The Reverend Dr. Carter Heyward
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
August 15, 2004
Speaking Truth to Power
Sister Angela, a contemplative Anglican nun and beloved friend of mine,
told a story about a 3 year old Australian boy named Bobby whose parents
overheard him one night leaning over the crib of his newly arrived sister:
"Baby! Baby! wake up and tell me about God, because I’ve begun to
forget what God is like!" This is the kind of story we cherish, because
it makes us happy, even perhaps ecstatic, to imagine such a God and such a
child as little Bobby. I love this image of a God we begin very early on to
forget, a God we need to help one another remember, a God who – if truly the
God we meet in Jesus – calls us as Christians to speak truth to power, to
speak up in the context of deafening silence, to step up boldly in a world
and, too often, a church that trains us to conform and simply adapt ourselves
to whatever.
Truth is, we share a ministry with our christic brother from Nazareth – a
ministry of solidarity with those left standing outside the centers of power;
a ministry today of helping save the people, like Bobby, his sister, and all
creatures great and small from the devastation we will surely endure if our
nation continues to pursue its policies of arrogant and reckless disregard, of
waging war for the sake of profit and of profiteering for sake of the rich.
If Mel Gibson’s film, "The Passion of the Christ," had any
theological merit, it was in its portrayal of how Empires treat those who,
like Jesus and his disciples, are experienced as troublemakers. Jesus’
imperial context and that of the early church was Rome. Ours today, as
contemporary Christians, is the United States of America and a world being
shaped by it. So let’s try to hear this morning what Bobby’s God may be
saying to us as Christians in the Empire:
In the reading from Exodus, we hear God exhorting the people of Israel,
through Moses their leader, to obey God’s voice and keep God’s
commandments. And why should they do this? Because they, the people of Israel,
are a chosen people. It is a tradition Christians share with Jews -- to think
of ourselves as chosen by God. It is a tradition fraught with danger,
especially the danger of mistakenly lifting ourselves above others as a people
set apart by God to be his only chosen, an exclusive people, a
"designer people". It is a dreadful mistake shared too often by
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, to the exclusion of one another and of all
other "heretics" and "infidels" within and beyond the
"chosen" tradition.
But listen to what Psalm 15 has to say about being God’s chosen people:
"O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill?
Those who walk blamelessly and do what is right. Those who speak truth from
the heart." God isn’t saying that only Jews may abide in the tent or
that only Moslems may dwell on the holy hill or that only Christians will
inherit eternal life. God is not talking about who we are, dear people, or
what religion we profess. God is interested in how we treat one another,
whether we love our neighbors as ourselves, whether we forgive our enemies as
we wish to be forgiven.
In our advanced capitalist global order, for example, God might well choose
the richest nation in the world to lift the burden – literally, the debt –
from off the back of the poor, so that the poor might live and thrive with us,
our sisters and brothers, in God’s world. Try to imagine what Jesus would
have to say about tax breaks for the wealthy? Oil profiteering in Iraq?
To live as people chosen by God is to extend our wings – the reach of our
national and foreign policies -- as far as we can and, with the Holy Spirit as
the wind beneath our wings, to soar toward inclusivity, seeking out those who
have been marginalized by us or others, those cast out by the dominant social
order and too often also by the deafening silence of the more progressive
churches.
One of the most urgent messages we are being called to speak
clearly today is that God is an inclusive power for good, and as people in God’s
image, people as God’s friends, we too are called to reach toward
inclusivity. And it is the business of Christian education to teach us how to
do this: to help us understand our power relations as people of different
races, cultures, classes, genders, sexualities, religious traditions, and
other varieties of social location. To help us learn how to be self-critical,
without being defensive; to teach us to notice how we are shaped by, and often
benefit from, power relations; to prepare us spiritually to speak truth
to power. This is what we should be learning together as Christians in the
Empire: learning about power, learning how to make justice roll down like
waters, learning to love mercy, learning to walk humbly with our God, coming
to understand ourselves as rooted and ground in the same God as every other
creature, human and other, on earth and throughout and beyond the cosmos.
To be chosen by God in this cosmos requires spiritual imagination! We must
help one another dream big! Imagine an earth upon which no person is an
"alien," a world in which there is no terrorism because there is no
poverty, no oppression, no Guantanamos! Imagine a world in which there
would be no suicide bombers because all horrific systemic oppressions that sap
the human spirit would have been dismantled and laid to rest! Dream up
such a world in which there would be no Departments of Homeland Security
because religious fanaticism would have given way to respect for spiritual and
cultural differences!
