Sermon 3.8.26 Those Who Make Way for the King
- standrewcin
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
Today is a day, when we need water from a rock! From the Mountain of Despair, a Stone of Hope; Living water from the Rock of Ages.
The magical thing that sometimes comes out of our church’s practice of following a lectionary calendar, in which we repeat cycles of readings every three years is that it is often possible to look back 3,6,9, or 12 years and consider what was happening in the world the last time these particular readings were the selections of the day.
We can assess how things have changed, and what remains the same.
This weekend is the culmination of several things in our recent and distant collective memory.
Six years ago, when we heard the collect for this morning, “Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen,”
The third Sunday in Lent, March 15th 2020, was the first Sunday that our church building was shut down for a pandemic, whose end we couldn’t fathom.
It was four weeks before Easter.
And you and I, St. Andrew’s, were waiting to meet each other for the first time, so it was a time when the lay leadership really had to stand up and be counted.
And I know we’ve given gratitude before, but can we say another thank you to the vestry and especially Leroy Staples who was Senior Warden and Don Kincaid who was Junior Warden during those first few weeks of uncertainty?
In all – we didn’t know this at the time - more than 120,000 people would succumb to the tragedy of the covid 19 pandemic, twice as many people as died in the Vietnam war.
Adversities of the body, indeed.
Many of us knew people who passed.
I had a friend named Jeff, who was a grocery worker on the front lines: an essential worker. One week he was chatting with me on Xbox, and then seemingly - in an instant - he was gone.
This is the story of so many, and may their memory never be forgotten.
Beyond the adversity to bodies, though, what we saw then and what we see continuing unabated now are the evil thoughts that assault and hurt the soul;
This third Sunday in Lent truly is a day that we must learn from history.
Beyond where we were six years ago, I am moved to consider where we were 61 years ago, 1,824 years ago, and 2000 years ago.
And I’m moved to preach to you: Those who make way for the King.
One of our civil rights leaders, who was part of Dr. King’s movement in the early 1960’s – reflecting on what they were able to accomplish – said, “We weren’t trying to make history, or rewrite history. We were responding to the problems of a particular time.”
61 years ago yesterday, March 7th 1965, was Bloody Sunday: the march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama.
This week we said goodbye and eulogized another bridge, the Rev. Jessie Jackson, who really was the bridge between the early civil rights movement and the movement as it stands today.
But this quote is not from him.
This quote is from Bernard LaFayette, who died this week at the age of 85.
He was one of the founding members of SNCC: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
And he moved to Selma in 1963 to prepare the way for Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement.
On the night that Medgar Evers was assassinated, as part of a coordinated and premeditated attack on the movement, a gunman came for him as well.
In the front yard of his home he was beaten up and had a gun pointed at him.
His neighbor came out with a rifle, and LaFayette stood poised in the very epicenter of a violent confrontation and held his ground in the name of nonviolence.
He committed himself even more to the idea that his life’s goal was a struggle for the human spirit and to win people over from the evil and violence that assaults their souls.
Bernard LaFayette, may his memory be a blessing, was someone who made way for a King.
He did the unglamorous ground work, the spiritually-centered heart work, that helped carry and sustain the movement for equality and justice.
Bernard LaFayette was someone who made way for a King.
1,824 years ago yesterday, March 7th, according to church tradition and story, a young woman named Perpetua along with her friend and servant Felicitas and several others, who had become Christians together,
Were sent into an arena unarmed to be mauled by predatory animals and then killed by armed soldiers for the entertainment of the Roman citizens of Carthage in North Africa, and in celebration of the birthday of Caesar Geta, the son of the Emperor Septimius Severus.
What a horrible and tragic way to celebrate a birthday, by the murder of innocent people.
In the year 202 of the Common Era, it was not legal in the Roman empire to be a Christian.
Perpetua’s family were wealthy Roman citizens who enslaved people, including Perpetua’s friend Felicitas.
Her family were not Christians, she was not raised as Christian. There was no money in being a Christian, no country club, no career advancement, no bright lights, or praise music, no sophisticated self-importance,
Just small groups of people from different walks of life, gathering as a family in a world that either didn’t care, or was actively malicious toward their Way of Love.
When the time came for their arrest and trial, Perpetua could have gotten herself released.
All she had to do was to revoke her faith in Jesus, and she could go back to her life.
A husband and a newborn baby, a father who was a prominent citizen, the comforts of a noble life.
But Perpetual decided that her greatest calling in life was to stand firm and to make a way for the King of Kings, not for a Caesar.
2,000 years ago, though it probably wasn’t March 7th, we celebrate on this weekend, another woman who made way for the King.
This woman at the well, to whom Jesus disclosed “everything she had ever done.”
A Samarian woman, whose people were related to, but estranged from the people of Judah in Jerusalem;
Two rival religions and people, who actually believed many of the same things, worshipped the same God, used some of the same Scriptures, performed some of the same sacrifices, lived in the same small strip of land.
They bickered about who was right, who was catastrophically wrong.
They were on opposite sides of a cultural, religious, spiritual, but ultimately political divide based on history and the stories they told themselves about themselves.
Their discussion could have devolved into the talking points that each religion had about the Sacred Mountains of their traditions.
Where is the center of the world and the center of true worship, of correct religion and political affiliation?
I wonder if we can imagine what that feels like.
Parenthetically, (You know how I know that what someone on Facebook is about to say, even if it’s couched in terms like, “trying to be fair,” or “I respect my friends who think differently.”
