DO NOT BE WEARY

November 14, 2004

Texts – Isaiah 65: 17-25

II Thessalonians 3: 6-13

Tired. Exhausted. Bone weary. Who among us hasn’t been each of these and more? It’s the Friday night special coming to a family room near you. “What’s for dinner?” the bedraggled bread-winner asks as he walks through the door after a long week at the office. His partner, equally exhausted at the end of the week, quips back – “What? You’re hungry? No problem . . . I can throw together a reservation for us in no time at all!”

“Do not be weary” indeed.

I’ll tell you what – I was plenty weary after last weekend’s “Unfinished Story” event. So too, I know, were many of you. But wasn’t it a marvelous time? Didn’t we do it up right? You bet we did. This is the last time I’m going to do this, but I am going to do it – Susan Saunders, Janice Clements, Charlie Church, Tony Hall, Anne Vivian, Adrianne Carr, and most of all Lucy Samara . . . Please stand up where you are and let us thank you! You done good.

But now, hear it again – “Don’t be weary.” This does not speak, of course, about the weariness of our bodies, but rather about the exhaustion of our souls. It is the depletion of our spirits that concerns the Apostle here. It concerns me as well.

There’s an enormous amount of spiritual fatigue around us and within us in this country right now. It exploded for some of us at the Friday night worship service last weekend where the Reverend James Forbes was our preacher. Disappointed and disheartened by the results of the Presidential election, and sensing that many in the congregation that night were equally discouraged, he invited us to release our frustrations by literally groaning our complaints to God. It was a unique experience (to say the least!), and the vast majority of folks who left our sanctuary that night did so buoyed up with fresh energy. But . . . But some among us left feeling deeply wounded. Some came away feeling like their convictions had been mocked . . . their values and commitments ridiculed . . . their worth as children of God called into question.

When you’re tired, you make mistakes. When you’re weary and exhausted, even the simple things that you do every day can become a challenge. Jim Forbes made a mistake. He said as much publicly the next day when I raised the question to him in our panel discussion. He quite correctly and compassionately and effectively reached out that night to those who felt like they were beaten and exhausted and living in exile. But . . . But he forgot that not everybody shared that point of view. He forgot that equally sincere and devout and worthy people were present among us for whom the Presidential election just couldn’t have turned out better.

When we talked about this at the Deacons’ meeting this week, somebody framed the issue this way – “I came here knowing,” he said, “that this congregation prides itself on being progressive, even liberal. The question that service raised is – Are Republicans welcome here?”

Is anybody really laughing? I hope not.

Spiritual fatigue . . . the exhaustion of our souls . . . it’s all around us, and it’s deep inside each of us. I’m talking about the message we are bombarded with from the moment we get out of bed in the morning until the moment we finally close our eyes at night . . . the message that says that life is a contest, with winners and losers, and you better be on your guard and you better be at your best ‘cause if you’re not you’re gonna end up a loser. Everything we do has to be put into those terms, doesn’t it?

We’ve been immersed in blue states and red states and battleground states for months. It was bad enough when the complexities of international relationships got “sugared off” into talk of an “axis of evil.” It was bad enough when too many people who should have known better allowed themselves to fall into the diabolical trap of equating Islam with terrorism. But now we just keep going further and further into that hole. Now even the phrase “moral values” has been coopted into the service of this divisive and life-threatening stupidity.

What are the “moral values” which supposedly divided us up into winners and losers twelve days ago? According to the sooth-sayers and oracles of the royal court – and by that I mean the national media – it all came down to abortion and gay rights. But what’s the truth? The truth is that “42 percent of voters cited the war in Iraq as the ‘moral issue’ that most influenced their choice of candidates, while 13 percent cited abortion and 9 percent same-sex marriage.” The truth is, according to this same post-election poll this week, that “33 percent of voters (both Democrats and Republicans) said the nation's most urgent moral problem was ‘greed and materialism,’ and 31 percent said it was ‘poverty and economic justice.’ Sixteen percent named abortion, and 12 percent named same-sex marriage.” [“Liberal Christians Challenge 'Values Vote',” by Alan Cooperman, The Washington Post, November 10, 2004]

Oh, but that doesn’t fit in with our black and white, right and wrong, good verses evil view of the world. I want those who disagree with me to be not just wrong (which of course they are!); I want them to be stupid, ignorant and slavishly self-centered . . . And if I can’t have any of those, then I’ll throw in evil for good measure. Isn’t that the way too many of us are?

This is not a baseball game, for God’s sake! This is not the World Series. I confess to being a Yankee’s fan . . . So shoot me; put me out of my misery! Am I still welcome here?

It’s a vicious paradigm, and it’s in each of us. It can’t help but be – it’s in the water we drink . . . it’s in the air that we breathe. We create these labels – we make’m up out of thin air! – and then we start to act as though they really meant something. Conservative / Liberal, Democrat / Republican, gay / straight, evangelical / mainline, black / white . . . Take it to the extreme, to the absurd – You all should be ashamed of yourselves! There’s not a one of you here that’s a real Vermonter . . . you all live in Chittenden County. Please.

