Indivisible

Matthew 5: 1-12
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
February 2, 2020

This past Friday UCC pastor Guy Johnson in Walkersville, MD posted on Facebook regarding the impeachment trial: “Day 31. I am not even upset about the decision in the Senate today. Black folks in this country are accustomed to injustice.” A friend of his responded, “I mean, we were here for how long before the constitution even halfway applied to us?” Rev. Johnson replied, “246 years.”

My privilege cannot even begin to understand what that means. Those who followed Jesus and gathered to hear that their poverty of spirit, their grieving, their gentleness, their hunger and thirst for righteousness is blessed by God, looked and lived nothing like me. To be poor in spirit and to be blessed by God means that God is on the side of the oppressed, that God is with the oppressed, that God is the oppressed. To be marginalized and criminalized means that God is marginalized and criminalized. To be despised or treated as less than because skin color or sexuality or gender or religion or physical or mental ability means that God inhabits that flesh.

It’s a complicated dance we are called to live. We really can’t judge others because we have no idea what it is like to live in their skin. The only person we can judge honestly, if we have the courage, is ourselves and yet we can’t be too harsh on ourselves but neither can we give ourselves a pass or get complacent. NY Times columnist David Brooks said, “Freedom is not an ocean you want to swim in. It is a river you want to get across so you can commit and plant yourself on the other side.” 

Committing to the poor in spirit and those who are persecuted—that’s what Church is all about; that’s what Jesus is getting at. Editor and air traffic controller Sigrid Ellis mused about the difference between what she calls acute compassion and chronic empathy. She writes, “Without question we haul strangers out of a raging flood, give blood, give food, give shelter. But we are lousy at legislating safe, sustainable communities, at eldercare, at accessible streets and buildings. It is the long-term work that makes the disasters less damaging. But we don’t want to give to the needy; we want to save the endangered. We don’t like being care workers, we want to be heroes. The world does not need more heroes. We need more care.”

Care can be a scary thing. We begin to realize that people’s lives are in our hands—another human being with fears and dreams and questions and really not just like us but in their own hallowed way. The whole of scripture tells us we are our sibling’s keeper, our neighbor’s keeper. This blessedness that Jesus is talking about, this being on God’s side—and if Church is about anything, it’s about being on God’s side—if we want in on that kind of blessedness, that freedom on the other side, then we need to be in solidarity with, indivisible from those who need our care.

Last month at Hope Dining Room, a woman asked me to call an ambulance for her. Her skin was hot and dry and her chest hurt every time she took a breath. I worried she had pneumonia. This past week I saw her on Main St. She told me she had the flu and pneumonia. She said she still had medicine she had to take, she was feeling better, and yet here she was on the street again. Freedom seems less like a river and more like a chasm we have to cross, and white privilege and cisgender privilege and the privilege of being temporarily abled and others make it so easy for us to return to our side of the chasm.

Which is why I need Jesus, why Jesus is such a loving, grace-filled, agitating, annoying piece of work. When I hear the words “This is my body, this is my blood, remember me”, that’s Jesus crossing that chasm to my safe side to take me over to where he is, on the other side. Jesus’ body is every black and brown and disabled and poor and trans and queer body. Jesus’ blood is the blood of the innocent and the wrongly accused and the assaulted and the shame still inflicted on every body that has a monthly period and everything that goes with it.



As we come to this Table, what are the chasms, the obstacles that keep us comfortably where we are, divided from those who need our care? What are the chasms, the obstacles that deny others access to righteousness that we need to dismantle? Let us remember that a lot of it has to do with fear, and yet our fear means that our heart is working, it’s in the right place; we’re just afraid to go there, to cross that chasm, to be indivisible.



God, Love, Mystery, Life itself is indivisible from the poor in spirit, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness but it is through us, through human beings that blessedness is expressed and made visible. The mystery of this meal reminds us that it is through our lives broken open for others that all life becomes a sacrament. There is no difference of sacred and profane, only hope and love and healing made known through all of what it means to be human: a whole and holy human being.



Amen.






Benediction – "He Will See You Through" by Rhiannon Giddens and Dirk Powell



When your path is full of worry
[Love] will see you through
When you feel alone on your journey
[Love] will see you through


All your silver, all your gold
Won't shine brighter than your soul
Amen
Amen, amen