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February 4, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Isaiah 6:1-8, “The Talking Book,” Luke
5:1-11
“Super Soul Shuffle: Playing the Book That Won’t
Play by the Book”
I’m afraid you had to be there in Chicago through the ‘85 Bears’ season and the
’86 Super Bowl. You know what I’m saying? “We didn’t come here looking
for trouble – We just came to do the Super Bowl Shuffle!” First there was
the Punky QB. Now there is Rex Grossman. Talk about white men can’t
jump! Or run! Or sometimes even pass! He’s as much a liability
any given Sunday as I am! And wouldn’t you know, Rex Grossman’s grandfather
Rex built our family home in Bloomington, Indiana, and lived beside us for several
years -- so that I grew up with this Rex’s dad Danny, still a prominent doctor in
Bloomington. Now both head coaches in this first Sunday of Black History Month’s
game are black!
Black History is not just the history of black people – though I suspect black
people often wish it was! Imagine how different black history would be without
white people in it! Imagine that the kingdoms and cultures of Mother Africa
never had been discovered by European colonizers. Remember? How when
the missionaries came they had the Bible and the Africans had the land? And
when they left the Africans had the Bible and the missionaries had the land?
And that history remains dynamic in the worldwide “connectional” churches today.
Imagine how different red history, brown history, yellow history would be without
white people. Then imagine how white history would be without all other colors
of history! I used to think that “white” was the absence of color. Not
true. White is a color, too. It is just one color among many.
But because those of us of that color have not claimed and sustained that color
and our cultures and histories in positive ways, our color has been used to divide
us and conquer us. Those of us who are white bear particular responsibility
-- to remember, learn, grow, change.
I remember the experience of my color at a clergy retreat back in Illinois.
The leader assigned each of us a different bread to bless for communion – whole
wheat, matzoth, flat bread, pumpernickel, corn bread, saltine, rice cake, tortilla,
pita . . . . I brought European rye to bless. In doing so I felt the
close presence of my white Mennonite German grandfather. I realized my color,
too, reflects culture, tradition, language, nation, history -- as well as religion.
In all those ways I am just of one among so many – even as our species is!
Even as our planet and universe are. All histories are interconnected, inter-related.
Each one of us has to find our self, even many times, in our own history – then
work for mutual awareness, respect, interaction, appreciation, enjoyment – with
all others we can.
The Bible -- with all its conglomeration of family story, popular mythology,
national and transnational history, poetry and theology – provides a rich source
of common reference. We find ourselves and each other there – over and over
again! I hope that will be our experience doing “Lectionary Lunches” on Tuesdays
– looking backward and forward at passages appointed for our worship. Asking
passages to come alive for us – to show us, tell us, engage us, struggle with us
– and what we trust are our eyes to see and our ears to hear!
Allen Dwight Callahan, New Testament scholar and Baptist preacher, recently wrote
a book entitled The Talking Book: (phrase created by Henry Louis Gates) and
subtitled African-Americans and the Bible. Here’s a brief passage –
African-Americans read their own
collective experience into the agony and exaltation of Jesus. The story of
the Christ child, blessed by God yet born in the shadow of poverty and violence,
was their story. Jesus’ humble birth in antiquity signified the humble origins
of African peoples in modernity. In his impoverished entry into the world,
Jesus turned the tables on earthly valuations. Fulfilling the promise of the
oracle that celebrates his advent in a stable, the hills of the privileged and the
valleys of the humble are inverted, marking the beginning of a new era.
Most history, we say, is written by “winners.” And is written as if history
consists almost exclusively of white men and wars! But the Bible is written
by “losers” – up to and including the one “’buked and scorned” as “King of the Jews”
-- betrayed and abandoned to die on a cross between insurgents. The Bible
is the voice of the underside, the under-people, the under-view of the dominant
history. The thread of biblical witness is like one long “underground
railroad” to freedom! That’s why the Bible shows such affinity with the histories
of peoples oppressed and exploited for whatever characteristic or condition isolates
them. Callahan writes that the Bible “privileges those without privilege and
honors those without honor” and that the Bible has a “penchant for bringing peripheral
people to the center of history!” Is that not what happens in today’s stories
of “call?”
