Wisdom in the Streets
Sermon based on Proverbs 8:1-4; 22-31 and John 16:12-15
Every once in awhile, a new musical comes to Broadway that changes everything. This year, the game-changer has been Hamilton: The Musical. The next big musical is about this nation’s’ founding father, and the current face on the ten dollar bill, Alexander Hamilton.
It’s the most ridiculous premise for a musical, and that’s not the only thing that makes it great. What is powerful about this piece is what the writer, Lin-Manuel Miranda, has done to distinguish the music of the revolution against the music of the establishment. Establishment language and roadway ballad and chorus song, but the music of the revolution in Hamilton is all rap and hip-hop. The radical ideas, arguments for justice and against slavery, are done in rap battles between Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington and Aaron Burr.
The music of the revolution is not music that we hear in polite society. If we think of fancy parties, we imagine a nice string quartet. Here in church, I can’t think of a single time that I’ve heard rap or hip hop. Our music is rich four part singing, often unaccompanied, and all of it easy on the ears.
But the music of the revolution is what we hear outside. In my neighborhood the music of outside is rap and hiphop. It is loud. It is fast. Urgent. The rhymes are creative. The bass reverberates in our chests. The music describes the reality of life in our country that is not the reality we present in polite society–but hip hop can be a challenge because it’s not our story, and we don’t always want to hear these words that challenge our systems and ways of living.
Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
“To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.
The wisdom of the street shows up in many different forms–
Outside the Damascus gate in Jerusalem, wisdom shows up in the form of old women selling sad looking figs and dates. It’s young Palestinians boys being arrested and detained. It’s the sounds of the call to prayer wafting over the city, calling Muslims (and all of us) to turn to God, to remember God’s greatness.
This is the wisdom of the street. This is the cry to all who live, at the gates of the city.
The wisdom of the street is at the intersections, where folks who long for home ask for something to eat. Or, teenagers who want to play in the underfunded school marching band, hold out their boots and ask you to help their school get new uniforms. Or the well dressed man sells mini-pies and a newspaper to make a living and to spread his truth.
This is the wisdom of the street. This is the cry to all who live.
The wisdom of the street is Philadelphia high school students organizing a protest on Broad Street in Philadelphia, in front of school district headquarters. They were protesting that their friend, Brian, was beaten and assaulted by a police officer in one of our public schools. These children organized, publicized and spoke out against the injustice they experience in the halls of higher learning. The cried out for their humanity to be remembered, and restored in their own schools–that they not live in prison conditions, but have the their human rights restored
This is the wisdom of the street. This is the cry to all who live.
So, what is this wisdom that is calling out at the city gates and at the crossroads?
This text is specifically read today to remind us of the work of the Holy Spirit. Today is Trinity Sunday, a Sunday when we remember the complicated theological dance of God the Creator, Jesus the sustainer, and the Holy Spirit, the life-giver.
But, rather than laying out a theological treatise, I’m choosing to focus on the holy spirit, also known as wisdom.
And here’s what we know about the Holy Spirit. She is wild–she shakes things up, and blows things around. She sets fires.
The Holy Spirit tells the truth, even when we don’t want to hear it. The Spirit also tells us things in ways we don’t want to hear it.
And, according to this text, Wisdom is directional. It shows up at the gates, and crossroads of our journey–those places where we ask for directions–and she shows us the way to go.
What we often hear and see at the gates and crossroads of our city are the stories that are unfolding in front of us. Stories of pain. Stories of exclusion. Stories of desperation and last resort. And in those stories, wisdom sits.
There are many ways that we choose to hear or tell these stories. We can look at the Palestinian youth detained at the Damascus gate and tell the story of a young “terrorist in the making” or we can tell the story of a frustrated kid living in occupation. Stories at the gates and the crossroads are wisdom, and they are calling out to all who live. But they are not wisdom if they are about protection, because the holy spirit is anything but safe.
The author of Hamilton: The Musical, Lin Manuel Miranda, a second generation Puerto Rican immigrant spoke at the University of Pennsylvania’s graduation last week. He’s a storyteller, so he talked about what he knows best. He said this (and I think it relates directly to our text today): Every story you choose to tell, by necessity, omits others from the larger narrative…this act of choosing will reverberate across our lives.
Stories are essential. They are life changing. It’s important that we tell stories, but what kinds of stories are we telling? Who do they include and who do they omit?
It’s so easy to tune into only the stories in this circle, to keep out wisdom’s cry for life outside these walls. It would be easy to plug up our ears as we crossed the busy intersection of Washington Lane and Germantown Avenue. But if we do that, we close ourselves off the wisdom, to the call to all who live. Inside the city walls is safety, but outside the gate, at at the intersections of our journeys, there is no safety and protection. We are open to the Spirit’s wisdom to blow us right over. We are open to hear wisdom in the voices that we don’t ever elevate.
The thing that has been so revolutionary about Hamilton the musical is that it elevates a different story. It tells the story that we are so completely familiar with, the story of our founding fathers, but puts it on the edges of the city, and at the crossroads. It tells the story from the perspective of Alexander Hamilton, a “bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman.” It tells the story from another perspective, and gives an urgency to the message in a history that’s run cold and self-protective.
Wisdom is at the gates of the city and at the crossroads. And if it is wisdom we seek, if it is the holy spirit winds we long to have blow over and through us, why are we not also in the streets, listening to unfamiliar, uncomfortable story?
Holy Spirit guide us until all truth. Let us be changed by the stories we hear. Because in those stories are life. AMEN.
Pentecost looks like Fire
Sermon based on Acts 2: 1-21
I’m constantly amazed at the ways that the church throughout the centuries has domesticated the Bible.
