Hey Mary, Whatcha Gonna Call That Baby?
As many of you know, I’m sort of grumpy about the commercialization of the most gracious day that rolls around this time of year. Christmas is the celebration of God’s inbreaking into our often too pathetic human affairs. It’s not for commercial “Christmas creep” — buying a bunch of stuff we can’t afford for people we hardly know, don’t like that much, and that they don’t need.
Despite the “grumpy,” I do allow some early Christmas music to seep into my soul. One of my favorites is the Gospel song, “Mary, Mary, Whatcha Goina Call That Baby?” That gets special honor right up there with Handel’s Messiah – wholesome, spiritual preparation for December 25th!
“Mary, Mary,” a folk hymn with a hundred different versions when it comes to the verses. So, here’s my take:
“Mary, Mary, Whatcha goina call that pretty little baby? Think I’ll call him Jesus. Think I’ll call him Jesus cause he’s gonna save his people.
Think I’ll call him Jesus. Strong to Save.
That might be his name, but he looks a whole lot like Liz Cheney when it comes to saving this republic.
Yes, we couldn’t handle his message so we nailed him to a cross – and Liz Cheney’s party can’t handle her message of warning. She has been politically crucified as well.
She and I, as you all know, disagree on virtually all policy issues. But on one thing, the most important thing, we’re absolutely on the same page – saving this republic.
I’ve been listening to her book on my car stereo system. Often, I find tears of gratitude rolling down my cheeks, listening to what this woman has had to endure from her tribe for standing tall. For doing the right thing – country over party.[1]
“Think I’ll call him Savior,” because we all need a little help here. We need a little help on the democracy front right here. Actually, a lot of help!
Liz Cheney has sounded the clear, clarion call to her party to reject the lies and wackadoodle conspiracy theories swirling around the January 6th insurrection.
In one of the most closely contested elections ever, she notes that Vice President Al Gore graciously conceded defeat. But not Donald Trump!
The Former Guy riled up an enraged, armed mob to storm the House of Democracy.
“But by January 6, 2021, Donald Trump had consumed a good portion of almost every day in a rage: inventing and spreading lies about election fraud, preying on the patriotism of his supporters, and telling them they had to ‘fight like hell’ if they wanted to save their country…
“Some of my Republican colleagues in the House were preparing to use Trump’s stolen-election lies as the basis for an unconstitutional attempt to overturn the election results.”[2]
Tears, streamed down my face. It’s this sort of political courage that will save our democracy.
“Think I’ll call him Savior,” ‘cause we all need a little help down here.
And he pops up into history right at the time needed, when all has gone to rot. In history, for God’s sake. And for ours.
There he is in the stuff of daily existence. We know the time. Emperor Augustus is on the seat of power of the Roman Empire. We know the place –one of the most out-of-the-way places, Nazareth.
And we know to whom: to the most unlikely of women, actually, a young girl. Most likely, barely sixteen or so.
Dropped down out from the birth canal right into the messy stuff of our world. “Think I’ll name him Jesus, for he will save his people.” Glory, Hallelujah! And all the angels, stage left, are readying the refrain: “Glory, Hallelujah.
“Mary, Mary, Whatcha Gonna Call that Pretty Lil Baby?”
Think I’ll call him Emanuel, God with Us.
The present-day hammer of God sounding out danger, sounding out warning.
John, the Baptizer, got it right. The ax is presently laid at the root tree of our human existence. The planet heats up. The planet floods up. Misery is the menu item of the day.
The name might be “Emanuel” but this heavenly presence looks a lot like Jake Bittle, with his warning, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration.
Our gracious present under the Yuletide tree is the prescient warning of disaster to come if we don’t Stop. Look. And Listen. Read and heed, my dear friends.
We know of the Great Migration out of the South, fueled by Jim Crow. How millions of newly freed African Americans fled the KKK and abject poverty for decent jobs and breathing room in the North.
Jake Bittle writes of a new Great Migration of the same magnitude now in the wings. This time, due to global warming. The science is clear. The time is now. The drowning Florida Keys are the canary in this coal mine.
A migration every bit as fraught as all the real stuff of history, as perilous as that of Mary and Joseph; forced to travel for a census enrollment in the City of David, Bethlehem. That’s how this “God-with-us stuff always happens. In bits and pieces. Dribs and drabs. Emanuel!
Danger and promise, as Mary and Joseph begin their fateful journey.
