William Yagel
Grace Radford
January 15, 2022
2 Epiphany, Year A
God, give us strength of body to keep walking for freedom. God, give us strength to remain nonviolent, even though we may face death. -The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Amen.
For years when I was building apartments I was the on-site Project Manager. When I was doing that work my wife would always groan when I told her that the framers were coming on site. Inevitably this would mark the end of my casual relationship with a project. When the framers arrived all the problems hidden in the plans would expose themselves in three dimensions and those problems could not be ignored. The framers brought with them the plumbers, electricians, sprinklers, and HVAC subs all of who brought their own issues and questions. The pace of my work would compound seemingly exponentially. You see, I was the guy who had to triage the questions and ultimately provide answers if the design missed something.
Apartments were also a funny animal because unlike an office or a home, they are, by their nature repetitive. That is great if you are trying to make time, because you can make a system to repeat the same work over and over again. But if there is a design problem it gets repeated over and over and over and over again! The smallest and least significant of problems can manifest at the final inspection and ruin a project. So, I became adept at that triage work by necessity. I spent more time than I ever care to admit learning building codes because I had to know how any piece of minutia fit into the whole. Trying to head off disaster with each question that came up.
While doing this work I picked up a phrase from an architect named Dan that we worked with from time to time. He used to speak to this reality by noting that there is a hazard in this business because once you have learned something, you really can’t unknow it. You may wish you didn’t know it, you may want to forget it, but the truth is right there. You couldn’t turn a blind eye to almost anything because the impact when multiplied over and over and over was terrible.
Once you know a thing you can’t unknow it, you can no longer be ignorant. Once you know it you must choose you course of action. You must choose; right or wrong. No longer can the winds of chance push you around. Knowing means you have to speak up.
I think about this simple reality on the construction site often when I think about The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. whose birthday is today. I wonder if he would have preferred not to know what he knew. Seeing the world as it is and as it should be is a heavy burden. Raising a prophetic voice and calling for justice is dangerous work at any time. But King had to speak his truth. It was on April 4 in 1967, one year to the day before he was killed in the Lorraine Hotel that King delivered his speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam”. He was speaking at Riverside Baptist Church in New York City when he said:
“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
It was statements like this from this speech that historians say truly made King a target. King made a turn in this speech from speaking in broad terms about equity and justice to speaking directly to the problem at hand. He refused to let America off the hook. He effectively said “You can wage this war if you want, but I am not going to let you be ignorant. You will have to choose.” I love that he wasn’t speaking out against the soldiers who were headed in Vietnam. This reality was bigger than any of them. In fact, he was defending those men whose lives were being used to prop up a system that was contrary to those values that so many of them were trying to live into.
King was taking on Empire. It is especially painful because he was taking on our empire. He was reminding us of who we aspire to be and he refused to let us unknow it. His words still ring with a truth that will convict us today. The relatively small voice of a Black man from Atlanta in the 1960’s had found the truth that he couldn’t unknow. And from the moment he knew it, King would point all of us to it.
He was pointing to the truth.
He was pointing to hope.
He was pointing to Love.
He was pointing to Christ.
This work of pointing to Christ has always been dangerous work. We see evidence of if from the beginning. From the first person to point to Christ, John the Baptist, who we heard about this morning. John is literally pointing at Jesus each time he walks by. Twice John says there he is, there is the Lamb of God. Simon, who was a disciple of John, saw what John was pointing to and followed Christ, literally. Simon who is called Peter would ultimately become the rock on which our church was founded. Such is the impact of that pointing that John did.
I love the reflection of Theologian Roger Nishioka about those bracelets from about fifteen years ago that said WWJD. He offers that this is too high and unreasonable a goal. Rather we should have had bracelets that said WWJBD, because that is a model that we can hope to live into. A life of pointing to Christ. A life not where we expect ourselves to be perfect and make the same choices that the incarnate God would make, but rather, to look at the life of this mortal, John the Baptist, and wonder how we can more faithfully point to Christ.
Those in our Advent Book study will remember that Rowan Williams, Retired Archbishop of Canterbury, challenges readers of scripture to always ask “where are you in this?” When I ask this of myself I must admit that I am convicted by both John’s and King’s witnesses. I want to point to Christ, but it is uncomfortable and frightening. It is easier to allow myself to be ignorant of my neighbor’s plight. It is easier to be ignorant of those things done on my behalf that I am not proud of. It is easier to point at myself. I invite you to join me and to ask yourselves these questions as well. I will warn you, however, that this is the great hazard of being Christian. The profound Love that is shown to us in Christ is infectious, but the love of the Gospel compels us to action. We know who we are called to point to and this morning we are reminded that we can’t unknow it.
Amen