I must be doing something wrong.  But I am perplexed as to what it could be.  This spring, as last spring, I went to my garden and scattered some seeds.  Sweet Alyssum, Nasturtium, California Poppy.  And what came up?  Nothing.  Just like last year.  Even with lots of rain.

We scattered packets of seeds of California Poppies around the statue of St. Francis at church.  And what came up?  Nothing.  Just like last year. Even with lots of rain.

Actually, there might have been a few new sweet alyssum plants among the leftovers from previous seasons.  Hard to tell. Lots of weeds, but that was last week’s parable.

Needless to say, I’ve become a bit skeptical when it comes to biblical stories about seeds.  Even that fabled mustard seed.  No birds are going to nest in anything I’ve planted.  Oh, there was one exception.  One year I was so late in purchasing a Christmas tree that I had to settle for a small living tree in a pot.  The boys never let me live that down.

After Christmas, I took it outside and planted it in the place where before had been a plum tree.  It had died and the yards-men came, cut it down, and hauled away the stump.  So, I figured that our little pine would be a suitable replacement.  That tree is now over fifteen feet high.  Yes, there are birds in its branches.

That little tiny tree five years ago I so lovingly planted, I wouldn’t have given you a nickel for its chances.  Surely the lawnmower guys or something else would have gotten it.  This luxurious pine tree by the garage is my substitute mustard seed.        And nasturtium seed. And poppy seed. And alyssum seed.

“Another parable Jesus put before the crowds, saying “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his fields; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”[1]   

This week we have witnessed a beautiful flowering of the Tree of Liberty in the life of Representative John Lewis.  Several years ago, he had written a graphic novel March, in three volumes covering the civil rights struggle he so deeply was involved in.

To watch that historic footage of the march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge on Bloody Sunday when John was almost killed by rampaging sheriff deputies is still heart wrenching.  Regardless of how many times I view it. 

Marchers were trampled by mounted horsemen.  They were bloodied by deputies’ batons.  They were arrested.  Most anyone else would have quit after such a rout. But not John Lewis.  Not the women and men who led that contingent of marchers.  They were not quitters.  For them, the promises of this nation were on the line.  This was existential survival for them.

“We do not k now how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”  These are the sighs and groans of those left injured on the side of the road that horrific morning.[2]

After the TV footage hit the 6:00 o’clock news and phones began ringing at the White House and in newsrooms across the country.  And a call went out across America.  Come march with us.  Stand with us.  President Johnson had told those leaders that he didn’t have the power to get the necessary civil rights legislation passed.  Martin Luther and Jessie Jackson said that they would “just have to get him that power.”  That led to the March to Montgomery. King, Jackson and Lewis decided they would have to drop the problem of white racism right on Governor George Wallace’s doorstep at the capitol.

Pastors, nuns, rabbis, priests – Christians, lay and ordained, came to heed the call.  Johnson realized he would have to send federal troops to protect the marchers.  The nation had been outraged by the brutality of the response by sheriffs.  As a result of those heroic marchers, Johnson now had the power.

Mighty seeds and marvelous stories have been passed down to us out of those struggles.  Another story, this a sports story is for you fans of the Clippers.

In the Sports section of the Sunday paper there was an item on the Clippers coach, Doc Rivers.  Coach Rivers told of a campaign trip with Andrew Young and John Lewis.  At the time Young was running for governor of Georgia.  Doc was then playing for the Atlanta Hawks. 

On this campaign trip, Andrew had given a speech at an all-white congregation.  Afterwards, as the party was boarding the plane for home, Andrew asked how they had thought speech went. 

It was a great speech.  The crowd went wild.  Andrew asked Doc, “And I jokingly said, ‘Well, Mr. Young, I thought the speech was great, but I don’t think you’re gonna get one vote from that church.’ And everybody started laughing.

“And John Lewis, he says, ‘Well, we’re not trying to get all of them.  We’re just trying to get one at a time.  And, eventually, it will be all of them.’  I thought that was just one powerful statement.”

John Lewis knew that politics was a game of addition.  About continuing to build on what was possible.[3]  It is as a seedling patiently unfolding at first two leaves. And that’s how resistance would melt away.  “Nearer and nearer draws the time…”

That little Seed of Hope, the Kindom of God, had its birth with John Lewis organizing sit-ins at lunch counters – that little seed grew into a great tree of accomplishment.  It was watered by Gospel values and Gospel hope.  At the Capital, John Lewis will rest in state, the “Conscience of the House.”  A man who was the offspring of share croppers.  He was a man noted by friend and foe as a Christian gentleman — a strong man who never compromised his values, and in the process did not demean others.

John Lewis’s well-lived life has become a mighty oak under whose shade we all, black and white, can briefly find refreshment, until it is time to pick up and resume that march towards Freedom Land.  Always processing toward a greater equality, a greater freedom and a greater compassion.  God has surely nurtured the seed that was John’s being and life, and inspires today. That is the Kindom of God –  as my friend, the Rev. Mike Kinman, aptly terms it.  It’s about the birth of a community in the Spirit where all are kin.

Recently, featured on “Morning Joe,” was Jennifer Palmieri, introducing her new book, She Proclaims: Our Declaration of Independence from a Man’s World.

She begins the prologue by recounting the small beginning of the Women’s Movement.  A seed planted, if you will that would eventually grow into such a mighty plant.  The Vote.  The right of independently owning property, Title IX, careers in science, politics and mathematics.  And to think that a previous presiding bishop in the Episcopal Church was a woman.  Not just any woman, Catherine Jefferts Shori is a PhD marine biologist.  It’s marvelous we have had such women’s leadership.  Through the struggle for full personhood, God has given life and breath to this movement.  The flourishing of these women is the Kindom of God,

It’s about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez standing up for herself and all women as she called out the despicable behavior, the piggish sexism of Republican Congressman Ted Yoho.  The vulgarities he spat at her on the steps of the House, she read into the Congressional Record.  Her assertion of her God-given dignity and the dignity of all women members of the body was a cultural earthquake. These women are going to take no more…stuff…from the lewd and crude crowd.  And the stars in heaven rejoiced.  This is an astounding moment in God’s unfolding Kindom.  And from Ted’s fellow Republicans, silence.  Crickets.  The Kindom is grounded in RESPECT.[4]  My God, are we ever at a new day, and it is glorious to behold!  For women and men alike.  Fathers, take care in how you raise your sons.  And for the Ted Yohos of the world – women and their supporters will remember your behavior on November 3^rd.  Just sayin…

Look at those amazing women mathematicians, those unrecognized women who calculated the trajectories of the first trips to the Moon. Only recently have they received the accolades due their accomplishments.  We’re talking of the dark ages back in the time of slide rules.  I bet many reading this haven’t a clue as to what a slide rule or a log table is, let alone what to do with them.  They’re now in the Museum of Science and Industry.

