Our Advent season of hopeful anticipation continues with our reading from Isaiah, from which, the Gospel of Mark uses a few lines to describe John the Baptist this morning.
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight…”
Prepare the way of the Lord. That is what the season of Advent is for us. To prepare ourselves for God who is coming. John the Baptist is here to shake things up. To remind us that things are not the way God wants them. To repent. To fix. To make things straight.
But Isaiah, starts us not with repentance but comfort: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem…” So we begin with comfort...
(On Twitter) “After 20-year-old Chris Betancourt's cancer came back and was given a year to live, his best friend dropped out of college to help him fulfill his bucket list. This day, they crossed off feeding the homeless.” (ABCNews)
The little clip was a piece of an amazing story filled with comfort even with death staring at that young man, who isn’t ready to stop yet. And Isaiah doesn’t stop with comfort, the announcement of God with God’s people. Think of what Isaiah is saying to us:
Look, this is how our God arrives…
1: Mountains: leveled
2: Highways: smoothed
3: Valleys: filled
4: Roadways: straightened
5: Ruts: plugged
6: Rocks: rolled
Look, this is how our God arrives…
With a shout, a cry
With a revolution, a reshaping
With a promise, a new world
This is your God!
Road-maker, Journey-taker, Path-builder
Way-maker, Trail-blazer
God’s glory will then be complete
And the world will see it
Just as God has said
— from the archives of the Church of Scotland (This is your God, slightly adapted)
But for God to do this, to bring comfort, to bring salvation, to bring hope in the midst of darkness, we must take our part in God’s plan. How will we make the crooked road straight? (and in Monroe!)
Let me tell you about Daryl Davis. He is a southern blues musician. He is African American who has an interesting hobby. He collects Ku Klux Klan robes. He's got about 200 of them. How he gets them is the story…
Davis got his first robe 30 years ago while playing in a bar in Frederick, Maryland. After his set, a white gentleman approached him. "I really enjoy your all's music," he said. "You know this is the first time I ever heard a black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis." Davis thanked him and then asked, "Where do you think Jerry Lee Lewis learned how to play that kind of style?" And then the musician explained the roots of rock 'n roll in the black blues tradition, that the rockabilly style he liked was not invented by Jerry Lee Lewis but developed by black artists like Fats Domino and Little Richard.
The two talked for some time. As the conversation went on, the man said, "You know, this is the first time I ever sat down and had a drink with a black man.'" He then said he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Davis laughed at first, not believing him - but he man pulled out pictures and produced his Klan card. Davis immediately stopped laughing. But the man was very friendly and asked Davis to call him the next time he played at the bar.
"The fact that a Klansman and black person could sit down at the same table and enjoy the same music, that was a seed planted," Davis recalls. "So what do you do when you plant a seed? You nourish it."
Davis decided to go around the country and meet and talk to as many Klan members as he could - music always being the entrée. First he learned all he could about the Klan to understand what they really think - that enabled Davis to sit down and talk with people who instinctively hated him. Davis deflated the racial stereotypes that fueled their anger and hatred. "How can you hate me when you don't know me?" he asks.
"If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy - it doesn't have to be about race, it could be about anything . . . you will find that you both have something in common. As you build upon those commonalities, you're forming a relationship and as you build upon that relationship, you're forming a friendship. That's what would happen. I didn't convert anybody. They saw the light and converted themselves."
Once the friendship and trust blossom, the Klansmen realize that their hate may be misguided. When they renounce their membership, Davis collects the robes and keeps them in his home as a reminder of the dent he has made in racism by simply sitting down and having dinner with people & sharing a love for music.
Daryl Davis has been having those conversations for three decades now. And he has their robes as testimonies. [NPR, August 20, 2017.]
A blues musician reduces the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan by his message of music and kindness; he straightens a very crooked path by his courage to sit down and talk with those who see him as beneath them, whose reaction from them is to see him destroyed. Daryl Davis is a prophet in the spirit of John the Baptist. In baptism, each one of us has been called by God to the work of prophet: using whatever talents and skills we possess to transform the wastelands around us into harvests of justice and forgiveness, to create highways for our God to enter and re-create our world in his compassion and peace.
May we hear Isaiah’s call in the lives of the prophets and in our lives too, to change all that is crooked, broken, uneven, so God can bring comfort, hope, and love in our world. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment