When Worship Is Noise (11.8.20)

When Worship is Noise
Amos 5:18-24
November 8, 2020
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

The past four years have changed me. I changed because of what I saw, felt, heard, and lived over the past four years as both a pastor and a citizen in the United States.

You’ve likely heard me reference (many times) the one, tremendously significant day I was able to spend with Gordon Cosby, pastor and founder of Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. Each time I continue to catch myself saying I have become disillusioned by the church, I then hear Gordon Cosby’s animated voice reply, “Good! That means you’ve been living under and illusion and now you see things for what they really are!”

It can be painful to recognize just how many illusions guide us, comfort us, entice us. How many illusions must be shattered?! The past four years have shattered more illusions for me as to what the church is in the United States, and particularly the language Robert P. Jones uses in his book, White Too Long, of White Christianity as American Civil Religion. So much of the faith that raised me, the Christ-haunted culture that shaped norms and mores around me, and even my professional life, has been more formed by American Civil Religion than the radical Way of Jesus the Christ.

I think I’ve been reclaiming that Way in recent years, or at least wanting very much to be on that path with intention and curiosity. I have felt myself in the “reorder” stage of assembling a faith that has been deconstructed by study, time, and the releasing of those old illusions. But I’m still in the work. I’m in process in my faithing—that life “journey without maps” Frederick Buechner calls “on-again-off-again, rather than once-and-for-all.”

I need to start in this very personal and confessional space because I am not a person with a poker face. What I am feeling and living and exploring inside myself comes out in real time all over the place. It’s how I process. It’s how I am. It just is.

So that means my processing enters the pulpit, too, and my processing in real time means I am in a certain place today, November 8, 2020, that is quite different than where I was on my first Sunday as your pastor on November 10, 2013. The world isn’t the same, either. I suspect you aren’t the same.

On this Sunday after a major election in our nation, mostly determined but with 10 weeks to go before we can officially say a new President has been sworn in, I find myself disillusioned yet again.

We’ve talked so much this summer and fall about white supremacy. About the systems and structures of our nation that were purposefully created to benefit people called white. Robby Jones’ book took us deeper into the very personal and sometimes painful work of looking at how white churches not only sided with those systems and structures but helped create those systems and structures. And not only helped create those systems and structures but twisted and massaged and manipulated their teaching of scripture and theology to support and maintain the systems and structures of white supremacy.

In seeing the breakdown of votes, and the rhetoric surrounding those votes, from white Christians, something broke in my again. Another illusion was shattered. I can’t believe I still have so many, to be honest. I broken-heartedly still don’t understand how I pick up our sacred text and read, “This command I leave you: love one another,” and “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,” or any number of guiding, formational passages of scripture and then hear my siblings in another part of this tradition sum up the whole of that same message with the slogan “God, Guns, Country.”

Now if you have hung with me for these past four years, chances are you agree with more more often than you disagree or at least you’ve learned to tune me out when I speak. But my guess is, you and I often let ourselves off the hook as the good white people who are woke and doing their work and standing up for what’s right and advocating for change. We’re different from them. That’s their problem over there.

The itch in me right now, the aching in my heart and gut, is that if I am a pastor in this huge tradition, one that is known for creating, maintaining, and supporting the structures of white supremacy, then I am still part of that very particular problem even if I’m not part of the voting bloc or the teaching platform. 

I told my friend and colleague Brian Jeanseanne this week that it feels like folks like us are sitting under a beautiful oak tree, sharing a lovely feast, having a great time. But the tree is at the edge of a field, and in the field is an enormous Klan rally complete with burning crosses. And we’re beneath the tree seeing what’s going on and congratulating ourselves for not bringing the wood or setting fire to the crosses, but we’re still at the edge of the field. And we know Uncle Tommy who brought the wood and Aunt Bonnie who helped sew the robes and we know they make the best sides at Thanksgiving because we’ll see them at the table in just a couple of weeks and sure enough plan to eat those mashed potatoes. As Fr. Rohr describes, our scrappy and wild little congregation is “at the edge of the inside” in Christian orthodoxy and certainly in American Christian practice. But this year’s growth and study, culminating in this election cycle, have me asking, “at the edge of what inside?”

Maybe it’s more like this.

Nathan and I are pretty in love with gardening, and our weekends for most of this year have become the time for acting out the plans we have been making and ideas we’ve picked up from various gardening shows and books and whatnot during the week. Early November has been marked as our time for doing some pretty heavy transplanting work of years’ old shell ginger, umbrella plant, and white swamp lilies.

But after years of neglect, all kind of other stuff is growing in there, too. And the roots have not only matted together with everything else but have found their way down so deep that they stretch beneath concrete and off to who-knows-where to find nourishment and water. Slowly and achingly, we are digging out rootballs, bulbs, and tubers. Tossing what we don’t want, carefully dividing and protecting what we do want, amending the soil, and then finally replanting what we want to see grow.

