THE POLITICS OF THE BROKENHEARTED
A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent

Two weeks ago a U.S. Senator resigned. After ten years of service to Indiana and our country, Evan Bayh announced he would not stand for re-election to that senior house. In an editorial he wrote for last Sunday’s New York Times, he spoke of his childhood, when his father, Birch Bayh, had also served as an Indiana Senator. “When I was a boy,” Evan recalled, “members of Congress from both parties, along with their families, would routinely visit our home for the holidays. This type of social interaction hardly ever happens today, and we are the poorer for it. It is much harder to demonize someone when you know his family or have visited his home.” Nowadays, Evan Bayh sadly admits, “it’s difficult to work with members (of Congress who are) actively planning your demise” (“Why I’m Leaving the Senate,” February 21, 2010).

This story might break your heart. It broke mine a bit when I read it. Because I, too, have known people – in hospitals, in schools, even in churches – who have actively plotted to end someone else’s livelihood. Or at least, that’s the way it felt to those folks at the time they were forced to decide whether or not to end their life’s work. For them, it was a time of enormous loss. When we feel the need to call it quits unexpectedly, we may, like Senator Bayh, have lost our dream. The end of a dream can make us angry. It will surely make us very sad.

Politics is now a blood sport. Yet poll the public, and a majority of our citizenry will say that partisan politics – one political party pitted against another – is odious, repulsive, even sinful. Although many of us long for a bi-partisan approach – working across party lines, trying to create true collaboration in our search for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – more and more of us are giving up. A former Maryland representative from Washington County said at an event I attended last week that he’d left politics a while back. He no longer believes in politics, he told us. Now, he said, he’s a political agnostic. Although he spoke matter-of-factly, I still heard heartbreak in his voice.

How about you? Have you given up? What do you believe? Does God have politics? Do politics and religion mix? Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said that religion is political – or it’s not religion. Does that mean that Jesus was a politician? And if so, what kind of politics did Jesus practice or preach?

We do know politicians are not the only political people in our world. There are office politics and school politics. Even the church is political. (You knew that.) Jesus was no stranger to political life. Just before our Gospel story today, Jesus taught the crowds that “some are last who will be first and some are first who be last” (Luke 13:30). He had been casting out demons and curing the sick. These were public words and acts defying the power of the “Holy” Roman Empire, demonstrating the sacred power of God’s empire, the kingdom of God.

It helps to know that Herod Antipas, the emperor in this story, was the son of Herod the Great, who wanted Jesus killed at birth. Antipas beheaded Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist. No wonder our Gospel passage begins with the warning, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." Jesus is unafraid of Herod, yet he is a realist. He knows Herod is like a fox – sly, cunning, destructive. But Jesus is foxy in his own way. He is on a journey to Jerusalem. Jesus will escape Herod, to lay down his life in a different way.

It also helps to know that, in Jesus’ day, Jerusalem and its temple made up the heart and soul of all things religious and political. Like our nation’s capital, Jerusalem had been for generations the destination of every kind of pilgrim soul. But that heavenly city would fall, leveled like buildings in a Haiti earthquake. Jesus’ entry into that holy city during what we call Holy Week would prepare the way for the pathos and destruction that lay ahead, less than a century away.

Today’s passage is the first of four times in Luke’s gospel when Jesus laments Jerusalem’s fate. When he finally arrives there, he delivers God’s word of judgment and love, like the prophets before him. If only Jerusalem could see “the things that make for peace!” (Luke 19:41). His lament turns angry later on, in the temple, with the moneychangers. But underneath his anger – underneath all human anger – are tears, deep sadness, real heartbreak.

Like seeing our own children go astray and wanting desperately to protect them from harm, we realize we cannot stop them from making their own mistakes. Our hearts ache when they stumble, and our hearts break when they fall. And today, we hear Jesus cry out, “ Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it. How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Of all the animals with which he could have compared himself, Jesus chose a hen. Jesus, our mother hen, weeps, heartbroken. And Jesus, our political mother of love, is ready to die for those chicks, to put his own body between those chicks and harm’s way.

