Year C, Proper 14: Across the Distance

Across the Distance
by James Joiner,
Preaching with St. Mary’s House Episcopal Center, Greensboro NC
August 12th, 2007

Year C, Proper 14
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer- And, let me speak slowly and clearly enough so that everyone can hear what those words and meditations are. AMEN.

“All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.”

The first sermon I ever heard preached at St. Mary’s House was on All Saints Day, 2004- and it was about Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Martyr of the Civil Rights Movement. When I saw Jonathan’s feast day coming up on the calendar, it made me want to revisit his story and bring it back out for us to listen to, and so I asked Kevin if I could preach on the Sunday before his feast day, which is this Tuesday. Jonathan was a seminarian at ETS when he heard the call in 1965 of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., asking students and others to join him in Selma, Alabama for a march to the state capitol in Montgomery. Jonathan went with other students to Selma, intending to only stay for the weekend, but when he and another friend missed the bus back home, they began to reflect on how touch and go their visit had seemed- so they decided they would stay longer. Jon requested permission to spend the rest of his semester in Selma. On Sundays he would bring small groups of black students to church with him in an effort to integrate the local Episcopal congregation, where their presence was barely tolerated and heavily resented. After exams at ETS, he returned again to Selma where he helped produce a listing of local, state, and federal agencies and other resources to persons in need of assistance.

That Summer he joined in several pickets and protests against local discriminating businesses. He was thrown in jail once. After his release, he and three other friends attempted to enter a local shop, and they were met at the door by a man with a gun, who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, the man aimed the gun at a young girl in the party, and Jon pushed her out of the way, taking the bullet himself. He was killed instantly.

There are, in Jonathan’s life, many inspiring stories, about the way he shaped his life in response to the call he heard, about the work he did to bring about the justice of God’s kingdom on Earth, about the manner in which he laid down his life for another. I sat down with his stories with today's Gospel reading in mind, and found one that seemed particularly resonant, which I would like to share with you now. The following passage is taken from his journal. The episode described was a common one- in which a proposed march would get blocked by rows of policemen:

"After a week-long, rain-soaked vigil, we still stood face to face with the Selma police. I stood, for a change, in the front rank, ankle-deep in an enormous puddle. To my immediate right were high school students, for the most part, and further to the right were a swarm of clergymen. My end of the line surged forward at one point, led by a militant Episcopal priest whose temper (as usual) was at combustion-point. Thus I found myself only inches from a young policeman. The air crackled with tension and open hostility. Emma Jean, a sophomore in the Negro high school, called my name from behind. I reached back for her hand to bring her up to the front rank, but she did not see. Again she asked me to come back. My determination had become infectiously savage, and I insisted that she come forward--I would not retreat! Again I reached for her hand and pulled her forward. The young policeman spoke: "You're dragging her through the puddle. You ought to be ashamed for treating a girl like that." Flushing--I had forgotten the puddle--I snarled something at him about whose-fault-it-really-was, that managed to be both defensive and self-righteous. We matched baleful glances and then both looked away. And then came a moment of shattering internal quiet, in which I felt shame, indeed, and a kind of reluctant love for the young policeman. I apologized to Emma Jean. And then it occurred to me to apologize to him and to thank him. Though he looked away in contempt--I was not altogether sure I blamed him--I had received a blessing I would not forget. Before long the kids were singing, "I love ---." One of my friends asked [the young policeman] for his name. His name was Charlie. When we sang for him, he blushed and then smiled in a truly sacramental mixture of embarrassment and pleasure and shyness. Soon the young policeman looked relaxed, we all lit cigarettes (in a couple of instances, from a common match, and small groups of kids and policemen clustered to joke or talk cautiously about the situation. It was thus a shock later to look across the rank at the clergymen and their opposites, who glared across a still unbroken "Wall" in what appeared to be silent hatred. Had I been freely arranging the order for Evening Prayer that night, I think I might have followed the General Confession directly with the General Thanksgiving--or perhaps the Te Deum. "

In the Gospel today the Kingdom of God is like a Master coming home to find his servants have put all their busy work and rest and lives away just for the sake of greeting him at the door. The Kingdom of God is like a thief in the night that we were unprepared for, unsettling all of the possessions that might stand between us and our reception of it. In Jonathan’s story, the Kingdom of God is like two enemies on a picket line, who for a moment forget their own agendas to be captured by the love of God.

