Heralds of His justice, His mercy, and His peace . . .

     The sermon focus for this week was remarkably easy, especially given that Tina was out of the office on vacation and I got to play nag with folks about getting reports in for the Annual Meeting, never mind having to play IT guy when the inevitable technical glitches appeared while trying to put the booklet together.  Tina and I started talking a bit about Baruch on Monday.  In her denomination, Baruch is not in a Bible.  In ours, it is in the Apocrypha, which means we have a . . . difficult relationship with whether it is good writing or God-breathed writing.  Naturally, we got to looking, and it would appear that Advent has never read from the book of Baruch, which made me think you’ve never heard a sermon on Baruch.  I see the nods and smiles.  That means you’re getting the best sermon you have ever heard on Baruch today.  Of course, I cognizant that for most of us it will be the worst sermon you’ve ever heard on Baruch.  If it makes y’all feel any better, it will be the best and the worst sermon I’ve ever preached on Baruch in over fifteen years of preaching!

     To set the scene a bit, and prove to you I did my sermon preparation this week:   Baruch is believed to have been written somewhere around the third or second century before Christ.  Given its setting, that may surprise most of us.  The book is named for the manumissive of Jeremiah.  Think of Baruch playing the role of Luke and Jeremiah playing the role of Paul.  Scholars are fairly certain the book was written significantly after their lifetimes for two reasons: (1) there are too many historical inaccuracies for someone who lived through them, and (2) Baruch focuses on the captivity in Babylon rather than Egypt.  Jeremiah, of course, reports that he and Baruch were carried off to Egypt in captivity.  If you want more background information on all this, go read the book of Jeremiah!

     The fact that the book is not written by the man who inspired the name does not make it a useless or necessarily “not God-inspired” book.  As I have shared with you for almost four full years now, one of the ways that students paid homage to a revered master or teacher and drummed up business for themselves was to write a book named for or after the master.  If the master did not disavow the teachings contained in the book, it was viewed as a sort of commercial endorsement of the former student.

     The author of Baruch seems to have been more inclined to rework the teachings and interpretations of some significant passages found elsewhere in Scripture.  Scholars call this ancient technique a mosaic technique.  Our college professors or peer reviewers would call it plagiarism today.  The author of Baruch clearly drew on passages and teachings based on Isaiah 40-66, Job 28, and Daniel 9, to name a few.  Even those of us Adventers not too familiar with Scripture should see the relationship with Isaiah and Daniel today and understand why our lectionary editors include it for the second week of our patronal season.

     As we just read in the lighting of the second candle, our focus this week is on the justice and mercy of God and the peace that we should have knowing that God, in the end, will see that His justice and His mercy wins.  If you are visiting today or unused to a liturgical tradition, Advent is a season of expectation.  In the beginning of the season, we look forward to the Second Coming of Christ in anticipation, confidant that He will keep His promises.  Toward the end of the season, our focus will become less anticipation and more remembrance, reminding ourselves that He came and dwelt among us.  As Adventers, we are called to remind people of those two defining truths.  God has come among us, and He will one day return.

     Baruch, of course, takes up this anticipation of the coming of God as we do His Second Coming.  Written before the birth of Messiah and inspired, if not outright plagiarizing Daniel and Isaiah, the author looks forward to the Day of the Lord.  True, the terms are expressed in ways that seem strange to us, at least at first.  Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty and glory from God.  Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God; put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting.  Clearly, the author envisions the people of God afflicted by sorrow and troubles.  But, as the Day of the Lord approaches, they are instructed to put on the garments of righteousness and the diadem of God’s glory.  We speak about such raiment differently today, but we should have the understanding that we are cleansed in Christ’s offering and have a promised share of God’s glory.  For those who study the Scriptures around here, you know the relationship between justice and righteousness.  They are courtroom terms and were applied, at least in the Jewish culture, in disputes where elders or judges needed to figure out who did something the “most Godly.”  As to the glorious diadem, we should hear the echoes of shekinah and those wonderful Christian hymns that sing of the crowns we cast at His feet.  I see the nods.  The language is not as unfamiliar as you thought at first, is it?

