God said, “Let the earth produce every kind of living thing: livestock, crawling things, and wildlife.” And that’s what happened. 25 God made every kind of wildlife, every kind of livestock, and every kind of creature that crawls on the ground. God saw how good it was.
26 Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.” 27 God created humanity in God’s own image, in the divine image God created them, male and female God created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, and everything crawling on the ground.”
29 Then God said, “I now give to you all the plants on the earth that yield seeds and all the trees whose fruit produces its seeds within it. These will be your food. 30 To all wildlife, to all the birds in the sky, and to everything crawling on the ground—to everything that breathes—I give all the green grasses for food.” And that’s what happened. 31 God saw everything he had made: it was supremely good. There was evening and there was morning: the sixth day. (Common English Bible)
“Reconnecting with a
Loving God: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week Three
At
Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the preeminent memorial to the Jewish Holocaust, there
is a term for non-Jews who helped save, shelter, or rescue Jews from the
Holocaust during the Second World War: Righteous
Among the Nations.
The
names of the Righteous Among the Nations currently number in the tens of
thousands—over twenty-six thousand as of this year—but I want to tell you about
two of them from an obscure Greek Ionian island named Zakynthos.
When
the Nazi occupiers of Greece came for the 275 Jews who lived on Zakynthos, the
latter were successfully hidden amid a network of mountain villages. The mayor
of Zakynthos, Loukas Karrer, was ordered at gunpoint to produce a roster of the
island’s Jews. The list was presented to the Germans by the Greek Orthodox
bishop Chrysostomos, and it contained but two names: Mayor Karrer and
Chrysostomos himself. In handing over the list, Chrysostomos reportedly said, “Here
are your Jews. If you choose to deport the Jews of Zakynthos, you must also
take me, and I will share their fate.”
All
275 of Zakynthos’s Jews survived the war.
There
is an epilogue to this story—eight years after the war ended, an earthquake
devastated the island. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial andMuseum, the first aid vessel to arrive came from Israel, bearing the message, “The
Jews of Zakynthos have never forgotten their mayor or their beloved bishop and
what they did for us.”
In
a war in which the image of so many a European to so many a Jew, a Romani, a
disabled or gay person, was that of a banal, murderous monster, atoning for
that image has been paramount in Germany’s history. Willy Brandt’s spontaneous
act of kneeling at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the conversion
of the grounds surrounding Hitler’s bunker and chancellery into a memorial
site, all these different acts of atonement mean a great deal, and yet, it is
the memories that we often reconnect with that move us to action—the memory of
a saintly bishop or a courageous mayor, or, here in church, the memory of a God
whose image was made in love, rather than wrath.
This
is a new sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that takes
us all the way to Advent. Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the
pastor and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it
from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or
otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers
permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church
hurts.
If
that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a
sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the
truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a
better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet
so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to
us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can
actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have
before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on
being better and doing church together.
We
began this series two weeks ago with a passage from Carol’s first chapter, “A
Tree Grows in My Bedroom,” and then last week we heard a passage from the
second chapter, “Finding Shalom. This, then, is an excerpt from Carol’s third
chapter, “Healing Our Image of God,” which takes place after a health scare for
her father, whose abusive relationship with her underlines vast swaths of her
book:
I had to rewire my brain,
so that my belly was in on the heady message that God loved me, and so it would
be okay to love God. It couldn’t happen in the church I served, because in that
sanctuary, I was so worried about everyone gathered, it was hard to concentrate
on my own work.
So I drove to the giant
stone structure of the National Cathedral…If you think of a cathedral as the
shape of a cross, the gathering was clustered at the heart of the beams. The
priest and musicians stood as the people formed a “U” shape around them. Since
there were plenty of vacant back seats, it was easy for me to slip into one and
begin chanting with those gathered without much notice:
Bless
the Lord, my Soul.
And
bless God’s holy name.
Bless
the Lord, my soul.
Who
leads me into life.
…
Though the act of singing
appeared simple, I knew a complicated healing process had begun—physically and
spiritually—as we joined in the repetition. We imagined a compassionate God as
we sang our prayer, and through that process we cleared out new paths of life
in our minds.
Imagining
a compassionate God should be so extraordinary a circumstance for any of us,
and yet it often is precisely that: extraordinary. And were that so simply for
the sole reason that God is indeed extraordinary, then I could end this sermon
right now.
But
that reality is true not just because God is in fact extraordinary, but because
we are not taught of such extraordinary compassion and, equally crucially to go
and emulate such compassion ourselves.
“God
created humanity in God’s own image; in the divine image God created them, male
and female God created them,” writes the priestly author of Genesis 1.
And
then God blessed them, intones our scribe, and saw that it was good. Not
mediocre, not “meh,” not adequate or fair-to-middling. Good. Very good, even.
God saw that we are good.
God
blesses God’s own image, for that which is created in God’s likeness is good in
God’s sight.
Yet
what image do we project, as the church, as a nation, as humanity itself? When
we elevate people who get on television and into books to say that God shows
blessing not through the fruits of the spirit, but through worldly wealth and
possessions, what image is the church projecting?
When
we elevate a message taught by preachers who emphasize that if you are beaten
or battered or abused that it is a part of God’s cosmic plan and that you had
best submit to it, what image is the church projecting?
And
when we elevate to the presidency someone who decides to call another man something
unprintable over a peaceful protest—whether you agree with that protest or not—what
image is the nation projecting to people for whom United States history is not
something to be proud of, but a long, painful story of enslavement, conquest,
and, yes, abuse?
The
image of God, of our communities, we tend to make it about ourselves. My New
Testament professor in college said that we have this tendency to make God into
an idealized version of ourselves, that we make God in our image rather than
the other way around. There’s a word for that—idolatry. And it is something we
are exhorted against in the first two of the Ten Commandments—that we shall
have no other gods before God, and that we shall not make to God any idol. A
god in our image that we then project is one such graven image. It is one such
idol.
The
image we project to survivors of all manner of abuses—spiritual, emotional, and
physical—matters. It matters for any chance of reconciliation, it matters for
any hope of honoring and acknowledging truth, and it matters for the future of
our communities—including the church.
The
courage demonstrated by the mayor and bishop of Zakynthos reverberated
throughout the future, not just in the Jewish aid response to the earthquake
that struck it eight years later, but in the form of the hundreds of lives
saved who went on to have lives and children of their own, and those children’s
children, all the way down to the present day.
So
it was, and shall be, with God. God created us in the divine image, in the imago dei, and that too reverberates
throughout the millennia, to us, and to our children, and our children’s
children, and long into that future.
May
those generations of the future find and have for themselves a church worthy of
the God-image that dwells deep within them.
May
we, the church of the present, be the ones to ensure that eventuality.
And
may the churches of both present and future days be all the better for having
done so.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
September
24, 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment