Earth Day

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Sermon, Second Sunday after Epiphany, Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., January 18, 2015

B Epiphany 2 BFC 2015
I Samuel 3-4:1
January 18, 2015

Generally, Christian spirituality holds aloft two overarching values:  balance and freedom.  Their definitions overlap such that one cannot be defined without the other.  Balance is the freedom to not be blown about by every breeze, get caught up in the flow of every tide, moved by the profit margin, or enmeshed in every fashionable political or Hollywood intrigue.  Freedom is the balance to speak and live our lives in a way that honors our highest values in keeping with the Heart of God.  When one is free, our choices move from black and white to a rainbow of colors we did not think possible—creativity and life breaks forth in the grayest of places.  I think freedom is best defined in a quote from Dr. Cornel West who regularly says, “If your success is defined as being well-adjusted to injustice and well-adapted to indifference, then we don’t want successful leaders. We want great leaders who love the people enough and respect the people enough to be unbought, unbound, unafraid, and unintimidated to tell the truth.”[1] 
In the Biblical tradition, this is who a prophet is:  a great leader willing to bear the truth to the board room and the voting booth, to city hall and the supermarket, to preach tough news to the principalities of power and good news to the poor and oppressed.  The prophet does not speak on behalf of a singular individual but on behalf of the wider community, nation, and world.  
Today we read one of my most beloved Scripture verses, I Samuel, Chapter 3, through Chapter 4, verse 1.  It is a Scripture passage intended as a template for all prophets.  God speaks, the Word of the Living God calls, and the prophet shows themselves to be worthy by merely saying, “Here I am.”  It is an echo of the call and response between Moses and God in Exodus, Chapter 3, when God says, “Here I Am” as a way of relating God’s own character to Moses.  God self-defines as the one who shows up, is present, and makes known that there is work to be done.  Moses, in return, shows himself to be a God-bearer, a truth-bearer, a prophet by saying, “Here I am,” when God speaks and calls.  In the same manner, Mary of Nazareth, in the Gospel of Luke, shows herself to be a prophet when God speaks and calls and she says, “Here I am.”  In our passage for today, the young boy, Samuel, shows himself to be a God-bearer, a prophet by saying, “Here I am.”  Here I am.  I will show up.  I will be present.  There is work to be done. 
One of the reasons I love this passage from I Samuel is how it relates the mythic and poetic nature of Scripture.  When we confine Scripture to petty moralisms and simple logic, we miss the broad sweep of a poet’s heart.  This passage has these beautifully mythic lines which unpack into wider realities. 
To compare in modern culture, there are these great movie quotes which are mythic in nature, right?  They set the stage, open or close a story in such a way that broad narratives are painted bigger than the literal words themselves.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good story told through movies spans generations.  "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.”  An iconic line that opens the movie, “Casablanca.” Or the ending of “Gone With the Wind”, when Rhett has finally had enough and says, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” 
“There’s no crying in baseball!” from a “A League of Their Own” to convey the strength of women found in both toughness and vulnerability.   Or from one of the best movies of 2014, “The Imitation Game”:  “Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of, who do the things no one can imagine.”  Indeed, the young boy Samuel, who works like an altar boy for the priest Eli who is the God-bearer no one can imagine.  Eli, the priest, his sons,  those pastor’s kids, meanwhile, have grown fat on the offerings the community has brought to them, keeping the best parts for themselves—a clear violation of the covenant which asks that the best and first parts be first offered to God who then returns it to the community for their welfare and benefit.  Eli’s sons were to be the most likely God-bearers we could imagine.  But the story doesn’t go that way.
