Greenwood Forest Sermons: Recent Episodes
greenwoodforestsermons
This is the sermon feed for Greenwood Forest Baptist Church, a progressive and inclusive baptist church in Cary, NC. We are glad you have found your way to our sermon podcast. We welcome you to join us in person if you find this podcast compelling!
Luke Perrin's sermon on James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a, week 3 of Wisdom Crying Out in the Streets
Rev. Efird's sermon on Proverbs 1:20-33, the first in our Wisdom Crying Out in the Streets series
Testimonies from the delegation who just returned from the Freedom Ride to the Border in Tucson, AZ
Rev. Spears-Newsome and Rev. Efird deliver homilies on John 12:12-16 and John 18:15-18, 25-27
Rev. Racquel Gill of Duke Chapel delivers our keynote address for Black History Month 2024 on Transfiguration Sunday.
Rev. Dr. Ben Boswell's sermon for GFBC's 60th Anniversary service on Revelation Chapter 3.
Rev. Spears-Newsome's sermon on Luke 4:21-30. This sermon concludes our series "Sing a Song."
Rev. Efird's sermon on Isaiah 43:1-7. This is the first sermon in the "Sing a Song" series.
Since we’ve been at home more than usual, we’ve done a lot of planting. We thought it might be fun to establish some things while we were actually able to water them! We’ve planted a garden, growing tomatoes, peppers, peas, and various types of greens. We planted herbs for the first time in years, making our own pesto and mint tea. We’ve established some small green giants in the back yard that we are watching grow. My mom planted a moonflower vine with my son Isaac that’s already grown all the way up our bird feeder. The crepe myrtle tree in our back yard was fertilized and watered this spring and is blooming for the first time since we moved in our house! The flowers in our front porch planter are actually still alive! We are normally not home long enough to even notice these things, much less water them, and we’ve enjoyed watching our plants and trees come alive and our garden yield fruit. I am known for my lack of watering, and my mom has poked fun of my husband and me a few times, saying, “See what happens when you actually water and fertilize!” It’s a classic illustration of the old saying, “You reap what you sow.”
It’s true a lot of times that we reap what we sow. If you put in the time, dedication, and hard work, you can often count on seeing the fruits of your labor. But we all know that the old proverb doesn’t always ring true. There are times when no matter how much attention you give a plant, it just doesn’t grow or before you even notice, it gets eaten up by a beetle. There are times when you put a great deal of time in a project only to watch it all fall apart, and you have to start all over again. There are times when you are dedicated to changing some behavior pattern and no matter what you do, you can’t seem to change. There are times when you are work hard at a relationship, and regardless of your sacrifices, it all falls apart. We don’t always reap what we sow.
It’s something Jesus knew well. He tells this parable in the midst of great opposition to the gospel he was preaching. He was sowing, but all his work wasn’t producing fruit. The seed of Jesus’s teaching had fallen on rocky ground filled with thorns. The Pharisees were challenging him; he was about to be rejected in his own hometown; and John the Baptist’s head was about to be put on a platter. In Matthew 13, in the midst of this opposition, he tells eight parables about what the kingdom of God is like. Jesus’s teaching is stirring up crowds; it’s so many people that he has to get into a boat to preach while the crowds stand on the beach. While Jesus allows the crowds to overhear what he’s saying, he is most concerned with teaching the disciples what the kingdom of God is like.
In our text for today, Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God is like a generous sower. The sower in this parable is extravagant, wasteful even. It’s like he knows absolutely nothing about farming. Why is he not tilling, preparing, and carefully calculating? Did he even bother to weed or water or fertilize? Why is he just throwing seed everywhere? Why is he wasting good seed, throwing it on rocks and shallow ground? Why is he not just saving his seed for the good soil? The sower sows with reckless abandon, unchecked generosity, undisciplined abundance. As perhaps should have been expected, the seeds that fell on rocky ground sprang up quickly, but since they had no depth of soil, they were scorched by the sun. Since they had no root, they withered away. The seeds that fell among the thorns died as the thorns grew up and choked them. The seeds that fell on good soil brought forth grain though. And while that might have been expected, it didn’t just yield normal results. The seeds that fell on good soil brought forth a yield of a hundredfold, sixtyfold, thirtyfold! As one theologian says, “Sevenfold meant a good year for a farmer, and tenfold meant true abundance. Thirtyfold would feed a village for a year, and a hundredfold would let the farmer retire to a villa by the Sea of Galilee!”[i] This magnitude of growth is a miracle!
Even though what happens seems to not be entirely up to the soil, these questions arise: What are the necessary conditions for fruitful discipleship? Why is some ground hospitable and other ground not hospitable to the values of the kingdom of God? The text says that the evil one can come and snatch away what is sown in our hearts. It warns us that if we are not rooted, we will fall away when faced with trouble or persecution. It cautions that the cares of this world and the lure of wealth chokes out the word of God’s kingdom. We are tempted here to find a way to distance ourselves from the bad soil, claiming that surely, we must be good soil. But it’s not that simple. I imagine we have all types of soil residing in us and in our communities, and we need to open ourselves up to the possibility of what we need to do to cultivate good soil. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas says, “Like Peter, we think that we will be able to follow Jesus, but when faced with the power of Rome, and the leaders of Israel it is hard to remain faithful to the crucified Lord. Peter, like so many of us, is too ready to follow Jesus. To be too ready to follow Jesus means that we fail to understand that we do not understand what kind of Messiah this is. Discipleship will hurt. The word cannot flourish among those who continue to be shaped by the cares of this world…The lure of wealth and the cares of the world darken and choke our imaginations…The gospel becomes a formula for ‘giving our lives meaning’ without judgment. Too often those who propose strategies to recover the lost status and/or membership of the church do so hoping that people can be attracted to become members of the church without facing the demands of being a disciple of Jesus.”[ii]
But to stop with a moralistic story about what kind of soil we should strive to be misses the main point. A seed produced an amazing yield in spite of many setbacks, and the extravagant, generous sower is the one who makes it all possible! This story isn’t ultimately about us; it’s about a God who shows extravagant love to all of us and seeks to take root in even the most unlikely places. As disciples, we might try to do what is wise, cautious, and careful. We might try to run our churches like good businesses, making the kingdom into something that it’s not. But as another theologian says, “The sower in this text is anything but a good businessperson. He seems willing to just fling that seed anywhere. Maybe he does so in order to remind us that the gospel might be bigger than good business principles, bigger than just good soil. Perhaps this sower throws seed just anywhere in order to suggest that ‘anywhere’ is, in the final analysis, the arena of God’s care and redemptive activity. This sower throws seed not only on good soil, but also amid the rocky, barren, broken places, in order to suggest that God’s vision for the world is itself often apprehended in strange and broken places.”[iii] This parable is about the generous sower, a God who will never give up on us, a God who will keep flinging boundless love, a God who seeks to take root in even the most broken of places.
