Seek Ye First

The following is a sermon delivered in Muelder Chapel, Boston University School of Theology, on Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2008. This sermon was prepared for the weekly interdenominational celebration of Eucharist. The reading was Matthew 4:1-11, the lectionary Gospel reading for the First Sunday of Lent.

There is a song we sing every Sunday at Common Cathedral, the outdoor church for homeless persons, and it goes like this:

Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness
And all these things will be added unto you
Allelu, Alleluia

I know that it is Lent, and as a good Catholic I know that, technically, we are not supposed to sing any alleluias during Lent, though I just did. You see what attending a progressive Methodist seminary has done to me … it’s made me a liturgical maverick. Anyway, I’ll leave it to Professor Westerfield Tucker to decide whether the inclusion or omission of alleluias is more theologically appropriate, and I will seek absolution for my liturgical transgression in a Catholic confessional at the earliest possible occasion. In the meantime,

Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness
And all these things will be added unto you
Allelu, Alleluia

This, to me, is the moral of today’s Scripture reading. These words come from Matthew 6:33, deep in the heart of the Sermon on the Mount. Wise words from a brilliant teacher. How do they sound to you? Coming from my tongue, surely not as astounding or as profound as they must have sounded coming from Jesus, the one who taught with authority. How do you suppose the great crowds of people who followed Jesus from Galilee to Judea knew he spoke with such authority? How do you think they could tell? What did they feel? I don’t think it was by the healings alone that they were convinced of his authority. Rather, they believed what he taught because they saw Jesus embodying this holy wisdom in his own struggle to be faithful to God. And his struggle was just like theirs. There is a freshness and immediacy to the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount that I believe comes right out of Jesus’ experience of testing, from the beginning of his ministry and throughout his ministry, up to the cross.

I want to focus on the beginning of his ministry, and this brings me to Matthew’s account of Jesus’ temptation. The narrative comes to us in the form of a haggadic tale and resembles the challenges given to Jesus by the scribes and Jewish leaders later in this Gospel. All of these stories were crafted in such a way as to demonstrate the continuity of Jesus’ ministry with the ministry of Moses and the prophetic tradition of the Israelites. While Matthew has an axe to grind against the Jewish authorities, especially Pharisees, it should be kept in mind that the evangelist was positively emphasizing the Jewish roots of Jesus. His quotation of Deuteronomy in the dialogue with Satan is in keeping with Matthew’s desire to prove Jesus’ saving fidelity to Yahweh’s covenant with us. And this covenant faithfulness is exactly what is at stake in the temptation narrative. Would Jesus, proclaimed at his baptism God’s own Son, who had passed through the waters of his own Exodus, rely on God and God wholly and completely? Where generations of Israelites before him failed to hold fast to the providence of the Lord, could he endure courageously, faithfully in the wilderness of sin and doubt? Would he seek first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness?

Jesus is led by the Spirit into the desert to be tested by God and tempted by the devil. Now let me be clear: I don’t think this is another case of divine child abuse. The plain sense of the text tells me that Jesus let himself be led by the Spirit of God. But this does not mean the Spirit of God tempted Jesus or was pleased to see Jesus suffer. He was tested by God, and to this testing he consented, but the temptation was not of God. God leads us always back to God, even if the journey leads us into tests and trials, but God does not lead us into temptation. God does not seduce or deceive us with the world God created to be good. Only we can do that; we let our natural desires be distorted into mindless passions, and we become acquainted with the demons. So testing and tempting are different things. God led Jesus into a confrontation with temptation, and Jesus found himself face to face, as do we all, with the devil’s seductions.

