Sermon September 13 2015
Proverbs 1:20-33
Psalm 19
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38
“Who Are You, Jesus? Who Are We?”
Teach us your names, O God, spoken in acts of mercy and justice and grace. May we learn your names, O Jesus, by trusting who you are for us and for all. May we recognize your names, Holy Spirit, in the renewing of our lives and communities.1 The heavens are telling your glory, God;
and the firmament proclaims your handiwork.
2 Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
3 There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
4 yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
14 Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.
Who do we say that he is? Jesus asks. Now, we may have confessed at some point in time that Jesus is Lord and Savior—that’s what makes us a part of this congregation of this particular worshipping community. But . . .
Who do our lives say that Jesus is? Who do our lives proclaim that we, each one of us are? Who do our lives proclaim that this community is and claims to be? What sermon does this company of Jesus’ followers preach as we walk through our lives together? Do we walk through our lives together or do we walk like lonely pilgrims who occasionally keep in touch? What is the name by which we are known as this community and what name would we like to have? And when I say name, I mean, who do our neighbors know us to be and do they know us at all? What do our presence and our actions here say about us? How are we known?
Because of who we are and what advantages we have, I’m going to talk about race, racism, and how it is that we participate in racism. I’m also going to talk about how we can stand against racism through the proclamation of our lives into this world.
• Sometimes through what we say—because we all have a message to speak and can speak up with others speak hate.
• And often by what we do and how we participate in the lives of others.
In the gospel lesson, Jesus began his particular teaching in this text by asking the disciples who they thought he was—from what he’d taught them, shown them, and how he had lived in and among them for a while. Those who knew him best, who saw him daily said he was Messiah, God’s chosen, God’s anointed, God’s successor to the throne of David. But more than that as God’s instrument for salvation and for the inauguration of the day of the Lord, the Messiah was to usher in a new time of God’s realm when things like bounty and peace would blanket the earth beginning on God’s holy mountain and when all people’s would be called to participate in God’s realm of justice and peace. (See Isaiah.)
Jesus had taught them what it meant that he was Messiah—God’s realm wasn’t of this earth; it was about the landscape of the heart. And because the landscape of the heart was to change, the landscape of people’s lives and their understandings of who was in charge, who was leader, teacher, student and follower would change. Who was chosen was a matter those who lived and spoke God’s message of love. Those who rejected the message rejected God’s call.
In Jesus’ life—in the first century when the Roman Empire ruled the world and those who succeeded in life often cooperated with that Empire, Jesus’ rejection of human power, human success, earthly leadership, etc. meant that he took up the cause of those who were anti-empire: poor, disadvantaged, had little. He was their leader through the life that he led—a life like theirs. He chose to be in solidarity or unity with the people most in need. The system of empire in today’s world and especially in this country, though all over the western world is a system of power based on race and historically based economic advantage based on race and racial identity. Who does that say that Jesus is today? Who does that say that we are and how are we known as Christian, followers of Christ? Who would Jesus identify with today? Would Jesus, who lived without the surety of home, family, and wealth identify with those who have power or those whose lives are most disadvantaged by systems of racial power? Would Jesus stand with those at the top or the bottom of racist systems?
When we choose to be Christians, if we are faithful to what Jesus taught, we choose to act against systems of abusive power. As Christians we can be known as anti-racist if we choose to be. We can do our best to recognize and name racism when we see it or beginning learning what racism looks like beyond labels, prejudices, stereotypes, or overt bigotry.
Racism is race prejudice + power. Racism isn’t just race prejudice—feeling or thinking about another race in prejudiced ways. It is those thoughts and feelings and the ability to uphold those thoughts and feelings with power—with institutional power, economic power, and historical power. The essential feature of racism is not hostility or misperception, but rather the defense of a system from which advantage is derived on the basis of race.
In other words, it’s not really about how you feel or whether or not you hate or fear people of another race—racism is about how there are systems of privilege and power that have been historically constructed based on race and how it is that people who are considered white in this culture benefit from those systems even when they do not realize it or name it.
I haven’t read, but have on my wish list a book called, “The Wheat Money.” Just the description provides a Middle America example of the racist systems in this country. Written by Kristi Tyler, a white woman who married a black man, “The Wheat Money is the true story of two families; one white, the other black. In 2005, the families merged through marriage and a mixed-race child was born. Will that child, as she grows older, want to know why, when her parents met, one had a master's degree and a high paying job and the other was homeless and addicted to crack? The story of The Wheat Money begins in 1865, the same year the slaves were freed.”
These are the opening lines to her book.
