from the First Nations to
express deeper respect and responsibility for the well-being of creation, and
in 1996 added to our Creed the line “to live with respect in Creation” which
was not there when it was adopted in 1968.
In 2012 we changed our official Crest to include the four colours of the
First Nations medicine wheel, emblematic of the wholeness of life and of
healing; and, along with the Latin words “Ut Omnes Unum Sint” – “that all may
be one,” the Mohawk words “Akwe Nia’Tetewa:Neren” – “all my relations” – a traditional
way of ending Mohawk prayers by remembering the web of relationships we live in
– human and natural, and that we forget or violate at our peril.
The apology and the shared
journey that it opened up, have helped us mature as a church and to understand and
live out in deeper ways than we did before, the good will, grace and blessing of
God for all of Earth and all its people.
One can only wish the
same might have been said of King Ahab – the first King Ahab whose story is
told in I Kings.
Ahab – as bad a king
as he turns out to be, started as good as any.
He was king by God’s good will over a kingdom God gave to the people for
their well-being and for the blessing of all the world. But Ahab does not understand or remember that
this kingdom is a blessing only if in particular ways it is willing to be
different from other kingdoms.
Perhaps this was due
in part to Ahab’s father who came to the throne of a disorganized and depressed
kingdom, and who over his reign built things up by making alliances with rich
merchant cities outside Israel, building comparable cities within Israel, and nurturing
in Israel the cult of fertility that other kingdoms practiced. In other words, his way of serving God and saving
God’s kingdom was to make it more and more like other kingdoms.
And so it is with Ahab. He too builds cities, makes alliances, enlarges
his property, and imprints his sign on everything and everyone under him, to be
a king like other kings with a kingdom like other kingdoms.
Not surprising that
all through the story Ahab is restless, obsessed and depressed in one way or
another, and oppressive, unjust, self-centred and immoral. Because when you live by others’ expectations,
and measure your worth by external stuff, the demand never stops.
What Ahab really wants,
though – more than he understands, is what Naboth has. It’s the vineyard, because it’s a good piece
of land right next to Ahab’s winter palace and Ahab can’t imagine not having
it.
And it’s also what
the vineyard represents and speaks of. The
vineyard is in the land of Jezreel, and Jezreel means “God plants.” The people of Israel at their best understand
land as a gift of God for the blessing of all the peoples of Earth. It’s not something you own, or buy or sell;
nor can you give it away, because it’s not yours to give. Rather, it’s an “ancestral inheritance,” as
Naboth says of his vineyard – something God has given to his family long, long
ago for their use and their place in the goodness of the world, and it is not
anything he can ever rightfully give away or let go of.
And I wonder if this
moment – the moment when Naboth stands up to Ahab and out of the depth of his
faith and his anguish at what he’s been asked, says to the king, “No! You cannot take from me, and I cannot give
away what God has entrusted to me. This
is my and my family’s inheritance from God, alongside and within your kingdom, our
part of the blessing of God for all the world” – I wonder if this is the
critical moment in Ahab’s story, the moment that reveals his heart and
determines his fate?
At that moment, the
story says, Ahab chooses to do just what he is practiced at doing. He goes home and sulks, because he cannot
imagine not being in charge. He continues
to obsess about what he will do to prove himself a king. He grows depressed. He never lets go of the need to dominate.
I wonder, though, if
he ever – even just for an hour, a minute, or a second, ever thought
·
of
apologizing to Naboth for asking such a thing of him,
·
of
coming down from his place of familiar power and putting to one side his need
to prove himself by being in control,
·
and
of asking Naboth to maybe join him on a journey of learning once again the way
of really living in, and really living out God’s blessing of all the world – to
do it together, as equal people of God.
And if he did – if
he felt that kind of nudge and urging of God, I wonder what stopped him and
made him unwilling to be God’s king and to serve God’s kingdom in a new and
different way?
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