There are words no one ever wants to hear. They are universal.
And then there are words that restore us. That move us from death back into life.
The test is negative.
She is safe.
The plane has landed.
He is out of surgery.
I made it home.
These are words that cause us to exhale, not even realizing we had been holding our breath, waiting to hear them.
Then there are other words. Words that usher in death, not life--words that make us wince before they have even been spoken. These words enter a room with heavy footsteps; we can feel them coming. These are words that we have learned to deliver with a warning:
Are you sitting down?
Is someone with you?
Who can I call for you?
The doctor would like to do some more tests.
There. Has been. An accident.
I bring these frightening phrases into our sacred space to illustrate the power of words to bring us death…or life. Even as I spoke these illustrative phrases that were not attached to specific real situations, you may have relaxed your shoulders and moved toward me or tightened your neck and braced yourself in your seat.
Some words command a response. What that response is depends on the magnitude and meaning of the words.
Take this age-old trite cliché: Sticks and stones will break our bones but names will never hurt you? Really? Because in my experience certain names we might have been called sting so badly we never completely forget hearing them…even when we try to wipe them from our memories forever they continue to echo as taunts. Today’s Gospel is about Peter’s epiphany that even if he does not like the immediate words that Jesus has said…there is no where else to go. No one else can offer life…after death and in this very moment the way that Jesus can. And so even though Peter may have the impulse to walk away from Jesus, when Jesus …again… begins speaking about his body being the bread the disciples must eat… Peter catches himself, and asks this question that is so profound that we ask it nearly every time we gather for worship. In fact, much like Peter, we ask it right before we too, accept this mysterious ritual we know as Holy Communion.
Alleluia, Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.
Alleluia indeed.
During the past week, maybe you heard some of the powerful words spoken at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
[Yes.] Starting on Monday, for four nights, speaker after speaker said words that fed hungry hearts in our beloved land. Even if these speakers had not been speaking for the purpose of promoting their candidates to the highest offices in the United States of America, many of their words made us exhale with relief and drew tears from our weary eyes.
Listen to some of the words we heard from Chicago this week:
“Weeping may last for the night, but what? [Joy] Joy comes in the morning!”
“Do justice. Love mercy. And what? Walk humbly with your God.”
Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, a member of the AME tradition, referenced 2 Corinthians 4in his speech, noting, “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair.” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who attends a Disciples of Christ church, spoke of the golden rule and the parable of the Good Samaritan….at length. The most overtly religious language of the night came from: Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who is also the pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, which we know was once the pulpit of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Warnock called voting “a kind of prayer for the kind of world we desire for ourselves and for our children.” And from my couch I murmured, mmm mmm. And then he added, “I think our prayers are stronger when we pray together.” And I whispered to no one, “Yes.”
He went on to cast a vision of us together and his refrain was, “Let us together heal the land!”
And at that point his words lifted my heart and moved me toward life in such a powerful way that I began writing them down!
“Who will heal the land?
Are you ready to stand up in this moral moment? Stand up for the best in the American covenant? Elections are about the character of a country and we must decide, again, we are the latest generation of Americans who get to decide what kind of country we want to be. A nation that embraces all of us or just some of us.
He said, “People have people who have no vision, traffic in division.
He vowed, “I choose the American covenant, out of many one. I choose a nation that provides a path for ordinary people and gives every child a chance.”
He told us about his father; a preacher and a junk man. Monday through Friday, he lifted old broken cars and put them on the back of an old rig. But on Sunday morning, the man who lifted broken cars, lifted broken people whom other people had discarded and told them that they were by God, somebody. He said, “My dad discovered strength in the broken places. A power made perfect in weakness. And so I’m convinced tonight that we can lift the broken even as we climb. I’m convinced tonight that we can heal sick bodies. We can heal the wounds that divide us. We can heal a planet in peril. We can heal the land.” And that’s not all. When Rev. Warnock got to the conclusion of his speech, I knew he was echoing words that reflected his strong faith in our Savior. As he urged us to take on healing the land he said, “And in a strange way, the pandemic taught us how. A contagious airborne disease means that I have a personal stake in the health of my neighbor. If she’s sick, I may get sick also. Her healthcare is good for my health. I’m just trying to tell you that we are as close in our humanity as a cough. I need my neighbor’s children to be okay so that my children will be okay. I need all of my neighbor’s children to be okay. Poor inner city children in Atlanta and poor children of Appalachia. I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza. I need Israelis and Palestinians. I need those in the Congo, those in Haiti, those in Ukraine. I need American children on both sides of the track to be okay, because we’re all God’s children.”
[Amen] That's what I said. And even though he did not spell out exactly HOW we would heal the land…even if I could not fully comprehend the details of the plan he was calling us to carry out, I knew that his words were aligned with the words of Jesus and therefore they were trustworthy and true. And even though he did not spell out exactly HOW we would heal the land…even if I could not fully comprehend the details of the plan he was calling us to carry out, I knew that his words were aligned with the words of Jesus. I knew that this faithful man of God went first to the words of Jesus when deciding what words to give us at this moment in history when we are literally choosing a way forward that leads to death or that leads to life, and not just for us, but for our neighbor. For our neighbors we know and for neighbors we may never meet.
I recently had a conversation with my homiletics professor from seminary, The Rev. Dr. Hank Langknecht. And even though he did not spell out exactly HOW we would heal the land…even if I could not fully comprehend the details of the plan he was calling us to carry out, I knew that his words were aligned with the words of Jesus. I knew that this faithful man of God went first to the words of Jesus when deciding what words to give us at this moment in history when we are literally choosing a way forward that leads to death or that leads to life, and not just for us, but for our neighbor. For our neighbors we know and for neighbors we may never meet.
I recently had a conversation with my homiletics professor from seminary, The Rev. Dr. Hank Langknecht. He taught me the craft of preaching. I was in his class for two out of four years in seminary and then became his teaching assistant and today take what he has taught me, and what I gleaned to the ages, and teach our licensed lay ministers the craft of preaching in this area. And I said to him, “I don’t remember hearing much in seminary about what we can and cannot say from the pulpit when it comes to the political issues of the day.”
And he said, “You didn’t!” We went on to discuss how the separation of church and state demands that we not stand in the pulpit and specifically tell the congregation who they should vote for. Who. But beyond that, we didn’t talk much about what you COULD say because we did not have the same pressing need to say it in 1999 that we have in 2024. The stakes, he said, were not the same then as they are today.” In this conversation, together, we landed on this: perhaps it is best to focus on what we CAN say. And what we CAN say, what we ought to say, what we MUST say is that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Jesus who calls us to love one another.
Jesus who tells us to eat the bread that is his body, and drink the wine that is his blood, and never be hungry again.
Jesus who tells story after story in which the lame walk, the blind see, the weak become strong, and God sends the rich away empty.
When all else fails and we do not know where to turn, Jesus Christ is the one to whom we should go!
And so as we each grapple with things of this world now, things including an election that will determine the course of history and the extent to which God’s people will be able to live freely as God intended, to love who they love, to worship where they worship, to make healthcare decisions about their very bodies, I urge us to remember that there is a reliable source against which we can compare the promises of the candidates that will help us choose a path forward that will lead us into life abundantly.
Because when we ask, Lord to whom shall we go?
Jesus replies, Come to me all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
And when we are faced with the worst that life can dish out…the death of a dream, a career, a marriage, the death of a loved one, a friend, a celebrity or even a beloved pet, Jesus is the one whose words offer the one thing, the only thing, this world does not guarantee
life in this world and the next.