How do we show the world what the kingdom of God is like right now? How do we model the love of the generous sower in a time when our mindset of scarcity has taken over? Our soil is filled with thorns. We are anxious and fearful of what the future is going to bring. We are carefully calculating all our decisions as we attempt to plan for the upcoming fall and winter. We are dry and in desperate need of water and fertilizer. We are feeling untethered from our roots, as the COVID-19 crisis continues to affect our nation at an alarming rate. There is no end in sight. All we see is what we lack. We are consumed by worries about lack of resources, lack of PPE, lack of enough ICU beds, lack of funding for our school systems to have what they need to open safely for both our students and our teachers and staff, a lack of time for increasing demands. These are very real problems, and yet it seems like there has to be another way. It seems like if maybe the world valued different things and put its resources in different places, we could navigate this crisis differently. What should our response be as disciples of Christ?
As a church we find ourselves trying to figure out how to best care for our community in the midst of this crisis, and at the same time, this crisis has amplified our worries about the future of churches. The cares of this world are consuming us. The desire for stability is threatening to choke out our imaginations. And yet God keeps throwing seed on us. God keeps trying to bring life into barren places. And God is calling us to be disciples of that kingdom, to be like the generous sower, to be extravagant in our love, to believe that growth can happen after many failed attempts, and to believe that God can actually work a miracle!
The Faith and Leadership Institute asked a number of leaders about the long-term viability of churches in the wake of this crisis. Bill Wilson, who worked with us during our visioning process, responded this way: “The Church has an opportunity to show the world what healthy people do in times of crisis. Rather than panic and devolve into self-absorption and self-protection, we run toward the needs in our culture rather than away from them.”[iv] Another ministry leader said, “God loves the church. But God loves the world more. Do whatever you can to love the world now, and don’t worry about your infrastructure. If churches focus on the money, they’re going to have a hard time. If they focus on what they can do culturally, I think they’ll have a fighting chance.”[v]
As the shelter in place orders were put in place in Wichita Falls, Texas, and it became clear we were facing a global pandemic, First Baptist Church of Wichita Falls reached out to its local healthcare system, United Regional, to ask how they could help. The human resources director of the healthcare system told the church that what they really needed was childcare for essential workers as many of the daycare centers had closed. First Baptist had shut down its own childcare center when the county schools shut down, but they agreed to help. They now offer exclusive care to employees of United Regional so that the healthcare workers can focus on doing their jobs and not worry about their children. [vi] When Greenwood Baptist Church in Boone, NC recognized there was a huge need for childcare for essential healthcare workers in their community, they turned their licensed center into an Emergency Child Care Provider site and became a place where healthcare workers could secure free childcare spots through the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.[vii] Even though First Baptist Church in Woodstock, GA had closed its doors for Sunday and Wednesday night services, it opened its doors to provide free childcare exclusively to employees of the healthcare providers and other employees of its local hospital. The pastor of First Baptist Woodstock said, “I don’t think it’s the role of the church to run from a problem. We have to run towards it and do what we can to help.”[viii]
We can’t take our cues from the world and lose our ability to dream of another way and work to make that other way possible. As Bebe Moore Campbell writes in her novel, Singing in the Comeback Choir, “Some of us have that empty-barrel faith. Walking around expecting things to run out. Expecting that there isn’t enough air, enough water. Expecting that someone is going to do you wrong. The God I serve told me to expect the best, that there is enough for everybody.”[ix]Greenwood Forest, you are filled with the spirit of generosity and are always looking for ways to show the love of God to our community. Don’t let fear or the cares of this world choke your imagination for how we can keep showing up right now. While you might feel dry, we do not lack abundance. Don’t give into the temptation to panic and devolve into self-absorption and self-protection. Open yourself to being tilled and watered and fertilized, to being shaped into a disciple of the kingdom of God. And take heart, because no matter the state of our soil, God is in the business of miracles! Jesus can enter into the most broken of places and create life and growth. Be like the generous sower. Love with wild abandon. Seed with extravagant generosity. Even though you don’t know how it’s all going to turn out, let God spread you on the rocks, on the weeds, and on the road. Amen.
[i] Talitha Arnold as quoted in “Pastoral” reflection in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 3, Edited by Bartlett and Taylor, 236.
[ii] Stanley Hauerwas, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible – Matthew, 129.
[iii] Theodore J. Wardlaw as quoted in “Homiletical” reflection in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 3, Edited by Bartlett and Taylor, 239.
[iv] https://faithandleadership.com/will-church-financially-survive-covid-19-pandemic
[v] Ibid.
[vi] https://www.texomashomepage.com/news/local-news/first-baptist-church-offers-childcare-to-united-regional-employees/
[vii] https://www.hcpress.com/news/greenway-baptist-church-child-development-center-offering-free-emergency-child-care-for-eligible-essential-workers.html
[viii] https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/woodstock-church-offering-day-care-to-health-care-workers-fighting-the-coronavirus
[ix] Bebe Moore Campbell, Singing in the Comeback Choir, 131.
The great theologian and mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., Howard Thurman, used to tell a story about his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose. Nancy was born a slave and lived on a plantation in Madison, FL until the Civil War. Howard and his family cared for her as she aged, and it was always Howard’s chore to read the Bible to her. Even though she couldn’t read or write, she knew her Bible well and requested specific readings from young Howard: sometimes the psalms, sometimes Isaiah, oftentimes the Gospels. However, with the exception of the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians, she never requested the Pauline epistles. When Howard came back to visit her on summer break during college, he finally asked her: “Grandma, why do you never ask me to read to you from Paul’s letters?” Her answer had a lasting impact on him. She said: “In the days of slavery, our master Old man McGhee would bring in a white minister occasionally to hold services for the slaves. McGhee would never allow a Black minister to preach to the slaves. But the white minister always picked something from Paul’s letters as his text. Three or four times a year he preached on “Slaves be obedient to them that are your masters…as unto Christ.” He would go on to explain how it was God’s will that we were slaves, and that if we were good and happy, God would bless us. I promised my Maker that if freedom ever came, I would never read that part of the Bible again.”
