Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream!
Brother Roger of Taizé, during a pilgrimage of youth to the Washington National Cathedral in about 1980 or 1981, at the conclusion of the service invited anyone who wanted to come up and he would offer them a sign of reconciliation: and he would make, with his finger, the sign of the cross in the palm of your hand.
Responding to the racial upheavals of fifty years ago, James H. Cone wrote his famous, fiery book Black Theology & Black Power. He said that reconciliation comes with the establishment of justice and righteousness, with telling the truth.
James H. Cone reminded his readers that it is in Christ that reconciliation comes. And he cited the words of St. Paul:
God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. (2 Corinthians 5:19)
Two very different voices, but both call on God as the source and endpoint of reconciliation.
If you want peace, work for justice.
Even last Sunday we were reminded, in the national service of prayer for healing and wholeness, to be brave, and seek the truth. (Valarie Kaur)
And in the truth, we will find our way toward justice, righteousness, and peace, the peace of reconciliation, to one another, and as these Christian witnesses would say, in Christ.
This Sunday, the second Sunday in November, I want to talk about reconciliation. Racial reconciliation is one of the three themes, along with creation care and evangelism, that the Episcopal Church has undertaken to address during this triennium, the three years between General Conventions. But of course that is not the only reason to talk about reconciliation today. Last Sunday at the suggestion of our local precinct captain, neighbors began to remove political yard signs from their yards, since there was anticipation of some unrest regardless of the results of the national general election. And this Sunday, November 8th, is the Sunday after Election Day.
It is also the Sunday before Armistice Day, Veterans Day: a day to remember the efforts of veterans and others to practice reconciliation after armed conflict, beginning with the first World War. Among the returning veterans from that war were the founders of the Iona Community, notably George MacLeod, who began to work for justice, and work toward their own righteousness, in community, on the windy western island of Iona, in Scotland. Iona began to attract visitors and volunteers, and continues to be a pilgrimage destination to this day.
After the second World War, in the small village of Taizé near the demarcation line which had divided France in two, a community gathered that became a place where people could seek reconciliation across national and generational boundaries, and seek the Spirit in guidance and celebration. Brother Roger came from there.
And on our minds this year in this country has been the overwhelming need to seek reconciliation between alienated people, of different races, classes, and political persuasions.
When reconciliation seems most impossible, then it most needs to be sought: in the work and words of Jesus we find a way toward it; and his footsteps we follow toward that goal.
***
Among the impressive achievements of reconciliation in the past centuries has been the effort of old soldiers, veterans from opposing sides of past wars, to reconcile with some of those from the other side. This may be rare, and therefore celebrated all the more. Veterans from the first and second World Wars have gradually found each other; leaders of nations from that conflict have met each other. Veterans of the American war in Vietnam have journeyed back to meet the people from the other side. An American president laid a wreath at Hiroshima.
After the Civil War, widows and veterans north and south began to decorate graves on certain days; eventually these observances were merged into one national Memorial Day. Problematic as some of the monuments were and are, there were attempts also to see the resolution of the conflict in peace.
Of course, “if you want peace work for justice” … which is why to move toward reconciliation we tell the truth, and strive for righteousness, and work for justice.
And that is what this day, between Election Day and Veterans Day, is about.
Working for justice, striving for righteousness, that peace may flow like a river, “flowing out from you and me, flowing out into the desert, flowing to the sea.”
****
So often with Old Testament (Hebrew Scriptures) prophets we want to know what the context is: when were they writing, to whom, what was going on around them. With Amos, in this passage, we know! He is writing to us, now, about what is going on around us. That seems to apply regardless of the immediate circumstances. And of course we cannot just cut and patch what he has to say into our own arguments. But we can use them as a prophetic distraction from our own concerns, our own perspective, and look beyond even his original readership to what God is doing in our listening to this ancient denunciation of vanity, hypocrisy, injustice, unrighteousness, and the lack of peace, truth, and reconciliation. Wisely, many have taken a page from the South African initiative called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And others no less astute have learned from mediation teachers like Hizkias Assefa, as they lay out and model the steps to peace.
