|
Click to hear this sermon sermon070826
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
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 16th and the 19th
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.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
|
Sermons 