Sermons

The title for this morning’s sermon is borrowed from a previous sermon, preached by Conrad Massa from this pulpit in June of 1971. The answer to the question then, “Should a Church Take Risks?,” was “yes,” just as it would be this morning. The presenting issue at that moment, some 32 years ago, was whether the Presbyterian church should donate $10,000 to the legal defense of Angela Davis, described in the language of that moment as a “Black, militant, Communist.”

Some of you will remember that event as a watershed one for the Presbyterian church, precipitating the defection, or at least precipitating the perception of defection, of many members. Like many Presbyterian conflicts before, then and since, we battled over two issues – process and the question itself. That is to say, could we give that money, and should we give that money?

I have no intention to re-visit that controversy, at least this morning. But the “could” and the “should” questions remain more than a little relevant. Conrad Massa’s sermon that day drew in broader topics – particularly the issues of race as they played themselves out in the city of Rochester and the broader culture. He used on that day the story of the Good Samaritan to under gird his point, that Jesus’ admonition to “love your neighbor” certainly had to include Angela Davis.

Should a church take risks? The question invites re-visiting this morning. We are well on our way to losing the impact of the holiday we mark tomorrow, honoring the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr. And so I would like to go off-line from the lectionary this morning, using Martin Luther King’s birthday as the moment, using Conrad Massa’s question as the pivot point.

In his final Sunday morning sermon, preached on March 31, 1968 in the soaring, gothic sanctuary of the Washington National Cathedral, Dr. King admonished his listeners to “remain awake during a great revolution.” He insisted then that three revolutions were happening, and that we, that is, they, should not be as Rip Van Winkle, falling asleep and waking up to a new world.

The three revolutions he identified seem hauntingly familiar now almost 35 years later – technological, military (the ability to build and use weapons of extraordinary power) and social – represented by the freedom movements and the efforts toward civil and human rights.

It is a sermon worth reading; it resonated then and it resonated now. Reminding his no-doubt-cultured congregation that morning of the abundance of resources held by America and Americans, he first addressed racial discrimination, linking it to poverty and then linking race and poverty to the Vietnam War. It was this last topic – Vietnam – for which he gained much criticism, from white and black Americans, those who were with him on race and even poverty. To King, though, they were interrelated – race, poverty, war.

His text that morning is the same one I just read, from the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos’ visions of yearning for a world yet to be, summarized by God’s promise to do a new thing. A new thing, in King’s eye, in the manner that issues of justice and peace were addressed in the life of the country and the life of the world.

And so we re-visit that big question, should a church take risks, prompted by this curious holiday, prompted more so by the best of our tradition, including the history of this congregation, prompted even more so by the texts that define us, from John of Patmos and the prophet Isaiah, prompted by the Trinity we know as the God whose justice we seek, Jesus whose peace we make, and the Spirit whose freedom we share.

It is a complex conversation, too easily caricatured as the way churches get involved in politics, and church members being alternately happy or unhappy depending on whether they are Democrats or Republicans and whether decisions reflect those perspectives or not. It is more complex than that. It is more complex than the reality of the nation in which we live, where religion and government, defined in prior generations as “church and state,” are not to be intermingled. And we agree that they should not be, of course, or, rather, that the government should not interfere with the practices of religion or that religion should not carry undue or improper influence on the workings of government.

But we would be neither good citizens nor faithful followers of Christ if we checked our religion at the civic door or left our politics in the church parking lot. The great movements of American history have witnessed this interaction, religion in public life, and have been transformed for the better: the American Revolution, the struggle for abolition, the march for civil rights. People of good faith, of very good faith, have disagreed all the way through, have disagreed on tactics and strategy, have disagreed on the “could” and “should” questions, as they should, as we should. For us, though, the fundamental question is a theological one, and we have answered that theological question time after time with a resounding “yes.”

