“He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.”

A lyrical manifesto for economic justice.  There it is, in chapter one of Luke, at the beginning of the Christian story.  Mary’s “Magnificat”, her song to God after learning of her mysterious pregnancy, is full of hope for a structural transformation of society.

Volunteering and making donations to causes that serve people in need are powerful expressions of our faith.  Charity takes hard work and sacrifice; it always will be a necessary and honorable way to live out the Christian life.

But right next to charity is Christianity’s imperative to change economic and political structures.  It is a beautiful thing for me to be able to use our church’s “Pastoral Discretionary Fund”, maintained by the charitable donations of our members, to help those among us who don’t have money or insurance to pay for essentials like medical care.  Every bit as beautiful is the work of California Council of Churches.  For years, the Council has been lobbying hard in Sacramento for universal, single-payer health insurance.  Such a systemic transformation would protect the significant number of people in our congregation who have inadequate health coverage, or none at all. 

Two thousand years later, Mary’s Advent cry for justice still rings.  But churches are often intimidated by it.  Unlike most charitable efforts, working for social change is often controversial. So churches often stick with charity and avoid advocacy that might cause arguments among members.  But if we really care about the sick, the poor, the homeless, and the victims of wars or disasters, the church won’t ignore the social structures that allow these problems to continue.  Surely we can find a way to advocate for justice while prayerfully honoring our differences about how to do it. 

It’s a good thing to feed the poor.  Our church’s Wednesday free lunch for the low-income people of our town makes me proud to be the pastor here.  But getting corporate money out of politics might turn out to be an even more effective way of alleviating poverty in America.  The hard political work required to clean up our deeply corrupt political system isn’t as immediately satisfying as personally filling a plate of food for someone who can’t afford a hot meal.  But if we took special-interest money out of campaigns, we might get structural change that prevents people from going hungry in the first place. 

Mary’s “Magnificat” song makes it little wonder that, years later, her son would turn over the money-changers’ tables in the Temple, where the common people of Israel were being fleeced systematically.  Jesus fed the 5,000, but he didn’t stop there.  In a time when corrupt, unregulated tax collectors could reduce families to starvation, Jesus spoke out for justice. 

Jesus healed not only the sick, but also the systems that sickened them.  He fed the hungry while attacking the structures that starved them.  May the first candle of Advent light our way as we follow him in practicing both charity and change.

Raise your hand if you think the Church is obsessed with sex, and especially homosexuality. If you read the news reports with any regularity you might think there is absolutely nothing else worth discussing in the minds of church folks. Okay. I admit that’s a bit over the top; but not by far. Every other day there is a news report about some church fight over what to do with gay and lesbians Christians who might actually desire to serve the people of God in leadership. Last week it was the struggles of the Episcopal Church to carefully avoid a schism that would further the current bizarre situation of having a Nigerian bishop providing pastoral guidance for a congregation in the marshlands of South Carolina.
 
During the same week the Presbyterians were scrupulously interrogating candidates for ordinations to ensure compliance with ordination standards barring homosexual candidates. We are not alone – all the churches seem obsessed with the same subject – and last week the international community got involved when one of the world’s more despicable leaders spoke at Columbia. Of all the outrageous things he said, the one that seemed to create the most buzz had to do with … guess what … homosexuality, or the absence thereof.
 
What is the deal? Okay, I admit, it was a laughable moment but I wish the buzz were about some of his other not-so laughable moments that seriously threaten the planet, not to mention Israel and Jews everywhere.
 
While I respect the desire for high moral standards among clergy and hear the vigorous disagreement over what that means with regard to sexual orientation, I am certain there are more pressing matters that the people of God might attend to if we weren’t otherwise distracted by such scrupulously narrow attention to gay and lesbian Christians. Perhaps it is our unfailing ability to be distracted that allows us to avoid the disturbing realities of the world’s poor that are at our doorstep. Endless discussions over who to bar from serving the Church, quibbling over obscure biblical passages, demanding a righteousness among some that no one, other than Jesus could match, distracts serious attention to the fact that 6 million people are dying each year from preventable diseases malaria, tuberculosis and HIV. 
 
