Sermon

God and Country:  Race and Religion

February 19, 2006

by Rev. Tessie Mandeville

Please join me in prayer as I share a beautiful prayer with you written by the Ojibway Indians of North America:

Grandfather, look at our brokenness.  We know that in all creation only the human family has strayed from the Sacred Way.  We know that we are the ones who are divided, and we are the ones who must come back together to walk in the Sacred Way.  Grandfather, Sacred One, teach us love, compassion, and honor that we may heal the earth and heal each other.  (Singing the Living Tradition, #518) 

This evening we continue our sermon series called, God & Country: Issues that affect our lives.  To the best of our ability, we have been telling our truths about religion and science and the necessary separation of church and state.  Charles told truths last week about war and peace and our call to love our enemies.  We haven’t by any means answered all the questions on these topics.  If anything, we’ve raised more questions.  That is part of our task, I believe.  This evening I want to speak truth about religion and race in America.  And I want to say that these are not easy topics for me to talk about.  I have a complicated relationship with both religion and race.  I don’t imagine I’m alone in this.  We’ve probably all heard it said that you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.  I’ve also heard it said that the truth shall make you free, but first it will shatter you.  Sometimes we have to fall to pieces in humility before we can be put back together again. 

It seems from the moment I was born, race and racial issues were destined to be part of my life’s work.  They were destined to be part of my own spiritual journey.  I was born in Charleston, South Carolina in May 1969.  My parents kept “baby books” about my birth; they recorded what I liked and didn’t like, what my first words were, and so on.  There’s one section of the book entitled, “News of interest in the year I was born.”  In that section, my Dad wrote the following sentences: “Racial tension.  Ralph Abernathy was in town supporting a strike of medical college hospital workers.”  The larger story is this:

On the day I was born, my mother went to the hospital.  Later my father was on his way but had a tough time getting to the hospital because there was a curfew in the city due to racial tensions and possible riots.  The National Guard stopped my father and inquired as to where he was going and then let him go.  Fortunately my Dad made it to the hospital in time for my birth.  But what was happening was that black nurses at the medical college had become tired of being disrespected and underpaid at the Medical College of South Carolina.  12 hospital workers were fired when they demanded a pay raise and respect; however, other workers joined them to sustain a 113-day strike.  Ralph Abernathy, a Baptist clergyman and civil rights activist joined their struggle.  Rev. Abernathy was a close confidante of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and he was Dr. King’s successor of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when Dr. King was assassinated.  At the end of the 113-day strike, black people were starting to be hired in positions of responsibility in the hospital.  This larger story about race in America surrounds my birth.

Truth telling about race in America has always been a difficult thing.  I am a White person and I find it presumptuous at best to speak about racism since I do not experience it on a daily basis.  At the same time, I find that it is my responsibility to speak to the issue of racism because I believe it is imperative that everyone enter the conversation from wherever they are because race, gender, class and sexuality matter in American society.  I am antiracist.  I am not preaching this sermon from a position of moral exemption.  My hands are not clean, because like other White people in this society, I have swallowed racist behavior and attitudes simply by living here, whether I wanted to or not.  Growing up, however, in Charleston, South Carolina, racism was conveyed to me as matter-of-factly as I was taught the alphabet and how to tie my shoes.[1]

For the first several years of my life, my family had a black maid.  For several years, I went to an all-white private, Christian school.  As a young child, I went to church regularly and remember when I was five years old that a Black family came into our church and was made to sit in the back of the sanctuary.  I grew up in a family and community that was extremely racist although they would never call themselves that.  My family simply understood, and taught me to understand, that Black people were “different.”

Later in life, my younger sister loved a Black man and together they bore a child.  My family was enraged and it has taken 15 years for my father to finally meet his granddaughter.  Later in life, one of my first lovers was a Black woman; my family couldn’t decide what they were most upset about--that I was a lesbian or that my girlfriend was Black!

As I grew older and sought to throw off the chains of racism, I had an encounter with someone on a weekend that the Ku Klux Klan marched in Charleston.  I was in a public restaurant with my friend, Steve, who was a Black man.  As we ate our lunch, a White man came up to us and pulled a knife out and threatened not Steve but me.  He called me several derogatory names and said, “I don’t blame the Black man.  I blame you for not keeping him in his place.”  Steve quickly intervened and kept everyone safe.

