Civil Rights Movement

Sitting at the Welcome Table

August 17, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 15:21-28
preached on August 17, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

(“I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table” audio)

That wonderful song, rooted in the life of slave communities in the deep South and sung in that recording at a rally during the Civil Rights Movement, seems strangely appropriate for today’s reading from the gospel according to Matthew. The Canaanite woman in this text seemed intent upon singing exactly those words even when Jesus himself tried his best to deny her a place at that table. Just as Jesus arrived in a town away from everything, in a region filled with people who were unlike him, this woman came up to him, begging him to heal her daughter: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”

At first, Jesus completely ignored her. You have to wonder what was going through his mind to drive him to behave like this. Was he just tired and a little zoned out after an intense week of teaching and healing, not to mention all the traveling involved? Was he so marked by the cultural influences of his day that he could not look past her different race, gender, religion, and ethnicity to offer her compassion? Or was he so intent on completing his mission to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” that he could not offer even a little to others along the way? Whatever the reason for his silence, when he ignored this woman in this way he looked a lot more human than divine to me.

The woman, though, didn’t give up so easily. When Jesus ignored her, her cries grew louder: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Now she was starting to get on everyone’s nerves. The disciples started complaining to Jesus, but why? Were they just reporting the unrecorded complaints of others? Were they too embodying the sort of attitude of their time toward people who were different? Or were they a bit afraid that she might draw more attention to them in this community where they were actually the outsiders? Whatever the reason, the disciples told Jesus to send her away, and he did, finally telling her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Still, this was not enough to convince her to go away. When her loud cries for help were ignored, she fell on her knees before Jesus, pleading with him, “Lord, help me.” This time, Jesus’ response to her went from quietly disrespectful to directly demeaning: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Again he insisted to her that his purpose for ministry didn’t involve her or anyone like her. While we may lose a bit of the cultural or linguistic play on words at our distance, Jesus’ intent in his response to the Canaanite woman seems clear to me: he had had enough of her. It was time for her to go away and leave him alone, and he would tell her whatever was needed to make that happen.

But even with this response the woman did the unimaginable and came back at him a fourth time. As one commentator paraphrases it, she basically told him, “Yes, Lord, I am a dog, so treat me like one. Give me the crumbs [from that table].” (Stanley P. Saunders, Preaching the Gospel of Matthew, p. 153) After this, Jesus couldn’t turn her away, so he turned toward her instead. He healed her daughter and praised her faith, her belief that “she and her daughter should receive mercy from the ruling activity of God.” (Jae Won Lee, “Exegetical Perspective on Matthew 15:(10-20) 21-28,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 3, p. 361) With her persistent faith in God’s mercy and compassion, she had claimed her place at that welcome table. She was willing to accept a lower-level grace for now, for the sake of her daughter, but by her persistence she made it clear that she would one day sit at the table, no longer relegated to lap up the crumbs on the floor with the dogs. She knew better than Jesus did in that moment that the incredible depth and breadth of God’s love breaks through every human limitation and makes a place for all at the welcome table.

Over the centuries since this first encounter, the followers of Jesus have often been too much like Jesus at the start of this story. We have let our exhaustion or anxiety in the moment shape our reaction to those in need. We have been so focused on our own understandings of ministry that we miss the people we weren’t expecting to encounter along the way. We have even fallen into the traps of the world’s ways to ignore those who cry out for help because they don’t look like us, live like us, think like us, love like us, or even cry out for help like us. If we haven’t done it ourselves, others surely have done it in the name of Jesus at one point or another.

We need people like the Canaanite woman to remind us that our reaction to injustice is so very often shaped less by God’s commitment to the humanity of all and more by our preferences. We need people like the Canaanite woman to step up and sing loud and clear, “I’m gonna sit at the welcome table,” claiming their place not under the table scavenging for the leftovers of justice and peace but a place where the fullness of new life from God is provided abundantly for all. And we need people like the Canaanite woman to urge us to action so that we can respond to the cries for compassion that are offered right in front of us, to challenge us to set aside the fears that all too often drive our actions, to bring us together in offering a united cry for justice and peace that is more than empty words, to join in God’s work of making all things new.

There have been plenty of people in our world crying out like this Canaanite woman in recent days, insisting that they too are gonna sit at the welcome table. Even on vacation over the past two weeks, I couldn’t escape the cries and shouts for justice in our world. All over London, thrift shops run by the relief organization Oxfam highlighted the great need of response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, where two generations of occupation have kept the Palestinian people from living life to its fullness and left Israelis at risk, only to have recent warfare bring further death to both sides in this intractable conflict as everyone seeks a seat at the welcome table.

