January 15, 2017

Matt Alspaugh

 

Introduction – The Mashup
“What was I thinking?” I’m asking myself now as I put together this sermon. This is the second of a series on our Seven Principles, this one focusing on the second principle, our affirmation and promotion of “justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.” Fair enough, but our monthly theme is, “What does it mean to be a community of prophecy?” OK, second principle, prophecy, but also this is Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, and it seems wrong to leave him out. But King was kind of a prophet, so maybe. But there’s more — our Annual Meeting follows this service, so I ought to at least touch on what is salient for UUYO. And maybe I should tie it all up with that bible verse from Amos that this sermon is named after – “Let justice roll down like a river”. You might put on life preservers – this could be a wild ride!
Prophets
We often think of prophets as solo operators — the guys in the Bible who go around in sackcloths and ashes, eating insects, raving on about God telling you this and that. Do that kind of thing today, and you could quite likely be put in the mental hospital for a 72 hour observation — and certainly I saw a few of these cases during my time working in the locked unit. They kept us chaplains around for a reason!
While I think such prophets as solo operators might have worked in Biblical times, modern prophets, at least the ones who want to accomplish something with their prophecy, realize they must work within communities.
When I think of a modern prophet, my mind goes immediately to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. To hear his speeches still makes my spine tingle. His messages cast a vision for a future — a prophetic future — encompassing not just racial justice — massive in itself– but also economic justice and peace in a time of war.
King and Prophetic Action
So I was amazed to read of how King turned his prophetic voice into action. In his book “Stride Toward Freedom”, King describes how the black community in Montgomery responded to the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white person.
A one-day boycott of the buses was organized, and a city-wide mass meeting was planned on the night of the boycott to make further plans. An organization to guide the protest was quickly put together, and King was nominated and elected to lead it. He notes,
“The action had caught me unawares. It had happened so quickly that I did not even have time to think it through. It is probable that if I had, I would have declined the nomination. [1]”
King went home after the meeting, and had to prepare his speech to the mass meeting.
“… I had only twenty minutes to prepare the most decisive speech of my life. As I thought of the limited time before me and the possible implications of this speech, I became possessed by fear. Each week I needed at least fifteen hour to prepare my Sunday sermon. Now I was faced with the inescapable task of preparing, in almost no time at all, a speech that was expected to give a sense of direction to a people imbued with a new and still unplumbed passion for justice. … [2] King reminds us that the boycott was possible only because a network of organizations existed to help create and manage it. There were the individual churches, the minister’s association, the black cab drivers, and new organizations, the Montgomery Improvement Association, with its transportation committee getting people alternative rides, and a finance committee that reached for resources as far away as New York City, and on and on. Early in the boycott, King remembered that a friend had led a bus boycott in Baton Rouge Louisiana, and called him long distance to get advice on setting up a carpool system for alternative transport.
And so it was with other marches, boycotts, and actions that Martin Luther King was involved with. He depended on networks of organization, communities, churches, as he worked to make social change. He didn’t go it alone.

The one reading from Martin Luther King that appears in our hymnal proclaims:
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”[3
I have read many meanings into these most prophetic words — our interdependence, a theological unity, the web of life. Now I also see a more prosaic meaning too — simply the sense that if we want to get anything done, we have to call on our ‘networks of mutuality’ and attend to the weaving of our ‘garment of destiny’. To get anything real done, we have to work in community, with others. We have to find the shared pain that urges us to work together to create justice.
This Church Community
Which brings me to this community, this congregation. In recent times, that is after the initial shock of the election, I have noted a renewed energy, an intensity among many of us here, and in fact in our entire church, around our identity as a touchstone, a beacon for progressive religion and ideas in the Mahoning Valley. We see ourselves as the community that can help people regroup, and find their way, both spiritually, making themselves better people, and as progressive activists, making the world a better place.
And we are all activists. We may not be John Cashin. But… There are many of us in despair for our country and the world. But doing something good, anything for change is a great antidote to despair. And so this church is one place where you can do something, anything. There is much to do. Or if not right here, we can help you navigate the networks of mutuality to connect with the things you do want to do.
We are involved, at various stages, with many other networks. We are part of conversations to bring Syrian refugees to Youngstown. On Monday morning, I will be part of a workshop on institutional racism in Youngstown being held at First Presbyterian Church — and I’d love to have many of you come and participate. We are working with ACTION and with Commonwealth on the issue of food deserts and the possibility of getting a grocery store in central Youngstown — and Commonwealth just this month opened a small store just two blocks south of our church. We are planning a LGBTQ Welcoming Congregation event in February with a new non-profit group in town. We are looking to put a butterfly garden next to our parking lot across the street, as part of a larger neighborhood gardens project. We are talking with Richard Brown Methodist Church, just north of us, about their food pantry ministry and food justice issues. There’s plenty of stuff going on that you can do.
We read together earlier, from the great Catholic radical socialist, and activist Dorothy Day, who said it straight:

