Fugitives from Injustice

The practice of preaching involves lots of listening and learning from others preachers.  There is lots of borrowing and using of preached materials--one wishes more of the borrowing and using included credit given where credit is due.  I don't deny that my preaching is shaped by many influences.  This sermon, in particular, depends heavily on the debt I owe to my friend J. Kameron Carter.

I have been blessed by his friendship in many ways.  As dads, we have supported and prayed with one another through the task of knowing how best to love our children as the gifts from God that they are.  As workers, we have hashed and rehashed, chewed over and stewed over the ups and downs of employment and collegial relationships on the respective plantations where we find ourselves earning a paycheck.  As theologians, we have run our current ideas by one another over coffee in conversations that seem to open up into so many vistas that there is never a good stopping point.

One such conversation that has gone on across many months is his reflection on Christology, engaging social theorists and classical Christian texts, from which he has been exploring the notion of fugitivity, of Jesus as fugitive.  As Jay might say, "dat joint has worked on me."  On this conversation, mostly I have listened.  My contributions have mostly been around my own efforts to understand Jesus' relationship with John the Baptist, his ministry under the constant threat of assassination, and his reactions to the political murder of John by Herod.

Finally, I felt compelled to try to think within this framing of Christology that has occupied many hours of coffee drinking.  I put it into the form of a sermon for chapel service at Shaw University Divinity School.  I first preached this sermon on Saturday, March 12, 2016.  Thank you, Brother J, for your generous teaching into the life of your friend.

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Mark 6:12-16

12So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. 13They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.

             14King Herod heard of it, for Jesus’ name had become known. Some were saying, “John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in him.” 15But others said, “It is Elijah.” And others said, “It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.” 16But when Herod heard of it, he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.”

John 4:1-4

1Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John” — 2although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized— 3he left Judea and started back to Galilee. 4But he had to go through Samaria.

John 7:10-14, 25-26, 30-36

10But after his brothers had gone to the festival, then he also went, not publicly but as it were in secret. 11The Jews were looking for him at the festival and saying, “Where is he?” 12And there was considerable complaining about him among the crowds. While some were saying, “He is a good man,” others were saying, “No, he is deceiving the crowd.” 13Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews.

             14About the middle of the festival Jesus went up into the temple and began to teach….

            25Now some of the people of Jerusalem were saying, “Is not this the man whom they are trying to kill? 26And here he is, speaking openly, but they say nothing to him! Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Messiah?...

            30Then they tried to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him, because his hour had not yet come. 31Yet many in the crowd believed in him and were saying, “When the Messiah comes, will he do more signs than this man has done?”

             32The Pharisees heard the crowd muttering such things about him, and the chief priests and Pharisees sent temple police to arrest him. 33Jesus then said, “I will be with you a little while longer, and then I am going to him who sent me. 34You will search for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come.” 35The Jews said to one another, “Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him? Does he intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? 36What does he mean by saying, ‘You will search for me and you will not find me’ and ‘Where I am, you cannot come’?”

Fugitives from Injustice

            This week at the Ministers Conference, Dr. John Kinney gave thanks that he has worked in a place that he can continue to learn by regularly engaging with students.  If we are faithful to God, we will keep on learning and having to change our minds.  I can agree wholeheartedly.  In the current Lenten season, as we seek to journey with Jesus and learn through his life what sort of lives we should live, I find myself going back into studies and sermons from my past to dig deeper.  How did Jesus’ life change when John the Baptist was executed?  What was it like for Jesus to continue to do his important work while under the shadow of death threats and people plotting against him?  How can learning about Jesus’ endangered life reshape my vision of the church and ministry in this critical time?

            The texts we looked at today, drawn from two different gospels, provide us pieces of a story.  It seems likely that a fuller version of how these stories fit together was well-known to people who through word of mouth passed down their remembrances of the activities and sayings of Jesus.  While it is not possible to piece together a definitive chronology of Jesus’ ministry years, the fragments we do have make evident certain patterns and relationships between events.  We can see more than mere suggestions of Jesus’ mode of life.  We see his strategic engagements of confrontation and withdrawal and his habits of prophetic witness and pragmatic self-preservation.

            Although the four Gospels provide different accounts of the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry, it seems clear that even in the early stages of his work he began to face serious conflicts.  John describes confrontations with the leaders in Jerusalem and their response in the form of persecution.  Under this state of affairs, Nicodemus avoided meeting Jesus publicly in the light of day.  Although the synoptic gospels do not describe an early ministry in Jerusalem, they convey a similar atmosphere of conflict early in Jesus’ ministry. 

             Matthew describes the harsh words John used in criticizing the Pharisees and Sadducees, and then shows Jesus continuing John's pattern in the first major discourse section, commonly known as the Sermon on the Mount.  Highlighting the shortcomings of the religious elite, the wealthy, and the powerful could not have won him many friends among those groups.  Mark gives account of how Jesus’ fame spread rapidly, drawing both fans and critics in greater numbers.  When he healed a paralytic and said, “Your sins are forgiven,” some began to accuse him of blasphemy.  He stood his ground and won over the crowd, much to the chagrin of his critics.  When Jesus called a tax collector to be one of his close followers, Pharisees began to challenge him for associating with outcasts, only to have Jesus stand up to them for turning their noses up at his friends.  Luke famously tells of Jesus’ invitation to preach in the synagogue in Nazareth, where he makes the leaders so angry they try to kill him.  Thus, we should be fairly certain that from the early stages of his public life, Jesus was in conflict with the powerful people in his world who began to plot his demise.

As the passage from Mark indicates, Jesus’ aggressive teaching and work among the people eventually gets the attention of Herod, and not in a beneficial way.  Herod, troubled by his shameless murder of John the Baptist, seems driven by his guilty conscience to believe that Jesus is in fact John raised from the dead.  Herod’s paranoia becomes a fast-spreading topic of conversation, eventually getting back to Jesus and his disciples.  We have no reason to doubt that Jesus had been deeply affected by the murder of his cousin and mentor.  Knowing the hatred Herod and his family had for John, Jesus could easily deduce that Herod would be coming for him next, and the stories of Herod’s suspicion confirmed there was reason for fear.

