2 Corinthians 5:1-17 (links validated 5/7/24a)
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Sermon Starters (Proper 6B)(2024)
Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer was a civil rights activist and extraordinary prophet whose story Kate Clifford Larsen tells in her book, Walk With Me. White politicians, officials, policemen and even ordinary citizen assumed that her skin color and prophetic voice gave them license to do to her whatever their racial hatred proposed. Larsen tells of one instance in which Winona, MS police officer Will Surrell assaulted Miss Fannie while she was in jail. She was there because authorities had charged her with disturbing the peace for defending her black friends who’d asked to be served at a whites-only café. Surrell later drove a still-weakened Fannie Lou Hamer to the courthouse for her trial. As he drove, she asked him, “Do you people ever wonder how you’ll feel when the time comes, you have to meet God?” Neither Larsen nor history records Surrell’s answer to Miss Fannie’s question. Maybe that’s because there wasn’t a good answer.Geography of the Imagination
Dr. Howard Thurman was a theologian and civil rights leader, who served as Dean of the chapels at both Howard and Boston Universities for many years. He was also the grandson of a slave, even though he died in 1981, which is within most of our lifetimes. He wrote about his grandmother’s experiences as a plantation slave in the Old South. In particular, he wrote about the impact that attending church had on those slaves. The plantation owner agreed to allow the preacher to hold services in the slave quarters on Sunday afternoons. More than 100 years later, Bishop Leontine Kelly would say, “If you want people to stay where they are put, don’t tell them about Jesus.” But apparently that thought hadn’t occurred to this slave owner. So the preacher would come every Sunday afternoon and tell the story of Calvary — how Jesus was falsely arrested and beaten and executed. Those were stories the slaves could understand because of their own personal experiences. Thurman’s grandmother said that “When [that old preacher] went by Calvary,” he would always be moved to shout, “But God raised him again! And he is seated at the right hand of God in heaven!” Then the preacher would take off his glasses, lean over the pulpit and look straight into the eyes of the congregation. Then he would say to them, “But slaves, you are not any man’s property. You are children of God Almighty! Never forget it!” Thurman’s grandmother told him that, whenever the preacher would come to that part of the story, her spine would stiffen, and she could endure another day...
Resources from 2021 to 2023
Sermon Starters (Proper 6B)(2021)
Flannery O’Connor was what one colleague calls “a remarkably perceptive diagnostician of the human condition.” One of her most diagnostic but startling short stories is entitled, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” It’s the story of Bailey, his wife, children, and mother who travel to Florida for a vacation, even though their route takes them through an area in which an escaped convict is on the loose. The ornery grandmother constantly tries to direct the trip. Eventually she convinces her reluctant son to turn off the main highway and onto a deserted road. There they have an accident that disables their car. The only people who stop at the scene of the accident are the escaped convict O’Connor calls the Misfit and his docile henchmen, Hiram and Bobbie Lee. When the grandmother shrieks his name, the Misfit tells her that it would have been better for all of them if she hadn’t recognized him (a poignant foreshadowing of the story’s final act). The old lady spends most of the rest of her life desperately trying to save her family and herself by insisting that the Misfit must come from good people. While we sense she really believes just the opposite of what she keeps saying about him, the strong-willed grandmother continues to insist that the Misfit is a “good man.”...We Honor the Gifts
I’ve been thinking about how hierarchies go hand in hand with categories and categorizing. If you’ve been through the conference’s Imagine No Racism training, you probably learned a lot about implicit bias. Implicit bias is the unconscious way our brains group things together in our heads, so that we can think and process and react quickly. Implicit bias is usually hidden to us - we’re not aware, moment to moment, of the associations our brains make. It is automatic. And we can’t really function without putting things into categories. We need to, to process the enormous amounts of information that come at us every day. You can see implicit bias at work by doing a simple test of something called the Stroop Effect, which demonstrates how our reaction times can be slowed when our brains are confronted with information that doesn’t belong together in our minds...
Resources from 2018 to 2020
Walking by Faith
There is a wonderful line in Sinclair Lewis’ novel Elmer Gantry. The book is a long ramble through the life of a blowhard ex-football player turned preacher who is variously successful and self-destructive. Gantry is on an upswing; he is the minister at a big church in a big city and he is on a speaking tour around the state, telling other people how to be as successful as he is. Andrew Pengilly is a gentle and humble minister with a long career in the same little church who volunteers to put the famous preacher up for the night when he comes to town. Gantry sits at the kitchen table, drinking coffee while boasting and bragging about all the things he has done, and plans to do, to bring in the kingdom. Suddenly, Pengilly interrupts, “Mr. Gantry, why don’t you believe in God?”...Preaching Helps (Proper 6B)(2018)
Tom Long once told a story that illustrates the “already and not yet” nature of reconciliation in our lives. One time Long was asked to preach at what was billed as a special “family worship service.” It was a great idea . . . on paper. The notion was to hold the worship service not in the sanctuary but in the fellowship hall. There in the hall families would gather around tables and in the center of each table there would be the ingredients for making a mini-loaf of bread. The plan was to have the families make bread together and then, while the sweet aroma of baking bread filled the hall, the minister would preach. When the bread was finished, it would be brought out and used for a celebration of the Lord’s Supper. It was a great idea . . . on paper. But it didn’t work out very well...
Resources from 2015 to 2017
Resources from the Archives
Beside Ourselves for God
Paul said, “For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God.” Now what do you suppose is going on there in that sentence? I know that phrase, to be beside oneself, and I think you do too. We use it in common, everyday story-telling with each other. “My daughter didn’t come in ‘till 2:30 in the morning. I was beside myself with worry!” The dictionary says that to be “beside oneself” is to be “in a state of extreme excitement.” I think I would add more than that. It can mean exceptionally worried, or exceptionally happy, or exceptionally frantic. In any case, the sense of it is to be at the top of our emotional spectrum. One notch higher and we would be in orbit. It is to be in a superlative state of our emotional lives, whether high or low. Another way of looking at it is to say that it means to be a little crazy, a little unlike our normal selves, to be “beside” the self that we usually are. One other place where this same Greek word is used in the New Testament is in Mark 3, where the family of Jesus, worried about his newly launched ministry, “went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’”[1] Clearly, this is serious business...The Lord Looks on the Heart
("Mr. Swiller was known far and wide as a hard-nosed boss who watched his employees like a hawk. He was making one of his regular tours of the factory when he spotted a young man leaning against a pile of boxes just outside the foreman's office. Since George, the foreman, wasn't around, Swiller stood off to the side and watched to see just how long the young man would stand around doing nothing..." and another illustration)