Today's Sermon

 

"Not So Minor Prophet 2"

 

Home: Not So Minor Prophet 2

         Have you ever heard of the Highland Clearances?  I hadn’t until I journeyed with our church group to Scotland.  They started in the mid-late 18^thcentury. People were “cleared” from their land to make way for larger scale sheep farming.  It amounted to the destruction of the local clan system in order to feed the machine of the empire.[1]  There were many dynamics and consequences.  Among them, in a cruel twist of irony, many who had been forced from their land fled to another, namely Canada, were the very ones who engaged in forced removals of First Nations people there.  We have become familiar with the horror stories of boarding schools, the attempt to kill indigenous culture also too often killed indigenous children.

         It is an example of the cycles of collective trauma and violence people share.  During our time, Philip Newell repeated a form of that now common phrase, “hurt people hurt people.”  We see these cycles across time and geography.  Just this week Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners were returned at long last, and we know the generations of violence over that contested land.  It so often revolves around land, territory.  Land signifies so much.  It’s a space to build and maintain home.  It signifies belonging and place in the world.  Land carries sacred significance.  It can mean security.  So many peoples have struggled for their own homeland, whether it’s Catalans or Basques in Spain, Kurds in the Middle East, and we know the tales of land and home lost. Everyone wants a home.

         We understand this desire on an individual level too.  I did a bit of a deeper dive into the provocative notion that’s been circulating that it’s harder now to afford a home than it was during the depression.  That appears to be true, though it’s a bit complicated.  Personally, our closest friends have just taken work elsewhere because while they had what anyone would describe as good work here, they just couldn’t afford a home for their family.  People need a place, and I’m not even pointing out the obvious, those in encampments or without anywhere to call a stable home.

         Today, we continue our series on the prophet Micah, remembering that the prophet critiques their own people, calling them to account for not living up to their own stated values, all out of love for the people and hope for what the community or nation could be.  This series might stretch some, because so much of Christianity in our culture is oriented around people’s personal connection to God.  This is not the prophet’s focus, or rather their personal connection to God should bear fruit in the form of ethical behavior and the establishment of justice in the nation, a better communal life.  In today’s passage, Micah has a particular word for those who take land from someone else.  We must remember—or learn for the first time—that salvation in the texts we now call the Old Testament was understood to be the wellbeing of the people in the here and now, and that wellbeing was often thought of in terms of material safety.  Did they have enough to eat?  Were they safe from foreign invaders?  Were they living in exile?  This would have been the thinking in Jesus’ time.

         Before we read Micah’s passage today, which picks up from where we left off last week, I want to merely list out for you some of the dimensions of land and land seizure that came to my mind.  You, no doubt, could form your own list.  In no particular order:

• I mentioned the generations of struggle around what we call “The Holy Land,” holy for a number of faiths. Jeff Shankle will hopefully be returning to one portion of it this winter with some of our young adults to see that continuing to play out in real time.  So much bloodshed and so much of it revolving around land.
• Many of us, thankfully, though I won’t assume all of us, have no concept of having one’s homeland threatened or taken.There are those who have been, or are, at Westminster who can tell such stories.  We do, however, live in the midst of tense conflicting public sentiments about immigration.  Part of what should enter that discourse is the reality that many who have fled other lands have fled dangerous ones, and some of those are lands which we have a history of significant interference, meaning we bear some of the moral responsibility of caring for those caught in the crossfire or collateral damage of our activity. 
• Especially those of us who have lived in cities know the histories of gentrification and redlining, disadvantaging the disadvantaged on the field of land.
  • There’s an interesting chapter in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Revenge of the Tipping Point about a novel, though troubled, attempt to address the related problem of white flight.
• We also know, and continue to learn, about the aforementioned displacement of indigenous peoples here, which is complicated by very different understandings of what land is and what it would mean even to make a claim about to whom the land “belongs.”
• Pull out an old map or globe some time and look how much the borders have changed and the names. That may seem like ancient history to us here, but the day I first gathered my notes for today some months ago, hot in the news were jokes that weren’t quite jokes about annexing two sovereign nations.
• Not displaced in the same manner or violence as the Highland Clearances, what about the disappearance of American family farms?What’s been gained and what’s been lost?
• What about neighbor disputes. These are very real as some of you know all too well.  The biblical edict of taking an eye for an eye was issued in order to restrainsuch disputes from escalating.  The temptation was to raise the stakes with ever escalating retribution.
• Land comes down to power and money. The powerless and poor are often left to occupy the most polluted and least desirable places, and one is left to wonder how many places will essentially just be off limits to anyone but the affluent. Is this faithful? 