Then, when I tried to turn to my social media friends on Facebook and Twitter to provide a bit of company along the journey, I was overwhelmed by the outcry over the troubling death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager stopped for walking in the middle of the street by a white police officer in a suburb of St. Louis last weekend. When the police offered limited, confusing, or conflicting answers to reasonable questions about the incident—in the rare moments when they spoke at all—the community’s peaceful protests escalated as the police approached the protestors in military riot gear. Images of these protests bear an eerie similarity to photos from the Deep South during the Civil Rights Movement, and it is clear that even fifty years later, with some real change in our world, there are still people crying out for a seat at that welcome table.

And there are so many other places where women and men cry out for justice and peace and wholeness and new life in our world—among Ebola victims in west Africa, amidst renewed conflict in Syria and Iraq, alongside power struggles in the Ukraine and Russia, even among the poor and marginalized much closer to home—women and men and children cry out for a seat at that welcome table.

So what are we to do with all this pain around us, both far and near? Is our best response to be like Jesus at the beginning of the story, to ignore those who cry out in hopes that they will be respectful and just go away, or to tell them that they are a distraction from our bigger purposes, or even to insist that they are something less than human because they have dared to challenge the established order of things and seek a seat at the table with us? Are we to take a step even further and respond with violence? Or can we find a better way than what Jesus did that honors both these cries and the humanity of those who cry out, that shows compassion to those who suffer, that offers a word of grace to those in need, that embodies God’s love for all—love whose power is greater than even the smallest portion of crumbs—that offers a much-needed seat at the welcome table of our world?

In the midst of all the pain and war and suffering that marks our lives and our world, we can live and pray and work in ways that honor the loud and soft cries of those who are in need so that God’s love might touch each and every place where new life is needed. So may we join in God’s work to make space for everyone to have a seat at the welcome table, not leaving anyone just to pick up the leftover crumbs but ensuring that all God’s people can know the full abundance of God’s grace, mercy, peace, and love. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Challenge and Hope

February 23, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23 and Matthew 5:38-48
preached on February 23, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Christ is made the sure foundation, Christ the head and cornerstone.

Those are such wonderful and important words from our last hymn, such important statements of our faith that help us describe God’s presence in our lives, such seemingly simple approaches to belief that will help us fit into what God is doing in our lives and in our world. These great words dating from the medieval church echo the wonderful words of the apostle Paul from our first reading this morning that help us to identify the source and foundation of all that we live and all that we believe—yet that too often leave us thinking that the pathway to following Christ is easy.

The bigger reality is that our two readings this morning from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth and from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as recorded in the gospel according to Matthew both tell us that it will be hard to follow Jesus in our world. First, Paul insists that the way of life in Jesus Christ doesn’t fit into the ways of the world. We are holy temples, he says, built on the foundation of Jesus Christ, and God will defend that temple against any worldly enemy. But even more, he declares that the wisdom of this world is not wisdom in God’s eyes:

Do not deceive yourselves. If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.

Paul suggests that we must set aside even our best attempts at our own wisdom and instead trust that God will guide us. In this, then, we will gain so much more, for “all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.”

But if that challenge weren’t enough to make our faith difficult, today the Lectionary also guides us to one of the most difficult portions of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. As one commentator describes it, “The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus at his ornery best: offering ‘advice’ that makes no sense divorced from the nature of the one giving it.” (Jason Byassee, “Theological Perspective on Matthew 5:38-48,” Feasting on the Word Year A, Volume 1, p. 382.)

Here Jesus instructs the large crowd who had gathered to hear him teach that they must change their ways. He first suggests that we must set aside our hopes for vengeance and instead seek transformation and reconciliation. His instruction here is not easy to hear:

If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.

This is dramatically different from our human instinct. We seek self-protection at every turn rather than risking our safety to bring the possibility of transforming those who attack us. We hoard what we have rather than offer from our abundance to respond to the needs of others. And we do only what is absolutely required rather than literally going the extra mile for anyone.

If all that weren’t enough to scare us away from following Jesus, we need only continue to Jesus’ second instruction:

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Some days it is hard enough for me to love my friends, let alone even begin to think of loving my enemies! But here Jesus insists that even the deepest-seated enmity must be addressed not through ever-more-hardened hearts but through love and grace for everyone. Then he sums it all up with the most challenging words of all:

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

For our great foundation, our head and cornerstone, to insist on this way of life is quite a challenge. Setting aside the wisdom of the world, approaching enmity with hope for transformation, praying for our enemies, even being perfect—all these things go against the grain for us, and our initial response is all too likely to try to give up on it all. Commentator Jason Byassee clarifies the challenge—and the solution:

We are called here to love as God loves. This cannot be done out of our own resources. So this is no admonition to try harder—if it were, it would indeed be recipe for despair. It is a plan of action rooted in the promise to be made ‘children of your Father in heaven’ (v. 45). The Sermon [on the Mount] here and elsewhere is a portrait of the very heart of God, one who loves the unlovable, comes among us in Christ, suffers our worst, and rises to forgive us. Turn the cheek, give the cloak, go another mile, lend, love the enemy—because that is how God loves. If you want to follow this God, fleshed in Jesus, you will be adopted into a life in which you find yourself loving this way before you know what you are doing. (Jason Byassee, “Theological Perspective on Matthew 5:38-48,” Feasting on the Word Year A, Volume 1, p. 382.)

