Stand Up and Live

Sermon from the Rev. Joe Hensley, Rector, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | The third Sunday after Pentecost, Year C,  June 5, 2016

As you will see in the announcements, I will be going with a group of youth and adults to a camp called Glory Ridge. I’ve talked about that a few times in other sermons. It’s near Ashville, North Carolina, and it’s a place where followers of Jesus have been gathering for decades to be closer to God and each other and to go out into the community and do service for others. It’s a place where I’ve really felt close to God and learned a lot about myself and about how faith works. The man who started the camp was a Presbyterian pastor named George Moore. I’ve probably told this story in a sermon before so if I have, you’re just going to have to hear it again; it’s a good story. This was in the 1970’s, and Brother George, as he’s known, was carving this camp out of nothing. It was an old apple orchard and it had gotten covered over in briars and they were hacking into the briars trying to build little cabins so they could bring children from the community to this little church camp he was building. Little did he realize that later on it would become a place where people from all over would come. They were just getting started on it and things were not going as smoothly as he would have liked, so he and a friend who was working with him on the camp went down to town to get some supplies. They got the supplies and were checking out and the lady at the counter asked, “Pastor, how’s it going up there at that church camp that ya’ll are building?” George took a breath and he could just feel the weight of all the things that weren’t going right and all of the things that he wished were going better and he started to open his mouth and say, “Well, you know it isn’t going as well as we would like,” but his friend interrupted him and said, “Ma’am, we’re right on schedule.” George tells the story and says, “It was like he saved my life. He saved me from going down that spiral of negativity. He showed me a truth that yes, we were right on schedule, we were right on time.” His friend interrupted him in a way that was life giving. Sometimes interruptions can be life giving.

In the Gospel today, Jesus interrupts a funeral procession. Can you imagine interrupting a funeral procession? Jesus comes to the town called Nain with this big crowd behind him and they come to the town gate and here comes this widow and her only son who’s dead on a stretcher and they’re carrying him out of the city with another huge crowd behind them and these two crowds are meeting and here comes Jesus. Now the respectful thing to do would have been to stand aside and be quiet and let the procession go by, but Jesus interrupts this procession. He goes up to the widow who’s crying and says, “Stop crying,” and he goes up to the stretcher and puts his hand on it and it says the bearer stood still. Everything stops. Then Jesus commands the young man to be raised from the dead.

If he hadn’t done that maybe people would have said he was being rude, but if you step back before the point where the boy raises from the dead, Jesus is being pretty bold, stepping into territory folks would say he shouldn’t, but he feels in his heart; it says “he felt compassion.” That word that the bible uses for compassion means this gut feeling of love, connection, suffering with the other. Jesus feels compassion, so because he feels compassion, he feels compelled to interrupt what is a procession to the grave.

Jesus comes into the world in many ways to interrupt our processions to the grave, not always literal processions to the grave, but there are lots of ways in which we behave as if we are in our way to the grave. My friend, brother George, opened his mouth to begin his laundry list of all of the things that were going wrong, all of the things that weren’t working out right. He was not in a life-giving mode at that point and his friend interrupted him to say, “No ma’am we are right on schedule.” We have our ways, do we not, of behaving as if we are not fully alive, and Jesus comes to interrupt us and to say, “You’re not dead yet. It’s time to rise up. It’s time to realize there can be a new possibility.” I think we too are called to be holy interrupters at times for one another. Now there’s a difference between interruption and interruption. There’s interruption that is rude, and that’s interruption we do because we think we’re right. We say “I’ve had enough of hearing you talk. I’ve got to jump in here because I know I’ve got something better to say.” That’s not the kind of interruption I’m talking about. Holy interruption comes from that sense of compassion, that sense of feeling, that sense of connection with another, saying, “Wait a minute, I’ve got stop this death train before it goes any further. “

This past week on Thursday, some of you may have seen that we circulated pictures from St. George’s and there were things all over the Internet of people wearing orange. Did anybody see people wearing orange this week? It was all about raising awareness about gun violence. June 2 is Gun Violence Awareness Day. I looked up the story about where wearing orange comes from. In 2013, a young woman was killed by a gun in Chicago, Illinois, and her friends didn’t know what to do. They said, “We have got to do something.” They heard about Gun Violence Awareness Day, and said, “We’re going to wear orange because orange is a loud color, orange is a color that gets attention, orange is the color hunters wear because they won’t want to be shot. We’re going to wear orange.” You might say, “That’s just silly, what’s that about?” For them it was a way of interrupting the cycle of violence in their community and saying, “We’re not just going to stand by and do nothing. We have to raise our voices. We have to interrupt this conversation that happens in our community that ends up with people dying because of guns.” So they wore orange in 2013. This year, the orange has gone viral, so to speak, and people all over the world were wearing orange. I don’t know if it’s going to do a lot of good to change violence or not, but I see it as a holy interruption, a way to say, “Wait a minute, let’s stop for a minute and look at how we are continuing patterns in our world that are about death and how do we turn them around and make them about life?”

Another story out of Chicago, Illinois. There are communities in Chicago where violence is at epidemic levels. There’s a group of people who have been involved in gangs who have decided that instead of going to funerals, they need to stop funerals. They need to be holy interrupters. There’s even a documentary called The Interrupters. These people are going into their communities and they’re treating violence like an epidemic disease. There are three things you do to treat an epidemic disease: You interrupt the transmission, so when they hear stories about one gang going after another gang, they try to mediate a peace treaty. The second thing you do is reduce the risk among those highest at risk, so they’re working individually with people in the community who are likely to commit violence, young people, trying to give them other opportunities, other avenues to direct their energies. The third thing is we change community norms, so any time there is an act of violence in the community, they don’t just sit by and say, “Oh well, there’s nothing we can do.” They say “No, we’re going to pray and we’re going to speak out and we’re going to say no more! We’re going to change the way we talk about and respond to violence in our community.” To me that is what holy interruption is. That’s life giving. That’s saying we’re not going to let this funeral train go any farther.

So how are you and I called to be holy interrupters? To be Christ-like in that way for one another. The first thing to remember is that it’s not because we’re right, it’s because we feel a sense of compassion. So the first thing to do is really take time in our lives to feel the compassion within ourselves and others of the suffering of the world. There’s so much that it can be overwhelming sometimes and we might have to pick and choose where we’re really going to focus our attention. Then we find ways to listen for how the Spirit maybe calling us to interrupt, to disrupt a disaster. Maybe a minor disaster, maybe a major disaster. Maybe it’s as simple as when we feel ourselves going down that downward spiral of negativity, stopping ourselves. Or when we see a friend say, “Wait a minute, you’re right on schedule.”

Today we’re going to worship in Hurkamp Park, and to me it’s a minor act of holy interruption because people will be coming down William Street and will say “What’s going on over there?” and we’re just going to interrupt a little bit, and it’s not because we’re right, or holier than thou or because we want to be out there so we can say look at what good Christians we are, but we want to be visible in a way that maybe interrupts just enough, just enough that somebody might say, “What is this community thing all about?”

Holy interruption. We heard the story this morning of Paul saying he had been persecuting the Christians and then God interrupted Paul and said, enough of this violent conversation, Paul, I’m going to make you somebody who is a giver of life instead of a bearer of death.

We are called to be Holy Interrupters, and so may God give us the grace to feel the compassion for ourselves and for each other. Give us the grace to say to one another, stand up and live. Stand up and live.