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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The witness

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:42
Psalm 22

The Gospels depict Jesus in a variety of moods.  He can, of course, be gentle and nurturing, as when he says to his disciples, “Let the little children come to me.”  Or he can be angry, as when he says to the Scribes and Pharisees “Woe to you, hypocrites: you shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven; you do not enter yourselves, and when others try to enter, you stop them.”   But the Jesus that we meet today is the one who suffers.  This afternoon we keep vigil with a suffering Messiah.  We remember his pain, and we seek in some way to share it, by our fasting, by spending these three hours in prayer and meditation on his crucifixion.

But as affecting as the story of his passion and death may be, this is not the sum total of his suffering.  The Servant Songs of Isaiah, one of which we heard read today, have profoundly shaped our experience of Jesus.  They may have formed his understanding of himself.  And they describe the servant of God as one whose vocation it is to suffer.  He is, as an older translation had it, a “man of sorrows; acquainted with grief.”

The sorrows of Jesus did not begin the night he was betrayed and handed over to his enemies.  We keep vigil with Jesus on the cross because his passion is a vigil he kept with us.  But it is the climax of a life-long vigil of compassion, in which he bore with us and our self-inflicted pain, a pain we finally turned against him.  So we acknowledge that the fact that he died in this way is no accident.  It is not a chance misfortune that befell him on the way to his exaltation as King of Kings.  We cannot simply pass it off with a callous remark, as we so often do with the suffering that we encounter every day around and within us, shrugging our shoulders and saying “shit happens.”  Instead, we make a conscious choice to open our eyes and our hearts to the sorrow and pain of Jesus.  We even honor it, venerate it, give thanks for it.  We call this day “Good Friday.”

And that is because we sense that Jesus’ crucifixion tells us something we need to know.  We come to it searching for meaning that we can’t make any other way.  Jesus endured this suffering because he knew something essential about us, and that knowledge, in itself, was already sorrow and pain.  That is why we recount and remember every detail of his betrayal and desertion by his friends, his anguished prayer in the garden, his arrest and interrogation, the mockery, the false accusations, the scourge and crown of thorns, the journey to the cross, and his agony upon it—not in order to add more and more to the account of his suffering, but because at each one of these moments his heart was breaking, not only for himself, but for us. 

The extreme physical brutality of crucifixion, and the sheer volume of pain that Jesus had to endure, is often held up before us as the measure of his love.   But these things in themselves have no redemptive meaning.  They are, in fact, business as usual in the long nightmare of history.  But what makes the cross of Christ truly sacrificial is that he accepted it willingly, and that in that acceptance he was free.  “Sacrifice” means to make sacred, and Jesus offered his suffering to God in the faith that God would make it sacred, for our sake, if not for his.  Because the God of Jesus is a God who sets his children free. 

And we are not free.  We are not free in relation to our suffering, and because of this we are not free at all.  Much as we might pretend otherwise, with our possessions and technology, with our power to mold the world to our convenience; much as we might entertain and distract and anesthetize ourselves by our endless consumption of the products of a culture of denial; much as we might seek the approval of others, or at least our selves, with flattery and conformity and productivity, all of it is so much effort wasted, trying but ultimately failing to avoid the truth that we are weak.  We are hurt.  We are lonely and dissatisfied.  We are going to die.

Jesus understood this about us.  He talked about a man who built his house on sand, and how the rain fell, and the floods rose, and the gales blew against that house, and how great was its fall.  He talked about the one who had a rich harvest and tore down his barns to build bigger ones, not knowing that the very same night his life would be taken from him.  He tried to teach us that the real measure of our worth is not our strength and self-reliance, our imperviousness to the afflictions that mar the happiness of lesser folk, or how well-defended we are from their envy and hate and slander; but it lies in our capacity to be affected, to love and be loved.  He tried to show us that our true and lasting value is in the eyes of God.

A lot of people didn’t want to hear this.  As a general rule, the more well-off and prestigious they were, the less interested they were.  Jesus captures this himself when he reports the contempt of those who say, “this man is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”  So add to his sorrow at seeing men and women trapped in useless vanity, the pain of their rejection and hostility.  And this enmity reveals a deeper and still more painful truth about us.  Because we are not in denial only about our own pain, but also of the pain we inflict on others, and the toll it takes on our own souls.

