Loving Beyond Our History - The Rev Dr Kelly Sprinkle - 5-4-2025

Reading: Romans 13:8-10 (John Armine)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Reading from Romans thirteen eight through ten. Act Jesus is
from Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ called to be
an apostle and set apart to proclaim the good news. Oh,

(00:20):
no one anything except to love one another. For the
one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments
you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you
shall not steal, you should not covet and any other

(00:43):
commandment are summed up in this word. Love your neighbor
as yourself loves. Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore,
love is a feeling of the law.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Years ago I told a member and discernment a student
preparing for ministry, be careful about sharing your pulpit. For
I had learned my lesson because on a return trip
from Nicaragua with a group of college students, the custom

(01:37):
was to sort of let them have the sermon and
reflect upon what they had learned during the trip, and
also just to reflect in general. And one of the
students did it. She stirred up a hornet's nest. And
it was my fault because now that I had, let's

(01:59):
share the pull pit. But one of our activities as
we were preparing for the trip, and just some of
the themes we were thinking about that year included reading
the book Lies my teacher told me, which is now
since nineteen ninety five sold about two million copies. And

(02:19):
she talked a little about the book. Then after worship,
a church member grabbed me by the arm pulled me
to the side. I said, is that one of those
leftist books that you found at some odd publisher? And
I said, actually, confunded at the bookstore just down the street,
which was an independent bookstore, but sort of the likes

(02:42):
of Barnes and Noble, if you will, And I said,
I bet there's probably four or five copies on the shelf. Well,
I'll go see. Sometimes you have to be careful about
sharing the pullpit if I say that halfheartedly, because it's
new perspective, new and understanding that makes us grow. Now,

(03:05):
some would say that love this is easy if we
just remember the ten commandments and move on with our lives.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
So I put it to the test.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
One Sunday and another congregation for during the children's moment,
I asked the children to give a quiz to the congregation,
and they've passed out note cards numbered one through ten
on each card, and then I said, your homework to do,
now it's a pop quiz, is to write down the
ten Commandments. Well, none of us did well, but I

(03:42):
thought I was the best because I had really worked
hard over the past week to basically to memorize them
in the correct order so I could quickly snap them off.
And so I said, and there you have it. And
then Lily looked up at me and said, you forgot
two of them. And then I looked at the congregation.
They knowingly agreed with her. I had forgot the one

(04:07):
about not stealing and honoring one's parents, which led another
child to say, are.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
You a thief? Do you not love your parents? But
you got the point.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
I hope that as much as we say that we
live our lives by the ten Commandments, sometimes we don't
remember all of them. And I'm not saying you need
to do that, or if you need to post the
tin Commandments in your home or on the walls of
a building, but it is sometimes it's the easy way.

(04:40):
Say well, if we do these, we show love. But
then we are countered by what Paul writes, that love
does no harm to a neighbor. I think it raises
the ante a little bit. Yes, if you do the
ten commandments, you do not cause harm. But I think

(05:02):
sometimes in our lives we should confess omission things that
we should have done or said, or sometimes our lack
of understanding or knowledge. In nineteen twenty three, at the

(05:23):
General Senate of the United Church of Christ, it was
the last sentod that John Dorhouer would be serving as
the General Minister and President of our denomination. And John
is the same one that visited us in twenty twenty
three as well. He asked, the question of the delegates
and the visitors of the meeting is how many of

(05:45):
you have taught confirmation that there are four streams that
make up the United Church of Christ, the Congregationalists, the
Christian Churches, the Evangelical, and the Reformed. Many stood raised
their hands in agreement, and then he said, well, we
should all ask for forgiveness and confess that we, perhaps unknowingly,

(06:12):
perhaps by just simply omission, we have left out the
fifth stream.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
And that fifth.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
Stream is what we are calling now the Afro Christian
Stream or the Afro Christian Convention. And now I feel
guilty a little bit because the Afro Christian convention has
its roots deep in Virginia and North Carolina, and I
knew nothing about it. I had done what many folks

(06:46):
in the United Church of Christ had done over the
years and sort.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
Of grouped all those in people of color in what
was the Southern.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
Convention, the convention that the Congregationalists were working really hard
to establish before the merger, a conference or a convention
for African American people. But as we came together those
four streams, as we would like to call them, we
had lumped all together, the Afro Christian Convention into the

(07:20):
Congregationalist movement. Now, yes, it seems to fit at times,
because the Congregationalists were abolitionists.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
Primarily, those were.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
The ones of the established the underground railroad, worked to
make slaves free. Were the people of the Amistad with
the attorneys that stood up for those who had been
captured as slaves. Yet in nineteen fifty seven, as we

(07:50):
were forming as a denomination in the spirit of unity,
we collapsed that tradition and into those four But John
wounded us. And now to confess even still that the

(08:15):
world view the impact of the Afro Christian Conventions are
not just appropriately represented under the congregational stream of the
United Church of Christ, because the Afro Christian Convention having
its roots all the way back somewhat to the founding
of Jamestown in Virginia, but by lumping it into the

(08:40):
congregational division, we were leaving it up to white folks
to tell the story of folks of African descent. For
you see, the Afro Christian Convention was born from a
wellspring of independent Black churches with deep African rudeness, which

(09:00):
is rightly understood and at last shared as a unique stream.

Speaker 3 (09:07):
Now I must tell you, in.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
Twenty twenty five during Confirmation, we told the story of
the Fifth Stream, which may for many churches maybe the
first time or the second or third time since our general.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
Sin and meeting.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
But I do believe that sometimes within our own histories,
we have to love beyond that history. Sometimes as we
didn't know, sometimes it was just easier to put it together.
But sometimes we as a nation and as a people,

(09:50):
must love beyond our history. Now we may roll our
eyes up books like lies. My teacher told me the truth.
It makes us uncomfortable, it makes us sort of squeamish.
But in all our attempts to revise history back to
what we thought was true.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
Does a disservice to all of us.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
To roll it back into something that makes it more
easy to swallow and gets us off the hook. Doesn't
really do justice to love. Perhaps there's no eleventh commandment

(10:37):
Thou shalt not omit

Speaker 3 (10:41):
Amen,