MLK Sunday
January 15, 2012
Sermon by The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Reading chopped up chunks of scripture on Sunday morning can warp the way we hear sacred stories.
We have the call of Samuel this morning. Read in isolation from the surrounding chapters this story loses crucial context and can be reduced to a somewhat generic and sweet story of call to ministry.
What we really need to do is read 1 Samuel Chapters 2 through 5 to get the whole story. (So why don’t we do that now…)
Why is God replacing the elder Eli with the boy Samuel? Eli has allowed his Sons to turn the temple at Shiloh into a den of exploitation and extortion. Eli’s boys Hophni and Phinehas are stealing the best cuts of meat the faithful bring for sacrifice, threatening them with violence if they won’t turn the best parts over to them or taking the meat right out of the sacred vessels where it is offered to God. It seems to me that Eli is in on the scheme because the author takes special not of how fat he is when he falls from stool and breaks his neck at the end of chapter 4.
The word of God was rare and visions were scarce in those days. The word of God would be inconvenient and unsettling for the exploiting, violent and greedy schemes of the priests in charge.
The very people responsible for attending to the sacred, the priests whose job it is to mediate the intersection between the sacred and the profane, had instead brought profanity right into the temple, obscuring and silencing the sacred. Samuel does not recognize the voice of God when God calls his name. Eli is blind for the purposes of the story because he does not want to see the violation, the violence around him. Eli is also fat. He is literally living off the sacrifice of the hardworking faithful who are exploited at his Temple. He has made God’s temple his franchise.
The sacred is inconvenient and disturbing. When we become aware of it – when we learn to see it - we begin to see the horrors and violations we commit against God and God’s creation. So the sacred is often drowned in pious sweetness…
I learned the spiritual “This Little Light of Mine” at Vacation Bible School at the Methodist Church in my town. It’s a sweet little song, easy to sing and easy to teach, great for ministry with children because of its gentle message. Only later did I learn that this Spiritual was a “Freedom Song” taught for totally different reasons at the Highlander School in Tennessee. Highlander was the school of community organizing and non-violence that trained the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights movement; Bob Moses, Septima Clark, Rosa Parks, Julian Bond, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker and John Lewis – among so many others who are often obscured by the long shadow of King.
“This Little Light of Mine, I’m going to let it shine, every where I go, I am going to let it shine.” The meaning of this refrain changes depending on where you are going with your light and when you are going. If you are going to register to vote in Mississippi in 1961 in the face of police dogs, fire hoses, white neighbors with shotguns, watched by white employers ready to fire you, with KKK and White Citizen Council terrorists bombing your house, lynching your neighbors and burning your church, then “This Little Light of Mine” is a song of dignity and defiance, of pride and righteous assertion of God given and sacred rights to equality under the law.
“This Little Light of Mine” is an eruption of the sacred into the profanity of racist violence and domination. I am a person. I am a sacred child of God. You can try, but you will not keep me down.
This light is mine. I will let it shine. Put it under a bushel (NO) I am going to let it shine.
When Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor turned the fire hoses and dogs on peaceful marchers he exposed the horror and profanity of white racist violence for our whole country to see. This violence and domination was part of daily life for African Americans and well known to them for 350 years. It took the assertion of sacred self-hood in non-violent protest to reveal the profanity to the nation and get them to see for the first time the sacred dignity of African American citizens. “This Little Light of Mine, I’m going to let it shine, Not going to let old Bull Connor blow it out. I’m going to let it shine.”
We need to recover the sacred in public conversation for the common good. When 3 fourteen–year-old boys are shot and killed in our city and a 4th wounded, where is the horror, where is the outrage? (Don’t we know from the psalmist this morning that these young men were known by God and knit together in their mother’s whom by God, that they were marvelously made, that their very limbs were written in God’s book.) Where is the sense that something sacred has been violated? It makes me wonder. Are some lives counted as more valuable than others? If three white boys were gunned down in Montgomery County would the reaction be different? Do we value access to gun ownership more than we value the lives of those who suffer from gun violence? Have we mingled the profane with the sacred and lost sight – literally lost our ability to perceive – the work of God in the dignity and integrity of creation and creature that ought to give us pause and restrain our license? Have we have so privatized the sacred in personal piety that we forget that the sacred is part of the common good. We cannot hold the sacred for ourselves alone. The sacred must be had by all of it is to had at all. From Corinthians this morning, “Do (we) not know that our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within us, which we have from God, and that we are not our own?”
It is simple and it is disturbing of the status quo, to let our light shine, all lights must have their chance to shine.