|
THE LITTLE GATE TO GOD The Rev. Rodney Romney Micah 6:6-9; Mark 4:24-34 The central focus of Jesus' teaching was the Kingdom of God. This concept undoubtedly took root in his temptation experience in the desert, the place where he rejected power for himself and determined that his role was to be a servant of God and a servant of the people. From that point on, his was a life of public service and compassionate caring. And that is what we mean when we talk about the Kingdom of God: service and compassionate caring for everyone. Jesus was strongly influenced by the Hebrew prophets from his own religious tradition, for he often quoted them, and his teachings clearly reflected theirs. Today I am linking him with Micah, a prophet who lived about 780 BCE, and who gave us the quintessence of all Biblical prophecy in a few words. As you read the sixth chapter of Micah's book, imagine that you are in the setting of a courtroom, where God is the plaintiff bringing a lawsuit against the nation of Israel, because it has broken the sacred covenant that had been established between God and the people. Micah is the attorney representing God, who has brought charges of infidelity against Israel. Witnesses to this trial are the mountains and the hills, the heights and depths of the earth, who have been called to support the divine accusation that God is making against Israel. God demands to know how any more could have been done for the people. God had freed them from slavery in Egypt and brought them to a new homeland where they could be free. Israel then takes the stand to plead to God in her own defense and says, "But we bowed before you, we brought you our burnt offerings, our calves and our rams. What do you want now? Shall we give you even our first born, the fruit of our bodies, for the sin of our souls?" Then the attorney Micah speaks, God has shown you, O people, what is good. And what does God require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? In other words: Israel, you cannot possibly repay God for the loving care you have received, not with your sacrificial acts of worship, nor even with the sacrifice of your children. There is only one thing you can do: you must act toward others in the same way God has acted toward you. You must act with justice toward all, you must love others in a kindly manner, and you must walk humbly in God's company. Three simple words, all verbs, spell out what God requires: do, love, and walk. In such simple ways do the people of God show their faithfulness to God-by how they live and care for others? Fast forward about 800 years to another Jewish prophet named Jesus whose central message was about an idea he called the Kingdom of God. He used numerous parables to describe this concept, and many of them compared the Kingdom to a farmer sowing seed in the earth, from which grows a crop that is destined to bless everyone. Underlying this teaching was the reminder that what we give we also receive. Plant justice, you will reap justice. Plant kindness, you will reap kindness. The seeds you sow will be the seeds you shall reap, and in this way is the Kingdom of God spread. The word kingdom is a bit troublesome to the ears of some of us today who have worked for a more inclusive faith language. Some have shortened it to kindom, meaning the place of right relationships, both within and without. Some call it the commonwealth, meaning we all share equally in the abundance and bounty of God. Neil Douglas-Klotz, in his ground-breaking work in the Aramaic language (which was the dialect Jesus spoke), says that the word for kingdom in Aramaic is not gender specific and really means "the province of the universe." This means that there is no place where God is not. It is therefore that state of recognition that God is everywhere and is most perfectly expressed when we care for others. One of the earliest and clearest voices in my younger years that connected the idea of the Kingdom of God with social and economic transformation on this earth was a Baptist minister named Walter Rauschenbusch. He was called the founder of social Christianity, for he inspired ministers, churches, denominations and church councils to speak out vigorously on social issues, as they had never done before. Born in 1861, the son of German emigrants to the United States, who came here as missionaries to the German Baptists already in this country, Walter Rauschenbusch followed his father's footsteps into the ministry. After completing his work at the Rochester Theological Seminary at the age of twenty-five, he accepted a call from the Second German Baptist Church in New York City. The American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society almost sent him to an educational post in India, but one of his professors at Rochester, disturbed by Walter's liberal views, blocked the appointment. So Walter went instead to a small congregation of German Baptists in New York City for the grand salary of nine hundred dollars a year. As it turned out, his service in that church redirected his life and thinking forever. The church, situated on the edge of Hell's Kitchen, one of the