In Alaska I knew a woman who had been part of the corps of female pilots who transported military aircraft from factories to air bases.  The flew the largest aircraft for delivery, maintenance and modification.  They flew them across the Atlantic to bases in England.  They trained the men who would become fighter pilots. These were the members of W.A.S.P. – Women’s Airforce Service Pilots.  Sometimes, flippantly called the “Fly Girls,” these women pilots quickly proved their mettle.

“In 1944, during the graduation ceremony for the last WASP training class, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Henry “Hap” Arnold, said that when the program started, he wasn’t sure “whether a slip of a girl could fight the controls of a B-17 in heavy weather.”

“Now in 1944, it is on the record that women can fly as well as men,” Arnold said.[5]

I believe what those first ordained women in my denomination asserted early on, “If a woman was fit to bear our Lord’s body at birth and to receive his body from the cross, she is certainly fit to bear his body at the altar.” Of course, I didn’t start out with such a view.  I believe I was the stupid jerk who said, “I’m all in favor of women’s liberation – as long as I don’t have to change.”  Fortunately, some kind, and some not-so-kind, women quickly disabused me of that notion.  I’m still a work in progress.  Ask my wife.

Ms. Palmieri tells of the very early beginnings of the women’s movement.Early on, a small innocuous beginning, a very small seedling sprang forth on July 1848 when “four women sat at Mary Ann M’Clintock’s kitchen table in upstate New York to draft the Declaration of Sentiments and accompanying resolutions that were to be presented at the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls later that month.”  In that august group were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mary Ann’s two grown daughters Elizabeth and Mary Ann.[6]

This dream was put to paper in a time when women had absolutely no legal or political power. Women’s suffrage was even considered by many women as perhaps a step too far.

God gave force and power to that seedling, for with in each human breast is the movement toward fulfilment.  This was a force that could not be squelched. This drive to fulfillment is God’s mighty power moving towards completion of what each person, each woman, each man is meant to become. It is what Paul means by “perfection.”  The unfolding and renewing of God’s Kindom.  “Nearer and nearer…”

This incipient movement is a seed that has become the largest coterie of women ever to serve in congress.  It has blossomed into the many who offered their candidacy for the presidency on our nation.  These women let loose in our world are like that song, “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God.”  You can find them in labs pulpits, and in cockpits.  You can find them in congressional offices – yes find them elected.  You can find them in class rooms and find them with stethoscopes.  You can find them most any place you’d care to look   And, we are all the better for it.

God’s power budding forth in each, brings forth a miracle. To paraphrase a line from a favorite hymn, “nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be, when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.”[7]

Every evening I look forward to the PBS News Hour with Judy Woodruff. (Did I mention that she is a national treasure?  But that’s another sermon).  At the end of the newscast she has a segment devoted to those we have lost as a result of COVID-19. 

I find Judy’s stories are precious seeds in my soul packing a wallop. They are motivation I need to get up and do whatever I can do to stop this pandemic where I live.

Here are a couple of their stories:

“Postal worker Jesus Collazos was known for taking the time to greet every neighbor along his mail route in Arlington, Virginia.  The 67-year-old spent over two decades with the U.S. Postal Service, after immigrating from Colombia in 1978.  Jesus and his wife raised his two children in a home he first discovered along his route.

“The proud grandfather loved posting family photos on social media always with the simple caption: “Life is good.”[8]

“Lynika Strozier never gave up on her dream to become a biologist.  As a child, she was diagnosed with a severe learning disability, but went on to earn two master’s degrees in biology and science education.  She became a researcher of plant DNA at the world-renowned Field Museum in Chicago, and a science professor at Malcolm X College.

“Fun-loving and friendly, Lynika was at home in the lab as she was out with friends, or watching horror movies with her grandmother, Sharon, who raised her.  Lynika was 35 years old.[9]

As I allow these stories, these seeds budding forth with abounding Grace, to rest in my heart, watered by prayers of gratitude, they blossom into the desire to do my part, to be a faithful citizen ot this grand Republic. Wear my mask.  Remind others gently to wear their masks. Social distance. Stay home as possible.

I lift up in my Facebook posts – diatribes and urgent pleas — the urgency of combatting the COVID-19 scourge that has taken so many precious lives.  And simply give thanks for the lives that those they have touched.  And their memory is a reminder to give thanks for each morning that I still have an opportunity to sally forth into the struggle.  Always a happy warrior.

I now close, giving Rep. John Lewis the “Last Word.” It’s called “Necessary Trouble.”  Our Lord would have known all about “Necessary Trouble,” as would his followers down through the ages. John Lewis has been a marvelous scion sprung from the Tree of Liberty.  For his life and sacrifice our nation is greatly indebted.  Never, never discount the power of God welling up in the human breast.  Look at the mighty miracle that was, and that lives on, in John Lewis’s testimony.  And what a mighty tree it continues to be.  We all, black and white, first nations folk and those who have come lately – we all can rest in those branches.  The glorious Kindom of God.”HH    JJJJKK

Necessary Trouble

This is the way another generation did it, and you too can follow that path, studying the way of peace, love and nonviolence, and finding a way to get in the way.  Finding a way to get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.

With all sainted troublemakers down through the ages, let us say, AMEN.

---

[1] Matthew 13:31, Revised Standard Version.

[2] Romans 8:26, Revised Standard Version.

[3] Mirjam Swanson, “Rivers reflects on civil rights icon, politician Rep. Lewis,” The Inland Valley Daily News, Sports Section, p. 2.

[4] Luke Broadwater and Catie Edmondson, “Ocasio-Cortez Defies Sexism by Shaming It on House Floor,” New York Times, July 24, 2020.

[5] Susan Stamberg, “Female WWII Pilots: The Original Fly Girls,” Morning Edition, NPR, March 9, 2010.

 

[6] Jennifer Palmieri, She Proclaims: our Declaration of Independence from a Man’s World (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2020) 2.

[7] Arthur Cambell Ainger, The Hymnal 1982, “God is Working His Purpose Out” (New York: Church Hymnal Corp.)   534.

[8] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/in-memory-of-5-more-u-s-victims-of-the-coronavirus.

[9] Ibid.

July 26, 2020

Pentecost 8, Proper 12

“With Sighs Too Deep for Words – Seeds of Hope” The Rev. John C. Forney

The congregation was dumbstruck that Sunday morning as Jai and I stood before the altar during the time of announcements to announce that we were expecting.  Yes, Abraham and Sarah, in our old age, expecting our first.

I still remember one of the congregation busybodies taking me aside after the service to express her relief.  “I’m so glad to hear your announcement.  I just thought Jai was letting herself go.”