There are these wonderfully mythic lines which open and close our Biblical story for today.  They are verses which remind us that this story is found in all ages and places.  The passage opens with, “And the word of the Living God was precious in those days, visions were not widespread.”  The passage ends with, “And the word of Samuel was for all of Israel . . .”  Not for priests and kings of position and power, not for the sons of priests who take advantage of their birthright and inheritance, not for any, chosen few.  The word of Samuel was for all of Israel. 
Finally, there is that mythic line within this story which holds me transfixed as I try to decipher its poetic meaning:  “And Samuel grew up, and the Living God was with him, and did not let any of his words fall to the ground.”  What does that mean?  Does that mean that Samuel’s words lasted and endured, had substance and were solid, or as Tracy suggested to me, were heard and received by the whole community.  For words that fall to the ground are ones that do not find purchase in the hearts and minds of those who hear them.   And God did not let any of Samuel’s words fall to the ground because people listened and were moved to action by them.  Is it that?  Or is it because Samuel spoke with an authority born out of the wildness and freedom given to him by God?  Or is it merely that Samuel’s words did not fall to the ground because they were spoken by God through the young boy, Samuel?
When does God come and speak to us mere mortals?  How do we know?  When is it known that the Living God speaks, is heard, and the words do not fall to the ground?  Absent a voice from the heavens, a cataclysmic lightning strike, or a dove sent to circle overhead, how do we know when God speaks?  How do we know any of us know that we are called by the Living God to do the work that is before us?  How do we know that any one of us is called? 
That word, “call” is one used much too often at seminary to describe the work of people in ordained ministry.  Does it require a halo or a special gleam?  A kind of look?  I know I do not have it. 
Some years ago, while I was in vacation in New Mexico, I decided to take a walk outside the hotel where we were staying just outside the campus of the University of New Mexico.  There they were, like I have seen on many a college campus.  A group of young men from Campus Crusade for Christ were stopping people at each street corner to ask whether passersby had received Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior.  The little voice inside my head just kept saying, “Leave me alone, leave me alone, just please leave me alone.” 
I thought my prayers to the Almighty were answered when a co-ed walking down the opposite corner seemed to attract the attention of the “saved” young men.  They gravitated to her.  Unfortunately for me, she made it abundantly clear she wanted nothing to do with their salvation.  One of the guys gave up and turned his attention toward me.  “Have you received Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”  Casually, and in stride, I said, “Thanks, but I’m already a Christian pastor.”  The guy stopped in his tracks, and he said , with a harrumph, “Yeah, right.” 
So . . . very clearly, I have to work on my earthly glow, that sign that heaven has anointed and called me to preach the good news.  Because it sure ain’t evident to many folk.  How do we know that the Word of God comes to some guy walking on the sidewalk in New Mexico, the most famous television preacher, a young boy who has been dedicated by his mother to the service of the Living God?  I think one clue is found in the beautiful words at the end of the passage read today:  “And the word of Samuel was for all of Israel.” 
Many of us have heard the story of Rosa Parks.  As a secretary for the NAACP, a person with some gravitas in the Civil Rights struggle, Rosa Parks was considered an ideal candidate to begin the Montgomery bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat in what were considered the “white sections.”  But nine months before Rosa Parks, a 15-year old girl named Claudette Colvin had refused to give up her seat.  The older Parks befriended the Claudette, learned from Claudette’s example, and the African-American community in Montgomery, Alabama, began a spiritual practice of fasting that was key in the struggle for racial justice. 
On March 2, 1955, 15 year-old Claudette Colvin refused to stand up and give up her seat to a white woman.  By her recollection, she could not get up.  There were people inspiring her courage.  Colvin remembers:
 My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn't get up.[2]