I share some of my stories not because they are unique in any way but because I have had a complicated relationship to the issue of racism and it is important for me to remember where I’ve come from.  It is important to say my truth out loud.  I humbly echo the words of Barbara Smith, a Black, feminist, lesbian writer who says, “...it is neither possible nor necessary to be morally exempt in order to stand in opposition to oppression.”[2]    If you believe, as I do, that none of us are free until all of us are free, then we have to engage in truth-telling about racism in America.  We also have to tell the truth about how religion, especially Christianity, sanctioned, and continues to sanction, racism in America.  

In my reading of the Bible, the prophets of old, as well as Jesus himself, stood in opposition to oppression, especially oppression done in the name of religion.  Eugene Peterson says, “Religion is the most dangerous energy source known to humankind.  The moment a person (or government or religion or organization) is convinced that God is either ordering or sanctioning a cause or project, anything goes.  The history, worldwide, of religion-fueled hate, killing, and oppression is staggering.  The biblical prophets are in the front line of those doing something about it. 

The biblical prophets continue to be the most powerful and effective voices ever heard on this earth for keeping religion honest, humble, and compassionate.  Prophets sniff out injustice, especially injustice that is dressed up in religious garb.  They sniff it out a mile away.  Prophets see through hypocrisy, especially hypocrisy that assumes a religious pose.”  (Eugene H. Peterson, The Message, NavPress, 2002, p. 164.)

The prophets of old said that a nation's righteousness was determined not by military power, or high IQs, or wealth, but by how it treated the poorest and most vulnerable in its midst.  Jesus said the same thing.  He told us in Matthew chapter 25 that whatever we do to the least of these, we do it unto God. 

And yet, the Bible and Christian theology in American history, has more often been used to bind people rather than to liberate them.  People in power have used the Bible to wound rather than to heal.  We know this is true as queer people.  We know first-hand that the Bible has been used as a weapon against us.  We know what it means to have sacred texts used against us to justify our oppression.  The Bible has been used to justify just about every form of oppression there is--oppression of women, of children; oppression of African-American people; of poor people; of immigrants.  The Bible was used to justify American colonialism that resulted in the genocide of indigenous people and the enslavement of another race of people. 

At the same time, we, as a queer community, also know the power of reclaiming the Bible and the teachings in it that lead toward liberation.  I believe that African-American communities know the same power.  The Bible and the teachings of liberation was at the core of the Civil Rights Movement and their communities continue to find strength in the Bible today.  The Bible has incredible power in our society, even today, which is why I believe we must know what it says because it is still often used as a weapon of power against those already experiencing oppression, and unless the Bible is being used to heal and to set people free, then it is not being used as the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ.  

Howard Thurman, a well-known African-American theologian,  shares a story about his Grandmother and the Bible.  When Howard was little, his grandmother cared for him.  His grandmother was born a slave and lived on a plantation near Florida.  Howard used to read the Bible to his Grandmother.  Sometimes it was a Psalm.  Sometimes it was from the book of Isaiah.  Sometimes the gospel.  But she would never let him read one of the Apostle Paul’s letters.  He always wondered why but he never asked until he was much older.  One day he asked his Grandmother why he couldn’t read any of the books Paul wrote and this is what she said: During the days of slavery, the master’s minister would occasionally hold services for the slaves...Always the white minister used as his text something from Paul.  ‘Slaves be obedient to them that are your masters..., as unto Christ.’  Then he would go on to show how, if we were good and happy slaves, God would bless us.  I promised my Maker that if I ever learned to read and if freedom ever came, I would not read that part of the Bible.”  ( Jesus and the Disinherited, p.31)

I understand Christianity as a religion of the margins, started by those who lived on the margins of society and who experienced oppression.  Jesus did not intend for Christianity to be used as an instrument of oppression against anyone.  It’s completely opposite of what he taught.  Jesus gave us a new love ethic that says we are to love our neighbors as ourselves and to love God with all our heart, mind, body, and soul.

Our faith must address the brokenness of our world, and the brokenness within each of us.  As we continue forward, I want to say with great love in my heart that we are called not to guilt, but to responsibility.  Our faith must continue to create itself as a witness for justice in our world.  We are called to stand in opposition to oppression, not just our oppression as queer people, but against all oppression, in all its forms. 

There is something in creation that wants to move toward liberation and away from oppression.  It does not always prevail, but it is always at work.  Our task is to let it be at work.  Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends toward justice.  Our task, my friends, is to help it bend.

Let me draw on the words and the spirit of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as I close.  He said, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.  And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.  For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.  And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.  This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured." (Martin Luther King Jr. Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution )

Praise be to God and Amen.