As some of you know, I spent a good bit of my college coursework studying and thinking about the Civil Rights Movement, and I’m still learning about this incredible time in our nation’s history. I am increasingly convinced that this movement was one of the great embodiments of these challenging texts. The Civil Rights Movement set aside the wisdom of the world that encouraged patience and careful obedience to the rules and replaced it with a worldview that said that civil disobedience would call appropriate attention to the unjust system of racial segregation that bordered on apartheid. The philosophy of nonviolence that prevailed through so much of the Civil Rights Movement was built on these very words of Jesus that sought to transform violence against African Americans into real and direct action against injustice. Throughout the Civil Rights Movement, women and men built up the spiritual capacity to turn the other cheek, to offer more than what was unjustly requested of them, to go beyond the basic expectations, to love those who were declared enemies, even to pray for those who persecuted them. All this love for the other was grounded not in digging into one’s own personal resources but in the foundation of God in Jesus Christ.

These ideas echoed throughout the movement. Whenever organizers were planning and executing direct action campaigns, participants gathered in regular mass meetings that resembled revivals as much anything, encouraging the community to stand firm amidst the challenges of the world and instead turn the other cheek, pray for the enemy, and give of everything that they had.

During the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, as he stood on the porch of his parsonage that had been bombed just hours before, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., suggested that these ideas of Jesus ought to be made real.

Let’s not become panicky. If you have weapons, take them home; if you do not have them, please do not seek to get them. We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. Remember the words of Jesus: ‘He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.’ Remember that is what God said. We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries: ‘Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you.’ This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love. (quoted in Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today, p. 37-38)

And even years later, an African-American activist who had faced the worst of white treatment and persecution made her understanding of Jesus’ message clear:

Of course, there is no way I can hate anybody and hope to see God’s face. (Lou Emma Allen, quoted in Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, p. 309.)

These challenging and hopeful words of Paul and of Jesus, then, have been and continue to be a real challenge to us. Every day, we are called to set aside the wisdom of the world and insist that there is a deeper and better way in Christ Jesus. Every day, we are called to turn the other cheek and offer even more than what is asked of us. Every day, we are called not to work against our enemies but to seek God’s transformation of them and us and our whole world as we work to embody God’s amazing grace and love. It seems almost impossible to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Yet while it may be impossible for us, “nothing is impossible with God”—and God is working in us and through us and in spite of us to bring about this perfection in our lives and in our world.

So may we join in this difficult but certain work of transformation and new creation each and every day, strengthened by the love of God that makes it possible for us to be something more than we have been, empowered by the grace of God that shows us the depth of mercy gifted us in Jesus Christ, and guided by the light of God that shines on us and shows us the way to join in this work in our lives and our world. Thanks be to God for this incredible challenge and hope! Amen.

Bait and Switch?

August 18, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 12:49-56
preached on August 18, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

When you think of Jesus, what kind of person comes to mind? Do you picture him as a kind and gentle man, always offering a nice word to everyone he encounters, caring for children, and never raising his voice or showing a temper? Or do you imagine him like a fiery preacher, ranting and raving against all the bad things in the world, and always making people mad about something or other? Maybe I just saw too many pictures of a gentle and kind Jesus in Sunday School as a child, but I sure have something like that first image stuck in my head, and I suspect I am not alone. The song “Jesus Loves Me” that marks so many of our images of God suggests a kind and gentle man, not a fiery preacher. The gifted teacher and healer we hear about in the gospels surely only offered positive words that never condemned anyone, right? The quiet and gentle baby that we remember every Christmas was born to be the “Prince of Peace,” not one who stirs the pot constantly!

We could go a lifetime with these simple and peaceful images of Jesus, and many of us do—but then Luke confronts us with the Jesus from our reading this morning. The Jesus who speaks here sure seems like a very different person than the one we sang about a month or so ago when Cristian so wonderfully led us in singing “Jesus Loves Me.” This Jesus doesn’t offer a gentle or kind word—he speaks of fire and division! It feels a bit like a classic bait and switch move, as if Jesus has lured us in with the promise of simple love and grace and then tells us that that is all out of stock—with only fire, brimstone, and family conflict available instead!

