Scriptures: Psalm 8
Matthew 28:16-30
II Corinthians 13:11-13
The United Church of Christ has asked its churches across the country to use this Sunday to begin a “sacred conversation about race”. As I look at web sites and hear about what’s happening – especially in the Southern California Nevada Conference – it appears that quite a few UCC churches will do just that. But what exactly is a “sacred conversation”? Rather a strange pairing of words, don’t you think? Our General Minister and President, John Thomas, said in his letter requesting that this conversation be held that it is “a time when we hope our churches will promote an honest, thoughtful and mature examination of the issue of race in this country.” In the materials promoting the conversation is this thought: “Sacred conversations are never easy, especially when honest talk confronts our nation's painful past and speaks directly to the injustices of the present day. Yet sacred conversations can, and often do, honor the value of diverse life experiences, requiring an openness to hear each others' viewpoints. Growth often happens when honest conversations are communicated in a respectful environment.”
In other words, what makes a conversation sacred is that it is characterized by honesty, openness to hearing one another, and trust. And these characteristics are not always easy to find – especially when the topic is race, which includes attitudes and actions that have been harmful to our society down through the years. There is also a level of uncomfortableness – those of us who are Caucasian are concerned that we will be criticized, condemned, and asked to confess our sins; those whose skins are black, brown, red, or some other hue are unsure about how safe it is to be truly honest about their experiences and their feelings.
None of us here considers themselves to be a racist. Am I right? Hold up your hand if you self-identify as being a racist. That’s what I thought. And so part of the difficulty in holding this sacred conversation is that we don’t want to confess sins of the past and be hit over the head with how bad our race relations have been. Some of the materials I looked at in preparation for this sermon were filled with that sense of needing to confess; for example, here’s a part of a pastoral prayer written to be used on this day, as the speaker prays to Jesus:
But to this day we continue not to understand
what you were all about and why you did what you did.
We accuse your disciples of not understanding your purposes,
but we are the same, too.
I rejected the idea of using this as our prayer of the people, because I just don’t think it helps to move the conversation along if we are breast-beating and pointing fingers too much.
And yet….. And yet….. Perhaps honest confession is the place to begin. You’ve heard me use this self-description before (I wrote about it in a Clarion article shortly after I came here): I consider myself to be, using 12-step program language, a recovering racist – and sexist, and homophobe, and classist, and ageist (although maybe not that so much anymore now that I’m 68). What I mean by that is that as a white, male, heterosexual, middle class person I have been formed by my position of privilege in this world, and there are attitudes and behaviors that I may not even be conscious of that prevent me from fully experiencing the slights, the injustices, the oppression that others have incurred because they are of a different race or gender or sexual orientation. Each new day I have to be watchful about what I say and do, just as an alcoholic has to take it one day at a time. As Edith Guffey, UCC associate general minister, said in her column in United Church News: “…statements that some may not see or experience as hurtful turn out to be exactly that to others. It is clearly a matter of intent versus impact, but often the impact is so significant that we find ourselves paralyzed, and we feed the unhealthy and unhelpful divisions among us.”
Each of us, no matter what our race, has some blinders on when it comes to honest conversations. When I first dealt with race relations in a sermon with my (all-white) congregation in Long Beach, NY – the year was probably 1964 or 1965 – I put on the front of the bulletin several quotes, mostly from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Afterwards, I got comments from some members of the congregation that while they thought the quotes from King were fine, they thought that quoting Malcolm X was too far out and radical (this, of course, was before the publication of Alex Haley’s fine “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and Spike Lee’s excellent movie adaptation of that book, both of which helped to demonstrate that Malcolm X was a significant prophetic voice in the civil rights movement, albeit a different prophetic voice than that of Martin Luther King, Jr.).
It is this tendency in our society – and particularly in our media – to demonize our prophetic voices that has led to the misguided perception of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. Now, I don’t want to turn this into a political sermon that deals with the relationship between Dr. Wright and Barack Obama (this being Trinity Sunday I was tempted to make a pun-y tie in to Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago…but I resisted that temptation). But it would be pointless to ignore the fact that it was the hullabaloo raised by the reaction to Dr. Wright’s remarks that triggered the UCC’s call to hold this sacred conversation about race now. As the United Church of Christ’s materials about this conversation said, “The UCC is holding this national dialogue in order to foster a spirit of healing and unity in our churches and communities. While much has been said during the past few weeks about the Rev. Jeremiah A Wright Jr., this dialogue among our members is intended to be a larger conversation, one not focused directly or exclusively on the recent controversy, but one certainly influenced by it.”
“To foster a spirit of healing and unity…..” That’s the ultimate goal of any sacred conversation. But it takes time. And patience. And the willingness to hear one another out. In the final verses of his second letter to the church at Corinth Paul admonishes the congregation there to put things in order, to listen, to come to agreement, and to live in peace. Listening comes before there can be any agreement or peace. The people of faith in Corinth had some conflicts among them, but Paul is calling them first to listen and then to work toward agreement, toward the kind of peace that passes all understanding. Elizabeth M. Magill and Angela Bauer-Levesque put it this way: “Listening to each other’s stories in order to learn about race is a crucial part of these sacred conversations. One of the ground rules needs to be that everyone talks about their own experiences and not those of others. ‘I’ statements help. Take time. Sacred listening will allow hearing the more difficult, uncomfortable truths.”
