What If We Had Not Believed That We Should See the Goodness of the Lord?
Sunday, March 4, 2007
by the Rev'd Theophus 'Thee' Smith
Mikell Chapel
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Psalm 27
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 13:31-35
In the name of God: our Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, and Friend. Amen.
"Go and tell that fox for me, 'Listen . . . on the third day I finish my work . . . I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.'”
—Luke 13.32-33
Well, I haven’t seen the movie yet. I’ve only heard the story. It’s the story of a social prophet who died a hero in his bed. It’s the story of William Wilberforce.
Wilberforce died peacefully in his deathbed in 1833. And he died just 3 days after learning that his life’s work was a success. He died victorious, knowing that he was the major actor in abolishing slavery in the British Empire. Almost 30 years before he had already achieved the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade in Great Britain. That was in March of 1807, which is why Wilberforce is being remembered especially this month of March, 2007—exactly 200 years later.
And that’s the story told in the film I haven’t seen yet. It’s the film now showing in Atlanta at the Tara theater on Cheshire Bridge Road. It’s the film called, “Amazing Grace.”
So maybe you haven’t seen the movie either. Maybe you haven’t even heard the story. Maybe you’ve only heard this little bit of the story that I just told you. But in any case you already know enough to know it’s NOT the same plot as the story of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. At least it’s NOT the kind of story that the church tells during this season of Lent.
Because today we learn of Jesus’ fateful decision to take his message from the countryside in the outlands of ancient Israel, to the very heart of things in the capital city of ancient Israel. “I must be on my way,” he declares when they tell him that Herod is plotting to take his life. “I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem . . .”
So “go and tell that fox for me, 'Listen . . .
I must be on my way . . .'” (Luke 13.32-33)
Now that’s the story we find ourselves beginning in today’s gospel. It’s the story of a prophet fully aware that he will most likely die violently—not peacefully in his bed like William Wilberforce. Jesus will die violently because in his time it is lethal to go up to Jerusalem and ‘speak truth to power.’
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‘Speaking truth to power:’ Let’s pause here with that description of what a prophet does. In recent months I can never hear that phrase without also hearing the comic version of that phrase: ‘speaking truthiness to power.’ It started back in 2004 when one of our most celebrated comedians, Stephen Colbert, laid the basis for a comic twist to the phrase.
First Colbert coined the word, “truthiness.” Indeed, “truthiness” was voted as the 2005 “word of the year” by a panel of American linguists. And this is how they defined truthiness: “the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.” [http://politicalhumor.about.com/b/a/235159.htm]
But then Colbert popularized this kind of truth-speaking by ‘talking back’ to certain authorities—authorities like the Associated Press and Fox News. He even roasted President Bush about the war in Iraq and the hurricane Katrina catastrophe on the Gulf Coast at the notorious 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner.
This is how Colbert ‘spoke truthiness to power’ when he first introduced the word on his Comedy Central show back in 2005:
Well, anybody who knows me knows that I am no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, what did or didn't happen.
Who's [Encyclopedia] Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I want to say it happened in 1941, that's my right.
I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart. And that's exactly what's pulling our country apart today. Because face it, folks, we are a divided nation. Not between Democrats or Republicans, or conservatives and liberals . . . No, we are divided by those who think with their head, and those who know with their [gut].
. . . Because that's where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen...the gut.
Did you know that you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your head? Look it up. Now, somebody's gonna say "I did look that up and its wrong." Well, Mister, that's because you looked it up in a book. Next time, try looking it up in your gut. I did. And my gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.
Now I know some of you may not trust your gut . . . yet. But with my help you will. The "truthiness" is, anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news...at you. [http://politicalhumor.about.com/b/a/235159.htm]
Well, so much for Colbert on the meaning of ‘truthiness.’ But can’t you just feel the meaning of the word in the very sound in makes in your mouth? Go ahead; try mouthing it silently with your tongue between your teeth just now. “Tru-thi-ness.” Isn’t there something ‘toothsome’ about the word itself; as if you’re eating a tasty snack whether or not it’s good for you or has real nutrients in it?
Well, that’s the difference between ‘speaking truthiness to power’ and ‘speaking truth to power.’ When you speak truth to ‘the powers that be,’ it may not leave you with that feel-good sensation in your mouth—or in your gut. Instead it can put you at risk for having a more challenging, perhaps endangered kind of life. Of course, that’s what happens to Jesus in the rest of the story following today’s gospel. And it would happen to Stephen Colbert too, says one blog website, no matter how clever a comedian he is. It would happen inevitably, these bloggers say, if Colbert risked speaking his ‘truths’ to the-powers-that-be in places unlike the U.S.—in Iran for example, or in North Korea or Saudi Arabia, by extension.
