Bandy Preaching Conference - Service of Word and Table - Rev. Dr. Thomas G. Long - 03.28.23

17:00 When Dean Fry Brown invited me so kindly to preach today, she told me that the theme of this preaching conference was reading the room, which I take it to be a preacher's mandate not simply to carve a sermon in oak, but to make it porous, to take into account those who are going to hear and the social context in which we live. Before I try to say something about reading the room, I do want to say how grateful I am just to be in the room.

17:38 I retired from Candler eight years ago. So many wonderful memories here. So many people I have loved and colleagues I have treasured and students I have enjoyed learning with and from. so many Candler graduates who are doing faithful and courageous ministries that give me hope. So Dean Fry Brown, Dean Love, thanks for letting me be back in the room. As for reading the room, I think that's important, but I also think it's hard.

18:14 For a lot of reasons, but one of them is there's so much clutter out there, so much static, so much distortion, So many competing voices and claims, it's hard to discern what's important and what's true and what's actually going on. And not only clutter out there, clutter in here.

18:35 This is confession time, but I don't think I'm alone. Preaching has always been for me a very vulnerable experience. I mean, the stakes are high. There you are, you're exposed. and you know how it goes you're trying to preach your heart out about something but there's this voice in the back of your head that keeps saying things like why does that guy in the third pew keep checking his watch I'm boring him aren't I that woman in the balcony she just got up and walked out It must have been something I said. I think reading the room when we get in the way so often is not really a muscular moral achievement. I think finally it's a gift of the Holy Spirit.

19:30 Only the Holy Spirit could clarify our vision. Only the Holy Spirit could rearrange our religious imaginations so that we could see what's going on and how God is involved in it, which is, of course, the gospel we're called to preach. That's why this morning I want to read a few verses from the Gospel of Luke because I think one of the ways to understand the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts is as the testimony of the Holy Spirit rearranging our religious imagination to allow us to read the room and to see what God is doing in the world. Now as I read, you're going to hear the name Theophilus, means lover of God, of course. It may be an actual person named Theophilus that Luke is writing to, or it may be a more generic term meaning all the lovers of God.

20:25 In Luke's community and beyond, who hear these words, hear the opening words of the Gospel of Luke. Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, having a grasp of everything from the start, to write a well-ordered account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may have a firm grasp of the words of which you have been instructed. Then from the third chapter. In the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Aeturia and Trachonitis, and Lysanias the ruler of Abilene during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

21:37 He went into all the region around the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. As it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight. Every valley shall be filled, Every mountain and hill shall be made low. The crooked shall be made straight. The rough ways made smooth. And all flesh shall see the salvation of God. This is the word of the Lord. I have written this to you, O Theophilus, that you may have a firm grasp. Or better, I've written this to you, Theophilus, so that you may be reassured about the gospel that you've been taught. Now, if we're going to read the room, I suppose we ought to start by reading the original room.

22:36 What's bugging Theophilus? What has unsettled Theophilus and the others in Luke's community so much so that Luke has to write a whole gospel and the book of Acts to reassure them about the gospel that they've been taught? Well, people have made some guesses about that. Some people think that what is bothering Theophilus is that Jesus has not come again as he said he would. He did promise that after disturbances on the earth and in the sky, that one day the whole creation would look up and there would be the Son of Man in the clouds coming in power and glory. And for the faithful, a victory shout could go up because the redemption of the whole cosmos was coming near.

23:24 Been 50 years. 50 long years and no Jesus. A few years before Luke wrote his gospel, Mount Vesuvius erupted with enormous power, a hundred thousand times as powerful as the first atomic bomb that landed on Hiroshima. And the whole Mediterranean world shivered. This was it, the end of the world. Faithful looked up into the clouds. But as the poet Auden put it, the clouds said, address unknown. Maybe. Or others say, no, it wasn't anything that dramatic. What was bothering Theophilus and the others was the sort of gradual erosion of faith that happens over time. You know how it is, they started out young and zealous and passionate for the gospel. Then they got a little older, they got a little richer. They got complacent and content. Later on in Luke, Jesus in one of his parables is going to warn that it's not just the sufferings and tough times of life that knock faith off its feet. Sometimes it's the successes and the pleasures and the riches of life. Well, maybe so. Actually though, I think if we read through the whole gospel of Luke, the deeper we get into it, the clearer it becomes that what is truly bothering Theophilus is not that he's lost his faith. He's as zealot and steadfast and passionate as ever.