     What of the sorrow and affliction?  Who here does not suffer sorrow and affliction?  One of the great blessings of our sojourn through Job this fall has been Adventers’ willingness to share those secret sins with me which they thought might be irredeemable.  My chief job in October and November was to remind Adventers that no sin is beyond God grace, that it really was hard work for Jesus, and that He stayed by force of will to redeem each and every one of us!  This is not all that there is.  This, the world around us, is not what God planned for us when He created us!  A number of Adventers have continued to deal with disease and injury.  Heck, we are an aging congregation and our aching joints and muscles remind us of that truth every morning we struggle to get out of bed.  Some of us are irascible and make it hard on ourselves to keep long and deep relationships.  Others make it hard for us to stay in relationship with them.  Some of us have questions of provision.  Some of us are dealing with death.  Some of us are dealing with the fall out of natural disasters.  I could go on and on.  If you don’t think the prophet is correct in his or her observation that we are wearing sorrow and affliction, open your eyes.  Open your ears.  Pay attention to the world around you.  It’s tough slogging out there.  But, and this is a wonderful but, one day this all will pass.  When Jesus returns, He will gather His people and re-create the world.  Until that Day, though, all we can do is the work that He has given us to do.  And today, this second Sunday of Advent, we are reminded that we are heralds of His justice, heralds of His mercy, and, because we know that on that Cross 2000 years ago His mercy kissed His justice, heralds of His peace!

     In truth, I struggled this week with the illustration part of this sermon.  It sounds great to say we are heralds of His justice, His mercy, and His peace, but you want concrete examples.  You want to know these aren’t just fancy words, that these are truths that surpass human wisdom.  Thankfully and mercifully, God met me in that struggle this week.  Nearly two years ago, a group called Good Neighbors formed in the congregation.  I cannot claim that I was involved, other than to give encouragement.  A few were concerned about how the formation of their group would impact Church of the Advent, but most were far more concerned that the evils facing immigrants and refugees were far greater than the group could tackle.  I would say it took the group a few months to find their stride, but now they are plugged into similar groups around Nashville and help meet the needs of immigrants and refugees in our midst and continue to educate us, their brother and sister parishioners, about the challenges and evils the foreigners in our midst face on a day to day basis.  One of those education events was yesterday.

     Many of you have heard that we are trying to put together a community event to educate those around us about the issue of immigration.  Right now, immigration is simply a tool for politicians to get elected and stir up their bases.  On one side, Republican politicians want us to fear that immigrants are overrunning our country and taking necessary services and money from American citizens.  On the other side, Democratic politicians want us to look the other way when it comes to border security and to believe our Republican brothers and sisters are completely heartless.  Have I offended both sides now?  Good.  There is blood on the hands of both parties.  And this discussion ought to transcend partisan debates.

     After the raid on the meat packing facility in Morristown last year, I mentioned to a few members of the group that I knew Luis Argueta, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker.  We had met in the aftermath of the government’s raid on the meat packing facility in Postville, Iowa.  I wondered if Adventers would be interested in learning what Luis had to teach us about all of this.  Naturally, the Good Neighbors agreed.  I, unfortunately, shared this idea with our bishop, who decided I and they were thinking too small.  This needed to be a community event.  And we should be able to raise significant funds from the community for those who work in this area.  That’s the background for that event.  We hoped to pull it off late this year, but it makes herding cats look easy by comparison.  Hopefully we can pull it off by spring of next year.

     Few of you are familiar with Postville, Iowa.  I lived in Iowa for more than ten years before the raid, and I had never heard of it until the day the gun ships and armored vehicles invaded a town of almost 2000 people in the middle of nowhere Iowa.  Truthfully, that’s an unfair description.  Postville is about 45 minutes west of the Field of Dreams, and thanks to Kevin Costner, everyone knows where that is, right?

     Postville was unique in Iowa because of all the ethnic groups living there.  Some claimed their restaurant choices were far greater than Iowa City or Des Moines.  They certainly had quite the number of ethnic restaurants for a town so small.  Why the influx of ethnic groups?  Meat packing.  A family in NYC bought a meat packing facility in Iowa to create kosher meat for Jews living throughout the United States, but especially NYC.  As is the case with all meat packers or livestock processing, Americans, by and large, want to avoid the jobs.  Think of Carl Sanburg’s descriptions of Chicago’s meat packing businesses and make it worse.