A bumpy, donkey ride, as pastor Heidi Neumark characterizes it. She recalls a donkey ride she and her son took down the Grand Canyon trail to the floorof the canyon. A ride that caused her to imagine Mary’s ride to Bethlehem.[3]
Time to cue up Ferde Grofé’s “The Grand Canyon Suite” in your mind.
Pastor Neumark and the other travelers were sternly warned, “…the National Parks Service did not guarantee the safety of any participant and was not responsible for any injury, major or minor, brain damage or death, that might result from our journey.”[4]
They had to guarantee that they had no known serious health problems or heart conditions, weren’t afraid of heights and were not recently recovering from open-heart surgery. And, especially, that NO ONE WAS PREGNANT!
And “if you can’t follow instructions and advice — If any of this scares you, get your refund and get out now!” That was the park ranger’s parting shot.
Mary, Mary…such a long road to travel. Watcha gonna call your baby?
As Heidi and her son and their couple of donkeys plodded down to the floor of the canyon, she thought of Mary’s journey to Bethlehem.
Once Mary’ had “said yes to the angel, she signed on for a trip with no way out. No chance to get out now and get her money back.”[5]
“Mary’s journey was just as uncomfortable [as mine]. She traveled on the edge, where injury and death are likely eventualities. The knowledge already pierced her heart. Did she turn her fearful gaze from her feet to the larger view—the seismic shifts in her womb, spectacular as a canyon carved with the signature of heaven?”[6]
Mary, Mary, whatcha gonna call your pretty lil’ baby. Think I’ll call him Jesus ‘cause we all need a little saving down here. Think I’ll call him Emanuel, ‘cause we definitely need God with us. Think I’ll call him Prince of Peace, ‘cause our warfare has been long and we’re sick and tired of the hate. Think I’ll call him Joy, for unto us He will be born a great joy. Gloria! Gloria!
“Think I’ll call him Jesus,” but he’s goina look a lot like you and me.
And, as Charles Wesley, quoting Philippians, put it, “Rejoice Again, I Say Rejoice.” Amen.
[1] Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2023).
[2] Op. cit., 82.
[3]Heidi Newmark, “Mule Ride,” Christian Century, December 12, 2001.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
December 24, 2023
Christmas Eve
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Isaiah 9:2-4, 6-7; Psalm 96;
Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14
“Hey Mary, Whatcha Gonna Call That Baby?”
A Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly
On November 18, on a clear, bright morning sky, the Starship, one of SpaceX’s efforts to launch humans towards Mars, hurtled into space from the Texas Boca Chica launchpad. Within minutes of launch, failure of the main booster to separate led to the termination of the flight.
In the cold, clinical terms of science, the dispassionate control announcer informed us of the explosion – “It was a rapid unscheduled disassembly.”[1] Talk about jargon! This was a classic.
Isn’t that what this third Sunday, Mary’s Sunday, is about? Here comes a most troubling revelation to any girl, an unexpected, unplanned pregnancy. Her world is shattered, dissembled. What sort of message might this be?
Through Mary we are now given a message, the Word from On High, of incredible “rapid unscheduled disassembly” – her world, our world, will be turned upside down. Grace and Hesed (loving kindness) rent the time continuum — God breaking through!
When told she will be pregnant without her consent, Mary is no shrinking violet. She takes one step back and says to this intruder messenger, “Hold my beer and watch this.”
Whereupon she cuts loose with one of the most radical statements of Torah righteousness in all of scripture.” Rapid unscheduled disassembly of the Principalities and Powers. Total ruination of the haughty.
“He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.”
“Sent empty away;” and in that wilderness perhaps they might be prepared to receive this message as one of joy and liberation for themselves as well.
The Advent landscape is wilderness. Astronomical calamity with stars falling from the sky. Mary’s shock at an uninvited change in her circumstances. John the Baptist announcing to the surrounding cities both judgement and promise of one to come.
A Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly of the current order.
It is more often out of the of desperation that we are prepared to perceive the new that is being born. One who will reign with equity and justice awaits at the manger. As one line of my favorite spiritual beckons to the weak and wounded, “If you tarry till you’re better, you will never come at all.”
Mary’s revelation is the inbreaking of God into history. Soon and very soon is the time of the release of those imprisoned. Addiction, violence, racism, impoverishment, sexism. These chains are being cast aside.
