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The Baton Passes (Sermon) April 4, 2015 (The Great Vigil of Easter)

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Sermon – April 4, 2015

The Rev. Rebecca S. Myers, CSW

St. John’s Episcopal Church, Corbin, KY

The Great Vigil of Easter   Bulletin 4-4-2015 (Easter Vigil)

Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel!

Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!  Zeph. 3:14

 Forty-Seven years ago at 7:05 our time, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, TN.  I always remember this date and if it weren’t for Easter Week, the Episcopal Church would remember Dr. King as a saint on this day…the day of his death.

For some reason I really can’t explain, I have always remembered this date.  I was too young to have remembered many of Dr. King’s speeches and I was only 7 when the March on Washington occurred, but much of my adult life, I have been on a kind of pilgrimage to the places important in Dr. King’s life and work – his birthplace and grave in Atlanta; the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis; his church in Montgomery; the Birmingham jail.

So when I lived in New York City and heard about a play by Katori Hall, who grew up in Memphis, about the last night of Dr. King’s life, I had to go.  Especially since Samuel Jackson and Angela Bassett were the performers in this 2-person play.  The play is called The Mountaintop and takes place in Dr. King’s room at the Lorraine Hotel after Dr. King had given his last speech at a church in Memphis.

A woman, who he thinks is the hotel maid, comes to his room that night.  Much of the play is the back and forth of their conversation.  We learn much about the facts of Dr. King’s life, but also get some idea of the interior of this life.  But there is a surprise and I’m spoiling the play for you now.  The maid is really an angel sent from God to take Dr. King home to heaven!

Eventually the maid, Camae, discloses who she is and that Dr. King will die the next evening.  Like most of us, the playwright has Dr. King begging to live just a little longer… to see his children again…to hold his wife again…to finish his work.  Dr. King gets Camae to call God, who is a woman, so he can plead for more time.  God hangs up on Dr. King.

Watching this part of the play, I nearly started to sob, because I realized what the character of Dr. King was saying, were my words and pleas to God too.  Why didn’t you let Dr. King live longer, God?  Why didn’t you protect him?  I felt that as a young child of 11 ½ on the night he died and I had carried that sadness and upset with me all of my life….

Well, tonight we begin our service in darkness.  You see, we left the church last night with Jesus securely in the tomb…horribly tortured and dead.  Buried in a tomb, hurriedly before the Sabbath.  Most of us know that silence of death, don’t we?  The person we love, our companion, our dearest friend no longer speaks to us…is no longer there to touch us or laugh with us or chide us.  That awful silence of the absence.  That’s where we are.  That’s where I was on that April 4, 1968, and for so many years after.

Yet, our lessons tonight are all about God’s saving grace.  Even when Jesus is silent…even when Jesus is in the tomb…even when there is so little light…even when there is so much grief…we are told to hope!  We are told that what is happening right now in this moment is not the last word!

Last night we sang some verses of a hymn, At the foot of the cross.  The verse for tonight is:

When it was finished, Jesus was laid in a tomb wrapped in grave clothes of death.
Three long night after, he left the grave clothes.
She did not help him.  She did not carry him home.

Our grief…our clinging to life can blind us to the fact that God is God and is still working.  That we don’t know what the end will be.  Jesus rises from the tomb regardless of what his beloved mother could or could not do about his death.

In The Mountaintop, Dr. King finally says he can face his death, if he is allowed to see the future.  Scenes begin flashing rapidly on the stage.  All of the years since 1968… event after event after event, good and bad.  Faster and faster they come.  Each event is named and throughout there is a mantra “the baton passes.”  Watching all of those events, I was finally at peace with Dr. King’s death.

The baton passes…God is still at work…God continues to save us…And Jesus Christ left his grave clothes.

Amen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Distorted Faith (Sermon) November 23, 2014

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Sermon – November 23, 2014

The Rev. Rebecca S. Myers, CSW

St. John’s Episcopal Church, Corbin, KY

Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King

Year A Proper 29 Track 1

Observance of Native American Heritage Month

`Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.  Matthew 25:45-46

Please be seated.

