I am embarrassed to say that I had never heard of “Juneteenth” until relatively recently.I keep discovering just how much American history I never learned and, perhaps even more disturbingly, that no one ever thought important enough to try to teach me – all that history that gets lifted up each February, for instance, as though Black history and American history are not the same thing.We don’t have a White history month, or a Straight, Cisgender Male history month, because as far as the wider society goes, that is American history.Everything else is relegated to appendices and footnotes.
So:“Juneteenth” is a fusing of “June” and “Nineteenth,” because it was on June 19, 1865 that Union General Gordon Granger stood on the balcony of a prominent building in Galveston, Texas and read aloud “General Order No. 3,” which said, in part:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.
Can you imagine what that would have felt like for the, now, formerly enslaved population of Galveston?They hadn’t yet heard about President Lincoln’s Proclamation of their freedom some three and a half years earlier, so this was a day that would cry out to be memorialized.Juneteenth celebrations became annual events throughout Texas and, eventually, throughout the United States.By 2008, nearly half of US states observed the holiday.As of May of last year, 45 of the 50 states (and the District of Columbia) have formally and officially recognized the observance of Juneteenth, even here in Virginia.
Juneteenth is a really big thing, and I had never even heard of it.Maybe this is new to some of you, too.I would ask how that is possible, but we all know the answer, don’t we?The dominant culture in which we live, the dominant narrative that defines us as a country, does not have time, or energy, or focus, or interest, really, in anything other than itself.That’s why we have Black History Month in February, and Women’s History Month in March, and LGBT History Month in October, and Transgender Awareness Month in November (just to name a few).This is one way that our culture – and by “our culture” I am referring to the dominant culture made by, for, and about people who look more or less like me – can recognize the undeniable fact that ours is not a homogeneous society while simultaneously reinforcing the “otherness” of everybody who … doesn’t look more or less like me.
One dimension of this dominant culture’s narrative is a mindset of what I’ll call “been there, done that, cross it off the list.”Here are two examples of I mean by that:
·Slavery was terrible, awful, heinous, but we fought and won the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation put an end to slavery.Been there, done that, cross it off the list.
·The Jim Crow era was terrible, awful, heinous, but the Civil Rights battles of the 50s and 60s won equality for all.I mean look, today we even have a Black President!Been there, done that, cross it off the list.
But that’s not how it works, of course.The truth is that there is a river of pain that runs through our nation’s history, a river of torment and torture, a river of separation and segregation and dehumanization and demonization, a river that has never stopped flowing.Ever.We – and right now I’m really talking to people, like me, who’ve been raised to think of ourselves as White – we would like to think that at least it has gone underground, or slowed to a trickle, but it hasn’t, except, perhaps, in our own mind’s eye.But we need to think this, we need to believe this, because if we didn’t we wouldn’t be able to go to sleep at night, so wet would our sheets be from all our tears.Yet we – and here I do mean “we,” inclusively and collectively, meaning “we” as in “all of us” – we need to see together the truth of things as they really are.We need to see those things that some of us try so hard not to see and some of us are so continually forced to see.Here’s one such thing that seems appropriate to see on Juneteenth 2016:
The slaves weren’t freed when Lincoln declared their emancipation, nor when General Granger stood on that balcony, nor when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, nor when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the same United States in which his wife’s ancestors had been enslaved.Certain freedoms, yes, have been grudgingly conceded, but real freedom?The freedom to be and be seen as whole, as the individual you are and as part of the human family?The freedom to have your value and worth affirmed and celebrated?That has not yet been won, not yet wrested from the slaver’s fist. Not been there, not done that yet, nothing to cross off the list.
The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray is one of the largely unknown and unsung heroes of the struggles for African American rights, and LGBT rights, and women’s rights.She was the first female African American Episcopal priest, the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School, a civil rights activist (fighting against both Jim Crow and what she called “Jane Crow”), a poet of profundity and power, and a friend of my mom’s.She referred to herself as, “America’s problem child.”(“I have never been able to accept what I believe to be an injustice,” she wrote. “Perhaps it is because of this I am America’s problem child, and will continue to be.”) In many of her poems Pauli gave voice to the experience of what another great African American poet, Langston Hughes called, “a dream deferred,” this experience of the ongoing denial of the fundamental right to be seen as more than three-fifths of a person. In the face of that, how can you keep on hoping for things to change? What can hope mean when time and time again you have seen your hope whipped, and lynched, and set upon by dogs and firehoses, and denigrated and sneered at by what passes for politicians these days? Here’s one of Pauli’s poems:
Hope is a crushed stalk
Between clenched fingers.
Hope is a bird’s wing
Broken by a stone.
Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —
A word whispered with the wind,
A dream of forty acres and a mule,
A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,
A name and place for one’s children
And children’s children at last . . .
Hope is a song in a weary throat.
Give me a song of hope
And a world where I can sing it.
Give me a song of faith
And a people to believe in it.
Give me a song of kindliness
And a country where I can live it.
Give me a song of hope and love
And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.
This is the still unfulfilled promise of Junteenth – a song of hope, and a world in which it can be sung by everyone; a song of faith, and a people who will truly believe it; a song of kindliness and a country in which it can be lived out; and a song of hope and love without having to give up who and what we are.Hope is a song in a weary throat. [This, by the way, was the original title of Pauli's autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat. Someone at the publishing house, no doubt, decided that for the second printing the title should be changed to Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet. It might be more descriptive for people who'd never heard of her, but oh what poetry was lost!]
One year ago this past week Dylan Roof walked into a Bible Study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and murdered 9 people, at least in part because he did not see African Americans as fully human, at least not in the way he saw himself.He apparently had not heard about the “absolute equality” affirmed by General Granger in Galveston one hundred and fifty-one years ago today, or he’d heard but didn’t believe it, and so he could believe that murdering these people was a justified and acceptable act.
This past week Omar Mateen walked into the nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida and murdered 49 people (wounding an additional 53), at least in part because he did not see people in the LGBTQ community, or the Latino community as fully human, at least not in the way he saw himself.And whether it was this blind and blinding hatred, or the distortions and perversions of a twisted religious ideology, Mateen was able to believe that his murdering these people was a justified and acceptable act.
When you can deny the fundamental humanity of someone, you can justify doing just about anything to them.It doesn’t count if they don’t count.Fifty-three years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all […] are created equal” to be a “promissory note” that had not yet been made good on.It still hasn’t.And so the weary throat must keep singing.