To replace the ashes of despair, we are given a garland and the oil of gladness to run down our foreheads in rivulets. This is on the doing of the Spirit of the Lord. This is Mary’s promise.
Today is Mary’s Sunday. Let us rejoice and be glad. Light the pink candle.
As in times of old, God continues to raise up strong women on a mission. Agents and harbingers of Rapid Unscheduled Dissembly. Good news to the oppressed and a salve to the brokenhearted. A couple I wish to celebrate this morning. All blessings of God.
Yesterday, I saw the clip of two of those women who in the face of lies and defamation have stood up to the powerful. And did the powerful ever look so pathetic.
Georgia election workers, Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, have had the courage in the national forum of public opinion and in the courtroom to challenge the lies and vituperation of Rudy Giuliani. And how this powerful man has been cast down from his throne! How about a $150 MILLION hit to the pocketbook to knock this duplicitous miscreant off his high horse! That’s what the jury awarded last Friday.
These two courageous women did absolutely nothing to warrant the death threats and harassment at all hours of the night. Despite all, these two patriotic women stand tall – beacons of democracy. Ladies, you’re what this republic is all about.
If there is any salvation for our nation it will be due to this sort of lowly election workers who put in long hours for little pay and a lot of grief. For us all. They are God’s blessing to America!
I want to lift up a fearless labor organizer, Mother Jones. She comes directly out of Roman Catholic spirituality. Her family in Ireland was steeped in the teachings of the church.
Mother Jones grew up in an impoverished family, threatened with the fate of starvation during the time of the Irish Potato Famine in the 1850s. Death was all about, forcing her father to migrate to America along with several million others.[2]
One English writer, William Cobbett described the domestic conditions of those living in that Irish rural poverty.
“I went to a sort of hamlet near to the town of Midleton. It contained 40 or 50 hovels. I went into several of them…They all consisted of mud-walls, with a covering of rafters and straw…I took particular account of the first that I went into. It was 21 feet long and 9 feet wide. The floor, the bare ground…No table, no chair…Some stones for seats. No goods but a pot, and a shallow tub, for the pig and the family both to eat out of…Some dirty straw and a bundle of rags were all the bedding…Five small children; the mother, about thirty…worn into half-ugliness by hunger and filth…”[3]
This destitution was not far from that which Mother Jones encountered in the hills and hollers of Appalachia.
When congressional stuffed shirts demanded to know her address, she responded, “My address is like my shoes – It’s wherever I am.”
What was that line about the Son of Man? “The foxes have their holes and the birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Because, if born in our time, he would have been out there in the coal fields with Mother Jones causing “Necessary Trouble.”
It was out of this heritage of destitution – virtually nothing – that God raised up Mother Jones to become one of the most fearless labor leaders in West Virginia. It wasn’t for nothing that she was labeled “The most dangerous woman in America.”
Her model was the great humility and compassion of the Blessed Virgin. In her persistence, showing up on most any picket line, speaking words of encouragement, suffering arrest and imprisonment for her activism, she was indeed an instrument of the Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly of the economic power of the coal oligarchs.
We celebrate today God’s gift of strong, prophetic women who persist. They are our Christmas blessing. They are redemption incarnate.
With these women of our Christian heritage, let us magnify the Lord that all might rejoice in a Savior to be born.
With these Fearless Ones, we, too, announce, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon US. To proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Today we celebrate God’s gift of strong women who have looked oppression in the eye, taken one step back and said, “Hold my beer and watch this! And light that PINK CANDLE! Amen.
[1] “Starship Takes to the Skies Again,” New Scientist, December 1, 2023. The launch can be watched on UTube.
[2] Elliott J. Gorn, Mother Jones: the Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 201).
[3] Op cit., 10, 11.
December 17, 2023
Advent 3
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Isaiah 61:1-4; 8-11; Canticle 3, PCP;
1Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28 “A Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”
Mostly Silence
In matters of the heart, when it comes to what deeply counts for the soul, Advent is mostly a season of Silence. Oh, there is much background noise, grey noise.
Like the traffic outside my hotel room in New York City at night – easily tuned out. A minor distraction.
Sometimes the news breaks through, but only a story which leads us into the deep silence of an unspoken prayer, maybe deep longing, perhaps a regret. This is the holy silence of Advent. If we truly are attuned to it.
I came home this last Sunday to a story of homelessness among college students.[1] I wasn’t aware of how many of our impoverished students are living in their cars in order to afford an education. In order to do better than their parents’ generation.
