Comforting or Stirring? Preached for Wollaston Congregational Church on April 25th, 2021 Scripture: Acts 4:5-12 This Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Easter, is traditionally known as “Good Shepherd Sunday.” In our scripture from John’s gospel we heard Jesus say “I am the Good Shepherd” and we listened to the words of the famous 23rd psalm “The Lord is my Shepherd.” These are texts that of bring words of comfort to those who follow Jesus, the Good Shepherd. Also we read the assigned scripture from the book of Acts. In this week’s passage, Peter and John are brought before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, the religious authorities. This is the same council that handed Jesus over to be crucified. The council is angry that the apostles were preaching, teaching and healing in Jesus’ name. Even though they have the power to convict, as they did with Jesus, Peter responds with a stirring speech, telling them that Jesus, the stone who was rejected, lives on. He has become the chief cornerstone of the movement that will become the church. This morning, we are presented with images of comfort and stirring. And as I committed to last week, I will continue to follow the book of Acts in this Easter season. We encounter Peter and John again, just a few days after the festival Pentecost, 50 days after the Passover on which Jesus was crucified. Even though very little time has passed, Peter has been preaching, teaching and now healing in Jerusalem. So far they have received more than 8,000 new believers. The high priests, Annas and Caiaphas, may have assumed that the Jesus movement had been stamped out, but they are wrong. The Holy Spirit is swirling through Jerusalem, and people are getting stirred up. We might wonder where Peter and John are finding the strength to head up this new movement of the Spirit, this new normal. It has been only a few weeks since they went through the trauma of seeing their beloved leader being crucified. It’s been only a few weeks since Peter was so scared he’d denied knowing his beloved teacher and friend. Perhaps Peter and John have had some time for rest in this hiatus between Jewish festivals. Perhaps there have been a few moments when they sat, again, at Jesus’ feet since he returned in resurrected form. Perhaps seeing Jesus ascend to the Father helped to restore their faith, following the harrowing scenes of violence and abuse during the earlier trial and crucifixion. Somehow, they have built up resilience, such that they are now brave enough to stand in front of the same council that handed Jesus over. And Peter finds the courage and resilience --- not only to defend himself and John --- but to preach in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s been eleven months since George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. And since that time, according to Newsweek magazine, 181 black Americans have been killed by police. We don’t know the details of all these deaths, but we do know that the killing of people of color by law enforcement is greatly out of proportion with the killing of white people. [1] We know about the killing of Daunte Wright, also in Minneapolis, and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, we know about the killing of Breonna Taylor, we know about 13 year old Adam Toledo in Chicago. We know about many more. I wonder, in the wake ongoing racial trauma for the African American community, how people find the strength to keep on organizing, advocating and protesting. And yet the family and friends of George Floyd and so many other activists have worked tirelessly to keep attention on this issue. A small victory came this past week, when former police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty and held accountable for the murder of George Floyd. One person wrote “the arc bent a millimeter today” a reference to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who said “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” [2] The event of George Floyd’s killing sparked protests throughout the United States and around the world. Citizens of majority white and western countries began to hold their own authorities accountable too. And in sports like European soccer, players have begun to take a knee and a moment of silence before games to draw attention to the “Black Lives Matter” movement. I know that my own inclination is to pay attention to racial justice and equity for a while. But then, I become overwhelmed, I get weary or I get stressed. I have to acknowledge, though, that is not too hard for me to engage with the issues of racism in our culture, and I am called to do it. The issue is, I need to work on my resilience. Over the past couple of months, the Massachusetts Council of Churches has been sharing Facebook live conversations around issues of racism and sexism. The titles of these conversations included: “The Black Church and Politics”, “What Male Colleagues Need to Know” and one conversation I knew I needed to listen to: “What White Woman Need to Know.” [3] This conversation hit home for me, as I suspected it would. There were truths that I needed to hear, even though they were difficult to listen to. Rev. Dr. Choi Hee An, a Korean woman professor of theology and Rev. Dr. Karen Coleman, a black American Episcopal priest and academic, joined the conversation with Rev. Laura Everett, to speak of their own experiences with white women. These were not comfortable truths: white women in the church have not always been their friends and allies. They spoke of white women’s resistance to having conversations about equality. They notice that white women’s body language shows they are disengaging when the conversation gets tough. They say things like “this stresses me out,” or “this gives me a headache.” The two women spoke of the disingenuous “niceness” of white women. White women have acted as their friends, but then have not been loyal to that supposed friendship. White women who have presumed familiarity by asking them inappropriate questions. Hearing these truths, I knew I had been guilty of all these things in my attempts to engage, and then disengage with the topic of racial justice. This was a reminder that even though I’ve done some work on my resilience, I have not done enough. I need to keep going. In a few minutes we will watch excerpts from a video concerning two churches and their engagement with the issues of racism in our culture today. Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ in Sherborn was my home church for many years before I came to Wollaston. Pilgrim Church has been in relationship and conversation with Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Jamaica Plain since 1992. [4] Sherborn is a very different setting from Wollaston. Pilgrim Church has a different history and different resources. And the issues of racism in Quincy are different from Boston and the suburbs, with more of a focus on anti-Asian racism. Still, I believe we can learn from this video that witnesses a relationship between these majority white and a majority black churches in Greater Boston. In this Easter season as we anticipate the coming of the Holy Spirit yet again, we might ask “will that Spirit be one of comfort or stirring?” There is a saying that the Spirit “afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted.” But this saying does not address the complexity of life. In reality no one is entirely comfortable, and few are entirely afflicted. I imagine that in our times the Spirit is both comforting and stirring for a purpose. This purpose is to build up our resilience to do the work of Christ in the time to come, the new normal. In this year of pandemic trauma and the stirring of anti-racism activism in our culture, we are called to seek resilience. We are called to ponder ways in which even in our setting, we, Wollaston Congregational Church, can grow in our engagement with the issues of the day. We can be grateful that we are not called before the Sanhedrin, like Peter and John. And, still, the spirit is stirring us to tell the truth about our relationship with Christ and with one another. In the video, Witness, Rev. Gloria White Hammond, pastor of the Bethel Afrian American Episcopal church, says that it is important to advocate for justice on a public level and yet … “ … [the] even harder work is to look at me and where is the ‘ism’ in me.” This is work that we can do, Church. May all God’s people say, Amen [1] https://www.newsweek.com/181-black-people-have-been-killed-police-since-george-floyds-death-1584740 [2] Dr. King was paraphrasing a quote of Unitarian minister, Rev. Theodor Parker, https://www.uuworld.org/articles/parker-radical-theologian [3] https://www.facebook.com/Masscouncilofchurches [4] https://www.sneucc.org/newsdetail/spotlight-witness-15202389
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