Nathan pulled up a clump yesterday that was more than 2’ wide, and it had all kinds of life growing in it. We divided the largest bulbs with a shovel, but the best way to really untangle everything that was growing was sitting down patiently and feeling through the clump by hand to find the hidden bulbs, separate them, and leave the rest behind.

For as long as I remain a pastor in the Christian tradition, this is my work. I must grow in my understanding of Jesus’ teaching and activist context of the 1st century of the common era. I must better understand how his teaching and activism lined up alongside other rabbis who were pushing and arguing and reforming their tradition in that very real, particular time. What was he doing and saying that got the attention not just of powerful religious leaders but also of the empire? This matters. This is important.

I must continue to read and learn about white supremacy in American Christianity so that I can figure out where the weeds and the tangles are that need to be left behind. I must grow in my learning from Black, Indiginous, People of Color teachers, pastors, theologians, and leaders. If I do not want to have a distinctly American lens on this faith, I must learn more from leaders of other continents and eras—particularly those great liberation theologians. 

And the more carefully attuned I am to what the glowering growth of faith MUST look like, the more easily and readily I will work my way through the clumps of matted weeds and good roots. I must be a perpetual student. I must be a student of scripture and theology and practice with a disillusioned eye and a skeptical ear when it comes to figuring out where the twisted, weedy roots of white supremacy have wrapped their way around what is meant to be growing in our hearts and minds.

That’s ultimately what this Way is about, right? What is meant to be growing in our hearts and minds? It’s not just that we are showing up and checking boxes and patting ourselves on the back for our participation trophy. Our particular church isn’t preaching the “fire insurance against hell” message, so we are (hopefully!) showing up for something other than that. What’s that something? What is the something that brings us back here, that draws us together as a people, that guides our steps in the days we are apart, that shapes our hearts and shapes our minds?

Being about the Way of Christ means we are truly living and walking and moving and exploring the Way. All of the time. 

That brings us to Amos. 

I hate, I despise your festivals,

    and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,

    I will not accept them;

and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals

    I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;

    I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

These fine folks, these good people are showing up for worship regularly. They’re gathering with their neighbors, they’re bringing their kids. They are faithfully participating in the high holy days of their tradition. They are following all of those steps deemed “right worship.” 

But their lives don’t match what their worshiping words profess. They are not practicing true justice and embodying holy righteousness. 

They want God to destroy their enemies.

And they flirt with other gods and deities when it is politically beneficial for them to do so.

They are inconsistent, filled with contradictions, and they see no problem with any of that. So the prophet Amos shows up with some harsh, even frightening words, and tells them to pick a path and be honest about it. The way you choose will take you in a specific direction. It can’t be two at once. That isn’t how paths work.

Professor Charles Aaron of Perkins School of Theology comments, “With anthropomorphic metaphors, Amos portrays God blocking every sense from enjoying or even acknowledging the worship offered by the people. God will not look on the worship, will not smell the offering, will not listen to the songs. At the beginning of the passage, God attacks. Here God ignores. The God who considered the people a ‘treasured possession’ in Exodus 19:4 now feels repulsed and disgusted by their worship. If the animal imagery sought to frighten the people, the words about God’s rejection seem intended to shame them.”

They may be faithfully showing up and going through all of the rituals and practices, but their hearts and minds aren’t being shaped by the radical love of God. They look more like the systems and structures around them instead. The something that is shaping them seems to be the power structure and dominant culture, and their worship of the one, true God is being dolloped on top of an already formed life.

If the radical love of God is the something that is forming them, then their lives should demonstrate radical love. In fact, their hearts and minds will be so totally and utterly transformed that justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

To this point, Aaron adds, “the passage more likely calls Israel to enact justice as the expected result of genuine worship. The concepts of justice and righteousness go together. Justice refers to fairness, attention to the needs of the poor, an end to oppression, a legal system that protects the rights of all people. Righteousness connotes healthy relationships, a sense of commonality, a recognition of God as the one who has formed the people into a community, a respect for the bonds among the people. The image of justice rolling down like waters calls for justice to happen immediately, like a sudden deluge. The poor and marginalized should not have to wait for justice. Justice must happen now, with the urgency of a storm. The ever-flowing stream calls for a steady supply. The community should sustain justice. Justice should remain available just as a stream provides a reliable source of water.”

This is our work, friends. For a long, long time. What path are we on? What does it mean to follow the Jesus path? How do we tend it and cultivate it and nurture it? What is it growing and producing in us? When is our worship empty and meaningless because it produces no justice and no righteousness? We have to be honest about this. We must continue to do this good, hard work, and welcome God’s radical love, the movement of the holy spirit, and the steps of Christ to be what guides us today and always.

Amen.