Repenting of racism

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23
Psalm 125
James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17
Mark 7:24-37

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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It's a given

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
 Matthew 2:1-12
Psalm 84 

The summer I was eighteen, I went on a 21-day course at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School.  I had just decided to take a leave of absence from college, even though I was doing well academically.   But, you see, that was part of my difficulty.  Doing well in school a given, and had been ever since I arrived at kindergarten already knowing how to read.  I’d skipped second grade.  My high school awarded me various academic honors.  I’d received early admission to my first choice of colleges, and after a rocky freshman year I’d made the Dean’s list as a sophomore.  If I’d wanted any of these things I might have been proud of them, but I hadn’t.  It was just what came naturally to me. 

People called me “smart,” but I didn’t feel smart.  They people applauded my academic success, but it wasn’t anything I wanted.   I didn’t know what I wanted, or who I was, or what to do with my life, but I did know I wasn’t going to learn the answers to these questions from a book or in a classroom.  Luckily, my parents understood at least a little of this, and they packed me off to an outdoor education and adventure program to sail around the coastal wilderness of Maine. 

And there I got to experience myself in a way I never had before.  I’d grown up the third of four boys.  In fourteen years of school I’d always been the youngest person in my class, usually by a wide margin.  But on the Outward Bound course I was with other kids my own age—many of them were younger than me.  And while they were still in high school, or had just graduated, I’d already completed two years of college.  To them I wasn’t the smart kid; I was the strong one, the capable and mature one.  I found, for the first time in my life, to my complete surprise, that I was a leader.    

We often think of ourselves as molded into a set shape by the unchanging “givens” of our lives.   Our ethnic background and genetic makeup, our cultural traditions and national and religious identities, the circumstances of our families of origin and early life experiences, make us who we are.  So do the choices we have made, and the habits we have picked up, not to mention the mysterious ingrained qualities of temperament and those involuntary feelings and thoughts and behaviors that we sum up with the term “human nature.”  We put all those “givens” together in a story, a story we tell ourselves and others about us, and that is who we are.

But the gift that Christmas brings us is a new given.  It is given, not by the history of the past or the circumstances of the present but by the grace of God.  Christmas begins a new story of what it means to be human, a story of what we are destined to become in Jesus Christ.   One of the ways that the New Testament talks about the impact of this new story on our lives is to say that it is like finding out we were adopted.   To really accept the gift of the coming of Christ into the world is like learning that what we thought was given, about ourselves and our place in the world,  is incorrect at the most fundamental level.  We aren’t who we thought we were, because, really, we were adopted.  We are God’s adopted children.

When a new and unexpected story overtakes the one we take for granted it can be an unsettling, even a frightening experience.  In the gospel of Matthew, when the wise men from the East appear, asking to see the newborn king of the Jews, Herod is afraid.  He is afraid because, without even knowing it, these foreigners have stirred up a ghost that he has worked his whole life to put to rest.  For Herod, the old hope of a new king of Israel, from the royal line of David, was a quaint legend for old women and country rubes.  His game was Roman imperial politics and the rule of terror, and he’d played it well enough to hold on to power for close to forty years.  He’s murdered all his rivals, and outlived the others, and he’s ready to pass on his throne to his sons were ready to succeed him on, and now, these outlandish messengers appear with their dangerous fairy tale.

And “all Jerusalem,” says the gospel, is frightened with him.  Because Herod is not the kind of person you wanted to be around when he gets upset, but also because this is news they’d long ago decided they would never hear.  The chief priests and the scribes know very well that Herod is not from the lineage of David, is not even ethnically a Jew.   They know how deeply he is hated and feared by the common people of the land, but they have learned how to stay on his good side, and have done very well for themselves on his patronage and his cozy relationship with Rome.  They have their given role, soothing the people’s seething unrest, and placating Herod’s tendency to violent outbursts of repression.  And now the arrival of the Magi threatens to upset this fragile peace.

