St. John the Baptist; Second Sunday of Advent year B, December 7, 2014; The Rev'd Dr. Richard Smith

On the surface, Mark begins his gospel very matter-of-factly: The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

But looks are deceiving; there’s more going on here than meets the eye. These are words of defiance. When Mark uses the terms “good news”  and “son of God”, he’s invoking terms used by Caesar, terms well-known in the Roman Empire of his day.

Back then, “Good news” was a political term. It was marketing hype that included all the official announcements about the Roman conquests, the victories of the Roman Legions, and their often brutal subjugation of many peoples--including Jesus’ own people, the Jews. Caesar’s good news inspired shock and awe.

In the opening line of his gospel, Mark co-opts this term from the Roman Empire to introduce a counter-story about a different kind of good news, a different vision for how life and the world can be. A vision based on love and mutual service, forgiveness, justice, mercy rather than on subjugation, domination, and brutal cruelty. Mark is writing a counter-story to that of Caesar, and it is an act of treason.

This is also the case when he refers to Jesus as the Son of God. In Mark’s day, that term referred to Caesar. Caesar was the Son of God, and here again, Mark is disrupting the story of the Empire by claiming that the real son of God is not Caesar but Jesus. 

For Mark, Caesar has it all wrong. Being son of God is not about power and control, but about laying down one’s life in love. The punchline in Mark’s gospel becomes clear when Jesus hangs from the cross, having just been executed by the Empire as a criminal. In that moment, a centurion who has just watched Jesus breathe his last declares, “Truly, this is the son of God”. It’s the supreme irony in Mark’s gospel, reflecting an understanding of what it means to be the Son of God that is very different from Caesar’s.

In our context today, we know well Caesar’s version of good news. We’ve seen the recent headlines about the killings of young African-Americans and Latinos by police officers: 

• Eric Garner was a father who was selling single cigarettes to support his family. 
• Michael Brown was a son heading off to college. 
• Tanesha Anderson, a mental health patient, was in need of an evaluation and intervention. 
• Tamir Rice was a twelve-year-old boy playing in the park. 
• Alex Nieto, a student at San Francisco City College, was eating a burrito in Bernal Heights Park while on his way to work.

Each of them killed by police.

Suddenly, as we see the faces of many African-American and Latino mothers, the ancient words of the prophet Jeremiah ring eerily true: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.”

And our judicial system has failed them and all of us as Americans. Grand juries in Ferguson and Staten Island have refused to indict the officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner, meaning those officers will never stand trial. Here in San Francisco, in the police killing of Alex Nieto, police have not released a witness list, not released the recording of a pertinent 911 call, not released the police reports, and not released the names of officers involved. This makes an independent investigation impossible. We’re forced to blindly trust what the police tell us. Given that no officer has ever stood trial for killing an unarmed black or Latino in this City, we have reason to be suspicious. It’s reasonable for us to want access to the available facts.

In our day, even in our City, we know well Caesar’s version of “good news” and how it manifests itself. 

In the very beginning of his gospel, Mark introduces the wild man John the Baptist who preaches repentance. Our spiritual ancestors realized that they had, knowingly or not, bought into Caesar’s story, and that if things were ever to change, they would first need to free themselves from that bitter story. They would need to repent, and so they wade into the muddy waters of the Jordan to be baptized by John.

And perhaps this is true for us as well--that, like our spiritual ancestors, we, too, knowingly or not, have bought into Caesar’s story. In our day, each of us in our own way have become complicit in the racism so deeply, often subtly, embedded in our culture and social institutions. And so, for us as for our ancestors, mountains must be leveled and winding ways made straight in order to find a new way. 

Years ago, in the pre-dawn hours of March 12, 1964, Kitty Genovese was assaulted and murdered in New York City. Her screams awakened at least thirty-eight neighbors who heard or watched how, for another half hour, her assailant stalked, stabbed, raped, and finally killed her. No one wanted to get involved or even call the police. The story attracted international attention. It was not just that many identified with the victim and understood that something like that could easily happen to them. Killings happen all the time.