Someone else who knew and beautifully expressed that song was the poet-queen Maya Angelou.She speaks of it in one of her most well-known and oft-quoted poems, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,”
The free bird leaps
On the back of the wind
And floats downstream
And dips his wings
In the orange sun rays
And dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks
Down his narrow cage
Can seldom see through
His bars of rage
His wings are clipped
And his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
With a fearful trill
Of the things unknown
But longed for still
And his tune is heard
On the distant hill
For the caged bird sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
And the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
And the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
And he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
With a fearful trill
Of the things unknown
But longed for still
And his tune is heard
On the distant hill
For the caged bird sings of freedom.
Oh the throats that sing this song may indeed by weary, yet the song remains strong.This song has many variations, yet still it is one song – the song of freedom and a long-ago made promise fulfilled.But here’s some good news:Dylan Roof didn’t silence it; Omar Pateen didn’t stop its steady beat; Donald Trump and his crowds can’t drown it out.
But there’s work to be done.We – those of us who have been taught that we are White – need to take it up, add our voices to those who have been singing so long that their throats are weary – oh so weary – of singing this song that should never have had to be sung.
the song of hope, and a world in which it can be sung by everyone; the song of faith, and a people who will truly believe it; the song of kindliness and a country in which it can be lived out; the song of hope and love without having to give up who and what we are to sing it.
I've been listening once again to some of the great music on the original Playing for Change Album, Songs Around the World. (And if you don't know about this amazing project, both where have you been and please go check it out right now. I'll wait.)
One of the songs they covered is Bob Marley's "War/No More Trouble." (Those two songs are often tied together.) As I'm listening to it lately I find that it's pulling together some of my thoughts about the idea that "colorblindness" is the ideal and that talking so much about race and racism actually exacerbates the problem. Check out these lyrics (which I've written to reflect the fabulous phrasing of the Playing for Change version):
Until
the philosophy that holds one race superior
and another
inferior
is finally
and permanently
discredited
and abandoned
everywhere is way (me say war)
until there are no longer first class
and second class citizens
of any nation
until the color of a man's skin
is of no more significance
than the color of his eyes
everything is war (me say war)
Note that it doesn't say, "the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes." That's what the advocates of colorblindness would say. (And they'd likely quote Dr. King's famous affirmation of a world in which people are "not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." See? Even the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. says that color doesn't matter!
Well, not exactly. What Dr. King said was that he has a dream that one day that such a society will exist in which the color of one's skin doesn't matter. "Dream" indicates that it's not yet a reality; "one day" reminds us that it's not so today.
And Bob Marley wrote, "until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes ..." Until... I have a dream that one day...
And that's the problem (one of them!) that I have with the assertion that we should be acting as if this were a "colorblind" world. Because it's not. And, ironically, the only way to get to that promised land is for folks like me who think of themselves as white to see what people of color see and live with every day -- it is not that way now. Only by seeing clearly how it is do we have any hope of getting to the place where it should be.
And I believe that we will be able to get there one day. That one day people will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. That one day the color of a person's skin will be of no more significance than the color of their eyes. One day. But the dream will remain a dream unless and until the reality of how things are is recognized, truly seen, and deeply understood by those of us who people see as white (who are, for the moment at least, still the majority of people in this country and who absolutely are the architects of our country's dominant -- and dominating -- culture).
I often listen to NPR as I drive in to work in the morning. (I also listen to Rush Limbaugh if I'm in the car while his show's on, but that's another matter.) This morning I heard a piece of a report on diversity in the workplace. I missed the beginning, but it seemed to be focusing on the tech sector, and it might have been about Intell in specific. At one point the reporter noted that at Intell, prospective employees not only have to demonstrate their coding ability, but also be assessed for their "cultural fit." Someone else said that this means that teams are looking for "a unicorn." She went on to say that in order to make the workplace more diverse they were looking for someone of a different racial, gender, or other under-represented identity who is also in every other way just like the folks who are already there.
I was immediately reminded of a moment in the movie The Color of Fear. This 1994 film from director and anti-oppression activist Lee Mun Wah documents a weekend retreat during which eight men -- two African Americans, two Hispanic Americans, two Asian Americans, and two Euro Americans -- talk openly and frankly with each other about race and racism. It's a pretty amazing movie, and if you haven't seen it you really should. If you're interested, you can stream it from Lee Mun Wah's Stirfry Seminars' website. (It's expensive, but I think it's worth it, especially if you get a group together to watch it. Just make sure to create a space and time to talk about it afterward!)
As I said, I was reminded of a moment in which one of the African Americans, Loren Moye, says that he can't wait to get home after a day working in corporate America so that he can "be Black" again. He talks movingly about how he knows that his Blackness is not really welcome in that environment so he has to "shuffle." He says that it might be a 1990 kind of shuffle, but that it's still a shuffle.
So often when White people -- yes, I do mean well-intentioned White people and not just explicitly racist folk -- say thinks like, "I'm colorblind; I don't care about race," or, "Why can't we all just be people?" I have to hold my breath a bit. Yes, in articulating his dream the Rev. Dr. King did say "I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls as sisters and brothers." (I don't know if this means anything, but in all of the websites of quotations by Rev. King this quote appears, but without the last four words.) More recently, the rapper and activist known as Prince EA created a video titled, "I am NOT Black, You are NOT White" which is making the rounds on social media:
So yes ... it is true that there has long been, and is still, a vision of a "post-racial" society in which the "color of our skin" is not as important as "the content of our character."
And yet ...
I have learned in my relationships with people of color that the same words can mean very different things depending on who is saying them and in what context. When an African American, for instance, talks about wanting a world where race doesn't matter, they may well be saying something quite different than when a Euro American says the same thing. Why? Because African Americans have for so long been treated as "other than," as "less than," that a world without an emphasis on race means an opportunity to live their lives without race getting in the way, being a hurdle, confronting them with injustices committed against them at virtually every turn. People of color may well mean that they want a world in which they are not judged -- and judged negatively -- simply because of their race or ethnicity.
Our nation's history of systemic racism -- beginning with slavery and continuing through the Jim Crow era and up until the present state of what civil rights litigator and legal scholar Michelle Alexander calls, "the new Jim Crow" -- has made a demonstrable divide between the lived experience of White Americans and people of color. To deny the inarguable fact of this is as indefensible as is denying the overwhelming evidence from climatologists about global warming. (As an aside, Ms. Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindnessshould be read by every American, followed almost immediately by Ta-Nehisi Coates's book Between the World and Me.)
