Genesis 45:3-11, 15
Luke 6:27-38
SERMON “Hoping Machines”
Once Allied anti-Fascist forces had secured the beaches of Normandy, a steady flow of service members and supplies flowed into northern France.
While the Allies had the advantage in the air and on the water, there were still risks. For example, the merchant ship S.S. Sea Porpoise was off the coast of Utah Beach on July 5, 1944 when it was hit by a torpedo fired by U-390, a Nazi German submarine. Fortunately, the ship did not sink, and while twelve crew members were injured, one notable crew member was not harmed.
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was a well-known anti-Fascist, and of course, one of our nation’s best known singer-songwriters. He had hoped to travel with the USO, entertaining our troops. The thing is, Woody Guthrie was a Socialist, and though never an official member of the Communist Party, he was considered a “fellow traveler.” So no USO for Guthrie, just a roll of the dice, enlistment in the service of his choice or a high probability of the draft. He chose the Merchant Marines.
In late 1946, not long before the onset of Huntington’s Disease, Guthrie wrote “The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine, a working machine.”
He would need that hope. He would live for 15 years after his diagnosis, often confined to psychiatric facilities, and unable to speak during his last years, a horrible fate for a singer.
Hope may seem an odd note for today’s scripture readings. Forgiveness, certainly. Pacifism? Maybe. But why hope?
Let me remind you that I am no fan of wimpy pacifist Jesus, long luxurious hair and a pristine white robe surrounded by pristine white sheep and pristine white children in the image so many of us saw in the Sunday School classroom, the Savior for white Christian nationalists, and pretty much no one else.
It is true that the passion narratives record no resistance on the part of Jesus when he was arrested with overwhelming force, when he was in the custody of the Sanhedrin’s security forces or the Roman Army. But he could be more than a little sharp with his words, and used force when monkey-wrenching the commercial enterprise in the Temple.
His followers may have entered Jerusalem with palm fronds instead of pitchforks, but that does not change the fact that he was preaching revolution, and it is not just an economic revolution, though it is certainly that.
This passage is often read as weakness by a society that worships power and greed, in which physical and economic violence is glorified.
This passage does not preach weakness. There are many kinds of strength.
Jesus is preaching a new way of being in the world, is flipping our way of being as surely as he will flip tables in the Temple. Rather than the old human system of vengeance, of fear, of might makes right, Jesus is preaching love and grace and generosity.
He is calling for people to be born again into a new way of being in the world, calling for human society to be born again into a new order of love, using the “kingdom” language of his day, but calling for a kingdom not lorded over by petty despots or even a Davidic shepherd-king, but ruled over by a good God, a God whose “yes” is bigger than our “nos.”
Jesus lived in a moment when people were particularly wretched. It should be no surprise that America’s white Christian nationalists idolize the Roman Empire, for Roman democracy had been destroyed, a mad man was on the throne, and the economic system was based on violently taking what little the poor had and brutalizing foreigners.
The Roman Legion was not in Judea and Galilee as anti-terrorist forces. They were the terrorists, slaughtering and enslaving entire villages if they did not meet the demands of the thieving empire. The Judean elite aligned themselves with Rome, exploiting the moment to expand their personal wealth and land holdings.
When Jesus said “It doesn’t have to be like this. God is not like this,” it gave hope to many. He modeled a sharing economy, a healing economy, a justice system that centered restoration, not retribution.
“Let the man who is without sin cast the first stone.”
And they all walked away, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are forgiven and reconciled if they would just live into the Kingdom of God which is simply this new love-based and open way of being.
“Your sins are forgiven. Take up your mat and walk.”
Even the most twisted interpretations of Jesus, as sacrificial victim of divine domestic violence, still rest on hope. And I don’t for a minute believe in that evil god that humans have created, a perpetrator of violence we have made in our own image.
People experienced in Jesus a love so intense that the broken experienced wholeness, a love so transformative that he could only be an incarnation of the god he preached, a divine king in the social context of the day. But most truly a parent, calling her children home, celebrating his prodigal son.
Yet, generation after generation, we try to twist God into our own image, make God and the people of God look like human systems of violence and power, when the presence of God was the victim of violence and power, a conspiracy between a manipulative elite and an ignorant mob. God is with the scapegoat.
Love.
Love who? Your neighbor. Who is my neighbor? There was this man who had been mugged…
I cannot tell you how many times I have heard people who claim to be followers of Jesus self-righteously brag that they have taken care of their family. And Jesus says, “So what? Even Tony Soprano takes care of his family. And that guy’s a mobster. I wanna know what you done for the lady that cleans your house.”
Jesus is preaching a revolution in the face of evil, and we need a revolution in the face of evil, for our half revolutions have not worked. What would Jesus do? Flipping over tables is always an option. And this Friday, we’ll have a chance to flip some tables, when we participate in the national economic boycott.
No one is better positioned to jam-up the gears of economic oppression, for we are part of that system. It is time to reject the zero-sum economy, and live into the abundance of God’s kingdom, where there is enough for the thriving of every human, and all of our living companions on this great green jewel circling a star.
Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” was a radical message when it was written, more than a decade into the Great Depression, in the wake of the Dust Bowl that drove the songwriter out of Oklahoma, in a time when when so many had lost their land, just as was happening in Christian Testament times, a time of drought and locusts.
In fact, the original 1940 version of Guthrie’s masterpiece and a later 1944 recording include this verse:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.
This land, this earth, was made for you and me and them and us and all that lives and is God’s giant “yes” into the cosmos.
Amen.