“No one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless. There’s too much to do.”[4] I so agree.
Now another way to be active is to help by serving the church directly, doing the things that keep the church vibrant and healthy. We call this Shared Ministry.
By now, I hope all of you are helping out with our Hospitality Teams, the teams that rotate approximately monthly to make Sunday mornings — well, hospitable. This is a basic level of shared ministry, a good way to start. Talk to Linda Mohn to learn more.
Beyond Hospitality Teams, there are many other ways to serve. Teaching our children in Religious Education, as Kerry Planty and ___ are doing today. Helping lead worship as a Worship Associate, as Marcellene Hawk is doing today. Helping with sound, as Tim Raridan is doing. There are numerous things to do. You will find a grouping of cards with descriptions of many of our shared ministry opportunities downstairs, on the south wall, with a yellow sign that says Volunteer! Shared Ministry.
It is so important that we share these ministries broadly. If they fall to too few people, those people can burn out. It’s a grave concern in churches and volunteer groups everywhere. But even in service, we can grow, and learn. As Karen Lapidus described in her Chalice Lighting, we can develop the level of self-understanding to know when a shared ministry task is feeding us or draining us, and we can take steps to move toward that which feeds us and let go of that which drains us. If we are more fully living out that second principle, ‘justice, equity, and compassion in human relations’ then we will be balancing ‘equity’ — the expectation that everyone contribute in equal measure as they are able — with compassion — the realization that we not all are the same.
Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Martin Luther King often returned to favorite Bible verses in his speeches and writings. One of those, also a favorite of mine, is line from the minor Hebrew prophet Amos, Chapter 5, Verse 24, which reads: “Let justice roll down like a river, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
King used that line in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”, part of which we heard earlier. King wrote that letter while sitting in a jail cell, under arrest for protesting in defiance of a court order. In jail, someone gave King a newspaper article signed by several white clergy who opposed King’s methods, calling him an extremist. King began to write a response, first on the margin of the newspaper, then on scraps of paper given to him by a supporter.
In this response, King called these white clergymen into account, excoriating them for — as I would put it — living the opposite of our second principle. King called them out for tolerating IN-justice, preserving IN-equity, and being IN-compassionate.
King summarizes this missive, saying:
But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.[5] And I think we are seeing exactly that happening today, in many churches. Even the conservative non-denominational and evangelical church movement is sputtering — losing the support of young people, forfeiting the loyalty of millions.
Amos
In thinking about King’s warning, I returned to that Amos quote. I looked at the larger context of that quote, Amos 5:21 to 24. Amos quotes God admonishing the Hebrew people. Amos, speaking for God, says:
I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
To me that is a powerful and oh, so true, passage. Admittedly the reference to festivals and assemblies, to the noise of song makes me think of the excess of the inauguration this week. But at the same time, I’m proud that at least one among us, and perhaps more, are participating in the Women’s March in Washington next weekend.
But, in my eyes, Amos offers prophetic validation of the work we do here at UUYO and in Unitarian Universalism in general. We do not spend our time praising some jealous God, bowing down in fearful worship, supplicating some capricious and wrathful deity with song and harps. Nor do we fritter our time away as an irrelevant social club.
Instead, what we do on Sunday morning is for our own uplift. It is to help us to become better people, to encourage us in our work to make this world a better place.
That is not to say that our God — if such a God exists — would not be gladdened for our work. Our God would be urging us to focus outward, not merely upward. Our God would call us to build a better future. Our God would call us to do all the things we can do, to let justice flow down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.