Here is a wonderful excerpt from a new sermon by one of our 2013 contributing authors, Eugenia Gamble; enjoy!
I grew up in the 1960s in the Jim
Crow south. The Civil Rights Movement shaped my life and family from the time I
was a tot. After the total desegregation of the school system, I attended a
high school where 80 percent of the students were African American. As a child
of white privilege, I attended the school as a matter of choice. I believed in
desegregation. I believed in public school. So, I went to public school. During
my senior year a friend of mine, a young African American boy, and I decided
that we were going to help with voter registration after school in the public
housing projects in our community. We didn’t have the sense God gave a turnip.
But that was what we decided to do. Somehow, word of our plan reached the
school librarian, a wise and wonderful African American woman who had seen it
all. She called us in to her office one day after school. Telling us what she
had heard, she told us that we simply could not do it. I remember rising up to
the full stature of my sixteen-year-old indignity and saying, “But we are
working for the truth.” She leaned over her desk, clasped her enormous
chocolate eyes on me and said something I have never forgotten. “Genie, you be
careful of the truth. The truth can get you killed.”
Mary knew from the first flap of
angel wings that the truth could get her killed. Yet she was able to respond
with joy and abandon. Why? Perhaps it was just who she was. Perhaps the Spirit
prepared her especially for this opportunity. We don’t know. But in the moment,
she made her decision. Yes. She would be who she was created to be and she
would do what she was created to do no matter how inconceivable, no matter how
inconvenient, no matter how incongruous. The risk of saying yes to God’s call
on your life may be great. But the payoff in intimacy with Christ will be
greater.
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