A Broom Tree Week: Sermon for Sunday 19 June 2016

Sermon for Sunday 19 June 2016

Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, Jerusalem

The Rev. Carrie Ballenger Smith

1 Kings 19: Elijah is renewed

A Broom Tree Week

NOTE: Preached in Jerusalem on the last day of Sunday School, and just before many in the community are leaving for the summer--including the preacher! 
It was also the week after the hate crime against the LGBT community in Orlando, and one year after the racist hate crime in Charleston. 
It also is Ramadan in Jerusalem. And our neighbors are being denied access to prayer. To top it off, the Israeli government is openly using the fact that the Orlando shooter was a Muslim to increase hatred here. 

That's a lot of context! All this to say: I hoped to acknowledge the broom tree many of us find ourselves sitting under this week -- and to seek God's Good News in the midst of it. I might still be looking. Thankfully, I trust God will come through for me, too. 


 ***

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

It was not a good day. My kids were about one and three years old, and we were living in a dark basement apartment in Nebraska during my spouse’s grad school internship. One of the kids – maybe both – had been sick. For days, I had watched the piles of dirty laundry and dishes grow, mysteriously towering higher no matter how hard I tried to keep up. The kids wouldn’t stop crying, none of us were sleeping, and even the cats seemed needier than usual.

Somewhere between the 50^th and 150^th time I had cleaned up after a sick child that day, the phone rang. It was a bill collector. I had forgotten to pay one of the bills – the phone, the water, a credit card – I can’t remember which.

Of course, it didn’t really matter which bill it was, because there was no money to pay it, anyway. I slammed down the phone, walked straight to the bathroom, shut the door, and just sat down and cried. And I mean a loud, ugly cry, an existential cry, a cry that meant– “That’s it! I can’t take this one more minute!” There in the bathroom, all by myself, I threw a grown-up tantrum that rivaled the professional ones my toddler sons threw on a daily basis.  I was so over it – I was just done with sick toddlers, done with housekeeping, done with graduate school, done with never having enough money, done even with the state of Nebraska as a whole. Whose idea was it to come to Nebraska, anyway?

I sat there on the cold tiles, my back resting on the bathroom door, feeling I simply had nothing left to give, to anyone. Like Elijah sitting under his solitary broom tree, I prayed that the Lord would just take me home—or would at least take my toddlers to someone else’s house for the day.

I sat in this state of despair for quite a while, and then I heard a quiet “knock, knock” on the door behind my head. Then again, a little louder—knock, knock. “Um, Mommy? Are you in there?”

Reluctantly, I pulled myself up and opened the door, to see both of my little boys looking up at me with concern. “Mommy, don’t cry, it’s ok,” they said. And then they wrapped their little bodies around my legs in huge hugs.

Truly, these were messengers of the Lord. Truly, this was my manna from heaven. This love, and these hugs, were the nourishment I needed. “Get up and eat” my kids were saying to me. As the angel of the Lord said to an exhausted Elijah under the broom tree: “Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you.”

It was not a good day for Elijah, either. When Elijah sat down under that solitary broom tree and prepared to die, he had good reason to be exhausted. Elijah didn’t have toddlers at home, but in the 18^th chapter of 1 Kings, Elijah took on 450 prophets of the god Baal to prove the one true God was greater than their false one. He was outnumbered 450 to 1, but Elijah alone courageously defended the honor of Yahweh. He was a prophet, and a bold one at that.

But now Jezebel was after his head. And he was tired! The struggle was too great, and the journey too long. He felt completely alone. He couldn’t go even one step further. So Elijah found himself a tree, sat down under it, and gave up.

The story of Elijah’s despair speaks to us today because most of us have been under that broom tree at some point in life. At one time or another, we’ve felt unable to take even one more step, or felt that the entire world is against us, or that we simply have nothing left to give.

This week in particular we have good reason to be exhausted, and not just because it’s the end of the school year and the beginning of a long, hot summer. Last Sunday, after a lively and spiritual worship service and then a productive church council meeting, a few of us were standing in my church office when the first news of a mass shooting in the US started to break. Over the next few hours, details began to emerge, and the numbers kept going up: Nine, twenty, no fifty dead. The victims were gay, and brown, and black. The shooter was Muslim. Allegiance to ISIS may have been a motive.

Each time a new detail was revealed, I could feel my heart grow heavier in my chest. Is this really the world we live in? Must we be tossed from one mass shooting to another, one terror attack to another, one violent expression of hatred to the next? How long, O Lord? Some clergy friends in the States commented that they were able to put together prayer services and candlelight vigils for Orlando in just a few hours. Why? Because they already had liturgies and prayers and songs prepared from other recent tragedies in San Bernardino, Charleston, Paris, and Brussels…sadly, even our lament has become routine.

