Old Survivor - A Sermon for Election Day

Philippians 2:5-11, Luke 14:15-24

In the hills of East Oakland there is a 500 year-old redwood that has survived the Spanish conquistadors, the Gold Rush, earthquakes and storms, the booms and busts of a world always hungry for resources. The tree is the only old growth redwood in the city and its is something of a miracle that it is still alive. Locals call it, “Old Survivor.” The tree is located on a steep rocky slope and the trunk is twisted, misshapen by the standards of timber mills. And so it has stayed, marginal and strangely formed, witnessing a world in flux as a rooted grace, contrasting with the vagaries of human ambition. “Old Survivor still stands,” wrote a pair of Oakland residents, “as a sentinel to remind us to make our choices wisely.”

On this day, gathering our prayers as the church when the choices of the ballot are being made, I thought about that tree and its ancient witness. The church, more than two thousand years old, its roots linked to an even more ancient worship, now stands in the world like a witness tree. Ours is community of cosmic scale, joined in Christ across time and space, united in the common response of love to God and neighbor. Over the church’s history we have seen empires crumble and new states rise, we have existed on the edges of every terrain of political power. We have survived the persecution of dictators and the indifference of democracies. The church has carried out the call of Jesus to endure to the end.

This endurance of the church, like that of Old Survivor, is a result of its strange shape. It is a useless reality from the perspective of the world, a community not easily conformed to any of the ends of earthly power. It’s teachings talk of a God who become like a slave and of a king who invite all the riffraff of the streets to a banquet. The usual human ambitions for sex, money, and power are replaced in the church by a call to sacrificial love, to service instead of domination. And yet oddly formed, we have continued.

The survival of the church, like that of Old Survivor, also comes from its depths, its deep roots. Artist and writer Jenny Odell writes that the “rootedness” of Old Survivor “…is something we desperately need when we find ourselves awash in an amnesiac present and the chain-store aesthetic of the virtual.” The church too has roots to provide for a world unmoored, tossed like a plastic bag in the wind. Trees whose lives span thousands of years do not live from above, but from the community of life they have cultivated beneath—not only their roots but the bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, and fungi that live in symbiosis, life together, below the surface.

This depth through which the church continues is rooted in Christ who did not go up but instead went down. This is a truth to which the Apostle Paul called the church in Philippi, divided over struggles for power. Paul called for them to inhabit a different kind of life, a mindset that diverged from the Roman world, where status was everything and achievement was made through domination. The church was instead to have a mind like Jesus, who though the Son of God, came to sleep in the kitchen with the slaves rather than to eat at the master’s table. It is that same mindset that Jesus offers in the parable of God’s reign, where the banquet is filled not with campaign donors or the practitioners of power, but by the poor and lowly. In both scriptures, the message is the same—our God is humble, found among those who are close to the ground and on the margins. It is the lowly who provide the life of any church that will survive.

Today is a day of anxiety in America. Whoever wins the presidency, many are worried about what may come. But I am here to say that whatever plays out over the days ahead, the church will endure in its witness to a life and love beyond anything that results from the machinations of power. As engaged as we might be in the questions of this time we belong to a politics far greater, a politics that stands in witness against this moment as it has stood in witness against every moment of the world. It is a politics that is found not by looking up to those who claim the seats of so called power, but down, among the lowly, the down and out, where Jesus lived and lives still.

I do not mean to say that fear is not warranted or that worry is unfounded. I feel the fear and worry as much as anyone else, but I am saying that like a tree that has stood for a thousand years, we have a place to take shelter; ground in which we can plant ourselves toward flourishing even amid the most dire outcomes. Our politics is not, in the end, that of any particular nation or even any particular time. Jesus is a politics, strange and misshapen according to the purposes of the world. Being useless to the powers that be, we have a freedom in Jesus for a life and love not found by those who must hold onto control. We can live, even now, into the grace and peace that is at the foundation of the world.

I recently heard a story from someone in our community. She and her daughter were going into the grocery store where they encountered a black woman and white man in the heat of an argument outside. It wasn’t clear what the conflict was about, but it seemed to be that there had been some racial slight. The woman and her daughter thought of turning away, but then had a sense that God was calling for some grace in the moment. She went up to the woman who was yelling, angry and hurt, and said, “I want you to know that we love you.” Her face softened. “Thank you,” she said surprised.

This woman and her daughter then turned to the white man behind her. He was maskless, standing by a luxury car. At first he seemed to hold all the power that being a white male confers, but when the woman looked into his face she saw brokenness amid the anger. “I want you to know that we love you too,” she said to him. The man tried to begin explaining the situation, but the woman stopped him. “We’ve got to go shopping, but I just wanted you to know that we love you too.” She and her daughter left, having sown a seed of strange grace.

This Election Day, when so much seems to hang in the balance and anxiety fills the air, let we who now worship be formed by our prayers into a people of peace. May our church be a witness to God’s grace, useless and strange, close to the ground and in community with the lowly. The people of God have endured through all the vagaries of a violent world and will endure still to announce again that Jesus, who lived among the outcasts and on the margins, is now the prince of peace, the Lord of all Lords and kings and emperors and presidents, now and forever. Amen.