So, yes, it is true that race is a social construct. Genetic science has shown conclusively that there is more genetic variation among people of the same "race" than there is between the so-called "races." Social historians and others can delineate the process of, and purpose for, creating the concept of "race." In a sense, then, it is true that "race" shouldn't matter; that people should all be seen as "human beings" rather than as Black, White, or any of the other racial/ethnic divisions that permeate our society. Yet that isn't the same thing as saying that thinking about, and talking about, these distinctions perpetuates the divisions (in other words, the idea that all of this anti-racism, multicultural stuff just serves to keep racism alive).
When White people -- again, I'm talking about well-intentioned White people -- talk about wanting a "colorblind, post-racial" society they are, of course, in one sense right on the money. And yet, the way many White people say this glosses over, denies, erases, the lived experiences of people of color. That's because without acknowledging the very real and devastatingly detrimental affects of centuries of systemic racism on the lives of people of color what we (White people) are really saying is, "none of that really mattered."
If people of color think about "colorblindness" as no longer having to be identified and judged fundamentally by their race or ethnicity, when White people say it they often mean, even if unconsciously, "everybody should be like us." And this makes a kind of sense, after all, because one of the pernicious aspects of racism is that White Americans have been led to believe that our experiences, our history, is the norm for what it means to be an American. (And to be human, really.)
And that brings us back to the "unicorn" from this morning's radio report -- the person of a different race or ethnicity who is, none-the-less in every other way exactly the same as the White people who are looking to diversify. That brings us back to Loren Moye and his experience that he needs to "act white" in order to have a place in the workplace. Can anyone really suggest that it is these examples of "colorblindness" that are, in unarguable fact, perpetrating the racism they claim to be eradicating?
It's important for Euro Americans to come to grips with the fact that this is neither nothing new nor an outlier phenomenon. To again use the climate change analogy, just as the truth of climate change becomes unassailable as scientist after scientist weighs in with the results of their observations, the truth of the effects of centuries of systemic racism on the lives and lived experiences of people of color is equally undeniable. Person after person after person have "published their results," if you will. No less than a climate-change denier, a reality-of-racism denier simply must be, at this point, willfully disregarding the testimony of experts. In the case of the reality of racism it is people of color who are the experts, those who have experience it's brutal reality day in and day out for generations.
And what the overwhelming number of experts are saying is that as long as White people mean by the idea of "colorblindness" and "treating everyone the same" that they don't want to recognize the very real and on-going ways our society's racial history has created painfully different realities, then they want no part of it. Until White folks are willing to step out of our experiences and try to see the world through another lens -- an other and tremendously disturbing and discomforting lens -- that we do need to keep thinking about and talking about these difference. It really is the only way we can all make our way to the land of the Beloved Community so many of so longed for.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
I leave you with a powerful and profound clip from The Color of Fear. The testiony of Victor Lewis:
On Monday I said that I would write more about the extraordinarily book Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, and the recipient of the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis, and the George Polk Award for his writing. His first book was the memoir The Beautiful Struggle, and he gained prominence in the mainstream media for his 2014 cover story in The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations." Of his most recent book, Toni Morrison wrote:
"I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates's journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. It is require reading."
I couldn't agree more, especially with her assertion that it is -- or, I would say, should be -- required reading. Coates's writing is both beautiful and brutal. His analysis is clear and challenging, painfully so. He writes of his respect and admiration of Malcolm X -- his example and his rhetoric -- and again and again while reading Between the World and Me I felt as though I were reading the words of Malik el-Shabazz himself. Perhaps his description of his feelings toward Malcolm X can better describe what I mean:
Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I'd ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white [a phrase Coates uses again and again] comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslvaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not be your morality. Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination. I identified with him. (p. 36)
Coates, too, shows no sign of wanting to make those of us who believe we are white comfortable. And he doesn't. With his unflinchingly honest description of what it has meant to him to be black in America, and his biting analysis of where we are and how we got here, those of us who believe we are white who read this book will be extremely discomforted. I found myself weeping over much of what I read, sitting convicted by much of the rest. It is no hyperbole to say that I was hanged, broken-open, by the experience of reading this book. And reading this book is an experience.
Americans believe in the reality of 'race' as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism -- the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them -- inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, or a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.
But race is is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming 'the people' has never been a mater of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy, (p. 7)
In all of the work I have done to try to understand the bubble of privilege in which I exist, and the systems and structures that privileged "my kind" while inescapably denigrating everyone else, I have never come across this analysis of race and racism. Others have made the point that race is a human construct rather than a biological truth, yet Coates takes this idea and makes use of it in making sense of the history of racism, and its current incarnation, in ways that I have never encountered before.
I've said that his writing is both beautiful and brutal. This passage should suffice as example:
Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, who thinks her sister talks to loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress-making and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and as capable as anyone. "Slavery" is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. ... Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains -- whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains. (pp. 69-70)
As we read this book, especially those of us who Coates would say "believe we are white," -- "need to believe we are white" -- we are essentially voyeurs, for it is written as a letter to his fifteen year old son. It is written in the context of all that has been happening that has lifted issues of race into the consciousness of white America in a way not experienced since the Civil Rights Era -- the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and all the others (including the often overlooked women such as Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tarika Wilson, Kathryn Johnston, and Tanisha Anderson) who have been killed in recent encounters with police, as well as the near-universal lack of convictions or even accountability for the people who fired the killing shot. He is writing in the age of Black Lives Matter and the defensively dismissive response of All Lives Matter. Of those who would argue that there is no conscious plan or pattern in all of this, no conspiracy, Coates says:
But what one "means" is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out hat day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black. (p. 103)
He notes that those of us who desperately want to be identified as white are able to continue to justify the Myth of America's commitment to freedom is our ability to forget our past.
The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote, the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. (p. 143)
There is so much more I could say of Between the World and Me -- his descriptions of growing up on the streets of Baltimore, his experiences of what he calls "The Mecca" at Howard University, the murder of a friend at the hands of the police, the birth and raising of his sons, and ever so much more. There are so many more passages I could lift up and out in the hope that at least some of it will be read. I will end with just one more. In writing of those who struggled, who laid down their safety and their lives, during the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s he writes:
Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, as done to the world. (p. 147)
I return to Toni Morrison's assessment -- that this book is, should be, needs to be required reading. And digested. And shared. Widely. I believe -- more accurately, I suppose, I hope -- that if it were those of us who are so ensnared in the Dream that we don't even know it as such will indeed be roused. And, being roused, might be able to work with all those who need us to work with them to change the reality behind the Dream.