This is more than personal.  The fear and aggression that come from bracing against our vulnerability are contagious.  They pass from house to house and generation to generation.  They threaten to dissolve the bonds that hold families and communities together.  And so we develop systems of social and psychological repression, to establish and maintain order.  These systems propagate the myths and rituals that impress deeply on their members the illusion of security and peace.  The fear and aggression are still there, below the level of conscious awareness, but we channel them into organized and sanctioned outlets.  This process operates by a logic which seems self-evident to everyone.  Everyone, that is, except its designated victims, who are the only people who can see how arbitrary and irrational these systems are.

Every society has its victims—its heretics and Jews, Commies, Niggers, Chinks, Gooks, and Redskins, its illegals, Ragheads, junkies, nut jobs, and retards, its faggots and punks, its thugs, bums, and trailer trash, its bitches, sluts and hoes.  It has its rituals of dehumanization in which the suffering and death that haunts us all is meted out in measured doses against the most vulnerable of our neighbors.  The unity that comes from bonding together against a common enemy, the feeling of release that follows the catharsis of sanctioned violence—this is what passes for peace.  And only the victim knows the truth. 

Only the victim really knows how scapegoating, abuse, and lynching dehumanize the perpetrator.   Only the victim, bearing witness to her own inviolable humanity, can break the spell of sanctioned hate and violence.   That is what the word “martyr” means—witness.  A martyr is one who bears witness, in his freely accepted suffering, to the unbreakable truth of our shared humanity, our common identity as children of God.   This is the truth that Jesus received, the truth in which he reached out to the lost, the outcast and afflicted, and welcomed them as sisters and brothers.  This is the saving knowledge that he restored to them when he healed them.  It is the truth he carried with him to Jerusalem and bore witness to on the cross.

This is truth where the deepest well of Jesus’ suffering mingles with the springs of hope and joy, because the witnessing victim is the one who knows it doesn’t have to be this way.  He is the one who sees that acknowledging pain, given and received, is what opens the door to forgiveness, to reconciliation and true peace.  He is the one who can say to the people preparing to destroy him “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”   He cannot force that to happen.  He can only stand fast in his own humanity, and bear his cross.  But he shows us in this way what mere words by themselves cannot convey—the hope that his sufferings are not fruitless and in vain, but are the birth pangs of a new world. 

         

Mexican Football

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71:1-6
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30

In the 2011 NFC championship, the final game before last year’s Super Bowl, a second-year wide receiver named Kyle Williams was fielding punts for the San Francisco 49ers.  In the 4^th quarter of the game, with the 49ers leading by 3 points, Williams made a critical mistake, failing to catch a punt, but allowing it to bounce off his knee, at which point it became anybody’s ball.  A New York Giants player fell on it, and New York scored a touchdown a few plays later, going ahead 17-14. 

The 49ers came back to kick a field goal, tying the game, and sending it into overtime, and with 9 minutes left in the overtime period, the 49ers forced the Giants to punt.  Kyle Williams fielded the ball at the 20-yard line and returned it about 4 yards before a member of the punt coverage team punched it out of his grasp.  A Giants player recovered the fumble, and their placekicker scored the game-winning field goal, sending New York to the Super Bowl, and San Francisco in defeat.  

Following the game, Kyle Williams’ Twitter account was flooded with hateful messages from disappointed fans.  "I hope you, youre [sic] wife, kids and family die," said one.  Another read “HOPE U RUN n2 A BULLET DA WAY U RAN INTO DAT BALL…”  Ugly sentiments like these are other side of the coin of the adulation that star athletes receive from their fans.  We identify with their exploits as if they were our own, as if our own honor and prestige were at stake when they take the field.  When they are victorious, we feel vindicated for all the years we had to watch the colors of our once-proud franchise worn by inferior teams.  And for some 49ers fans, the sting of coming so close to the ultimate prize, and then losing, was a personal disgrace.  And taking it so personally, they looked for someone to blame.

Something like this happens in the story of Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth.  When he reads from the prophet Isaiah about how he has been anointed by the Spirit to proclaim good news to the poor, and release to the captives, to let the oppressed go free, and then he sits down and says "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing," the people of Nazareth start to taste victory.  They start to imagine vindication for all the humiliations they have endured--the heavy taxation and usurious debt, the encroachment of foreign aristocrats and occupying armies on their land.  They know Jesus, and so they imagine that when he sets out to right these wrongs, their needs will be uppermost in his mind. 

