Introduction by President Peter Judd:

Sermon by Reverend James Lawson:

I'm delighted to stand here in this historic pulpit of Stone Church. I'm delighted to be yet a part of this Peace Colloquy of the Community of Christ. Dorothy and I have had a very wonderful weekend. We've enjoyed your hospitality, your warm welcoming, and we will always remember you in our thoughts and prayers, and we add you to the names of people and to the communities of people for whom we have great affection and for whom we continue to pray and of whom we consider ourselves a part by God's grace. I want to especially thank Grant McMurray and Andrew Bolton for this very fine invitation, for this award, as this peace award for the 11th annual year in the life of your community in this year of 2004. We will leave this place greatly encouraged and greatly strengthened in the work that I sense very deeply God has given me to do.

Let us bow our heads now for a moment of prayer:

“Oh, God who has sent us to school in this strange life of ours and has set us tasks which test all our courage, trust, and fidelity. May we not spend our days complaining that circumstance or fretting that discipline, but give ourselves to learn of life and to profit by every experience. Make us strong to endure. We pray that when trials come upon us we may not shirk the issue or lose our faith in thy goodness, but committing our goals unto thee who knowest the way that we take, come forth as gold tried in the fire. Grant by thy grace that we may not be found wanting in the hour of crisis. When the battle is set, may we know on which side we ought to be. And when the day goes hard, cowards steal from the field, and heroes fall around the standard, may our place be found where the fight is fiercest. If we faint, may we not be faithless. If we falter, may we not fail. If we fall, may it be while facing the foe. Amen”

I want to lodge my remarks this morning in a passage of scripture that is to be found in the gospel of Luke, the ninth chapter, the 51 through the 56 verses. .

"When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And [Jesus] sent messengers ahead of him. On their way, they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him, but those villagers would not receive him because [Jesus'] face was set towards Jerusalem. When his disciples, James and John, saw it, they said, "Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and to consume them?" But [Jesus] turned and rebuked them and said, "You do not know of what spirit you are of, for the Son of Man has not come to destroy the lives of human beings, but to save them." Then they went on to another village." (Luke 9:51-56 NRSV)

I think that we in the churches must decide upon a very hard decision. We must decide whether or not the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is the Jesus of unconditional love and grace for all humankind, whether or not when we call Him Lord this means he's the Lord of all of life, all the nations, all of the Earth, all creation. That when we call him our personal Savior, we mean by that that we know that none others can save us; no other ideologies or gods can rescue us or the human family. In doing that, we must come to the conclusion that a savior of unconditional love is essentially a non-violent savior. A person who deliberately chooses not to pick up the sword, either the sword of hatred or the sword that wounds or the sword that destroys, but rather insists on picking up a sword of the love of God that can truly heal, that can truly lift and redeem.

This I understand to be the choice that Jesus laid upon James and John and his disciples in this episode from Luke 9. They are at the height of their movement, and we must understand Jesus and the Kingdom of God Movement as a movement. It was not formalized in congregations such as we are, but it was a group that moved across the countryside. In fact, if you search the gospels easily, you will recognize that apparently Jesus walked all around Galilee and Samaria and Caesaria Phillipi and the lands across the Jordan and Judea. He must have known his territory with great thoroughness because everywhere he moved to the people. He did not wait for the people to come to him; he went to them. And it was a movement in another sense, that often times, he was not only accompanied by his best friends, the 12 or the 72 or 120. But oftentimes, he was accompanied by literally multitudes, according to all the gospels. Great, great crowds, Matthew says, accompanied Jesus where he went. This is one of the reasons why I have learned more about Jesus and the Movement by being in the Movement of the 1950s and 1960s than I ever imagined possible because a movement cannot and will not locate itself in any single place. It does not see itself as being ethnocentric, that is only for me and for those I know and care about. It is a movement goes to Galilee and Jerusalem and Philip Caesaria Phillipi and the like.

A movement also is one where there is, often times internal tensions, and one of these comes out in this episode. The Samaritan village through which they were marching in order to get to Judea would not receive Jesus. Now, notice another item about the movement. Jesus sent advance organizers to the village all along the path to prepare and organize for his then coming to that spot and that place, but this particular village rejected the organizers because they rejected Jesus. But then remember and hear what James and John wanted to do. They wanted to use their enormous power, literally the power of God, to call fire from heaven and to consume these recalcitrant persons who did not have any willingness to even receive this Galilean prophet. And so they want to turn their power to destruction and to hurt and to brokenness.

Now, for many decades, centuries, indeed, our temptation in the churches has been rather that when we see people who differ with us to want to shove them on the outside of the grace of God, and therefore outside our own even making any kinds of efforts to be engaged in common work or common fellowship or moving towards a common acceptance of our common humanity. James and John, therefore, are very real and should be very real to us in the church.