Please. Read this book. And then lend it so someone.
RevWik
P.S. -- The most recent issue of UU World magazine includes a transcript of a discussion that took place among five Unitarian Universalists of color about Ta-Nehisi Coates's book Between the World and Me.
I will admit that I don’t know if this story is true, and I’ll confess that
I didn’t try to find out because it’s such a good story. So let me just say that this is what I’ve heard. There was an experiment done in which some
fish were put into a small tank that was then put within a larger tank. The fish could see the larger space around
them, yet were confined to a much more limited existence. They were left this way for a while and, as
far as we can know what fish are thinking, they grew used to it. And then the scientists removed the smaller
tank so that the fish now had unlimited access to the entirety of their
environment. And yet – again, so I’ve
heard – the fish never did swim beyond what had been the boundaries of their
smaller tank. They had, apparently,
internalized the limitations that they had learned and simply were not able to
move beyond them.
We just recognized and honored the choice of several members of our
community to formalize their membership.
I, personally, struggle with the right words here, because I believe
that a person can absolutely be a member of this community as soon as they walk
through those doors and decide to come back again. From this perspective, being a member (lower
case “m”) has to do with involvement, engagement, connection. From this perspective there are lots of folks
who are members of TJMC even though they’ve never signed the membership
book.
At the same time, though, there is
something important in taking the step to formalize that membership. That’s the reason I generally discourage
people from doing so right away. I think
it should be the response to our involvement and not the doorway to it. And I think it’s a decision not to be made
lightly, because afterward things will be
different in some perhaps imperceptible yet really important ways.
I remember my mother telling my older brother on his wedding day that there
would be something different after the wedding – maybe even only subtly
different – even though he’d already lived with his bride-to-be for several
years. Pat pooh poohed it, of course,
but during the reception he came up to her and told her that she’d been
right. He couldn’t quite put his finger
on it, but something was different now that they’d formalized their
relationship in this way.
I remember, too, the phone call I got – years ago now – from a woman who’d
just signed the membership book that morning.
She called because she wanted to tell me right away about something
strange that she’d noticed. This was a
woman who’d been a part of that congregation for a while and who was almost
evangelical in her sharing of the wonderful community she’d found. She’d tell her friends, “at the church I go
to we’re doing this …,” or, “at the church I go to we’re doing that …” She was always telling someone something our
congregation was up to. She called me
that day to say that she’d been talking with someone about the church and
realized that she had said, “at my church …”.
Something subtle had shifted in her when she took the step of
formalizing her membership. It was no
longer simply “the church I go to;” it had become, for her, “my church.”
So, to those we recognize today for taking this step I want to say the two
things I’ve always said when people make this choice. First, congratulations – you’re joining
yourself to a really wonderful community.
And second, thank you – because your presence here makes it more
wonderful still.
And that’s really what I want to reflect on this morning: the way new members – formal or more informal
– change this community. In one of our newcomer orientation sessions someone
said that at the last congregation she’d attended the ordained minister would
say that as soon as someone made the choice to become a regular attendee and
participant it was as if they were handed a metaphoric paintbrush so that they,
too, could add their colors and shapes to the mural that was constantly being
created and recreated. That’s a lovely
image, isn’t it? Yet there’s a dimension
to it that most of us most likely would rather not think about.
I don’t know how many of you have ever worked with others on a free-form
mural. I know that when I’ve done this
there are times when someone comes along after I’ve created some wonderful
thing and they dare to change it. My
tree becomes their rocket; my sun becomes their flower. Or I’ve got in my mind how to use a blank
space over here, and someone else comes along and does their own thing in
it. And depending on my mood –
especially depending on how seriously I’m taking it all – this can be really
annoying. Upsetting, even. And, in keeping with this month’s theme, I’d
have to say that it can be hard to … let go … of the plans I’d had when someone
comes along with plans of their own.
This happens when we invite new members to grab a paintbrush and add their
own artistic vision to our ongoing mural.
At least, it should. It should change things if we who are
already here are serious about really inviting new people to bring themselves,
and be themselves, and offer themselves to this beloved community. We who are already here are already doing the things, and doing them
in the ways, that we’re already doing them.
One of the gifts, we say, of expanding our circle – as the choir so
movingly sang last week – is that our common life becomes infused with the
inspiration of “the new.”
And this will be especially true when we who are already here welcome in a
greater diversity of people, which we say that we want to do. Diversity speaks to difference, so the more diverse we become the more different we become. At least, of course, if we really do mean it
when we invite people to bring themselves, and be themselves, and share
themselves. Welcoming “diversity” means
welcoming people who are in some way or other different than the majority of the people who are already here or,
at least, the people who set the tone and establish the norms of how we behave
toward one another. And these different people will have – do have –
different ways of seeing things, and doing things, and envisioning what ought
to be done.
Speaking in generalities for a moment, the Eurocentric culture – which
informs most of the world around us and, let’s face it, the world in here, too
– tends to focus on the individual and our own personal growth. Consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or
implicitly, the question most commonly asked is, “What do I get out of this? How will
this assist me in reaching my own full potential?” Bluntly said, “What’s in it for me?”
Communities of color – again, speaking in generalities – are more often
focused on the community and the health and wellbeing of the whole. “What do we
need? How can this build us up?
What’s in it for us?” I’ve heard this described succinctly as the
difference between an I culture and a
we culture.
So as long as our community here is built around largely homogeneous
Eurocentric norms, we’ll tend to focus on doing
things, defining “success” by how well our own particular needs are being met,
and essentially maintaining the status quo so that we, ourselves, can remain
comfortable and feel “at home among like-minded people” (as is so often
said).
To the extent we’re serious about becoming a more multicultural place, to
the extent we mean it when we say we’d like to see TJMC become more diverse, to
the extent our talk about a wide and welcoming invitation to all people is
genuine, there will be challenges to that comfort. If this vision of a more diverse, more
multicultural congregation begins to take hold, the “we” of this place will be
increasingly comprised of people who come from cultures that are more
interested in the being in relationship
than the doing of things, who define
success by how the whole community is being supported and strengthened rather
than the individual, and who will want to see us being flexible and fluid so that
we can readily change as the “we” of this place continues to change.
