“God meets us in the middle of our pain and rage at injustice and oppression and, to all those who say the way things are is the way they have to stay, God says “I call BS.”
Sermon by Mike Kinman at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, March 18, 2018.
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“This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says our God: I will put my Law in their minds and on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
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For every lament, there is a response. Grief, exile, despair – these are powerful things. They are emotions that demand to be felt. And … the promise of God is the final word.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that last part. Sometimes the grief and despair gets the best of me. Sometimes I need help.
It was that way the morning of February 14 when a news alert flashed on my phone – shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida. Multiple casualties. All I could do was sigh and silently shake my head.
I think that’s what hopelessness feels like. And this wasn’t the first time I’d felt it. Pulse. Las Vegas. There was something about the inexorability of gun violence in our nation.
After all, if 20 elementary school kids being massacred in a white upper-middle class bedroom community – the very demographic we will usually do anything to protect – if Sandy Hook couldn’t move the needle one millimeter, couldn’t even start a serious conversation about gun control. If we loved our guns and our ability to use them on each other that much, what hope did we have for change?
Vigils, prayer litanies, action table items. I had absolutely no expectation that any of it would do any good. No hope that we would do anything but once again wait for the next news alert, the next body count, the next round of thoughts and prayers and hand wringing and so on and so on and so on.
And then something happened. A group of students, led by a young, queer woman of color named Emma Gonzalez, stood up and literally called B.S. on hopelessness. They didn’t hide their tears … or their pain … or their anger. They showed them to the world and they said Enough. “It’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see.” The world we are dying in is not the world we are supposed to be living in. We are not meant to live like this. We are not meant to die like this. We are meant for something greater. We are meant for safety and security and creativity and love.
And then something else happened. Young people from around this nation stood up and took their place beside and behind Emma Gonzalez and the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. They are standing up and they are speaking up and they are walking out. More than 80% of the youth who showed up for our youth group last Wednesday participated in some sort of walkout or statement against gun violence that morning. Next weekend, our youth will lead me – I am not leading them – to Washington D.C. to participate in the March for Our Lives and another amazing group of All Saints youth will lead us in a similar March in downtown Los Angeles.
This Wednesday night, I hope you will join our youth here at All Saints Church as they lead us in phone banking and mobilizing this community and this state to change our gun laws so that Enough isn’t just a hash tag, so that Enough becomes the law of the land.
Youth of All Saints, I am so grateful to you … because you have saved me. You have saved us from hopelessness. You are reminding us who we really are as people of God and that is that we are people of the promise. The promise that for every lament, there is a response. God’s promise that while grief, exile, despair are powerful things, emotions that demand to be felt, the promise of God is the final word.
I am so grateful to our youth. I am grateful to you the way I am grateful to the young, black, often queer leaders all over this nation who are reminding us who we really are as people of God standing up for black lives. I am grateful to you the way I am grateful to the young Dreamers and other undocumented youth who are reminding us who we really are as people of God in demanding that families be allowed to stay together and that the blessing of the presence of beautiful and powerful members of our community not be taken away.
We claim a prophetic tradition here at All Saints Church, and I am so grateful to all of these young people because they are claiming and reminding us and calling us into the fullness of that tradition for such a time as this.
For the prophetic tradition is not just speaking truth to power, though certainly it is that. The prophetic tradition holds that for every lament, there is a response. And … the promise of God is the final word.
We hear this morning from one of the most powerful prophets in our scripture, Jeremiah. Now I believe when Emma Gonzalez stood up and called B.S. on the gun lobby and the leaders it has on its payroll that somewhere Jeremiah was smiling and saying “yeah … that’s the stuff.”
Because Jeremiah called BS on a government that was not responsive to the needs of its people. Jeremiah called BS on religious leaders who talked about thoughts and prayers but who refused to act because action would offend the wealthy and powerful.
Jeremiah proclaimed that actions had consequences and that the exile that the people were experiencing, the tears they were crying, the laments they were wailing … were a result of their failure to remember God’s justice and love, a failure for them to protect the vulnerable, a result of them lining their own pockets instead of filling each other’s stomachs and hearts.
Jeremiah stood up and spoke up and walked out. Jeremiah called BS on the way things were and proclaimed judgment on those who kept them that way. But that’s not all Jeremiah did.
This morning’s reading comes from a brief section in the middle of Jeremiah that scholars have called the Book of Consolation. In it Jeremiah speaks to a people in the midst of pain, grief and exile and reminds them that even in the most hopeless of times, especially in the most hopeless of times, God is true to God’s promise. And God’s promise is always to build and to plant. God’s promise is always to make new.
In the middle of a book that suggests that God has abandoned Israel, God says I will never leave you. God says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”
It is just before the portion we hear this morning that we hear the words that Matthew quotes centuries later, of Rachel weeping for her children. That image that resonates in our heart and breaks our heart open even today.
For we know that Rachel weeps not just for her children but for all the lost children – all that ever were and her vision of the legions to come – children that suffer and die because of our self-centeredness, because we love money and power more than them, children that die quickly from the barrel of a gun and children that die slowly from poverty, hopelessness, stolen education and economic opportunities, murderous disparities in health care and the substitution of incarceration for restoration.
