C Proper 28 33
Ord Stewardship BFC 2016
2 Thessalonians
3:6-13
November 13,
2016
I
use the quote often but this is one of those Sundays I need it to frame my
sermon. My Pastoral Theology professor,
Peggy Way, used to say, “Christianity is coming to the table to talk about the
impossible things.” The Scripture read
for today reminds us that we are called to work toward healthy community. And that is true, as much for our country, as
it is for Billings, as it is for our local church community. Building community is hard work. Building God’s Beloved Community is even
harder work—requiring our participation, our mutuality, and our courage.
With
that explanation for what I am about to do, I launch myself headlong into the
events of this past week. Evident in our
own community, permission seems to have been given for hatred, bullying, and
bigotry. In turn, I have become aware of
a number of people, strong people, adults and young persons, who feel
vulnerable and are afraid. Mass protests
are in the streets of our cities, suicide hotlines are overloaded, and a
teacher at Senior High School reported that while the LGBTQ community is
especially vulnerable right now other students are proudly wearing their red
hats. I’ll leave the reasons for why
this is happening to someone else or for another day, but I do know we, as
Christians, are told that the Living God draws close and finds solidarity with
the most vulnerable and hurting in the world. The anxiety and fear all of us
are facing in the world seems to be assembling kindling for something even more
explosive.
And
that anxiety and fear is being sometimes realistically stoked from all sides of
the societal argument. I know I find
myself incredibly anxious and fearful. One
of the climate scientists I regularly read, Michael Mann, from Penn State, said
that any fear one has about the presidential election should diminish in favor
of what may be already a done deal for the planet.
Presidential historian Doris Kearns
Goodwin often talks about the time at the turn of the 19th Century,
during the Industrial Revolution, as one similar to ours. It was a time of great anxiety and fear about
the change going on all around the country.
Telegrams and telephones sped up the pace of life. Many rural folk were losing their
livelihood, feeling left out, and exiting small towns to urban settings. The gap between rich and poor grew. A large influx of immigration made many
fearful of having their place set aside in the world and losing their
livelihood. Populist candidates
emerged. Goodwin notes that the anxiety
and fear can create a want for the country to call forward a demagogue who
promises to be savior and solve the ills of the nation. What was needed, Goodwin said in an interview
this week, was a sharpening of that rhetoric around anxiety and change to bring
about real solutions.
Enter Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt was able to mobilize Congress to
change the working hours for women and children, to deal with the exploitation
in factories, and to draw boundaries around larger industry swallowing up
smaller industry.[1] I offer that not to say everything will be
alright. There is already enough water
under the bridge to prove that will not be true. And I don’t want to diminish any of the pain
you all might experience around this whole process, what happened in the election
on Tuesday, and what has happened since.
I do want to offer some context
provided by documentary film maker Michael Moore this past week. Many of you know him as someone who is very
far left on the political spectrum and has done movies emanating from his home
area of Flint, Michigan, to be critical of right wing politics. In a post-election interview, Moore shared
that he had voted for Hillary and urged us all to confront violence or hatred aimed
at any one of the vulnerable communities President-elect Trump may have
unleashed with his rhetoric and actions.
He was vehement in saying that clearly racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and
homophobia were a part of what got President-elect Trump elected. But, he said, we miss some of the point if we
think States like Michigan and Wisconsin went “red” because they were
racist. Those same two States went to
Obama in two elections. There were two
incidents, he believes, that were instructive.
First, he talked about his love for President
Obama—how he adores the man. But
President Obama came to Flint, Michigan, five months ago, while the water there
was still poisoned by lead, literally killing people and poisoning the lives of
children who had gone from straight-A students to becoming children with
chronic health problems, unable to go to school, unable to concentrate and do
any school work. There in Flint, five
months ago, President Obama drank the water when it was still poison as a way
of saying to Flint residents, “All is well.”
And all was not well. The pipes
had not been fixed. Change needed to
happen. And water is life, right? Moore said, “It was like a knife in the heart
of the people of Flint, a black city.”
From that point forward, there were no news stories about Flint’s poison
water supply. President Obama’s actions had sealed those off.
The second incident was at the town hall meeting
debate. Those of you who saw the debate
may remember that there was a woman from Flint, Lee-Ann Walters who stood to
ask about the water supply. Her twin
five-year old children were poisoned, and she thinks her question is being
heard for the first time. Walters'
five-year-old twins were both harmed by drinking the lead-tainted water. She
said one of her sons has not grown in two years and both suffer from hand-eye
coordination and speech issues tied to the lead poisoning.
Walters said she and her whole family have rashes
to this day from the water, which they still cannot drink. What Walters found out later is that Democratic
National Committee leader, Donna Brazile, had fed the question to Hillary
Clinton. A week before the election,
this mother showed up on television in Michigan to say, “I was used. I was nothing but a prop for the Democratic
Party. Hillary should have been disqualified
from the election.” Lee-Ann Walters said that it was probably the first
presidential election she would not vote in.
Moore went on to share that
Hillary Clinton lost in Michigan by 11,000 votes. Meanwhile, 90,000 Michigan voters left their
ballots unfilled for the Presidential candidates, done with the process,
refusing to vote—voted for every office and every proposal on both sides of the
ballot but refused to vote for president.