Now, why are the devil’s seductions temptations? Relieving hunger is a good thing. Self-sacrifice, when undertaken to realize a virtue or ideal, can be a good thing. Putting power in the hands of people whose hearts burn for justice is a good thing. But listen to Wendy Farley, who writes, “You see how tricky the demons can be. Wanting to be good, trying to be good—these are also temptations. There is a sense in which wanting and trying to be good can be good things, just as morality, self-sacrifice, and love can be good things. But all of these things are ways the demons try to get us to accept their bargain.” Farley is saying that in our insatiable desire for the good, we are blinded to the source of goodness, and we end up grasping at fragments of goodness, fragments of the divine mystery, and then we lose ourselves. Satan dares Jesus to seek fragments of God—God’s power, God’s protection, and God’s glory—for himself, not for God’s sake, or even for the sake of others. First, the devil provokes Jesus to turn stones into loaves of bread only to satisfy his own aching craving. Some commentators propose that the devil tempts Jesus to transform the stones in order to feed others, but this would only confirm Farley’s point that we are tempted by the good. Later, Jesus performs a miracle just as wonderful, multiplying a few loaves and fishes to feed the thousands, but there is a difference. There, he does so to satisfy the people’s hungry hearts, not only their hungry stomachs, and he does it to bring the masses closer to God. Neither Jesus’ appetite nor his desire for God and for others would have been satisfied had Jesus changed the stones in the desert, and Jesus would have lost sight of his Lord. Thwarted once, the devil then tempts Jesus to throw himself down from the Temple in order to be saved. Another temptation to the good—don’t we long to see some sign that God is powerfully protecting us, watching over and within us, supervising creation, gently but surely guiding us, rejoicing and mourning with us, deeply present with us in the face of suffering great and small? Wouldn’t a miracle rescue of the Son of God by the angels be just the awesome display of might that the Judeans needed, and wouldn’t that strike the hearts of the Roman occupiers with terror? Jesus would not give in to the devil’s delusions. This kind of self-sacrifice would be vanity and vexation of the Spirit, and it would be in vain: acts of faith can never be used to extort favor from God. Later, upon the cross, Jesus refused once again to give in to this temptation. In being raised upon the cross, Jesus let himself truly be thrown down, but not to save himself or Israel or even to prove he was the Son of God, but because he loved others, and by his pierced, crushed hands he would support others just as the angels supported him in the wilderness after being tested and found worthy. Finally, the devil offers Jesus the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. Jesus answers, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” He knew that to accept this offer would mean trading the genuine glory of God’s rule for the ungodly grandeur of empire. Instead of accepting the world for himself, Jesus Christ in his glory finally bestows the nations upon his disciples, fulfilling his own proclamation: blessed are those the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God; blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. He will give the world to the disciples so that all things may be given to their God. Jesus does not claim anything for himself except as granted to him by God whom he called his Father, and he offers even these things back to the Father in bestowing them to the disciples.

Satan insinuates that Jesus is being less than the Son of God if he does not demonstrate or lay claim to his divine power. “If you are the Son of God,” the devil begins twice, knowing full well who Jesus is and what Jesus can do. Farley says we are deceived into thinking we are worthless if we do not give ourselves over to the good we think we should be doing. In fact, we sell ourselves short, because we are denying the precious and beautiful persons we have already been created to be. And this is the basic temptation to which we always yield. That is one of the morals of the story of the Fall in Genesis. The man and woman, presented with the tantalizing possibility of being like the gods, of grasping the divine power, were in fact denying the spirit of God that was already within them. They could not delight in the gifts with which they had already been graced. They counted them of little worth, and as a result they suffered a wounding of their personhood and a separation from the divine Spirit.

But Jesus remembered. He remembered the covenant. He trusted in the Lord. He trusted in his own sacred worth and infinite dignity. He rejected the temptation to reject the reign of God within him and the justice of God around him. And his victory is our hope. God has drawn near to us in Jesus’ confrontation with sin, suffering, and doubt, and we can draw power from the person who we confess is the Son of God. Moreover, Jesus’ fully human struggle, in obedience to God and rebellion against the world, is not a distant cosmic ideal but our immediate flesh-and-blood model. So let us not seek the stony bread of security but the sweet bread and roses of solidarity; let us not seek terrifying and terrorizing displays of monolithic force but the constructive and healing exercise of communal power; let us not seek the consolidation of social, economic, political, cultural, and religious empires but the creation of the beloved community.

Jesus teaches us a simple but hard-won wisdom. Seek ye first the kingdom, the kindom, the reign of God, the peace of God. Don’t seek the power, the prestige, and the glory for its own sake. Don’t mistake the glimpse of God for some unfiltered beatific vision, for we see only in part, and what we grasp is but a filament in the strong web of interdependent being. And check yourself before you conclude that you are all right just because you believe you are seeking, glimpsing, and grasping these things for others. Don’t be tempted by false altruism; don’t be tempted the good. Seek ye first the kingdom of God. God will give us the power, the glory, and the miracles of love and justice we desire and for which this hurting world yearns when first we seek after the source of all good things. And this seeking is not so much a grasping for godliness as much as it is a growing into oneself and a growing into relationship with our God. Amen.