Jesus tells us today that we don’t need to worry- that it is God’s good pleasure to give us the Kingdom, all we have to do is sell our possessions, let go of the things we’ve worked so hard for in this life, and we’ll be ready for it. How willing are we to really do this, especially when we have come to possess so much. Not just cars and clothes and houses and other material wealth, but ideologies, ways of doing things, habits of practice. We have jobs to do, responsibilities to fill, most of them initiated because we feel in our small way that we are fulfilling a part of God’s work with our own. I’m sure that the young police man in Jon’s story felt that way. I am sure that the policeman in Jon’s story could have stuck to his guns and made himself invulnerable- confident that he was there for the right reasons, unwilling to let a small group of students show him love with their song. I’m sure that Jonathan could have stuck to his guns too- could have kept that policeman as the clear enemy in his mind, a subject at whom only fierce righteousness could be directed. But somehow, in a moment on a picket line in the rain in Selma, these two men put their guards down, they stepped outside of their expectations and the responsibilities they had assumed, and they entered into God’s love for both of them with one another: against all odds, against all roles, against all circumstance. But the thing about it is that they were not waiting for that moment- that was not the object of either of their days- they were not servants waiting at the door of their Lord, anticipating with each moment that the Spirit would come knocking. They were more like the house that gets broken into. They had other things on their mind, other agendas planned for the day ahead. The hour was unexpected. But rather than treat that moment like a thief, rather than lock the doors and hold fast against the unexpected, they allowed themselves to be broken into, and there, in that suddenly open place, God rushed in to serve them with his love.

Such a brief, beautiful glimpse of the Kingdom can give us hope, and it can also give us questions about the houses of work and livelihood that we prepare for ourselves now: how willing we are to let the things we’ve come to be so sure of get broken into by the work of God? At what point does our work for God become a possession? At what point do we get so caught up in the work we have designed for ourselves that God’s Grace becomes an interruption to it? An interruption that we are too stubborn to acknowledge? How often do we plow forward with blinders on, unwilling to see the Kingdom of God if it looks different from what we expected, if it doesn’t fit in with what we do. What will it take for us to throw the baggage out the door when the Kingdom comes knocking, what will we have to let go of in order to participate in Grace?

These are not easy questions for us to answer. Imagine, for example, being among the religious minds of Judah when Isaiah comes to tell them: You’ve got it all wrong! your heart is in the wrong place, your ceremony automatic and insincere. You’ve gotten so caught up in your traditions that you have presumed you are honoring God while the real work of God is going on without you. God has come to see your ceremonies, your convocations, and your solemn assemblies as a burden because there is justice to do! Oppressed to be rescued, orphans and widows to defend: that’s where God is- not where you’ve been looking. What would it take for us to hear words like that today if we’ve spent so much of our lives crafting ceremonies, convocations, and solemn assemblies? Are we sure that we would not be too outraged to listen?

Perhaps we don’t have to know what it will take, perhaps we just have to be willing. Whatever our answers now, the good news is that it is God’s good pleasure to give us the Kingdom, and God will have what is God’s good pleasure to have- and that, quite simply, is us. In fact, it is such a sheer delight for God to have us in the fullness of his Grace, in the swell of his complete love, knowing and all-forgiving embrace- that God doesn’t turn away when we’re too busy to take it- when we look at God as if God were interrupting something much more important than all that. And he’s going to keep coming back to give it to us day after day, whether we miss it the time before or not.

“All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.”

In his life, I think that Jonathan, along with the myriad souls of communion who moved Civil Rights forward in their time, received many promises that were made, even as they died in faith on their journey to a better country. As for us, as for Jonathan, a distance divides us from our brothers and sisters in this world and it is as thin at times as two sides of a picket line. The time will come when we are so full of God’s presence that we won’t know the difference in that distance any longer; and until we can realize that Kingdom in its fullness, we will look over the divide, we will greet those from whom we are separated with unabashed song, and step across from time to time as our unguarded moments will allow. AMEN.


Referenced

Eagles, Charles W. Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Kiefer, James. “Jonathan Daniels.” July 1, 1006, Accessed August 11, 2007, http://satucket.com/lectionary/Jonathan_Daniels.htm

Schneider, William J. ed. The Jon Daniels Story Morehouse, 1992.

