The Church By The Newsstand, 2*

Sermon by James W. Crawford

November 2, 1997

Luke 4: 14-21

*The number 2 stands after the sermon title because it is a title used in 1977. The theme is the same; the sermon is different.

Last Sunday morning Etta Johnson sat at our front desk greeting people and answering the telephone. I happened to be picking up some material from  narthex office and heard Etta on the phone speaking with someone inquiring about our services here. The person asked about our location. I found myself intrigued with Etta's answer. She talked of our corner here at Dartmouth and Boylston. She alluded to our place on Copley Square. But then--just amazing!--She did not mention the landmark library across Boylston Street. She did not refer to our neighbor across the Square, Trinity Church. She located us as the Church next to the newsstand. "When you exit the subway," she said, "you'll see a newsstand with a tower next to it. That's us."

Oh, Etta! Right on the money! What a great place to be! A church at an urban crossroads next to a newsstand.

I

I am convinced our Lord himself loves this location for one of his churches.  We are cut from New Testament cloth. Surely one of the pivotal passages in the Gospels, as we read from the Gospel of Luke a few minutes ago,  signals the return of Jesus to his hometown and to his local congregation. One of Nazareth's boys, so to speak, goes off to carve out a career for himself. He returns home to reintroduce himself and to offer a show-and-tell regarding his experience while away. As the custom of centuries virtually dictates, his neighbors invite him to participate in morning worship and to read the scriptures, so Jesus opens to the prophet Isaiah and he reads as follows:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind; to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

Nothing startling here: a passage the congregation knows by heart. Then Jesus stuns them: "Today," he says, "today, in your very hearing this text comes alive. I am the one," he affirms, "who fulfills the dreams for our heritage, whose life is given over to those in bondage, in poverty, in prison.  A new era begins today. The age of justice and reconciliation you wait for breaks in upon you now."

Now this proclamation of our Lord says different things to many people. But clearly, we see in this announcement that the emissary of our God comes to our world because our God cares about what it is that makes or breaks our common life. When Jesus talks about releasing prisoners and liberating the oppressed, he is talking about conditions of the world we live in. He insists the center of Christian faith lies not in a series of mystical principles, nor a collection of pithy sayings. He describes a new community where those on the outside and those at the bottom know freedom and full participation in the human community. He does not formulate a new philosophy; he proclaims the release of prisoners. He never mentions a new religion; he promises only that broken victims go free. He does not read the prophetic passage as if it were an antiquarian text. He reads it and presents it as challenging and vibrant testimony to a living God. Jesus announces the inauguration of a new order bursting on the world's landscape promising nothing less than dramatic social change. He represents a world turned upside down. His presence, his promises, his vision, so upsets and infuriates his listeners--friends, no doubt of his family throughout his life--they find themselves so agitated and enraged, and no doubt threatened by his message, that before the day is out they arrest him, bundle him up, take him to the edge of town and prepare to throw him over the cliff to his death. Jesus escapes that assault, but it bodes ill for the remainder of his ministry.

You see, the Bible tells about a God who takes our human story seriously. It contains a vast collection of material, narratives, poems, myths, songs, testimonies, polemics, history, and unflinchingly deals with news--withnews! That slave revolt in Egypt, for instance. Moses stripping the land of cheap labor. Remember? Brick makers for the pyramids. What happens?  Brick futures fall through the Alexandria stock exchange's psychological floor. Pyramid construction companies cannnot fill their contracts. The economy crashes--who knows?--554 points! More! Pharaoh's army chasing the fleeing slaves into the Red Sea, then gets swallowed up in an oceanic catastrophe. Talk about news! That'll make headlines in the Cairo Times.

Or King David. My heaven! talk about news! International intrigue, clashing tribes brought together not so much by negotiation but by cracking heads; James Bond-like espionage; mucking around in bloody battlefields. And who can forget Bathsheba? David plots a soldier's death just so he can claim that soldier's wife. Not a nice guy, this David. An investigative reporter like Bob Woodward would have a field day and win a Pulitzer off him.

