A Easter 5 BFC 2020
Acts 7:55-60; 1 Peter 2:1-10
May 10, 2020
About six years ago, I waited with
some anxiety in the Fellowship Hall at Pilgrim Congregational Church in Bozeman
as the search committee from Billings First Congregational Church decided
whether they would ask me to return to Montana to give a trial sermon at 310 N.
27th. It was taking an unusually long
amount of time. My kids were giving me
pep talks to try to allay my fears. “It
was a great sermon, Dad! They’d be crazy
. . . “ I barely heard what they were saying as I contemplated whether it was a
smart move to talk about zombies, the apocalypse, and the resurrection all in one
neutral pulpit sermon. The search committee returned to let me know
that they would indeed like to schedule a trial sermon. Whew! Zombies
saved the day!
Aaron
Blakeslee later told me that what took so long was the search committee had to
decide whether the congregation would be ready for me. Six years later . . . well? Probably yes and no, right? Regardless, I have been honored to serve at
this courageous and prophetic church for six years. And to realize that this is the last sermon I
shall deliver to you . . . all bends and
bows my heart with sadness and gratitude.
In
a simple way, in the preaching and teaching I have done, what I have tried to
do is to pull the Divine close so that you might know it not so far away or
distant or untouchable. In the same
manner, I hope you have heard me name the everyday in your lives as
Divine. I think I have repeated to Lisa
three or four times over the last couple of weeks that if we don’t get the
reality of Creator involved, invested, and incarnate in the material, ordinary
bases of life as a planet, I think we will create a future that turns that
material bases of life into wilderness and hellscape. At the same time, if Creator is not more
transcendent than just our individual narratives, we will find ourselves
hoarding and clutching for what is left never recognizing that what is the
stranger, or the different, or the alien might actually redeem or save us. This is a paradox of faith I hope is endemic
to what you have heard me teach, and preach, and, on my best days, seen me live
out.
Annie
Proulx’s novel, The Shipping News, centers on a rather ordinary, clumsy,
rough-around-the-edges guy named Quoyle.
When he was young, his father threw him into water without teaching him
how to swim. His brother, the favorite
of his father, referred to Quoyle as Snotface, Ugly Pig, Warthog, Stupid,
Stinkbomb, and Greasebag. Quoyle was
physically oafish and ugly. His parents
completed joint suicide. He ended up in
a heart-rending marriage with a woman who treated him terribly, cheated on him,
and then left him with two children.
The
story is not only about Quoyle, but about a whole community of people in
Newfoundland, the home of his ancestors, who believe themselves to be beyond
the reach of a good and healthy life, beyond the gaze of God, beyond
redemption. Quoyle arrives back “home” to
some suspicion as his ancestors were considered unsavory characters--thieves,
murderers, and pirates. All they have
left him, the only thing Quoyle has to hang onto, is the house on the
coastland. But even the house is thrown
into the sea by a huge storm.
With
the sun rarely peeking through the clouds in this Newfoundland community, it
appears that Quoyle and his small village are caught in that old Hee-Haw song,
“Gloom, despair, and agony on me. Deep,
dark depression, excessive misery. If it
weren’t for bad luck, we’d have no luck at all.” Quoyle’s life mirrors the life of his
community. They walk through trauma
after trauma in a relentlessly gray existence.
Although
Quoyle acts with a fundamental goodness and earnestness, life seems to have dealt
him a hand from which he will never recover.
No redemption seems possible.[1]
One
of the most profound studies we did together as a church was a text on the
Gospel of Mark, titled, Re-reading the Gospel of Mark Amidst Trauma and Loss. The book helped us to see the Gospel of Mark
anew as it reflected on the crippling oppression, the imperfect lives of people
living in poverty and deprivation, amidst rampant disease and deformity. At the end of the Gospel of Mark, we seem to
be left with far more questions than answers.
When trauma after trauma is the Biblical reality, is redemption even
within reach?
It
is why I love Bob Marley’s tune, “Redemption Songs.” Marley reflects on the story of the Biblical
Joseph and his coat of many colors—betrayed by his brothers, left in a pit to
die, picked up by pirates and sold into slavery in Egypt, falsely accused, and
finally imprisoned. Trauma after trauma,
weight after weight, and yet Marley sings, “All we ever have is redemption
songs.” In singing with Jesus, Marley
asks, “How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?” He
closes asking for participation, to help him sing songs of freedom, to join in
singing and bringing into reality redemption songs. This simple song, so full of wisdom, is
mindful of how difficult life can be, trauma after trauma. But asking us to speak with a strong voice
and join hands in singing redemption songs.
Our
Scriptural story from the Acts of the Apostles this morning is the stoning of
Stephen with a young man named Saul looking on as a bystander as Stephen,
considered the first Christian martyr, is stoned to death.. Saul sees no hope, no possible redemption for
people like Stephen, and so . . . Stephen must be stoned. The verse following the lectionary passage
for today says as Saul is holding the coats of those who stone Stephen, “Now
Saul was consenting to Stephen’s execution.”