25:03 What's bothering Theophilus is that when he looks out at life, when he tries to read the room, he can't see any evidence out there that the gospel is true. The gospel he was taught is that Jesus was a revolutionary who embodied the reign of God and turned the whole creation upside down. This theology he was taught was beautifully embodied in the song that Mary sung when she learned she was going to be the mother of the Christ child. My soul magnifies the Lord, she said. Why? Because God has brought the powerful and the mighty down from their thrones. and lifted up the weak and the lowly. The hungry have been filled with good things, and the rich, they've been sent empty away.

25:56 And Theophilus looked out and said, Hmm, where? As for the powerful being brought down from their thrones, well, as far as Theophilus could see, the Roman Empire was trucking right along, thank you very much. And as for the hungry being filled with good things, look to him like the rich just kept getting richer and the poor kept starving in anonymity. I have written this to you, O Theophilus, to reassure you about the gospel that you've been taught. Well, I want to hear what Luke has to say too, because I don't know about you, but most days I look out and I see what Theophilus sees. Just a few hours ago, once again, a shooting where the weak and the lowly were not lifted up.

26:55 They were shot down. And as for the hungry being filled up and the rich being sent away packing, well, when a pompous dude like Jeff Bezos can put on a space cowboy suit and spend four minutes in outer space on his own private rocket ship at a cost estimated to be able to save 35 million people. from hunger and poverty. I want the reassurance that Luke gives to Theophilus.

27:35 What Luke does for Theophilus is not simply stamp his feet and say, we're doubling down on this, Theophilus. This is our story, and we're sticking to it. What he does instead is, in the power of the Holy Spirit, he rearranges Theophilus' vision and ours. He gives them a new religious imagination so that they are able to see and discern what is truly going on in a way that they could not before. And he does it through what might playfully be called a knight's move theology. If you know about chess, you know that all the pieces on the chessboard move in a straight line except one. the knight who moves forward and then over, forward and then to the side.

28:30 It's that pattern theologically and literarily that occupies Luke. For example, our passage, in the year when Tiberius was Caesar and Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea and Herod was the ruler in Galilee and Philip the ruler in Aeturia and Lysanias ruler of Abilene. and Annas and Caiaphas, the high priest, the word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah over in the wilderness.

29:02 Luke is saying, you want to know what God's doing in the world? You want to read the room? Don't look there. That's where Fox News looks. That's where Wall Street looks. Don't look there. Look over here. And when you look over here, you can see what God is doing over here, but it's hidden by the clutter. Or here again, when Augustus was the emperor and Herod the Great was the king in Galilee, the word of the Lord came to two pregnant women, Mary and Elizabeth in a little house in the hill country of Judea. You want to know what God's doing? Don't look over there in the palace. Look over here to these two women with stretch marks waiting on their water to break and their wombs filled with the promise of redemption.

30:01 The Episcopal lay theologian William Stringfellow said, The odd thing is the powers and principalities, the palaces and the kings and the rulers that be, in an ironic way already know that Jesus is Lord. They don't name it, they can't, but they feel it. Because constantly the structures of evil that they set up keep getting eroded, and the lies they tell to support them, the lies of death, keep getting exposed, and it is the power of Christ that does it. New Testament scholar Matthew Skinner says that's right, but Luke keeps shining the spotlight to the margins and the edges and the little people and the lowly places.

30:56 Do you want to know what's going on over there? Don't look there. Look over here. Several years ago I was privileged to go with some wonderful Candler graduates, some of you are here in the room today, down to the southern border to El Paso Juarez. We spent a week down there studying the situation. It can be a dispiriting place as the militarized border patrol pulls up and down the walls and the fences and the folks who are desperate to get across the border get put in oppressive and overcrowded detention centers and the angry rhetoric comes out of Washington DC about terrorists trying to come over the border. We went down there and saw those terrorists. Most of them are teenage girls who are pregnant fleeing because their husbands have been killed in violence and they are desperate to save their lives or men who can't support their families who are hungry for work of any kind. It's a desperate place, the border.

