On Friday afternoon, Nazis tried to rally in Lincoln Heights.
They appeared to be the same men, who rallied after the election on Short North in Columbus, showed up in their black jumpsuits and red face masks and put up nazi flags and a sign that read “America for White Men.”
Within about 15 minutes, a crowd of Lincoln Heights neighbors gathered to chase them out of town.
People from the Cincinnati community showed up yesterday with Peace signs in the same spot in order to assure their neighbors that they aren’t alone.
It is no coincidence that White supremacists chose the oldest self-governed black community north of the Mason-Dixon line for their display of hate.
I wanted to say this right off the top, because I’m sure that many of you heard about this taking place,
And, after reading the incredibly disappointing sermon that our presiding bishop gave last week at the National Cathedral last Sunday,
in which he talked about the “poor and the marginalized,” but said nothing about the fact that his own office had closed down Episcopal Migration Ministries, because of the president’s freeze on government funding…
I wanted to lead with what is on the top of our minds, so that you don’t wonder if and when I’m going to say something about it.
I also want you to know that I’ll be coming back to it in a little bit.
Communication between humans is a strange thing.
It’s something that we all do every day, but it’s also something that we are often really bad at.
Have you ever been in a conversation where the person you’re talking to doesn’t seem to hear a word you’re saying?
They’re looking at you, but you can tell that they’re either totally distracted, or you’re in a crowd and they’re looking to see if someone else they know is around, you’re on a zoom call and everyone starts talking at once and then noone is talking, because they’re embarrassed by the confusion.
Or there is what happens when you’re arguing with someone, the other person is thinking of what they’re going to say next, so they don’t actually hear what you’re saying.
Have you ever been the person that was distracted and not listening?
The truth is that we have so many things going on in our lives, it can be hard to put them away at the best of times, so that we can hear and listen.
We have so many things on our minds constantly running on loop, there’s not enough silence of thought to truly listen to other people.
And if we can’t even be bothered to listen to each other, it makes me really wonder how many people are able to listen to God.
In Christianity, and especially in the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement, we talk a lot about the idea of call;
That God is calling each one of us into a particular kind of ministry, a particular kind of service to our community.
A few weeks ago, we heard the Apostle Paul preaching about the faithful as the body of Christ; each different, each talented, each with a different gift, each necessary to the healthy operating of the whole.
The way that we come to hear how God might use our talents is by listening for God’s call on our lives.
Put simply, if we don’t actively listen, we won’t hear.
On a personal level, when we don’t listen for God’s call, we miss out on what the Holy Spirit is preparing for us to walk into.
We miss out on opportunities to give love and to receive it.
We may get stuck in a way of living that doesn’t actually give us life or purpose.
On the extreme end, we may find that having listened to everything but God, we have trod down a path of anger and resentment to a place of hate,
Like these men who think it’s okay to try to recreate nazi Germany on our streets.
They literally call themselves the Hate Club.
Not listening for God is detrimental to our individual development as human beings.
But this problem can affect whole societies as well, not just individuals.
Isaiah 6 is one of the most famous passages in all of Scripture.
It is the call narrative of Isaiah to prophethood.
Usually, when we read this passage we get caught up in the imagery of the Seraphim; these six-winged creatures that appear to Isaiah in the sanctuary of the Temple.
Or, we hear the singing of the Holy, Holy, Holy, which we also sing during the Eucharistic prayer, where it is called the Sanctus (the Latin word for Holy).
We don’t always hear or listen to the rest of the message though.
Our lectionary even leaves the last five verses as optional for Sunday morning.
Those are the verses, where Isaiah actually begins to speak his first prophecy.
”Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand.'
Make the mind of this people dull,and stop their ears,and shut their eyes,
so that they may not look with their eyes,and listen with their ears,
and comprehend with their minds,and turn and be healed."
I was having a discussion this week about these very verses with a colleague.
And they said that they didn’t always like these verses, because it seems like God is intentionally keeping the people ignorant and then it leads to their destruction.
For my part, I look at the world around us. I look at societies around the world and particularly our own and I say to myself, “Isaiah is right.”
This is the way that humans operate when they are not listening for God’s call.
They are content with the benefits of their society such as they are.
They are amenable to the disparities that keep some people down, while others flourish;
Like Ursula K. LeGuine’s short story, the Ones who walked away from Omelas, where an entire happy society knows that there happiness is secured by the fact that there is one person that they keep in a dark cell, who is the scapegoat for the whole society.
They never bother to ask how such a system of relegating one person to misery works, they simply go along with it, because things seem to be working out.
Isaiah’s message is a real message, it is an acknowledgment of how things actually are with the human condition and our unwillingness to listen to God.
We hear all kinds of things, we “keep listening”
But we don’t comprehend the things of God, because we’re listening to the wrong things.
We “keep looking,” but we’re looking through lenses of greed, of status quo, of resentment, and so it’s no wonder that we do not understand.
This is why we can all look at someone who does a nazi salute and some of us say, “eh… I’m not sure, maybe he was just really excited.”
Comedian Joshua Johnson put it well with regard to this particular event when he said, “if all of the neo-nazis saw a nazi salute and it made them feel emboldened to come out of hiding and to cheer ecstatically, then it doesn’t really matter what Elon meant by it, it was a nazi salute.”
See, Understand.
Our minds are dull, our ears are stopped up, our eyes are shut, we are sleepwalking through God’s call to “Stay awake.”
Isaiah’s words are a challenge;
“Wake up, listen for God, because God is calling.”
Let’s not wait until cities lie in waste.
God wants to know who to send, and who will go.
If it’s not you, who will it be?
We need to become a society who listens for God, not a society who tells God who we want them to be.
To do this, we need to start practicing the art of active listening.
That means we are present to the conversation; with loved ones this means putting down distractions (this is one of my biggest struggles)
With God it means actually stopping to pray and take ourselves out of our own worries to be present with God. (congratulations, you’re here today, but you also need to have your own prayer life)
That means that we notice non-verbal cues; we look at body language and feel the other person’s energy.
With God this means not just listening for words, but for small inclinations of the Spirit’s movement.
That means allowing for mystery and asking open questions; don’t seek questions that will give you the right answer, seek for answers to deepen your next question.
That means listening so that you can understand, not so that you have a soundbite.
That means not rushing to judgement.
We’re constantly in a cycle of thinking that convinces us that we have to have an answer right away, that we have to have an opinion about everything immediately.
God doesn’t usually work like that.
Sure, we can do the easy ones like, nazis are bad.
But what about the more difficult discernment?
Humans have probably always had a difficult time with active listening.
Isaiah shows us that this was true in ancient Israel and Judah as well.
It is true today.
We have a crisis in America.
It is particular to white America.
We are a people of unclean lips, but we refuse en masse to turn and be healed.
But it’s not only a white America problem.
White America just shows it to us on an almost unbelievable scale what is true for everyone.
We are a parable for the rest of society about what it looks like when a group of people fail to actively listen to God rather than greed.
As the still dominant culture, though, this kind of thinking pervades every other part of our society.
God is calling all of us to listen;
To do Justice, to Love Mercy, and to Walk Humbly.
The truth is that when we fail to listen, when any of us fail to listen, whether it’s in a personal relationship, in our spiritual walk, or as a group within society,
There is a result.
Judah went into exile,
Millions of people were murdered during the Holocaust,
Civil Rights was proclaimed victorious and subsequently redundant and now we have nazis in our streets.
God is calling you.
I wonder what God is saying.
I wonder if you’re ready to say “Here I am.”
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