'Til We Have Faces (Proper 7B)

 

The Spire of Emanuel AME Church, Charleston SC

‘Til We have Faces
21 June 2015 Fourth Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 7B
Homily Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Job 38:1-11, 16-18; Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32; 2 Corinthians 6:1-134-21; Mark 4:35-41

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

What terrible news from South Carolina.  Wednesday night, at a small mid-week prayer meeting and bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, horror struck.  A young white man, obviously marginal and troubled, showed up and asked to join the meeting, where twelve churchgoers were studying the parable of the sower and the soils.  Mid-week prayer and bible study is known to most of us:  apart from the formal ceremony and busyness of Sunday, it is where many Christians connect with small, intimate groups of faith, share their hopes and fears, urge each other on, and try to make the Gospel real, incarnate in our day-to-day lives.  The group of twelve, despite misgivings about this stranger, welcomed him.  That’s what the gospel is all about, after all.  And it’s the troubled and the marginalized Jesus taught us to serve, and showed us to love.  After an hour listening to them, the stranger began to argue with the Pastor, Clementa Pinckney.  He pulled out a .45 caliber handgun from his fanny pack, and aimed it at 87-year old Suzie Jackson, a veteran of the civil rights movement.  Her 26 year old nephew, Tywanza Sanders, tried to talk the gun-wielding stranger down and asked him why he was attacking churchgoers.  The stranger then replied, "I have to do it. You [people] rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go."  He said was going to shoot everyone. Sanders dove in front of his elderly aunt and was shot first, his aunt died next.   The stranger then shot the others while shouting racial epithets.  According to the survivors, he said, "Y'all want something to pray about? I'll give you something to pray about."  He reloaded his gun five times. Only three of the church goers survived: two apparently by playing dead and one intentionally left alive by the gunman with the instructions to tell others what had happened.    

The killer was arrested within a day:  a troubled young man with drug problems and a history of white supremacist hatred, including a web page with a manifesto calling for whites to "take back their country". 

 

It is fitting to mention the names of the dead: Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd (54), a manager for the Charleston County Public Library system, Susie Jackson (87), church choir member, Ethel Lee Lance (70), the church sexton, Depayne Middleton-Doctor (49), a Bible study teacher who worked as an administrator at Southern Wesleyan University, Clementa C. Pinckney (41), the church pastor and a South Carolina state senator, Tywanza Sanders (26), a 2014 graduate of Allen University, Daniel Simmons (74), an assisting minister at the church, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton (45), an assisting minister at the church who was also a High School speech therapist and track coach, and Myra Thompson (59), a Bible study teacher and retired high school counselor.  

A measure of the faith and devotion of the dead and their families is this:  at the initial hearing after the gunman’s arrest, the families of the dead all expressed their sorrow, grief, and pain, and said they forgave the killer, inviting him to listen to the message of Jesus that he was hearing in the Bible study.

They were following the teaching of Jesus, who said love your enemy and pray for those who spitefully use you.   Jesus, who said as he died, “Father forgive them, for they don’t really know what they are doing.”   

They were following the teaching of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who once preached, 

“Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear; only love can do that. Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illumines it.”

This is what Christian love, true Christian faith, looks like.

In 1963, Dr. King gave the eulogy at the funeral after four children died in the basement of the black church bombed in Birmingham Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan.  He said:

“The[se] martyred [children] … have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents … hatred and … of racism [or who have hypocritically compromised with evil for political gain]… They say to each of us [to] substitute courage for caution. They say … that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.” 

Though some in our political classes are afraid to say it, this horror in Charleston came from the sin of racism.  It came from the sin of worshiping violence and guns.  These two sins are linked: a major historical reason for the adoption of the second amendment granting the "right" to "bear arms," despite the pretty political propaganda surrounding it, was to ensure white slave owners had weapons to suppress popular uprisings from those they held in chattel servitude.  These sins are the sin of America, of us all.   The troubled killer committed great evil and is responsible; but in a real sense he did not really know what he was doing.  Like us, he was the product of a sick society, and of dysfunction all around him.  These horrible acts are the result of despair, of giving up hope, of turning our backs on God, on what is beautiful, just, and loving. 

