[sermon] the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the city

Sermon for the people of St. Mark Hope and Peace, preached 2015-07-05.

Primary preaching text: 2 Samuel 6:1-10
Secondary text: Mark 6:14-29


The second-most difficult thing for me about this reading from second Samuel is verse 4 -- David was thirty years old when he began to reign. I'm almost thirty, and what have I done with my life? I'm not ruling a nation, and I'm not prepared to start a ministry like Jesus did when he was thirty.

On the other hand, I haven't slain any Jeubsites, so there's that.

The hardest part of this passage are verses 6-8, which, coincidentally, are the verses that the Revised Common Lectionary cuts from this morning's appointed lesson:

⁶The king and his men marched to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, “You will not come in here, even the blind and the lame will turn you back” —thinking, “David cannot come in here.” ⁷Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion, which is now the city of David. ⁸David had said on that day, “Whoever would strike down the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack the lame and the blind, those whom David hates.” Therefore it is said, “The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.

In the scripture that many of us read together two weeks ago, David was a young shepherd from Nowheresville who killed a very tall Philistine with a slingshot. Last week, we looked in on David grieving for King Saul and Saul's son Jonathan.

In between those moments, Saul grew increasingly mad, in the sense of angry and also in the sense of not in his right mind. His jealousy of David, who had the Lord's favor, poisoned what had been a mutually beneficial relationship. Saul tried several times to have David killed, and David ended up on the run, fleeing for his life.

He killed a bunch of Philistines and acquired a couple of wives, and he spared Saul's life, even though Saul wanted him dead and he had multiple opportunities to kill him.

Saul died, falling on his sword rather than letting himself be taken captive by Philistines, and, as we read last week, David's grief over his death was heartfelt and genuine.

The few chapters between last week's reading and this week's tell us about the conflict between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms that followed Saul's death. David is the acknowledged and anointed ruler of the southern Kingdom, Judah, where he was born, and for seven and a half years he ruled Judah from the capital city Hebron, while Saul's descendants and followers held Israel, the northern kingdom. Scripture tells us, "There was a long war between the house of Saul and the house of David; David grew stronger and stronger, while the house of Saul became weaker and weaker." (3:1)

After seven and a half years, the people of Israel, even Saul's own tribe, the tribe of Benjamin, are ready to accept David as king, and David accepts them as his people.

David has been ruling from Hebron, which belongs to Judah, and it seems prudent that he shift the seat of rule to a neutral city. He chooses Jerusalem, which is about twenty or thirty miles north of Hebron and uninhabited, except for the Jebusites who have been living there for centuries.

David's people came into the city through the water shafts -- tunnels bringing water into the city from an outlying spring -- and struck down the Jebusites. He didn't spare people with disabilities, and it's hard to imagine him sparing the old or the young or the women, either.

And a generation later, those Jebusites who did survive, along with those who were left among the Amorites, the Hitties, the Perizzites, and the Hivvites, were conscripted as slaves. Their forced labor built the temple that Solomon dedicated to God.

Classic rabbinic lore tells us that Jerusalem remained unconquered prior to David because it was part of an early land deal. Abraham made a covenant with the Jebusites: Jerusalem would remain unmolested by Abraham and his descendants, and in exchange Abraham took possession of the cave in which he buried his wife Sarah.

This is why (the rabbis tell us) we read in the book of Joshua that, "the people of Judah could not drive out the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem; so the Jebusites live with the people of Judah in Jerusalem to this day."

The rabbis also tell us that the Jebusites invalidated their covenant with Abraham by going to war against Joshua and his armies, and that when David took possession of the city, he paid the Jebusites its full value.

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We are so eager, when we write our histories, to justify the atrocities committed by our ancestors.

And to be clear -- David is just as much our ancestor as he is the ancestor of those rabbis.

Or, name a nation founded by people who conquered a land already inhabited, enslaving those people who weren't killed outright, and who justified that conquest using God's name -- who believed that they'd been given this land by God and that the people who already lived there didn't count as people because they didn't believe in the same God --

Happy Independence Day.

In the fifteenth century, forty years before "Columbus sailed the ocean blue," Pope Nicholas the Fifth granted to the King of Portugal and his successors -- and by extension all Christian rulers -- the right, indeed the divine mandate, to "...invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, to claim the kingdoms [...] possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery."

This papal proclamation helped frame the beliefs that Europeans brought to this land, that it was ours by right, that non-white people were three-fifths people or not people at all, that the people already inhabiting this country didn't count.

When my Puritan ancestors came to Massachusetts on the Mayflower, they believed that the "new world" was a New Jerusalem, promised to them by God as surely as the original Jerusalem had been promised to the Israelites.

As for those people already dwelling here...

John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachuetts Bay Colony,
claimed, "God hath consumed the natives with a great plague in those parts, so as there be few inhabitants left."

Governor Winthrop also generously contended that there was enough land and then some for Puritans and for the various Algonquian tribes already living in the area that would become Massachusetts.

Unfortunately, as I'm sure you know, peaceful cohabitation didn't last, and American greed was outpaced only by American exceptionalism.

At their most charitable, Christians wanted to convert and "civilize" native peoples.

Not all of them were as explicitly racist as the Richard Pratt, who, founding a school for Native Americans in the late eighteen-hundreds, explained:

A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. [...] In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.... [emphasis mine]

And Pratt was a reformer. He decried the massacre of Indians, and unlike many of his contemporaries believed, "it is a mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage." He believed that his students could achieve that most desirable of goals -- they could assimilate into civilized culture, by which Pratt meant white culture. There was no need to massacre American Indians -- only American Indian cultures. As if that weren't itself an act of savagery.

My people believed that destiny brought them to this land, that God had ordained this vast, beautiful continent for our possession and peopled it with savages for us to convert and subdue -- at gunpoint if necessary.

This destiny was made manifest in the blood and sweat and tears of Native peoples.

This destiny was made manifest in the blood and sweat and tears of black slaves.

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What makes this part of our nation's heritage most appalling is that so many atrocities were carried out in the name of Jesus.

Think about how David established his kingdom: David and his men marched to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of that land.

And this is how Jesus established his kingdom: Jesus went about among the villages, teaching. He called the twelve and began to send them out, two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. And his disciples went, and proclaimed that all should repent, and cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick, and cured them.

David's people came into Jerusalem by stealth to kill its inhabitants; Jesus' people went into the villages openly, carrying no weapons, to live among the people, eating their food, sharing their homes, curing their sick.

To establish David's kingdom, the lame and the blind were killed. To establish Jesus' kingdom, the lame and the blind were healed and restored into society.

David went to Jerusalem to reign over a united Israel.

Jesus went to Jerusalem to die.

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Far, far too often, people bearing Christ's name have ignored Jesus' example and used David's tactics to build kingdoms like his. We've trampled on Native lands and then turned around and built fences to keep immigrants out.

We are promised a New Jerusalem in Revelation:

The dwelling place of God is with mortals, and God will dwell with them, and they shall be God people, and God shall be with them in truth, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. Behold: God makes all things new. [Rev 21:3-5 KJV alt]

Some of our ancestors thought that this land would be the New Jerusalem. And some of our ancestors saw the people native to this continent as expendable. The Jebusites, the Amorites, the Hitties, the Perizzites, and the Hivvites were displaced, their cultures destroyed, their people enslaved to build the original Jerusalem.

And the Navajo, the Cherokee, the Massasoit, the Lenni-Lenape, the Iroquois, the Osage, and many more nations were displaced, their cultures destroyed, their people enslaved in the name of building a New Jerusalem.

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Remembering guiltily the sins of our ancestors is unhelpful if we don't learn from them, if we don't vow not to repeat them, if we don't repent of the systemic racism that has been part of our heritage of our nation, if we don't boldly do a new thing.

Go, Jesus tells us. Go, and take nothing with you. Go, and accept the hospitality of strangers. Go, and heal the sick. Go, and bear witness to the Kingdom of God. This is why we have named the neighborhoods surrounding our church as our parish and our mission field. This is why we sing together, "Go into the streets and cities, to the farms and families. Tell about the splendid table, God's mercy." This is why we then do just that, why we spill out the front door onto Troost, onto Manheim and the Paseo and Prospect, why we go into this city and into others, to Jefferson City and to Washington DC, bearing the Good News.

This is why every week we share the splendid table and the news of God's merciful, healing love.