Thus the fourth chapter of the fourth gospel tells a story of Jesus making a rapid retreat to Galilee.  Unlike some more bigoted Jews of his day, he did not take the roundabout Transjordan route through Perea.  Jesus did not share the same prejudice, and he was in a hurry to get away from those who were plotting to harm him, so he took a path straight through Samaria toward the cosmopolitan Galilean region where he could move more freely with less surveillance and fewer threats.

If we can accept some version of the timeline offered by the fourth gospel, then Jesus seems to have made multiple trips to Jerusalem, and perhaps across several years of public ministry.  The last passage we read describes one such trip which was cloaked in secrecy.  First, he told his brothers that he would not go.  But later, he sneaked into the great city and avoided being noticed for a while.  Eventually, he started coming out in public and getting into confrontations.  He seems to have had to go back into hiding from day to day, or even from hour to hour, because people were openly plotting to arrest and kill him.  He intentionally engaged them in argument, then slipped away before they could grab him. 

The gospel says, “his time had not yet come.”  In other words, he was not ready to be caught.  He was not ready to interrupt the subversive work he was doing throughout the countryside and from town to town.  He was not ready to be torn away from his close friends and his large crowd of followers.  They were part of a mass movement, and momentum was building.  He was making progress and wanted to see it through.  So his time had not yet come.  He was not ready to push the conflict toward its possible conclusion.  So he told them that even thought they would look for him, they would not find him.  He eluded their grasp and left them confused.

To borrow a term from my coworker and friend in ministry, J. Kameron Carter, Jesus was a fugitive.  He had taken on a fugitive mode of life.  As a fugitive, he was pursued by the powerful and their agents of police control.  He had become an enemy of the state, persona non grata, an undesirable, unwelcome in the synagogue or temple, a threat to the social order, a subverter of economic progress.

He was Trayvon taking a short cut through the neighborhood.  He was Michael or Rekia walking down the street.  He was Sandra driving into a new town where she was not known.  He was Renisha or Jonathan on a porch, knocking on a door to ask for help, outside their neighborhoods.  He was walking while black, driving while black, living while black—unable to be carefree and at ease in his life.  He had no place to lay his head.  He was living under suspicion, always at the edge of danger, ever aware of the threat to end his existence.

He was forced into constant watchfulness, powered by anxiety, as were those who had escaped slavery into the northern states during the era of slavocracy.  Although they had entered into territory which should have made them free, the perversity of white supremacy had allowed the Fugitive Slave Law to require citizens and police of the northern states to catch, detain, and return slaves.  The corrupt profitability of trade in human flesh meant that even free blacks were in danger of being falsely accused of escaping and forced to go south and be enslaved. Slave catchers and informers could be anywhere.  Fugitivity was the condition of life for escaped slaves.  The danger to black persons even today when they cross out of their assigned neighborhoods maintains a disturbing similarity to the Fugitive Slave Law system.  And yet by living in this fugitive condition, their very bodies announced the truth of a counterpolitical social order.  The truth of their existence was freedom.  The lie was slavery.

For Jesus to be a fugitive required in part that he keep a low profile.  It was not that he remained hidden away in a cave or a back room.  The gospel accounts tell us that he was regularly surrounded by crowds who went searching for him when he escaped their presence for a brief time.  In fact, it seems clear that he often found it hard to rest because of the constant barrage of people wanting to meet him, to hear him teach, or to be touched or healed by him.  Jesus was a revolutionary presence in his world.  People’s expectations were sky high.  And this popularity and fame is what was at the same time forcing him into a fugitive life.

Carter says that this fugitive life of Jesus constitutes a “zone of the new humanity.”  Jesus was enacting through his atoning life the model of social existence to which the church is also called.  It is a life that pursues a different purpose from that of the ruling powers.  Its end, its goal, the Reign of God, is a social order not authorized by the existing power structures and worldly economic and political order.  To the extent that churches or other religious systems accommodate themselves to the status quo, to the interests of the current regime and its overreaching power, they align themselves against the fugitive way of Jesus.  They take on the neocolonial role of the Sadducees, Herodians, and Pharisees, as supporters of structures of domination who gladly take their elite position just below the officials of the colonizing power structure imposed by the Roman empire.  Churches need to stop being that kind of auxiliary to empire.

Carter further says of the fugitive Jesus,

His mode of life, the way he lived, was fugitive from the order of things.  He cared for the poor, fed the hungry, hung out with menaces to society, refused to judge according to our measure of judgment (indeed, his judgment was against all judgment); he worked on the Sabbath, doing good and healing the sick even and especially on that day.  This was his mode of life, his way of being human.  And it was a threat….He was the quintessential enemy to both the religious order of things and, especially, to Roman imperial society.  And because of this there was massive collusion to kill him by his Jewish compatriots, Roman/Gentile society, and even within the fold of his followers, the disciples.  (David Kline & J. Kameron Carter, “Race, Theology, and the Politics of Abjection: An Interview with J. Kameron Carter, Part I,” The Other Journal, March 26, 2012.)

The forces which made Jesus into a fugitive, the empire and its lackeys, had a deadly purpose.  The fugitive Savior was not playing a friendly game of hide and seek.  The consequences of his fugitive ways were likely to cost him his life.  And of course, they did.           

            One hundred fifty-one years ago, not too far away from where we gather today, former slaves hunched down, sometimes having to hide among the crops in the field to dodge bullets that still would fly in their direction.  They were gathered together to study the Bible and theology, in the rudimentary formation of what would become Shaw University Divinity School.  Although by proclamation and by terms of surrender, they were free persons under the law, by actual conditions their efforts at betterment and uplift put them in danger of harm at the hands of those who wished for them to remain enslaved. 

