Bending the Arc

June 21, 2015

Letter from the Birmingham City Jail

Before sharing the reading for this morning, a word or two on what’s going to unfold in worship here this summer. As you may have noticed, last month I invited you to share with the worship planning team suggestions for readings for the summer, with a particular eye to non-scriptural texts or Bible passage that are not part of the Revised Common Lectionary’s three-year cycle of readings from the Bible.

The canon – the Bible as we know it – was fixed by sometime around the year 400. It’s impossible to date it with certainty because the records of many early church councils have been lost to time.

Indeed, St. Iraneaus, writing almost 200 years earlier, had observed:

“It is not possible that the gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four-quarters of the earth in which we live, and four universal winds, while the church is scattered throughout all the world, and the 'pillar and ground' of the church is the gospel and the spirit of life, it is fitting that she should have four pillars breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh… Therefore the gospels are in accord with these things.”

And, therefore, more than 1,500 years ago, the institution of the church decided that, when it comes to “Holy Scripture,” God had said all that God needed to say.

Personally and theologically, I think that’s wrong, but when it comes to ecclesiology – that is to say, when it comes to the church – I’m willing to go along. Most of the time. It makes sense, to me, that we should struggle together with the texts that have been the center of Christian faith and life for 2,000 year, and it’s also quite clear to me that the richness of the established canon has wisdom that remains for the church to discover and live into.

Nevertheless, I agree whole-heartedly with our UCC sisters and brothers who famously marketed a slogan a few years back declaring that “God is still speaking.”

God is still inspiring women and men to put words together praising the Creator, challenging the church, comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable. The church should pay attention, and it should do so in worship.

So, this summer at Clarendon we will. Thus, our readings will come from a variety of sources, and we begin this morning with a reading from a text around which there has grown, over the past half century, a movement to have it considered for inclusion in the canon of scripture. Listen, then, for a word from God in this passage from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators." But they went on with the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven" and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. Things are different now. The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's often vocal sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson scratched across the pages of history the majestic word of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. For more than two centuries our foreparents labored here without wages; they made cotton king; and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of brutal injustice and shameful humiliation -- and yet out of a bottomless vitality our people continue to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

I hadn’t intended to preach from King’s letter this morning. I had planned to begin this summer on a lighter note. When the worship team looked at the various suggestions for the People’s Lectionary, the group noticed a common theme running through the readings: persistence. That’s often another word for faithfulness, and one that comes with the suggestion of struggle – against opposition, against nature, against exhaustion.

As I read comments and commentaries in the aftermath of last Wednesday night’s shooting at the historic Emanuel AME church in Charleston, exhaustion was a common theme.

“Too tired of it even to be outraged anymore,” wrote one friend on her Facebook wall.

“I ache at this bloody reminder of the power of the system of racism to shape our behavior,” wrote another friend.

Finally, the comments that President Obama made rang with exhaustion: “I’ve had to make statements like this too many times.”

How long, O Lord, must your people cry out before you deliver them? How long?

The question I find myself asking is, do I have the faith that Dr. King had as he sat confined to a southern jail cell?

“I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour,” he wrote. “But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future.” Can I say the same thing, a half century further on?

Given that he was younger than my parents, it would have come as no stunning actuarial surprise were Dr. King still living. There are many things that likely would have surprised him had he lived even his full three score and ten, but I think King’s biggest disappointment would be the collapse of the very hope that sustained him amidst the mountains of despair he carved through in his own short life.

“I have no despair about the future,” he said more than once. Indeed, on the night before his assassination he declared:

“Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind.

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

“And so I'm happy, tonight.

“I'm not worried about anything.

“I'm not fearing any man.

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

That is perseverance. That is faithfulness. And that places a prophetic demand before the church in the year of our Lord 2015. For so many of us today will look at the ongoing systemic racism, injustice, and violence in America, throw up our hands and say, “I am just sick and tired of it; there is nothing I can do.”

It’s understandable that we, as individuals, can come to feel that way. I have certainly felt that way more than once in this congregation’s long struggle for LGBTQ equality. So, sure, feeling tired and fed up and even hopeless, is going to happen to us as individuals from time to time.

