Watch with Me

"Tarry ye here, and watch with me."

--Mt. 26:38 KJV

Often we must face these crises alone, or believe that we must face them alone. It is hard to speak our pain when we are not sure if anyone is really listening or if anyone really cares or understands. Some of us need to be liberated from our own, self-imposed solitude and loneliness, and to reach out to others who can help us, or who at the least can keep us company along the way.

There is a poignant passage in the New Testament accounts of Jesus' final hours in Jerusalem before his arrest and trial. Jesus has retired to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray, as was his practice whenever troubled or challenged, and has asked his disciples to accompany him, to stay awake in order to protect him, and to keep watch with him: "I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here and stay awake with me," he says. The disciples, however, fail to keep their watch, and fall asleep, leading Jesus to ask, "So could you not stay awake with me one hour?"

I suspect that some of us have experienced a similar sense of abandonment in our times of need, or the fear of it. And, like the disciples, I suspect that some of us have fallen asleep on the job when others have needed us. We have failed to say the saving word. I know I have. The World War I German U-boat captain and later pastor Martin Niemoller, imprisoned during World War II for his anti-government activities, is reported to have said upon his release,

First they came for the Communists,
          and I didn't speak up
                    because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
          and I didn't speak up
                    because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
          and I didn't speak up
                    because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
          and by then there was no one left
                    to speak up for me.

The Jewish celebration of Passover and the Christian observance of Palm Sunday offer themes of liberation and betrayal for our lives. Passover, in particular, is a great tale of liberation. It recalls the time that God's plague on the first born of Egypt "passed over" the homes of the ancient Israelites, causing their keepers to "let them go," and sparing them for their eventual flight to freedom in the promised land.

We should not take this story too literally. It is, after all, a piece of post-Exodus revisionism, and we are right to cringe at the thought of all those innocents caught in the path of an angry and murderous God. But the story helps to explain the miraculous and otherwise inexplicable escape of the rag-tag Israelite people from their bondage in Egypt. As someone has said with truth, these stories about Israel's liberation are the "Cecil B. DeMille" version of historical events; reality was no doubt more mundane.

The story of the Exodus is central to Jewish self-understanding and has served as inspiration to many oppressed people down through the millennia. Consider the importance of this story to African American slaves and their descendents, or to the poor of Central America or Africa in our own time. So-called "liberation theologians" see liberation from oppressive systems of domination as the central motif of the Bible. Many Christian theologians also believe that Jesus was trying to free people from the various restrictive practices, roles, and purity taboos of his time.

This theme of liberation is one of the continuities between the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, and the New. It is no coincidence that Jesus goes up to Jerusalem to preach his subversive message against the powers that be during the annual Passover celebration. He was, after all, a Jew, familiar with the Hebrew Bible scriptures, and would have seen the Passover observance as a perfect opportunity to preach his liberating and law-transcending message of love to God and one's neighbor. He hoped to liberate people from what theologian Walter Wink has called "the domination system" of his time. He advocated what biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan calls a "radical egalitarianism." He wanted to turn his world upside down, and for a short while he succeeded. He succeeded well enough, at least, that people never forgot. It is little wonder that he was ultimately betrayed. It was his resistance to and witness against the powerful forces of domination, religious, social, and political, in his own day, that got him into trouble with the authorities and eventually got him killed.

Some of us would not have liked Jesus very much.

In our own time--whether rightly or wrongly I leave to your consideration--many people in the world view the United States, capitalistic democracy, and imperialistic Christianity as the great dominating systems which need to be subverted. We would do well to at least consider whether there is any truth to their claims, and whether we bear any responsibility for whatever truth they contain.

Most of us will need to find more humble ways to work for liberation than Moses or Jesus, or Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. for that matter. We may not succeed in changing the world, but all of us can work toward saving a little piece of it, beginning with those who are nearest to and dearest to us, beginning even with ourselves.

Always, we need to be aware that our vision of the right may be clouded, that compassion for others is the order of every day, and that self-righteousness must always be carefully guarded against.

In working on my sermon for this morning, I have struggled with the idea that liberation is costly. One great martyr to the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, referred to this idea as "costly grace" versus its opposite, which he called "cheap grace." It is true whether we are talking about the liberation of an individual or a people from past or present wounds or the liberation of a great political or religious system. It is true if we are talking about differences of opinion on the "war on terrorism" or on same-gender marriage. There is a price to pay for any act of witness, either for ourselves or on behalf of others. Liberation doesn't come cheap.

A few will gladly pay the price and immolate themselves on the altar of their truth. We need those who will stand up for what they believe whatever the cost, as long as what they believe is true. But reality is almost never as simple or as black and white as we would like it to be, and we all bear some responsibility for the oppressive structures and ideas of our time. There are times when all of us, just like Martin Niemoller, might have spoken out, and out of complacency failed to do so. There are also times when we need to check our facts and give our opponents the benefit of the doubt and keep the lines of communication open. We might all learn a thing or two by doing that.

I began by speaking about the kinds of things that most of us need to be liberated from. These include the fears and prejudices which most of us carry around with us, that prevent us from seeing the faces of our enemies and even of those with whom we disagree. Jesus, after all, said "love your enemies," though many Christians ridicule this commandment as naivete at best, pie-in-the-sky idealism at worst. How does one love a terrorist? How does one love even someone who disagrees about the best way to deal with a terrorist?

Perhaps "empathy" is a better word than love. I truly believe that until we are able to "feel with" the other, whether the person desperate enough to kill him or herself and others, or the one who disagrees about the best way to deal with that person, we are doomed to keep re-living what Walter Wink calls "the myth of redemptive violence": the idea that violence can overcome or defeat violence, or that violence can ever solve any problem whatsoever. It is a pervasive myth that Wink believes we as a society, indeed as a world, have fully bought into; and that it is the cause of most of the problems in the world today: of terrorism and counter-terrorism, as well as those problems in our own mean streets and even in our own homes.

The solution, I believe, lies in community. It lies in the communion of people, that is, in the sharing of thoughts and ideas. It lies in giving the other the benefit of the doubt, of thinking the best of our fellow travelers along the way, of standing with and by them, of watching with them in their times of trial, of being vigilant about the feelings of others, of speaking our truth with love and not with anger or disregard for the truths of others.

The great themes of the Passover and Palm Sunday holidays will never grow old. We will always need the messages they bear about liberation and about speaking truth to power. We need to be reminded of the power of our integrity and presence in the lives of others. And we need to be reminded that "we are not yet finished," but that "we are in the making still," that misunderstandings and failures are inevitable along this journey of life.

May the liberating sun and the showers of early spring open our hearts and minds to one another, even as it opens the buds and blossoms all around us. May this miracle of recurring life continue to amaze and delight us, on this day and in all the days still to come.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock