Jesus and the Disinherited, Part 3: Deception

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

May 16, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

Our gracious, eternal God, we thank you for the challenges which life brings. It also brings changes which sometimes throw us into crisis. Be with us in such times in our Christian community. Like the early disciples help us in our common life to find your guidance in our collective decisions.

Help us to approach our decisions, seeking your guidance through prayer.
Help us to examine our own hearts for any unseemly motives.
Help us to focus on the common good and not be driven by our own selfish interests.
Help us to seek consensus and never be satisfied with power plays and divisiveness.
Help us all to share in our mutual ministry.
Lead us forward and help us to create a community where love, acceptance, and mutuality are expressed, where joy abounds, and where results are achieved because we are all working hand in hand together. May it be said of us as it was said of old: “See how those Christians love one another.”

We ask that you would save us from ever being a cloistered cell which seeks escape from our world. Instead, open the windows of our souls to the world and its needs. Send us forth to herald the good news of Jesus, to be your servants to those in need, to visit the sick and the imprisoned, to remember the forgotten in our society, and to work for justice and peace. Use our varied gifts so that as Peter suggested we all might do our fair share in this ministry. Bolster us in moments when we feel inadequate for the task and give us courage. Amen.

 

Luke 24: 44-53

44He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.”

45Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. 46He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, 47and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. 48You are witnesses of these things. 49I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

The Ascension of Jesus

50When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. 51While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. 52Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. 53And they stayed continually at the temple, praising God.

 

A Message

Jesus and the Disinherited, Part 3: Deception

 

Friends, we’re up to part 3 of this 5 part sermon and worship series based on Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. As I remind you every week, you don’t need to read the book in order to follow along, but if you do read the book along with us it will be one of the best reads of your spiritual life. Plus, if you’re reading the book, you can join us at 11am for our book study! A fun time is always had by all, I promise.

 

My greatest goal in this sermon series is to strengthen our discipleship in Jesus by understanding the heart of Christ. In the first part of this sermon series, we learned that Jesus is the source of all that helps us grow, as well as the pruner of all that harms us. Last week, we learned that Jesus teaches us a love that eliminates the fears of this world. This week, we’re talking about the deception this world has us engage in, and how Jesus responds.

 

“Deception” the title of the third chapter of this book, is a word with an awfully negative connotation. Yet, Thurman teaches us that in order to survive in a harsh and dangerous world, especially if you grow up in a disenfranchised community of color as he did, you start learning from a young age how to tell partial truths and hide important things for the sake of self protection. Thurman teaches us that many African-American spirituals started out this way. Enslaved people working together on plantations learned over time that, despite their loss of freedom, there were some things their oppressors couldn’t control. Like singing in the fields. So they shared songs with one another with coded messages about a heaven awaiting them, a hell awaiting their captors, and a faith that would sustain them.

 

As time wore on, and our country inched closer to the Civil War, African-American spirituals morphed into an even greater purpose—coded messages and instructions from the Underground Railroad. After a harrowing journey escaping slavery, a young woman named Araminta Ross found her way to Philadelphia and began a new life, with a new name that she chose for herself: Harriet Tubman. Though she was urged to stay where to stay where it was safe and leave the horror of her past behind, Harriet couldn’t bear the thought of abandoning the rest of her family. So she joined the Underground Railroad, and became its most famous Engineer—and then its most infamous engineer. She made thirteen trips back to the south, rescuing 70 people. To avoid being captured and to protect her identity, Harriet used the deception of a code name, Moses. This code name became very well known among enslaved peoples seeking freedom, and Harriet signaled her presence and shepherded enslaved peoples away into the cover of night by singing call-and-response spirituals about Moses freeing the Egyptian slaves from a distance that overseers couldn’t hear, but field workers could. Amazingly, part of the reason she evaded being captured all those years was because slave owners assumed “Moses” must be a man, and weren’t looking for a petite woman in disguise.

 

Despite what we might think when we hear the word “deception”, Christian people have launched revolutions and revivals by hiding their message inside something else, and have saved countless people from misery, suffering, and isolation. Although the origins of this story are somewhat debatable, the symbol that we call either the “ichtys” or the Christian fish, depending on how much you like Greek, began as a secret code. It’s a simple thing to draw, just two intersecting arches. And during a time when Christians were being persecuted by the Roman Empire and risked all kinds of peril if they made their religious identity known, they connected with one another through this symbol. One person could draw the first arch, and if the other person finished the picture, then you knew they were your ally and friend. Over a thousand years later, as faith leaders sought to reform the existing Church, subvert its teachings into something with more hope for the common person, and reach people who didn’t feel welcome in these imposing buildings, they found ways to sneak theology into the familiar. Martin Luther, at the height of the Protestant Reformation, wrote the original lyrics to “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” over a popular drinking song. Two hundred years later, when John and Charles Wesley drifted away from the Church of England and began preaching in camp grounds and market squares, they wrote hymns that we still sing now over pub songs and folk tunes.