     How is it worse?  Since Americans won’t work the jobs, they target immigrants, both documented and undocumented.  In truth, many like to employ undocumented immigrants because they are far easier to manage.  If you are an employer, you can take away breaks, lunch hours, overtime pay, vacations, safety equipment and add sexual harassment and rape and who will tell on you?  If law enforcement comes, you just mention that Jose or Margarita is an illegal and the problem literally goes away thanks to ICE.  That was the business in Iowa, with a bit child labor violations tossed in for good measure.

     Now, I messed this up at 8am, but picture yourself an immigrant from Mexico or Central America.  You live in a tropical environment.  What would draw you to employment in Postville, Iowa, given the job description I just gave you?  That’s right, desperation.  The working conditions in Postville were better than the working conditions in your home country, if working conditions existed at all.  And lets add the weather for good measure.  You live in a tropical climate.  People invite you to move above the Artic Circle.  Would you go?  Seriously, 34 and rainy/icy like this morning is a good spring day in Postville.  What would it take for you to go?  And, if the press covers the political lobbying of the country where you are headed, how inclined are you to take the job offer?  That is what those folks did.  It’s not nearly a simple question as our political leaders would have us believe, is it?  These are human beings trying to scratch out a living as best as possible.  And, just to be clear, Iowa is not California.  Iowans don’t give you healthcare, food stamps, Section 8 housing or anything else.  You have to scratch and claw, just like Iowans used to from the land, to make your way in the world.  If a group of people wears a garment of sorrow and affliction, it was those who depended upon the meat packing company in Postville, Iowa.

     Thankfully, the federal government helped make their life more difficult.  They raided the town with gunships and armored vehicles.  Folks were rounded up and chained together and hauled off to the cattle pens in Cedar Rapids where they were treated like, well, cattle.  The lucky ones were left at home but fitted with ankle bracelets and not permitted to work.  The United States proclaims itself a nation of law, and we have a billion lawyers to make sure those laws are not violated.  Few of those lawyers are immigration lawyers.  There’s little money to be made in that expertise.  Those arrested were given lawyers who knew next to nothing about immigration law.  The outcomes were predictable.  Most were deported.  More than 300 were deported illegally, according to the United States Supreme Court.  Victims of slavery and federal and state laws were rewarded, not with U or T Visas, as our Congress intended, but with nightmares of an invading army, separation from their families, and deportation to the country they fled to begin with.

     Those of you smugly thinking this was clearly a Trump/Republican thing can wipe the self-righteousness off your face.  The President through all of this was President Obama.  At no time did he step in to humanize this process.  The lady who organized the herding in the cattle pens and the assigning of lawyers was, thanks to the nomination of Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, made a Federal Judge in Iowa, the first woman to be so named.  Those of us who protested her appointment were told that while the events were unfortunate, it was far more important in the bigger picture to get a woman, and a Democratic woman at that, onto the Federal bench in Iowa.

     Does everybody feel dirty?  Does everybody feel a bit tarnished?  Do you feel a bit oppressed by evil?  Do you feel impotent?  We should.  Sometimes we follow party politics way better than we follow God’s torah.  That is why that education event needs to happen.  People in Morristown, TN are going through the exact same aftermath as the folks in Postville, Iowa.  Businesses are closing.  Government services are being strained.  Cost of goods will go up for all of us.  It impacts us here in Nashville even more.  We are the modern Ellis Island.  Only Minneapolis has more immigrants and refugees settled in it than Nashville, Tennessee!  Last I heard, we have something like 86 different ethnic groups settled in our community.  You know the stories of the Karen people thanks to All Saints Smyrna and maybe some of the Sudanese thanks to St. B’s.  There 80 more group stories out there.  How many individual stories are there?

     We serve a God who calls us to champion his justice and His mercy in the world.  Thankfully and mercifully, we know that at the end His justice and His mercy will reign.  His justice and mercy kissed on the Cross of Jesus, and His redemptive power showed forth most gloriously at that Empty tomb.  We know, like the prophet of the book today, that He will finish what He started that Good Friday through Easter two thousand years ago.  But in that tension between the already and the not yet, as Carola taught you for almost two years, we are called to live, to serve, and to proclaim, by word and deed, His justice and mercy.  We proclaim and serve in the face of such injustice because we know His redemptive power and we know, we absolutely know, He delights redeeming those individuals and things which seem nigh impossible.  Postville serves as a wonderful illustration.

