Transcript
Lord Jesus Christ, the son of the living God, have mercy on us. Please be seated. It is lovely to be with you again. I haven’t been with you in a long time. I was preaching before you called Mother Erdeljon. So my Garmin took me to the first site of Saint John’s, and I was in the middle of Hampton University, and it’s, I had such a difficult time getting here.
So this prayer is a prayer, from Claudio Carvalhaes, from Liturgies from Below. God of life and of the oppressed. We are living under an empire of greediness, injustice, poverty. It is taking away everything that brings justice and freedom for the oppressed and peace in our communities. We pray that under the power of the spirit of justice and love, we may resist every evil perpetrated by empire.
We pray that we may speak for justice and give voice to the voiceless in our communities, whose voices have been silenced by the evil of empire.
We pray together. We receive the fullness of life promised by our Lord Jesus Christ. In the name of Jesus Christ, our liberator and giver of life, we pray. Amen.
The word of the Lord came to me. What do you mean by repeating this proverb? Considering the land of Israel, the parents have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge. As I live, says the Lord God. This proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Know that all lives are mine. The life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine.
It is only the person who sins that shall die. God goes on to say through Ezekiel. Yet the house of Israel says, the way of the Lord is unfair. O house of Israel, are my ways unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair? Therefore I will judge you. O house of Israel, all according to your ways, says the Lord God.
Repent and turn from all your transgressions. Otherwise iniquity will be your ruin, cast away from you all transgressions that you have committed against me. And get yourselves a new heart, a new spirit. For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn then, and live. God is asking the house of Israel to repent.
God is saying to the house of Israel and to us. Begin taking responsibility for your own lives and choices. Sometimes we are very good at blaming someone else for our mistakes. Also for our errors in our past. It would be much easier if we could say, I have nothing to do with the death of Jewish people during Nazism.
Even though a group of 200 white protesters marched at the University of Virginia in 2017 yelling blood and soil and Jews will not replace us, or I have nothing to do with the enslavement of blacks in this nation. Though many of us have benefited because of the structural racism in America, in addition, some of us have benefited because of the success of the civil rights movement.
It catalyzed various social justice movements like women’s rights, gay rights and disability rights. God is offering the promise of life to us if we only turn and repent. Instead of relying on the sayings that blame people and misplace God’s will. God is calling people to repent and choose life. How have we misplaced God’s love? By blaming all the Jews for Jesus’ death and blaming all documented and all undocumented aliens for diseases and unemployment, or blaming them for eating pets?
Theologian Amy Plantinga Pauw commented on this: God is warning us not to fall into the trap of perpetrating and passing along the sins of our parents, or to fail to acknowledge how we have been affected by the sinful legacies that we have received. I grew up in the segregated South in North Carolina. We were taught in junior high school.
It was before middle school. We were taught in junior high school that reconstruction failed because of corruption. We were never taught the truth. Reconstruction was painted in our history books as a fundamentally corrupt era. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. By the 1890s, reconstruction had been painted as a fundamentally corrupt era of Negro rule.
It was said that South Carolina stood under the threat of being Africanized and dragged into barbarism and iniquity. A black South Carolina congressman, Thomas Miller, in 1895, appealed to the state’s constitutional convention. We were eight years in power, he said. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided education for the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the ferries.
In short, we reconstructed the state and placed it upon the road to prosperity. Coates goes on to write from W.E.B. Du Bois’s perspective. The 1895 Constitutional Convention was not an exercise in moral reform, or an effort to purge the state of corruption. It was simply a cover for the convention’s true aim. The restoration of a despotic white supremacy.
When Paul says of Jesus, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. Paul was not saying that obedience is submitting to authorities or to the order of the world, but Paul was using obedience to allegiance to Jesus and his vision of God’s realm. Reverend Noelle Damico writes in her commentary on Paul’s letter to the Philippians, the obedience to Christ brings on trouble. It brought Jesus to the cross. It landed Paul in jail. Where is God in the midst of trouble? God in Christ is the troublemaker, the instigator, propelling us through word and action to defy dominating powers and principalities of our day in order to be faithful citizens of God’s dawning realm.
As late Senator John Lewis says, as followers of Jesus, we make good trouble. The gospel passage takes place the day after Jesus’ triumphant ride into Jerusalem to the crowd’s chant of Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest heaven! He storms the temple, overturning tables of the money changers and healing the blind and the lame.
Reverend Noelle Damico says of this passage with dramatic, direct action. Jesus indicts the twin authorities that regulated the life for Jews in the first century Palestine, the Roman Empire and the temple.
I want to concentrate on the parable of the two sons. Jesus told this parable to the religious leaders. What do you think? A man had two sons. He went to the first and said, son, go and work in the vineyard today. He answered, I will not. But later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second son and said the same.
He answered, I go, sir. But he did not go. Which one did the will of his father? The religious leaders said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, truly I tell you, the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. The leaders’ answer corresponds to Jesus about God’s will. With their answer, they condemned themselves for not doing God’s will.
Jesus is saying, actions speak louder than words. In the late Senator John Lewis’ book, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, he writes. Prayer is the power. Well, I don’t want to call it a weapon, but it’s a tool. An instrument, a way of reaching out that humankind has. We can do it.
We can use it to deal with problems and things and issues we don’t understand and we don’t quite comprehend. It’s very hard to separate the essence of prayer and faith. We pray because we believe that praying can make what we believe our dreams and our dreams come true. Amen. Lewis goes on to say, there is an old African proverb when you pray, move your feet.
As a nation, if we care for the beloved community, we must move our feet, our hands and our hearts and our resources to build and not to tear down, to reconcile and not to divide, to love and not to hate, to heal and not to kill. In the final analysis, we are one people, one family, one house, the American house. The American family. Amen.