Lent is the Mountaintop

A Homily for 4^th Lenten Service          Outer Banks Presbyterian Church, Kill Devil Hills, NC   April 2, 2014                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Episcopal Minister

Exodus 3:7-12             Luke 6:27-36               Psalm 98:1-4

The lessons we use for this day are actually for use for April 4^th, the Feast of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Today, as part of the Community Lenten Ecumenical Preaching Series, I would like to take us back in time to the first week of April 1968, 46 years ago. Do you remember where you were that week? I ask that confident that many of us have white hairs and may be old enough to remember 46 years ago.  I was 21 and a senior in college at Chapel Hill and working part time at a restaurant, with two months to go before I graduated. I was thinking about what I was going to do then. We were in Lent as Easter was two weeks away, but at that time I had stopped seeing Lent as something important. When I grew up in the church, Lent was the time we gave up something like chocolate. We gave up something, so the teaching went, to sacrifice like Jesus sacrificed. In the church I grew up in, I don’t remember too much talk about Jesus and how our lives needed to change because, as far as that church, was concerned God blessed us and asked us to be nice, sexually pure, work hard, stand up against communism, and obey our leaders so that we could get into heaven after we died. In return God would graciously stay away from interfering in our business as usual. The church saw itself as chapels of ease for the blessed to get away from the world and promised to have nothing to do with politics and economics.

Two months before, far away in Memphis, Tennessee on 1 February 1968, two Memphis garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck. The sanitation workers were frustrated by what they considered the last straw in a pattern of abuse of African-American workers when the city refused to make changes for safety.  Feeling their concerns for respect and safety were not being addressed, on the 13^th of February they went out on strike as their early Valentine’s Day present to the city. The city council voted to accept the union but the mayor vetoed the move on the 22^nd of February. The police used tear gas and clubs to clear the demonstrators. Eventually on March 18^th, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis to encourage solidarity.  He said, “You are demonstrating that we can stick together. You are demonstrating that we are all tied in a single garment of destiny, and that if one black person suffers, if one black person is down, we are all down.” Many white workers and students joined the movement. After some demonstrators were killed by the police and churches stormed and gassed, the Mayor declared martial law and brought in the National Guard. King went back in on April 3 and addressed a rally and delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address. King's flight to Memphis had been delayed by a bomb threat against his plane. In the close of the last speech of his career, in reference to the bomb threat, King said the following:

And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

King was bright, and he knew all about Philosophy and Theology because he had a good mind; but he spent his time living into the spirit of the Gospel. He suggested that maybe the Bible is really concerned about the exploitation of people. Maybe God is more torqued off about the exploitation of people than God is worried about the correct interpretation of the Westminster Confession versus the Episcopal Articles of Religion. King suggested that how we treat people is a matter of our immortal soul, where the arc of the universe bends toward justice, rather than just being “nice”. King suggested that, as Christ had given up violence, maybe we ought to do the same and pray for our enemies - and maybe not just for Lent but for our whole lives.

In the reading from the Gospel for today, Jesus tells us how to act when we are under oppression. People who oppress are usually projecting their own inner fear onto other people; they are afraid that they will lose something, maybe their own respect for themselves, if the other is treated with honor or respect. If someone hits me on the cheek, the world says I have two choices, fight or flight, because I am trapped in a win-lose situation. If the person doing the striking is more powerful than me and has stacked the law in his favor, then if I strike back and win I will be charged with breaking the law and I ultimately lose. If I fight and lose, I will hate the winner, and if I just take it, I will feel contempt for myself. Jesus, and King, offered a third option - to confront the oppressor with the sin of his oppression and the underlying projection, and to return love when he tries to enforce his law instead of God’s law. I stand before this person and, in love, am willing to take the next blow, acting as a mirror of his action to show him he is not in charge because I am offering myself my body as a sacrifice for his sin. I prove that I am not his projection. He does not need to fear me, but he needs to face his own deeper fear. If I get enough people behind me, then the system crashes under its own weight, as the violence expended to keep the man-made laws becomes more apparent for the desperation and fear that drives it. The point is to bring my enemy to repentance by my sacrifice; I, in love, will pay the price for his fear. The point is not to win or lose but to reconcile as brothers and sisters, children of the one God. The point of Lent is to ask ourselves to give up the dead-end cycle of winning and losing and to find and claim the third option of being a living sacrifice.

For Jesus and King, heaven is not what happens after we shuffle off this mortal coil, but the Kingdom of the Heavens is right here and now as we pray and work for God’s will, reconciliation and justice to be done on earth as it is in heaven. God’s heaven on earth, the Promised Land, is not a place of rest for people on earth; it is a place of faithful struggle where you and I, broken as we are, both sinner and saint in the same body, work to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.

Two days from now we will remember when King was shot and killed in Memphis as he stood up against government and religious authorities devoted to keeping the status quo of exploitation. Sixteen days from now we will remember Good Friday when Jesus was killed as he stood up against the government and religious authorities devoted to keeping the status quo of exploitation. We have choices on how to view these days.  We can either see them as tragedies and triumphs of evil, or we can see them as models of willing sacrifices in order to bring about reconciliation.

Lent is not a valley; it is a mountaintop from which we can see the Promised Land. It is the place we learn not to fear. It is the time in which our eyes can see the glory of the coming of the Lord.