CHAPTER 1
An Encounter with God
Linda Lee
God speaks to humanity through the Holy Scriptures, through the stories and teachings they offer. When I first began to preach, I understood myself to be the vessel through which God spoke because I had only spoken publically during church programs and didn't really like speaking in public. But God guides us through the challenges and celebrations of the human experience, and by revealing truths about myself and my experiences God inspires my faith and enables understanding that provides the capacity to deal with challenges, obstacles, and dangers.
From my first experience of preaching I came to the realization that this was God's call on my life, but it took many years of preaching and pastoring before I accepted that I was indeed called to preach. In the early years of preaching, my confidence in my sermons came from the knowledge that I was seminary trained and thus had the right interpretation of the Scriptures. The fact that the people in my congregation just weren't "getting" what I was preaching to them was frustrating, and it took a conversation with God for me to come to an understanding of the context of the people to whom I was preaching and the importance of not only understanding their context but also understanding that I was part of that context—namely, sinners saved by God's grace. That understanding has remained with me throughout my years of preaching, and it enables me to share openly and willingly my witness, experience, and understanding of God.
Each setting of preaching offers a unique encounter with God. Preaching is an organism of the Holy Spirit that is never again duplicated and thus a unique and singular expression of God's presence. The proclamation of good news is my public witness—a sharing of my personal experience with God through events of healing, family challenges, and other life crises. And the purpose of that public witness, as well as the witness of scripture, is to assist people in becoming acquainted with God and in developing the capacity to experience personally a transformative encounter with the living God in our midst. Whether I am guided by the lectionary or I'm asked to preach a specific text or topic or I preach from a text of my choice, my most important criterion for engaging the task of preaching is prayer. I ask God to reveal to me the word God has for the people to whom God is sending me. I pray also that God will reveal to me the specific word for me; because without that word, I have nothing to offer.
Reading the text and exploring what was going on in its biblical context allows a key metaphor to emerge, which is the start of the writing process. Whether following my normal practice of using a manuscript or being guided by an outline, I've learned to trust God to enable me to preach the message that is appropriate to the particular congregation. I work diligently to discover the social realities, the human condition, or the need that may be present in the text in order to discern the parallels and apply them to the present context. There is a consistency both to human nature and to God's nature, and this work of discovery brings to light the constancy of God's love and presence as a mitigating force for human behavior.
It is important for me as preacher to discover more of the nature and Spirit of God within us in order to reveal to the hearers the indwelling Christ. For twenty-first-century Christians, there continues to be the need for voices that call for counter-cultural practices that defy violence, domination, greed, and unholy living. I am committed to be a voice that speaks peace and justice for all people; that dedication helps energize my delivery whether from behind the pulpit or moving around the pulpit area or walking to each part of the sanctuary in the midst of the people. Through the anointing of the Holy Spirit, I become an instrument through which God speaks peace and calls for justice for all people.
The animated, energetic, and enthusiastic style of my preaching is meant to invite hearers into the experience I'm having with God. At times, my focus is on teaching, which is less animated; but in every case my hope is to accomplish what the Lord has sent me to do, to say what God has given me to say, remembering always that it's not about what I feel or don't feel. God can and will use me (or any of us) in God's way. So I need to be "prayed up" and available to the Holy Spirit in the preaching moment so that God's word will go forth through the words I speak, but in the power of the Holy Spirit. Only so will people experience the presence and the power of God, which will enable them to leave different and better people than they were when they arrived.
Over the years, listening to some of my favorite preachers, such as Bishop John Bryant, Dr. Samuel Proctor, Bishop Leontyne T. C. Kelly, Dr. Charles Adams, and Dr. Jeremiah Wright, I've attempted to learn some technique, style, or skill from each of them. But learning how to be fully myself and fully available to God in the preaching moment, as well as the importance of good research, written and spiritual preparation, and good contemporary application, are the most important lessons I learned from these great orators.