We don't need a fearsome king or a mighty army to participate in building God's kingdom. Jesus tells us we don't even need a change of clothes. Just ourselves, and the good news that we bear in our bodies: the Kingdom of God has come near. God is ushering in a new way. A new way of building a kingdom grounded in hope. a new way of being nation-states while living in peace. a new way of loving our country -- which is beautiful, and which is our home -- while still building hope, and singing peace, and holding love in our hearts and our bodies for all God's people.

Hymn of the Day: "This Is My Song, O God of All the Nations".

[sermon] David danced with all his might

Sermon for the people of St. Mark Hope and Peace preached 2015-07-12

Primary preaching text: 2 Samuel 6:1-2, 5, 12b-23
Secondary text: Mark 6: 14-29

Dancing sounds kind of innocuous to me. Dancing -- it's the little boy who dreams of being a ballerina, the middle school girl trying to get up the nerve to ask her crush on a date.

David, on the other hand, I don't like very much.

I know I've hidden that distaste real well over the past month -- what with the sermons about racism and genocide and the abuse of power and the evils of violence, especially violence inflicted in God's name. So it may surprise you to learn that I don't like David. But... I don't.

Dancing, though -- dancing I love.

David danced before the Lord with all his might.

I've been waiting to preach about that for more like three years than three weeks -- it was three years ago, the last time we were at this point in the Revised Common Lectionary cycle, that my best friend and I talked about how this pair of texts would be perfect if one wanted to have a liturgical dance Sunday.

And then I got here, this week -- actually here, this morning, at seven am -- actually writing this sermon. And here's the thing about dancing with all your might.

It means dancing with all of yourself.

That's what Michel found so distasteful about David's dancing, right? all of him on display for everyone to see.

So there's debate about whether David was actually dancing... mostly naked. He's not totally naked, obviously -- he's wearing a linen ephod. But just what an ephod covers is unclear -- whether it's more like a robe, or more like an apron. And it's unclear whether David was also wearing a robe underneath the more bib-like ephod.

Certainly Michel was scandalized, and whether she was scandalized by her husband actually sharing his... private parts... with all Israel, or whether it was just that she felt it was unseemly that his private devotional life was on display for the whole kingdom, Michel found this dance unseemly, unbefitting of royalty.

The actual nature of the scandal is less important than that Michel found it scandalous and apparently God didn't.

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Emma Goldman was many things, including an anarchist and a labor organizer. In the early days of her organizing, she attended a series of events for women in the cloakmaking trade, whom she wanted to recruit into a union.

Goldman writes:

I became alive once more. At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening [...] a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. [...] I did not believe that a Cause which stood for, a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. [...]

.........

A young labor activist at a union social, untiring both in her organizing and her dancing.

A little boy in a tutu pirouetting in the cereal aisle of Sunfresh.

A teenager asking her girlfriend to prom.

A king in the presence of his God, dancing with all his might.



Many stories of dancing include the voice of authority saying DON'T.

Boys DON'T do ballet. It's unmanly.

Girls DON'T dance with girls. It's immoral.

Agitators DON'T dance with abandon. It's undignified.

Kings DON'T dance half-naked in front of the servants. It's lewd.



The voice of authority -- the voice of parents, of teachers, of culture, of well-meaning friends and cranky spouses -- puts a lot of DON'Ts on our bodies.

Bodies are dangerous, so we create a lot of rules around them.

And bodies are dangerous.

When I was a kid, I got scolded for turning cartwheels in church.

We can probably think of lots of reasons not to turn cartwheels in church.

I might do damage to myself. I might do damage to furniture or liturgical vessels. I might do damage to nearby people.

Bodies are dangerous, because bodies are powerful.

David dancing before the Lord with all his might holds nothing back.

That includes all the parts of him that Michel thinks should be private.

And it includes too the things that offend my sensibilities.


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I dance
to name God with my body
not your body, Michal,
not yours.

