Scripture: Matthew 5:38-48
I have to say at the outset that Timmie Jones is responsible for a good portion of this sermon, so if it doesn’t go so well, blame her! I’ll explain what Timmie has to do with the sermon in just a moment, and part of that will have to do with the picture we have on our screen this morning, what it is and why I wanted to include it. But the sermon actually has several strands to it that relate to each other, at least in my mind, and I guess my approach this morning is going to be to just try to tell you about how the sermon came to be, the various pieces and concerns that have gone into it, and in the process of telling you that story, I’ll say what I have to say today.
After last week, when I focused quite a bit on how scripture can be used and misused and abused, when even my sermon title was “Holy (and Unholy) Scripture”, I decided that I should do something this week that presented scripture in a little more of a favorable light. I wanted to say a few things that may have been understood in what I was saying last week, but I wanted to say them again more directly and clearly this week. For one thing I wanted to say that the title of the sermon last week notwithstanding, I do not consider scripture itself to be unholy, but it can be put to unholy purposes. It is the way it is used, and the way that it is interpreted, that can be a problem. And everyone interprets scripture, even people who think they are taking it literally. And one of the problems in pretending that scripture can be taken literally, and then proceeding to draw unholy conclusions from that supposedly literal reading, is that it can turn people away from the Bible altogether. And, as I did say last week, that distresses me. I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want the Christian community to disown or devalue its sacred writings. And so I wanted to offer up some different kinds of examples than the one I was talking about last week.
Let me try to tell quickly a personal example that’s a little bit off point, but that relates to this. One summer I was taking a crash course in German so I could pass the German language exam for my graduate studies. One of the things the teacher did was to pass out little books on various subjects, written in easy German that might help us learn the language but also a little something about German history or culture. One of the books was about Albert Schweitzer, maybe best known as a missionary in Africa and for some Christian writings and a major study of the life of Jesus, which he did while he was practicing medicine in Africa. But what I learned from the book was that prior to becoming a missionary and a theologian, Schweitzer had been famous even as a young man as a musician, an organist, an expert in the music of Bach both in his knowledge of Bach and his performance of Bach’s music. A fantastically successful career in music seemed guaranteed to Schweitzer. But his life was changed as a result of reading the Bible, specifically the part of Matthew 25 that says, “Lord, when did we see thee hungry and gave thee food?…When did we see thee a stranger and we welcomed thee? When was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited thee?” And the response came: “Insofar as you did it unto the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.” As a result of reading this, the book said, Schweitzer’s life was changed. The Bible led him to put aside a successful career and begin another career in medicine for the purpose of going to Africa. It wasn’t that the Bible gave him some clear command, wasn’t that he did what he did because the Bible told him to do it and he saluted and obeyed. It was just that as a result of his encounter with the Bible, something was laid on his heart that he could not ignore, and that led him in a totally new direction. Now I will say in all honesty that I realize the book may have romanticized reality a bit, but the way the story was told affected me and opened up that thought of ways in which the Bible positively affects people at a time when I was trying to figure out my own relationship to the Bible. And since then I have read about and known personally many other examples of people acting with great love and selflessness, and being led, encouraged, guided, supported, and nurtured in doing so by the scriptures. That kind of thought was in my head going into this week and as I began to think about this week’s sermon.
In the meantime, there had been a worship committee meeting, and at that meeting Timmie had mentioned that she had seen a DVD recently about the sculptor, Maya Lin, who is the person who designed the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, and Timmie mentioned that she had also the been the designer of a civil rights memorial in Montgomery that was worth seeing. I know some of you have seen it in person. Alice has family history connected to Montgomery and has visited there, maybe others have too. I had to settle for looking it up on the internet, and when I did I decided I should use it as a visual aid this morning. The quote on the wall, “…until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream…” is attributed to Martin Luther King, because he used that phrase in the March on Washington speech and many other places, and maybe the exact words are his, but of course he is quoting from the book of Amos, chapter 5, where the prophet speaks for God, saying, “I hate, I despise your festivals (your religious holidays), and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies (your worship services)…Take away from me the noise of your songs…But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”
The flat circle you see has the names of 44 people who were killed in the struggle for justice between 1954 (Brown vs. Bd. Of Education) and 1968 (the death of Martin Luther King). A thin veil of water continuously flows over the memorial to symbolize the words of Amos, “let justice roll down like water”. Besides just being of interest in its own right, the memorial stood for just what I’ve been saying that I felt I needed to emphasize this morning. That scripture from Amos, and many others, inspired the civil rights movement in many ways and at many levels. When the young minister in his first pastorate, fresh out of seminary, not yet Dr. King, still working on his Ph.D., had doubts about whether the Montgomery Improvement Association was the right thing to do, he spent a night in prayer and with his Bible. Scripture kept him going. And he was to use it, in the best sense of the word, he was to invoke scripture on countless occasions to keep other people going, to inspire them, to give them hope, to console them, and to remind them that justice was not just their dream but was also God’s dream.
