Letter to the future

 

Mark 4: 26-34
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
June 16, 2024

Photo of a dense forest of tall trees. A beam of sunlight shines from between the trees, creating a circular rainbow.

55 years ago, on June 28 at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York, when gay men and drag queens rioted against a police raid, little did they know that it would be this event that would spark the gay rights movement. A year later the first gay Pride marches would take place in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The second year, 1971: Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, London, Paris, West Berlin, and Stockholm. The year after that, 1972: Atlanta, Buffalo, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Within two years of the Stonewall riots, there were gay rights groups, now LGBTQ+ rights organizations in every major American city, as well as Canada, Australia and Western Europe. Sometimes a seed for the kin-dom can look like a riot.



When Freddie Mercury wrote his progressive rock anthem “Bohemian Rhapsody” and his rock band Queen recorded it in 1975, little did he know that in 2017, 26 years after his passing, 65,000 people would sing the entire song before a Green Day concert in Hyde Park, London.







We live and we yearn for moments of unity and togetherness like this. All thanks to a queer man! Sometimes a seed for the kin-dom can sound like a song.



A seed is like a letter to the future. The seeds we plant today tell of our hopes, our dreams, our needs, the direction we want to move in. Sometimes a seed for the kin-dom can look like a social protest movement. Barbara Gage wrote in the NYT Magazine, “One open secret of social activism is that nobody can ever really predict when, where, how or why any given issue will change from a lost cause to a cause célèbre. As my Yale colleague and gay rights pioneer Evan Wolfson often reminds students, ambitious goals have usually seemed ‘impossible’ until they were achieved, at which point they suddenly became ‘inevitable’, a matter of simple justice and common sense.” We plant seeds of change but we can’t always predict which ones will take root. Nevertheless, whether we realize it or not, we are communicating to the future “this is the world we want to live in”.



It sounds as if Jesus is saying that God’s kin-dom is a gift, in that we can’t predict it, it comes to us in the fullness of time, but I’m not convinced it’s inevitable. There are other seeds we plant, other messages we send to the future, that are not mysterious at all and yet we continue to be astonished by the outcome.



Whenever people are oppressed and marginalized, we criticize and attempt to control whatever resistance that predictably follows.



When violence is used to control that resistance, we enshrine our right to defend ourselves and ensure that the conflict will persist, even to future generations.



When violence is used to resist oppression, we have joined the oppressor in the agreement that all one has to do is dehumanize the other to achieve one’s ends.



The seeds of White supremacy and White Christian nationalism were planted when we came to these shores, colonized the land of the people who were living here, destroyed their homes, all in the name of persecution and religious freedom. A narrative that would continue into the future in which we are now living.



All of this communicates to the future that humanity is a greedy, violent race, war is inevitable, and peace is impossible.



Which can make us feel like it is hopeless to plant seeds for the kin-dom of God. Because there are so many bad actors who would rather sow seeds of discord. Who think they can achieve their future security by destroying everyone else’s.



But sometimes it backfires on them. On Wednesday, Twitter users were informed that their likes would now be private to protect their privacy. Which means that when you visit another person’s profile, you can’t see what posts they have liked. You can’t see which accounts have liked other people’s posts, only your own. Knowing that privacy doesn’t just protect, it can also provide cover wrongdoing, one user wondered if perhaps this is a means of removing community’s ability to validate a post’s engagement by verifying who liked the post. Perhaps opening the door to run bot campaigns without being able to verify their legitimacy. The summer before one of the most contentious presidential elections ever.



So rather than using the like button, users starting commenting on posts using the word “like” in quotation marks, the most prolific person being actor Mark Hamill who is most known for his role as Jedi knight Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movie franchise. Wielding his “Like” saber at will, he earned the moniker “Like” Skywalker, as fans proudly retweeted his messages with obvious delight and humor, filled with “a new hope” as the Jedi returned, even as the empire strikes back.



This may not seem like a big deal to some, but for those who depend on Twitter for community and a sense of cohesiveness in the midst of chaos, Mark Hamill’s simple act of resistance was a seed planted for sheer joy. It’s not about carefully planting seeds but being extravagant with our hopes, our dreams, no matter how great or small the gesture, the gift. When we do this, we communicate to the future that despite the worst that human beings can do, we are also generous, compassionate, hopeful, justice-dreaming, and this is the world we want to live in.



45 years ago, some folks in the greater Newark area planted some small seeds of doing church differently. You wrote a letter to the future and here we are. Did this church turn out like anything you thought it would when you began? Creatures of all kinds have found shelter, hospitality, and renewal here in this scrappy church community. What seeds will we plant now? What messages to the future do we want to send? What is the kin-dom of God calling forth from us now?



If the future we want to live in is kind, forgiving, and just, full of mutual care and abundance, interdependent, anti-racist, anti-fascist, sustainable, non-violent, where everyone has what they need and everyone is safe and respected, it means we plant those seeds today and every day, in all that we do.

Photo of a still pond with grasses and a small wooden pier in the foreground and a forested shoreline in the background, in shades of sunrise pink, with a quote by Manal al-Sharif, author of "Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening": "The rain begins with a single drop."

Benediction – enfleshed.com



God does not burden us with tasks beyond our reach
God fills us with creative capacities
to be makers of shared life,
to be disrupters of destruction,
to practice radical kinship with neighbors near and far.
Alive to the power God has given us,
may we be co-creators of all that brings forth life.