[A sermon preached to Hinckley Unitarians on Sunday 17th of July 2022]
(Readings: Luke 12:49-56 and An Extract from When Peace Becomes Obnoxious by The Rev’d Martin Luther King, Jr. (1956))
A few services ago, I mentioned how Jesus has often been portrayed as a hippy-like character. Well, viewed in isolation, our reading from the Gospel of Luke today certainly seems to shatter that caricature! Few hippies would wish to sow division on Earth as opposed to peace!
This process can sometimes be a good thing. It can be all to easy to say that “Jesus was a this,” or “Jesus was a that,” or “Jesus certainly supported this ideological position.” Jesus was an individual who existed in the gospel narratives in a particular time and place with its own specific context. The labels that we apply to people and ideological positions today are unlikely to map on perfectly to a figure in the Classical Near East.
Yet, looking over the whole of Luke’s gospel, today’s passage does seem to genuinely be out of place. For example, the whole narrative of Jesus’s birth in the Gospel of Luke seems eager to cast Jesus as the one who brings peace, including Zechariah’s Prophecy in the first chapter when it is confidently stated that Jesus will help “to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:79).
If today’s passage seems to be so at odds with the general gist of Luke’s Gospel then maybe it is better to just to cut it or skip over it as an odd little discrepancy in the text. Surely, there is no positive message to gain from this passage that casts Jesus as a figure of division who detests peace?
Well, you would certainly have my sympathies for thinking this, but The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. might well have taken issue with you!
For our second reading today, I provided you with an extract from one of Martin Luther King’s sermons and, on a surface level, it can appear distressing in the same way that our passage from Luke’s Gospel can. It is hard to read the words of someone who famously won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality though nonviolent resistance state repeatedly “I don’t want peace.”
If you did pick up a similarity between the two readings today, well done, that was intentional on my part. In fact in his sermon, that is very much worth reading in full by the way, Martin Luther King is actually preaching in reference to very similar Gospel passage “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34-36).
To preach on this passage The Reverend King begins with a recent story of a Black woman being allowed to study at a University – the first Black person to be admitted as a student to this university after a legal challenge. When racist students caused disruption on the University campus to protest her presence, the University took the easy rout out: They gave into the racists and removed the innocent Black woman. This stopped the protests and brought peace back to the campus.
Yet it is this “peace” that The Reverend King finds so disturbing. It is not a peace that fixes social ills but rather a peace that attempts to sweep them under the carpet to fester further. It is not a peace that is built on justice but rather a peace built on the injustice of blaming the victim while granting power to the oppressors.
King also recalls a conversation with a man who talked about the decline in racial relations as a result of the “bus situation”. This likely refers to the Montgomery Bus Boycott that King was leading, the one started by after Rosa Parks famously refusing to give up her seat on the bus for a white man and move to the back of the bus just because of the colour of her skin. The local black community responded by refusing to use the busses, putting the city’s budget in jeopardy as it wasn’t being bolstered by the usual amount of bus fares. White racist groups reacted against this with violence, including by firebombing King’s house.
This voice of the man King talked to is a voice we have heard many times before and since. It is the voice that observes homophobic attacks and says, “well, if only LGBT people weren’t so ‘in your face’ about it this wouldn’t happen to them so much.” It is the voice that would have observed the force-feeding of the suffragettes and said, “if only they went back to their husbands and did the housework instead of harping on about this ‘votes for women’ stuff then they wouldn’t be in prison would they?” It is the same voice that, saw the horrors of the Peterloo Massacre and exclaimed, “if only these working-class northerners had been more concerned with finding work than gaining the right to vote then they wouldn’t have all been charged at by the cavalry, would they?”
It is a voice that has sounded against a multitude of peoples across a multitude of times and places. “Stay in your box,” “don’t rock the boat if you know what is good for you,” “stop making people with more power than yourself feel uncomfortable.”
We have all heard, followed, and even parroted this voice at times.
I was speaking to someone, I think it was Mike, who had been looking though our historic committee meeting minuet books. Now, we at this chapel, quite rightly, pride ourselves on being the first chapel (indeed currently the only chapel) in Hinckley to be registered to marry same-sex couples. Well, the minuet books tell the story of how this came to pass and it was not an easy road. Indeed, I am told that, when it was eventually decided that this connection would bless same-sex couples a few long-term members left never to come back. This separation must have been a painful time for many people in our community.
How easy would it have been to have continued to listen to that voice of reaction and live in denial of changing times in order too keep a false peace within this community, to have avoided those award and difficult conversations, to have not caused a fuss, not have not spoken out?
But such a false peace and false sense of unity would only have been able to be retained by continuing to sacrifice the rights and interests of an oppressed minority. This would have been a false peace based on oppression and injustice – a situation that too many of my fellow LGBT clerical friends are still having to put up with in their congregations!
The fact of the matter is that achieving justice involves change and change can be very scary for some, and that fear will cause division.
A sustainable, true peace is only available to all if it is based on justice and righteousness – a big word there but one that simply means being in right relationship – one cannot experience peace with one’s neighbour if one continues to exploit the other.
We cannot settle for a peace “that stinks in the nostrils of the almighty God.” Instead we need a peace that smells of roses and that can only be achieved though the fight for justice and righteousness for all.
Amen.
