On Listening: Sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost

Jesus said, “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  (Matthew 10:39)  To be a disciple of Jesus is to live a dying life.  We have to die before we can live.  What does this mean?

My mind immediately moves to heroic action in opposition to evil, being a martyr for justice like Mahatma Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King.  Or at least the kind of renunciation and single-minded commitment to serving the poor exemplified by Dorothy Day or Mother Teresa of Calcutta; dying to privilege if not literal physical death.  I’m not a hero or, in all honestly, all that single-minded in my devotion to serving the poor.

Does that mean I’m off the hook?  That living a dying life is only for spiritual elites, not regular schmucks like me?  Does this mean I can’t follow Jesus?  I don’t think so.  Such comparisons are not very helpful.  In fact, I think they can lead us astray as much as they can inspire us.   The Dr. King and the Blessed Teresa we that we revere represent the end of a long process that begins in a very ordinary way.  It begins with listening. 

The dying to which we are called is first and foremost the dying that we experience when we cultivate the practice of listening.  Authentic listening is always a little death.  It requires me to set aside my preconceptions and preoccupations so that I can be present to another.   At least temporarily, I have to allow my ego to die, to let go of the imperative to impose my will and instead cultivate a stance of receptivity.  Such listening is quite different from screening out what I don’t wish to hear, or seeking only what will help me to express more powerfully an essentially preformed response.  When I really listen, I open myself to the possibility that I may be changed, even profoundly changed.  I may discover that I am not who I thought I was, or who I want to be, or that I am becoming someone quite unexpected.  I listen, so that I may discover my true self.   

This is so whether I am listening to another person, or to the interior dialogue – cacophony really – that is usually going on inside me.  How much more so when I come to a place of listening to the deep silence that lies below the surface of the interior and exterior voices calling for my attention.  The deepest listening is attention to the silent abyss from which both interior and exterior voices emerge and return to rest.   This can occasion a real dying; the realization of an ultimate unity of being that de-centers the ego and opens us to the flow of life as it is.  Here, we touch into a truth and a power that may give shape to subsequent word and action.  From the Silence a creative Word emerges and we intuitively know how to respond with creativity and insight to life as it is given in the moment.

The deepest listening frees us from bondage to the internal and external voices that divert us from attending to our true self.   St. Paul speaks of this as the death of the old self, crucified with Christ so that we might not longer be in bondage to sin – sin, understood here, as anything that separates us from our true self in Christ.  Dying in this way, we are raised with Christ and alive in God.   This is what it means to die so that we may live.  Obedience – the root meaning of which is “to listen” – is acting in accordance with our true self. 

Christian disciples are people who are obedient to Jesus – people who learn to listen to the true self that Jesus reveals in the pattern of his own dying life.  Jesus, said, “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.” (Matthew 10:27) Living a dying life begins with listening, and then acting from the true self who speaks from the still point of our being.  Listening sets us free so that we can respond to life in ways that allow others to attend to their true self. 

Such freedom can be scary.  It can bring us into conflict with those who prefer our old self, the self that is familiar to them, comfortable, easy to predict or even manipulate; the old self that confirms the status quo.  It requires patience and courage to listen to what Jesus is saying to us, to listen to our Christ nature or true self, especially when what we hear contradicts Mom or Dad or the President or the Pope.  This is the sword of which Jesus speaks, not a literal sword, but the conflict that arises when others resist listening.  Conformity requires a certain kind of deafness.  People who listen are always a threat to the status quo, because one of the things they hear first is the cry of the poor and the oppressed.  Those who listen deeply eventually reach a point where they can no longer keep silent.  It is then that they take up their cross and follow Jesus.  But not all listening is so dramatic.  It can lead to quite simple, yet profound service to others. 

In his book, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, Mark Nepo eloquently describes his experience of progressive hearing loss.  He resisted acknowledging the loss initially, but eventually embraced it as an invitation to a deeper interior silence.  His deafness has heightened his appreciation of the power of listening. 