And the prophets. Indeed, one of them, Isaiah, after whom Jesus patterns his life. The prophets provide polemical commentary at the vortex of human events: war, exile, poverty, power abuse, fraud, public lying. These seers are not into abstract romantic visions. As Abraham Heschel writes, "Instead of showing us through the elegant mansions of the mind, the prophets take us to the slums. . . To us, a single act of injustice--cheating in business, exploitation of the poor--is a slight; to the prophets a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence; to us an episode, to them a catastrophe, a threat to the world . . . Even a minor injustice assumes cosmic proportions."

Jesus is immersed in this heritage. Not, as Heschel reminds us, amid the "elegant mansions of the mind," but in the pain, outrage, struggles and misery of human life. In short, the stuff of newsstands.

II

I take that as our charter. This stuff of newsstands ought still to serve as a primary concern of those of us who confess the Biblical faith. Great issues with profound implications for justice and peace swirl around us no less so than they did for Jesus and his precursors. Not long ago, just three years--remember?--we had two ordained ministers running for president of the United States, Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson, each of them using religious rationale for their public policy stances, both of them, more often than not, 180 degrees in disagreement with one another.

And daily we see the conflict over reproductive rights, the struggle going on with men and women on picket lines, some carrying rosary beads, others holding little crosses, still others garbed in clergy collars, quoting denominational arguments and judicial proclamations. My colleague, Rick Chrisman, for religious reasons, commits himself profoundly to The Massachusetts Religious Coalition for Reproductive Rights. That is one side. And Bernard Cardinal Law of the Catholic Archdiocese is hardly able to make any pronouncement about any public issues without using reproductive choice as his lens for the contempt for human life he sees embedded in other matters of human breakdown scattered across our urban landscape. Two Christians, radically divided by a life and death issue, their convictions rooted in theological rationale. God bless you Richard Chrisman! Newsstand stuff!

Or the death penalty. What a week this has been at Max Kaiserman's newsstand next door! And it is not over. What do we do with a criminal penalty that in the name of justice--justice!--and the legal procedures of what John Winthrop called a Commonwealth, what do we do when we find ourselves wrestling with moral questions having to do not only with the heinous nature of the crime but who these people are whose life the state will take in retribution? The questions surrounding the death penalty in this country are simply staggering. For instance: Is it evenly applied to all cases?  Do some people get a break? Will all those charged in a capital case have the best lawyers and defense available to them? Is there evidence the penalty deters the crime? Is it possible the state will take a life through an error of judgment, a tainted procedure, a perjured testimony? What is the intellectual capacity of the so called perpetrator? Good people disagree on the weight of these variables as they seek to ameliorate a cycle of violence, as our House of Representatives did this very week. Statistics, of course, do not tell the whole story, and passions run high. But the Supreme Court's former Justice William O. Douglas, looking at the statistics some years ago, wrote a telling and illuminating statement. He wrote that the Courts would not permit any law which stated "that anyone making more than $50,000 would be exempt from the death penalty . . . nor would the courts permit a law whose terms said that blacks, or those that never went beyond the fifth grade in school, or those who made less than $3000 a year, or those who were unpopular or unstable would be the only people executed. A law which in the overall view reaches that result in practice has no more sanctity than a law whose terms result in the same consequences." Race, poverty, inadequate legal representation, intellectual incapacity, the passion for vengeance add up not to justice, although that is the claim, but as Justice Douglas indicates, to gross injustice played-out on a corrupt and topsy-turvy playing field. This deserves headlines at the newsstand!

How shall we speak to these matters as Christians from our churches? It can be a dangerous path to follow. Faith and public issues, faith and the newsstand can lead us into deep and turbulent waters. Over the centuries we Christians have, as Roger Shinn reminds us, consecrated too many wars, blessed too many ventures of imperialism, censored too many artists and scientists, sought the privileges of government for ourselves, endorsed Holy Commonwealths resulting in merciless persecution of dissenters. This matter of faith and our religious plunge into the frequently moral ambiguities behind the headlines can lead us into an arrogant, blind, stupid, self deceptive, communally destructive moralism rupturing and defeating the very hopes and goals we pursue in the name of the good.

