♦ September 25, 2015 ♦
♦ Remembering the Emanuel AME Nine ♦
A sermon preached on Pentecost IV (June 21, 2015) at
Christ Church Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
by the Rev. Roger Ferlo
Texts: 1 Samuel 17:32-39 and Mark 4:35-41
We don′t often hear the David and Goliath story in church, especially as we just did, in such lavish and entertaining detail. It feels almost like an episode from Game of Thrones.
Y
ou will be hearing about the aftermath of this story all through the summer. Listen closely. It′s a rare opportunity to hear one of the great epics of ancient storytelling. It′s a story of increasing complexity, full of dramatic irony and acute psychological insight. By the time we get to the tragic story of David and the death of Absalom, you will get the sense that Game of Thrones has somehow morphed into a version of Wolf Hall.
But the great succession narrative—Saul to David to Solomon—is not the only story you will hear in this summer season. In the next several weeks, you will also hear Mark′s Gospel read aloud, almost in its entirety.
Mark by comparison occupies a completely different thought-world than the sophisticated writer of the great succession narrative in Samuel and Kings. Mark’s narrative is brief, curt, rough-hewn. His two favorite words are “again” and “immediately,” words that drive the story breathlessly forward, episode by episode. Mark′s world is haunted by demons. His story is peppered with exorcisms and miraculous cures; its plot careens mercilessly toward Jesus′ execution in Jerusalem, and then shunts to an abrupt halt, as the women flee in terror from the empty tomb. The ending is so abrupt that within one generation of its first telling people started adding awkward epilogues of Jesus-sightings, stories designed to diminish the combination of fear and awe that those women felt when all they expected was news of death but instead were confronted with the fact of resurrection.
Giant-killing—young David slaying burly Goliath with a single shot from his sling—well, that′s something we can get. It′s the story where the little guy is the good guy, and the good guy always wins. But there′s no predicting how we will respond to the script Mark offers us. Jesus is no giant-killer. The story Mark tells us about Jesus is open-ended, unpredictable, dangerous, shadowed by betrayal, very much like a calm sea erupting in sudden storm. The ending of Mark′s gospel threatens to careen out of control (just like the storm in today′s reading), with the body of the executed Messiah nowhere to be found, and the women who had sought to embalm the corpse instead running away in fear from the angel who haunts the open and empty tomb.
II
From this morning’s gospel:
On that day, when evening had come, Jesus said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped.
As you listen to this story, think about this room where are gathered, under this great vaulted Gothic nave. That word “nave” comes from the same root as the word “navy.” So, if you can, imagine this room upended, its gabled ceiling becoming the floor of a vast ship. Churches like this were designed to suggest such a shape, evoking a place of safety for all who attempt to sail the chaotic waters of this life, for all who seek safe harbor in Jesus. Or to put it succinctly, when we gather in church, we are all in the same boat.
So on this somber morning, I want us to imagine ourselves in another ship, a ship smaller than this one perhaps, but just as much created as a place of safety. I am thinking of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where this past Wednesday evening 12 ordinary people boarded ship as usual—gathering there for Bible study, as they might have put it, with Jesus resting comfortably in the stern. They welcomed a young stranger to share the peace of Jesus’ presence among them.
And then all hell broke loose.
How many people in Charleston today are asking the question that the disciples put to Jesus in the midst of that storm:
“Teacher, do you not care that they are perishing?”
The question resonates throughout the country this morning, as it always does at moments of senseless violence and deep hatred. When that young stranger shot those nine innocent people in cold blood this week, mouthing hateful propaganda, when that sea of racist hatred engulfed that chapel, was Jesus still asleep, his head resting on a comfortable cushion in the stern of the boat, oblivious to the violence, oblivious to the chaos that will forever mark Emanuel AME Church of Charleston, the chaos that will forever mark and mar that place of peace?
Perhaps at least a partial answer to that question might lie in Friday’s news report.
Nadine Collier is the daughter of the 70-year-old Ethel Lance, one of the victims of Wednesday’s shooter. At the shooter’s bond hearing on Friday, she addressed him face to face. Here’s what she said to him: You took something very precious away from me. I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.”
Myra Thompson’s grandson Anthony, also in that courtroom, was even more direct: “I forgive you. My family forgives you. We would like you to take this opportunity to repent. Do that and you will be better off than you are now.”
It’s easy for us to picture ourselves as David mowing down Goliath. But how many of us could picture ourselves as Anthony Thompson, speaking on behalf of his sorrowing family? How many of us could picture ourselves as Nadine Collier, bravely facing down her mother’s murderer, and offering him not hatred but forgiveness? They are like Jesus rebuking the storm, cutting through the bloodshed and chaos with a clarity that stunned every person in that courtroom into astonished silence:
He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace, be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.
I have a sense that it was that same dead calm that fell on that South Carolina courtroom on Friday, the dead calm of people’s stunned disbelief as they heard and witnessed the relatives of the Emanuel victims, one after the other, speaking not of vengeance but of justice, not of retribution but of forgiveness, as they heard and witnessed those brave Christian people saying to that young man what God was saying in their own hearts:
Peace, be still, and know that I am God.
III
The great African American theologian and mystic, Howard Thurman, mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as scores of Americans, black and white, who strove for justice and civil rights, had this to say about God’s healing stillness, a stillness that can calm even the most tumultuous storms experienced in what Thurman describes as every person’s “inward sea”:
There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea there is an island and on that island there is an altar and standing guard before that altar is the “angel with the flaming sword.” Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless it has the mark of inner authority.
It was that mark of inner authority that allowed Reverend Pinckney to invite that strange young white man to sit beside him and to study with him and to pray with him on that ordinary evening in Charleston this past week. It was that mark of inner authority that allowed Nadine Collier to confront her mother’s murderer and treat him like a human being rather than a senseless monster, to forgive him. Nadine Collier’s act of forgiveness confirmed the peace in her own Christian soul, calmed the stormy waves in her own inward sea.
Peace, be still. And the wind ceased.
Peace, be still. There’s a way of hearing those two words—whether in English or the original Greek—as somehow enacting what they express. It’s as if the sea is calmed by the intake of breath that occurs between the utterance of the first word and the answer of the second. Try it with me, say it aloud, but take a deep breath between the first word and the closing phrase:
Peace. [Breath] Be still.
Let us pray in solidarity with those who died and with those who mourn, responding to every petition with the phrase “Peace, be still.”
Pray for those who have died in Charleston—Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Myra Thompson, Reverend Daniel Lee Simmons, Sr., Reverend Sharonda Coleman Singleton, Reverend Clementa Pinckney.
Peace. Be still.
Pray for those who survived.
Peace. Be still.
Pray for the families of the slain, and give thanks for their Christian witness.
Peace. Be still.
As Jesus taught us, pray for Dylann Roof, whose racist ignorance and racist hatred continues to contort his soul.
Peace. Be still.
Pray that God may lift the burden of our history—the lasting legacy of racist hatred that continues to afflict us all.
Peace. Be still.
Amen.