Not Saul's who tried to destroy it
or Jonathan's who loved it

the same hands that gathered five smooth stones from the wadi, meant to slay a giant
are lifted now in praise
the same legs that climbed the hilltop whence the littlest lamb had strayed
the same arms that hefted slingshot
then sword
these harpist's hands that once soothed Saul

these hands, these legs, this mass of muscle, journey-hardened and
not innocent in any way

This is all I have God, all I have.
And you --

you spilled over my hair in the in the oils of kingship
I felt your touch in Jonathan's hand --
and Abigail's and Ahinoam's too

-- and Michal's too, at first

It was you, Lord, who protected me in battle,
my breastplate and my shield

So now I remove the vestments of battle and don this priestly garment
your Law is hard, Lord
God, your Law is hard
but here, in the presence of tens of thousands of your people,
here, in the city you gave me
here, I feel your presence
in the throbbing pulse of the city's heartbeat, thousands of voices lifted in thanksgiving, thousands of feet pounding the ground in ecstatic victory
thousands of arms raised upward to you
thousands of hearts

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David's dancing body is also a shepherding body and a harpist's body and a soldier's body and a lover's body and a king's body. David's body is exceedingly powerful -- physically and politically -- and he throws all that power into the ecstatic praise of God.

You are invited to bring your whole self here, but since Eve and Adam discovered their nakedness and felt shame, we have been trying to hide parts of ourselves from God.

So we put clothes on our bodies and made rules about who could wear what, and then we put bodies in boxes and made more rules.

A king is not a priest. An agitator is not a socialite.

And so the terrible, dangerous, frightening power of bodies is contained.

Emma Goldman attended her first dance as a teenager, and loved it so much that she wanted to dance forever --

“I will dance!” I declared; “I will dance myself to death!” My flesh felt hot, my heart beat violently as my cavalier swung me round the ball-room, holding me tightly. To dance to death — what more glorious end!

-- and Emma Goldman, passionate and impetuous and fifteen, grew up to be an activist, not in spite of her love of fine clothes and fine men and the joy of movement, but because she loved those things so much that she wanted, with every fiber of her being, for everyone to have access to that same kind of joy.

What would happen if you gave all of yourself to God? You are invited to bring your whole self here, to this place where all are welcome, but I know that there are pieces of me that I don't want you to know, beloved. It's exceedingly hard to be totally vulnerable among other human beings, all of whom are imperfect and fallible.

But we can aim to be vulnerable before God.

And we can give our bodies to God.

I know that's a sentiment that's frequently used to place more limits and rules on bodies -- If my body is God's temple, then I shouldn't defile it by drinking caffeine -- or having sex with women -- or eating cheesecake or getting a tattoo....

That's not what I mean.

I mean something like this:

We do bring our bodies to church. We can't do otherwise, because we are bodies just as much as we are spirits. And if we invite God into our lives, we invite God into every part, not just the ones we're proud of.

That's what God asks of us. That we love God with heart and soul and mind and strength and love our neighbor as ourselves. That we love God with everything we have, everything we are, everything we feel and think and dream, and all the things we do with our bodies.

David, dancing before the Lord with all his might. There are things that I don't like about David, and things Michel doesn't like about David, and things David doesn't like about David -- but in the moment of worship, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if David's body is lovely or ugly, if his deeds are noble or atrocious, only that, in that moment, he has come before God and given God worship with everything he has and everything he is.

The things that you bring this morning that you don't love -- the things that you are that you're not proud of -- the things you don't understand -- they are God's.

I don't know what they are (for you -- I know mine all too well) and I don't know what they mean:
-your temper
-your thighs
-your addiction
-your bruises
-the knot of anxiety in your stomach
-your jealousy
-your hunger -- for cheesecake, or for human connection, or maybe for both, or maybe for something else

-- all your hungers, all your fears, all your pain, all your faults, all your shallowness and frivolity and your love of cheesy Netflix sitcoms and your inability to keep the bathroom clean --

All of those things that are you, even though you wish they weren't. Your love of dancing, when the world wants you to be a Srs Bsns Social Justice Agitator. Your distaste for dancing, when the preacher went on for fifteen minutes about how great it is. Your inability to dance.

All of you.

God loves you, and that includes all of you, every piece. And when you dance before the Lord with all your might, then all of you, every piece, hungry or wounded or bitter or violent, sad or worried or bored --when you dance before the Lord with all your might, you give glory to God

and you are God's presence in the world.

Amen.

[Hymn of the Day: Lord of the Dance]

[Emma Goldman quotes from her autobiography, Living My Life.]

[sermon] on activism, shame, power, and pride

Sermon for the people of St. Mark Hope and Peace 2015-06-28

Primary Preaching Text: Mark 5:21-43
Secondary Text: 2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27


I fully intended to talk about David today.

