The Gospel of the Long Game

Sermon for Feb. 28, 2021
Genesis 17:1-7,15-16; Mark 8:31-38

Welcome to week 2 of our sermon series on the book Love is the Way, by our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry.  Today, we’re considering chapters 4 through 6, where his reflection on the power of love gets a little more personal for us.  Bishop Curry moves from asking “can love really change the world?” to asking “I’m just a regular person – can my love have an impact?” 

Well, you know, if we ask ourselves, “What can I do to change the world,” most of us will stop dead in our tracks.  But if we ask ourselves, “Who can I be for the people around me?” – well, maybe we can live into an answer to that one.  I think Bishop Curry would say we are nothing less than God’s conduits, delivering the power of Love that gives itself away.

Going down that road, we’re following in the footsteps of some unlikely world-changers.  In our first reading today, we eavesdrop on Abram and God, who’ve already talked twice before this story.  Earlier, God promised children to Abram, and a woman he held in slavery had borne their son, Ishmael.  Well, that was one way to make good on the promise of descendants, but it wasn’t the answer Abram was looking for.  Now, God formalizes that promise by making a covenant with Abram and his wife, Sarai.  God says, “You shall be” not just the ancestor of a nation, Abram; “you shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations” (Genesis 17:4).  And to mark this pivot point in history, God gives them new names – Abram, the “exalted ancestor,” becomes Abraham, the “ancestor of a multitude.”¹  And Sarai becomes Sarah, meaning “princess.”²  The new names mark a turn in the lives of these characters:  They won’t just change the future for their nation; they’ll change the future for peoples yet to come.

Then, of course, we hear from Jesus in the Gospel reading, the Son of God taking a path that even his chief lieutenant thinks is crazy.  After a section of Mark’s Gospel where Jesus has been healing people, and walking on water, and confronting the religious leaders, and feeding thousands, Jesus now drops the news his followers least expected:  His path to bringing in the reign and rule of God goes through Calvary.  There’s a cross awaiting him … and not just him.  “If any want to become my followers,” Jesus says, “let them deny themselves, and take up their cross, and follow me” (8:34).  And Peter says, wait a minute, Jesus.  We thought we were heading to glory.  We thought we were changing the world.  Now you’re telling us that we’re giving up everything, giving up our lives, in the hope that things will get better later?

Abraham and Jesus are both playing the long game.  They’re both practitioners of the spirituality of tomorrow.  They’re both seed planters, as Bishop Curry says.  Abraham is never going to see the nations that will rise as his descendants.  Jesus is willing to be the seed himself, the grain of wheat that dies in order to bear the fruit of eternal life (John 12:24).  His followers, like Peter and Andrew, then take the promise of the kingdom on the road, to the Roman world and beyond, dying themselves without seeing the end of the story they’re preaching. 

Well, let me tell you about some other practitioners of the spirituality of tomorrow – other folks who play the long game of God’s kingdom.

As you know, we’ve begun a Lenten class in civil discourse.  Our leader, Ann Rainey, asked the 25 people on the Zoom call to say briefly why they were there.  Many of the responses reflected frustration with conversations, social media, and culture now, as well as class members’ grief that they just can’t stay in relationship with friends or family who say objectionable things.  But along with this frustration and grief, I heard shared faith that the act of offering themselves for this experience might be
the start of a change.  As any educator knows, learning, by definition, is change; and applying what we learn can change the world around us.  In Bishop Curry’s book, he quotes a Jewish proverb that says, “Before every person, there marches an angel proclaiming, ‘Behold, the image of God’” (95-96).  Archbishop Desmond Tutu has asked what we would do if we took seriously that notion that every person is made in God’s image and likeness.  What would we do?  We would bow to every person we meet³ – even those whose points of view we can’t abide.  In trying to build that skill, I think the folks in the civil-discourse class are playing the long game, practicing the spirituality of tomorrow.

Here's another example, a community leader profiled in last Sunday’s Kansas City Star: Alvin Brooks.  If you’ve been around Kansas City any length of time, you know that name.  Alvin Brooks grew up in here in the 1930s and ’40s in a world of strict segregation – something he learned directly as a boy when he and some white friends walked into a drug store on the border between a black and white neighborhood and ordered themselves cherry Cokes.  The White druggist made him take his Coke in a paper cup out on the sidewalk.⁴  Since then, Brooks has made it his life’s work to bring people together to confront and upend injustice. 

