Omnipresence
~ Independence ~ Interdependence
A
Sermon Preached by the
Rev.
Jean Niven Lenk
Sunday,
July 1, 2012
First
Congregational Church of Stoughton, United Church of Christ
Text: Psalm 139:1-18,23-24
This coming week, our country will celebrate another Fourth
of July, complete with flags and bunting, parades and speeches, family
gatherings and fireworks.
Independence Day is one of those holidays that brings out
our deepest feelings of gratitude and love for our country, and hopefully in
the midst of our celebrations, we will pause to ponder why we celebrate in the
first place – to commemorate our freedom and the signing of the Declaration of
Independence, which articulated the
noble intentions of justice, equality and liberty.
And in offering up a new and radical
form of government in the form of a representative democracy, our nation’s
forefathers proclaimed independence from a government that represented the will
of only a small elite; independence from a system of rule in which the vast
majority had no voice; and independence from colonialism in which an empire
imposed its will and extended its influence around the globe for economic gain.
Yes, Independence
Day is a time for us to celebrate our freedom.
And yet, while we are a free country and we are a free people, that does
not mean we are independent from one another.
As Bishop Desmond Tutu notes, “We are not made for an exclusive
self-sufficiency but for interdependence… A person is a person through other
persons.”
And if we stop to
give it any thought, we realize we would never survive without each other. What would we do if we did not have the trash
collector to pick up our garbage each week?
The hospice worker to help us care for our dying loved one? Teachers to teach, doctors to make and keep
us well, municipal workers, farmers, retailers – the list is endless of all the
people who touch our lives every day in large and small ways, often in ways
that remain unseen and unknown to us.
And as we look
forward to the Fourth of July, may we be mindful that our interdependence
extends beyond the borders of our country to include other nations and the
people in them. Dr. Martin Luther King
made this point in a 1968 sermon:
… all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all
indirectly. Did you ever stop to think
that you can't leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on
most of the world? You get up in the
morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that's handed
to you by a Pacific islander. You reach
for a bar of soap, and that's given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your
coffee for the morning, and that's poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that's poured into
your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you're
desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that's poured into your cup by a
West African. And then you reach over
for your toast, and that's given to you at the hands of an English-speaking
farmer, not to mention the baker. And
before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than
half the world. This is the way our
universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren't going to have peace on Earth until
we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.[i]
Although the words
“interrelatedness” and “interdependence” don’t show up in the Bible, their message
echoes throughout the Holy Scriptures, and it is a foundational truth that God’s
Spirit has worked to impress upon the human heart since the beginning of time.
With the Garden of
Eden, God created a perfect world. But
then Adam and Eve decided to assert their independence from God by eating from
the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
In doing so, they denied the truth that their lives depended upon our
Creator God, and their story shows how much can be lost when we attempt to live
apart from God. In his book Credo, the late pastor and peace
activist William Sloane Coffin put it this way: we sin when “we put asunder what God has joined together.”
In this morning’s scripture lesson, King David speaks of
God’s omnipresence. In fact, the heading
in your pew bible names this psalm “The Inescapable God” -- and it is not just from
God’s eye that we cannot escape; it is also from God’s love. When we read of God’s abiding, constant,
forgiving, and gracious love, we usually think in terms of ourselves. And it is indeed comforting and affirming to
know that God loves me and you and you and you, no matter what.
But do we recognize that God’s abiding, constant, forgiving,
and gracious love is also offered to others – and not just us, not just to the
members of this church family who aren’t here this morning, not just to other
members of the Stoughton community, or to the residents of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, or to the citizens of this country. There are no godless zones, no borders or
boundaries or outsiders to God’s love.
Rather, God’s abiding, constant, forgiving, and gracious love is offered
to every other beloved child of God, no matter where they live, no matter to what
country they pledge their allegiance, no matter if they consider the US of A
their friend or their enemy, or we they.
In the Gospels, Jesus
shows us the openness and acceptance of God’s
inclusive love, and the meal which he instituted, Holy Communion, points to our
interdependence because the
sacrament calls and connects the people of God together in unity, love, and
harmony.
As we celebrate the Fourth of July this week, may we resist
the temptation to put limitations on whom God loves and blesses, but rather may
we live into the larger vision to which God calls us. We can proclaim that God loves the USA – as
long as we also understand that God loves every other nation and every other
people as well. Understanding this may
help us to embody in our personal and national lives the words of Abraham
Lincoln: that we pray not for God to be on our side, but for us to be on God’s
side.
And so, this coming week, as we celebrate our nation’s
independence, may we also acknowledge our interdependence with and on all of
God’s people. And may God bless all of
God’s creation. Amen.
[i] Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,”
1968. http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/12/276406.shtml
