Mission Yearbook: A sermon on Amos challenges assumptions about sanctuary

Whose sanctuary is this, anyway? 

That was the provocative question the Rev. Dr. Starsky Wilson, president and CEO of the Children’s Defense Fund, recently explored during a sermon based on Amos 7:7–17 at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Watch Wilson’s sermon here. 

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The Rev. Dr. Starsky Wilson

“I’m glad those are not my words!” Wilson said after relating the words of Amos’ prophecy of doom for King Jeroboam II and his people. “This is the Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.”

“This conversation and conflict comes up between one who is a priest, Amaziah, and one whom we have deemed a prophet, Amos,” he noted. “Here at Bethel there is a dialogue about whose sanctuary this is.”

In this context, sanctuary “is an open-air space, spaces in nature where those who gather might have direct contact with God,” he said. “God’s open space in nature had been … sanctified and set apart by those who engage in priestly ritual to distinguish between the sacred and the profane, that this is holy ground.”

Just before this text, Amaziah engages in conversation with the king “about Amos before he talks to Amos,” Wilson noted.

“Where I’m from [Wilson served congregations in Missouri and Texas before beginning his work with the Children’s Defense Fund], we are a little bit careful about people who talk about you to the authorities before they talk to you. We’re careful about people who would rather talk to the police than talk to their neighbors. … We have a short word for that: We call them ‘snitches.’”

“Some feel more comfortable with proximity to power,” Wilson said, “than they do with [proximity to] God’s people.”

Go back to your own neighborhood, Amaziah tells Amos. “Don’t speak this way here,” is how Wilson put it, “because this is the king’s sanctuary.”

“Amaziah’s declaration may sound far-fetched. We can hardly imagine someone coming here into the hallowed grounds of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church and saying, ‘this is the president’s sanctuary.’ We would never say, ‘this is [Mayor] Muriel Bowser’s sanctuary.’ But I want to suggest there are many of us who do so each and every day.”

Amaziah “is not only claiming property rights for a building, he is also gentrifying ground, claiming a portion of Creation that God made for God’s self. Who does he think he is?” Wilson asked.

The question can also be asked, “whose sanctuary are you, anyway?”

“The challenge of dual citizenship in this world and in the kingdom of God is presented in the context of this text,” Wilson said. “The question of allegiance to the things of God or the things of the kingdom, the empire, the nations of this world, is a realistic question we must answer as we begin to shape our beings as God’s people.”

Amaziah “calls Amos a prophet and Amos says, ‘nah, bruh,’” Wilson said. “If you let others define your identity, your community, your call, you’ll be left to pick up the broken pieces of the narrative they construct for you.”

Amos’ answer to Amaziah has lessons for us today, he said.

For one, “prophecy is not a profession but a commitment to principles.”

Amos is saying, “I don’t have papers for this. I’m not a member of the guild … I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees. Amaziah has done what many of us have done when it comes to ministry: he has delegated the ministry of God’s Word to a select group of people who hang together in the sanctuary, tarry around the church” and wear garb like the stole Wilson wore on Sunday.

“Your call,” Wilson said, “is to live out the reality of what the red doors of your sanctuary really mean.” Church doors that are red historically signal there’s refuge and safety from violence inside. “In a world where people are knocked out and grabbed up for being different, what does it mean to live a witness that among us, they are fully and completely safe to be their whole selves?”

“It’s not a professionalized ministry that is somebody else’s responsibility,” he said, “but rather is the call of the entire congregation.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Adam Foster, Accountant, Financial Reporting, Administrative Services Group    
Penny Franklin, Executive Relations Coordinator, Executive Office, The Presbyterian Foundation        

Let us pray:

Loving God, help us to be people of faith, hope and love in a world that needs them desperately. Help us to express your love. Teach us to cling to the possibilities of your transforming power and allow us to help others to do the same. In your loving and welcoming presence, we pray. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Children’s Defense Fund’s leader draws from the Parable of the Sower to illuminate the agency’s work

The Rev. Dr. Starsky Wilson speaks at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C.

August 14, 2024

The Rev. Dr. Starsky Wilson

Channeling Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), the Rev. Dr. Starsky Wilson resonates with her reasoning: “My theory of change,” she’d say, “is the Parable of the Sower.”

Wilson, the current president and CEO of the Children’s Defense Fund and its Action Council, recently spoke at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., as part of its McClendon Scholar Program, using that very text found in Matthew’s gospel. Wilson, a United Church of Christ pastor, titled his talk, “Unleashing the Joy: Faith in Pursuit of Child Well-Being.”

Wilson opened his talk by honoring Edelman, who recently turned 85, and the Rev. James Lawson Jr., the civil rights leader who recently died at the age of 95. Wilson said Lawson “poured into young people and challenged faith leaders to stoke the fires of freedom’s faith.”

In the parable at hand, we can focus on the Sower or on the seed, Wilson said. The place where the seed is spread also plays a significant role. “I like focusing on the seed,” Wilson said. “The seed in this passage has the capacity to do what it does based on the setting in which it finds itself.”

All that seed reminds him of the 74 million Americans under the age of 18. At CDF, “we think something has been placed within the seed. That something is a certain joy. Children who are safe and secure will sing and dance. There is joy inside every child no matter where you find them,” he said.

Wilson recently met with members of Congress. “Not everyone is focused on the seed,” he said. In the parable, birds eat up the seed that falls along the path. That seed, “without any protection or care or commitment to its ultimate rooting and grounding feels like young people 0-8 in America,” he said. “They are exposed to a nation that has decided not to invest in a system of care for young people under the age of 5.”

“Their seed of joy,” he said, “is lost on the path.”

There’s precious little soil on rocky ground. In the 1950s, 9 in 10 young people climbed into economic circumstances that exceeded that of their parents. Today it’s 4 in 10, Wilson noted. “There are fractures” in public education as well as the nation’s economy and political landscape. “It’s not enough when the sun shines a light on what’s really playing out,” he said. “They get scorched.”

Those seeds that get choked by the thorns “have the same potential, the same capacity for joy, the same ability to flourish” as the other seeds, he said. “The thickets have crept up differently in this economy.” Expanding the child tax credit in 2021 cut child poverty in half, he said, but those same numbers got much worse when the expansion went away. “Those are thorns,” he said.

“I’m glad there’s the good ground” in the parable, Wilson said. “Good soil allows for the seed to be the center of attention. The birds didn’t take the story and fly with it.” With the rocks, the sun takes center stage. Thorns crowd the seed out. But “here we see what the seed can do: produce grain. There is agency in those 74 million seeds of joy,” he said. “The seed became grain, which means something else — someone else — benefitted from the seed.”

“When we talk about good soil and the Children’s Defense Fund, we talk about just and caring communities — places where children play freely in parks, walk safely to bus stops, learn in schools and sanctuaries, with neighbors and public servants as guardians of their well-being,” he said. “It is tilling the soil by shaping policies, ordinances and laws that allow children to flourish, sing and dance, to create space for them to say what they need. It’s the silent work that allows for health and healing.”

Mike Ferguson, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: Rev. Dr. Starsky Wilson, Children’s Defense Fund’s leader

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Patricia Nunez, PT Admin Asst. Stony Point Center, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Matthew Nurkin, Vice President, & Managing Director, Investments, Board of Pensions

Let us pray

Teach us to be faithful, O Lord, in hearing your call day by day and in responding with heartfelt obedience that we may help establish your kingdom in every heart, within each community and all around the world. Amen.