But that cannot be the response of the church. Though he all but predicted it in the passage I read to begin this morning, what I still think would most have surprised Dr. King had he lived was the remarkable and swift decline of the role of the church as an effective advocate for justice in American life.

We have conceded the role of prophet, and turned in on ourselves to become nothing more than spiritual balm for individual souls.

A half century ago, King warned us:

“If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”

Well I’ll be damned if I have given my life to a social club.

So, borrowing a phrase from the title of a book King published the year before his death, where do we go from here?

I remain convinced that the community of the followers of Jesus remains central and crucial to the work of reconciliation. We have been given the ministry of reconciliation as the central calling of the people of God, according to St. Paul’s word to the early church. That ministry remains our most pressing work, and the work to which we must remain persistently faithful no matter the circumstances that press against us.

By the grace of God and through the gift of the church, we don’t struggle alone. We are part of a larger movement in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) that has consistently worked for racial justice, for reconciliation, and against gun violence. These issues are as real and pressing and local for us as the economic – and racial – divide between North Arlington and Nauk, or the placement of a gun shop between a flower shop and a frame store in the midst of a residential neighborhood about a mile or so from our doors. A Sunday morning sermon is not the time to dig into the details, but the larger point is this: we are not alone; there are good resources on anti-racism and strong networks of advocates within the larger church for the work to which we are jointly called.

To be sure, the arc of the moral universe is mighty long, but it does bend toward justice. When you and I do the work of love, we bend that arc just a little closer to holy ground.

This week, the bodies of nine of our sisters and brothers will be committed to that ground. The ground will be watered by the tears of survivors; it can, if we so choose and commit, be consecrated by the work that those of us still living do to further the cause of reconciliation, justice and shalom. May it be so, and by that work of hearts and hands and faith, may we all overcome someday. Amen.

We Are Family

Mark 3:31-35

June 7, 2015

This passage always comes with a soundtrack for me: as I read it, it’s 1979 all over again and I’ve got Sister Sledge singing “we are family” running through my mind and it’s Disco Jesus joining in on the chorus.

You’re welcome for that image.

Seriously, though, I take this brief passage as central to the proclamation of Mark’s gospel. Consider the setting: in the typical urgency of Mark’s gospel, Jesus has been preaching, teaching, and healing throughout Galilee, and ever-increasing crowds are gathering to listen, to seek healing, or just to see the next big thing. And, in the case of the authorities, to check out this guy who is threatening the status quo.

Sensing a threat to their own power and position, the religious authorities begin to spread stories about Jesus: “he’s dangerous; he’s crazy; he’s possessed by demons.”

The crowds press in on him such that it’s impossible for him to move around freely, and rare for him to find time alone and apart. Perhaps his family is concerned for his well-being. Perhaps they fear for his safety. Maybe they worry that the rumors about his sanity are grounded in fact, after all, some people are calling him “the son of God,” and though he’s told them to keep quiet he hasn’t denied what they said.

Whatever their motivation, Mark tells us that Jesus’ mother and his brother came to see him in the midst of the teaming throng, and Jesus offers the enigmatic reply: “who are my mother and my brothers? Who is my family? Who belongs to my tribe?”

This is the central question of the gospel, and on the answer rests the entirety of scripture – at least as I understand it. For me, the central thread binding together the quilt of texts gathered into the canon of scripture is this: these are the stories of the Creator seeking to be reconciled with creation, and, of the human creature’s struggle to live into reconciliation with the Creator and with fellow creatures.

From the call of Abraham to the stories from the early church, over and over and over again we read variations on God’s promise to be God for the people, and the struggle of the people of God to be faithful to the covenant that defines them. Moreover, we see throughout, the widening circle in which this call and response plays out.

It begins with a single family, spreads to include the nation of Israel, and grows out toward “all nations” through the words of the prophets and the work of the disciples.

Now this is not just Biblical interpretation, it is ethical imperative with the fierce urgency of now. Look at the news of the day: so much of our brokenness cleaves over disputes between who is in and who is out, who is a child of God and who is not, who is part of our tribe and who is on the outside.