In many ways, over the last 60, 70 years we of the United States (an extraordinary nation of power and wealth and scientific and technological efficiency with capacities to communicate around the world in an instance) have so often used the powers that we have been give - powers I'd like to say have come from God - for hurt rather than for help, for harm rather than for healing. I want to say to you as clearly as I can this morning that our involvement in Iraq, our lifting up the "axis of evil" with intentions to go perhaps to Iran or to Cuba or to Syria or to North Korea is the temptation to use our power to consume those with whom we differ and forgetting that the powers are of God.

And if we do use those powers continuously for wrong rather than right, sisters and brothers, our future is a dim future because what we will therefore promote and encourage and escalate is chaos, not community, is division and hatred, not the solidarity of the human family. We will divide our own land, very much as this election has divided us - red and blue, and such lies that were told and have been told, such untruths that are lifted up in order to win an election or to lose an election. Well, you and I know in our heart that Christ is truth and any, any tolerance of untruth not only shames Christ, but also sows the seeds for our own hurt.

In this passage from Luke, Jesus rebukes his best friends, "You do not know of what spirit you are of, for the Son of Man has not come to destroy human beings, but to save. I have come that human beings may have life, and may have life more abundantly. I have come to help human beings enlarge their lives, expand and explode their imaginations, move into the likeness and the image of God which has been sculptured in every single man or woman or boy or girl. I have come to lift, to raise, to heal, not to cause brokenness or hurt.

If you and I would think about the healing of the nations, if you and I would think about the healing of racial harm and hurt and brokenness, if you and I would speak of the healing of the spiritual and moral consequences of wrong, we need to take Jesus with utter seriousness and faithfulness. We may not know the way, but we can set out to find the way and to explore the possibilities of health and healing for ourselves and for our whole world.

Let me give an illustration. This has been the journey of my own life, and I wish I had time to share many of those experiences that I know have resulted in my own healing. I was born to a pastor's family in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, but then my dad, when I was four, was appointed to the St. James A.M.E. Zion Congregation in Maslin, Ohio, so we moved there. That's where my mother determined that she was not making another move for another church, and that we were going to settle our roots, as a family, there, and she told my dad that and the rest of us. She had had the experience, in that day, in Methodism. Many pastors moved every year because your appointment from the bishop of your area is only for one year, one year at a time and it's appointment that's made and publicly announced every year. And so, my mother and father, therefore, had the experience that he was appointed to churches in New York, Syracuse, Jamestown, Binghamton, and in every congregation, they were there no longer than a year, perhaps, or 12, 14 months. I had a sister born in each city: five sisters. Then, when Dad was moved, appointed to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, I was born. Then, he moved to Sewickly, Pennsylvania, the next year and Bill was born. And the next year, Corapolis, Pennsylvania, John was born and Phillip was born. So, Mom, when we went to Maslin, said "Enough is enough!"

So, they purchased a home there, their first home there, and all of us went to public school there. And, I am very grateful for that and all of that, but the point I want to make is that that beginning taught me the meaning of the love of God in Christ. I found my life at a very early age resisting the slurs of racial animosity and prejudice in the parks or the streets or the schools of Ohio. I learned that by turning the other cheek, by going the second mile, the words of Jesus in Matthew 5, that that became for me, not a moment of acquiescence, but a method and methods of resistance. I discovered in that resistance then my own heart expanded so that fear or resentment or envy of other people were dried up. My heart became and has become a heart of love and compassion for all humankind, not just for myself or for my family, but for all human beings.

One of the reasons we in United States think ourselves to be that special nation in the world, that has the right to tell the rest of the world how to operate, has the right to bring about regime change anywhere where we claim it's right, is because of the spiritual consequences of racism, sexism, and violence and greed and injustice in our land that has not only done things like structuring poverty. It has also structured in our hearts superiority, and the inability to be simply human, children of God, with a huge family that is God's humanity.

It's also a strange kind of society that we live in, as much as I marvel. Let me give you another illustration. In 1953 I had served a jail term in federal prison because I could not follow Jesus and then take the way of violence, even in military purposes. I was then accepted by my Board of Missions to go to India to coach and to work as a campus minister at Hyslop College in Nagpur, India, in the geographical center of India. There was time in between sailing to India and the time when I finished all of the things I needed to finish to be accepted and to go. The Methodist Student Movement in Texas invited me to come and do a tour of the campuses in Texas with Methodist Student Movement centers: to do retreats, to do teaching, preaching, to do some workshops on non-violence and the rest of it, and I did so.