What could account for the public’s fascination with this crime? Many who have studied the case attribute it to people’s deep-seated fear that, had they been there, they would have been the thirty-ninth silent witness. In this crime people caught a glimpse of the “bad Samaritan” in themselves.

The story of Kitty Genovese shines a light on our sense of being guilty bystanders in a cruel world. Today, with the recent police killings of young people of color, we are more aware of the scope of racism, the fact that we are all, especially if we are white, its beneficiaries if not its agents.

It’s not enough to say that we ourselves would never use the “N-word”, would never mug or kill or exploit others. In the war between good and evil, there is no neutral ground. All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to stand by silently. Martin Luther King used to say that he was more troubled by decent folks standing on the sidelines than by the racists who threw rocks.

The point is not to get down on ourselves but to awaken from a lonely hypocrisy. We are all caught up in this racist web. We too have bought Caesar’s version of “good news”. Better to feel our solidarity in sin and the need for repentance than to cling to a phony righteousness.

It is often said that the longing for liberation begins when you notice that you are in prison. Getting free to love requires facing up to our part in the sin, the racism, of the world. 

In today’s gospel, our spiritual ancestors wade into the muddy waters of the Jordan River. They come to John dissatisfied and desperate. They come for baptism with a look in their eye that says “God, I hope this works”. The past has become intolerable and they know they can’t go on as they are.

We in this country know that our racist past is no longer tolerable, that we can’t go on like this. And so on this second Sunday of Advent, we are invited to join our ancestors in the Jordan to confess our sin along with them, especially our sin of racism and our acquiescence to it, and to repent, to turn away from the story of Caesar and to gently turn a new way toward life, toward what Mark calls “the way of the Lord”. 

The Sheep and the Goats; Feast of Christ the King; November 30, 2014; The Rev'd Dr. Richard Smith

Ignacio (Nacho) Martin Baro (1942-1989)

Today is the last day of the year on the church’s calendar, and so the gospel speaks about the end times. Our thoughts turn to more ultimate things, ultimate in the sense of having utmost importance. Thoughts about how to measure a life, how to know whether it is successful or not.

It’s like what happens when someone approaches the end of their own individual life. They get a clarity about what is most important. Things that might have once mattered matter no longer. What is most important--for example, the love of family and friends--now becomes very clear; other things fall away.

Sometimes it’s good to look at our own context in which we are hearing the days’ gospel. This year we have a special context for hearing this particular gospel passage, for thinking these ultimate thoughts. I’m aware of three things going on at this moment in the world and in my own heart.

• For one thing, the grand jury in Ferguson is about to announce their verdict in the case of the officer who killed Michael Brown. That verdict that will have broad implications for all of us Americans but especially for the many young brown and black people whose lives too often don’t matter within our larger American culture.
• Secondly, last week, the President removed the fear of deportation from 5 million undocumented immigrants. It was a bold move on his part, and a hard-won victory for immigrants after hundreds of thousands of parents had been torn from their children. Still, it leaves 6 million people still under threat of deportation, including our immigrant LGBT sisters and brothers who remain particularly vulnerable.
• Something else is going on as well, perhaps more personal to me. Last Sunday was the anniversary of the death of a friend of mine. I’ve been thinking of him all week. His name was Nacho. He was a Jesuit priest teaching at the University in San Salvador. Every Friday after he finished his classes, he would travel to one of the poorest barrios outside of town to offer the Eucharist and minister to the people there. Twenty-five years ago last Sunday, early in the morning, several armed soldiers raided the University where Nacho was teaching, dragged him, his fellow priests along with their housekeeper and her daughter into a small garden area and shot and killed them. They did this because Nacho and and the other Jesuits had given themselves heart and soul to the poor of that country who in those days were being rounded up and massacred left and right.

These are just a few parts of our context as we listen to this morning’s gospel, as we try to reconnect once more with the things that matter most in lives.