            They were a fugitive people following the way of the fugitive Jesus.  As Kelly Brown Douglas notes, they were aware that the prophet’s claim that “My ways are not your ways” brought divine judgment on the slavocracy and its religious cheerleaders.  The so-called Christianity of the master class denied the truth of the gospel, leading our forbears to conclude that “everybody talking about heaven ain’t going there.”  In a world where human flesh is bought and sold, where a person’s body becomes another persons tool for profit or pleasure, where families can be broken apart by cruel commercial calculation, the first students at the Raleigh Institute understood that to follow Jesus was to disavow the social order.  The world needed to be turned upside down, and they were fugitives struggling to overthrow a perverse and corrupt social order.

             Like Jesus, they needed to stay alive long enough to do what they were called to do.  Also like Jesus, they would have to be willing to stare down a deadly system of power, and in doing so keep putting their lives in danger of violence, imprisonment, or death.  It might seem to be a useless plan of life, a hopeless struggle against insurmountable odds.  Why not find a way to fit in?  Why not trade away some dignity for survival, accept limited freedom in exchange for passivity?  But that was not the conclusion they reached.  They were, instead, the vanguard of a new order living under the conditions of fugitivity.  They embraced their fugitive lives because they served a risen Savior.

As Carter explains, Jesus’ fugitive life was not a mere isolated moment.  He was not a tiny, passing blip on the radar of human existence.  The movement he built in his fugitive life grew toward a tipping point.  Eventually, he pressed his fugitivity toward a full-scale confrontation.  Having demonstrated the truth about human existence, the truest way of living, he went toe-to-toe with his enemies. 

Unlike them, he refused a violent solution.  He turned his followers away from the idea of overthrowing one domination system in order to reinstate another one in which they could be the ruling elite.  He shut down his friends’ efforts to kill or harm their opponents, and offered healing even to the ones who would arrest him.  In other words, he was faithful to the end in refusing to live the life of worldly domination. 

Caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, befriending prisoners, loving each neighbor (even the ones who are enemies)—this was his mode of life even until the end.  Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.  Believing that the way of love is the true path to joy and fulfillment, he fixed his gaze on the joy that was set before him.  That was how he could endure the cross and despise its shame.  For his followers, it seemed that his arrest and execution was the end of their hopes.  But they were wrong.

Jesus became a fugitive from his tomb.  In vindication of his faithful life, God raised him from the dead.  Through the resurrection, we may be united to Jesus in his fugitivity.  We may along with Jesus live in contradiction to the domination systems of this world which would deny that black lives matter.  We may reject the respectability politics that tell us the world will accept us and reward us if we will merely follow its rules and avoid rocking the boat.  There is an outcry today among young people who look upon a world in which the government and the corporation and the church have turned their backs on them.  Following the rules is not working.  Trivial traffic stops can quickly turn to life and death situations through no reasonable cause.  Stop and frisk policies make the prejudice of the enforcer adequate reason for a beat down.  When they speak up in their own defense, they are met with militarized policing; they are fired for pointing out unjust wages and organizing workers; they are labeled as lost and narcissistic and unreachable.  They have become outcast in their own homeland, and then blamed for bringing it on themselves.

The church cannot concede to respectability politics.  The world’s interests and purpose are not our interests and purpose.  We follow a fugitive Savior.  If we are to be the body of Christ, we must live in that resurrected fugitive mode.  Going along to get along is not an option.  Carter argues that we can understand Jesus’ death and its atoning power as his descending “right into zone of death, the fallenness of the creature. His death witnessed to a [fugitive] mode of life, and his resurrection was an affirmation of that mode of life; a distinct way of being human was complete and full and utterly accomplished in him” (Carter, ibid.).

United to him in his atoning life, death, and resurrection, we also become participants in this mode of life as fugitives from the regimes of this world, from the established ordering of society.  We take up a revolutionary way, a subversion of the oppressive, violent ways of this world.  We are made new, and as a cadre of the new creation, we press toward the overthrow of corrupted, perverse systems of death.  We do so with prophetic witness and pragmatic perseverance. 

As Dr. Gina Stewart proclaimed concerning the ending of the Gospel of Mark, we receive the news of the resurrection as a shocking awakening to the breaking in of a world of love and justice.  The women at the tomb received an assignment to organize the disciples and meet up with Jesus in Galilee.  They did not run around making a ruckus and provoking a new crackdown on Jesus’ followers, but they worked carefully and faithfully to build a movement ready to go public.  Ultimately, they got their marching orders from the fugitive Savior.  They strengthened themselves for the struggle ahead.  Behind closed doors, they built trust and community.  The made strategic plans and considered alternatives.  They deepened their resolve to give their lives fully to God.  They looked out for one another. 

Then one day there was a sound as a rushing mighty wind.  They were filled with power as the Holy Spirit came upon them.  They went out and filled the streets.  They proclaimed the coming of a new world order.  They saw it breaking in.  They saw the “powers that be” taken aback and confused. 

And they demonstrated for us, heirs of their movement centuries down the way, that we also may become fugitives from the regimes of this world in the struggle to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.  Amen.

Barber, Like Hope, Does Not Disappoint

Last March at the Alexander-Pegues Minister's Conference of Shaw University Divinity School, one of the outstanding speakers was Rev Dr William Barber II.  Barber has become well-known for his leadership in the Moral Mondays/Forward Together movement that began in North Carolina and has spread across the USA.  He has long been known for his abilities as a preacher, and his preaching has always been linked to a concern for social justice.  Many people would be aware of his leadership of the North Carolina NAACP and the movement to bring together a coalition of groups from around the state through the annual Historic Thousands on Jones Street gathering.  Moreover, his partnership with Rev Dr Nancy Petty to resist the dismantling of effective desegregation policies in Wake County Schools displayed a new confidence and focus on taking a stand against those who would seek to undo the progress made in civil rights.

Barber has become an iconic leader in the current political situation.  When many feel that all they can do is shake their heads and wish for a day when people seemed to care for the common good and for protecting the poor and marginalized, Barber has become symbolic of a politics that says we cannot wait to start the fight for justice.  Now is the time, even if it seems the deck is stacked against us.

