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A couple weeks ago, Newsweek magazine reported on a racial incident on a Mississippi campus...

Seven Days with God: Day Five: God Adds Variety - Genesis 1: 20-23 - August 26, 2007 - Cicero United Methodist Church - Everett J. Bassett

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            A couple weeks ago, Newsweek magazine reported on a racial incident on a Mississippi campus. A group of African-American students assembled under a tree where white students usually congregated. The next day, there was a pretty clear warning hanging from the limb of the tree, in the form of three nooses. The already evident racial tension ratcheted up from that incident, and eventually bubbled over in violence.

            A couple years back, there was a rash of racial depictions among fraternities on various campuses. At one, white students attended a costume party dressed as KKK, leading a black-faced partner by a noose around his neck; both students were suspended. Another campus expelled two students who were shown in a photo as a policeman holding a gun to the head of another white student wearing black-face.

            Another article chronicles the rise of white-power rock and roll, a growing music movement with a clear hate message. White supremacist rock bands are carving a market out of angry young adults. Now there is a well-planned effort to get the music into the hands of junior and senior high school students. Project Schoolyard was the title of a group of white supremacists who fanned out to small-town schools around the country, and handed out free hate-CDs to students as they got off the school bus. As the result of this effort, several Web-sites, and a growing number of hard-edged rock bands, the music is spreading - concert and CD sales are growing rapidly. As one proud disc jockey declares on his Web site: "We don't just entertain racist kids, we create them!"

               These seem like tired old stories, from way back in the '50s or '60s in the Deep South. The fact that they are current events from all over America - North, South, East, and West -- is something we and many of our leaders would just as soon sweep under the rug and keep secret. We want to say that we have dealt with the issue of racism, and created a society where everybody has an opportunity for a big piece of the pie. But incidents like those above lift up the truth. One writer called it "America's Secret Shame" - the racism that is intertwined with our way of life.

            Like most of you here, I am of European-American descent. When I look back on the history of America, I read it through European eyes. And the more I study it, the more it seems like we Europeans missed a golden opportunity. When we arrived in America in our heroic boats, we found here a Native population that had much to teach us. They honored the earth, the family, the spiritual side of life, and each other in ways that held many lessons for us. Of course, we shouldn't paint too idyllic a picture - there was much warfare and racism in the New World before the Europeans arrived. But with the arrival of the newcomers, those negative factors multiplied significantly. Instead of seeing the meeting with the Native Americans as an opportunity for renewal and the beginning of a rich, diverse experience, the Europeans labeled them savages and heathens, and exercised domination over the native peoples, often under the cloak of Christian evangelism.

            At the same time, European diseases wreaked havoc in the Native societies. Literally millions of native people were wiped out by disease. If not for that, the Natives may have ended up as the slave culture in the New World economy. But the diminished Native population, and other factors, forced the Europeans to look elsewhere for Slaves ­and they turned their sights on Africa. Between the 16^th and the 19^th century, an estimated 12 million Africans were brought to the United States to be sold into slavery­ - what some called 'Black Gold.'

            We all have some idea of that history. 1 suspect that most every last person-here would agree that it is shameful. What we don't appreciate enough is that we are still living out the legacy of that shame. That's the secret we'd rather not talk about. This past year, the pastors and other leaders of our United Methodist Conference underwent training around racial awareness. The leader, Dr. Kenneth Hardy, said that many white people will say, "Slavery ended 140 years ago. Why can't we all just get over it?" What Dr. Hardy said to that was that slavery was stamped into the identity of America for over 300 years. It will take at least 300 more years to remove that stamp.

            But then the point was driven home for me by a female African-American pastor who raised her hand and said that when she hears white people say that she should 'get over' slavery, it feels like telling a woman to get over being raped while the rape is still taking place. Here's her point, as 1 understand it: there may be a law on the books that says that it is illegal for one person to own another as a slave; but that doesn't change the fact that there are something like 35 million African-Americans who live their lives in the aftermath of slavery. And if it were only the history books that reminded them, it would be bad enough. They are also reminded by three nooses hanging from a tree limb, by racist costumes at fraternity parties, and by rock groups and Web sites dedicated to hate.

            Let me take this point about denial one step further. One time 1 said in a college classroom, "I don't know why 1 should feel responsibility for slavery; 1 never owned a slave." The professor responded by talking about solidarity. About that time, the American hockey team had just miraculously won the Gold Medal at the Lake Placid Winter Olympics, and all the country was abuzz with it. Headlines and people and bumper stickers and buttons all said, "We won the Gold Medal!"