And, of course, what matters most is love. “In the evening, we will be examined on love,” St. John of the Cross once wrote. In the end, it won’t matter how much money you made, or the color of your skin. It won’t matter whether you looked like Miss America or Groucho Marx. The only thing that will matter is whether you tried to love with all your heart.
When I was hungry, Jesus will ask each of us, did you feed me? When I was thirsty, did you give me to drink? When I was naked, did you clothe me, or sick or in prison and visit me? When I was a stranger, an immigrant, did you welcome me?

These are the kinds of things we must do, what we each try to do. But notice: There is nothing uniquely Christian about them; all people with good hearts do these things whether they are Christian or not.

Still, I think there’s something unique about the way we Christians do them. After watching how Jesus lives and moves through the gospels, after spending time with him in prayer, after drinking in what we can of his Spirit, we come to do these good things in a uniquely Christian way. There’s a unique quality to the way the Spirit of Jesus goes about these good things.

For one thing, there’s a lack of calculation. jesus cautions us not to be like the goats. They’re the ones who say, “Lord, had we known it was you, we would have responded. But all we saw were these poor folks, some of them not looking not very well put together, some of them strangers who can’t speak English, some who don’t smell very good, some with criminal records. Why exactly would we want anything to do with them?”

There’s a Wall Street kind of calculation going on here: I’ll do this to get something in exchange. I’ll invest my time and energy and money caring for someone if it will yield me a good return of one kind or another--if not money, then perhaps some recognition or influence.

So the goats say, “If we had known it was Jesus, we would have responded--because we would have gotten something out of it: a place in the kingdom, a ticket to heaven. But to us, these folks didn’t look anything like Jesus. They just looked like just run-of-the-mill needy people, the kind who can’t repay us. So we did nothing for them.”

So goes the thinking of the goats with their quid-pro-quo calculations that constrict their hearts and short-circuit their love.

The sheep are not like this. They don’t calculate. No quid pro quo. They see people in need--people hungry, in prison, sick, people who are strangers, and they respond. They don’t even know that all along they are doing these things for Jesus. In fact they’re surprised to find that out at the end. Quite simply, they had seen people hurting and in need and so they responded. It’s very simple and pure, the way love is supposed to be.

Be like the sheep, Jesus is urging here. Love with his Spirit.

When Jesus sees a man with a withered hand, he doesn’t stop to do various mental gymnastics, asking whether it’s appropriate to heal on the sabbath, wondering how it will play out among the religious leaders if he were to heal the man’s hand. No, he simply sees this man in pain and he responds, he heals him.

And when Jesus comes upon a leper, one of the outcasts of his day, he doesn’t stop to consider what all the purity codes dictate and what the onlookers might be thinking. No, he just reaches out his hand and touches this man, this leper who probably had not been touched by anyone in years.

Simple. Pure. How love is supposed to be. Without calculation. It’s how Jesus does things.

There’s another unique way the Spirit of Jesus goes about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the imprisoned. It does these things without calling attention to itself.

When the religious hypocrites of Jesus’ day did good things, they would blow trumpets, stand on street corners, look glum so everyone would know they were doing some noble and heavy stuff. We may not be quite as dramatic as they, but we can certainly understand the need to be recognized, have our good actions noticed and applauded.

But when the Spirit of Jesus is at work in our actions, the need to gab about our accomplishments is not as strong as the need to be thankful for the grace that enables us, has caught us up and moves us along.

The other day after watching the President’s speech on immigration, I was complimenting a young Latina for the amazing work she had been doing for immigration reform. She said, “It’s all because of my mom who was always there for me and never lost faith that one day I could have a better life if she brought me to this country.” No need to promote herself or her abilities. She knew that what she did was enabled and supported by a grace from outside herself.

Years from now, when I get to heaven, I can imagine running into my friend Nacho. And if I ask him how he managed to end up in his cool new heavenly home, my hunch is he’ll say, “Well, I just tried to love everybody I could, freely, without calculation, and it was no big deal.”