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25th November 2007 I rarely watch Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, but this year I saw more of it than usual, and for the first time, actually saw the end of the parade. Only I didn’t know it was the end. I thought it was just a continuation of the rather inane commentary offered up by the broadcast. It ended with something like, “…here it is, the moment we’ve all been waiting for….the arrival of Santa…. And with his arrival, the holiday season officially begins.” Of course the parade’s namesake sponsor connects Santa’s entrance with retailer’s make-or-break season. We who live in this culture of consumerism would expect nothing less. For all the entertainment value surrounding the parade, the commercial message is there from start to finish. It’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. It’s Santa’s arrival in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade that inaugurates the holiday buying season. Now that he has arrived, it’s time for all of us spectators to do our part and spend in a manner as extravagant as the show we’ve only finished watching. And just in case we didn’t connect those dots, the broadcasters help us do so in the very way they conclude the event: Santa has arrived; the holidays can begin. We in the church could take a lesson from Macy’s: No matter how big or how small the project, stay focused on the message. It’s not a new lesson. Bill Clinton adhered to it in his first election with his consistent focus on the economy. Rudyard Kipling speaks to something similar in his classic poem, “If.” “If you can keep your head when all about you/are losing theirs and blaming it on you…[and with numerous subsequent ‘if’s’, he concludes,] you’ll be a man, my son.” Kipling enjoins the young man not to be swayed by the myriad possibilities that tempt him to join cause or style, and instead, as Shakespeare would have it, to be true to his own best self. This is one of the primary lessons for the faith community as a whole that comes from today’s reading of the prophet Jeremiah. We don’t know for sure if this part of the book is written just before Babylon destroys Jerusalem in 587 BCE, or if it’s written while the Jewish people are already in exile, but it doesn’t really matter. Incidentally, the Babylonian exile marks the beginning of a huge diaspora or dispersion of the Jewish people. When Babylon conquered Judea, some Jews fled to Egypt; the majority were deported to Babylon; and a very small number remained in Judea. Some 600 years later, Rome exiled or dispersed an even greater number of Jews, creating a Jewish diaspora all over the Old World - from Spain to China, from Yemen to Germany.[1] But one of the most important issues the Jewish people struggled with during their Babylonian exile, the exile at the time of Jeremiah’s writing, was the transition of understanding themselves not as a nation, but as a people living in covenant with God and with one another, even as they are live in the nations of many lands. Jesus uses this idea when he speaks of the cup of the new covenant, a covenant that is renewed every time we remember him in eating the bread and drinking the cup. The apostle Paul runs with this same idea in the image of the Body of Christ, the church, diverse in land and language, in social and economic status; diverse in every conceivable way, yet bound together in covenant with God and one another through our discipleship to Jesus the Christ. Last week we saw one expression of that covenant in our joyous celebration of faith through music, South African style. This week, we join new members to this congregation whose roots trace to Taiwan, to Kenya, to Europe. Our identity is not national; it is covenantal. Our Statement of Faith articulates that covenant: binding together peoples of all nations, tongues, and races…. Which leaves us with a problem. If we are not identified primarily by nationality, how do we remain true to ourselves? For that matter, to which ‘self’ are we remain true? Our family self? Our work self? Our school self? Our race self? Our sexual identity self? Jeremiah tells us that it is our God-self…which can be pretty tricky business. Because after all, we can assume that the very shepherd-leaders against whom Jeremiah rails think that they are leaders precisely because God ordains it. And if God ordains it, then anything they do on behalf of the nation surely carries God’s stamp of approval. And they are wrong. Wrong. Wrong! Jeremiah tells us that a shepherd-leader worthy of God’s seal of approval is someone who governs with justice. Someone who brings the people together, rather than scattering them into polarized camps. No special interests. No favors for the Wall Street crowd. Or the oil crowd. Or the health industry crowd. Or the military procurement crowd. Instead, God’s shepherd-leaders put everything right. They seek out the best interests of those who have the least access to power. They don’t operate from a trickle-down but from a building upward, welcoming at the table not just those who provide the bread and cup, but also those who are equally hungry, yet don’t have the resources to feed themselves. Jeremiah would be appalled by current law in Dallas, where “anyone caught sharing food with a homeless person without a permit may be fined up to $2,000 and/or jailed for up to six months.”[2] Under this law, even the good Samaritan ends up in jail. On churchly calendars, today is the last Sunday of the Christian year, the Sunday known as the Reign of Christ Sunday. We subscribe to a bulletin service for the children’s bulletins, and the bulletins they produced for today carry the message, “Jesus died on the cross for our sins,” complete with graphics of the crucifixion and three crosses. We didn’t use those bulletins. Not because that isn’t a popular message...it’s practically as old as the church itself. We didn’t use those bulletins because I believe they hijack the gospel message in the same way that Macy’s hijacks both Thanksgiving and Christmas. I believe that the gospel message is the message of God’s love that doesn’t trickle down, but builds up. I believe the gospel message is of a love that calls us to follow in the footsteps of the one who refused to be sucked in by the powers that wanted him to identify with the nation self of the zealot. Or the self that focused on the family. Or the personal piety self, or the work self, or the ethnic identity self, or any of the other selves that clamored for Jesus’ allegiance. When Jesus was baptized, his identity was to his first self, beloved son of a loving God. That is the identity into which we each are baptized, the identity that keeps us centered, keeps us focused. That is the identity we claim as disciples of Jesus the Christ. *** [1]Richard Hooker, “The Diaspora, Washington State University, <http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/HEBREWS/DIASPORA.HTM> [2] “Anti-Hunger Groups Hoping For Action on Stalled Farm Bill”, Heather Donckels, The Washington Post, Saturday, November 24, 2007, page B-1 |