It is for good reason that people with their backs against the wall have often rejected dominant interpretations of the writings of Paul. As we have been talking about the last three weeks, Christians have misused and abused Paul’s words in Romans and elsewhere to support toxic theologies of every variety. Evangelicalism has used Paul to forward a surface-level and individualistic type of faith that isolates and shames certain people, and shifts attention away from systemic problems. Nationalist religion has used Paul to suggest that all governments, no matter how unjust, are God-ordained and that civil disobedience against unjust laws and systems is outside of God’s will. Patriarchal religion has used Paul to suppress the God-given gifts of women in life and ministry. Homophobic religion has used its misreadings of Paul to exclude and harm LGBTQ people. Slaveholder religion has used Paul to justify and undergird the great evils of chattel slavery and white supremacy in this country. But here we are today, listening to words from Paul that seem to spit in the face of all those who would appropriate him in order to maintain bondage and oppression. This Paul is caught up in the liberation that God intends, not just for people, but for the whole of creation. This Paul is a freedom-fighter who, in solidarity with nature itself, longs as a woman in labor for God’s justice and love to pervade our world.
Americans love to talk about “freedom” and this is the weekend when our freedom fetish is on full display. You probably heard or saw the word hundreds of times over the past few days, from advertisements, to clothing, to political speeches, to music. It seems to have unmatched rhetorical power for people in this country—simply shout the word freedom on the street or in a crowded room and people are liable to begin cheering spontaneously. Freedom has become such a cliché in America that there are parody songs and internet memes that satirize our freedom fetish, but many Americans don’t understand these things as satire (how do you satirize a satire?). My favorite example of Americans taking the freedom thing too far happened WAY back in 2003 (which factoring in the length of 2020 was 50 years ago). When France refused to support the proposed invasion of Iraq, the illustrious US House of Representatives changed french fries and french toast to “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” on all three House cafeteria menus. Riding the post-9/11 wave of patriotic fervor, restaurants all across America followed suit, scrapping all references to French fries in the name of freedom. The name “freedom fries” began to fall out of favor as support for the war in Iraq plummeted but the House menus kept freedom fries and freedom toast until 2006, when leadership changed. This is an admittedly ridiculous example but it raises a serious question: what do these Americans mean when they cheer for “freedom?” Is it the same kind of freedom that Paul is talking about when he exuberantly proclaims that “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God?”
The meaning of freedom has always been deeply contested in this country. From the very beginning there was an irreconcilable contradiction between the high-minded rhetoric of the founding fathers regarding the God-given right to “liberty” and their refusal to extend that liberty to all God’s children. BBIPOC have long raised their voices to alert America to its great contradictions, and to bear witness to an alternative freedom that is possible. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce said “If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all people equally. Give them the same laws. Give them all an even chance to live and grow.” When called upon to speak at an Independence Day celebration in 1852, Frederick Douglass said,
"Why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions!...But, such is not the state of the case. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. — The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn."
In 1935, Langton Hughes likewise wrote,
“O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free…
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me,
One of the powerful voices of the Black Freedom Movement, Fannie Lou Hamer, bore witness to the contradiction of American freedom at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. After recounting how she was arrested for organizing voter registration drives in Mississippi and then beaten and sexually abused in jail by the police, she said “I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook, because our lives are threatened daily, in America?”
The unresolved contradictions of America’s past are on full display in our current moment as well. In the first week of May, as several states were discussing plans to re-open their economies, Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be An Antiracist wrote a gripping piece for the Atlantic called “We Are Still Living and Dying in the Slaveholders’ Republic.”[1] In the piece, Kendi describes the two fundamental understandings of freedom that have always been in tension in American social and political life, and shows how these different understandings of freedom, which led to secession and the Civil War, are also on display in the COVID-19 pandemic. Kendi says “Slaveholders desired a state that wholly secured their individual freedom to enslave, not to mention their freedom to disenfranchise, to exploit, to impoverish, to demean, and to silence and kill the demeaned. The freedom to. The freedom to harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom to infect. Slaveholders disavowed a state that secured any form of communal freedom—the freedom of the community from slavery, from disenfranchisement, from exploitation, from poverty, from all the demeaning and silencing and killing. The freedom from. The freedom from harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom from infection. The slaveholder’s freedom to seceded from Lincoln’s “house divided against itself”—divided between the freedom to and from. Americans went to war. Americans are still waging this same war, now over COVID-19. There is a war between those fighting to open America back up for the sake of individual freedom, and those fighting to keep America closed for the sake of community freedom. A civil war over the very meaning, the very utility of freedom.”
So what kind of freedom does Paul mean when he says “the freedom of the glory of the children of God?” There is a clue in verse 12. Paul says “So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh to live according to the flesh—for if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live.” The freedom that characterizes the glory of those who have been adopted into God’s family is life in the Spirit, as opposed to life according to the “flesh.” The meaning of the word “flesh” is key. Western Christians often hear that word and think that it references particularly carnal sins, or think that Paul has something against bodies. But that’s not what “flesh” means. Flesh and body are actually different words in Greek so Paul says body when he means body. No, what Paul means by living according to the flesh is living according to one’s own desires, serving one’s own belly as Paul says in Romans 16:18, or what St. Augustine called living incurvatus in se—living curved in on oneself. The concept is more akin to a posture of selfishness than some kind of licentious sin. The Common English Bible translation makes this very clear by translating the Greek word as selfishness instead of flesh, knowing that the latter is often misunderstood. Listen to the first half of Chapter 8 up through the beginning of our passage for today from the CEB translation: “The law of the Spirit in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death…People whose lives are based on selfishness think about selfish things, but people whose lives are based on the Spirit think about things that are related to the Spirit. The attitude that comes from selfishness leads to death, but the attitude that comes from the Spirit leads to life and peace…People who are self-centered aren’t able to please God. But you aren’t self-centered. Instead you are in the Spirit, if in fact God’s Spirit lives in you…So then, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation (we are debtors), but it isn’t an obligation to ourselves to live our lives on the basis of selfishness. If you live on the basis of selfishness you are going to die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the actions of the body, you will live.” The freedom that Paul says is the glory of the children of God, the freedom for which all creation groans, is life beyond selfishness. We will truly be free, we will truly live, when we embrace our obligation to God and to each other.
Here in the “land of the free,” many who think they are free are actually enslaved by their own selfishness. Many have made idols of their own bellies, caring more about their personal desires and autonomy than about God’s command to love one’s neighbor. As we have seen in recent weeks, plenty of our neighbors can’t bring themselves to suffer even the slightest inconvenience in order to ensure the health and wellbeing of the community, all in the name of their individual “freedom.” But this is not freedom. This is enslavement to sin and death all the while thinking you are free. Biblical freedom on the other hand, is the opposite of the unfettered autonomy and individualism that Americans seem to prize so dearly. It is the freedom to be bound to each other in Christ. The freedom that brother Paul is describing is freedom from sin and hatred and death that comes by Spirit-filled obligation to the beloved community made possible by Christ.