[http://wuzzadem.typepad.com/wuz/2006/05/now_that_would_.html]
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But somehow ‘speaking truth to power’ did not result in personal violence or premature death for William Wilberforce in 19th century England. Rather the miracle of social transformation happened, as remarkable as the biblical story of Ninevah repenting before God in the Book of Jonah. That’s what author Eric Metaxas chronicles in his recent book of the same name as the film, “Amazing Grace.”
Actually, the full title of Metaxas’ book is “Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery.” But this focus on one great man as the agent of change—a much criticized focus in contemporary scholarship by the way—this focus raises another similarity between Wilberforce and the prophet Jonah. Like Jonah surveying the repentant city from the heights of his success the prophet himself is all but forgotten. Similarly Wilberforce’s campaign to end slavery was so successful that he himself is virtually unknown as its primary visionary and ‘visioneer.’ How, Metaxas asks, did Wilberforce’s vision emerge, succeed, and eventually eclipse the man himself?
How did just one small group of people led by Wilberforce suddenly see this injustice for what it was?
. . . To fathom the magnitude of what Wilberforce did we have to see that the "disease" he vanquished forever was actually neither the slave trade nor slavery. Slavery still exists around the world today, in such measure as we can hardly fathom. What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world . . .
. . . Somehow Wilberforce saw God's reality — what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven . . . He saw things that existed in God's reality but that, in human reality, were nowhere in evidence. He saw the idea that all men and women are created equal by God, in [God’s] image, and are therefore sacred . . .
These ideas were at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and they had been around for at least eighteen centuries by the time Wilberforce encountered them. Monks and missionaries knew of these ideas and lived them out in their limited spheres. But no entire society had ever taken these ideas to heart as a society in the way that Britain would. That was what Wilberforce changed forever . . .
Once this idea was loosed upon the world, the world changed. Slavery and the slave trade would soon be largely abolished, but many lesser social evils would be abolished too. For the first time in history, groups sprang up for every possible social cause. Wilberforce's first "great object" was the abolition of the slave trade, but his second "great object," one might say, was the abolition of every lesser social ill . . .
. . . The world he was born into in 1759 and the world he departed in 1833 were as different as lead and gold. Wilberforce presided over a social earthquake that rearranged the continents and whose magnitude we are only now beginning to fully appreciate.
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7551106
Excerpt: 'Amazing Grace' NPR.org, February 21, 2007. Eric Metaxas most recent book is “Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery;” author of many children's books; humor pieces have appeared in Harper's magazine, and The New York Times.]
So, having forgotten that former world we have also forgotten the man who presided over its demise, Metaxas argues. But our scriptures appointed for today confront us with a more compelling question—more compelling than, ‘How did they do it?’ The compelling theological question that presses upon us today is the ‘What if?’ question. ‘What if,’ to paraphrase Psalm 27 appointed for this second Sunday of Lent, ‘What if they had not believed that they should see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living?’ (Ps. 27.17)
That is the question, Christian friends—the question for Jesus and his disciples as he turned his face to go up to Jerusalem and face King Herod. And it was the question for William Wilberforce and his band of abolitionists in 19th century England. Moreover, it was the question for all those Africans—and other ethnic groups—caught in the slave trade in the British empire. And let us not forget the many more who endured slavery in the Americas, who had decades more to endure before our own Civil War brought emancipation to this hemisphere.
What if all those uncounted and unremembered souls ‘had not believed that they should see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living?’ (Ps. 27.17) But the final version of this question is addressed to us here today. Yes: ‘What if we do not believe that we shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living?’ (Ps. 27.17)
It’s the question that confronted Abraham in the reading from Genesis this morning. Because Abraham first doubted that he would one day have a blood heir. But then he ‘believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness.’ (Gen. 15.6) And more recently it’s the question that confronted a family friend of mine who doubted the success of a recent program that she was sponsoring at Emory. Yet once again the prayers of our family and the prayers of her other supporters prevailed and she had a ‘smashing good’ program this past week.
But what if she could give up doubting ‘the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living,’ and live life instead like an imitator of father Abraham in today’s Old Testament—Abraham who, again, ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.’ (Gen. 15.6) As St. Paul also says in today’s epistle to the Philippians, “Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us.” (3:17)
So instead of unbelief let us go forward in this season of Lent the way Jesus goes forward with his face set toward Jerusalem: ‘believing that we shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.’
In the name of God: our Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, and Friend. Amen.
Comments? Contact The Rev. Thee Smith at: TSmith@stphilipscathedral.org