Last Tuesday I walked from my
office to the market to pick up some food for lunch. I already had a few things in the
refrigerator, and it wasn’t all that hot, so I decided to get soup. When I got to the soup bar, I saw that they
had a pot of my favorite, “Italian Wedding.”
I also saw there was a line.
There was a person ahead of me waiting on a young lady who seemed to be
struggling to make up her mind. She
opened the lids on one and then another of the pots and lifted the ladles to
get a better look at their contents. Finally,
she settled on the chicken noodle, and filled her paper cup with some difficulty,
leaving a fair amount on the counter.
Now, I felt a mild sense of
impatience about all this, and maybe just a hint of annoyance. That in itself is something I’m not
particularly proud of. But the really
troubling thing was the subtle move my mind made next. I could have attributed that young woman’s
behavior to circumstances, like maybe she hadn’t been to that market before, or
didn’t usually get the soup, and wasn’t familiar with the offerings, or with
the job of getting hot soup into that little cup with that big ladle. But instead I caught myself interpreting my
irritation as due to something essential about her. Just by looking at her I could tell she was
the kind of person who doesn’t know how to handle her business at the soup bar,
and wastes other people’s time. And what
kind of person is that? Well, there’s no
way to sugar-coat this: she was black.
I am not a racist, in the
sense that I do not openly espouse a racist ideology. I do not use the “n-word,” or other derogatory
slurs, to refer to people of color. I do
not believe or promote the idea that there is such a thing as the “white race,”
which must be kept pure and defended against those are trying to destroy my
kind and take what is ours. I do not
believe or teach that people of color are culturally inferior and have made no
significant contribution to the advancement of civilization, or that they are
by nature lazy and undisciplined, prone to promiscuity and criminality, and
only want to live parasitically on the hard-work of “the American Taxpayer,” which
means “white people.” No I am not a racist,
in this narrow sense, and, neither, I imagine, are you.
But I recognize these
ideas. They have been around me my
entire life, and I know them by heart. Like
misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice, racism has a purchase on
me, because I, like you, am not immune to hate.
I am not immune to taking the pain of my relations with other people,
from mild irritation or embarrassment, to full-blown fear, shame, and powerlessness,
and turning that pain into blame. I am
not immune to shoring up the broken places in my own sense of worth by
denigrating someone else. And I have
been schooled by my culture to know which people are the right kind to hate.
Thankfully, that’s not the
only kind of teaching most of us receive.
The history of American culture is infused with the theory and practice
of white supremacy, but almost from its very beginning there were also men and
women who resisted with the theory and practice of racial justice and
reconciliation. So the other day in the
grocery store I could see that what I was thinking was wrong. I could confess it to myself, and repent of
it. I even had a chance to make a kind
of amends, since I ended up at the checkout at the same time as that young lady
from the soup bar, and could give her a kind thought and a friendly smile.
We can be grateful that in the
last fifty years or so overt racist hate has become less acceptable in
America. But that alone is not enough to
heal the evil of racism. And we have largely
been in denial about this. We have been lulled
by the wishful thinking that the problem is solved, that fifty years of uneven
and hard-won progress has undone 500 of dehumanization, exploitation, and
abuse. We have been prone to the
kindler, gentler racism of wanting black and brown people to shut up all ready,
and stop demanding justice, because everyone has problems and we’re tired of
hearing about theirs.
I don’t take any particular
pleasure in saying this. I don’t want
you to think that I’m putting myself above anyone else by talking about these things, or
saying that some of you are wrong, and some of us are right. I know I risk sending you to your political
bunkers to grab your ideological weaponry, and I’d hate for that to happen, and
for us to miss the chance to reflect truthfully on the impact of race and
racism in our own lives.
But I’m taking that risk,
because the struggle for human liberation is not the struggle of one party for
power over another; it is the struggle to transform systems of oppression that
hold the oppressor captive along with the oppressed. Racial justice has a political dimension, but
at its heart it is a religious matter.
It is about the debasement of the image of God in human beings, about the
refusal of God’s will for us. It is also
about the hope of reconciliation, not just with one another, but with God.
And you know, I’m not
preaching about this today on my own authority.
I got a letter on Monday from the Presiding Bishop and the President of
the House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church asking me to do it. They, in turn, were passing on a request from
Bishop Reginald Jackson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was
formed in 1816 by African-Americans tired of being treated as second-class
citizens in the Methodist Church in Philadelphia. It’s also the denomination of Zion Church in
Charleston, South Carolina, where a young white supremacist shot and killed the
pastor and eight parishioners in June.
“Racism will not end with the passage of
legislation alone;” the letter quoted Bishop Jackson as saying, “it will also
require a change of heart and thinking. This
is an effort in which the faith community must lead, and be the conscience of
the nation. We call upon every church, temple, mosque and faith communion to
make their worship service this weekend a time to confess and repent for the
sin and evil of racism, which includes ignoring, tolerating and accepting
racism, and to make a commitment to end racism by the example of our lives and
actions.”
I guess I feel that if the
African Methodist Episcopal Church is saying we still have work to do on this
issue, who am I to say that I don’t? I figure they know a little more about it than
I do. If they are asking us to join them
in confessing and repenting for racism, it’s not really my place to say “no.”
In making that request to us, the
AME Church is a little like the woman in today’s Gospel story. She comes to Jesus for healing for her little
girl. And good, kind, gentle Jesus
doesn’t want to do it, because she is not a Jew. She’s from a different ethnic and religious
background, and Jesus calls her a dog, not fit to eat at the table of the
children of God. But she doesn’t take offense;
she doesn’t contradict; she takes what Jesus says and turns it around on him:
“Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's
crumbs." You may not give me a
place at your table, she says, but it is God’s table, and it has room under it
for me. You may not want to feed me with
God’s grace and favor, but it is so abundant that some is bound to fall to the
floor, and it is so good that even the crumbs can satisfy.
Having a sermon and saying
some prayers one Sunday won’t do much to heal racial injustice in our
land. It amounts to nothing more than
crumbs. But who knows what God will do
with these crumbs. They might be just
the food we need. If we let the AME
Church get through to us, it could be like how that woman got through to
Jesus. He heard her, and saw that she
had a bigger vision than he did of what his ministry was all about. He admitted that he had been wrong, and he’d
shut people out of the family of God that God wanted in. So he changed his mind, and the woman went
home and her child was there, and the demon was gone.
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