Having come from a family with not the best example of fatherhood, I was pretty insecure about my nurturing ability.  As the day drew near, waiting over two days of contractions, my nerves didn’t settle down.  After the third trip to the hospital, the midwife suggested we call in medical expertise. 

In came two people, I remember the names exactly – they were classic – Emerson and Newton.  No. I’m not kidding.  And they both looked like they were only a year or two out of high school.  By this time, we were looking at a caesarian section.  I thought to myself, “These two kids are going to cut up my wife?”

Was Jai in travail?  No, she was pumped full of happy juice.  Not feeling any pain, or much else.  As the hospital had a policy that fathers could be present for the birth, there I was as Dr. Newton made the incision.  Biting my fingernails.  Though I had been an Army Medic and had seen lots of blood, I was never related to any of these patients. You might say, I was the one in travail. 

When a boy was delivered, it didn’t help my anxiety to hear several loud slaps and our pediatrician, Dr. Clint, yelling, “Breathe, damnit.  Breathe!”  Finally, there was a reassuring piercing cry and I knew the worst was over.  Talk about “high anxiety!”

Paul, in his letter to the Christians at Rome speaks to such times as “high anxiety.” 

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons and daughters, the redemption of our bodies.” 

“But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

Remember the old TV show, “Kung Fu?”  “Patience, young grasshopper.”  As the old master would seek to settle his young novice.

We are in the midst of a contagion unlike anything our generation has ever seen.  We have suffered more death than twice the casualty rate of the Vietnam War.  We are sick and tired of being shut in.  We are even sicker when we come across people not wearing masks in public – those, who through their carelessness, through just not giving a rip, who through their dismissive attitude, continue to put the rest of us at risk.  And prolong the shutdown we all are sick and tired of.  As Fanny Lou Hamer was fond of saying, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

And that goes double if we have young children at home.

With COVID-19, we’re all in travail. 

We wonder how much education our children will lose.  This week the Claremont Unified School Board went back into emergency session to reverse its decision of a week previous.  Now, there will be no face-to-face school in session.  All teaching will be by internet.  I’m sure parents are groaning in great travail.  And patience for grasshoppers, or much of any other creature, is in short supply.  The only hopes parents had for respite have been dashed. 

Paul can talk about hope.  Well and good for him.  He didn’t have a cooped-up seven-year-old and a junior higher to deal with!  Yeah, “…we wait for it with patience!”  Right.

All creation groans in COVID-19 travail. 

For people of faith, our usual support is lacking or somewhat anemic.  We at St. Francis miss each other terribly.  We long for a hug.  We long for that familiar face.  With the reoccurrence of massive infections, our bishop John counselled patience and forbearance.  It may not be until September or later before we can safely resume worship on site.

One wit remarked, “When this is all over one half of us will be excellent cooks and the other half alcoholics.”

Uncertainty and deprivation bring out the worst AND the best in many.  The parable of the seeds explained in Matthew 13 indicates, amongst the church folk, there is some variation.  Some look like followers of Jesus, and some – we’re not quite sure WHO they are following.  But it sure doesn’t look like Jesus.  In such situations, folks were tempted to judge.  Divide the congregation up into First Class Christians and Second (or Fifth or Tenth) Class Christians. 

I remember as a young child our family attended a Presbyterian Church.  Faithfully.  I knew my father must have had a large pledge because one Sunday morning my teacher whispered into my hear that she so appreciated the large financial support our family gave the church.”  I wasn’t old enough to know that such a comment was out of place.  But I did feel a bit embarrassed for having been singled out.

Well the day came when our old pastor retired and we got a new fellow.  A number of weeks afterward we stopped attending.  When I finally had the nerve to ask my dad what was wrong, he told me the issue.  This new pastor believed in the Calvinist doctrine of Predestination.  He, in sermon after sermon, let those sitting in the pews know where they were predestined to end up.  And where he was predestined to go.  And they weren’t the same place.  Eventually, my parents, and a number of others, got tired of hearing that they were unalterably bound for perdition.  Hellfire is not a very good selling strategy for the love of Christ.

Such is the situation in Jesus parable of the seeds.  Don’t condemn.  Don’t shun or cast out.  Let God sort ‘em out in the end.  It’s beyond our pay grade.

And if we are honest, brutally honest, with ourselves, each of us is a mix of good wheat and weeds.  Some of us filled with a lot of devil grass and puncture vines

You look how this pandemic has brought out the best and the worst. 

Sometimes it is just a little act of kindness that makes my day.  Like the image of a young fellow helping an elderly woman get her shopping cart of groceries out of the bus as she was exiting the door.  A priceless, simple act of kindness.

Yes, there are inconsiderate, narcissistic people who will not wear a mask, but there are so many who do.  It was such a climate of common consideration that enabled Taiwan, which has a little over one tenth the population of the United States to get through their experience with COVID-19 with only seven deaths.  Seven deaths in the whole country!  Just imagine.  If we had been as proportionally successful as Taiwan, we would by now only have about 97 deaths – instead of 138,000.  And counting. It’s all about leadership and consideration.

We might also note, incidentally, that the countries that have come through this pandemic intact — Taiwan, New Zealand, Denmark, Germany, Iceland – they all have one thing in common.  They’re all lead by women.  Causes one to ponder.  Could it be that too much testosterone is an impediment to doing the right thing, the bright thing?  Just sayin’…

As our bishop John says, WWJD?  “Wear a mask.”

Yes, in spite of the travail and struggle, there is yet much joy to be had.  The people I meet on my walk, almost all are wearing masks.

I turned on my Facebook site and came across the most post someone had left me, an orchestra playing on the streets of Havana, Cuba.  Rondo alla Mambo’ by Sarah Willis and the Havana Lyceum Orchestra.  Rhythm. Bodies swaying.  Smiles on the old faces of folks peering out of second floor windows.  Check it out.  It will delight your heart and warm your soul.

Travail, yes.  But in solidarity we move through COVID-19.  Bowed but not broken. Knowing discouragement, yet immersed in the joy of solidarity from common support.  Surrounded ever by that glorious company of saints, those living and those having gone on before – in them I rejoice.

Travail, yes.  BUT, JOY IN THE MORNING!

I also rejoice in this Spirit-filled meditation by a Lutheran pastor serving an Episcopal congregation, Grace Memorial Episcopal Church in Darlington, Maryland.  The Rev/ Nadia Bolz-Weber:

I do not know when we can gather together again in worship, Lord.

So, for now I just ask that:

When I sing along in my kitchen to each song on Stevie Wonder’s Songs in The Key of Life Album, that it be counted as praise.

And that when I read the news and my heart tightens in my chest, may it be counted as a Kyrie.

And that when my eyes brighten in a smile behind my mask as I thank the cashier may it be counted as passing the peace.

And that when I water my plants and wash my dishes and take a shower may it be counted as remembering my baptism.

