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You are here: Home / Archives for MLK

5 Pentecost 2022: Dig Deeper

July 10, 2022 by Cam Miller

This is a real sermon this week.
By that, I mean
standing back
and letting the texts
speak for themselves
without a lot of interpretation
or 21st century chiropractic adjustment.
Of course, it isn’t every week
I have Martin Luther King, Jr. helping me out.

Just as the culture has secularized Christmas
and Easter,
we have secularized
The REV. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
He’s known as DR. King these days,
when not MLK.
People forget he was
a preacher by profession first,
and then of course, a prophet
by his actions
and his sacrifices.
The secular world —

which is largely an economic arena
in which people and things
are monetized
to measure their value —
doesn’t really have a way of measuring
the value of preachers and prophets
so they just don’t mention them.

But because they teach this speech in schools,
almost everyone in the USA
knows the “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech —
even though it was as much sermon.

It was delivered
on the eve of the Memphis
sanitation worker’s strike,
a civil action that King was warned
not to attend or participate in,
but that he felt compelled to do.

So even though he didn’t know it,
the sermon he preached that night
and what he said,
turned out to really about him.
He stopped
to help the man on the road
and was killed for it —
which of course, he noted,
the priest and Levite
were precisely afraid of.

But King’s last speech
was indeed a sermon
and I will prove it
by reading some of it to you.
It is better than anything
I could tell you about the Good Samaritan story.
In a couple of paragraphs
King nails it.

So, this is an excerpt
from The REV. Martin Luther King’s sermon
on April 3, 1968
at Mason Temple, which
was the Church of God in Christ
headquarters in Memphis.

King says this:
“Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

One day a man came to Jesus, and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters of life. At points he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew and throw him off base….

Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho.

And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn’t stop to help him.

And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thou,” and to be concerned about his brother.

Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn’t stop. At times we say they were busy going to a church meeting, an ecclesiastical gathering, and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn’t be late for their meeting.

At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that “One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony.”

And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem — or down to Jericho, rather to organize a “Jericho Road Improvement Association.” That’s a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect.

But I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that those men were afraid.

You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, “I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable.” It’s a winding, meandering road. It’s really conducive for ambushing.

You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles — or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you’re about 2200 feet below sea level. That’s a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the “Bloody Pass.”

And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over at that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure.

And so the first question that the priest asked — the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

I don’t know if you
feel like I do
when I read that sermon,

but it calls me into a kinship
with Rev. King
that is intimate —
as intimate as we are
sitting around this worship space.
Maybe it is because I am a preacher too,
but to me, it is like seeing the ordinary
in the midst of the extraordinary
and realizing the sacred
has been there all along.
Because, you see,
it is just an ordinary old sermon
about a story we have heard a thousand times,
and he reminds us of what it is about
in ways both unique to him —
to his stature —
and also as familiar and cozy
as old shoe to us church-goers.
It is familiar old church-talk
and a familiar old story
wrapped in an extraordinary moment
that the whole world
would come to know
and remember.

He was one of us,
just an old preacher
doing what Christians do
when they tell a story that is primal to the memory
of what we are all about.
So this story

it is now a touchstone
to a man who did what Jesus did —
died for us
or because of us.
Died because he asked
the right question
instead of, “What will happen to me?”

The irony of course,
is that the Good Samaritan story
was all about race —
even though race didn’t exist in Jesus’ day.
Race is, of course,
a made up construct
to monetize people and enslave them.

But in Jesus’ day
there was indeed, historic hatred
between Judeans and Galileans
and people from Samaria.

It was a hatred that went back centuries
to the civil war that divided Israel
when Israel had actually existed as a nation.
So it works
as a story about racism
even though race didn’t exist yet,
because it is about crossing the stupid boundaries
human beings erect
for selfish and evil purposes.
Then there is Amos.

Amos might be my favorite prophet
but we don’t get to hear from him much
in the Revised Common Lectionary.
He is perhaps the first
of the great prophets
and gets buried under the amazing
poetry of Micah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah.
But Amos adds a perfect bookend
to the Good Samaritan story,
framed by Martin Luther King, Jr. on the other side.
The thing about Amos
is that he wasn’t a prophet.
He was a migrant worker —
the guy who picked fruit in the orchard
or vineyard.

He was out doing his work one day
and God, out of no where,
told him to go to the northern kingdom
of Israel, and prophesy
against the king up there.
Amos,
a lowly peasant laborer
was to go into another territory
and preach
to the king of another tribe,
a sermon
that that king
would not like.

