This sermon was preached for Sunday, February 23, 2025 for the seventh Sunday after Epiphany, and the last Sunday of Black History Month. The texts for this sermon were: Genesis 45:3-11, 15, 1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50, Luke 6:27-38, and Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42. This sermon draws from the work of Dr. James Cone, Dr. Delores Williams, and Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas.
Growing up in public school in Connecticut in the 90s, it’s funny to me now to look back at how Christianity stuck its way into my secular classrooms. There was Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and the African-American spirituals we sang in music class. There was that terrifying day in September 2001 when our teachers openly prayed with us. And then there was the Golden Rule, hanging up on a poster on my classroom wall, justified perhaps because it is not an exclusively Christian teaching, but has relatives in Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and most other major world religions. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
To take Jesus seriously as Episcopalians means that we do not just extract the Golden Rule and let it hang out on a poster without the rest of its context, though. To follow Jesus as trinitarian, incarnational, sacramental, catholic with a little “c,” Protestant with a big “P” Christians means that everything Jesus says and teaches deepens in meaning when we place it within Jesus’ story, in the context of Christ’s birth, his ministry and life, his death on the cross, and the empty tomb.
Because the one who teaches us nonviolence will himself die by violence. The one who says, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also,” will himself be struck again and again - abused, cursed, and despised.
We understand these verses, this teaching, best when we trace how Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence led directly to his public execution. But our understanding must flow the other way, too. Our theology of the cross - what we think Jesus’ death on the cross does, why we think it happened - must make sense in light of God’s rejection of violence. To do otherwise is to break Jesus apart - to cleave his legacy in two. Over here, his nice ethical guidance and way over here, his incarnational salvific acts. A likeable, peaceful teacher over here, and a sacrificial lamb over there. There’s much more at stake here than just trying to keep Jesus coherent - bad theology kills. What we believe about God - what we believe God desires matters.
When I was choosing which Episcopal seminary to attend, I visited the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge and stopped in for noon Eucharist at the school’s chapel. Before we launched into worship, the dean of the chapel drew our attention to the line from Eucharist Prayer A: “He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.” The Very Reverend pointed out that this line makes it sound like violence was God’s will. As if God desires or needs violence to achieve God’s ends. It was my first experience of a seminary professor critiquing words straight from the Book of Common Prayer. It wouldn’t be my last. We went on to use the prayer anyhow, but I never thought of that line the same again. Surely Jesus was obedient to God’s will in going to the cross. Doesn’t he pray in the garden in the Gospel of Luke, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me, yet not my will but yours be done?”
The question of who is holding the cup is what matters here. Is it God forcing Jesus to drink or is it humankind? Are the crowds calling for Jesus’ public execution merely bit players in God’s epic plan or are they us, broken, fallible, caught up in sin, making the same terrible choice we’ve always made to scapegoat, humiliate, and lynch the other?
This isn’t just some academic thought experiment. This question is alive today. It sits by every deathbed. It lurks on every battlefield. It haunts the lynching tree. Was this death God’s will? Is this violence God’s will?
The collective, interrelated body of Black American Christian theology epitomized by the work the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Dr. James Cone, the Rev. Dr. Delores Williams, and the Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, has an answer for us on this last Sunday of Black History Month, an answer born out of Black History itself: No. No, violent death and blood-soaked suffering is not God's will nor is it God's desire. It is what God moves to defeat.
Jesus said, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” For generations, Dr. Cone writes, American slaveowners taught their African slaves that Christ “told them to turn the other cheek and to look for their reward in heaven. Be patient, [the slaves] were told, and your suffering will be rewarded for it is the source of your spiritual redemption.”
But meekness, acquiescence to oppression - that is not the nonviolence Jesus teaches here.
When Jesus says, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also,” he is doing more than just teaching us not to respond to violence. He is teaching us what a nonviolent response looks like. Offer your other cheek.
When the civil rights activists sat peacefully at lunch counters, they dared authorities to expose the violence at the roots of racist policies. When Jesus goes to the cross to die, he is not just passively accepting his fate. He dares humankind to take their rejection of radical love as far as it will go. And then, and then, God forcefully responds.