And that when the tears come and my shoulders shake and my breathing falters, may it be counted as prayer.

And that when I stumble upon a Tabitha Brown video and hear her grace and love of you may it be counted as a hearing a homily.

And that as I sit at that table in my apartment, and eat one more homemade meal, slowly, joyfully, with nothing else demanding my time or attention, may it be counted as communion.

The Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber

She gets the “Last Word.”

Amen.

July 19, 2020

Pentecost 7, Proper 11

“As in Travail”

The Rev. John C. Forney
Isaiah 44:6-8, Romans 8:18-25, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Some will remember that “Hot August Night” when Neil Diamond stepped out onto the stage.  The orchestra began with a winsome prelude that slowly crescendoed to a pulsing beat.  Then began the first strains of that ballad that so aptly celebrates the promise of this nation for millions around the world, “We’re coming to America.”  Neil Diamond in an iridescent blue shirt with flashing blue lights spangled about it, and the joyous crowd responding, “Today.  Today.  Today.”  The camera does a slow pan across the audience and comes to rest on the face of an old guy about my age with tears streaming down his face.  “Today.  Today.  Today.”

This is the America I grew up with as a young boy.  In school we made Pilgrim hats and the white shoulder coverings those early pioneers wore.  We read of that almost deified, mythical Thanksgiving feast.  We learned of the colonists rising up and throwing British tea into Boston harbor made up as Indians. And watching over all, Divine Providence. 

Yes, actually, historically, some of those things happened.  There were a few heroes in all this.  But the reality is much more complicated.  And not quite as divine. 

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was to go.  By faith he sojourned in the land of promise.”

Unfortunately, that so-called Promised Land has been too much promised.  So, with America.  Other than the first inhabitants, all the rest of us arrived to find it already taken. And, don’t forget, even those first inhabitants drove much of the original wildlife into extinction.  All of us have blood on our hands.

Yet by faith, generation after generation, we persevere.  The original promise continues to unfold, but we all stand in the need of Grace.

To put it into the passive exonerative voice, “Mistakes were made.”  Many. You know them.  We’re still making them.  I wouldn’t have been sad at all to see the statue of Andrew Jackson toppled in Lafayette Park in D.C. the other night.  You remember that president, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”  His expulsion of some sixty thousand Native Americans from the Southeastern United States today would have been considered a war crime.  If this bit of our history escapes you mind – maybe you weren’t paying attention in your eighth-grade history class.  Oh, you say it wasn’t in your history book.  Well, that’s not a surprise.  The victors write the history.  Don’t remember?  The Cherokee, Seminole and Choctaw – they remember.  Ask one of their people.  If you’re ready to listen respectively, with a heart ready to be wounded – maybe one of them will share the story of the “Trail of Tears.”  Mistakes were made.  In abundance.

So here we are.  With the exception of those original inhabitants – and while we all came in different boats – we’re all in the same boat now.  America is adrift and pestilence stalks the land. 

And yet, and yet…by Faith… “They’re Coming to America.”

The first came to escape tyranny and the oppression of kings and Church.  We didn’t believe in the freedom of religion in these scattered colonies much more than the king believed in it in Mother England.  Here, we ended up with so many different religious traditions on these shores, we were forced to come to an accommodation.  People leaving Europe were exhausted by religious wars.  If you can find that in your old, musty history book.  These stories are there.  Start under, “Thirty Years War.”  It left some eight million dead.  All over whether Jesus was actually in the piece of bread at the altar, or whether he was present in our celebration of his presence in the reality of those who gathered in the memory of his name.  Eight million souls gone to wherever over a theological disputation – and a few other things.  For sure, politics and nationalism and other stuff were mixed in.  As they say, it’s complicated.

The genius of this new land is that we have found a better way (not that we always heed it).  As Winston Churchill noted about us, “Americans always do the right thing.  After they’ve tried everything else.”  Eventually, we made progress.  A Catholic could be president.  Recently, a Jew did almost win the Democratic nomination twice.  Jews, Catholics, Protestants serve on the Supreme Court and in Congress with their Muslim brothers and sisters.  Don’t forget our first black president, EVER.  In the twenty-first century, gay, straight and trans, we elect them.  And not a few atheists.  Yes, God loves atheists, too.  Or what part of “ALL” didn’t you understand? 

By faith we till the soil of this Promised Land.  We hold an expansive vision for all.

For those who might be a little squeamish or put off about this last assertion, I refer you to Calvin (also in your history book).  Think Presbyterian, Reformed, Congregationalist.   “Man does not have the authority to decide whom God will save.”   Nor does woman.  Any of us, flawed as we are, can be an instrument for Good under the power of the One who created the heavens and earth.

“We’re Coming to America.”  Today.  Today.  “By Faith…”

What is that ineffable quality about this land that others find so compelling?  Listen to the stories of those Jews fleeing the shtetls of Russia and Poland in the eighteen-hundreds.  Those Orthodox village communities that had known stable communal life for hundreds of years were beset by famine and pogroms.  Thousands were killed by czarist mobs and driven off their lands.

“We’re Coming to America.”  Today.  Today.  “By Faith…”

The Forneys, originally French Huguenots fleeing papist mobs in France, first settled in Switzerland and then in Germany.  Looking for a better life, we landed in the Port of Philadelphia in 1767 or there abouts.  Between my father’s and mother’s families we are a mix of French, German and English.  Throw in a Jewish peddler who married into the family in Iowa and gave my mother’s side the surname, Gross.  Her mother was a Howe.  Yes, in our lineage Julia Ward Howe – think the first Mother’s Day Proclamation.   Also General Howe, the British general who proved so inept as to let George Washington slip through his fingers three times.  He was finally sent home back to England.  But, apparently, not all the Howes.

We’re coming to America.  Sweet Land of Liberty.  Today.  Today.  Today.  “By Faith…”

We all came in separate boats, but now we’re all in the same boat.  Today, virtually every one reading this — your family — came from somewhere. By boat, on foot or, lately, by plane.

As immigrants, our ethic should be formed by Torah values, as explicated in the book of Deuteronomy. 

“The Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great the mighty, and terrible God, who is not partial and takes no bribe.  He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.  Love the sojourner therefore; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.”

You should love and cleave to God, “…who has done for you these great and terrible things which your eyes have seen.”

This ethic, passed down from Abraham in the Torah to the Prophets, and enshrined in the teachings of Jesus is the heart of who we are created to be as an immigrant nation.  This ethic is the cornerstone of the Declaration and Constitution.  It was in the mind of Lincoln when he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation.  This ethic tore at the hearts of Congress when, shamefacedly, they issued a formal apology to Japanese-Americans interned in concentration camps during WWII. 

