God is Change

 

Luke 21: 25-36
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
November 28, 2021

If anyone needs to hear of the hope of liberation, it is those who are not free. If anyone needs signs of an impending apocalypse, it is those who live with apocalypse every day: the poor, the unhoused, the incarcerated, trans, queer, disabled, Black, brown, and Indigenous people. To the rest of us, apocalypse sounds like something to be avoided at all costs, like pain, suffering, destruction but it’s really just another word for revelation. This pandemic has been and continues to be an apocalypse because it reveals the ever-widening chasm between those who are used to having what they need and want and those who are barely surviving.



Jesus said that we need only to look around to know that God is coming, but the signs he described do not sound anything like the Advent we hope for. These signs are all around us. Water levels are rising. Storms are more powerful and destructive. What used to be a hundred-year flood now occurs more frequently. Where there is drought there are battles over water rights. People are working more for less pay. Black people are still killed just for being Black. Intimate partner violence continues to rise because for many people there’s nowhere else to be but home.

We know things need to change and yet some of our best efforts are more about mitigating the pain of a violent system than they are about changing or interrupting some part of the system itself. We ask ourselves how feasible is it to change, to interrupt a whole system, but then how feasible is it to continue to live in a violent system that in the end harms everyone?



In his book How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram Kendi wrote, “White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.”



We live in a nation that has its roots in White supremacy. We live in a culture of White supremacy in which property matters more than people, in which those in power define who is fully human and who is not, people treated as though they are property to be kept or disposed of, depending on their assumed value. It is a dehumanizing system that eventually ends up dehumanizing everyone in it. It is a system that disconnects White people from non-Whites, divides White people from other White people, and separates all of us from the earth and everything that makes this planet alive. It is a system that seeks to control that which cannot be controlled, which is change.

In 1993, in her prophetic book The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler wrote, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is Change.” The Five Remembrances of Buddhism put the inexorable more pointedly: I will grow old. This body will know sickness. There is no escape from death. Everything and everyone changes. All I have are my actions.



Thousands of years before the Buddha, in a desert wilderness Moses heard these words from a blazing bush, “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh”. “I Will Be Who I Will Be”. “I will become whatever I will become”. God is Change. It is not up to us to decide or choose how God will show up. It is up to us to be ready when God does show up. All we have are our actions.

Advent is one such time to prepare for when God shows up. Throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, God longs for connection with human beings and with the creation. God desires to repair relationships between human beings, between humanity and the earth, between God and humankind. Author Paula D’Arcy wrote, “God comes to us disguised as our life”. I believe too that God comes to us disguised as our life together, disguised as Church, as community.



At the moment God has come to us disguised as a person without a home who is taking shelter in the black corrugated culvert pipe in the playground. Lately God has also been disguised as someone using the bushes to go to the bathroom. If you think I’m taking this a bit too far, let me go a little bit further. God is disguised not only as our life together, but God is also disguised in the decisions we make. All we have are our actions. God will be what God will be. God is Change.

Things change, situations change, people change when our relationships to each other change. We need find ways to connect to each other and to other people in ways that are sustaining and life-giving. We’ve talked about having a land acknowledgment in our bulletin and on our website, recognizing the Lenni Lenape and Nanticoke peoples who were the first stewards of this land but also wanting to initiate a relationship so that it’s not just performative words but substantive change. How can we have such a relationship, make such an acknowledgment while moving someone else off “our” property?



I know there’s concern that it’s a playground for children, but right now there aren’t any children playing there and probably won’t be through the winter. I know there’s fear as to what could happen with liability and insurance. I also think there’s an even deeper uneasiness that we would be responsible for a human life, which is a very serious concern. And yet how is it all that different from being responsible for a refugee family, except this person is a refugee in their own country? How different is it from us being responsible to each other, connected to each other, belonging to each other?

I don’t know what the answer is, except that “Love your neighbor as yourself” has to be a part of it. One option is that for now we do nothing but doing nothing isn’t who this church is. God is Change. All we have are our actions. And yet Advent is a season of waiting and a grit-filled hope for what is not yet, for God to be what God will be. Sometimes the way is made in the not-knowing, in the letting go, in the asking “What would Love have us do? How can we embody Love in a way that is visible and tangible?” and sitting with the questions.



God’s kin-dom of Change is at hand. God will be what God will be. All we have are our actions. May God come to us disguised in what we do and who we are. There’s hope in that. Amen.

Benediction – enfleshed.com

Even on days when sunlight seems thin,
may you notice signs of new life,
the kin-dom of Change at hand.
Go forth in your own time and space
trusting that God Who is Change 

will bloom you in your season.