Scripture: Luke 4:14-30, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13Sermon for Black History Month
Each year, I enter into Black History Month humbly, fully aware that my personal lived experience is different from those in our communities that are of African decent.
And in this month where we honour Black culture and contributions, I am especially mindful of not wanting to fall into cultural appropriation, or tokenism, and I admit, that each year I do hold some apprehension about making mistakes, and falling headlong into my own blind spots.
But this year... this year, any apprehension I felt about preparing this message quickly faded away into gratitude.
Gratitude that I get to serve in a church where there is a growing diversity of background and culture and lived experience, that enriches our ministry, and makes my life so much better for being a part of it.
I am also thankful that I live in a country, while far from being perfect, still seeks to honour the differences amongst us - that still finds pride in its multiculturalism, and sees beauty in the cultural mosaic that is the Canadian people.
I am also very aware, and this has been driven home for me the past couple weeks - perhaps it has for you as well - that we cannot take any of this for granted.
"Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability" and if we do not make very deliberate decisions, it is not just possible, but probable that we will roll backwards.
It's already happening.
KPMG recently published research of 1,000 Canadian professionals who identify as Black, and found that in the past year, 81% of them reported enduring some form of racism or microaggression in their workplace.
81% of Black people experienced racism at work - here in Canada in the past year.
And this backsliding extends to other groups as well.
Homophobia, transphobia, Islamabobia and anti-semitism are all on the rise in our country.
Last week, when the world marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a new study showed that a growing number of Canadians, especially young Canadians, believe the Holocaust has been exaggerated.
The backsliding is real and it is dangerous.
Fomented by certain politicians and propagated by the big tech algorithms, there is a growing, and increasingly rage-filled backlash against any program or policy to level the playing field for historically marginalized groups, contemptuously labelling such efforts as "woke" - a term that originated in Black communities, meaning to wake up, to become aware of the realities of the Black experience, and by extension, any experience that is different from our own.
This awareness is the basis of compassion, and a necessary step in building a just society, and frankly, makes our lives better. How is this not a laudable goal?
But rather than celebrating our differences, and ensuring that all people have opportunities to flourish, too often we are being told by those in places of power to fear - even to hate - that which is different from us.
And there is a real and growing threat of people being radicalized into hate on the social platforms who profit, not from upholding human dignity, but by fuelling our division - where life is presented as a zero-sum game, and for you to win, others must lose - where anger seems to be the only currency that holds any liquidity.
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These past weeks, as I have seen the societal backsliding into our very worst impulses, I will admit to feeling angry, and I fear for what these drastic shifts might mean for us - especially for the most vulnerable amongst us.
Now, as a person of faith, I don't believe that a faith that promises easy answers is much of a faith at all.
Faith is about wrestling with hard things, with the belief that a loving God is with us in the struggle. A God who calls us to be co-workers in bringing God’s Kingdom to earth as it is in heaven - and who gives us tools for this work through community and tradition and scripture.
As our United Church Song of Faith says:
scripture is our song for the journey, the living word passed on from generation to generation to guide and inspire, that we might wrestle a holy revelation for our time and place from the human experiences and cultural assumptions of another era.
We do not live in first century Israel, but by reading these ancient texts each week with open hearts, we do the work of wrestling a holy revelation from them for what we face now.
With this in mind, we we turn now to the 4th chapter in Luke’s gospel, and a moment of such fear and anger, that in just under eight verses, the crowd in Nazareth turns from amazement to murderous - from lauding Jesus as the hometown boy done good, to wanting to throw him off a cliff.
Why? And what can we learn from this?
The story begins with the story of how Jesus began his public ministry. Filled with the Holy Spirit after spending 40 days in the wilderness, he comes home and goes into the synagogue in Nazareth, and opens the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and reads these words:
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."
According to Leviticus, this "year of the Lord's favour" - also known as the Jubilee - is the divine directive where every fiftieth year would be a kind of “reset” for creation as a whole: the land would be given a rest, enslaved people would be set free, debts would be cancelled, and “liberty” would be proclaimed “throughout the land to all its inhabitants.”
The Jubilee would have helped prevent any one of Israel’s groups from becoming dominant over the others. Which would be great news for the vulnerable — and unsettling news for anyone attached to the inequalities and privileges of the status quo.
Now I don't think it's fair to say that those people in Nazareth saw themselves as particularly privileged - they were rural farmers and labourers living under Roman occupation and subject the whims of their vassal kings like Herod.
Their lived experience would have had more than its fair share of pain.
But, as we see in the text, Jesus refuses to make the good news about just this one group of hurt people, even if it is his neighbours.
