Red Bison Faith: Akbaakuxshé: Second Sunday after Epiphany, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday, "Taking our faith to the casket," January 19, 2020

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Second Sunday after Epiphany, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday, "Taking our faith to the casket," January 19, 2020

Epiphany A2

John 1:29-42

January 19, 2020

The annual celebration of the life, ministry, and dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., will continue with a worship service we host today at 3:00 p.m. I got a chance to do a joint interview with the preacher for this afternoon, an attorney at Russ Plath law firm here in Billings. I want her to be my friend. Seriously, she is a powerful person bent on justice, a new member of Not In Our Town. I look forward to the message she has for the Billings community.

During this time when we remember King, I’d like to turn to the story of Emmett Till, a young Chicago boy who traveled to Mississippi to stay with his great uncle, Moses Wright, in the late summer of 1955. Three days after arriving in Money, Mississippi, Emmitt joined a group of teenagers to purchase refreshments at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, a white owned store, catering to sharecroppers. Some of the teenagers outside the store claimed that they heard Emmitt whistle at Carolyn Bryant, after he entered the store to purchase bubble gum.

Four days later, at 2:30 in the morning, Emmitt was kidnapped from his uncle’s home by Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy, and Roy’s half-brother. For an offer of money, Roy and his half-brother later described brutally beating Emmett Till, taking Emmett to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, shooting Emmett in the head, fastening a large metal fan used for ginning cotton to Emmett Till’s neck with barbed wire, and pushing Emmett’s body into the river.

Emmett’s body was later retrieved from the Tallahatchie River and identified by his uncle who recognizes the body from a ring his mother, Mamie Till, had given Emmett in memory of his father, a casualty in World War II. Emmett’s casket was sent to Chicago where his mother collapsed in grief when she first saw his body.

Mamie Till decided to have an open casket funeral, Emmett’s head so brutally beaten that it is five times the size it was when he left Chicago for Mississippi. Thousands of people in Chicago waited in line to see Emmett’s brutally beaten body. Jet magazine and the newspaper, The Chicago Defender, published photos of Emmett’s brutally beaten body. Roy Bryant and his half-brother were later acquitted of the kidnapping of Emmett Till by an all-white, all-male jury after that jury deliberated for 67 minutes.[1]

I know it is strange to say but, as a church pastor, I lose faith quite a bit. This week I took what I thought was a necessary trip out to Yellowstone so I could walk two miles into the Lamar Valley with the new hiking boots I got from my mom for Christmas. I walked two miles into the Lamar Valley entering near the Soda Butte landmark, using the Lamar River’s edge to make sure I wasn’t stepping in too deep of snow. I yelled and screamed at God on the way in, “Don’t you see me?” I yelled. “Don’t you see what I am trying to do here?” I screamed. “Why won’t you answer me?” I bawled and cried, wanting my rather charmed life to be different. I sat on a tree log and ate my yogurt cup, and then started to make the walk back. Almost immediately, snow began to fall and the wind blew such that it was a white-out. I couldn’t see much in front of me, and my tracks back covered quickly. I was now in waist deep snow with every step and my right foot began to sting. I kept walking, hoping the bridge across the river would show. But I had missed it about a half mile to the west. And I looked down and it looked like my foot had broken through my boot. No, it was just that my boot had been sucked off my foot in some of that deep snow. And I wasn’t retracing my steps to find my boot. I had to walk another mile and a half with one boot and a sock. And there were times when I fell and wondered briefly, with wolves howling in the distance, whether my faith means anything.

And I am moved and measured by people like Mamie Till who go through great tragedies, incredible trauma, and demand that their personal and communal pain mean something in the world. They wring it out of the situation in a way that dwarfs the yelling and screaming I did in Yellowstone.

I so desperately want religious faith to mean something. I want it to be more than a pomp and circumstance that acquits me of my sin every week and helps me get by. I want it to be about existence here on earth and the gritty, real life struggles here on earth. My fear, however, is that religious faith is becoming more and more marginalized. My fear is that religious faith has become irrelevant and has become a sideshow for the comfortable and guilt-ridden.

