Character Shaping Community
By Charles Rush
March 17, 2013
Phil. 1: 27, 2: 1, 2a, 3-5, 2 Timothy 1: 3-7
was very moving watching the Pope bless the crowd the other night. The 2000 year old history, Rome as the backdrop, the elegant formality of the Swiss guard marching in, that was all part of it. But there was an unscripted moment of spiritual gravitas that always surprises me. The Pope stopped and asked people from all around the world to pray silently, partly to pray for him as he assumes this calling. And then he bowed and that huge square fell silent.
I'm
always surprised at what comes next. I get somewhat light headed and emotional
tapping into this connection with hundreds of millions of people the world over
opening themselves to God. It is palpable how powerful it really is to wade
into a world-wide river of prayer.
What
a natural thing to do. He knows that he is an ordinary man of limited and
compromised abilities. Suddenly he is stepping on the stage of history. Who
wouldn't seek the prayers of the Church universal as you leave behind your old
life and step into something you couldn't possibly prepare for ahead of time.
What
a powerful thing to be a recipient of all those prayers. It really is an
overwhelming gravitas. You can almost see in those moments how we are shaped by
the community of the Church down through the ages. Our scripture this morning
says, “I'm reminded of the faith I saw in your grandmother, then in your
mother, that now rests on you.” That is the way that the Holy Spirit moves
among us as we shape one another down the generations. What an awesome
responsibility we have, for good and for ill, to shape our children and the
rising generation or two.
And
when you stand in Rome or Jerusalem, you can just feel the gravitas of millions
and millions of people making spiritual pilgrimage to these places over years
turned into decades turned into centuries turned into millennia. All of these
people shaped by the same traditions, the same scriptures, praying to be
healed, praying for insight into what they should be about, praying that they
might rise to their higher selves and that we might know peace in our time. It
is such a huge procession over such a long, long time. I get dizzy just zooming
out on the transcendent perspective.
And
it is also, of course, the touching humanity. I was praying at the Western
Wall. People write their prayers on wee scraps of paper and wedge them in the
cracks. One of them fell out. I couldn't help but pick it up and read it. It
said, “God please reunite me with my son.” I'm trying to envision what it was
like for this Father who probably came thousands of miles and this is what is
on his heart. And I wonder how that worked out because we are all connected and
somehow the prayers of our heart actually make contact with each other as well.
We
shape each other with the traditions and structures and institutions that we
hand down the generations. But we also shape each other with the prayers of our
hearts and our blessings too.
I
was also struck by the public gesture that the Pope made, inviting the prayers
of the people. Our public acts really have a way of binding us. We only do
these gestures for our most important things. So when we get married, we invite
our family and our friends, and we publicly pledge our faithful love to our spouse
‘for better for worse, for richer for poorer, until we are parted by death.' We
can feel all these things but saying them in public to each other in front of
the people that are most important to us in our lives. That is something else
isn't it.
I
remember the first time I attended the blessing of a gay union, the couple
added another piece, pledging to each other to be supportive even when
persecuted and the congregation also pledged to support them during times of
discrimination. Moving on a different level even.
But
we say these things in public because we put ourselves on notice. We are now
making a commitment. We are allowing the power of this community to help hold
us to our pledge. We are really going to do this, come what may.
I'm
always reminded of the power of the community to shape our character during
this time of the year, looking towards Good Friday and the meaning of Easter.
The Gospel of Luke has Jesus teach many things but then comes this ominous
line, ‘Then he set his face towards Jerusalem.' And in Jerusalem, he will
eventually speak in public defying the authorities in front of his followers.
He will commit himself in a way that will require the deeper moral courage. And
you would probably turn back from that task if no one was watching. We are very
sophisticated at finding ways to compromise when we are all alone. But in public, that is
quite another thing.
The
bible illustrates it poignantly. Jesus is in Jerusalem. He knows he will be
arrested and he knows that means he will be tortured. He prays with his
disciples. And in his personal prayer he says to God, “let this cup pass from
me.” Let's find a way out of this, please!
And
then, he prays the harder prayer, ‘Not my will but thine'. I can't do this on
my own. But with God, in front of all these people, we can surprise ourselves
what we are capable of becoming.
It
is funny how that works in our real lives. You know when Dr. King wrote about
the beginning of the Bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama, the leaders of the
movement were worried more than anything about failure. There had been a couple
attempts at a boycott in the past but they had never worked because they could
never get the whole black community to participate in them, let alone get the
white community to join them.
But
no sooner had they declared that they were going to boycott the buses, than
they started doubting that they could actually do it. So they were very
anxious. Nothing like this had ever really been done yet and they didn't want
to look like fools and maybe even risk getting attacked physically after it
didn't work.
And
they had a real problem on their hand. Back in ye olden days of Jim Crow, at
least in the deep South, very few African-Americans had cars. Because the deep
South was completely segregated, almost all of them lived outside the city
limits in shanty towns. The buses would take them 5 miles to downtown. In
Montgomery, again because of Jim Crow laws, there were only a couple of taxi
services that were owned by African-Americans.
There
was a very real issue of the distance but there was more than that. Again,
Montgomery being the in Jim Crow South, a big percentage of the black community
were employed as domestics. They would be rightly worried about losing their
jobs if the white community came out against the boycott in a unified way and
they had every reason to believe that they would.
Finally,
in the days before the internet, the South was so poor that very, very few
black people had phones at home. So how would they even get the word to everyone
and how could they make a compelling case? They were right to be nervous. The
odds of success here were long.
But
sometimes in these moments where history is made, it seems like God has other
plans. The bible has a saying, “They meant it for evil, but God used it for
good.” Sometimes no matter how much you try to hold back change, you can't hold
it back any longer and this was one of those times.