Today’s Hebrew Scripture reading is the climax of the Book of Job.  The book tells the story of a man who is “perfect in all his ways,” yet who suffers devastating horror in his life.  His friends, ever willing to defend the justice of God, urge Job to confess and repent of whatever hidden sin he has committed that God is so obviously punishing him for.  Most of the book’s 40 some chapters outline the argument.  And contrary to the proverbial portrayal of the “patience of Job,” Job is not patient.  He complains, bitterly, about the unfairness of it all.  He won’t lie to get God off the hook.  Yet he does not “curse God and die,” as his wife suggests. 

Curse God and die—a colorful phrase for despair.  When we lose heart and fail to pursue our faith, that is despair.  When we grow cynical and believe that there is nothing we can do to change things—that is despair.  When we grow complacent and jaded,  when we let the painful wounds in our heart scar over and seal off all emotion, that is cursing God and dying.  When we give up, and don’t ask any more questions, and disengage—that is despair.  When we lose our passion, our compassion, and even our anger at injustice—that is despair.    

Job does not curse God and die.  He continues the argument, drags out the discussion. Finally, God at long last engages him directly, and in today’s reading speaks to Job from “out of the whirlwind.” But instead of giving Job an answer or some kind of explanation, God himself asks a series of questions:  “Where were you when I created the foundations of the earth?  Do you even know about when the morning stars and the angels shouted for joy in creation?  Where do I keep the snows and frost, and the winds?  Do you even know how I treated the mighty ocean like a baby, and put it in a crib and diapers--the sandy shores and the mists--to  keep it from wiping you out with huge waves that don’t keep their bounds? What about the natural processes of the world?  What about the hippopotamus (behemoth) or the whale (leviathan)? What about the stars and comets (mazaroth)?”  The questions go on for three chapters of beautiful and highly enigmatic poetry.  The point is that Job’s perspective is so different from God’s that he wouldn’t understand any answer God gave him about justice and fairness.

Job humbly says, “I talked out of turn, in ignorance.”  But he still tries one last time to get his question about fairness in.  God replies with more riddles and enigmas.  The difference of perspectives is so overwhelming that all Job can do in the end is put on dust and ashes and bless the name of the Lord.  In so doing, he is not granting his friends’ arguments or giving up on arguing with God.  He is simply mourning the hard, hard, facts of our human condition, and expressing trust for its ultimate resolution by a reliable but mysterious God.   

God does not condemn Job and praise his orthodox friends.  He praises Job for his loyalty, and condemns the friends for presumption:  Job’s asking hard questions and nevertheless sticking with God is wisdom; presuming to speak for God and rationalizing his ways, especially at someone else’s expense, is the real darkening of counsel.  

“Talk to me man to man” says Job to God.  God replies, “Alright then! Stand up, and gird your loins!”  That means “Get ready for a real workout!” “Talk to you face to face? Show me your face so we can get to it!” 

C.S. Lewis once made a profound comment about those who have difficulty with faith because they can’t get God to answer their questions or grant their petitions in prayer.  In his retelling of the myth of Psyche and Eros, the main character says bitterly near the end of the story that the gods cannot speak to us openly, nor answer us, until we ourselves have found a real identity. Lewis writes, “[God] cannot meet us face to face until we have faces.”

Friends, we have hard lives.  We see horror like in Charleston, and wonder.  We see our loved ones and ourselves growing old, getting sick, suffering diminishment and dying.  We might lose heart.  People can break our hearts.  But we must not curse God and die.  We must stay engaged.  We must continuing arguing with Love. 

That’s the only way that we can grow into who we truly are, what God intended when he created us.  Despair and disengagement are death.  Hope and continued asking and questioning are life. 

We must not curse God and die.  We must stay engaged.  We must not “give up the ship.”

That is really what the Gospel story today is about:  a big storm on a big lake in a little boat causes the disciples to give up.  Jesus, sleeping like a baby, wakes to find them despairing.  And he says, gently, come on, guys!  Show some faith here!  And he calms the storm. 

I pray that we can keep on asking the questions, getting angry with the world and sometimes even with God, and have hope and courage to find ourselves.  I pray that we can start addressing some of these grievous sins like racism or violence and gun-worship.  I pray that one day we will have faces, and God will be able to speak to us in terms we understand.  I pray that Jesus will calm the storm. 

In the name of God, Amen.  

Sermon Hymn:  Lift Every Voice and Sing!

Trinity tolled its bell nine times before each Sunday service this week instead of pealing the bell, in memory of the Charleston dead.  There will be a community gathering on the Ashland Plaza this evening at 9 pm for a candlelight vigil, songs, and prayers in solidarity with what people in Charleston call "Mother Emanuel."