Heavy lifting

 

Exodus 33: 12-33
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
October 18, 2020

Last week a colleague of mine shared in a Facebook group that she is devastated that she was turned down for a sabbatical grant. The church she serves has the finances to cover her absence. The grant would’ve paid for her travel and expenses. Then there are the travel restrictions because of the pandemic; she can’t go where she would like to. Foregoing her sabbatical would also forestall her retirement because of her call agreement that states she must serve at least two years after sabbatical before making any transition. She’s suffering the loss of two close family members; she lives next door to the church and—*gestures broadly*—there’s everything else that’s going on. For the sake of her mental health she needs Sabbath.



Many colleagues saw her post and wrote expressions of similar troubles, words of sympathy and empathy, and prayers for a creative solution. As I read prayer after prayer, I felt this rebellion rise within me. This creative solution will not arrive magically from on high. It will come through the hard work of human beings, human ingenuity, human generosity. To me, it felt like thoughts and prayers all over again. We cry out angrily and justly so when lawmakers only offer their thoughts and prayers in response to violence and injustice without the necessary legislation to prevent it. And yet here was an instance in which we were willing to accept that thoughts and prayers were all we could do. (In the interest of transparency, I did offer to contribute to a plan should she come up with one and invited others to join me.)

Prayer and the request for prayer are one of the many expressions of our longing for God’s real and palpable presence. The hymn that we just sang gives voice to the most desperate, the most human of pleas: does God care, is God there? In the reading from Exodus, Moses doesn’t want God to just tell him that God’s presence is real but he wants God to show him God’s presence, God’s glory.



You see, not long after the debacle of the golden calf, after Moses had talked God down from wrath and destruction, God decided God had had enough of these stiff-necked people and said that an angel would accompany the Israelites from now on to the Promised Land. But for Moses this will not do. He even goes so far to say that if God doesn’t come with them, then the people will not go. Moses sounds like he doesn’t have it in him to go it alone. And for Moses an angel is no substitute for the intimacy he has shared with the Creator of the universe.

Wouldn’t we all like to see God’s face, in a sense, to have the veil pulled back and be able to know something more of the why and the how? We live in an age of speculation news: what if this or that happens, then what? We want to know how this is all going to play out. Consider how much more so if one’s personhood, one’s identity, one’s rights are in jeopardy.

Just as in 2016 there are some folks talking about making their own exodus should the election go the way it did last time. We do not live every day remembering that for those who are not White or those whose lives are marginalized this nation has always been Egypt. Author and scholar Saidiya Hartman wrote that we are living in a future created by slavery. And yet most of us are closer to the center of power and privilege than we are distanced from it. We’re outraged by injustice that will crush other lives but for the most part not our own.



“Show me your glory”, Moses says. And yet as the song goes, one day when the glory comes, it will not be ours but theirs. God’s glory is for the oppressed set free. Liberty and justice haven’t come yet for all. When the glory comes, when God’s face is seen, it will be liberation, not from on high, but as close and intimate as human lives, human choices, human love.

Until then, until that Promised Land, we work, we witness, we are the evidence of where God has been, where mercy and truth have met together, righteousness and peace have not yet kissed each other but they’ve at least been introduced. As Fannie Lou Hamer famously said, “You can pray until you faint but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.” In his autobiography Frederick Douglass wrote, “I prayed for freedom for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

We who have power and privilege will not receive the answer we want to our prayers or the answer we need until we pray with our power and our privilege. We cannot pray for freedom, for liberation, for liberty and justice for all, and expect to keep what we have. Humanity has fought time and again against the depraved self-interest that leads to slavery, to fascism, to domination, holocaust and genocide, and as always, a small percentage of humanity has also benefited from that self-interest. And here we are again. Violence, force, guilt, shame, and fear have never really changed anything. Liberation takes longer, evolution takes longer than every generation thinks it will. Now more than ever we are on the very edge of midnight, and we wonder what will it take for us to change?



Civil rights activist and author Valarie Kaur asks is this the darkness of the tomb or the darkness of the womb? She asks, is our nation not dead but still waiting to be born? In all of her speaking Valarie continues to repeat these words: “For we will be somebody’s ancestors someday. And if we get this right, they will inherit not our fear but our bravery.”

It seems we are waiting for our Moses. We want to know the way we should go. We want a very real and intimate and palpable presence to go with us. We’re waiting for other hearts and minds to change, for there to be more of us. We want a safe space to make changes so they will seem less like risks and more like informed decisions. And yet none of us have ever been here before, with our technology and the climate crisis and corrupt White power and authoritarianism and a global pandemic. We’re afraid of what will be required of us, of what we will have to give. The changes that are upon us feel like lifting dead weight. This week someone wisely said to me that our grandchildren will see and remember but we will not see them seeing and remembering. We will not see the face of God but where God has been.



In 1944 German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his prison cell, “So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as [those] who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. [God] is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which [God] is with us and helps us.”



We are being pushed out into the world, the most difficult part of labor called transition, when we want to give up, we can’t take the pain anymore, and hopefully we are being birthed into a new way of being. I learned a new word this week: protopia, coined by futurist Kevin Kelly. Where dystopia imagines a broken future and utopia an unattainable one, protopia is a today that is better than yesterday, if only by just a little bit. It is the incremental, conscious, intentional steps we take each day to make life better not just for ourselves but especially to get out of the way of those who are making their own way to their liberty and their justice.

As King said we will get there but we won’t all get there together. It’s been hard and harder for too many people for too long. And it is not God’s will but our desire to keep what we have that gets in their way. Those who suffer do not lack will. We lack nerve because we’re too comfortable with the way things are. God’s will is justice. Once again it’s time to embrace the hard and do the heavy lifting.

Benediction - enfleshed.com


Faithful are we when we remain the course,
clinging to the promises of resurrection 

until the day of liberation.
May we be courageous in renouncing evil in word and practice.
May we be undeterred through mistakes and setbacks.
May we be attentive to the motivations of our own hearts.
The Spirit will rise up among the willing.
Let us go with peace to join in the work of God.