| "Last Friday, April 4th, marked a significant anniversary that went virtually unnoticed amidst the current fever of war. It was the 35th Anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On that fateful day in 1968, Dr. King was in Memphis to support a strike by Black sanitation workers and to further the agenda of the Poor People's Campaign that he and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were launching. They were seeking to raise public consciousness about a crisis looming here at home in the United States-namely, an increase in poverty, an increase that was being fueled both by racism and by Congress's preoccupation with the war of that day, the war in Vietnam. Interestingly, all last Friday, I felt led to try to view current events through the lens of that anniversary, and as I did so, there was one particular question that kept popping into my mind. And it was this: "Has anything really changed during the intervening 35 years?" For isn't it the case right now, as we speak, that our House of Representatives is poised to fully fund our war against Iraq and to enact huge tax breaks for the rich, while cutting from the budget that's proposed for the next fiscal year billions of dollars from food stamps, school lunches, Medicaid, and many other entitlement programs that assist low-income Americans? Isn't America today, 35 years later, still in need, dire need, of something like Dr. King's Poor People's Campaign? Anyway, back to 1968. On April 3rd of that year, the very eve of Dr. King's assassination, he addressed a rather small crowd in Memphis's cavernous Mason Temple, and he spoke these prophetic words: "We've got some difficult days ahead.… Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will." (David J. Garrow, "Bearing the Cross [New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986], p. 621.) "I just want to do God's will." That is, I just want to make the right choices when on each and every day I am presented with options between good and evil, and then I'll let the chips fall wherever they will. Today, as we look back on the life of Dr. King, I believe we can say with confidence and integrity that Dr. King's life was indeed one that was lived "into the will of God." Oh, his life was not by any means perfect. Nevertheless, throughout his life Dr. King was always striving to embody the fullness of God's will for humankind. In this morning's Old Testament lesson from the Book of the prophet Jeremiah, we find the prophet reflecting on how much difficulty God's covenant people, Israel, had had in trying to do just that, in trying to live "into the will of God," in striving to embody the fullness of God's will for humankind. God had chosen Israel. God had said to them, "I will take you as my people, and I will be your God." (Exodus 6:7) And God had then led them out of the bondage of slavery in Egypt and into the joys and responsibilities of freedom. Then, to help this people use their restored freedom to make choices consistent with God's will, God had given them the ten commandments to structure their life with God, the ten commandments to be the covenant that would define their relationship with God, the ten commandments to be their guide to the kind of choices that constitute living "into the will of God." You see, in creating the world, God had bestowed on humankind "free will." The great poet Dante, in his Divine Comedy (Paradiso, canto V, line 19), speaks of freedom of the will as "the greatest gift that God…made in creation." And countless others have agreed with Dante's assessment. Listen, for example, to this graphic metaphor of human freedom given by the 17th-century French bishop Jean Pierre Camus: "There are no galley slaves in the royal vessel of divine love-every[one] works [their] oar voluntarily." Yes, God created humankind free, yet in God's greatest gift to us-the gift of autonomy in decision-making, the gift of a life that is unscripted-in God's greatest gift to us God also took the greatest risk. God risked that we would exercise our freedom not to uphold God's will but to oppose it. And the account in the Book of Genesis of the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden and of their choice to oppose the will of the Creator by eating the fruit of the forbidden tree-that account is fully emblematic of God's gift, of God's risk, and of humans' failure. God's choosing of Israel, God's restoring of an enslaved people to freedom, and God's giving to this people of the ten commandments were also both a great gift and a great risk-a gift and a risk followed, as it seemed to Jeremiah and others of his contemporaries, by the people's great failure. For throughout much of the people's history, they had opposed rather than upheld the will of God. And in Jeremiah's day the cost of the people's failure to live into the will of God had been the loss of their nation, their land, and their political freedom. God's will as summarized in the ten commandments had been broken by the choices made by free people. And now, Judah, the nation, was no more. And most of the people whose ancestors had, in the days of Moses, been slaves in the foreign land of Egypt were now themselves, in the days of Jeremiah, captives in the foreign land of Babylon. Yet remarkably, in that time of utmost gloom-when nation and land and political freedom had been lost-Jeremiah broke from his 40-year pattern of speaking nothing but words of impending doom, and he spoke the words of glorious hope we heard this morning: "The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant … that they broke… But this is the covenant that I will make… I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people." (Jeremiah 31:31-33) Which is to say, that to assist us in making our free choices, God will move inward. No longer will the commandments be a code external to ourselves, a set of tablets out there that we are to study and obey. Instead, God will act to help us internalize God's will so that our choosing of the good will be more fully directed by the promptings of our own hearts. In our later Christian tradition, we speak of this promise by God pronounced to us through Jeremiah as having been fulfilled through the work of the Holy Spirit, God's inward dimension. The Holy Spirit given to us in baptism indwells us and "inwills" us. That is, the Spirit inscribes God's law in our hearts and prompts us to choose what is right. Or to say it yet another way, the