Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 21, 2015
First
Lutheran Church, Bothell, WA
Grace and peace to you brothers and sisters from God
our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
As a father I have spent a lot of time worrying
about the safety of my children. I am proud that my children have grown into
loving, peace seeking young adults. But, now one is on his own and in a year
the other will be on her way to independence; outside of my sphere of influence
and even more outside of my control. The world is full of evil and violence and
I pray that they never visit my children.
Yet, this past Wednesday the children of God of
other parents were visited by evil and violence. One of our own chose to go the
way of the terrorist and reign hatred down on the innocent and the righteous,
turning what was once a place of sanctuary into a place of fear. We who gather
in this sanctuary at First Lutheran Church in Bothell, Washington, some 3,000
miles from Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina cannot ignore or
argue away the systemic racism out of which this act emerges. As a mostly white
and certainly privileged congregation, it is imperative that we take time to
call for justice for and an end to violence against our black brothers and
sisters.
The psalmist today asks the question: The LORD is my
light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my
life; of whom shall I be afraid?
From our fellow citizens, we hear that they live
daily in fear. As one pastor put it: Being Black in America is exhausting.
Constantly having to navigate the perils of the color line and having to live
within a system that repeatedly reminds you of your contested existence is
beyond burdensome. [i]
I have to say that I have no idea what this must be
like. As a fellow preacher, this pastor and I share a lot in common in our
struggles in ministry – yet in this I have nothing to compare. We share the
same faith, the same God, the same baptism and gather around Jesus’ table as a
part of the body of Christ, yet in this country I have to admit that I have
privileges that he does not. He would be the first to embrace the psalmist
words: God is my light and my salvation, the Lord is the stronghold of my life,
but he does so from an entirely different reality than my own.
With a certainty that I often do not have the
psalmist proclaims: When
evildoers assail me to devour my flesh--my adversaries and foes--they shall
stumble and fall.
Here we are
reminded that in the end the judgement of God will be made and we must place
our trust in this reality. This is hard when we witness constant hatred and
violence perpetrated on God’s people. This trust escapes me. Instead I agree
more with Habakkuk:
How long, O Lord, must I cry for help and you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!” and you do not intervene?
Why do you let me see iniquity?
Why do you simply gaze at evil?
Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife and
discord.
This is why the law is numb and justice never comes for the
wicked surround the just; this is why justice comes forth perverted.
For, Rev.
Pinckney, Rev. Coleman-Singleton, Rev. Middleton-Doctor, Rev. Simmons, Cynthia
Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, and Myra Thompson many in
this country share this cry.[ii]
In a country
like ours, where we claim to be about equality and blindness when it comes to
the law, it is indisputable that we fail to live up to these ideals when it
comes to our black brother and sisters and our immigrant neighbors. I do not
need to quote to you the statistics that prove this to be true, I am compelled
to mimic what our presiding Bishop Eaton wrote:
It has been a long season of disquiet in our country. From
Ferguson to Baltimore, simmering racial tensions have boiled over into
violence. But this … the fatal shooting of nine African Americans in a church
is a stark, raw manifestation of the sin that is racism. The church was
desecrated. The people of that congregation were desecrated. The aspiration
voiced in the Pledge of Allegiance that we are “one nation under God” was desecrated.[iii]
To make this
even more personal: Two of the pastors are graduates of an ELCA seminary and
the terrorist a member of an ELCA congregation. As a congregation and a nation we
have to say one of our own reigned violence on another of our own. How long, O
Lord, how long?
We cannot remain
silent any longer or sit idly by. As Eli Wiesel wrote:
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the
victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we
must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in
jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men
and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views,
that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.”[iv]
If we have
trust, as the psalmist has, we must act with that trust. For we ask the lord to
teach us The Way, and lead us on a level path because of our enemies. Jesus
would have us live this out through his call to us to love our neighbor. This
loving is done through the example that he gave us: Eating with the lost, the
left out, the persecuted, black, immigrant, transgendered, gay.
What is God
calling us to do? To seek for peace. We must not turn away from the
truth. Our hearts need to be exposed, our eyes need to be wide open, not blind
to color, but in awe of it. We need to lift the veil from our assumptions
and our leanings towards supremacy. We need to let go of our deep seeded fear
and prejudice. We need to confront hate when we hear it and see it. To take
risks and call out ignorance, bigotry and hatefulness – even when it is small,
even when it’s only a joke, even when the person doesn’t mean it, doesn’t know
better, or doesn’t seem to care. For those in power and privilege must work for
the least of these in every fabric of our culture.[v]
Our work in this
world to end injustice is never over. Our work in bringing the Good News of
Jesus Christ to a world that so desperately needs to hear it is never over,
even in our deepest pain and gut wrenching moments. As proven by the victims’
relatives when they confronted the terrorist in the courtroom just two days
after. The only words they had for him were words of forgiveness. Not words of
retribution, not words of hate, not words of condemnation, only words that echo
the Word of our Lord Jesus – Father forgive them.
We are people of
the Way of Jesus. We claim something as a baptized people. Listen to the
promises that are made on behalf of Owen, the promises that Aric will make:
they promise to proclaim Christ through word and deed, to care for others and the
world God made, and work for justice and peace.[vi]
These
are the same promises you make every week we gather here for worship. Another
pastor wrote: the psalmist makes his proclamation of trust not from a position
of untested faith, but from a position of tested faith. The psalmist reflects
the ability of the people of God to experience evil, pain, and suffering, out
of the darkness, and the pain of life and to speak with confidence, hope, and
faith about the role God plays in our lives, even in the face of what some
might consider evidence to the contrary.[vii] When we attempt to live up
to our promises, it is this kind of trust and faith that will carry us through.
I
will end this with these words from the ELCA’s social statement on Race,
Ethnicity, and Culture:[viii]
While we have taken many measures fitting to a church
in mission and ministry in a multicultural society, we still falter. We falter
in what we do, or in refusing to carry out what we have promised to do. We
falter through ignorance of what we have done or left undone. We falter when we
cling to old ideas that prevent us from becoming the people God calls us to be.
With all Christians everywhere, members of this church live in a time of crisis
(Romans 2:1 ff.). We are torn between the freedom offered in Christ, the new
Adam [and Eve], and the captivity known by the old Adam [and Eve]. We are torn
between becoming the people God calls us to be and remaining the people we are,
barricaded behind old walls of hostility.
Until
we break free of our old ways of thinking, our old ways of hiding behind our
walls of privilege, our brothers and sisters in Christ will continue to be
slaughtered all day long. This is a time of lament and confession for us. Let
us trust our God, who gave his only Son, Jesus, to us to love and to know, who
taught us a better way. Through our baptisms let us trust in the Good News and
bring it to bear in our world. God is Good, All the time. Let us be God’s
people and set the captive free. Amen.
[i]
Rev. Billy Michael Honor on odysseynetworks.org
[ii]
These are the nine who were murdered on the night of Wednesday, June 17, 2015
in CHarelston, SC in the Emmanuel AME Church.
[iii]
Rev. Elizabeth Eaton, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America, Statement dated Junee 18 in response to the shooting in Charles, SC.
[iv]
Eli Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night/Dawn/The Accident
[v] Adapted
from a prayer written by Rev. Shawna Bowman, June 19, 2015 and shared on
Facebook, Narrative Lectionary Page.
[vi]
Service of Holy Baptism, Evangelical Lutheran Worship
[vii] Rev.
Wade Halva, shared on Facebook, Narrative Lectionary Page.
[viii]
ELCA Social Statement: Freed in Christ: Race, Ethnicity, and Culture. Adopted
on August 31, 1993.