They ask, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” and there are other places in the Gospels where this question is asked with a kind of a sneer.  But in this context, the people of Nazareth say it with wonderment and just a hint of self-satisfaction.   They are impressed by the gracious words that come from Jesus’ mouth, because they think they belong to them.  They’ve heard rumors of the powerful and inspiring sermons he’s been giving in the neighboring towns, and now he’s come home and they’ve seen and heard him for themselves.  No doubt the great and powerful deeds that will follow on these words will be to their particular advantage.  

We discover that is what they are thinking because Jesus knows them.  He knows them better than they know themselves, and he provokes them to reveal how shallow and self-serving their faith in him is.  They want him to be their prophet, and so he tells them stories about the great prophets of old, of Elijah and Elisha, who acted in obedience to the purpose of God, not in order to be the home-town hero.   In times when Israel suffered famine and foreign hegemony, those great prophets performed miracles on behalf, not of their neighbors, or any of their own people, but of foreigners.   And when Jesus tells these, the fond hopes of the Nazarenes are dashed, and as quickly as they embraced Jesus as the instrument of their victory, their admiration turns to a murderous hatred.

There are a couple of taquerías here in town where I like to eat burritos, and one of the things I like best about these places is watching Mexican soccer.  Now, I am a sucker for sports on TV.  If I had a TV that was compatible with digital technology, and it was hooked up to a network that carried sports, and if I had control of the channel selection in my house, all of which are extremely big “ifs”, sports is mostly what I would watch.  And as much as I enjoy watching televised sports, I find Mexican soccer to be a uniquely satisfying form of entertainment. 

There are several reasons for this.  First of all, there are no commercials.  In a soccer game, play never stops, so there’s no way to fit them in.  Secondly, watching five minutes is just as good as watching an hour.  There’s no feeling of “if I leave now I might miss something exciting,” because nothing exciting ever happens.  The teams rarely if ever score.  They just play soccer. 

Finally, I like watching Mexican soccer because I don’t have to choose sides.  I have no need to root for the guys in the blue stripes over the guys in the solid green jerseys because I know nothing about either team, and there’s a wonderful freedom in this.  I know that somewhere in Mexico a stadium is full of tens of thousands of people who care passionately, and hundreds of thousands more are glued to their TVs, and maybe even here in this restaurant there’s a guy over across the room getting sweaty and clenching his fingers and feeling his stomach tense up in his gut the way I know I’m going to feel during those short breaks between the commercials this afternoon, and yet I’m blissfully oblivious to it all. 

I just eat my burrito, watching some guys who love to play soccer doing what they do best, and enjoying the beauty of the game.  When I finish eating and leave the restaurant, they are still at it, and for all I know it will go on for eternity.  I’ll get to heaven and blue stripes and green jerseys will be there, playing soccer, still tied at one goal apiece.

Now I’m sure most Christian preachers in America today would agree that we should root for the gospel of Jesus Christ as if it were our home town team, playing in the Super Bowl.  There are probably more than a few sermons being preached on that theme today, right here in the Bay Area and in the vicinity of Baltimore, Maryland.  And I’m sure those preachers are right, and that they are preaching better sermons than this one.  But for all the value that we place on our religion, and for all our culture of passion and fervor, for all our emotional investment in excellence and victory and vindication, I wonder sometimes if we might be closer to the mark if we embraced the gospel more like Mexican soccer.  In the 13^th Chapter of his 1^st Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul seems to be suggesting something like that when he writes about Christian love. 

Love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things, love that never ends, is a love that is profoundly disinterested in particular outcomes.  It does not set out with a personal investment in how we ought to be transformed by love, but only with the hope that we can love, and the faith that transformation happens.  Such love does not press its advantages, or trade on its own importance, and so it does not turn to hate when it is delayed or defeated.    

When Jesus says that “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” he is not seeking fans for his team.  He is inviting us to join him in celebrating the freedom of life in the Spirit.  He is urging us to put aside our partiality concerning God’s work in the world.  He is telling us to let go of our self-centered, childish anxieties about when it will happen and what we will become and to trust that love is bringing everything to completion, and to look for the ways it is happening now.