           He did that as one of a handful of Black police officers here in the 1960s.  Once, he was hanged in effigy, called the N-word, and told to go home.  Fellow police officers cut down the effigy, took it back to the station, and set it at a desk, thinking that was funny.  Brooks’ father asked him why he would want to be a police officer here, saying, “You know how they treat us.”  But, Brooks said, his thought was that he would show them how to “be a better cop.”  From there, Brooks served with the school district, served as the city’s director of human relations and assistant city manager, served on the Board of Police Commissioners, served on the City Council, and became mayor pro tem.  And maybe most significantly, he founded the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, which for decades has provided crisis intervention and crime prevention, supporting families affected by violence.⁵  

In all this, he’s pushed against seemingly immovable forces, but he’s done it Jesus-style.  Here’s how one of our city’s greatest religious leaders, the Rev. Wallace Hartsfield, described Brooks:  He said, “Alvin deliberately takes up the pain of others.  He doesn’t have to do that.  He has his own pain.  But he has surrendered his life for others, and that is the secret to his strength.”⁵  Alvin Brooks has spent decades changing the world one life at a time.

        Here’s another example, a Kansas City leader from a younger generation: Natasha Kirsch.  You know her work if, like me, you take your dog to The Grooming Project.  Natasha created The Grooming Project and the organization behind it, Empower the Parent to Empower the Child, or EPEC.  Most of you have heard about EPEC and its training program, where single moms can learn a profession that actually pays a living wage.  It’s worked so well that its dog-grooming facility is now expanding, and EPEC is building apartments for students who need housing as they go through the program.

Natasha’s gift – one of her gifts, at least – is that she figured out how to use the world as she found it to change women’s lives.  Yes, many people in our culture probably care more about their dogs than they care about hungry people on the street, or about moms who don’t earn a living wage.  That’s not good, and we need to keep moving away from our “our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice…,” as we prayed on Ash Wednesday (BCP 268).  And, at the same time, Natasha looked at the fact that I’m willing to pay $40 to get Petey groomed, and she figured out how to use that to train a mom for a job that will pay her a living wage.  Natasha is changing the world, one life at a time.

Here's a final example of someone playing the long game and practicing the spirituality of tomorrow.  I know a businessman here at St. Andrew’s who, politically, has a pretty conservative bent; he finds that this approach to public policy works best for his small business.  He also invests himself in the people who work for him.  In fact, he intentionally hires people of color and people with sketchy histories.  And then, he takes the time to get to know them –  learning their stories, learning their gifts, guiding them when he can.  I don’t know whether he’d frame it like this, but I’d say that by taking his employees so seriously, he’s seeing in each worker the image and likeness of God.  As a result, their lives improve – and, by the way, his business benefits because his workers know he’s invested in them.  That’s changing the world, one life at a time.

So, what do these examples have in common?  They flesh out our story.  As Bishop Curry says, “To pray and to work for the way things could be ….  That’s the hard way of love.” (79)  Their story also can be your story, a narrative any of us can step into.  In fact, it’s a narrative we’re each called to step into, in our own ways. 

You can change the world because you have the two fundamental capacities required for it.  First, you are made in the image and likeness of God, filled with power to accomplish God’s purposes.  And second, you can make the choice to recognize that divinity in everyone else around you.  You can invest yourself in real, live human beings who also bear God’s image and likeness.  For a few of us, that happens by leading a movement or starting a nonprofit.  But it also happens by putting yourself out there to serve someone who needs justice or who needs a second chance.  And, I’d say, it happens through your engagement in our democracy – when the way you vote seeks solutions, progressive or conservative solutions, that share this priority: putting first the well-being of the folks who get the short end of the stick.  That’s the test.

I guarantee you that you can change the world by being the person you are, living into the identity, the new name, God gave you in baptism.  If you’ve come through those baptismal waters, you share in the Spirit of the incarnate God who changed the world by giving his life for the people around him, even the ones who didn’t deserve it … which is all of us.  You have the capacity to “[set] your mind on divine things [not] on human things” (Mark 8:33), practicing the love that gives itself away by changing one life at a time.  

It’s the Gospel of the long game.  You may not see the harvest, but you’re called to plant the seeds.  And, as Bishop Curry says, even though the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second-best time is now (120). 

1.       The HarperCollins Study Bible.  Text note on Genesis 17:5.  New York: Harper Collins, 1993. 26.

2.       Speiser, E.A. Genesis.  In The Anchor Bible, volume 1.  Text note on Genesis 17:15.  New York: Doubleday, 1964. 123.

3.       Tutu, Desmond.  In God's Hands: The Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book 2015.  New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.  22.

4.       Schirmer, Sherry Lamb.  A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002.  179.

5.       Williams, Mara Rose.  “Alvin Brooks and Kansas City: A love story imperiled by racism, saved by service.”  The Kansas City Star, Feb. 21, 2021.  Available at: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article249015770.html. Accessed Feb. 26, 2021.