Christopher Thomas
Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 9, Year B – 7/4/21
2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10
Psalm 48
2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Mark 6:1-13
Living in the Tension
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
- Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, 1776
A bold, glorious, shining, luminous declaration!
Radical, if you stop to think about it. Seriously!
What did the world look like, what was the world view, for those few, who came, and cleared, and claimed, that glorious stake in the dirt, not theirs, not ours, but God’s glorious Creation?
“Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain;
For purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plains
America, America! God shed God’s grace on thee!
And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea!”
When God and man come together in co-creative force, its good stuff, right? No kings and queens, no monarchs, no fiefdoms or serfdoms for Americans. The glorious song ringing out in our hearts is FREEDOM! How could God NOT be behind this endeavor? God knows our hearts, after all. God knows the situations we have come from. God knows the situations we are in. God knows the situations God is calling us into, for God is, after all, past, present, and future, everything rolled into one.
I can scarcely imagine the instant Jefferson birthed the words, the struggles, deep within his own mind, his own heart, his own soul, surely must have, had to have, begun. For these truths were to him, after all, self-evident. God the Creator deigned it so. Do I turn to my own back yard? Do I overlook the misery toiling away in the dirt, the grueling grind that will make all of this grand gloriousness that I have dreamed come to life? Are these people part of self-evidence? They should thank me!
Well, that won’t work, so, they must be 3/5ths people (like being “almost pregnant”), or maybe they are savages, or maybe they are women, or maybe they are gay, or maybe they are UFO’s, who knows. But they are not me. And I need them, to fulfill this great purpose, God’s purpose. To build this thing, this imagination of mine, this grand, glorious expedition we are on called FREEDOM!
God knows my motives. God knows my heart. Surely God’s grace is with me, on me, on this expedition.
I don’t claim to know all things of God, only sprinklings of misty footsteps here, there, yonder, and even I surmise through the Great Good News that FREEDOM must be a top agenda-getting item for the loving, liberating, life-giving God. And for this on-going project of FREEDOM, on this day, and every day, I give thanks.
I find myself wondering how Jefferson wrestled with the tension in which he found himself…
Proclaiming goodness, meanwhile perpetrating, codifying systems of radical social injustice?
Do the words, does the aspiration, did the goals simply fall to the ground in ash heaps of hypocritical failure in the midst of years (and years and years) of obvious tension? Where are those amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties that so many have fought and died so that every single one of us might have the gift, the responsibility of FREEDOM?
Please don’t ask me to give up my Jefferson, my hopes and dreams for my better life, the better life that Jefferson dared to dream for me in those self-evident truths, the dreams that took hold, and caught flight, and were worth blood, and sweat, and tears, and Iwo Jima, and Stonewall, and 9/11, and apple pie, and Bob Hope, and “God Bless America.” How do I, how do we, how do all of us, hold these things, good and evil, in tension?
Of this we need to know, because I promise you, Jefferson runs through every single one of us. We must know how to honor this tension, because, truth be told, every single one of us carries the seed of humanity along with the seed of divinity within our own human hearts. This is why it is so very easy for the oppressed to become the oppressor, the bullied to become the bullies.
Maybe this was the thorn of evil to which Paul refers that kept him from being too elated. “Three times I appealed to the Lord that it would leave me, but God said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”
Freedom in weakness?
Well, that simply can’t be right. They are just going to run over me. That’s the end of the great experiment. Humanity loses.
So I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses (my humanity, my imperfections), so that Christ’s light may dwell within me, so that you will know that whatever good you see is Christ shining through. So you can sling all the insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities you want to fling at me, but for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, that is when I am strong. I have assumed the mantle of FREEDOM!” FREEDOM from your expectations.
People of color, and indigenous folk, and women, and LGBTQIA+ communities have known this all along.
Those people who are not us, those who do not look or act or smell like us, those who do not reside within these walls, are FREE from our expectations; they don’t care how we’ve always done it; they already know right where the amber waves of grain and the purple mountain majesties are located. They are waiting to show us these things. They are waiting to show us Jesus. They are waiting to reveal to us the Jesus that resides within us.
Today’s Gospel holds some hard words for Christians to hear, because they invite us into the negative spaces of self-examination, the places that Jesus once occupied, but no longer does. The message of FREEDOM can be snuffed out so easily in the face of nostalgia, “the way we’ve always done it,” and “who are you,” and are so often met with dust-shaking, and leaving.
If there are people, others who are not here anymore, why are they not? Can we, in humility, ask these hard questions? Can we ask them of ourselves?
This congregation has asked hard questions before. This congregation has been confronted with serious culture shifts that required close contemplation and decision-making and risk-taking. I’d venture integration or HIV/AIDS ministry were paradigm-overturning decisions.
This congregation has been amazingly, resoundingly resilient over the course of the last 16 months. Who would have dreamed that we could go to virtual church, and actually hang together? Who would have believed that we would grow in the midst of that? Who would have imagined?
And yet, when we were FREE, truly FREE, the FREEDOM that the founders of this parish probably envisioned for us, FREE from all of the expectations, we actually soared! Look what we can do when we are FREE!
Memories are an odd, curious thing. You take a few facts and stir them in with nostalgia to get memories. There is something programed deep in our DNA that always longs to drag us back to Egypt. We are the people of Israel, after all. “Oh, if only it could be like it was when…” This is our weakness to confess. We simply must confess it, so that it will not hold power and sway over us. Because there is only slavery and death in Egypt.
FREEDOM is forward, carrying the light of Jesus Christ into the scary, frightening, joyful, joy-filled darkness of night.
All those others are waiting out there to meet us and to show us FREEDOM!
Let it ring!
Amen.