Come to think of it,
that is not unlike
what Martin Luther King, Jr. did.
He was preaching to white clergy
and white church folks
about something
we did not like to hear.

Anyway, this bit we read from Amos today
is him telling King Jeroboam
that his whole kingdom would be smashed
and he, the king, would die.

The king and his kingdom
was a wall
that the the plumbline of righteousness
showed to be falling down.

Think about it.
It is kind of like God showing up
in front of that guy who is our neighbor
who sits out on the front step smoking cigarettes.
It is as if God would tell him
to go to the Supreme Court
and say God has issued a judgement
upon those nine robed vectors.
First of all,
he couldn’t get near those nine justices.
And the only way Amos
got near King Jeroboam was through trickery.

That is another part of the story I really like
but we’ll have to save it
for another day.

Anyway, the Revised Common Lectionary
played a trick on us this week.
By pairing Amos
with the Good Samaritan
it makes it impossible
to romanticize the Good Sam story
as if it is just another example
of Jesus being a nice guy.

Amos being sent
to be a truth-teller
of hard truths
even into the court of a king
stands this Samaritan story up
to be the tough
hard truth that it is.

The people Jesus was telling the story to
hated Samaritans
the way some white folks
hate anyone who isn’t white.
Or like any one of us
who hate anyone
who we don’t think
should be allowed to be
in the United States.
Or hate anyone — anyone —
and then act it out
socially, politically, or economically.

It is a story
told against hate,
and told against righteous indignation
and told against,
anyone with a sense of moral superiority.

Our wall isn’t straight
and we are falling down
if we are built on hatred,
or built on keeping people out,
or built on keeping people down,
or built on holding people back,
or built on seeing any other human being
as somehow less than
or signficantly different than
we are.

When the question we ask
is what will happen to him or her
if I do not act,
then any presumed
and ridiculous boundary or border
between us
is stripped away.

What will happen
to him
or her
or them
if I do not act?
Just that one question
narrows the boundaries
we have drawn or been given
and gets us close
to being the neighbor
Jesus invites us to be.

“We shall love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul,
and with all our strength, and with all our mind;
and our neighbor as ourselves.”

So if we are here
saying to ourselves,
”Well I don’t hate anyone,”
dig a little deeper.

If we are here
saying to ourselves,
”Well I don’t keep any boundaries
between myself and
any other socio-economic,
racial, or ethnic group,”
dig a little deeper.

If we are here
saying to ourselves,
”Well I wouldn’t be afraid
to go help a downed Samaritan,”
dig a little deeper.

That is part of what we are meant to do
as a spiritual community
gathered in the name of Jesus:
dig a little deeper
in thought, word, and deed.

Any group that has the chutzpah
to gather
and invite
Amos, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesus
to preach to them,
has the Chutzpah
to dig deeper
and to measure itself
with a plumbline
of righteousness.

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5 Easter: No Spiritual Secrets

May 14, 2017 by Cam Miller

TEXTS for Preaching

Acts 7:55-60

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Stephen gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he died.

Excerpt from a speech by The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If a man happens to be 36 years old, as I happen to be, and some great truth stands before the door of his life, some great opportunity to stand up for that which is right and that which is just, and he refuses to stand up because he wants to live a little longer…or he is afraid he will lose his job…he may go on and live until he’s 80, and the cessation of breathing in his life is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

We die when we refuse to stand up for that which is right. A person dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true. So we are going to stand up right here…letting the world know we are determined to be free.

Gospel of John 14:1-14

Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”

Sermon

Honestly, I forgot we used this excerpt
from Martin Luther King back in January,

but I thought of it for today as a companion piece
to that reading from Acts about the stoning of Stephen.

This story from Acts has always bothered me.
I once served a “St. Stephen’s” congregation,
and so had to contend with it on a regular basis.

The problem, you see, is that Stephen
was called to be a deacon not a preacher.
The church made a big deal out of him
being the first martyr – after Jesus of course –
but he wasn’t called to preach to people,
which is what got him killed.
Stephen’s mission was to make sure
the many widows and orphans
who were supported by his community
received equal benefits.
His was a service role,
but instead he took it upon himself to preach,
and it was his preaching that got him stoned to death.

Now it seems laughable today,
in the church in the United States of America,
that someone could get killed simply for preaching –

because, honestly,
few people take preachers very seriously anymore.
But then we remember
that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a preacher,
and millions of people took him very seriously –
but then he was an organizer as well as preacher.

