Spectators Or Sentinels?
Sermon
SPECTATORS OR SENTINELS?
Sermons For Pentecost (Last Third)
The gospel reading for this day is bracketed by the command to keep alert, to watch. Suppose I could hang before you a giant photo of the sun peeking over the horizon and asked you to tell me if this were a surprise or a sunset. Could you tell? Only the photographer would know for sure. A sunrise and a sunset are similar in appearance. We can mistake the one for the other.
The fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple had a devastating effect on Jews and Christians alike. It was a sunset. Our gospel lesson speaks to Christians for whom the catastrophic Jewish war marked an end of the world as they had known it. The language of the 13th chapter of Isaiah seemed appropriate. "For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light." (Isaiah 13:10) This is the source of verse 24 in our lesson.
But there is a significant change. The Lord has edited out all references to the destruction of sinners and the fierce anger of God. Instead a new beginning is proclaimed, an ingathering universal in its scope. One age is passing away, another is emerging. Is it a sunset or a sunrise? The old structures crumble, but the gospel goes on, the mission goes on. The green branches signal God's new tomorrow. We can so easily misread the signs in our human experience. When Rome fell to the barbarians a colleague of Saint Augustine bore the awesome news to him. Augustine made the reflective comment, "but the kingdom of God goes on." And so it is that we also go on in the service of that kingdom amid the dislocations of history. And because we know that the switches of history are set on the side of him whose words will never pass away, because in him we have caught a glimpse of God's coming tomorrow, we are called to the sentinel's vocation which is another way to think and speak about the Lord's call to us to join him in the ongoing struggle for justice and peace.
"Watch!" Here is the second of the two grand imperatives uttered by Jesus in this his last discourse with his disciples in Mark's gospel. These commands are spoken not just to the few there and then, but to all of us in the here and now. Jesus makes that abundantly clear. "And what I say to you I say to all: Watch." The New Revised Standard Version translates the command as "keep awake." The word "watch" is still preferable and justified by the Greek usage for the vigilance commanded is that of the sentinel.
Watching is big business today. The need to post sentinels persists in history. Over the last several decades security and surveillance have become growth businesses. Look at the yellow pages of your telephone book and note how many companies provide guard services, burglar alarms or electronic surveillance for homes, shopping malls, business and industry.
Watching is a deterrent. Human and electronic eyes scan the boarding airline passenger and luggage. Spy satellites keep track of what is moving on the face of the earth. Ours is that kind of world. Somebody is always cooking something up. Warning systems are set up to track tornadoes and hurricanes and monitor movements in the earth. It's that kind of planet. Something is always on the way.
Local police departments encourage the formation of neighborhood crime watch networks. Watching helps. When they built the Kennedy Government Center in the city of Boston they erased a good section of Hanover Street in the North End. I remember the old Hanover Street. It had the look of a tough street when actually it was a safe street. Lots of tenement windows looked out over Hanover Street and numerous immigrant mothers posted themselves at those windows to watch their children playing below. They saw everything. They were sentinels. Theirs was a caring kind of watching that helps us get a hold on this command of Jesus.
In the novel by Andre Schwarz Bart, The Last of the Just, there is a scene that involves windows and watching. The locale is Germany in the 1930s. Ernie, a young Jewish lad has been followed into the courtyard of the apartment complex where he lives by a club-swinging pack of Nazi Brown Shirts. Suddenly the Brown Shirts stop their attack and Ernie hears a strange noise above him, jeers. The jeers were directed at the Storm Troopers who were looking up in annoyance. It dawned on Ernie that the windows bothered them. When he looked up he could see the heads of men, women and children in the windows. This was strange since those windows never opened except to throw garbage down on the Jewish residents as they came and went. What had changed? Then way above he caught sight of the familiar face of Herr Julius Kremer, his teacher in the public school. A rebuking finger was pointed at the Brown Shirts and a shrill voice was shouting, "Have you no shame?"
This is the watching of the shepherd. This is watching with emotional and moral content. This is watching that activates conscience and triggers a willed response. This is not "spectatoritis." Someone has coined that word. Spectatoritis is the condition of impassive watching. The spectator is on the side lines, an onlooker. You might say that the spectator is a sort of couch potato inertly watching the human drama with all its joys and pathos and remaining unmoved.