Today we are observing Native American Heritage Month.  I think I told you last year that as a child, I was scared to death of Indians.  There was Wagon Train, and so many other westerns.  There was the train ride at Hershey Park where Indians attacked the train.  And my father said some of our ancestors came to Kentucky with Daniel Boone, but were killed by the Indians.  There were historical markers in PA for Indian massacres.

Then there were the other images given me by learning about Jim Thorpe who was relocated to Carlisle, PA at the Indian Boarding School there.  At age 14, my parents took me to Tahlequah, the Cherokee Nation Capital in Oklahoma and taught me about the Trail of Tears. I had lots of confusion, fear, and curiosity about Indians as I grew up.

In 1989, I joined a group to address racism in our local community.  Eventually, we connected with the New Orleans-based Peoples’ Institute for Survival and Beyond.  I was fortunate to attend a nationwide training on Undoing Racism in the early 1990s.  It was held at a retreat center on the Gulf of Mexico, just outside of New Orleans.

The morning after I arrived, I took a walk along the Gulf.  On my way back to the center, I noticed one of the women from the training.  She was from the Navajo Nation in Arizona.  She motioned me over and told me she was doing a blessing in thanksgiving for safe travels.  She also told me she was from a water clan and this was the first time she’d seen the ocean, so the moment was very special for her.  She had traveled with a friend, but the friend was from the Wolf clan and the ocean/gulf felt very intimidating to her.

She asked me to join her in the blessing, which I did.  We turned in all of the directions and gave thanks for all of creation.  It was a wonderful prayer moment for me.  And more than that, I started thinking about who I was in a different way.  I, too, loved the ocean, and realized that my mother’s family was also “water clan people” of a sort since they’d been on Italian islands for many, many years.

Also, that this woman knew her clan and identified that as important information, made me think, too.  In fact, during the training another woman who was Indian asked why white people always introduced themselves by telling about things – their job or where their house was – rather than about their relationships – clan, mother, daughter.

And then, there was the whole notion of not owning the land!  That was a hard one to wrap my head around – that the land was just like the air we breathe and belonged to the community, not to individuals.

I’m sure you know of the awful history of how the Immigrants, for many of us, our ancestors, treated the indigenous people of this land.  The dominant society, who claimed to be Christian, certainly did not read the section of Matthew we read today nor other sections of the Gospel where Jesus clearly tells us how to treat one another.  No, many of our ancestors came, and played mental tricks so the Indians were not seen as human beings, and therefore, could be destroyed.  It’s a painful history, which has led to a painful legacy for all of us.  We have all been hurt.

And for we Christians who identify with the dominant culture, our understanding and faith in Jesus Christ has been distorted by the actions and legacy of our ancestors.  Rather than listening to the indigenous peoples about the reality of the context of life here, right here in what is now known as Corbin, KY, we imposed our understanding of the land and resources where we came from.

The indigenous peoples, the Indians, had been on this land for over 14,000 years!  They’d seen Cumberland Falls develop and change, most likely.  They’d learned the patterns of the seasons, the patterns of all living creatures.

In thinking about our observance today, I was going through some books I have.  One is God is Red:  A Native View of Religion by Vine DeLoria, Jr.  At the end of the book, Mr. DeLoria says (p. 296, 30th Anniversary Edition):

Who will find peace with the lands?  The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things.  Who will listen to the trees, the animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land?  As the long-forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors.  That is when the invaders of the North American continent will finally discover that for this land, God is red.

Ken Phillips will now share some words with us.

