For Zion's sake I will not keep
silent,
and for
Jerusalem's sake I will not rest,
until her vindication shines out
like the dawn,
and her salvation
like a burning torch.[ Isaiah 62.1]
There are eight
steps that lead up into this pulpit.
Every time I ascend these steps I remember that, on March 31, 1968,
Martin Luther King, Jr. preached his final sermon from this very place. Four
days after he preached here at Washington National Cathedral, Dr. King was
killed by an assassin wielding a gun.
The sermon Dr. King preached that morning
was a call to the faith community to wake up to the world around us. He titled the sermon, “Remaining Awake
Through a Great Revolution”, and he asked that all Christians join in the
ongoing struggles against racism, poverty, and especially violence. As he said, ”It is no longer a
choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence
or nonexistence.” He also said, “We must find an alternative to war and
bloodshed.” As a student of Gandhi and a follower of Jesus, Dr. King had made
nonviolence central to both his theology and his practice as a Civil Rights
leader. Four days before he died
by means of gunfire, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in this pulpit and asked
that we all reject violence.
I remember King’s
assassination very well. It
happened in Holy Week, and it’s one of the events that first compelled me, as a
college freshman, to go to church at Easter to try and make sense of it. I’ve always had an aversion to guns,
even though I have been pretty much sheltered from them and no real sense of
what it feels like to be faced with one.
As I was driving to a meeting last week, I heard NPR’s Terry Gross
interview the actor Dustin Hoffman, and I was surprised to learn that Hoffman
has refused for a very long time to carry a gun on screen. His refusal comes as a result of having
been threatened at gunpoint when he was a younger man. Here is part of what he said:
I don’t think people understand what it’s like to have a gun
pointed at you. I remember when it
happened to me . . . Every split second you’re feeling the bullet go right
through you.. . . I was aware of how easy that finger is to just touch this
thing called a trigger and it’s all over.
[Fresh Air January 17, 2013]
As
I listened to Hoffman talk about his experience at the wrong end of a gun, I
thought of this season of Epiphany and our gospel reading for today. The season of Epiphany celebrates the
manifestation of God’s glory in the world. Today’s Gospel is the story of
Jesus’s changing water into wine at a marriage feast in Cana of Galilee. There are many possible ways to
interpret this story, but to me it has always been about the way everyday stuff
can reveal the transcendent glory of the divine hidden within it. In the presence of Jesus, water becomes
wine. The ordinary becomes a
window in to the extraordinary. Here’s how John puts it at the end of the
passage: “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and
revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” [John 2.11]
The
point of our Gospel today is not that Jesus is a magician. The point is that the glory that Jesus
reveals in himself is God’s glory, and the big truth on offer here is that not
only Jesus but all God’s precious human creatures similarly reflect and reveal
that divine glory. Like water
being transformed into wine, we are all, all of us, windows into the glory of
God. That’s what we mean when we
say that human beings are created in God’s image. That’s what we mean when we say that the Word became flesh
and dwelt among us. What Jesus
reveals to us is that we are each particular incarnations, enfleshments of the
divine. And so one thing today’s
Gospel leads me to understand is the way in which every abuse or terrorization
or threat or assault on a human being is also an attack on God.
We Christians follow someone who incarnated
God perfectly on earth. We follow
that same one who died at human hands by means of violence. The first thing I get as a preacher
occupying Dr. King’s pulpit space on this Sunday is the link between Jesus and
Dr. King and Newtown and you and me.
Jesus was precious and he died because of violence. Dr. King was precious and he died
because of violence. The first
graders and their teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School were precious and
they died because of violence. The
urban kids who shoot each other on our streets are precious and they die by
means of violence every day. You and I are precious, too, and we have the
opportunity to resist violence, to stand with its victims and say “No more,”to
call others into work and action to stop it, and to help heal the wounds of a
nation that has already suffered too much because of it.
So
in the spirit of Dr. King, I want to say that opposing gun violence may have
political implications, but it is not primarily a political issue. It is a religious issue, a theological
issue. Human beings are precious,
unique, unrepeatable icons of God. We stand with God and for God’s values when
we stand with and for the human beings who bear God’s glory into the world. And
one of the ways we stand with and for them is to proclaim their dignity and
worth and oppose all forces that threaten or oppress them. And right now one of the chief
oppressive threats to human dignity in our world is the obscene proliferation
of guns in America. If we want to stand with Jesus and with Martin Luther King,
we’ve also got to stand with those who, like them, die by means of
violence. And that means we who
follow Jesus and stand with King have to stand against guns. That may sound
like a hard truth, but for a Christian, there’s no way around it.
Christianity is not primarily about thinking
good thoughts about God or admiring Jesus. It’s about loving God and following Jesus. And that means that as Christians we
have not only blessings but obligations.
If you don’t believe me, listen again to what Dr. King said right here:
Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls
in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and
the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers
with God. . . . Nothing will be
done until people of goodwill put their bodies and their souls in motion. And
it will be the kind of soul force brought into being as a result of this
confrontation that I believe will make the difference. [Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”, WNC 3/31/68]
We at Washington
National Cathedral have come to the end of the first part of our work, the
preaching part; and that’s the easy part.
Now we are entering the next phase of our work, the organizing part; and
that’s the harder part. Bishop
Budde and I and our staff colleagues have spent the last month getting
connected to other faith community and gun control leaders, many of whom have
been doing this work far longer than we have. We have learned a lot from them. We also have something to contribute.
I believe we at
the Cathedral need to get behind the President and Vice President’s
recommendations on gun control legislation, supporting a ban on assault weapons
and high-capacity magazines, supporting universal background checks, and
supporting stiffer criminal penalties for those engaged in gun trafficking. We
are joining with our interfaith partners to shape a strategy by which all of us
can bring pressure to bear on legislators around the country to support these
three common sense, consensual, middle of the road goals. As that strategy emerges, we will ask
that you join in that work of moving the legislation forward. As President Obama said last week,
This will not happen unless the
American people demand it. If parents and teachers, police officers and
pastors, if hunters and sportsmen, if responsible gun owners, if Americans of
every background stand up and say, enough; we’ve suffered too much pain and
care too much about our children to allow this to continue — then change will
come. That’s what it’s going to take. . . .The only way we can change is
if the American people demand it. [Presidential Press Conference on Gun Control
1/16/13]
As the National
Cathedral, we are a visible faith community in a symbolic building. We have a unique role in American
religious life. We represent what
is best in American civic life—we stand at the intersection of faithful and
civic values. It is vital that we
use our visibility and our symbolic role to keep the need for gun control
squarely in the public eye. As the
leader of this wonderful place, I commit myself to that work and ask you to
join me as the legislative process moves forward. We can make Washington National Cathedral a visible focus of
our shared commitment and so help end our national tragic scourge of gun
violence.
Tomorrow is Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is
also the day on which we inaugurate the president and vice president. The day after tomorrow the Cathedral
will host the 57th Inaugural Prayer Service. As President Obama begins his second
term, I can think of no better way for this Cathedral to support him in this
work than to reaffirm our commitment to Dr. King’s vision of an America
characterized by justice, equality, and peace.
For Zion's sake I will not keep
silent,
and for Jerusalem's sake I will not
rest,
until her vindication shines out
like the dawn,
and her salvation
like a burning torch.[ Isaiah 62.1]
Amen.
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