“Now,” he writes, “I go to a café near our house where the young ones know my name and make my hot chocolate ahead of time if they see me in the parking lot.  What’s beautiful is that they know everyone’s name and everyone’s drink.  This is the sweetest kind of listening.  And you’d think, having lost a good deal of hearing, that noise wouldn’t bother me.  But in fact it bothers me more.  I find it overwhelms me.  Even when I turn my hearing aid off.  So I ask the kind young ones to turn the music down and they do this now, without my asking, as they make my hot chocolate.  This too is instructive . . .

To honor what those around us need in order to hear is an ordinary majesty.  The young ones in the café are my teachers in this.  Not only do they do this for me, but it’s their ethic regarding everyone.  It’s the relational environment they create – a place to gather where everyone can hear.  Their simple caring has made me ask, do I honor what those around me need in order to hear?  Do I help them find their center point of listening?  I ask you the same” (Nepo, p. 8).

“A place to gather where everyone can hear and find their center point of listening” sounds like a good definition of Church to me.  Here at St. James, we are inviting people into a season of listening.  Next month, following the 10 am service each Sunday, you are invited to participate in a small group gathered to listen to one another reflect on those things that bring you joy in life and those concerns that keep you awake at night.  The point is simply to listen to one another as an end-in-itself, trusting that nurturing a culture of listening is one way that we can live a dying life as disciples of Jesus.

Some of you already participated in these groups or one-on-one conversations during Eastertide.  While participants found it to be a positive experience, some initially expressed skepticism about the process.  “Why are we meeting?”  “Are you going to asking me to do something?”  These questions reveal the cynicism of a culture in which genuine listening is rare, and manipulate agendas often are masked by pseudo-listening – even, sometimes especially – at church!  We are inviting a little bit of vulnerability, and trust that we can be a community where everyone can hear and find their center point of listening. 

In closing, I want to briefly comment on the story of Hagar and Ishmael that we heard today, a story which may be unfamiliar but is relevant to theme of listening.  Recall that Abraham and Sarah are the great biblical exemplars of faith, who respond to God’s promise that through them a great nation will arise and become a blessing to all people.  The only problem is that Abraham is old and Sarah is barren. 

Abraham and Sarah persevere through many challenges to travel to the Promised Land, but they promised heir doesn’t appear.  In attempt to take matters into their own hands, Sarah gives her slave, Hagar, as a concubine to Abraham so that Hagar may conceive a son for them.  She does so, but her pregnancy arouses Sarah’s jealousy, who then accuses Hagar of becoming uppity.  Sarah treats Hagar harshly, and so she attempts to run away.

While in the wilderness, an angel of the Lord appears to Hagar, telling her to return to Abraham and Sarah, and promising that her son, too, will be blessed and become the progenitor of a great nation.  The angel also instructs her to name her son, Ishmael, which means “God hears,” because God had given heed to her affliction.  Hagar obeys – listens – and returns to Abraham and Sarah.

The birth of Ishmael is complicated by Sarah’s eventual pregnancy and the birth of Isaac, initiating another round of jealousy and the final expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael.  Near death in the wilderness, the angel again appears and assures Hagar that “God heard the voice of the boy” – in other words, “God hears ‘God hears.’”  God will be faithful to God’s promises; even when, like Abraham and Sarah we doubt the promise, try to take matters into our own hands, and jealously exclude others from sharing in it.  God will be faithful to God’s promises, even when, like Hagar, we are outsiders, bereft in the wilderness and feeling abandoned by God.  God hears the cries of the exploited, the nobodies, who also are promised a share in God’s blessing. 

The God who promises blessing, is first and foremost a God who hears.  It is from the primordial silence, the patient listening through eons of time before time, that God speaks a creative word and brings the universe into being.  It is this God who listens to Hagar the Egyptian slave and to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, who speaks a liberating word and brings freedom to those who are oppressed.  This Word becomes flesh in Jesus, who invites us to listen as God listens, and so live a dying life that the whole world may become new.  Meister Eckhart said there is nothing so much like God as silence.  And we are never so much like God as when we listen.

