Sunday, June 17, 2018

Seeds of Hate Or Seeds of Love?

St. Paul’s Church in Bergen & Church of the Incarnation, Jersey City NJ
June 17, 2018

Year B, Proper 6: The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
Psalm 20
2 Corinthians 5:6-17
Mark 4:26-34

Seeds of Hate Or Seeds of Love?
            If we’re Facebook friends, you know that pretty much every weekday I post a Scripture verse or a quote from a great Christian, past or present.
            I don’t remember when or why I started doing this, but I’ve been at it for a long time now, and enough people have told me it’s meaningful and helpful for them that I’m reluctant to stop – plus, this seemingly small act early morning searching through Scripture and reflecting on the words of holy women and men has evolved into an important part of my own spiritual practice.
            Sometimes the Scripture or saint of the day don’t quite offer what I’m looking for, so my next stop on the search for inspiration is a website that lists the names of prominent people who have died on that particular day.
            Maybe you think that’s a little weird or morbid, but I find it really interesting!
            Anyway, that’s what I was doing this past Tuesday morning – scrolling through the names of the dead - when I saw a name that will probably be completely unfamiliar to all of you but that I know well:
            Michael von Faulhaber, a Roman Catholic cardinal, who died on June 12, 1952.
            Faulhaber was the Archbishop of Munich, Germany, for a very long time, from 1917 until his death, and he also happens to have been a distant relative of mine – my great-grandmother’s cousin. (If you google him, I think you’ll see a resemblance to my father.)
            I’ve been interested in Faulhaber because of this family connection, and also because he found himself leading the church during what the psalmist calls a day of trouble – a very real day of trouble during the rise and fall of Hitler and the Nazis.
            As I’ve mentioned here before, the sad truth is that there were relatively few German Christians – and relatively few German Christian leaders - who heroically resisted the Nazis.
Instead, most Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, either enthusiastically followed Hitler and his inhuman agenda or chose to keep a low profile to save their skin, and to save their churches.
I’ve often wondered what I would do in such circumstances.
            For his part, Cardinal Faulhaber steered a middle course.
            As a patriotic German, he appreciated Hitler’s call to restore Germany’s greatness and seems to have even managed to convince himself that Hitler, this profoundly immoral man, was in fact a faithful Christian.
            Faulhaber was well aware of what was happening to the Jews. At first there were seemingly small acts limiting their freedom, then destroying their businesses and livelihoods, and eventually ripping them from their homes and sending millions to misery and death – but, at least at the start, Faulhaber’s attitude seems to have been that the Jews were strong enough to take care of themselves – that it wasn’t his problem.
            The Church was his problem, and he was able to see the Nazi threat to the Church. His main goal, no surprise, was protecting the institution and its people.
            One of the threats he saw was the call among some Nazis to deny the Jewishness of Jesus and his first followers – there were even demands that the Church delete the Old Testament from the Bible.
            If Faulhaber is remembered at all today it’s for a series of relatively bold sermons he gave during Advent in 1933, insisting that the Hebrew Scriptures formed the foundation of the Christian faith – and that the Church would die without those Jewish roots.
            He should get some credit for that, at least, but unfortunately, during the day of trouble, Faulhaber wasn’t able to translate his concern for the holy book of an ancient people into care for the Jewish brothers and sisters suffering so terribly in his own time and place.
           