“Living in their cars, for God’s sake?” I thought. Is this the best we all can do for these students working sometimes two jobs and at night typing up their assignments at night in a van.
It was a story of a group of students unable to afford campus housing finding community in a campus parking lot, G11, at Cal Poly Humboldt in Northern California. Finding community until the school ordered them off campus.
The president of the college refused to meet with any of them, closing off any possible discussion of alternative solutions. “Just be gone – we don’t care where,” was the official message.
With this, my Advent silence was filled with deep shame. That we, the richest nation in the world, this is how we treat the “least of us?” Shame and sadness overcame me. The angel of Annunciation must be weeping. Our hearts are nowhere prepared to receive the Prince of Peace. “Love Divine” is far. With the author of Isaiah in today’s reading, our lives are rent with sorrow and longing.
“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—as when[2] fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name know to your adversaries, so that nations might tremble at your presence!”
Silence. Waiting.
And in the meantime, we have much to answer for. We’ve made hash of our priorities and a mess of the planet.
The other day at our common meal at Pilgrim Place, our friend Helen Dwyer read for the noon meditation a poem by another of our Pilgrims, Renny Golden, of her hometown Chicago and its river. It is a tale of the deep stain we humans have left across the land.[3]
We’ve come with shovels, dynamite, and bulldozers. We’ve polluted with run-off oil from our streets, plastic bags and who-knows-what-else. We’ve dammed and drained until the fish are gone, and only a fool would now eat any pulled from the muck.
And from that river, it could be mostly any river in America, silence. And in our hearts, in our soul of souls, a silent yearning for what might have been. What once was. And if we have any humanity left at all – deep silence within.
“I spoke to the Chicago River today the way
I talk to God. Not begging. Grateful
as Potawatomi mothers dipping water gourds
“in dawn light, a nod to thank the river.
Who, what were you, I asked the river,
when you were tribal, pure, a companion?
“Silence, like God’s, not even a whisper.
We came with muskets, then shovels, then dynamite.
I asked forgiveness. The dog we kids let out
“near traffic. Its hind legs crippled.
This mutt river wounded with sewage,
oil, crop poison. Same sorrow.
Advent is of two messages – judgement, the need of repentance and the promise of restoration. The babe in the manger grows up, and, if we’re fortunate, so do we in our spirituality.
The words of Isaiah, the promise of End Time Reckoning – this is far beyond nasal chipmunks singing happy Winterfest songs.
In this life not every participant gets a gold medal just for showing up. To the degree we despoil God’s creation, we are all losers. There may be no do-overs. In the damage we do to one another, we are all losers. With tears of repentance and forgiveness, sometimes a do-over.
The ersatz spirituality of shopping mall speakers blaired across aisles stacked with Christmas specials is no substitute for the biblical Advent message folks will hopefully hear in many of our churches. If they have chosen wisely.
In his book, What is Vital in Religion, Harry Emmerson Fosdick relates the story of one man who has seen it all, one for whom the platitudes of an easy faith are an insult to the conscience and to the integrity of experience. I fear this fellow speaks for much of modernity:
“I don’t know what I believe, but I don’t believe all this God is love stuff. I have been in two world wars. I have been unemployed eighteen months on end. I have seen the Missus die of cancer. Now I am waiting for the atom bombs to fall. All that stuff about Jesus is no help.” [4]
The wanton slaughter of Palestinian civilians – women, children, the elderly — picks up pace again this morning. An eerie silence from piles of rubble until we hear the shrieks of horror and sirens.
Truly, the dark night of the soul. Silence shrouds our fears, the misery we nightly witness. Repentance is the only authentic response possible. The beginning of any authentic Advent journey.
These past weeks a friend, a former pastor of Downey First Christian Church, asked me to write a review for his recently published book, Acres of Oak.[5] The title is taken from a quip by the senior pastor of a church he briefly served as an associate, Pilgrim Congregational Church in Pomona, referring to the rows of empty pews in many of our churches. In his book, Pastor Rich narrates his story of his entering the ordained ministry and the congregations he has served,
Pilgrim Church is a very large edifice with a good number of Sunday school rooms, all built with the expectation that when the kids left the Sunday school door, they would enter the sanctuary door. Instead, they just migrated out the door, and shortly after, their parents followed.[6]
In his pilgrimage he has seen the mainline church become a mere vestige of what it once was in its former glory days. One congregation he served in San Gabriel, Mayflower Congregational, founded by three breakaway splinter groups grew to over 900 in the 1960s. Then with amazing rapidity the bottom fell out.