I think we should focus our attention on that fact alone just long enough for it to make us seriously uncomfortable. Do not reach for the remote control, don’t fast forward to the celebrity news or switch to the game. Let us simply sit with the fact that according to the best estimates of medical experts 6 million people, many of them children, will die from lack of vaccines for malaria, tuberculosis and HIV. Why? Because good vaccines to treat these diseases don’t even exist.
 
Do you think just maybe God would even be pleased  if we paid more attention to that problem than figuring out how many ways we can distract ourselves over sex?

We believe that everyone—political figure or commentator, citizen or alien, man or woman, black or white, conservative or radical—who at this particular time says that this people and this nation are in deep, perhaps irremediable political trouble, speaks the truth.
~ ~ Will D. Campbell and James Y. Holloway.

Some words come back with haunting relevance.  Back in the 1960s, these two southern churchmen, Will Campbell and James Y. Holloway, co-edited  the journal of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, called Katallegete Be Reconciled.  A collection of their essays from that journal was published in 1970 under the title, Up To Our Steeples in Politics (Paulist Press).  The words above led the essay from which the title of the book was drawn.  Wipf and Stock Publishers has recently re-released this book.  It’s eerily timely, but not for reasons a quick reading of this lead might have you believe.  For these writers go on to unsettle an easy take on their political assessment.

Stated simply, we believe that the fundamental crises in our land rise from the obsession with politics, the faith that the political order is the only source and authority from which we can and ought to seek relief from what ails us as a community and as individuals.  Because there is in our land no real challenge to these obsessions, we believe that our crises will deepen, perhaps even beyond a point of no return . . . (111)

In 1970, they were calling into question the “political messianism” of Christian liberals.  Nearly forty years later, it would seem that the Christian Right took the bait and have been for two decades the more successful purveyors of this apostasy—the belief that we are called to create via political action what the New Testament claims God has already accomplished for us in Christ:  reconciliation.  Liberals haven’t left it far behind, however, we’ve just been outflanked.  So Campbell’s and Holloway’s message goes both ways, trying to identify a error we share when we trust Ceasar over Christ, and confuse politics—a means for an end, which is justice—with the end itself.  Despite flowery theological or biblical rhetoric accompanying the political action of the church, to the extent that the church, conservative or liberal, trusts Ceasar to do its bidding it falls inside Caesar’s yoke.  “Surely our calling as Christians is not summed up by a vapid, pathetic and generally ineffective effort to inject morality and high-mindedness into political activity” (117).  Ouch.

And they go on:  “Is obedience to Christ exhausted by immersing oneself in Caesar’s definition of politics?  Is witness to Christ’s victory uniting all men [sic] best made by service to what Caesar judges as the urgent issues of our times?  Might it not be that Caesar himself is confused, or is lying?  There is evidence in the history of Western civilization to support both affirmations” (118).  1970 or today?

What if we worked as hard to change the subject as we work to sway opinion within the subjects we are handed by powers that use us more than hear us?  Now I realize that in asking that question I’m stretching credulity, for one of our most difficult challenges in the American church is deciding who, at the beginning and end of all of this, is us?  Are we Americans, Christians, Christian Americans, or American Christians?  Must we begin to think again about the difference, all the while admitting the confusion?  I believe so.  And Campbell and Holloway have a word worth remembering.

These two write in a great and too often ignored tradition of Christian anarchy, refusing to acknowledge any monopoly of means (economics, politics, schooling, development, relentless pursuit of happiness) over holy ends (commonwealth, peace, knowledge, justice, joy).  They would remind us that trusting techniques of human invention as primary vehicles for the divine will amounts to idolatry, and should be treated as such.

Are Campbell and Holloway calling for retreat?  Are we to hold ourselves up in Christian enclaves, depending on what the world can give us but not making any contribution toward the common good of those who don’t live with us in our enclave?  Not at all.  We are to engage, to wish peace upon the city and to work for it as best we can.  But we are not to trust it too much, or like it too much, or confine our desires to its standards too much, lest we begin to confuse it with our home. 