 

 

 

 

 

The violence in us (sermon) Good Friday April 18, 2014

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Sermon – April 18, 2014
The Rev. Rebecca S. Myers, CSW
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Corbin, KY
Good Friday

Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe. …. So they took Jesus; and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. There they crucified him….  John 19:1-2, 16-18

I’ll never forget the day and you probably won’t either.  I had a terrible feeling as I left my apartment that day on my way to work.  I worked nearby and had an upcoming board meeting.  It was the first board meeting with the new board members.  It was a 2-day meeting with orientation, dinner, and business.  And it was my 4th year of organizing this meeting, so I was an “old pro,” as the saying goes.  Yet, I felt so uneasy.

I was absorbed in my work, when a staff member came to tell me a plane had flown into the World Trade Center.  We went to the board room and turned on the TV, only to see smoke pouring from a building in Washington DC.  We were 3 hours from New York City and 2 hours from DC.  I had visited both cities many times.  My brother lived in New York and you could see the Towers from his apartment building.  My daughter was living on Long Island.  My children and I had visited those Towers many times over the years.  It was one of our favorite destinations in New York.  And that tragedy of that day midst a beautiful, sunny September continued to unfold.  Such terrifying violence that dramatically changed our lives. 

The days and weeks ahead were filled not only with grief and fear and responding to disaster, but also with how we would respond.  Personally, I thought about violence in the world and ways in which I had participated in violence against other people.  That’s what Good Friday asks of us…to look deep within our hearts and see where we have inflicted violence on others.  Where have I inflicted harm?  Where have I been forcibly vehement?

It’s much easier to look at a nation or at others to see how they are violent.  It’s much easier to be the victim of violence in some respects.  But to look squarely at ourselves and to see where we have crucified Jesus…where we have been part of the mob or even a mob of one…is much harder.

I catch myself rushing through the grocery store, intent on the things I need…acknowledging no other human being, but being only exasperated when they are in my way.  Truly, most of us want to be seen…to be acknowledged as human beings…and this rushing to accomplish my agenda, whether it’s in the store, or in an email, does not see the other person, which is a violent act. 

I get frustrated with customer service and before I know it, I’m yelling.  I do try to remember the people answering the phones did not create the systems or processes that are causing me trouble.  I work hard to be firm, yet kind.  And sometimes I can no longer do it and I’m saying all sorts of things. 

I once saw a demonstration about the violence of words.  A woman running a workshop I attended picked the biggest, strongest person out of the group.  She had him hold his arms out and tried to push them down.  She could not do it.  Then she spent 5-10 minutes saying terrible things to him…how he was weak and couldn’t do anything.  When he held out his arms again, she easily pushed them down. 

Yet in our inherent self-centeredness, whether as individuals or as a community, we obsess about who has treated us wrong and who has treated us unjustly.  We plot how to get revenge.  Some of this is out of fear that we will be hurt.  In truth, in our fear and self-centeredness, we have shut out the voice of God.

And here comes Jesus on this most violent of days…dying in the most violent of ways and he shows us the power of nonviolence.  He barely speaks during his trial.  He forgives the people who are harming him.  He takes care of his mother.  He hangs in pain on that cross…enduring an agonizing death.  He does not respond with violence.  He does not respond with revenge.  He does not create a feud that will go on forever.  He loves. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a strong advocate of nonviolence.  He said many things about it, but here’s one from his book, Stride Toward Freedom,

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.  Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Towards Freedom

At the National Prayer Service on September 14, 2001, then Dean, Now Bishop Nathan Baxter said, Let us pray that as we act, we not become the evil we deplore.  Representative Barbara Lee from California heard those words and took her faith seriously.  She stood on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and was the only member of Congress to vote against going to war as a response to the tragedy.  While others also felt the resolution was flawed, they were too afraid to speak up.  Violent revenge was the only response many of us could see.  While ultimately war might have needed to occur, both Dean Baxter and Representative Lee were telling us to wait.  

In Romans 12:17-21 Paul reminds us of Jesus teaching:  17Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. 18If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.19Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God;* for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ 20No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ 21Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

 

Today is the day we bend the knee of our heart and examine where we have been violent and where we have participated in violence.  It is the day to recommit ourselves to the love of God through the witness of the nonviolent Jesus Christ, hanging on that cross.  

Amen