One of the only reasons I remain in
ordained ministry is because I believe what we do in church matters—not just to
us as individuals but to our community, to our nation, and to the wider
world. And so, when I first started at
this blessed church, with verses from First and Second Samuel staring at me in
the Revised Common Lectionary, I thought it important to share with you all the
deep anti-authoritarian thread that is found deep within our tradition. In this moment in time, I would want you to
engage your family members, your neighbors, and your government officials with
a faith that says, “What my faith tells me is this, that when all the power
flows in one direction, this is directly counter to the will and desire of God. For it is God’s grand wish that power be
shared, that the vulnerable be protected, and that the least of these—the poor,
the morning, the imprisoned, the stranger, the land and the water—are dear to
God’s heart.
We heard that in Scripture verses chosen by the
families of Fred Gibby and Maria Melcher this week as a way that defined who
they were in the world and how their faith was lived out as members of Pilgrim
Congregational United Church of Christ.
In listening to their family members define their lives, I heard them state
with great confidence who Fred and Maria were and are. They are now our faith ancestors who form a
cloud of witnesses, a communion of saints, ancestors who walk with us so that
we might walk confidently before our elected officials and say, “I know God’s
heart. And I demand, by that heart, that
you act accordingly.” I truly believe
that it was only those kinds of courageous statements, often made by every day
people, that saved our country from going headlong into an authoritarianism
based in white evangelical Christendom—an authoritarianism that still threatens
us all.
Three
years ago, Stephanie Wilkerson, owner of the Red Hen farm-to-table restaurant
in Lexington, Virginia, had been called by the chef to tell her that President
Trump’s Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, had arrived with a group of
people at the restaurant. The staff was
concerned. What should they do? Stephanie hopped in her car and headed down
to the restaurant. It was true. Sanders, party of eight, had taken their seats
and were eating from the cheese boards.
She knew what the Trump Administration had meant to many of her
employees, several of them identifying as members of the LGBTQ+ community. Wilkerson quickly huddled with her staff and
asked them what they would have her do.
The staff wanted to ask Sanders and her party to leave. Wilkinson asked Sanders to step outside with
her and said, “I explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I
feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation. I said, ‘I’d like to ask you to leave.’” Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party left,
with Sanders then tweeting out her displeasure.
It was the week of July the 4th, one week
and three years ago to the day when we celebrate the values of our country, a
remembrance, sometimes, of where we have grossly failed, a grand experiment in
democracy we may never get fully right, and the peculiar idea of the United
States as a country where e pluribus
unum—“out of many, one.” The common
idea of a monolithic state where the one person or one faith dictating to the
many has been tried and tried and been found morally wanting. “One person, one vote” is that sense that we
are all participants in this grand experiment, our voice and our basic life,
liberty, and pursuit of happiness matters, such that when others try to usurp,
fabricate, or manipulate away from not only our equal protection but also the
common good, something is amiss and we must engage and confront.
So it was that on July 2nd, three years
ago, middle-school teacher Kristin Mink was out for lunch with her two year-old
son when she noticed the then Environmental Protection Agency Administrator,
Scott Pruitt, out for lunch as well. She
loaded her son on her hip, her son an important part of shaping her values, and
headed over to Pruitt’s table. She began
Hi. I just wanted to
urge you to resign for what you are doing to the environment in our
country. This is my son. He loves
animals. He loves clean air. He loves clean water. Meanwhile, you’re slashing
strong fuel standards for cars and trucks for the benefit of big corporations.
You’ve been paying about 50 bucks a night to stay in a D.C. condo that’s
connected to an energy lobbying firm, while approving their dirty sands
pipeline. We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who
actually does protect our environment, somebody who believes in climate change
and takes it seriously for the benefit of all of us, including our children.
So, I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out.[1]
When she was finished, Scott Pruitt thanked her.[2] Three days later, Pruitt did resign, most
assuredly not from the singular confrontation of Kristin Mink, as Mink herself
knew of the number of people who have called him out. But any embarrassment or shame or dishonor
Pruitt experienced on that day came from a person who spoke and carried her
values plainly, truthfully, forthrightly, in a confrontational, non-violent
manner. Just the week before, Kristin
Mink had been arrested at the Hart Senate Office Building for protesting the
separation of children from their parents at our country’s border with Mexico.[3]
Whether it is Karen Mink with her two-year-old son
or Stephanie Wilkerson with her Red Hen staff, love shows a willingness to
align ourselves with others and not let go, not turn away, to show up and stand
up. Justice is love with legs on, what
love looks like in public.[4]
We need to get back to basics—to tunnel down to who
we are in relationship to Creator, to the good earth Creator is continuing to
shape and form, to each other as blessed partners in mutual care and public
love for one another. We do that, I
believe, by beginning to affirm that we know what God intends for us—life, rest,
love, play, and joy.