Can we stretch our minds and hearts to imagine our own involvement
in the un-doing, the radical re-shaping, of the major evil of the postmodern
world -- the greed of unfettered global capitalism? Dare we dream that
our own small lives can make a difference as we struggle toward that utopic
realm – Jesus called it the "kingdom of God -- when the lust for profit
succumbs to the "constant love for one another" of which I Peter
speaks?
Can we dare to imagine, with Jesus, Gandhi, King and many others a
nation that does not fight fire with fire? A nation genuinely committed to
peace-building, a nation in which our leaders know how to think about
nonviolence not as a wimpy way, and not even simply as the utopic dream of
some religious folk, but as a powerful, strategic force social and global
change?
Can we bear to imagine ourselves sharing the christic willingness to
lose our life – our security as religions and as nations– in order to find
our life as a people chosen and blessed by God?
Bear in mind that one of the ways the Empire keeps us in bondage is by
trivializing our dreams. The Empire badly wants us to dream small dreams about
computers and clothes and chocolate and try to stay safe. We are well-trained
by the Empire to be good consumers and good citizens. And we are cultivated
not even to think about dreaming big spiritual dreams. After all, fear shrinks
us spiritually -- and the spirituality that pervades our nation today is
cemented in a collective fear that the less things change, the better. But to
the contrary! Whatever doesn’t change, dies. And we are being urged by the
Living God to dream of God’s universal love, of His dances of universal
peace, of Her dreams of a "common language," in the words of the
remarkable lesbian feminist Jewish poet Adrienne Rich.
And so we must not let ourselves be silenced by the plea for patience with
injustice and oppression. Martin Luther King wrote in 1963 from a jail cell in
Birmingham:
"I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely
disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable
conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in the stride toward
freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the KKK, but the white
moderate who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a
positive peace which is the presence of justice."
If we believe that God’s spirit arcs toward justice; if we believe that
love is concrete, economic, and nonviolent; if we have faith that God’s love
is for all persons and creatures; then we are being called to help lead the
way in both world and church today, not to follow along once it seems safe.
A former colleague of mine and a pioneer for the ordination of women in the
Episcopal Church, Sue Hiatt, put it this way: "Whenever church leaders
slow down in their justice work for fear of going too fast and getting too far
ahead of the people, the church winds up getting rear-ended – and is shown,
yet again, to be the caboose rather than the engine in God’s movement for a
better world."
My friends, Bobby’s God, who is Sue Hiatt’s God, who is Martin Luther
King Jr.’s God, and who is the God is Jesus and Mary, is calling us today to
boldly take up our position in the engine of the peace train being fueled by
the love of God and chugging along on tracks of justice, compassion and hope.
Finally God assures us that living this way – breaking the Empire’s
unholy silences, speaking truth to power – is not simply a dangerous way to
live, though it comes with its risks. Life in the Spirit is also a pleasure,
an honor, really a joy because it is such a wondrous – and challenging –
opportunity to learn and grow and change together. Sometimes it may for awhile
tear us apart, as churches and communities and families, but the healing power
of God will always bring us together in the end, as we discover more fully who
we actually are! Through the eyes of God, we will see ourselves honestly for
who we are, each and every one of us, and we will see that, sure enough, we
are (and always have been) sisters and brothers in God’s world!
Of course, living together in such a Spirit means that our spiritual engine
must keep chugging along on tracks that always run counter to, and often
cross, those of the dominant capitalist spirituality, its violence, and its
politics of division and fear. There will be many collisions and more than a
few casualties. So one of our tasks as God’s people is to help one another
learn how to weather conflict and how, together, to survive our crashes with
the Empire.
The founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, themselves Jesus people, figured it
out: It is only as a team, only together -- understanding our survival, our
sanity, and our spiritualities as utterly bound up in one another’s -- that
we have even a chance of surviving the violence and wickedness in high places
that threatens to suck us into the abyss and will, insofar as we are
spiritually isolated individuals.
And so, my friends, may we never forget that we live together in God. May
the Holy One of Mary and Jesus, Liberating Spirit of church and world, give us
the serenity, courage, and wisdom to live faithfully in Her Spirit, wherever
on this planet we may find ourselves. May we keep learning, how better to
share the earth, how better to love one another, how ever more gracefully to
let ourselves be borne on eagle’s wings, lifting our voices and casting our
ballots for those who most genuinely struggle on behalf of the poor at home
and abroad; those who seriously seek to wage peace, rather than war; those for
whom justice-making for all people of all races, sexual orientations, and
genders is a priority and for whom compassion is a way of life, not a
political sound bite.
May the Spirit that arcs toward justice, God of Jesus and and the prophets,
She who is our first and final home, bless us one and all!
Amen!
