Duo-logue: To Write a Sermon

“What’s the good news? Where is it? I didn’t hear any good news!”
I hear Gennifer Brooks’ voice echo in my head.
”There should always be good news. That’s what Preaching is: Delivering the Good News.”

But what good news?

Trans kids are being endangered… as so are the parents who love them.
Queer kids are being threatened.
Abortion rights are steadily under attack.
Russia is flinging missiles - aggravating all of us who carry PTSD of the Cold War.

WHAT GOOD NEWS?

Weekly, a Black person - asleep or unarmed - is shot by cops, mostly unheralded.
Black institutions - churches and schools - are receiving bomb threats.

what. good. news?

“The Good News is what God does for the people, the church,” I hear her lecture.
“I hear a lot about what people are doing to people. What is God doing?” She prompts.

The pandemic rages.
Millions, worldwide, have died.
masks are optional.
Schools can’t find enough teachers to hold classes 5 days a week.
Kids can’t stay home. Companies don’t offer their parents sick leave.

“What is GOD doing?”

Forbes has new billionaires to report.
The prices of, well … everything continue to rise so owners - the kryrii - can maintain their place on the list.
The Rams won the Superbowl.

What is God doing?!

Am I supposed to gaze into the mind of God? How do I answer that?

The earth is warming and the polar caps are melting while carbon footprints increase with home deliveries for those whose lives are endangered by a viral illness that is a mere inconvenience or a political ploy for others.

Even the Church can no longer play church, as her leaders come to grips with the reality that a man they called “friend",” whose power they helped create, maintain, and solidify robbed them blind. They have little hope of being made whole. And no one can talk about the irony. No one can mention the same Leaders bewailing their fates now threatened the livelihood of folk as coercion to give the Leaders’ friend money. Enablers hate being told as much. Pastors have been robbed of their future.

WHAT IS GOD DOING, indeed.

And, in my heart, I hear Audre Lorde declaring, “honey, I don’t know what you thought this was. We were never meant to survive.”

“How is that GOOD NEWS?” Gennifer Brooks responds. “How is that GOOD?”

We were never meant to survive. Not us. Not those of us who live on the peripheries of the margins, pulled from the possibility of ever centering ourselves. Other even in our own eyes.

We were never meant to survive. Not us. Not those of us ripped from our mothers’ wombs with an ear check to see how much melanin we’d carry, to judge how much hell we’d catch in life.

We were never meant to survive. Not us. Not those of us snatched from wildernesses into pulpits, with no family name to claim and no footsteps to follow. Who are left on our own to find which trails have already been blazed.

We were never meant to survive. Not us. Not those of us whose existence can be debated in congressional halls, argued in courthouses, and discussed - however politely - in church houses. Who are at once confronted with the question, ‘who made you’ and the demand to be something other than our Othered selves. Not queer. Not gay. Not trans. Not lesbians. Not … no one sees bi-folk anyway.

we were never meant to survive!

Not the Ukraine without Russia. … hell, not any formerly-Soviet state.
Not women who hope to be fully human: sexual but not perpetually pregnant, with their own moral agency, whole lives, enmeshed in decisions women make for themselves about themselves.
Not trans adults (if they can break them and kill them as kids, there will be no trans adults).
Not Black.
Not Brown.
We were never meant to survive.

we did. we are. we shall.

Is that the good news? That somehow, despite all efforts to the contrary, we have survived? Is it good news to know that we were never meant to … and, therefore, every moment of our lives will be a struggle to continue to survive? A subversive existence, an effort to maintain what was never meant to be? Is there GOOD news in the proclamation that the attempted destruction only smashed us, only hurt a little bit for a long while? We survive … and suffer. Is this the good news?

“The Good News is words of God’s act in the world. The Good News consists of statements where God is the subject and we are objects - and only indirectly so. If you have found a statement that consists of human action, where humanity is the subject, it is NEWS. Whether you deem it bad or good. It is news. It is not THE GOOD NEWS.” Dr2 Brooks’ thick Trinidadian drawl answers my questions across 17 years of time and space.

“We survived.” We survive.

But what is GOD doing?

Must I, like some modern preachers and pastors, surrender the divine to human hands? Even apologize for expecting GOD to work within human history, upon humanity, without the imposition of human hands? Have I, too, reached the point where I must declare, “the good news is we are human! We deliver ourselves, make our own possibilities, our own way back from the brink of disaster! We survive!”? Am I not just echoing the humanist refrain that collapses all power into our hands? That ignores what happens to those who must inevitably succumb to our power? When we - who were never meant to survive - wield power (ahem!… Church…) what of those who we declare were never meant to survive? What of our own created margins and peripheries, the edges of which we cannot see?

We survive. That statement, Dr. Brooks would say, is incomplete news. It works as a poem but not as a thesis statement to a sermon.

We speak THE GOOD NEWS. And only that as it is given. “A speech may use another text as its source. A sermon may only use the Bible. I don’t teach public speaking. I teach preaching. In my class, you will preach from the Bible.”

We survive.

Maybe the good news in the midst of this global foolishment is not that, somehow, some of us survive. Maybe the good news isn’t even that the world has gone crazy before - over and over and over and over - and yet we are still here, managing to ensure the world will go crazy again and again and again. Maybe, disembodied Dr. Brooks’ voice, the good news is that we have a Good News to seek. Maybe that’s The Good News, too. That even as the world teeters - again - on the brink of self-destruction, that God is doing something

even if I - or we - have no idea what that might be.

And maybe, vision of Mama Lorde that lives in my heart, that is why we survive: because we have a Thing that is bigger than us, distinct from us, whose action we can seek, whose presence we can search, even if we don’t mean to understand it; even if we don’t need to comprehend it.

God is doing … something
and so we survive.