The Most Important and Marvelous Truth of Life

Transcribed from the sermon preached April 8, 2012

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Isaiah 25:1-9; I Peter 1:1-9, 2:1-5, Mark 16:1-8

For the first time since I was ordained, our family took a vacation during Holy Week. We went to Atlanta Georgia to visit Feliciana’s sister Dinora and her nieces Ivana and Hemma, and nephew Fernando. Dinora has lived in the United Sates for 19 years and in Atlanta for 18, but she cannot travel so she hadn’t seen Nick since he was one and had never seen Kevin. So we traveled to see her during spring break so all of us could go.

On Tuesday the ladies sent me out with the kids to go to Six Flags where we spent gobs of money, waited in long lines, and rode roller coasters until I almost blacked out. Wednesday we went up to the Blue Ridge Mountains and hiked through hemlock and pine, and an afternoon shower, down a creek to a beautiful waterfall. It was the perfect antidote to the crowded, controlled, commercialized amusement park. Have you ever stared up at a waterfall so close that all you can see is falling water and sky? Super cool!

On Thursday we went down town Atlanta to the Martin Luther King Jr. Visitors Center next to Ebenezer Baptist Church. The exhibit followed the chronology of King’s life. Nick and I went in the wrong entrance and wound up starting at his King’s funeral, then worked our way backward. We went past the strike for the sanitation workers, past the stand for peace and against the war in Viet Nam, past the voting rights demonstration in Selma, past the March on Washington, past bombed churches, past the demonstration in Birmingham and Bull Connor with his fire hoses and police dogs, past the Freedom rides, his visit to India to study Gandhi, past Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, past his graduation from Boston and his marriage to Corretta Scott and back through his childhood.

The significant steps in his life were exhibited through a series of plexiglass circles about ten feet in diameter. You stepped in and turned around to view photos, video, artifacts, letters or essays.

On the first circle of the exhibit, which we ended with, the Jim Crow laws were printed. From the 1880s to the 1960s, Jim Crow laws prohibited the mixing of races. White nurses would not treat black people. Interracial marriage or cohabitation was illegal. People of different races could not eat, drink, sleep, use the bathroom, be educated or travel together. Behind us as we read the Jim Crow laws were pictures of white mobs, the hooded KKK and a graphic photo of an African American man hanging dead from a tree. As I turned around the circle, I came elbow to elbow with an older African American man who was leaning down with his arm around a young boy. I listened to the man tell his grandson about white injustice, racial prejudice, hatred and violence as we stood before the graphic picture of death.

I thought to myself, there was more life and hope where I began, at his death, than here at his birth. God help us to keep moving forward and not backward. We have so far to go. There is more life, more justice, more love after King’s death than at his birth. We have an African American President, mixed race marriage is common, our kids are all colors and so are their friends. Yet we still live in a world where a young man wearing a hood is presumed guilty, where a woman who has lived, worked, paid taxes and raised children for 20 years is considered “Illegal”, and where some people who want to commit their love to one another are still prohibited from doing so. It is with great joy and thanksgiving that we celebrate the new life, the forgiveness and redemption, not only for African Americans but all Americans, all of us through the life work and sacrificial death of Martin Luther King Jr. In response to this great Christian legacy, we commit to the ongoing work of Jesus Christ, which consists first in the simple notion that love is what we were made for, no exceptions and no end.

As the man next to me became conscious of my presence, I said, “it was such a sad nightmare, it breaks my heart.” He said, “I lived it.” He introduced himself as Michael from Montgomery. His grandson had come out to visit from San Diego, so we talked with him about San Diego since that is where I attended school and Grandpa Michael had served there in the military. He told me about his march with King in Montgomery, and I told him that I trace my call to the ministry to the day King was shot. It came on the evening news as a special bulletin and my mom began to cry. My dad, the history teacher, told me that King was a Christian minister who tried to live like Jesus. Then they played a clip from King’s I have a Dream speech in Washington, and it was by far the most powerful, inspired speech I had ever heard in my young life.

After we shook hands the kids and I left the exhibit and stepped past the large new church building and across the street to the old church. It is an old brick structure built back in 1918. Inside it looked and smelled like a church. It looked like hundreds, perhaps thousands of churches in the US, medium sized, with thin rectangle stained glass windows down the side, and old wooden pews that seat about the same number as this church. It has a raised chancel with red carpet, two high backed chairs for the minister with a pulpit in the middle and three rows of choir pews behind. As we each spread out and found our own pew, we listened as the sound system played King’s sermon, the Drum Major Instinct. It was powerful for me to sit there where I had seen video of him preaching the Word, from where the old donkey led wagon carried his casket with 50,000 followers, and I tried to imagine the place full of people worshipping. One thing is for sure, it would have been a lot louder than what was coming over the sound system.

