St. Philips Day Celebration
Isaiah 30: 18-21
May 3, 1992
I trust I speak for many of you this evening when I say I am deeply troubled. The happenings this past week in Los Angeles and in our nation as a whole have reverberated in my soul. Where to go with this, what to say is at best difficult and at worst can lead us into superficial cliches.
As I’ve watched the events transpire on TV, I’ve become concerned about justice in this country of ours as I know you have, and I’ve become concerned about frustrations, the feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and of powerlessness of so many of our people. And, I become concerned about fear, the underlying terror that eats away at this nation’s fabric.
I feel like the black preacher in Allan Paton’s book Cry the Beloved Country, who said about his country, There is fear in the land. For what can mend when so many have grown lawless? But what do they help if one seeks for counsel, for one cries that, and another cries something that is needed of this nor that. Yes, God save Africa; here you can substitute America, the beloved country. God save us from the fear that is afraid of justice. God save us from the fear that is afraid of men. God save us all.
God save us all, as a nation, we are going through a time of profound change. What is justice, and how can we apply it to everyone? As Los Angeles and other parts of the country are going up in smoke. I believe what we are seeing is a part of our population is saying, I don’t believe there is such a thing as justice; it does not have anything to do with me.
The riots can be interpreted, and I’m sure will be analyzed for months to come but one way to view what is happening is that part of our nation is saying, voice me, see me, love me. No longer can the poor be invisible. No longer are blacks invisible. Do you remember in the movie, The Color Purple where Celie is about to get rid of that terrible marriage of hers? Her husband tries one last shot to keep her down by saying, You’re poor, you’re black, you’re ugly, and you’re a woman. To which Seeley stands up and responds, I’m poor, I’m black, I may even be ugly, but I’m here, thank God I’m here.
It is this ability to hear others that we are experiencing this solidarity of people, which real justice celebrates and in this ability to hear, which is both so frightening, we are reminded what makes justice so important. What is happening is that we are finding that justice is more than individual justice. Justice has to do with what the whole body owes itself. So it simply isn’t a matter of Rodney King, our fixation on individuals is getting us into trouble. We forget that justice in the biblical point of view has to do with the common good The writers of the Old Testament always reminded Israel that there was a connection between private affluence and public square. And the justice demanded a common vision, for the Lord, as Isaiah said, is the God of justice.
Two points I want to make this evening, and I will not elaborate, the 1st is that justice ultimately is about connections more than individual rights. I’m always amazed that we have more lawyers than any other country, over half a million, and we do more suing of each other than any other nation. I feel we have less of a vision of the common good, less of an understanding of our interrelatedness, than any other civilized country.
And secondly, justice is about being and doing the work of God. It is written, I am Lord, I’m perish walls throughout Central America are these words, to know God is to do justice.
The impression from many pulpits is that to know God is to be successful or to know God is to be rich. But the words from Jeremiah stand as a judgment on the poor theology that gets hooked from our contemporary churches. To know God, to be God like, is to seek justice for a society as a whole. But wait, you may be saying, what does all of this have to do with our parish celebration? What
What does this have to do with the feast day of our patron St. Or let me ask this question even more directly, why do we celebrate Saint Philip’s day particularly at a time of national fear and disease?
Then I would answer that it is important that we gather as a parish family to find out as a people who we are and what God has in store for us.
As a parish that bears the name of Saint Philip, we gather around the table to acknowledge our fragility, our powerlessness, and our participation in the conditions we find in our nation. But, we also gather around a table to have a Holy Communion in the midst of burning, looting, angry people. Affirming our solidarity with all that has happened and with each other.
This parish is so diverse, with so many opinions on what to do in our country, in our community, here today, to celebrate his connections, it’s one miss of the body of Christ. Its vision of the common goods. It’s interrelatedness in the midst of all the forces that would divide us.
In Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, there are some important lines which I would ask you to take home with you on this day. Let me set the stage. Mozart is speaking to 3 influential people. Each one bitterly opposes him, and as they argue and really don’t listen to each other, Mozart has a vision that we might take and follow our own. Mozart says, a dramatic poet would have put all these divergent thoughts down to represent a second of time and make us see the relatedness of all our words. But a composer can put them all down one after another and still make us hear each other in one great Symphony.
I tell you, he says, I want to write a finale lasting half an hour. A quartet becomes a quintet, becoming a sextet on and on. wider and wider. All Souls flying and rising together, and then together making a sound entirely new. I’ll bet that’s the way God hears the world, millions of souls ascending it once and mixing in his ear to become an Unending music unimaginable to us. That’s our job, we are composers, to combine the inner minds of him and him and him and he and her and her. The thoughts of chambermaids and court composers turn the audience into God. What a vision. As a parish, our job is to combine the inner minds of him and him and her and her period the thoughts of rich and poor, black and white, Conservative and Liberal, and turn the world into God.
This community is most God like when we can reach out and acknowledge our interconnectedness. Renew our sense of justice and rejoice around the broken bread and poured wine. Rejoice that each of us is a part of God and that we may walk together, and in hand with our Lord.
Amen