Outsider Voices--Pentecost + 5, July 14, 2019

Sermon for SMHP, Year C, Proper 10, Pentecost + 5, July 14, 2019

Luke 10:25-37

               ²⁵Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” ²⁶Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?”

          ²⁷He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” ²⁸And Jesus said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” ²⁹But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”         

          ³⁰Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. ³¹Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. ³²So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. ³⁴He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. ³⁵The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ ³⁶Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

          ³⁷He said, “The one who showed him mercy.”

          Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Amos 7:7-17

               ⁷This is what the Lord God showed me: the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. 

          ⁸And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?”

          And I said, “A plumb line.”

          Then the Lord said, “See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; ⁹the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.”

               ¹⁰Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to King Jeroboam of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you in the very center of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words. ¹¹For thus Amos has said, ‘Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel must go into exile away from his land.’” 

          ¹²And Amaziah said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; ¹³but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.” 

          ¹⁴Then Amos answered Amaziah, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees,¹⁵and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ ¹⁶“Now therefore hear the word of the Lord. You say, ‘Do not prophesy against Israel, and do not preach against the house of Isaac.” ¹⁷Therefore thus says the Lord: ‘Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city, and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be parceled out by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.’”

[Slide 2]

          Fannie Lou Hamer was born October 6, 1917, the last of twenty children.  Her parents, Ella and James Lee, were farmers in Mississippi.  They raised pigs, until all of the pigs were poisoned by a white supremacist.  Then they became sharecroppers.  Fannie Lou started working in the fields picking cotton when she was six years old.  She went to school from age six to twelve, but had to leave to support her parents.

          She continued to study at church, where she developed a deep love of the Bible and spirituals.  After her marriage, she and her husband worked on the Marlowe plantation, where Fannie Lou was the timekeeper, because she could read. 

          [Slide 3]  In 1961, Fannie Lou was admitted to the hospital for the removal of a uterine tumor.  While performing that operation, the white doctor also removed her uterus, without her consent.  The procedure, meant to control the population of people of color, was so common in her home state that it was called a “Mississippi Appendectomy.”

          That summer, Fannie Lou went to her first meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (or “SN(i)CC”).  There she realized that it was possible to demand rights for herself and other people like her, people without much power by conventional terms. 

          In 1962, she led a delegation of women to the county courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi, planning to register to vote.  She was denied, based on a literacy test that asked her to explain “de facto laws.”  When she returned to the Marlowe plantation, she was fired for trying to register.

          She kept at it, though, working from the margins to improve her own life and the life of thousands like her.  On her third attempt, she was able to register to vote.  In 1964, she founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party out of her frustration at the state Democratic party’s refusal to allow black participation.  [Slide 4] The Freedom party soon became a force in American politics.  In 1968, she turned to matters of economic justice, starting a “pig bank” which gave swine to black farmers, then the Freedom Farm Collective, which bought 640 acres of land for farming, a co-op store, a sewing collaborative, and 200 units of affordable housing.

         

          She was a poor black woman in the rural American south.  An outsider to the American political and economic systems.  Without access to any of the conventional means of power and privilege in this country.  And she accomplished more than our entire Congress has gotten done of late.

         

          Sometimes it takes an outsider.  You will find, I believe, as we consider our Hebrew scripture lessons more fully in the next couple of months, that the voices and experience of “outsiders” are prominent. 

          This morning we have heard two outsider stories, one about a Samaritan—the ultimate outsider in Jesus’ day—who steps in to help when the insiders—a priest and a Levite—cross to the other side of the road.

          Jesus holds up the Samaritan, the outsider, as an example of love for the neighbor.

          And then there’s Amos.  Amos, “a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees” from the southern kingdom of Judah, whom God called to prophesy in the northern kingdom of Israel. 

          How excited was the northern kingdom to receive this unusual prophet?

          Not so much.  The first thing that happens, according to Amos, is that he runs up against Amaziah.  Who is Amaziah? [Slide 6]  “the priest of Bethel”  Priest of Beth-El, the house of the Lord.

          Amaziah is an insider.  There are still some insider priests today.  (And some outsider ones.  I think our call is to be the latter, but whatever.)

          The first thing Azaziah the Insider does?  Writes to the king, Jeroboam II.

          “Dear King, [whiny voice] Amos is prophesying bad stuff.  He says God is mad at us and we’re going to be sent into exile.  Tell him to go back to Jerusalem, please.”

          You don’t win a lot of prizes for truth-telling.  People often don’t want to hear the truth.  Our planet is in rebellion, but most people still don’t want to hear about it.  Our country is keeping little kids in cages, but our officials would prefer to argue the semantics than the policy.  “Are they ‘concentration camps’ or is that an exaggeration?”

          That is why from the beginning of recorded history, and certainly from the beginning of Biblical history, the truth has so often been brought by outsiders.  Moses.  Abraham.  Joseph in Egypt.  Amos in the Northern Kingdom. 

          The Syrophoenician woman.

          People who stand on the margins with the lepers and the ones left to die by the fundamentalists who cross to the other side of the road—those are the ones God calls to speak truth. 

          Sometimes people start to listen and heed their truth.  Pharoah eventually heeded the cry of Moses and let the people go.  Yeah, he changed his mind quickly, but it was too late.

          A later Pharoah listened to Joseph the Israelite and stored up food for the coming famines.  Egypt became the most powerful nation in the world because of the Pharoah heard Joseph.

          Oftentimes, voices from the margins are not heard until late.  Sometimes too late.

          The Civil Rights leaders of the fifties and sixties are hailed as heroes today.  That was not the case in the day.  And we are still reckoning with our legacy of white supremacy.

          One of the things we are called to do as disciples is to make a way for voices from the margins.  To find ways to amplify the voices of the Fannie Lou Hamers of our time, the prophets among us.

          As children of liberation—which we are—we are also called to stand at the margins ourselves.  To speak from the marginalized places within us.

          And to listen from our privilege too.  It’s a balancing act, one which takes practice.  Repetition.  Humility.

         

          Fannie Lou Hamer died in 1977.  Her eulogy was delivered by Andrew Young, the US Ambassador to the United Nations.  She shares a stamp with civil rights leader Medger Evers.  She is a hero today, because she found her voice and stood on the margins to speak for truth and justice.

          Just as Moses found his voice, Joseph found his voice, Amos found his.

          And we will find ours.