And what amends will we make to generations of African-Americans who built much of this place?  Built the very White House itself and laid out the boundaries of our nation’s capital.  Look up Benjamin Banneker, surveyor, astronomer, and farmer.  He calculated the solar eclipse of 1789 well before other, more famous astronomers.  He worked to set those boundary markers.

What reparations will we make to the people of Greenwood?  Who built the section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, stormed by white mobs in some of the worst violence our nation has known?  What reparations?  “Black Wall Street” burnt to the ground, the pride of generations of Tulsa’s Black citizens?  They’re still waiting for an answer. 

What amends will we make to the First Nations people from whom we stole Mt. Rushmore and so much more?  Impoverished on neglected reservations.

Th e miracle is that we have survived thus far and somehow managed to keep the country together after some fashion.

This ethic reverberates in the agonized plea of Rodney King, “…can we all JUST get along?  Can we get along?”

So, listen up, Sweet Land of Liberty, we’re at a new beginning.  As M.L. King wrote, “…tomorrow is today.” 

 “By Faith…”

Read the opinion section by Caroline Randall Williams, “You want a Confederate Monument?  My body is a Confederate Monument. The black people I came from were raped by the white people I came from.  Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?” [1]

Yes, read it.  The mere fact that such a searing story could be printed at all is evidence that God has graced this land.  True greatness begins with truth-telling, repentance.  And at some point, hopefully, absolution.  Absolution, not ours to demand, but a mark of God’s grace that grows out of honest, heartfelt conversation with those harmed.  Freely offered, not ours to demand.  Ultimately, a gift of God’s Grace.

“Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past.  They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land.  They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.”

“To those people it is my privilege to say, I am the proof.  I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.”[2]

The fact that Ms. Williams’s story could even be told — and read — and hopefully absorbed with empathy by a white audience, is a mark of God’s grace.  Freedom begins with truthful story telling.  She, and all who have survived such a shameful legacy – they are the true heroes of the South.  They are its righteous legacy.  So, also with those of the southern branch of the Forney family.”

If America is ever to be Great Again,” it would only be when we disenthrall ourselves of our made-up, high school sanitized history.  With the Rev. Al Sharpton, we must acknowledge that any greatness will only begin when we honestly ask, “Great for whom?”  Great for whom?  And prayfully listen for an answer. The Spirit will speak to an open and contrite heart.

Any greatness will begin with an honest assessment of who we are and from where we have traveled.  As my mother always said, “Handsome is as handsome does.” I think I now know what she meant.

“By Faith Abraham…”  By Faith, each one of us embarks on a new journey, sojourners in a land every bit as strange and as foreign as it was to those first people who crossed the Bearing Strait eons ago.  Every bit as foreign as it was to those first Pilgrims.  As it was to those who disembarked from fetid slave ships. Every bit as foreign as were the streets of New York that opened to hundreds of Suffragette women marching for their personhood to be acknowledged at the ballot box.  Every bit as foreign as to those who on Bloody Sunday crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge — named after a Grand Dragon of the KKK.  Every bit as foreign as America now is to all of us in this new era of #BlackLivesMatter, COVID-19 lockdown, and the beginning of an economic collapse unlike any since the Great Depression.  “By Faith…”

“By Faith…” Might we be receptive on this July 4th to the stirring of God’s Holy Spirit.  Indeed, “The times, they are a changing.”  Might this nation embrace this fresh opportunity to live out its creeds and promises.  A new birth of common purpose.

“By Faith….” let each take hold of the opportunity to begin anew.  Then, and only then, do we embark on a journey towards greatness – a destination never reached, but approached from afar with starry eyes.

“By Faith…”  We’re still Coming to America.  Today.  Today.  Today.

 Amen.

---

[1] Caroline Randall Williams, New York Times, “Sunday Review,” June 28, 2020., p. 4.

[2] Ibid.

Independence Day Weekend

“We’re Coming to America”

The Rev. John C. Forney
Deuteronomy 10:17-21; Hebrews 11:8-16; Matthew 5:43-48

My first parish assignment at a little town in the upper Mojave Dessert.  There I met a number of wonderful, faithful Christians.  Yes, the town was little.  My wife would have said infinitesimal.  When we first arrived to be interviewed, in all of about one minute we had passed through the entire downtown section and crossed the railroad tracks back into open desert.  My tearful wife said with a quaver in her voice, “Is this all there is?”  Later she would tell friends that we were centrally located, “One hundred fifty miles from nowhere.”  She was certain that the End of the Earth was only four blocks past the local schoolhouse.  Or was it two?

One of the wonderful members of that church was Bill, our Lay Leader.  Bill’s father had been a Methodist pastor, and it was his father’s example that led Bill to strongly insist that the church should be involved in its community.

One day Bill told me the story of his father’s involvement in the early Civil Rights struggles in Florida.  Tensions had been building and Bill’s father had an idea of how the church might bridge the gap and promote understanding.  He went across town to see an acquaintance who was pastor of a Black Baptist church.  He proposed a plan whereby the two children’s choirs might do an exchange on an upcoming Sunday.  The two pastors agreed on a date.  The Baptist kids would spend Saturday night over at Bill’s father’s church, getting to know their kids.  Then, on Sunday morning they would preform a couple of numbers for the eleven o’clock service.  Bill’s father had decided that since race relations were so raw, he ought to spend the night at his church with the kids and their chaperones.

Around 9:00 p.m. there was a banging on the church door, and when the pastor opened it, he was confronted by an armed mob of fifty or sixty.  A man with a shotgun stepped forward, “Preacher, you best send those kids out here now.”  Bill’s father told the man in no uncertain terms, “They aren’t coming out.  And if you want them, you’re only get to them over my dead body.”

Everybody got really quiet.  After what seemed like an hour, Bill’s dad being silhouetted by the light of the open doorway and the belligerent armed men facing him, there was the faint sound of shuffling feet.  A few around the edges began to peel away, then others.  Sounds of some more car doors closing and engines starting up.  After a few more minutes most had gotten back in their cars. The mob had quietly dispersed.  They’d gone home.

That is an indelible story Bill would take to his grave.  It is a story of Christian courage and discipleship when it was all on the line.  The Baptist kids remained unaware of what had happened that evening as they sang to the delight of that Methodist congregation Sunday morning.  Given the emotionally charged experience, so fraught with potential for tragedy, the Methodist kids never made their reciprocal visit to the Baptist church across town.

In our passage from John’s gospel, we are given fair notice that this Jesus Movement stuff will not be a walk in the park.  Most everybody will hate and despise you.  Your ways are foolishness.  Un American.  Communist!  Jesus’ way will tear up families.  If daughters-in-law were not be getting along all that well with the in-laws, Gospel values will make things exponentially worse.  This is going to go way beyond kitchen turf conflicts and how to raise the grandkids.  And who makes the best meatloaf.