Robert Frost was a good soul. He was an honorary Vermonter! “Nothing scares me,” he said once, “like a herd of scared people.” Well that’s a big piece of what’s going around, and of what’s going on inside. Scared. A lot of us are scared. It didn’t start with September 11^th, but it most certainly has been ratcheted-up by it. The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq have added to it. Real people are dying there – some of them our compatriots, but all of them our sisters and brothers. It’s a God-awful mess.

But you don’t have to look “over there” to find the source of our anxiety and fear. You just have to look “in here.” I ran across this description of what it’s like to be five years old and to be headed off to your first day of school. “My name is Donald,” it begins,

“and I don’t know anything. I have new underwear, a loose tooth, and I didn’t sleep last night because I’m worried. What if a bell rings and a man yells, ‘Where do you belong?’ and I don’t know? What if the trays in the cafeteria are too tall for me to reach? What if my loose tooth comes out when we have our heads down and are supposed to be quiet? Am I supposed to bleed quietly? What if I splash water on my name tag and my name disappears and no one knows who I am?”

That’s scared. It starts early and it never ends. It’s who we are. It’s what we’re like, all of us – Democrat and Republican, black and white, straight and gay, evangelical and mainline, Muslim and Christian, Iraqi and American. And it’s why we’re all welcome here in this church right smack dab in the middle of the Red Sox Nation, even us Yankees from Chittenden County!

Did you know the Bible talks more about fear and anxiety than it does about sin or even money? It’s true. It says place your fears in the hands of God, let God take them over, assume responsibility for them. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t need that. And when push comes to shove – and it does for all of us when death draws near –, isn’t that where we turn? “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; he makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. Ye though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will not fear . . .” Isn’t that what we say, what we read?

I did a funeral this Fall for a man who had been a career military officer his entire life. When they were treating him in the hospital intensive care section, one of the nurses asked him if he was allergic to anything. “No,” he said weakly, and then he added – “just Democrats.” Patrick Leahy came to his funeral. “He was one of my biggest supporters,” he said. “I thought he was allergic to Democrats,” I replied. “Oh he was, but he thought I was a Vermonter.”

We read the 23^rd Psalm at that service. I asked somebody once, “what’s the most important word in that psalm?” She surprised me. She said, “through.” “Through?” I said. “Yes,” she replied. “It means we don’t get to go around the dark valleys, only through them. But God goes with us.” She’s right. The Creator of this whole world is with you, and you can trust him to get you through it.

“Let not your hearts be troubled,” Jesus said, “You believe in God; believe also in me . . . Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled; neither let them be afraid.” [John 14: 1, 27] We need to hear that over and over, don’t we? I know I do.

“Do not be weary in well-doing,” the Apostle says . . . “in doing what is right.” [NRSV] If anybody had a right to be “weary,” they did. This is one of the earliest of Paul’s letters; it probably dates from somewhere around 47 or 48 A.D.. The Christians in Thessalonika were a hard-pressed, persecuted minority. They yearned for an end to it all. Bring on the eschaton, they prayed.

What they earnestly believed was that history was about to end, and that then (and here I am quoting Paul) “the Lord Jesus (will be) revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel.” [II Thessalonians 1: 7-8] Talk about a “black and white” world with big time winners and losers. This malady that afflicts us is very old and very universal! But in spite of that, Paul writes to them to temper their enthusiasm and to moderate their zeal. “We hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work,” he says; “anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” [3: 10-11] Now this is not the much-maligned Protestant work ethic raising its ugly head. Far from it. This is a caution against buying in so heavily to an ideological / theological world view of winners and losers that you allow that to override all other considerations. Those whom Paul singles out here are those who have said – “God is on our side! We don’t need to work for our daily bread. The Realm of Heaven is going to break out all around us at any moment.” And so they stopped caring about their normal duties, to say nothing of their sisters and brothers, and they had become a burden on the community.

“Do not be weary in well-doing,” he says. Do not be weary. But they were, and so are we. Weary of the tensions and pressures. Weary of the judgments we have passed on others, and which therefore we are certain others have also passed on us. We are fatigued and our community is in danger of becoming fractured. The dividing lines are being drawn even as we speak. Red and blue, black and white, saved and damned, moral and immoral. You’re either for us or you’re against us. Nonsense.

For we, though many, are one body in Christ. Shall I read it to you from the scriptures? “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ,” Paul says. “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and were all made to drink of one Spirit. . . . So you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” [I Corinthians 12: 12 -13, 27] He’s talking about us.

A season of divisiveness and great unease has come upon us in our land. Some of us remember an earlier time of polarization and alienation. We do not want to return there. Yes we differ on important and substantive matters . . . matters of vital moral content and concern. But we are one in this place of worship and spiritual community. In the words of our hymn – Let us trust God to guide and direct us, with hopeful hearts through all our days . . . Let us find the strength, with God beside us, to bear the worst of evil days.

Let us remember and never forget – those who trust God’s changeless love,

build their lives on the rock that will never move.

Amen.