Consider the various responses to Caitlyn Jenner’s story. For some, during this season of Pride, she is a hero and role model. For some, she is a “teachable moment.” For still others, she is a punchline. For one conservative blogger, she is “a mentally disordered man who is being manipulated by disingenuous liberals and self-obsessed gay activists.”

Of course, that blogger would never use a female pronoun in this case, so I’ve just “outed” myself in claiming Caitlyn as a sister in the family of humankind.

I’ll further “out” myself as ignorant in confessing that I find most aspects of transgender experience strange and hard to understand. But, as with so much else that I find difficult to understand, it’s only hard to understand it because it’s completely outside of my experience.

The flight of the robin outside my window as I wrote this is strange to me because it is – and always will be – outside of my experience. That some people don’t like the taste of good chocolate is strange to me because tasting it as anything other than delicious is totally outside of my experience. The fear of water so palpable in non-swimmers is strange to me because it is outside of my experience – or, at least, outside of my remembered experience as one who learned to swim at the same time I learned to walk and have no memory of a time when I couldn’t do those things.

I may not understand the fear of water that non-swimmers experience, but I do know what fear feels like. Fear is key here because of the costs and consequences of radical difference. It costs me nothing that I cannot fly. It costs others nothing that they do not like chocolate – as tough as it may be for me to fathom it. But to differ from the prevailing normative or dominant experience of such central social constructs as gender, gender identify, sexual orientation, racial identification – differences there carry costs. The first cost extracted is exclusion from the inner circle, exclusion from the tribe.

Recognizing that cost as he ministered to lepers, those possessed by demons, women, tax collectors, and others marked by condition, identity, or circumstance as outsiders, Jesus lives into ever deeper understanding of his calling to transgress and erase the lines the mark some as insiders and others as permanent outsiders. At the same time, in story after story in the gospels, those previously considered outside the tribe begin to experience their full, authentic humanity as Jesus touches their lives and welcomes them into his tribe.

The gospels launched what should have been a movement to scatter the tribal gods and end violent tribalism. Alas, Christians have all too often simply reinscribed the patterns of tribalism and reinforced the boundaries with our own violence. But if the will of God is captured most clearly in Jesus’ commandment that we love one another, then our own acts of exclusion – however large or small they may be – work first on ourselves for they mark us as outsiders to the family we most want to claim.

“Who is my family?” Jesus asked. “Whoever does the will of God is my family.”

To love one another – that is how the family of followers of Jesus is known. And that is something to be proud of. Amen.

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I’m always at least mildly amused when we celebrate Pride in worship. After all, “pride” is one of the seven deadly sins, and it’s that thing that “goeth before the fall.” But that is, as it were, pride understood from above or from the center, pride understood from positions of power and privilege. Pride understood from the margins, on the other hand, is a source of empowerment and a way of finding voice for peoples long silenced.

When they sang, “I’m gonna sit at the welcome table,” African-American civil rights activists – following the lead of their enslaved forebears – expressed pride as insistence. Pride is an expression of insistence from those long excluded that, indeed, they have place at the table.

Jesus understood this, and surely that fact was central to his own practice of opening the table and welcoming everyone to break bread together.

Pride, thus understood, is first a simple expression of humanity. “I am a man,” read the signs carried by sanitation workers at the Memphis marches at the time of Martin Luther King’s assassination. I am somebody. I am a child of God. These are fundamentally expressions of pride when articulated by anyone whose full humanity has ever been denied.

At this table, your full humanity and fundamental worth will always be recognized. There is a place at this table for every child of God, thus this table is a place of pride.

As we come to the table this morning, we come, as always, prayerfully. This morning, as we center ourselves in silence, I invite you to think about your own life. As the anthem we sang a bit ago asks, “what have you done … to make you feel proud?” Think about that, and then, consider this question: what does your pride prompt you to do in the world? If, for example, you are proud of your children, does that pride prompt you to work in the world for conditions under which all children can prosper? In other words, what does your pride prompt you to do for the family of humankind?