Year B, Proper 19: Tongue of a Teacher

my first sermon...

Tongue of a Teacher
by James Joiner
Preaching with St. Mary's House Episcopal Center
September 17th, 2006

Year B, Proper 19
Isaiah 50:4-9
Psalm 116
James 2:1-5, 8-10, 14-18
Mark 8:27-38



“The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again...If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

-from the Gospel reading today, and from Isaiah:

“The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.”

IN THE NAME OF GOD WHO MADE US, SAVES US, AND WILL NOT LEAVE US ALONE. AMEN.


Jesus and Isaiah would have us know today that the act of following the word and will of God can be an alienating experience, and our readings have colored that alienation with violence.

For the Isaiah that I know, the Lord God appeared, bearing the tongue of a teacher when she was seventeen, and a High School junior in Fayetteville, North Carolina. One day she was looking out the window of whatever classroom held her at the time, when she saw the AP Physics class walk outside. Apparently, whatever equations those students were tackling for the day had grown too large for the chalkboard of the classroom, so their instructor had turned to public chalking instead, transforming the sidewalks outside the school building into a vast expanse of page on which their problems could unfold. Something in that instructors innovation, something in the simple way he engaged his students with a quirky passion, awoke a new realm of possibility in my Isaiah. It enticed her with its participant learning and the level of trust it required of the other students to leave the school walls and enter the world scribbling with inquiry. The witness of this scene gave her the first pangs of a new love she would gradually fall into, one that resonated within her and within a need of the community. Morning by morning she woke, she woke with ears to listen as those who are taught. She listened intently to the world around her, and she followed her new love where it would allow, even when the first places where it led her seemed stifling. The University never could quite match up to her ideological expectations with its emphasis on methodology. Her love would have much rather explored the what’s and why’s of the learning relevant to the populations she would be entering, rather than the how’s- such as the all too common: how best do we engage students with the content deemed necessary by the state. She took the pragmatics for what they were worth, and kept her passion at bay. She was not rebellious, she did not turn away, she was faithful to her love in her compromise and her waiting, she jumped through the hoops, and picked up those things of value to be had- one eye always on graduation and a classroom of her own. She got hers right off the bat, in a high school not too far away from here. Despite some uneasiness and what she perceived to be a lack of support from her administration she was incredibly successful. She garnered the respect and love of her students with her own respect and love, she was lauded by superiors and peers alike for what seemed to be an innate ability to sustain the weary with a word. It was actually an innate ability to empower those students charged into her care with the worth and motivation intrinsic to their own experience. That was her word, the word within the weary that she served, which she could hear so clearly with her burning ears, for which she tasked herself simply to discover, refine, and present back to the souls she had been listening to. If it is the job of a prophet to speak truth to power, the Isaiah that I know spoke truth to one of the more frequently neglected powers around: poor kids in Greensboro, North Carolina. It may sound grand, but for her it was as simple as inviting participation, as simple as the trust it requires to send students outside of the school walls, scribbling with inquiry.

I have always had a hard time understanding how the Isaiah that I know, how a teacher so “with it”, so in touch with her surroundings, could be assaulted by her own students, in her own classroom, as she was one December afternoon, nearly two years ago. The whole incident erupted in a flash, the room had gotten out of hand as was typical for many other classrooms at this school, and before she knew it, six of the girls in the class rushed her at the front of the room, clawing and scratching, slamming her into the chalkboard and reopening a surgical wound in her back from a recent operation. She escaped the room crawling, sobbing in pain. Yes, it is as literal as that, the Isaiah that I know had her back ripped open, her cheeks clawed. But the difference between her and the Isaiah of our text this morning is that she did not give her back under the attack of adversaries, she did not give her back because it was what holding fast to her ideal required, she did not give her back because the message that she carried threatened or contradicted her aggressors- it was nothing so grand as any of that. The Isaiah I know was touched by violence in the pursuit of her love simply because it has become common in the places where that love has led her, simply because that kind of violence is the norm. I have asked her why this is so, and she has told me quite simply: “Apathy.” Apathy breeds violence, breeds it in our schools and from there breeds it in the nations that we occupy. If we do not give our children the respect, the support, and the resources they require to be instilled with the sense of capability, the sense of responsibility that must fuel all we require of them- and we must require so much of them if we are to survive!- how can we expect them to care? If our brothers and sisters are naked and lack daily food, and we say to them, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill”, yet do not supply their bodily needs- what is the good of that? The Isaiah that I know tried as best as she could to give as much of that respect and support as she could, but she would often come to me frustrated, saying that if we weren’t treating these children with the dignity they deserved from their very first year among us, it was nearly impossible to do by the age she got them.