Let’s look at another example of the potential clash of different cultures,
this one more generational than racial. We
who are already here – we who have been here for a while, and know how things
work because we’ve been the ones doing the work to keep things working – we know that there is a natural progression
which folks are expected to follow: you come for a while and then get involved on
one or another of our committees; you volunteer your time to a fundraiser or,
as we sometimes call them, a funraiser;
you eventually become a chair of a committee (or two), gradually increasing the
level of your responsibility until you find yourself on the Leadership
Development Committee, the Committee on the Ministry, or the Board – levels of
leadership and service that have traditionally been reserved for those who have
“put in their time” and have gained the respect, or are at least fairly well
known by, the congregation as a whole.
And, of course, along with this is the expectation that we will support
the church financially – through the weekly offering and our annual pledge –
and that we will increase that support the longer we’re here and the more we
get involved.
That’s the way things work. Or at least,
that’s the way things are supposed to
work, and it’s darned frustrating that it doesn’t seem to be working that way
anymore. Frustrating and a little scary,
because that’s the way things work and if things aren’t working that way any
longer it won’t be too long until our whole church
isn’t working any longer.
Yet more and more often there are people joining this community who don’t have these expectations, and not
simply because they “haven’t learned how to do church yet,” as is sometimes
said. They don’t have these expectations
because that isn’t the way they see
the world. I know I’m speaking in
generalities again but folks who make up what’s called Generation X and the
Millennial Generation usually have no interest in climbing the committee ladder
like us Baby Boomers and Traditionalists.
In fact, they have no interest in sitting on a committee in the first
place. They want to be up and moving and
making a difference. Committees? Not so much.
Active task forces focusing on doing something real? Much better.
Especially if their work can be done largely asynchronously so it can
fit into an already tremendously full life.
Maybe even most shocking, they’re not all that interested in making sure
that they’re doing things in accordance with the way things have been done
before. They’d rather do things in the
ways that work best for the task at hand and the people who are doing it. In fact, they tend not to be all that devoted
to “the church,” per se – the church as a concept – and are really more
motivated by the real relationships they form than they are by some abstraction
like a mission statement or sense of “church identity.”
A truly multicultural community – the kind we who are already here keep
saying that we want – is full of all kinds of diversity. Generational diversity. Racial and cultural diversity. Economic diversity and diversity of
educational background. Diversity in
mental health status, and physical ability.
Gender identity and expression.
Political and theological diversity.
Each of these, and so many others we could think of, require of all of
us a letting go of our own expectations of who we are and how we are so that we
can listen across and through the differences to see the world – and our part
in it – in new ways.
It was so easy – if you’ll forgive my anthropomorphizing – for those fish to
remain content to swim within the comfortable confines of what they’d always
known. And it is easy for we who are
already here to want to be comfortable in what we’ve known – the in-jokes, the shared history that goes unspoken (except
through glances and knowing smiles), the assumptions we make about the new
person we meet (because we expect that they’ll be more or less like we are in
terms of educational background and the experiences a certain economic status
provide). It is easy – and natural
– to want to be surrounded by
“like-minded” people who reinforce our own world-view and who validate our
experiences as normative.
It’s easy, but our Unitarian Universalist faith calls us to be people of
letting go, and that means letting go of all these things, too. As a monocultural institution – which, let’s
be honest, this is – becomes a multicultural one, people with different world-views and different experiences become part of the
mix and no single one can think of itself as normative anymore. Yet letting go of these things doesn’t mean
throwing them away, but simply letting go of our death grip on them so that, as
we said earlier, our hands might be truly open to receiving, our minds truly
open to learning, and our hearts truly open to loving.
I will tell you this, when I reach out my hand to welcome a newcomer, I
don’t want to be holding on to anything that will get in the way of my
completely clasping theirs. And in that
spirit, and with that conviction, I want to welcome again those we honored
earlier for their decision to formalize their membership here and say once
more: congratulations – you’re joining
yourself to a really wonderful community, and thank you – because your presence
here will make it more wonderful still.
I don’t know quite how yet; I can’t
know quite how yet; but I can’t tell you how excited I am to find out. So me it be of for us all.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
This is the sermon delivered in worship with the people of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist on Sunday, October 25th. You can also listen to it, if you prefer.
I have been asked by several people, now, if I would be willing to share the words I spoke at the prayer service at the First Baptist Church on Main Street in Charlottesville on June 22nd, 2015. The service was a response to the tragic murder of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charlotte, S.C. I had preached on the subject the day before, and was honored to have the opportunity to address the truly diverse crowd that gathered at First Baptist that night.
I serve a congregation that is named after Thomas Jefferson, a man who in many ways embodies the reality of America -- he talked a good game about freedom but was, himself, unable to live up to those ideals. From that context, I offer these words:
From the book of Jeremiah, hear these words: "A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and
great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more." I read ablog post this afternoon by the Reverend Jennifer Bailey, an itinerant AME
minister and founder of the FaithMatters Network, and she reminded me of these
words: "A voice is heard in Ramah,
mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be
comforted, because they are no more."
Refusing to be
comforted! Refusing. That means to me that she'd been encouraged to be comforted, invited to be
comforted, no doubt pushed, and pulled, and prodded toward being comforted. But
she refused. She refused.
I don't know about you but when I'm in the vicinity of
someone who is in mourning with great weeping I want to comfort them. I want to
help them to feel better. I want to help them to see the big picture, to
remember the context, to think about the plan. I want to help them feel hope.
But I'll tell you a secret:
as much as I want to be somehow comforting for them, I'm also wanting to
do it for me because it's uncomfortable to be around great weeping. It's
disconcerting. Distressing. Disturbing.
So the people around Rachel wanted to comfort her at least in part so
that they wouldn't have to feel uncomfortable. Rarely does the one who's feeling comfortable
wants to be made to feel uncomfortable. But Rachel refused to be comforted.
She refused to be comforted, and maybe so should we. I know
that the purpose of tonight is to bring us together -- to bring us together so that we can heal, to bring us
together to reclaim hope, to bring us together so we might comfort one another
in our grief, and our anger, and our despair.
But while I think that the coming together is good, even necessary, this
is not the time to come together in healing.
We should come together to demand that things change, We should come
together to demand the end of these atrocities!
We should come together and refuse to make others comfortable when we are grieving, grieving that so many of God's children, so many children of life itself, have been
slaughtered for no other reason than being black in a country that can't live
up to its ideals. This has got to end,
and I refuse to be comforted until it has.