As some point, Saul must have
reflected on this part of his story, as we, the readers, are led to reflect on
that very same narrative. Is Saul beyond
the pale? Unworthy of redemption? We know how the story plays out, how Saul
hears God’s call and becomes the apostle Paul, the evangelist for the very
people he had been persecuting. Injustice
upon injustice, Saul consents to the death of Stephen. His later blindness is a manifestation of his
soul’s inability to see any good outside himself and his own people, his need
to do violence to others is about defending the turf of him and his people.
Do
we really believe in such redemption? In
this story is such violence, such trauma.
How can Paul possibly go on knowing who he was and the violence and
cruelty to which he consented?
This
is the Biblical story—filled with human, sometimes wounded and traumatized and
lowly people, sometimes people with a terrible past and having done horrific acts. Yet many piece together a life out of a sense
that redemption songs are not only possible but probable when Creator is seen
at work in their everyday, material lives in ways that only required eyes to
see beauty and wonder and miracle.
But
many of us might see ourselves as a Quoyle.
We go through trauma after trauma, wondering if it will end, if we will
ever fall under the gaze of God. Some of
us experience tgloom and misery on an everyday basis, struggling with
depression, mental illness, or even chronic physical pain. Maybe we are in a painful relationship where
we cannot possibly see newness for ourselves now or in the future. Worse yet, maybe it is our whole people or
community that endures trauma after trauma as the Jewish people did in the
First Century. Such that our individual
resilience to future traumas is compromised because our whole community or
people struggles.
For
others, it is a season, a time of life when we wonder if we will ever see the
sun peeking through the clouds again. If
we are lucky, maybe we go through it as just a time in our lives, as part of
the human experience. Maybe we feel it
tied to the deep concerns and alarms of the world, wondering if the next crisis
will arrive to obliterate us, lay us flat.
Some
of us know ourselves as Saul. We are
caught in patterns of everyday violence and cruelty and we don’t know how to
stop, so we just continue to defend our fragile existence fearing that what
little dignity we have will be taken from us by those who are different, or
alien, or not like us. We circle the
wagons—refusing to make the necessary change.
Maybe we are just bystanders to the violence. But we are blinded so strongly by a need to
defend that we will never lift our voice with the Divine to sing a song that
might not only bring redemption to our community but to ourselves as well.
Maybe
many of us are both people.
Through stories and sermons, most of you
probably know that my faith is informed by time I spent in Latin America. I would say that I went to Latin America
without faith, thinking religious faith too Pollyanna, without grit, not
believing that God had anything to say into the real world of pain, trauma, and
loss.
In
late 1991, a call went out to people in the United States to provide
accompaniment for Guatemalan refugees who believed it was time to return to
their homeland after years in exile in southern Mexico. Over 200,000 people fled across the border
from Guatemala in the 1980s as General Efrain Rios Montt, who seized the
presidency by military coup, savagely
slaughtered indigenous communities, estimates of killing over 70,000 Mayan
people, and persecuted any journalist,
human rights worker, or organization who stood in his way. When leaders of the exiled refugees called
for a return back to their homeland, they knew the situation had not improved
much. But they could not justify staying
in Mexico while others within Guatemala continued to struggle for the heart of
their homeland.
In
my year of missionary work in Chiapas, I had gone out to a few of the
Guatemalan refugee camps accompanied by my Witness for Peace friends, Barb
Wenger and Anna Utech. One camp, living
at subsistence level, had made an impression on me. When we went out to Zacaleu Zacualtipan in
the heart of the Chiapan rain forest, the small camp had scraped everything
together, taken food off their own tables, so they could to feed us that
evening. They could not imagine refusing
hospitality to their guests. One of the
leaders of our group was so impressed that he was dreaming up how he could send
mountains of supplies from UCC churches to camps like this. So he asked the leader of the camp, Miguel,
“What can we provide for you?”
Miguel
did not hesitate, “Accompaniment,” he said.
The leader of our group thought he did not understand. “No, really, we can provide many things for
you. What can we get for your
people?” Miguel half-smiled. He said again, “Accompaniment. What we need is for you to join hands with us
and walk with us, to not leave us when things get difficult, to raise your
voice for us before your government and our government. Accompany us.” Our leader knew it was the one thing he would
be unwilling to provide.
When
the call went out from Witness for Peace in 1991 to provide accompaniment for
the first return of Guatemalan refugees back to their homeland, I knew I had to
go. Just kind of knew it. In January of 1992, I headed down to the
Mexican border town of Comitán to meet up with my old friend Barb Wenger and be
part of the first return. But I had
forgotten to take my first typhoid pill as instructed so I kind of bunched them
together and ended up with a terribly upset stomach over the next two
days. I stayed home. Others went out to the eastern part of southern
Mexico where the return was starting with busses beginning to load up with
refugees. A day later, Barb asked if I
wanted to tag along to go out to Zacaleu Zacualtipan. Feeling better, I jumped at the chance.
