Isaiah 49:1-7
The Golden Globe Awards were at one time credible though controversial, the work of a Hollywood Foreign Press Association that was mostly blind to the systemic racism in America. In 2023, the enterprise was bought out by a privately-held company called Eldridge Industries. They own all or portions of many American companies and media platforms, the awards now basically billionaires celebrating the achievements of production companies owned by other billionaires.
We’ve always had foreign journalists in the United States, especially since the Second World War. And just as tapes that had been in a basement for half a century became the remarkable 2021 Questlove documentary “Summer of Soul,” about 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival, so coverage of America’s Black Power movement by Swedish reporters in the 1960’s and ‘70’s was re-discovered and became the 2011 documentary “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.”
There is footage of the Rev. Dr. King, of course, though not much, as he was assassinated just one year into the video archive. Other well-known figures of the era featured in the documentary include Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, and Stokely Carmichael.
It is Carmichael, a former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who says on this found footage:
“Dr. King’s policy was, if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption. In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
We celebrate King, and there is much to celebrate, though his critics were not limited to white supremacists, witch-hunting anti-communists, and the military industrial complex. Carmichael and Malcom X were Black critics on one side, while there were also Black voices on the other side, concerned that the time was not right to pursue equality, that the non-violent tactics of King and his followers were too confrontational, that any effort to address longstanding oppression would result in greater oppression.
The 20th century prophet we have turned into a saint, despite his well-documented moral failings, was assailed from all sides.
There are many I consider saints, as I have shared from this pulpit. They are all very real and very imperfect, for how else could they serve as role models for those of us who are imperfect? But I have four from the 20th century that are especially important to me, and it should not surprise you that three are clergy, two of those clergy are nerds, and the fourth is the first openly-gay elected official in America. Each was not just a prophet. Each was also a martyr, killed for their belief, their courage to say what others feared to say out loud.
Amos, an arborist and herdsman from Judea, crossed into Israel to denounce economic injustice, to denounce the excesses of the rich, and was deported and banned from the county. Jeremiah warned the king that he was leading the nation into a war that would end in defeat, and was thrown into a cistern to sink and die. Scripture tells us that prophets were not exactly loved by the powerful, and given the behavior of some of them, and I’m thinking especially Hosea and Ezekiel, they weren’t always understood by the common people either.
In the Christian trajectory, Jesus is the culmination of the prophetic tradition, with the Jewish Council and colonial administration equally responsible for his execution, though we’ve been trying to put the blame on God for two millennia. Not only have we tried to pin that crime on God, we have white-washed Jesus into that freaky European with Breck shampoo hair we’ve seen in so many Sunday School classrooms, and have turned a revolutionary into a wimp not worth following, mealy-mouthed and un-inspiring, some hippie dude on the hillside with lambs, though he tells us himself that his message will bring conflict, that it will divide families.
To be a prophet is to have a sword mouth, as we heard in our reading from Deutero-Isaiah, written during the Babylonian Captivity, the same setting that produced Ezekiel.
A “mouth like a sharp sword” is Stokely Carmichael’s every speech. It is King as well as Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh, two other non-violent faith leaders I admire, denouncing the hubris and stupidity of the war in Vietnam. It is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Rev. James Reeb marching in support of King and Civil Rights in Selma, the latter a Unitarian Universalist martyr in the struggle.
Christianity started as an alternative to empire. It would become an instrument of empire, would even have imperial aspirations at times, ruling parts of Italy with the pope as king. Though no one is wearing a crown in America, at least not yet, make no mistake. The capital-worshiping nationalism of today’s American Christianity, complete with a colonial enterprise every bit as corrupt as Roman rule of Judea, is empire-aligned, and has nothing to do with Jesus.
“Stay in your own lane, pastor.”
This is my lane, the same lane occupied by Moses when he stood before the Pharaoh, by Jesus when he stood before the Sanhedrin, before Pontius Pilate, the lane occupied by all who speak truth to power, in Bethel 2700 years ago and in San Salvador in 1980.
To have a sword mouth is to confess that we are a nation of idolaters, and we do not need God to come punish us, for we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction. When I describe our economic system as “end-stage” Neo-liberal Capitalism, I am saying what we all know to be true, that this trajectory is not sustainable, as uncomfortable as that may make those who grew up during the Cold War, who were told that there is an absolute binary between capitalism and state communism. We know that binary is a lie, at least intellectually, though we have difficulty stepping outside of that system, too often choosing charity over a truly cooperative economics.
To have a sword mouth is to confess that while the United States was a radical experiment in government for the white men who established it, those same men insured that the corrupting institution of slavery would remain in place, ignored the existence of the continent’s Indigenous People as European settlers pushed west into the Ohio River Valley and across the Appalachians.
“Stay in your lane, pastor! Dream all you want, but keep it to yourself. You want health insurance, right?”
To have a sword mouth is to admit that there is no one correct version of Christianity revealed directly by a divine being, not our version, not their version, but that Christianity, like all religions, is as much humankind looking in the mirror, projecting onto holy mystery what we see in ourselves, and if we are lucky, seeing what we might yet become, better in our relationships with one another and with the planet, embodied, yes, but also transcendent, co-creators in this mysterious dance.
To have sword mouth is to challenge our own certainties as well, and that requires a humility that is rare in any age, much less our current age, when arrogance and ignorance are lauded.
It is difficult to tell the prophet, the visionary who sees what we fail to see, from the truly mad. Sword mouth is the razor’s edge of enough in the community to remain grounded, but enough outside of the community to be free to say what needs to be said, “in the world but not of the world” in the language of Paul of Tarsus.
Finally, you do not need a pulpit to be a prophet, to have a sword mouth. In fact, many in pulpits serve as chaplains to empire. Mother Jones preached the picket line. Harvey Milk had a camera shop and a cause, a tape recorder and a rotary phone, and his simple words about hope and queer kids in the heartland were as much a sermon as any I have delivered, as powerful as the vision of a man who told a Mall full of people that he had a dream, people in the pews in Memphis that he had been to the mountaintop, that there was, absolutely was, a promised land. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Blessed Rabbi,
You taught in a synagogue and in the streets,
in Jewish towns and Gentile towns,
heard the Syro-Phoenecian woman’s challenge,
the appeal of the Centurian,
welcomed the unclean and the upper class.
Your reform would outlive you,
ignore borders,
and change the world.
But first, you spoke truth,
in the commercialized Temple,
before the collaborators of the Sanhedrin,
before a Roman Prefect with deadly authority.
Help us speak truth,
be agents of healing
and justice.
Hear our prayer for those who grieve,
here in our own church family,
in occupied Minneapolis.
You were still present to your followers,
even after they had seen you executed,
so we pray as you taught us, saying:
Our Father