A Meditation on Discipleship
9/16/12
1.
Sometimes
being nice is not enough. Not nearly
enough. You heard the story. On the way, on the road to compassion and peace and the kingdom of God, Jesus and Peter
get into it.
 |
| Jesus Blesses Peter by the Sea |
And
Jesus? Jesus turns on Peter, in front of
all the rest. In front of their
friends. Jesus turns on Peter and says,
“Get behind me, Satan.” You’re missing
the point. You’re missing the whole
point of this. You know, it’s easy to
get all worked up about Satan and the devil here; many of us remember Dana
Carvey’s ‘church lady’ on the old Saturday Night Live. “Satan!”
But for the ancient Hebrews Satan had more to do with temptation than
evil. Satan was for the Hebrews the
personification of temptation, the one who distracts, the one who diverts, the
one who suggests an easier path to the truth.
So Jesus looks at Peter, Jesus rebukes Peter. And he says: “Get behind me, Satan.”
Now
maybe Jesus’s saying: Don’t tempt me, Satan!
Don’t tempt me with this bit about power and living forever and having
all the answers. The suffering ahead is
sure to be hard—don’t tempt me with an easier way. Maybe that’s how Satan works here.
Or
maybe Jesus’s saying to Peter: Don’t you be tempted, Peter. Don’t go for the path of least
resistance. Don’t give in to your ego’s
every whim, to your desire for power and privilege and certainty.
If
you want to follow me, Peter, you’re going to have to lose that ego. You’re going to have to loosen your grip on
the kingdom. After all, this kingdom
isn’t about you and your grip on it, your position of privilege in the big
scheme of things. This kingdom is about
love. Just love. So you’re going to have to take up your
cross, learn to suffer; and that’s where we’re going, Peter. That’s where we’re going together.
Now
we know this isn’t the end for Peter and Jesus.
Their friendship, their partnership, their courage in enacting a whole
new world of love and grace: it goes on from here. This moment on the way crackles with tension
and rebuke. Being nice is not
enough. For either of them. But it’s not the end either. It turns out that tension is part of their
path. Part of their journey. Part of how we grow and evolve and encourage
one another on the way.
This
is not the last time either. This is not
the last time Peter and Jesus get into it, not the last time there’s tension
and truth-telling and disagreement between them. But again and again, their relationship
survives the unsettling spirit of difference.
Again and again, they grow through it and then beyond it. To something new. Something like brotherhood.
So
no, being nice is not enough. Not for
Peter. Not for Jesus. Not for us either.
2.
This
past Tuesday evening, I found myself in a strange place, a new place. I was invited to a meeting of COPA leaders in
Castroville. And, you know, I thought I
knew Castroville. I’d been to meetings down
there, at the church, the new library downtown.
I’ve done that drive through the middle of town—where they’ve got that
wonderful sign. “Artichoke Capital of
the Universe!” But this meeting, on
Tuesday night, was in a whole different part of Castroville, way out there in
the fields, where the farmers grow their artichokes and the farmworkers work
long days for their families.
In
fact, Tuesday’s COPA meeting was hosted in a housing development built by and
for farmworkers themselves. Seemed to me
like a completely different country, like a completely different time zone. You take a left turn at the huge power plant
in Moss Landing, and you just keep going.
I was disoriented even by the ride.
Farms and fields, trailers and chicken coups. Could this be California?
So
we gathered to do some strategizing around the campaign, aiming at a huge
assembly with Congressman Sam Farr and all kinds of candidates in county
supervisor races in Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties. And part of that strategizing had to do with
the signatures we’ve been collecting across the two counties. We’ve been doing that right here at FCC—and
in all the other institutions.
Well,
early on in the campaign, we made commitments.
Each of the churches, each of the institutions made a commitment to collect
a certain number of signatures. The
total—amongst all 25 institutions—was something like 22,000 signatures. A commitment to collecting 22,000 before the
November election. That number—22,000—represented
our determination to make our voices heard and build a power organization
across two counties. It was ambitious
and so were we.
On
Tuesday, though, we learned that, realistically, we’ll be lucky to reach
11,000. We’ve got just 7,000 right
now. Only seven institutions (of the 25)
are set to meet their commitments. (I
want to say, with great satisfaction, that we are one of those seven. FCC is
one of the seven! Thanks to Darrell
Johnson, Mary Male and the rest of our COPA Core Team, we’re not only going to
meet our commitment of 550 signatures, but surpass it! And that’s great news!)
But
over all, there was a certain kind of tension in the room Tuesday night. Tension when our lead organizers read out the
numbers. Tension when we all realized
how much work was yet to be done.
Tension when we sensed we’d fall far short of our commitments to one
another. It wasn’t an easy meeting.
But
here’s something I learned Tuesday night.
Something about COPA. Something about
who we are together. Of the 7,000
signatures COPA’s already collected in the campaign, 3,500 have been collected
by the Center for Community Advocacy in Salinas. And you need to know that CCA is an
organization of farmworkers, farmworker families, immigrants and Latinos in
Salinas. I don’t have to tell you what
farmworkers are going through these days. The challenges of making ends meet and feeding
their families and fending off all the xenophobia around immigration in
America. But just the same, they’ve
collected, these farmworkers in Salinas, together, fully half of all the
signatures COPA’s gathered in four months of working on this. 3,500 of them.
