Thursday, June 9, 2022
Thursday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Singing in the rain
Sometimes I wait till the last minute to write these devotions. Sometimes there is even a good reason why I wait. Last night I could not tear myself away from PBS’ “The Black Church.”
I could not tear myself away, from the pictures and the stories, the humiliations and the humility of black people in America, from the songs and the speeches that mesmerized the listeners then and mesmerized me now. Not just me, no, but hundreds of thousands of others.
If I’m black, I am proud and lifted up. If I am white (and I am), I am ripped into a patchwork of broken fabrics: guilt and shame, sorrow and joy, complicity and silence, but then finally I hear the awesome, ear-splitting harmonizing shouts of victory. Victory in Jesus, our savior forever. He sought me and bought me (even me) with his redeeming blood. And I too can sing.
Elijah said to Ahab, “Go up, eat and drink, for there is the sound of a heavy rain.” And Elijah climbed to the top of Mt. Carmel, crouched down on the earth, and put his head between his knees.
Can there be any doubt that the rain will come? Three years and no rain, but now as Elijah prays again, here comes the rain, here the rain is coming, the falling down of the sky … is nigh. Do you believe it?
“Climb up and look out to sea,” he told his servant, who went up and looked but reported, “There is nothing, sir.” And seven times Elijah told him, “Go, look again!”
A black singer said, sitting in her church, “Without the music there would have been no black freedom movement. We sang to gain courage and march out on the streets. When we were grabbed and beaten by the white police, we sang; when they slapped handcuffs on our thin wrists, we sang; when they kicked us into prison cells, we sang. And as we sometimes fell asleep, we kept on singing. We heard each other singing. And we did not stop.”
Now the seventh time the young man looked toward the sea, and this time he told Elijah, “There is a cloud as small as a man’s hand rising from the sea.”
Now isn’t that just the way of God, to take nothing, make a little something, and then make something great from that little something? President Obama stood in the AME pulpit in Charleston on a hot June day of 2015 eulogizing, mourning the murder of nine men at the historic South Carolina church, saying that the killer hoped his gun and bullets would divide and further separate blacks from whites. Then the president looked up, and made a little something into …
“He smiled a tiny smile and looked out at the huge, weeping congregation, He said to them, “But you know, our God works in mysterious ways.” The president stood for thirty silent seconds. And then he sang. President Obama sang “Amazing Grace” in his strong baritone voice, and the spectacled, berobed preachers and Methodist bishops behind him rose and clapped and sang along. We rocked our souls in the bosom of Abraham. In that moment President Obama became Pastor Obama, and he led the nation in our grief, inviting us all to tap the “reservoir of goodness” that God has given us for such a time as this, and for every other time as well.
Elijah told his servant, “Go and say to Ahab, ‘Harness up and leave the mountain before the rain stops you.’” In a trice the sky grew dark with clouds and wind, and a heavy rain fell. Ahab mounted his chariot and made for Jezreel. But the hand of the Lord was on Elijah, who girded up his cloak and ran before Ahab all the way to approaches of Jezreel.
(1 Kings 18, Psalm 65, John 13, Matthew 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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