The sacredness of everything

 

Isaiah 56: 1, 6-8; Psalm 133
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
August 20, 2023

Photo of a dandelion ready to seed from within. Overlapping light, airy white filaments in concentric circles with tiny light green stems in the outer circles and coral pink and peach stems in the inner circles

Earlier this week I was contacted by a mother who lives in Dover who wanted me to baptize her baby girl who is in a NICU unit and coming along well. I asked her why she was calling a pastor in Newark as she lives about an hour away. She replied that she wanted her sister and her sister’s wife to be the godparents, but the Catholic Church, which she left, and other Christian churches will not allow same-sex couples to be godparents. She went on to explain that she is a spiritual person and is raising her children to have a spiritual life and baptism is part of that. I responded that in the United Church of Christ and in our congregation when a child is baptized it is a communal act. The congregation makes promises to the child and to the parents to love, support, and care for them. Baptism is an outward expression of the mystery that we are members of one Body, the Body of Christ.



In the end, what she was seeking was ritual but not community, blessing but not connection, validation but not solidarity. I encouraged her to find a church home close to where she lives and so pointed her to a Presbyterian church in Middletown whose pastor is a colleague and friend and to People’s UCC in Dover.



Even as people leave church community, they are still seeking answers to the same questions we all have: What is the meaning of life? How do you live a good life? Three of the big blockbuster movies this summer—Barbie, who asks “Do you ever think about dying?”; Oppenheimer, which confronts these questions in the decision to drop the bomb, and Indiana Jones, a 70-year-old professor at the end of his career—each in their own way invite us to ask these big questions of ourselves.



These questions are especially pressing when we are living through difficult times, in our own lives and in our life together. When God’s people were living in exile over generations, Jewish religious leaders struggled with how maintain faithfulness, integrity, and cohesion as well as communicate the depth of God’s love and care for God’s people in the midst of so much disconnection, suffering, and upheaval. What is the meaning of life when one is so far from home and feeling so far away from God? How does one live a good life when everything that gave life meaning has been taken away?



In this passage from Isaiah, in what is known as Third Isaiah, a wave of exiles has returned to their homeland. How shall they live? The prophet exhorts the people to keep justice and to do what is right. He then goes on to say that any foreigners, anyone who has left their home and their people because they married an Israelite or joined their fate to theirs, if these people will keep God’s covenant, these too will be God’s people. Then we hear a verse that Jesus quoted when he cleared the moneychangers out of the Court of the Gentiles in the temple: “For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples”. God is one who gathers outcasts no matter who they are and calls them home.



These religious leaders realized that this God who gathers everyone but especially the oppressed, this God can be found anywhere, in everything. God is not constrained to a particular place nor is God’s love limited. The God of the oppressed is the God of everyone. God is liberator and protector. But when God is the God of the oppressor, as in Christian nationalism, God is the God of everyone through oppression and the elimination of diversity in the name of a perverse unity.



Passages like this one have been used by Christians to justify Christian supremacy, which is the absolute height of appropriation and hubris. Yet even those who call themselves Christian universalists can sound like they are beating a drum to the words of the apostle Paul: every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord.



If there is a cosmic Christ, a universal Christ spirit beyond Jesus, would there not also be a cosmic Buddha, a cosmic Krishna? Isn’t cosmic just another way of saying hierarchy, superior, we had it right all along?



Thank goodness for the psalmist who reminds us that this unity that God offers is not about one people, one religion, one language. Unity is when we realize we are kindred and we live that way. The psalmist expresses their joy in a specific way, naming a particular priest, Aaron the brother of Moses, and a particular place, Mt. Hermon, with sumptuous, evocative language: oil running over his hair onto his beard, which was a sign of a good life, like the cup runneth over, and dew from the mountains saturating the land. And there in this unity we find God’s blessing—life forevermore.



Our specific joy might sound like this: How good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity! It is like a peace walk down Main Street with Sikhs and Muslims, atheists and agnostics, Unitarians and Hindus, Jews and Christians. It is like a community Thanksgiving service with Jains and Baha’i, Quakers and Baptists. It is like an Ash Wednesday service with our Presbyterian and Baptist siblings. It’s not just about appreciating our differences but our differences making us better people. It’s about acknowledging that there are truths about reality that we can only learn from other people who think and believe and live differently than we do.



How good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in interdependency, when we recognize that our differences make for not only our survival but our thriving. None of us knows what it’s like to be another person, and sometimes it is only through being curious about someone else that we deepen our knowledge of the truth about ourselves. This is how we dismantle Whiteness, the patriarchy, ableism, homophobia and transphobia, all the ways we try to divide humanity.



What makes the least sense out of all of this, of trying to answer the meaning of life and how to have a good life, is when we try to find our answers apart from any kind of relationship to the earth. If we really want to appreciate the sacredness of everything, it has to begin there. To be curious about the earth and its creatures and what they can teach us about ourselves, that the earth is our first kindred. The earth is the first and truly the only house of prayer for all peoples.

Benediction


How good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!
Sikhs and Muslims,
atheists and agnostics,
Unitarians and Hindus,
Jews and Christians,
Jains and Baha’i,
Plants and animals and fungi,
Birds and marine life,
Humans of all colors, genders, sexualities, languages!
In community we receive the blessing—life forevermore!

Amen.