William Yagel
Grace Radford
August 14, 2022
Proper 15, Year C
We have never preached violence,
except the violence of love,
which left Christ nailed to a cross,
the violence that we must each do to ourselves
to overcome our selfishness
and such cruel inequalities among us.
The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword,
the violence of hatred.
It is the violence of love,
of brotherhood,
the violence that wills to beat weapons
into sickles for work.
Amen
It was a steep price that Archbishop and Saint Oscar Romero, author of our prayer, paid as he prepared his final mass in El Salvador on March 24, 1980. While he was celebrating the Mass in his Catholic church, the assassin carried out his work. He died in support of those on the margins of his society because the power of the gospel compelled him into dangerous and profound conflict with those who sought to oppress and enact violence on the people of El Salvador. The gospel compelled division.
It was on this day, August 14th, 1965 that Jonathan Myrick Daniels was arrested in Alabama for peacefully protesting segregation at lunch counters in that state. Daniels was an Episcopal Seminarian at Harvard University at the time, who found himself divided from the laws of the day by the words of Christ’s gospel message. Daniels would be released from jail a few days later, on August 20th, and that was when he and three others decided to buy a soda from a store that sold to non-white patrons. When a deputy forcefully refused them entrance Daniels stepped in front of the shotgun blast intended for then 17 year old civil rights activist, Ruby Sales. Sales is, by the way, alive and well in Washington DC, and has spent a life of advocacy for the marginalized. Both were compelled to stand at odds with forces of oppression by the message of Christ.
These martyrs, like countless others over the past 2000 years, have understood the central message of our gospel message today in poignant and costly ways. They were compelled by Jesus’ prophetic call for love to stand in the way of systems that had to be confronted. I think of others who were compelled to action by the Gospel message. Bell hooks, Doris Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and so many more who knew that complicity with those forces that they saw as evil went against the gospel message and against the very fiber of their being. They risked their health and dedicated their lives to the notion that the radical message of Love would be worth the risk of division.
This morning is a sharp and startling turn from the message that we have come to expect from Jesus, but I think it is beautiful because it speaks to our reality in this world. But it is a challenge to hear that Christ’s came for conflict. At least my tendency, when I heart these words from Luke, is to assume that Jesus is asserting that his purpose on this earth was conflict, and that is certainly in tension with the message of Love and Hope to which we are accustomed. I struggled with this reality and in so doing I came across theologian Audrey West. In her reflection on these verses she offers that this passage is descriptive rather than prescriptive, which helped a great deal.
She is saying that Jesus’ mission is not division, that God is not here to set son against father, that God the Holy Spirit does not pit mother against daughter. Rather, we might understand that the power of the gospel message compels action, and the by-product of that action will be division because of who we are. It is us who provides the division. Jesus’ message of profound love will not be welcomed by all, and Lord knows, it isn’t heard the same by all. So despite knowing the challenges it will bring, Jesus inserts prophetic truth into our midst. We are called as Christians to grapple with those truths and to try to hear God’s call to us in our lives.
I want to offer to you this morning that it is these truths, at this risk of division that brings us here each week. We can find community in lots of places, and clubs and organizations are willing to fill that need for community all over the place. In fact, my brother, who lives in New York city and works for as a Vice President of something at a division of large Stock Market Ratings firm, expressed that to me a few months back.
You see, they have divided their work force into teams, and those teams meet regularly to discuss their lives. They take time out of the work day to focus on community, to hear about those struggles and challenges that each other faces. Part of their reality is that they spend a great deal of time in communication, so the organization realized that it was productive and profitable to foster community. I will tell you that as my brother shared some of their guiding principles for their time together, it was not so terribly different from a church community on its face. They are supportive and affirming. They are even encouraged to provide benevolent gifts to charities and the company will match that gift to a certain point!
It sounds like a pretty thoughtful company, and all reports are that it is a really good place to work. But it is alarming to me. Not because I don’t want employees to have community, not because I don’t want them to be supported in that way, but because the underpinning of the system is not a profound and transcendent message of hope and love. Rather it is a corporation bound by the laws of a profit and loss statement. When that generosity is no longer economically sound, or when the members of that community are too old, or too slow, or too expensive they are removed and replaced. Suddenly the community that the employees found so uplifting has abandoned them and moved on.
The community that this church, and churches just like it around the world, provides is different. It is based on a truth and a message bigger that the community that holds it, bigger than we can ever really live up to. That truth is a transcendent, abiding, and sacrificial love that calls us together as one body. We are reminded this morning that power of that love will be greater than we can manage. There is no way around this hard truth. I remember it in the eyes of old friends when I told them I was called to the priesthood. I had to follow my path, they could not. It was disappointing to them, they couldn’t imagine it, and I could no longer imagine not following this call, finding my way to you.
The Good News is actually sitting right in front of us in the form of our ritual this morning. In a moment we will share the peace with each other. We will acknowledge in a ritual form the healing and reconciliation that we are called into via the bonds of Christian fellowship. We acknowledge these challenges of division every time we celebrate Christ’s sacrifice and ask for God’s help to repair those relationships. We then proceed to the table where all things are made new again as we celebrate the Eucharist. This morning I am reminded of the words of our Eucharistic prayer C:
“Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us. Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal. Let the grace of this Holy Communion make us one body, one spirit in Christ, that we may worthily serve the world in his name.”
May it be that we are continually called deeper into the message of Hope and Grace in Christ. May the divisions among us heal and though we know we will not be of one mind, let us be of one body, God’s holy church.
Amen