This sermon was delivered for the UCC San Diego Partnership's annual combined Ash Wednesday service.
Ash Wednesday Reflection March 3, 2022 Excuse me one moment. Take off my glasses and clean them. Wow. What a difference that makes. I’m always amazed that despite enjoying the ability to see more clearly, I just usually adjust to looking through dirty glasses. Maybe we could think of Lent like a reminder to clean our glasses. To appreciate how we may be able to get by looking through distorted lenses, but what a difference it makes when we can see more clearly. So, think of tonight’s prayers and songs and this season ahead as the invitation to clear the dust from our eyes, clean the lens through which we look, and see what’s important. And what might happen? Well, I want to tell the story of Emmett Till. Familiar to some, only a vague recollection for others. Emmett lived in Chicago and when he was 14 years old, he wanted to spend August with his cousins in Mississippi. He’d never been there before. He didn’t know, or maybe as a teenager he wouldn’t listen to, instructions about how to survive as a young Black man. It all started in a country store on the side of a road. As Rick Bragg describes it, on a “thin blacktop that cuts between fields and swamps and islands of trees.[1] Rural Mississippi where some of the roads link up with seemingly pointless routes that go nowhere in particular. And others that just peter out into dirt roads and vanish into the weeds a few miles on.” On that thin blacktop road in the middle of nowhere, Emmett entered a country store and purchased the 1955 equivalent of Skittles and ice tea. But under the pretext that whites were always constructing to terrorize Black citizens, Emmett was accused of whistling at the white store owner’s wife; as in “flirting” with her. Under the pretext that this 14-year-old was flirting with an adult white woman, Emmett was dragged from his relative's home, beaten until one of his eyes came out, shot through the head, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River with a 70-pound cotton gin fan around his neck. His body was found several days later. Two white men were arrested and tried but never convicted, never punished. There was no shame along that thin blacktop road. Emmet could have stayed a statistic, just one among many children lynched in some way or another. But instead of staying hidden on those seemingly pointless roads that go nowhere, Emmett’s mother, Mamie, decided that if the country could see what happened, they might care. She demanded an open casket funeral for Emmett. People thought she was, forgive the language, crazy. Or overcome with grief-stricken irrationality. But, she saw clearly what was needed. "I think everybody needs to know exactly what had happened to Emmett Till." Some 50,000 people streamed in to view Emmett's corpse in Chicago. Horrified by the mutilation of her son's body, many people left in tears or fainting at the sight and smell of the body, but they also left determined that it would not happen again. There may have been no shame along that thin blacktopped road, but the country reacted in horror. And with that momentum, leaders for civil rights moved the fight to the front lines. Emmett was killed in August, 1955. In December, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. Soon after, a 26-year-old minister was asked to lead a city-wide bus boycott. His name was Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. With Emmett’s death and Mamie’s brave determination that people would see exactly what happened to her son, the Civil Rights movement was officially born. At first, she said, “I just wanted to go in a hole and hide my face from the world.” But at his funeral, she stood at the pulpit and looked down at her only son's mutilated body. She told mourners, "I don't have a minute to hate, I'll pursue justice for the rest of my life." Mrs. Till took her fight to the people and gave speeches to overflowing crowds across the country. It was almost like an evangelistic crusade. She said later that, like God, she also lost her only son, but through her work, she became the mother of thousands. I’m so inspired by the line: "I don't have a minute to hate.” She could have. She had every right to. Instead, “I'll pursue justice for the rest of my life." Jesus said, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” “Treasures in heaven.” I want to remind us that references like these are not about the hereafter – or only about that. Members of Mission Hills will have already heard me use this line before. Rev. Kenneth Samuel describes what progressive Christians believe in: “Something sound on the ground while we’re still around, not some pie in the sky bye and bye when we die.” After all, we pray the Lord’s Prayer every week or even more: “On earth, as it is in heaven.” Therefore tonight, we’re reminded that our task is always to bring earth a little closer to heaven, or maybe it’s to bring heaven a little closer to earth by cleaning our lenses distorted by fear or shame or apathy so that we might experience the fullness of life. To know that God sees us, hears us, loves us, forgives us. But it is also to let go of the distorted lenses by which people see or define us. The issue isn’t just the way we look at the world but the way the world looks at us – as people of color, as people who are LGBTQ, as women, elders and children, people with a disability, who speak a different language. Any way in which who we are is distorted by others. May God set us free. Lastly, Emmett and Mamie Till also invite us to wipe away the distortions of anxiety or guilt or indifference so that we may participate in the fullness of life for everyone else too. Through our prayers of confession and assurances of grace, the dust is cleared from our eyes and we are free to understand what’s important. Just look inside and all around and, I promise, one day you’ll see and know exactly what you must do. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/weekinreview/emmett-till-s-long-shadow-a-crime-refuses-to-give-up-its-ghosts.html
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