City's notorious slums, gave Rauschenbusch a first hand glimpse of the devastating effect of poverty and crime on people's lives. There in the late 1880's his soul was awakened to the need for a gospel that would address social evils and create social reform. He admitted this passion did not come from the church; it came from outside and his contact with poverty. He saw how people worked all their lives and at the end had almost nothing to show for it. He began to reconstruct his theology around the conviction that the Kingdom of God on earth is not only the predominant factor in Jesus' message, it is meant to be strongly connected with the economic order. Walter was almost a lone voice shouting in the wilderness at first, and he was often labeled a Marxist, a Socialist and a non-Christian because of his views. In fact, he called himself a socialist but never joined the Socialist party, for he felt the Kingdom of God cannot be identified with any social theory. He believed it meant justice, freedom, fraternity, labor, and joy for all people everywhere, and not just for those who call themselves Christian or American. In 1897 he accepted a call to teach at his alma mater, the Rochester Theological Seminary, and there he began to exert a profound influence in the classroom. The theological climate of that time was centered strongly in the belief that Christ's second coming was imminent and that the real business of the church was to save souls and not waste its energy trying to abolish physical misery. Deploring the concentration of wealth in a few hands, Walter Rauschenbusch said that wealth is to a nation what manure is to a farm. If the farmer spreads it on evenly over the soil, it will enrich the whole. If he leaves it in heaps here and there, the land will become impoverished and nothing will grow. But Walter was not simply a social activist. His activism sprang from a deep and genuine spirituality. By making service to others an inseparable part of the Christian life, he laid the foundations for a healthy new form of spirituality to emerge that combined social activism with the contemplative life. His scholarship, his passion, his prophecy and his deep spirituality remain alive today, almost a hundred years later, reminding us again of the redemptive value of a single life when it is committed to the total benefit of all humanity. For twenty-one years, as a professor at Rochester, he wielded a powerful influence in the classroom, and through his books and writings he was able to reach the churches all across this nation and redirect the thinking of thousands. Walter died in 1918, his final years shadowed by World War I. While he never declared himself an absolute pacifist, he did declare that there is no greater sin than war. To the end he was the voice of protest against the evils of an industrialized and militarized society. One can only speculate what he would say about this age. Harry Emerson Fosdick, in writing about Rauschenbusch, said that he did more after his death than he did in his lifetime. He was often the lonely voice of a new era when he lived, but after his death, ministers, churches, denominations and councils of churches began speaking out vigorously on social issues, as they never had before. The essence of his message-that social and economic transformation are involved in the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth-is an integral part of the Christian gospel. Wherever this understanding and compassion are alive in churches today, there we find the province of God and what Walter called "the apostolate of a new age." "The future," he said, "belongs to the sower, provided the seed that is sown penetrates the old humanity and transforms it." Walter Rauschenbusch wrote numerous prayers, books and affirmations, but little poetry that remains. Yet one poem, written in 1918, titled "The Little Gate to God," has survived and offers a clue to the depth and richness of his inner life. In the castle of my soul is a little garden gate, I first came to know Walter Rauschenbusch through his books when I was a student at the American Baptist Seminary of the West in Berkeley, where I was graduated in 1960. I was profoundly influenced by his message that while faith is a solitary and private decision, its impact must carry into the community and reshape the social structures of the world if it is to be authentic. Dr. Ralph Knudsen, Dean of the seminary during my years there and a former pastor of this church, required our New Testament Theology class to read Rauschenbusch's "Christianity and the Social Order," "A Theology for a Social Gospel," and "The Social Meaning of the Lord's Prayer." These writings have a timeless quality that is relevant to any age or social problem. I am personally grateful, therefore, that University Baptist Church has established this center as a means of keeping alive his memory, his message, and his mission, and I am honored to be part of it. Building on Rauschenbusch's work, I would like to offer my interpretation of the interrelationship and interdependence of personal spirituality and social activism. I believe that one is not