We got booted out as they closed at 5, and on the way back to the car we peeked in the windows of the big beautiful new sanctuary. Nick asked, do they still hold worship in the old building? I said, “they must.” He said, “Ya, it wouldn’t seem right if they didn’t.” As serene and prayerful as an empty sanctuary can be, I think Nick hit on a profound theological insight. A museum is appropriate to tell the history. But the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., the Ebenezer Baptist Church, the civil rights movement, St. John’s Presbyterian Church and the Church of the resurrected Christ is a people alive and the Word preached and Praise sung.

For it is in worship, with living worshippers that the old, old dream becomes born again in those who have come together.

King’s story and the civil rights movement are awesome, but they didn’t rise out of thin air. Not only were his father and grandfather preacher activists, but he was named after one who lived 400 years before, and a follower of Jesus and the prophets from old. As Gandhi said, “I have nothing new to teach the world, truth and non-violence are as old as the hills.” And it is last week on Palm Sunday when we hear the story of the scribes and Pharisees asking Jesus to quiet down the crowd who call out as he comes into Jerusalem, and he says, “if these were silent, the very rocks themselves would cry out.” And Isaiah sings out, “O Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you, I will praise your name; for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure.

It is in worship, where the people’s dream is called forth from the prophets and given new life and energy to move out into the world.

Surely in the face of being barred from ordering drinks at lunch counters and getting blasted with fire hoses, Christians drew sustenance from this very passage from Isaiah.

Isaiah recalls the redemption of his people after a long-suffering wait where they endured the oppression of more powerful nations. “For you have been a refuge to the poor, says Isaiah, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat. When the blast of the ruthless was like a winter rainstorm, the noise of aliens like heat in a dry place, you subdued the heat with the shade of clouds, the song of the ruthless was stilled.

⁷And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. ⁸Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. “
Even as the truth of peace and love eco from the hills of Jerusalem and the historic bricks of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the legacy comes alive when people gather for worship and work of the Gospel.

Gathering for worship is the starting place, where we are justified and sanctified for good work of justice and peace. With what hope or what confidence would we move from and against the old legacy of sin in our hearts, against the storm winds of prejudice of our culture…how do we move from in front of hanging death and consider ourselves called by God to join hands as all people of every class, race, gender and orientation, and proclaim a new day and new life? How do we move past our own limitations and finitude, past the sins and mistakes of our own doing against others, against family and ourselves? How do we move past disgrace and shame and stand together elbow to elbow for peace and love. How do we still have hope, and still make it to a new day and new life?

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading…Though for a little while we may have to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of our faith, more precious than gold which though perishable is tested by fire, may redound to praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Christ goes before us, to paraphrase Dan Migliore, to expose the world of violence, fear and hatred for what it is, to enter into solidarity with us as victims and mediate God’s forgiveness to us as perpetrators, and to open a new future and new humanity through the cross so that there may be an end to all the crosses of History.

We come with the humble confidence of knowing we are forgiven by the one who was hung on a tree and yet lives, by the confidence that his love and mercy are more powerful than our sin and death. And by this grace, we are empowered to put away all malice and guile and insincerity and envy and slander. Like newborn babes we long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it we may grow up to salvation.

Yes, with the Church full and his father preaching on Easter Sunday after Easter Sunday, King Jr. would know the living hope of this great story: about how the ladies came to the tomb that early morning and found it empty, and an angel said, You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, he is not here. He is risen. Go tell his disciples that he is going ahead of you to Galilee.” So it is no surprise to us this morning that King Jr. would say in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”

Jesus said, tear down this temple, and in three days I will rebuild it. In three days he is risen, and the Spirit of the risen Christ is a living stone, and like living stones we are built into a spiritual house.

The change is that with the risen Christ, the new temple, the new spiritual house is made up of living stones, and it is movable. Christ, the cornerstone, goes out ahead of us to Galilee, to Atlanta and Montgomery, to Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond and Washington. So we come to Church to be living stones, built into a spiritual home. But the Church is to be a mobile home. And so we are to go out into the world with joy and thanksgiving for the knowledge that God’s love killed rises again. We are to go out with the joy and thanksgiving for the beautiful diversity of God’s Creation and all God’s children. We are to carry this joy, the joy of knowing love and peace through the risen Christ, into our work place and neighborhood, into our restaurants, schools, into our tweets and blogs, emails and web pages, into our friendships, marriages and families, into our actions as citizens of this nation and the world, certain that Christ is there before us.

Inspired and saved by a truth as old as Creation, we come together to be built into a temple of living stones and to go out to the future and live radical love so that there would be more joy at the time of our death than our birth, and people will say, let us not go back. With Christ in our hearts, we now know the way of life and love. We could not nor will not go back. The stones of fear and hate will not hold us down – Roll away that stone. That old violence and hatred have died in our hearts, and we give thanks that in love we are born again.