The sentinel is an Advent figure in our Christian tradition. "Watchmen tell us of the night, what its signs of promise are." Lurking behind the figure and the command of Jesus is the prophet Ezekiel who understood his own prophetic role as that of a sentinel. "So you, mortal, I have made a sentinel for the house of Israel." It is an awesome office. It makes the prophet doubly responsible. "If I say to the wicked, 'O wicked ones, you shall surely die,' and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand." That charge makes the sentinel shiver. But an even more awesome point emerges in the sentinel passages of Ezekiel. (Ezekiel 33:1ff) The greatest danger Israel faces comes from God himself. This is a staggering thought. God is the great danger. There is such a thing as judgment. Human decisions and actions bear consequences for good or ill. Individual and collective moral accountability is in the air. The prophet is impelled to be more than a spectator in the human drama.
One way to sharpen and illustrate to sentinel vocation in contemporary terms is to speak of a unique breed who have emerged in our own midst in recent years. They are called "whistle-blowers." Not too long ago they held a convention in Washington where a number of them spoke to a large audience. They are a varied group of people who in the course of their jobs watch certain things take place and were impelled by conscience to speak out.
There were former CIA people like John Stockwell who spoke out in his book, In Search of Enemies. One is a Chicago policeman who founded the Afro American Patrolmen's League when his superiors ignored his reports of unfair police practices in the ghetto. Another is a woman who works in the benefits section of the Veterans Administration. She had been excluded from staff meetings after gathering details on former soldiers contaminated by defoliants used in View Nam. Yet another is a doctor who did a special government study on the effects of working in nuclear plants and found the danger level from radiation 10 times lower than that announced by the government. He was dismissed and ordered to hand over his files. These folk have produced a book, A Whistleblower's Guide to the Federal Bureaucracy. They advise watchers how to blow the whistle without losing their cool. The prophet Ezekiel would have been right at home amid the whistleblowers.
There are sentinel organizations that have emerged in recent decades. One thinks of Amnesty International and the eye they keep on human rights violations around the world. There is a similar organization called Africa Watch. We have had occasion to see the sentinel power of the television camera/recorder whether used by a reporter or a citizen. The protesters who filled the streets of Prague as the iron curtain came tumbling down faced the riot police and shouted, "Remember, the world is watching."
There is a sentinel vocation for the church and for individual Christians. It is one of the ways we express care for people. It is a shepherding role. And in expressing that concern specific people and specific situations have to be addressed. It is not enough just to proclaim generalities. That was central in Ezekiel's commission as a sentinel. The whole 13th chapter of Mark's gospel is predicated upon continuing tension between church and the surrounding culture. The retaliation encountered is part of the birth pangs of God's coming new day. The command of Jesus implies a situation of ongoing warfare. To watch is to live faithfully, lovingly, hopefully. The worst thing is to fall asleep. To sleep is to stop praying, to die to God, to become numb to any higher impulse or the prompting of conscience. To sleep is to lay aside the hope of salvation, to put God out of the picture. To sleep is to give in to cynicism and compromise.
The command to watch reaches into the whole spread of life. Someone has said that the most dangerous ism is somnanbulism. There are so many forms of sleep walking: the glazed eyes that never notices one's ideals are being eroded, one's purposes being eroded, the evils that gain strength.
Ezekiel as a sentinel feared the retribution of God. Such scenes of retribution and Divine vengeance are absent from these words of Jesus in Mark. Instead we have a vision of the new day of God's making. In Jesus of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Lord, we have caught a glimpse of the new world order. It will be a day of ingathering and embracing and new beginning. It is that vision we are called to serve in the here and now.
The late J. Wallace Hamilton was one of this century's finest preachers. He compared the situation of the disciple between the times to that of the Connecticut Yankee who had an accident and woke up in the ancient court of King Arthur. The story of course was told by Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. As he began to explore his new surroundings this man from the future kept bumping into practices obsolete in his own century. He set about trying to shape things in terms of the future. That is our situation as Christians. We have seen the future in the words, life and actions of Jesus. We have glimpsed nothing less than the agenda of God himself present on our earth. In the crucified and risen Lord we behold the first flashes of love's far ranging victory on the horizon of history. We are sustained by hope as in the here and now we live as the sentinels and servants of that victory that shall surely come in God's own good time.
The fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple had a devastating effect on Jews and Christians alike. It was a sunset. Our gospel lesson speaks to Christians for whom the catastrophic Jewish war marked an end of the world as they had known it. The language of the 13th chapter of Isaiah seemed appropriate. "For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light." (Isaiah 13:10) This is the source of verse 24 in our lesson.
But there is a significant change. The Lord has edited out all references to the destruction of sinners and the fierce anger of God. Instead a new beginning is proclaimed, an ingathering universal in its scope. One age is passing away, another is emerging. Is it a sunset or a sunrise? The old structures crumble, but the gospel goes on, the mission goes on. The green branches signal God's new tomorrow. We can so easily misread the signs in our human experience. When Rome fell to the barbarians a colleague of Saint Augustine bore the awesome news to him. Augustine made the reflective comment, "but the kingdom of God goes on." And so it is that we also go on in the service of that kingdom amid the dislocations of history. And because we know that the switches of history are set on the side of him whose words will never pass away, because in him we have caught a glimpse of God's coming tomorrow, we are called to the sentinel's vocation which is another way to think and speak about the Lord's call to us to join him in the ongoing struggle for justice and peace.
"Watch!" Here is the second of the two grand imperatives uttered by Jesus in this his last discourse with his disciples in Mark's gospel. These commands are spoken not just to the few there and then, but to all of us in the here and now. Jesus makes that abundantly clear. "And what I say to you I say to all: Watch." The New Revised Standard Version translates the command as "keep awake." The word "watch" is still preferable and justified by the Greek usage for the vigilance commanded is that of the sentinel.
Watching is big business today. The need to post sentinels persists in history. Over the last several decades security and surveillance have become growth businesses. Look at the yellow pages of your telephone book and note how many companies provide guard services, burglar alarms or electronic surveillance for homes, shopping malls, business and industry.
Watching is a deterrent. Human and electronic eyes scan the boarding airline passenger and luggage. Spy satellites keep track of what is moving on the face of the earth. Ours is that kind of world. Somebody is always cooking something up. Warning systems are set up to track tornadoes and hurricanes and monitor movements in the earth. It's that kind of planet. Something is always on the way.
Local police departments encourage the formation of neighborhood crime watch networks. Watching helps. When they built the Kennedy Government Center in the city of Boston they erased a good section of Hanover Street in the North End. I remember the old Hanover Street. It had the look of a tough street when actually it was a safe street. Lots of tenement windows looked out over Hanover Street and numerous immigrant mothers posted themselves at those windows to watch their children playing below. They saw everything. They were sentinels. Theirs was a caring kind of watching that helps us get a hold on this command of Jesus.
In the novel by Andre Schwarz Bart, The Last of the Just, there is a scene that involves windows and watching. The locale is Germany in the 1930s. Ernie, a young Jewish lad has been followed into the courtyard of the apartment complex where he lives by a club-swinging pack of Nazi Brown Shirts. Suddenly the Brown Shirts stop their attack and Ernie hears a strange noise above him, jeers. The jeers were directed at the Storm Troopers who were looking up in annoyance. It dawned on Ernie that the windows bothered them. When he looked up he could see the heads of men, women and children in the windows. This was strange since those windows never opened except to throw garbage down on the Jewish residents as they came and went. What had changed? Then way above he caught sight of the familiar face of Herr Julius Kremer, his teacher in the public school. A rebuking finger was pointed at the Brown Shirts and a shrill voice was shouting, "Have you no shame?"
This is the watching of the shepherd. This is watching with emotional and moral content. This is watching that activates conscience and triggers a willed response. This is not "spectatoritis." Someone has coined that word. Spectatoritis is the condition of impassive watching. The spectator is on the side lines, an onlooker. You might say that the spectator is a sort of couch potato inertly watching the human drama with all its joys and pathos and remaining unmoved.
