Reflections on MLK Day 2011 - redux...

NOTE: I've revised and reconsidered parts of this sermon - and rather than re-edit yesterday's posting I'm just going to share the new version. The heart is the same, but I think it better articulates the real challenge for American Christians. We shall see...

This morning I’m going to preach to you. Most Sundays I stand among you as a teacher – wrestling insights and ideas from the Word of God for our time together with you – as well as asking questions and exploring possibilities in community. This is my preferred approach for such strange and daunting times as our, but not today…

• No, today on the occasion of the 83rd birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the inexcusable violence in Tucson, today is a time for preaching… for to preach is to publically proclaim a path of moral instruction.

• Dr. King once said in a sermon that: “When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. And when evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.”

And that is my hope and intention for today – to construct a moral context for understanding both the ugly words of hatred shouted by evil men and women in our generation – and their consequences – as well as the alternative articulated in the glories of God’s love. For make no mistake: God’s people clearly have a role to play in matters such as these. Dr. King was right: when evil is publically articulated, it must be politically challenged; and when evil is given shape and form, our opposition must be more than mere personal piety.

You see, it is dishonest, dangerous and destructive to teach Christians that our religion has no place in politics. For such thinking not only reduces God to a personal and private flutter of the heart, but also shrinks our capacity for compassion and action. Privatized religion trains us NOT to consider the public good, NOT to embrace the wounded as a sister or brother and NOT to notice when public policy or discourse becomes ugly and mean-spirited.

To be sure, I understand the motivation behind such a limited spirituality – no thoughtful person in our day wants a return to medieval theocracy – but whenever we radically restrict God’s love to only the interior life the result is always a shrunken heart and a morally weakened body politic.

Consider the testimony of the prophet Isaiah as God’s suffering servant in this morning’s lesson. The young prophet was demoralized – his people had been taken into captivity by Babylon in 587 BCE, the world as he had known it from the womb had been destroyed and all of the comforting and cultural signs of God’s presence in the life of his people had been destroyed – and so he blurted out:

It looks like I’ve worked for nothing. I've nothing to show for a life of hard work. Nevertheless, I'll let God have the last word. I'll let him pronounce his verdict."

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? I’ve been there before and I know you have, too: remember what it was like when JFK was gunned down – or his brother Robert – or Dr. King – or President Reagan – or John Lennon – or Malcolm X – or President Ford? Remember what it felt like after the terrorists explosions in Oklahoma City or September 11th? Let’s not pretend, beloved: we know what the ancient prophet was talking about. We live in America – an often violent and harsh land – where we turn upon our own with a ferocious regularity and only liars or those trapped in the fantasies of social amnesia think otherwise. We know that the prophet was right on the money: sometimes it feels like we’ve worked all our lives with nothing to show for it.

That’s how I felt last Saturday when first hearing the news about the attempted assassination of Gabby Giffords in Tucson: it’s all going to hell. I served that wounded and wonderful city for 10 years – it is one of my favorite places in all creation – and we have friends as well as some church folk currently living and working in Tucson with Congresswoman Giffords. So it just made me sick – like Isaiah said – and everything seemed spinning out of control.

But listen carefully here because although the young prophet knows what it feels like to have his world totally destroyed, he doesn’t stop with despair. The text goes on to say that after his wail of lament, the Lord replies, “My man…”

It is not enough to simply care for the tribes of Jacob or merely round up the strays of Israel. So I’m setting you up as a light for the nations so that my salvation becomes global!"

Hold the phone and stop the presses – did you hear that: I am setting you up as a light for the NATIONS? Think about it! There’s nothing private about God’s reply, is there? God is going global, baby – international – and that’s just the beginning of the Lord’s response because Isaiah concludes with this:

God, the Redeemer of Israel, the Holy of Israel, says to the despised one, kicked around by the nations, slave labor to the ruling class:"Kings will see, get to their feet—the princes, too—and then fall on their faces in homage. Because of God, who has faithfully kept his word, the Holy of Israel, who has chosen you."

Not only does the word of God tell us that there is a way through the darkness and into the light, it also says that WE have been chosen to embody that light in the world. Not somebody else - not the preacher, not the deacon, not my brother, not my sister, but it’s ME, O Lord in community with you – WE have been chosen to make visible this global – and never personal or private – moral way of living so that the kicked around people of creation are embraced and the forgotten, enslaved and wretched of the earth are welcomed into the holy, sacred and public family of the Lord. That’s the religion Isaiah was talking about as the way of hope in these dark times and that is the religion that Dr. King advocated in his generation. “All I'm saying is simply this,” he once preached:

…that all life is interrelated, that somehow we're caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

St. Paul thought in a similar fashion when he likened our life in Christ to being a part of a body: what affects one part of the body, affects the whole. In today’s text from Ephesians, Paul builds on this insight by telling us that it has been God’s plan since the beginning of time to bind us together in Christ’s love.