Campbell and Holloway are working within the kind of distinction Stanley Hauerwas so aptly described a few years later, the distinction between the church as a peculiar politics that gives witness by whatever means necessary to the justice that God has already accomplished in Christ (beyond and more powerful than economics and politics, and nonviolent all the down to its core in Christ), and a political church that seeks to produce something like justice within a polity gone wildly off kilter and irretrievably distant to the ways of God (bound to economics and politics as the primary tools of human freedom).  We are called to give witness to what we begin to see, that God has reconciled the world in Christ—that reconciled, we need no longer kill each other because we are afraid, or angry, or belittling, or prejudice.  We can live reconciled, even before our politics catch up, even before we agree, even before we approve of each other.  And by so doing, we will humble the political for the sake of new politics (God’s politics).

Within echoes of the New Testament, the church need not be chaplain to a reigning order—be it military/industrial, commercial, religious, political or economic; be it conservative, liberal, radical or moderate.  It may live within the reigning order wisely, using its goods for holy purpose, but it need not accept the empire’s logic.  It may sow seeds of a more fundamental dissent.  And it may both experience and put on display an alternative order, with changed subjects and holier objects. 

Have any churches tried?  Yes, indeed, in their own broken ways.  And those broken ways sow seeds of this Christian anarchy—humbling wealth, power, race, gender, ideologies, and other distinctions we hold so dear.  Imagining a new reality, already here.

It was a cube consisting of many separate pieces of charred wood, each piece dangling from a thin black wire, hanging from the ceiling of the De Young Museum in San Francisco.  This artwork by Cornelia Parker was entitled “Anti-Mass”.  It was a compelling sight.  It reminded me of the way blackened embers are suspended in air above a fire, as if momentarily weightless.  The installation was thing of simple beauty, taking the mind to a place beyond words. 
 
Then I read the card next to the installation and found that I was looking at the creatively re-arranged remains of a black Baptist church in Alabama which had been destroyed in a racist arson attack.  “Anti-Mass” was at least a double-play on words – referring to the airborne wood, and the violent act against the worship of the congregation that once met inside it.
 
As soon as I knew the story behind the wood, I sensed that I was in the presence of the sacred.  In a way, this work of art was the resurrection of that burned church.  The artist had taken that terrible act of racist arson and turned it inside out and upside down.  Just as the early Christians turned the crucifixion inside out and upside down, transforming the cross from a terrifying symbol of Roman state power into a hopeful sign of salvation.
 
When I got home from the museum, I reflected on the striking difference in my experience of the artwork between my first glance at it and my later discovery of the wood’s source.  It revealed how influenced I am by the emotional and spiritual associations that I make, or that others make for me.  It revealed that I, and the rest of us, seem to be primed for experiences of the sacred.  There is a God-shaped cube inside of me, ready to be filled by encounters with divinity.
 
It also revealed the resurrecting, redeeming power given to each of us by God.  We have within each of us a remarkable measure of divine energy which we can use to turn hopelessness into hope, violence into compassion, despair into positive vision, destruction into creativity.  If a church building, burned down in an act of hatred, can be brought back to life in such a remarkable manner, what isn’t possible for us, both as individuals and as a collective? 
 
What creative, redemptive leap can our nation take to help the people of Iraq turn seared flesh, twisted metal, and dusty rubble into elements of peace and prosperity?  How can we take the emotional charge from the injuries and insults we each suffer, and direct that energy toward healing and wholeness?  What can we do to transform the church from being a reliquary for old dogma into becoming a living spiritual community for the present? 
 
If an artist can bring about a resurrection with nothing more than wire and bits of burnt wood, think of what you and I can bring to life!  Each counter-intuitive action we take to change ourselves and the world for the better is a form of artwork, as worthy of “ooohs” and “aaahs” as anything hanging in a museum…

It was on July 4th that I read this news release from across the pond:  “LONDON (ENI):  The Church of England has welcomed Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s proposal to parliament to remove the prime minister from the process of choosing the church’s bishops in the future.”  Good news!  What could be better than to have the church be the church, unfettered from governmental, or any other, oversight. Hard to see a down side to that article.  Then I thought some more.

Ironic, isn’t it, that the very act of choosing bishops, or their respective equivalents in denominations with differing governmental structures, has caused such hurtful and terrible fighting among so many of the church’s faithful in so many locales within so many denominations in this country and around the world. The curse of choice?  Perhaps.  Power politics is a closer approximation of the truth.