 

Through the ages, though Christians have made terrible mistakes and supported the oppressors for a season, Christ-following people have recognized their Divine call to liberate the oppressed, and have subverted the deception of our oppressed beloveds into hope for a better future. We have done this for the poor, for people of color, and for women, each in an appointed time. For the last fifty years, we, the people called Methodists, have tried to nurture and support our lgbtqia friends, but so often fear of the oppressor has paved the way for a closeted support.

 

The book I’m holding up right now is called the Book of Discipline. It’s our denomination’s official rule book, and it specifies everything from which committees we need to have and how many people need to serve on them, to social principles we need to uphold, to religious articles that form the basis of our theology, to how you go about getting ordained and serving in Church leadership. This book gets updated every four years when our General Conference meets. The General Conference is our legislative branch, and they write laws for the entire denomination. This book that I hold before you didn’t say a single word one way of the other about lgbtqia identities until 1972. It was a tense time in our nation’s history. The women’s liberation movement was blazing its trail, the Stonewall Riots had happened in New York City three years prior, highlighting queer rights in the public sphere, the very first Pride parade had happened in San Francisco just two years prior, and several Methodist clergy had publicly come out as gay. Saying nothing was not acceptable anymore. So the 1972 General Conference of the United Methodist Church convened, and put a new statement of care in the Book of Discipline: “Homosexuals no less than heterosexuals are persons of sacred worth, who need the ministry and guidance of the church in their struggles for human fulfillment, as well as the spiritual and emotional care of a fellowship which enables reconciling relationships with God, with others, and with the self. Further we insist that all persons are entitled to have their human and civil rights ensured.”

 

However, this sentiment brought out the rage of the oppressor—a vocal, conservative faction ever present in our denomination who wish to exclude our queer beloveds from full belonging in the Church. And they insisted we add this sentence: “We do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching.” Famed Methodist theologian and seminary professor Georgia Harkness approached the Conference floor sobbing, and said “It will take us 40 years to get rid of those words.” It’s been 49.

 

The debate over lgbtqia inclusion in our Church has gotten more intense with each passing year. Over the last five decades additional sentences were added to the one you just heard, clarifying that the UMC bans non-cis-hetero marriages and will not ordain queer clergy. The debate over sexuality has dominated every single General Conference gathering since 1972, with some truly horrible blow ups. One year a distraught woman threatened to jump over a balcony, and another year a fist fight broke out in the parking lot. In 2019 a special gathering of the General Conference was called with the goal of settling the debate over sexuality once and for all. Progressives prayed that either the “One Church Plan” or the “Simple Plan” would pass, either of which would take the homophobic language out of the Discipline and allow churches and pastors to make their own decisions about marriage equality. But the oppressors came out in large numbers and elected a horrible piece of legislation called the “Traditional Plan”, which not only maintains the Discipline’s homophobic language but imposes severe, mandatory punishments on clergy who try to defy the rules.

 

For nearly half a century a Methodist clergy person who supports full lgbtqia inclusion is failing to uphold official Church law, and risks being defrocked. It’s been dangerous to be a progressive Methodist. And some of us have used tactics of deception to protect ourselves from the oppressor—soft language about how “all are welcome”, about how this is a “controversial issue” and “there are no right answers”, about how “both extremes are just as bad”. We’ve shared the truth of our progressive theology only with other progressive pastors, and tried hard not to publicly identify our beliefs, out of fear that as soon as we did the UMC would be done with us.

 

But then I’ve witnessed the actions of my very courageous colleagues. Colleagues who, just like the disciples in this morning’s Gospel story, have witnessed Jesus’ ascension into heaven, have yet to experience the arrival of the Spirit at Pentecost, and realize that, for now, we are all waiting in this “in between” space. General Conference was supposed to meet again in 2020, and might have overturned the Traditional Plan by now, but it’s been postponed twice because of the pandemic. What do we do in this “in between” space, while we wait for a more just Church to take form? We act like the disciples, and keep praising God while we wait.

 

Thurman teaches us that, even when our intentions are good, the oppressor keeps harming us as long as we hide from them with deception. Braver people in this in between time have fought back with a far better tool that Jesus provides us: sincerity. Or rather, in the famous words of Michelle Obama, “When they go low, we go high”. Don’t hide—speak your truth. And stand by one another when we speak it. The sin of homophobia is as old as the Church itself and it’s not going anywhere until we make it leave. We need to voice our praise for the God who made us all in the Divine Image by answering those awful words in the Discipline with a liberating theology—we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Gay, straight, bi, pan, ace, queer, trans, nonbinary, and every identity under the sun. All ages, all races, all colors, all nationalities, all abilities, all people. We are God’s Children. And a Church that excludes a single one of God’s children sees Jesus walk right out the door with them. Until the Spirit rains down the fire of a just UMC, we need to praise God by being that Church ourselves.

 

Amen.

 

 

 

I invite you to receive the benediction:

May God protect you through your time of trial.

May the love of Christ,
            seen in what he did, and
            heard in what he said,
                        fill you with joy and hope.

May the Holy Spirit advocate for you,
            leading into all truth,
            lighting the way of faith, and
            strengthening you to follow Jesus,
                        so that you will become
                                    like a strong, young tree,
                                                growing deep and
                                                bearing much fruit.
                                                            Amen.