What a blessing God is! He's the Father of our Master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessing in him. Long before he laid down earth's foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ… (For it is) in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living…

Did you hear that? Do you grasp the moral consequences at stake? Those of us who have been embraced by the Word of God have been called together as a body to be made whole and holy by Christ’s love. And I’m talking about whole and holy by Christ’s love – not raggedy and incomplete – but whole and holy. And that includes our hearts as well as our homes – our checkbooks as well as our Smart Phones and the world beyond – because we have been called by God to become part of the living evidence of Christ’s love. So let’s be clear:

• This is not a call to be a partisan Democrat or Republican – you can do that in your spare time if you must – but your primary identity is as a disciple of Jesus Christ being made whole and holy in his love. His grace. His forgiveness. His living presence within and among us.

• And don’t try to parse this calling with ideology or sophisticated word games telling me that you’re only being a devil’s advocate because guess what? Satan already has too many helpers and we’ve been called into Christ’s love.

That is why I have been persuaded that in the light of Christ’s love, Dr. King’s birthday and the shootings in Tucson we need to do some serious rethinking about how God is shaping us into whole and holy disciples in this global and inter-connected world. It just won’t do any more – if it ever really played – to say that religion and politics don’t mix. It isn’t political in a partisan sense, is it, to notice that a patient is dying of neglect and bring them the healing balm of both medicine and attention? Same is true for America… So please consider three challenges that could give shape and form to what it means to be whole and holy in the United States in our generation.

First, in the wake of the Tucson shootings let’s be clear that this is not the time for blaming our political opponents or searching for deep social and psychological explanations. They have their place and will happen no matter what given our obsession with cable news and talk radio. But for those of us called to be made whole and holy in Christ’s love perhaps our first response is to let ourselves suffer the agony of this moment deeply. Let’s not try to escape it or push the pain away, but rather like Jesus the Lamb of God let us enter and embrace it.

Preacher, Brian McLaren, put it like this and his words ring true: This is a time… to be suffered, something that must, in a sense, crash over us like a wave or knock us down like a fever, shake us so that we truly feel our feelings and name them; so that we can speak of them and share them and feel an exchange with others of sympathy, empathy, common grief, and common sorrow. This kind of sorrow doesn't make us bitter; it makes us better. It doesn't make us smug at having an explanation; it makes us humble as we understand our shared vulnerability. It doesn't make us put up walls of blame; it tears down walls as we feel our common humanity. In so doing, it teaches us wisdom - wisdom that, in the scriptures, is often associated with pain and struggle. It softens us, makes us more sensitive to the pain that others suffer but we often ignore. It forms compassion in us.

We American Christians are not very good at suffering – we’re a feel good people – we want solutions to our problems. We are the world’s most active utilitarians who want to get things done. And action has its place – but not reaction. Unless we allow ourselves to suffer the depth of our loss like Jesus we will not be able to move into the next truth of the Lord’s love. Remember how did the Hebrew poet put it? “To everything there is a season…”

A right time for birth and another for death,
A right time to plant and another to reap,
A right time to kill and another to heal,
A right time to destroy and another to construct,
A right time to cry and another to laugh,
A right time to lament and another to cheer,
A right time to make love and another to abstain,
A right time to embrace and another to part,
A right time to search and another to count your losses,
A right time to hold on and another to let go,
A right time to rip out and another to mend,
A right time to shut up and another to speak up,
A right time to love and another to hate,
A right time to wage war and another to make peace.

There is some redemptive and soul-searching work for us to do in this season of suffering – and without we will remain shallow chaff blowing in the wind – this is our first challenge.

Second, let’s revisit the wisdom of Dr. King when he said: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” In his day he was talking about the good people who looked the other way when a person of color was degraded; or turned a deaf ear when a racial slur was blurted out; or a politician stood mute when their vote would have helped. He was addressing all of us who said in the heat of the moment, “It isn’t the right time… you need to learn to wait” whether that waiting was for civil rights or an end to the war in Vietnam.