The
leaders decided that the best thing they could do was mimeograph off some
leaflets at the church, distribute them around as best they could and hope. How
many of us here can even remember a mimeograph machine. You hand cranked this
round drum. They ran off 7000 I believe and this is what they said, “Don't rid
the bust to work, to town, to school, or any place Monday, December 5th.
Another Negro woman has been arrested and put in jail because she refused to
give up her bus seat. If you work, take
a cab, share a rid, or walk. Come to a mass meeting Monday night at 7 p.m. at
the Holt Street Baptist Church for further instruction.”
People
started handing them out but they were sure they couldn't get the word out to
everyone. It was too diffuse, so they got a little help from the Spirit, as we
would say.
One
woman got a leaflet, took it to work, and it accidentally gets in the hands the leaflet to the white woman that she
works for. Her white employer is alarmed and she immediately calls the editor
of the Montgomery Advertiser (the local newspaper) to tell him what ‘they' are up to. I can hear
her now. She could have been my Aunt. She reads him the leaflet word for word and
the editor writes it down. He sits right
down at the typewriter and does a story on the Negro community and the bus
boycott and they print the leaflet right in the front middle panel, above the
fold, where everybody can see it. In an instant, the leaders of the boycott had
their communication challenge solved for them for free.
Now
everybody was talking about it. White people were asking black people about it,
showing them the article in the paper. Suddenly, it was pretty hard not to know
about it. And the perception started to permeate the town that ‘all the blacks
were doing this' which became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you
start to think that everyone in your community is expecting you to do
something, guess what, you start thinking of more reasons why you shouldn't let
every one around you down. If they are all depending on you, guess what, you
might just might find some moral backbone and rise to your higher self.
What
followed was something of a miracle as disparate groups of people coalesced
into one community of protest. The taxi companies agreed almost match the bus
fares and people with cars volunteered to drive all day and night. But with so
little way to directly communicate, no one knew for sure what the actual
protest would look like.
As
you might imagine, there was a lot of worry at those committee meetings to
organize the protest. The leaders actually thought that if they could get 40%
of Montgomery to boycott the buses that would be a great victory but they
weren't sure what to expect.
Dr.
King was up before dawn the morning of the protest. The parsonage that he lived
in was right on one of the main bus lines. It would be a good test of what the
day would look like because the first bus was usually filled with
African-American workers on the morning commute. He was drinking coffee at the
breakfast table with his wife when the first bus pulled up and stopped right in
front of his house. Not a single person on the bus. He was stunned.
Twenty
minutes later the second bus pulls up. Not a single person on it. Now there was
a flurry of calls with ‘what do we do now?' Dr. King had to drive all over town
to make sure the buses were empty everywhere. And what he saw were people
everywhere walking in quiet nobility, hundreds and thousands of people
expressing their dignity and humanity, rising to their higher selves,
transcending the ‘nobodiness' of Jim Crow with the ‘sombodiness' of a new
self-image for a new era.
In
the late afternoon, he stopped his car next to an aging grandmother who was
walking home, the first of many miles. And he said to her ‘hop on in
Grandmother, you don't need to walk anymore.' She waved him on and said, “I'm
not tired. I'm not walking for me. I'm
walking for my children and my grandchildren.'[i]
All of these people inspiring each other, in this unspoken, subconscious way,
to give voice to their higher selves. It was a powerful day.
And
that night, when Dr. King had to address all of them, now that a movement of
sorts had started, he could only close by making a prediction based on what he
had witnessed that day. He ended by saying, “If you will protest courageously,
and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in
future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a
great people- a black people, who injected new meaning and dignity into the
veins of civilization.' This is our challenge and our overwhelming
responsibility.”
Looking
back, you can see how the group shaped each of them and encouraged them to rise
to their higher selves. Looking back, you can see how that protest could only
have been so successful precisely because they rose to their higher selves and
collectively it shaped the American conscience for the good.
Let's
live out of our higher selves. Collectively, we have a tremendous power to
shape who and what we will become, for good and for ill. And that shaping takes
place right down the generations too.
Who cannot think about that in our
era, reading the papers week in and week out.
In
Syria, when you read the stories about the real life consequences of violence
in a civil war. You can only imagine that the damage from that trauma will
shatter an entire generation. We know what happens when you unleash a cycle of
violence, how hard it is to stop. Just Friday, on the front page of the paper
was another sectarian bombing in Iraq, continuing a cycle of revenge and
violence that has spanned a full decade. And you think of the damaging effects
that has on the families that have had their loved ones blown up in a market or
even on a religious pilgrimage, the bitterness, the fear, the rage. It not only
deforms you and your generation, you end up passing it down the generations too,
even if you wished you couldn't. “The sins of the father's are visited upon the
children unto the third and fourth generation.” That is not a prescriptive
judgment by God, it is an observation of moral fact.
So,
how important it is for us to build communities of inspiration, to stand
against that in us that is destructive and to inspire us to become better, more
dignified people of spiritual purpose. How important it is for us to become
communities of prayer for each other, lifting one another up, strength to
strength, all of us together forming our children and our grandchildren in ways
that are healthy and whole. This is what brings us together. This is why we do
what we do.
My
brothers and sisters, I hope for you that you are able to purge from yourself
the dross left over from the previous generation. I hope that you will be able
to let go those things that hold you back, perhaps even the crippling
dysfunctions from the ways that you were malformed. And I hope that together we
might become a source of strength and prayer for each other, that together we
might distill the spiritual values that make us stronger and healthier people,
that we might create ways to live them with each other, embodying for our
generation the best of what we have known and lived. May God bless us all.
Amen.