The Work of the People

The following is a sermon delivered at First Parish in Cambridge, Unitarian Universalist, on Sunday, Sept. 2, 2007. This sermon was prepared for Interfaith Worker Justice's Labor in the Pulpit program.

The readings were Isaiah 58 and an excerpt from Martin Luther King's Letter From Birmingham Jail.

***

Greetings and blessings to you from Boston University School of Theology, where I am a seminarian. With me I bring the greetings and blessings of my fellow students and my professors, who are my brothers and sisters in the Spirit, and my dear friends.

But I have come this morning particularly to bring you the greetings and blessings of a specially chosen and beloved group of men and women. I bring you the salutations of Selida Pol, a janitor who works three jobs, in downtown Boston, Cambridge, and in Chinatown. Selida works 15 hours a day; she gets hardly any sleep, and she supports herself and her family in her home country.

I bring you the greetings of Vanessa Reeves, who worked for three years at Smithfield Packing in Tar Heel, N.C., butchering hogs. She was injured when a 200-pound hog carcass fell on her, and because of this she suffered a miscarriage. Her doctor said the miscarriage was caused by the stressful pace of the assembly line or from the hogs hitting her. While she was in the hospital she wasn’t thinking about work at all. But Smithfield fired Vanessa for not calling in. She was fired when she was in the hospital and she lost her baby.

My friends, I bring you the greetings of all these working women and men near and far, your sisters and brothers in the Spirit, and mine. And on their behalf, and according to the commission given to me by Interfaith Worker Justice, I bring you a message of healing and hope. Let us dedicate ourselves in faith to work generously for the well-being of Selida, Vanessa, and the thousands of working poor among us so that we may be found by our God to worship in spirit and in truth.

Some Unitarian Universalists, I am told, would not characterize their Sunday morning service as worship. The term worship itself is problematic because of the hierarchical and patriarchal assumptions embedded in its meaning. In our public language, worship is used in an exclusive sense, as if what we did when assembled in sacred spaces such as these was exhaustive of the service we render to God and all that is holy. So allow me to offer another, more expansive word in its place: liturgy. It comes from the Greek leitourgia, a compound word which means “work of the people” and in its original secular context referred to work toward the common good of the nation or state, or to use a less hegemonic term, the public. In a theological context, leitourgia became the “work of the people” in public prayer, worship, and spiritual service for God and God’s holy people. The English word liturgy as it is used today is associated with public acts of worship in a church or other consecrated space, but reclaiming its older meaning it may also be applied more generally to ritual acts that bear witness to God and all that is holy, giving praise and thanks for divine favor and blessing.

With this expansive view of liturgy I affirm that what we do here is the work of the people, a people that is chosen, beloved, special, and holy. But it is not the only work. I also affirm that to march with Cambridge janitors for living wages, better health care benefits, and full-time employment is the work of the people—it is liturgy, and it is worship. To go on a hunger strike for underpaid security officers at Harvard University, as students did in Harvard Yard in May, is to worship in spirit and in truth. To meet with the manager of the Star Market in Mt. Auburn and urge the supermarket he runs to stop selling Smithfield bacon, packaged with the blood and sweat of five thousand exploited and abused workers in North Carolina—this is the work of the people, courageous and true. To return weeks later to the same manager with a letter of thanks because Star Market removed Smithfield’s product—this is worship, joyous and good.

And it is indispensable. In fact, without this kind of work, the worship we offer in this sacred space remains a soulless formality. Without leitourgia, our worship can still be technically competent, theologically politic, and even externally beautiful. But internally it is false and intrinsically alien to the divine Spirit of life and to all that we hold sacred and dear. We know this truth well in the head, but we do not treasure this truth fully in the heart, and we do not honor this truth fully with our hands, for truth is served only when truth is done.

This morning you have heard the words of Isaiah, one of the Hebrew prophets. And by prophet I mean one who is a fiercely passionate lover of the sacred and of all people. Isaiah delivers a stern message about true worship to Israel, God’s chosen and beloved people. I will skip the exegesis and get to the point, which is that external worship is no worship at all. The people of Israel stand accused, tried, and convicted of the insincerity of their service to God. Their liturgical practices are judged empty. Their worship is self-serving. This is not to say Israel’s fasting or any of its religious disciplines are wrong, but without the fasting from self-interest which these practices are meant to develop, these devotions enact a lie. Their work constitutes a betrayal.