            "Why are you so happy about that?" asked the professor. And I said, "Because we won!" And she said, "What do you mean, 'we?' You weren't there. You didn't score a goal. You didn't pass the puck." And I said, a little more weakly, "'I'm an American. And America won." But 1 understood the point she was making. We want to identify ourselves with the good stuff: We won the Gold Medal. We developed a democratic nation on the ideals that we hold dear. We were the first to step out onto the moon. We turned back the armies of Hitler. We take pride in all those things because we have solidarity with one another as Americans. But then, when we talk about the decimation of the Native Americans, or the cruelty of slavery, we want to say, "Oh, but that wasn't  me." Well, you just can't have it both ways, can you? Either we're Americans or we're not. And if we are, then we share in both the glory and the shame.

            But it's even more complex than that. The phenomena of ethnic and racial discrimination goes way beyond Native and black and white. There has always been a strong stream of Nativism in America.  Nativism is that tendency to say, Now that I'm here, the door is shut. Any newcomers from now on are outsiders. We would not have time to give a whole list of groups of people who were opposed and discriminated against, and even violently attacked as they tried to make their way into the American dream: Catholics, Quakers, Jews, Irish, Chinese, Mormons, Polish, Italians, Slavs, Vietnamese, Muslims, Mexicans - the list could go on and on. A couple decades ago, Archie Bunker, the ultimate Nativist, showed up on TV and did a great job naming the groups that felt the prejudice of other Americans. We have to at least acknowledge this discriminating tendency as we talk so heatedly about immigration today - and whether the "Star-Spangled Banner" should be sung in Hispanic. Our nation -- at least not since the Natives helped the first Pilgrims to survive - has not welcomed newcomers very readily. And we have a long way to go before we can say that we have mastered diversity as a way of life worthy of celebration.

            This sermon has not gone in the direction I had in mind. But it IS still on track. Let's take a look at the scripture lessons for today. On the fifth day of creation, God created swarms of creatures of endless variety. We humans try to catalogue all of them, and then suddenly we find some cave, or some remote part of the rain forest, that has a whole series of animals and plants that we haven't even seen or heard of before. The variety of life forms is no accident. This is the way God intended for it to be. What is amazing to me is that those words of scripture in Genesis 1 were written in a time and a place that we don't think of as representing a very diverse environment. The deserts and plains of the Near East some four or five centuries before Christ. The collage of pictures we showed at the beginning of this service represented a color and a variety that would be beyond the imaginations of those writers. Yet they instinctively knew this about God - that God would create a world of variety beyond imagination.

            As the Bible story unfolds, we witness times of reluctance on the part of God's people to embrace diversity in the human family. For example, we see some strong laws against associating with people of different race and ethnicity. We see people in Jesus' time and afterward reluctant to spread the message of grace to people unlike themselves. Even Jesus seems to fall into this groove at times. But in other ways, he starts to break the barriers down, and open the door to diversity in God's kingdom. And by the time the apostle Paul was writing his letters, a beautiful new vision had emerged about what the Church of Christ would look like. "There are varieties of gifts," wrote Paul, "but the same Spirit. There are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone." And Paul then unfolds this beautiful image of the Church as the Body of Christ, made up of its diverse parts - you and me, and the variety of characters that make life in the Church exciting, challenging, interesting, and immensely blessed. Every one of us plays a part in God's plan. The very diversity that God created on the fifth day of creation is embodied in the life of the Church, where each person's unique gifts are honored and celebrated, because it is the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God who activates all of them in everyone. That's God's plan, and the more we live into our diversity, the closer we come to being part of God's vision for all of us.

            A year or so ago, after the death of Rosa Parks, the mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, was petitioned to issue a pardon for Ms. Parks for her crime of refusing to move to the back of the bus. The mayor, Bobby Bright, responded by saying, "I feel horribly inadequate to pardon someone who did nothing wrong. We should be asking them to pardon us for the way we treated her and others in that period."

            "Pardon" a good word in our faith.  It is one of the words we use to talk about what the cross of Jesus Christ accomplishes for our sins. Our sins take many dark and shameful forms, but certainly one of them is our failure to honor the diversity that God poured out in creation, including the diversity of human life that is so dynamic and enriching, when we let it be. Before pardon must come repentance - the honest acknowledgment that we are helpless to conquer sin on our own. But after pardon comes hope - the hope that God can break the addiction of sin over us, and move us toward new and just relationships. Wouldn't it be an amazing gift to leave to the generations to come - our repentance for the sins of racism, past and present; our recognition of the power of the cross to conquer those sins; and our hope that might rise up again if you and I were truly resolved to confront the prejudices that enslave us, and to work together to break the shackles of racism, and to let God's vision for rich and beautiful diversity set us all free.

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Sources:

            Various news reports from Newsweek magazine. .

            There Is a River: the Black Struggle for Freedom in America, Vincent Harding.

Harvest, 1981.

            American Colonies: the Settling of North America, Alan Taylor. Penguin, 2001.