Some of us can feel that in our bones. Others need to engage practices to get that
into our bloodstream: practices like
counting our blessings, regular movements in prayer, gratitude, meditation, and
the stretch and pull of our bodies sunward.
Still others are like me growing up in the midst of evangelical Christianity. It is not in my bones. Some of us have been so beaten down, hear
another message so much in our lives, that we have to fake it till we make
it: teach and preach it so much that it
gets into us, ask good friends and colleagues to hem us in with their love,
wisdom, and warning, use our imagination, science fiction, to see the world not
how it us but how God wills it, desires it, with us in it—living surrounded and
embraced in love, rest, play, and joy, or even call our good ancestors to bear
to remind us who we are—our sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, siblings
and cousins from another realm who encircle us and urge us on.
That is
one of the basics. One of the other
basics is the birth story of the Jewish people, the Exodus. The Children of Israel were victims of abuse
and exploitation, enslaved in bondage by the most powerful nation of the age,
Egypt. It is the mark of compassion that
God identifies with them, promises to release them from bondage, and delivers them. God would not let go, did not turn away,
showed up and stood up. In the same way,
the Jewish people were held captive in Exile.
The most powerful nation of the age, Babylon, razed the Jewish Temple,
salted the promised land, and carted off the best and brightest to sing the
songs of Zion in a foreign land. In that
foreign land, God identifies with the Jewish people in compassion, promises to
return them from exile, and delivers them.
God would not let go, did not turn away, showed up and stood up. The action of God in Israel's past history is
to ground and shape Israel's own continuing action on behalf of those
comparably abused and marginalized.”[5]
The
prophets were those reluctant leaders who held onto the plight of the people in
one hand, asked for God’s mercy, and held the hand of God in the other,
unwilling to let go of a character that demanded compassion for people in their
own nation who might identify as Hebrew slaves in Egypt or Jewish exiles in
Babylon in another age.[6]
Earlier in
chapter 7, the prophet Amos pleads for the people, begs as an intermediary for
God’s mercy. But now a plumb line has
been established, a way to say that God’s compassionate character for the
economically poor and the socially outcast cannot abide by systemic evil found
in Israel. The way must be made
straight. In an ode to the Exodus story,
God can no longer “pass over” this violence, injustice, and evil. God must pass through--wreaking desolation
and waste on the halls of the political power and the signs and symbols of
spiritual collaboration and corruption.[7]
Indeed. Amos is regularly preaching at Beth-el,
literally meaning, “the house of God”, that place where Jacob encountered the
Divine. The ruling priest at Bethel,
Amaziah, shows just how coopted he is by the political establishment. Rather than assert the freedom intended to
provide necessary critique to the political establishment as a spiritual leader,
Amaziah wants Amos to stop preaching at Bethel. In verse 13, Amaziah sends out
an edict, “Don't
prophesy anymore at Bethel, because this is the king's sanctuary
and the temple of the kingdom.”
“With those words the religious justification of political
empire is complete, and faith is reduced to patriotic cheer-leading.”[8]
Hebrew
Scripture scholar, Terence Fretheim, penned an article way back in 2008,
titled, “The Prophets and Social Justice:
A Conservative Agenda.”
Fretheim’s point was that social justice was not a new morality or a
novel analysis. He writes, “In promoting
social justice, the prophets were religious conservatives. They built on the
ancient traditions of Israel and the central promises of God to call Israel to
attend to issues of justice on behalf of the oppressed.”[9] What the prophets did do differently and
creatively and new in each age, Fretheim observed, was to figure out how to
“get in the face” and “under the skin” of the rulers, public officials, and
religious elite, often at great sacrifice.
Those signs of God’s creative love are
breaking out everywhere and we best pay attention to recognize that the Divine is
seeking ways to make love public. It
might be a Parkland, Florida, student, with stubborn, opportunistic discipline,
in love for their classmates, asking an elected official to not take one more
dime from the NRA as a way to move through thoughts and prayers to real action
to curb gun violence. Or it might be an
organization of kayakers, in love of the earth, who will not allow an
oil-drilling rig moored in Seattle to leave port to make its way up to Alaska. It could be Native people who continue to
hold camp steadfastly in northern Minnesota in prayer and wisdom, for the love
of water, to stop the advancement of a pipeline that crosses the Mississippi
River twice, drilled down this past week and hit a valued aquifer, and threatens
the wild rice fields of the Anishinaabe people in breaking their treaty rights,
considered the supreme Law of the Land.