They could not vote for Trump, Moore opined, but they could not
participate in a system that had forgotten them and left them at bay—many of
them African Americans who had seen their public common destroyed, their
children poisoned by water, used only as a means to an end even by the
Democratic Party.[2]
What I want you to hear in that is
that the language and actions of President-elect Trump were not the only
deciding factor in this election, so that we might see each other and the pain
in each of our lives. I want us to rally
and be the church that once again says, over and over again, “We see you. Not in my town! Not yesterday. Not today.
Not tomorrow. We will meet your
violent force and hate with a soul force that is two somethings deeper through
nonviolent confrontational action that will not only seek to transform our
community and our country but also ourselves; so that the racism, xenophobia,
misogyny and homophobia that is in all of us as people who are immersed in
these systems and structures, will be transformed as well. We need to be in those struggles so that we
affirm in our own selves that we are the Beloved Children of God down to our
last red blood cell with whom God wants to work and shape and form to become
God’s Beloved Community. Struggle is the
only way this happens.
Hear that in the Scripture verse for
this morning. The teacher is chastising
people who have become an audience rather than a congregation. “Anyone unwilling to work should not
eat.” This is not about rich and
poor. This is about some who are sitting
idly by waiting for Jesus to come again while the rest of the community does
the hard work of transforming themselves, their communities, and the
world. It is hard work. It is struggle. It is about a mutuality. We cannot wait for the next savior to come
around to solve our problems. We must
be active participants in our own transformation.
Now there is a caution I add for
myself. For a straight, white male like
myself, I understand that what I say can sound cavalier. Sometimes the worst parts of being the oldest
of four, the big brother, rise up in me. I see pain out in our community, people I love
threatened, and I want to say, (breaking
imaginary bottle and holding it out in front of me), “I will cut you if you
hurt one of the people I love. Go
ahead. Do it. I will cut you.” And that really adds nothing to the necessary
confrontation that sometimes needs to take place, or the dialog and
conversation, even the listening.
Part
of my job is to show such solidarity that my fate is tied to the fortune of
others. Some of you are already part of
vulnerable communities that shouldn’t have to take on any more bullets. People like me are now called to become more
intentional about entering into the struggle.
And if you do not see that happening, I hope you will challenge me.
An old Jewish saying says, “A miracle
changes things for a moment in time.
Struggle changes things forever.”
We may be in that time where struggle is necessary. For me, it calls to mind the great speech
given by African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a speech that was
almost a foretelling of the Civil War. In
that speech, Douglass mentioned the African leader Cinque who was a part of
that historic event in our church’s history, the Amistad event. Douglass spoke in August of 1857, four years
before the Civil War.
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole
history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to
her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been
exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other
tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle
there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate
agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without
thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many
waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it
may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes
nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.[3]
No matter who
you voted for in this last election, we are now called to oppose the rhetoric
and actions of hatred, abuse, and violence being threatened and acted upon in
our community and nation. We are to
affirm everyone as Beloved Children of God.
We are not to be idol bystanders, freeloaders when so much is at
stake.
If Doris Kearns Goodwin is right, we
may very well be standing on the precipice of revolutionary change that will
bring goodness, health, and light to our world.
It is not waiting for another Teddy Roosevelt. It is entering the struggle to begin shaping
the anxiety and fear into a movement that seeks transformative change for our
world. Of all faith communities in
Billings, I would expect it to begin with none other than us. We are not spiritually strong because of our
numbers, the cheeks in the seats as it were.
Ha! That is the ecclesiastical prosperity
gospel and it runs counter to the theology of the cross. We are spiritually strong because of a
faithfulness that is already in engaged in our community and world out of deep
compassion and love and a belief in the power and strength of women, a belief
in the gifts and power of the LGBTQ community, a love and hospitality for immigrants,
a gratitude for the gifs and leadership of people of color, and even a
certainty in the unique truths people who have a faith that is vastly different
than our own can teach us.
Let us affirm that the awful roar, the
thunder and the lightening of our time is a sure sign that change is about to
take place. And walking with God, not as
idle bystanders, we can be the people who begin to shape and form what that
change will look like for our children and grandchildren. So that all of us might be seen, let us begin
the slow and sure work of struggle to plow up the field so that we may reap the
food of justice. And that this beloved
community of God may lead the way. Amen.
[1] “Doris Kearns Goodwin
Explains What We Can Learn from the 2016 Election,” History News Network, November 9, 2016, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164371.; “Doris Kearns Goodwin on
BBC News,” Doris Kearns Goodwin,
November 8, 2016, http://www.doriskearnsgoodwin.com/video-146.html.
[2] “Morning Joe: Michael Moore joins wide-ranging election
talk,” MSNBC, November 11, 2016, http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/michael-moore-joins-wide-ranging-election-talk-806604867876.
[3]Frederick Douglas, “West
India Emancipation,” Canadaigua, New York, August 3, 1857, http://www.blackpast.org/1857-frederick-douglass-if-there-no-struggle-there-no-progress#sthash.ViFvf7RX.dpuf.
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