If you're my friend on Facebook you might have seen that weeks ago I posted excitedly about this text being appointed for this day, the eve of the 46th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. The love of David and Jonathan, and particularly this text from Second Samuel is beloved in many lgbtq Christian and Jewish spaces because we can so easily claim David as one of our own -- especially for gay and bisexual men, this is a story that we can look to and say unabashedly, David is one of ours. Rev. Nancy Wilson, current moderator of the Metropolitan Community Church, says, exuberantly and with exclamation points, that David is the most clearly bisexual figure in the whole Bible.¹

I was planning to preach about David until yesterday afternoon, when I finally noticed the woman who'd been tugging at my sleeve all week. My plans to talk about David, central to the institutions of both church and state, and what Rev. Wilson calls, a bit anachronistically, his "same-sex, lifelong relationship" with Jonathan, were disrupted and interrupted by a person on the very fringes of society, a person in desperate need who demanded -- and demands to be seen and heard and healed.

In this complicated moment in our nation, when joyous news from the Supreme Court and tragic news from Charleston compete for our emotions, the woman with a flow of blood speaks more fully to my identity as a queer person and our identity as a Reconciling in Christ church than does King David with all his power.

The woman with the flow of blood is the filling in a sandwich story about the healing of Jairus's daughter. Jairus is a person of power and influence, a leader in the synagogue. He summons Jesus to heal his sick daughter, and Jesus goes with him, and on their way, they're interrupted by a woman who has suffered in many ways for the way her body is made.

There are physical torments of her constant hemorrhaging, and the ungentle and unsuccessful cures she's endured from a stream of doctors, and then there is the cultural torment of being perpetually unclean. She is excluded from her society, rendered untouchable by the flow of blood she can't control.

She has nothing to lose. She's spent all her money on ineffective doctors and she had no social capital to begin with. Her physical condition has deteriorated, and she constantly endures rejection. Everything in her culture has taught her that bodies like hers, and her body in particular, are shameful.

So she reaches the point beyond shame, beyond propriety, beyond fear, where her need for healing is greater than any force that would constrain her.

Forty-six years ago, the patrons of Stonewall reached this point. The police raided a gay bar, as the police did. And that night, when tempers were hot, when activism was in the air -- Vietnam, civil rights, women's liberation -- that night drag queens and trans women, bulldykes and sex workers, homeless youth, most of them people of color, all of them people who had nothing to lose and so nothing to fear -- that night those patrons of Stonewall Inn refused to comply.

A few years earlier, transgender and transsexual patrons of Compton's Cafeteria reached that point, and they threw first coffee, and then dishes and furniture at police in protest of harassment and mistreatment.

The nineteen-eighties and nineties were full of those moments, and ACT UP, (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) picketed and protested to draw attention to the AIDS crisis, to demand access to medical intervention, to share accurate information about HIV transmission and safer sex. A people dying of AIDS screamed that "SILENCE=DEATH" and refused to be silent.

This past Wednesday, Jennicet Gutiérrez, an undocumented trans Latina activist, reached this point at the White House LGBT Pride Month Reception. She interrupted President Obama's speech to shout, "Release all GLBTQ immigrants from detention and stop all deportations!" She later wrote, "In the tradition of how Pride started, I interrupted his speech because it is time for our issues and struggles to be heard."²

Indeed.

In the tradition of Pride, and in a tradition older than Pride. In the tradition of Jesus, who announced in the Nazareth synagogue that he had been sent to proclaim release to the captives, and in the tradition of Isaiah, whom Jesus was quoting.

And in the tradition of a nameless woman with a hemorrhage, who had endured all that she could endure.

She didn't ask.

She took.

When we remember the activism of the previous century, we sometimes sugarcoat it. Last fall we saw many white lgbtq people deride the protests in Ferguson, crying, "Remember Stonewall! Peaceful protest is totally possible!"

Oh yes. Remember Stonewall, with thrown pennies, thrown bottles, thrown shoes. Remember the patrons who thought to set the bar on fire.

We don't need to condone violence to remember that it's part of our history.

The path that led to the Supreme Court decision this week that legalized same-sex marriage across the country was not always peaceful and it was not always nice. It did involve middle-class gay men and women asking nicely if they could please have their rights now, if it's not too much of a bother.

And it involved thrown shoes and burning police cars and groups called Lesbian Avengers and Queer Nation and Transexual Menace. It involved shouting and crying and name-calling.

