The Rev. Dr. Richard Lischer, guest preacher

January 20, 2008

Second Sunday after Epiphany
Isaiah 49:1-7; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42

There is no audio file for this week's sermon.

I am what every congregation loves: a returning visitor! Six weeks ago, I worshipped with you as a visitor in this great church and sat where most visitors sit - on the back row near the door. It was the Second Sunday in Advent, and the Gospel lesson was all about John the Baptist. It contained the Baptist’s great self-renunciation: “There is one who is coming after me, who is greater than I, the latch of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. I baptize you with water, he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Today, it is the Second Sunday in Epiphany, the season of Christ’s appearing. I am back, and once again I find you listening to this man John the Baptist. Once again he is pointing away from himself (as he always does) toward something or someone greater. He is saying, “Behold (look), the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

John is usually portrayed as an other-worldly figure, but he was very much a public man. He was no stranger to the violence of politics and religion; he was well acquainted with what we know as “faith-based violence.” “Since the days of John,” Jesus said, “the kingdom has been plagued by violence, and the violent bear it away.”

Fifty years ago God raised up another young prophet, this one in Montgomery, Alabama. He was no John the Baptist (though he was a Baptist), and he plied his ministry in one of the most violent decades in American history. He lived out his days on what he called “life’s restless sea,” and like John he too met a prophet’s violent end.

This year is the fortieth anniversary of his death, and the fortieth anniversary of one of the most shattering years in American history. There may be some out there who remember 1968 as a wonderful year. After all, it was the Age of Aquarius and free love, the year we discovered that we didn’t have to grow up to wear tailored suits and button-down collar shirts (though alas many of us did). It was the year we discovered that we didn’t have to grow up and become our parents (though many of us did).

But it was also a terrible year. By the spring of 1968 the war in Vietnam was effectively lost, with 20,000 Americans dead and more than 200,000 Vietnamese. The war would grind on for another seven years and 34,000 additional American fatalities before it ended. That spring American infantrymen at My Lai killed 504 Vietnamese civilians, most of them women and children, and threw their bodies into irrigation canals. In 1968 the President of the United States gave up on the war and the Great Society, and went back to Texas. In 1968 the Kerner Commission made its report, including this, its most famous sentence: “This nation is moving toward two societies—one black, one white, separate and unequal.” In 1968 the junior Senator from New York Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles; in 1968 the great Mahalia Jackson sang “Precious Lord, Take my Hand,” and King’s body was borne in a mule-drawn wagon to its final resting place.

Then, like now, Americans seemed caught in the grip of something they could not escape and did not understand. We seemed unsure of what it means, morally, to be an American. The 19th century Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville said, “America is great because America is good.” 1968 made it harder to believe that.

It is an irony and a miracle of American history that the nation has chosen a nonviolent pacifist to honor with a national holiday. As a young man King, like many in his generation, studied the Mahatma Gandhi and, like others, noticed that in liberating India Gandhi’s techniques followed the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also . . . You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Many people, religious and irreligious, have tried to practice the words of Jesus in their personal lives; very few have applied them to social policy; and practically no one to international affairs. King tried all three.

It was in relation to nonviolence that King made one of his most creative theological leaps. He claimed that the public demonstrations of resistance, if done non-violently and with the right heart and in prayer, qualified as exercises of Christian love. To not give in to the primal urge to strike back against someone who was insulting or hurting you was to witness to the better way of Jesus. To his enemies he said, “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering [with] our capacity to endure suffering. . . Do to us what you will and we will still love you.” He called this technique “the weapon of love.” And it was controversial as soon as he said it. Now, for a preacher to speak of love should not be controversial (that’s our job), but when you take “love” out from under the sacred canopy of the pulpit, where it is the safe and expected word, and inject it directly into the veins of a racist society, it makes people strangely uncomfortable. The very idea that “love” could sit at a counter and order a hamburger nonviolently was odd. The notion that you could oppose a war a half-world away not for strategic reasons but because you “loved” the people who were suffering in it - was unthinkable. Even Christian theologians said, ‘The kind of love that opens its arms and makes itself vulnerable to the violence of politics has no place in this world. It could get itself killed.’

By the time 1968 rolled around King was under tremendous pressure from other African-American groups to give up nonviolence. It was demeaning, they said, and fostered a slave mentality. One does not ask for freedom, one takes it. “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” But King refused and stuck to his Great Refusal to his dying day.

When it came to the war in Vietnam, King made another leap of faith. He asked a prophetically naïve question: If it’s wrong to kill for the sake of freedom at home (and it is), why isn’t it wrong to kill for freedom abroad? (I mean) Killing is killing, and little brown children are little brown children. Speaking across town at Riverside Church, King became the first prominent American to come out against the war in Vietnam, and he suffered the prophet’s consequences. He was condemned by every major news organization, including the Washington Post and The New York Times and by every civil rights organization except his own. They said, Dr. King, If you oppose the war you will alienate the President and undermine the administration’s support for civil rights. But King knew that it was the war itself (and what war does the soul of a people—not opposition to the war—but the war!) that would sap America’s moral energy to even care about civil rights.

John the Baptist didn’t suggest moral improvements; he demanded repentance. Martin King didn’t call for improved military policies; he dreamed of conversion. He dreamed of a day when America’s first impulse—it’s default position—would be to work for peace, when all of us would throw our vast resources into international reconciliation based on justice.

Five years earlier he stood up stood up at the Lincoln Memorial in an angry and still segregated nation. He could have played the angry prophet and read off a list of demands and sat down. But, remember John. Remember, a prophet is a See-er—a prophet always says, Behold. Look. And so he said, ‘It seems to me I can see black children and white children holding hands and playing together; I can see black people and white people (and you’ll never guess what they’re doing) sitting down at table together and treating one another like kin, because in God’s universe they are kin.’

That peaceable kingdom was not visible in 1963 (and still isn’t), but once the prophet says, “Behold, I can see it,” it is bound to come to pass, and soon others will see it, too. Standing before 250,000 people, which is a lot of flesh, King quoted the prophet Isaiah and said, “All flesh will see it together.”

On the beautiful altarpiece at Isenheim in the Alsace is an overwhelming painting of Jesus on the cross. Some say it is the greatest crucifixion painting ever. Gathered around him are his mother, the beloved disciple, Mary Magdalen, and an intruder. The artist Matthias Gruenewald, indulging his artistic license, places John the Baptist at the scene. No longer beheaded and dead, there he stands (!) with his arm raised, and an unnaturally long and boney finger extended toward a dying man—frozen for all time, as if to say, “Behold.”

With the help of prophets like John and Martin, God invites us all to see the world and ourselves in a new way—not by focusing on the prophetic messengers, but on the one to whom they point and say, ‘Behold.” Follow the boney finger away from self, away from hate, away from our group, to the cross. The peace that Jesus offers can change your life and, we dream, the world.

Six weeks ago Advent was all about our hopes and dreams. But this morning we can say with John, “Behold, I saw the Spirit descend . . with my own eyes” –in acts reconciliation, forgiveness, and in the courage of those who promote them.

This year’s interminable presidential campaign, like others in our history, finds us at the familiar intersection of religion and politics. We’ve been there before. Fifty years ago King went public with his Christian faith. His followers prayed, preached, and suffered in the streets in front of the cameras. The motto of his organization was “To Redeem the Soul of the Nation,” a phrase that would make us as nervous today as it did some fifty years ago. But let me make this distinction. The question is not about religion and politics, but what kind of religion? For King, public religion did not consist in setting limits on, or building a fence around, God’s goodness. For him, public religion meant opening the floodgates of God’s mercy and justice in Jesus Christ and letting it was over all flesh.

That kind of prophecy is animated by a desire to relieve human suffering. That kind of prophecy announces deliverance to the captive and recovering of sight to the blind. That kind of prophecy is a sign that the Spirit of God is still capable of descending on us and our generation.

Previous sermon: Waters of Promise • Next sermon: Bathed in Light

All past sermons