Pastor Sue Koenig
Graceham Moravian Church
(1/21) Grace and peace to you on this third day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2020; a day that is also a day of remembrance of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., pastor in churches in Montgomery, AL and Atlanta, GA, Civil Rights leader, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, martyred in 1968. Given that a metaphor for the early church was a
boat, I am reminded the Rev. Dr. King once said, "We may have all come on different ships, but we are in the same boat now."
It is a privilege and an honor to preach this evening for this Service of the Word as we seek to live into Christ’s prayer of Christian unity and remember the faith and work of Rev. Dr. King.
You may have noticed that the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is eight days long and wondered if an extra day was added because of the significant challenges to unity that we face in and among our churches and denominations. Actually, the 18th of January is a festival day for St. Peter and the 25th is recognized as the day of St. Paul’s conversion,
so it is fitting that we hear a story from Paul’s life from the Book of Acts – The Storm at Sea, The Shipwreck, and The Epiphany on the Island of Malta. This year’s WPCU theme is drawn from the extraordinary hospitality shown to Paul and those on the ship by the Maltese people: "They Showed Us Unusual Kindness."
In a commentary on the text, Dr. Amy Oden writes that hospitality was a central practice of early Christian life; Christians, themselves outsiders in the Roman Empire, practiced hospitality to strangers as Christianity began to take root in diverse cultures and ethnic contexts. From the 4th through the 14th centuries, Christians established hospitals,
houses for the poor, orphanages, and other places of hospitality. The ground, or the core understanding of their Christian identity as those who practiced hospitality, welcomed the stranger, and cared for the poor, was every person is created in the image of God – and they were welcoming the image of God in each person. It was a central practice of their life and identity as
Christians to show unusual kindness. [Commentary for WPCU, Graymoor Ecumenical and Interfaith Institute]
In Middle English (in use from 1150 to 1500) the word "kind" and the word "kin" were the same. In a very recent article entitled, "Kindness, kinship, and the boundaries of justice," Amy Petersen explained,
God’s kindness meant precisely that God became my kin – Jesus, my brother…To say "our kinde Lord" was to say that the difference in social or economic status between peasants and nobility was also erased…Jesus erased divisions that privileged some people over others…we are all the same kind of people, we are all kin. Practicing kindness requires at a
minimum, a willingness to see the image of God in, and to find a point of honest connection with, every person. [Kindness, kinship, and the boundaries of justice@amylpeterson. (Christian Century.org)
The people of Malta were outsides, barbarians to the Romans. They showed Paul and the 275 people with him extraordinary kindness – providing a warm fire, food, the necessities of life, and later honoring them as they set sail again three months after their arrival.
Oden writes that there are identity markers of Christian hospitality and kindness. First, Christian kindness involves risk. The people of Malta risked their physical safety, the depletion of their resources, the possibility of danger, disease, or dishonor that could have all devastated their community. They knew Paul had been convicted of a crime; they
received him and cared for his needs anyway. Second, Christian kindness changes the hosts, "divided people were drawn closer together." We likely know from personal experience that these things are true of Christian kindness, or hospitality, of seeing the image of God in people perceived as different from ourselves – there is risk involved; and when we welcome someone from
another country or culture and in Christian kin-ness open ourselves to seeing the world through their eyes, we are changed. "Hospitality expands the human heart." (Oden)
A third and perhaps more profound marker of Christian kindness is its healing power. In welcoming the stranger, Paul, the people of Malta received healing; here was their deep need – to welcome the stranger so that they themselves could be healed.
