Doom to those who desire the day of the Lord!
Why do you want the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, not light;
19 as if someone fled from a lion,
and was met by a bear;
or sought refuge in a house,
rested a hand against the wall,
and was bitten by a snake.
20 Isn’t the day of the Lord darkness, not light;
all dark with no brightness in it?
21 I hate, I reject your festivals;
I don’t enjoy your joyous assemblies.
22 If you bring me your entirely burned offerings and gifts of food—
I won’t be pleased;
I won’t even look at your offerings of well-fed animals.
23 Take away the noise of your songs;
I won’t listen to the melody of your harps.
24 But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Common English Bible)
Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday 2021
I was in my second-hour high school debate class—it was my first year on the school debate team. Ironically, a classmate and I had just written a case on the need for the federal government to treat terrorism as a weapon of mass destruction—when our principal switched on the school’s public address system to tell us that the World Trade Center had been attacked on September 11, 2001.
That day became one of those days where you knew exactly where you were when a moment that changed everything occurred. It rivets you to that spot, because you know exactly what took place right when you were in that spot. It changes your relationship not just with time, but with geography as well. It spins strands of memory that extend past yourself, and into the world in which we live.
Valley Christian Church is now one of those places for me, because it was here, just a stone’s throw away in my office, where I first learned of what was occurring at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Carrie was off that day, and we had just finished having a sushi lunch together here at church, when I had returned to my desk and saw the news notifications popping up on my devices. Valley was already a special place to me, but it is now tied to me in a way that very few other places are.
For those of you of my parents’ generation or older, I imagine the 1960s produced some of those places for you, as one after another you witnessed the loss of a generation of leaders—John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and, on April 4, 1968, Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, a few of you have already shared with me where you were on that day, and I have been genuinely moved by those memories and recollections. Especially as time inexorably plunges forward, removing us ever further from the events of those days, your memories are especially valued and cherished.
This is my first Martin Luther King Jr. weekend with all of you, here in the Deep South, and I want to stress that what I preach today, I preach to the church universal as well as to us. There is a helpful term in Roman Catholicism, urbi et orbi, “to the city and the world,” which is used for certain papal sermons and speeches—they are addressed not only to the gathered assembly, but to humanity.
Because on this topic, we are dealing with a fifty-state sin. I was born and raised in Kansas, and growing up, our history curricula and broader culture made a holy stink about us being a free state—the last free state admitted to the Union before the start of the Civil War. But afterwards, we became a segregation state, to the extent that the watershed Brown v. Board case that integrated the public schools originated in Kansas—the case’s full name is Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the state capital of Kansas. And I attended college in the state of Oregon, which was explicitly chartered and founded as a whites-only state—Black Americans were expressly forbidden from settling there.
So to force the South to shoulder the entirety of this sin
does, I believe, a grave disservice to us all. At least outside the South, I can
say that I think it is done to try to absolve the rest of us of doing the work
to really reckon with the fifty-state sin of racism. But it is all of us, as an
assembled people, upon whom the task of dismantling this original sin falls.
That much, Amos makes abundantly clear. And I will testify that deciding to leave behind any defense of this sin, and to devote myself instead to taking it apart, has been one of the most freeing things that I have ever done in my personal walk of faith.
The final verse of this excerpt from Amos, that justice would roll down like waters and righteousness like a never-ending stream, was famously preached by Rev. Dr. King, and there is an entire buildup to it. Amos is a prophet whose ministry coincides with the reign of one righteous king—Uzziah of Judah—and one unrighteous king—Jeroboam II of Israel. It is the latter to whom this stemwinder in Amos 5 is directed.
Ancient kings were sometimes notorious for employing court prophets—prophets who essentially told the king what he wanted to hear about God’s will for him, rather than what may or may not have actually been God’s will for him. Amos is not one such court prophet; in fact, in Amos 7 he explicitly denies any such status. The preface to his book describes him as a shepherd from Tekoa, not far from Bethlehem, the city of David and later of Jesus, in Judah--a city with a tradition of raising up world-changing shepherds. Amos also adds later in the book that in addition to herding, he is also a gardener or groundskeeper—a manual laborer.
