Sunday, May 18, 2008
Bridgton United Church of Christ
“Beginning a Sacred Conversation on Race”
Psalm 8; Matthew 25:31-40; Galations 3:19-29
Dear Friends, thank you for inviting me to come back to Bridgton
and be a part of this service this morning. When I first accepted Pastor Dick’s
invitation, I assumed that I would be sharing with you the joys and challenges of my ministry as the protestant chaplain at
Maine Medical Center. I even looked at the lectionary texts appointed for this
Trinity Sunday, including that lyric psalm 8, “O Lord, our sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!…what
are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet
you have made them -- made us -- a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.”
But then the events of the last couple of months on the political
stage intervened. First, the media’s broadcasting of clips from sermons
of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor for nearly four decades of Trinity United Church of Christ, a sister congregation in Chicago. Although recently retired, Rev Wright was pastor of Barak Obama, and in the evangelical
tradition of our faith, the one who led him to the Lord. Senator Obama responded
to this firestorm with a speech given in Philadelphia, in my opinion, one of the most eloquent discussions of race in America
since Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech,” delivered over forty years ago in our nation’s
capitol. Then came the interviews of Rev. Wright by Bill Moyers and the National
Press Club. As our denomination’s president, John Thomas, wrote recently,
while the exchange on Bill Moyers brought a hopeful anticipation by many in the UCC “that the prophetic voice of the
church would be more clearly understood and affirmed…” following the National Press Club statements, “deep
hope has turned now to unsettling despair for many. There is a collective and
abiding sadness and anger in the present moment, regardless of theological or political persuasion.”
The Collegium of Officers of our United Church of Christ
sent out a pastoral letter on racism, asking those of us who are preaching on this 18th day of May to begin a sacred
conversation on race. Thus, I am out of my comfort zone this morning as I try
to be faithful to that call.
Let me be clear from the outset that what I am trying to
share this morning is not a call for an endorsement of Barak Obama. While we
can feel proud of our country -- whose history is so severely marred by its founding and continued flourishing on the back
of a slave economy, by the Civil War that put an end to legal human bondage at the cost of thousands and thousands of young
lives but a war which many southern citizens continue to call the War of Northern Aggression –proud that we have now
a serious black candidate for the White House, the decision for whom to vote is a private one.
There has long been a history in our congregational tradition of New England Election Day sermons, but this conversation
on race is both broader and deeper than that.
Also, this is neither an apology for nor a call to condemn
the statements of Jeremiah Wright. As John Thomas acknowledged in his Palm Sunday
reflections, “many of us would prefer to avoid the stark and startling language Pastor Wright used in (the clips we
have seen of his sermons).” But I think it is important for us to embrace
the radical openness of our denomination. Can we be a church that (in the words
of Obama’s speech on race) “contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking
ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black (and, I would add,
the white) experience in America”? Can we be that kind of church?
I visit with patients and families of all different denominational
persuasions and none in my rounds of hospital beds. I am struck by the oft-repeated
sentiment of patients who have no church affiliation: “Churches are full
of hypocrites.” I’m not always sure what they mean by that, but I
think part of it is what was revealed to the Apostle John at Patmos. Jesus said
to him, “Write to the angel of the church of Laodicea (maybe the angel of the United Church of Christ churches in Maine?)
‘I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were
either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth…” Surely, that was received as controversial preaching!
I believe that this invitation to a discussion of race is an invitation away from being lukewarm, an invitation to
a deeper honesty with ourselves and with one another and a reclaiming of the fire in the belly that is what our faith calls
us to.
Let me share some of the pastoral letter of our church’s
leaders and their hopes for this conversation. “Racism remains a wound
at the heart of our nation, a wound that cannot be wished away or treated carelessly.
In this sacred conversation, we seek to engage one another in a deep and sustained dialogue that may be uncomfortable
at times but is absolutely necessary if our nation is to find genuine healing of its past and present sins. Not only the health of our nation is at stake, but also truth-telling and racial reconciliation are crucial
to our spiritual, physical, and emotional wholeness.”
“Our conversations will be sacred,” the Collegium
writes, “if we trust in the Spirit of the living God to do a new thing in our midst and create beloved communities where,
as Dr. King envisioned, descendants of former slaves and descendants of former slave owners sit down together with Native
peoples and immigrant peoples and their descendents to share our lives, our fears, and our dreams.” Yes, as we look around us here this morning, we are a white congregation gathered in a predominantly white
state. But we have Native peoples as neighbors, and we have proven to be a State
that has welcomed the refugees from Cambodia, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and, I hope, as the war in Iraq is brought to a
close, we will welcome Iraqi and Kurdish refugees as well. If we are not clear
about where we stand on race, if we are not willing to express our hopes and our fears in this community of faith, we will
not know how to respond to those aberrances of Maine hospitality like the racial epithets hurled at two African American women
in Bethel a couple of years ago, like Confederate flags flown on the lawns of Maine homes, like a pig’s head thrown
into a Muslim house of worship in Lewiston.