32:04 One day we went to a modest building right close to the main crossing. It's the Agricultural Workers Center. And every morning before dawn, the undocumented workers gather in the parking lot and the vans come and they take them to New Mexico where under the hot southwestern sun, they pick chili peppers for scents on the bushel. Then they come back to the parking lot, and in the workers' center, there is a shower and fresh towels and a hot meal and a pallet for the night before it all starts over the next dawn. The center was founded and run by Carlos Menentis, and he's a Roman Catholic layman, but he said, you know, for a long time, I did not make any connection between what I was doing at the center and my faith. I was doing this as an act of humanity, an act of justice, but I didn't see any connection with my Christian faith.

33:05 But then I watched closely the Brazilian garbage strike, and suddenly I realized the workers in that strike were motivated not only by a hunger for justice and good wages, they were motivated by Jesus Christ. Their Christian faith gave them a dignity and a hope they did not otherwise have. So Carlos said, I added something to our program at the Workers' Center. Not only would they find a shower and towels and a meal and a pallet, but for those who wanted, and all of them did, between dinner and bedtime, we'd sit on the floor. They were bone weary from harvesting during the day, but we'd sit on the floor and study the Pope's encyclical, Caritas et Veritate, the love of God and justice in labor. And they learned there that God had given them a name and a dignity that could not be taken away by the oppressive systems, a hope that could not be eroded by the palaces and the Herods and the kings.

34:16 You want to know what's going on in the world? Don't look over there. Look in that room with those workers listening to God's love. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention, this was during the second year of the reign of Donald Trump as President of the United States, when Kristen Nelson was the Secretary of Homeland defense and Greg Abbott was the governor of Texas and Robert Jeffress was the high priest of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. Don't look over there. Look over here where the word of God is taking root and giving hope. When Harvey Cox was on the faculty at Harvard Divinity School, he wrote in the New York Times about an unusual event that happened in the Little Baptist Church just off Harvard Yard where Harvey Cox was a member. It seems that a woman came and worshipped with them one day and she stayed and kept worshipping and they learned her story.

35:18 She was from El Salvador, her husband murdered by a drug cartel, putting her in immediate danger and her children. She entrusted her children to relatives and came undocumented into the United States desperate to get money to take care of her family. The Immigration Service found out about it. They were moving in on her to deport her, and the Little Baptist Church said, oh, no. They put their arms around her and said, we are a sanctuary for you. We will protect you, you will be safe here, and we will raise the money for you and for your children. A number of churches were doing this. They call them sanctuary churches. There was a network, and the network said to this Little Baptist Church, It's our advice that you use the Freedom of Information Act and find out if there are federal files on your congregation. Not that there are, probably, but if there are, it's good to know what's coming.

36:16 They didn't think they needed to do that, but they decided, filled out the paperwork, and they were shocked. Not only did they have an FBI file on the congregation, they said we can't give it to you because it would expose the identity of an informant in your congregation who has provided the information. My God, they said, we've got a spy in our church. After they got over the shock, they were a little amused by it. This is a Baptist church. There are no secrets here. This is the last place you'd want a secret kept. You read the monthly newsletter, it's too much information. Do we have a contralto spy in the choir?

37:02 Does our informant sneak in on Wednesday nights after a prayer meeting and dust for knee prints? But then the humor dissolved and it became fearful. and they noticed that people were being reserved in conversations and not revealing their lives at coffee hour and at church. And the pastor said people were not coming for pastoral counseling anymore and people were looking around the room suspiciously. Somebody out here is an informant. And then it happened. One Sunday, it was during the pastoral prayer,

37:40 the pastor was praying for all the usual things. She was praying for the sick, and she was praying for the shut-ins. And then she said, oh, God, this morning we asked for a special blessing on our informant. the terror of an oppressive regime trying to seek out and send to death a woman from El Salvador. Don't look there. Look over here at the church of Jesus Christ, praying even for its enemies. Harvey Cox ended his piece by saying this. Most of us in the church hope our spy doesn't get tired and go away. Because we think if they will stay with us, they will learn that when we say we're a sanctuary, we don't just mean for Salvadorian refugees. We mean for everybody, including informants and everyone who's lost and hungry and in need.

38:38 And if they come and pray with us long enough and listen to the gospel long enough and sing out Beulah Land with us, who knows? They might get saved. It wouldn't be the first time, said Cox. Luke says, you want to read the room? Don't look at the power structures. Look over there where the word of God is taking root and all flesh will see the salvation.