     How, do you ask?  In the aftermath of the raid, prosecutors decided that the child labor violations offered the best chance of convictions of the owners and managers of the facilities.  Tom, the assistant AG, called Luis one day and asked if he could hunt down 4 minors who had been deported back to Guatemala.  They were placed on airplanes and shipped back to Guatemala.  Not much else was known about them.  Luis found them, and three others.  After some time, he convinced them to return to the United States as material witness to testify at the criminal trials of the owners and plant managers.  After some months of trials, all the managers and owners were found “not guilty” by the juries.  The young men were returned to Guatemala, the American justice system had failed them . . . again.

     Of course, God was at work in that mess.  The people of Iowa, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalian, and even agnostics and atheists, had responded.  We fed and clothed those who were not allowed to work while they waited for their trials.  Doctors provided medical care to the sick; dentists took care of teeth.  Some folks welcomed the immigrants into their homes.  Clothing and food came from all over the region.  Immigration lawyers came from all over the country, mostly for free, to provide legal expertise in this swampy setting.  Politicians were harangued and found themselves on the defensive.  Who raids an American town with gunships?  Who are we that we ignore our laws?  You might think events the way that I described them were an abject failure.  The poor and destitute were victimized again.  The rich and powerful got off . . . again.  Where was God’s mercy?  Where was His justice?

     As it turns out, His heralds were in the midst of all that mess.  In the muck and misery God called for the His servants and those around them to meet the needs of the downtrodden, and meet them they did.  The boys, now young men, were amazed at the number of people who supported them, who donated necessary items, who took others in, and who added their voices to their own.  I met one of the young men at an event at St. Ambrose, I think it was.  I was sorry for what he had gone through.  I wished there was a way we could have gotten more Americans to listen.  He thanked me for my work on behalf of his sisters who had been sold as sex slaves—Luis had shared my work and inflated it, and he thanked me for letting him share his story at events like these.  And then he reminded me that sometimes we do not reap the benefits of the work that we do.  Just as I preached the Gospel and trusted God to do the harvesting, he did what he was called to do, and trusted God that those who came after would experience the justice for which we all longed.

     He returned some weeks later to Guatemala.  But his story did not end there.  One of the attorneys took on their cases for free.  Over the next year or so, they were awarded a U-Visa.  As a condition of their visa, they were allowed to bring those who lived with them.  They were allowed to settle where they wished.  They had like 9 months or something like that of support from the government.  Did I mention in the beginning they were from tropical climates?  Guess where they chose to settle?  They who fled their homeland to those working descriptions I shared with you in the beginning, chose of all places to settle in parts of Iowa.  They had found community in the midst of their suffering.  They had found people who cared for and about them.  And that was where they wanted to raise their family.  It did not matter that snow and cold would be a part of their lives every day from now on, except those days when the snow let up and tornados blew through!  They were living among a community that cared.

     That’s a good story, but not a Gospel story, because God never settles for good enough or fairy tale endings.  Though Iowans could not get the Federal government to reform all its ways (though no gunships were used in Morristown), we had a much stronger impact on our own politicians.  Before the events of Postville, prosecutors had to be able to prove that owners and managers knew about violations of the law.  Now, the burden of proof is on them.  They must take the necessary steps to prove to the government and juries that they do not want children working illegally.  And, the fines per violation changed a bit.   Before Postville, violations were $100 each.  Today, they are $10,000 each.  Guess what has happened to those businesses that did not like the new laws?  That’s right, they fled to states around Iowa that have not yet had to face the garments of such sorrow, affliction, and injustice.  And, while I am sure such evil is not eradicated yet entirely from Iowa, I do know it is greatly reduced.  In our calls for justice, politicians were forced to act.  The result is that the Kingdom of God crept forward a bit closer in that small part of the world.  Better still, now that Tennesseans have heard the story, the testimonies, they know they can tackle such evil in our midst, even more confident that God can do more than we ask or imagine!  Knowing and following His justice, proclaiming in word and deed His mercy, we can becomes herald of His peace, just as the prophets of old called us to do in the days of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Baruch, just as His prophets call us to do in this day, the Second Day of our patronal season of Advent, and in this place we call Nashville!

In Christ’s Peace,

Brian†