Barber has become ever more focused on this message of challenging citizens to read the signs of the times, to listen to the cries of the poor, and to use the strength they have to build beloved community.  That was the message he brought to ministers at Shaw last March.  His words, his sincerity, and his intensity did not disappoint.  He highlighted four biblical passages which he says pose four critical questions for every minister of the gospel.  Some of you who have heard him speak recently have probably heard some of these themes echoed.  I will briefly review these texts.

Psalm 94  Who will stand up?

This Psalm cries out for justice.  It's arguments echo the complaints of Isaiah's prophecy against the leaders and powerful people of his day.  "How long shall the wicked exult?" the psalmist asks.  They crush the people, kill widows, orphans, and immigrants.  But the psalmist knows that God sees and hears and will act.  Finally in v 16, the psalmist asks, "Who rises up for me against the wicked?  Who stands up for me against evildoers?" 

One clear answer is "The Lord."  But the implication can't be swept away that we must rise up against those who do harm to the poor, who destroy the lives of the weak.  "Can wicked rulers be allied with you, those who contrive mischief by statute?"  The writer recognizes that we owe no obedience to those who use the power of government to benefit themselves and the wealthy.  A crime called a law is no less a crime against justice.  We may not sit by and watch this kind of violence take place.  Who will stand up?  If we do stand, the psalmist reminds us that God will be our stronghold and rock of refuge.

Jeremiah 22 Who will leave the sanctuary and go to the seat of power?


In case the ministers listening might believe that their task is done when they stand in the pulpit to speak a word against injustice, Barber went on to this text from the Prophet Jeremiah.  This long chapter combines a series of harsh oracles against the ruling family of Judah.  The great King Josiah, a reformer who had sought to turn back to the ways of the Lord, had ended his days as powerful empires to the north and south began to battle for dominance in the region of Palestine.  Josiah was succeeded by three sons and a grandson as the Kingdom of Judah crumbled.

God gave Jeremiah another hard task in this text.  Jeremiah seemed always to be sent to deliver a hard message to people who would not want to hear it.  Often it was full of devastating news.  That is the case in this chapter.  In it, he delivers castigating words to the rulers of Judah.  Each one he speaks of will find a humiliating end.  None will share in the blessings they had assumed would go with sitting on the throne of David.

Each of Josiah's descendants receives chastisement for his unjust ways.  Wage theft and slavery amass wealth in the royal household.  Oppression and violence toward the marginalized--widows, orphans, immigrants--accompany outright murder of the innocents by a corrupt law enforcement system.  They turned away from Josiah's ways of looking out for the poor and needy, protecting them through laws and fair policies.  This will bring all of them to utter destruction.

Jeremiah probably delivered these collected indictments together before the last of the Kings of Judah, Zedekiah.  He reminded him of the empires who took away his brother Shallum (Jehoahaz) and nephew Coniah (Jehoiachin).  He recalled the judgment against his brother Jehoiakim, who died in disgrace.  The same fate awaits Zedekiah.  A great repentance is necessary, and a change of domestic and foreign policy, but Zedekiah will not change.  All of this makes Jeremiah a very unwelcome visitor.

The chapter begins with Jeremiah getting the instructions to "Go down to the house of the king."  The Temple, where the priests did their service, was on the highest ground.  Thus, Barber reminds us, that Jeremiah's priestly work took place inside the sanctuary.  For many priests, carrying out the mandates of priestly service in the Temple seemed enough.  Jeremiah might also have wished for that life.  However, the unjust systems all around him required another type of work.  Jeremiah had to leave the confines of Temple service to go to the house of the king.  The message had a specific recipient, and this servant of God needed to deliver it.  Barber insists that we are in such a time, when the oppression and injustice of our world demand we not merely preach inside the walls of the church, but we take the message to the seat of power.

Amos 6  Who will refuse to be at ease in the world?

Barber's next text speaks to those who would be satisfied to marvel in the critique of injustice while living in comfort and waiting for change to come.  A term for this way of addressing social justice has emerged in social media:  slacktivism.  Combining slacker with activism, this term points to those of us who get great satisfaction reading about and commenting about injustices in the world without ever getting beyond pixels. 

For ministers, it could take the form of gravitas in speaking against injustice when preaching or in a gathering of church people, but otherwise enjoying the benefits of a good salary, a nice car, a comfortable home, and access to prestige and the good life.  To be "at ease in Zion" was what Amos called the wealthy and powerful people who believed God was on their side.  They had convinced themselves that they would never have to worry about losing their privileges.  But Amos reminded them they needed to be more aware of the crisis all around them.  Injustice and oppression were destroying the people, but the privileged were ignoring it.

If we really do believe that God demands justice, and that it should "roll down like waters," like a mighty torrent that sweeps away the barriers to its victory, then we cannot remain at ease.  Staying comfortable and cheering on the few who are in the struggle will not be an adequate response from those called to preach the gospel.  Barber says we must not be at ease.  We must be ready to be inconvenienced.  We have to shift priorities and rearrange schedules and show up when it is time for action.

Luke 4  Who will yield to the Spirit's agitation?

The fourth text is from the New Testament.  It is, by my estimation, the central text invigorating various theological turns toward liberation in the late twentieth century.  To recognize the position of Luke 4 in the narrative of Jesus' life and ministry challenges many of the false and distorted ways that Jesus has been proclaimed by the church.  Centering on this text portrays Jesus in a particularly liberative mode.

Jesus reads from the Isaiah scroll to say that he came for a specific purpose:  to bring good news to poor people, to set prisoners free, to liberate slaves, to bring good things to the marginalized.  He describes the kind of restorative justice that the tradition of sabbath years and Jubilee taught Israel would be the right way to make sure there was no permanent debtor class, no enduring oppression, no monopolistic enterprise, no land barons and blood-built mansions.