By the 1980s the membership had dropped some 600 members. In 1984 the church had a remnant of only 52 pledging units. Acres of oak, indeed. And high maintenance demands. The world seems to presently have little need of what we once offered.
Even seemingly healthy mega evangelical churches are being rent asunder by conflicting loyalties – to the Former Guy, or to our Lord Jesus Christ. Their youth leaving in droves over this conflict.
These are tough times. Our world, like that of Herrod, is in great anguish. The birth pangs of what we cannot yet fathom.
Expectancy mixed with dread fills the silence of our souls as we scan the morning papers over coffee. No easy answers. Certainly not from happy Jesus music or holiday extravaganzas.
This Advent, at St. Francis, we will gather once more, read the ancient texts, await fulfillment in the silence of passing days. Or maybe join in plaintive hymn: “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here…” And we will work for a better tomorrow for the “least of these.”
But we sing our hymns together in solidarity; and in that I find hope. Hope as small and as powerful as in a tiny baby laid in a manger. Amen.
[1] Debbie Truong, “Living in their Cars to Afford College,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2023
[2] Isaiah 64:1-2, NRSV.
[3] Renny Golden, The Music of Her Rivers (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2019), 77.
[4] Harry Emmerson Fosdick, What is Vital in Religion (New York: Harpers Brothers, 1955), 1.
[5] Richard Kurrasch, Acres of Oak: A Pastor Rethinks Church in the 21st Century (Chicago: Windy City Publishers, 2023).
[6] Op. cit., 61-62.
December 3, 2023
Advent 1
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18;
“What the River Said;” Mark 13:24-37
“Mostly Silence”
A Vision Glorious
If you’re my age, you know where you were. You know where you were when JFK was shot in that motorcade in Dallas, Texas. You know where you were when Dr. King was gunned down on that balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. You know where you were when those planes flew into the World Trade Tower in New York City on September 11th.
Some tragedies indelibly are etched in memory, living with us throughout the rest of our natural lives. The pictures at times unexpectedly flashing before our eyes, unbeckoned. Blindsiding us in moments of vulnerability.
Sometimes it’s a private, family tragedy, like the day my mom called to tell me my father had had another heart attack and was now in Long Beach Memorial Hospital. He had somehow survived that one; it was his fourth.
“No, don’t fly back here, he’s recovering. The doctors say he’ll make it.”
“Be sure and call us every day, and if he takes a turn for the worse, “I’ll be there.”
Mom had waited a few days to call. Like many families, ours did not do well with bad news.
There are times, public and private, when the bottom just drops out. Hope dies. With bated breath time stands still. When just getting out of bed seems an insurmountable obligation of the day.
It is on those days we desperately long for a way forward. A word of hope. The message of faith that this is not the end.
This past week, at a preaching conference put on by our Episcopal magazine, the “Living Church,” a group of a little over a hundred of us, clergy and lay, wrestled with our most difficult of assignments – preaching the Word of God.
We had three bishops at the conference. One of those, on being introduced from Saskatchewan, gave the following advice: “The best way to accommodate a bishop in ceremonial functions is to assume he’s blind, he can’t hear, he smells, and he doesn’t know what’s going on.”
Now, Jai said that this story doesn’t really fit in here, but it’s too good to pass up – a preacher’s prerogative.
Preaching today — on the face of it, how presumptuous! To speak for God!? Especially in a secular age, when such seems most irrelevant. A task so inconsequential as the world rushes on. Often, from one catastrophe to another.
And THAT’S exactly why our task is so utterly important – to bring a message of hope and redemption. To speak to the heart and the mind. To bring a message that binds up and renews!
Our minds, our hearts, as of late have been transfixed by the calamity unfolding in Gaza and Israel. Every evening on our TV screens, tragic, sorrowful remnants of families are interviewed, asked to go through their loss one more time. “How was it in the midst of that music festival, running for your life as all about you your friends were being slaughtered by Hamas gunmen?” “What do you want to say to those who have kidnapped your three-year old daughter?” One more day of disaster porn.
Images of total and absolute destruction of Gaza flash on the screen over and over. Paramedics rushing hopeless cases through piles of rubble, gray with the settling dust of an overnight bombing. Scenes of distraught survivors picking through mounds of broken concrete, desperately hunting for lost loved ones.
