Sunday was a long day for me – and I knew it would be. I had to preach at my home church at our 7:30AM service and then at a United Methodist church at 10:30AM. I didn’t wait until the last minute to prepare for the preaching engagements, but yet and still I was up late Saturday night putting finishing touches on one of the sermons that needed to be just right. It was a sermon that I called “A Word to the Church during the time of War” I know it’s a pretty long title and to be honest I was fighting with that title late Saturday night. However, the sermon was about what I perceive to be the responsibility of Christians in a militaristic and unjust society. The sermon in a sentence is: “Christians should be advocates for justice, righteousness, and peace in the world.” Some might say that’s a pretty common sense or maybe even a misguided sermon. Maybe. But I enjoyed highlighting Amos 5:21-24 where the herdsman turned prophet named Amos acts as oracle of YHWH and suggests that there are times when The Almighty gets tired of solemn assemblies, offerings, and “joyful noises” and those times are when injustices are allowed to permeate society. Iraq was the main focus of the sermon. The 2,000 deaths really hit me hard – of course not as hard as those who have lost loved ones, but I felt that people of Faith (any Faith) needed to be more vocal of our displeasure with the madness that is the Iraq invasion and ongoing resistance to occupation.
I was hoping to get a copy of the sermon so that I could upload it here so that you could listen and give your views on it. Church folk don’t really critique your sermon. If they don’t like it they just don’t shake your hand on the way out. One member did say that she thought I did a good job in raising a sometimes controversial issue in a non-polarizing way. She also said that just that morning before church she was on the phone with a friend and her friend was asking, “Why aren’t more preachers speaking out about the war in Iraq?” So I guess I took that as confirmation. A couple of the other preachers said that they heard “Martin Luther King” in me and that they see me “preaching to nations.” A humbling statement and thought, but not a surprising comment. In preparation for the sermon I listened to Dr. King’s “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam” sermon over and over again. When doubting whether or not I should preach about Iraq, I was haunted by the statement that King quoted from Italian poet, Dante’:
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
I may not have lived a virtuous enough life to escape the boundaries of hell, but if I do go to hell, I don’t want it to be because I kept silent when I knew I should’ve said something.
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