I think the author of Matthew knew exactly what he was doing, weaving all these political implications into his story.  It’s how he sets the stage for the conflict that will center on the ministry of Jesus and culminate in his death.  But this story also lifts the curtain on a new revelation of God, one that calls age-old “givens” of religion into question.  Because Matthew, of all the gospel authors, is the most explicit in grounding his story in the Scriptures.   He quotes the Hebrew Bible at every opportunity, showing how the details of Jesus’ life fulfill the sayings of the prophets.  We have an example of this in today’s Gospel lesson, when the scribes quote the book of Micah to tell Herod that the Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem. 

But the biblical knowledge of the scribes wouldn’t have mattered if the Magi hadn’t come.   And the Magi are not scholars of the Hebrew scriptures.  They are Zoroastrian priests and astrologers from the country we now call Iran.  They have not come because of reading the scrolls of the prophets, but find their way into the story following a star.  From a thousand miles away, across great deserts and rivers and mountain ranges, across the frontiers of warring empires, the Magi saw God’s new sign.  By their esoteric wisdom, they knew it for what it was, and set out on the long and dangerous journey.  Carrying their precious offerings,  they followed the glory of the star until it led them to the greater glory of the face of the Beloved Son of God.  They gazed for few moments of wonder and adoration into that face, and then, just as mysteriously as they came, they were gone. 

But they are in the story long enough to reveal something essential about Christmas.  In the strange new light of their star, religion can no longer be a power struggle over givens.  Who has the royal blood, who owns Jerusalem and the Temple, who controls the interpretation of the Bible—the new given that is Christ is not concerned with anything like that.  Because Christmas is the point of departure for a pilgrimage of grace, a journey following the call of hope toward the face-to-face encounter with the glory of God.  

   

The New Testament is all about this journey, this grace-filled path that leads from glory to glory. It reveals a new kind of person, says the Letter to the Ephesians, living in a new kind of community, called the church. Many of us don’t think about the church this way.  We look at it and see a whole lot of givens—lectionary texts and liturgical calendars, prayer books and hymnals, old buildings of glass and wood and stone, committees and by-laws and denominational structures—all of it stamping us into a mold of givens from in the past.  But all of these things are really just accessories to the essential work of the church, the essential life of Christian people, which is praise and thanksgiving for the unfolding blessings of God.  We gather to remember a story, but it is God’s story that reveals who we really are,  what we are becoming more and more— God’s own adopted children.  And of all the things in this world that’s the only one that’s really a given.

   

Revolution of compassion

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24

Psalm 100

Ephesians 1:15-23

Matthew 25:31-46

Some of us here at St. John’s have been meeting since September to study a book about Jesus.  Not Jesus as the author supposes he might have been, but Jesus as people have imagined him, in every era of Christian civilization: Jesus as they have honored and adored him; Jesus, who one way or another has held the key for them to know who God is, and what is good, and beautiful, and true. 

Reimagining Jesus is what Christians have always done.  It’s a process that was already well under way when the four Gospels were written, as you can easily see by comparing them.  Each one presents a different picture of what he said and did, how he died, and what happened to him after that, because each of them arose in a different community.  These little groups that became the church took the traditions that had been handed down to them about him and shaped them to speak to their hopes and fears, their needs, their experiences of the Spirit of Christ, and the signs he showed them of God’s kingdom.   Of course, those differences only serve to make the main character of the stories that much more compelling.  So while we find four distinctive images of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we have no doubt that they are all about the same person.

Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists, even atheists and agnostics, are curious about the person who inspired those stories.  Many admire his teachings and try to understand him better by making comparisons with other prophets, saints, and sages.  But what animates Christian faith is something more than curiosity and admiration.  It is more than the search for an accurate portrait of a historical figure.  It is something more even than the willingness to believe certain things about Jesus.  The heart of Christian faith in Jesus is the desire to know him as he is.  It is living and creative, because it is love infused with hope for oneself and for the world.   

In the great chapter on Christian love in First Corinthians, Saint Paul writes “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then [we will see] face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.”  Our desire to know Jesus is one with our hope of knowing ourselves and others as we truly are, as we are known and loved by God.  And when we look at those men and women who have cultivated that desire, and have committed more and more of themselves to the fulfillment of that hope, what we see is transformation. 

