You may not have noticed but a couple weeks ago your preachers began preach-ing on an area of the Bible— the Old Testa-ment– that is not as often touched as the New Testament.  In fact these recent preaching texts have dipped into some of the lesser known books even of the Old Testa-ment.

Last week Debbie Jorgens got us started in the book of Ecclesiastes and this week Pastor Joanna continues that journey. Ecclesiastes, most familiar lines (Ecclesiastes 3:1-10 talk about the various times in a  person’s life— they are often used as a text for a funeral—  ^“…a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,….”  Next week I will be visiting the book of Lamentations, which will also be Maria Markman’s text site the following week. 

The subtitle of my preaching text for August 1/2 is “Lifting Up Theologies of Protests”.  I think this is an appropriate topic for the times in which we are living.  Ronald Brownstein in an article last month in The Atlantic, reminds us that the 1960’s have  achieved  almost mythic status as a hinge point in American history. (At least until now.) Both those who welcomed and those who feared the convulsive changes that decade brought can agree on one thing: Socially, culturally, and politically, the nation was a very different place when the ’60s ended than when they began.

The death last week of Representative John Lewis and the Rev. C.T Vivian have caused a revisitation of the ’60s watershed moments—the civil-rights campaigns in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington and the anti-war March on the Pentagon; the outpouring of demonstrations following the shootings at Kent State—can seem in retrospect like towering peaks of transformative activism.

This could be another such moment.

Brownstein also said that while enormous differences separate the two periods they may ultimately prove united by the magnitude of the change they impose. 

In that light let me suggest, maybe it’s time to redeem the word “protest”, just a little bit.  We have become too used to seeing crowds in the streets of our cities, fires burning out buildings once occupied by persons whose ethnicity is the one allegedly being championed by the protesters.  Perhaps a better than “redeem” is reclaim.

We have a right to that word and use it to implement change that truly does— change things—  not just destroy them. I think we Lutherans particularly have a stake in the word protest— after all more than 500 years ago we were called protestants— before we were known as Lutheran.

About the time I got to seminary a protest movement rooted in the Catholic Church in South America was getting started.  It was called Liberation Theology.  The birth of the liberation theology movement is usually dated to the second Latin American Bishops’ Conference, which was held in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968. 

It’s big surge forward, though, was borne on the tragedy of the assassination of one of its stalwarts— Archbishop Óscar Romero.  An outspoken champion for the people who were suffering during El Salvador’s brutal civil war, Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was murdered on March 24, 1980. His death was celebrated by the military and the ruling class.

The night before his murder, the archbishop made a personal appeal to the soldiers responsible for the escalating violence in El Salvador: “I beseech you, I beg you, I command you! In the name of God: Cease the repression.” The next day, he was gunned down while saying Mass.  Not a bad line for today as well.

As I thought about the church and protest I ran across a Romero quote which challenges us not to shrink from our heritage but to embrace and reclaim our heritage in protest:  “This is the mission entrusted to the church, a hard mission: to uproot sins from history, to uproot sins from the political order, to uproot sins from the economy, to uproot sins wherever they are. What a hard task! It has to meet conflicts amid so much selfishness, so much pride, so much vanity, so many who have enthroned the reign of sin among us.”

I am not sure what direction I will take in next week’s sermon— after all that’s 10 days from now—  however I think it will be partly informed by another Romero quote which brings redemption of protest to a manageable level:  “The Gospel is a very dangerous idea. We have to see how much of that dangerous idea we can perform in our own lives. There is nothing innocuous or safe about the Gospel. Jesus did not get crucified because he was a nice man.”