Jesus quotes this text to say that he will pursue this ministry because the Spirit of God has stirred him to do it.  This is his calling.  He has been agitated to act.  No wonder the listeners that day, putting aside their initial interest in his words, began to consider violence against him.  The Spirit agitated him that day to challenge the powers that be, the wealthy who benefited by not returning land to its rightful owner, the ones who did not pay a fair wage.  Rather than walking away, Jesus took the text given to him and took the calling laid upon him.  He spoke truth to power on that day.  Barber asks ministers whether we will be ready to let the Spirit agitate us to action.

After looking at all four of these texts--no it was not a brief sermonic offering--Barber pointed his challenge directly at all of us who listened.  In this time when injustice is on the rise, will we answer these four questions as we must?  Some will not, and they will end up as preachers who go to their graves with no record of standing up, going out, refusing a vacation, and yielding to the agitation.  Their greatest accomplishment will be to have stayed in their sanctuaries in comfort and made sure the praise team was good.  I like a good praise team.  Don't get me wrong.  But will that be enough for me to offer to my Lord?


I would hope that many more preachers will be listening to these texts Rev Barber has brought to our attention.  Any preacher worth her or his salt should be able to find at least four good sermons from this set of questions.  Having the discipline to study them, teach them, and proclaim them from the pulpit should also help to build up the resolve, the courage, and the companionship necessary to go out and deliver a prophetic message in the seat of power.  Continuing to be in the walls and at ease in a time of rampant injustice will not lead to a good result. 

If any of this stirs you to wonder what you should do, let me also mention that an outstanding learning opportunity is coming.  Barber and some of his co-workers in the Forward Together movement will be leading an intensive learning opportunity on October 29-30, 2015.  The Moral Progressive Organizing Leadership Institute Summit will take place at a retreat center in Whitakers, NC.  The theme of the retreat is "Repairers of the Breach," taken from one of the powerful social justice texts of the Bible in Isaiah 58.  Experts in many fields of policy along with ministers and organizers will teach and train leaders to continue the struggle for justice in this important time.  Information about the conference is available at repairersofbreach@gmail.com.

"I'll give you three minutes to disperse and return to your homes or to your church."

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When I first preached on "The Regard of God" in February, it was in preparation for joining the Moral March to the Capital with Historic Thousands on Jones Street.  A few weeks later, I had the opportunity to preach again, and this message seemed appropriate for the occasion, Shaw University Divinity School's Alexander-Pegues Ministers Conference.  This year's theme was "Resurrecting the Dream:  The Gospel and Socioeconomic/Political Freedom."

Since I preached it the first time, I had opportunity to hear the Mt. Level MBC seminary intern, Tyler Joshua Green, preach an excellent sermon on Matthew 17 and Jesus' struggle and determination to challenge the deadly structures of injustice in the world.  As he moved toward his conclusion, on the fiftieth anniversary weekend of the Selma march, he drew a powerful insight from John Lewis's descriptions of the events of Bloody Sunday.  It was a theologically powerful claim about the nature of the church.  I just kept thinking about it, and decided to rewrite the sermon with a different ending, expanding and "riffing" on what TJ Green had said.  So what you have below, in the spirit of Markan scholarship, the "alternate ending" of my sermon on "The Regard of God," offered at the early morning session of the Ministers Conference on March 10, 2015.  The text for this sermon was Isaiah 40:21-31.

When the economy crashed half a dozen years ago, the easiest thing to do was to relegate economic injustices to the realm of things too complicated for action.  Church people too often shrank back from the challenges the world was throwing at us and said, “[Sigh!] All we can do is pray.”  When I hear that, it often seems to be a way of saying, “We give up, and we don’t plan to use our energy trying to make a difference.  We will just leave it to God and ask God to fix it without us.”  That is a sad kind of prayer.

Praying is actually a big thing to do, if we do it right.  Praying, contrary to much of our actual practice, is not about changing God’s mind.  It is about God changing our minds.  If we had prayed seriously, we would have come out of prayer meeting working on a plan for action against economic injustice.  If God hates injustice, then praying ought to ignite hunger and thirst for justice in us.  That hunger and thirst should stir us to walk and not faint.  A congregation cannot do everything, but it can do something.  We can do the obvious things of offering relief to those who struggle, but we can also do the less obvious things of economic development, forming credit unions, insuring the health of our poor members, creating business incubators, growing fresh and healthy foods, investing in our neighborhoods, providing job training and jobs, shutting down the usurious lenders, pressuring businesses and governments to act justly toward the people.

For all the talking we professors do, you might not realize how much we learn from our students.  I came to Shaw University with an almost lily-white, bleached-out education.  My first day teaching undergraduates sent me to the library and the bookstore.  When I got the chance to teach in the seminary a few years later, I had to intensify my study to be able to teach black theology as an integral part of theology class.  Conversing with my students brought me step by step down a road of deeper understanding.  So if you hear me saying something worth remembering, be assured that my students’ hearts and voices are echoing throughout my words.

I say that because on Sunday at Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church, we had a first-year seminarian named Tyler Joshua Green preach.  I need to credit him with the next move I’m going to make in this sermon.  He was bringing his text into conversation with the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March.  He drew my attention to a specific quotation from Congressman John Lewis.  Lewis retold key events of Bloody Sunday, and the one I want to point out was the warning he says Major John Cloud of the Alabama State Troopers gave them.

"I'll give you three minutes to disperse and return to your homes or to your church."  Six hundred people, two-by-two, had stepped out of the Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, to carry their case to the seat of power in Montgomery.  At the front of the procession were the young John Lewis, a contemporary and fellow-soldier with our distinguished Dean Forbes, and Hosea Williams of the SCLC.  TJ Green pointed out the irony of Major Cloud’s instructions, and I’ve been thinking hard about that ever since.

Cloud told John Lewis, Hosea Williams, and the many who stood behind them that they had three minutes to leave and return to their homes or to their churches.  It seems pretty clear that the Major misunderstood what he was talking about.  Major Cloud thought the churches were a place to go and hide from the world, to escape from the world’s troubles, to ignore what goes on outside their walls and doors.  But the churches were not like that. 