And who has been betrayed? Israel’s God? No, because one’s God is not betrayed as much as denied. Then who has been betrayed? It is the hungry, the oppressed, the homeless. The people of Israel have broken covenant with their God because they have betrayed their poor. How I wish you could have heard the words of Isaiah 58 from the mouth of the Rev. Dr. William Barber, the president of the North Carolina NAACP, who preached full-throated and unsparingly on Wednesday at the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg. Eight hundred fifty of us gathered at this church in this historic town in Virginia because the shareholders of Smithfield Packing were in the city holding their annual meeting. We were electrified by Reverend Barber, who embodied Isaiah’s words when he said that work without justice is slavery. But even more do I wish you could have seen the Smithfield workers from Tar Heel, who were greeted with an ovation and given a place of honor in the front pews of the church. Vanessa was with them, and she told us how she lost her baby, and we were stunned into silence, worshipful silence. Behind her whisper, we could hear Isaiah bellowing, calling out to the executives of Smithfield: “Lo, on your fast day you carry out your own pursuits, and drive all your laborers.”

And we marched out of the church onto the streets of Williamsburg, continuing our leitourgia. We sent a handful of workers and clergy into the Smithfield shareholders’ meeting, inviting the executives and stockholders to join in our worship, to hold back their feet from following their own pursuit of higher profits and production quotas, to stop seeking their own interests, to cease speaking of the workers and labor unions with malice. They did not join our assembly, but we will not withdraw the invitation.

Today we have also heard the deceptively familiar reflections of Martin Luther King, whom many would regard, in addition to being a pastoral and political leader, as a prophet, a Christian prophet. I say deceptively familiar because we are accustomed to reading his rhetoric and comforting ourselves with the knowledge that some of the victories for which he struggled have been achieved. But like Isaiah in the reading we heard, King had no intention of comforting the recipients of his letter from the Birmingham jail. As his letter states, throughout his campaigns for civil rights and economic equality, as he toured the churches of the South, King asked himself, “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?” King knew the answers to these questions because the work of a people tells us what kind of people they are and who their God is. He asked them because he wanted his fellow clergy members, both his enemies in the flesh and friends in the Spirit, to hear the questions. Like Isaiah’s ominous interrogation of Israel, King’s questions call across forty-four years and hundreds of miles from that cell in Birmingham to us. These questions call across thirty-nine years and a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, where King was staying during his stand in solidarity with 1,300 striking sanitation workers. Do we dare to recognize ourselves in the questions? Do we fear to recognize ourselves in the answers?

When people ask me why I came to Boston to study theology, I tell them it is because I want to know and love God better, and to know and love people better. As a person of faith I believe that knowing and loving God is somehow related to knowing and loving people. The better I know and love God, the better I know and love people, and the better I know and love people, the better I know and love God. I also believe the inverse is true: the less I know and love people, the less I know and love God.

I have concluded that it is impossible to know and love my sisters and brothers or my God unless I accept the invitation—a calling, if you will—to join the priestly, prophetic people of God fully in the work of the people. If I am a stranger to Selida Pol and Vanessa Reeves, then I am a stranger to the God I claim to worship. The gentle songs of sympathy I sing in the sanctuary are so much sound and fury, signifying nothing, if I do not join the choruses of the mighty songs of solidarity heard on the streets of Boston, Cambridge, Memphis, Tar Heel, Williamsburg, and elsewhere. For my failure to see the needs of my working brothers and sisters as my own, I seek forgiveness. I pray to the divine Spirit to help me remember that every time the families of our hard-working brothers and sisters suffer the indignity of involuntary material deprivation, a spiritual wound is inflicted upon us all. We cannot turn away from this wound. The wound is part of our history; our story is a story of a wounded and wounding people. But our story does not end with the wound alone. The story ends with healing and hope. It is the healing of this wound that Isaiah proclaims when he announces divine blessings to those who release those bound unjustly, untie the thongs of the yoke, feed the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted.

This is the hope of Interfaith Worker Justice. It is the hope of Selida and Vanessa and Reverend Barber. It is my hope, and I invite you to share this hope with janitors, security officers, meat packers, and hotel workers; with laborers who are African-American and Latino; with immigrant workers, documented or not; and with all who bear the heavy yoke for our enrichment, for despite our neglect of and estrangement from them, they are truly chosen and beloved.

I will not close with my own words of peace. Instead, please hear the peaceful words of two janitors who work in Cambridge, our brothers Elcides Perez, who comes from El Salvador, and Rafael Emilio Soto, who comes from the Dominican Republic.