Sermon: B Lent 3/Amistad Sunday, March 7, 2021, How long? Not long!

 B Lent 3 UCB 2012

Psalm 107 (OL for Amistad Sunday/BLent4 Scripture)

March 7, 2021 

              When I was in seminary, I regularly lampooned and directed sarcasm at the Bible, suggested that its moral authority meant little to me as a Christian.  I found very little eternal meaning in its pages.

           In the dreaded Middler Orals at Eden Theological Seminary, the seminary student is brought before a panel of three faculty members and quizzed and questioned on every theological issue under the sun.  One of the professors on my panel knew of my disdain for Scripture and sought to bring that forward for the other two faculty members to see.  By that time in seminary, I had decided I was not going to die in a ditch created for me by someone else.  At the time, my seminary was at war with itself, and too often seminary professors took out the differences of opinion they had with each other out on the students.   

           And I was changing in seminary.  I had one of the most gifted New Testament professors, the foremost Gospel of Thomas scholar in the world, who taught us the basics, encouraged critical insight, did not allow us to be lazy with politically opportune translations, and someone who sparkled when we investigated the text.  Like Steve, I began to delight in the work required to do Biblical investigation and find its meaning.  But during Middler Orals, I certainly was not going to display the transition I was going through, believing that would have conveyed theological weakness to at least one of my professors who wanted my Biblical certainty. 

           And Steve, my New Testament Professor, helped me even further when I would call him about a particular text for a sermon—usually late on a Saturday night!  Here I was, calling my New Testament professor out of the blue, and he was taking the time with me to look at the Scripture.  It was like going through a mini-class of Biblical CSI.  I would hear Steve working through his analysis over the phone, looking at the Scripture through four different angles, and delighting in a new perspective or understanding he had found right in that moment.   This was usually followed by me saying, “How am I supposed to preach THAT?”  And Steve would respond, with a smile in his voice, “Mike, my friend, that’s why they pay you the big money!”

           I retained my critical eye for Scripture, but I began to see real life truths that emerged from ancient stories and mythologies.  I began to see Biblical authors working the tradition—passing it on, repeating it to remind people that the story could be heard echoing into a new time, reshaping it and reformulating it for their day.  I saw a deep tradition beginning to reveal itself to me. 

One of those deep, deep stories had to do with the prophets, the truth tellers to power.  Something courageous within the heart of prophets placed them as intermediaries between God and the people. 

The prophets experienced the pain and suffering of God in a very real way.   I think I too often forget to relate that to you as a congregation, but relating the heart of God is done so well by the Biblical prophets.  God’s heart is full of revelry and joy when people live in right relationship with one another.  The prophets relate that God delights in us.  Like a small child, God is gleefully clapping hands, making music, and singing along.  At the same time, when God witnesses us taking advantage of the most vulnerable, the prophets share that God moans and grieves, openly weeping.  God’s heart is broken.  Almost like a young lover who sees her sweetheart in the arms of another, God feels jilted and scorned by such behavior.   So the prophet is given the job of relating God’s busting-at-the-seams joy with the people.  Or God’s disappointment, sorrow, and anger to challenge people in power—to communicate God’s joy or pain.

But the prophet also, as intermediary, must relate the pain of the people to God.  The people wonder, “Is God listening?  Does God care?  Where is God?  Why is God not present when God promised?  Why must our people suffer?  Why must our people go on living in such pain?”  And the prophet is, at first, when called to respond to the pain of the people by God, somewhat reluctant.  But when immersed in the struggle, feeling the pain the people feel, and wondering whether God’s character is to be believed, the prophet snaps, and begins to ask the perennial question:  “How long, O God, how long?  How long must your people suffer in pain and degradation?  How long must they go about suffering the stinging blows of their oppressors?  How long must they live in slavery, prison, and torture while you sit idly by, O God?  Where is your providence and care for us now, O God?  You promised.  And we see no evidence that you are active, alive, and up from your slumber, keeping your promises.  How long, O God, how long?”  The prophet first wants to know if God is woke.

Finally, returning from a God who listens, attends to, and answers prayer, the prophet communicates God’s hope against hope in the midst of despair.  The prophet seeing with God’s eyes has more clarity than most, and envisions the coming new day.    The prophet returns from prayer newly aware how they and their people are responsible for joining together with God in making a new creation.  And so the prophet begins to describe the contours of the new creation so that the vivid detail might goad us into collaborating with God to bring it about.  The prophet communicates that God is active and ready to act as God has done of old. 

March 25, 1965, Montgomery, Alabama.

 

I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long,  Because "truth crushed to earth will rise again."

 

How long? Not long, because "no lie can live forever."

How long? Not long, because "you shall reap what you sow."

How long? Not long:

Truth forever on the scaffold,

Wrong forever on the throne,

Yet that scaffold sways the future,

And, behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow,

Keeping watch above God’s own.

 

How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

How long? Not long,  because:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; God is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

God has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword;

God’s truth is marching on.

 

God has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

God is sifting out the hearts of all before the judgment seat.

O, be swift, my soul, to answer God! Be jubilant my feet!

Our God is marching on.

Glory, hallelujah!  Glory, hallelujah!

Glory, hallelujah! Glory, hallelujah!

God’s truth is marching on.[1]

 

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.  This quote from Dr. King is the sentiment expressed in our psalm for today.   But . . . we acknowledge, as Ta-Nehisi Coates said, the arc did not bend for so many of the people enslaved on the Middle Passage, African-American communities segregated, lynched, or set on fire, Trayvon Martin, or Tamir Rice, or Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, or George Foster.   