Jim Wallis, former editor of the Christian evangelical social justice magazine Sojourners, wrote a book some time back titled God’s Politics: Why the Religious Right Has it Wrong and the Left Just Doesn’t Get It. Though I have not read the book, I have read enough of Jim Wallis to imagine that he critiques those of us on the left for our inability to think that faith or religion has any power or relevance in the world.

Even during the early 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., wondered in his letter from the Birmingham jail whether the church was willing to have any relevance, willing to step out in courage to be real in the world, willing to be anything more than an “irrelevant social club.”[2] Close to 60 years later, are we still trying to bury the violence and evil of the world behind verbal niceties? Are we still unwilling come to the casket and look, still unwilling to look at the photos of those destroyed by our violence. Mamie Till opens the casket and makes us look--and the photos are published far and wide.

In our continuing New Testament scripture about the baptism of Jesus, John the Baptist points at Jesus and says, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” Such strong historical allusions would be understood by the Jewish people. “Lamb of God” refers to the lamb that is slain by the Hebrews, a reminder of the violence as its blood is put on the doorposts of the Hebrews so that the angel of death would pass over Hebrew homes. The angel of death takes all of the first born of the Egyptian sons—a reversal of Pharaoh’s declaration to kill all the Hebrew male children. At every turn, God sought to soften the heart of Pharaoh through non-violence. It was not to be. The angel of death comes to liberate the Hebrew people; while death-giving to all that prevents their liberation.

Making the connection, Jesus is the “Lamb of God” who takes away the sin. Sin is defined as political and economic slavery and oppression. Jesus and his relationship with his community point the way to liberation and unmask and lay open all the violence and death brought by its systems and structures. While the Lamb of God worries about real life and death issues, we, in the Christian church, have sometimes trivialized religious faith by becoming overwrought with personal sin and guilt. Although I do believe God cares about the way our personal sin and guilt interacts and is in relationship with others, I also believe that God cares little about setting up some scoring system where rights and wrongs are enumerated.

God cares about the salvation of the world—a place where we move and breathe and lay open the truth in life-giving ways. That we care less about how we and others are to be perfectly moral, and care more about how what we do brings life into the world. That we care less about how we pray, and care more about how we shall plead and lay bare the broken and hurting places in our community and world. Are we able to look at the lamb upon the cross and say, “No more. Never again in our world. We shall be resolute and struggle so that crosses no longer appear on Golgotha.” Or is the cross we wear merely a fashion statement, a Christian nicety to remind us of our morality?

Remember one of the turning points in the Viet Nam War? The results of the violence, the body bags, were beamed onto the television screens in the United States. In today’s tightly controlled media messaging, the government remembers its mistakes and controls when the results of death and violence come home. How often are we made to look at the results of violence and war? When will be the caskets be opened?

Mamie Tilll, way back in 1955, at the funeral of her fourteen year old son, stepped up to the lectern at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago and said: “I don’t have a minute to hate. I’ll pursue justice for the rest of my life.”[3] In opening the coffin of her son, Emmitt Till, Mamie said, “No more. Never again in my world. I shall struggle and be resolute so that lynchings never again happen in this country.”

So, my sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins. I beg of you to live as Mamie Till. I beg of you to say no more, to say never again. I beg of you to make the church relevant and to be willing to look hard at the pain and trauma of the world until you say, “No more lynchings. No more crucifixions.” I beg of you to find faith by recognizing that it is often found among those who believe their trauma is not ordained by Creator but that Creator is ordaining a revolution of values. I beg of you to listen to words of Dr. King as he spoke to Riverside Church in New York:

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just."[4]

May we have the courage to take our faith to the caskets of the world, to see faith in the grit of the every day and live out of an understanding that God wants us to move from personal narratives to a broader and wider justice.

Amen.