Our communities are in labor pains right now. With all of creation, they are groaning for freedom from infection, freedom from lack of affordable healthcare, freedom from lack of affordable housing, freedom from food insecurity, freedom from poverty, freedom from patriarchy, freedom from homophobia, freedom from white supremacy, freedom from violence and brutality. Our world is longing for the freedom that only comes when we recognize that God has adopted us all as children. At this moment, in this already-but-not-yet, in-between time, there is much pain and suffering as we groan for freedom. Paul speaks a word to those who are suffering in the struggle for liberation: the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is about to be revealed to us. The new birth of freedom is coming. God’s will is liberation for all God’s children—and God gets what God wants in the end. There are people led by the Spirit of God all around us who are acting as midwives for liberation and justice and love. We can be midwives of God’s freedom and justice and love too. [One year ago today, 40 of us were in Alabama on the Freedom Ride, learning from the saints of the Civil Rights Movement what it means to be midwives of God’s liberation. We have been on the road since then and 50 people are now continuing their midwife training in our antiracist reading groups which will inform our antiracist action in the world. But we must not stop—the journey to liberation is not about any one experience or choice but about the daily, the hourly, striving to be led by the Spirit into more of the life God wants for you and the world.]
So today, as every day, we face a choice: are we children of God or are we children of Washington and Jefferson? Do we call out to God as “Abba! Father!” or do we trace our lineage to the so-called founding fathers? Are we led by the Spirit or are we led by the “Commander in Chief?” Do we place our hope in our adoption into God’s family, or do we place our hope in our citizenship as Americans? Is the Lord our God or are our own bellies our God? This Independence Day weekend, I pray that we will develop a new imagination for the world as it should be. I pray that we will learn to hope in a world that is not rooted in what has been possible in the past, in what we can see right now, but in what we have not yet seen but know is possible with God—that world for which all of creation groans, the world where the first fruits of solidarity and liberation and justice and love become a plentiful harvest for all. I pray that we will embrace a new (but very old) conception of freedom—a freedom that is not about the flesh’s desire for toxic individuality but which frees us so that we might be bound to each other in mutual affirmation and just relationship. That’s the freedom that I long for, that I hope for. It is just around the corner if we are ready to receive it. But we must make our stand with the Spirit of God on the side of the liberation for which all creation groans. As the freedom songs say “Which side are you on, friend, which side are you on?” cause “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom’s coming and it won’t be long!”
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/what-freedom-means-trump/611083/
A few weeks ago, my two year-old daughter Hannah was being her normal feisty self, explaining to me exactly why she wanted something, and I looked at her and said, “You are so sassy!” She looked me right in the eye and said, “I’m not sassy; I’m strong!” Well, I guess I’ve done something right! It’s also clear I’ve passed along my strong, determined personality to my daughter. I appreciate determination; I think it’s a quality that will take you far. I’ve been called stubborn quite a few times, but being a determined person has helped me to stick with things when they got hard and accomplish many goals I’ve had for myself. Paul’s words in Romans 7 unsettle me: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.” What do you mean you can’t do it, Paul? Where is your willpower? Where is your determination?!
I grew up believing that if you knew the right thing, all you had to do was choose it. After receiving the knowledge of the Roman Road’s path to salvation, one is enlightened, and one should now be able to do what is good. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life. If we confess with our mouth and believe in our heart that Jesus has been raised from the dead, check. We are good. Change of mind equals change of heart. If you wanted to do the right thing, then all you had to do was make up your mind to do it! Apparently, I skipped over Romans 7. But if I had read it, I’m sure it wouldn’t have resonated with me; it would not have held up my simplistic understandings of what it means to be saved. I only began to resonate with Paul’s words after I became a parent! Now I understand! I have on several occasions quoted to my friends when confessing something about my parenting, “I do not do what I want but the very thing I hate!” I snap at my kids even after I’ve decided I will remain calm and ignore their undesirable behavior. I find myself talking negatively even after I’ve made up my mind that I will only frame things in a positive manner. Becoming a parent has laid me bare in so many ways; it has humbled me as I’ve realized that I can’t always do the right thing or always parent in the way that I think or know I should. There have been so many times when I was determined to handle a situation in a different way only to find that my sheer willpower wasn’t enough to change my behavior. I’ve learned that generational patterns don’t just vanish into thin air. I’ve learned that a lot of them time my actions are a response to my own deepest fears and worries. We are humans bound to our histories, our upbringings, our societies, our desires, and our fears. We are bound to these things in ways we don’t even fully understand.
Last year, my husband and I decided to seek out some help with our parenting practices. We engaged in a type of therapy that was immersive, where a therapist watches you interact with your child and provides feedback. Like I said, parenting has come with so much humility! There’s nothing more intimidating! I’ll never forget the day that sweet woman whispered in my ear: “Lauren, where are you right now? I can see you. You are years down the road; you are in your head imagining your worst fears coming true. I need you to stay right here and only worry about being in the moment and how you are responding for the next five minutes.” While challenging my mindset, this therapist helped me to work on my behavior patterns, to be in the moment, and she measured my success by my behaviors. She didn’t care what I thought about parenting style or techniques; she focused on shifting my actions. Sometimes I wanted to declare, “Hey! I majored in religion and psychology in undergrad! I’m trained in pastoral counseling!” But even though I might know all the right answers, the truth is that with something as complex as the journey of parenting, I need practice! Being with this therapist helped me to understand that I get caught up in things that are larger than me, things that cannot be undone by sheer willpower. This process helped me to understand what Paula heard from her mentor that she told you about last week: “We may know something intellectually, but we have to practice it for it to become a part of who we are.”
For me, it was becoming a parent that really complicated my sense of my own ability to choose the good. It might have been something else for you. Paul’s words in Romans 7 are brutally raw and honest and invite us to confess how evil has been close at hand for us. It’s something addicts know all too well. They have gained humility that can be learned from. The first two steps of any twelve-step program are: 1. Admit that you are powerless over sin and can’t help yourself. 2. Believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. Paul was certainly living testimony of someone who knew the good and who couldn’t just muster up the power to always choose it. Paul was zealous for the law of God, and yet, he ended up doing great evil by persecuting and murdering the followers of Jesus. He believed he was keeping the law, defending it, in fact. Paul confesses this contradiction in himself. This description is actually where Martin Luther’s phrase “at the same time righteous and sinner” comes from. Luther said that believers often find themselves pulled in two different directions. We arrogantly think that we have the power to always choose the good on our own. But if we could be freed from sin by just a little more willpower, all we would need is a really good life coach – not Jesus!