Spirit imparts to us a deeper understanding of God's will, to the end that we may more fully and readily choose it. So now let me say it again: the Holy Spirit given to us in baptism both indwells us and inwills us. As Christians, we profess that the person in history who most fully embodied the will of God written on the heart, the person in history who through the exercise of free will most fully chose to live into the will of God-that that person was Jesus. Yes, Jesus was a person like you and me. Jesus was fully human. I say this not to deny the mystery that Jesus was also fully divine, for I truly do affirm that part of the mystery of faith as well. But today I want to emphasize the other part of that mystery of faith, the part that Jesus was also fully human. And I want to emphasize this part so that we may truly understand that living into the will of God was a struggle for Jesus just as it is for you and me. You see, Jesus's divinity did not in any way shield him from the necessity of having each and every day to struggle, in an exercise of free will, to choose God's will. For instance, at the beginning of each Lenten season, we speak of Jesus's struggle in the wilderness, following his baptism, to resist a whole series of temptations-temptations to choose the will of Satan rather than the will of God. And at many times throughout Lent, we pray the Lord's Prayer, the prayer that Jesus himself used and taught to his disciples. And in it wefind this petition: "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Now these words are not just included because followers of Jesus need always to struggle with living into the will of God, which of course we do need to do. They are also included because another who regularly prayed this prayer struggled with living into the will of God-namely, Jesus himself. We see that clearly, near the end of each Lenten season, on Maundy Thursday, when we read the account of Jesus's struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus obviously would prefer to escape the cup of crucifixion that is set before him. So struggling in spirit while standing apart from his disciples, Jesus falls on the ground and prays: "Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will." (Mark 14:36 NIV) Note, by the way, how Dr. King's resolve on the eve of his death eerily reflected this final resolve of his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on the eve of his. Listen again to Dr. King's words: "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. … But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will." (Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 621) But back to Lent and the struggle of the fully human Jesus to live into the will of God. At the end of each Lent, on Good Friday, we reflect on Jesus's agony during his hours on the cross, on his final struggle with dying into the will of God. Listen to Mark's account (15:34, 37): "At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?' which means, 'My God, my God why have you forsaken me?' … Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last." Yes, from the beginning of Lent to its end, we hear of the fully human Jesus's struggle to live and to die into the will of God, a struggle throughout which Jesus, having been indwelled and inwilled by the Holy Spirit at baptism, invariably exercises his free will to choose God's will. This truth about Jesus's full humanity and about his free-will struggle to live and die into the will of God-this truth is vividly captured and portrayed for us in this morning's Second Lesson, from the Letter to the Hebrews (5:7-9). Listen again to its words, accompanied by additional commentary: "In the days of his flesh," that is when the pre-existent Christ became fully human, became a person of flesh and blood, "Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death," that is, throughout Jesus's life, but particularly in Gethsemane and on the cross, he struggled to conform his living and his dying to the will of God, "with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission," that is, because Jesus exercised his free will to choose God's will, God upheld him throughout his time of agony and then, beyond death, transformed his suffering into triumph and his transitory pain into eternal joy, "and he was heard because of his reverent submission." "Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered," that is, Jesus, like every other human being, had to learn obedience to God's will, had to learn how to live into God's will, by drawing on the law of God written on his heart and then fulfilling it, through the power of the indwelling and inwilling Spirit, fulfilling it each and every time he was presented with a choice between good and evil, and, even when that course was obviously leading him to suffering and death, still choosing God's will. "Although he was a Son, [Jesus] learned obedience through what he suffered, and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him," that is, having struggled into a perfect obedience to God's will, Jesus is able to present his complete and willing obedience as an offering to God made on behalf of us all-on behalf of all who are seeking, however imperfectly, to live into the will of God by following Jesus. The Letter to the Hebrews offers us a gripping image of the man Jesus wrestling fervently in prayer with the issues of how to live and how to die into the will of God. And in offering us this image of Jesus, Hebrews summons each and every one of us to the highest standard-to the standard of Jesus's own perfected obedience. Hebrews summons each and every one of us to offer to God, as Jesus did, a lifetime of using our free will to choose unwearied prayer and unwearied action on behalf of others even at the risk of personal suffering-like Dr. King and his commitment to the Poor People's Campaign. Hebrews summons each and every one of us to offer to God, as Jesus did, all that we are and all that we have-our time, our possessions, our hopes, our dreams, our ambitions, our fears-to the end that God's will may at last be done on earth as it is in heaven. Yes, Hebrews summons each and every one of us to live and die as Jesus did. That is, while strengthened, upheld, and instructed by God's indwelling and inwilling Spirit given in baptism, we are to freely choose to live and die "into the will of God." Let us pray: Amen |
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