Isaiah calls himself “lost,” “unclean,” and guilty by association with people
who are the same – “running with all the wrong crowd!” And these poor, ineffectual
fisher folk are so sure they cannot be worthy of Jesus himself, or of the catch
he leads them to make with their retired and washed-out nets. Do they not,
by grace, become the privileged unprivileged ones? The honored dishonored
ones? From the margins abruptly brought to the epicenter of God’s current
life and work in the world! Is that not what happens in Black History? Even
as Black history in these United States inspires histories of so many “lost” peoples
of the world? So that “We Shall Overcome” is sung as anthem at the fall of
the wall in Berlin, the liberation from 27 years’ solitary confinement of Mandela
in South Africa, even the massacre in Tiananmen Square – among many other centers
of change?
Dr. King, whom historian Vincent Harding calls our “inconvenient hero,” says
shortly before he, like Jesus, is crucified, executed, assassinated, got rid of
–
The storm is rising against the privileged
minority of the earth, from which there is no shelter in isolation or armament.
The storm will not abate until a just distribution of the fruits of the earth enables
persons everywhere to live in dignity and human decency. The American Negro
. . . may be the vanguard of a prolonged struggle that may change the shape of the
world, as billions of deprived shake and transform the earth in the quest for life,
freedom and justice.
Who is to say his words are not another way to interpret much of what is trying
to happen in today’s world? Much as Dr. King would abhor and die again for
all the violence and vengeance, he would add that he did try, in his ways, to warn
us.
We remember Isaiah sees all the Lord’s glory, shock, and awe, and receives his
call to be sent as a lonely prophet, “in the year that King Uzziah died.”
Death, it seems -- and loss, and grief, and memory -- may provide new entries to
life. Do we not remember the years of our deaths and losses of those who matter
most in our lives? Do we not endure long and dark nights of the soul?
Clouds of unknowing? A lostness that feels like Isaiah’s uncleanness?
Lack of all belonging? The fruitlessness and the weariness of Simon Peter
and the other fishers here? They are so unready and, by their own power unable
to let down their nets – even just one more time! They are completely defeated!
So why, and how do they do it? What inspires such an obedience in them --
that if Jesus tells them to do it, they will try again? No matter how used
up they feel?
As we read between scriptures this morning, Allen Dwight Callahan calls the Bible
“the book of slavery’s children.” Slave masters and those who preached their
interests-- as some preach for the masters of all generations! -- preached another
kind, a less faithful and fruitful kind of “obedience,” as if “control” of self
and others were Christianity’s “first commandment!” Yet Callahan writes –
The God of holy scripture has made
slaves no less than their masters in the divine image and likeness. The Apostle
Paul has declared that master and slave were equal in God’s sight. And in
the book of Exodus, God had freed the ancient Hebrews from bondage in Egypt; the
liberation of slaves had been God’s will.
Sisters and brothers, what is it that enslaves us this morning?
What intimidates us, conditions and controls us -- to the point that “obedience”
for us is just more of the “same old same old?” What keeps us from doing
what we want and need to do for others and for the good of this world? Now
OUR liberation is God’s will! Now there is another kind of obedience at
work in us – as in the prophet and fisher folk! Jesus disturbs the old
order of whatever is holding us down and back. Jesus does not ask for our
thanks and worship of him. He asks for our fulfillment – for our
liberation and freedom to follow him here and now in our lives.
As African-American children, facing Bull Connor, dogs, and water cannons, sang
in the streets of Birmingham, 1963 – “I ain’t scared of your jails ‘cause I want
my freedom, I want my freedom, I want my freedom. I ain’t scared of your jails
‘cause I want my freedom, I want my freedom now!” We dare to say, to them,
and for them, and with them – Amen!
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