And now abideth . . . 

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
(Proper 15C)
August 17, 2025

Seminarian Shawan Gillians.

Let us pray.

Don't exalt the preacher. Don't exalt the pew. Preach the gospel—simple, pure, and free. Lord, you teach us that, if you would be lifted up from the earth, you would draw all of humanity on to you. And so Lord, we lift our hearts, we lift our minds, we lift our voices to you with the expectation that we will be drawn ever closer to you. Amen.

The task I find before me today is not an easy one for some obvious reasons. And I'll name a few of them. We've been together now sojourneying for a year. It's hard to believe, but I'm a second year seminarian now. It's been a year we have been together. This like a bad penny. This message just keeps rolling back around. When I spoke to you this time last year, we talked about boney fish. As I was preparing for a class, I happened upon the sermon of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, “Love your enemies.” If you've ever heard any of the audio from Dr. King's sermons, when he preaches, it's like being in a football stadium. The crowd, the congregation goes wild. Amens and hallelujahs everywhere. Until you listen to his sermon about loving your enemies when the church is quiet enough to hear a pin drop.

So if he could preach to a quiet church, I reckon I ought to be able to preach to one, too. But first of all, with regard to the difficulty of the text, the portion provided in the lectionary today isc hoppy right in some parts Jesus is talking to the crowd; at other points he's talking specifically to the disciples. I'm not sure it's entirely clear all the time who he's talking to and when. We'd really need to read more of the text than we have time for today to make it all logical. So, allow me to provide a Cliff's Notes version, if you will, for context.

Jesus is preaching at a revival in a mega church. Thousands of people show up to this revival. He's brought some of his deacon board with him. He's gotten fired up because when he was at the “meat and three” having breakfast, lunch or dinner, he did not particularly like what he was seeing in the town. Now he's got their attention and he's about to let them have it. Okay.

The second reason that the text is difficult: the task is not easy is because the Jesus we meet in the text is not the Jesus we are accustomed to meeting. In the text, Jesus tells us that he has not come to bring peace, which I find interesting since the prophet Isaiah identifies the Messiah as the Prince of Peace. Yes, ma'am. The prince of peace. And quite frankly, the idea of a Jesus who sews division is more than mildly alarming to the above average believer.

The third and final thing is that Jesus concludes with a seemingly random castigation of the crowd for not being able to understand the signs of the present time. Okay, this this would be a difficult message to preach on any Sunday, on every Sunday. And I get to preach it on the Sunday we bless backpacks. Yay!

So there will not be many chuckles this morning. And if I had an “Amen Corner”, the inhabitants almost certainly wouldn't feel like they had much to shout about. Jesus is all at once teaching a word that condemns us. And yet, in that way, the gospel always does, it also liberates us. So allow me to divert for a moment.

You might be surprised to hear that it is difficult for me to see this passage without my mind's eye casting back to the Tower of Babel. That might sound curious to some of you, but as a black woman in America who is the descendant of enslaved Africans, I am acutely and intimately familiar with what psychologists would call generational trauma. Sometimes it's called intergenerational trauma. Essentially, there are some things my ancestors experienced in their nearly two hundred years of enslavement that were so indelibly stamped on them that it shows up in my life experience, in the way that I interact with things, that I react to things, that I perceive things. And I don't necessarily have a full understanding of why that's so.

And this isn't unique to the descendant of enslaved Africans. It's any group that's had a prolonged exposure to trauma. They experience the same thing. So when I read the story of the Tower of Babel, what I see is a people experiencing generational trauma. We often tell the story of Babel by viewing them through a lens that depicts them as a prideful people determined to have unfettered access to God or maybe even to be perceived as having a holiness equivalent to God. But consider with me if you will the possibility that what motivated the people of Babel was not pride but fear. Lest we forget these are the people who are the descendants of Noah.

Noah who along with this immediate family had to watch their loved ones, their extended family, their friends perish in a flood while they got away to safety. That is the kind of trauma that literally sticks to your bones that embeds itself in your psyche. So, it is not difficult for me to conceive a world in which the Tower of Babel isn't built because they are a people who went around chanting, "We're number one. We're number one." But because they are a people who' heard the stories about the flood since they were little children. And because of the very rational belief that a cl that a flood could one day carry them away. They're afraid.

And how do you escape a flood? We all live in Charleston. How do how do you escape a flood? You go up. You build above it. So a tower makes sense to a people who are afraid of a flood.

