Life Lost…and Found

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC May 10, 2020, the fifth Sunday of Easter. “Life Interrupted” series. (and Mother’s Day)

Text:  Acts 7:55-60

When I was growing up, Mother’s Day included cutting pink tea roses from the bush at the corner of the house by the garage, affixing them to our Sunday best before going to 1st UMC, Sapulpa (where the tradition was to wear a colorful rose to honor a mother still living, and a white rose to remember a mother who’d died), then, we’d eat out! Churches I’ve served observe a variety of traditions, often involving carnations and honoring mothers in the congregation. These are lovely memories for me and cherished traditions for many in congregations of all stripes. 

But other things I experienced over the years—both as a woman and a pastor—are the extraordinarily mixed and often painful emotions that come up on this day for many—for women longing to be mothers, for those whose relationship with their mother or child is broken, for those whose children are suffering or have died, and on it goes. 

Further, I’ve come to understand that Mother’s Day didn’t begin as a day to honor mothers at church or as a greeting card industry. Its origins began with Ann Jarvis who lived in Appalachia mid-19th century and founded “Mothers Work Day” to advocate for health and hygiene education to mitigate child mortality. Later, she mobilized women in Appalachia to go into Civil War camps to treat the wounded soldiers on both sides and to teach sanitation and disinfection through “Women’s Friendship Day.” Inspired by Ann Jarvis and deeply affected by the suffering and death experienced in the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe wanted to bring an end to war and equality for all people, regardless of race, religion, gender or nationality.  She wrote the Mothers Day Proclamation, calling mothers to leave their homes for one day a year and work for peace in their communities and in 1872 the first “Mother’s Peace Day” was celebrated.

While I certainly honor my mother and all mothers, I will ground my words today in this original spirit of Mother’s Day. Our text helps me to do so. Stephen’s story begins in a conflict in the early church in Jerusalem. Greek-speaking widows weren’t receiving their fair share of the daily food distribution, an “oversight” possibly motivated by prejudice or conflict between the Greek and Aramaic speaking disciples.

The response was to form a ministry team of seven servant leaders to care for this social justice and direct service ministry. Stephen is described as a shining light among this group. His powerful witness in the community is seen as a threat to certain leaders in one or two of the Jerusalem Synagogues and they stir up a slander campaign against Stephen, accusing him of blasphemy, a charge punishable by stoning according to the Levitical Law (Lev. 24:13-14). In Acts 6:13 it’s clear that the whole thing is a set-up, a completely false accusation. But it works. Stephen is brought before the Jerusalem Council and doesn’t mince words when asked what he has to say about the charges. He proceeds to lay out a “history of Israel that identifies two Jewish groups: those who accept God’s message and messengers and those who reject them. The comparison Stephen develops…aligns Stephen and the church with Abraham, Joseph, the prophets, and Jesus. His [accusers] are aligned with the Egyptians, Joseph’s brothers, the rebellious in the wilderness who disobeyed Moses, and the ancestors who killed the prophets.”

If you read the whole sermon of Stephen before the Council, you might start to feel worried about the feelings of the folks he’s calling out. It might seem overly polarized and harsh. And truth is that Stephen’s sermon—along with so many passages of Christian scripture—has been twisted and perverted into a diatribe against the Jewish people as a whole causing untold suffering and loss of life for our Jewish siblings over the centuries. And that is never OK.

What I want to highlight, however, is that in the narrative flow of the story, Stephen’s sermon was simply a prophetic reminder of what Jesus himself had said in various ways. It is a call for God’s people—no matter their religion!—to align with God’s message of love and justice as many had done through the ages. The facts of this case are that Stephen is unjustly accused by those who have power, arrested on a lie, then chooses to speak out in the face of the injustice, and is brutally murdered at the instigation of some religious leaders who manipulate the system to achieve their goal with the sanction of both church (temple) and state. (This doesn’t happen anymore, right?)

Stephen had a mother. I don’t know if she was present at her son’s final sermon or outside the city where he was dragged by people with stopped ears and enraged shouts (7:57)—those who wouldn’t or couldn’t hear the truth or contemplate the painful history that set the stage for this terrible moment. But think for a minute about how many mothers over the centuries have seen their children suffer indignities, violence, and often death in the wake of injustice? / 

A “disease” is a particular quality, habit, or disposition regarded as adversely affecting a person or group of people. A “pandemic” is a disease that spreads over an entire country, continent, or the whole world. Right now, the COVID-19 pandemic is the reality understandably on everyone’s mind. But I pray we will see that this pandemic highlights another one that has been allowed to fester and grow for ages in our country: the pandemic of racism, a disease from which no U.S. citizen can socially distance themselves. It touches and infects all of us. From the beginning, when the First Nations of this land were betrayed, forcibly removed, and slaughtered, to the horrific and immoral buying and selling of African siblings into slavery, to Jim Crow, to redlining, to voter suppression, and more—the racist “virus” has adapted and morphed as most diseases do in order to thrive. If those of us who feel defensiveness rising as I name these things allow our ears to remain open and our shouts of protest withheld long enough, perhaps we will notice who is bearing the brunt of this current suffering. 

