A Sermon By: The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Posted on
July 16, 2017
Trinity Church, Hartford
Proper 10, A
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
As both individuals and as a nation we live in a time of great uncertainty; and with that uncertainty comes a pervasive sense of insecurity. Wars and the rumors of war surround us. Terrorists strike without warning and in seemingly random places, killing innocent children and bystanders. Natural catastrophes strike the just and unjust alike. Disease and illness affect both rich and poor. Evil and horror seem to lurk around every corner and none of us are immune.
And yet none of this is new: the forms or types of evil and its wounds to our humanity may differ from age to age, but injustice, cruelty, and suffering have been with us since the beginning of the human race: Cain kills Abel without justification and the fratricidal curse of Cain continues down to the present. What has changed is our ability to rain down evil on others in horrifying proportions. We can unleash nuclear holocausts and bio-chemical warfare upon our perceived enemies. We have also invented new forms of guns and other personally owned weapons, the sales of which we are reluctant to subject to background screening and registration for fear of losing our precious right to own weapons of personal mass destruction.
We also have the ability to destroy others more subtly through less lethal technological means such as public shaming on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We can virtually murder the reputation of others electronically by humiliating, and denigrating them in the public arena of social media. In an extreme case a person was recently convicted of involuntary manslaughter for urging her boyfriend through text messages to commit suicide, which he subsequently did.
As a nation we often create laws and public policies which increase the uncertainty and insecurity of those living in poverty or suffering from illness and disease when they have no financial resources to deal with them. We threaten to take away from those with the least resources the common goods of a just society, such as guaranteed education, housing, and health care which are essential to living meaningful lives. We exacerbate the divisions between the most affluent and everyone else through tax cuts to those who least need them. And without these common goods peoples’ lives are devalued and their political and economic power is diminished. That is a form of murder which strikes at the very heart of what it means to be human.
Ironically, however, the more ways we find to do harm to others, the more we increase our own sense of uncertainty and insecurity. We fear that if we make others afraid of our power
and privilege they might eventually rise up in rebellion against us. In response, some have even argued that we should arm everyone so that we sow the seeds of uncertainty in would-be violent people to the point that they wouldn’t dare to unleash their weapons in public places for fear that we will unleash ours on them. This argument built on rampant fear would turn uncertainty and insecurity into virtues that will allegedly calm the waters of division and hatred. And if you can’t by your own power overcome your enemy, whether it be poverty, injustice, or terrorism, then you deserve to be a loser in the competitive race to be and remain a winner.
And yet we look in the midst of such insecurity for a sign of hope. Some will find it in individuals who proclaim their strength and history of being winners who have defeated the losers. Individuals who promise greatness through the power of wealth and privilege will reassure us that we can shrug off of any responsibility to help others who are still suffering and in gratitude for this lifting of such mutual responsibility these winners will be lionized and emulated.
But it is precisely at this point that we who have committed ourselves to the truth of the gospel will find another deeper, truer, lasting, and more certain sign of hope. That hope is one that is rooted in the only power in all of reality that can
really and truly deliver on the desire we all have to be made whole and to flourish in bonds of love and trust with others.
Paul reminds us of that power when he points to the spirit of life found in Jesus Christ, a spirit which is promised to us if we will but accept the gracious act of God in sending Jesus to free us from the law of sin and death. In sending Jesus God is participating in a narrative, a history, which begins in the creation of the universe and will end in the fullness of the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. If we are to find hope and a relief from the uncertainties and insecurities of life in the flesh, we have to be willing to place ourselves, our lives and our loves, squarely and unreservedly into the narrative of God’s work in the world. We need to seek out the places in our world where the good soil will take the seeds we sow and bring them to fruition. That soil is not to be found in following false messiahs, or schemes of individualistic self-protection, or in cutting ourselves off from our obligations of caring, compassion, and justice toward others. The fertile soil is the ground watered by communal interdependence, not by extolling the alleged virtues of heroic self-reliance in splendid isolation from the needs of others. Instead of a health care plan that would leave the poorest and the sickest to their own devices because we believe that we can’t afford to help them or because they weren’t able to buy their own way back to health, we need to
embrace a policy of universal health care that makes us all our brother’s keepers, to restore the bond of mutual responsibility between Cain and Abel, because there is no one who is an island unto himself. Why should the fundamental health needs of my brother or sister in Christ be overridden by the desire to have a little more relief from taxes? Do families say that they will care for a sick child only up the point that he or she becomes a financial burden, at which point we cut them off from care? As Christians we are committed to the care of all people within the same human family because we believe that the narrative of history leads to a common interdependent community of all persons. We may never eliminate entirely the rain that falls from the cloud of uncertainty and insecurity that life throws at us. Nevertheless we can, with God’s help, lift that cloud so high above the darkness that it casts down the light of Christ and illuminates the certainty of God’s grace. When we open ourselves to that light we will be given the hope and the strength to do what God expects us to do when we are filled with his life-giving spirit.