Abundant Life and Valuing Black Lives

I have been meditating on a disturbing juxtaposition of images that is meant to be provocative. I do not mean to equate these images in every respect.  They do not represent exactly the same thing.  What they do suggest is a certain historical continuity in our social structures and the way in which they shape our perception of who is, and is not, human.

The first image is a photograph of overcrowded prison conditions in California.  

The second image is a recreation of the way in which slaves were stored aboard ship as cargo for the middle passage from Africa to North America.

While the mass incarceration of men of color in historically unprecedented numbers is not the same thing as chattel slavery, it is another moment in the evolution of racist social structures that seek to keep black and brown people locked in an inferior racialized under-caste.   What story do these images capture?  How does mainstream culture tell that story?  How do people of color tell their own story? 

As people of faith, we understand the importance of images and narratives. Whoever controls the narrative, controls our interpretation of reality and determines what we are allowed to see.  In one sense, Jesus’ whole ministry was spent trying to open people’s eyes and ears.  “Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind’” (John 9:39).   Jesus is changing the narrative, empowering those considered “blind” to trust their perception of reality, while challenging those who control the interpretation of reality to recognize just how blind they are to the truth.  Jesus knows what every community organizer knows:  if we are not telling our own story, somebody else will tell it for us in ways that serve their self-interest rather than the truth. 

Conversely, it is important for us to listen to people tell their own stories, rather than hearing about them from someone else.  I’ve come to believe very deeply that to understand these images, I’ve got to listen very carefully to people of color as they tell me their stories.   And so I was in East Oakland this week at the Elijah Muhammad Cultural Center listening to black colleagues talk about their experience of the War on Drugs (which, in truth, has been a war on poor communities of color) and gun violence and mass incarceration and police brutality in their communities. 

There, I heard Dr. Alvin Bernstine, pastor of Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church, open up the "Good Shepherd" passage from John’s Gospel in a new way.  He broke it down real simple.  If Jesus came so that we may have life, and have it more abundantly, then we have to value life.  We have to value the lives of black men and boys enough to question why it is that they are being warehoused in prisons like livestock - like sheep, if you will.   

Looking at these images of people treated like livestock challenges me to reconsider Jesus’ figure of speech about the shepherd and the sheep.  The first thing to note is that Jesus is employing a metaphor.  He is neither talking about fuzzy pets or animal husbandry, nor is he deploying this metaphor in the ways we might assume as 21^st Century people.  We think of sheep as dumb animals who do what they are told.  It is insulting to be referred to as sheep.

For 1^st Century people, sheep were the animal of choice for ritual sacrifice. Sheep were victims sacrificed as scapegoats in lieu of human beings, both as sin offerings and thanksgiving offerings to God.  They are made to suffer for the benefit of others.  Remember that Jesus here is addressing the religious leaders in the Temple, where such sacrifices were offered on a daily basis.  The connection is clear. 

Jesus is also drawing on prophetic traditions in which God is seen as a good shepherd of the people who brings justice, unlike corrupt human leaders; a shepherd who feeds the flock rather than simply fattening them it for slaughter.  God desires that we care for one another, rather than exploit each other.   Another stream of prophetic thought imagines the Messiah, God’s anointed leader, as one who identifies with the suffering of God’s people, and even chooses to endure suffering for their sake.  God desires mercy, rather than sacrifice.

In his peculiar use of the shepherd image, Jesus brings both of these streams together.  For Jesus, the sheep are human victims of injustice, exploited by the very leaders who are supposed to guide and protect them.  Jesus speaks of himself as both the “shepherd” who goes before them and the “gate” through which the sheep pass.   What does he mean?

As shepherd, Jesus knows the victims of injustice intimately – by name – and they recognize his voice.  He is one of them.   In fact, he tells us later that he will even give his life for them.  Unlike the thieves and bandits who kill victims for unjust gain, and the cowardly hired hands who run away at the first threat of violence, Jesus willingly becomes a victim so that others may live.