The driving force behind racism is the desire for one group to become dominant over another, and in doing so find any means to hold them down. The powerful emotion that is used to undergird that dominance is fear. And it doesn’t seem to matter whether the dominant group is small or large in relation to the oppressed group in terms of numbers if the reins of power are held tightly. Last week I was watching a video of “Lost in the Stars”, which is the musical version by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill of Alan Paton’s novel of South Africa, “Cry, the Beloved Country”. In the middle of that musical, after a white man has been killed by a black man, there is a dynamic, pounding song with the constant refrain: “fear of the few for the many; fear of the many for the few”. Fear, reinforced by stereotype, causes those of us who are white, say, to cross to the other side of the street when a threatening-looking black man is walking toward us. Fear, reinforced by life-experience, causes a black woman to resist real relationship with a white woman when she hears the seemingly well-meant phrase, “some of my best friends are…..” Fear, reinforced by ignorance, causes each of us to use generalities about groups of people and thus utter words that are harmful and hurtful when we would wish to be healing and whole.
Here in this church we are partners with three other congregations whose ethnic make-up is different from our own. Cultural patterns are also often different. It is all too easy when looking at differences to get caught up in a “we-they” kind of thinking. Part of the “sacred conversation” we are seeking to hold – in fact, a very large part – is to use this opportunity to go beyond such “we-they” thinking and behaving and find the common bonds that bring us as faith-filled Christian groups into community with one another. Again, what is required for the bonds of “we-they-ness”, the bonds of fear, to be broken are honesty, openness to hearing one another, and trust. To be able to trust one another in relationship goes a long way toward resolving any disputes – large or small – that may occur between groups of people.
And it also goes a long way toward getting beyond the uncomfortableness that is found in “difference”. We are meeting today to take a potentially significant step in proclaiming that as a congregation we are not going to let “difference” get in the way of our sense of discipleship – particularly not the difference indicated by sexual orientation or gender identity. Societal pressures and oppressions toward homosexuals and people of color have followed different arcs – it is easier to hide one’s sexual orientation than one’s race, for example – and the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement have often had differing dynamics. But the bottom line is the same: fear of the different “other” must be overcome by individual Christians and the Christian community in order to affirm who we are as disciples of our Lord.
The commissioning that Jesus gives to his disciples at the end of Matthew’s gospel to “make disciples of all nations” is not a command to force their will over others. Unlike the expansion of empires, crusades, and other so-called holy wars, this call is not for a dominant group to take over others, disrespect their cultures and religions, and force them into submission to a dominant religion and world view. Too many times Christianity has taken this approach when encountering other cultures, but this is not what the Great Commission is all about. Rather, it is about making disciples – those who by calling Jesus Lord seek to be servants and thereby discover pathways of healing, of reconciliation, of unity, of wholeness.
The other important point to make about the Great Commission is that here Jesus is opening wide the circle of disciples to include all future converts. In Matthew – indeed, in all the gospels – Jesus breaks through the social barriers that separate people. In the famous passage in Matthew 25 he says that Jesus is present in the least of his needy brothers and sisters – those whom people identify as “the other” are the ones Jesus has come to serve. Jesus showed us who to include at the party; when Jesus invites us, we are all welcome. In the Great Commission’s mandate to make disciples there is no provision for any kind of racial ranking; the only ranking is our own self-assessment of how well we are living up to serving the least of these.
And we have been given resources to enable us to fulfill our role as disciples. The Psalmist speaks of us human beings as being “little lower than God” – in other words, co-creators with power and responsibility to care for the earth and who can shape how humans feel about one another. This 8th Psalm does not talk about differences among humans but considers them all equal. It is out of this very equality that we are enabled to proclaim with the Psalmist: “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”
As we said on Pentecost, God the Sovereign has provided us with the life, ministry, teaching, and healing death of Jesus the Son and with the on-going presence of the Holy Spirit as resources to aid us in fulfilling God’s will. This Trinity of divinity is our rock, our “undivided God whom we claim”, as we sang in the opening hymn, whom we adore and to whom we sing our praise.
God the Sovereign, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit call us now to enter into sacred conversations, toward the end that healing and unity will infuse all of our relationships with those of all races. The important word in the sermon title today is “starting”. To engage in sacred conversations about race is an on-going process. It means being and becoming intentional about going out of our way to begin such a conversation. It means having the courage to be honest about our own feelings, especially being honest with ourselves. It means being open to hearing what may be hard truths to listen to. It means finally letting go, knowing that God will lead you to a level of trust in relationship that could never be possible on our own. May your conversations begin this day and continue throughout the years to come.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, UCC
Las Vegas, NV
May 18, 2008