After
a long bus ride on suspect road, we disembarked and traipsed about 15 minutes
till we reached the camp. We were
greeted with the same incredible hospitality we had experienced some years
earlier. Only this time, Miguel, now one
of the refugee leaders, was convening a meeting in the camp. We learned that the busses out east had been
stopped by the Mexican government and not allowed to go forward. “So,” Miguel said, “we will tell the
government we are leaving tomorrow. And
we will leave the next day. They will
prepare the way for us so as not to embarrass themselves.” I turned to Barb to ask if I had heard all
this right. Zacaleu Zacualtipan, this
little camp in the heart of the rain forest, was going to lead the first return
of refugees. With wide eyes, Barb
confirmed what I had heard.
Later
that day I sat with Miguel’s brother, Diego, who shared a theology of communion
that made more sense to me than any seminary class I had taken. He told me there would come a day when God
would invite the Mayan farmers to the table to eat with the business
people. The business people, in their
suits, would of course decline to eat with the farmers. As a result, the sharing of the table would
not be available to the business people. He went on and on telling me what he had
learned in base community Bible study. Diego
shared matter-of-factly that he knew he was probably walking back to his own
death—having left Guatemala in haste because he was targeted for
assassination—his wife Natalia pregnant with their first child at the
time. Now they had just had their third
child as they returned back to their homeland.
Trauma after trauma their family
had endured, here they were this small camp of indigenous farmers. But they believed God was active in seeking
redemption for their people.
Later
that night, I tried to make myself scarce, watching the lightning in the
distance as I listened to Barb talk and laugh, laugh and talk in Natalia and
Diego’s makeshift home with other women of the camp. How could a people so traumatized, so
persecuted and pursued, experience such amazing joy, believe that God was with
them? How was this so? And yet their conviction moved on me until I
began to smell God in the air, feel God on my skin, and taste God in every
piece of food they offered me. God was
no longer an abstraction.
But
I wondered what God would do with me as I held the coats of my government as
they destroyed the lives of these people. President Efrain Rios Montt had said, “We are
not killing Indians. We are burning communists,”
in reference to the attacking of over 600 indigenous villages, wiping some of
them off the map, Montt’s quote was a clear nod to President Reagan and his
warfare against communism in Latin America.
Two
days later Barb and I were on United Nations busses back to the camp. It had rained heavily the night before and
the 15 minutes it took to get from the camp to the road became difficult as mud
that would swallow your whole leg made it impossible for the elderly and those
carrying things like their corrugated metal roofs to get to the road. Most people were bleary-eyed having made the
trek over and over in the early morning through the deep mud. On the bus, Diego took out his guitar and broke
into songs of his Guatemalan homeland. I
watched Natalia as tears poured down from her face. She now carried her youngest of three and
must have wondered what it would mean to return to the country where her
husband was targeted for assassination. Natalia
looked straight ahead, tears streaming down her face, as her children played
around her.
The
caravan of busses rolled into fairgrounds at the Mexican border town of Comitán. Over the next two days busses were released
to come from eastern Mexico and they just kept coming. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchú
Tum, a Mayan Quiche woman, was there to greet them. But I could barely see her, as small as she
was in stature, the much taller
reporters gathered round her to ask questions or hear a word from her on this
historic day. As the refugees made their
way into Guatemala, indigenous people poured out into the road to greet them
and welcome them home. And the mixed
emotions that were once a part of the caravan transformed into full joy at
expressions of solidarity. I had to go back to the States but Barb’s
photos, further into Guatemala, made me aware of a grounded and grittier God
who could join with an entire people and sing redemption songs. In Miguel, Natalia, and Diego, I had been
gifted faith, a loyalty to a God who cared so little about my foibles and
failures but just wanted me to get on the road and accompany that joy, who
wanted me to be about the common project of singing redemption songs.
In
Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, it is Quoyle who helps his community recognize
that there was substance and beauty and wonder in their everyday lives as he
chronicled the incredible stories of strange and foreign ships who found harbor
along their shores. And Quoyle, himself,
began to see life differently.
With
the house of his ancestors and all their lies and crimes against him and his
family gone, he final began to understand himself as not beyond the reach of
beauty or truth or a good and healthy life and in one, incandescent moment it
happens. Proulx tells the story.
Quoyle experienced moments in all
colors, uttered brilliances, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting
stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do .
. . . For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a
broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack
in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid
ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its
back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs
without pain or misery.[2]
If
a man who consents to the violence of a people has his eyes opened to see the
possibility for the redemption songs of a crucified Christ and becomes his
evangelist, if a whole people who were persecuted and oppressed might lead a
pilgrimage back to their homeland singing redemption songs, why would we not
believe that God intends goodness and joy and redemption for us even amidst
trauma and loss, foibles and failures?
It
was into the pain and trauma and loss of a poor and ordinary people that one of
the early Christian teachers said to the forgotten of the world: “You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a
holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts
of God who called you out of night into the marvelous light.”
As
I leave you with the incomparable soon-to-be Rev. Lisa Harmon as your pastor, I
pray that you will now live into that sacred identity, not written for the
elite and the wealthy, the fortunate sons and privileged daughters, but for
those who join with God in singing with Guatemalan farmers the world’s
redemption songs. May you know yourselves as that royal
priesthood. Amen.
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