#RevThread # 138
Walking Well
1/Listening to the Clintons, Speaker Pelosi, Barack Obama and Maya Rockeymoore-Cummings at Elijah Cummings’ funeral was really inspiring. There was something healing and magnificent in what each of these gifted leaders had to say...
Walking Well
1/Listening to the Clintons, Speaker Pelosi, Barack Obama and Maya Rockeymoore-Cummings at Elijah Cummings’ funeral was really inspiring. There was something healing and magnificent in what each of these gifted leaders had to say...
2/.. about a person they all acknowledged as their mentor. They were -- every one of them -- good preachers who knew how to draw from Scripture. Contemplating Elijah’s grace ennobled all of them.
3/I’ve had the experience of preaching in several African American urban churches, and I can tell you that the congregations always drew out of me better stuff than I knew I had in me.
4/ One of God’s great gifts to America is the African American church. And one of America’s best gifts to God is the African American Church, where God is never bored, and you never know when revival will descend.
5/So let’s think about the last few days of Elijah. As he was dying he begged us to pay attention, to open our eyes.
6/ I had no idea he was so sick; he was so full of life as he ministered with such grace to the broken Michael Cohen and roared in righteous wrath at what stupid, cruel Trump was doing to children at our border. He knew he only had a minute and he knew that eternity is in it.
7/He told us that the question we’ll be asked is: “In 2019 what were you doing to save democracy?” He knew.
8/He knew that enemies of freedom -transactional, transnational leaders of organized crime-- had breached our elections and were following a script designed to drag us into servitude.
9/Right up to the last hours on his deathbed he was signing subpoenas to force people to testify to the horror going on in our land. Open our eyes, O God!
10/Elijah reminds me of Christ Himself, reminds me of the final walk of Jesus into Jerusalem to face His own death at the hands of the Empire and the Church of His day.
11/As Jesus walked, he taught and he healed--beckoning a hated rich man down from a tree and going to dinner with him, touching and giving sight to a blind man, healing lepers so they would no longer have to scream “Unclean!” as they died in isolation.
12/Jesus knew what Elijah told himself 20 times a day: “I only have a minute, but eternity is in it.”
13/I know a good response to the evil of our time, to this moment when scores of millions are adoring a demagogue, when thugs surrounding the demagogue are looting our country’s treasure and despoiling our landscape...
14/...when deranged men with AR 15’s are lurking near school yards, when scores of millions of us are indifferent to the destruction of our Constitution as long as gas is under $3.00 a gallon.
15/That response is two-fold: (1) Decide upon legal, non-violent actions to deliver an overwhelming victory to Democrats in next year’s election.
16/Whoever wants to stay independent or Republican can of course do so, but for 2020 the only moral choice for patriotic self-aware citizens is the Democratic party.
17/With our rights and our Constitution on the line, this is no time to abet the mobsters and their goons by voting for some hapless third party. Only the Democrats have the resources and the talent to defeat the party of Trump and begin to restore constitutional order.
18/ (2) Between now and then, commit to acts of compassion, mercy and justice as you walk. Surprise people with grace: Elijah-level grace.
19/ Grace is actually powerful enough to defeat the graceless thugs trying to plunge our country into autocracy.
