But There Is No Peace

Isaiah 64:1-9; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9

November 30, 2014

A friend of mine who lives in Oakland posted this on Facebook last week on the morning after the grand jury decision on the Ferguson shooting was announced:

On the bus this morning, a 17-year-old boy asked me about what I thought about last night. We talked about anger and sadness and how to keep going. He talked about his music career and how he has been mixing and producing tracks. He talked about getting shot in the leg for "being in the wrong place at the wrong time" and how he never really knew his dad growing up because he was in and out of jails until he was shot five times by the police in 2002. The kid would have been five when his dad died. So much pain.

I confess, I do not know what to do with the pain, with the sadness, with the anger. I found the images from the streets of Ferguson – militarized police firing smoke grenades into crowds, looters setting fires, and holiday lights hanging over all of it – I found it profoundly sad and unsettlingly strange, all the while being also all-too-familiar.

Seasons greetings, indeed. Peace on earth, and goodwill to all? Well, maybe later. How do we, in the midst of that, gather here and talk about joy, hope, love and peace?

When a group of us sat together in this space one evening early this month to talk about worship during Advent, we concluded that the readings for this morning, and in particular the one from Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, spoke to us of peace and grace.

Less than a month later, and it was all too easy to entitle this homily, “But there is no peace.”

Paul would have understood the feeling. To be sure, the particulars we confront are vastly different than those in first-century Palestine, but Paul knew and understood deep social divisions, anger, mistrust, and the violence they breed.

The church at Corinth, after all, was certainly not all beer and skittles.

We don’t know with precision the facts about Corinth – any more than we know with precision the facts about Ferguson. What we do know about Corinth suggests an abiding division between the affluent and the impoverished, a feeling of being marginalized in some quarters, an attitude of entitlement from others, and a general atmosphere of suspicion.

“Uh, excuse me,” you might well ask, “is that Corinth or Ferguson you’re talking about there?”

Well, yes. Exactly. When such conditions explode into violence we should not be surprised.

It is easy to stand at a great distance, watching the fires in Ferguson, and condemn the looting and violence. But, as Martin Luther King said in a similar context, “It is not enough to stand before you … and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible  … to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. […] A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?”

King asked that question more than 40 years ago, so the answer today must be that we have failed to hear what we already know. We know, or should know, for example:

·      Despite the fact that rates of drug usage are approximately the same across all racial groups, in many states more than 80 percent of those imprisoned on drug charges are people of color.[1] Thus, while five times as many white people use illegal drugs, 10 times as many African Americans as whites are sent to prison on drug charges.

·      Prison sentences reflect deep racial bias, and blacks serve approximately the same amount of time for drug offenses as whites who were convicted of violent crimes.[2]

·      Young men of color are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than young white men, and, during a typical week in the United States, two black people are killed by white police officers. [3]

The litany of inequality goes on and on and on, and covers access to education, housing discrimination, employment discrimination, financial institutions, voting rights, and it includes the fact that, as Dr. King noted in 1963, “eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.” This is what we should hear.

As Paul Waldman, writing in the Post following the grand jury decision, noted:

It took cooperation to create last night’s conflagration, a conspiracy of failure that ran deep and wide. It took a local political system constructed to keep power in the hands of a white minority. It took police practices designed to degrade, dehumanize, and intimidate people. It took a criminal justice system that makes it all but impossible to hold police accountable when they kill, as they do hundreds of times every year in communities across the country.[4]

This litany of hopelessness likely leaves us feeling what Isaiah describes – We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. 

Nevertheless, as Eberhard Arnold, founder of the Bruderhoff community, wrote during the hopeless years that witnessed the rise of Hitler in his country, “Advent hope is a certainty of faith that shows itself in action through mutual responsibility for the whole of life. The church of Christ is the fellowship of this hope. It believes so unreservedly that it is convinced that the divine must conquer the demonic, that love must conquer hate.”

That’s the hope that Martin King clung to in Birmingham. It’s the hope that Mother Theresa clung to in Calcutta. It’s the hope that Paul clung to in Rome, and the one that he encouraged those in Corinth to embrace. It’s the hope that we cling to now when we insist that black lives matter.

It is the hope that we lift up as we light a candle in the darkness and lift it high for all in the house to see.

Paul, let’s recall, opens his Corinthian correspondence with gratitude for the grace God has given the fractious community. Though there is as yet no peace among and between them, there is grace. We begin with grace. That is to say, prior to our acts – whatever they may be – there is the grace of God. All is gift, to begin with, and there is a place at the table for everyone born – men, women, rich, poor, black, white, straight, gay, old and young. All. All. All. All lives matter.

That is why this morning we began this new liturgical year with communion. The gifts of God for the people of God form the foundation of the community of faith, and for all it can accomplish in God’s world.

The question is not, then, what can we do to bring grace and healing and wholeness to this present brokenness. No, the question is, how shall we respond to the grace, healing and wholeness of God already at work in a broken world?

This morning, we respond in worship. We light candles to symbolize hope, and we make commitments to pray and act for peace in a world darkened by fear and violence.

May we go forward from this place and bear that light into all the world. Amen.

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[1]http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/americanprospect/20110102specialreport/#/20

[2] http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet

[3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/14/police-killings-data/14060357/

[4] Paul Waldman WaPO 11-25 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/11/25/barack-obama-ferguson-and-racial-wounds-unhealed/?hpid=z5)