Life on the Margins

“When we start from the margins, we are freed to speak the truth to power in fresh ways.”

Life on the Margins

A Sermon by Jeffrey K. Krehbiel

21^st Sunday in Ordinary Time

August 24, 2008

But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. (vs. 17)

Church of the Pilgrims

2201 P Street NW

Washington, DC 20037

(202) 387-6612

www.ChurchOfThePilgrims.org

E veryone seems to be captivated by the civic forum held last week for the presidential candidates led by Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church out in California. There has been a lot of controversy over whether we now have a theological litmus test for presidential candidates, and whether we will see similar forums at mosques and synagogues some time in the future. I suspect not, which is too bad. I want to know a candidate’s values, but not necessarily their views on the atonement. I would point out, however, that while the venue has changed, the dynamic is nothing new. In fact, one of the pastors of this congregation played a similar role in the in the 1960 presidential campaign.

Herb Meza, who served as pastor here from 1968-1980, was before that pastor of a Presbyterian Church in Houston. While he was there, he organized and moderated the crucial Houston Ministerial Association meeting where candidate John F. Kennedy and his advisors chose to address head-on the continuing questions about whether he would be taking directions from the Vatican if elected president. After their meeting with Kennedy, Meza and the other pastors– all of them Protestant, of course– pronounced with confidence that they believed Kennedy would be his own man, thereby laying to rest the controversy of Kennedy’s Roman Catholic faith. Virtually every historian of that campaign credits Meza’s organizing of that meeting to have been the turning point of the campaign; and in recognition of that fact, Dr. Meza was later asked to give the invocation at the dedication of the Kennedy Presidential Library in Massachusetts.

Well, as it says in the first chapter of Exodus, “there is a new Pharoah who knoweth not Joseph.” None of the candidates this year are lining up Presbyterian ministers for endorsements. When Pilgrims was built, FDR himself commented on the beauty of the design. There was a time where the words spoken from this pulpit literally reverberated through the halls of Congress. Those days are long gone, not just because we are a smaller congregation than we once were, but because the Presbyterian Church and the other so-called “mainline” churches have been “sidelined.” There has been, simultaneously, not only a shift to the “Religious Right” but a shift to the “Secular Left,” with former mainline Christians like Presbyterians– who were used to being in the middle of everything– feeling somewhat irrelevant.

I can’t help but wonder if that’s not a good place to be. There is a lot of freedom that comes from being on the margins. While there is a part of me that wishes I could organize a forum that would be a command performance for presidential candidates, the gathering I really was really sorry to miss this past week was the protest outside Mayor Fenty’s house organized by residents of the Franklin Street Shelter. They are concerned that the Mayor is going to close down Franklin without plans for a new low-barrier shelter in the downtown area. No matter how many homeless people we move into permanent housing, there will be newly homeless people tomorrow, and we will always need emergency shelter. Franklin, in my opinion, is a lousy building for a shelter. But without it, there are few alternatives left. There needs to be something to take Franklin’s place, and so far, the City has not made plans for an alternative.

This is a concern that the congregations of the Washington Interfaith Network share, and we will be pressing that same question with top administration officials at a meeting next week. I hope we make more progress than the protestors did last week. They received a polite “Let’s talk about this in my office” from the mayor. We no longer need to camp out outside the Mayor’s home in order to get a meeting with the Mayor, but we are under no illusion that we are the first people the Mayor listens to. That’s why we have worked so hard on organizing congregations and communities, and are doing Get Out the Vote work this summer, because we know that if we don’t press a powerful collective voice, we will not be heard. And the more we have worked to organize not just middle class people, not just working people, not just poor people, but homeless people, the harder time we have had getting the Mayor’s attention.

In WIN we always start with polite overtures to elected officials, but we know that sometimes you have to be a little confrontational. When he started back in the 1940's, Saul Alinsky, the irascible founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation, WIN’s parent organization, taught his organizers on the south side of Chicago to always work inside the comfort zone of those they were organizing, but outside the comfort zone of those they were organizing against. It was a way of shifting the balance of power, getting attention, getting heard. So when the bank president wouldn’t meet with them, they would line up hundreds of members to stand in line with bags of change to deposit, disrupting service until they had a meeting. When the mayor wouldn’t negotiate, they took three hundred people down to city hall and waited outside his office. When the University of Chicago was buying up real estate in the south-side Woodlawn neighborhood where I used to work when I was in seminary, over the objections of the residents, they threatened to attend the symphony en mass after consuming a hardy baked-bean banquet. They never actually pulled that last one off, but the very rumor of the threat was enough to get the University officials’ attention.