really complete without the other. The meaning of salvation is deficient if it does not include making this entire world a better place for everyone and everything. Spirituality that does not lead to social justice is bereft and incomplete. This is not just a Rauschenbusch concept or a Romney idea. It is, I believe, central to the ministry and message of Jesus. Traditionally there are three ways by which the Christian faith has been expressed. These are the way of the head, the way of the hand, and the way of the heart. I have tried each one individually and separately at various times. I began my ministry in 1960 at the Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church in Oakland, California, where I tried, as best I knew how at that time, to present sermons that represented sound theology and clear thinking. As I look back now on those early sermons, it is almost amusing how intellectually precise and accurate I tried to be, making sure that the major Christian doctrines were presented, sometimes as many of them as I could crowd into one sermon. I was majoring in the way of the head. Then came the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War, and I was drawn inexorably into the way of the hand, where I realized preaching is hollow if it does not grow out of a life committed to social justice. I publicly disagreed with the war, and I disagreed with the unfair housing laws and barriers of discrimination that faced citizens in that community whose skin happened to be black. I lost members over my stand on both issues, but we gained far more than we lost. The church, originally all white, began to integrate in a reflection of the neighborhood that surrounded it, so that by the time I completed my ministry there twenty years later it was no longer a white congregation but was roughly 50% non-white. The Black Power movement grew up in the shadow of that church and drew in some of the young people from our congregation. I was allowed to attend some of those early meetings of the Black Panthers. I came to know some of the early leaders of the movement, and though I sometimes found their rhetoric harsh and polarizing, for the first time I came to understand the shadow of oppressive forces under which black people still lived in this country. However, by the mid 70s I had become almost spiritually bankrupt and was mildly depressed. I had concentrated so heavily on the way of the hand that I had ignored the way of the heart. As my theology grew more liberal and socially inclusive, I found myself turning away from the old forms of piety and prayer that had been instilled in me by the little Baptist church in Arco, Idaho, where I had made my confession of faith when I was fifteen. Now I needed something to refill my wells if I was going to keep going. At that point I returned to school to work on a Doctor of Ministry degree, and through the Graduate Theological Union I focused my studies on Mysticism in World Religions. For the first time in my religious experience I stepped outside the Christian/Baptist tradition and discovered spiritual strength and nurture in the lives and writings of mystics of all religions. In studying Buddhist thought and meditation under a Jesuit priest, I found a new peace and vision that enriched my spirit and made me an even more loyal follower of Jesus Christ. The Hindu notion of universal salvation appealed strongly to me, and in the five pillars of Islam I found parallels with my own spiritual practice. Although I am still a Christian and a Baptist and will ever be so, I found peace, strength and insight by exploring wider arenas of religious thought and spirituality. We need the balance of all three ways--the head, the hand and the heart--if we are going to live the truly authentic life. We each have different temperaments. Some of us are more activistic than mystic, and some of us may find more satisfaction in pursuits of the mind than in exploration of the spirit. But at a very deep level we are all the same. We each have an inborn hunger for God, and that hunger for God may initially drive us in different ways but will ultimately bring us back together again. The inescapable truth is we are all one. We are not only breathing the same air and swimming in the same waters; we are parts of each other. Kabir, a 15th century Hindu poet, said, "As the river surrenders itself to the ocean, what is inside me moves inside you." No matter what path we may take to reach God, we all end up eventually at the same place. When I came to Seattle First Baptist Church in 1980, I brought with me a deep and abiding conviction that all people are precious in God's sight and must therefore be precious to all who seek to follow and serve God. But here was awaiting a new challenge. Here I faced what some have called the last legitimate discrimination of the church: a prejudice against people whose sexual orientation is other than heterosexual. I am not absolutely certain it is the last prejudice. I suspect there will be others, because a fundamentalist religion, which is almost totally a religion of the head, is built on the premise that there is always an