Sermon at the Ordination of Emily McNeill

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
Journey United Church of Christ, Glenmont, New York
March 13, 2016

It is truly a joy and an honor to share some words at Emily’s ordination. This day has been a long time in coming and am so pleased that it is at hand! And I love the Bible passage that Emily chose for this special day.

1 Corinthians 1:18-31 is a challenge to conventional wisdom and the status quo. In his epistle, Paul follows a logic of reversals – reversals of who are the moral and political agents of change, reversals of status and political position, reversals in our conception of who God is and what God is doing in the world, what grace and prosperity are, and how to worship and honor God.

This passage seems appropriate if not a usual text for an ordination. It’s about understanding and preaching the good news of Jesus. It’s about not just going along to get along with the status quo but marching to a different drum. It’s about giving all that you have to follow the path of Jesus and the will of God. Indeed in this passage, Paul reminds us just how revolutionary the work of the early Christians was. Paul is preaching here and in his other letters about Christ Crucified. We are in Lent approaching Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter. Thinking about Jesus’ Last Week, and the death and life of Jesus seems appropriate.

Separated from its contexts, the idea of Jesus dying is kind of mundane. Indeed as Christians we know this sacrifice of Jesus is necessary to get us to the happy ending of Jesus being resurrected. I mean he has to die (and crucifixion is just as good a way as any) in order to be brought back to life.

But put in its social, historical, political context we realize that crucifixion isn’t an ordinary or mundane way to die – crucifixion is reserved for insurrectionists, social movement leaders, revolutionaries who were openly opposing the power of the Roman Empire. Crucifixion is a punishment enforced by the Roman Empire not the Jewish people. It is not used to punish common criminals, robbers, even murderers. Crucifixion is about stopping radicals in their tracks. It’s about scaring those being oppressed in their society, telling them to not rock the boat because things might be bad now but if you stand up to us, we can stop those bread and circuses. We can sick those legions on you. We can criminalize attempts by other poor people from across the empire to come to your service with a collection for the poor.

And crucifixion is vilified during Jesus’ time. It was considered a curse and a shame to the Jewish people to be labeled such a dissident. But Paul in 1 Corinthians and elsewhere proclaims Christ Crucified. And Paul doesn’t just stop there. He valorizes something as shameful as crucifixion and continues with putting more things on their head. He breaks through the fear and shame of crucifixion and encourages the poor and lowly followers of Jesus, telling them that they are God’s chosen.

Joe just read the NRSV translation of it, but I wanted to share a few verses of 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 from the Message translation, just to emphasize the radicality of what Paul is proposing. It reads:

This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out. It’s written,

I’ll turn conventional wisdom on its head,
I’ll expose so-called experts as crackpots.

Where can you find someone truly wise, truly educated, truly intelligent in this day and age? Hasn’t God exposed it all as pretentious nonsense? Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb – preaching, of all things!—to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation.

Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”?

Wow. This is quite a challenge and it seems to ring quite true to our situation. We struggle to find anyone wise, moral, intelligent in our public discourse. The experts are crackpots?! The nobodies show how corrupt and vacuous the somebodies are?!

But this is not the way we are told that society works – business leaders and lawyers and politicians and social workers are supposed to save our world. They’re the ones who are supposed to come up with policies and plans that reduce inequality and make society work. Not the poor, the low-wage, the dispossessed, the homeless. And religious leaders are supposed to ordain the good work of the somebodies – as religious leaders we are called to preach the good news of wealth and prosperity to the poor, if you stop your sinning, God will bless you. Rarely do we preach the good news of justice and righteousness of the poor to the whole of society, a good news that says that ending poverty is possible, that the poor and despised will put us on a path of justice.

This good news from the poor sounds a lot like the logic of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign that he launched just months before his crucifixion/assassination. In the Massey Lecture Series of the Canadian Broadcast in December of 1967, King says,

“The dispossessed of this nation — the poor, both white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against the injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty…There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life…”

Emily, this passage from 1 Corinthians 1 and from King’s Massey Lectures are very fitting for you and the communities you have committed yourself too. You are interested in wisdom from the bottom. You have proven yourself to be a Poverty Scholar – someone who is dedicated to getting at the root causes of poverty and developing the leadership and intelligence of those most impacted by poverty and oppression. You do not fiddle while Rome is burning. You will not participate in education that is divorced from engaged analysis and action. You will not use your education, training, resources to uphold the status quo and unjust structures. You have committed yourself to uniting the nobodies to show that another world is possible – that poverty and oppression are not inevitable – and that all God’s children have dignity, not that some life is more sacred than others.

