Second Sunday after Epiphany January 15, 2017
Is. 49:1-7; 1 Cor. 1:1-9 Rev. Rona Kinsley

A Task with Your Name on It

In both our scripture readings, the authors use the language of call to describe their relationship with God. Each has been called by God for some specific task or purpose. Isaiah dates his call to be a prophet to the very beginning of his life: The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. He made my mouth like a sharp sword . . . For Isaiah, it seems, there was never any question of his destiny— God formed [him] in the womb to be [God’s] servant.

Paul also considered himself to be called by God, even though his call came much later in life, and not until after he had opposed and persecuted the followers of the one he would later come to call “Lord.” Paul opens his letter to the Corinthians with the words, Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God. He goes on to tell the church in Corinth that they, too, are called— called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I remember, from this past summer’s small group meetings, that some of you were unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the language of call. You weren’t quite sure how to discern who God might be calling this congregation to become. We may think that the calling of prophets and disciples is a thing of the distant past, and not something we need to concern ourselves with
today. But, this morning, I’d like to share with you three stories in which someone of our time accepted the call to be a disciple— to love as Jesus loved, and even a prophet— to speak truth to power, as Jesus spoke. The first story comes from a wonderful book, Invisible Lines of Connection, written by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner.

A light snow was falling and the streets were crowded with people. It was Munich in Nazi Germany. One of my rabbinic students, Shifra Penzias, told me her great-aunt, Sussie, had been riding a city bus home from work when SS storm troopers suddenly stopped the coach and began examining the identification papers of the passengers. Most were annoyed but a few were terrified. Jews were being told to leave the bus and get into a truck around the corner.

My student’s great-aunt watched from her seat in the rear as the soldiers systematically worked their way down the aisle. She began to tremble, tears streaming down her face. When the man next to her noticed that she was crying, he politely asked her why. “I don’t have the papers you have. I am a Jew. They are going to take me.” The man exploded with disgust. He began to curse and scream at her. “You stupid bitch,” he roared. “I can’t stand being near you!” The SS men asked what all the yelling was about. “Damn her,” the man shouted angrily. “My wife has forgotten her papers again. I’m so fed up. She always. does this!” The soldiers laughed and moved on. My student said that her great-aunt never saw the man again. She never even knew his name.

The second story is a more familiar one. It concerns the man whose memory we will honor tomorrow— the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When King was just twenty-six years old, and just a year into his first pastorate at a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks was arrested by Montgomery police for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. This was the event through which King heard God’s call to be a prophet. Moving out of the safety of serving just his own congregation, he became the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, gaining national prominence almost overnight.

Over time, King became an increasingly effective prophet, able both to rally African Americans and move the conscience of White America. The nonviolent campaigns he led, resisting segregation and calling for full equality for all people of color, were instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, and 1968. In the sixties, King turned his attention to the
economic needs of the poor and to the war in Vietnam, because he believed that racism, poverty, and militarism were all interrelated.

King lived in constant danger— he was jailed nearly thirty times, he was harassed by death threats, his home was bombed, and he was almost fatally stabbed. In 1957, after receiving a latenight telephone threat, he wept and prayed alone in his kitchen. King related that he heard God speaking to him, saying, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice,” and
promising never to leave him on his own— “No, never alone.” King called this his “Mountaintop Experience,” his strong assurance that God was with him in the struggle for equal rights. He referred to this experience, in April of 1968, as he spoke to sanitation workers in Memphis, supporting them in their struggle for better wages. The next day he was shot and killed.

The third story is also about the struggle for racial justice, but the man involved is much less well known. Jonathan Myrick Daniels was born and grew up in Keene, NH. In March of 1965, when he was a twenty-six-year-old seminary student, at Episcopal Theological School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he saw Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, televised appeal for people to come to Selma, Alabama, to help all citizens secure the right to vote. Daniels felt called to go to Selma, a sense of call that deepened during Evening Prayer, one night, as he sang these words from the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise to God: He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things.

Daniels went to Selma and was jailed for joining a picket line. When he and his companions were unexpectedly released, four of them walked to a small store for a soda. Seventeen-year-old African American civil rights worker, Ruby Sales, had just reached to top step of the entrance when a man with a gun appeared, spewing curses at her. Daniels pulled her aside to shield her and was killed by a blast from the 12-gauge gun. (Ruby Sales went on to attend Episcopal Theological School, Daniel’s seminary, now Episcopal Divinity School. She worked as a human rights advocate, in Washington, D.C., and founded an inner-city mission dedicated to Daniels.) In one of his letters, Daniels had written, The faith with which I went to Selma has not changed,
it has grown. . . I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord’s death and resurrection . . . with them, the black men and white men, with all life, in him whose Name is above all the names that the races and nations shout . . . We are indelibly and unspeakably one.”

The man on the Munich bus, in Nazi Germany, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jonathan Myrick Daniels — all were confronted with a situation and a moment when justice required a decision. It required them to decide and to act, without thought for their own safety, because not to do so would make them complicit in maintaining and perpetuating injustice. I have heard that one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, favorite hymns was the one based on a poem, by James Russell Lowell, that begins: Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, in the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

We don’t know about the man on the bus, but we do know that both King and Daniels were men of deep faith. Through their relationship with God and their reading of scripture, they had come to believe deeply that God’s calls us to work for justice for all God’s people. And central to believing and living into that call is the realization, in Daniels’ words, that We are indelibly and
unspeakably one. The creation stories in Genesis tell us that the diversity of creation is intentional. God didn’t make one kind of plant but many, one kind of animal but many, one kind of human but many. And yet, these many retain an essential unity as part of all that God created and pronounced good.

When we recognize this essential unity, we also realize our complete interdependence— whatever is done to one part of creation is done to the whole. Lawrence Kushner puts it this way: If everything is connected to everything else, then everyone is ultimately responsible for everything. We can blame nothing on anyone else. The more we comprehend our mutual interdependence, the more we fathom the implications of our most trivial acts. We find ourselves within a luminous organism of sacred responsibility.

Within this “luminous organism of sacred responsibility,” we are called to care for others, even those who are different from us, or those we find hard to care for, or, hardest of all, those we consider our enemies. We are called to love as God loves, without discrimination or exception, and to work for justice because, as African American theologian, Cornell West, has stated, “Justice is love made visible.”

The witness of Christ and of the prophets makes it clear that it is God’s will that we live in just relationships with one another, whether or not it is in our self-interest to do so. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jonathan Myrick Daniels, and the man on the Munich bus all knew this, and when “the moment to decide” came to each of them, they recognized and responded to the call. Kushner writes, You are going about your business when you stumble onto something that has your name on it. Or, to be more accurate, a task with your name on it finds you. Its execution requires inconvenience, self-sacrifice, even risk. You step forward and encounter your destiny. This doesn’t mean that you must do everything that lands on your doorstep, or that you should assume every risk or make every self-sacrifice. But is does mean that you must tell yourself the truth about where you have been placed, and why.

When the task with their name on it found the prophet Isaiah and the apostle Paul, they stepped forward and encountered their destiny. What is the truth about where we have been placed, and why? What is going on in our community, our nation, our world, that is contrary to God’s desire for compassion, for justice, for peace— that denies the truth that we are indelibly and unspeakably one— and how are we called to respond? What task has our name on it?

Amen.