In a time when extremists of every religion -- and of no religion -- are trying to kidnap both the church and the world, it can feel like we are only a tiny voice in the wilderness, just whispering God’s love, grace, and mercy above the deafening shouts of hatred, violence, and exclusion. We know that Holy Scripture proclaims that all are made in the image of God, every single person fearfully and wonderfully made. We know the Gospel of Jesus Christ denounces every force which defies God’s radical love, including the forces of racism, sexism, extremism, terrorism, and homophobia. We know our Lutheran heritage teaches us to stand firm in opposition to every power and principality which tries to separate us or our neighbors from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.

We do it imperfectly--and often the church fails miserably--but this is the message the church is sent to carry to every corner of the world.

Some days, frankly, this mission wears us out. Some days it feels there’s always someone after our head. Some days we’re checking the map for directions to Elijah’s broom tree.

Sunday was one of those days, especially for our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and friends, who are LGBT, and who are brown or black. This week was a broom tree week.

But I was reminded this week that Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, once wrote:

“People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”

Sister Dorothy helps us to remember that Elijah didn’t stay under that broom tree for very long, and neither will we. The God who came through for Elijah when he faced off 450 prophets of the so-called god Baal was not going to let his prophetic ministry end in a nap under a broom tree.

God came through for Elijah! An angel came to Elijah as he lay under that broom tree, touching him on the shoulder to say, “Get up and eat!” When Elijah looked around, he saw there were cakes baked on hot stone and a pitcher of water sitting near him. So he ate...but then he went right back to sleep. 

But God would not let Elijah go. The angel came to Elijah again, saying “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” So Elijah got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.

God came through for Elijah, and God will come through for us.

Elijah’s story did not end under that broom tree, and neither does ours.

Our story does not end in yet another mass shooting.

Our story does not end in a spray of bullets aimed at gay and lesbian sisters and brothers.

Our story does not end with black church members being killed by a white supremacist.

Our story does not end in a bombing, or in a stabbing, or in systemic racial and economic injustice.

Our story does not end at a checkpoint, or in apartheid.

The story of God’s beloved creation, the story of us, does not end and will not end this way. Love always wins. Death never has the final word. This is our Christian hope and our witness: That the Way of Jesus may lead to the cross, but it does not end with a stone blocking the entrance to the tomb.

Thanks be to God, the love of God rolled that stone away, and Christ is risen! Amen!

Thanks be to God, Jesus healed the Gerasene man who was tormented by demons, and he was sent out to share the Good News!

Thanks be to God, an angel fed Elijah under that broom tree, giving him the strength continue his journey and his prophetic ministry!

And thanks be to God, the love of God gets us up from under our broom trees, too.

When we are exhausted, when we are weary, when we feel we can’t take another step toward healing, toward wholeness, toward justice, toward peace—the love of God gets us up and sends us on our way. Again and again, our loving God wakes us up and feeds us in unexpected ways.

We are fed by the love and support of family – whether it is the family of birth, or the family of choice we have created here in Jerusalem.

We are fed by the Word of God, through which we have come to know God’s promises and Christ’s radical love and mercy.

We are fed by the presence of Christ in the bread and the wine, the food of heaven, a foretaste of the feast to come.

And we are fed by the witness of the saints – men and women of faith who have walked this path before us, who boldly stood for justice, love, and peace even at great risk: 

This week we remember especially the Charleston Nine, church members who sat and studied the Bible with a stranger for over an hour, sharing the love of God with him. And even though that visitor chose to end their meeting in a violent act of hatred—the Charleston Nine’s witness of love and hospitality, in the name of Christ, lives on today. Their story did not end there. Love always wins.

Again and again, the love of God comes to us in our despair. Again and again, we are offered the bread of teaching, the wine of wisdom, the water of new life. Again and again, we get up to eat and drink – and why? Why get up at all?

Artwork created during worship by a child of Redeemer Lutheran

For the sake of Christ, and for those who have not heard the Good News.

For the sake of peace. For the sake of justice. 

For the sake of our children.

By the grace of God, we get up from under our broom trees for the sake of the ones who will inherit this earth – the little ones, the meek ones, God’s newest beloved creations – precious ones who deserve to live in a world free of racism, free of sexism, free of homophobia, free of human rights violations, free of religious persecution, free of military occupation. Free of walls, of any kind.

Today, as we gather just before many of us leave for the summer, returning to our other homes and other communities, we give thanks for this one. We are thankful for the ways that God feeds us through this beloved community we call Redeemer Lutheran  – day by day, in times of despair, and in times of joy. And we give thanks for the love of Christ we have come to know through our littlest angels – the children of Redeemer, for whose sake we continue the struggle for a better world. Amen.