BREAKING DOWN DIVIDING WALLS
Scriptures: Ephesians 2:11-20
Mark 1:40-45
I was rather conflicted when I thought about this week’s sermon. After talking about repentance and forgiveness the last couple of weeks, it would seem quite natural to talk about love and tie it in with Valentine’s Day on Tuesday, as I did with the kids just now. And the hearts that Judy made to put in each one of your bulletins with “God loves you” on them would make another nice riff. We could have gone home with some pleasant, sentimentalized feelings about how much God loves us and how nice it would be if we all loved one another as much as God loves us.
But then I looked at the UCC planbook and saw that in our denomination today is Racial Justice Sunday. Also, as I’m sure you’re aware, we’re right in the middle of Black History month. Uh oh. Isn’t this really where we ought to be? Shouldn’t we save those warm, fuzzy, lovey-dovey feelings for another time? Well, the more I thought about it, the more is seemed to me that these two topics really do come together in the final analysis. You’ll have to let me know by the end of the sermon if you think they do.
Of course, events of the past couple of weeks have drawn our attention to the struggle that we are still engaged in with regard to civil rights and racial justice: especially, the passing of Coretta Scott King and the tributes that accompanied her funeral. Last year’s death of Rosa Parks, as Lura reminded us during a children’s sermon four weeks ago, also helped us once again to focus on the path we have walked as a nation since the Montgomery bus boycott. Hearing the stirring oratory of Dr. King in those clips from the March on Washington, or reading once again his remarkable insights in the “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” reminds us all over again why it is important to keep these concerns in our minds.
I was reminded, too, of the first sermon I did on a theme of racial justice. It was the fall of 1964 in Long Beach, NY, and it had just been announced that Dr. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize. The New York Times editorialized that this is “…an award that exalts the prize as much as it does this brave crusader for human understanding and brotherhood.” That quote, and others I had put in the bulletin from Dr. King were pretty well accepted by that just about completely white congregation. But, interestingly, I was criticized afterwards because I had included quotes from Malcolm X in the bulletin as well (remember, this was before either man had been assassinated). His rhetoric, the anti-white behavior and attitudes, the rejection of Christianity and embrace of a form of Islam, the acceptance of violence were more than some members of that congregation could stomach. Now, I would disagree with some of the approaches that a Malcolm X and others who felt and thought like him would take, but his was a legitimate voice expressing the depths of pain felt by an oppressed people and the need for more than just slow, evolutionary redress of wrongs, as we since learned from the remarkable “Autobiography” of him by Alex Haley and the movie by Spike Lee. It remains true, even today, that those of us who are part of the establishment and who are in positions of privilege are troubled by something that is more of a firebrand approach to achieving human rights.
And that is exactly why we still need a Sunday with an emphasis on racial justice and a Black History month. Despite all the achievements of the past 40+ years on the road to real brotherhood and sisterhood and humanhood, there is healing that has not happened, there are wrongs that have not yet been righted, there are attitudes that have not yet been changed, there is reconciliation that has not yet taken place.
Indeed, just this past Wednesday in the Las Vegas Sun the lead story was about five Sierra Vista high school basketball players being investigated in relation to an assault that is being called a “hate crime”. The fourth paragraph of that story said, “The possibility of a hate crime arose because the victim was of a different race than his attackers.” Whether in this particular instance that turns out to be the case, or whether this really is just an instance of hazing a new player as the story has continued to play itself out, the fact is that hate crimes do still exist in 2006; attitudes that can lead to such crimes simmer just below the surface.
Attitudes. How we think and how we feel. These are ultimately the most important shapers of paths that lead us to justice and equality and wholeness, or in the other direction: to oppression and invoking privilege and hostility. I had an experience as a college student that taught me something about how such attitudes can be shaped. I was dating a girl who, as a high school senior, had been dating and then broke up with a fellow who treated her miserably – browbeating and degrading her unmercifully. Now, though she had come to DePauw University where I was going to school, he had gone to Dartmouth, and as I learned more and more about how cruel he had been to her, I began not only to loathe him for his behavior but to transfer that loathing to all things related to Dartmouth. I would cheer, for example, when I saw in the paper that Dartmouth had lost a football game. Even though I knew in my head that this was irrational and just a projection of other feelings about one individual, I was becoming prejudiced against anything that had to do with Dartmouth. Just so, do prejudicial, oppressive, judgmental attitudes arise – even when we think we are non-prejudiced, non-judgmental people.
In writing to the Ephesians Paul is aware of how similar attitudes are starting to corrode the fellowship of a young and struggling church. In this case the enmity was between Jews and Gentiles – and whenever we hear these words in our scriptural text we have to translate them into the racial, ethnic, cultural divisions that we are familiar with today. In Paul’s world and for the Ephesians it was the Jews who were in a position of privilege and authority – symbolized by the act of circumcision. What this act meant for most Jews was that it granted them access to God. What a position of power and privilege! We know it today whenever we hear or sense the sentiment that “God is on our side” – that God cares for us more than for some others. But Paul is not going to let these Jewish Ephesians get away with their pompous and pious privilege. Speaking directly to the Gentiles in the congregation, he tells them what the coming of the Christ means for them: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” The kind of peace Paul is talking about here is that captured marvelously in the words of Martin Luther King when he decries those who want peace at any cost preferring, in his words, “a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
The dividing wall that Paul refers to here, incidentally, is quite real. It was the wall in the inner court of the temple, and Jews had access to it on one side, which allowed them further access to the deeper, holier parts of the temple, while the Gentiles were only allowed in the outer court. Again, we are back to the problem of privilege. Throughout history and still today the need to exert control over others and so deny them their basic humanity is what drives the attitudes that have led and still lead to oppression and inequality. And for those whose humanity is denied the natural, inevitable reaction is hostility. As Francis W. Beare says about this passage, “The atmosphere of hostility in human relationships was itself a barrier to full communion with God.”