“What have you done … to make you feel proud?” If you feel so called, jot a few words on the sticky note, as a prayer of dedication of your own actions – on whatever individual scale you get to engage – and then, in a few moments, when we come to the table of grace, attach the sticky note to the cross as an expression of gratitude and commitment for the gifts you have been given that enable you to act in the world and to take authentic pride in those actions.

Let us pray.

Why Are We Here?

Isaiah 6:1-8; John 3:1-10

May 31, 2015

Over the past 25 years or so, I have turned often for insight, inspiration, and agitation to a collection of Wendell Berry’s essays entitled, What Are People For? Unlike the Westminster Divines, Berry never attempts a direct answer to the question. Our 17^th-century forebears from England phrased the question this way: “what is the chief end of man?” Their answer? “To glorify God and enjoy God forever.”

I posed the question my own way – “why are we here?” – because I am so often at a loss when I go wandering and find myself some place most unexpected. Moreover, I think place is important when you’re trying to sort our what people are for, or what the chief end of humankind amounts to.

That is to say, people on a baseball field may have a different end or purpose than people in a protest march or people at camp or people in a classroom. Context matters.

At least, context matters when we try to live out our purpose in the world. Even if we take the Westminster Catechism as our guide, the way we glorify and enjoy God in a hospital room is probably different than the way we glorify and enjoy God in a boardroom.

What Berry reminds me, though, is that while context matters greatly in sorting what I am here for, in a larger sense, I am wherever I am to experience the grace of engaging the world, the gift that opens upon engaging creation and community.

In an extended prose poem that is the first section of What Are People For?, Berry writes these lines:

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:

We clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

We enter the little circle of each other’s arms,

And the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

And the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.[1]

Listening for the fragments of the vast symphony is key to discerning our vocation, our calling, our own individual responses – in our given time and place and situation – to the question Berry poses: what are we for?

It’s the question Isaiah begins to sort out as he imagines the great dance of the seraphs in the midst of their song: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the earth is full of God’s glory.” Isaiah hears a fragment of the great symphony, and in its strains he discerns the voice of God asking, “whom shall I send?”

Berry might answer his own question – what are people for – by simply saying, “to do good work,” and one could be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that this is some kind of “works righteousness” unless one recalls that, elsewhere, Berry also writes that “good work, done kindly and well, is prayer.”

God, after all, presumably sends Isaiah out into the world to do something, to engage the world – in other words, to do good work, work that heals, work that makes the world more whole, work that builds up the commonwealth, work, that is to say, that saves or, that at the very least, participates in God’s unfolding work of salvation.

Which brings us to the reading from John’s gospel. If we’re paying any attention at all, we recognize the incredible richness and challenge of this particular passage and, what’s more, we know what’s coming next.

God’s unfolding work of salvation, John’s gospel insists, involves being born again from above.

At some point or another in many of our lives we have either been personally confronted by the question – “are you born again?” – or we’ve witnessed people wielding the question like a cudgel on someone else. It’s become such a trope of the conservative evangelical world that it’s difficult to hear in it any fragment of the great symphony Isaiah heard.

But let’s see if we can look at this story afresh. After all, it’s a story. Let’s pose some questions to the story. A guy – a faithful religious leader, the story tells us – comes to see Jesus at night.

Why at night?

Why come at all? That is to say, what do you suppose Nicodemus wants to learn?

What would you want to learn from Jesus?

The story, of course, doesn’t answer these questions, but John’s gospel does offer us another glimpse of Nicodemus much later, for Nicodemus brings a hundred pounds of burial spices to wrap Jesus’ body in after the crucifixion. I can’t help thinking that something profound happened that first night when Nicodemus met Jesus.

Jesus touched his life such that Nicodemus made a risky and extravagant offering. The gospel is silent on it, but I believe Nicodemus loved Jesus and his life was transformed by love.

That’s what love does. Love changes lives.

The great pattern of scripture, underscored in the texts we’ve just read and repeated with remarkable frequency, is as simple as it is clear: love compels transformative action. Put even more simply, in scripture, the faithful are sent into the world to love the world.