But again, just as churches over the years have taken deadly and inhuman action ostensibly for Christ's sake, so have we evaded responsibility by setting ourselves apart or standing aloof from the fierce moral struggles of God's world. Just as we have zealously run haywire, so we have too often cozied up to the powers that be. We still look back on the blatant evil of slavery wondering how a country calling itself Christian at the time could in any way countenance the horror of a slave trade, the contempt for human beings, the inclusion in our constitution of men and women of African descent defined as ¾ of a person.

Or, even in our own time--this year, this week, yesterday, today!--to witness the vast concentrations of wealth marrying themselves to vast concentrations of political power, corrupting a democratic polity--a democratic polity--where everyone is to be equal before the law, where conscience, integrity and fairness cannot be bought off, where privilege, access, exemption are not for sale--a stance our religious tradition, with its meeting houses and democratic style, claim as a birthright. To throw up our hands in cynicism with the comment, "They all do it!" as close to the truth as that sometimes appears, is to fail the promise of equality before the law and before God. It is to surrender to the inevitable--inevitable--sin grounded in powerful inclinations to self-interest inherent in binding economic and political power. Human nature being what it is --fallen--these powerful combinations operate to sustain themselves, their preeminence and position, so those without the votes, the money, the quid pro quo, the deal--you know, the poor, the disenfranchised, the alien, the silent ones--are left outside the system. Is it any wonder so many of them--so many of us--no longer vote?  To use that time-honored title appearing on Anita Hill's new book, the churches must continue to speak truth to power, political, economic, ecclesiastical, bureaucratic--whatever--and our failure to do so may be a sign of complacent acceptance of our own privileged place in the system itself.

And yes, another risk of our standing aloof to the issues of the newsstand can be witnessed in this late emphasis on religion's being some kind of salve for our personal hurts, an extension of therapy for our inner tensions, a means to personal success. This privatizing of spirituality flies in the face of public responsibility. My needs, my interests, my feelings must be met and satisfied to the full or I am an unhappy camper. My soul! This turning our faith into the equivalent of talk show catharsis, this sticking of the Universal God into a niche no larger than ourselves and how I feel today bespeaks a trend that somehow fences us and our religion off from the great public concerns embraced by the prophets and their progeny, yes, even the Nazarene who followed the footsteps of Isaiah.

So friends, being a church next to the newsstand and taking the headlines seriously, the risks of our discernment and involvement are two: a zealous moral arrogance dusting antagonists, and positing ultimate evil in a world frequently garbed in grays. And secondly, a spiritual narcissism leading to complacency, self-satisfaction, if you will, an "It's just me and Jesus" syndrome locking out the urgent cries of a world all around us suffering and struggling for wholeness and healing, justice and peace.

III

Before we are finished one important footnote. If you take a look at travelogues, postcards, books about Boston, you will find references to this church as "historic Old South Church." It is not because we are 327 years old. It is not because we own Thomas Prince's monumental l8th century library or Paul Revere silver. Hardly. It is because ours is a tradition of engagement in issues troubling our world: newsstand issues. We claim here a forthright dedication to the social implications of the Christian ethic. At the time of the American Revolution important questions of civil liberty lay at stake and our forebears did not retreat into a privatized religious stance. They dumped the tea into the harbor. When the abolition of slavery and the Civil War divided this nation, our Meeting House became a conscription center and Jacob Manning, one of my most illustrious predecessors, went to war as a chaplain and sent his reflections back to the Boston Journal. When 19th Century Boston passed through the pains of industrialization and children--children--were being ground up in the factories and on the streets, Joshua Huntington, Pliny Cutler, Samuel Armstrong, Charles Cleveland and Josiah Salisbury --the minister and Deacons of this church--founded the City Missionary Society, a coalition establishing the first primary schools in this city. They constituted the conscience of the community. That kind of concern and action makes a church historic. It insists, as one observer writes,  "it insists that any version of Christian faith that does not grapple with war and peace, human equality, hunger, civil liberties, the hard decisions posed by medical technology and a host of other social challenges is not a version of faith worth either the time or pulpit or pew."

True. And what does that mean? It means we will always be a church by a newsstand.