How do we choose bishops or other church officers?  On what basis?  Litmus tests of various sizes and shapes exist and are driving forces in so many cases.  Why?  For exceedingly good and important reasons, no doubt. I’ll confess to having a strong opinion or two on matters I consider central. “If we could only get a bishop (or regional minister, or presbyter, etc.) who would  _______, then this church could really stand for something.”  Or, “we can’t allow a bishop (or regional minister, or presbyter, etc.) who would do that, then what’s next?”  And yet, who is the “we” and what are “we” constituted for?

I have been spending some time, lately, with Paul’s Letter to the Galatians and the complicated relationship that his descriptions therein of the very real and threatening (at least to him and his “gospel” message) challenges facing the churches in Galatia have with the descriptions of the so-called Jerusalem Council in the Book of Acts chapter 15.  It’s a mess.  The accounts don’t quite line up.  The core issues aren’t exactly clear.  The resolution, insofar as there was one, doesn’t seem to have stuck (for very long). What’s more, at the council itself, there were delegates “secretly” brought in to “spy on” others (Gal 2:4)—who’s ever heard of something like that happening at a church meeting?! 
And yet, Paul emerges from that ugly, messy, complicated and ambiguous affair with one thing very clear:  “that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do” (Gal 2:10).  Now that’s quite an outcome, no?  
 
What about the many local and national church councils which are being held this summer in this country alone, many of which have contentious items, or elections, on the agenda? I wonder what will be decided, and how, and who will be elected?  I wonder too, finally, how important the answers to those questions would be, or even how soon the very questions would begin to melt away IF, at each of these conventions, the delegates emerged so committed: “that we remember the poor” as we are “eager to do.”  Now that would be a church council, and a set of decisions, worth recording!   

A few years ago a member of the church I then served asked me to preach a sermon addressing the question, “How the Bible Says it is Okay to be Gay.” I was stumped. The Bible says things are beautiful or idolatrous, sinful or wondrous, evil or holy.  Terrible is a biblical category.  So is wonderful.  But “okay” isn’t a biblical category. Fair-to-middling doesn’t make an appearance in scripture.

The common assumption is that in the debate over homosexuality, the Christian Right have the rules on their side, a Bible that says homosexuality violates God’s will.  And liberal America has a political philosophy which holds that the autonomous, self sufficient, free person is able to do whatever he or she pleases.  Okay is a liberal word.  It refuses to pass judgment.  I’m okay and you’re okay. It is okay to be gay.   It is okay to be straight.  You do your thing and I’ll do mine and so long as no one gets hurt, what’s the difference?

The theologians I love have taught me to be suspicious of this kind of liberalism.  Not because I am conservative, but because I am a Christian.  And any ideology whose bedrock assumption is that people should be free to do as they please flies directly in the face of the Christian doctrine of sin.  A doctrine which holds that we are flawed creatures who, when set free to do as we please, will do the selfish thing, subjecting ourselves to what Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School calls the “tyranny of our own desires.1”

But you’re not reading this blog for a civics lesson or to agree or disagree with my politics.  You are here, I hope, to listen for God’s word.

Which speaks a wonderful truth to my parishioner’s question.  For while liberalism makes a good argument for the fact that homosexuality is acceptable, the Bible goes one step further to say quite clearly that gay people are good.  Not all right, but beautiful.  Not tolerable, passable, okay.  But wonderful, beloved, glorious.

This might sound absurd, even to those who wish it were true.  For despite the fact that Jesus mentions homosexuality as often as he mentions frequent flier miles, organic food and diesel engines (which is to say, not once) if conservative Christianity has taught America anything it is this: the Bible opposes gay people.

Let’s move quickly to prove them wrong.  Unlike a previous generation’s psychology which followed Freud to believe that homosexuality was some sort of disorder (and in a toxic combination of both misogyny and homophobia often blamed it on a gay person’s mother) today’s thought accepts that a person’s sexual orientation is an essential, ingrained dimension of who you are.  Homosexuality is no more a choice than is heterosexuality.  If you’re a straight man, ask yourself, “when did I first decide I would be attracted to women?” It is a ridiculous question.

