Comforting words for a hurting city

LOUISVILLE — Few sermons preached by PC(USA) teaching elders receive a standing ovation, but that’s how the congregation at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis responded Sunday following stellar preaching by the Rev. Margaret Fox, the church’s associate pastor of adult ministries.

Watch the service here, with Fox beginning her sermon at the 28:35 mark.

Image

With Isaiah 6:1-8 and Luke 5:1-11, as her preaching texts, Fox used biblical call stories to speak words of compassion and comfort to residents of a city that has suffered the deaths of two of its residents at the hands of federal immigration agents.

Fox, who’s also trained as an attorney, said she woke up Saturday morning “with a renewed sense of resilience, connectedness and purpose” following Friday’s demonstrations, an interfaith worship service, and “the supportive presence of elected officials, the hundreds of clergy who traveled in from across the country … the great peaceful crowd that formed downtown, the messages of love and support coming in from around the country. All came together to cultivate a shared sense that Minnesota is figuring out something important about how to do resistance and mutual care, and that our community has something to say to the country and the rest of the world about how to stand up against tyranny and how to stand together with and for each other.”

But by mid-morning Saturday, “that brief sense of hopefulness was shattered” as reports of the killing of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti began to circulate. Fox was in a public space at the time, and she received a hug from a stranger sitting next to her. “I could feel the hurt and the anger radiating out of his body in waves,” she said. “Finally, I forced myself to put down my phone and open my Bible, looking again at our texts for today.”

What she hoped she could offer those in worship Sunday was a comforting message, “words that tell us that it’s all going to be OK,” Fox said. “There is a word of solace in these [biblical] stories, to be sure. But the primary message in these stories is a word of call, reminding us that we have agency, that we have purpose, that we have each other and that we have a role to play.”

Isaiah’s call begins with a “a time stamp,” the death of King Uzziah, “the end of … an era marked by economic growth and military stability” for people living in Judah. “Judah had few options, and all of them were bad,” Fox said: capitulate to the Assyrians, become occupied, pay tribute, or “stand up and face possible annihilation.”

It’s in the midst of all this chaos that Isaiah has his famous vision, which “takes the form of a theophany, a spectacular manifestation of God.” Isaiah protests that he is unworthy, and so an angel presses a hot coal to his lips. “With that, he is ready to answer the call of God,” Fox said.

It’s a terrifying vision, she said, but the comfort is this: “In the middle of a time of great upheaval, the prophet receives … an overwhelming, overpowering embodied experience that God is on the throne. No matter who on Earth might seem to have all the power, it is God alone who reigns.”

“Even in times when it feels the political order is crumbling, a deeper order, a moral order, underpins the universe,” she said. “What is true and false, right and wrong, fact and fiction is not decided by the ones with the most weapons, but by the Lord God of Hosts.”

What about the other story, which details Luke’s version of Jesus calling his disciples? “In contrast to the spectacular vision of the prophet Isaiah, this call feels much more ordinary,” Fox said. “There will be a miracle, yes — the great catch of fish — but it’s a much more earthly [calling]. The one who does the calling — he feels more ordinary, too”: Jesus, who is at once “fully divine but also fully human, an ordinary, man-sized man,” not a being whose garment hem alone filled the temple.

Rather than taking up space, Jesus is running out of space, Fox noted. People “have come out in droves to see what he’s all about,” and so Jesus orchestrates “a feat of ingenuity” by asking Simon to push the boat a ways from the shore. “He’s made himself a little amphitheater where, arranged on the slope of the shoreline, the people can all see him and, with his voice carrying across the water’s surface, hear him too,” she said.

“What Jesus does here is an inventive act of repurposing — taking something meant for one use and transforming it into something else,” Fox said.

“There’s been a lot of repurposing here in Minnesota over the last two months,” she said. Parents and neighbors “have become patrollers, taking shifts as kids are dropped off and picked up at school. Signal chats have become networks for arranging rides and distributing food.” Cellphone cameras “have become recorders of crowdsourced documentary shot in real time,” she said, “one brutal clip after another, of the rise of an authoritarian state.”

The one repurposed object “that feels the most ubiquitous is the ordinary whistle,” she said. “Until two months ago, whistles were relatively rare. You might find one at the bottom of a soccer coach’s gym bag or in the emergency kit of the hiking pack stashed in the garage. Now they’re everywhere.”

A whistle is a warning, she said. “It’s a way to alert those who are in the most danger that it’s not safe to be out in the street, or to call those who are able to come and witness. … A whistle is a warning to ICE agents too. On the lips of a referee, a whistle means stop. It means foul. It means you are out of bounds. A whistle says this is a violation. It’s a violation to enter a private home without a warrant. It’s a violation to bring someone outside in the cold with no clothes. It’s a violation to profile people based on race. It’s a violation to detain a 5-year-old and to release tear gas into the vents of a family’s car. It’s a violation to knock the phone from the hands of a legal observer who has the right to record what is happening. It is a violation to shoot, point-blank, 10 times, a man who has been wrestled to the ground. It is a violation of the rules that we’ve agreed to live by, of the bounds of human decency, of the norms that hold us together, of the laws of our democracy. It is a violation of the ICE agent’s own humanity and of the sacred worth and dignity of every person.”

A whistle issues a call “so sharp and piercing that it cannot be ignored,” Fox said. “It’s a call to come out and bear witness. It’s a call to stand up and say no.”

“I promised you I would find comfort in these stories, and there’s comfort in this one too,” she said. “The comfort comes in the abundance of ordinary miracles that are unfolding here before us in our cities. In Isaiah’s story, it’s God who fills the temple. In Luke’s story, it’s the fish who fill the net. In our story here in Minnesota, it is the people who fill the streets. The comfort that comes with our call is we are answering it together in connection, in community, in mutual care, and that we are standing, we are resisting and we are strong,” she said to sustained applause from those in worship.

“From the nets of our labor, through the noise and confusion — from the city or the seashore, Jesus summons us all,” Fox said, and those in worship stood and again applauded.