Mark 8:31-38
Called to Listen
February 25, 2024
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap30hs_kksQ
Frederick Buechner says to pay attention to your tears because God often speaks through them. Many of us on the Civil Rights Pilgrimage wept unexpectedly at various moments this week. Even those of us who didn’t actually shed tears felt very strong emotions like grief, anger, despair and hope. Please talk with the pilgrims today and next Sunday. They might be a little shy to bring it up, so you might give them an opening by asking what was most moving for them.
The most unexpected tears in my week happened at a museum in Birmingham. Among other things, this museum tells the story of the children’s marches for desegregation and of the physical beatings, dogs and fire hoses inflicted on children. As horrific as that was, it didn’t make me cry.
What made me tear up was one name. This name kept appearing as I made my way through the museum. The name is Fred Shuttlesworth. Rev. Shuttlesworth was the pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham from 1953-1961. That church was the headquarters of a group called the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which was formed after the state of Alabama outlawed the NAACP. The protest movement launched from this church challenged segregation in every arena in Birmingham and inspired people across the world.
Rev. Shuttlesworth was a chapel speaker at my seminary in the 1990’s and I did not know who he was. I think the shame of that ignorance may have contributed to my tears.
Bethel Baptist Church was a black church in a black neighborhood in fiercely segregated Birmingham. In 1963, they reached out to 16th Street Baptist Church downtown. 16th Street was a large and prominent church located just blocks from City Hall and the commercial district. It was the center of the Black Community, serving as church and social center and lecture hall. Famous people like Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson were among the guest lecturers or performers.
When Fred Shuttlesworth wanted to invite Dr. King and the Southern Leadership Conference to come to Birmingham, 16th Street was the logical gathering place, but some church leaders and members resisted. They did not want to link themselves with the civil rights movement. They did not want to attract any more attention from the white authorities than they already had.
That’s an echo from Jesus’ conversation with Peter. When Jesus tells the disciples about the suffering he will face at the hands of the religious and civil authorities, not for doing anything wrong, but for speaking truth and advocating for the marginalized, Peter pulls him aside and says, “Don’t talk like that Jesus. Don’t take unnecessary risks. Keep your head down. The Romans don’t even have to know what you’re doing.”
That’s human nature, isn’t it? To protect ourselves, to want to live our lives as normally and as trouble-free as possible.
We heard similar concerns in Selma. The gathering places for the movement were churches. Looking back on history, we might assume that connection came easily, but we would be wrong. The churches often actively resisted. “Don’t bring that kind of attention to us. We don’t need that trouble.”
That’s what they said at first at Brown Chapel and at First Baptist in Selma. When the police chased peaceful marchers off the Edmund Pettus bridge, they ran after them into the sanctuaries of those two churches and continued beating them there.
That’s what they said at first at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Five months after they hosted Dr. King, the Klan placed a bomb which exploded in the building on a Sunday morning killing four little girls and leaving a community traumatized. The people were right. The consequences were severe.
But Jesus rebuked Peter for focusing on the wrong things. Jesus said “If you want to follow me, take up your cross.” The cross had only one meaning in the Roman empire. It meant a painful, torturous execution. Fear of the cross was the way that Rome maintained its power.
On Thursday, we went to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It remembers more than 4,400 black people killed in racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. One of our pilgrims said “This was systemic terrorism.” In Jesus’ day, crucifixion was state-sponsored terrorism, designed to keep occupied Israel under control. Lynching served a similar function. Perhaps it was not officially state-sponsored everywhere, but unofficially it was, because the government did not do anything to prosecute those murders.
When Jesus said, “take up your cross and follow me” in 19th century language, he was saying “if you follow me, chances are good you will be lynched.”
The churches were hesitant and fearful but they did it anyway. They came to understand, as the earliest Christians had, that when you pursue the Kingdom of God, even at the cost of your own life, you work on shattering the power of Empire.[1]
After I found myself welling up in the museum, I wanted a closer connection to Fred Shuttlesworth. A few pilgrims cut their lunch time short and went with me to Bethel Baptist Church. There we learned the details about one of the three times the church was bombed.
The sign that we read out loud together said this “On Christmas Evening 1956, Rev Fred Shuttlesworth was sitting in the bedroom of the parsonage reading his Bible when a bomb exploded in the yard. The house foundations were blown away and the structure collapsed instantly. Neighbors who rushed to the scene presumed Rev. Shuttlesworth had been crushed. Soon a crowd gathered and angry voices began shouting for retaliation. Slowly out of the rubble and confusion, Rev. Shuttlesworth emerged. He assured the crowd that he was unharmed and urged them to return peacefully to their homes. Later he said that at the moment of the explosion he felt an overwhelming sense of peace and assurance that his life would be saved to continue his work.”
He said to a policeman “you go back and tell your Klan brethren if God could keep me through this, then I’m here for the duration.”
The next year, he was savagely beaten by a white mob when he tried to register his children to attend an all-white school. That was three years after Brown vs. Board of Education had ruled segregation schools were unconstitutional. The year after that Bethel Baptist Church was bombed again.
Some might argue that the church was doing political work, not spiritual ministry, but Baptist scholar Alan Culpepper says, “Taking up the cross means being at work where God is at work in the world to relieve suffering and injustice, to rescue the weak, and to bring peace and justice to bear in the human community.”[2]
This is the call of Jesus that still sounds for us. “ Lose the normal life you had planned for yourself. Discover with others the life that God intends for us and for all people. Take up your cross . . . follow me and get lynched.”
For, Jesus says, those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
Beloved ones, . . . you with ears, . . . listen . . . and take courage. Amen.
[1] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, p 247.
[2] Alan Culpepper, Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary: Mark, (Macon, GA: Smyth and Helwys Publishing, 2007), p. 288