But in the Bible’s most infamous comment on same-sex activity, Paul presumes that those who engage in gay sex engage in isolated acts of deviation from a universally shared heterosexual norm.  “Women,” Paul says in the first chapter of Romans “giving up natural intercourse exchanged it for unnatural .  .  .  And men, giving up natural intercourse with women were consumed with passion for one another”. In this understanding, homosexual activity is a choice heterosexuals make.  Like a truth-teller deviating from honesty in order to tell a lie, a person engaged in same sex activity momentarily departs from the morally preferable universal standard.

This was Paul’s first-century Jewish worldview, and it is one adopted by contemporary Christians who label homosexuality a “lifestyle” and try to convert gays and lesbians “back” into heterosexuality (as if they ever left in the first place).  To my mind, subscribing to a first-century sexual anthropology that modern understandings of human sexuality have refuted makes as much sense as believing the earth is flat because the ancient Hebrew cosmology assumed it so.  The earth is round.  You don’t learn to be gay.  You’re created that way.  Neither of these realizations diminish our appreciation for the Bible.  In fact, both can enhance it.

I like this metaphor.  Life is a long road trip.  You don’t have your CD collection or your i-pod.  Just a broken radio.  The only station you can find is playing the most amazing piece of music you have ever heard.  It soars, it ebbs, it reaches crescendos that make you want to floor the pedal and race through the beauty, it affirms you, it convicts you, it makes sense of existence.

But your radio is broken.  And while the music is occasionally clear, there are interludes of pure, unlistenable static.  Much of the time you hear both at once, this wonderful song, slightly obscured by the hiss and the fuzz of a broken receiver.

The stories of Israel and Jesus are this piece of music.  A piece that God composed.  And the authors of the Bible are our broken radio. Sometimes they give us the story in its pure form.  Other times God’s beauty is hidden in the static of ancient politics or prejudice.  And sometimes as is the case with this unfortunate reading from Romans, the signal is lost altogether – all we get is an ugly hiss.

The question before us is this: Are we going to listen to the Bible carefully, straining to hear the gorgeous melody of a nonviolent lamb who conquers by giving his life for ALL people, or are we going to listen indiscriminately, confusing the static for the symphony itself?

Let me take a brief detour here.  If blog entries had footnotes this would be one.  The approach I just suggested opens itself to the charge of “selective literalism” whereby we accept those aspects of scripture that we agree with as the word of God, and reject the rest.

Now, on some level I think everyone reads the Bible this way.  Neither Ralph Reed nor James Dobson has taken a public vow swearing that never again will they eat shrimp scampi.

But, I don’t think the accusation applies in this instance.  There are Biblical themes that I don’t like.  The second coming for instance. The claim that God will conclude history totally violates my modern perspective.  But, this belief is shot right through the New Testament.  Jesus mentions it frequently and it pervades Paul’s thought.  So, I place my questions and my doubt and my dislike underneath the doctrine’s pressure.  I try to believe it, or at least accept it.  I hope it shapes me.  I don’t ignore it.

Homophobia is not one of the Bible’s major themes.  Sure, it makes the occasional appearance.  But so does the justification of slavery.  So does the demand that women wear hats to church.  Even on 100 degree days! Most every Christian in America has rejected these latter two teachings as absolutely opposed to scripture’s primary theme: the truth of God revealed in Christ.

Back to my main point: we need to be clear in stating that our belief that homosexuality is natural, is not primarily a negative response to the Christian right.  Instead, first and foremost, it is a positive theological conviction.  God creates some people gay, and because God declares creation good, homosexual people must therefore be good.
Genesis doesn’t say that God made straight people on the sixth day and gay people two weeks later.  We are all children of the same creation, same creator.

Paul picks up this theme from Genesis in First Timothy when he says, “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected.” The true meaning of the Greek word used in this context is “beautiful.” The meaning here, Karl Barth argues, “is that everything created by God is good, [in that it] is right, is well-ordered and therefore is beneficial.”