Rachel weeps for her children and her tears are our tears, her grief is our grief, her rage is our rage. Rachel weeps for her children and she refuses to be comforted because her children are no more. She is paralyzed by hopelessness. And in the midst of that hopelessness, God comes to her and says “there is hope for your future. Your children shall come back to their own country.”
Rachel weeps for her children, just as we weep today, just as the children among us weep for themselves. And God meets us in the middle of that pain and that rage and the temptation to hopelessness and reminds us that a new day is coming.
That there is HOPE for our future. That our tears will be wiped away. That the children will be safe.
That we will look around and know that together we can build a home where everyone has a place at the table, where God’s love, justice and compassion are written on our minds and on our hearts, where nobody need fear, nobody need go in want, where there are no second-class citizens and no internalized oppression.
God meets us in the middle of our pain and rage at injustice and oppression and, to all those who say the way things are is the way they have to stay, God says “I call BS.”
For the promise of God, the hope of God, is not a silver lining just meant to make us feel better in the midst of our pain. Nor is it a promise that things will always stay the same – quite the opposite, in fact. The promise of God, the hope of God, is God’s pledge that not only is God’s love for us and fidelity to us everlasting. Not only that God looks on us as she did the people of Israel and sings “I have loved you with an everlasting love” but that God has the power to make that love real, to incarnate it in our lives, to rebuild and regather, to build and to plant, to be forever reshaping us and remaking us in new and wonderful ways. To make this church and make this world into everything it can be, must be and will be.
That is God’s promise and faithfulness to that promise is our highest call. And it was with that in mind that this week, your vestry passed a budget which, thanks to the grace of God and your deep generosity, represents more than $4.6 million dollars devoted to God’s mission of radical love for 2018. $4.6 million dollars for us to proclaim God’s everlasting love. $4.6 million dollars for us to be God’s voice calling BS on the structures of the world that will oppress. $4.6 million dollars to help us together grow even more into the Beloved Community of God.
That budget includes a decision not to hire an additional clergy person this year. We do anticipate adding a new clergy person in 2019, and your vestry will be taking that time to discern how God is rebuilding and reshaping us. How we structure our staffing to best serve that mission for such a time as this. God’s promise is never that things will stay the same. We are being invited to be a new church for new possibilities, new generations and new hopes – building on all that is past to make this church into everything it can be, must be and will be. Meeting the tears of the world with compassion and bringing God’s promise that there is hope for the future and being that hope incarnate in our life in the world.
That’s exciting. The possibilities for us as All Saints Church literally are endless. And, as with all change, it will involve feelings of loss. There will be lament.
We have come to know how important it is for every one of us to be able to see themselves standing behind the table gathering us in worship. For now, we have a clergy staff that not only does not have a black priest, but continues to not have a Latinx priest or an Asian priest and, as of this coming November, will not have a priest under age 50! And we know that does not represent the Beloved Community we have been, are and that God is calling us to be.
And so we lament. And for every lament there is a response. And God’s promise is the final word. And we trust that if we are faithful to God’s promise, we will end up with leadership who represent not only the wonderful church we are but the church God dreams for us to become.
I know as I share this news, there is pain in this community. Particularly because our grief that our clergy leadership does not fully represent the makeup of our community connects with the ongoing grief process over the death of one who did that so powerfully, Zelda Kennedy.
And so we lament. And for every lament there is a response. And God’s promise is the final word. And so as much as I share the lament, I am also grateful for it because it shows we care deeply about God’s promise. About truly being the beloved community. About being the change we must see in this world. About building together a community where all God’s children know their gifts of leadership and expression will be embraced equally and given a chance to shape who we are.
And so what do we do with that? We lean into our prophetic tradition. We lean into the example of the prophet Jeremiah and the prophet Emma and the young prophets of All Saints who are leading us today.
First, we let the emotions be felt. We sing our joys for there is so much joy in our life together … and we also cry our tears and share our anger and frustration. And we do these things together. And we strive to speak clearly and listen courageously. And so, over the next month, we will be providing opportunities both in a rector’s forum and in a facilitated weeknight listening session for this to happen. For us to share, and listen and feel.
And that is not all we do. Following the example of the prophet Jeremiah, the prophet Emma and the young prophets of All Saints who are leading us today, we look for the promise of God. And the promise of God will always be the final word. And we will hear the truth of a God who loves us with an everlasting love and who invites us to share that radical love with one another. We will resist the temptation to set our feelings – be they songs of joy or tears of grief — in competition with one another and instead will find the joy in wiping one another’s tears away and merging our songs in harmony together.
As our young people are showing us, we will learn to be the church in new ways, with new leadership and embracing new possibilities. We will call B.S. on the structures of the world and of our own community that oppress and we will become the beloved community of God. We will stand up, speak up and walk out into the world and with one voice shout Enough until the gun lobby falls and poverty is erased and mother’s weep no more.
We do these things because All Saints Church has been, is and always will be a church of the prophets. And today the prophets of our scripture and the young prophets in our midst are with one voice reminding us who we really are as people of God and that is that we are people of the promise.
God’s promise of love.
God’s promise of hope.
God’s promise that always is the final word.
AMEN.