Lewis, Williams, and so many more had been in church praying.  They seem to have known what prayer was about.  Through their prayers they had been drawn up into the mission of God.  Their hearts had become unsatisfied with the warm feelings they could get in the pews and aisles of their sanctuaries.  Their eyes saw through the stained glass windows and brick walls into a world where the beloved children of God struggled for a crust of bread to eat, for a book to study, for a job to earn with dignity, for a voter registration card to affirm their citizenship, for a safe street to walk without being shot down by vigilantes or police.  They saw a place where Jesus had walked among the outcast, the despised, the wretched of the earth.  Their prayers fortified their wills to be followers of Jesus.  They found sweet communion with a savior who walked in the dangerous and barren places of the world, and they did not want to miss out on a minute of being right where Jesus was walking.

The churches may have been a refuge in the storm, but they were, Oh, so much more than a refuge.  They may have found joy in singing and praising, but they were praising a God who was calling them to walk and not faint. The churches were not a place of irrelevance for the shape of the world of politics.  They were ground zero for the in-breaking of the Reign of God.  They were the launching pad for a Holy Spirit invasion of every stronghold and power base of evil in God’s world.  The churches were a place to see a new vision.  They were the strategy room to plan and prepare for taking on injustice.  They were the School of Truth that this Christian Band would be speaking to power.  They were the dressing room for any who would be clothed in righteousness.  They were the supply depot for any who would put on the whole armor of God.  They were the sign-up desk for everyone who would embrace the mission of God's Reign, saying, “Here I am!  Send me!”  They were the breeding ground of a liberating gospel that revolutionizes the world through a simple prayer, "God's will be done on earth!"  They were an empty tomb where dreams are being resurrected.

So when this conference is over, take Major Cloud’s advice and go back to your churches.  But don’t go back to hide and cower.  Don’t go back to ignore and doubt.  God has regarded our worship and our faithfulness.  God’s regard goes beyond those walls of the building and to all God’s children.  Therefore, go back to stage the next wave of gospel change.  Go back to live in the regard of God, to pray and be changed, to walk and not faint. 

Isaiah, if you are listening there in our great cloud of witnesses, this is what we will do.  We will go into the world because we have known.  We will make sure the poor in our neighborhoods have health care because we have heard.  We will stand up against the killing and locking away of our children because it has been told to us from the beginning.  We will create opportunities for education and jobs because we have understood from the foundation of the world.  We will go into the world because it is a sign of who we are and whose we are–those who belong to the One who spread the heavens as a tent for us to live in.  We do our Kingdom work as a foretaste of the new age God is bringing among us, who brings princes to naught and strengthens the powerless.  We go into the world under the everlasting, unsearchable regard of God. 

God is the one who has regard for us.  The everlasting God, creator of the ends of the earth, created our little corner of it too.  God has regard for us.  We walk in the regard of God who does not faint or grow weary.  We go to our churches to be transformed and become part of a long walk to justice, to love, and to community.  Let’s plan to walk and not faint, thankful that we live and move and have our being in the regard of God.

There Might Still Be Hope for That Little Seminary Down the Road

Today at the Shaw University Ministers' Conference, we heard from a young preacher who was new to our gathering.  Rev. Chalice (pronounced shah-LEASE) Overy, youth minister at Baptist Grove Church in Raleigh brought a message.  She is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill with a bachelor's degree in Public Policy and African American Studies.  From UNC she went to Duke Divinity School, that little seminary down the road from us here at Shaw University Divinity School.  The message she delivered with great power made me (tongue in cheek) say that there might be hope for that school.  As many of you know, my fellow Mt. Level members and close friends teach at Duke Divinity School, and I also earned a Duke degree.  I would say they are doing fine.  But still, hearing Rev. Overy gave me great encouragement for the type of student who has studied and learned in those halls of divinity.

She selected the text, Acts 8:26-39, which is the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch.  She paired it with a few verses from 2 Corinthians 5 about the new creation and the ministry of reconciliation.  As she began to tell the story from Acts, she made note of the barriers to admission to Jerusalem worship that the eunuch must have encountered.  There were physical walls, steps, doors, and curtains constructed in the Temple of Jerusalem, all designed to keep certain people far away from what was considered the holy place of God.  No doubt, the eunuch had been held at bay and unable to participate in many aspects of divine worship while in Jerusalem.

When Philip asked him whether he understood the Isaiah scroll he was reading, it is not surprising that he said he did not.  Who among the religiously accepted would have been willing to teach such an outsider and outcast?  Overy said that it was good that they were on a wilderness road for this conversation, because Philip himself might have been worried about associating with this man if other religious folks were looking.  Not only was he an outsider from Ethiopia, but his physicality as a eunuch might have raised many questions for those who would watch the two men converse.  The sexual undertones are not hidden, even if unspoken.

Overy brought the 2 Corinthians text as a contrast to the likely experience of the eunuch in Jerusalem.  Then she asked why our churches have turned away from the ministry of reconciliation and taken up the regime of death by setting up barriers to keep people out of our congregations.  She described the ways that church people try to be the respectable people and keep out anyone who differs or questions or challenges or diverges.  She implied that the entire regime of death that the law brings had become the playground of domination systems (my term) in Jerusalem and now in our churches, so that some of us become the gatekeepers and protectors of God from the rabble and the outsiders.

Overy shook us all up with a message about the gospel that lets the Ethiopian's rhetorical question need no answer--what's to keep me from being baptized?  No legalism, no wall, no steps, no evil-eye, no harumph, no gate, no curtain--no that was torn from top to bottom.  It was a powerful sermon calling on churches to be welcoming communities and to get out into the streets to let people know that our God receives them in all their variety and diversity.

Thank you Rev. Chalice Overy, for your care in reading the text and listening to the Spirit.  Thank you to her teachers for contributing to a powerful ministerial formation.  And thank you God for the immeasurable gift of the Good News.

