In her poem for the inauguration of President Joseph R Biden, Amanda Gorman began like this,
“When day comes we ask ourselves, ‘where can we find light in this never-ending shade,’ the loss we carry, a sea we must wade? We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just is” isn’t always just-ice.
I’m moved to preach to you this morning about what “just is,” what’s “just us,” and what’s justice.
I have to say that I have woken up just about every day in the second half of this week asking myself something akin to, “where can we find the light in this never-ending shade?”
As I’ve been seeking to make sense of another school shooting that has made national news - not to mention the 22 other school shootings that have happened this year, many of which have not made national news –
And I - like you, I’m sure - still don’t get it.
And our politicians, God bless them, seem to always give us the same answer.
It "just is."
“this was just a bad apple,” “an evil person,” “a tragedy.”
The real answer behind these statements, then, is that it just is part of who America is.
You just have to deal with it.
And it seems to be that way.
I came into the kitchen the other day and Melanie was listening to one of her sermons from a few years ago.
And in that sermon she was talking about gun violence against children and shootings at schools.
I asked her, “oh did you have the Wednesday night Eucharist this week at Redeemer?”
She said, “no, why?”
I said, “because I thought this sermon was maybe your sermon from this Wednesday after what happened in Georgia.”
It wasn’t.
I mean, listen, I know that it can feel like preachers sometimes say the same things over and over.
We have our particular things that we like to talk about, or lessons that we like to learn.
We have a favorite part of Jesus’ ministry that speaks to us and so the sermons can often start, middle, or end similarly,
But, it’s a sign of what “just is” that I could literally have woken up this morning, found any number of sermons from the week after a school shooting and probably preached it verbatim the same and it would remain just as relevant today as it was 10 years ago, or 8 years ago, or 6 months ago.
I think Amanda Gorman is right, what “just is;”
“the norms and notions,” are rarely justice.
But, I want to expand on what Amanda Gorman started in her inauguration poem and say that there is another piece that seems to be getting in our way; and that is our feelings of “Just us.”
I think these two things are subtly linked together; “just is” and “just us.”
I have a friend who is an Episcopal priest (I guess that shouldn’t be surprising),
And this friend wrote on Facebook earlier in the week about what we shouldn’t - as responsible preachers – say about the Gospel lesson from this morning.
He had a whole list.
One of them, was don’t say that Jesus is a racist.
Sure he tells a woman that she and her sick child are equivalent to dogs, but…
Now, I’ve preached about this before, you’ve heard me preach about it, if you’ve been here a while.
There are plenty of reasons not to call what Jesus said racist, mostly for pedantic historical reasons, and there are reasons to definitely call this racist.
But what I noticed within myself as I grappled with this passage one more time, is that on a certain level my friend was helping me to see a deeper issue in the Gospel.
He was allowing me to notice that one of the dynamics at play in Jesus’ interaction with this foreign woman was the issue of a “just us” mentality.
I’ll say more in just a bit.
In our post-school shooting debates we often get focused on the problem of the individual, which is the regular playbook of systemic injustice.
It tries to keep us from seeing the bigger picture.
Just like calling Jesus a racist, we forget to ask about the broader context and purpose of the story.
I mentioned the idea of the “bad apple.”
I’m sure I’ve preached about it before, (see my comments above about preachers saying the same things over and over).
Saying that the individual who perpetrated a crime is evil, that’s easy.
It takes all of the pressure on the society that created that person away.
“It’s not a societal problem, it’s an individual problem.”
“It’s not us, it was him.”
This is how systems protect themselves, by convincing us not to question the larger issues.
But at some point, we have to look around and say, “maybe there’s something wrong with a tree that continues to create bad apples.”
At some point - and maybe 30 to 35 years isn’t long enough, I don’t know – we have to look at a society that continues to see young men perpetrate these types of acts, and say “there’s something wrong with that tree.”
I want to say to you today that the other thing - beyond the “just is” - that gets in the way of justice is “just us.”
The whole point of these excursions that Jesus makes into lands that lie outside and North of the promised land of Israel is to bring to our attention the problems of a “just us” mentality;
A mentality says that “there’s not enough healing or bread to go around, I can only feed or heal my own children.”
Because that tends to be the “just is” in so many times and places in this sinful and broken world.
“I take care of my own.”
And that is how our entrenched discussions about the privileges and limits of the 2nd amendment have tended to go after school shootings.
People talk about the “right to bear arms,” about “responsible gun ownership,” about “law-abiding citizens,” about the “few bad apples” that I mentioned earlier.
In the face of the Syro-phoenician woman, who is begging for her child’s life,
Our society continues to say, “it’s not fair to take the children’s crumbs and feed them to the dogs.”
Gun lobbyists and politicians continue to use every excuse they can to hold back even the smallest crumbs from the table, the smallest concessions,
the smallest recognition that every single child in this nation is “our child.”
We’ll send thoughts and prayers, but not a bill to congress.
Every single child in this nation is worthy of being safe at school, at home, in the streets, or on the playground.
The Book of James reminds us to “show no partiality,”
Jesus bucks his society’s “notion and condition” of “just us,”
When are we going to listen?
When are we going to let Jesus’ word Ephphatha! Open our ears to hear?
Where, for God’s sake, can we find light in this never-ending shade?
My light continues to be Jesus and his followers.
People like James who remind us, “thoughts and prayers are nice,” but…
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
God is speaking to us today and telling us flat out, “just is” and “just us” will not get you to Justice.
“just is” and “just us” will not get you to Justice.
And so I’m moved to conclude this morning with a new kind of thought and prayer.
Let us pray.
God of all creation, we are your children and we lift our voices to you. Help us not to blindly accept the notions and conditions of our common life. Help us not to remain deaf to the cries of injustice that surround us. Send your spirit upon every hardened heart. Lord, don’t just hear our prayers, but help us to hear yours. Feed us the crumbs from your table, help us to share what you have given us, in Jesus Christ’s holy and life-giving name. Amen
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