Well, here I am at the Festival of Homiletics, 2020. I’m not alone this time. Dora, the upstairs cat, is sleeping on the pile of boxes next to her window here in the room of requirement in #S303 here on Sawyer Brown Road, Nashville TN. Yeah, like so many other things this year, the in person Festival was canceled and replaced with this virtual edition. So, I’m up here in my home office, which sounds like an awfully grandiose title for the spare room. Or the comic book room, because that is where the comic books reside. And the room of family genealogy papers that La Donna is working her way through. All of which is why we call it “The Room of Requirement.” For the non-Harry Potter fans out there, it is the room where what you need to have happen, happens. So, since mid-March, it has been where my computer and books reside so I can do whatever I need to do for Discipleship Ministries.
This week what I am doing is attending the virtual Festival of Homiletics. As well as various other things that work requires. That’s the problem with not going away, you end up trying to it all. So, I’ll miss some of the Festival, while I maintain my virtual presence as a part of the Worship Team, and the larger Strategic Programming Team, and the Discipleship Ministries Team. It’s hard to keep all those things in motion all at once. Especially in “these difficult times.”
That is the subtext of everything happening at the Festival this year. The theme is “Preaching a New Earth: Climate and Creation.” But the pandemic has focused the thinking and acting and the whole structure of the event. We’re scaled down this year, no overlapping or concurrent events, we’re not starting at 8am and ending at 7 or 8pm. Instead we’re “live at 12noon Eastern time and we end at 4pm with some music. Today, for example, after an opening welcome we had a sermon by Rev. Traci Blackmon/worship experience, a lecture on Christians and Climate Change by Climate Scientist Katherine Hayhoe, then a talk on Genesis in reverse, or undoing creation by Bill McKibben, an interview with Bishop William Willimon, and music by Ashley Cleveland. That’s Day One. Seems like a lot, but it is a light day for the Festival. Trust me on this.
But, I have to give credit to the organizers who have been scrambling for these past few months to figure out what and how. It was still a significant event. The beginning of a significant event.
The Rev. Traci Blackmon serves as pastor in the UCC and also is the Executive Director of Justice and Local Church Ministries. Think about that for a moment. Justice and Local Church Ministries. I don’t think, or rather I hope that isn’t two different jobs cobbled together. But rather a denominational position. Justice and Local Church Ministries. Justice isn’t something that happens somewhere else, by people apart from the functioning of the local church. No, justice is what the local church is about. What the local church does. And Rev. Blackmon says it begins by seeing. Her text was Luke 13:10-17, the woman bent over whom Jesus heals on the Sabbath causing all sort of conniptions amongst the people of power. Blackmon points out that this woman didn’t come to be healed. She was just coming to the synagogue. Coming for prayers. Coming to make her offering. She doesn’t come with a request. She is bent over, has been for 18 years - and there isn’t any indication of her age, we assume elderly because bone density and curvature of the spine is an affliction of some in the old age, but she might have been this way from birth, maybe she was 18 years old and didn’t know any life but this bent one. We don’t know. But she might have been there, worshiping beside us for years, and we knew it, we know her, but we don’t see her. That’s Blackmon’s point. The bent ones among us, the ones burdened by the injustice of this world, the one’s carrying this society’s burden of not being the majority, not being the right race, the right gender, the right ethnicity, the right economic class, she and they are bent over trying to carry all that has been piled on them, all that has been thrown at them and we don’t even see them. By choice, often. We don’t want to see them. Because seeing them might carry responsibility to do something, to heal something, to bring justice.
That’s why workers of justice in our society want us to know the names of those who are bent over by injustice, those broken, the Ahmaud Arberys and the Breonna Taylors, and the Atatiana Jeffersons and so many others who have become statistics and not people who are bent over in our society. Jesus healed her because He saw her. Not because she asked, not because she “deserved” it more than any others, but because He saw her. Can we do less than to see those around us. In part because we hope someone will see us when we are bent over.
Like those who hope we will see a world bent over, in need of healing. I missed Dr. Hayhoe’s lecture, but I heard Bill McKibben speak about an issue that he has spent most of his life trying to get people to see. The earth is bent over, he argues, has been for years. And, he claims, everyone knows it. Even those most at fault, the oil companies and fossil fuel companies, who have known for years the impact of their industy on the planet. They’ve made some changes in what they do, not to halt the devastation or to lessen their impact, but to ensure that they can keep making money. One example, they raised the level of their oil drilling platforms off-shore to account for the rising sea levels that they predicted decades ago.
Frankly it was hard to listen to Bill. You could hear the despair in his voice, the fear that we will continue not to see, to want to sustain our lifestyle to such an extent that the world we give to our children and grandchildren will not be able to sustain life. Will we see? That’s the question that Bill McKibben is asking us. Will we see what’s bent over around us?
Bishop Willimon talked with Karoline Lewis, who is the host of the event from Luther Seminary in Minneapolis. The subject was preaching in this difficult moment. And let me sum up the Bishop’s advice, listen to God. He says we need to turn back to the Word and hear what God has been saying to God’s people about who is in charge and who isn’t. Sometimes it isn’t our innovation that is called for but our confession and our surrender. Then maybe we can stop thinking we’re in charge, and let God direct our eyes to see who is bent over.
Ashley Cleveland echoed that with two of my favorites from her repertoire, God Don’t Never Change, and Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning. May we indeed!
Shalom,
Derek
#Homiletics2020
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