I had a very good friend who was a Methodist: a young white student from Tupelo, Mississippi, and Bert and I at some of our national meetings because we both loved sports, and especially football, had become very good friends. And so when I was in Dallas, I made Bert's apartment my home for the six weeks that I was in Texas and came back there, and one weekend when I was back in Dallas, Bert announced to me "The Ice Escapades are in town at the fairgrounds, and I want to go. Would you like to go?" I said, "Yes." So he called, and in the process of calling, being a sophisticated student, he raised the question "I want to bring a Negro friend with me." And so immediately the person on the other end of the line said, "You can not come. We are segregated." Well, then, Bert asked, "Is there not even a segregated section in which we both can sit?" And again the person said, "No." And so he told me, "You know, it looks like I can't get tickets or seats because it's completely segregated." So I said, "Bert, I have an idea. Why don't you call and ask them if an Indian can come to the Ice Escapades?" So he called back, and they said, "Yes, of course." So we found a Pakistani girl in one of the dormitories at SMU, and she had a bright blue turban scarf, and then that Saturday afternoon she wrapped that turban around my head and we went to the Ice Escapades in the fairgrounds in Dallas, Texas, and had a good time in the process of doing it. The strange ways that we live, and yet I want to assert that we can be healed.

Let me suggest to you a couple of things. Number one, that we need to lift up the standards of equality, justice, and liberty for all. You know those words came from July 4, 1776, and the agitation and the resistance to the British tyranny in the months before 1776. Equality, liberty, justice for all: these are interconnected and interrelated. You cannot be free, as Martin Luther King said, if I'm not free and if she's not free. Equality is related to justice. Justice, equality, liberty are connected to how you build community in a nation, so community building requires that we do indeed make these not just nice words in our historical documents, but civil words that we understand to represent what Jesus meant when he said the Son of Man has come not to destroy, but to save, to heal, to lift to encourage, to raise up.

The second thing I want us to understand is that no matter how much things have changed, our society is in deep perplexity. I've been involved in these matters of race and social justice almost since age 10 or 11 in a conscientious personal fashion, seeking to read and study and to observe and to hear and to gain as much experience and understanding as I have been able to do so. Let me say to you: racism is more pervasive today in the United States than I have ever known it, more pervasive than I have ever known it. And I am not taking here now about personal prejudices or fears because racism is not a personal matter, though we have to take responsibility for it. And you and I did not create racism. Racism is an inherited part of coming to this country and being in this land and being citizens of this land.

Sexism is more pervasive than I have ever known it. If you take the maps of employment of people of color and women, you'll see that massive preferential treatment continues. Between 90 and 97% of the heads of institutions of the heads of institutions of America are white males, and people of color and women are not even in the middle portions of management most of the time. They're perhaps at the middle going downward, in terms of employment and opportunity.

Now, don't accept my word for this, but go study it for yourself. And don't study it from the perspective of the labor statistics; study it from the point of view of the sociologists of our nation. One of the tests for me in Los Angeles is if change is being made is to go into downtown Los Angeles at noon and just drive around and watch who I see on the streets. Who are the people rushing from offices going for lunch? And you'll see in Los Angeles mostly white males with suits and ties. Rarely do I see, even now, a black man in a suit and tie. Rarely do you see that many white women in business dress and garb, carrying briefcases and the like. The point I want to make to you is it is pervasive more so than ever before.

Violence is more pervasive than ever before: on television and video games, with our military budgets, with the availability of arms, and the rest. Those things have taught us badly about ourselves. I believe you and I can be healed. Our nation can be healed, but it will require great boldness on our part for that to happen. The Community of Christ can face this issue, as you are doing, wonderfully so, and you can indeed find reconciliation and healing. There will be all sorts of tensions in the process. There will be aches and pains and awkwardness. Some people will become quite angry because you are changing, they think, the church itself. I'd like to say to you that my own journey has discovered over and over again that the points all the time of pain and awkwardness and hurt, if I have the boldness to walk through them, to put them on the top of the table and to talk about them and manage them and dissect them and analyze them, the growth on the other side is extraordinary. The increase of the size of heart, of the vision, of the mind, of the understanding is beyond imagination itself.

I relish what I've heard this morning and yesterday and the day before and this serious attempt on the part of the Community of Christ to become a congregation diverse, a people diverse in every fashion, people, ideas and the rest. Stick with it. Be firm in your determination that Jesus is the way of peace and truth. Be committed to Jesus as a non-violent, spiritual athlete. Dismantle the injustice in you and around you. The path to peace is by working for justice and for truth. The way to peace is peace, itself. The way to peace is using means and ends which conform to your goal. Healing is possible. Make it so for you and for your church, for your family, your friends, your community, and your nation. Jesus said, "You are the light of the world." Yes, we are. Jesus said, "But if the light in you be darkness, how great is that darkness." Let us be sure that the light in us is not darkness, but is indeed the light of Jesus Christ. And then Jesus said, "I am the light of the world." That means our identification with His spirit, His mind, His heart, His sayings, that which he did is the path to peace and truth.

Marianne Williamson has said this so very well in another way. She writes, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful, beyond measure." It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous." Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. You're playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking, so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that shines within each of us. It's not just in some of us. It's in everyone; and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. As we dare to reach out and to walk out and to move out and to go on, God holds astonishing surprises for the Community of Christ, and for each of us. Know of what spirit you are of: the spirit of eternity and grace and love and truth and beauty and wonder. And cling to the Christ, the Son of Man who has come not to destroy any of us, but to save and to heal. Thanks be to God. Amen.