First Presbyterian Church
Useful Holy Sanctuaries
Listen and Prepare
Sermon for January 18, 2009
by Pastor
Susan Barnes
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Our psalm reading is on page 577. Psalm 139 is typical Hebrew poetry. It takes one thought and repeats it over and over for emphasis, saying the same thing again and again in different ways. The psalmist says that God knows us from stem to stern, head to toe, forwards and backwards. Listen for the word of God as it is found in Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18. (NRSV)
This ends our reading from the psalms. Psalm 139's verse 14, which is also on the cover of the bulletin. “I am fearfully made” – Does that mean that God, was full of fear when God made us? That word ‘fearfully' is better translated ‘reverently.' “I am reverently and wonderfully made.” We have been made so as to inspire reverence in others. Genesis tells us that we are made in the image of God. That's a great responsibility. It's a little overwhelming. We inspire reverence. And it's ever more overwhelming to realize that all people are made in the image of God, that all inspire reverence. Shouldn't that mean we'd treat each other as carefully as we'd treat God? Paul is trying to inspire the Corinthians to treat each other better. He has already lectured them on taking one another to civil courts, instead of settling their disputes among themselves. He has written them about the man living with his stepmother. In our reading today, he speaks of ‘porneia.' Our pew Bibles translate ‘porneia' as ‘fornication' but we don't really have a good word for it, so I'm using the word ‘harlotry.' 1‘Porneia' is Paul's catchall word for any sort of sexual wrongdoing- adultery, incest, intercourse with a temple prostitute, rape, sexual harassment or abuse. Apparently some of the Corinthian Christians had believed the “popular view that sexual activity is only the innocent satisfying of a natural appetite.” 2 Paul let them know that wasn't true. We'll be reading from my translation. Listen for the word of God as it is found in 1 Corinthians 6:12-20.
This ends our reading of God's word. Let's listen to the choir interpret this text. When Paul says “you were bought with a price” he wasn't talking about atonement theology. He was using a business term; at the slave market, slaves were regularly traded so they ended up with different lords or masters. The Corinthians belong to a new Lord: Jesus Christ. 3 The old ways of worshiping in the Roman temple, of eating food dedicated to a Roman God, of meeting with temple prostitutes, bring sacrifices to that god's temple, did not fit in their new life in Christ. Belonging to a new Lord means you do what that Lord tells you to do. Paul told them to glorify God with their bodies; he wasn't speaking just of not being sexually immoral; he was saying everything we do matters. The holy spirit is in us, and so we need to treat ourselves with care. Knowing that we are reverently made makes a difference. The psalm speaks of how God knows us, no matter where we are. Even when we're in a plane in the air, soon to be in the river. Many of the passengers of US Airways Flight 1549 were praying as the plane went down, ‘Lord, forgive me for my sins.' But a man named Josh wasn't praying; he was sitting in the exit row and so “he pulled out the safety card and read the instructions on how to open the exit door.” That was a higher priority than prayer at that moment. By now, we've seen the pictures of the US Airways plane in the Hudson River, surrounded by ferries and rescue boats. Water started coming into the plane, and passengers had to leave fast. A man in another exit row, Don Norton, opened the emergency exit, trying to figure out what to do with the hatch, finally tossing it into the river. “He was the first to step onto the slippery wing. About 20 or 30 people had joined him when he realized that in his rush to remove the door, he had forgotten to grab a seat cushion — how many hundreds of times had he heard that announcement? (Your seat cushion may be used as a flotation device.) At that moment, ‘the woman next to me handed me my seat cushion,”' he recalled. ‘She had hers and handed me mine. We bonded.' He needed it, too, because the New York Waterway ferry stopped about three feet from the wing's edge, so he had to jump in and swim. The cushion kept his head dry. Passenger Dave Sanderson saw a woman pulling her luggage out of the overhead bin. “I just started screaming, ‘Get out, get out!' She said, ‘I need my stuff.' “Then he said, ‘Another gentleman who did a great job — he's a hero — actually picked her up and threw her on the lifeboat.'” 4 Even people who do unbelievably selfish things on a waterlogged sinking plane are reverently made, and can be helped. A ferry captain said “as our ferry turned around, we noticed the plane in the water. We thought it was an odd-looking vessel.” Another captain said “I pulled out of Pier 79, I looked for any kind of southbound traffic, and I saw the plane there. It was hard to stay next to it, but you practice that by throwing life rings in the water and trying to stay alongside them. One of the people got on board, turned around and hugged my deckhand. We're just working as if we're training and drilling.” 