There are couples who have waited patiently for decades to get married, and we rejoice with them this week.

And there are couples who got married decades ago who fudged applications for marriage licenses, people who changed their names to more gender neutral alternatives.³ Further back in time, there are people who didn't ask, but simply lived as members of their true genders, butches and trans men who married women and were their husbands.

There are Lutheran pastors who waited patiently for ELCA policy to change. And there are Lutheran pastors who were ordained extraordinarily years before the 2009 Churchwide Assembly.

There are people like Jairus, people with power and with a lot to lose, who got on their knees and begged.

And there are people like the woman with a flow of blood, people with no institutional power and nothing at all to lose, who reached out and claimed power, demanded healing.

Violence is still not God's will for God's people. God still doesn't want us to harm each other; God doesn't want us to take what's not ours. God has made that perfectly clear. We can and should feel conflicted about those parts of our history. Reaching out and touching a person in a crowd -- on purpose and without permission -- is a blatant violation of bodily autonomy, and that is also not okay.

But it's understandable.

Activism is not pretty, because it arises from the mess we've made of the world.

There is a point of desperation where everything falls away but the need for healing.

From the outside, it's a stillframe, a single moment in time of explosive rage, or uncontrollable weeping, or a woman reaching out her hand.

But inside, it's year upon year of oppression and pain.

It's the experience of an African-American woman, a single mother working two minimum wage jobs, whose body bears the aches of standing all day every day, of working through illness, of walking the long mile from work to the bus stop, the half mile from the bus stop to day care, from tensing whenever she sees a police officer. Whose face aches from smiling at customers and wishing them a nice day. Whose heart aches from the death of her husband to gang violence, the incarceration of her brother, and the endless, endless news stories about anti-black violence, and the stories her friends tell that don't make the news.

It's the experience of a transgender woman whose body aches with an undiagnosed condition because she can't access a health care provider who will treat her with dignity, whose muscles are tense from cringing whenever she walks alone after dark, who spends day after day warding off crude sexual advances but who can't find a partner who loves her for herself.

It's the experience of an African-American man, perhaps the most powerful man in the world, whose body aches from sleepless nights, whose head aches from recalcitrant congresspersons, and mostly, whose heart aches with the death of his siblings in the place that was their sanctuary. It's the experience of President Obama, whose wisdom and education and credentials and deep faith are invisible to those who, still, after eight years, see only the color of his skin.

It's the experience of the heroines and heroes of Stonewall, women like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha Johnson, who sold sex and took drugs and sometimes lived on the streets and felt themselves excluded from the movement they'd started, pushed to the side for the sake of the politics of respectability.

It's the experience of a woman whose body is despised by her society, who's been abused by the medical establishment, and who lives in poverty, alone and outcast.

Let me be clear, these experiences, all of them, are only part of the story of people's lives. There are moments too of transcendent joy, moments of beauty and love and laughter.

But in this time of grief, in Ferguson and Charleston and all the places in between-- this is a moment that's poured onto people already hurting from year after year of violence and fear.

This is a moment of pain, but also a moment of possibility, a moment of promise.

Those moments in scripture, those moments in history, this moment now --

The moment when survival is more important than manners, when the only words that will give voice to anguish are not polite words, when power that's been stolen from people and hoarded by institutions must be reclaimed --

that moment when with thrown rocks and raised voices and a hand lifted up to touch the fringes of power

that moment of desperate hope reaching up from anguish

it's that moment when God's power flows like lightening into the hands of God's people.

God can transform a bleeding woman's desperate faith into healing and restoration. God can transform angry arson and vandalism into the rainbow people who rejoiced on Friday. God transforms debt into jubilee, slavery into freedom, death into life.

The world fills us with shame -- for the shape of our bodies and the depth of our grief, for our passions and our pleasures, for the places we live and the clothes we wear, for the color of our skin and the fluency of our language, for who we love and for who we are.

Activism is the moment when people who have been made ashamed become shameless, because we have nothing left to lose and no other recourse left.

And grace is the moment when shame and shamelessness alike are transformed into pride.

Amen.


¹Wilson, Nancy L. Our Tribe: Queer Folks, God, Jesus, and the Bible. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995. Print. 146.

