Sunday, March 1, 2015
First Congregational United
Church of Christ – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
Something fascinating happened at the Academy Awards last
week. It was hard to see, so you might not have caught it. I’m not sure I would
have, but a clergy colleague brought it to my attention. When John Legend and
Common performed their Oscar-winning song Glory
from the movie Selma, something
fascinating happened onstage. Common walked across a model of the Edmund Pettus
Bridge while Legend sat at his piano. Behind Common was a large, multiracial
chorus, singing backup. Towards the end of the performance, as Common and John
Legend were standing together singing the final chorus of the song, they are
surrounded by the people in the chorus…I’ll let Blogger Aliza Worthington
describe the scene, “The chorus was made up of both People of Color and
white people,” she writes, “The white people, however, weren’t singing. They
simply marched in step, and side by side with the Black people on the stage.
The only voices we heard were the voices of POC. White people showed UP. They
walked. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder. They marched. And they let the people
of color do the talking. They stood silently so Black voices could be
heard. What a brilliant piece of staging…”[1]
It seems to me song Glory was
written by Black people, for Black people. When I first heard it, I was moved
to tears. And I was very aware that it was not a song written for me. As a
White person, I’ve already had my fair share of glory in this nation. John
Legend sings, “One day, when the Glory comes, it’ll be ours, it’ll be ours.”
Whose, exactly? Is it glory for one group? Glory for all? I don’t know the
answer (though I would happily sit down with Mr. Legend to talk it over if he
had time).
The passage we heard this morning from Genesis seems to me to
be about a dream of glory. A promise of glory. Abraham and Sarah, in their old
age, were starting to give up hope. They had lived most of their days and were
still waiting for God’s glory to shine upon them. And then, in a laughable turn
of fate, God comes to Abraham when he was 99 years old and made a covenant with
him. It is a covenant rooted in the promise of glory. Through Sarah and Abraham’s
children, God’s glory will shine forth to the entire world. Nations will come
forth from their offspring and they will produce proud rulers. The entire world
will come to know of God’s goodness and grace through the descendents of this
elderly couple.
And it will be an everlasting covenant. Through this one
encounter with Abraham and Sarah, God seals herself permanently to their
family. Just as God promised to never again destroy the world after the flood,
God is now promising to accompany the descendents of Abraham and Sarah from
generation to generation.
And where, exactly does this proud lineage lead? Well, to
Jesus, of course. When the writer of the Gospel of Matthew begins the story of
how Christ came to us, he begins with a very long genealogy. Jesus is a
descendent of Abraham and Sarah, one of the many who was borne from God’s
everlasting covenant with these two unlikely parents. Jesus is portrayed as the
culmination of that covenant…he is the one who has come to show us what it means
to live more fully into relationship with the one he calls Abba-Father.
As Jesus shows us how to live, we come to see that living
into Glory isn’t perhaps what we thought it might be. The promise to Sarah and
Abraham seems glorious – fertility, offspring, land dripping with milk and
honey, riches. Glory! But when Jesus comes, he speaks of a very different kind
of Glory.
"If any want to become my
followers,” Jesus says, “Let them deny themselves and take up their cross and
follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who
lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
Let them deny themselves. This
is a hard teaching. I have an image in my head of those white people standing
on stage with Common and John Legend, standing there silent when they could be
singing. Are they denying themselves? In a way, yes. They are silenced. But,
the looks on their faces….their faces are shining with joy as they take in the
scene. I can only imagine the sense of destiny, power, grace, hope they must
have felt standing there silently as a part of that massive chorus of Glory.
It makes me wonder: is there a
way to deny oneself that leads to…Glory? Maybe Jesus isn’t as off-the-wall as
he initially seems. I want to share with you an extended quotation from the
Rev. Dr. Karoline Lewis, who is a professor of homiletics at Luther Seminary.
She nails this much better than I can:
Jesus’ charge is not a
demand to deny your true self. It’s an invitation to imagine that your self
needs the other. Desperately. Intimately. Because this is what to be human is
all about -- intimacy. Belonging. Relationship. Attention. To what extent we
barely know ourselves without all of the above in our lives, without others in
our lives acknowledging, regarding who we are. We can’t be ourselves on our
own.[2]
Perhaps “denying myself” isn’t as
much about negating who I am, but about realizing that I am who I am because of
relationship. I do not exist in a vacuum. As Common said in his acceptance
speech last week, “God lives in us all.”
Five short words that open up a
whole world of possibilities. For if God abides in each of us, then we are all
imbued with the Holy. When we focus less on our individuality, our own
concerns….when we begin to direct our attention outward, towards the other
inhabitants on this planet, well, then, we deny ourselves. But it is through
that very denial that we become more attuned to the reality that we are all
bound together. We are united through our connection to the Divine.
And this is what the season of
Lent is all about. Not denying yourself in order to punish yourself or be
miserable – but denying yourself to make space for something else to come into
your awareness. Again, Karoline Lewis:
Lent cannot be just about yourself….We don’t do Lent
alone. Lent is this radical communal experience in many ways. People willing to
wear crosses on their foreheads when buying groceries. People willing to talk
about their Lenten disciplines -- out loud, even to strangers.
Why?
Because we realize it’s not just about our own selves. Lent is a denial of the
self in the best way, the self that refuses community. The self that thinks it
can survive on its own. The self that rejects the deep need of humanity —
belonging.[3]
I think back to those people singing on the stage at
the Oscars. The people of color raising their voices as one, crying out for the
dream of Glory. And I think about the shining faces of the white people
standing there silently. They may have been silent, but their presence was
loud. They were a part of the movement. Belonging. Marching. A part of their
spirits bowed to the immense realization that we are all connected – all of us
bound together through the everlasting covenant God has made with all of
creation – and that we are all on a journey to Glory together.
When we allow ourselves to risk denying self, I think
what we discover is that there is so much more goodness to be found through
living into the everlasting covenant together.
When I am overly focused on me and mine, I miss out on the great gift of
connection.
When we get too focused on ourselves or people like us
– when we eschew the call to “deny ourselves” – we lose out. But when we
remember that all of these struggles are connected, we are able to move
forward. In his acceptance speech, Common poetically called attention to the
interconnectedness of all who struggle for freedom and justice. He said, “The
spirit of this bridge transcends race, gender, religion, sexual orientation,
and social status. The spirit of this bridge connects the kid from the South
side of Chicago, dreaming of a better life to those in France standing up for
their freedom of expression to the people in Hong Kong protesting for
democracy. This bridge was built on hope. Welded with compassion. And elevated
by love for all human beings.”
And so I leave you today not with answers, but with a
few questions. Some of us in this room have layers upon layers of privilege.
What does it mean for us to take seriously Christ’s call to deny ourselves,
take up the cross, and follow him into a life of sacrificial love? What does it
look like to live a life radically oriented towards the covenant we all share
together - the reality that all of us are bound together through the Holy that
resides in and around us? How do we each find our way into that great chorus…and
what role do we play as we sing together with the hope of bringing about God’s
glorious reign of justice to this world?
[2] http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=3542
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