"They showed us unusual kindness," the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement who confronted racism and hatred and violence with Christian kindness, love and non-violence. They showed Christian kindness to those who persecuted them; risking, and experiencing, physical violence, at the Edmund Pettius Bridge in
Selma, AL on their way to Montgomery, to name one site of thousands, and imprisonment, and bomb threats and detonated bombs. They risked and sacrificed, and they stayed true to their Christian kinship with all people; practicing Christian kindness, and avoiding what the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman called, "the hounds of hell:" fear, hypocrisy, and hatred." In the book Thurman
wrote that King kept with him from a young age, "Jesus and the Disenfranchised," Thurman preached, "…out of the heart are all the issues of life and that no external force, however great and overwhelming, can at long last destroy a people if it does not first win the victory of the spirt against them. "To revile because one has been reviled – this is the real evil because it
is the evil of the soul itself." Thurman understood Christian kindness and kinship, Jesus’ command to love, and the reality of our unity – if we what to come through the storm, if we want to be healed, we must welcome the image of God in every person; and shake off the hounds of hell biting at our ankles.
"They showed us unusual kindness," after the devastating and traumatic experiences of slavery, after physical, mental and emotional abuses, after being separated from family and friends, children from parents, parents from children, spouses from one another; after being inventoried among the tools and the animals in the barn, [Peterson]; "after slavery
ended [and] metamorphosed into racism" [Rev. Dr. W. Franklyn Richardson, NCC Christian Unity Gathering, October 15, 2019]; after slavery evolved and appeared with other names, Jim Crow, forced labor, mass incarceration; after the robbery of future and inheritance and land and hope; after the discrimination and segregation; after the more than 4,000 lynchings of which W.
Fitzhugh Brundage writes, "Perhaps nothing about the history of mob violence in the United States is more surprising than how quickly an understanding of the full horror of lynching has receded from the nation’s collective historical memory;" after putting people to death by hanging them on a tree, "they showed us unusual kindness."
A week from today, I will have the privilege of traveling again to part of the "US holy land," [Robert C. Wright, Living Into God’s Dream] to walk across the Edmund Pettius Bridge in Selma, Alabama; to visit the fields where people lived for years after being evicted from their homes after they supported efforts for voting rights; to experience the
Equal Justice Initiative’s Museum and Memorial in Montgomery: to travel through the history of slavery, and racism, its offspring, [Richardson] to visit virtually those imprisoned; and then to see the hanging steel monuments with the names of all those known to have been lynched – one for every county in the country where a lynching occurred, and its duplicate lying in the
field waiting to be taken home by those counties that are working through the past on the way toward racial healing. Frederick County, MD is on the map in Montgomery, AL – a light-up map of the places across the US where lynchings occurred.
The Equal Justice Initiative was founded by Bryan Stevenson. Stevenson’s life and work are depicted in the recently released film, Just Mercy, a true story, based on his book by the same name. I encourage each of us to see the film. Just Mercy speaks to many theological themes, some that are woven through today’s service - justice, mercy, faith, grace,
trust, perseverance, evil, repentance, forgiveness, redemption, transformation, reconciliation, love, hope, resurrection. Just Mercy is devastating, compelling, and inspiring; and shines light on the shattering, generational effects of racism, childhood trauma and poverty. There is risk involved in seeing the film. It takes courage. It will change you, sisters and brothers,
and I trust you will never see the cross, the tree on which Christ was hung, or hear "The Old Rugged Cross" in the same way ever again. I also trust that it will be a step toward healing.
James Cone concludes in The Cross and the Lynching Tree: "All the hatred we have expressed toward one another cannot destroy the profound mutual love and solidarity that flow deeply between us – a love that empowered blacks to open their arms to receive the many whites who were also empowered by the same love to risk their lives in the black struggle
for freedom. No two people in America have had more violent and loving encounters than black and white people. We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, [the blood of sexual union,] and the blood of the cross of Jesus."
We are kin in our kind Lord, who first showed us extraordinary kindness.
In a few moments, we will pray and bring forward eight oars: the oar of reconciliation, enlightenment, hope, trust, strength, hospitality, conversion and generosity. But before those oars will carry us out of the crushing waves of racism in the US, we must put two other oars in the water: the oar of repentance and the oar of empathy (. We will have to
risk showing unusual kindness. May we recognize that we are of one kind and kin, that we are all in the same boat. And may it be said of us, "They showed us unusual kindness."
Read other articles by Pastor Sue Koenig