²Guttiérez, Jennicet. "I Interrupted Obama Because We Need to Be Heard." Washington Blade. Brown, Naff, Pitts Omnimedia, Inc, 25 June 2015. Web. 28 June 2015.

³Eckholm, Erik. "The Same-Sex Couple Who Got a Marriage License in 1971." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 16 May 2015. Web. 28 June 2015.

[sermon] on David & Goliath

Sermon for the people of St. Mark Hope and Peace Lutheran Church
preached 2015-06-21

Primary Preaching Text: Selections from I Samuel 17
Secondary Text: Mark 4:35-41


It might be pleasant to believe that God orchestrated David’s entire life to prepare for this moment, that God sent the bears and the lions for David to practice on, whispered in Jesse’s ear about the ten cheeses, set those five smooth stones in the brook.

Because if that’s so, then every difficulty we encounter has also been orchestrated by God. God has a plan.

The Philistines had a plan. Goliath had a plan. They had advance preparation. Goliath had been a warrior from his youth. He was prepared to do battle and to do it well. Everything in his life had led up to the moment when he challenged any Israelite who dared to try his strength. For the most part, God doesn't have plans like that.

What God has are fantastic improvisation skills.

We do not have a God who stirs up storms or raises up giants to prove God’s power. We do have a God who confronts storms and giants and deficit budgets and the horrors of institutional racism with power and creativity and whatever tools are at hand.

David has trained his whole life for this – not by preparing for battle with a giant, but by doing the things he’s called to do – shepherding, playing the harp, carrying cheeses.

If we don't have physical strength, God will use our skills with a slingshot.

If we aren't gifted orators, God will give us siblings who will do the talking and use our faithfulness and leadership abilities.

If our faith is weak, God may roll God's eyes, but God will guide us to use our seamanship to weather storms.

If our pockets are not deep, God will use our creativity and our generosity and our friendship networks and our attics overfull of antiques.

Saul offers David armor, and David tries to wear it, but he can barely walk. Logic and tradition say there's a certain thing you wear when you fight giants, that it's foolish to go into battle without a sword, but it's even more foolish to go into battle wearing armor that doesn't fit. A slingshot is the right tool for this job, not because it's the only thing that will fell a giant, but because it's the tool that David is best equipped to use.

When we find ourselves facing giants, or storms, or lions and tigers and bears --

Whether they as devastating and inhuman as an earthquake or as insidiously, terribly human as systemic racism...

Giants taunt and torment us, and if we try to do battle on their terms, they will always win.

That doesn't mean we aren't required to be flexible. We are, exceedingly. But we have to flex the muscles we have, not the ones we wish we had.

We also want to take care with the gifts that we choose to develop. The old truism that if you have a hammer, all the world's a nail is not at all humorous if you consider the NRA board member who claimed earlier this week that murder could have been prevented if members of the Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston had taken guns to midweek worship. I'm pretty sure guns are the wrong tools for dismantling systems of racism and violence. Audre Lorde is right -- the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

There is another side to this, deeper and more difficult. God uses our giftedness with slingshots or ships. But God also uses our flaws.

If you were here last fall, you might remember that we last encountered David at a moment of disastrous sin, when he abducted Bathsheba and had her husband killed. Not a proud moment in David's life, not how we want to remember him. We much prefer the story in front of us today, for all its gore and violence.

We are going to walk with David for the next four weeks. It is definitely odd, to join up with David at this moment in his life, knowing that he will become a king who sometimes abused his kingship in terrible ways.

But right now David is just a kid. A young man, taught from childhood to despise the Other, that Philistines are less than human, that killing them is doing the world a service. Perhaps hearing his soldier brothers boast of the numbers of Philistines they've killed.

This is the third story in the Bible about David. The first is the story of how David's father, Jesse, paraded all his sons before the prophet Samuel, and it was David, youngest and least, who was off tending the sheep, who was anointed by Samuel.

The second is the story of how David was a talented harpist who entered into Saul's service to soothe him when he was tormented with an evil spirit.

And the third, and best known, is the story of David and Goliath. There are some contradictions in the particulars of the stories about David -- but the themes are consistent. This is what Israel remembered about her beloved king: that he was handsome and charismatic, skilled at music as well as war, that he came from humble origins, a youngest son, a shepherd, an armor bearer in Saul's army. That he was full of courage, and that he was full of God.

