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07053 January 25, 2007
Faithful beginning
PHEWA participants urged to keep eye on Jesus, not ‘happy ending’
by Jerry Van Marter
NEW ORLEANS — Eyewitnesses to the overwhelming devastation of post-Katrina New Orleans, many for the first time, participants in the 2007 social justice biennial conference sponsored by the Presbyterian Health, Education and Welfare Association (PHEWA) were exhorted by their conference preacher to set aside their self-righteousness, preconceptions and desire for happy endings in order to follow Jesus Christ into an unknown future.
“We think we want a happy ending. We think we want assurance that all will be all right,” said the Rev. Margaret Aymer Oget — who’s assistant professor of New Testament at Atlanta’s Interdenominational Theological Center — in a series of four electrifying sermons during the Jan. 11-14 conference. “But not every story has a happy ending. But every single story [in the Bible] has a faithful beginning.”
And when Christians pay more attention to faithful beginnings than to happy endings, she said, they follow in the footsteps of Christ.
What kind of fast is this?
When the Hebrew exiles returned from Babylon, Aymer said in her first sermon, “everything had to be just so, Isaiah tells us in chapter 58.” And so they set about reconstructing their laws and rituals.
However, their social and economic rebuilding did not match the religious and liturgical renewal, Aymer said, and so God rejected their rituals. “How can you love God whom you have not seen when you mistreat and oppress your brothers and sisters made in the very image of God, whom you HAVE seen?” Aymer paraphrased the prophet.
“It would be easy to say, ‘they didn’t get it but we do,’” Aymer said. “But do we?” she continued, citing the economic disparities, discrimination against immigrants and minorities and grinding global poverty resulting from globalization that plagues contemporary society. “How many of us passed the homeless and the food-less in our cars on our way to and from the airports to get here today?” she queried.
“And while the needs of the world go unmet,” Aymer said, “our churches diminish and Christianity becomes a by-word among the generation that sees more liberation, more acceptance of others and more willingness to live in the diversity of God’s world on “YouTube” and Sesame Street.”
The prophet, Aymer said, “is calling us to awareness, to repentance, to a holiness based in pious justice and righteous mercy.”
Holy dissatisfaction
Nehemiah, a servant of the king upon the Hebrews’ return to Jerusalem, walks around the city lying in smoking ruins, Aymer said in her second sermon, and decided “I could no longer put on a happy face before the king.”
Nehemiah’s “holy dissatisfaction” came from his eyewitness realization that the walls of protection around Jerusalem could not protect the people, Aymer said, and his belief that the king had turned a blind eye to their vulnerability.
The collapse of New Orleans’ levees in August 2005 “led to the collapse of other, very important protective walls,” Aymer said, “walls that sheltered those who fight addictions, who are living with domestic violence, and who are HIV+ of living with AIDS …walls that protected women who were pregnant but had no options, the physically and mentally disabled and children … and a community of people from church and neighborhood ready to reach out, to help rebuild and make things new.”
Nehemiah sought help from God, Aymer said, and people of faith must do the same today. “Come walk, and as you walk, prepare to ask for help, for partnership and for guidance,” she said, “from those on the ground and from the One who made the waters in their coursed and who spoke to calm the sea, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”
Faithful beginning
“Happy endings are what life is all about,” Aymer said to begin her third sermon. “We are a people who love dessert.”
But the preacher in the Letter to the Hebrews “will sigh deeply and say,” Aymer continued, “Friend, not every story has a happy ending.” Particularly after a day of viewing the devastation in New Orleans, she said, “We think we want a happy ending. We think we want assurance that it will all be all right.”
The Hebrews preacher, on the other hand, “details all the ways in which stories might otherwise end,” Aymer said, citing biblical examples such as homicide, floods, lifelong existence as exiles, life-or-death demands, torture, imprisonment, all manner of oppression. Some stories, Aymer paraphrased the preacher, “simply end in failure.”
Christians dare not mistake the Hebrews preacher’s exhortation — “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…” — for Madison Avenue’s saccharhine “and they lived happily ever after,” Aymer said.
“For the witness of scripture is not that they lived happily ever after,” she said, “but that despite what they went through, despite what they had to face, despite all that lay ahead of them — they lived by faith.”
Not every biblical story has a happy ending, Aymer said, “but every single story in this early Christian sermon has a faithful beginning.” There are no guarantees, she said, “but on those days when hope is hard to find, we can decide again to make a faithful beginning.”
The big “if”
Presbyterians love words, Aymer said in her concluding sermon, with one exception: the word “if.” For people who love certainty, the word “if” promises choices … and consequences.
In Isaiah 58, the community returning from exile is faced with two choices, Aymer said. “The first is this: IF you do justice …” For the Christian community in New Orleans (and elsewhere), the big “if” is the same, she said — the choice to ignore the poor and vulnerable or to “choose to break the yoke, to choose to feed the hungry, to choose to work for justice and peace.”
The second choice the prophet gives, Aymer said, is “IF you keep a Sabbath of justice…” According to the prophet, Aymer said, the choice is “to continue with life as it has always been, ignoring the impact of the lack of rest, the lack of Sabbath on your health and the health of those who work for you” that mistreats others and diminishes human relationships.
Or, she said, “There is another choice. It is a choice to keep a Sabbath of justice, to keep a Sabbath of right relationship.”
Isaiah, Aymer said, “speaks to us of a God who will guide us, a God who will strengthen us, a God who will fulfill the needs of our very being.” And the resulting restoration is not just of individual lives but of the lives of communities.
“God made a choice in the person of Jesus Christ,” Aymer said, “a choice to walk among those who were cast aside because of physical and mental disability; to touch those that society would not touch and to eat with the outcasts; to honor the children, the very least of these … our brother Jesus walked with day laborers and wealthy women, healers and tax collectors, and created community, community built on love for one another and action taken on behalf of each one’s neighbor.”
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