His words here are intense and direct. He starts out with a simple promise tied to a lament:

I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

Now it is certainly reasonable for Jesus to suggest a fire to purify the problematic areas around us, but I for one am not really interested in him bringing great destruction to the entire earth. Either way, his words here are not easy to hear.

Then he turns to the things that are ahead for him. As Luke tells the story, we’re right in the middle of an intense time for Jesus. He has been doing his basic ministry of teaching and healing for quite some time, and after an encounter with Moses and Elijah on the mount of Transfiguration, he has set his face toward Jerusalem, knowing that great challenges await him on the journey. So after he promises to bring fire to the earth, Jesus declares that he has “a baptism with which to be baptized,” and that he faces incredible stress until it is completed. He clearly knows that that road ahead for him leads to the cross, and because of that he has little patience for anyone who doesn’t share his commitment to the new things that God is doing in the world.

After this, he clarifies his intentions once and for all:

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two and against three; they will be divided:

father against son and son against father,
mother against daughter and daughter against mother,
mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

This is the ultimate bait and switch of this text, I think— the one who has repeatedly been declared the “Prince of Peace,” the one who has said that he comes to inaugurate a new and different way of life in the midst of the deep uncertainty of his time, the one whose mother sang of his mercy and strength even before his birth, for this one to suddenly declare that he comes not to bring peace but rather division is a dramatic reversal!

It seems that we have been deceived into thinking that Jesus is up to one thing when in fact he is doing something entirely different. We have been deceived that Jesus will make all our relationships stronger and better right away. We have been deceived into thinking that Jesus wants us to put our families first and ask questions about it all later. We have been deceived that following Jesus will lead us simply and easily into eternal life.

You see, when you get down to it, the content of Jesus’ message is so radical that it can’t help but bring a divisive response from some people. If we take just the words of his mother’s song, the Magnificat, that help to open Luke’s gospel, there are a whole bunch of potentially angry people: the proud who have been scattered in the thoughts of their hearts, the powerful who have been brought down from their thrones because the lowly have been lifted up, and the rich who have been sent away empty as the hungry have been filled with good things.

All this is only the beginning of what Jesus is up to. As commentator Richard Carlson puts it,

The divinely wrought peace that Jesus inaugurates and bestows involves the establishment of proper relationships of mercy, compassion, and justice between God and humanity. Not everyone, however, wants or welcomes this divine peace plan. Hence the initiation of Jesus’ peace agenda also triggers contentious disunity and fissures among all facets of society, right down to the societal core of the household. (“Exegetical Perspective on Luke 12:49-56,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 3, p. 361, 363)

So will we be deceived? Will we be deceived into thinking that that we can only focus on Jesus’ message of love without talking about the things that that message condemns? Will we be deceived into thinking that the “Prince of Peace” who comes to bring people together will not stand up to those who continue to beat the drums of war? Will we be deceived into putting temporal relationships with family and friends above the call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God? It is easy to fall into these traps and set aside the more challenging parts of the gospel message, but when we listen to Jesus and take these words seriously, something can and will change for us and our world.

When we listen to him closely here, we will recognize that a full embodiment of Jesus’ way of life will make some people angry, maybe even some people we deeply love. But we will also remember that this is to be expected, and we can’t let others’ responses to our actions turn us back from following him. I find strength for doing exactly this in the example of the thousands upon thousands of women and men who practice nonviolent resistance, where quiet and gentle people simply seeking to exercise their rights to assemble, protest injustice, and live with the full dignity of their humanity insist with words and actions that they will not be moved, that they will not be silent until all people are recognized as children of God, that no one of us can be truly free until all of us are free. In the protests of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the Moral Mondays celebrated each week this summer in North Carolina, and so many other such things, these women and men do not set out to bring conflict but show that the divine intentions of justice, peace, and mercy stand in direct conflict with so many of the practices of our world and so deserve our condemnation. In drawing attention to the injustices of our world, these people who live out the message of Jesus in this way remind us that those who claim a place of power and privilege for only a few do not speak for all.

And so Jesus’ strong words here can give us the courage to speak up with so many others around us about the places that need the purifying fire of the Holy Spirit, about the people who face a challenging road of uncertainty as they follow the path that Jesus set out for us, about the injustice that remains so pervasive in our city, state, nation, and world, and about the depth of peace that still evades us even when we seek and pursue it each and every day. Jesus calls us, even us, to be a part of God’s new thing in our world, to speak up against everything that gets in its way, and to step into the world proclaiming this way of justice, peace, mercy, and love every day.

So may we trust even the Jesus who seems to bait and switch us and not be deceived along the way, for the path is not easy, but he walked it before us and walks it with us as we join in his work of making all things new until that day when he comes again. Lord, come quickly! Amen.