This is what we know about Goliath: Goliath is a big man. When you're nine and a half feet tall, that's certainly the first and frequently the only thing people notice about you. If it's how everyone around you defines you, it becomes part of your identity too. Goliath is a big man, and he was trained from youth to be a warrior.

When we tell this story to children, we talk about the boy hero David, who defended Israel from a giant the way he defended lambs from bears and lions, and the giant, like lions and bears, becomes an inhuman, monstrous figure. We tell children about the stone that killed Goliath, but we mention less frequently that he cut off Goliath's head with Goliath's own sword, and less frequently still that he carried Goliath's severed head all the way to Jerusalem, a trophy of war.

Those parts of the story make us a little uneasy.
We should feel uneasy about David. We should be uneasy of the gore and violence in this story.

We should remember that David is not God, and we should remember that Goliath too was God's child, and that God grieved his death.

We need to know that sometimes there are no good solutions, just solutions that are less bad, and that God's creativity and God's redemptive power are endless. God uses sinful broken people because that's the only kind of person there is. But we also need to know that war is not God's will for humankind.

So here we are, a people of peace -- peace in our name and peace in our mission -- people committed to proclaiming peace -- and we have in front of us a story of violence. It's hard to face that violence. We'd rather ignore it, or treat it like video game violence. This is folklore, after all; it did not really happen exactly like that. We treat it as a metaphor, say that we "do battle with" systemic evil, identify our giants with faceless, inhuman systems -- the payday loan industry, white supremacy, terrorism. Perhaps that metaphor is helpful, sometimes. If nothing else it reminds us that the stakes are life or death, that people who would deny others health care, people who would deny others a living wage, would deny people life. But if the stakes are life or death, we must be on the side of life.

I would like to ignore the violence, or make it into a metaphor.

I can't look away from it, not this week. Not when nine people are dead in Charleston because a young man -- a Lutheran, our brother -- so awfully and tragically misunderstood what God wanted. Because he believed about black people the things that David believed about Philistines.

So David slew a giant. A charming young man who was sure he was doing what God wanted kills a man who has been threatening his people. And yes, Goliath was, quite literally, asking for it, and yes, it was war and that's the nature of war, and doubtless more lives would have been taken if they hadn't resolved it with single combat... but it is still death, and God still grieved, and when we think about the tools we have at hand, it's not enough just to say that God will use whatever is available, although, yes, God, being endlessly resourceful and creative, will use whatever is available.

We can acknowledge the painful truth that sometimes there doesn't seem to be a nonviolent solution. There was no peacemaker or negotiator between Socoh and Azekah, where the Israelites pitched their tents, but there was David, David and his slingshot and the five smooth stones from the brook.

And God's redemptive power is greater than the greatest evil we can do.

God does not sanction or condone or encourage warfare. But God does God's redemptive work through the means that we provide.

And to join in God's work in the world means using the tools we have, the gifts and skills we're given and the smooth stones we find, to work God's redemption. It means seeking out brokenness and working to transform it. It means confronting the concrete realities of injustice and racism, deeply unpleasant and difficult as that is.

Violence and sacrifice and death are some of humanity's favorite tools. The perpetual battle between Philistines and Israelites demonstrates that. So does the tragedy in Charleston. And so does the cross. And nothing demonstrates God's ability to take tragedy and transform it into redemption better than the cross.

Sometimes there is no good solution. That's not particularly heartening news, perhaps, but it is true. Sometimes the giants in our lives can only be slain, not redeemed. Sometimes we capsize. Sometimes people are murdered at Bible study. Sometimes God makes God's way to the cross.

This is true.

And in the bleakest of hours, God is present, building hope, proclaiming peace, and using God's people to redeem and transform and resurrect everything that is broken.

This is also most certainly true.
Amen.

[sonnet] Martha

She sweeps detritus from the table top,
love's residue, crumbs of laughter, date pits,
grape stems, and scattered promises all dropped
by men who've left the table where she sits.

She strains to hear the echo of the hymn
that they all sang as Jesus left, drunk friends
in tow. Their hearts (and hers) held fast the slim
hope there's some other way the story ends.

With willing hands to knead the sabbath bread
the garden-goers come to clean spilled broth,
to share the news that even Peter fled,
to cry, to help her with the tablecloth.

Each takes a corner of the linen, fine,
undyed, but stained bloodred with love and wine.