It was Ibrahim X. Kendi, the director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, where he’s the Andrew W. Mellon professor in the humanities, who, in remembering the longer arc of history, reminded us that when African American people have exercised their right to vote, have exercised their right to hold office, or have exercised their right to be free, they have experienced a consistent push back of white supremacist mob violence over the course of 400 years.   Professor Kendi points to what the super wealthy have done to all of us—the disinheritance they have created, the pressure they have put on our economic system to be like rats racing around for the fewer and fewer resources.   And many of us white folk who have suffered, even more so during pandemic, had their anger educated that the source of their suffering was not corporate elites but those Latinx invaders, those Black anarchists, or even antifa protesting in Portland.  You didn’t lose an election, they were educated to believe, you had it stolen from you by African American voters in Atlanta, and Philadelphia, and Detroit.  When that is repeated and hammered day after day, why wouldn’t they believe it?  Professor Kendi asked in referencing the capitol insurrection “What did you think they were going to do?”[2]

As people of faith in a largely white church, we must take up the task of confrontational education and protest so that the white supremacy abounding in this country is met and stemmed by an other-hearted people who remember the courage of their faith ancestors and hold the purveyors of violence accountable and will not stop until all God’s children see themselves as sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins.  We must rise to that task

Dr. King and that Psalmnist are not about optimism.  They are about a hope against hope.  There is no evidence but for God’s character that a people ground in suffering is not God’s plan and purpose.   Psalm 107 reminds us that God’s purposes are being worked out.  God is active and moving.  Providence is knowing that God is active and moving on our behalf, particularly as we found ourselves enslaved, broken, or economically destitute.

But hear these words very carefully.  They are not spoken from a place of power and privilege.  For when these same words are spoken from places of power and privilege, they become justification for genocide and slaughter.  God does not trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored to declare supremacy for one people over another.  No!  That wrath is to rightfully restore those who have had their own humanity taken from them, left broken and hurting along the road of life, so that they might know God is their advocate to restore and redeem them to human community.

That it is not in God’s character to leave us in desolate places, hungry and thirsting.  So where we see people redeemed from such troubles in the world, we know that God is at work. 

Even those who end up in prison and hard labor from their own actions and rebellion against God, when they cried to God, it was not in God’s character to leave them in chains and behind bars.  Where we see people freed from their chains and brought forth into the light of day, we know enough to say that God is at work.  

Some people are caught in their own sinful ways and find themselves caught up in destructive ways of being and close to death’s door, and they wake up from their nightmare and call to God, and it is in God’s character to forgive and heal.  So where we see people delivered from their own paths of self-destruction and healed, we know for certain to say God is at work. 

Repeating over and over again, as a mantra, Psalm 107 tells us that where the oppressed are liberated, the hungry are filled, creation is renewed, the needy raised up, and the politically powerful brought low, God’s purposes are being worked out.  It is not so much that God does these things through His power but rather through Her persistence and endurance, acting in love along that long moral arc so that right relationships are built in our personal lives, in our families, in our schools, in our community institutions, in the systems and structures of our government, and throughout our world. 

It is in the nature of God’s character, that God’s providence is found in His persistence and not in Her power.    That is the claim of Psalm 107, that God wills and wants our liberation from anything that would destroy us, even if what would destroy us is self-inflicted, so that we might experience joy. 

Can we possibly hear the good news that God wills and wants and works hard at delivering us from what would enslave us from the outside and what would enslave us from the inside as well?

This is what those Congregationalists believed, one of the historical denominations that came together to form our beloved United Church of Christ, against all odds, when slavery was still the norm in our country and a group of would-be-slaves revolted, took over the ship, La Amistad, and turned the ship back toward Africa during the day.  At night, the Cubans who had formerly been steering the ship, reversed course until the zigzagging ship landed in Long Island.  The Africans were jailed and charged with piracy and murder.    Congregationalist Lewis Tappan headed up the Amistad Committee, that was the precursor to our present-day United Church of Christ Global Ministries Board.   It is the courageous history in Jackson of abolitionist papers like the American Freeman and the Sentinel and Jackson’s history in the Underground Railroad.

In God’s great providence, not in power over, but in persistence and endurance, this church has been part of the long moral arc that bends toward justice.  

And I think that continues to be.  That Biblical story I have come to love so well, the prophet who cries to God, “How long, O God, how long?” is repeated in age after age.  Let us as a church in matters of justice, continue to join with those in our local community and throughout our world, to say for another year, “How long?  Not long.” for we know God’s providence and purpose are being worked out through St. John’s United Church of Christ.   We communicate through our many and varied ministries and missions that the arc of the moral universe is long and that we believe God intends joy for the people in our church community, for those in Jackson, in Michigan, and for all of God’s creation.  How long?  Not long. 

The Bible teaches that persistently and with endurance, God’s Truth is marching on.  And we are marching in the light of that same God.  Glory.  Hallelujah.  Glory!  Hallelujah!  And thanks be to God.  Amen.

---

[1] http://www.mlkonline.net/ourgod.html .  I have edited the speech to make language for the speech divinity gender neutral and language for humanity inclusive and expansive.  lThe video of this portion of Dr. King’s speech can be found at:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAYITODNvlM 

[2] “Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha Blain on Impeachment, White Supremacist Violence & Holding Trump Accountable,” Democracy Now!  February 10, 2021, https://www.democracynow.org/2021/2/10/ibram_x_kendi_keisha_blain_impeachment,

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.

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[1] PBS:  “The Murder of Emmett Till.”  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/timeline/index.html.

[2] “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963

[3] Cornel West, Democracy Matters (New York:  The Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 20-21.

[4] King, “Beyond Viet Nam.”

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. 

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[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.