Preaching the sermons we hate

So I hated my sermon this morning.

Not because it was bad sermon, I don't think. Not saying it was Best Sermon Ever, but my guess is it "worked," whatever that means for a sermon. It's even possible it worked too well.

I'm semi-using the lectionary at the moment, so this week I was a week ahead in an ongoing march through Paul's epistle to the Romans. As a result, today's sermon came out of Romans 12:9-21. (For what it's worth, I've been a week ahead for a couple of weeks, and will be for one more, in order to avoid missing Romans 13 when I'm on vacation in a couple of weeks.)

So Romans 12, the first portion of which supplied last week's sermon, is a profoundly rich chapter by any accounting. The first two verses in particular are among the best ever, and what follows from them does so in striking and powerful form. (If you ask me my favorite verse of scripture it could vary from day to day, but Romans 12:2 is always a good candidate.)

The second lectionary chunk of Romans 12 presents one immediate difficulty for preaching; you really could extract about twenty different sermon topics from it without trying too hard. Nonetheless, I did my prep work, muddled through Greek and hit the commentaries and read again and again and finally came to the conclusion that I had, more or less, a sermon. (Make of it what you will.)

By the time I preached it I hated it. Profoundly so.

Some of this scripture is quite beautiful, but some of it is awfully difficult to deal with. Paul wants to talk about how the Christ-follower, living as a living offering to God and transformed by the renewing of the mind, both lives in the body of Christ and in turn responds (as part of the body of Christ) to the larger world outside. Sometimes that means running up against evil, and Paul comes back to that idea in different ways throughout the chapter.

Some of them are easy to get behind or even to cheer. "Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good." Yeah! We can get behind that! (Never mind that we might not always be completely clear on what is evil sometimes, but there are some obvious things out there in the headlines and we can get behind hating that evil!) Woohoo!!

But "bless those who curse you; bless and do not curse them"... whaaa? 

"Do not repay anyone evil for evil"... oh, come on... .

"Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God"... but I want revenge now!!!

"No; 'if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads'." ...you have got to be kidding me...and what does that "burning coals" business even mean???

Finally, "do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good." Again, what does that even mean?

Seriously, what does that even mean to "overcome evil with good"? What evidence exactly do we have that this kind of thinking won't get us killed (in a very literal physical sense these days)?

It's possible that the destructive effect of Hurricane Harvey is illustrating some of these verses for us. It's entirely possible that there are black or Hispanic or LGBTQ+ rescue workers pulling KKKers or neo-Nazis out of the floodwaters in Houston even as I type. They're preaching this scripture far better than I can do.

I don't want to do these things. I should be ashamed to admit it, but that doesn't make it any less true.

There's a lesson, of course. Even as the mainline tries to be faithful and admittedly not die in the process, we don't get to ignore the stuff we'd rather ignore. We're still obligated to preach the tough scriptures and feed those who would just as soon see us go down the drain (and they are out there). If anything, we're probably more obligated to do so, seeing as we know what it is to be endangered by our own hubris and blindness, lest others fall.

Our churches may not worship scripture the way some (*ahem*) Christian traditions do, but we don't get to dismiss it when it becomes difficult. I still need to confront all those unpleasant instructions in Romans 12, not to mention the much-abused first seven verses of Romans 13, famously used to justify a nuclear strike on North Korea just a few weeks ago (remember that?). Far from being a "political" move such is mandatory as precisely a theological imperative in the wake of Robert Jeffress's claims. I can't avoid confronting that (even though the lectionary tries to let me off the hook by leaving those seven verses out of the prescribed reading). It would be no less than dereliction of duty.

Sometimes we are charged to confront other corners of the church, and sometimes we have to proclaim the stuff that we don't even like. Just because I might hate the sermons that result doen't let me avoid preaching them.

Who's rescuing who in the wake of this?

From mainline to front line

I have seen more than one tweet or Facebook comment in the last twenty-four hours suggesting that for those who wondered how they would have acted or reacted in the era of the civil rights movement, well, you're finding out now.

To be sure there's some truth to that. It might be slightly more accurate to say that if you haven't yet, you will soon.

I say that only in the sense that such realization might be forced on you in a way it has not necessarily been yet. You may not live anywhere near Charlottesville, Virginia, but don't be under any illusions that your town is necessarily immune from such white supremacist violence.

So I've been looking at my own town of residence with an eye towards what might incite the nation's white supremacists and Nazis and violent racists of whatever stripe to show up here.

I've never lived in Charlottesville, but in my time in Richmond I ended up making a lot of visits, some of them for work or internship reasons. Gainesville is not that much like Charlottesville. The vibe and culture are quite different. The point here is not to prefer one or the other (and neither of them will ever hold a candle to Lawrence, Kansas, to me anyway), simply to note that they are very different towns.

The universities housed in those towns are also quite different. They both claim a role as the "flagship" universities of their states, but otherwise they work in very different ways. UVa can be much more of a "snob school" than UF can get away with being, due to varying regulations and attachments that require them to take students that wouldn't get into UVa. Partly as a result, UF is larger. In fact, it is (blank)ing huge. I had no idea when I moved here how large it had become. It's like a freakin' educational Death Star.

But the two towns and universities housed in them have a few slight similarities. Both Charlottesville and Gainesville (as do many university towns) sit in pronounced contrast to the parts of their states immediately surrounding them in terms of educational level as well as social and political attitudes. But other than that, there really isn't anything in Gainesville that should set off the firestorm that happened in Charlottesville, right? No renamed park or removed statue...

Oh. Forgot about "Old Joe."

That's a statue that currently stands on the grounds of the local county administration building, placed  in 1904, and now a source of disagreement. The most recent move by the local county authorities has been to offer it to an area United Daughters of the Confederacy group (the organization that originally placed the statue) who would then be responsible for its removal from public property (supposedly it might be moved to an area with a number of graves of Confederate soldiers).

For the moment this resolution seems to have held sway. But who knows? What if some copycat bunch of hooded sheets decides to cause trouble when the time for removal arrives? So, it's not impossible for something to happen.

And if it does I have no choice to be on the front line.

That's part of the call for the mainline right now. If we're really going to live up to the gospel we claim, we have to been there when the likes of this weekend's marauders in Charlottesville show up in our towns seeking to commit racial terrorism under the guise of "free speech." We have to stand with those being terrorized, even (dare I say especially) if it's risky. We cannot pretend that racists and those hated and hunted by racists are somehow equally at fault.

Furthermore, we have to take our cues from the ones hated and hunted by those racists, the people of color who face this threat basically for waking up in the morning. It's not our job to come in and save the day; it's our job to be there with the ones who are under threat.

A lot of mainline pastors, including some old seminary classmates and friends, did this beautifully this weekend in Charlottesville. Singing "This Little Light of Mine." Praying and singing and worshiping God. Together. And then standing in the way of the racists.

Not every individual is physically capable of that kind of literal standing on the front line. But the mainline really has to, individually but even more collectively, be there with the ones who really do know what persecution is. Otherwise we might as well just go ahead and die off like all those evangelicals keep saying we're gonna do.