Do you feel it? It is the love of God, bubbling up among
those who know those communal values, who know words like “community” and
“citizen” and “family” are defined far wider and broader than what the
domination system tells us. We define
those words in a way that is far more long-standing, in a way that might sound new
or novel but in a way that is Biblical and ancient and religiously conservative
to attend to issues of justice on behalf of the oppressed. Amos defines God as a lioness, on the hunt,
on the prowl, her feet padding out of the den to say, “Enough! No more!
It is time to restore the ancient values on which the good earth was
created.” She roars and she is
ready. And I am asking you to be
prophets with God.
I think, somewhere along the line, we were
told that religion makes us into nice, civil people. We are supposed to be nice. I just don’t see it. Not with these cantankerous
prophets—tambourine players, shepherds, stutterers, and carpenters. Not with this wild God who seems much happier
in a tent than in a palace, is found changing the world more out in the desert
and wilderness than in the halls of Congress, and on this day is coursing in
you to bring about the transformation of this community and this country.
Pshaw, you say. Not happening you say. In every time, there will be religious
leaders like Amaziah who try to shut you up and tell you not to preach. We are part of a long-standing tradition, a
conservative tradition, a Biblical tradition, that will not shut up. In the time of Christ, the religious elite
tried to quiet the crowds, and Jesus knew.
He knew that God would have the very stones sing out if the crowds were
quieted.
Why are we losing hope? God’s movement is breaking out all across our
country. All it requires is for us to
enter the struggle in love. As
Christians, we are called to do this confrontation non-violently, with a
discipline and wisdom that represents our freedom apart from any political
party. We seek transformative justice. We do
not confront, or get under the skin, or get in the face to do what I call “garbage
can protests”—where we feel content hearing our own voices or seeing our own
signs from two blocks away. We find
creative ways, opportunistic ways to confront with deeply held, Fretheim’s
basic, conservative values seeking transformation. And we also do this confrontation with an
idea of what we will do next. Then we
keep practicing and practicing and practicing until what was once on the skin,
gets under the skin, what was under the skin gets into the bloodstream, what
was in the bloodstream gets typed on every, last red blood cell found in the
body politic. Amos defined it as letting
justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing
stream. It just keeps rolling and
flowing. All we have to do is rock and
roll, get in the flow.
Basic, conservative faith
tradition. Nothing new. Nothing novel. It was the daughter of the assassinated
indigenous land and water protector, Berta Cáceres, her daughter, Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres who said when a U.S. trained former military
officer and businessman was found guilty in Honduran court:
We
recognize this as a step toward justice, as a victory for the communities
around the world who have accompanied us through this process in solidarity. …
We urge the international and national communities to continue their efforts
against impunity in Honduras and to support the efforts of social and popular
organizations. In the words of our Berta Cáceres, we reiterate that justice is
built by the grassroots from our daily work with the defense of our
territories, the fulfillment of our life projects and the constant fight
against inequities and injustices.
In true
faith, after reading this statement, the crowd shouted back, “¡Berta no murió, se multiplicó!” Berta did not die. She multiplied. It is
the true fear of those in power, that love in justice will not remain dead but
that the blood of the martyrs might be the seed for our collective soil. As Amos might say, “Justice rolls down like
waters. Righteousness like an
ever-flowing stream.”
You are
loved. Do not fear. In love, God seeks the transformation of
oppression, abuse, exploitation, and domination. In the public square. With legs on. God is on the move. Ready to roar. We best walk together. Amen.
[1] Kristin Mink, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXLIsLLlLIA.
Kristin Mink, “Meet the Mother Who
Confronted Scott Pruitt & Urged Him to Resign—Three Days Later, He Did,” Democracy Now!, July 6, 2018, https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/6/meet_the_mother_who_confronted_scott.
[2]
Bonnie Fuller, “Kristin Mink: 5 Things
to Know About Teacher Who Told Scott Pruitt to Resign in a Restaurant,” Hollywood Life, July 3, 2018, https://hollywoodlife.com/2018/07/03/who-is-kristin-mink-confronted-scott-pruitt-restaurant/.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]Dr.
Cornel West, of course.
[5]
Terence E. Fretheim, “The Prophets and Social Justice: A Conservative Agenda, Word and World, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring 2008, p. 164
[6]
Ibid, pp. 152ff.
[7] John Holbert,
“Preaching from Amos? Reflections on
Amos 7:7-17,” Patheos, July 7, 2013, http://www.patheos.com/progressive-christian/preaching-amos-john-holbert-07-08-2013.html
[8] Daniel P.
Clendenin, “Remembering
Romero: Amos
the Prophet vs. Amaziah the Priest,” Journey
with Jesus, 2010, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20100705JJ.shtml.
[9]
Fretheim, “The Prophets,” p. 159
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