Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Matthew 9:35-10:8

In the Lion King, Zazu, the hornbill, begins each day with the morning report. He sings:

This is the morning report
Gives you the long and the short
Every grunt, roar, and snort
Not a tale I distort
On the morning report

Chimps are going ape, giraffes remain above it all
Elephants remember, though just what I can’t recall
Crocodiles are snapping up fresh offers from the banks
Showed interest in my nest egg but I quickly said “No thanks!”
We haven’t paid the hornbills and the vultures have a hunch
Not everyone invited will be coming back from lunch.[1]

The beginning of today’s gospel is like the morning report, the summary of what Jesus has been doing: speaking words that felt like liberation to people’s ears. Stepping into places of disease and illness with a touch that connected them to a healing that was even beyond the physical, compassion overflowing when he witnesses the lives that people are living, aching that they are sheep without a shepherd, harassed and helpless. In his very own morning report, he tells his friends, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.  Let’s pray for more laborers.”

It’s hard not to hear this passage through the thick and unforgiving lens of cultural Christianity, which assumes that the labor of the church is to get everyone into the institution or into heaven. But here, I think the harvest is all those who are harassed and helpless.  They need to be gathered into love and community.  It’s that need that leads him to recruit partners in his project to do the same thing that God wanted to do with the twelve tribes of Israel, namely build a contrast society, God’s reign coming near, a nation within the nations that will be marked by love and justice.  That’s why he chooses twelve.  Not because there were great people but because he needed a number that would say something on its own.  Turns out Jesus was a better poet and preacher than he was a talent scout.

All these guys turn out to be awful laborers in the harvest. In a week when some churches have restricted the ministry of women, it’s probably also important to point out that it wasn’t their maleness that set them apart.  Remember that, at the most important morning report, it was the women who gave it: He is risen.  He is not here.

Here’s the morning report for June 18, 2023:  There is still a harvest of lostness and suffering and oppression out there, and there is a collection of workers who may be fantastically unqualified, EXCEPT that Jesus has recruited them to be part of a project to bring heaven near, to make mercy and justice real in the world.  That list of disciples includes your names.

June 18^th, 2023, a day that falls between the commemoration of the Emmanuel Nine, and Juneteenth, a celebration of that moment when word of the Emancipation Proclamation finally arrived in Galveston, Texas, two years after it was signed.  We gather today in fields of deep lament and joyful liberation.  I think we probably need both in our morning report.

The ELCA chose to add the Emmanuel Nine to list of commemorations because our church is part of the tragic story.  Pastor Clementa Pinckney was the senior pastor of Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.  He was a state senator, and he was a graduate of Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, along with Pastor Daniel Lee Simons. Their murderer, Dylan Roof, who joined them for bible study before he began shooting, a white supremacist, neo-Nazi, was a member of an ELCA congregation.  In the wake of the murders, our church was left with the haunting question of whether our denomination, the whitest in America, had confirmed Roof’s early flirtations with white supremacy.  Probably not directly, although one wonders what good church people say when they think no one is listening.  More likely it was indirectly by our absence of diversity. He would have likely heard almost exclusively white preachers, or had white youth leaders, white teachers, white musicians, white phrasing in the liturgy and prayers, and, without a doubt, pictures of white Jesus.

The ELCA, including Gloria Dei, is laboring within a full harvest of whiteness.  Supremacy. Unless we can grasp that we are lost, too, like sheep without a shepherd, the fruits of that harvest will continue to grow:  hatred, violence, and death.

Tomorrow is Juneteenth, sometimes called Freedom Day, Emancipation Day, Black Fourth of July. It became a federal holiday and state holiday a few years ago. It will become one of Gloria Dei’s official holidays on Tuesday when the council adopts a new Employee Handbook. We’re already living into that and taking the holiday tomorrow.

Alan Freeman grew up in Houston celebrating Juneteenth every year.  He has vivid memories of smoke permeating his entire neighborhood because so many people were using their barbecue pits for celebratory cookouts.  You could go to anyone’s house and be welcomed to join in the feast.” Dr. Karida Brown, a sociology professor at Emory University whose research focuses on race, said there’s no reason to feel awkward about wanting to recognize Juneteenth because you have no personal ties or you’re not Black. In fact, embrace it. Brown said. “It absolutely is your history. It absolutely is a part of your experience. … Isn’t this all of our history? The good, the bad, the ugly, the story of emancipation and freedom for your Black brothers and sisters under the Constitution of the law.” [2]

It is part of our history.  As much as the arrival of the Swedes at the first Gloria Dei in Philadelphia.  As much as the calling of the twelve or being baptized into the Jesus project.  It’s the morning report, the Easter proclamation, the dawn of a new age, a harvest of freedom and justice that is welcoming everyone to the feast.

Let us not cease to pray for laborers in this harvest. Alleluia. Christ is risen.  Christ is risen, indeed.  Alleluia.

[1] https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/lionking/morningreport.htm.

[2] “A Beginner’s Guide to Juneteenth:  A Guide to How All Americans Can Celebrate,” by Terry Tang, June 17, 2023.  https://apnews.com/article/juneteenth-holiday-beginner-celebration-guide-460084b8008206febf23bd8d083170fa