Another reason I’m putting that memorial with the quote from Amos before us today is that it comes from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, and I want to make clear that I was not saying last week that the Old Testament has all these awful things in it, and the New Testament corrects all that. There are some difficult things in the New Testament, and some beautiful inspiring things in the Old Testament. Martin Luther King was inspired by the words of Jesus, as we shall see, and by the words of Amos. It is not so much a matter of which parts of the Bible we are looking at as it is the spirit with which we approach the Bible and what we hope to receive from the scriptures. Jesus’ own words can be turned to uncompassionate purposes just as much as words from Genesis or Leviticus.
At the worship committee Timmie also had a quote from Martin Luther King that she wanted to pass on to me, just in case it would be of interest to me for today or maybe for sometime in Black History month or maybe just sometime, anytime. It turns out that this quote, which we also heard this morning, had been read in connection with a sermon given by the founding minister of Little River UCC in Annandale in Northern Virginia, a sermon in which he told the story of Little River’s early days. Timmie later gave me the full sermon I found the story both interesting and inspiring. It turns out that racial themes are very much a part of the story of this sister church of ours, and I decided it would be a good thing for us to hear part of that story this morning. Timmie was a member of Little River before coming to Charlottesville and was part of that history and I asked her if she would tell us some of that story herself. She said she would, and so I’ll turn the floor over to her for a few minutes…
So you see I wanted to put in a good word for scripture this morning, and when I read the story of Little River, I wanted to put in a good word for this sister church of ours, or have Timmie put in the good word for us. It’s a story that helped me to feel my spiritual kinship to this other UCC congregation and I think you would have to say a story that’s appropriate to lift up on this Sunday of Martin Luther King Day. And that brings me to the last piece of this sermon that is a bit scattered, I admit, but that all goes together in my mind, maybe not so much in yours.
When Rev. Beckwith, the founding pastor of Little River, gave his sermon recounting some of the early days of the church, one of the readings he chose was from a book by Dr. King called Stride Toward Freedom, which basically told the story of the Montgomery bus boycott. It was a reading from Dr. King, but it also served in a way as a reading from scripture, or at least a commentary on scripture, partly on the scripture we heard earlier. It’s not too long. Let’s listen to that reading as well.
“Christian love is not a weak and passive love. It is love in action. Christian love is love seeking to preserve and create community…Christian love is a willingness to go to any length to restore community. It doesn’t stop at the first mile but goes the second mile to restore community. It is a willingness to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven to restore community. The cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community…The holy spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history…Therefore if I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate, I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in the broken community. I can only close the gap in broken community by meeting hate with love. If I meet hate with hate, I become depersonalized, because creation is so designed that my personality can only be fulfilled in the context of community…”
Now you see what this does is provide a segue for me back into the theme of “the teachings of Jesus”, which I was doing in the fall and promised to get back to after Christmas. One of the passages I knew I would have to get back to, that I hadn’t dealt with yet, is the one for today from the Sermon on the Mount, about (among other things) loving your enemy (not just your neighbor but your enemy), turning the other cheek, going the second mile and so forth, sayings that Dr. King referred to in the passage we just heard. The way he referred to them is helpful for me, and I am going to make just a few comments today and come back to this next week.
As noble as the sentiments in that passage may seem to some—about loving the enemy and turning the other cheek—and I think there are quite a few people who don’t even look on them as noble sentiments—but even if they do seem noble, they raise a lot of questions too, don’t they? We know that when Dr. King put those particular teachings of Jesus into practice in the civil rights movement, there were a lot of questions raised along the way. Is it realistic to expect people not to fight back when pushed to the extreme? Is it even right to expect people who have been abused to continue to accept the abuse with not even the threat of retaliation? And civil rights movement or no civil rights movement, isn’t this a lot for Jesus to ask of us? And is it always even the right thing to ask of us?
As I say, the Rev. Dr. King’s words are helpful for me in relating to this set of teachings of Jesus. They put what Jesus says in a context. It is not just a question of establishing some moral code that we are supposed to follow. It is not just a question of what we are supposed to do if we want to be good men and women, or good Christians. Don’t strike back. Go the second mile. Turn the other cheek. Love your enemies. If you do, you’re a good person. If you don’t, you’re not such a good person. It’s not a question of being good or not so good. It’s not a question of what the right or the wrong thing to do would be in some abstract sense. For Dr. King, what’s at stake here is human community. For Dr. King, what’s at stake here is the beloved community. For Dr. King what’s at stake here is the current brokenness of our human communities and the need to restore community, the need to mend the brokenness, the need to strain toward the beloved community. For me this takes away the moralistic tone to what Jesus said, not that he intended to be moralistic, but I think we often provide the moralistic part ourselves. We hear some voice in our head that says, “now, now, don’t strike back, don’t have those feelings about that person; it’s not nice; it’s not Christian; we’re supposed to love our enemies.” That sort of thing. But for me if the beloved community is not just Dr. King’s dream but is Christ’s dream and is God’s dream, then these teachings of Jesus begin to have a more compelling claim on me. Because I do want to strain toward community, community among God’s children, which is part of what I believe it means to strain towards God, period. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 18, 2009