If a man or woman happens to be 36 years old,
or 23 or 89
or 16 or 48,
and some great truth stands before the door
of his or her life,
some great opportunity to stand up
for that which is right and that which is just,
and he or she refuses to stand up
in order to live a little longer –
or hold onto a reputation,
or maintain a quiet life no one will notice,
or keep the friendship of people who might be offended,
or make a dollar that might be lost,
or suffer humiliating scorn or harassment from peers,
or any number of small but powerful reasons
that could cause our hands to cramp
and our feet to stand still…

Then that person may go on living until eighty
and be wonderfully well known
and greatly respected
and be comfortable and affluent,
but the cessation of breathing
at the end of his or her life,
will be merely the belated announcement
of an earlier death of the spirit.

Oh, Rev. King, you knew us so well
and described us so eloquently.

Here it a naked truth:
There is no secret spiritual wisdom.

Truly, there is no secret spiritual wisdom
hidden for us to find
or waiting to be delivered to us by Yoda,
or suddenly to arrive in a blinding vision.

What there is to know, we know.
The profound and enduring spiritual wisdom
some people spend a lifetime searching for
is already known to us.

BUT, and there is always a catch, isn’t there?

But for whatever reason,
we have a hard time hearing and learning
and remembering the wisdom
that is available to us as a guide to shape our lives.

We have amazing wisdom at our fingertips.

It is ancient wisdom
that millions and millions of others before us
have learned
and forgotten
and re-learned
and passed on to us.

It is written in our own lives,
and with poetry
and in Scripture.
It is sung among the music of the ages
and written or told
over and over and over again
in chapels, caves,
ashrams, sweat lodges,
cathedrals,
and temples all over the world.

In every dusty waterless place
and every frozen treeless tundra
where human beings eek out a living,
the not-so-secret wisdom is shared.

In today’s excerpt from Rev. King,
and whispering between the lines
of Jesus’ farewell prayer,
is a powerful thread of the filament
weaving a web of wisdom
we work so hard to forget or deny.

It is simply this:
What we are desperate to hold onto
we will lose with all the more cruelty;
and that which we cherish but refuse to clutch,
will flourish even without us.

As frequently warned throughout the gospels,
Jesus said,
“Those who want to save their life will lose it,
and those who lose their life for the kingdom,
will save it.”
Or, “what does it profit us
if we gain the whole world
yet forfeit our lives?”

It is the same thing we hear in Rev. King’s refrain:
“the cessation of breathing at the end of his or her life,
will be merely the belated announcement
of an earlier death of the spirit.”

You see, this is something we know
deep in our heart of hearts
where the hard truths we have lived
are stored, even when forgotten.

And we do forget it,
and bury it,
and deny it;
we who are so fretful about loss;
we, who are so prone to grabbing whatever we can get;
we, who are so well trained to clutch.

The understandable fear of loss,
if it guides our lives, will kill us
and as is so often true,
Jesus stands in contrast to our fear.

This excerpt from John’s gospel today
is from the so-called “Farewell Discourse.”
Oddly, as weepy and sorrowful as Jesus gets
at many points on his journey to the cross,
this long, fond farewell
is neither maudlin nor anxious.

He is on the dock
and without hesitation
he chooses to step off the life he has known
onto the boat of his future
without knowing where it will land.
He does not try to straddle
with a foot on both
until he has to jump one way or another.
He steps forward and leaves the other behind.

He is not naive.
He is not Pollyanna.
He is not a pie-in-the-sky preacher
spouting wishful thinking.
Rather, he is rock hard;
a life-toughened muscular prophet of God’s love.

He knows what he is asking of his friends
and he makes no excuses for it.
No more than Rev. King does.
No more than Harriet Tubman did.
No more than any fierce lover of God facing that choice.
They all know what we also know in our heart of hearts:
Clutch and we lose,
release what we have known
in favor of the risk to affirm
where the love of God beckons us,
and we live.

It is not rocket science;
it is not science at all, it is wisdom –
spiritual wisdom.

Here is one small example
of how and where you and I face this a choice.

It is an obvious if humble example
of how Christians
in a post-modern or secular culture,
clutch what was
or release it and move forward to what will be –
even if we do not yet know what it will be.

I grew up in a city
and at a time
when the Klu Klux Klan held a night parade
replete with torches and a burning cross.
They had a way and a truth and a life,
and they even had Jesus
(according to them).

Like many if not most of you,
I grew up in a culture in which homosexuals
and transsexuals
were openly harassed, humiliated, and beat up.
No one seemed to have a problem with it either.
In fact, some forms of their sexual intimacy
were actually illegal.
In those days, in the culture at large,
we had a way and truth and a life,
and we had Jesus,
(or so we claimed).