Interestingly, just a generation earlier, a similar silence encouraged the Nazis in Germany to systematically exterminate all of their social and political enemies. Pastor Martin Neimoller, who had once urged patience and silence himself only to find himself incarcerated at Dachau, too later said to the world:

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; for I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn't a Jew. And then they came for me and when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

Words matter – so does silence. We should know this as People of the Word – and the Word of God made flesh – but most of the time we forget. We forget and excuse our political leaders – we forget and excuse our loved ones – we forget and excuse ourselves. But let me remind you this morning that as People of the Word not only must we remember, but we must urge caution and discretion in the public square. That is part of the way we live as whole and holy disciples in this global village.

This weekend, my friend, Lou Erste, who used to work with the Citizen’s League in Cleveland, Ohio, sent me a link to a front-page editorial that Ralph McGill, then editor of the Atlanta Constitution, wrote in the wake of a synagogue bombing in 1958. It appears that the local rabbi had been too outspoken on behalf of civil rights for some so the local citizenry decided he needed to be silenced. “Let’s face the fact,” McGill wrote:

This is a harvest. It is the crop of things sown. It is the harvest of defiance of courts and the encouragement of citizens to defy law on the part of many Southern politicians… It is not possible to preach lawlessness and then restrict it. To be sure, none said go bomb a Jewish temple or a school. But let it be understood that when leadership in high places in any degree fails to support constituted authority, it opens the gates to all those who wish to take law into their hands. There will be, to be sure, the customary act of the careful drawing aside of skirts on the part of those in high places. "How awful!" they will exclaim. "How terrible. Something must be done." But the record stands. The extremists of the citizens' councils, the political leaders who in terms violent and inflammatory words have repudiated their oaths and stood against due process of law, have helped unloose this flood of hate and bombing. This too is a harvest of those so-called Christian ministers who have chosen to preach hate instead of compassion. Let them now find pious words and raise their hands in deploring the bombing of a synagogue. You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe. Hate and lawlessness by those who lead release the yellow rats and encourage the crazed and neurotic who print and distribute the hate pamphlets - who shrieked that Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew - who denounce the Supreme Court as being Communist and controlled by Jewish influences.

Christian friends, words and silence matter: I don’t care whether you are a Republican or a Democrat – words matter. I don’t care whether you are Sarah Palin teasing and flirting with the nuances of a “lock and reload” ammunition metaphor or Joe Biden carelessly shooting off your mouth in public – words matter. And as People of the Word we need to hold one another accountable for the words we speak as well as the words and silences our elected officials share, too because God has called us out of our private rooms and into the global marketplace.

And then third, we need to wrestle with the American idolatry that links guns with God as Susan Thistlethwaite’s so clear wrote in the Washington Post this weekend. “That incendiary political language (of our era) needs a match to turn rhetoric into lethal violence – and in the USA the proliferation of guns is that match.” She writes:

There is NO “God given” right to handguns and the second amendment is NOT holy writ… The United States of America is staring down the barrel of a gun, literally and figuratively. Handguns and ammunition proliferate and strong gun lobbies pour millions of dollars into political campaigns to make sure the guns keep coming. When you combine how easy it is to obtain a handgun under permissive gun legislation with inflamed political rhetoric and authorize the whole unholy mess with talk about how this is connected to belief in God, you are asking for trouble – and trouble is what we’ve got.

It is not enough to urge civility – that is a starting point – but let’s not dumb down towards the lowest common denominator. How does St. Paul put it in Philippians? Brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about these things. Americans – and American Christians – like to think of ourselves as an exceptional people: God’s light upon the hill.

This has, in fact, become one of the rallying cries of the current war between liberals and conservatives. Let me suggest, however, that before we consider our unique virtue and lofty ideals, we need to come to terms with our exceptional national violence:

• Since Dr. King’s assassination over one million Americans have been murdered by other Americans – and we barely seem to notice. Every day 8 children and teen-agers are gunned down in the land of the brave and home of the free – and nothing happens.

• Civic horror was expressed after the Columbine killings, the Maryland and Virginia shooting spree following September 11th, the Virginia Tech murders as well as the terrorist’s actions in Oklahoma City, New York City and the Pentagon but nothing changed.

Sounding like the exasperated young prophet Isaiah, Bob Herbert wrote in Saturday’s New York Times: “Sadly the two most common responses to violence in the U.S. are to ignore it or be entertained by it.” We can do better – we have been summoned by God to do better – and here is how Brother Martin told us how to make it real almost a year to the day before he was gunned down.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered… A true revolution of values will cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. To be sure, 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 is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring…

Just like a home that encourages and tolerates murder must be reformed and trained to become its best self. Beloved in Christ, from where I sit, this is the challenge of the good news for today: let those who have ears to hear, hear.