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“All Flesh Shall See The Salvation of God” |
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Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin Luke 3: 1-6 |
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This past week I watched a made-for-TV movie called Redemption. It tells the true story of Stanley Tookie Williams, who was an early leader of the Crips, a notorious American street gang, which formed in Los Angeles in 1969. In December 2005 he was executed by lethal injection for the murders of four men.
He maintained his innocence to the end. The trial seems to have been controversial at best. The prosecutors, for example, removed three black jurors, leaving a jury of no blacks, one Latino, one Filipino, and ten Caucasians. In other trials, the California Supreme Court censured this same prosecutor for using race as a criterion on jury selection. He had two murder convictions overturned on these grounds.
Mind you, even if Williams was innocent he was no angel. When the jury gave the verdict, he allegedly threatened their lives. While in prison, there is a record of him being involved in six fights with other inmates. As well, there are reports of him acting violently toward guards.
He was in solitary confinement for six years, and when he was released he claimed to have undergone a transformation; he wrote several children’s books during this time, advocating non-violence and alternatives to gangs. He publicly apologized for his role in creating the Crips. In 2004 he helped broker a peace agreement called the Tookie Protocol for Peace between two rival gangs, the Crips and the Bloods.
Williams was then nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize every year from 2001 to 2005. Nominations came from Mario Fehr, a member of the Swiss Parliament, and four times by Notre Dame Professor, Phil Gasper. On December 12, 2005 Governor Schwarzenegger denied clemency for Williams.
In an interview hours before his execution, Williams offered the following statement: “My lack of fear of this barbaric methodology of death, (is because of my) faith. It has nothing to do with machismo, with manhood, or with some pseudo former gang street code. This is pure faith, and predicated on my redemption. So, therefore, I just stand strong and continue to tell you that I am innocent, and yes, I have been a wretched person, but I have redeemed myself…redemption is tailor-made for the wretched, and that’s what I used to be… Redemption is accessible to everyone. That’s the beauty about it.”
The prophet Isaiah, whom John the Baptist quoted in today’s Scripture, said pretty much the same thing… “ All flesh shall see the salvation of God.” He didn’t say, “all those who believe the right things”, or “all those who say the following words” or even, “all those who believe what we believe” will see the salvation of God. The work of redeeming all creation is an ever-present dynamic built in to the universe by the one we call God. All the religions of the world, including the Christian faith, emerge out of this redemptive and all-pervasive Presence.
Think of salvation, not as a one-time event, but rather as a process. It’s a spiritual pathway that involves cooperating with God in our continual growth toward healing and wholeness. The root of the word means “healing”. There is a power at the very heart of the universe working to make all things and all people whole, gang-leaders and gurus alike – sinners and saints. It doesn’t matter where we think we are on the continuum of good and evil. Only God is whole and complete. The rest of us are involved in a life-long process of opening to God’s wholeness.
This Redemptive, “saving power” manifests in our desire to be the whole person we were created to be. It can be seen in our longing to transcend our moral shortcomings, our psychological wounds, and our moral shortcomings. Whatever it is within us that wants to grow and develop, learn more, love more, and offer more of ourselves to this great adventure of life is a response to this power. Salvation then, is a way of life – it’s a spiritual path of wisdom – of discovering the gracious presence of the Holy One, everywhere and in every moment, nudging us to take the next step.
So there I am, in the middle of my hot yoga class. It’s 110 degrees and I find myself going deeper into a particular posture than I’ve ever been. Something in my body releases and I find myself going to a new place. At that moment, as if the teacher knows what’s happening for me, says, “It’s a beautiful thing to watch our bodies change and develop as we recover our original bodies.”
This is about as good a definition of salvation as any. It’s growing back into our original blessed selves, in order that we might evolve toward the people God intends us to be. Before I could move to a deeper, more evolved expression of the yoga posture, many blocks had to be removed. I had used and abused my body as a jock for decades. Scar tissue had built up in my joints, old injuries returned to remind me that there’s a cost to everything we do in life. But after 17 months of going to classes three times a week, my body found a primal suppleness I thought I had lost forever.
It’s a beautiful thing as well to witness our psychological and spiritual evolution. Redemption is about consciously cooperating with the urge to wholeness at large in the universe – the one we call God – to reclaim our original blessed selves, and from there, to evolve to the next level.
All of us go off the rails at one time or another. We wake up one morning to discover we’ve been reading off the wrong script, and it’s taken us so far off the narrow path that leads to life, that we hardly recognize ourselves when we look at ourselves in the mirror. Or we feel like we’ve tried everything the world has to offer, and still we’re left feeling like there’s something missing. Tookie Wilson didn’t start out to form a gang. In the beginning it was just going to be a citizen’s group to try and stop the gang violence, but then he got sucked in to the cycle of violence. The path of salvation begins the moment we recognize that we’re walking down the wrong road.
Wake-up calls come in all shapes and sizes. It came 2000 years ago in the person of John the Baptist. He rang the alarm down by the river Jordan, reminding all who cared to listen that they had ventured a long, long way from their original beautiful selves, and it was time to come home to God. He tells them - and us – to begin today to build a highway to our heart so that the Holy One may enter and take the throne. Level the mountains, fill in the valleys, and smooth out the rough spots – prepare in the wilderness of our lives a highway for our God!
We gather in this season of Advent to prepare ourselves to hear the story of God coming in a tiny babe to show us the path. Truth is, God never stops coming. The Christmas story crystallizes, in a single historical event, what is a continuous process – an evolving universe biased in the direction of all things and every body attaining the blessed wholeness that God intends.
God comes to me as I
look out upon this congregation. On Friday night you were serving stew
to our friends in the downtown eastside; on Saturday morning you could
be found in the kitchen of the Center for Peace making a freezer full
of sandwiches for street kids and now, on Sunday morning, here you
are, bringing in gifts of food and clothing for others. Mid-week many
of you shine the flood light of Scripture upon your own life to
discern where the holy, redemptive power of God is leading. After
church today a group of artists will prepare to share how the creative
and healing power of their God is manifesting through them. Others
will meet to discuss how they can help us as a congregation to tackle
global warming. I look out at you good and faithful people and know
that it’s true what John the Baptist says: |