Over-against that barrier Paul proclaims that the work of Christ is a new creation. In him the dividing wall has been broken down, and any hostility that is between us is no more. Yes, it’s an idealistic vision – but no less important for being that vision – for being held out in front of us as a goal: to tear down the hostility among us – to really mean it when we sing the hymn, “Be Thou My Vision”. Paul sees the power of the Christian gospel to unify disparate people, and this is what the Christian church has to offer the world in our time – despite the fact that when it comes to racial justice many see the church as, in Bill Stringfellow’s words, “too little, too late, and too lily-white”. We do have a vision, and we can make that vision become reality. I don’t know if you realize how unique this congregation is with its multi-culturalism and outreach to churches of yet other cultures, as is the congregation Ann and I came from in Spring Valley, for most churches across America today still tend to be all or nearly all one race. We have an opportunity right here to witness to what it takes to break down the dividing wall of hostility.
But first it’s necessary to understand how easily such dividing walls can get built. I want to share with you another experience of mine that really shook me at the time. In August, 1963, just before the March on Washington, I was attending a youth conference at Kent State University – the same Kent State where seven years later four students were gunned down by National Guardsmen. A major theme of the conference was race relations, and Andy Young, then an associate of Dr. King’s, came to help lead us. He suggested we do a role-play in order to dramatize how silly discrimination can be. We separated out all of the blond, blue-eyed people and put them over in one corner. We all joined in the fun and spirit of it – laughing and making a caustic comment when another blond was sent to the corner. As we got ready to begin a panel discussion, this segregated group left and went outside. Still in the spirit of the role-play, we yelled after them that we were glad they were going. One boy stood up and said he thought someone should go after them and bring them back, but the leadership told him to wait awhile – maybe they were going to stage a demonstration or a sit-in or something. But the boy decided to leave and join them anyway, and one of the adults called after him “blonde-lover”, as we all laughed. We went on with our panel discussion. Then, one of the leaders with the blond group came back and said that they had been sitting in a room in another building, talking about what had happened; as the time went on they began to get more and more disturbed that only one person had come to join them, that we had continued with our meeting seemingly with no concern about them. Some even began remembering slights and insulting remarks which some of the leaders had made about blond-headed, blue-eyed people earlier in the week. When this group finally came back into the main room, they were obviously upset; several were crying. We started to talk about the need for reconciliation, and the talk in small groups went on far into the night. Emotions on everyone’s part were at a high pitch.
Now, appreciate what had happened here. As a total group we had been together almost a week. We were not foreign or strangers to one another; a spirit of fellowship had already grown up among us. Yet, an arbitrary distinction, which everyone knew had been made for that purpose, and a role-play situation, which everyone knew to be just that, led to perhaps the most real feelings of hostility and alienation I have ever known. The one person who tried to express some concern initially was stopped by the “white” (in this case, dark-headed, brown-eyed) power structure. Once the group was out of sight there seemed to be no reason for concern – we could go on with our business – until feelings of alienation and hostility burst in upon us. If ever reconciliation was needed, it was here, and it was a long and agonizing time in coming. Perhaps the most terrifying moment for me came the next morning when I was driving Andy Young back to the airport after that sleepless night, and I asked him whether something like that had ever happened before when he used that role-play technique, and he softly responded, “It happens almost every time.”
Despite our good intentions, despite our desire for justice and equality, the triggers for feelings that can lead to hostility are never far from the surface. In the gospel story we read today from Mark, which was selected for this Sunday, ministers most often will identify the leper symbolically with the “other” whom we mistreat, although Jesus treated him kindly and healed him. But I would submit that the leper in this story is really…us – you and me. That is, leprosy is the symbolic disease of hostility we each carry around inside us, waiting to manifest itself when an attitude we didn’t even know we had overcomes our good intentions.
But the even more important part of this story is that the leper, knowing he is sick, makes the effort to come to Jesus to be healed. In the family of faith we find the healing power we need to break down the dividing wall of hostility. “So then,” as Paul says, “you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.” “The household of God” is for me an even more wonderful image for the church than “the body of Christ”, which Paul uses elsewhere, for it means that we are, or can be, more like a family. And in a family it is need, not right or power or authority that determines privilege. Theodore O. Wedel has said about “the household of God”: “Justice and law are there, but they are transformed into grace by family oneness. Love fulfills the law.”
So, we have circled back around to love – not the sentimentalized love of Valentine’s Day, but a love that is built upon the foundation of justice. As I said last week about justice and forgiveness needing one another, so also justice and love intertwine – we love because we are just toward one another; we seek justice because Christ has taught us how to love. Christ is a new creation, and it is his vision to bring the whole created universe into an all-embracing unity. May we as his church – his household of God – participate in that vision.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, UCC
Las Vegas, NV
February 12, 2006