One’s not going to need to heed Civil Rights leader, Congressman John Lewis’s call to get into, “good trouble, necessary trouble.”  It’s going to come knocking at your doorstep.  In spades!  Neighbors will shun you.  You will be beaten in city streets by hostile policing authorities.  Some of your neighbors will burn down your church. Tear gas, pepper spray.  It’s all coming at you.  I can testify from personal experience.  You are about a most inconvenient truth THEY don’t want to hear.  You will be fired and sidelined if you work for a government agency.  Your career’s toast.  Nobody wants to hear it.  Go away.

During the recent mass rallies, the Los Angeles Times has reported on the ugliness peaceful demonstrators have encountered in rural, mostly white, California.  Protestors encountered pure ugliness.  They were beset upon by threats of violence and malicious rumors.  Two teenagers from Angels Camp spoke of horrible abuse.  Angels Camp – remember the home of the “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain.[1]  That Angels Camp.

One seventeen-year-old Black student in rural Quincy has been spat on by white students at her school and called the N-word.  The torment got so bad, she finally had to transfer to another school — a move that would cost her a scholarship and the captain position of the cheer squad.  God may love all, but not so much some of the residents of Quincy.  

In Tuolumne County some angry folks threatened to bring guns and dogs into town.  Large dogs.

In Shasta County an unauthorized “militia” of armed men in tactical gear threatened to show up at the protest at Oakdale.  Not at all what local law authorities wanted.  The word the sheriff used?  “Counterproductive.”

One mixed race citizen, Camereon Medico, began a one-man protest with a sign board in Susanville.  He was assaulted with racial slurs and curses, “We don’t like your kind around here.” And “Black lives don’t matter.”  Some on Facebook denizens threatened to bring guns and “run over” protesters.  In spite of the hate and threats, a white neighbor and then others soon joined the man’s protest.  Yes, there’s going to be “trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”

Standing for justice and equity – standing for the ideals Jesus preached is not easy.  “If this stuff was easy, we’d have already done it a long time ago,” President Obama is fond of saying.  It this stuff was easy, Jesus would have had it wrapped up during his earthly ministry. 

My first work while in seminary was in community organizing.  Trained seminary interns in teams of two were sent to clusters of churches who had invited them in to help them work on white racism.  Vic and I ended up at Temple City, California, hosted by a cluster of five congregations.  We called it Project Understanding, though there often wasn’t an abundance of understanding.

Our work there took shape as an ecumenical fair housing council.  Temple City was a bedroom community for Los Angeles and it was in housing patterns that racism was expressed.  Talk about lack of understanding!  I remember our first meeting with the city manager.  His opening words, “This is a nice, peaceful (read white) community and I intend to keep it that way.”  Our first client was Italian.  For some reason, the owner of this rental property hated Italians.  Why?  Go figure.

Members of our project were sent out to investigate, or check out complaints, to confront hostile apartment managers and owners.  To secure the just rights of minority clients, they were often castigated as “trouble makers” and worse.  Called all sorts of names.  Jesus was right.  His message of love put into action would not be popular.  Justice is the public form of love, and it’s not often popular because it means giving up power. 

The last time I visited the church that had hosted our office, was on the occasion of a memorial service for the woman who had followed me as director of Project Understanding,  Now, Temple City was overwhelmingly Asian.  Communities change.  But it was “nice and peaceful.”

“They will deliver you up to councils, and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake…”  Tough stuff.  Not easy, indeed!

“Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake.”  Yes, indeed if this stuff was easy, we’d have done it a long time ago.  And, if you try — yes, you too, will end up in deep doo-doo.

“What I tell you in the dark, utter in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim upon the housetops.  Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul…”

Cinch up your belt.  Get your game face on. There’s work to do if we’re going to build a Promised Land.  It’s about the risk to love.

Dante Stewart alerts us to risk as the costly expression of faith.  “Sympathy feels bad about a situation. Solidarity joins in as a co-laborer to change the situation. Sympathy calls for love without risk. Solidarity calls for risk as love. Sympathy centers the comfort and timetable of those who benefit from a system of difference. Solidarity calls for a revolution of value in a system in which we build a loving and just common life together.”[2]

Solidarity, as corporate love, is costly.  It demands something.  It demands risk.  It is easy to march with thousands of like-minded people in Los Angeles or in any other large, mostly progressive city.  To make that witness in a small, rural setting is costly.  One will quickly reach the “unrepentant heart.”  Fearful and damaged persons will react out of that fear and reject you and your message.  The challenge then, is how might one creatively engage and disarm that fear.  Move beyond it.  I can’t say we interns in Temple City were often that successful.  Too green, most of the time.

But understanding is possible.  Or maybe just tolerance.  We did have some small victories.  We did host a number of community symposiums on the fair housing laws and how to follow them.  When managers and owners heard that if a Black family would rent a unit, the rest of the tenants would not move out.  Why?   Because people hate to move.  If the new family could afford the same rent the others were paying, they would keep up their unit in pretty much the same fashion.  And this was the case.  Most people want to do the right thing.  Soon neighbors got to know one another and the neighborhood’s heart grew one size bigger.  In the years I ran the project, we never actually had to sue anyone. 

For those brave Catholics, Methodists, Quakers, Presbyterians and Disciples of Christ members of Project Understanding, this was costly love.  Faith, being put to the test, grew beyond measure.  In the work, Jesus became real like he had never been for many of our investigators.   They tasted a smidgen of Life Eternal.

Our nation, we sense, is at a crossroads.  The Rev. William Barber calls our time a Third Reconstruction.  Lately I have been moved to pick up a book of Martin Luther King, Jr., Where do we Go from Here:  Chaos or Community?[3]

In one of his last works, Dr. King lays out his hopes for a better America.  It is a vision firmly rooted in the promise of our Constitution and founding documents.  But he knew that the continued pressure of mass demonstrations, supported with strategic organizing and policy proposals would be essential.  Just as now.

Love, if it is to amount to anything in the public sphere, must be disciplined and tenacious.  Just as now.

“Mass nonviolent demonstrations will not be enough.  They must be supplemented by a continuing job of organization.  To produce change, people must be organized to work together in units of power.[4]

Building up what King called “The Beloved Community” is tough stuff. It’s about changing the power dynamic.  And power makes no concessions.

If this stuff was easy, it would have been done a long time ago.  It is sort of like of weeding or housework.  It’s never done.  Those of us who marched in the sixties thought we’d gotten voting rights, civil rights, fair housing, LGBT rights, women’s rights and a city worthy of the Beloved Community.

Far too many of us rested on the accomplishments of a past day.  When we awoke, we woke to racism and discrimination every bit as virulent as when we had begun so many years ago.  We woke up to intolerance, economic despair and voter suppression.  Crap schools and dilapidated housing.  Thousands sleeping on the streets and rampant addiction.  Gangs and disaster neighborhoods.  Did I mention global warming, mass incarceration and a pandemic?  And an America with no direction, a nation adrift?

