Scripture: Luke 5:1-11
This sermon begins where last week’s ended. I said then that I had some more to say, which I do. I also have some places to go this morning that I didn’t know about last week. This is a sermon about knees.
I said last week that several Sojourners had said to me, independently, that they felt we needed to be more prayerful in our congregational life, especially as we move through happy but necessarily stressful times, changing locations and taking on large financial obligations, and all the things that are involved in our current transitioning. One of the people who said that to me was Archie. And, if you were there one Sunday some weeks ago, you probably remember that he said this to all of us. And to emphasize the point, he talked about getting down on our knees to pray—in other words being more serious about it than saying a few words that sound sort of like a prayer and letting it go at that.
At that time Archie recalled for us a sermon that he had heard Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright give once. (An aside for people who don’t know: Jeremiah Wright is the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. It is the largest church in the United Church of Christ, but its size is not the point. People always talk how large it is, but we really ought to talk about how many people have found a new direction for their lives with the help of Trinity, how many African American youth have gone to college with the help of Trinity, how many talented people have found their way into the ministry because of their involvement at Trinity. We ought to talk about their strong social witness and the fact that this church can be very Afro-Centric and at the same time welcoming of people from all different backgrounds. And we ought to talk about how Trinity has hung in with the UCC even though it didn’t always feel it was treated fairly by the UCC. All that’s an aside, but I just felt I had to say today.) Back to what Archie was saying…He said that he had once heard a sermon by Jeremiah Wright where he was exhorting folks to get down on their knees and pray, in fact where, if I understood Archie right, he was on his knees himself pleading with people to pray from their knees. I’m not going to do that. I don’t have the kind of flair that Jeremiah Wright does, and my sermon will have to be quite different from his. To paraphrase a famous line from a vice-presidential debate, I have met Jeremiah Wright, and, friends, let me tell you, I am no Jeremiah Wright. I have great admiration for him, but I will have to be myself, which partly means preaching about knees from a standing position.
Archie’s comment is not the only thing that led me to think about knees for this morning. Yesterday, as we acknowledged earlier, was the birthday of Martin Luther King. January 15, 1929 was his birth day. He would have been 76 yesterday. I decided this year, as my own personal way of observing Dr. King’s birthday, to re-read a biography I own of Dr. King. So often it seems to me we reduce Dr. King’s life to one day and one speech, “I Have a Dream”. Sometimes we add a few other tidbits: the Nobel Prize, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, maybe the Selma to Montgomery march. I wanted a more complete reminder. Even though I had read through a biography before, and even though I am old enough to have lived through those twelve-thirteen years from Montgomery to Memphis, I just felt the need to go back over it again. So I re-read this biography as a kind of devotional exercise.
There was a particular part that struck me. The book was describing a march. There were lots of marches, of course, and I’m not sure which one it was. I think maybe one in Birmingham, though it could have been in Selma or Albany or St. Augustine or any of a number of other places. There was a confrontation. The marchers came to a point where their way was blocked by a thick wall of policemen with clubs and maybe firemen with hoses and someone in charge like Bull Connor or Al Lingo. The leaders of the march, including Dr. King, walked up to the sheriffs or chiefs of police, whoever they were, and said they were coming through, and they were told they were not coming through, and after they went back and forth about this for a short time, the marchers did something strange. They knelt down in prayer.
Now this was not the only time this happened, where at some time of great tension demonstrators might begin to pray, maybe even falling to their knees to do so, but this particular description caught my attention for whatever reason. On the one hand, as I say, it was not at all unusual or surprising. What better to do at a time of tension and danger than to pray? On the other hand, the knees part started me thinking, thinking that there was a lot more going on there than meets the eye.
So I’m picturing the scene. Here were a whole bunch of black folks praying. If you couldn’t hear what they saying, you could see what they were doing. Down on their knees being religious, just like white people had been trying to teach them to be all their lives. Just stick to religion. Don’t worry about changing the world. What’s a little trouble on earth compared to the rewards of heaven anyway. So be good, that is obey the laws and don’t cause any trouble, and then if you believe in Jesus and say your prayers you can spend eternity in a nice place, maybe not quite as nice as where the white people will be in eternity, but a pretty nice place nonetheless (pardon the sarcasm). So here were these black people kneeling in prayer, being obviously religious, just like they were supposed to be, except that they weren’t just like they were supposed to be, and they weren’t doing what they were supposed to be doing, and they weren’t being good like they were supposed to be good. Religion could no longer be counted on to be the friend of the status quo. The world as it is, the known world was coming undone—because of prayer.
I continue to imagine the scene. Here are a bunch of black people kneeling in front of a bunch of white people, just like it’s supposed to be. White people in charge, in control. White people in the position of power. White people above the black people, looking down on black people. Black people knowing their place, being in a position of begging from white people, acknowledging the authority of white people, like a subject kneeling before a king. Black people kneeling is the social system we live under. It’s our way of life. It’s the way things are supposed to be. Except this was not the way it’s supposed to be. Black people were kneeling but they were definitely not acknowledging the authority of white people and they weren’t acting like they knew their place. The world as it is, the known world was coming undone—because of prayer.
