Fishers of People, Part 2

 

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

 A warm welcome to each worshipper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today.

 

As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation.

 

943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkwayumc.com

                                    Welcome to Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

February 13, 2022

10:00 a.m.

*You are invited to stand in body or in spirit

 

Prelude                 

 

Greeting and Announcements

 

Mission Statement:

We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.

 

Call to Worship

By BJ Beu

 

Blessed are those who trust God, whose trust is the Lord.

They are like trees planted by water, sending out roots by the stream.

They have no fear of summer’s heat, nor do they wither in the sun.

In the year of drought they are not anxious, for their lives bear the fruit of righteousness.

Come to the waters of life

all you who trust in the Lord.

We have come to worship

and to send forth our roots

into streams of God’s living water!

 

 

*Hymn                  Dear Jesus, In Whose Life I See                    #468

 

Prayer of Confession:

Gentle guide, loving guardian, heal our foolish ways. We long to forsake the advice of the wicked and the slow seduction of sinful paths, but our speech and actions often belie us. We yearn to be like trees planted beside living waters, bearing the fruit of righteousness in due season, but the seat of scoffers calls to us and the temptation to return evil for evil withers our souls like shrubs in the desert. Our hearts seek the ways of your Spirit and the waters of life, but our footsteps lead us into arid, desert sands. This is not your hope and plan for us. Forgive us. Turn us again to the healing you so freely offer, and mend the brokenness in our lives and in our world. Amen.

Assurance

God looks at us in our brokenness, and offers blessings to all who turn to the Lord. With the assurance of God’s faithful love, choose this day to be people of blessing.

Anthem

Scripture Reading               Luke 6: 17-26

Jesus Teaches and Heals

¹⁷ He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. ¹⁸ They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. ¹⁹ And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.

Blessings and Woes

²⁰ Then he looked up at his disciples and said:

“Blessed are you who are poor,
    for yours is the kingdom of God.
²¹ “Blessed are you who are hungry now,
    for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now,
    for you will laugh.

²² “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you^[a] on account of the Son of Man. ²³ Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

²⁴ “But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have received your consolation.
²⁵ “Woe to you who are full now,
    for you will be hungry.
“Woe to you who are laughing now,
    for you will mourn and weep.

²⁶ “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

Sermon                       Fishers of People, Part 2

 

Good morning, friends.

 

We’re in part 2 of this sermon series that I titled “Fishers of People”. We’re looking at what this odd and vague commandment, “fish for people” means, and we’re reading stories from Luke about the early days of Jesus’ ministry. While we talk about the emerging ministry of Jesus, I’m also lifting up African American heroes and sheroes who both exemplify the teachings of Christ, and who should inspire us to Christ-like love and service. An important part of this sermon series for me is that I won’t be lifting up historical figures who are well-remembered and famous. You will rightfully hear many sermons, from myself and other like-minded preachers, about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, about Rosa Parks, about Malcolm X, about Harriet Tubman, about Maya Angelou. The stories that I want to lift up to you right now, though, are the ones most of us never heard, because racism forced these people so far to the margins of memory that they faded away without notice. We can atone for our social sin of racism by acknowledging how wrong we were to forget the work of our friends of color, and by telling their stories now.

 

Today’s story is about Cathay Williams. Born in Independence, Missouri in 1844, Williams’ parents were a free father and an enslaved mother. Her mother’s imprisonment in the institution of slavery meant that Williams was also considered the property of her mother’s master, and she grew up a house slave on a plantation in Jefferson County, Missouri.

 

In 1861, as the Civil War took hold of the nation, Union soldiers began to occupy the land near Jefferson County. On the surface, this looked like good news, and an opportunity to escape to freedom and safety, for enslaved Missourians like Williams. In reality, the Union soldiers merely offered a different form of captivity. At seventeen years old, Williams fled the plantation to the Union soldiers. Officially considered stolen property by the Government, Williams performed whatever servant duties the US Army demanded of her. Williams became a cook and a washerwoman, and though both her status and work were deeply dehumanizing, Williams still focused on her path to liberation.

 

Williams was remarkably intelligent, resourceful, and strategic. While a servant of the Army, Williams traveled the country, witnessed important military conflicts, and grew to understand the system very well. Despite being a woman of color, and property in the eyes of the law, Williams eventually decided that service in her country’s military was her future. On November 15, 1866, Williams took on the pseudonym ”William Cathay”, assumed the public identity of a man, and enlisted in a 3 year tour of duty in the Army. Amazingly, though the army required a medical exam for admission which should have immediately outed Williams as female, the Reconstruction era Army was so desperate for new recruits that the doctor that examined her gave her a single eyeball once over, checked the box that she was healthy, and sent her on her way without a second thought.

 

By all accounts, Williams made a brave, dedicated, noble soldier. She was also exposed to the dangers of war and substandard medicine. She fought off smallpox, and carried on with her service. Eventually, though, the strain of fighting a war in poor health began to catch up with her, and after several negligent doctors prescribed medication while clearly skipping a physical exam, in 1868 an army doctor treating Williams finally discovered that she was a woman in disguise. This doctor, a man of compassion in his own right, helped to spare Williams from punishment, perhaps because there were around 400 white women also posed as men so they could serve the military during the Civil War. Clearly there were some ladies dissatisfied with sitting this one out and leaving the fighting to their husbands. Williams received an honorable discharge from military service.