I grew up in a church, an Episcopal one,
in which women could cook and wash dishes
but they could not be deacons, priests, or bishops.
You better believe that we had
a way and a truth and a life
and we had Jesus as our own.

All those truths,
so fiercely held onto by so many Christians.
Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life
as long as he is our way, and our truth, and our life.

Truth can be highly over-rated like that –
something with bloody barbs
when we expected sustenance.

Who would ever have thought,
back in those days,
that Jesus would have,
or could have,
changed so doggone much?
When we had the way and the truth and the life,
we had no idea
it was a changing way,
and a slippery truth,
and a temporary life.

I mean, think about it.

We had Thomas Aquinas,
and St. Anselm,
and Richard Hooker, Karl Barth, and Paul Tillich.
We had a whole bunch of ecclesiastical councils too,
that declared creeds and doctrines
and the shape and limits of truth.
Almost all of those pronouncements
were once and for all,
and for all time!
God does not change
and truth does not change
and the facts don’t lie,
and we had them all.

But then some quarrelsome people
started asking niggling questions
and those questions began to unravel the whole thing.

That dogma and doctrine, for example,
and even that foundational creed,
was written and voted on well before it was decided,
once and for all,
that actually the sun does NOT orbit the earth
but instead, the earth orbits the sun.

That is like discovering as a grown man or woman
that you have lived all your previous years
standing upside down, and now,
suddenly, everything is right side up!
Even so, you refuse to allow it to change what you see.

That kind of reversal and re-arranging of truth
kept happening over the centuries.
Somewhere toward the second half of the 20th century
we began to get the uneasy feeling
that perhaps we had been looking at the Bible
upside down too.
We began to wonder,
and to actually recognize and see,
that all of our previous interpretations of Scripture
were through a rather narrow and scripted lens.
From the perspective of the late 20th century
we began to understand that our view
of Judaism and Jesus
had been distorted by our
white, male, European Colonialist assumptions.

What happens, we began to wonder,
if we read Isaiah and Luke
and John and Paul
from the perspective of a Salvadoran peasant,
or a South African Zulu living under Apartheid?
Will we hear the same things in what we read?
Actually, no.

What happens, we began to ask,
if we listened to the teachings of Jesus
from a Womanist, or 21st century American Feminist perspective?
Will we hear the same things in what we read?
Actually, no.

What does it do to our traditional assumptions
regarding what Jesus did and taught,
if we view them from the perspective
of an Egyptian Christian
resisting an authoritarian regime,
instead of an affluent middle class American
living undisturbed by the police
and isolated from poverty?
Well, actually, it changes everything.

What happens to our uniform understanding
of Christian theology
and Biblical scholarship
rooted in the 19th and 20th centuries,
when it is undercut by an almost monthly
archeological discovery
calling into question
earlier methods of scholarship and ideas?

What happens when we are told
that the beloved King James Version of the Bible
is actually a pretty bad translation?

It is in those moments
we learn to parse wisdom from mere perspective,
or we retreat into resistance.

It is in climbing out of our own special perspective
and standing in someone else’s perspective for a bit,
that the wisdom woven through Scripture and tradition
begins to make itself known.

Do we hold onto our truth for dear life,
as if it is the only thing that will keep us from drowning
in the brutality of an on-coming tsunami?
Or do we let it go;
hoping against hope
that surrender to the torrent
will reveal a new, deeper, truer wisdom?

That is where we stand in 2017
as we listen again to Jesus’ farewell,
and Martin Luther King’s poignant challenge,
and read what happened to Stephen
when he lost track of his mission.

I have no doubt that you and I face
the challenge of clutch or release
in many arenas of our own lives,
and whenever we face it,
our true life, if not our breath, hangs in the balance.

But as Christians,
and as Trinity Episcopal Church in Geneva, NY,
we face this challenge to our faith as individuals
and as a congregation.

Clutch or release:
hold onto what we have known
or step forward in faith not yet knowing
where the boat is going.

We have the ancient wisdom we need
in order to unclench our fists,
and open our arms
and step into the boat.

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Trinity Place

 Trinity Place, An Open Space for Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts

“Open Space” means open and inclusive, welcoming the Geneva and FLX community to use our space, and to partner with us in building an inclusive community for spiritual inquiry and wellness. 

“Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts” means we are pointed toward a particular dimension of life, specifically that which strengthens the relationship of body, mind, and spirit. 

Trinity is a Christian community of worship and spiritual practice welcoming all, and an Episcopal Church in particular. However, we welcome all spiritual traditions and those who have no particular spiritual background but are engaged in a mission consistent with ours. We are looking for partners in mission not members (although we love to welcome new members too).

 

 

 

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