Preaching as Resistance

Voices of Hope, Justice, and Solidarity

Phil Snider

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780827231603
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

30 new sermons to empower your prophetic voice for solidarity and justic e.

As nationalism, patriarchy, and alt-right fear-mongering threaten our troubled nation, the pulpit has again become a subversive space of sacred resistance. In this provocative and powerful collection of sermons from diverse pastors across America, hear the brave and urgent voice of Christians calling for radical change rooted in love, solidarity, and justice. Preaching as Resistance resists, confronts, and troubles the dangerous structures of authoritarianism and oppression crashing in from all sides - and proclaims the transformation, possibility, and hope stirring in the gospel of Christ.

From big-steeple churches in big cities to rural congregations in red states, preaching as resistance is practiced in a wide variety of social contexts and preaching styles, inspiring and equipping listeners to respond to the call of justice. Ideal for pastors and church leaders, Preaching as Resistance also provides the opportunity to experience hopeful, welcoming Christian voices rooted in the gospel values of love, solidarity, and justice. In these challenging times when Christianity is so often misrepresented, misunderstood, and misused for unjust agendas, take heart and find your own voice in this collection of resistance sermons from everyday pastors across the country.

Contributors: Emily Bowen-Marler, Amy Butler, Jeff Chu, Aric Clark, Wil Gafney, Sarah Tron Garriott, Richard Gehring, Molly Housh Gordon, Cassandra Gould, Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Anna Holloway, Jesse Jackson, Sandhya Jha, Jin S. Kim, Kenji Kuramitsu, José F. Morales, Gary Peluso-Verdend, Alton B. Pollard III, Micki Pulleyking, Susan Russell, Leah D. Schade, Darryl Schafer, Austin Shelley, David Swinton, Laura Jean Truman, Richard Voelz, Alexis James Waggoner, Lori Walke, Michael W. Waters, Erin Wathen, Layton E. Williams, Brian Zahnd

Part I: Responding to the Call

Prologue: When I Kept Silent

Laura Jean Truman

Laura Jean Truman is a queer writer, preacher, and former chaplain and pastor living in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a BA in philosophy from the University of New Hampshire and an MDiv from Candler School of Theology. She supports her itinerant chaplaining, writing, and eternally optimistic church planting by slinging drinks at a historic bar in downtown Atlanta. This reflection was originally written on November 27, 2016, three Sundays after Donald Trump’s electoral college victory.

• • •

“Alas, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young!”

Jeremiah 1:6 (NIV)

I used to work as a chaplain at an elderly residential facility and rehab hospital in Atlanta. I was there on December 28, 2015, the day that the police officer who killed Tamir Rice was not indicted. I was scheduled to preach to a community of little old black ladies who marched in Alabama for civil rights, and little old white ladies who practiced racism as a daily ritual.

I haven’t ever felt so young, ever, ever, as when I stood up to preach. I looked at all these people who leaned on me for spiritual care and guidance, and a fear/anger/sadness/anxiety ball sunk in my stomach, because oh Jesus this little white girl from one of the whitest states in the U.S. who has only just barely graduated seminary is not prepared to do this. Let’s just skip this subject and preach something else, because what I was holding felt too heavy and too fragile for me to lift and not shatter.

I want to start by clarifying that this is not a story of me wildly succeeding as a White Savior to end racism in the course of a nine-minute sermon. And it’s definitely not a story of me mastering how to talk about oppression when the oppressed and the oppressor are both in the room with me. It’s not even a story about me owning my spiritual authority and leaning into my female empowerment as a pastor.

I’m not really sure what this story is about, but ever since the presidential election I can’t stop thinking about all those elderly faces watching me, and how it felt to talk about evil when we all disagree about what evil is.

I started work at the nursing home in August of 2015, and by December, I was excelling at ducking and dodging all sensitive topics with my congregation. It was a politically and racially diverse hospital, which seemed like a really good reason to just talk about “Jesus Loves Me” all the time. I avoided taking a stand like it was my job (I may have actually told folks this was my job). I was Chaplain Laura Jean for the middle-aged Midwestern white man as well as the black trans woman on suicide watch. My work was to be present to every member of the community, to love well, to listen well, to hold them up in prayer, and when preaching, to preach the gospel of grace and the unfailing, unrelenting, unstoppable love of God through Jesus Christ.

I had underestimated a really central part of life in the nursing home. Everyone, of every political, religious, ethnic, racial identity, was watching the news. Nonstop. There isn’t a whole lot to do in a nursing home except play bingo (not a stereotype! We loved bingo!), sing old Broadway musicals (my favorite unofficial chaplain position was Broadway pianist), and watch the news. Every time I knocked on a door and walked into someone’s room, people talked about politics. People wanted to talk to the chaplain about the primaries and the next year’s general election and about the immigrants and about the urban crime and police violence and the gay agenda and racist politicians. So I listened super well to everyone, and asked good questions, and worked hard to be present to every member of the community.

Every week, I got up and I preached on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday to a racially mixed community about trusting God, faith in light of physical sickness, God as reconciler of relationships, Jesus as comforter to our loneliness, unrelenting grace for our own sins of resentment and fear and greed. And every week, in people’s cramped, barren hospital rooms, I listened to the patter of anxiety while TVs ran in the background like a morbid soundtrack—prayers and reflections punctuated by CNN and an endless loop of gunshots and shaky cameras and black bodies dying in the road.

