Re-turning to God
December 6, 2015
The Rev. Sally Johnston
St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields
Columbia, SC
Last week, Dec. 1st, was World AIDS Day. It’s a day of prayer and activism, commemorating and advocating, because too many have died and too many more will, if we do nothing.
I lost my brother Oliver to the AIDS virus in 1990. In the years before he died, AIDS was becoming an epidemic ignored in the mainstream because everyone knew it was “just a gay disease.” The silence from the Centers for Disease Control, other agencies, and the President himself fueled the epidemic. Not everyone was silent. Some were actually pretty loud. Scared out of their wits they called for the quarantine of gays. And the Church? For the most part, the church was split between those who preached AIDS as retribution for a life of sin and those who stayed stunningly silent. As if that made them innocent and uninvolved.
Oliver and five of his friends became a support group to one another. With no hope of even experimental treatments, they shared their fears and they buried their friends. Weekly. Finally they said to one another, ‘We have to do more than this.” And so they created a piece of art, a black poster with a pink triangle, reminiscent of the pink triangles tattooed on those identified as homosexual by the Nazis. And the poster simply said, “Silence = Death.” Perhaps you’ve seen it. It has become an international icon for education and the fight against AIDS.
At the time they simply began plastering it on walls and light poles around New York City. It quickly went viral long before we knew anything like Facebook or YouTube. Their actions coalesced with other actions, breaking the silence of fear and quiet desperation. Did they eliminate AIDS? No. Did they prevent my brother’s death? No. But they began a movement, because they realized that the “somebody” to do something was them and they began by repenting of their silence and pushing back against the fear that threatened them as much as death.
In Advent we are reminded that it is repentance that prepares us to receive Christ at Christmas.
The biblical, theological term for repentance is metanoia. But metanoia means more than simply saying “I’m sorry” and carrying on in the same direction. Being sorry is a good start, but not enough to carry the full freight of what it means to repent. Being sorry is only regret, not repentance. The deeper meaning of metanoia is to change our ways. Change our minds. Quite literally, “to go beyond the mind we have.” To look outside ourselves, cleanse our assumptions and “grow beyond the mind we have.” Repentance is a deliberate act, a commitment to make ourselves more available to God. Not necessarily in one dramatic event, but bit-by-bit, a very Anglican turning and turning and turning again until we have been formed and reformed anew.
For the Israelites, repentance meant to re-embrace Torah. When they felt abandoned by God, they returned to living by the law. In our tradition, we could say we live in sin – that is, separated from God - when we abandon the Gospel of Christ. Driven by our own fears and desires and self-proclaimed innocence, we lose our connection to God and become ineffective as channels of God’s grace. And we must remember it’s not our innocence that justifies us – because we have none – it’s the recognition of our sinfulness and our repentance, returning to God, that saves us.
But this Advent it’s hard to consider our own sinfulness and repentance when we feel under attack. Our deep, deep fear this Advent – of terror and random acts of violence that we cannot control – provokes our protests that WE are the innocent, attacked unfairly. Not perfect, but the good guys. Where is God?” we cry. Why has God let this happen? Why should WE repent? The Hebrew scriptures answer the lament again and again. When the chosen are in trouble it is not because God has abandoned them. It is they who have turned away. They who’ve left God waiting for their return. Repentance is not saying we’re sorry for what we’ve done wrong. It is not simply confession. Repentance is about re-turning to God when– guilty or seemingly innocent - we know that we are lost.
In the clergy vesting room here, posted on the bulletin board with the liturgical calendar, the worship schedule and a few other items, we still have the list of names of the nine people who died at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston last June. It’s been almost six months since a young man, raised as Christian, gunned them down.
Beside that list is another from 3 years ago this month, December 2012. It contains the names of the 20 children and 6 adults killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Ct. If we put up all the lists, of all who have died by gun violence just since Sandy Hook, we would need a much, much bigger bulletin board. The shooting in San Bernardino, California this week was the 355th mass shooting in the U.S. just this year.
The numbers are staggering. Sanity would suggest that we take whatever means possible to stop the insanity. And yet, we can’t agree on what that is. Every means possible to address what? Access to guns? Violent video games? Religious practices different from ours? Refugees who might include a terrorist? Mental illness? What shall we stop? Who shall we stop? And what are we willing to give up, who are we willing to become, in the name of feeling safer if not actually being safer?
There will be – there already are – those who respond with the same fear-driven vengeance as in the early days of AIDS. Calls for racial and religious profiling, quarantines and waterboarding will not make us more secure. They will not lead us to justice and righteousness. They are not the way of those who follow Jesus, because Jesus is not moving in that direction. He never has.
The biggest threat to our way of life right now is not that terrorists will kill us, but that they will be successful in separating us from our faith in God and love for one another. That we will abandon our baptisms and run toward vengeance as if we could stop killing with more killing. Any acts that lead us to retribution, stereotyping and accusations based on religious differences –things some think will keep us safe - are not the way of God. We can do them, but we cannot call ourselves the Body of Christ with blood on our hands.
St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Philippi of his confidence that the good work God had begun in them, God would complete. “And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless….” Even Paul knew that believing does not eliminate difficult choices. To grow in Christ means to co-mingle knowledge and insight with love; in order to choose what is best. Will growing in Christ be without risk or danger? No. But it will be from and toward love and faithfulness, not easy, crowd-pleasing choices that sound powerful and safe but abandon the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Fourteen people: 9 men, 5 women – the latest victims of a mass shooting from an easily obtained arsenal of automatic firepower. 14 people who won’t go home again to see their families. 14 pairs of shoes that won’t be worn again. These aren’t their shoes. But they represent – for each one of us to see as we come to this table – the most recent result of despair and silence.
Around the country activities, events, and vigils are being planned for next week-end as calls to action for gun control. But I guarantee you every preacher in America this Sabbath – Christian, Muslim or Jew – has wrestled all week with the same question: “What do I say THIS time?”
I say this: We cannot stand by, wringing our hands, crying “Enough is enough!” and waiting for someone else to do something. We cannot stand by while others saddle up as vigilante posses and lead us all down a road away from our baptisms. Nor can we settle for the false innocence of silence.
A number of you have contacted me with ideas and appeals for what we might do. I invite you to join me Tuesday evening at 7:00 in the chapel for prayer and planning for collective repentance to break the silence. To return to God and ask: How will we follow Jesus now? How will we be faithful now? And how will we, in this season of Advent and Christmas, stay calm enough to hear the angel say, “Be. Not. Afraid.”
This morning in the face of no clear or easy answers let’s take to heart the words we just sang from the Song of Zechariah:
In the tender compassion of our God
The dawn from on high shall break upon us,
To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death,
And to guide our feet in to the way of peace.
We’ve gotten on the wrong path. God is not in this direction. We need to repent, “to go beyond the minds we have” to find our way home. Together. Amen