Marie Alford-Harkey's Sermon, February 3, 2013
Posted on
Epiphany 4C
February 3, 2013
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford, CT
Marie Alford-Harkey, M.Div.
It’s striking in today’s gospel reading that in the space of 7 verses of scripture, the narrative takes us from “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth” to “they led him to the brow of the hill … so that they might hurl him off the cliff.”
The hometown crowd moves from adoration to vilification in what seems to be a matter of minutes because Jesus has the audacity to tell them that he’s not doing his miracles among them, but rather in places all around his hometown of Nazareth. And he points out that he’s in good company as Elijah and Elisha did miracles outside their own communities.
Being a prophet has never been a guarantee of popularity. This is true for Jeremiah, too. In Jeremiah’s call story, we hear God tell Jeremiah not to be afraid because God will be there to deliver him. We can infer that if Jeremiah is going to need deliverance, his mission isn’t going to be easy or fun
God tells Jeremiah that he’ll be appointed over nations “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” Even though the end result is planting and building, Jeremiah’s message is largely one of disruption of the current order. It’s not an easy message to give or to hear.
Speaking out against the established order, going to the margins of society, even in God’s name, is dangerous. Prophets get killed. Even though Jesus manages to elude the crowd that wants to hurl him off the cliff, in this story, we know what happens later. His prophetic critique of existing social and religious structures leads directly to his death.
But here’s a scary truth: we are all called to be prophets – speaking God’s truth as it is revealed in our own lives. Being a prophet - as Jeremiah, Elijah, Elisha, and Jesus show us - requires courage. And as Paul tells us, it also requires compassion.
I’m learning a lot about courage and compassion right now. Because of Kim Litsey’s sermon on the Sunday after the Newtown shootings, I’ve been reading a book by Brené Brown called, “The Gifts of Imperfection.” Brown is a researcher who dedicated the first part of her career to studying difficult emotions like shame, fear, and vulnerability. In 2007 she had what we might, in this season, call an epiphany.
She realized from her years of research that all people struggle with shame and fear and doubt. But she also saw hundreds of stories of people who were living inspiring lives.
Brown, an Episcopalian, came to call these people “wholehearted” people, after the line in our prayer of confession that confesses, “We have not loved you with our whole hearts.” She began to identify the characteristics of these people and what she discovered was that they exemplified both courage and compassion in their lives.
These traits are required of we prophets as well.
Courage, according to Brown’s definition, isn’t about heroic acts. Rather, it requires that we “speak our minds by telling what’s in our heart.” This reason it is courageous to speak our truth from our heart is because it makes us vulnerable, and vulnerability is a difficult emotion that most humans would rather avoid.
I’ve been working on having this kind of courage in conversations with my family in the wake of the Newtown shootings.
I know I’m not the only one in this congregation who was devastated by this event. Perhaps, as it did for me, this shooting called up other incidents and situations for you.
I grew up in a home and a family and a culture where owning a gun was and is seen as a hallmark of courage. The idea that everyone should own a gun and know how to shoot with accuracy and skill was a given. It was accepted as fact that if you knew how to shoot a gun, you were safer, and you would be better able to protect your family and those you loved.
My father taught me to shoot when I was 14. From an early age, he had instilled in me a respect and fear for the destructive power of the weapons that he owned. He was and is a model gun owner – responsible and diligent with his guns. He even taught gun safety classes. When he asked me if I wanted to learn to shoot, I was eager.
I learned to shoot handguns and shotguns, and I was proud of my skill.
Over the years, after I moved away from the South and my family, my opinion about guns began to change. I was a teacher in a high school when the Columbine shooting happened in 1999. Because that shooting was so close to my own life, it solidified once and for all my position for strong gun control laws and against owning a gun myself.
The first time I intimated to my Dad that I might not be against gun control laws, he took it badly. I imagine it felt like a betrayal of how he had raised me. Talking to my father about these issues has never gotten any easier.
Anytime I choose to engage in a conversation with my Dad about gun control, it requires the courage to speak my mind by telling what’s in my heart. It makes me feel vulnerable to disagree so thoroughly with someone I love so much. My Dad and remind each other frequently that our differing opinions will never change how we feels about each other, and I know that’s true. But it doesn’t make disagreeing with him any easier.
These discussions with my Dad help me to practice prophetic compassion. As Brown says in her book and as we’ve all probably heard, the Latin roots of the word compassion mean “to suffer with.” But human beings, quite naturally, seek to protect ourselves from suffering.
This is certainly true when I discuss guns with my family. When my Dad emailed me, six days after the Newtown shootings, he put forth his opinion about gun safety, and he allowed me to put forth mine. And then he very kindly asked me if I wanted to continue the discussion. I said no.
My family of origin’s influence on me is still strong, and it hurts me when I realize that no matter what concessions I make, or how much I work to see their side of an issue, we will never agree on these issues. So sometimes practicing compassion means that we agree to back away from a confrontation.
But that’s not the only way to practice compassion. Brown says that practicing compassion also means practicing setting boundaries and holding people accountable. It’s much easier to shame, blame, and demonize those who disagree with us than it is to figure out how to hold one another accountable. But shaming and blaming without determining accountability and consequences just leads to a lot of self-righteous yelling and finger pointing.
We can imagine a different way. If we were able to hold ourselves, our communities, and our policymakers compassionately accountable for our complicity in the violence of our society, what solutions might we then be able to dream up?
We as Christians cannot lose the hope that something can be done.
The reading from 1 Corinthians speaks to this hope, both for prophets and for those who hear them. Far from the Hallmark card sappy sentiment that this passage has come to represent, 1 Corinthians 13 calls us to courageous, compassionate love. Coming just after the passage about all the different gifts of the body of Christ, this treatise on love deftly subverts our attempts to exercise those gifts for our own gain.
Paul reminds us that no gift is perfect in this world, that none of us is a perfect prophet or and none of us has complete knowledge. So a prophet must have love. Grounded in God’s love, we modern-day prophets can learn to practice our craft with compassion and courage.
A true prophet’s words reject polemical rhetoric and call us to find the way of truth and healing in a complex world where we only see dimly. May we find ways to both issue and answer that call. Amen?