Our beliefs about our ability to choose the good are formed around our ideas of sin. We often think that sin is simply failing to live up to some standard or missing the mark. We believe sin is an individual action that we can either choose or not choose. There are people who make good decisions and people who make bad decisions – good apples and bad apples, sheep and goats. But sin is so much more than this. Sin is wrecked relationship with our selves, with others, and with God. And in our text for today, Paul talks about sin as an “active, aggressive power that takes hold of God’s good gifts – even the law – and bends them toward death.”[i] He describes sin as something that dwells within us. He describes the sin that lives within fallen humanity. It recalls what God said to Cain when he said, “Sin is lurking in wait for you.” It infects us as individuals, but it also infects our society, our institutions, and our systems. Sin is the evil that is close at hand. It controls us in ways that we don’t often fully understand. It’s not just bad behavior. It’s something that resides in us and tries to kill us from the inside out. We are trapped in it.
Paul’s word here feels depressing and fatalistic and might lead us to the conclusion that sin is all-encompassing and unavoidable and that we are all just doing the best we can so there is nothing we can do about it. But Paul doesn’t stop there! Paul is writing to those who are in Christ, who are living under a new rule and a new life. And while he confesses that we do not have the willpower or determination to rescue ourselves from sin, he says God does! He asks, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” His answer is: Jesus Christ our Lord! Thanks be to God! We don’t have the power, but God has the power. Through the Spirit of God, we can resist doing the evil that lies close at hand. We who are baptized into Christ, buried with him, crucified with him, raised in him can allow him to dwell in us and release us of our captivity to sin. Through the power of the Spirit, we can go about the work of repenting of our sin and repairing what is broken. We can bridge the gaps and go about restoring right relationship to self, others, and God.
Jim Wallis has said that racism is America’s original sin, and it is clear that we have work to do to repair this evil that is close at hand, a lot of work to restore relationships that have been ruptured because of white supremacy. Paul’s lesson on sin this morning has a lot to say to us about the sin of racism. As we set about the work of becoming not just “not racist” but anti-racist, it’s important that we make theological connections, that we see this work as spiritual work, that we understand that our salvation depends upon it. The sin of white supremacy literally kills black and brown children of God, and it destroys the image of God in all of us. And we have to reckon with the fact that ridding ourselves of this sin is not just about individual determination or willpower. It doesn’t matter our individual commitments to just choose the good or our individual feelings that we are “not racist” or our individual relationships with people whose skin color is different than ours. We are being short-sighted when we see racism as something that can be addressed purely as individual sin.
We show that we aren’t seeing racism’s power as systemic sin when we say things like: “I don’t see color; I just see people.” “I don’t care the color of anyone’s skin. We are all the same.” “I only judge people by their actions.” “I didn’t mean any harm by what I said. My intentions are good.” “I think things will be okay when the next generation comes of age. Some people just have to die.” “I marched in the sixties; I thought we were beyond this already.” We also show that we don’t see the power of the sin of racism when we think it only resides in bad apples and not in us. We show that we don’t see racism’s power when we think we can get rid of it by only removing certain people from their positions of power and replacing them with other people who will make better choices but largely leaving our systems, our laws, and ourselves the same.
Antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo says that we need to distinguish between prejudice and racism. She reminds us that prejudice is prejudgment about another person based on the groups to which they belong. She says, “All humans have prejudice; we cannot avoid it. People who claim not to be prejudiced are demonstrating a profound lack of self-awareness. [But] Unfortunately, the prevailing belief that prejudice is bad causes us to deny its unavoidable reality…We then feel the need to defend our character rather than explore the inevitable racial prejudices we have absorbed so that we might change them.”[ii] She goes on to say that, “When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors….Many whites see racism as a thing of the past…yet racial disparity between whites and people of color continues to exist in every institution across society, and in many cases is increasing rather than decreasing….Individual whites may be ‘against’ racism, but they still benefit from a system that privileges whites as a group.”[iii]
DiAngelo cautions us, “White supremacy is something much more pervasive and subtle than the actions of explicit white nationalists.”[iv] She says that when we refuse to examine the racism that dwells within us because of our own shame around it, it leads to something insidious – aversive racism, which is racism that professes egalitarianism but avoids interaction with those of racial or ethnic groups to which one doesn’t belong. This behavior is implicit or unconscious. She says an example of this is “holding deep racial disdain that surfaces in daily discourse [maybe by flippant uses of stereotypes, for example] but not being able to admit it because the disdain conflicts with our self-image and professed beliefs. [And this] Aversive racism only protects racism, because we can’t challenge our racial filters if we can’t consider the possibility that we have them. [We operate] under the false assumption that we can’t simultaneously be good people and participate in racism.”[v] As Paul would say, I delight in the law of God ,but I am captive to the law of sin, wretched human that I am.
Hear Paul’s words again. Hear them as prayer. Hear them as confession for our participation in the sin of racism, the evil that is close at hand. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.” This morning, I invite you to confession. I invite you to honesty. I invite you to humility. I invite you to be reminded that that while you can’t save yourself by your own good intentions, Jesus can rescue you! While we collectively can’t save ourselves from the evil that is close to all of our hands, God can deliver us! The Spirit can work to excise the sin of racism from our world, from our very bodies. The Spirit can repair what is broken. The Spirit can restore broken relationships. We just have to come just as we are and surrender ourselves and allow the Spirit to dwell within us and break every barrier down. Thanks be to God! Amen.
[i] Feasting on the Word – Year A, Vol. 3, Bartlett and Taylor, Eds. Quote from Ted A. Smith.
[ii] White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, 19-20.
[iii] White Fragility, 20-24.
[iv] Ibid, 33.
[v] Ibid, 45, 47, & 49.
Peace to you in the name of Jesus, who when tempted to drink from the cup of dominion...chose instead the cup of salvation…when tempted to dine at the banquet of power…fasted in the wilderness of humility. Be our brother and guide today, Jesus.
Let’s pray.
Well, I would imagine we’ve seen enough Jesus inspired film productions to conjure up a few images after hearing the story of Jesus being tempted, more like manipulated and abused, in the wilderness.
Satan…sporting a black Armani suit…a subtle set of horns…ominous sunglasses…
Jesus…in a white religious garment, at this point tattered and worn, he’s sleepless, emaciated, dirt and tears caking his face…
And in this series of temptations, this person, whom God, has just bellowed forth as “my Son, the Beloved, in whom I’m well-pleased” as Jesus takes a holy plunge into the Jordan River.
This Jesus, gets pushed to the limit...
