Traveling Light: The Path of Most Resistance
Luke 1: 47-54
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
Epworth United Methodist Church
Mary Ann Wright is 87 years old. In 1950, she left New Orleans and an abusive husband, and moved to Oakland. She worked in factories and as a domestic to support her children over the years. When she was 63 years old, she woke up in the middle of the night. All she remembers is that she had a vision that God was calling her to feed the hungry. “Feed the hungry?” she thought to herself, “I have 12 children!”
As Chip Johnson wrote in Friday’s San Francisco Chronicle, that Mary Ann, or “Mother,” Wright knew that this vision and calling was from God. She said, “I had no right or reason but to do what the Lord said to do.” So she began to feed the hungry. She began with one meal a week, finding and feeding hungry people camped beneath overpasses, paying for it out of her own social security check.
Today, 25 years later, at 87, she feeds 450 people a day on a modest budget with no pay and assisted primarily by her family and a network that has grown over the years.
On December 5th she was honored– but she refused to give a speech. Instead, she sang. She sang these words, “I’m a ship without a sail and by God’s grace, I’ve come a long way. I don’t know what I would do without the Lord.”
Mary Ann Wright resisted limitation, risked humiliation, insisted on her freedom to sing God’s new creation. Her soul magnifies the Lord.
Mary of Judea was about fourteen years old. She was somebody nobody would notice. She lived in a tiny occupied country. She was part of a group called Anawim, or what we would call “the poor.” Yet the angel Gabriel visited Mary and told her: God is with you; do not be afraid; God is pleased with you; you will bear and birth a child and you will name him Jesus. He will save the people.”
Mary may have been a poor unwed Jewish teenage girl from nowhere, but she sang large. She sang a song of liberation for her people. She sang a song of justice for the whole earth. She sang God’s future as if it had already happened.
God has done great things in me
I rejoice in God, my help,
For God has ended my humiliation,
He casts down the mighty from their thrones
And raises up those who have been trampled on.
God who created the universe, who liberated the slaves, who gives dreams and visions, God who calls us to community, God, who saves, who raises what is dead to new life, this God was born of Mary.
Mary resisted limitation, risked humiliation, insisted on her freedom to sing God’s new creation. Her soul magnified the Lord.
Alice Walker in her novel Possessing the Secret Of Joy, reveals that the secret of joy is resistance. The secret of joy is resistance.
In the membership vows of the United Methodist Church, one of the questions asked is “Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?”
The freedom and power to resist! The joy of resistance when responding to God’s vision with the song you were born to sing.
Those of you new to Epworth may not know Frank Walter … after decades of living in and loving this community, Frank moved to Seattle following the unexpected death of his wife, Marvel. Not long ago he sent me a newspaper clipping about a World War II military chaplain named Frederick McDonald. The article was titled ”Remembered Light.” It begins,
As he stooped to the floor of a bombed-out cathedral in Germany, picking up a few bits of colored glass, Army Chaplain Frederick McDonald had no grand plan in mind. “I guess no one will call this looting,” the Seattle-born McDonald told a fellow chaplain.
It was 1945, and McDonald was traveling across Europe with Allied troops. He collected pieces of glass from two-dozen churches in England, France, Belgium Holland and Germany. He put them in envelopes and mailed them home to his mother in Seattle. He wanted to remember those shattered sanctuaries.
50 years later a team of artists has created 25 stained glass windows each one incorporating these fragments of glass and memories from McDonald. They have become, “Remembered Light: The McDonald Memorial Peace Windows Project.” The peace windows project began over a dinner conversation at his retirement community when McDonald was in his 90s.
Early next year, these windows will find their home at the Interfaith Center at the Presidio in San Francisco. Paul Chaffee, Director of the Center said, “(McDonald) was a man of peace. His hope was that light would shine through these again in spite of the bullets.”
“Remembered light” … reclaimed glass, resists the darkness of forgotten history and hope, insists that Light, not bullets, not wars will have the last word. Fragments of glass reclaimed from violent destruction will illumine and inspire peace once again.
Ted Loder expressed this promise in human terms as he prayed … Resurrect the cluttered pieces of me into a stronger somewhat “whole” - and make me brave to dream anew, to hope the kingdom in…
On November 26th four Christian Peacemakers were kidnapped in Baghdad. Our prayers continue for their safe return.
On November 29th Rush Limbaugh responded to this news report by saying that he kind of liked it, because he liked it when people had to face reality of life and world.*
Our prayers continue for their safe return.
One of the peacemakers is Tom Fox of Virginia, 54 years old. Last May he wrote, We are throwing ourselves open to the possibility of God’s grace bringing some rays of light to the shadowy landscape that is Iraq.
These Christian peacemakers resisted limitation, risked humiliation and death, and insisted on their freedom to sing God’s new reality.
The secret of joy is resistance … the insistent claim that what will be is being born anew here and now. Fragments, broken pieces … of our lives just like broken glass made to shine in a new reality.
Fourteenth century mystic and theologian Meister Eckhart wrote these words: “We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me, if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself?...What good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace… if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture?
This Christ of resistance and of freedom and of joy is ready to be born once again … let every heart prepare him room … let every life prepare him a path … and may our souls magnify the Lord. Amen.
*(Media Matters report re: Rush Limbaugh’s comments on the Christian Peacemakers) "Well, here's why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality."
After suggesting that the story "could all be BS ... could all be a stunt," "But any time a bunch of people that walk around with the head in the sand practicing a bunch of irresponsible, idiotic theory confront reality, I'm kind of happy about it, because I'm eager for people to see reality, change their minds, if necessary, and have things sized up."
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