Aug 20 | Come and be known: Summer 2018 Preaching Series, Part 10

Today’s citations:

1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14

John 6:51-58

We’ve hit a big milestone in our summer preaching series on monarchy as we bid goodbye to King David, giant of the Hebrew Bible. Succeeding him on the throne is his son Solomon, the second child he bore with Bathsheba – their first, for lack of a better word, legitimate child.

This week we also said goodbye to another cultural and spiritual giant: Aretha Franklin. Known as “the Queen of Soul,” Aretha Franklin was a titanic figure in the music scene from the sixties onward, recording dozens of hits including “Respect,” a cover of an old Otis Redding tune that has since far outstripped the original for a number of reasons, chief among them being that the tone of the piece changes significantly when sung by a black woman. It becomes an anthem.

Aretha wasn’t just a queen because of her voice. She was a deeply spiritual and politically active person, posting bail for the prominent African-American activist Angela Davis, touring with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King as a young woman, and financially supporting other figures in the movement.

Something I didn’t know about Aretha was that she was a P.K., a preacher’s kid, daughter of the American Baptist minister and civil rights activist C.L. Franklin. C.L. Franklin became a preacher at age 16, worked an itinerant circuit, then settled at a number of different churches before finally being called to New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, where he served from 1946 until 1979. He was a prominent civil rights activist and a personal friend of the Rev. Dr. King.

While reading about Pastor Franklin I learned he had had some of his sermons recorded, including one lauded as his most famous: “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest.” I decided on the morning after Aretha’s death to listen to it as my morning devotional.

It was about half an hour, being a black Baptist sermon, and it was incredible.

Referencing a passage from Deuteronomy, Pastor Franklin preaches that whenever we come to times of difficulty in our lives, these are moments when God, like a mother eagle, stirs the nest of her fledgelings so that they will topple out and learn to fly, and dives beneath them if they do not yet have the strength to do it.

Each sentence, of course, is punctuated by beautiful interjections from the congregation: “Yeah-huh,” “My Lord,” “Yes He does!”

“I don’t believe you hear me,” Pastor Franklin says every so often, and the congregation responds, “I hear you!”

Now there’s an old saying I learned in my preaching class when we talked about the differences between white and black preaching styles. It’s “Start slower, go lower; Go higher, catch fire.” White preachers tend to drop their voices when they get to the climax of their sermons. Black preachers tend to build and build until the roof comes off the top of the church with joy.

This is what happens in Pastor Franklin’s sermon, as you can imagine, but I had never heard anything quite like it. There was a certain point where I really couldn’t tell if he was speaking or singing. In between each phrase, he would take a rapid, deep breath, making a growling sound that made me think of earthquakes and thunder. It was mesmerizing.

“Now the question is, is God still stirring the nest? Yes! He’s still stirring the nest – he stirred the nest in history when we came as slaves to this country. …My great grandparents were slaves, but oh, look where their great grandson stands tonight. Well God has been stirring the nest. In suffering there is redemption, oh Lord.”

He wasn’t called the Million Dollar Voice for nothing.

Folks have all kinds of different ideas about what meaning can be ascribed to suffering, so it’s okay if you can’t follow Pastor Franklin that far. But it does take a person of very deep faith to be able to see God’s blessing flowing through one’s life like a river. This is one of the great gifts of many of the African-American churches – the way that a people so marked by suffering and pain could find themselves in Scripture as chosen people of the liberating God of Exodus.

Solomon, David’s son, is now left without his father, whom he loved. Like his father, he too has been put on the throne through the machinations of others, specifically Nathan and Bathsheba. We should expect this, as we learn at his birth that God loves Solomon, who is even given a special name by Nathan: Jedidiah, “beloved of God.” Why should he be more beloved than the others? It’s never certain, although if we think back to the story of David and Bathsheba, perhaps we may surmise that Solomon was born in a spirit of reconciliation and repentance. David mourns and fasts for the child he has lost, then goes and consoles Bathsheba in her own grief. He has finally learned to look beyond his own desires and see her as a person. It is then that they conceive Solomon. God surely smiled to see David return to the exemplary man he once was.

Solomon then delights God in asking not for riches or many wives or a large kingdom, but for wisdom. He does not put his trust in his own innate ability or privilege. He wants to be a good and wise ruler, to, despite her birth into privilege, carry that shepherd’s mantle his father once had. And since wisdom is from God, this is almost like saying, “Holy One, I want more of you.”

Of course God responds – and not only to Solomon, but to us.

Jesus, still speaking with the crowd about living bread, goes a step too far for some as he claims that his own flesh is the living bread they desire, and his own blood is the true drink which brings eternal life. It may sound a bit vampiric to us, but this is a misunderstanding. Eternal life, for one thing, does not mean simply life forever, here on earth or in heaven. The Greek word, zoe, does not only refer to physical life but spiritual life. This is a life marked by fullness and peace, by depth and intimacy with the sacred. This is beautiful enough, but be aware that we’ve come back to something we touched on last week. Jesus here is not merely himself – either Jesus of Nazareth or even Jesus the Christ. Here, we are invited to see Jesus as wisdom itself, a Sophia figure.

Like Wisdom, Jesus calls out to those who pass by the cross-roads, inviting all to a feast of his bounty. The bounty is of his own body, flowing forth, and if that suddenly made you think of mother’s milk, you’re not the only one. John, Paul, even Augustine saw this parallel, although as you can imagine it took a woman to write about it most beautifully. Julian of Norwich, the famous anchoress of Medieval England, wrote in her book Revelations of Divine Love that Christ was like a mother breastfeeding us with the Eucharist. This is wisdom, a most intimately received substance which helps us grow, helps us heal, helps us mature in our faith.

In his sermon, “John’s Vision of a New Heaven,” Rev. C.L. Franklin preaches, “As I look around upon the horizon of time and observe what’s going on in this world, the misery, the war, the bloodshed that’s going on in America… all that’s going on all over the world tells me that God is about ready to give birth to a new world.”

He wrote this in the ‘50s, but listening to it you can imagine it speaks just as strongly today. And indeed, we still stand as confused believers among a crowd that grumbles against the bizarre claims made by our strange king. We still stand among those who are afraid to accept such intimacy, having been burned so many times before. We stand while wondering where we stand.

It’s times like this that it helps to take a moment to remember who we are.

So come here to your mother, your beloved, your life, wisdom. She awaits with open arms.

Come, and be known.