Do you remember Dr. King saying there were some things to
which he was, and always would be, maladjusted?
Do you remember that he called on us all to form -- and you gotta love
this name -- the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment? Now that is a reason to come together! That
is a group I would stand with, and sit with, and march with, and, yes, fight
with, and mourn with, and weep with, and be with .. just as we are doing this
evening.
That's what I had to say that night. And that's what I'd say today.
This is the (rather extended) sermon I offered to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia on Sunday, June 21st, 2015. (You can listen to a podcast if you'd prefer.) This sermon was spread out through the Opening Words, the normal slot for our "Exloration," and the time normally set aside for sharing Joys & Sorrows. Before beginning I noted that there are those in the congregation who have been wanting to hear more from their preacher. I said that, perhaps, after today's service they will be more careful about what they wish for.
PART I
I’d like to begin by sharing a quotation:
"Is something missing from your life? Are you doing all you can to have a closer relationship with God? If you have a desire to learn more about God, then join us on Wednesdays at 6:00 pm in the lower level of the church. We look forward to seeing you."
That is the invitation to the weekly Bible Study that you'll find on the website of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. "Mother Emanuel," as it is often called, has had what President Obama called, "a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America." CBS News This Morning, on Friday, said that the church has "played a part in nearly every political and social movement since it opened in 1816."
And on Wednesday night, June 17th, they were having their weekly Bible Study in the lower hall just as they'd been doing for quite some time. But this would not be an ordinary evening.
In 1813, Morris Brown, a free black, a shoemaker by trade, wanted to find a church where African Americans were more welcomed than in the Methodist Church of his time, a segregated church that not only kept blacks and whites from worshiping together, but kept them separate in their cemetery as well. Not seeing anywhere what he was looking for Brown founded the community that would come to be Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
One of its more prominent members – a formerly enslaved man who'd purchased his own freedom from, of all things, having won the lottery – was accused of planning a slave rebellion. Scholars today are apparently divided on whether there ever really was such a plot, yet no matter the truth of the accusation, Denmark Vesey and 34 other men were hanged. Only nine years after its birth, some of the earliest members of “Mother Emanuel" were lynched. The violence they’ve known started early.
Now, I have to tell you that when members of an African Methodist Episcopal Church get to studying their Bible, they really get to it. I know that this might be a little hard for a lot of us Unitarian Universalists to grasp, but these folks had been engaged in Bible study for just about two hours before Dylan Roof entered the building, and they weren’t anywhere near done yet. By most accounts Roof sat with the group for as much as an hour before he pulled out the .45 caliber automatic pistol he’d brought with him. Survivors say that he was clear about his intentions and his motivations. "I have to do it," he reportedly said, "you rape our women and you’re taking over our country. You have to go." Some who know him say that he spoke of wanting to incite a race war. The car he drove from the scene had a vanity plate on the front: "The Confederate States of America."
There are those who have been suggesting that he is simply a sick young man; that he's used too many drugs or that he has a mental illness. (They always bring up mental illness, don’t they? Especially when the gunman is white, right?) There have even been those who've said that rather than being racially motivated this was more likely -- or, perhaps, at least as likely, -- another example of the ever-increasing war on Christianity in our culture. “… we won't know until we have all the facts”
Well … I don't have all the facts, yet the facts I do have seem pretty clear to me -- this was a self-described racist who said in his own words from his own lips that his goal was not only to kill black people but to incite a race war. One survivor said that he told her he was letting her live so that she could go on and tell others about what had happened. This wasn’t the action of a deranged loner; it was an intentional act of terrorism.
And this is supposed to be a post-racial America! It's absolutely astonishing to me how hard people who have some measure of power will work to justify their excessively destructive and dehumanizing abuses of that power. Ask them about slavery and they’ll answer, “Well, our slaves are happy, you know,and well cared for; they couldn't survive without our beneficence.” Bring up the subject of Jim Crow and they’ll say, “It's better this way -- each to their own. That’s the natural way of things.” And what about the modern practice of the mass incarceration overwhelmingly of African Americans? “Well ... we can't help it if they commit more crimes.” (Which, according to law enforcement’s own statistics is, if you’ll pardon my French, foutaise.). But with an act like this that façade begins to break and, so, today the voices plead: “Please! Let's please call this anything but what it is.” But here’s what it is: a terrorist attack on American soil aimed at defending the system of white supremacy that is so engrained in our country that there are people who quite honestly don't believe it exists, and others who believe it but don’t see anything really wrong in it. Of course, there are those who know it exists all too well, because they are its victims. Let’s not forget them.
Those who have ears, can hear the incessant drumbeat of death, after death, after death of young black men. Those who have eyes can see the mounting evidence that apparently black lives do not matter as much as others’ do. Those who have been paying attention are aware of the ever-increasing rumbling that portends the coming of a massive storm, a storm of, as we might say, a storm of Biblical proportions. I fear – and in some ways I guess I hope, too – that that storm’s coming soon. Really big storms are scary, often dangerous things, yet sometimes they’re the only thing that can end the oppressive heat and make everything seem new again.
Back in January I preached on the subject of race in America, and then again in March, but I must confess that in the context of the all that is happening, and all that has been happening, and all that is most surely going to keep happening, I really have been silent. Too silent. And in that silence, yes, there is some fear, some cowardice. And, yes, in that silence there is complicity. And, yes, that silence is an example of the white privilege that grants me the freedom to be silent, to hope that somebody else is going to do something, or to cynically and conveniently believe that nothing can be done.
I recently saw a Tweet which expressed the hope that we would, in this time, come together for healing. In response I wrote, “With respect – this is NOT the time for coming together for healing; this is the time for coming together to really work for real change.” Actually, I think the demand of this time is even more fierce that that – this is the time when we must change things. And that “we” means largely white America, because only those who are privileged by a system have the power to change that system.
I know that I’m preaching to the choir here, but as a colleague of mine says, “I know I’m preaching to the choir, and what I’m preaching is – get off your buts and sing!” Our opening hymn is #149, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
INTRODUCTION TO THE OPENING HYMN,“LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING”
Every time we lift our voices to sing our opening hymn, Lift Every Voice and Sing, I make note that this hymn has such a prominent place in this history of African Americans in this country that it is often been called “the African American National Anthem.” I’ve usually mentioned, also, that it was the Rev. Dr. King’s favorite hymn.
