Resentment or Reconciliation

 Sermon preached on January 17, 2021, the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany at St. Thomas' Church, Bath:  1 Samuel 3:1-17.

You can listen to the sermon here.

          As the prophet Samuel was growing up, the world around him was falling apart.  There had been a series of people called judges who—with varying degrees of success—held Israel loosely together: people like Deborah and Gideon and Samson.  But Israel was descending into anarchy—social and religious.

          Samuel was born by God’s intervention in the life of a woman named Hannah, who, with her husband Elkanah, had been unable to conceive a child.  Whenever a miraculous birth happens in the Bible, you know God is up to something major. 

          The boy Samuel was being raised by the priest Eli.  At the beginning of today’s story, we are told two things which reflect the chaos in Israel.  First, “the Word of the Lord was rare in those days.”  Israel’s relationship with God was on the verge of total collapse.  No one listened for God anymore, and when no one is listening it appears that God is not speaking.  Second, we are told “visions were not widespread.”  There was no one speaking words and images of hope, no one opening up a fruitful future for Israel.

          In summary, there was no faith to sustain Israel in the present, and no hope to guide her into the future.  And when there is no faith and no hope, there is little love, little caring for the neighbor.

          Samuel would grow up to be Israel’s first great prophet.  His whole exchange with Eli as a boy was a signal that God was giving the priests a back seat and bringing prophets to the fore.  At the same time, the days of judges ruling Israel was coming to a close.  Soon Israel would be ruled by kings.  God was doing a new thing, intervening to bring Israel back to God.

          Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  Dr. King’s last book was published less than a year before he was murdered. It was entitled, Where Do We Go from Here?  Chaos or Community.  It was a diagnosis of where the civil rights movement was and where it was going, but not on its own.  His bigger question was:  Where are we going as both Americans and as world citizens.

          He warned that America was losing its soul.  Three soul-killers held sway in America. One was racism that was so engrained in the American way of life that the vast majority of white people could not see it.  The second was racism’s evil twin, poverty.  The third was militarism, the dependence on violence to solve problems, which he saw as not only infecting the country, but the civil rights movement itself.

          Of the three, poverty driven by materialism was the most seductive because it seemed a positive thing. Who could be opposed to the the growth of wealth.  Of course, it was not growth for everyone, something that is still the truth, perhaps even more so.  Dr. King wrote, “Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul.”  And the growth of the soul most needed was the capacity to love and the commitment to live in beloved community.  He closed the book speaking of “the fierce urgency of now.” He said,

Let us hope that this spirit [of love] will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation.

I would add one word. I would say: We can no longer afford to bow before the altar of resentment and retaliation.

          Did we heed Dr. King’s call?  On the one hand, yes, we have made great progress. On the other hand, no.  While progress was being made over the past fifty years, a culture of resentment was also flourishing.  We saw that culture boil over into retaliation—violence—on January 6^th.

          Where has the church been over these fifty years?  Part of it (including The Episcopal Church) has been trying to aid the progress, although this has caused such fierce internal fighting that we are left greatly weakened and afraid for the future.  Another part of it has been providing fuel for the fire, casting God in the role of an American patriot whose primary purpose is to vanquish his enemies.

          As these two movements within the church have been going on, there has been another movement, the rise of the “nones,” those who will have nothing to do with any form of the church, which they see as doing more harm than good. It is hard, overall, to argue with them.  Throw in the ongoing sexual abuse scandal throughout the church, and we have to admit that we have a massive credibility problem.

          I think we are in a place much like that of ancient Israel as Samuel was growing up.  Because the church is either afraid or so caught in a particular political ideology, the Word of the Lord is rare in our days.  And we are not offering much of a vision for the future.  This is not to say that we are not saying good things and doing good things. We are.  But few are listening anymore.  And because few are listening, it is as if we are saying nothing at all.

          Despite all this, I still believe the church has a vital role to play in our society.  We must commit ourselves to doing our own soul work and inviting others to do theirs, offering our soul story, and the things we have known to be soul nourishing.  And we need to find ways to do so that people can hear.

          What do I mean by “doing our own soul work”?  I mean getting clear about two “r’s” to counter the culture of resentment and retaliation.  We must be about creating a culture of reconciliation and relationship.

          We must do that work internally, because even in the progressive church we do not all agree and we have a tendency not to talk about those disagreements, and what ends up happening is those who sense they are in the minority drift away, and those of us in the majority either feel sad about that but don’t know how to fix it or we are glad to see those disagreeable people go.

          We can only lead doing this work in the culture around us if we have done it ourselves among ourselves.

          If we did do that work, our own soul work, here’s a vision.  Imagine the mainline churches of Bath and the evangelical churches of Bath sitting down and talking to each other, not seeking one another’s conversion, but seeking relationship with each other even if we profoundly disagree.

          Not possible?  Perhaps not.  But I am reminded by what G.K. Chesterton said of Christianity, that it has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”  What if we took the risk and asked the question:  What would it look like if across our deep divide we were still in relationship with each other?  Do we dare risk trying to find out?

          As I said, we live in a time not so unlike that of Samuel.  It’s a time when the Word of God is, if not rare, at least so confused that the majority of people have stopped listening.  It’s a time when community is falling apart, in many respects it has already fallen apart.

          What if we invited, pleaded with God to do a new thing?  And what if we—like Hannah and Samuel and even Eli, signed on, and said, “Here I am.” Here we are. In the words of today’s Collect: “Let us shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory.”