Then, the week after Christmas, a grand jury declined to indict the police officer who killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy playing with a toy gun. The police officer pulled up in his car and shot him dead. The official record states it was less than two seconds after his arrival on the scene. The officer did not go to trial. Tamir was a little boy who likely hadn’t even hit his growth spurt yet. He was still young enough that he probably wasn’t embarrassed to be seen at the grocery store with his mom. We know that he liked to draw and play drums.

What I had started to feel somewhere in my gut was suddenly out loud and in my face. I had worked so hard to “be present to every member of the community” by avoiding difficult issues in public. That week I realized that my avoidance was also a statement—a statement of non-presence to my black residents. My silence said that both sides of the issue of racism had equal weight and that as a spiritual leader I was committed to letting evil hide as long as it was uncomfortable for me talk about. I had chosen the most vulnerable members of my congregation, and had decided that I’d address their fear and sorrow and anger privately, just in case I unsettled a cart of apples that I didn’t have the skills to re-bag.

I had another sermon prepared that day and I threw it away. I sat in my car outside the building I worked in, and cried, and prayed, and looked at my watch because I had to walk into that building in 45 minutes to preach a sermon to my brokenhearted and oppressed and racist and lonely congregation.

There are times in a preacher’s life when the lectionary is more than just a convenience, it’s a sacred mandate. I went scrabbling to the lectionary to throw me a line and keep me from drowning, and the text for the week was Matthew 2:13–23. “The Slaughter of the Innocents.”

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.” (Mt. 2:16–18)

Little boys, innocent children who didn’t know the geopolitical scene they were born into, didn’t know that they represented something terrifying and threatening to the powerful, didn’t know that they weren’t just “little children” but symbols of a deadly threat to the oppressor, little boys taken down in the streets by an insecure regime terrified of what they signified. Mothers weeping, because they didn’t lose a symbol but their babies. Oppression driven by rage and above all, by fear. And always it’s the babies, the innocent, the harmless, the different, the unarmed, that are shot down in the streets.

A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more. The sorrow of black women and mothers and sisters, right here, in our sacred text.

I wrote my sermon on the back of a charting clipboard, and I don’t have it anymore. What I remember most is how scared I was when I stood up. It would have been easier to preach to homogeny—to my seminarian friends, to the college ministry group, to the small liberal church plant. It was terrifying to preach to a room of beautiful ancient black women that I loved, that I was scared to betray by saying the wrong thing; and a room full of beautiful ancient white women who grew up in the South as far back as the 1920s and whose racism was rooted as deeply in their hearts as their identity—and who I also loved, loved, loved so much.

What I preached that day was probably 80 percent wrong, unhelpful, overly self-righteous, or overly capitulating. I “spoke of things that I did not understand” and spoke to people that I barely understood.

But I did speak. Too late, too young, too wrong, too complex, overly simplified—but none of those things were silence.

Scripture gives us a lot of ways to speak. It’s rich with language for calling angry judgment on pastors and priests (Malachi), mocking authorities with potty humor (Elijah: “LOL, maybe your God is on the toilet hehe”), for performance art as activism (Jeremiah), for calling rulers to repentance with metaphors (Nathan), for answering questions in the dead of night with the religious leaders (Jesus), and also for calling religious leaders names (also Jesus). The only thing that is not a powerful force against injustice in scripture is silence.

The only thing that is not a powerful force against injustice in scripture is silence.

I’m going to get it wrong. You’re also going to get it wrong. I’ve already gotten it wrong a ridiculous amount of times and I’m not even to my 30s yet. Some days I’ll be too gentle toward evil, and some days I’ll be too self-righteous toward humans made in the image of God. I’m going to be angry when I should be listening well, and listen silently when I should be angry at injustice. I’m going to get called out, sometimes kindly and sometimes angrily, by people that I hurt when I get it wrong. And I’m going to have to learn how to humbly course-correct myself when I’m called out, so that I keep learning how to speak, when to speak, and what to say.

These are weird and confusing and ev...

Table of contents

• Praise for Preaching as Resistance
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Responding to the Call
• Prologue: When I Kept Silent
• 1: Beloved Resistance (Or, the Sunday after Tuesday)
• 2: When to Break the Law
• 3: Answering the Call to Prayer
• 4: Everything Must Change
• 5: More Bricks, Less Straw
• 6: Heresy of Heresies: “From Deadly Unity to Life-Giving Unity”
• 7: Wake Up and Stay Woke!
• Part II: Reflecting on the Issues
• 8: Take a Knee
• 9: Sinking: A Sermon in the Wake of Charlottesville
• 10: Overcome Evil with Good
• 11: The Sleepless Night: A Sermon on Ferguson, Keeping Awake, and Jesus
• 12: And God Hovered over the Face of the Deep: Transgressing the Gender Binary
• 13: Religion That Kills: A Sermon in Response to the Pulse Massacre
• 14: When Our Thoughts and Prayers Turn to Ash: Religion, Gun Violence, and America
• 15: Encountering Pharaoh—and Climate Change
• 16: Hope for All the Earth: A Sermon from Standing Rock
• 17: Dependence Day: A Sermon for the Fourth of July
• 18: Jesus Christ for President
• 19: Nevertheless, She Persisted
• 20: Did Mary Say “Me Too”?
• 21: Deacon, Apostle, and Mother of God
• Part III: Moving Forward in Hope
• 22: Rachel Weeps for Her Children: A Sermon of Restoration
• 23: There Is Nothing New under the Sun
• 24: Schadenfreude
• 25: Who Is Your Nathan?
• 26: We Are “Them”
• 27: Good News vs. Fake News
• 28: The End of Beastly Empire
• 29: Take Me to the River
• 30: The Gospel of Resistance
• Afterword
• About the Editor
• More Books You Might Like