The lyrics originated in a poem written in 1899 by James Weldon Johnson, who was the principal of the Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida. The occasion of its first public performance, in 1900, was a celebration of the birth of President Abraham Lincoln. The poem was part of Johnson’s introduction of the day’s guest speaker, Booker T. Washington. (As an aside, 9 years later Washington would preach at the very same Emanuel AME Church that’s in the news today.) Johnson’s brother John set the poem to music that same year, and it had gained such celebrated importance in less than a decade that the NAACP dubbed it, “The Negro National Anthem.”
Ninety years later, the Rev. Joseph Lowery used the third verse nearly word-for-word to begin his benediction at the inauguration of the first African American President, Barack Obama.
Let’s sing together ...
PART II
Nine people are dead in Charleston, South Carolina. The youngest was 26; the oldest was 87. I was watching the news with my older son the other night. Both of my children are adopted, and both are what is called, “multiracial.” The younger one, the 10-year old, Les, has African and Cherokee ancestry from his birth father’s side of the family, but he really takes after his Irish and Scottish birth mother. His brown skin, as he used to say when he was little, is on the inside.
The older one, the 13-year old, Theo, absolutely favors his East Indian birth mom, with hints of his birth father’s Haitian and African roots. His brown skin is most definitely (and, I have to add, so beautifully) on the outside.
Over the years I have tried to help Theo, especially, to understand that the world he’s living in now – the world my wife and I have lived in all of our lives; the world, simply put, of white privilege – is not where he’s going to live out most of his life.
In the past year or so, especially, I’ve tried to have “the talk” with him. Not the talk about sex, or the talk about drugs, but the talk about how to stay safe in a racist world. I’ve told him, as so many others have had to tell their children, that he’s now on the pivot point at which people are going to stop seeing him as an adorably cute brown-skinned boy and begin seeing him as a scary black-skinned man. That day is no doubt coming sooner than either of us can imagine, if it hasn’t come already.
Theo and I talked some after the murder of Trayvon Martin, and that takes us back three years ago now. More recently we talked more after the murders of Jordan Davis, John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown – and unfortunately I could all too easily go on for quite some time with that list. And when I’ve talked with my son about this terrible and terrifying dimension of black life he’s responded with the kind of bravado only really possible during your teen years, and the kind of dismissiveness only really possible if you live in the world of white privilege. “Oh, that won’t happen to me, dad,” he says. “You don’t have to worry.” “I’m not like that,” he adds, and by “that” I think he means that he doesn’t listen to rap, doesn’t low ride, doesn’t do drugs, doesn’t hang out in the wrong part of town (wherever that is), doesn’t sprinkle the “f word” into every single sentence or use the “n word” as if it means nothing. He seems to think that because he speaks standard English, goes to a good school, and has never gotten into any real trouble he seems to think that these things will keep him safe in this world.
So the other night when the news was on, reporting on the shooting in Charleston, I turned to Theo and told him pointedly that that’s what I’ve been trying to tell him. These people weren’t dealing drugs or smoking crack. They weren’t being threatening or even ever so slightly disrespectful. They weren’t listening to rap music. Hell, they weren’t even wearing hoodies and eating skittles while walking in their own neighborhoods; they weren’t even driving!
Not that any of those things should make any real difference, but these folks were sitting in their church, studying the Bible, for God’s sake. They’d been into it for a couple of hours when Dylan Roof joined them. One of the survivors told him during his initial bond hearing the other day that they had welcomed him into their Bible study “with open arms, she said” Another said, “we enjoyed you.” Roof sat with them for as much as an hour … an hour … so there can’t be any possible doubt that he knew what kind of people he was about to shoot and try to kill; he knew that they weren’t “like that,” either. I told Theo that the awful truth is that in this world, as it is now, it doesn’t matter who or how he is – who he knows himself to be, who his friends and family know him to be. It doesn’t matter what kind of grades he gets at school, what kind of work ethic he has, or how much time he spends playing Minecraft on a PC he that he built himself. All that matters, I told him, all that matters in some people’s eyes, is that he is black. He’s black and, as Roof allegedly said, “taking over his country.” His country.
I was listening to a recording of it in the car yesterday, while I was driving with Theo somewhere, and he looked over at me and said, “Dad, are you crying?” And I was. Barely controllably. When the dynamic last lines of the music blends with the powerful last lines of the hymn’s first verse, it’s almost too much. “Facing the rising sun / of a new day begun / let us march on / till victory is won.”
Theo asked me why I was crying, and I really wasn’t sure what to say to him, so I said something lame like, “Racism sucks.” But I was thinking about that so long sought, that so long hoped-for “victory” which we’ll know has be won when no one will any more be able to talk about the United States of America as “their country,” while excluding anyone from that collective pride of ownership. The victory will be won when nobody – nobody – has to fear for their lives, or worry for their loved ones’, just because they’re out driving, or walking, or talking, or studying the Bible, or simply breathing … while black. I cried because I was listening to an African American woman appropriating the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner” and using it so that the honor, the dignity, the pride that go with it might be claimed by those for whom such things have for so long been denied. I cried because I could see a vision of what might have been. What should have been.
Let us march on ‘till victory is won. It’s been such a long march already. Starting with the landing of that first ship at Jamestown in 1619, carrying those “twenty and odd” kidnapped Africans, millions of African women, children, and men marched off those slave ships to be used, to be treated, to be seen as no more animals. Sometimes not even that well.
It was a long march for the 100,000 or so who escaped enslavement and traveled north on the Underground Railroad, and for the 6 million who marched north and west in the two Great Migrations. Then there’ve been the marches most of us think of, and many of us lived through – Selma to Montgomery, the March on Washington, the march for worker’s rights in Charleston, and so many others both large and small. And today we’re we’re marching still – protest marches and funeral processions. Always, it seems, the marching continues.
So many miles marched; so many miles to go. On Friday, at that prayer service at the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church here, one of the preachers said in his prayer (and I’m paraphrasing), “How long must we continue to gather in response to events like the shooting in Charleston? How long? As long as it takes.” Till victory is won.
PART III
There are debates among preachers. Some say that you need to end every sermon on a note of hope and optimism; others say that there are times to leave people discomforted. Some say that it is perfectly permissible to leave things unsettled, encouraging people to seek the answers for themselves. Others say that one needs to give concrete “next steps” for people to act on. Well … today it’s my plan to try to do all of that.