Public Reading of Scripture

It's the last day of the Shaw University Divinity School Ministers' Conference.  This morning was my morning on the dais.  I was scheduled to offer the Invocation.  One of our alumni was called away, so I also filled in to read the Scripture Text.

Some of you who know me realize that public reading of scripture is one of my favorite forms of worship leadership.  Having grown up in church, I have been hearing people read aloud from the Bible all my life.  In children's Sunday School classes, it was a challenge, a duty, and sometimes a competition to see who could get through some verses without stumbling over big Bible words.  We excellent readers and pronouncers felt smug toward the ones who couldn't sound out Nebuchadnezzer or Amalekite.

Eventually, it came to be the "gracious" thing to do to allow anyone to "pass" or "prefer" not to read publicly.  We learned that we should not force people to do something they were not comfortable doing, lest they feel humiliated by struggling with the words and sentences.  I never got completely comfortable with that policy, thinking that we ought to show the grace through loving one another enough to encourage everyone to continue to grow and improve in public reading.  That was a kind of internal white church conversation.

At Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church, I came to see that there was another kind of conversation about public reading of scripture to which I had not been privileged.  I don't know the story as a participant, although I have had some opportunities to study in books or listen to testimony about that different world from the one in which I was raised.  What I did learn was that the social function of public reading of scripture at Mt. Level carried with it a communal memory of injustice:  the injustice of being denied the sacred text and the training to be a reader of it.

So at Mt. Level, when a person stands to read the scripture publicly, it is not the same kind of pressure to perform flawlessly to prove one's pedigree that might have fed our competitive spirits in Sunday School where I grew up.  It takes on more of a shared consciousness of liberation struggle, as people whom outsiders might not expect to read sophisticated texts join hearts of encouragement to read and hear the sacred writ.  Almost any time a young person or child reads publicly, there is an outpouring of congratulations and encouragement for achieving this important task.  Now the feeling about children's public reading is not so different than what I grew up with, but the expression is more overt through words of praise and applause.  Getting an education is not something to take for granted, and gaining the skill to handle sacred things is a reason for gratitude to God who made a way where there was no way.

As a seminarian at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, I gained another insight into public reading of scripture.  Certainly, I had experienced different styles of reading as I grew up.  Some people read in a monotone, giving little emphasis while making sure to get all the words correct.  Others put on a "church voice" or "preacher voice" and read with a different tone than conversational speech.  It may include certain efforts at emphasis, although as a whole it offers little insight into the particular text, and in a way makes all texts sound the same, each verse and sentence and paragraph adopting the same "officious" or "elevated" tone of voice.  Some readers adopt a sing-song phrasing that gets to be very predictable and at times causes the mind to relax and drift away.  A few readers show evidence of trying to read with contextual understanding, yet most such reading either takes on idiosyncratic interpretive emphasis (such as highlighting a transitional word like "but" or "therefore"), reading excessively slowly, or singling out one or two phrases in a passage for emphasis.

While in California, I was blessed to become part of a congregation that was unusually populated by people who gave serious attention to how scripture should be read publicly.  Among many with gifts, some who stood out were Jerene Broadway, Kyle Smith, and Jane Medema.  One thing I learned from these and others was to look at a text for its particularities:  conversational speech, story-telling, poetic phrasing, and musicality.  I listened as readers varied the speed of their speech cadence, stretched out particular words, raised and lowered the pitch or tone of phrases in unexpected ways rather than in the same way with each line.  I saw that scripture gives clues about the emotive character of its words, so that fear, excitement, anger, or sarcasm may need expression.  Some words may need to be shouted and others whispered.

From that point on, I came to see that worship planners should engage two concerns when calling on people to lead through public reading of scripture.  First, I retain my baptist egalitarianism that tells me everyone who wishes to have opportunity to read scripture publicly should get to do so.  Reading scripture is a practice of all of our lives in discipleship, and no one has to be a professional to share in that practice.  Whether it is read with a more mumbling monotone, a stumbling cadence, or articulated in all its detail, the people of God do the work of God by reading scripture publicly.  Second, churches should identify those with gifts to read with expression and convey the depths of the text and have them read regularly and often.  Moreover, those who understand how to study a text and draw out an oral interpretation of it should offer training to others so that more members of the congregation can offer gifted leadership in public reading of scripture.

I also learned at seminary that many traditions of Christian worship read multiple texts in worship.  I grew up hearing the scripture read as a preparation for the sermon.  Whatever text the preacher planned to use was the one we heard.  Then I found out that some churches read an Old Testament Lesson, a Psalm, a New Testament Lesson (or Epistle), and a Gospel Lesson every Sunday.  Of course, in our small-town Texas Baptist self-assurance, we were not aware of the Lectionary and such things.  I remember my fellow-seminarian Dan Ratliff saying to me that for all of our baptist talk about being Bible-based, we mostly let people say their own words in worship.  He helped me see that in this multiple-text liturgical approach, we could give God's Word a chance to speak more often, more diversely, and more extensively than our anti-liturgical pattern had led us into.

All of which leads me to say that I was overjoyed to get to read from Acts 8:26-39 today and try to make the text come alive.  I always know the English teachers and speech teachers out in the congregation because of the way their eyes light up.  One woman greeted me after the service to say, "You read that scripture just like I would have told you to read it!"  So I knew I was talking to someone who thinks about how to interpret texts orally.  If this is the text we claim can tell us the story of our lives and guide us in the way we should go, then there is a value in letting the words operate in our mouths and ears with the same liveliness of the conversations we carry on with one another.  They are sacred texts, but that does not mean they must sound like drudgery.

So anytime you want to ask me to read the scripture publicly, don't be surprised that I say, "Yes."

Why Myrtle Trees?

On Monday night of the Shaw University Minister's Conference, the conference preacher, Rev. Dr. William H. Curtis of Mt. Ararat Baptist Church, Pittsburgh, PA, chose as his text the first vision of Zechariah, chapter 1, verses 7-17.  In particular, he focused on the first part of verse 8:

I saw at night, and behold, a man was riding on a red horse, and he was standing among the myrtle trees which were in the ravine (NASB).