Which brings me back to the people Jesus is teaching in this morning's gospel lesson. We've been chipping away at this sermon of Jesus for the last few weeks. You heard Father Adam preach it. You heard Father Will preach it. We've been going at this chapter 12 for quite some time now. And the sermon that Jesus is preaching begins at the beginning of chapter 12. Like the excellent teacher he is, Jesus gives us the subject of his lesson from the beginning. In fact, if you were to read chapter 12 in the English standard translation of the Bible, the subheading of the verses beginning with verse four is “Have no fear.” So then Jesus spends the rest of the chapter giving examples of the various ways fear creeps into our lives and plants itself in our hearts and in our minds without our even being aware. And he's warning us to be on our guard from hoarding wealth to anxiety about material possessions. So Jesus is teaching us, “Do not be afraid.”

Then we get to the kicker. After all that talk about not being afraid or anxious, Jesus tells us the gospel he's teaching causes fear. He says he came to bring division. But what brings division? Like fear. And what is it about the gospel that co causes so much fear? It's the message we hear again and again. Be merciful. That means feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, the imprisoned, the captive, giving shelter to the unhoused.

Now, there are some people who will tell you that's socialism. But saints, my Bible tells me that's the gospel of Jesus Christ. (Amen. Oh, the Amen Corner is here. Praise the Lord, somebody.) But Jesus isn't only warning us about the fear that comes from our understandably self-protective natures. The fear that causes us to think about what sacrifices we'd have to make and risks we'd have to take to live out that gospel. or the fear of what that could mean for us and our families. No, no. The explicit fear Jesus is warning us about is what fear could do within our families. It is no mistake that Jesus runs through children against children and in-laws against in-laws. We are talking an inter-family squabble. That family is the Family of God.

When one group interprets scripture one way, one group interprets scripture another way, and yet another group isn't sure they believe scripture at all. I wonder what the world would look like if instead of assuming the people on the other side of the fence were prideful, we believe, and therefore evil. What if we considered that maybe, just maybe, they're afraid. I know you don't want to hear this, but sometimes, mean people, angry people, even hateful people, y'all, they're just scared people.

I wonder what the world would look like if it would change the way you react to what the other side (whoever that is for you) does. I wonder if it would change the way you reacted. And I don't mean would you condone what they do. That's not the point. That's not the intent.

But would it change the way you interact with them? If you disagree with me that we are called by God to serve the physical needs of others (and that's absolutely your right) or even if you agree with that concept but disagree with me about the particulars of who should do the serving or about limitations on who gets served, would it make you view me differently if I tell you that what drives me is a fear about the direction of a world that can so easily discard and disregard other human beings just because there's something about them we don't like?

What if I told you? What if I told you I'm afraid one day I'll be on your list of undesirables? And what about the other side of the equation? What if the people who want to limit access to “insert popular issue here” were to say they feel attacked right now? What if they told you they feel afraid now that the things that matter to them are being taken away? Would it make you sit down with them and try to work toward a world where none of us is afraid of systems in place in this world? Would it make you want to sit down with them and try to work out toward a world where no one feels the need to be afraid of the systems in place in this world?

Jesus said, "You hypocrites, you know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" But I'll say it this way. Do you seriously think that you that we are the only ones who can feel afraid? Do you think that you that we are the only ones whose fear is justified? As I conclude, allow me to assure you that if those of us with good sense 0don't start talking to one another, seriously talking to one another instead of at one another and soon, before too long we're going to find ourselves out of time.

And isn't that a scary thought? So, if you found this to be a word that causes you to consider or reconsider your interactions, if you found this to be a condemning word, good. Now, let me invite you to move past that condemnation because after all, this is good news. Be liberated. Be liberated from that fear that's held you bound, held you captive, caused you to stay silent when you ought to speak, to speak when you ought to remain silent. If I might quote from that collection of sayings entitled “A Course in Miracles”,

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's fear.”

And saints, we have not been left in despair. For the eternal words in First Corinthians tells us that, “Now abideth”—Not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, not next year, not in four years, not in eight years. “Now abideth faith hope . . .: Now, let me find my Bible scholars in the room. “Faith, hope, and . . .” (love, charity) “Faith, hope, and . . . love.” “Faith, hope, and . . .” Oh, say it like you mean it. Faith, hope, and love. Faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is (LOVE).

Amen. Amen.

© 2025 Shawan Gillians

Image “Love Mosaic” by Quan Ha, 2009