Lectionary readings
Those of you who have heard some of my sermons or might have read some of my other lectures and publications may recognize that I’m a bit obsessed with the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. We are in a period where we’ll be hearing a lot about this era in American history, as we enter a stretch of 50th anniversary milestones: last August, we commemorated the March on Washington. Just a few weeks ago, NPR reported on the 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Some of you know that I’m particularly taken by stories about Freedom Summer, that great campaign in the summer of 1964 in which a thousand young volunteers, mostly white college students, descended on Mississippi to organize the black community, register them to vote, teach African American history to its children, and build leadership in the poorest, most vulnerable neighborhoods. It’s easy, as I’m wont to do, to romanticize this period as the story of nobly minded, idealistic people living out the best of the human spirit amidst adversity, saints in our midst.
But I want to share with you a story that I just recently heard, about one of the volunteers of Freedom Summer. Gwendolyn Zohara Simmons was a student at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, when plans for Freedom Summer were underway. Before she left home for college in 1962, her grandmother made her promise that she would never get involved in the movement. Two years later, word got back to Simmons’ family that she was preparing to travel to Mississippi with the Freedom Summer volunteers, and at 6 am one morning, her grandmother, mother and stepfather knocked on her dorm room to take her back to Memphis. In Memphis, Simmons was able to get a money order from Freedom Summer organizers to get back to Atlanta before the entourage traveled to Mississippi. In a last ditch effort to convince her to stay, her grandmother said to Simmons, “If you leave, don’t ever come back.” We don’t usually hear these kinds of stories about the movement, do we? Simmons recounts that she cried the entire bus ride to Atlanta. For her grandmother, Simmons’ going to Mississippi meant that her granddaughter would return in a coffin; going to Mississippi was a death sentence. Simmons went to Mississippi for the summer, to set up Freedom Schools and libraries. She stayed for seven years in the deep South. She’s still at it! She’s still on this great adventure. Simmons is now a professor of religion at the University of Florida, and a member of the National Council of Elders, a group of activist veterans who work with young activists today to keep alive the legacy of non-violent work for justice, peace, and reconciliation.
Somehow, this 20-year old woman found the capacity, the audacity, to take this journey to Mississippi, to respond to the call to action, even as her face surely was breaking as the bus pulled away from the station and the face of her grandmother surely also breaking grew more distant. I wonder where this courage comes from. I yearn to have this kind of experience, the experience of being so compelled by something that to respond to such a call is irresistible, even if or especially when that call is fraught with risk and uncertainty and danger. I wonder if you have wondered and yearned for this too. Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian minister and author, calls this irresistible call, vocation. Here’s how he explains it: “Vocation comes from the Latin Vocare, to call, and means the work one is called to by God. In life there are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work and the problem in life is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society or the super ego or self-interest.
“By and large” Buechner continues, “a good rule for finding out your calling is this: the kind of work that God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do, and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you presumably have met requirement (a). But if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony you have probably met requirement (b). But if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by being a doctor in a leper colony the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably are not helping your patients much either. Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
This then is what makes Epiphany, the manifestation of God in the activity of our everyday human affairs, all the more radical, because it teaches us that God engages with God’s creation, us, not only through the visitation of angels, or from the eruption of a star announcing a birth, or in the excitement of a trip to Jerusalem, but in the very simple invitation that we hear in this morning’s Gospel lesson: “Follow me.” In those two words resides a different world than the one that Peter and Andrew, James and John, inhabited before. The four fishermen may very well have heard about the danger that was inherent in Jesus’ invitation: after all, it is after John is arrested for his insurrectionist activities that Jesus begins his ministry of preaching and healing, of proclaiming the coming of God’s reign over the reign of Herod and Rome. Before Jesus’ invitation, the four men did what they knew, perhaps enjoyed their livelihood, and most likely helped themselves, their families, and their friends. And it is very likely that as they abandoned their nets, a family member, a father, a wife, a cousin, stood there with faces breaking saying to them, “If you leave, don’t come back.” But it was when the invitation was made—Follow me—that the four realized what their deep gladness might mean for the world’s deep hunger. They recognized in Jesus the walking epiphany of God, and were invited to become themselves epiphanies to others, to shine into the broken, hungry world of 1st century Palestine that a different way of being was possible. They must have known, as did Zohara Simmons in 1964, the cost of their discipleship, of family members faces and hearts breaking. But they also knew in their bones that in responding to Jesus’ call, they were engaging, accessing, finally, perhaps for the first time in their lives, their deepest gladness as it rose up to meet the world’s terribly deep need.
You and I are called to do likewise in our baptismal covenant, when we promise to strive for justice and peace amongst all people, to respect the dignity of every human being, and indeed of all of God’s creation. This doesn’t have to be dramatic like it was for Zohara Simmons or Peter, Andrew, James, and John. Jesus’ invitation to follow him, to be walking epiphanies so that you can discover your true gladness as you confront what the world needs, is a daily, constant invitation and opportunity. When you engage family and friends, when you walk out your door and confront strangers and coworkers, when you read the newspaper, when you cast your vote, or help someone in need, every moment is an invitation to reveal what Desmond Tutu calls the “divine goodness” in each person you encounter. And when the divine goodness in you and me meets and enables others to see the divine goodness in themselves, then sisters and brothers we will bring ever closer God’s reign, God’s dream, on earth, our hearts rising up to meet and heal the broken heart of the world.
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