7 Epiphany C
Feb. 24, 2019
DOK Profession
Later in our service, we will celebrate with Sheilah Wiser, as she takes her life vows in the Order of the Daughters of the King. Daughters of the King, is a religious Order for women in many different branches of the church; women who belong to the Order live their lives out in the world, living in their own homes, but they gather together in chapters or larger groups for worship and service. Women in the Order live by a rule of life that they construct, which emphasizes a life of Prayer, Service and Evangelism. They also wear a special cross as a sign of their vows, that they wear for the rest of their lives.
The 2 parts of the rule of life that are lifted up as being of prime importance are the rule of prayer and the rule of service. Seems to me, that once again, that if we listen really carefully, we can hear echoes of “love your God and love your neighbor” when we hear those words. Obviously, we are all called to these commandments, whether we take religious vows or not. Today, Sheilah, like other Daughters of the King before her, will vow to keep these two commandments at the center of her life. She will do this, not as a person alone, but as a person who becomes part of a community of women who will help her to live into these vows, just as she will help them live into theirs. As someone who has taken vows in a religious community myself, I can say that my community is incredibly important to me, and to my living my rule of life. None of us was created to live alone and cut off from others; it is in our nature, as I believe it is in the nature of the Holy Trinity, to live, and work in community.
In today’s gospel, we have the next part of the sermon on the plain; what a great reading for a day when someone shall take vows! As I said a couple of weeks ago, the Christian life is simple, but not necessarily easy. Jesus gives some guidance here about what it means to follow him; he shows us that God is always wanting us to go further and deeper into living as disciples. As followers of Jesus, we are held to a different standard; we love not as others do, but we love even those who hate us; we give, rather than lend, expecting nothing in return. We are told not to judge or condemn… that’s kind of hard in this day and age, don’t you think? It seems we are always trying to compare ourselves, or told to anyway, so that we can come out on top… we are constantly barraged with all sorts of news stories asking us to take sides so that we might demonize those who are different from us. That kind of behavior doesn’t promote peace or healing; rather it promotes fear and hatred; it causes us in our fear to see things that aren’t true; it can cause us to side with evil all in the name of “good”. It can cause us to see things and believe things that aren’t true…
One such story that has been on my mind for a while now, is the story of Emmett Till, an African American boy, who was visiting relatives in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Emmett was 14 years old in 1955 when he was brutally murdered by 2 white men who had accused the boy of flirting with a young white woman in her family’s grocery store. The men kidnapped Emmett, brutally beat him and shot him in the head. Then they threw his body in the Tallahatchie river, tied with barbed wire to the 75 pound cotton gin that they made Emmett carry on his back to the river. His body was discovered and returned to Chicago, where he was from. His mother had a public service with an open casket, so that all could see the brutalized body of her son. Her 14 year old son. His murderers were acquitted by an all white jury. Decades later, it was admitted that the testimony against the boy was false. Fear, hatred, lies… all of these things caused people to act in violent, murderous ways to kill a 14 year old child. Who kills a 14 year old child? And just so we realize that the story of hatred against this child isn’t over, the sign that was placed on the bank of the Tallahatchie where his body was found, has been vandalized numerous times; the last time that I was able to find was in August of 2018… the metal sign had been replaced just 35 days before and was once again shot and had several bullet holes…
People who own family grocery stores probably don’t believe themselves capable of this kind of violence; many of us don’t believe it still continues… it continues for the same reasons it has since the beginning of time; it seems that we it is deep within our nature to need to be ahead of each other; we need to somehow prove that we are better than another; and if somehow we aren’t better, sometimes we try to figure out ways to look better; the story today of Joseph and his brothers is one such story; and yet, even though he suffered mightily at the hands of his brothers, Joseph manages to come out on top, saving his whole family from starvation. Joseph's success at least in part was because he never let his relationship to God wither away. When he realized what his brothers had done and later how Potiphar's wife lied about him, he continued to believe in and pray to God. He never let that relationship suffer because he believed ultimately God would bring about the good. His brothers were jealous, and they lied about Joseph, and could have caused his death; certainly they caused him great suffering. Joseph prayed, and continued to serve God even when it would have been easy to to deny God to save his own skin; but we know the life of faith is not always if ever easy; praying to God and serving God sometimes take us to places we do not want to go… Emmett Till’s tragic story helped to ignite the civil rights movement so that others might one day enjoy the justice and freedom that Emmett did not; Joseph being betrayed and sold into slavery eventually brought about good for him and for his family…God’s faith, the faith lived in and through Jesus, is the faith that keeps all of us growing toward being the people that God has created us to be. God’s love and God’s creative power are one in the same… if each of us can hold on to the faith given to us in the Holy Spirit, we can weather what others throw our way… not easily perhaps, not without sadness or anger, but in faith, we know that like the sheep led through the valley of death, we will come through to the other side.
Today, Sheiliah will join other Daughters of the King by taking her solemn vows. It is a day of celebration as well as a day of seriousness. She does not take these vows lightly. She will promise to live a life of prayer and of service; and in those 2 places the third part of the rule is lived, and that is to evangelize. My hope and prayer for her and for all of the Daughters of the King, especially the St. Clare chapter, is, like your patroness Clare, keep the Eucharist at the center of your worship life. Meeting Jesus in the Eucharist is where we learn about love, about forgiveness, about being made strong in our weakness; it is where we all experience in all of our senses the life of Jesus… I hope you will pray daily, and offer up your whole life and all that you do, so that you might pray without ceasing, so that your life will be a living sacrifice and gift to God; I hope that you will be quiet, so that you might hear the voice of Jesus telling you what is yours to do in the world… and with that, I end with the motto of your Order: “I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, I ought to do. What I ought to do, by the grace of God I will do. Lord, what will you have me do?”
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