In Jerusalem, there was an actual Sheep Gate through which the herds were brought to holding pens to be ritually slaughtered.  That Gate led in only one direction – toward death.  In claiming the gate image for himself, Jesus emphasizes the reverse:  through him, victims are led out into freedom and new life.  When we walk through the Jesus Gate, we enter into a spacious and generous reality in which forgiveness replaces retribution, justice restores relationships, and the abundance of God’s love brings life out of death.  

In walking through the Jesus Gate, we begin to be transformed into a people who identify with victims and act in solidarity with them.  Compassion moves us even to take some risks on their behalf, but always in such away as to avoid the making of new victims.  Jesus makes clear that he is not like the bandits – the revolutionaries of his day who simply kept the cycle of violence churning, replace one unjust regime with another.  Jesus sacrifices his life in protest against the making of victims, completely trusting in the ever-renewing, creative power of God to renew life. 

Which brings me back to the images of black men warehoused like sheep awaiting slaughter.  They are among the victims with whom Jesus so compassionately and forcefully identifies himself.   They are being exploited by a system of social control reinforcing white privilege; criminalized to politically and economically disenfranchise them in some ways even more subtle and devious than slavery or Jim Crow. 

Since 1982, the War on Drugs has provided a veneer of legitimacy to an unprecedented assault on communities of color that has swelled the prison population in the U.S. from some 300,000 to more than 2 million inmates in just thirty years (larger even than the prison populations of Russia or China).  The increase is due overwhelmingly to new harsh sentencing for nonviolent, drug-related felonies, massively disproportionately targeting communities of color and especially men of color. 

Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control (including prison, parole, and probation) than were enslaved in 1850.  As of 2011, because of laws prohibiting convicted felons from voting, more black men are disenfranchised than in 1870, the year the 15^th Amendment was passed to protect their right to vote.  In major urban areas, more than 50% of African-American men have felony, again mainly drug, convictions.  If you add the men who are in prison currently (who, by the way, are not included in calculations of poverty or unemployment), that number shoots up to 80% in some states.  This has led to massive social dislocation and economic inequity.

Jesus knows these victims intimately.  He knows there names and they know his voice.  Do we know their names?  Do they recognize our voices?  Who will lead them out through the Jesus Gate if the Church has not entered the gate in solidarity with them?

A faith-based movement called the Lifelines to Healing Campaign has begun to do so.  The Campaign is committed to ending the public health crisis of gun violence in communities of color AND the mass incarceration of men of color feeding the distress and hopelessness that fuels the violence.  Here in California, the Campaign is working concretely to lead victims through the Jesus Gate by passing the Safe Neighborhood and Schools Act of 2014, a voter initiative that will be on the ballot in November. 

This law includes four components that will help reverse the school to prison pipeline:

1.  Reducing nonviolent drug possession and petty theft crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, and authorizes resentencing for anyone incarcerated for these offenses who poses no threat to public safety – both juveniles and adults.  The vast majority of those eligible are men of color.

2.  Redirects hundreds of millions of dollars from prisons to education and drug treatment programs.  Since 1981, the percentage of California’s general fund going to prisons has increased at a rate 22x that of K-12 eduation spending.  We spend more than $60K per year on each inmate, and less than $8.5K on each student.  That has to change. 

3.  Protects public safety by limiting prison release to nonviolent offenders, and focusing law enforcement resources on violent and serious crimes and programs that can stop the cycle of crime.

4.  Eliminates the collateral consequences of nonviolent felony convictions by reducing prior convictions to misdemeanors, eliminating barriers to employment, professional trades, housing options, and public assistance programs faced by convicted felons. 

Jesus came so that victims may have life and have it abundantly.  Let us share that abundant life, beginning today with a commitment to value the lives of black men and boys victimized by mass incarceration.   Let us hear their stories, and let them hear our voices calling for justice.