5 It takes a lot of work and practice to be ready for such an emergency. But all that preparedness paid off. This week I have been thinking of the civil rights movement as our nation prepares to inaugurate our first African-American president. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day. Martin Luther King did not start the civil rights movement. He wasn't the only one killed as he worked for civil rights. But he became a powerful symbol for the movement. I wanted to tell you about some other people involved. Historian Lisa Cozzens was a teenager when she wrote this summary of the beginning of the civil rights movement. She wrote “The Montgomery Bus Boycott officially started on December 1, 1955. That was the day when the blacks of Montgomery, Alabama, decided that they would boycott the city buses until they could sit anywhere they wanted, instead of being relegated to the back when a white boarded. It was not, however, the day that the movement to desegregate the buses started. Perhaps the movement started on the day in 1943 when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks paid her bus fare and then watched the bus drive off as she tried to re-enter through the rear door, as the driver had told her to do. Perhaps the movement started on the day in 1949 when a black professor Jo Ann Robinson absentmindedly sat at the front of a nearly empty bus, then ran off in tears when the bus driver screamed at her for doing so. Perhaps the movement started on the day in the early 1950s when a black pastor named Vernon Johns tried to get other blacks to leave a bus in protest after he was forced to give up his seat to a white man, only to have them tell him, ‘You ought to knowed better.' The story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is often told as a simple, happy tale of the ‘little people' triumphing over the seemingly insurmountable forces of evil. The truth is a little less romantic and a little more complex.” 6 Martin Luther King Jr. was the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and he hosted the first meeting to plan a bus boycott. There had been other boycotts in other cities, for a day or a week. This one would last 381 days, Dec. 20, 1956. It was the first big victory in the Civil Rights movement. It was dangerous work. Medgar Evers was a native of Mississippi. He was a World War II veteran. He tried to register to vote after the war, and was greeted by a mob of gun-wielding whites. He was denied admission to the University of Mississippi law school and went to work for the NAACP. His wife Myrlie said that by 1963, “'Medgar was a target because he was the leader. The whole mood of white Mississippi was that if Medgar Evers were eliminated, the problem would be solved. . . . And we came to realize, in those last few days, last few months, that our time was short; it was simply in the air. You knew that something was going to happen, and the logical person for it to happen to was Medgar.' He told the crowd at an NAACP rally, ‘Freedom has never been free . . . I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die, and die gladly, if that would make a better life for them.' Five days later, he was shot and killed as he returned home around midnight.” 7 That was the beginning of Freedom Summer, to expand black voter registration in Mississippi. More people were killed, black and white. Bruce Klunder, a 1954 Baker high School graduate was part of Freedom Summer. He protested unfair housing practices, among many other things. He was murdered at a building site by a bulldozer operator. Mike and lived next door to Bruce's stepmother Marie on 9 th Drive, and we were able to meet Bruce's widow when she came to visit. For a long time, Bruce's name was one of the few white names on the Civil Rights Hall of Fame. The danger didn't stop the college students who came to participate. It didn't stop the adults who kept organizing and planning, knowing that it was risky. When Mike and I attended General Assembly two years ago, Mike visited the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham Alabama. He said this “when you enter the museum, you sit down and watch a brief film, and then the screen is lifted and you're presented an iconic sight: two drinking fountains, one marked ‘white' and one marked ‘colored.' Even for those of us born after Brown vs. the Board of Education was decided and were children when D. King was assassinated, we were thrust right back to the struggle. It's a struggle that continues, even after President Obama's inauguration Tuesday. But it's a struggle made less difficult because it's one we share – with each other, and with the one who created us all.” We are in God's image, sanctuaries for the Holy Spirit. We are reverently made. Let's take care of the Spirit inside. Amen. Our closing hymn is "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" often called "The Black National Anthem. " It was written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson in 1899. It was first performed in public in the Johnsons' hometown of Jacksonville, Florida as part of a celebration of Lincoln's Birthday on February 12, 1900 by a choir of 500 schoolchildren at the segregated Stanton School, where James Weldon Johnson was principal. 1 as suggested by Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex. |
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