So here’s some hope. In response to the report that Roof had said he wanted to start a race war with his actions, Charleston residents – both direct and more indirect survivors, both black and white and all of the shades in between – essentially said to him, and to all others who share his goals, that it isn’t going to happen. It’s just not going to happen. And not only that, but even while expressing the devastating consequences of his action in their own lives, many prayed that God would be merciful and that God might forgive him. Some even said that they forgive him themselves.
Reminds me of the Amish community in Nickles Mine, Pennsylvania in 2006 who expressed forgiveness toward the gunman who’d entered their small schoolhouse and shot six little girls, killing five, before shooting himself. Forgiveness. And that even just some of those whose lives have been shattered by acts of unmitigated … well, “evil” is really the only word that makes sense to me … the fact that even just some of them have the ability to own both the fullness of their grief and stay true to their values is for me a powerful source of hope. And those values are our values too, you know. In her benediction last week the Rev. Alex McGee spoke these words: return to no person evil for evil. When even for only a moment any of us are able to do that -- I have hope.
And yet … I really wasn’t kidding when I said that there are those who have become so twisted in their minds that they would really want to argue that this was not an act of racial hatred but an attack on Christianity. Really? Even if they don’t really believe it themselves, they believe that there are enough people out here who would believe it that they spew such spurious speculations as if they were facts. If that doesn’t leave you unsettled, I don’t know what will. There is so much denial.
Now, this whole sermon may well have made some of you uncomfortable all the way through it, so I can check that off my list. And that leaves only my sending you forth with concrete steps you can take to resolve the issue we’ve been exploring. A classic preacher’s ploy. Except that we all know that there’s nothing we can do – certainly not individually, and not even collectively – that will end racism. Write the word in the Sands of Forgiveness and Atonement and then wipe those sands clean and it’ll still be out there, and in here … part of the air we breathe as Americans.
But there are things you can do … that we can do.
Read. Watch. Listen. And now I’m particularly talking to other white folk here. There is no way for us to fully and truly know what it feels like to live a lifetime in the oppressive heat racism. But we can learn from those who have no choice about it. We can listen – and try to really hear – the experiences of those who’ve experienced things very different than what we have. The world will look different through their eyes, and we – again, we white folk – must learn to expand our vision or all we will do is continue to perpetrate the system in which we live. But we have to be willing to do the work for ourselves; it’s not fair, and it’s just not cool, to ask people of color to be our mentors in all of this.
So go to the Jefferson Legacies Library in the church parlor (and the big plaster bust of TJ) and borrow a book or three. Read them; return them when you’re done, of course; and invite others to read them too and then discuss together what you’ve read. Attend the films we offer here, or make a plan to watch them on your own via Netflix or just old-fashioned borrowing them.
Your Director of Faith Development and I are working to bring to TJMC in the fall a remarkable program out of Meadville Lombard Theological School, our seminary in Chicago. The program is called “Beloved Conversations,” and it’s described as, “an experiential and evocative curriculum that provides a container for exploring the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of racism in our lives.” It’s good. It has been transformative elsewhere. Let’s really engage it here.
For those who are looking for something immediately practical, on July 12th, immediately following the Sunday service, there will be a gathering of some of us who are somewhere on the spectrum between “interested in” and “passionate about” seeing TJMC become more focusedly, more intentionally, more explicitly anti-racist and anti-oppression in our words and deeds, and more truly multicultural in our identity. Not all who might want to will be able to attend this meeting, of course, but it is to be only the first of what should prove to be a very exciting year here next year.
There is energy behind initiating our Public Witness Process so that we might, as a congregation, get clear about what kind of public witness we are willing to make. Could we hang a #BlackLivesMatter banner on the front of the building like our Marriage Equality banner? Many of us think that we not only could, but that we should. The process that was developed for making a public witness is intentionally slower than many think such things should be; it is intended to ensure that a truly congregation-wide and truly deliberative conversation takes place so that before we go out to speak with one voice we find out what we want to say. In the meantime, I am going to take the prerogative you’ve given me to exercise responsibility for our common worship as the Lead Minister, to put a smaller one here in our sanctuary. All lives matter, yes, of course. Yet right now our nation needs and explicit and specific reminder that black lives matter. I want all who enter this sacred space to know that we know.
And, of course, there’s an elephant in the room, isn’t there? For years, now, we’ve wrestled in both formal and informal ways with the question of what it means for a liberal religious community in the city of Charlottesville, in the 21st century, to be named after a man who thought it acceptable to own other people. Jefferson said and did a great many things for which he should be deservedly praised, and of course no individual can be expected to live up to their ideals in all things, but we’re not talking about an indiscretion here or there. So … what would it say to the surrounding community, what would it say to us who call this place home, what would it say about our reverence for the values of freedom and tolerance, what would it say about our abhorrence of slavery and modern-day racism, were we to change our congregation’s name? What would it say if we were to intentionally choose to retain it? This is a conversation we must take out of the parking lots, and the coffee shops – and our FaceBook page – so that we might all and fully participate. It is that important – how we choose to identify ourselves and with whom and with what we choose to identify ourselves is that important. One of the things we’ll be talking about at the July 12th meeting will be how to structure a process that will help this conversation move forward.
One more thing – individually and as a congregation we need to get out there more. Oh, some of us seem to be everywhere – Pete Armetta, Elizabeth Breeden, Edith Good, Jen Larimer, Frank and Linda Dukes, Bob Gross and Jean Shepherd, Greta Dershimer, and a host of others I’m no doubt forgetting in the moment. We currently have a relationship with the Ebenezer Baptist Church, but there are other churches and organizations we could, and I’d say should, get to know better. And we can collectively get better at practicing the four Ss of the work of being an ally – show up, sit down, shut up, and, when invited, stand up and be both counted and counted on.
My friends, I have talked now for far too long. But these are things I’ve been needing to share; I hope they’ve been worth your hearing. When I began to write I was definitely unsettled, despairing, even. But as I thought about all the things we can do, all the things we’re planning to do, and all the things we’ve been doing for some time now, I began to feel hope. Perhaps – well, definitely we won’t see an end to this in our lifetimes, but we can certainly be a part of its ending. To paraphrase Edward Everett Hale,
We cannot do everything, but we can do something. And because we cannot do everything we must not hesitate to do the something that we can.
Let’s keep hoping, let’s keep praying, let’s keep working, let’s keep marching … till victory is won.
Amen, and amen.
Closing Words: “If You Had Lived,” by Bernice Johnson Reagon (annotated)