I’ll give Dr. King the last word here before we pull the covers up over our heads.

   “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.  We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.  In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.  Procrastination is still the thief of time.  Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with lost opportunity…We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.  This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.”[5]

“I set before you the ways of life and death,” says God.  “Choose life.”

Thousands, Black and White marching in solidarity through America’s streets, are choosing life.  Two brave teenage protestors in Angels Camp, California, are choosing life.  City mayors and police department chiefs confronting legacies of abuse and misconduct are choosing life.

Tough stuff indeed, but more precious than much fine gold!

As Anne Lamott has written in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, “Hope begins in the dark…” 

Amen.

---

[1] Brittny Mejia, Hailey Branson-Potts, “Some in Rural California take up racial justice cause,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2020.

[2] Dante Stewart, “Verse and Voice,” Sojourners, June 16, 2020.

[3] Martin Luther King, Jr., Where do we go From Here: Chaos or Community?, (Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 2010).

[4] Ibid, p. 139.

[5] Ibid, 202.

June 21, 2020

Pentecost 3, Proper 7

  “If This Stuff was Easy…”

The Rev. John C. Forney
John 9:35-10:8

Over fifty years ago I distinctly remember being lined up with a bunch of other guys in a dingy, depressing room, downtown L.A., and raising my right hand and swearing to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.  We then stepped across a line painted on the floor and, instantly, I was no longer a civilian.  For the next two years I would be a U.S. Army medic.”

As part of that induction ceremony, we all were given a list of “General Orders.”  These were the duties we are to be about if there is no officer to direct us, if we got separated from our unit.  “General Orders” are the common sense actions one would take in any emergency: secure government property, protect life, report to the first officer that one might encounter.

You are part of the Church because you have been inducted into the Jesus Movement.  In this day and age, no one is making you be here.  You are here because you were Spirit-called.  In the Jesus Movement our General Orders are to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind, and your Neighbor as yourself.”  That simple.  Common sense.  Gospel sense.  Gospel orders.

At the beginning there were twelve inductees.  “…first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.”

Then he sent them out.  Their mission?  To heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons.  You received without paying, give without pay.”  And why?  “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”  And travel light.  Common sense General Orders.

The “Kingdom of Heaven” – what our brother Martin Luther King called “the Beloved Community” is at hand.  This is the inbreaking reality where all are valued for who they are.  Sort of like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.  We’re here as citizens to fulfill its promise and celebrate its joys.

But there are those who would pain the Beloved Community.  Do it great harm.  And we are called to action.  General Orders time.

This week, the summons came through those agonized words: “I can’t breathe.  I can’t breathe.”

In today’s world the first assignment to those of the Jesus Movement is to remove the knee.  Communities of color need to breathe.  The scab has been ripped off four hundred years of oppression in America.    As George had a knee on his neck, we all have a knee on our necks.  Remove the knee!  None of us can breathe.  It begins with #BlackLivesMatter.

To those disbelieving souls who would object, “Well, don’t all lives matter.”  There are some who just don’t get it.  Some who don’t know our American history.  Some having an appalling lack of empathy.  Back to the Penalty Box.  You’re not ready for this discussion if the first words out of your mouth are, if your first thought is, “Yes, but…”  Best sit down, be quiet and listen.  “I can’t breathe.”  Do you hear him?  Listen to the agony.  Humility is the order of the day for you.  Those are your “General Orders.”

In another sense, yes, you are right.  For the forty percent of Americans who live in poverty and near poverty, your lives matter every bit as much.  The lives of the impoverished and left out do indeed matter. Those who live day by day working a gig job with no future, laid off at an economic whim – your life matters.  Those downsized, outsourced and abandoned —  your communities matter.  

Some insight into our common economic and political disenfranchisement might, hopefully, lead you to realize that at the root, you have much more in common than you think with your sisters and brothers of color.  Maybe that’s why the crowds in the streets these past weeks are so diverse.  Everyone’s marching.  We all have a stake in this.  The knee on George Floyd’s neck is also on yours.  And on your children’s.

The call to us in the Jesus Movement is to tend the sick, lift up the downtrodden, and give hope to those abandoned by this idolatrous, so-called Free Market.  Folks, there’s a big fat thumb on the scale.  A thumb larded up with billions and billions in bribes to the political elite.  This is not partisan.  Both parties are equal opportunity grifters.  That’s one thing Mr. Trump got right.  The system’s rigged.

We can’t breathe.  We need a platoon of disciples from the Jesus Movement to remove the\knee.  George Floyd couldn’t breathe.  Trayvon Martin couldn’t breathe. Folks in abandoned communities all across America can’t breathe.  The citizens of the Inland Empire who have suffered decades of political corruption can’t breathe. 

Our charge is to remove the knee.  We are now all George Floyd.  “I can’t breathe,” is our desperate cry.  Maybe our dying cry.

While a citizen army of hundreds of thousands mobilized in the streets and boulevards of our cities all across the land, too many of our elected officials mobilized to be scarce.

“I’m not going to criticize other people,” was the lame excuse of one.  “I’m late to lunch,” the response of several. Silence.  Crickets, the response from others as they passed by reporter Kasie Hunt on the “Walk of Shame” to the Senate Dining Room.  Remind me again, what are we paying these folks a salary for?

Unfortunately, a criminal element, we now know, was organizing to use these massive demonstrations for their own nefarious purposes — outright looters and arsonists.  Others were acting out of their varied pathologies.  And a few were political subversives – yes, we have evidence of their being egged on by the same malefactors who conspired to manipulate our elections in 2016 to great effect.  What a delight the internet can be.  For fun, profit, organizing, and election rigging.

The best, the majority inducted into these marches and rallies across the land, they were exemplary of the values of the Jesus Movement – Spirit recruited,

What gives me hope this time, what is different from the demonstrations of the ‘60s of my era is the portrait of this crowd.  This is the most diverse group of people ever to come out into the streets of our nation.  Those standing in solidarity with George Floyd’s family, those raising the cry for decency, sisterhood and brotherhood – those called to good purpose have been the most diverse group of Americans ever to take to the streets to say, “Enough.”  We can’t breathe.  They could be Peter, John, son of Zebedee and Bartholomew.  Or Alice, Manuel, Serena, Jamil, or Alex.  And cast out demons, do they ever!  We’ve got whole new batch of ugly demons to confront in American:  racism, poverty, dysfunctional politics, a decrepit health care system, hate, a collapsed economy – just to name a few.

We don’t need to worry about boredom and nothing to do.  Did I mention a raging pandemic?  People dying like flies?  Another of our ills needing healing.

