A Sermon for Sunday, June 14, 2020. Emory Presbyterian Church. Romans 5:1-5
Intro: Today, we begin our Summer Saints sermon series, a beloved custom here at EPC. In the Reformed tradition, we Presbyterians have a different focus on “saints” compared to our Catholic siblings. Instead of canonizing them or putting them on a pedestal as holy people set apart in glory, we give glory to the triune God for the ordinary, holy lives of believers in this and every age. We put more emphasis on how we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, both dead and living, on our spiritual journeys. Ordinary, flawed human beings who have made or are making a tremendous impact on the world through acts of love and mercy. While the “saints” I’ve chosen for this year’s series are notable figures in culture, they have come from humble beginnings and have mostly led regular lives, even those in the entertainment industry. They are imperfectly perfect people who are grounded in faith—striving to do what is right and to work toward the betterment of humanity.
More than a century ago, in January of 1917, a 32-year-old Alice Paul, born in a Quaker family in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, and other women suffragists began an 18-month campaign of picketing the White House to demand the right to vote. They stood at the gates with signs that read, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?”
Alice and her friends endured an onslaught of verbal insults and physical, which increased after the U.S. entered World War I. The police, instead of protecting the women’s right to free speech and peaceful assembly, arrested them on the flimsy charge of obstructing traffic, even though they weren’t in the street. Alice Paul was arrested on October 20, 1917 and sentenced to seven months in a women’s prison and workhouse in Virginia. Conditions in the prison were terrible: poor sanitation, infested food and rats everywhere. And the women were forced to work all day long and regularly beaten by the guards on the orders of the prison warden who desired to break their wills. “But Alice’s spirit could not be broken,” says author Daneen Akers in the book, Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints. Akers writes:[1]
“Alice saw an inscription that another woman had etched onto a prison wall: ‘Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.’ Alice drew strength from that reminder of the higher calling of this difficult path. In response to the brutal prison conditions, Alice organized a hunger protest. Alice’s hunger strike went on for so long that prison officials were afraid she would die and they didn’t want the negative publicity. They eventually force-fed Alice and threatened to send her to a hospital for people with severe mental illnesses. However, Alice and the other imprisoned suffragettes managed to get messages to journalists.”
Eventually public outcry compelled authorities to release the suffragists and drop all charges. And three years later, due to increased pressure from Alice and the suffragists, the 19thAmendment, allowing American women the right to vote, was ratified on August 18, 1920.
This right, however, applied mostly to white American women. It took many years before laws were established to give Native-American and Asian-American women and Black Americans the right to vote. And Alice encouraged many generations of women in the 1960s and 70s who fought courageously for those rights. Alice also played an instrumental role in adding protection for women in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She once said, “When you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row.” Alice Paul, who died at the age of 92, devoted 60 years of her life to ensure that women have full equality, an effort that continues today.
In similar fashion, Thurgood Marshall also spent six decades as a champion for equality and justice. Every year on May 17, the Episcopal Church celebrates the Feast of Thurgood Marshall, an Episcopalian who became the first African American justice appointed to the United States Supreme Court. He played a pivotal role in promoting racial equality between the 1930s and 1960s. As a lawyer for the NAACP, Thurgood defended black clients who were the victims of a racist criminal justice system that consisted of police brutality, all-white juries, and unconstitutional state and local laws in regard to eating in restaurants, sitting on buses, buying homes and voting. He also attempted numerous times to get anti-lynching bills passed in the Senate but was thwarted by Southern senators.
Thurgood is widely remembered for winning 29 of a record-breaking 32 civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including the 1954 landmark decision of Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The Supreme Court declared the doctrine of “separate but equal” to be unconstitutional, which resulted in the desegregation of public schools.
Thurgood Marshall’s devotion to civil rights and reforming the system was formed when he was a teenager. The year was 1922 and the 15-year-old Thurgood was trying to board a trolley with a delivery load of hatboxes when he inadvertently bumps into a white woman. The accident prompts a white man to call Thurgood a racial slur and shove him off the trolley. In self-defense, Thurgood punches the man and then gets arrested by the police and thrown in jail. Eventually his white boss arrives to get him released. Like many black kids growing up in America during the 1920s, Thurgood was forced to attend a blacks-only school, which unlike white schools, had no library, guy or cafeteria. In the award-winning children’s book, Thurgood, author Jonah Winter recounts:[2]
From a classroom window, Thurgood could hear the sounds of the white cops beating confessions out of black suspects in the police stations across the street. This was the world he was born into: a world where black people had few legal rights. Thurgood’s dad worked at jobs where he had to serve and bow to white people…Thurgood saw how these jobs hurt his father. He saw the rage that boiled inside him. But he also learned some things from his dad. He learned about courtrooms and lawyers. His father used to take him to trials, and there they would sit, watching lawyers argue about justice and injustice, guilt and innocence, truth and falsehood. Back at home, over dinner, his dad would engage him in arguments about these trials, about the news, about anything. He would raise his voice, demand that Thurgood back up his points with evidence. And Thurgood would put it right back to him, word for word, point for point—with glee, with fire.
