Community Church Sermons
Year A
April 10, 2011
Lent 5
The Myth That
Holds Us Back
Psalm 139:1-18
2 Corinthians 5:14-20
Guest
Preacher, Philip Gulley
Quaker
Sayings 10
He
has gotten above the God in him.
She
has gone beyond her Light.
He
is running ahead of his Guide.
This
past New Year’s Eve we were at the Whipple’s house watching a movie in 3-D. I
had never seen a 3-D movie before, having grown up watching the silent movies
with the lady in the balcony playing the organ. But Chad and Elise’s little
girls talked me into watching a 3-D movie and showed me how it worked. If
you’ve seen a 3-D movie, you know it’s quite fascinating. You watch it through
special glasses.
It
reminded me of when I was a kid and would go to the library on rainy Saturdays
and look at pictures through a stereoscope. The pictures had the same images
side by side, differing just slightly in perspective and angle, which gave the
two-dimensional picture a three-dimensional appearance. Stereoscopes were
typically made of wood, with a little tin hood that fit around the eyes, and a
handle that came down, with a bracket that would hold the picture. Because they
were most popular in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, most of the pictures
dated to that era. I would go to the library and look at pictures of our town
and county from long ago, and wonder about those people.
Sometimes
an elderly person would be there, someone way up in their 80’s and 90’s, and
they would be looking at those images from their childhood and would reminisce
aloud about those perfect days of long ago, which, of course, were only perfect
in their memory. Then moving pictures were invented, and the stereoscope
companies went out of business. The new replaced the old, that unchanging
principle. The new replaces the old. It is an inviolate rule, no matter how much
we resist it, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. The new replaces the
old. The human body is designed to walk forward.
We’ve
been talking about Quaker sayings, and this week’s saying is a bit different from
the others we’ve studied in that it is cautionary in nature. It was said of
those Quakers who defied the settled teachings of their time that they were
“running ahead of their Guide,” or “gotten above the God in them, “or gone
beyond their Light.”
It
was intended to give one pause, to check the impulse of moving beyond the
majority’s sense of divine leading. If someone, for instance, was teaching or
saying something inconsistent with the doctrine or the custom of the day, they
would say to that Friend, “Perhaps you’re running ahead of your Guide.” They
would put the brakes on that person, you see. It was intended to be a powerful
corrective, because you risked losing the support of your religious community.
Here’s
the interesting thing about it. In nearly every instance someone was told they
had gone beyond their Light, or ran ahead of their Guide, or gotten above the
God in them, in nearly every instance, time and history proved that person
correct. They had not gone beyond their Light; the majority had lagged behind
their Guide. They should not have said Slow
down! to that person. They should have said Hurry up! to themselves.
Remember
this: Every moral, spiritual, ethical, and intellectual advancement was made by
someone the rest of us were telling to slow down.
In
April of 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned in the Birmingham
jail, eight religious leaders of the city wrote an open letter titled “A Call
to Unity,” and published it in the newspaper. Friends, we commit more sin in
the name of unity, we let more evil go unchallenged for the sake of unity than
for any other reason. We will permit injustice after injustice to accrue simply
to prevent any tension or disagreement from troubling our ranks. So these
religious leaders of Birmingham, Alabama wrote a letter and named it “A Call to
Unity.” In the letter they scolded King for his “untimely” demonstration. It
was a polite way of telling King he had gone beyond his Light.
King
responded with a beautiful letter-if you’ve never read his “Letter from
Birmingham Jail” you need to- in which he wrote, “Frankly, I have yet to engage
in a direct-action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have
not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard
the word `Wait!’. It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity.
This `Wait’ has almost always meant `Never.’ We must come to see…that `justice
too long delayed is justice denied.’
The
church’s problem isn’t that we have gone beyond our Guide. The problem is that
we have lagged far too far behind our Guide. This Quaker saying is one we would
do well to lose, for it and the entrenched mindset it represents has surely caused more harm than good. It had
demanded that men and women of good will make a butchery of their conscience,
it has silenced prophets, it has kept us stuck in the yesteryear of a fabled
goodness, preserving the sepia tones of a long-ago morality that excluded so
many.
Not
only should that saying be forever abolished, it should be recognized for the
lie it is, for it implies it is possible to run ahead of the very God who is
constantly before us, always ahead of us, beckoning us toward a land and life
we have only reluctantly entered.
Not
once, not once, has God ever said Slow
down to someone pioneering the moral landscape. Not once. It is only the
case, when we have finally dared enter the land of justice and freedom and
pitched our tents, that God has said, “What took you so long?” Remember that
when God led the Israelites by a pillar of fire, God was well in front of them,
not behind them. God does not push us from behind, God pulls us from the front,
beckons us from the future.
When
John Woolman traveled about colonial America, visiting Quaker meeting after
Quaker meeting, urging the Quakers to free their slaves, do you honestly
believe God was whispering in his ear, “Slow down, John Woolman, you are
running ahead of me.” Of course not.
Now
let us be relevant. We cannot let ourselves off the hook. Today, too many in
the church are telling gays and lesbians to wait, that we are not ready for
them to enjoy the same rights we enjoy, the right to have as their life partner
the person they cherish. When the matter is raised by those who cannot keep
silent while others are punished for the way they were born, they are scolded
for running ahead of their Guide, as if God is somehow honored by the
relentless persecution of those born differently from us. Someday, one day, we
will cross that river and enter that land of liberty and justice for all and
God will rightly say, “What took you so long”?”
I
called the library this week. I said to the librarian, “When I was little, I
would go there and look through this contraption at pictures. It was made of
wood and tin. What was it called?”
The
librarian said, “Oh, that was a stereoscope. We have one in our historical
collection. We don’t use it anymore.”
That
is as it should be. Some things belong in our historical collections, in our past.
Other things belong to our future. Friends, God might well have been our help
in ages past, as the hymn says, but God is also our hope in years to come. We
do not run ahead of God, we cannot run ahead of God. For God is the pillar of
fire in front of us, not the cloud of dust behind.