Jesus and Isaiah would have us know today that the act of following the word and will of God can be an alienating experience, and our readings have colored that alienation with violence. Where Isaiah is a prophet of possibility, her back is struck and her face is pulled by hands reaching out out from places where that possibility has yet to materialize a reality. But I would dare say that finding a cross to bear in the world where we live is the easy part. I would dare say that our culture and our age have taken the Gospel question, “Who do you say that I am?” further than ever before, with the individualism that we have afforded ourselves branching us out into our troubled world in a myriad of crises and causes that seem intent on increasing, intent on dividing and deepening, intent on loosing each of us in their need. Anyone who listens to the world with burning ears, anyone who has found the Word of God there and taken it upon themselves to cherish it, to heal it from the pain where it is defined, will find a cross to bear, will find a point of tension between the wounded world where our love is born and the world our love would have us establish. But I wonder if we haven’t left one another alone in the process. Love calls to us from the Gospel saying, “Follow me, deny yourself for this! The path will ruin you, reject you, and kill you in the end, and it is there where you will have to rise again.” The most idealistic among us take the first steps with enthusiasm, forging out ahead of all the rest, confident that we are fighting the right fight, confident that it will be worth the cost, confident that the one who vindicates us is near. But then we find ourselves alone, we find ourselves worn away beneath the tension, and in our weakest moments we, like Peter, crushed by fear, ask Jesus, “Does it really have to be this way?” At which point Jesus says, not for the first time or the last, “No- I don’t think you were listening.” Jesus has no intention of setting out alone. Time and time again Jesus cries, “Follow me!” time and time again Jesus begs us for our company, time and time again God gives us the opportunity to understand that we are not to be without the camaraderie that will save us. Maybe we, like Jesus, can learn to say: Come with me where I am going. Do not leave me there alone. For we must not take up the cross alone, we must not let the world alienate us in the work we have to do, we must be bound there together, we must not forget the company of our busy, wearied kin, and we must not follow Jesus to the cross without the hope that we will follow him into the sky as well. We must not take up a cross without taking up its resurrection, a resurrection that is a promise, yes, but a job to do as well, a resurrection that demands the work of learning, progression, and resiliency, and demands it only in the context of community which is baptized into that work together. A resurrection whose faith demands to be worked out together. Isaiah does not intend to speak the word of God alone, but rises with her face set like flint and cries: “Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together! Who are my adversaries? Let them confront me. It is the Lord God who helps me; who will declare me guilty? All of them will wear out like a garment; the moth will eat them up!”

Unfortunately, for Greensboro, that is exactly what the Isaiah that I know did. But when she cried for help to come, it did not come from here. When she sought recompense for her injuries she was treated with suspicion by her own administration. Even if she hadn’t given her back she had already given her spirit a hundred times. I know for a fact that some classrooms in this city are wonderful places for children to be valued in their learning, that there are some schools who can afford to give their teachers the support they need, but for this story, when the Isaiah that I know sought camaraderie in her dream and love of a learning that belonged to the students she came to serve, she found none. She found a system that saw her school as a liability of poor test scores and behavior problems, and treated it as such, rather than as a wealth of opportunity, rather than a community of souls who clearly needed something more. The Isaiah that I know would not be compromised in such a way again. When she called for kindred to contend with her love, the answer came from another city, another state, and Greensboro lost another amazing teacher. For this story, Greensboro is the garment that has been cast off to wear away.

Jesus and Isaiah would have us know today that the act of following the word and will of God can be an alienating experience, and it will continue to be if we do not call on those we know to be our kindred for their help. It will continue to be alienating if we do not hear the loud shouts and nursed whimpers of those prophets in our midst who are calling on our own.

AMEN.