 

Now a free woman, and coping with chronic health problems, the reasonable, safe course of action would have been for Williams to retire and live out her days in peace. But Williams, via her tour with the Army, found her calling, and couldn’t be kept from it. She stayed in the Army, finding work as a cook, and made her way to Colorado. She fell in love and got married, but her husband stole her money and a herd of horses. Williams got his sorry hide arrested, then moved on to an all-black military regiment known as the Buffalo Soldiers. Williams is the only woman to ever serve among them.

 

In old age, around the year 1890, Williams was suffering from severe diabetes and lost her toes to infection. She depended on the Army that she had faithfully served to support herself through illness, and applied for a disability pension. Because of both her race and her gender, Williams was denied, and lived in poverty until her death in 1893. Her final resting place is unknown, and she has no known living descendants. Despite her incredible life, most of her story is known only because of an interview she did with the St. Louis Daily Times in 1876.

 

Switching gears for just a moment, in this morning’s Gospel story, Jesus performed works of compassion in front of his disciples, and then sat them down to teach them Luke’s version of the “Sermon on the Mount”, sometimes nicknamed the “Sermon on the Plane”. Though these words are still quite recognizable, there are significant differences between Matthew’s retelling of these words and Luke’s. While Matthew softens and generalizes the language—“blessed are the poor in spirit”—Luke focuses directly on the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society—blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry, blessed are the hated. It can come off as a small, semantic difference, but Luke teaches us something very important about our relative privilege. This is an especially important point during this Black History Month, in this sociopolitical atmosphere, two years into a pandemic that has killed poor people of color in catastrophically disproportionate numbers. When the Black Lives Matter movement began to emerge in 2013 after the murder of Trayvon Martin, we all started talking about these issues of white supremacy much more than we had before, which was very good. However, as a knee jerk response that only highlighted the importance of these conversations, as soon as we started proclaiming that “Black Lives Matter”, we immediately started hearing “Well what about white lives? It should be all lives matter!”

 

Y’all, nobody ever said they didn’t. What I am saying is that as followers of Jesus, it’s not enough for us to just say “all lives matter”, and trust that everyone will kinda figure out that that includes black people. Jesus knew that if a population of people were likely to be discriminated against, then he needed to go to them first and lift up their sacred worth. He dined with tax collectors and sex workers, he met a five-times-divorced town pariah at the well, and, as captured by Luke, when he taught his disciples the values he wanted them to have, he didn’t say “having enough money to live is nice”, he took the brave, bold stance and said Poor Lives Matter. He also spoke out against those who were taking advantage of society’s most vulnerable—the rich, the full, and the laughing. 2,000 years before Occupy Wall Street, Jesus was going for an Occupy Palestine protest and preached that those who had all the money, food, and comforts they needed were a top 1% of that population, and only got their because they swindled the Cathay Williams’ of their day and denied their pensions. This is as good as it gets for them, Jesus proclaims, and warns that, in the words of Dr. King, the arc of God’s moral universe may be long, but it always bends toward justice.

 

The work of following Jesus is deeply uncomfortable. Especially if this society’s unjust biases have helped you. Or me. It requires us to directly say things that we’d rather casually imply. It requires us to stand up for those hiding in society’s corners, and then be willing to take some heat when we do. It requires us to live in bravery and compassion, seeking out the stories of forgotten heroes like Williams as our guide for this life. It’s work that comes with humility, and pain. But someday future generations will ask about the ministries of our church, and they’ll want to know what we did for the good when the world was embroiled in bad. And our grandkids could say “Well, the bad news is they really didn’t stand up for those who needed their voice, but hey, they had some great chicken barbecues!” Or they could say “They recognized how lucky they were, to have so many privileges and resources in this wealthy suburb, and they used their strengths to help other people, even though they got some flack for it sometimes. They were as brave as a lady posing as a man to fight in the army. And the community became a more just a loving place because of them.”

 

May it be so.

 

Amen.

 

     

*Hymn                               Bind Us Together                              #2226

                              Led by the Front Porch Rockers

 

Offertory          

*Doxology

*Prayer of Dedication

 

Time of Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

 

Father, Mother, God,
Thank you for your presence
during the hard and mean days.
For then we have you to lean upon.
Thank you for your presence
during the bright and sunny days,
for then we can share that which we have
with those who have less.
And thank you for your presence
during the Holy Days, for then we are able
to celebrate you and our families
and our friends.
For those who have no voice,
we ask you to speak.
For those who feel unworthy,
we ask you to pour your love out
in waterfalls of tenderness.
For those who live in pain,
we ask you to bathe them
in the river of your healing.
For those who are lonely, we ask
you to keep them company.
For those who are depressed,
we ask you to shower upon them
the light of hope.
Dear Creator, You, the borderless
sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the
world that which we need most—Peace.

—Maya Angelou

 

Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.

 

 

*Hymn          O Day of God, Draw Nigh (v 1, 2, 3, 5)               #730

 

Benediction

Postlude            

_____________________________________________

Staff

Natalie Bowerman               Pastor

Betsy Lehmann                     Music Director

Joe White                               Custodian

Cassandra Brown                 Nursery Attendant