It was Thurgood Marshall’s fire that led him to a seat on the Supreme Court of which he served from 1967 to 1991. According to a History Channel bio, “During his 24-year term as Supreme Court Justice, Marshall’s passionate support for individual and civil rights guided his policies and decisions. Most historians regard him as an influential figure in shaping social policies and upholding laws to protect minorities. Thurgood Marshall who died at the age of 84, two years after retiring from the Court, wisely observed: “The measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis.”
Friends, we are in a time of crisis. The issues of equality and justice have never gone away since Alice and Thurgood’s days, of course, but they have come to a loud crescendo in 2020. In the midst of a global pandemic, that has exposed a broken health care system and economic and racial inequalities, we are witnessing national (and global) anti-racism protests unlike anything we’ve seen since the 60s—all sparked by the recent murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. And if that wasn’t enough, the Trump administration announced on Friday—during Pride month and the 4-year anniversary of the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando—that it would remove nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ + people when it comes to health care and health insurance.
Like many of you, I’m angry and distraught by the state of our world. And my heart deeply laments the misery that many human beings have to go through because of their gender or the color of their skin or their sexuality or numerous other things that cause them to be marginalized by society.
The misery is quite overwhelming and I find it difficult to know how best to respond to all of the brokenness that is occurring. How should we respond to the suffering? What do we do with it?
In his letter to followers of Jesus in Rome, who like many Christian communities, were under the cruel occupation of the Empire, the apostle Paul writes:
“We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
Boast in our sufferings? Seems insensitive and offensive for Paul to say that we should brag and even be glad about our suffering because it’s good for us or makes us better people. But Paul’s remarks aren’t actually as tone deaf as they seem when one considers the amount of suffering that Paul has experienced due to being relentlessly persecuted and thrown in prison for proclaiming God’s sovereignty in Christ over the authority of Caesar. Furthermore, he is addressing churches where conflict has arisen among Gentile and Jewish Christians whereupon Gentiles had developed prejudice toward Jews. United Methodist scholar and pastor, Rev. Diane Turner-Sharazz, explains the reasoning behind the apostle’s message:[3]
“It does not seem like much to boast about, but Paul is assuring us that we can be triumphant in our sufferings. Rather than being destroyed or challenged by our sufferings, we can triumph through and over them. Paul’s words are certainly not meant to celebrate our experiences of suffering. However, when we do suffer, we are not, nor do we need to be, defeated. He explains that the experience of suffering can bring persons through a series of results. As we stand in the grounding of our faith, and go through trials and tribulations, our suffering can produce endurance, the ability to be strengthened to keep going as we take each step forward. When we have endured with patience, the endurance produces a strengthened character, and this character can move us toward a stronger hope. Our hope is fruitful because it is hope in the God in whom we have faith.”
Paul’s wisdom is reflected in the lives and philosophies of Alice Paul and Thurgood Marshall who endured hardships because they fervently believed that God would see them through it and use their endeavors to bring about change and hope for many who were suffering from injustice.
“Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God”
“When you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row.”
“The measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis.”
Like Alice and Thurgood and many saints that have walked the road ahead of us and the faithful who trod the path now, we are called to be advocates for hope in the midst of suffering.
We are each called to be a better human to other humans by doing the work of anti-racism and fighting for injustice for all who are denied equality. We are each invited to resist, to put the hand to the plow and show compassion for those who have been in anguish for far too long. We are each called to make God’s hope for the world a present reality—a hope rooted in God’s love for every human being, especially the oppressed.
God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit, and we must continue to endure the suffering of both the present and future so that we might share that love boldly and abundantly.
Amen.
[1] https://www.holytroublemakers.com
[2] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/554491/thurgood-by-jonah-winter-illustrated-by-bryan-collier/
[3] Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 3, Westminster John Knox Press
georgia preach 
Amen Andy,….another excellent one.
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