Take the Creation story. The story of the creation of the first people on earth is one of humans made from dirt and the hand of God, and this story of awe and beauty somewhere along the line was twisted into a story about gender power and gender roles. And, in nearly every artistic rendering we see of this story, the first humans always look well groomed with the right sized leaves being placed just in the right spot. Where’s the vulnerability? Where’s the mess? Where’s the dirt out of which they were created?
Or how about Jesus’ birth: God became a vulnerable child in an infant Jesus, a strange unlikely answer to the cry of God’s suffering people. This story has been turned into the cute little baby Jesus, whose cheeks we want to pinch.
Even Jesus’ stories and words–which are the most counter-cultural things you’ll read– have become a model of piety for the church, when they were anything but that.
Jesus violent death at the hands of the empire, has been deformed into a personal Jesus, dying on the cross for you. And don’t you forget it.
And Jesus’ resurrection has come to represent this pristine, perfect, and spiritual act. When it was anything but that. It was defiance, against death, against everything that tried to kill goodness and love. It was big and unexpected, and we still don’t know what to do with it.
Likewise, the church has domesticated the wildness of Pentecost fire. We have turned dangerous fire into a carefully encased candle, a gentle flame dancing daintily over the heads of awaiting disciples. Even the lovely rendering of fire behind me is tame, although let me assure you, taking down the cross that has been up, and putting up the Pentecost fire was about as wild and harrowing an experience as I’ve had in a while.
What happens when we domesticate the scripture? It turns our scripture into a nice story, rather than a dangerous one, a pretty metaphor, rather than an event of utter destruction, where new things arose from the ashes.
And honestly, domesticating the story makes it more difficult to relate to. How many of you have perfect lives? If you raise your hand, I don’t believe you for a second. So, why, why, why does the church keep trying to impose perfection onto this book.
Every good and perfect thing that happened in this book comes from mess. Jesus birth–a mess. It didn’t happen where it was supposed to happen, and the mother was not who we imagined she should be. Jesus was not the royal messiah the people hoped for, he didn’t deliver the message they wanted, he didn’t live and he certainly didn’t die the way they hoped.
The Pentecost story is read as if the tornado and flames in the room is tame and fanciful, like something magical and enchanting from a Harry Potter book. But, pentecost was anything but that.
Folks, the church was born amidst terrifying wind and fire that filled a room. It was not organized and pretty, as we also see documented in art. It was a tremendous mess that took the disciples breath away. And as a result of this weather event in a room–the disciples were compelled to leave the fear behind, the fear that brought them into that room to hide. After the fire and wind, the fear was gone, and they couldn’t help but be in the streets.
Fire and wind are a dangerous mix. Wind causes the fire to spread. Wind makes the fire hot. And when fire comes, it destroys everything. Some of you who have experienced the power of fire know this all too well. Fire is traumatic, life threatening.
Beyonce’s new album came out a few weeks ago, and it it one of the most incredible pieces of musical art I’ve ever seen or heard. It documents a marital crisis between her and her husband. She lets him have it about his infidelity and lies. With her words, burns everything in her relationship down, and says, “I’m not sorry.” But at some point on her journey in this album, she sees the seeds of something beautiful that still exists between the two of them, and says, “If we are going to heal, let it be glorious.” And from the ashes, these two people, begin again. She and her partner had to burn everything down to see what was left. Their relationship had to burn to the ground so they could see what was left.
This happens in forest fires too. As terrifying as they are, they serve an important purpose. They kill off diseased trees and insects, and they allow those smaller groundcovers to grow. Those ground covers are what hold the soil in place. When the trees get too big, the other plants are denied sunlight.
And, when the forest fire dies, it leaves strong tree seeds to grow in the earth, in a soil nurtured by the ash from the fire.
Today I’m thinking about Pentecost in the wildest way possible–On that day when the wind and fire entered that room, everything burned away. And what was left were seeds.
And those seeds were the disciples, and their passion to tell the story of Jesus, who showed them the way to live, and in his death and resurrection, showed them the way to live and die without fear. These disciples–after this weather event in the upper room where they waited fearfully–they were sent to all parts of the world. We know some of the disciples traveled all around the world–to Spain, Africa, Italy and elsewhere–to tell the story of Jesus. They did not have a book. They didn’t have a theological perspective. They had the stories and their experience.
Today I pray for fire. Not an actual fire to consume this building, but a fire to burn away all the things that have been created and called church. I want to burn away all the bad theology that has been used to hurt, exclude and keep people away from God. I want a fire that will burn away all the extraneous, distracting things that cover up what is what is truly the gospel.
I want all of that to burn away, so that we can see what’s left. What is left are the seeds that grow strong in the rich soil of what was. What is left is a story that is radical again, that–under all the theology has been layered on top of the creation story, Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection stories–under all of that is a radical, counter cultural, message that we need to hear again. Under all those layers of cultural normativity we’ve put on the biblical story is a story of God reaching out to us, of God wanting relationship with us, and wanting us to love and care for each other.
So maybe this sounds more angry than I mean it to, but let’s just let this whole thing burn down. Let’s let this system of Christianity we’ve inherited be burned by the intense fire of God’s love, and by God’s original intentions for us. Let it burn. Let’s let go of all those things that we’ve inherited that have nothing to do with the gospel. And let’s see what’s left.
And then let’s let what’s left be blown about by the great wind that is the holy spirit. Because, this gift we’ve been given is not ours to hold onto so tightly, it’s not ours to tame or control or even define. It is God’s gift to us.
AMEN.