enemy that needs to be fought and destroyed. Our two churches (Seattle First and University Baptist) stood together on this issue, even though vilified and threatened with expulsion. But we prevailed, because in our affirmation of the fact that all people are precious, we have stood on the side of truth and love. They may expel us from a region, but no one can ever expel us from the Kingdom of God. I do believe in another decade or so homosexuality will no longer be the major issue of the church, as it has been for the past twenty plus years. We will have learned the truth that sexuality is not what people do, it is who they are, it is their God-given birthright. We all have something valuable and precious to contribute to each other, straight, gay or whatever, and whom we choose to love intimately is a decision no one else should be able to criticize, prevent or curtail. All people must be free, must be welcomed and affirmed, cared for compassionately and lovingly, and treated justly by society. This is what the Kingdom of God means. And when we finish with this current battle over homosexuality, we can then direct our energies to addressing the horrifying hunger and poverty that is in our world and the ways we are misusing and abusing our planet. Traditionally those who sought to purify themselves through devotion to the inner life felt, since the word was essentially evil, they had to try to purify it and if that failed, then they must withdraw from it in order to be holy. But slowly we are beginning to realize that authentic spirituality calls us to be to be lovingly aware and fully present in the world, serving all people with compassion and justice. Temptations lie in both the path of the activist and the mystic. Without spiritual motivation and strength, the activist can burn out and become frustrated and exhausted. Without an awareness of the needs and pain of the world, the mystic can become self-absorbed and be of no earthly use to anyone, not even God. We need to balance the work of the head and the hand, even while yielding ourselves to the way of the heart. The authentic spiritual life must become a manifestation of God's compassionate action and presence in the world, if is going to have any lasting effect or social value. Compassionate action, offered as a grateful and joyous response to a compassionate God, is the greatest gift we can ever bestow. In the Sanskrit, a Hindu sacred writing four thousand years old, is the phrase Tat Twan Asi. It literally means, "that thou art." The truth is not there is only one God; the truth is there is only God. You are not the small self you think yourself to be; you are the limitless consciousness that is the truth in all. You are the word of God to the age in which you live. You are God's love, God's justice, God's peace. Perhaps that is what Micah the prophet meant when he said to walk humbly with God. Perhaps that is what Jesus the prophet meant when he told his disciples they were children of Light and therefore to travel sharing the light. We have important work to do not just for ourselves but also for the generations that will come after us. On a street in downtown Seattle I saw a man on crutches propped against a building with a cord around his neck to which was attached a sign and a cup. The sign read HUNGRY, HOMELESS, HELP. The cup contained a few coins, mostly pennies. He was missing a leg, and his entire demeanor was one of abjection and despair. He did not even look up at people as they hurried past him. I also started to pass, but a voice inside myself said, "Help him." I put my hand in my pocket and realized all I had was a single bill. With a silent prayer that it might be a one, I drew it out. It was a ten. I walked over to the man, placed the bill in the cup and mumbled a few words I can't even remember. The man looked at the bill, then raised his eyes and looked at me. Suddenly I was looking into the soul of that man. He raised a scarred and dirty claw of a hand toward my face, drew broken, dirty fingernails gently across my cheek, and murmured softly, "God bless you, my friend." A jolt like electricity went through my entire frame, and my eyes suddenly filled with tears. In all my life I had never felt as humbled as I did at that moment. All the degrees I had received, the honors I had been given, the tasks I had achieved, all paled into insignificance as I received the blessing of that beggar. Journey reverently, dear friends. Enter often into that little gate in your soul that leads to God, for it is there the lowly and the despised are shot through with glory, it is there all your desires will be fulfilled and your joys will be like the everlasting hills. There your life will find new meaning, as you discover the many terrible and wonderful disguises by which God will come to you. I close with an Affirmation of Faith by Walter Rauschenbusch I affirm my faith in the reality of the spiritual world, in the sacred voice of duty, in the compelling power of truth and holiness, in prayer, in the life eternal, in Him who is the life of my life and the reality behind all things visible. I rejoice to believe in God. |