In Amos, I think we should recognize the tradition and history of Black American Christianity—brought up by people very purposely kept segregated away from places of status and power in favor of lower-paying labor-intensive jobs (and for no pay during chattel slavery) yet through whom God chooses to speak. Amos is also a transplant, someone born in Judah but laboring in Israel, a lowly and oppressed outsider.
And God speaks to him, and through him. The context of justice, as true as it was in Amos’s time as it is in ours, is that God will eternally confound our efforts to enable oppression, evil, and senseless violence—and especially when we try to claim that God wants or endorses such sinful things.
For what God says in Amos 5 is unambiguous: what we may think pleases God, or more specifically what we may want to please God, may not necessarily in fact please God. In Amos 5, it is the offerings of animals and music in joyous assemblies that do not please God. Today, it is the white nationalism dressed up in Christianity and unleashed upon the Capitol building that does not please God. It has been the racism against which Rev. Dr. King preached and protested, the bigotry that he and his colleagues in righteousness protested and resisted, that does not please God.
And do not for a second, beloveds, believe that their work is done. The first two weeks of 2021 should impress upon us that fundamental reality. We may have come so far, but we still have so far yet to go, and simply splicing together a greatest hits version of Rev. Dr. King quotes stripped of their context is not going to deliver us there. More, much more, is required of us in this moment.
I spent part of Advent sharing with you, in my sermons, my family’s own story, our history of escaping genocide, of losing everything including loved ones, just to be able to survive, and I did it for moments like this one, so that I can share with you from a place of both benefiting from unearned status and privilege, and belonging to an ethnic group historically targeted for violence and persecution.
These should be incompatible things—my family history should have instilled in me a fierce aversion to benefiting from racial supremacy, because ethnic supremacy was what led to my ancestors being exterminated en masse. But it didn’t. It didn’t. That is how strong these sins are.
I was led by the Holy Spirit to Valley in part because of how fondly you spoke of your relationships with our siblings in Christ at Macedonia Christian Church and Primera Iglesia, both in your search profile and throughout the candidating process. The Spirit spoke to me through that. And if you are game to continue building upon that work of right relationship and reconciliation, including making ourselves into better participants in that work, I am right there with you. I cannot begin to tell you how happy and fulfilled that would make me.
Our work together can be the context of justice, if we are able to see justice as not only the righting of historic wrongs, but also of preventing future wrongs by building a kingdom of heaven here that honors our neighbors and siblings as the creations and children of God whom they are.
Decreasing the likelihood of future harm done, of future sin inflicted upon one another is a critical part of justice, including as practiced by the Civil Rights Movement. They marched and demonstrated and voted and educated so that people in the future would not be subjected to the same racist sins that they were. The context of justice must make room for that vision of the future, a future in which accountability is sought for wrongs done, but also in which we ourselves also become less apt to wrong one another.
Then, and only then I believe, may our assemblies and sacrificial giving be as fully pleasing to God as they are capable of being, because they will have been built on what Amos’s fellow prophet Micah tells us that God values the most: justice, kindness, and walking humbly.
I do not know when, or where, the next event will happen that we will remember exactly where we where we were when we took place, only that there will surely be another, and another after that. Lightning strikes, and moves on from the spot where it last struck, but it strikes again, with the rolling thunder that chases after it.
What follows is up to us, and us alone. No buck-passing, no excuses, no dissembling. It did not work for Adam when God confronted him about eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and it will not work for us. Excuses are burdens—we have to keep up their justifications, they weigh down their consciences, and they inhibit us from walking forward together. Laying them down in favor of the truth is an act of freedom, of liberation, of faithfulness in the God who gave to us a Messiah to lead us into truth, and away from the lies of bigotry, racism, and prejudice that have been used to weigh down and keep back our fellow children of God.
You shall know the truth, Christ Jesus teaches us in John 8, and the truth shall set you free.
Free at last, free at last.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
January 17, 2021