            In today’s Gospel lesson, we heard Jesus tell two parables about seeds, and as I hear them today, I hear Jesus teach us about their enormous power – the enormous power and potential of small things.
            God seems to have been interested in the power of the small for a very long time – long ago choosing a small and insignificant people as God’s own – and, as we heard today, choosing David, choosing a youngest son, choosing the one so insignificant that his family left him out in the field tending the sheep when the prophet Samuel came to anoint Israel’s king – surely God wouldn’t choose the youngest and least experienced, the smallest, to lead God’s people!
            The power and potential of small things.
            Unfortunately, the power and potential of small things cuts both ways, doesn’t it?
            A tiny seed can produce food for many – a tiny seed can produce what Jesus calls “the greatest of all shrubs,” providing a shady home for the birds of the air.
            But, just like a how few rogue cells can produce powerful life-threatening cancer, bad seeds can produce great destruction.
            That’s why Jesus is always so concerned with what’s going on inside our hearts.
That’s why Jesus still shocks us by saying that what’s going on inside our hearts is just as important as what we actually do – something as small as just a feeling can produce great goodness or terrible destruction.
            So Jesus offers the still shocking teaching that we’ll be judged for the anger in our hearts just as sure as we’ll be judged for murdering someone – that we’ll be judged harshly for even just saying to another person, “You fool.”
            Jesus offers the still shocking teaching that if we look at another person with lust, it’s as if we’ve committed adultery.
            Jesus offers the still shocking teaching to remove whatever small piece – a hand or an eye – to remove whatever small piece of us causes us to sin.
            Jesus teaches that what’s going on in our hearts is just as important as what we actually do.
            The power and potential of small things.

            As I’ve thought about Cardinal Faulhaber and his day of trouble, I’ve thought about how the Nazi menace started with such small seeds of hate.
            At first, the Nazi Party was a fringe group, seen as unimportant, led by a man who was seen by most serious people as a joke, someone who could be easily controlled by wiser statesmen, who could use this ridiculous man to hold on to their own power and carry out their agenda.
            And, then other small seeds of hate were planted.
            The transformation of aimless young people into Nazi thugs.
            The rallies with their mindless chants of hatred.
            The passage of laws limiting the freedom of Jews, and others like gays and the disabled and even Jehovah’s Witnesses, all those who were seen as undesirable, those seen as the cause of the nation’s troubles.
            And, sooner than one would have imagined, one of the most civilized lands on earth, the country that produced magnificent literature and sublime music, that country and those people launched a massive project to round up and kill millions of people and instigated the most destructive war the world had ever seen.
            It all started so small, with such small seeds, that perhaps we can understand how Faulhaber and so many others, concerned with their daily business, could have missed it, and eventually found themselves morally compromised and even fighting for their own survival in the day of trouble.

            And now, you and I find ourselves living in our own day of trouble.
            And, it’s not too hard to see the small seeds that have grown quickly into noxious weeds that threaten so much today.
            After September 11, our country was briefly, beautifully, united but also so very terrified – that was the whole point of the attacks, after all – and our government quickly began taking unprecedented actions, planting many small seeds that have brought us to this point:
            Among other things, our government created the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement – better known as ICE – an organization with a cool name but often brutal tactics – ICE, whose officers frequently defend their actions, including as we all know now separating children from their parents, defend their actions with the chilling and all too familiar claim that that they are just following orders.
Our government planted many small seeds by launching endless wars in faraway places, and torturing captives at Guantanamo Bay and at secret sites all around the world.
Our government became even more secretive, limiting the freedom of the press.
            All these small but powerful seeds – all these small seeds that most of us missed, or if we paid attention we accepted them because we were led by people we rightly or wrongly believed were decent, humble, honest, and well-intentioned, never considering what might happen if we ever found ourselves led by people with obviously less noble traits.
            And so now, in the day of trouble, we seem to be getting very friendly with  “Hitler” and turning our back on “Churchill.”
            Now, in the day of trouble, truth itself is under daily assault.
            Now, in the day of trouble, children are being forcibly taken from their parents and warehoused – and the Attorney General of the United States quotes Romans 13:1 to defend that policy, using the same out-of-context verse about obeying the government that was much beloved by Christians who justified slavery and, yes, Christians who supported the Nazis.
            Just like Cardinal Faulhaber and so many others in the past, now, in the day of trouble, you and I, we Christians, face some big choices, some big questions:
            What kind of powerful seeds do we allow to be planted and to grow in our hearts?
            And, what kind of powerful seeds do we plant in the world?
            Seeds of hate?
            Or, seeds of love?