I continue to think about being on your knees. I think of how vulnerable it makes you to be on your knees. You can’t protect yourself very well when you’re on your knees. You certainly can’t move very fast when you’re on your knees to get out of the way of the water from a fire hose or a blow from a policeman’s club. When you’re on your knees you’re pretty much at the mercy of anyone who might want to do you harm. And so here were these marchers on their knees right in front of a lot of people who were not committed to non-violence and who were more than happy to do some harm to people. In a way being on your knees in front of people could be seen as an act of submission, but not this time. The people made themselves vulnerable all right, but they were not submissive. And their actions said not that they accepted their position of vulnerability but that they would not be intimidated by it. It dramatized the unequal power that was there every day and that they were now saying was not gonna “turn ‘em round”. It was not an act of submission but an act of defiance. The world as it is, the known world can come undone— because of this kind of prayer.
Then I start thinking too about what being on your knees symbolizes to me in other ways, outside the context of the civil rights movement. Maybe kneeling by its very nature is a counter-cultural thing. In a fast-paced, results-oriented, excitement-oriented society that values productivity, aggressiveness, salesmanship, and shows of strength, the idea of kneeling it seems to me is profoundly counter-cultural. It forces us to be still. (As I say, you don’t move very fast while you’re on your knees.) And it allows us to do things we might otherwise not think or take time to do. Like listen. And like grieve.
You understand, in all this I am not talking literally so much, not talking about kneeling in a literal, physical sense, though of course I’m not excluding that possibility. But kneeling in this sense is more a spiritual attitude than a physical posture. It’s just that the image of kneeling is what has been going through my mind and informing what I’m saying here. In any case, when we are in that kneeling position, whether it’s physical or spiritual, I imagine us as being better able to listen because we’re not trying to do something or get somewhere. Listen to the promptings of our hearts, the promptings of God’s spirit within us. We can shut ourselves off from that pretty easily, and do. Listen to the voices of those who are trying to say something to us and not getting through, to the voices of those who have trouble making their voices heard, listen to the voices of people who have something important to say but don’t have the gift of being glib or speaking in sound bites. Listen for the call of God, however that may come to us. And grieve. Grieve for ourselves, the failures we produce day after day, the losses we endure, losses of all kinds—losses of people, losses of opportunities, of abilities, of health, of hope—all kinds of losses. And grieve of course for our world, where there is so much to grieve about that sometimes we’re afraid to get started. It’s important to kneel, if not actually, physically then in some meaningful way spiritually. We don’t listen or grieve very well when we just remembered some important thing we said we would do but didn’t and we’re trying to figure out when we are going to do it. We don’t listen or grieve very well when we’re sitting impatiently at a red light with an eye on the clock to see how late we might be for the appointment we’re going to. We need to kneel in a spiritual sense, and maybe physically, in order to be still and allow ourselves to listen and to grieve. And if in the process we also are able to gather together our courage and begin to imagine a world different from what is, then prayer becomes not so much something that is nice and pious and religious but can become an act of liberation.
Thinking of kneeling, I thought too of the scripture we heard this morning where Peter falls down at the knees of Jesus saying, “Lord, depart from me, for I am a sinful person.” As I read this story, what I hear Peter saying is not that he is a terrible, worthless person in whom there is no good at all, which is not the kind of effect I expect Jesus to have on people. Peter is overwhelmed not by his own awfulness, nor by the miracle Jesus has just performed filling the nets with fish, but because he is in the process of being called by Jesus to tasks, to a faith adventure, that he doesn’t understand and where he doesn’t know what will be required of him and doesn’t know whether he has what it will take. It is hard to be arrogant about what you know or believe or are capable of while on your knees. It is hard to be self-satisfied about what we know, or believe, or are capable of while on our knees. It is appropriate to pray, as the communion hymn suggests: “When I fall down on my knees with my face to the rising sun, O Lord, have mercy on me.” Not because any of us are such awful, miserable creatures, but because though we are not awful or miserable, we do need mercy, every one of us every day, and so does our world in more ways that we can count. O lord, have mercy…
I think of our being on our knees, and I think of our need for mercy. I think, to return to Dr. King for a moment, of our need for mercy because the image of being on our knees reminds me too that in many ways the steps we have taken toward justice have just been baby steps, the kind you take when you are on your knees. Here too, as in the case of following Jesus, we are not in a position to be making any grand claims for ourselves. And that leads me to reflect that being on our knees is not always where we want or need to be. It would be better if we really could stride towards freedom, rather than inching along on our knees.
And when we find ourselves on our knees because we have lost our strength or our will to go on, then may God strengthen our drooping hands and weak knees.
And if some among us are on their knees because society has said that’s where they damn well belong and don’t you dare get up, then may the world as it is come undone and may we do our part in helping it to happen.
If we’re on our knees voluntarily, but we’re praying when we ought to be standing up and marching or speaking out or in some other way standing up for what we believe, then may God get us up off our knees.
But if we’re on our knees because we know that’s where we belong, because it’s where we are best able to listen, and to weep, and to imagine a world that is closer to what is in the heart of God than to the world as it is, then may God bless us and bring us often to that place. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 16, 2005