Neighbor Love is Never Neutral
Ed Bacon, Jr. is a minister at the All Saints Church in Pasadena, CA. The church is under investigation by the IRS, which questions the appropriateness of a sermon given at the church before the 2004 presidential election. For updated information on the case, visit www.allsaints-pas.org. This sermon was given on 9/17/06.
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I want to begin this sermon by once again expressing my gratitude to the Internal Revenue Service. Those brothers and sisters really know how to shine a spotlight on a church and swell the numbers of worshipers. I will try to explain briefly what is going on between the IRS and All Saints in just a moment.
But first I want to welcome those of you who have come as visitors to All Saints this morning. This Sunday is Homecoming Sunday, the annual celebration in which we kick off the new program year. We often have a bit of a summer diaspora here at All Saints. This is the Sunday when all hands are back on deck, ready, rested, and raring to go to celebrate a new year of transformation. We believe in transformation here — the transformation of those who worship together in order for each of us in turn to do our part to transform the world to be more like that dream God has for creation. A world that has not yet been but can be and will be if we will dedicate our energies to it. A world of healing, love, and justice for all, a world of peace among peoples and nations, and a world where every human being is fully alive without bigotry, violence, injustice, oppression, terrorism, war, or torture.
Homecoming Sunday notes the reality that the more each of us is rooted in a community where we feel at home, the more joyful energy we have available for this journey of transformation of self, church, and world.
So, my friends, members of long-standing, members who have just come, and those of you who are sniffing us out this morning for whatever reason, welcome. We have come together, come home today, to recommit ourselves to another year of worship that moves the heart and challenges the mind, another year of working for compassion, healing, inclusion, justice, and peace and to have hearts full of joy while we’re at it.
Now, a word about our relationship with the IRS: If you need background information about the IRS investigation of All Saints, let me ask that you go to our website to download relevant historic documents, including a copy of the sermon that our Rector Emeritus, George Regas, preached prior to the presidential election in 2004. You can also find copies of the two summonses served on me Friday [and the church’s response, declaring its intention to contest the summonses].
With those legal details noted I want now to address what I see at stake in our religious and political lives as a result of this latest IRS action. The current administration of the IRS apparently thinks that religious organizations should stay neutral when political issues are concerned. What that thinking totally misses is that we do not have a choice about whether or not to be neutral in the face of dehumanization, injustice, and violence. Our faith mandates that always stopping short of endorsing or opposing political candidates, the church can neither be silent nor indifferent when there are public policies causing detriment to the least of these.
History is shamefully littered with the moral bankruptcy of people who were Christian in name but not behavior who were silent or indifferent or neutral in the face of dehumanizing and destructive public policies. We remember Christians who would own slaves, expecting them to have the Sunday meal prepared when they returned from church. We remember Christians who would go to Easter services not far from death camps brushing the ashes off their Easter finery to enter churches where their pulpits were silent in the face of the Holocaust. Neutrality and silence in the face of oppression always aids the oppressors.
For pulpits in the USA to become even more neutral than they already are will make religion even more of a problem than it is already. Jesus proclaimed that religion too frequently is not a part of the solution. Too often religion is not only a part of the problem. It is the problem. Jesus said that religious institutions can become like salt that has lost its flavor. Its only good then is to be thrown away. The book of Revelation (chapter 3) speaks of the Church of Laodicea that had become so bland, so ineffectual, so callous to human suffering, so cowering before the saber rattling of the empire of the day, so lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, that God said, “I will spew you out of my mouth.” That is exactly what happens to churches and other faith communities that do not stand up, speak up, and act up when human beings are not treated with the dignity and honor due those who bear the image of God. The fundamental commandment that pulsates at the core of our being is a three-fold love: To love God with all our being and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Love of neighbor is never neutral.
I have known a lot of faith communities who think religion consists only of beautiful worship, saying one’s prayers, all the while hermetically sealed in ignoring those forces which are destroying the least of these. All Saints will always invest great resources in movingly beautiful worship. That is often how the heart is opened and moved. At the same time we will never ask someone to check their conscience or their courage at the door. We stand in the prophetic tradition where movingly beautiful worship is valuable only to the degree that it heals the human heart and then empowers the people to daring action on behalf of the oppressed.
In our lesson from the Hebrew scriptures this morning (Isaiah 50:4-9a), the prophet says, “God wakens me every morning, wakens my ear to listen like a student.” Listen to God speaking through the prophet Isaiah (1:14-17) , speaking to us the students of God:
14 Your New Moon festivals and your appointed feasts my soul hates. They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. 15 When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you; even if you offer many prayers, I will not listen. Because your hands are full of blood; 16 wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight! Stop doing wrong, 17 learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of those without parents, plead the case of those who are widowed.
Listen to the prophet Amos when he speaks for God (Amos 5:21, 23-24):
“I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies. 23 Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. 24 But let justice roll down like a river, and righteousness like a never-failing stream!
That is the prophetic tradition that tells us that we have no choice about the matters of justice. When Jesus preached his inaugural sermon in his hometown of Nazareth, the reading from which he preached was from the prophets — Isaiah 61 to be exact. This shows that of all the traditions and theologies in Hebrew scripture, Jesus was grounding his ministry in the prophets and their tradition. Here is the account.
Luke 4:16-21
Jesus stood up to read. 17 The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because she has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, 21 and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Psalm 15 has been summarized by some scholars as saying this, “Those who do justice dwell in the presence of the Lord.”
My friends, there is something about a moral argument that clarifies the mind about why we do what we do. And I have never felt more energized and joyful than I do this morning about expressing with passion what is at stake in this argument we have with the IRS. And my heart is filled with hope that there are millions of Americans who are standing with us and will stand with us in the claim that loving your neighbor as yourself has no place for neutrality and silence in the face of anything that demeans another human being.
Welcome home, my friends. Happy Homecoming. Let us never forget that our true home is the heart of God where each of us is loved just as we are and each of us is given this beautiful, energizing, audacious gift to resist any efforts to dehumanize others or to block God’s dream of turnving the human race into the human family.
Amen.