Curtis took note that the description of the vision included only a few details before an extensive interpretation.  At the heart of the vision is a rider on a horse, and there are other riders on horses in the background.  Most of what follows pertains to the message, including questions and answers to the other riders and to God, delivered by the primary rider to Zechariah.

But Curtis said that his homiletician's imagination was drawn to the details given in verse 8.  The riders and horses were in a ravine.  It was a valley, a low place.  In it was a clump of myrtle trees.  Curtis could not stop wondering, "Why myrtle trees, and why in a valley?"

His message went on to say that myrtle trees grow especially well in valleys or ravines.  Unlike our ambitions to be on the mountain heights, this detail of the story represented for him a message about those common experiences of being in a low place, in a "valley."

Curtis demonstrated a kind of "spiritual" or "allegorical" interpretation of the text.  Such visionary passages often already have an allegorical meaning deeply embedded in the texts themselves.  As Curtis developed the allegory, he linked it to the interpretation of the vision that became Zechariah's prophetic oracle.

The people of God had endured great hardship.  Their enemies had treated them far more harshly than someone might say they deserved.  In the pilgrimage of the history of Israel, they were certainly living in a valley.  They had been in exile for decades.  A few had been able to return to their homeland, and they were scrambling to build a temple and reestablish their center of faith in Jerusalem.

They might look upon their situation as hopeless.  They might think that things have been just too hard, and no one should expect much of them.  But Curtis points out that even in valleys, there are trees that grow especially well.  These myrtle trees signify that the hard times the Israelites have faced can still be a time for growth.  They can still find the water and nourishment they need.  In fact, the valley may be the only setting in which some people can grow.

When they are on the mountaintop, God's work seems small from up so high.  They begin to imagine they are the the reason for their own success.  But in the valley, we can come to see how great God's work in our lives may be.  We become eager to find those things we need to rise from our struggles.

I give a very brief and weak synopsis of the message.  As you might imagine, in this valley of my life, wondering how to move on after Everly's death, it was a message that spoke to me.  For even in the valley of the shadow of death (and that is the shadow in which I walk), God is with me.  It was an encouraging word.  Even in my deep valley, there is growth that can and must happen.  I shed tears, but they were tears of hope.  So I am relieved to be standing among the myrtle trees.

Commenting on Jeremiah Wright has for the past few days become the national pastime. I was checking in on a web site I have followed lately, Real Clear Politics, and looking at some of the comments. Almost no one is able to listen to Jeremiah Wright sympathetically. The majority of writers are most concerned about the horse race for the presidency, and Wright's effect on that race is all they want to examine.

There are those who can't understand that a preacher might not be measuring his or her remarks by the winds of politics, might not be holding back or pushing forward positions that would help or hurt a candidate. They simply talk about how Wright intended to further or hinder the campaign of this or that candidate, but especially Obama. Wright has tried hard to disabuse them of this notion that he plans his speeches, especially for a minister's conference or a church meeting, around their effect on this or that candidate.

Other writers care little about what Wright might or might not have intended. To them, Wright represents a version of blackness that "America" (meaning an assumed normative white America) cannot stomach. Robert Novak makes such a remark.

Obama's danger is being perceived by white voters as representing a hostile separate culture.

He then refers to conversations he had with two African American commentators. Armstrong Williams, labeled a conservative by Novak, said,

"It is not unusual to hear in many black churches the same language that Rev. Wright is being criticized for."

I think that anyone who has attended a meeting such as the Proctor Conference, sponsors of the event Wright was attending in Washington, DC, or a Ministers' Conference at Hampton, Shaw, or any number of other events, would find that this kind of preaching and conversation is not an aberration.

On the other hand, Juan Williams of NPR and Fox told Novak,

"Not at all," he replied. "It's ridiculous. I never have heard that in church."

I know that there are black preachers who do not take up issues of poverty, war, violence, oppression, and white supremacy in a prophetic way. But to say that he has never heard Wright's kind of preaching in church stretches credibility.

Juan Williams's remarks on Fox after the National Press Club question and answer session showed this same incredulity at Wright's comments. Juan Williams accused him of handling the whole occasion wrong by talking about liberation and transformation as if they were so much fluff. Williams acts as if they were irrelevant to explaining Wright's context. Theology is irrelevant. He was frustrated that the press had to "wait" for the questions and answers to hear about the sound bites they have been fixated on, even though they are guilty of not doing their own due diligence to get to the bottom of the story by listening to the full sermons. Juan Williams seems to think that Wright owed both Obama and the Press a very different speech which would have tied everything up neatly and calmed everyone's nerves. The Juan Williams comments can be heard as the last few minutes of part six of the video here.

From a Fox News editor, John Moody, a short paragraph in the midst of his personal tirade displays far more than he intended. He is puzzled about the claimed invisibility of the black church. Offended by Wright, he insists he is not a racist. He says that the mostly white church he attends does not talk about the problems of "whites." He thinks that by not identifying whiteness, he has risen above it to universals. He ups the ante by referring to "souls" as the concern of God, and asking whether souls have color. (I'll set aside the pop theology of disembodied souls, part of a mind-body dualism that helped to institutionalized African slavery long ago.) Yet his so-called universals give him no framework in which to understand what Wright has said and the people his word represent. Maybe they are not so universal, but instead a projection of white identity.

What reality is that, reverend? How is reality visible or invisible? Is it a different reality from my church? Who says so? God? Or just you? What the heck, to be polite, are you talking about?

The main point here seems to be that Moody does not understand what Wright, and probably many blacks, are talking about. He does not know their lives. He does not know the history.

Why is it so bad to talk in public about the wrongs of history and their effects today? James Evans talks about the way that so many people believe that "the past could be scuttled." Wright and others have a responsibility to criticize the wrongs they see around them and to analyze their historical roots. If we are so uncomfortable with our common history that we have to deny it, we will never be able to make progress in overcoming its continuing deleterious effects. As it stands, the untreated infection is killing our children's future.