So
we’re all experiencing tension, a little uneasy about the goal we’re short of
making. And then, just then, CCA’s
director, a quiet, hardworking organizer whose name is Juan Aranga; at one
point, Juan is asked why. Why has his
CCA succeeded in gathering thousands of signatures? Why has CCA invested so much of its leaders’
time and energy in our COPA efforts? And
Juan thinks about it for a minute. It
looks like he’s had a long day. And he says:
“You know, I’ve been organizing Latinos in Salinas for thirty years. My people have been at it for thirty years
down there. And we’ve done some good
things, very good things. But I’ve
reached a point, we’ve reached a point where we can’t do it alone. We need Anglo churches and Jewish synagogues
on our side. We need Central Coast labor
on our side. We need other immigrant
organizations on our side. We can’t do
this work alone.”
And
then Juan Aranga looks around the room, at lay leaders and ministers, at rabbis
and teachers. And we’re all on edge, just a little. It’s been a long night, a little tense. And Juan says: “I need you, friends. My people need you. We need you to show up for us. We need you to care about COPA the way we
care about COPA. I’ll show up for you,
but you’ve gotta show up for me.”
So
tension. Just like there’s a place for
tension on the road, tension between Jesus and Peter, tension that clarifies
what’s at stake and where they’re going.
Just like that tension, there’s a place for tension in our work
together, in our life together. And we can
not only survive it, but thrive in the midst of it. It can focus our mission, define our purpose
and energize our loving and caring in the world.
3.
When
we met, as a congregation, last spring, in our annual meeting, there was some
of this tension around our participation in COPA, around the time and energies
we commit to COPA. There’s tension
around how we prioritize mission, and how we prioritize our advocacy for
justice issues and peace around the planet.
And you know, the more I thought about this (and I did think about it
over the summer), the more I thought about it, the more grateful I was for the
passion, for the differences of perspective and opinion, for the tension among
us. We care PASSIONATELY, as a
congregation, about affordable housing and health care access and immigrant
rights. And we care PASSIONATELY, as a
congregation, about GAY RIGHTS and full inclusion in the church and its
sacraments and ministries. We care
PASSIONATELY about marriage equality.
And we care PASSIONATELY about the homeless poor in our own city and the
needs of women and men in jail and what happens when they get out. We care PASSIONATELY about so many people and
so much of the world’s needs.
And
all that PASSION, when we mix it up together, when we worship together and pray
together and budget together, all that PASSION gets stirred up. Each of us has a different take on how to
prioritize, how to proceed. Each of us
embodies urgency in a different kind of way.
But that’s GOOD. That’s so, so
good. The tension’s good and creative
and a sign of our faith and hope and determination to make a difference in a
world that GOD STILL LOVES, in a community that GOD IS DETERMINED TO
BLESS.
I
want to be part of a church that care for all of it, that commits to all of
it. I want my children to grow up in a
church that is every bit as committed to peace in Salinas as it is peace in
Palestine. I want your children to grow
up in a church that is every bit as committed to Dinah and Gail’s marriage (or
Tom and Jim’s) marriage as it is to Kate’s and mine. I want to worship with a community that is
willing to go the distance to show Juan Aranga and CCA that yes, we will show
up. Yes, we will respond. Yes, we will work in partnership and
brotherhood and sisterhood with those hard-working farmworkers in the Salinas
Valley.
4.
Now,
I’m too young to have participated in the Civil Rights Movement of the early
‘60s. But I’ve heard many of you tell
stories from that era, from that movement.
And I’ve heard older clergy friends describe the feeling they had when
Martin Luther King called for clergy all across the country to come to the
South and sit with black clergy, march with black activists, organize with
black families. Martin Luther King said,
in effect, we need you. We need our
Christian brothers and sisters to be Christian brothers and sisters, to walk
the talk, to make the journey of conscience and distance. My older friends tell me it was hard
sometimes, to make the decision, to tell Northern churches why, to take the
time off to make the trip. There was
tension around King’s call, around the moral imperative he laid on the hearts
of his Christian colleagues.
But
every one of those folks, every one of them says it was worth it. And maybe the most important moral moment in
their lives, spiritual moment in their lives.
I
felt something like that Tuesday night.
Listening to Juan Aranga. Feeling
his passion. Feeling the tension in the
room. He needs me. He needs you.
Farmworkers and immigrants, Jews and Catholics, poor families and
working families: we need each other. So
I want you to know that I will continue to push hard for our partnership with
COPA, just as I’ll continue to do everything I can to be sure this church is a
loud and dynamic voice for full inclusion, for gay and lesbian, bisexual and
transgender rights around the world. I
love the tension that’s generated when all this energy, all these commitments
come together. I'll even go so far as to suggest: it's the tension we must live with in the kingdom of God.
And if
Jesus and Peter can survive it, and thrive, so can we.