Barth suggests that when Paul says humanity is “beautiful” he means something other than the Genesis claim that we reflect the image of God in its pure power.  For of course Paul believes that we need to be saved, and we need to be saved because we have fallen, and in the fall, Paul thinks, the image of God was wiped from us.  We are broken and imperfect creatures, not God-like, but human – in desperate need of salvation.

So, how can we say that we are beautiful, beneficial even? Creation is the most important act in the Bible.  But after creation, comes the Fall and our ensuing radical distance from God.  This makes the redemption of creation, the salvation of creation, the work of Jesus Christ, the most beautiful act in the Bible.

Barth wants to argue, and I love this argument, that while we no longer reflect God’s perfection, we are called to reflect the work of the one through whom we were created.  We are beautiful not because we reflect God’s power, but because we reflect God’s mercy. We were all born through Christ to do the work of Christ: to love God, and to save each other.  And we all have a role to play in salvation.

This means then, that by rejecting gay men and lesbian women the church has stymied the work of Christ.  For if Paul is right, and all are a part of God’s salvation drama, gay people must have a unique role to play in that story.  What could that role be?

Well on one level (the most important level) the answers to that question are countless.  For every gay individual brings a distinct and personal self to the church.  The next time you’re in church ask yourself, who here has helped save me? Who helped me move? Who held me up? Who has modeled good parenting, committed love, joyful singing, a commitment to peace, an active faith? Who helped save me? My guess is the answer has almost nothing to do with that person’s sexual orientation.  Before we fall into any category, we are individuals crafted and created by God with individual gifts that no one else has.

But, of course we also fall into categories.  And if you worship in a church  faithful enough to fly directly in the face of dominant Christianity, a church Christ-like enough to unapologetically welcome gay and lesbian people, you are blessed to be saved by the beautiful category of homosexuality.

How?

Well, we all have doubt.  We all have reasons (good reasons!) to stay away from church, to abandon our childhood faith.  To write the church off as a disappointing institution, and Christianity off as an ancient and confusing myth.  We all have hurdles to clear in order to worship on a Sunday morning.  But, not all of us have heard the Church say “you are not welcome here.” Not all of us need to ask their pastor to preach a sermon in order to challenge two-thousand years of liars who twist the truth and smile as they tell us we are not “okay.” Not all of us have been told we are beyond the pale of salvation.

It is only gay and lesbian Christians who have to clear those hurdles in order to sing a hymn, teach Sunday School, feed the hungry at a Christian soup kitchen, share a cup of coffee in the church basement and praise the God who made them.  And in leaping into God’s embrace over the obstacles our religion has placed in their path, our gay sisters and brothers teach the rest of us how petty our excuses are, and just what it means to be faithful.  In their brave response to grace, we see faith that has the power to save.  And so we learn to be faithful.  And in our faith we are saved.  And so I thank God for my gay brothers and lesbian sisters in the church.

1. This is a paraphrase of a quote from the book Exilic Preaching reviewed in the magazine Christianity Today, March 2004 2. Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader

Over the past month, I’ve been to Qatar, Germany and Egypt. As jet setting as all that sounds, I was counting the days till I was in Bellevue, Ohio for it was in this tiny town halfway between Cleveland and Toledo that my family would finally gather again for the first time in six and a half years.

And so here we are. My parents and sister flew in from our hometown Cairo, Egypt, three days ago and as I write this, my father is feeding my nephew something green and mushy. My niece is eating Arabic food that her father bought from a Lebanese store in Toledo and I’m trying to write amidst the chaos that my family is famous for. But it is chaos that we have longed for. The last time we were together, loudly and gloriously and chaotically together, was in London in February 2001.

And then September 11, 2001 happened.

But this isn’t one of those “Muslims are miserable in America” essays. For sure, it hasn’t been easy for Muslims in the U.S. since those awful attacks. But the story, as are the best ones, is complicated.

My brother, a cardiologist in Toledo, has not left the country since the terrible events almost six years ago because as a Muslim and Arab man in this country on a work/study visa, he would have to renew that visa at the U.S. Embassy of whatever country he travels to. To renew that visa, he would have to submit to a FBI background check that could take months and that could cost him his fellowship and job. Two co-workers lost their jobs because of lengthy background checks when they traveled to their home countries of Syria and Pakistan respectively.