In one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Christ and Culture, H. Richard Niebuhr embraced for us the model of Christ as “transformer” of culture, a “view of history that holds that to God all things are possible in a history that is fundamentally not a course of merely human events but always a dramatic interaction between God and humanity.” (page 194) Niebuhr places our tradition, Reformed, Presbyterian, somewhere between two poles: we do not reject culture and live apart from it and we do not fully embrace culture for everything that it is. We transform it, or, rather, the spirit of Christ transforms it through our actions.

That’s why it can never be as simple as the role of faith in politics. William Sloane Coffin wrote that "there is a real temptation to think that an issue is less spiritual for being more political, that the sanctuary is too sacred a place for the grit and grime of political battle.” (“The Politics of Compassion,” in The Heart Is a Little to the Left, page 17)

Our forebears took on the politicians, and rightly so – Calvin in Geneva, Knox in Scotland, Witherspoon in colonial America. People of faith from Walter Rauschenbusch to Dorothy Day to Desmond Tutu have insisted on basic human needs as fundamentally political manifestations of fundamentally religious affirmations. And we may disagree with tactics and strategy, but we certainly, at our best, have never questioned the primacy of the conversation.

We have not always been at our best, of course. That most famous response of Martin Luther King’s, called now “A Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” is written not as a response to politicians, but to white religious leaders who counseled him to slow down, questioning the appropriateness of the movement. I remember several decades ago interviewing a then retired Presbyterian minister, a campus chaplain at a great Southern university. Regarding the civil rights movement, he said to me, “Whatever we did, John, we didn’t do enough.” A conviction, a conviction and a call to action.

And the action takes on many forms. Some of it is hands-on – tutoring, food cupboards, dining room ministries, things like Habitat for Humanity. Loving your neighbor takes on tangible and immediate form. There are different gifts, to be sure. Sometimes those gifts of hands-on service lead to other interesting places, from one on one to a global, systemic view.

None of these examples are simple, none without controversy, none without people taking opposing views, none without voices saying that religious people have no right to participate at all in these conversations. But we have answered that question, or, rather, the question has been answered for us. These are the words to which Martin Luther King turned, to which we turn: let justice roll down like an overflowing stream, love your neighbor, blessed are the peacemakers.

Where might it begin, or, rather, continue for us? If Karl Barth was right, that life is about living with a Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, then we don’t need to look very hard to discover where our conversations should be. This morning’s paper reports on two sets of events happening yesterday – one in Washington on war in Iraq and one in Rochester on violence in our city. These are conversations that we as people of faith should take seriously. The outreach and education committees at Third Church are poised to help us with all of this. But we should not off-load these conversations to particular program areas. They are for all of us, all who hear the words of Jesus and the prophets as calls to action and invitations to take risks.

I can almost imagine Martin Luther King reading the words from Revelation – I am about to do a new thing, the old has passed way. What is that new thing? What old things need to pass away? They are many, and complex, but such difficulties and complexities should not deter us at all, but rather inspire us, just as they inspired those who have gone before us in this place.

And despite the complexities – should we give $10,000 to help defend Angela Davis, for example – in some form it’s not all that complex. Whatever we do, whatever new thing we seek to envision, should embrace the commitments of peace and justice as filter, leaven and benchmark. And love.

A few remarkable buildings lie within a few remarkable blocks in the city of Atlanta. A modest house where a middle class African-American minister’s family raised a son. A church, Ebenezer Baptist, which served as clearinghouse for much of the good of the 1960’s. And there is now, down the street, a museum and gravesite. In the museum, tucked back in a corner somewhere, is a little glass-booth display, papers and awards. And there is a preacher’s robe, for King was, first and foremost, a preacher.

And behind the robe, almost easily missed, is a little pocket Bible. The image remains a strong one for me. The word, under girding it all, backing it up, supporting, pushing forward. The word. The word, which for this day and every day, insists that the old things have passed away, and that God makes all things new, insisting not only that a church should take risks, but that a church must take risks.

Thanks be to God for the gift of the word, and for those who, from season to season, invite us into its power and truth. Amen.