Please pray with me: Gracious God, your Word is light and life. Sharpen our spiritual sight to see, and tune the ears of our hearts to hear, in these ancient words of Scripture, your Word for us. Then help us live by its light, and scatter the darkness of our present age. We pray in the name of the Word-made-Flesh, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Well. It’s true that this preacher doesn’t always get it right, but the perils of malfunction stand in sharp contrast to the warm relationship between Central and Peoples. We treasure those bonds and are deeply grateful for worshiping with you again today. Thank you for this visible expression of unity. May the Lord continue with us, as we remember the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and recommit ourselves to fulfilling the dream – God’s dream — for which Dr. King gave his life.
I’m always a little puzzled that the lectionary designers end the reading where they do, with Jesus’ electrifying words, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Everyone loved this hometown young man, who drew from the old prophetic tradition to hint that he too is a prophet. It’ll take next week’s reading to finish the picture, because when Jesus begins to describe how to apply this teaching in present life, the crowd becomes enraged and tries to throw him off a cliff.
We always run the risk on this particular weekend to applaud Dr. King’s soaring, visionary language without attending to the ways they need to be applied in 2019, when our country is still deeply divided along racial, political, and socio-economic fault lines.
Working for social justice and renewal, serving our neighbors in need -- these aren’t optional for the Church, something we add on after the bills are paid, the new members received, and the Bible study guides ordered.
If Beale Street Could Talk … there is a Beale Street in Memphis, center of the blues and barbecue and Black culture. But Baldwin used the name symbolically, to represent the segregation (both legal and de facto) embedded in the landscape of American life. Every black person born in the U.S. was born on Beale Street, he wrote, born in the black neighborhood of some city … When I was growing up, I was trying to make a connection between the life I saw and the life I lived. There are times when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. I’ll tell you a story if I may, of darkness laced with light, a story that has not stopped being true in the years since it was first told.
We are all implicated, friends. And we are all in need of God’s grace. So we return to Jesus’ sermon and the call to those who would follow him: proclaim good news to the poor, sight to the blind, and release to the captives and those who are oppressed. Working for social justice and renewal, serving our neighbors in need — these aren’t optional for the Church, something we add on after the bills are paid, the new members received, and the Bible study guides ordered. This is our mission statement, our credo, our sermon and our song.
I think they would have much to say about the ways this scripture is fulfilled. I think they would have much to say about actions and attitudes and a spirit afoot that would give us hope and courage to keep on.
And we can! We can talk with each other, right now, today. So let’s rearrange ourselves a bit so that we can have conversation, both Peoples and Central folk.
First Question: introduce yourself and briefly describe who you are and why you’re here today.
Second Question: Say something about your congregation that characterizes its identity and mission. What is most compelling for you?
Howard Thurman, the great civil rights leader, preacher and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr. put Jesus’ challenge firmly before us. May we hear it, and fulfill it, today and all the days ahead.
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