In case it didn’t pop out to you immediately, an Old Testament reference, Psalm 91, has nestled itself right in a New Testament story, Luke 4. A poetically rich, empowering, uplifting Psalm uttered in a moment with Jesus. As a student of the Scripture, I love a good testamental crossover like this one. They make this big thing called the Bible feel like it has tentacles and strings…which link it together…in mysterious ways…
But this one doesn’t feel so beautiful or empowering or uplifting.
It feels…well…evil.
Can we take another glance?
Hear these words from Psalm 91. “For he [i.e., God], will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”
Amen. That’s a word.
That’s a word for you.
That’s a word for the church.
That’s a word for spirits that often feel as though they are dangling above death’s pit… a mere thread away from annihilation and despair.
Fear not. Angel’s very hands will lock themselves under your shoulders…and bear you up. I mean, that’ll preach.
But will it preach if Satan preaches it to you?
Will it preach if someone reads it to you with the intention of dismantling what you know to be true about yourself and about God?
I guess that begs a few more questions, huh.
Who is Satan? And why does Jesus resist the Psalm Satan quotes?
Ok. Let’s start here.
Who is Satan? Well, lucky for me, we have communion this Sunday, so I suspect that means I’m allowed a shorter sermon, yes?
Some call him the advocate…the insinuator…the challenger. The trial lawyer who pushes God’s buttons. Who asks the important questions…but then…turns those questions inside out until we can’t remember what the point was in the first place. Or better yet, Satan personifies the choice we all carry within us…the choice to be powerful…to believe that our own strength is enough to sustain us and make us immortal. Or better yet, Satan is the best second guesser there is…in the universe and in each of us…the second guess that tells us that depending on God…really might mean…depending on ourselves instead.
That’s a lot of definitions. Which leads me to believe that it might not be too easy to define Satan…though I think some of us in an effort to delineate good and evil are prone to do. I’d rather not today.
Because personifying the voice of evil makes it too easy for us to quiet and ignore its grip on us. Maybe that voice has placed us at temple pinnacles far too long…recited Scripture to us…and told us what to be and how to act…all in the name of God…
Maybe that voice…turns out to be a whole lot of voices…within us and around us.
Satan, in this moment…is the power that seeks to draw Jesus away from himself. To pull Jesus into another reality…one that no longer calls him Beloved…but twists him into a Master of his own Domain.
So why is Jesus resisting the Psalm? I mean, it is an encouraging one. It’s a beautiful one. It’s a sustaining one. And as he’s standing at the temple’s high-point, I suppose it’s an appropriate one. It’s good to know that God will catch you if you fall. Unless of course, God’s never asked you to fall in the first place.
It is understood that Hebrew temple practices called for priests and liturgists to chant the Psalms outside the temple. They chanted them in order to remind the people of the God they worshipped. Songs, words wedded to rhythms, have a way of teaching us and forming us, don’t they? So…Satan is Jesus’ priest here…his liturgist. And he’s chanting God’s love-song. One of protection and safety and security.
He is calling Jesus into the collective memory of the community…and telling him…
Remember this Psalm?
Isn’t it beautiful?
Isn’t it TRUE and GOOD and RIGHT?
Don’t you think this is true about God?”
And in this moment, like a flash of light, we get a glimpse of God’s own identity crisis in the person of Jesus.
Am I Love? Or am I Power?
Am I Vulnerability or am I Might?
Will people know that I’m God’s Beloved based on the Mighty, Powerful things I do?
So, if we can free ourselves a bit from worrying too much about personifying Satan, about making this character the landfill where we dump evil like this week’s trash, maybe we can see what this moment in Jesus’ life says about God and about us. And what it says about our Lenten journey, our journey in the wilderness, our journey towards Belovedness.
See, Satan uses the sacred text…the stories and songs we base our lives on…and in an effort to re-orient Jesus away from the intimacy he has discovered with God…sings to him words that are true in a moment that is altogether false.
Let me say that one more time.
Satan uses the sacred text…the stories and songs we base our lives on…and in an effort to re-orient Jesus away from the intimacy he has discovered with God…sings to him words that are true in a moment that is altogether false.
Let me clarify something important here, though. It isn’t the Psalm that’s the problem. The Psalm is true…it is good…it is beautiful.
It’s the intentions that beckon the Psalm in this instance, it’s the manipulation of the words in the face of someone’s sheer vulnerability, it’s the use of it to rip Jesus away from the intimate work God was doing with him in the wildnerness.
But Jesus saw this. He smelled it a mile away. And while his belly ached with insecurity and this Psalm could have filled him up again, he knew that it would not last long enough.
For Jesus, on his way into a 40day fast as the story begins, was full of the Holy Spirit.
And so, Jesus refused Satan’s Song to him. Jesus would not be fooled by Satan’s solid exegesis, Biblical prowess, or narcissistic authority.
Have you ever been fooled this way?
Have you ever used the Bible against yourself?
Has anyone ever done that to you?
Even with what seems to be…the best intentions.
Even when they are doing nothing more than “telling you the good gospel truth.”
Let me tell you, as a woman married to a woman who is also pastor seeking to follow Jesus all the while wedged inside the Christian Church in America, I bet you can guess what my answer to that question is.
Uh, maybe once or twice now in my life, someone has used Scripture this way against my body, my life, my story. And they’ve done at some of the most vulnerable moments of my life.
And I know that I’m far from the only one.
For those of you at this weekend’s retreat, think about the conversation we had on manifest destiny, on the idea that it was God’s will for the American landscape to stretch from east to west, no matter who was “in the way.”
There were Scriptures that built that argument, too.
Joshua 24:13. I gave you land on which to had not labored, and cities which you had not built.
Genesis 1:26-28. Be fruitful and multiply and full the earth and subdue it and have dominion over every living thing.
Can you sense the crisis here for Jesus? The identity crisis here.
What does this book say about me?
What does this God say about me?
And Jesus…with the force of his Belovedness behind him, proclaims…
“I’m not putting God to the test like that. I’m not gonna poke God’s sides just to see what might happen. God’s already told me who I am. And a bungee jump off the temple isn’t going to confirm that any further. I am Beloved.”
And Jesus does his own Bible-quoting in response. He says back to Satan, “It is said, Do not put the Lord God to the test,” a reference from the good old book of Deuteronomy. And like two good Rabbis, Jesus and Satan are engaged in a textual dialogue, both using Scripture, and both for different reasons. The significant thing to note is that Jesus’ interpretation points him back to and not away from his relationship with God.
Jesus resisted his tempter’s chant…because…he carried a song much deeper than Satan’s interpretation of scripture could give him.