One time Dr Assefa waited all day at the edge of a jungle clearing, in southern Sudan, with representatives of the official government, as they kept an appointment with some one no one had see for ten years: the leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army, an insurrectionary group famous for its violent methods. At the end of the day the sun was setting, everybody was getting nervous - they were in the middle of the jungle, far from safety - and the LRA vice-president emerged from the jungle, clad in immaculate white safari suit. He had been watching from the jungle for signs of betrayal and only emerged when he was satisfied. And so, on a pad of group-process newsprint Dr Assefa, as mediator and facilitator, began to enumerate the ground rules of the conversation. No interrupting, yes, raise your hand, listen, but first: begin by not killing people or kidnapping children any more.
What Amos does for us is remind us that
we are not the ultimate,
we are not alone, that in fact
what God is doing and
what therefore we are called to do, will always
stand in judgment over our own perspective and our actions.
What does the Lord require?
To do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. (Micah 6:8)
What does the Lord require, of us, now? God is present in the present moment, the moment of freedom, of decision: what now shall be done? We don’t always know.
And so we seek wisdom from the ages not just our own. Even ancient wisdom of a faraway people in a time long ago, Amos in Israel... and next door. Right now.
χρόνος is out the window! καιρός is what is going on now. That is, clock time, twenty-four hour-a-day check-your-phone time, is no longer applicable. What matters is time in its fullness, the completion of time, the consummation of time. That is when the bridegroom arrives.
You may know people who operate like this - they arrive when they arrive. I’ve seen it everywhere from a Sufi imam to a group of Miwok dancers absorbed in a gambling game and missing their turn on stage at an acorn festival. It makes the manager types - the clipboard carriers - tear their hair out. And I’m not immune myself, having been to a wedding where the bride was twenty clock minutes late.
Then, on the arm of her uncle, in she walked. Radiant. At last! and right on time.
And that is what is, was, is, will be, like when Jesus comes. At last! And at once.
The bridegroom. Here at last, after shaking as many hands as could reach him, making his way down the street from congratulatory bottle-happy well-wisher to cheek-kissing lipstick-planting auntie.
All of it happens at once and for always. Every moment becomes the present moment, the moment of freedom.
And now - as it is always now - we face the judge who is our friend.
That is the last scene that this gospel is leading toward, the scene beyond dreams that is the last judgment, when Jesus meets again for the first time those who have treated the least of these as they would have treated him.... Christ the King. And your neighbor.
Proper 27 Year A (Revised Common Lectionary)
https://pima.bibliocommons.com/list/share/1102635677_pimalib_kindred/1747324749_the_power_of_the_black_vote
https://pima.bibliocommons.com/list/share/338799627_pimalib_nuestrasraices/1658182879_borderlands_a_scarred_landscape
https://www.library.pima.gov/blacklivesmatter/
Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance (1995; Broadway Paperbacks, 2004)
Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Crown, 2006)
Barack Obama, We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama. E. J. Dionne Jr. and Joy-Ann Reid, eds. (Bloomsbury, 2017)
Barack Obama, A Promised Land (Crown/Penguin Random House/Bertelsmann, 2020)
Martin Buber, I and Thou (1932)
James H. Cone, Black Power and Black Theology (Harper & Row, 1969; Orbis Books, 2018)
James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: the Making of a Black Theologian (Orbis Books, 2018)
King, Martin Luther, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here; Chaos or Community? (Beacon Press, 2010)
Wallis, Jim, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America (Brazos Press, 2016)
Taizé: The Beginnings (https://www.taize.fr/en_article6526.html)
November 1, 2020: 11am Sunday Worship Service at Washington National Cathedral (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaoajBV890g&feature=youtu.be)
The Episcopal Church, November 1, 2020: Holding onto Hope: A National Service for Healing and Wholeness (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXCaXNSrX8s)(https://episcopalchurch.org/posts/publicaffairs/presiding-bishop-michael-currys-sermon-holding-hope-national-service-healing-and)
The Call, Reconciled, LP (1986: WEA/Elecktra/Asylum (catalog#60440)
J. S. Bach, Wachet auf ruft die stimme BWV 140 (https://youtu.be/DqZE54i-muE)
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