For families on both sides, the End of the World. Waiting for news that never comes.
And we who watch this unfolding tragedy from across an ocean, from miles away – yes, we’re caught up in the sorrow as well. If we have any heart at all. If we haven’t lost our soul.
And we who watch this serial disaster unfold, we wonder, what of our complicity? Will we find our nation before the World Court, forced to answer for our role in this slaughter of innocents?
Honest contemplation forces us to consider the seeds of this disaster. It was years in the making. Since the founding of the State of Israel. The foundation for some and the nakba, the catastrophe, for others. As one writer has put it, “The Too-Much Promised Land.” So many hopes pinned on one small piece of real estate.
How does one preach a word of hope in such a world? Let alone the Word of God?
A young seminarian is said to have asked the great theologian Karl Barth: what could be preached after the news came of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany. What saving word was there to be said? Barth responded, “Preach as if nothing happened.”
God’s Word transcends the daily setbacks with a Vision Glorious – the enduring Word of God’s purpose for a restored world, restored relationships. Take this message to Herr Hitler.
Coming out of Babylonian captivity, the Psalmist could proclaim:
“Come, let us sing to the Lord; let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving and raise a loud shout to him with psalms.”
Such vision has pulled us through the muck and mire of daily tragedy. Even decades-long disaster.
Reading of those Conductors on the Underground Railroad, they were guided by such hope. Cold, wet, terrified. Leading small bands on the journey from slavery, with the baying of vicious dogs of the trackers on their heels. Follow the Drinking Gourd. Following that constellation to a dreamt of future. No guarantees, only keep one foot going in front of the other. Breath searing aching lungs.
And what inspired them? it was the faith of a Risen Christ proclaimed and put into action. A gospel literally with feet. It was the belief that human beings are meant for something better than drudgery and degradation. Recited at church Sunday after Sunday, in prayer meetings, and in the hymns your mother sang while at her daily chores about the house or in the field.
And here’s the secret – we all get there together. On that Last Day, on that “Great Getting Up Day in the Morning,” gathered into glory, only one question – did you give your sister, your brother a helping hand? That’s the only question on your Final Exam. Did you give a care for the very least?
Today we celebrate the consummation of what this whole Christianity thing is all about – The Reign of Christ. We celebrate a Vision Glorious where all will be seated at the Table of God’s Plenitude. A seat for all. Yes, ALL MEANS ALL!
Each one of us who follows that crucified carpenter from Nazareth is commissioned to be a Conductor on this Railroad of Freedom, this Railroad of Promise. “Get on board, little chillun.”
It is this vision, this hope, shared with friend, family and stranger that daily sustains. This is what, on our best days, we would preach. And in this Vision is Salvation. Amen.
November 26, 2023
Last Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 29
Christ our Sovereign
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 95:1-7a;
Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46
“A Vision Glorious”
One Lord, One People
As I often say, I especially love All Saints Day because with grateful hearts we receive the blessings of God through the lives of so many who have built us up. These are the ones who’ve helped us to thrive. Or like my 11th grade English teacher Mrs. Reiner who did her darnedest on my behalf.
George Regas called these folks his “balcony people” — those living and those who cheer us on from beyond the grave. They urge us to pull out our best stuff. They instill confidence and expect that we will strive always to do the honorable thing. Even when the cost is high. These are the people who have invested in us. Because of them we are far better than we might have been, left to our own devices. These are the Saints of God, a few of whom I want to highlight.
In short, the Saints are those who have brought us along with them that we might thrive. Their victories are our victories. They are testimony to the basic truth: We are all One.
You’ve known them – a parent or other family member who believed in you. A teacher or maybe a scout leader. It might have been a neighbor down the street. Or someone at work.
I want to mention Ruth Jean Simmons. Ruth, born in 1945, grew up in a Black East Texas sharecropping family. The last of twelve, the baby of the family. She not only rose far beyond what life expected of her, but returned that gift to her many students later on.[1]
Her family’s house — actually, “shack,” — in Daly, not much more than a wide spot in the road, had no running water, the only heat being provided by the woodburning stove in the kitchen.
She worked in the cotton fields, beginning at the age of six. The work was backbreaking and consumed most of her waking days and those of her other family members. Restricted to purchasing at the company store on the farm, families would sink further and further into debt.
This is what life had laid out for Ruth Jean Simmons. Her foreseeable future, until she would die. A life of unending toil, dwelling in a land of ignorance and Jim Crow racism.