The sentinel is an Advent figure in our Christian tradition. "Watchmen tell us of the night, what its signs of promise are." Lurking behind the figure and the command of Jesus is the prophet Ezekiel who understood his own prophetic role as that of a sentinel. "So you, mortal, I have made a sentinel for the house of Israel." It is an awesome office. It makes the prophet doubly responsible. "If I say to the wicked, 'O wicked ones, you shall surely die,' and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand." That charge makes the sentinel shiver. But an even more awesome point emerges in the sentinel passages of Ezekiel. (Ezekiel 33:1ff) The greatest danger Israel faces comes from God himself. This is a staggering thought. God is the great danger. There is such a thing as judgment. Human decisions and actions bear consequences for good or ill. Individual and collective moral accountability is in the air. The prophet is impelled to be more than a spectator in the human drama.
One way to sharpen and illustrate to sentinel vocation in contemporary terms is to speak of a unique breed who have emerged in our own midst in recent years. They are called "whistle-blowers." Not too long ago they held a convention in Washington where a number of them spoke to a large audience. They are a varied group of people who in the course of their jobs watch certain things take place and were impelled by conscience to speak out.
There were former CIA people like John Stockwell who spoke out in his book, In Search of Enemies. One is a Chicago policeman who founded the Afro American Patrolmen's League when his superiors ignored his reports of unfair police practices in the ghetto. Another is a woman who works in the benefits section of the Veterans Administration. She had been excluded from staff meetings after gathering details on former soldiers contaminated by defoliants used in View Nam. Yet another is a doctor who did a special government study on the effects of working in nuclear plants and found the danger level from radiation 10 times lower than that announced by the government. He was dismissed and ordered to hand over his files. These folk have produced a book, A Whistleblower's Guide to the Federal Bureaucracy. They advise watchers how to blow the whistle without losing their cool. The prophet Ezekiel would have been right at home amid the whistleblowers.
There are sentinel organizations that have emerged in recent decades. One thinks of Amnesty International and the eye they keep on human rights violations around the world. There is a similar organization called Africa Watch. We have had occasion to see the sentinel power of the television camera/recorder whether used by a reporter or a citizen. The protesters who filled the streets of Prague as the iron curtain came tumbling down faced the riot police and shouted, "Remember, the world is watching."
There is a sentinel vocation for the church and for individual Christians. It is one of the ways we express care for people. It is a shepherding role. And in expressing that concern specific people and specific situations have to be addressed. It is not enough just to proclaim generalities. That was central in Ezekiel's commission as a sentinel. The whole 13th chapter of Mark's gospel is predicated upon continuing tension between church and the surrounding culture. The retaliation encountered is part of the birth pangs of God's coming new day. The command of Jesus implies a situation of ongoing warfare. To watch is to live faithfully, lovingly, hopefully. The worst thing is to fall asleep. To sleep is to stop praying, to die to God, to become numb to any higher impulse or the prompting of conscience. To sleep is to lay aside the hope of salvation, to put God out of the picture. To sleep is to give in to cynicism and compromise.
The command to watch reaches into the whole spread of life. Someone has said that the most dangerous ism is somnanbulism. There are so many forms of sleep walking: the glazed eyes that never notices one's ideals are being eroded, one's purposes being eroded, the evils that gain strength.
Ezekiel as a sentinel feared the retribution of God. Such scenes of retribution and Divine vengeance are absent from these words of Jesus in Mark. Instead we have a vision of the new day of God's making. In Jesus of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Lord, we have caught a glimpse of the new world order. It will be a day of ingathering and embracing and new beginning. It is that vision we are called to serve in the here and now.
The late J. Wallace Hamilton was one of this century's finest preachers. He compared the situation of the disciple between the times to that of the Connecticut Yankee who had an accident and woke up in the ancient court of King Arthur. The story of course was told by Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. As he began to explore his new surroundings this man from the future kept bumping into practices obsolete in his own century. He set about trying to shape things in terms of the future. That is our situation as Christians. We have seen the future in the words, life and actions of Jesus. We have glimpsed nothing less than the agenda of God himself present on our earth. In the crucified and risen Lord we behold the first flashes of love's far ranging victory on the horizon of history. We are sustained by hope as in the here and now we live as the sentinels and servants of that victory that shall surely come in God's own good time.
