delivered June 26, 2011
at Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ
If you are paying any attention at all, you cannot help but be outraged. Unchecked greed has wrecked our economy, crippled our democracy, turned the financial industry into a vast criminal enterprise, and destroyed countless lives here and abroad. Political extremists use the same tricks, the same language, that were used by the National Socialists in Germany in the 1930’s. This week I went into our local auto repair shop / gas station, just down the street, and found racist images of the president and vile right-wing hatred. And these are just a couple of examples of the evil we face, and it is not personified evil, it is not the work of a Satan, it is us and our neighbors and the things we support when we spend our money… it is enough to drive us to despair!
Here you are hoping to hear “good news,†and if we are honest with ourselves, instead we have litanies of evil, cadences of grief, psalms of pain and desolation. We could in truth preach from the Book of Lamentations, that great cry of despair after the destruction of Jerusalem, we could turn to those pages every Sunday, but we don’t… because we believe that in Christ there is an answer… that despair does not make the grade when it comes to God’s plan for us… what are we to do?
For many, Christian and non-Christian alike, the problems are overwhelming, and so they enter a brutal cycle in which they become angry about a problem, they learn the scope of the problem, the great inter-connected web of causes contributing to the injustice that is occurring, they are immediately defeated for they feel they cannot instantly correct a problem that is so large, and in our culture of immediate gratification an instant answer is all that is acceptable, and so, these good people who can see the evil, just give up. “What difference will it make if I change banks?†they ask.
Institutionally, churches have turned inward, many Mainline Protestant churches are engaged in the fine art of naval gazing, obsessed with their building and keeping the loudest voices inside the congregation happy. They might cut a check to a distant mission, might occasionally participate in a mission-tourism trip, might even help at the local food bank, but their vision if stunted and anemic. Oh Lord, pity your servants!
Scripture is very clear about our mission as a church. We are to deepen faith, make disciples, and build the just and caring kingdom of God. This latter mission can be further divided into care for the vulnerable in our own community, the biblical call to care for the widows and orphans, into care for the vulnerable outside of our community, the biblical call to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, to visit the imprisoned, and finally, into the our mission of prophetic witness. We are called by God to announce God’s justice, you cannot read the prophets, you cannot hear the words of Jesus and come to any other conclusion! The self-righteous personal-salvation followers that dare call themselves Christians have abandoned this mission, following instead the Gospel of Ayn Rand, the satanic gospel of “me, me, me 
Even in scripture we see religion turning in on itself, making institutions and bureaucracies, creating a powerful elite fed by the sacrifices of the people, oil and bread and slaughtered livestock, and the prophets denounce it again and again. I do not want rivers of oil! I want kindness, humility, justice that rolls down like a river!
We are called by God to be prophetic witnesses. This is part of our mission. And it doesn’t have to be overwhelming, we do not have to start with the aim of ending the confinement of Ai Weiwei, the artist on the cover of your Order of Service, tomorrow. We don’t have to believe that we alone can end poverty in America, can defeat corporate control of our government. But we can announce the good news, can announce God’s justice, and can take one small step today, one small step tomorrow.
This is why I selected a summer theme based on Christian action for those at the margins, to remind us of what others have done. Christian history is full of mistakes and grievous sins, from the Sack of Constantinople to the Salem Witchcraft Trials of our own tradition. But it is also full of small acts of justice and great acts of courage. This summer we will celebrate those great biblical themes of Exodus and Liberation, we will rejoice as we recall latter-day prophets who proclaimed God’s just and caring Kingdom.
We will call this our Summer of Love, not only because liberation is an act of love, but because for many of us the era of the March to Selma, anti-war protests and the assassination of Rev. King, Harvey Milk and countless others marks a great last moment of civic engagement before the ’80’s ushered in an age of selfishness and greed, an era we are still in! We are going to purge that poison from our own systems, because every single one of us is infected. And I’ll be right there with you… I will never ask you to do what I am not willing to do myself! Given my income and seminary debt, tithing is going to be hard, but I have set up an automatic payment from my online banking that equals $85 a week. I hate gardening, but I have a garden, because if I am going to ask you to live simply, to be better stewards of creations, to consider the amount of fossil fuel used to transport food, then I have to do something about it myself!
I found it ironic that after we set Summer of Love as our theme, decided to use protest signs in our décor, after we had set out on this path, the Vatican issued a statement blaming the problem of pedophile priests on very same era we hope to recapture and celebrate! But we won’t just celebrate that one era. We’ll look at 19th century struggle, prophetic witnesses who opposed slavery, who proclaimed the rights of women, who stood for workers. We’ll remember those who have courageously stood their ground when faced with extermination at the hands of the wicked… we’ll remember the martyrs Dietrich and Harvey, Martin and Oscar. We will look at struggles that are not yet won, at the road ahead, and we will celebrate God’s justice and we will pray about small things we can do, we will creep out of our paralysis, we will name those ways we are already listening to the Spirit, and we will ask God to pour into our hearts so we can find new hope and new courage. It will be a summer of love because we have much to celebrate. It will be a summer of love because God loves the world and we love God’s world!
Contemporary theologian Scott Bader-Saye has written that following Jesus “will mean avoiding the safe path in order to pursue the good.†But he warns that “in a culture of fear, we find such risks all the more difficult since our natural inclinations lead us to close in on ourselves when we face danger.†Bader-Saye is right, if he is speaking for the ways of the world. But he is very wrong is he is speaking for the Way of Jesus, for the Spirit-filled Way. For in Christ there is freedom from fear. Be not afraid! Jesus says it, Jesus meant it, and we need to live it! Be not afraid! Stop fearing that this church might not be here in five years. It might not! Or maybe it will! But I can guarantee you this, God’s just and caring Kingdom will be. In Christ we have defeated aimlessness and sin, evil has no power over me, death cannot undo the love that is mine from God through Jesus. This is the summer of love!
This summer and into the fall we will continue to do some of the things we have already been doing, loving efforts that this community has done for years. But we will also pray about our role as prophetic witnesses. We will pray that the Spirit will be active in our own lives, transforming us. If you love the status quo, if you think everything is just spiffy, you might wanna come back in the Fall, because we serve a living God and to serve a living God is to adapt and transform and to respond to the Spirit. Thy will, not mine, be done!
This summer you will not be called to stare down the barrel of a gun in the name of justice. You are unlikely to be arrested or beaten. You will not be asked to change your entire lifestyle overnight, and you most certainly won’t be asked to come up with an instant solution. But you will be asked to celebrate all that has been done. And to pray, to pray, to pray without ceasing, about what God has in store for us. It will be a grand adventure, a Summer of Love, and we, who follow the Way of Jesus, will be not afraid. Amen.