The work of those in the Jesus Movement is most contagious.  We saw multiple scenes of members of the police, even chiefs and mayors taking a knee in solidarity.  It is said that Hope is the evidence of things unseen.  We’ve seen some beautiful evidence of Hope on the streets of America.

In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 82% of Americans support the peaceful protests as a legitimate response to what has happened.  Retired generals and admirals have finally spoken up against use of the military against peaceful protesters.  The military is not a plaything.  It is not a collection of toy soldiers that can be shuffled about as in a game.

All this protest is born of the values and teachings of the Jesus and the prophets.  These enduring values are enshrined in our Constitution and common norms of decency.

We are inducted to raise our voices to high heaven over the injustice and oppression done to the “least of these.”  

Because we are not bystanders in this democracy, but have power as citizens, it is up to each of us to pull our nation back to our higher ideals.  It is up to all of us, in the face of the travesty of justice done to George Floyd to raise his voice, ‘I CAN’T BREATHE.”  To raise the voices of all in the face of pandemic, racism, economic collapse and in the threat of a politicized military: “WE CAN’T BREATHE.”  That is the commission of our induction into the Jesus Movement. 

At the conclusion of his eulogy for George Floyd, the Rev. Al Sharpton asked the question.  If time’s up for injustice, what are we going to do with the time left to each of us?  Will we fritter it away with sitcoms and mindless consumerism?  Will we just go to sleep or indulge in various addictions?  Or expend it for that which endures?  Kingdom building.

Will we use it to perfect our fragile union?  Will we use it in acts of unselfish solidarity?  For a cause greater than ourselves?

After I completed my service as a medic I became a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.  I received my copy of their paper, The Veteran with updates on events, reunions, and projects.  Often included are articles on the early history of the organization and the early protest against that war.  Laurel Krause wrote of her sister Allison, one of the four students killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State on May 4, 1970 – fifty years ago this month..

One piece that caught my eye as I skimmed the paper.  “The Little Girl at My Door.”  On his way from Landing Zone Andy into the Vietnamese army base at An Loc, Jack Mallory noticed a group of several children.

“Something wasn’t right, and I told my jeep driver to head over there.  Half a dozen kids were gathered around a young girl, maybe 10 years old, lying under a tree.  She wasn’t visibly injured, but pale, motionless and dead.”

“Through my interpreter, her friends told me she’d been up in the tree gathering branches for firewood.  She had triggered a booby trap set up by the local Viet Cong.  A grenade, without pin, had been placed in a tin can with a wire strung across the road.  They had hoped that the antenna on an American vehicle would hit the wire, yank the grenade from the can, detonate it over the vehicle.  A few minutes earlier, however, the little girl had detonated the grenade herself.  She was apparently untouched, except for a small hole not much bigger than my thumb nail, right in the center of her chest.  She had bled out internally.  Not my fault.  Not, directly, our fault.”[1]

No not our fault, directly.  Much of the racist history in America, not our fault, directly.  Most do not scream racial slurs or expressly oppress.  We would be horrified to have thought that it was our knee on the neck of another, snuffing out the last remaining seconds of life.  Surely, we would have reacted to those dying words, “I can’t breathe.”  This is what we learned as inductees into the Jesus Movement.  It’s what we would have been taught in most any of the great religions of the world.  Yet, collectively, our knee has snuffed out the breath of too many.  Like that tragic event around a tree in a Vietnamese countryside, blame for the tragedy of that war is complicated. 

Regardless of fault, and the American foreign policy of that time was surely complicit, how do we move on?

Vietnam Veterans Against the War’s answer has been to build links of people-to-people connection with the citizens of Vietnam.  Approval has recently been received from the headmaster of a village school, Binh Thanh, to begin he construction of a future VVAW library.  Many of us have donated to its construction.  This last March was the organizer, Chuck Theusch’s fifty-third trip on behalf of VVAW. 

Will this library bring back that little girl?  Will our efforts to transform policing and our criminal justice system bring back George Floyd?  No, that pain will endure — but goodwill and friendship can triumph over evil and death.  Empathy and amends are tokens of Grace.

We are the incarnation of love that trumps hate.  We in the Jesus Movement, by the power of the Pentecost Spirit, we usher into reality a New Heaven and a New Earth.  “On earth as in heaven,” are our orders.

Just how did we get signed up?  Over what line did we cross into this Jesus Mission?  It was when the Holy Spirit got into our hearts and grabbed up our imagination.  In that instant, we knew that Love is the Answer.  My friend Ed Bacon says that each morning we wake up, we have a choice.  Will we live in the House of Love or the House of Fear?  The Spirit prompts our better angels.  Most of us.  Most of the time.

Presbyterian pastor and writer, Frederick Buechner, tells us of our duty in the Jesus Movement, in the Life Movement – it is our Vocation.  Which is?

“Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

For many our vocation has been to be out in the streets. Wearing your facemask.  Keeping proper social distance.  It has been to labor in crowded hospitals tending to the sickest of the sick.  It has been in a newsroom.  It has been keeping folks safe on the streets (Yes, there are good police who actually care).  It is that teacher attempting to figure out technology in order to reach out to her students.  It has been to mourn George Floyd.

Our vocation is where we are placed.  It is where “our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”   It is our commission.

Our commission is to speak truth in a time of lies and violence.

When peaceful demonstrators were summarily rousted by clouds of teargas, chemical agents and flash bang grenades from Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, for a militaristic photo op, while our Secretary of Defense thought they might be walking to the park only to “inspect the restrooms,” some of the better angels of our retired military saw the danger of this spectacle.  They found their voices.  Senator Mitt Romney, unlike so many other senators, was not out to lunch.  When our president made a travesty of our Christian heritage, waving about a Bible as if hawking a frozen steak on the Home Shopping Network –desecrating our church — religious leaders, the Catholic Archbishop and my bishop, spoke out against this tawdry spectacle – even the Rev. Pat Robertson and other Evangelicals – leaders often quiet on political matters, raised their voices.  Our vocation is often to speak out, to exorcise the demons of racism, of hate and the perversion of Jesus message of peace.  God is not a plaything.

In the end, our commission, our vocation, General Orders if you will, is summed up in a poem by the Jesuit brother Peter Byrne, “We are Simply Asked.”

We are simply asked to make gentle our bruised world,
To be compassionate of all, including oneself.
Then in the time left over to repeat the ancient tale,
And go the way of God’s foolish ones.[2]

Amen.

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[1] Jack Mallory, “The Little Girl at My Door,” The Veteran, Spring 2020.

[2] Peter Byrne, “We are Simply Asked” as set to music by Jim Strathdee, “Light of the World,” Caliche Records, Ridgecrest, CA, 1982. Words copyright 1976 by Peter Byrne, S.J. Music by Jim Strathdee, copyright 1981. 

June 14, 2020

Pentecost 2, Proper 6

The Rev. John C. Forney
John 9:35-10:8

Inducted