The text for the sermon
is from 1 John. Hear the word of the Lord:
See what love the Father has given us,
that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. ….Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but
in truth and action….Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness
before God; and we receive from God whatever we ask, because we obey God’s
commandments. And this is God’s commandment: that we should believe in the name
of God’s Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.
Those two twinned
healing stories that we heard in our gospel reading today—the healing of the
woman with the flow of blood and the healing of Jairus’ twelve-year-old
daughter--are among my favorite Bible stories. They’re powerful. And moving.
And they’re a beautifully structured, from a literary point of view, a story
within a story, a healing within a healing. And honestly, I struggled long and
hard to write a sermon that would serve our strange and tumultuous national
context this week, using these stories.
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| Mother Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, SC |
But as I worked on it, I
wrote with the Charleston, South Carolina massacre vying for attention in my
brain. I worked on it, but then the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage
came down. I worked on it, but then our Presiding Bishop, Elizabeth Eaton, sent
out worship resources to create a different liturgy for this week, a liturgy
she called “A Service of Repentence and Mourning.” And she caused a stir doing
this because the resources for this liturgy were not received in pastors’
Inboxes until Thursday by which time most churches have their bulletins
printed, as we here at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Albany had ours printed. So I continued to work on the
sermon, using these gospel texts that had nothing to say about our national
common life that is front and center to us in these days.
But then I watched our
President give the eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. And if you haven’t
watched this from start to finish, I urge you to. It’s preaching. It’s
preaching at its finest. And when, on Friday night, I finished listening to his
sermon, I realized that I could not finish the sermon I was writing using the gospel
readings the lectionary gives us. Instead, I was going to follow Bishop Eaton’s
directive and use some of the resources she provided for today.
In 1 John we read: See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called
children of God; and that is what we are.
The preacher in me who has spent all week
reading reactions to both the Charleston massacre and the Supreme Court ruling
feels irritable in reading that statement. Because if we are children of God,
then we need to start acting that way. I’m sorry to say this, but to be perfectly
blunt, a great, great many of our fellow Christians, frankly, do not act as
redeemed sinners, claimed by grace alone, as
children of God. Our nation is so polarized, so apparently unable to come to common ground on the toxic cocktail
of cultural poisons that gave us the Charleston massacre: race relations, gun
control, health care.
Somehow managing to
ignore the racist culture in which Dylann Roof was raised, Rick Santorum called
the event “an assault on religious liberty.” Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy of
Fox News speculated that maybe this was all about “hostility toward Christians”
with Doocy stunned that this was labelled a “hate crime.” And a National Rifle
Association board member mused that had Clementa Pinckney been packing a piece
in the pulpit, fewer would have died.
Of course, we are
harshly divided on other issues, as well: climate change, immigration reform,
care of the earth’s resources. And while many, many of us are rejoicing today
at the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage in the United
States, others continue to cherry-pick at scripture to as a way to deny the rite
and right of marriage to all. Republican presidential hopeful, Bobby Jindal
announced that the ruling “will
pave the way for an all-out assault against the religious freedom rights of
Christians who disagree with this decision."
The fundamentalist Christian,
American Family Association put out a statement saying “There is no doubt that
this morning’s ruling will imperil religious liberty in America, as individuals
of faith who uphold time-honored marriage and choose not to advocate for same-sex unions will now
be viewed as extremists.”
And the LDS-funded National
Organization for Marriage, citing MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” on the
moral importance of disobeying unjust laws, makes its case by saying that “The
National Organization for marriage and countless millions of Americans do not
accept this ruling. Instead, we will work at every turn to reverse it.”
And Fox News Todd Stearnes
tweeted, referencing both the removal of the Confederate flag from the South
Carolina State House and the Supreme Court ruling, “If you think the cultural
purge over Southern traditions was egregious—wait until you see what they do to
Christians in America.”
And I pause here.
I pause here in order that
we remind ourselves: We are
Christians in America.
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be
called children of God; and that is what we are.
