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"A Sacred Conversation On Race"

Jeremiah 6 (Sacred Conversation On Race)
May 18, 2008

For thus says the LORD of hosts: Cut down her trees; cast up a siege ramp against
Jerusalem. This is the city that must be punished; there is nothing but oppression within
her. As a well keeps its water fresh, so she keeps fresh her wickedness; violence and
destruction are heard within her; sickness and wounds are ever before me. Take
warning, O Jerusalem, or I shall turn from you in disgust, and make you a desolation,
an uninhabited land.

For from the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from
prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people
carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace.

O my poor people, put on sackcloth, and roll in ashes; make mourning as for an only
child, most bitter lamentation: for suddenly the destroyer will come upon us.

I don’t know if you recognize these words from Scripture that we just heard, but if you’ve
been paying attention to the news over the last few months, you might recognize them
as the Scriptural basis of one of the now infamous series of sermons clips from the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity UCC in Chicago, a series of clips that found there way
all over the internet and TV and that caused quite a headache for Presidential
candidate Barack Obama. It is this Scripture that Rev. Wright based his now famous
“God damn America” quote, and that has caused a lot of us to cringe when we heard it
for the first time. But if you listen to larger sermon, you realize what Rev. Wright was
trying to say, even if he says it poorly, in my opinion, which is that like Israel, God will
base God’s judgment on our nation by the same criteria that God based God’s
judgment of Israel—how we take care of the least of these, the widows, the orphans,
the nobodies in this world. It is not based on how religious of a country we are, or
whether or not we have the 10 commandments or prayer in the classroom, or we all go
to church, or if we have “In God We Trust” on our money, or whatever. God’s judgment
of Israel and every nation is how a nation deals with the oppression within her, how the
greedy are dealt with, how the truths is told or not told, how the poor are dealt with, or
not dealt with—these are things that matter to God, and they are the standards by
which God judges every nation.

Now, would I have gone to the extreme the Rev. Wright did in his sermon? No,
probably not, but of course, I don’t come out of a community of color that was brought
over on slave ships, or up until the last forty years had a difficult time even voting, or
for census purposes and constitutional purposes were once counted as only 3/5 of a
whole human being. Even Wright’s silly argument that AIDS was a disease created by
the CIA to destroy the black community has its roots in the deep mistrust of some
African Americans have towards the medical community, because of a legacy of
medical experimentation that violated many basic human rights. And then to see
Wright explain himself so eloquently on Bill Moyer’s television program to only then
seem himself act so inappropriately a few days later at the National Press Club—there
is something else going on there, though I am sure some of it has to do with having a
career of preaching being distilled down to 15 minutes and having it used to
characterize you and the church you built as a racist church, ironically enough—I know
I would probably be angry and bitter as well, so I don’t fault him his anger, though I sure
wish he had expressed it a little better.

All of this drama, of course, is an opportunity to actually talk about the issue of race,
something the national setting of the United Church of Christ asked its churches to do
on this Trinity Sunday. And it’s an opportunity to think about the ways we’ve still not
quite gotten over what has divided this country for centuries and for which the bloodiest
war on American soil took place—the color of one’s skin that justified the enslavement
of a race of people and what the fact of race means and doesn’t mean in this world. As
a Southerner, the issue of race has been something that cannot be ignored in my
context, even though I spent most of my early childhood living overseas. My hometown
of Meridian, MS is built on the land donated by my relatives from their plantation
holdings, something that I am proud of, and yet, of course, those same relatives also
owned many African slaves, something that is as deeply shameful as anything I can
think of. I only stumbled on that fact that our family owned human slaves when I picked
up a brochure about African American history in Meridian when I was flying out our tiny
airport.

I can also remember one of my dear grandmothers arguing fiercely that there were
biblical reasons for discrimination towards blacks, citing a very poor but very common
interpretation of the story of Ham in the Bible, an interpretation that is still oddly
commonly used in some parts of the deep South and other places. I can remember a
beloved uncle, the backbone of his Baptist church, the teacher of adult Sunday School
for many years, a good man, as good as anyone I will ever know, say things about
African Americans that still shock me even after all these years, especially because I
know how faithful he was to the Gospel, except, except when it came to this issue. I
remember my father who grew up in the segregated south, and who believed and said
many of the things of his generation, reflecting the racism that he had been fed him as
a child along with his mother’s milk. And yet, even then, when it came to his one-on-
one relationships with African-Americans, he would always treat everyone equally and
with respect, a respect he had for people in particular, but not for black people as a
whole. I remember an interracial couple—a black man and white woman—came to live
in the same camp as we did when I lived in Indonesia, and amazingly, this black man
was from Meridian, our hometown! Even then I wondered how my parents would react
to this very different couple, especially in the seventies, and yet, ironically enough, they
became friends. And even me, usually the one white guy who showed up at
celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday in the deep South, even I struggle with
the subtle racism that has been fed me—the other day I said something in Sven’s
presence that had some racist overtones, something I will not repeat because I am too
ashamed of my sin, and Sven looked at me oddly, saying quizzically, “woo, Kevin,
where did that come from?” And I was embarrassed because of the assumptions that
lay behind those awful words—and I too had to ask myself—after all these years,
“where indeed did that come from?”

