July 10, 2016: May God’s words alone be spoken, may God’s words alone be heard. Amen.
Sometimes, it seems impossible to know what to say. The news of the past few days, and really, the past few weeks, have left my heart broken, my spirit wounded – I feel pained. I am in grief. And…I am angry.
The names: Mr. Philando Castile, Mr. Alton Stirling, Officers Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Smith, Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, & Brent Thompson, Army Reservist Micah Xavier Johnson, Ms. Jennifer Rooney, Ms. Deborah Watts.
The places: Falcon Heights, MN, Dallas, Texas, Baton Rouge LA, Bristol TN. And that is just the dead in the US – and only the ones to make the network news.
Since Orlando, there have been 298 killed in Baghdad, including children, 22 people in Bangladesh, 40 in Aleppo Syria, 25 in Yemen, and 44 at the Ataturk Airport in Istanbul. And again, these are just the ones with numbers large enough to make it to the news.
After the Orlando massacre, where 49 were killed plus the shooter, I preached at the vigil, from a place of anger – well…we are now 24 days since that vigil, and another 439 people have been killed in these places – 439! – killed because of fear and hate. 439 in just 24 days, and that doesn’t even count those smaller bombings, or shootings of individuals all over the world, all over our nation.
I am still angry – and I hope you are too.
On that night in June, at our Vigil for Love Against Hate, I railed against the injustice, the fear, the hatred, the violence – I said emphatically “Enough is Enough!”
“Enough of turning a blind eye to gun violence in our communities.
Enough of fostering hate, or rejecting people different than ourselves […]
Enough closing of doors, and building of walls, pushing people to the margins, and arming citizens with weapons of war.
Enough of saying we love you, but only if you would be more like us.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!”
And…here we are…again.
You know, when I was preparing for this sermon, looking at the lectionary, I was stunned to realize that the last time I preached on this text was the week of the shooting of Trayvon Martin (just three years ago). And so here we are – in the wake of yet another week….NO – several weeks – of violence. Violence born of racism. Violence born of religious extremism. Violence born of homophobia. And let’s not forget the women slaughtered – born of misogyny, that happens every single day. And for some, as we saw in Dallas, violence born of revenge.
God have mercy on us all.
And I mean on all of us – because all of us are a part of what is happening here and abroad. We are a part of it, because we are a part of the society that has bred this unholy trinity of fear, hatred, violence – intentionally or not – so if it exists anywhere, it exists everywhere. It is what we do about it that defines us.
All of us have a part to play. All of us have a choice. We have a choice to see, to speak, to act.
And that is what Jesus and Amos were trying to teach us in the lessons today.
The parable of the Good Samaritan from our gospel, is a story so ingrained in our common culture – heck, we even have Good Samaritan Laws! We have tidied up this gospel, making it about doing good deeds. But Jesus isn’t trying in his parable to tell us to do good to one another – he already started out the passage with that. Done! We’re done, right? The lawyer (well really, a person learned in the law of the Jewish people, not a lawyer in our contemporary sense) anyway, the lawyer asked Jesus “”what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus flips it back to him, “What is written in the law? (I mean really, you are a lawyer – right – gotta love Jesus) What do you read there?” he says to him. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” And it is THEN that we get the parable of the Samaritan, because the lawyer had a follow up question, as lawyers do. He asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” So this parable is not about teaching us to love our neighbor…we should already know to do that.
Jesus is answering the question about how we define neighbor. Well, actually, what Jesus is saying is that the question of who is my neighbor is all wrong! Jesus never says that the others were not neighbors to the victim – but which one acted as the neighbor – the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan were all neighbors to the victim, and all neighbors to each other, but only the Samaritan acted like it – reminding us that everyone is our neighbor – those who are like us, and those who are the furthest from anything we would believe ourselves to be. Because the thing you need to know about the Hebrews and the Samaritans – they absolutely hated one another.
You see – the truth is – the question was never who is my neighbor – because the answer is – everyone – all of creation. Black, white, gay, straight, male, female, all people of all countries, of all religions, of all cultures and languages – everyone. The question is – who are we willing to see and to love as we love God and ourselves? And the sad truth of these past few days and weeks is that we are not very good at this neighbor thing.
Now, you may be thinking, “but I don’t see that in my neighborhood, only on TV.” Or, “what can I do – I am only one person – and not a priest or a community leader or a politician or anything like that.” And THAT is where the passage from Amos today becomes so powerful – because he wasn’t any of those things either, as he put it “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, `Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’
Ahh, but you see he was a prophet – far more than the priest that tried to stop him from speaking. Isn’t it always the way that those in power don’t like it when folks speak truth. In fact, this priest said to the King about Amos that “the land was not able to bear all his words.” Prophets are like that. They make folks uncomfortable with their truth, because injustice of any kind finds its roots in the fear of what is unfamiliar, fear that if all are lifted up, there won’t be enough of everything, or worse, that the oppressor would become the oppressed, as if we lived in a binary world where you had to be one or the other.
And so the world was then, and is now, in need of prophets like Amos, the simple shepherd, to stand up.
Prophets like Sojourner Truth, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dorothy Day, Harvey Milk, Margaret Sanger, Frederick Douglas, Louie Crew, and Susan B. Anthony. Prophets like Nelson Madela, Malala Yousafzai, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Shirin Ebadi, and Mahatma Gandhi. And prophets like you.
Yes – you.
When I was working on this sermon, a friend from seminary, Geny Kimbrall, commented to me on Facebook about it, with “Where do you even begin, my friend…” She added, “I’m not preaching, but I’m beginning where I can. Finishing my rape crisis training and hugging people. That has to help something.” And I responded, “That, my friend, is preaching – it is prophetic witness of God’s love in the world. Well done, good and faithful servant.”