What I love best about preaching is the ways I encounter God. God preaches to me in the preparation, in scripture, through the Holy Spirit in the preaching moment; in the souls that are touched and sometimes healed or helped by the word. God has given me a testimony that has voice in my sermons as I continue my walk with Jesus Christ. Regardless of the challenges of life, I've learned to tell the story. That story is the good news that God really does love us, and that Jesus is a living Savior who epitomizes God's love, who lives and moves and loves among the people of God.
Choose Life
Deuteronomy 30:15- 20
Moses and the Hebrews had left the land and life of enslavement. Their departure was just the beginning of two generations of victory and challenge as they found their way to the precipice of the land promised to their ancestors. God's hand had guided them this far, providing signs and wonders from the instant Moses accepted God's call to lead them to this very time in the life and history of their people. Two generations had died out and now those who had survived the wilderness, the grandchildren of the ones who left Egypt, were about to enter and live into the promise God had made decades before.
For forty years, Moses had been a steadfast and faithful guide and now even he had to let go. But having given his life and all of himself to this call, everything within him needed for those who would carry on to do so through the same source of power and help and support and love that he had come to know and trust and love. Building a new nation could not be accomplished by human effort alone. No amount of law or political machinations or planning would enable them to accomplish what was before them. They were going to need complete clarity about where their power and their help were coming from. Moses knew and wanted them to understand that the help and power they needed to take them forward could come only from God.
Now it should not have been difficult for this generation to recognize the truth of what Moses was trying to tell them. Miracles had become normal for them. As they grew up, they had seen a rod turn into a snake, bitter water become sweet, and manna fall from heaven, with every day bringing just the amount that was needed. But this generation would need to remember they had a choice. When taking possession of the promised land got ugly, when death and destruction was a stench in the nostrils, when grief and fear and anger and weariness threatened to overcome their ability to complete the task at hand, they needed to remember that they had a choice. And that they must choose life.
And when things got real good and the pleasures of life got real enjoyable and everybody had a job and enough food to eat and wine to drink and a nice home to live in and furniture and a beautiful wife and a handsome husband and gorgeous, talented, wellmannered children—they would have to choose then too. Choose not to be seduced by too much of any good thing—choose not to let the good things become god to them and take the place of the God of their ancestors. It was essential for the generation going forward to understand how important it was for them to remember they had a choice. And that they must choose life.
What does it mean for people of African descent in the United States to choose life in the twenty-first century? Like the Hebrews in Egypt, Africans in the Diaspora of the U.S. continue to experience brutal oppression, marginalization, demoralization, and exclusion. In the midst of corporations, institutions—including the church—and local and national government, racism continues daily to impact the mental, physical, and spiritual health of people of African descent in measurable and immeasurable ways.
The condition of many of our communities and congregations, and the suffering and struggle of so many of our people, are not unlike the plight of the Hebrews standing with Pharaoh's army threatening sure annihilation behind them and the certain death of the Red Sea in front of them. They had nowhere to turn, no place to run, and no place to hide. There was no hope of escape back into the past and no possibility of moving forward into a new future. But in that moment God moved! And made a way where there seemed to be no other way forward.
Consider some of our communities today, where all the supermarkets have fled and left single mothers and parents with young children in need of healthy nourishment. Day after day they are ripped off financially and health-wise because they have no choice but to feed their families with overpriced, old, canned, denatured food from what we used to call the mom and pop stores that are all that are left in the neighborhood. Where else can they go without a car or money for both a cab and food or without the time and energy to take a bus to the suburbs—if there is a bus? Consider the plethora of violence in music, video games, TV, and movies. Gang life, domestic violence, and verbal and emotional abuse plague our communities and even some of our congregations. Consider the prevalence of drugs and alcohol in African American and other communities of color. Who makes them available and why? And every time the current President of the U.S., a man who happens to have Black blood running through his veins, is attacked and maligned and insulted and disrespected, every person of African descent in this nation is impacted, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. Where are our children to go to see that there are other ways we can treat each other—life-giving, life-affirming ways? What will enable them to choose life?