I think he intuits their desire for exceptionalism, a feeling that they are entitled to a greater share of the bounty - of the Jubilee - because of where they are from and their perceived connection to him.
Perhaps they assumed that "Joseph's kid" would give them a special standing in a golden age or an inside track to the winners’ circle in the zero-sum game of life that they felt tired of losing.
Jesus, I believe, senses this presumption and brings it out into the open by referencing two stories of prophets who bless not insiders but outsiders - something central to the teachings of Torah.
But there in Nazareth... and in Washington, and in Toronto, and in all places where even the thought of the possibly of being passed over or left behind takes hold, the age-old fears rage through the crowds:
"If outsiders are to be welcomed in, doesn’t that mean that we will be pushed out?"
This fear turns to fury, and the mob becomes murderous.
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There are no easy answers for us here. But what stories like this allow us to do is reflect on how the Gospel challenges us, or provokes us, or even offends us?
Having a biblical faith invites us to place ourselves within the biblical stories, there in the crowd, and imagine what we might be feeling, what we would be doing if the story was unfolding in our lives.
Because it is. Scripture is the living word.
Are there not times that you or what's important to you are threatened? What does that feel like?
When you are scared, how does that impact how you treat other people?
What do you post on social media when you are upset?
What is the effect of anger on you - what does it do to your body, your emotions, your faith?
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I've had to wrestle with some of these questions myself recently. You see, someone left me a message last week.
After my sermon last Sunday, which was very much about honouring the diversity within the church and the world, someone left me a message in the form of a Bible.
A Bible on my desk at the church open to Paul's letter to the Romans, chapter 1 and one of the texts that some people point to, to put it bluntly, to legitimize bigotry.
There are a handful of verses in the Bible, that are sometimes referred to as the "texts of terror", because in some fundamentalist Christian circles, they are used out of context to make the claim that there’s something sinful about how and who some of us love.
This message that sought to diminish people that I love was left for me. And it made me angry.
I could feel it in my body. For hours, I couldn't focus or think straight. I couldn't work.
And then I remembered that line in our Song of Faith about scripture being the human experiences and cultural assumptions of another era that we wrestle with in hopes of finding a holy revelation for our time and place.
And so I forced myself to sit down, and have a little prayer, and read that passage in Romans again.
And then I felt the Spirit’s nudge to kept reading, and there in the very next paragraph, clear as day, was, I believe, a message back to anyone who tries define the parameters of God’s love and acceptance. The text says:
"Now if you feel inclined to set yourself up as a judge of others, let me assure you, whoever you are, that you are in no position to do so. For at whatever point you condemn others, you automatically condemn yourselves."
And then I though I would just keep reading, and I flipped ahead a few pages to our 1 Corinthians text today and found this:
"If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable;
it keeps no record of wrongs;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing
but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends."
These are Paul's words, but I believe they encapsulate the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
That even when he was faced with the murderous mob in Nazareth; even before Pilate and the seat of Imperial power; even on the cross, Jesus did not pass judgement - he did not lash out and he did not lose focus on his mission.
He took all the fear and pain of this world into his own flesh and transformed it though resurrection love - his work was to show without hesitation or equivocation that the powers of hatred do not get the last word.
The salvation he brings is for all of creation, but as he points to in the book of Isaiah, it starts by bringing good news to the most vulnerable, and the end of dominance by one group over another.
And as Christians, we must always be mindful that our proximity to Jesus provides us with no special privilege - no claim to exceptionalism - in fact, it binds us, body, mind and soul, to his sacrificial ministry of love.
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Though he did not know it at the time, Martin Luther King Jr. preached his last sermon on March 31, 1968 at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington DC.
And in that sermon, Dr. King said:
“Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God.”
And so I ask, are we as followers of Christ, continually called to build God’s Kingdom of love, willing to be co-workers with God?
In these days of backsliding into the very worst of human impulses, are we willing to be co-workers with God?
Alongside our Black sisters and brothers and siblings facing racism, are we willing to be co-workers with God?
Amidst rising homophobia, transphobia, Islamabobia and anti-semitism, are we willing to be co-workers with God?
Within a culture that tells us to fear that which is different amongst us, are we willing to be co-workers with God?
In the face of leaders who claim an exclusive exceptionalism for some based on where they were born, or the colour of their skin, are we willing to be co-workers with God?
And whenever we receive divisive messages that incite us to anger, are we willing to prayerfully but clearly send a message back saying that in the church of Jesus Christ, we don't play those zero-sum games - we uphold the dignity of each person as a beloved child of God, because we are co-workers with God?
Are we willing to do this?
Are you willing to do this?
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