Jesus resisted the tempter’s chant because he carried the whisper of the Creator…the tune of the Sustainer…the melody of the Redeemer.
Jesus was able to call this argument what it was. Not just agreeing to disagree, or simple differences of opinion. Jesus knew that this argument was about his Life.
See evil, at its core, is a distortion of truth. And even if the words are true, when their context is untrue, when their context is violent, when their context diminishes human thriving, then they are evil.
Jesus exposes this reality, and frees us to be obedient, not to those who challenge our Belovedness, but to God who ensures it.
So, I say this with all the humility I can muster up.
If someone, even if their words carry Biblical heft, says them to you with the intention of throwing you off the temple, tempting you to believe you need to do something spectacular to prove God’s love for you, that who are you already, even the you that’s hungry in the wilderness doesn’t quite cut it for God…
Don’t you dare listen to them.
Say to them, with all the love you can muster…Get behind me, Satan!
You do not know who I am.
You do not know what I have been made for.
You do not know and I cannot convince you on my own.
Because real power is not in your Scripture reference. It is in God’s calling.
When Satan chants your Psalm, trust that God will see you through it and that you’ll have the Power and Grace to sing back something old, something new, something borrowed, maybe something with a little blues…
And before you know it, even smack dab in the wilderness, you’ll hear the song erupting within you….
“Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells Me so…” Yes, Jesus loves you. Yes, Jesus loves you. Yes, Jesus loves you. The Bible tells you so.
There was a boy named Sam who didn’t speak. His parents began to get very concerned as he passed all the developmental milestones and still wasn’t talking. They took to the pediatrician, to the speech therapist, to the neurologist—all the docs said the same thing: we can’t find any medical reason why he isn’t speaking. One night while the family was eating dinner, Sam looked up and said, “my soup is too salty.” His parents freaked out, and started yelling and crying with relief, and saying “we can’t believe it, Sam! You can talk! It’s a miracle. How did this happen?” Sam just calmly said, “Well up to now, everything has been fine.”
Salt is used for so many things in our world. It is the most ubiquitous food seasoning on earth. From sea salt to kosher salt to pink Himalayan salt to Japanese moshio made from dried seaweed, every culture has its own unique forms of salt that people use to flavor cuisine. Salt is vital in the preservation process and was used to keep food safe to eat without refrigeration. Bacteria can’t survive without water so people figured out a long time ago that if they covered meats and other foods in salt, the salt would remove all the moisture, flavor the food, and keep the food from growing harmful bacteria. Salt has been used by many cultures for ritual purposes, often symbolizing purity or cleansing. Salt doesn’t just serve flavoring, preserving, and symbolic functions, however: it is actually essential to the functioning of the human body. It is necessary for nerve and muscle function, it helps regulate fluids, it plays a role in the body’s control of blood volume, and it provides electrolytes that regulate blood pH and pressure. We simply can’t live without it.
The people of ancient Palestine couldn’t live without salt either. But in addition to the uses I’ve already mentioned, salt had another very important use for people in the ancient world. The Greek word translated as “earth” in the phrase “salt of the earth” from our passage gives us a clue. The word is “ges,” the root for English words such as geology. It means earth but most often in the sense of arable land, the ground we are standing on, the soil. Jesus is more accurately saying “you are salt for the land” or “salt for the soil.”[1] Salt was frequently used in ancient farming techniques as a fertilizer to be applied directly on arable land, and to keep manure from rotting until it could be transported to a field. The version of this teaching in the Gospel of Luke makes Jesus’s intended meaning clear. Luke 14:34-35 says “salt is good, but if it loses its savor, how can saltiness be restored? It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure heap.” Jesus is employing an agricultural metaphor, not a metaphor about seasoning food.
This has been blowing my mind all week and for me, adds a lot to the conversation about what Jesus expects from his followers. We are not simply to add flavor to the world around us, or to preserve it, but to scatter ourselves into the world’s arid places and make abundant life possible. We should be integrated into the soil around us, providing essential nutrients and stimulating growth. We should be a transformative presence in our community. If a fertilizer sits in the shed until the nutrients in it break down and it expires, it does nothing for the soil and has to be thrown out. Fertilizer is meant to be used for the life of the land around it. You are fertilizer for the ground also fits more neatly with Jesus’s other metaphor in this passage—you are the light of the world. In the same way, fertilizer does no good if it sits idle and isn’t scattered, light does no good if it is hidden under a basket. Fertilizer must give life to arid ground, and light must illuminate darkness. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said “A community of Jesus which seeks to hide itself has ceased the follow him.”[2]
The metaphors of salt, light, and the city on a hill were not just general images Jesus pulled out of thin air to describe how his followers should live. These metaphors were Jesus’s response to a very real conundrum facing the people of Israel in his day: how do we remain faithful to God under the boot of the Roman empire? For some in Jesus’s day, the best way to be faithful under oppressive Roman rule was a kind of “circle the wagons” approach—keep to ourselves, try to follow the law and the prophets as best we can, and interact with the gentile oppressors as little as possible. Pharisees often fell into this camp. The people in this camp placed a high value on maintaining a distinct identity from Rome, on being holy, and they thought the best way to accomplish this was to focus their energy internally, bolstering the Jewish community’s knowledge of their faith and exploring how to fulfill the law in daily life. I call this option revolutionary withdrawal. It remains an appealing option for religious people of many faiths, especially those who live under a government that is hostile to their religious practices. You can see this tendency throughout the history of the Christian church from some forms of the monastic movement to the radical reformers such as the Amish to a recent dustup over a book by conservative evangelical author Rod Dreyer called the “Benedict Option,” in which he argues that the only way for conservative evangelicals to escape the increasing decadence and immorality of American society is to “embrace exile from mainstream culture.”