But just like God opened the Red Sea for the Hebrew children in the Old Testament, God has intervened for people of African descent in the U.S. over and over and over again, through the efforts of saints in our midst who, like Moses, have been called to give their lives for the sake of the community. People like my friend Sherri, who has given her life as a therapist, working only in places where people of African descent with most need of her services can get them. She has worked for less money and less personal stability in order to serve God's people who otherwise would not have the support to build new lives. God opens the Red Sea in front of us and overcomes Pharaoh's army behind us every day through those, some in this very room, who open possibility and accessibility to the men, women, and children otherwise left to suffer or die. We have had times of wandering in the wilderness since the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Now some of the generation who led us out of the legal segregation, social marginalization, and spiritual pain of that era are dying out. But we are on the precipice today of entering a promised land, of building a new nation of healthy, self-aware, gifted, confident, creative, spiritually grounded, faith-filled people who know what it means to choose life.
In spite of all the protestations and so-called research and posturing about African American people being less intelligent, more lazy, more prone to violence, sexually preoccupied and promiscuous, and all the other misrepresentations made up by those who have a need to do so, we continue to set the standard. We are imitated in popular vernacular, clothing style, walk, hair styles, even beauty. Folk still want thick lips and full hips while demeaning the dark skin and nappy hair that naturally accompany them. But we also set the standard for spiritual and ethical character. Dr. Joy Degruy, in her book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, writes: "We have demonstrated time and time again that we can courageously fight for justice, we are not crippled with hatred or rage.... We are strong, resilient, industrious, creative, forgiving.... We are a spiritual, loving, hopeful people." Through it all, we choose life.
We choose life because we have hope; because we know that God still makes a way out of no way. God has a bigger plan than we can see; a plan for people of African descent; a part for us to play in the grand scheme of things; a plan not just for us and ours. God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts. God's ways are higher than our ways. God's plans for all of humanity are for good and not for harm—to give the whole human race a future with hope. The land and territory God promised is spread before us. It is a vast panorama of possibility and opportunity. Our task, our challenge and the thing we must do today, is to remember that we have a choice. We can choose blessing and life or we can choose curses and death. God's promise to us and to all of humanity in and through Jesus Christ is not a physical territory, but it is real just the same. The land Jesus promises us is a territory within us that when we have possessed it overflows into family and community, congregation and world. We have the capacity to be renewed, rebuilt, and revived, beginning with the transformation of our minds. Whatever the challenges and obstacles we may be facing— as individuals, as congregations, as communities—we have a choice.
We can choose life! Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Whoever believes in me, though they die, they will yet live. Jesus said, I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.
What does it mean to choose life? Our ancestors chose life. In antiquity, long before the Atlantic slave trade, they chose life through living the values of Maat—truth, justice, reciprocity, rightness, and balance. Oba T'Shaka, in his book Return to the African Mother Principle of Male and Female Equality, wrote: "Just as a male or female must demonstrate the spiritual, mental and physical attributes of honesty, justice, bravery, respect, and hard work before they could enjoy the rights of manhood or womanhood, so the King [or queen—my addition] must display through the highest qualities of responsible, ethical conduct, these same character traits." Choosing life for them was not theory; it was a practice.
During the Middle Passage our captured ancestors chose life even when death was the reasonable antidote to the horror and inhuman terrorism that staying alive promised. They chose life all during the years of brutality and abuse of chattel slavery and every effort that was made to prove that it was they who had lost their humanity. We carry the DNA of those who understood what it means to choose life. And our text for today defines it with three actions. To choose life means first, to love God, second, to obey God, and third, to hold on to God.
Once, in the eyes of some, we were not a people, but now we are God's people. Once, even in our own eyes we may have received no mercy, but now we know God's mercy. We are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation! Not for the purpose of dominating others or puffing ourselves up. God chooses us to be among the witnesses who proclaim the mighty acts of the One who calls all races, all peoples, all nations, out of darkness into God's marvelous light! How can we help but love God with all our heart, all our mind, all our soul, and all our being, and our neighbor and ourselves?