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that on his deathbed Lenin made this confession to a childhood friend who was a priest:

“I have made a mistake. No doubt . . . many people who were oppressed had to be freed, but our method let loose new forms of oppression and murder. You know it, and it is my deadly nightmare to feel smothered in this ocean of blood of innumerable victims. What was needed to save Russia—but now it is too late—was a dozen like Francis of Assisi.”

Whether or not this story is historically accurate, it rings true.  Because it says that no movement to transform the world will ever truly succeed unless it awakens in human beings the hope that they themselves can fundamentally change, and the power to do it.

The hope of taking revenge on their oppressors is not enough; the hope of taking control of the factory, or of the land, or even the simple hope of having enough to eat, are not enough.  These motivations will carry a revolution for a while.  But if it does not have at its heart a persuasive image of the ultimate purpose of being human, the movement will falter and lose its way.  It will be another promise broken, another dream that turned into a nightmare.   On the other hand, I know of one revolutionary movement that has kept going for two thousand years.  In spite of all its sad and shameful history of selling out and settling for less, of complacency and outright crime, it is still able, with regularity, to turn ordinary people into Francis or Clare of Assisi, into Oscar Romero, or Martin Luther King, Jr.  It can do this because it still carries within it, as its source and reason for being, the living image of Jesus and the desire to know and be known by him.

We have this image because of communities like the one that created the Gospel of Matthew, who saw in Jesus Christ what they most wanted to become, and found in him the power to transform the world.  The irony is that they had nothing of what we would account as power.  They were members of a marginal and vilified ethnic group, the Jews, who had fought and lost disastrously a war to free their nation from the tyranny of Rome.  And this particular little congregation was doubly marginalized.   Because their proclamation that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth was the resurrected Messiah of Israel, and their practice of including Gentiles among them as equals, were scandalous to their fellow Jews.  And though the Gospel never explicitly says so, it leaves clues in the text that they had been thrown out of the synagogue. 

But these painful events did not make them discouraged; they actually strengthened and amplified their hope.  They only confirmed that the things that Jesus had said were true, and that he had said those things for them.  The stories said Jesus promised to return in the glory and power of God, though about that day or hour no one could know.  But they also said that he would be with them where ever two or three were gathered in his Name, and that he would be with them until the end of the age. 

And the stories told them another thing about how Jesus would be present, a promise that was also a warning.  Because they were going to have to live for the time being in a mixed up world, a world like a field of wheat with weeds growing in it.  And they were always going to be tempted to take sides in that world’s arguments.  They were going to hear that there were nations of sheep and nations of goats, people who were favored, and entitled to kill to get what they wanted, and people who were cursed, and deserved whatever they got.  But Jesus told them that the whole human race was mixed up, that every nation was sheep and goats mixed together, and no one could sort them out until the very end, and, by the way, it would be up to him to do the sorting. 

But so they wouldn’t lose hope for the world, and become passive and turn inward, he gave them an image of himself, so they could pick him out in the crowd.  Jesus left us with an image of the ultimate purpose of being human, the same image that God showed him.  And it was not a self-image.  It was an image of God’s beloved, the key to the transformation of the world, and it was not a charismatic healer, a sinless savior, a spiritually enlightened being in a white robe and sandals.  Before he gave himself up to death on the cross, Jesus told us to seek him in the old man in the nursing home whom nobody comes to visit, to desire him in the pierced and tattooed girl on the

sidewalk with her placard and her dog, to love him in the ISIS fighter shaking his rifle and shouting “Death to the Infidels”, to care for him in the Guatemalan child on the bus to the immigrant detention center.

The violence of Matthew’s language of judgment disturbs us, but its purpose is to warn us.  Having lived through the horrors of total war, and the pain of religious schism, Matthew’s community knew well what also need to know—that any vision of our future based on the might of the strong, the wisdom of the intelligent, the purity of the self-righteous, or the prosperity of the rich, will sooner or later prove to be demonic.  And I hope that this threat of darkness won’t keep us from also seeing the light—the light of judgment that Jesus and Francis of Assisi and so many others saw and were transformed by—that when we stand with the weak, the hated, the powerless and destitute and share their hope, we take the part of God in the world.