Her hope for something better came from her church and the hymns they sang. They resonated with the promise of something better than endless toil and hardship.
Recitations were one activity young Ruth delighted in. The passages she memorized for this activity, especially the verses about the Passion and Resurrection embodied hope.
“Come and see the place where he lay,” was an invitation to the imagination to conger up a time of liberation of Blacks from their earthly burdens.
“Even as a child, I understood that these passages gave hope to all of us who sought signs of change from segregation and discrimination. When churches staged programs and gave us the opportunity to recite stories of deliverance, I understood that these performances were giving sustenance and meaning to many of the famers attending the services.”[2]
It was her Sunday school teachers that opened up the meaning of the Bible to her, and the sermons she heard. It was the hymns which gave comfort and promise of a better future.
These comforting hymns her mother often sang through the weekdays of her unremitting toil. “In the Garden,” “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah,” and “Jesus, keep me near the Cross,” were among her favorites.
Because she lived on a school-bus line on Highway 19 after the family moved to Latexo and truancy laws were more strictly enforced, Ruth, unlike her siblings, regularly attended school.
There she encountered one teacher who would set her on the path to an unimaginable future: Miss Ida Mae Henderson.
“Accustomed to my family calling me ‘you ole big-eyed girl!’ I found it remarkable that this woman greeted me with ‘Hello, precious!’ or ‘good morning, baby!’ By telling me that I was valued and speaking to me in this way, she invited me into a world of mystery and magic.”[3]
Ruth remembers the classroom as something special, from the brilliant lighting that was unaffordable in her home to the order of all the desks in a neat row. More importantly, she had her own desk, her own private space just for her. And laid out on that desk were all the materials to begin her education. The whole setup indicated that something very important was to happen here. This room seemed like magic to a child coming from a house where there was not enough furniture for everyone to have a place to sit.
She recounts, “Everything seemed possible with Miss Ida Mae.” From that teacher Ruth received the first praise she had known as a child. “Her words made me feel like a unique person rather than an appendage to my family.”[4]
Much later in life Ruth Simmons would be invited back to the little community of Grapeland, the home of that first school. The invitation came from one of the prominent white churches, a church that back in the day allowed no Blacks in Sunday worship. This for a program held in her honor.
And up came a very frail Miss Ida Mae. “I was overwhelmed to see this woman who had set me on the path to a career in education. She had introduced me to the simple premise that the life and exercise of the mind bestowed enormous power and promise. She provided me a beacon that guided me toward achievement through education.”
“She was the incarnation of all that it means to be a teacher, a mentor, a guide. Ever hopeful about what human beings can achieve through learning.”[5]
Saints Alive! If you were fortunate, you also remember a teacher like Miss Ida Mae Henderson. Or you had a mother like Ruth’s who sacrificed to make sure you had the basic necessities for school. But more than that, a mother who taught you discernment. Ruth, as a young girl, would aspire to “be able, like Mama, to be as observant or as discerning.”
Years later at a ceremony at Harvard, where she had earned her PhD in Romance Languages and Literature, Ruth sat on the stage listening to the encomiums lauding her accomplishments as president of Smith College and later Brown University — the first Black woman to have ever reached this pinnacle of academic achievement, wondering how on earth she got there. “How did I end up here?”
There she sat, musing about the “improbability of the moment.” It was through a life’s journey graced with saints galore who sped her along the way. Saints who had paved the way through their own accomplishments and perseverance, and then given back.
As I sat in Decker Auditorium on All Saints Day as we at Pilgrim Place celebrated the lives of those saints in our midst who are now no longer with us in body, gratitude welled up in my soul as candles were processed up the aisle for those who had nurtured us along the way. My old ethics professor Joe Hough, an iconoclastic hero who taught me community organizing. Dean Freudenberger, an agricultural missionary in Africa who returned to teach those skills at my seminary. Saints galore flooded my being as tears flooded my eyes.
We celebrate those family and friends who have been part of our common life here at St. Francis. Testifying that we all are One, in the benevolent embrace of one Lord. Amen.
[1] Ruth J. Simmons, Up Home: One Girl’s Journey (New York: Random House, 2023).
[2] Op.cit., 43.
[3] Op.cit, 68
[4] Op. Cit., 69.
[5] Op.cit. 72.
November 5, 2023
All Saints Sunday
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 22:15-22
“One Lord, One People”