I could go on and on, and undoubtedly you have thought of things I have neglected, but hopefully your prime is pumped as to how much of life is affected by our relationship to the land. Hear now then, the bulk of today’s reading from Micah:

Micah 2:1-5

2 Woe to those who devise wickedness
    and evil deeds on their beds!
When the morning dawns, they perform it,
    because it is in their power.
2 They covet fields and seize them,
    houses and take them away;
they oppress householder and house,
    people and their inheritance.
3 Therefore thus says the Lord:
Now, I am devising against this family an evil
    from which you cannot remove your necks,
and you shall not walk arrogantly,
    for it will be an evil time.
4 On that day they shall take up a taunt song against you
    and wail with bitter lamentation
and say, “We are utterly ruined;
    the Lord alters the inheritance of my people;
how the Lord removes it from me!
    Among our captors the Lord parcels out our fields.”
5 Therefore you will have no one in the Lord’s assembly
    to allot you a piece of land.

         The prophet does not hold back on those who seize other people’s land, calling it wicked and evil.  Micah says that while this evil may persist for a time, the day will come when the tables, or property lines, will be reversed.  Micah’s critique is of the wealthy and powerful who took land because they could (which isn’t all of the wealthy and powerful).  “Because I could,” is never a moral defense.  It is not a comforting promise, except for the wronged, but the cycles seem to go on.  Ultimately, Micah says that there will be no one in God’s assembly who will grant land to those who have taken others.  In other words, when justice reigns it is those who have taken who will be left out.  The poetic justice is a reversal of fortunes, even though, of course, we wouldn’t wish anyone to be without place.

         What, then, does the prophet dream?  Remember, last week we said what distinguishes a prophet is they do not only critique their own people and those who hold the power.  They offer visions of what it could look like. Prophetic work is morally imaginative work.  It is, in my opinion, what is so missing in our public discourse today, very little articulated of what good could look like.  Micah goes on,

Micah 2:12
I will surely gather all of you, O Jacob;
    I will gather the survivors of Israel;
I will set them together
    like sheep in a fold,
like a flock in its pasture;
    it will resound with people.

         The vision is of a people gathered together, like a sheep in a fold—safe, secure, at home.  One would hope that future would be long to everyone.  Micah employs a common prophetic technique, however, to offer promise to a faithful remnant, those who endure a difficult time and are around to birth the community anew when difficult time has passed.  It is comfort, but one tempered by grief for those who will not make it.  The prophet offers real talk, not fairy tale promises. 

         We have to wrestle with what the implications are for us, how we make just peace with that land around us.  It’s so big a question, it helps to take a small example, to hold it up as one image of what creative moral imagination can do.  Last weekend at the Presbytery meeting, the regional gathering of the church, the executive director of Zephyr Point conference center in Tahoe, Dick Young, spoke of a budding partnership the retreat center has with the Washoe people. Washoe just means, “people who live here,” a name that bears some painful historical irony.  While the Washoe people have called the Tahoe region home for 15,000 years, they were subject to the same forced removal as were many peoples who predated European colonialism.[2]

         Zephyr is entering into relationship with the Washoe.  A Presbyterian conference center, the board changed the bylaws in order to welcome a Washoe into their membership. Moreover, they have embarked on a project to use the trails on their property to inform people about the sacredness of the land from the Washoe perspective as well as the Presbyterian history there.  They likewise will give voice to the natural history and species who call that area home, knowing they too have a plight to understand and protect.  As the Washoe put it, “If the land is not healthy, we are not healthy.”[3]I’m especially glad to share this with you because our own elder Jim Arce, who is on the board at Zephyr, is behind this beautiful effort, along with others.  This is more than a land acknowledgment, it is an attempt at meaningful engagement.

         It’s not about going back to the way it was so much as acknowledging what has been and learning to go forward together in a better, wiser way. We learn of cycles in order to break them and begin something that looks more like forming holy circles of coming and belonging together.  Amen.

[1]For more background information, see https://www.britannica.com/event/Highland-Clearances

[2]https://northernsierrapartnership.org/current-projects/sierra-valley-preserve

[3]https://www.capradio.org/news/tahoeland/2019/08/07/if-the-lands-not-healthy-were-not-healthy-how-the-washoe-people-view-climate-change/