Christopher Thomas
Sermon for Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A – 9/27/20
Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16
Philippians 2:1-13
Matthew 21:23-32
“If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.” – Philippians 2:1-2, NRSV
Joy seems such an elusive thing these days, a commodity in short supply. It’s a subject that is in the forefront of my conscious mind, and weighs heavily on my heart, each and every morning, as I go to God in my personal, most private prayer time. I pray, this fervent prayer, each and every morning, before my feet ever touch the floor, “God, please let me feel your joyful presence within me today, so that I may be your joyful presence in the world around me today.”
What I am really praying for is to know joy, to be released from this constant spirit of heaviness that looms large over my nights and over my days.
Why wouldn’t that be the case, after all?
No matter your position, any logical mind could see the wanton lack of, well, joy, that exists in the world around us today. 2020 is not the year of joy! COVID-19, economic collapse, financial peril, racial violence and injustice, and loss. Well over 200,000 lives and counting. 200,000 lives cut short, fellow humans whose potential gifts to the world are forever lost. An administration hell-bent on harnessing anarchy and chaos to its political and financial gain.
In the midst of all this sadness and confusion, we lose pillars of hope, these guiding lights that stream rays of justice and mercy and grace into the world, just when we so desperately need some hope the very most!
John Lewis.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Oh, the things that these two did, on their own, to illuminate the path for so many, each in their own way, to literally change the way reality is, for generations of lives that will come hereafter. I had no idea, until they were gone, really, how great they actually were. And that makes me sad.
And I learn of the passing quietly into the night of another of my own personal titans, a piece of social justice history that I was privileged to touch, and to know, and to benefit from, the Rev. Robert Graetz, at 92. And I am a little heavier, and a little sadder, that another light has gone out, a light that I actually knew, and touched, and that changed the course of my own trajectory.
Bob, a retired Lutheran pastor, and his wife Jeannie, were our tour guides, we band of privileged seminary students in 2010, through a gallery of memories so lovingly shared of direct experiences of the Civil Rights struggle of the late 1950’s and 1960’s. They were both white, and had been assigned to a black congregation in Montgomery, Alabama, about the time Martin Luther King began his ministry at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church only blocks away. They worked directly on the Montgomery bus boycott. They knew and worked with the Kings. We were literally within one degree of separation from Martin Luther King, as we sat at his kitchen table in his parsonage, and heard the story of Martin’s epic epiphany call into the civil rights movement, from Bob’s very mouth.
Throughout our time together, Bob and Jeannie spoke so casually of all these events, all of this hatred swirling around them, of bombs going off on their front porch as they were branded “N-word” lovers, as though it were common, nothing more than anyone else would do.
That was so surprising to me. I remember being absolutely fascinated by the casualness of their recantations.
It finally got the best of me, and I had to ask, “Bob, I’m down with the struggle as much as anyone else. But here you are, this young white pastor with a wife and baby, in the middle of all this chaos, and bombs going off! Why are you in the middle of this? And what possessed you to stay?”
And his reply to me set me back on my heels, and changed the course of my ministry forever.
He said, “Christopher, when God calls you into something, you go, knowing full well that God goes with you. Being here was the only place I COULD be. I knew God would take care of us.”
In an instant, all of the oxygen went out of the room!
Where is that elusive joy, the kind that comes in the midst of struggle, not beyond the struggle?
That’s the kind of joy that these people seem to know how to access.
That’s the kind of joy for which I fervently pray each day.
For Paul, joy is the fulfillment of this strange, kenotic act, the emptying out of self for the exclusive benefit of other. This is what will make joy complete, this radical turn, the ultimate repentance, from self to other.
Be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than you. Look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. And then he goes on to implore our great role model for this, Jesus Christ. Do as Jesus Christ has done. Empty out yourself on behalf of others! There, my friends, is true joy!
“By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority,” that is what the world will ask, when they see your queer, strange way of acting. “What’s wrong with you, thinking of others rather than ME, ME, ME?!?” “It’s all about ME!”
“By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”
I know they asked John Lewis this, and the Notorious RBG this, and probably Bob and Jeannie Graetz this.
I asked Bob that question myself, and he told me, much more plainly than Jesus told the chief priests and elders that day so very long ago.
My authority comes from God. The question is, where does your authority come from?
When you get clear on that, where your authority is coming from, you may find the well of your own joy, in the midst of struggle, and strife, not waiting for it to show up in the over yonder.
You know these people, you’ve seen them. There are people who just go around, joyful, joy-filled, most all the time. It’s not that they don’t have struggle, and strife, and all the worries of the world. They can be unhappy, and anxious, and yet still be filled with the peace that passes all understanding, clear in the sure and certain knowledge of where their authority begins and ends, and it is not in them, but in God, Godself.
Let this mind be in you, this same mind that also was in Christ Jesus.
And then start acting like it!
Amen.