From some Christian perspectives, God accomplishes God’s work with blood and violence. The crucifixion is the seminal event of salvation, the pinnacle. It’s even suggested to be the horrific torture and death we would all deserve if it weren’t for Jesus taking our place. But in our Epistles, last week, we read the words of St. Paul to the Corinthians, “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain…If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” Paul wants his readers to remember that our faith depends on the resurrection. Easter isn’t just the surprise happy ending tacked on the salvific work of God on the cross. Easter IS how God saves the world. Resurrection, the triumph of life over death, love over hate, is what it is all about.
God does not use death to kill death. God uses life. God always uses life.
To follow Jesus is to categorically reject the notion that the ends justify the means. To follow Jesus is to live as if the means matter. The means are our spiritual witness. We already know the end. The end belongs solely to God.
To be Episcopalian is to understand context shapes theology and theology in turn shapes how we construct, resist, and respond to context.
The Kelly Brown Douglas book used to prepare this sermon, Stand your Ground, was written in the wake of the 2012 murder of Black teenager Trayvon Martin. Reflecting on the execution of another Black teenager, Jeremiah Reeves, on Easter Sunday in 1958, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached one of his most famous sermons, Loving Your Enemies, in which he said: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” It’s another quote that’s taken on a life of its own on motivational posters everywhere - but it cannot, should not, be separated out from what King was preaching about here: the words of Jesus and the ongoing injustice of capital punishment in America.
And if that lofty statement - only love can do that - brings up doubt in you, if you are wondering if you really believe it to be true, I want you to think for a minute about the people you know personally who have indeed been changed by love. I think of the folks I’ve known whose gay, lesbian, nonbinary or transgender child shifted their entire worldview. The parishioners I’ve served whose multiracial grandchildren opened their eyes to injustice and the harm of their own unconsidered prejudices. I think of my own heart.
Yes, this work is hard and slow. Yes, Jesus was dead and gone for days.
When the Psalmist says, “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.” I do not think he means the stillness of a paralyzed passivity, nor the kind of waiting that requires no action from us. I believe he means the stillness we achieve when we breathe deeply to calm our wildly beating heart, the patience we cultivate when we choose not to react with violence, and the kind of waiting that is, in its essence, trust in something beyond our own efforts and lifetimes.
I want to end with a story for you. It’s a story that isn’t finished yet. It’s a story that includes the reality that, indeed, sometimes the long slow work of love involves the sense of slipping backward.
For a brief moment in 2004, in the so-called “Winter of Love,” the city of San Francisco issued about 4,000 marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Those marriages were quickly voided by the California Supreme Court. Then in 2008, the state bans on gay marriage were overturned. Eighteen thousand more same-sex couples were married before a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage passed in 2009 and City Hall went back to denying licenses.
It was in that context on Valentine’s Day in 2011, that a small group of clergy accompanied same-sex couples as they applied for marriage licenses at San Francisco City Hall. And when they were refused, the clergy and the couples sat down and began to sing. They kept singing as they were handcuffed and led away.
The Rev. Karen Oliveto wrote that as the police officer guided her out of the building, he did so with the gentlest of touches. And when they walked down the long City Hall corridor, the officer suddenly burst into tears and blurted out, “I didn’t think it would be this hard.”
She writes: “he looked at me, tears running down his face, and told me of how he and his husband had been married in 2008. He was grateful that they were amongst the lucky ones, whose marriage is still recognized by California. "But it hurts to know there are other couples who feel the same love we do, who can't get married."
By then, we were both in tears, held in the tension felt between our two vocations. He was doing his job, by arresting me. I was doing my job by standing up for justice and love. Together, we saw how flawed our legal system is when it refuses to protect the loving relationship of all committed couples.
He led me into the holding room and before he uncuffed me, he blessed me with two simple words: “Thank you.””
That is what it means to turn the other cheek. It is to call up in the other their own deep knowledge of love. It is to say, go ahead, but as you slap me, feel how hard this is, this right here. Feel and know that this is not what you want. Not what God wants.
This is not how the story ends. Amen.
Sources for this sermon:
- Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-talk, 1993.
- James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 2011.
- Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, 2015.
- Karen Oliveto, Standing on the Side of Love, Blogpost February 14, 2011.
- Martin Luther King, Jr., Loving Your Enemies sermon as contextualized by the Death Penalty Information Center in their January 20, 2020 article: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/the-reverend-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-hate-cannot-drive-out-hate-only-love-can-do-that
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