You know, that is what is so troubling about the issue of race is that it keeps popping
whenever we think we’ve moved beyond it, that we’re supposedly not longer burdened
with our parent’s prejudices, and yet, there it is, coming out of our mouths, my mouth.
Racism just makes no sense, of course, and it makes no sense in our lives as well. My
father’s way of living his life contradicted what he said he believed about a group of
people—that he was good to people in particular but believed such horrible things
about them as a whole. His beliefs contradicted his lived values, the way he actually
lived his life. And the only reason I have the courage to say these things about
someone I love as much as my family is because I saw it being said aloud for the first
time in that speech given by Barack Obama about race in Philadelphia a month or so
ago, about his beloved grandmother who loved him, but who often said things that were
clearly racist—for me, to hear someone say that aloud was extraordinary, I’ve never
heard anyone say that aloud—that you can love and be loved by someone who so still
clearly is full of shadow and light as you are, as we all are, especially when it comes to
our racial prejudices. And yet, it was amazing afterwards to hear a few voices argue
that this moment of truth by Obama about his grandmother was somehow an act of
throwing his beloved grandmother “under the bus.” The idea that somehow admitting
that you and I and the people we love and are loved by still carry some shadow in the
midst of the great light within us, that racism is still a reality in most of our hearts, is
somehow dishonoring of those we love, well, I think it just shows you how far we have to
go with this sacred conversation about race we are still trying to have in this country.

Racism, of course, and any form of prejudice against another group of people, never
really makes much sense, it’s never very logical. My father, myself, the people I love
and am loved by, maybe even you, you know, we say this and thing about “that” group
of people, and yet, of course we know it’s not the truth about every person in that
group of people, people of that race, or nationality, or gender, or sexual orientation, or
whatever. The particular always trips up the blanket whole we impugn on “those
people.” I’ve come to realize over the years people don’t change their minds about
anything because you have a better logical argument about something else, especially
about something as volatile as race—people change their minds about what they
believe to be true only when they begin to have particular experiences that challenges
something they have always believed. It doesn’t always happen, this changing of our
minds, through this new experience that challenges a long held belief, but at the very
least it often changes the way we behave with others, the way we actually interact in
particular with the people we’ve been told to avoid or to hate or to despise—I think of
my father, and even myself, for that matter. Our particular experiences of other people,
they can change our minds, and change our lives, because they begin to introduce us
to another way of seeing the world, and even more miraculously perhaps even
introduce us to another and different face of God.

You see, I think that is one of the things we miss in our racism, in our spoken or
unspoken exclusion of certain types of people out of our lives: it is that the new and
different face of God that each of us individually bring to the table. This is Trinity
Sunday, the day when the church honors the doctrine, if you will, of the Trinity, this
radical idea that God meets us in three different ways, at least three different ways—
through the God who created us, the Father and Mother of us all; as the Son of God,
this one who walked beside on this earth; and, as the Spirit, this one who is within us,
as intimate with us as the air we breathe. Now, we don’t think about it much, but this is
a pretty radical idea, an idea that both Islam and Judaism reject fiercely, because it
seems to challenge the most fundamental idea found within monotheism—that God is
one, and that there is only one God. Now, Christians affirms that truth as well, that God
is one, but we Christians also argued that this one God can be met in many ways, and
the whole doctrine of the Trinity is our own imprecise way of sharing that truth. The
diversity found within this idea, this idea of this one God meeting us in at least three
distinct ways, as our creator, as our brother, and as the God within us, simply points to
the truth that God meets each of us in such particular ways, such unique ways, that to
simply say that God only meets us one way, this way, or that way—well, the early
church wasn’t going to buy that idea, because it contradicted their many different
experiences of God in the real world. The face of the one God changes in whatever
particular ways we may need to be met by God at that particular moment in our lives.
They, and I would even argue, us, we’ve come to meet God in so many wonderful ways,
unexpected ways, that we Christians can’t imagine just saying that this face or that face
is the ONLY face of God. That is what the whole idea of Trinity is trying to say, in its
own awkward, and mysterious way—that one beautiful face is not enough.

And so it is with us, down here on earth, so to speak. One face, one color, one way of
being, one way of loving, it’s just not enough to capture the face of God, if indeed we
are made in the image of God. The whole idea of the trinity says that God looks
different from our particular point of view, and our own particular need at different
points in our lives, even though it the same God whose face we see in so many
different ways. The problem with racism, with any kind of prejudice that excludes others
from our realm of friends and family, is that we limit the presence of God in our lives, we
set boundaries to the way we allow ourselves to see the living God in this world. If we
are all made in God’s image, what a wondrous image of God we really do reflect back
to God and to each other. One color of human skin, one culture, one nation, wasn’t
enough to reflect the wonder and beauty of God, and so God decided to create a world
full of beautiful hues and tones that only the Greatest Artist could imagine. We miss
the many faces of God when all the faces in our lives look like us, and somehow,
mistakenly, we come to think of God as looking ONLY like us. If diversity is part of the
fiber of the living God, as the whole idea of the Trinity tells us, then maybe we’ve got to
get to know each other in particular, especially across the lines of color that so often
divide us, in order to get to know God more fully. But we can’t get there, we can’t see
those different faces of God, if we can’t be honest with each other about how much we
struggle to see the face of God in faces and colors and ways of being that don’t look or
act like us. I think we’ve got to start telling the truth about this sort of stuff, because as
a nation, as a people in this country, we’re going to be held accountable to that God
that Jeremiah Wright spoke of in that sermon based on our text today…we will be held
accountable to God for the ways we choose to deny the face of God in others, whether
it be the faces of poor, or the faces of the supposed nobodies of this world, and
certainly the faces of the people that don’t look and act like us. I believe that this is a
beautiful world, full of places and faces that reflect who God is, and I say, I say, we take
up the challenge of embracing the God who created such beauty, such different and
wondrous beauty. Amen.