In a perfect world, I would have been able to dialogue with
you before this sermon, and would have opportunities to continue the discussion with you in the weeks ahead. But that was not possible, and I pray that you and Pastor Dick will pick up where we leave off today. Let me share with you some of the conversations, some of the dialogue partners that
influenced my thoughts this morning. The first was with Senator Obama, or, I
should say, with his speech delivered in Philadelphia. In this age of computer
technology, it is so easy to download a transcript of almost any public presentation, and I encourage you to access this one. The speech is both a history lesson and a call to action, a personal confession and
a truth telling about where we are today as a nation. It acknowledges the anger
that underlies some of the preaching in African American churches and, insightfully, the anger that is real in white communities
where “most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by
their race.” Obama was able to speak of the resentments in both black and
white communities and call for our moving beyond racial wounds to that more perfect union of our founding fathers and mothers. My encounter with this speech leads me to the importance of confession.
You no doubt remember the song from “South Pacific”,
the 1949 musical,
“They have to be carefully
taught.” It reminds us that racism is not born in us but has to be taught.
You’ve got to be taught
to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully
taught.
You’ve got to be taught
to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are
oddly made,
And people whose skin is
a diff’rent shade…
You’ve got to be carefully
taught.
Obama
confessed that his white grandmother was afraid of black men who passed by her on the street, and that she occasionally uttered
a racial or ethnic stereotype. His confessions brought me back to my own minister
father, the loving pastor of two small evangelical churches in the Bangor area, who ridiculed other Maine ministers for going
south in the 1960’s to participate in voter registration and freedom marches.
My dad was a man who never used profanity, but was known to use the hateful “n-word” in his own home to
describe Brazil nuts. He must have learned these ideas from his parents. Confession does not lock us into fear, hatred, and despair. But, as Obama said, “These people are a part of me. And
they are a part of America, this country that I love.” More to the point,
confession helps us look squarely at our need to teach our children tolerance, acceptance, compassion.
From confession, my conversation continued with former Maine
conference minister, Carl Beyer. Carl pointed to Maine’s proud history
in the civil war, our sending teachers to the black schools in the south, our commitment to justice and equality. He encouraged me to do some reading about Maine churches in the 18th and 19th centuries. So I picked up a book by an old Bangor Seminary professor, Calvin Clark, published
in 1940. It is entitled American Slavery and Maine Congregationalists: A Chapter
in the History of the Development of Anti-slavery Sentiment in the Protestant Churches in the North. There are many positive legacies in Maine, including the vote of George Thatcher against the Fugitive Slave
Act passed by Congress in 1793. However, I was appalled to learn that there are
records from the 1700’s of several Maine ministers from York to Machias who not only owned slaves, but whose congregations
purchased these slaves as body-servants for their pastors! We were and are an
evolving nation of practices and opinions on racism. I hope you all will celebrate
June 14, not just as Flag Day, but for the day that marks the 174th anniversary of the Union Conference. This gathering was organized in South Bridgton by churches from both Cumberland and Oxford Conferences
of Congregational Churches to pass a resolution condemning slavery as one among “the sins of our country which have
become so many and aggravated as to occasion serious apprehensions for the safety of our invaluable institutions, and lead
us to anticipate, without speedy repentance, the awful judgments of heaven.” (Clarke
p. 82) So confession leads to repentance.
And repentance leads to an honest accounting of where we
are today. My last conversation partner was a journalist by the name of Leonard
Pitts. He too is a an African American and a member of a United Church of Christ
congregation in Maryland. He spoke very movingly at our Maine Conference Annual
Meeting a couple of years ago about the state of racism in America, about the fact that his teenage sons may still be randomly
stopped by the police at any time of night or day, simply because of the color of their skin.
In a recent newspaper piece entitled “Can you see the Promised Land of equality?” Pitts reminds us that blacks continue to “earn a fraction of what whites earn, they suffer higher
rates of infant mortality, they are unemployed at a rate nearly twice the national average, and they are more likely to be
poor and live at dramatically greater risk of being jailed or killed.” We
have made great progress in this country since the 1960’s, acknowledges Pitts, but like Moses and Dr. King looking from
the Mountaintop to the Promised Land, we’re not there yet.
Pitts
cites some sociological studies at Ohio State, Harvard, and Yale that look at how whites and blacks measure racial progress. “Whites,” they say, “judge it by looking at how far we have come.
(‘How can you say there’s still racism when we have an Oprah Winfrey, (a Condoleza Rice), and a Barack Obama?’)
Blacks judge it by how far we have yet to go.” Pitts observes, “So
each side of America’s most intractable debate chooses the path of least resistance, the path that shoves the onus for
change off to the other side. Thus, whites can feel justified in noting the incredible
progress we have made, and blacks can feel equally justified in feeling still victimized, and it never seems to occur to any
of us that both views are true, that they do not contradict one another. We never
seem to realize that we are having an argument over how much water is in the glass.”
One of the researches from Yale said, “Whites see that promised land – racial equality – as an ideal,
something it would be nice to achieve someday. Blacks see it as a necessity,
something you work to make manifest here and now.”
As we begin a sacred conversation on race, my prayer is that
we too can see equality as a necessity, that we can avoid the polarization that makes such great media stories (Blue states
and Red states, who is playing the race card), and that we won’t retreat from where we’ve come. We will stay involved. I asked one of my Maine chaplain colleagues,
a black man from Chicago, who has not had such an easy time working among “God’s frozen chosen” of the Northeast,
what I should share with you this morning. “Remind them,” James said,
“that the church is the one place that can maintain the critical capacity for redemption. Help them to think about what it’s like to be the ‘onliest only’ – the only black
person in a group, the only woman, the only man, the only Native American. That
is a very lonely place. Remind them that we need one another to be the whole
people of God.” Amen!
The Rev. Dr. Judith H.
Blanchard [2470]
