Keep Marching!

If you have heard me preach before I hope one thing always comes across.

I am not interested in the theories about God, I am interested in how God is lived out in our everyday life.

How do we as people of faith experience God?

How do we know God?

How do we live out our faith as parents, children, workers, bosses, friends, political participants?

As I was preparing to preach this week I was thinking about how Jesus "takes away the sins of the world."

And I started with lots of theories and then realized that none of them matter.

What matters is how we experience both sin and how we experience Jesus taking it away.

Let us start this morning with sin.

I wonder if you have ever been sworn at while at a prayer vigil?

On the second and fourth Tuesday of every month there is an interfaith prayer vigil in front of the federal Norris Cotton building in Manchester.

This prayer vigil is to support immigrants that are coming to check in at the ICE office.

As part of that prayer vigil we do what is called a Jericho walk.

We walk around the building seven times to pray that the walls that divide us will come down, just as Israel did when they came to the promise land.

Anyway, most of the time this is a fairly uneventful event.

However, there have been a handful of times when we have been sworn at.

Either by someone driving by.

Or in one case by a person looking from their apartment window.

We might disagree about immigration policy, but what comes out of the mouths of people yelling at us is not something I can repeat in church.

It is rude, ugly, cruel, and hateful.

It is one way I experience the sins of the world.

That we have constructed a hateful attitude towards someone because of their immigration status, or because they are not "one of us", is a sin.

Martin Luther King Jr. preached about the importance of seeing our connection to each other.

In his last Sunday sermon on March 31, 1968 from the National Cathedral he said, "We must all learn to live together as brothers (and sisters).

Or we will all perish together as fools.

We are tied together  in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."

Our sin is to divide our world up into sections, into us vs. them.

To make it seem as if the person in Iran, Iraq, or brazil is our enemy, instead of our fellow traveler on this third rock from the sun.

This is what leads us to wars, to injustice, to hatred of others.

Is that we don't see in each other our common humanity.

Or that we somehow want to believe that we are better than someone else, because of superficial things like what country we live in, or what our skin color is, or who we love, or how much money we have.

We might disagree about the nature of sin, but there is no doubt that it exists in our world.
It is a powerful source of our suffering.

Not just as individuals, but as a whole people.

This is not a theory.

It is a reality we live with everyday.

Because every day we are confronted with the symptoms of sin.

Death, destruction, hatred, violence, self-righteousness, delusions of grandeur.

Anyone who has been picked on, left out, made to feel inferior knows personally the results of sin.

And we see this on a larger scale in our politics and our dealings with other countries and other people.

All of it can be overwhelming when we think about it.

So what does a person of faith do?

One option that many people take is to try to retreat from the world and its sins.

To make our faith about removing ourselves from the world and the complicated problems that are involved.

In its most extreme we see this in monks and religious mystics who ran off into the dessert to avoid the world.

But even in less extremes I hear it in religious people who want to divorce themselves and just think that it all comes down to God and me.

That I have nothing to do with the messiness of politics, or what is happening to my neighbor.

All I need is to go into my room and pray and all will be well.

I suppose that there might be a time and place for this.

That the world is overwhelming sometimes.

That the sin that is out there becomes too much, and we must retreat.
Surely, there are times when Jesus went off to be alone and pray.

But I can't believe that this is the answer all the time.

I believe that Jesus takes away the sins of the world.

I believe that Jesus does this through love and grace.

That it is the Holy Spirit that calls us through God's word to love the world.

To go out into the world and fight for what is good and right.

And do it knowing that the world is full of sin.

I don't believe that it this will take away the sins of the world.

I believe God takes away the sins of the world.

And my acts of resistance, my acts of participation are acts of faith in that truth.

That this world is worth involving myself in.

That this world is worth my love and care.

That this world is not without hope.

That this world can is redeemed by God.

So I will make little stands of resistance against cynicism, despair, and sin.

I will march around the Norris Cotton building.

Not because I believe it will fall down, but because I believe in God's power to help us see the humanity in someone else.

I will march not because it stops our sin, but because I believe Jesus Christ takes away the sins of the world.

I will preach about love and unity.

Not because it will stop hatred and division, but because I believe that the word of God is more powerful than sin.

I don't know what it was like back in 1960's during the Civil Rights movement.

But I am sure that there were times when it seemed like nothing would change.

That it seemed like sin had won.

But people kept marching.

People kept speaking.

People kept believing.

For Dr. King and others what kept them going was their faith in Jesus Christ.

Today I want to honor that faith.

Not one of theories, but one that is lived in this real world.

The world with all of its ugliness and sin.

And a faith that preserves us and gives us hope in a better tomorrow.

So you can use all the profanity you want.

You can call me any name you want, but I will keep marching.

Because I believe in Jesus Christ who takes away the sins of the world.

This morning I hope you keep marching too.

Keep loving despite people's hatred.

Be kind, even though people can be cruel.

Keep hoping even though everything seems lost.

As Dr. King said about our hymn of the day, "When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our night become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows."

That is what keeps me going is that Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Amen