He was one of 5,000 Muslim men visited by the FBI shortly after the attacks to be asked, among other things, if he knew anyone who celebrated the attacks, and a year later he had to submit to being fingerprinted and photographed as part of Special Registration, which was put in place by the Patriot Act but which has thankfully been suspended.

But he would be the first to tell you that despite the FBI questioning and the humiliation of Special Registration, he is happy here in the U.S. And the reason that he commutes almost an hour to and from Toledo every day is so that his wife can maintain her OB/GYN practice here in Bellevue. She is the only woman OB/GYN doctor in the town and her waiting list is almost as long as her husband’s commute to Toledo.

There are many delicious ironies and surprises that make this story even more complicated. My sister-in-law wears hijab, or a headscarf and modest clothing that some Muslims believe is required of Muslim women. But her patients could care less. Their only concern is that they have a woman doctor to tend to them. I like to think that if they ever see something on television that is Islamophobic or an ugly stereotype of Muslims, they can yell at the television and say “My doctor is a Muslim and she’s not like that”.

And finally, the house where we’ve all gathered for the first time in six and a half years is one which is rented from the church which is just a few yards from our kitchen window. Every time the church parking lot fills with its worshippers’ cars, I am reminded that despite our differences and despite the complications of our stories, many of us turn to faith and to God to sustain us during challenging times, whether they are years of separation or the longing for family or whatever else ails us.

And as I look around my family finally gathered in this house around the dinner table and as my niece says grace in English and Arabic, I am thankful for that faith and for God’s sustaining presence. And thankful for this tiny town of Bellevue which has finally brought us together.
 

How long, O Lord, must I cry for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. (Habbakuk 1:2-3)

Habbakuk wrote these words about 2500 years ago – as he looked out at a world that was filled with violence, war and injustice. Most of our world has changed since he wrote these words – but some things remain the same.

We still war against one another…violence still abounds…conflict, not peace, is often the choice…and there are many of us who are frustrated, as Habbakuk was, with the fact that so many choose to treat one another in such violent ways.

And notice that Habbakuk is not asking God why bad things happen to good people……he is specifically asking about the injustices that are fully within our own power to prevent…violence, destruction, conflict….He is frustrated that God allows us to treat each other in such violent ways.

But ultimately what we learn – when we read on beyond Habbakuk – and we come across the life of Christ – and his call to love our neighbors as we love ourselves…his call to engage the needs and the people of our world in a way that values those people and their needs as equal to our own…what I think we learn is that the real question we are to be asking is not why God allows these types of things to happen, but rather when will we no longer allow these types of things to happen.

This call of Christ’s to love our neighbor, to feed those who are hungry, to clothe those who are naked…and on and on….ultimately all of these things are first – I think - about recognition.  If we fail to see the person who is in need, if we don’t acknowledge the systems that oppress even if to do so is uncomfortable or fearful, if we don’t look at the world with an unflinching and courageous eye to continually discover where God’s justice is not yet…where God’s love is not felt…where God’s hope is not known…then the people and the desperate needs they have….become invisible….which is perhaps the greatest form of violence, the greatest form of destruction there is.

Ralph Ellison wrote in The Invisible Man, “I am an invisible man…I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

And today, we still live in a world filled with invisibles. The desperately poor are invisible to most of us. The underage sweatshop workers that fill thousands of factories around this world are invisible to most of us. Victims of malnutrition are invisible to most of us. The list is long of invisibles in our world. And while so much of the Church seems to be fighting over ordination qualifications, who goes to heaven, etc…Perhaps the time is upon us to focus our attention on the issue of effectiveness….how effective are we, the Church, at making visible…the people and issues and needs that are invisible to the world?

I believe this is what Martin Luther King fought to achieve…a world that would recognize its own injustices…a world that would make the needs of our neighbor truly our own…to the point that we refuse to allow those people and their needs to remain invisible.

As we look out upon a world that reveals in many ways the violence and destruction that Habbakuk looked out on in his world – It is helpful to be reminded of the power and purpose of our existence as a church…to name the invisibles…to help make God real & relevant in a world filled with many people and places that do not feel God, that do not see God.