Even though 21 st century movies can show us what the end of the world might look like, Washington does not yet lie in ruins. Yet there is deep sadness, real heartbreak. Systems that seemed they would hold our lives together, even into retirement – our government, our healthcare, our economy – are breaking down. If we are honest, if we allow ourselves to get in touch with how we feel about it all, we are angry, and it breaks our hearts. Some say the church – not just All Saints’ Episcopal Church, not just the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, not just the Episcopal Church, not just the church in the United States of America – some say the church of Jesus, the new Jerusalem, the body of Christ is just plain broken. Doesn’t that make us angry? Doesn’t that break our hearts?

And yet…and yet…what if we all gathered together, as one broken family of God…and started over? What if we tried once more to be who we say we are: the one body of Christ? We did this on Valentine’s Day, a day of heart, and at the end of our Annual Parish Meeting that day, we agreed to meet again. Plans are underway for a special parish gathering, as well as other times and places for public conversation and fellowship. Today, and in the weekends ahead, you’ll hear and read about all those other gatherings. I, as your rector, along with your parish leaders, want to create safe, non-partisan gatherings – to listen, to pray and to speak our truth to one another, without being shunned, stoned or sent away. Even if we have something prophetic to say. Even when we are angry. Even though we may be in tears, heartbroken.

Perhaps this is a way for us to live a holy Lent this year. Perhaps, in some small way, we can make a wee bit of history with these, our own bi-partisan events. No event in our nation’s history created a season of lament, a time that felt more like Lent, a day more heartbreaking than the death and destruction of September 11, 2001. After 9/11 one of our teachers, a spiritual guide named Parker Palmer wrote an essay called “The Politics of the Brokenhearted.” He suggested that, at that moment in American history, “…heartbreak offers a powerful lens through which to examine the well-being of the body politic.”

There are, Palmer claims, “at least two ways to picture a broken heart. The conventional image…is that of a heart broken into a thousand shards – shards that sometimes become shrapnel, aimed at the source of our pain….But there is another way to visualize what a broken heart might mean. Imagine that small, clenched fist of a heart ‘broken open’ into largeness of life, into greater capacity to hold one’s own and the world’s pain and joy….” (from Deepening the American Dream: Reflections on the Inner Life and Spirit of Democracy, pp. 231-232)

Parker Palmer invites us to imagine the Christian tradition as “the broken-open heart…virtually indistinguishable from the image of the cross,” where the “excruciating tension” of that cross “can pull the heart open” (ibid.). My sisters and brothers in Christ, I invite you this morning to use your imagination. Imagine with me a room full of people at All Saints’ Episcopal Church, where there are no party politics, no Historic Church or Great Hall partisans, no one who cares whether you stand, sit or kneel. Imagine that, in that room, there are just Christians, their friends and loved ones, who always feel truly welcome here. Imagine a room full of people who come with hearts broken by loss of job or home or health or whomever or whatever. Imagine a room full of broken-open-and-pulled-open-hearted people who simply want to learn how to live and to love more like Jesus. For Jesus is our open-hearted One – the One whose heart was broken and pulled open all along his journey to Jerusalem, the One who still weeps for that heavenly city, for all cities, and for all people – even for us.

And then, dare to imagine with me that our hearts have become, in Parker Palmer’s words, not just a fist, but “a supple, well-exercised muscle…giving us a larger capacity for both suffering and hope” (see his blog about a new book called The Politics of the Brokenhearted: Opening the Heart of American Democracy at www.couragerenewal.org). Dare to imagine a world where we use both our opening hearts and our opening minds, both the politics of Jesus and true religion, to embrace suffering and hope. Dare to imagine that we might become, wherever and whenever we go into this world, the poured-out blood and the broken-open body of Jesus Christ.

AMEN.

The Rev. Thomas A. Momberg
All Saints’ Episcopal Church
Frederick , Maryland
February 28, 2010

For more on the interruptions of life, go to http://fathermom.wordpress.com