It is often said that when white folks catch a cold, black folks get pneumonia. And what we see in the data is that black and brown siblings are disproportionately getting sick and dying from COVID-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outline multiple factors that contribute to the disparity, including housing, work, and health conditions. The CDC states, “Health differences between racial and ethnic groups are often due to economic and social conditions that are more common among some racial and ethnic minorities than whites. In public health emergencies, these conditions can also isolate people from the resources they need to prepare for and respond to outbreaks.” All these “conditions” are the result of a long, painful history that has created fault lines of injustice and inequity throughout our society—from lack of access to health care to food deserts to disparate education and school resources to a broken criminal justice system to voting access to economic divides and obscene inequalities in compensation between what we now call “essential” workers and the folks who make a phone call to make millions while playing another round of golf. Here in D.C., as of May 7th, we have had 304 deaths; 241 of those were black siblings; and 23 identified as Hispanic/Latinx. That is 264 of 304. 

I can hear the voices rushing to explain this away, to defend themselves, to rationalize the reality, to blame the victims. Those voices get so much play—those voices of people who look like me, some voices of people I hold dear—and they remind me of my own ongoing, often stumbling journey of waking up to my privilege as a white, educated, cisgender, employed, woman married to a man. I know the arguments but will not give them air here today. What I will lift up is a very basic reminder as one author frames it. “Racism is a form of structural oppression. The most common way to think about racism is to imagine a person who harbors ill will against people of color or who believes stereotypes about people of color…Such discriminatory attitudes are not racism; they are prejudice and bigotry. Racism is not merely a matter of individual feelings and beliefs but also a matter of systemic oppression.” The virus touches every person in the system regardless of where you live or what you look like or what you have.

I keep thinking about Stephen telling the story of a nation—without whitewashing it. He told the good stuff and the ways people had done harm. And the people who felt most threatened by him and what he was saying became enraged, stopped their ears from hearing or seeing what was real, worked him through the system, and got rid of him so that his words and work wouldn’t disrupt whatever it is that they felt was more precious than his life.

Stephen had a mother who knew nothing was more precious than his life. And today I want to honor her and all mothers who know intimately how precious the lives of their children are, in particular mothers of color who—as women—carry the added weight of misogyny on their backs as they navigate racism and all the complicated intersections and mutations and indignities that trail along with it while also being asked to care or worry about the feelings of white people more than their own. 

On this Mother’s Day 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I invite us to honor mothers who have been living through the pandemic of racism for generations:

• mothers whose children suffer from diseases due to poverty, pollution, or food deserts

I especially remember Ms. Wanda today as it was Mother’s Day 26 years ago when her son Ahmaud was born.  And as I prepared for today, I was struck by how many of these women I’ve just named have channeled their grief and pain into advocacy, education, and public service. They, like the women who instigated the first expressions of Mother’s Day, are not simply letting a disease—in this case the disease of racism and racist violence—continue as the normal way of things, but are rather tirelessly pressing for new practices and policies, for healing, justice, and peace.

That is the intention of Foundry Church as well. We’re not going to just flare at the outrage of another lynching. We have systematically, consistently, and more slowly than many of us would like, been laboring to arrive at this day, when we enter a time of self-assessment and discernment to identify and address how our words, practices, and both conscious and unconscious bias toward siblings of color may undermine our desire to become beloved community. This work will be akin to Foundry’s “Summer of Great Discernment” around the question of marriage equality. In order for this to have lasting impact and not just be an exercise in massaging our perceived moral highground muscles, I implore all who care about the life and witness of Foundry and truly desire a more intentional and awake expression of beloved community to engage this process even when you don’t feel like it. In a moment you will hear from servant leader, Greg McGruder, to learn more about this initiative.

I want to close by lifting one detail that may be easily overlooked in our text today. Stephen, filled with Holy Spirit as he stood before his accusers, looked up and saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God. Normally, Jesus is seated at God’s right hand. Early interpreters like Ambrose and Augustine picked up on this detail. Ambrose observed, “Jesus stood as a helpmate; he stood as if anxious to help Stephen, his athlete, in the struggle…” “[Jesus] sits as Judge of the quick and the dead; he stands as his people’s Advocate.”

As those who claim to follow Jesus, let’s stand with those he stands for, those who like Stephen are the victims of injustice… Let’s do our own work wherever we are that beloved community might become more than a dream among us strengthening us for the ongoing work to change the world for the better. Let’s let the tragic loss of life wake us up and motivate us to find a new—and so much better—way of life together.

https://foundryumc.org/