Sunday, November 04, 2018

God will wipe away their tears


All Saints Sunday, Isaiah 25 and Revelation 21

These are the pictures of the end of the story, according to Isaiah, according to Revelation…
God will make for all peoples a feast of well-aged wines, and rich foods…
Mourning and crying and pain will be no more… see, I am making all things new
To the thirsty I will give water as a giftfrom the spring of the water of life.

It’s a vision, but it’s not an easy vision to believe.
In this country that witnessed the massacre at Tree of Life Synagogue last week…
In this country “strengthening its borders” and trying to turn people’s hearts against the “caravan of migrants” traveling north seeking asylum from violence...
In this country where we have to have campaigns like Black Lives Matter and Doing Justice seminars and where our statewide organization, Isaiah, people of faith working for #faithnotfear, finds itself having to put out ads where people are helping each other out of snowbanks to counteract ads that want to divide people into their racial, ethnic groups and turn us against one another.

I read a lengthy article from the Washington Post from November 2nd.
Here was a description of two voices from that caravan of migrants (actually two groups of about 3500 and 3000 people) as they heard the news of our President’s words and actions against them:

The migrants were resting in a soggy sports field on the edge of town, a few miles from where Mexican families celebrated the Day of the Dead in the town cemetery.
“They won’t shoot because we’re not criminals,” Erik Miranda, 39, said of Trump’s threat that U.S. troops would open fire if attacked with rocks. “I lived there for 15 years. I know the United States is a country of laws.”
Miranda said he had been deported from America twice despite asking for asylum after being shot three times by the 18th Street gang in his native Honduras. “If the caravan reaches the border and enters, these people will have their day in court in front of a judge,” he said…
“How horrible,” Daniela Carbajal, 27, said when told of Trump’s threat. “I’m not justifying throwing rocks but remember: We have children among us.”
As she spoke, her 9-year-old son, Oscar, watched a video advising migrants of their rights, his head poking out of an orange tent Carbajal and her husband had just bought for 150 pesos. Inside, her 3-year-old daughter, Karla, was sound asleep.[1]
I thought… will they? Will they have their day in court? Are we still? Are we still a country of laws? There is a fearful part of me that wants to shout to them—turn back, turn back, because of what is happening at our border—more than 50,000 arrests each month. 15,000 troops being sent to the border
These travelers, walking what they call the Way of the Cross, trust that the United States is the place that Isaiah describes… a place of rich food, of well-aged wines, of water flowing free and abundant… yet our leaders send out messages that these thousands are criminals, dangerous, an invading mob of terrorists… that we should support our leader’s plans to separate them from their children, gun them down, keep them out of this country by any means necessary. We are supposed to be afraid of them, afraid enough to not care at all what happens to them.

But of course, we can’t respond like that because we gather here, so much like them… and we hear these words from Jesus:

Hear, O people, the Lord your God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

Love God with every fiber of your being… and love your neighbor.

In view of our context, this ethic of love is an invitation to an incredibly different life than our unbelievably rich, narcissistic, violent-minded rulers can imagine.
We imagine and then begin to practice a gathering where everyone is invited to the feast, where God wipes tears away, where water is freely given out—like Knute did this year at the State Fair—rather than hoarded or tampered with so the poorest can’t get it in the desert… 

Some of our leaders want the people to starve along the way or die of disease in tent cities or be torn from the arms of their parents…
And yet, we attempt, week after week to believe in the crazy talk of a God who, out of the terrible, horrible realities that are killing us, brings new life and purpose… 

Spanish Jewish doctor and poet, Judah Halevi, wrote this…

‘Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.
A fearful thing 
To love, to hope, to dream, to be –
To be 
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
And a holy thing,
A holy thing
To love.
For your life has lived in me,
Your laugh once lifted me,
Your word was gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
‘Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing, to love
what death has touched.[2]

Today, we will say their names—the ones that we have loved, the ones that death has taken.
We’ll say their names even when it brings painful joy—joy because their lives have made us who we are and because their laughter and words made a difference;  pain because they have flown.
We see feathers, evidence they were here, but we really wanted more time in their presence, these who fly with their own wings and now are gone.

And so in response to this deep love, this deep grief, we practice.
We practice love… for those closest to us who need our love the most and for those far away, across a border who need us to act and vote on their behalf.

We resist all lies that would fill us with fear or stop us from doing what we can; instead we act with courage and solidarity with those who are our neighbors, in the wide, wide way that Jesus defined neighbor. We come together as church, we practice loving, and then we are sent to practice that deep love that finally brings us together around a rich feast where tears are wiped away.


[1]Nick Miroff, “Migrant caravan: What Trump’s threats sound like to the Central Americans trudging north”
The Washington Post, November 2, 2018
[2]Judah Halevi was a Spanish Jewish physician, poet and philosopher. He was born in Spain, either in Toledo or Tudela, in 1075 or 1086  and died in 1141 in Jerusalem.

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