The words describe the pattern, and it’s clear in the most famous words of all Christian scripture – indeed, the words that John writes as the conclusion to this night story of Nicodemus: for God so loved the world that God sent Jesus into the world in order to transform it, to make it whole and healthy, in other words, to save it.

Now this sounds all sweet and light and nice. God loves the world. Jesus saves the world. Neat and tidy, seal it with a bow. But we don’t have to look very far to understand that there’s more to it. Indeed, most of the time, for me, anyway, I don’t really need to look beyond the mirror to know that my own salvation is incomplete. I can look around my own neighborhood to understand clearly that the salvation of my own community is incomplete, and a cursory look at the news tells me that the salvation of the world is far from accomplished.

That’s the truth that Nicodemus confronts in the midnight hour – in order to live into wholeness, healing, community – that is to say, in order to live into salvation – one must be born again … and again … and again. Confronted with this phrase that has far too often been used to beat folks over the head, we have two choices: ignore the phrase and be done with it altogether; or, wrestle with it.

To ignore it concedes the field of Biblical interpretation to those who want to beat folks up with it, so I choose to wrestle, and I’ll make it a tag team effort by calling again on Berry.

Though he doesn’t make this claim explicitly, I think it’s a perfectly fair reading of the third chapter of John and of What Are People For? to find in Berry’s words this definition of “born again”: the practice of a proper love and respect for the creatures of God.[2] 

To be born again in the spirit means to practice a proper love and respect for the creatures of God.

That is what we are for; that is why we are here: to practice a proper love and respect for the creatures of God.

Now one could hear in that something almost a sweet and light as God so love the world that God sent Jesus into the world in order to transform it, to make it whole and healthy, in other words, to save it, until we remember that the work of saving the world put Jesus on a cross.

There’s a great deal of money and power tied up in maintaining the profoundly broken status quo – that was true when the status quo was defined by the Roman Empire and it is equally true now that it is defined by the American Empire. Truth be told, there’s a great deal tied up in maintaining the broken status quo of our own lives as any addict knows well, but as most comfortably affluent folks – that is to say, most of us – so urgently and persistently deny.

Again, I’ll turn to Berry’s essay to make this point clear, and in terms that the church – that is to say, us – stand condemned by. Berry writes,

Like any other public institution so organized, the organized church is dependent on “the economy”; it cannot survive apart from those economic practices that its truth forbids and that its vocation is to correct. If it comes to a choice between the extermination of the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field and the extermination of the building fund, the organized church will elect – indeed, has already elected – to save the building fund. The irony is compounded and made harder to bear by the fact that the building fund can be preserved by crude applications of money, but the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field can be preserved only by true religion, by the practice of a proper love and respect for them as the creatures of God.[3]

This does not mean that we ignore our responsibilities to steward the resources we have been given. We take care of our homes and improve them, just as we do our community’s space. But we do this appropriately when we do so as part of the practice of proper love and respect for the creatures of God.

That must be the chief measure of our various economies – remembering, crucially, that economy – in its Greek roots – means the ordering of the household. In other words, we order our households in order to practice the proper love and respect for the creatures of God. We make home improvements to improve our practices of love and respect, and we do so in community because the community is so much better at holding us accountable than we are by ourselves.

Imagine, if you will, convening a prayerful discernment group before taking out a six-figure home-improvement loan – not a group to help determine if you can afford it, but a group to bring me to a deeper understanding of the motivations behind the expenditure, knowing that money spent in one place is unavailable to be spent in a different one and understanding that my chief purpose, my reason for being here, is to practice the love and respect for the creatures of God.

If I am in the world to change the world, if I am in the world to participate with God in the ongoing project of transforming the world, then the salvation of the world must be part of the calculus in the way I spend my money and the way I spend my time.

If that is not the true meaning of being born again in the Spirit, then the phrase is empty and meaningless and has no hold on me. If, however, such being born again … and again … and again does entail such practices of love then it means everything, and it answers the only question that ever really matters: why are we here? To save the world by loving it as God’s own. Amen.

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[1] Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (New York: North Point Press, 1990) 10.

[2] Ibid. 96.

[3] Ibid.