Faithful Action
Sermon by Rev. Dr. Christian Scharen on the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany + Saturday, February 15, 2025.
Last night for a Valentine’s Day date, Pierrette and I did what we often do—we went out to hear live music. Last night’s show was nearby—at the Jazz Showcase in the old Dearborn Station. The Alexander McLean Project, a collaboration of vocalist Dee Alexander and band leader, composer, and guitarist John McLean, was just what we wanted for a delightful evening. They played old standards like My Funny Valentine (of course) and new tunes they are working on for their next record. Their gesture to the larger political winds were subdued but not subtle—they signaled in no uncertain terms that the so-called “Love Day” shouldn’t be just one day in mid-February but every day. Ms. Alexander couldn’t have said it better had she been in a pulpit.
I won’t lie, I was coming into our date night feeling upset, overwhelmed, besieged. I’d been pondering Pastor Sharai’s sermon from last week about remembering that even when we are feeling alone, we are not abandoned, that God is with us, and we are members of a community who stand with us. So the love talk felt more powerful than simply romance—it felt like they were saying our fundamental humanity is at stake.
There was a moment in which I was overwhelmed, though it was not because of what Ms. Alexander was saying or singing, but rather by what Mr. McLean was doing. As band leader, he was rightly front and center next to Ms. Alexander. A piano player was stage left, and to the back, the rhythm section—an upright bass player and the drummer. As the set went on, I noticed Mr. McLean kneel during a bass solo by Mr. Jeremiah Hunt, a young local stand-out player. At first I didn’t really notice, thinking perhaps Mr. McLean was fiddling with his guitar or effects pedal in front of him on the floor. But the second time, I realized that the older white band leader was kneeling so that the audience could more clearly see the brilliant young Black bass player.
I found myself thinking of this story from the Jazz club as I re-read the gospel lesson. I was not on the side of those without, that’s for sure. If I fit into Jesus’ preaching in our gospel lesson, it is certainly as one of those who is rich, full, laughing, and enjoying people speaking well of me. Woe to me, Jesus might say. The audience for Jesus’ sermon offering blessing and woe clearly included those who were poor, hungry, weeping, and suffering from hate and exclusion. He offered them not only blessing but healing, presence, compassion, mercy. “Power was coming from him,” Luke writes, “ and healing them all.”
So what of those who, like me, incur Jesus’ warning: woe to you? I was struck by the posture of Mr. McLean, kneeling on the stage so that his younger, less well known Black colleague could be seen clearly by the whole audience. It was modeling a way that those with privilege can yield it for the sake of building up those who suffer dehumanizing realities. It was on an interpersonal level what I think our faith argues we should work towards in our public life. “Justice,” the theologian Cornel West once said, “is what love looks like in public.”
Yet in our politics right now, I don’t see love and justice. What I see unfolding is the photo-negative of the Jesus I follow, the Jesus we hear in our gospel lesson today. And I have a hard time imagining how any one person’s actions will make an impact in pushing back against leaders who are rich, full, laughing, who require others to speak ill of them, and have no problem spewing hate and exclusion for those who don’t bow down. They want their rewards now, and they will spare no sacrifice to get them. History has known many such persons; Jesus knew one whose name was King Herod.
In making sense of this moment, I am finding New York Times columnist M. Gessen really helpful. They’ve spent two decades writing about the rise of authoritarianism in their homeland of Russia, and in Eastern Europe. M. left Russia in 2013 after Putin’s anti-L.G.B.T.Q. policies made life too dangerous for them and their family. Gessen, who is non-binary and trans, said this about what, if anything, has surprised them so far with this administration: “I think I’ve been unpleasantly surprised, by the fact that even in his inaugural speech, Trump started going after trans people. I knew he was going to go after trans people, but in the inaugural speech? That was unexpected, even for me.” Fighting against the attacks on trans people, on immigrants, on diversity initiatives that support historically disadvantaged people, Gessen says, is hard in the United States because of two factors.
One is the remarkable wave of “obeying in advance,” something Gessen said happened in Nazi German and in the Soviet Union, as well as in Putin’s Russia. People signal an acceptance of the shifting political winds by withdrawing into their personal lives, trying to just get by. But along with this, and contributing to it, is a second factor: “we don’t have a culture of collective action, Gessen says. We’re not equipped to stand up to this. Some extraordinary leadership and some extraordinary organizing efforts really, really soon would be needed to stave this off.”
There are few spaces of collective belonging and power in the United States. Organizations that foster by their very nature a sense of an identity not of “me” or “I” but of “us” and “we”. Unions of course are fundamentally this: their bread and butter is collective bargaining. The Church, too, has as its core theology that we are the body of Christ. Paul writes, “For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body…” (1 Corinthians 12:13). One member of the body cannot say to another, “I have no need of you.”
One powerful way we practice this collective identity is faith-based community organizing. It got its start right here in Chicago with Saul Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. The IAF mandate was to partner with religious congregations and civic organizations to build "broad-based organizations" that could train up local leadership and promote trust across community divides, an experiment in diverse popular democracy.
A successor of this legacy is Chicago’s The People’s Lobby and its Faith Liberation Movement. Next Saturday, at Fellowship Missionary Baptist, they are hosting “Pulpit to Pavement: Community Organizing and Social Justice Ministry.” I’ll be there, and I invite you, too, as we join together with churches across the city to equip ourselves for the work of fighting for our trans siblings, our immigrant siblings, all who are vulnerable and under attack by the current administration. I’ve put flyers on the welcome table if you are interested.
Such faithful action is a collective way to take a personal gesture in the jazz club where the one with more power knelt so another with less power could be visible in all his talent and dignity. Yet joining in next Saturday is only one way to participate. This moment needs us all—in prayer, in giving money, and perhaps most of all, so that we might not be discouraged, in gathering here around this table where Jesus meets our fears and doubts with mercy and compassion and with healing that empowers our daily living. This is my body, given for you, Jesus says. And by it, we become more than ourselves alone. We become the body of Christ, living as Christ for the sake of the world. Amen.