Using words like “them,” “the dems,” “the right-wing maniacs,” “the leftist marxists,” “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” or any number of other monikers that are a lazy way of trying to put a whole group of people up as a straw man that I can knock down with my erudite take-down of hypocrisy.)
We know that the differences between the Samaritans and the Jewish people of Judah were no less fraught, no less encumbered with age-old talking points, with religious and identity politics.
And, here, across this divide, no less antagonistic than our own, we see a messiah and an ordinary woman putting aside those imposed boundaries, stepping in a space between the mountains, and getting to the heart of things,
By finding a well of water that goes deeper than traditions and identities all the way to the source of life and spirit.
“the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
This unnamed Samaritan woman was one of the first evangelists, one of the first to announce the Good News of Jesus; the first to make a way for the King.
The first to show us that there are no sides when it comes to the Spirit of Truth; no dispute over holy mountains.
Today, St. Andrew’s, as we look at the convergence of these four different times that all meet this year in and around March 7th and the third week of Lent,
I ask you, how will you become someone like Bernard LaFayette, Perpetua, Felicitas and their companions, like the Samaritan woman, who make a way for a king?
First, I would suggest that we need to declare who our true king is.
Earthly kingdoms and rulers come and go, heaven has an eternal ruler and an eternal foundation, which will never crumble
Second, we need to know what the bread for our sustenance is, and where our source of living water comes from.
My friends, as Christians, we may live under the authority of earthly rulers as Romans 13 tells us, so that we may live peacefully,
But never conflate that with our true allegiance to King Jesus.
Our anthem of our earthly country may begin with “Oh say can you see…”, but our hearts “lift every voice and sing, til earth and heaven ring with the harmonies of liberty,”
And our celebratory canto, “Ride on King Jesus, no man canna hinder thee…”
Our king is Christ the king, maker of heaven and earth.
In a few weeks’ time, there will be another of the nationwide No Kings Rallies.
It happens to coincide with a part of our liturgical life that is also about knowing the difference between earthly kings and our true king.
On March 28th, the day before Palm Sunday, many will gather, as is our right, to bring concerns from our mountain and plead with the people of the other mountain to meet us at the well;
To forsake the harshness of a new Caesar, who from our vantage point seems to want to sew the seeds of violence around the world instead of the bread of life;
A person who, like the Roman emperor of Jesus’ day, believes that peace comes through strength and violence rather than through non-violence and the firm belief that justice comes through just-ness.
Many have faith in this earthly power being proclaimed from capitol hill.
Many have faith in the Roman way of peace through power.
They have experiences that tell them this is the best way.
Although hopefully we can agree that giddy reveling in the “silent death” of adversaries is a certain sign of a morally corrupt heart.
On the other hand, we must recognize that many of our modern protest movements have been spiritually shallow.
This is why we often see the violence of words and sometimes of actions in otherwise legitimate protest movements.
People get so convinced that they are right and righteous in their opposition to the violence of Romanesque rule that they allow violence for the other side to infect their hearts.
My brothers and sisters, this cannot be.
The Civil Rights movement was successful, because it had a soul; a spiritual centering; a well of living water, and bread that could not be seen, as Jesus puts it in Romans 5.
Our civil disobedience and protest must be sustained by spiritual non-violence and heart-centering, as Martin, and Jessie, and Bernard showed us.
No matter how you feel about the politics of the moment, may I suggest that our ultimate allegiance is to the King of Kings?
This No Kings rally, then, the day before Palm Sunday is an opportunity to show our fellow people the same thing that those folks who sang Hosanna in the Highest did 2,000 years ago,
The same thing that Bernard LaFayetter, Perpetua, Felicity, and the Samaritan woman show us.
We have no king, but the King of Kings.
In this spirit, I have gotten permission from our bishop, and am working to organize diocesan leaders to take this message to the No Kings rally;
To gather for a Palm Sunday procession at that rally with other Episcopalians and to make our statement and confession of faith in the public square in robes, with crucifers and thurifers, with palms and hosannas:
No king, but the King of Kings.
No King, but the King of Kings has been our cry since Jesus entered Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, and it is our cry still today.
Together, we will proclaim the coming kingdom of peace that opposes violence in all of its forms, especially the shedding of innocent blood for political gain.
Together, we will join the throngs of witnesses who throughout the ages have made a way for The King of Glory, Jesus Christ.
And because we will need bread for our journey and the endurance and the hope of Romans 5,
We will gather at the cathedral for an hour before the rally to center ourselves in prayer and pledge the Ten Commandments of non-violence that Dr. King and his supporters pledged in Birmingham in 1963.
“I hereby pledge myself—my person and body—to the nonviolent movement, therefore I will keep the following ten commandments!”
1. MEDITATE daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.
2. REMEMBER always that the nonviolent movement in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliation—not victory.
3. WALK and TALK in the manner of love, for God is love.
4. PRAY daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free.
5. SACRIFICE personal wishes in order that all men might be free.
6. OBSERVE with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.
7. SEEK to perform regular service for others and for the world.
8. REFRAIN from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.
9. STRIVE to be in good spiritual and bodily health.
10. FOLLOW the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration.
I ask you today to join me on March 28th and to show the world how powerful our King is, to walk in love as Christ loved us, to shed the evil thoughts that assault and harm the soul,
And to sing, “ride on King Jesus, no man canna hinder thee, ride on King Jesus, no man canna hinder thee.”
Amen.
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