“I’m beginning where I can…that has to help something.”
It does, my friends, it does. We begin our prophetic witness usually in response to something, and there is not a single person here who cannot be a part of that. Sometimes it begins with a hug, as she is offering. Sometimes with marches of protest and vigils. Sometimes it comes in the midst of chaos.
As the shootings broke out in Dallas, Nate Homan, a former reporter, wrote that “In the middle of the horror, in the wake of nightmare, amid the outrage and the call to arms is this moment of humanity: People, black and white, surrounded a baby stroller in Dallas as the gunfire broke out. This is the better nature of our angels. This is who we are and who we should strive to be.”
Those are prophetic witnesses who respond to injustice when it happens. But there is more.
We not only must respond to what has happened, we must stand up to the very things that created this injustice in the first place. We need to not only care for those laying on the sides of the road, but stand in solidarity with them BEFORE others would harm them, that one day there will be no need for lending aid in a crisis. We must not only see the neighbor, but we must address how we interpret that image. It is without a doubt that the black men killed were seen by the white officers before they were shot – but what were the officers seeing! What do we see! In a world where a black man who is shot is identified by the media as a person with or without a criminal record, but a white rapist is identified by the media as a young man with great swim times as he preps for the olympics, we are certainly seeing the neighbor – but we aren’t seeing them the same way. We use different lenses.
As the writer Anaïs Nin once wrote, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” We, for far too long, have seen others not as they are, but as we love or fear them to be. And the result is that we are blinded to our own prejudice, our own inability to truly see the person in front of us for who they are. The result for all of us, as we have seen, is catastrophic.
In times such as these, we might prefer the words of George Bernard Shaw from his play Back to Methuselah, to those of Anaïs Nin. They were so wonderfully paraphrased in a speech by the late Sen. Robert Kennedy, “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”
But I say – it is not enough to dream. Dreams help us to envision a new reality, especially such as the dream shared by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963. But, King never wanted us to linger in a dream, but wake up to make it happen. We must wake up!
Wake up to the fact that people are being killed because they are black.
Wake up to the fact that people are being killed because they are gay.
Wake up to the fact that people are being killed because they are female.
Wake up to the fact that people are being killed because they are Muslim, Jewish, Kurds, and Christians.
Wake up to the fact the people are being killed because they are police officers.
Wake up to the fact that beyond the killing, people are still in slavery – real human traficking, and the slavery of poverty and oppression.
Folks – it is time, no long past time, to wake up and continue to push for the dream to be realized – for us all to say enough is enough is enough – for us to claim our role as prophetic witnesses, which shouldn’t be something we do just in response to tragedies such as we have seen these past few days and weeks, but our life work.
You know, I saw the strangest Facebook post yesterday – a petition to pastors and priests – asking that we pledge that we will, “commit to naming racial division from the pulpit [this Sunday] and challenging our congregations to become active in ending racial injustice. We will ask #WhoIsMyNeighbor!” I was stunned. Why? Because, as I said in my response: “Why on earth would we pledge when we are supposed to be preaching against injustice all the time? For me, that pledge came in my ordination vows…well, really, in my baptismal covenant.”
Folks, maybe people do get tired of me preaching and speaking about, about how God loves everyone, about the church not being a destination, but a place where we are nourished for the journey ahead of us – to bring God’s all inclusive love out into this broken and dark world.
But this isn’t something that is “one and done”. It isn’t something we pledge to do on a particular Sunday – it is who we are, and what we are called to do every single day! And no, not just priests and pastors – you! Every single one of you! This isn’t about a collar, or about titles, or about an MDiv degree – it is about following the call of God – it is about living into our baptismal covenant when we committed to seeking and serving Christ in ALL persons, loving neighbor as ourselves, and striving for justice and peace among all people – respecting the dignity of EVERY human being. We can’t sit here in these pews, if we won’t live that out when we leave. That, my friends, would be living a hypocritical life – a life no better than the Levite or the Priest who passed by the beaten man in the parable.
We have a lot of beaten people laying by roadsides, and the thing is – we, as members of this broken society – are complicit in their being in that condition in the first place. If we don’t do something about it, then we are a part of it – there is no middle road, no pass that lets you avert your eyes and walk quickly past. We have to draw near to what is happening – see the anguish of our brothers and sisters – really see them and their pain – and then respond!
But it isn’t enough that we help once they are beaten – we have to stand up to those who would do the beating in the first place and STOP this from happening by refusing to accept this as the “new normal,” by rejecting the idea that beatings “just happen,” or that the guy shouldn’t have been on that road to Jericho, or maybe there was a reason he got beaten. Enough!
The nation and the world are in Good Friday – because Jesus is in all people, and he is being crucified every day. Jesus is the one laying beside the road! If we are ever to live into Easter, we must respond to the call God gives to each of us to be prophets, just as Amos did. We must take a step – open our hearts, and speak up against the injustice before us. That doesn’t require money, or position, or charisma, or eloquence. It requires only the belief that what we do here on Sundays actually means something.
Because if we stay silent – we render our faith meaningless.
If we stay silent, then what we do here on Sunday is hypocrisy.
If we stay silent – we condem ourselves and all the world to live in the darkness of our indifference.
It’s time to light the candle of healing and to raise the torch of justice.
It is time for us to begin where we can, because it WILL help something. And doing nothing is NOT an option – it never was.
Amen.
For the audio from the 10:30am service, click here:
The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
July 10, 2016
Pentecost 8 – Year C
1st Reading – Amos 7:7-17
Psalm 82
2nd Reading – Colossians 1:1-14
Gospel – Luke 10:25-37