For a young girl, Colvin was also politically active.  She had high aspirations to be President one day and was a member of the NAACP Youth Council.  Her classmate, Annie Larkins, remembers Colvin, in refusing to give up her seat, shouting over and over again, “It’s my constitutional right.”  Said Larkins, “She had decided on that day that she was not going to move.”[3] 
          Claudette Colvin stood on the shoulders of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.  Rosa Parks stood on the shoulders of 15-year old Claudette Colvin.   
Not unlike the early 60s when Mississippi was a state sweltering with injustice or Alabama was a state with a governor whose lips were dripping with words of “interposition” and “nullification”, on this week when we become painfully more aware of the violence, of racial injustice, the movie “Selma” makes its way into our theaters, and we celebrate the birth of a leader and prophet from another generation, we might term these days in our country as a time when the words of the Living God are precious and visions not widespread.  In such a time, leaders and prophets are needed who are unbought, unbound, unafraid, and unintimidated to tell the truth.
And more and more spiritual leaders are saying that the particular enterprise needed at this time is none other than non-violent actions which will build democracy.  In book after book, magazine after magazine, in blog after blog of those people I read as spiritual mentors, Cornel West and Tavis Smiley, Sister Joan Chittister and Chris Hedges, Amy Goodman, Frances Moore Lappe, and Rita Nakashima Brock, democracy is a way that we remember that God’s word is for all of God’s people. 
Quaker spiritual leader, Parker Palmer, wrote a book in 2011, Healing the Heart of Democracy.  In that book, Palmer offers five habits of the heart that will help sustain democracy.  Palmer suggests that these five habits can be summarized in two words:  chutzpah and humility.  Within those habits, Palmer reminds us that it took a village to raise Rosa Parks and it took a community to translate her act into social change.  There is much complexity in the world today, and Palmer believes that this complexity can only be held by community.[4]  More importantly, and perhaps illustrated by Palmer’s example of Rosa Parks, is that this community can only be defined by intergenerational community.  Rosa Parks happens because of Claudette Colvin.  Claudette Colvin happens because of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. 
My heart grows weary and sad when I realize that the one place where intergenerational community should flourish, the mainline Christian church, has become a place where the music, stories, and power is largely reserved for a singular age and a singular generation.  As mainline churches, particularly Congregational churches, those people and places that used to be hothouses for the town meeting and democratic process . . . as those people and places now isolate the age groups, they become less and less the institutions and movements which could be the grass roots initiatives to sustain democracy. 
Our children and our youth never hear the stories of their ancestors inspiring them to courageous speech and action.  How is it that we have so many incredible stories in this congregation of prophetic power when so many of you said, “Here I am!” to the call God gave to you, and our children and youth do not know them?  And your words fall to the ground because no young person ever receives them into their heart.
And the words and actions of 15 year-old Claudette Colvin and the young boy Samuel fall to the ground because nobody is listening.  How is that I hear stories of my daughter saying, “Here I am!”, standing in solidarity with a young woman coming out to her parents or painting her nails to stand in solidarity with a person struggling with their sexual identity who committed suicide, and yet, my church family does not know.  I am sure that Sophia is just the example I know while I am willing to bet there are so many others.  And with the resources for becoming vibrant and new and inspired by the word of God right in the midst of us, we are all losing.  We all are losing.  The word of the Living God is given to the prophet for the whole community, nation, and world. 
We are spending time looking for that Word in people who are no longer here while I am certain that if we talked to each other and listened to each other across generations, we would hear the Word of the Living God once again. 
God . . . calls.   And in return, we are asked to be present, to show up, and know that there is work to be done.   May we have the courage to speak and also the courage to listen so that none of the words of the Living God fall to the ground.  Amen. 




[1] I have tried to source this quote from Dr. West but have been unable to find it.  I have heard him say it several different times so I feel confident using it.  I apologize for not being able to source it.  A part of the quote can be found here, Adam Serwer, “All the President’s Frenemies,” The American Prospect, September 21, 2011.  http://prospect.org/article/all-presidents-frenemies.
[2] Margot Adler, “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin,” NPR, March 15, 2009.  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101719889
[3]Amanda Dawkins, "'Unsung hero' of boycott paved way for Parks," The Huntsville Times, p. 6B, February 7, 2005.
[4] “The Inner Life of Rebellion, Interview with Parker Palmer and Courtney Martin,” OnBeing with Krista Tippett, January 8, 2015.  http://onbeing.org/program/transcript/7194#main_content.  “Five Habits of the Heart That Make Democracy Possible Study Guide,” p. 2.  http://www.couragerenewal.org/PDFs/Five-Habits-of-the-Heart.pdf.   

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