I t turns out, it is all very Biblical. Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives who defied Pharaoh’s decree to kill all the Hebrew baby boys, resorted to lies and trickery to do what they believed was right. Notice what a chain of events they unleashed by their actions: Shiphrah and Puah’s example seems to have infected the whole community. By the end of the story, not just the two midwives, but Moses’ mother, his sister, and likely the entire village of Hebrew women were involved in undermining Pharaoh’s brutal edict. Even Pharaoh’s daughter and her attendants got in on the act. When Moses’ mother shows up with her breasts dripping with milk, there is no way Pharaoh’s daughter did not know she was baby’s mother.

Shiphrah and Puah are part of a whole line of characters in the Bible who, like them, lacking power or status of their own, broke the social rules of behavior in order to shift the balance of power. Hebrew Bible scholar Carole Fontaine refers to this group of character as“tricksters.” They are part of a consistent dynamic within the Bible where God uses those without power to challenge those with more. Lacking what sociologists call “assigned power”— that is, power that comes from social status— they make use of trickery and other forms of manipulative behavior to turn the tables on those who do.

So later on in the Bible we read of Rebecca who, knowing that God had chosen Jacob, the younger, instead of Esau, the older, conspired with Jacob to trick his father out of Esau’s blessing. It seems a horrible thing to do, until you stop to ask, who exactly was it that decided that the older son should inherit and not the younger? In Genesis 38, the widow Tamar tricks her father-in-law Judah, in order to protect the future of their family. In Genesis 12, when Abraham and Sarah enter Egypt, Abraham pretends that his wife is his sister, because the ruse seems necessary at the moment for their survival. Jesus heals on the sabbath. His disciples pluck grain from the field. Last week we heard the story about a Canaanite woman whom he praises after she breaks all the rules to seek her daughter’s healing, and later Jesus tells a parable about a nagging widow who won’t give up even when the unjust judge ignores her pleas. Through out the Biblical narrative, rules are broken, conventions are thwarted, and official power is outright subverted in order to pursue God’s will. As Fontaine puts it, “When the power brokers simply will not listen, when the center forgets the margin— well, then a trick may be in order.”

There is an innate understanding in the Bible that those who had no role in helping to make the rules in the first place are not necessarily bound by them in the same way. This infuriates those in power, but makes perfect sense to those on the outside. Rules are sometimes made to protect the powerless, but more often than not they serve to protect the privilege of those already in power. Think of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenging the rules at the 1964 Democratic Convention. As a church, we may not like moving from the mainline to the sidelines, but living on the margins we find we are in pretty good company.

When we imagine that we have power, we go to all sorts of lengths to protect it. When we start from the margins, we are freed to speak the truth to power in fresh ways. When Hubert Humphrey, who was the Vice Presidential candidate in 1964, outlined a rather weak compromise proposal to the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, Fannie Lou Hamer stood right up to him. Humphrey told her that his position on the ticket was at stake if they did not accept the compromise. In response, Hamer said to him, sounding every bit the Biblical prophet that she was:

“Do you mean to tell me that your position is more important than four hundred thousand black people’s lives? Senator Humphrey, I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs trying to register to vote. I had to leave the plantation where I worked in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Now if you lose this job of Vice-President because you do what is right, because you help the MFDP, everything will be all right. God will take care of you. But if you take [the nomination] this way, why, you will never be able to do any good for civil rights, for poor people, for peace, or any of those things you talk about. Senator Humphrey, I’m going to pray to Jesus for you.”

I hope Fannie Lou is praying for us now. Perhaps then we can re-discover ourselves as the spiritual heirs of Shiphrah and Puah, and the merry band of “righteous tricksters” of which they are a part. Life on the margins is where the action is, and often, where the Spirit of God is at work. ✞