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Rev. Dr. Damaris D. Whittaker Sermon: Ferocious Roots:Racism – 07 12 20 Sermon
Fort Washington Church – July 12, 2020

The following sermon was given for my siblings at Montview Presbyterian Church, one of the three local worshipping communities I am affiliated with here in Denver. (The other two being St John’s Episcopal Cathedral and New Beginnings, a Lutheran church that meets within the walls of the Women’s Prison.

170 Danish scholars from 5 universities came together to consider how the world needs to change post covid-19. They make five crucial suggestions:

Looking upon the sea of interpretations of the story about Jesus walking upon the waters of the Sea of Galilee, makes me feel like that young monk who continues to sink each time he tries to find his way across the lake.

During our lock-down we have found new ways of being the Church, new ways of seeing the DIVINE in one another, new ways of communing with one another.

Wwe have to make choices to be more “human” as we care for those who are physically at risk, those who are unemployed, impoverished, and without either shelter or access to healthcare. Evolution didn’t happen once thousands of years ago, it is something that must be renewed daily or we are in danger of slipping back into more primitive if not reptilian ways of thinking.

We really are not in the same boat but we surely are in the same storm. The pandemic is very inconvenient for the people who get to keep their jobs, income, health insurance, and home. But those who are now unemployed, uninsured, evicted or facing foreclosure are in another kind of boat and it is in danger of sinking.

A service centered around the Theology of Hamilton.

Today’s lectionary reading from the Hebrew Scriptures is an appalling story about a Father, Son, and sacrifice. God commanded Abraham to make a human sacrifice of his only son, Isaac.

Opioid overdoses increased by 18% in March, 29% in April, and 42% in May making addiction and overdose deaths a silent pandemic within the viral pandemic. To respond to this crisis, today’s message is a panel presentation from our pastor, a physician who is an addiction specialist, and a psychologist who specializes in suicide prevention and addiction.

Black and white. Light and dark. Good and evil. This binary way of cataloging and compartmentalizing our thoughts and experiences is useful when it comes to categorizing much about life. But what about gender identity?

When we begin to give up the formal, creedal faith of our youth, accepting that no religion is entirely true and no sacred text was actually written by God, many people will abandon the journey of faith entirely.

To the powers that be, Jesus’ execution was little more than the routine death of a homeless, outcast who spent far too much time creating social unrest. Nothing more than the insignificant death of a troublemaker without influence in the halls of power, who would not or could not moderate his own behavior. An insignificant troublemaker dies, under the rule of law, and yet, the impact continues to reverberate all around the world, nearly 2000 years after it should have been long forgotten.

The anti-mask vs pro-mask divide in this stage of the global pandemic becomes an interesting litmus test for either an empathetic world view or a kind of apologetic for being something of a sociopath.

SCRIPTURE Zechariah 8.1–8

Far too often, patriotism is expressed as enthusiasm for wars as if the battlefield was the only way to become a hero or to find virtue when, in almost every case, the opposite is true.

Perhaps the story isn’t so much about God but about us. But if you accept that the Bible is the work of many authors, the story tells you nothing about God. Instead, it tells you what the various authors’ believed.

Covid-19 will also have a casualty count among congregations. Which churches will survive into the 21st century and, frankly, which ones really shouldn’t? If loneliness is the number one form of suffering in the western world, surely the connections made in a faith community should be a major solution to that isolation.