Pentecost 14, Proper 16C
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Well, it’s good to be back.
My time in Africa was inspiring and beautiful and full of adventure -
even a bit more adventure than I’d originally planned. My time at home in Tennessee and Mississippi
was relaxing, and gave me a chance to reconnect with family and friends, even
though it did prove to be a few days shorter than I’d originally planned. I return to you refreshed, and eager to begin
this next year together. We have a lot
of work to do, but also some times of celebration and fun planned, and I’m
eager for us to continue exploring together where God is calling us in the year
ahead.
But our work starts here: at worship. In hearing the word of God. In breaking it open together. In breaking the bread and sharing in the cup,
and taking our faith - and even our doubt - out into the world where God has
scattered us.
As I was preparing to preach this week, something happened
that doesn’t often happen. I tend to
preach, as I was trained, pretty unfailingly on the Gospel. There are often hints of the other lessons
that work their way into my thoughts, but usually the Gospel lesson is the
center - the place where I begin.
But this week, as I read through the lessons, one line from
the Epistle kept standing out to me. It
kept sitting in my mind and became the lens through which I saw everything else:
“We are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken”.
“Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let
us give thanks.”
“A kingdom that cannot be shaken.”
It’s an alluring image.
So many of the kingdoms of this world not only can be shaken, but seem too often prone
to being shaken. We may not always see
it as acutely in this part of the world as in other places, but kingdoms are
shaking all around us. All the time.
You may have heard part of the story of my sort of
surprising trip home from Africa. The
day my friends and I were scheduled to leave - after we were about an hour or
so away from the camp where we’d been staying - our host, the village elder,
James ole Lesaloi, received word of a fire in the international terminal at the
Nairobi airport. We were still several
hours away from the airport, so we assumed - probably out of our American
ignorance (or maybe even arrogance) - that by the time we arrived the fire
would have been put out and service would be restored in time for us to make
our flight, some eight hours later.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I think I already knew this
to be true, but I had never really experienced it as drastically as I was about
to over the next 48 hours. In the
developing world, systems can be easily shaken.
When things are running smoothly, you hardly notice it. But when the structures of that part of the
world get shaken, they can begin falling around you like dominoes.
We sat by the roadside - prohibited from entering the
airport grounds - from about four hours prior to our scheduled departure. The police officers advised us to sit there
for “some few minutes” - that soon things would get cleared up and the airport
would reopen. As our flight’s scheduled
departure grew closer, we became more anxious, and eventually convinced the
police officer to let us through. We
believed that if we could just get to the ticket counter to speak with airline
agents, we’d know more about when we might be able to leave. It was only when we saw the still-smoldering
ruins of the terminal that the gravity of the situation began to sink in for
all of us.
The details of the story could go on - the now nearly laughable
chaos we went through trying to get home - but in brief, we ended up taking a
bus the next day from Nairobi to Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, where we were told a
plane would be waiting for us to get us to our flight back to Washington, D.C.,
just 24 hours late. Of course the bus
ride took longer than we were told, and the plane wasn’t there, and when we did
finally make it back to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, we were told there were no seats
available on that evening’s flight. It
wasn’t until my traveling companions and I essentially staged a sit-in at the
customer service desk before we were granted boarding passes and seat
assignments for the flight to D.C. that night.
We eventually made it home 48 hours late - a fate much more
favorable than many other travelers’ stories I’d heard who were in the same
position as ourselves.
The point of all of this is to say, the “kingdoms” we were
relying on not only could be shaken, but were actively shaking, and even
crumbling.
It’s an uncomfortable position to find yourself in, but
we’ve all been there. We’ve all been
through experiences in our lives - maybe even whole seasons of our lives - when
we felt vulnerable to the shaking kingdoms around us.
And that brings me to the story we hear today from Jesus -
that kingdom shaker we’re here to worship.
It wasn’t so much the fact that he was healing that troubled
the leader of the synagogue; it was the fact that he was healing on the
Sabbath. There’s a way that we do these
things. You can heal the sick six days
out of the week, but to heal on the Sabbath is against the rules. And the rules are there to keep the kingdom
from shaking - to protect the established order. Rules don’t envision newer, more stable
kingdoms, they’re only there for the kingdoms we already know.
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| James ole Lesaloi |
James, the village elder and our host, was also something of
a kingdom-shaker.
The established order - the social norms - of the Maasai
culture, including the communities we visited, dictate that girls can be given
in marriage so that her family might profit from the dowry that’s paid for
her. In the Maasai culture, the primary
instrument of wealth is the cow. And the
going rate for a wife is 10 cows - valued at somewhere around $2,000. Because girls are so valued, marriage can
happen as early as 9 years old - and often to men as old as 50 years old. In the dominant culture there, it’s fine to
educate girls, but only as long as it doesn’t interfere with the men and their
wishes, or families and their financial stability.
James saw this “kingdom” that stood around him, and imagined
another way. He’s come to see that if
girls are older and more educated when they marry, the dowry they bring can
still provide financial stability for their families, but beyond that, staying
in school longer makes them more productive members of their communities. They might even have more of a chance to
become leaders.
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| The girls' rescue center at Sekenani Boarding School |
So to accomplish this goal - educating girls and protecting
them from early marriage - he’s led their
community school into unprecedented growth:
providing high quality education for children that has become the envy of every
family.
They’ve even
established a girls rescue center that, in addition to educating these at-risk
girls, protects them from early marriage, or genital mutilation, or anything
else that might keep them from becoming strong, educated, and productive
members of their communities.
He’s shaking his culture.
But only to make it more stable.
That’s the kingdom of God being built. It takes some shaking. But it’s being shaken up to settle down into
an unshakably strong community.
One of those quasi-theological questions that you’ll
sometimes hear is, “Can God create a rock so heavy that even God couldn’t shake
it?” I think the answer is YES. The kingdom of God is that rock - that “kingdom
that cannot be shaken”. And God is
creating it right now: in the work of Jesus shaking things up around him; in
the work of James shaking things up around him; and even in our own work, when
we are brave enough to shake things up around us. It’s only then that the rubble can settle in
to something unshakable.
The shaking can be a little unnerving, but it’s how God builds that unshakable kingdom for which we give thanks. Amen.
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Now, go thou and do likewise.