The second prominent option for remaining faithful during Jesus’s day was to take up arms and attempt to drive out the Romans so that a kingdom faithful to God might be established in Israel. I call this option revolutionary violence. Two memories animated the draw to revolutionary violence: the memory of God defeating Pharaoh and liberating the Hebrew people celebrated at Passover, and the memory of the Maccabean Revolt, which happened just 150 years before Jesus was born, where Judah Maccabee led a briefly successful guerilla war against the Greek/Seleucid empire, expelling them from Jerusalem and re-dedicating the temple to the worship of the one true God. In Jesus’s day, people such as the Zealots preferred this option, hoping to lead an armed rebellion against the Romans, kick them out of Israel, and freely live and worship as they chose. Several of Jesus’s disciples were likely affiliated with Zealot groups before becoming his followers and found this option appealing.[3]
It was into this climate, and in answer to this specific question, that Jesus is offering the metaphors of salt and light. Jesus is rejecting the path of revolutionary withdrawal and the path of revolutionary violence, and offering an alternative path to faithfulness in the midst of Roman oppression: revolutionary discipleship. “God’s people are salt for barren ground,” he says. Salt is meant to be scattered across the land, catalyzing growth and life wherever it embeds itself. But salt that doesn’t do what it is meant to do, that doesn’t perform this life-giving and transformative role for the earth, is useless. “God’s people are light for a dark world,” he says. Why would you go to the trouble of lighting a lamp in the darkness and then hide it, confining its impact by covering it up? You wouldn’t! Light must shine to be what it was meant to be! And it only takes a little to illuminate the deepest dark. A city built on a hill is meant to be seen not hidden! Revolutionary withdrawal hides the light of God under a bushel basket and leaves the fertilizer in the shed. Revolutionary violence destroys the image of God in the one you are called to love, and puts your own light out. But revolutionary discipleship allows the light to be seen, the salt to be used for the good of the earth, and opens up the possibility that even one’s enemies might glorify God in heaven.
As a saying I came across this week says, “There can be no such thing as secret discipleship, for either the secrecy destroys the discipleship, or the discipleship destroys the secrecy.” Following Jesus in revolutionary discipleship cannot help but be visible. It cannot help but generate reaction from the world around it. Sometimes those reactions are positive—some will see our good works and give glory to God. Some will be drawn to the city on a hill, they will want the meaning and purpose that comes with fertilizing an arid earth. But sometimes the reactions revolutionary discipleship brings are negative. Jesus was killed after all and promised us that if we truly wanted to follow him, we will have to be prepared to share in his suffering. It takes courage to be salt and light in a barren and dark world.
When I think of courageous people who embraced their calling to be salt and light come what may, the first person that comes to my mind is Ida B. Wells. Our youth learned about Ida B. Wells last year in the lead-up to the Freedom Ride, but I’d venture a guess that very few of us learned about her until recently (if at all). She is one of the unjustly forgotten Black women whose uncommon boldness and prophetic fire should be at the forefront of our national memory, and certainly at the forefront of the U.S. church’s memory. Wells was born a slave in Mississippi a few months before the Emancipation Proclamation.[4] She learned her courage from her mother and father, who fled their former slaveowner after they were liberated and made a life for themselves, including boldly participating in political meetings among freed slaves, even as White backlash to Black enfranchisement was heating up. Tragically, both her parents and her baby brother died of yellow fever when Wells was only 16. She took responsibility for raising her other 6 siblings and took a job as a schoolteacher among freedpeople in rural Mississippi before she had even finished school herself. Once her brothers were old enough to care for themselves, she moved to Memphis, Tennessee with her sisters in tow and got a job as a journalist. It was in journalism that Wells found her calling. She began reporting on and protesting the establishment of Jim Crow laws around the South. In 1883, after Tennessee had adopted segregated train cars, Wells refused to move from the ladies car to the smoking car, which was where Black passengers were told to go if a train did not yet have a segregated car for them. The conductor returned with more White men to forcibly remove her, but she chose to get off the train rather than move to the smoking car. She sued the train company and won an initial suit, before the Tennessee Supreme Court eventually ruled against her, chastising her unladylike “persistence.”
In 1892, she launched the crusade that would occupy the rest of her life. A White mob lynched the three owners of a Black grocery store in town, including one of Wells’s closest friends. Instead of retreating in self-preservation, or lashing out in soul-destroying violence, Wells devoted her life to investigating, documenting, and exposing the brutality of lynching. She travelled around the South, by herself, interviewing witnesses and documenting thousands of lynchings that were intended to terrorize Black Americans into not exercising the freedoms to which they were entitled. Wells is the reason we know as much as we do about how widespread lynching was as a practice. She was tireless and fearless in her devotion to what was right, deconstructing the harmful myths and lies that were used to justify these murders. She once said, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” Wells’s courageous devotion to what was right and good inspired many other freedom-fighters, including Frederick Douglass, who remarked about Wells, “brave woman! You have done your people a service which can neither be weighed nor measured.” She chose revolutionary discipleship, and because she did, her witness was compounded immeasurably. She was light and salt in the midst of a dark and barren world.
Our world is not so different from Jesus’s or Ida B. Wells’s. The particulars are different, but cruelty and oppression still run rampant. Those who wish to be faithful to God in the midst of darkness and barrenness still face a choice. We can try to insulate ourselves from danger, from hostility, from loss. We can choose to try and ride out the storm from inside the safety of these walls rather than engage boldly with the world around us. We can try to eliminate all the threats against us. Or we can pursue a revolutionary discipleship that rejects the violence of our world and refuses to shrink back in fear or self-preservation.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, an author and activist, wrote a moving letter to those engaged in the fight for goodness, and truth, and justice in our world today. She said: “Mis estimados queridos, My esteemed ones: do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. Abject disregard of what the soul finds most precious and irreplaceable has become, in large societal arenas, the new normal. Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to visionary people. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet…I urge you: do not lose hope. We were made for these times. I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. Look out over the prow; there are millions of righteous souls on the waters with you. One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is not to allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of despair. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. To display the lantern of the soul in shadowy times like these, to be fierce and show mercy towards others, are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: when a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But…that is not what great ships are built for.”[5]
Greenwood Forest, look up. Our beautiful ceiling resembles the underside of a ship, which has long been a symbol for the church universal’s journey in the world. Our challenge today is to see this place as the boat from which we leap like Peter to follow Jesus out on the water, rather than an ark in which we hide until the rain stops. We were made for times like this—to be salt for arid ground and light for a dark world. Let us stand up and let our souls shine for all those in our world who are waiting to see the light of other brave souls. If we can do that, then together, as the prophet Isaiah says our light will rise in the darkness, we will rebuild ruins, we will repair breaches, we will restore streets, and with the power of the God who made us salt and light, we will right the wrongs within our reach and be who we were built to be. Let us pray.
[1] See Anthony Bradley, “You Are the Manure of the Earth” Christianity Today October 2016; and Eugene Deatrick, “Salt, Soil, Savior” The Biblical Archeaologist 25 no. 2 (May 1962).
[2] Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
[3] See Yoder, The Politics of Jesus
[4] See Wells, The Light of Truth ed. Mia Bay
[5] http://newstoryhub.com/2020/02/do-not-lose-heart-we-were-made-for-these-times-clarissa-pinkola-estes-ph-d-2/?fbclid=IwAR3cYRVVnTRluXE5tueMFj3inmS4dnYwguMOJqDN5akfM5S7oh8DOXa4-bw
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