This reminds me of “Ella’s Song” dedicated to Ella Baker and written by Sweet Honey in the Rock:

Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons
Is as important as the killing of White men, White mothers’ sons
We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes
Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot I come to realize
That teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survive.
We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes

You have given your life to God and the oppressed. You are following in the footsteps of MLK and other fallen fighters who were tools for Christ. You don’t seem to get too much rest as you struggle for freedom and dignity for all – to bring God’s reign here on earth. In fact 1 Corinthians 1 reminds me of another favorite quote of Rev. Dr. King’s about the nature of real wisdom and education, a quote that we studied together at Union Theological Seminary. In Where Do We Go From Here?, King writes,

“Education without social action is a one‐sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy. Deeds uninformed by educated thought can take false directions. When we go into action and confront our adversaries, we must be as armed with knowledge as they. Our policies should have the strength of deep analysis beneath them to be able to challenge the clever sophistries of our opponents.”

Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan reminds us that this is true of Jesus’ actions and positions.

“In any situation of oppression, especially in those oblique, indirect, and systemic ones where injustice wears a mask of normalcy or even of necessity, the only ones who are innocent or blessed are those squeezed out deliberately as human junk from the system’s own evil operations. A contemporary equivalent: only the homeless are innocent.”

God chose the despised and outcast and who everyone thought were nothing to show what God’s about and what is good and right and the path of righteousness.

And you have shown this in your life too – you have helped raise up the voices and struggles, and especially the wisdom and prophetic action, of low wage fast food workers who have changed the whole conversation on wages and inequality and who have pushed forward to raise up New York when the Governor and other officials were saying that the minimum wage couldn’t possibly be raised.

You have helped document the history of homeless people organizing, including telling stories of homeless people raising the questions and slogans of “homeless not helpless” “housing is a human right”, “why do we worship a homeless person on Sunday and ignore on on Monday?”.

You have witnessed survivors of Flint and Detroit and the Gulf Coast exposing academics and other paid apologists for the poisoning of thousands of children in Flint: so-called experts called mothers crazy and uninformed when they raised the health effects of drinking water from the Flint River. For a year and a half this went on before authorities declared a state of emergency there. And other “experts” covered up the devastating health effects of the BP oil spill in order to save BP money in lawsuits. Opposed to them, you suggested that these impacted families lead the way to a new Poor People’s Campaign today.

The NIV reads, “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters:[g] not many of you were wise by human standards,[h] not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong”

We live in a time where there is great suffering and crisis. And much of what is going on doesn’t make sense. We throw away more food than it takes to feed every man, woman and child in this country. There are wars and conflict throughout our world and communities. Many are being pitted one against another – with complaints that immigrants are taking the jobs of long-time residents, that the economic crisis was the fault of low-income families who couldn’t afford their mortgages, that working people are bailing out the unemployed.

But just like Paul celebrates the wisdom of the poor and oppressed, he reminds these Jesus followers of their call to proclaim God’s reign – on earth as it is in heaven – he proposes a collection for the poor of Jerusalem in 5 of his letters, and he preaches Christ Crucified exposing the violence and oppression of the Roman Empire. Just like in Paul’s day, in our day many of the people who are suffering in our society are also ministering to each other; they are opposing the cruel and unjust structures and suggesting that this is not the will of God. These despised people are doing what God wants and asks of us all and they are exposing and shaming the injustice of the status quo. In a time of crisis, a time that demands action, people are making a commitment to each other – blessing others with hopes for security and a good life and answering their call to join the struggle.

Earlier this week I got a text message from Rev. William Barber, architect of the Forward Together Moral Mondays Movement in North Carolina. He texted saying that he was just in a discussion with some people in North Carolina who were telling him that the reason they were going to vote for Donald Trump was because Trump was rich enough to tell the truth. Despite the fact that studies show that only 8% of what Donald Trump says is actually true and accurate, these men equated prosperity with wisdom and truthfulness rather than being able to see how his wealth has been made based on lies and defrauding the poor. Still today, the poor are considered liars and sinners and lazy and crazy and the rich are considered blessed by God.

Rev. Barber ended his text with “Lord have mercy. God help us.”

I think today in the ordination of Emily McNeill, God is helping us, she has heard our prayers, the Lord Jesus is having mercy on us, by sending a truly committed, faithful disciple of Christ Crucified.

Emily you have answered the call of Christ Crucified – a call to proclaim good news from the poor, release of the captives, and letting the oppressed go free as they free the whole of society.