“My great-grandfather’s name was Ai. He was born in 1865, the same year victory was declared in the American Civil War. Eighteen years later, Ai got a gift from the U.S. government: he was given a free plot of land to farm. Although he’d been born into a poor family, he died a rich man with hundreds of acres of land, several houses, lots of cars, and a handful of businesses and investments.
“The same year Ai was born, my husband’s great-great grandparents had their natural-born rights to live freely, restored. Tolliver was ten years old and Jemima was five when they were most likely to have heard the news. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery and granted them a sort of rebirth. As Freedpeople, my husband’s ancestors would finally have a chance to pursue their destinies or so they must have thought at the time. They did not get a gift of land from the U.S. government and they died penniless.”
That’s the premise of the book. I understand that not every white person received what her great-grandfather did—however, there were many systems put in place to reward some families and refuse to reward others. What I would say to this situation is that by the time 1865 rolled around about 250 years of sweat equity had been involuntarily invested in the economic systems of this country (in the North and South) by slaves whose lives were controlled, bought and sold by those who used them as labor and their sweat equity was worth millions then and probably billions now. As time went on, racism was continued through economic deprivation that red-lined cities, disallowing black families from owning homes in particular neighborhoods or as here in Robinson, whole cities and towns. Other systems kept many black people from receiving adequate educations. Many black Americans who had already been deprived of several generations of economic and cultural support and self-determination were subsequently used for experimental medical testing, such as that done at the Tuskegee Institute. (And still many accomplished so much, but how much have we lost as a nation through those who did not.)
While you may never have said anything people might consider racist or used racial stereotyping in relationship to other people, if we are white, we benefit from historical, economic racism every single day. And while you may never have said anything racially prejudiced, I can’t say that and I’m sure that I have and that I also benefit personally from systemic racism.
Racism isn’t just about white supremacy and African Americans—those who are and those who are not descended from the chattel slavery in this nation. Racism is about systems of oppression that benefit white people and/or take from people of color. The land that my great-grandfather homesteaded in Oklahoma/Indian Territory/The Cherokee Strip was taken multiple times from multiple tribes after multiple attempts by our government to make the indigenous residents of this land disappear. Grandad McCully came from West Plains, Missouri to stake a claim for a homestead near what became the town of Aline in Alfalfa County in the state of Oklahoma. My grandmother was born 3 years after Oklahoma became a state in 1910. She married my grandfather Elliott when she was seventeen and I’m not sure how he came by his land, but together they owned several hundred acres of farm land. He was also a welder/inventor and had the capital through his worth and wealth to invest in his creations and put them into use in pipelines and oilfields from Canada to South America—where he got to travel and work in other lands who’d had indigenous populations. And they were all good people benefitting from systems that gave advantages to those who came to this country from Europe and took the use of land, resources, and the very right to exist from those who were already here. (And that’s just the story I know.)
I didn’t participate in the actually theft of the land where I lived as a child—neither did my folks, but we benefitted. We had homes, income, cattle, crops, and shelter that came from that privilege, the privilege that allowed us to take that land as our own. Though it had previously been the hunting land of several Plains tribes, it was held by the Cherokee for a time before it was opened for white settlement in 1893. (The first land run was in 1889, which opened up the land south of the Indian Meridian in Indian Territory—the name given to Oklahoma before statehood.)
Who do we say Jesus is in all of this? How do we claim the name of Christ as Christians or little Christs as we stand upon such a lifetime of privilege based upon race, based upon ancestry, based upon feelings of superiority that sometimes bubble up from so deep within us that we find it very easy to deny they are even there?
Jesus taught that the Son of Man—that’s him—would undergo suffering. And he would be rejected by the elders, those men who led the religious council of his faith, and by the chief priests, those who led the religious rituals of his faith and by the scribes, those who knew and kept track of the written law of his people. He would be rejected because the purpose God had given him didn’t not support the local systems of supremacy and power that the institutions lived by. Jesus didn’t reject the Jewish faith—he was called by God to call people into relationship with God that didn’t depend upon the systems of power, the institutions of law that had been built. Instead, he called his followers to take up the cross that they would be given, whatever it was, so that they could be faithful to the purpose God gave each one of them.
Who do we say Jesus is? Jesus is Messiah, Christ, chosen and anointed one of God. And if we are Christians, we claim that anointing and choosing as our own. We claim a calling that rejects the power structures of our day—not the Roman Empire, but the empire that claimsI racial superiority and that builds more and more elaborate and subtle systems to keep those power structures in place.
Or, we can continue in this life, to do what profits us and (more likely) what profits those who already hold much of the wealth and power in this world, in this nation, and gain the world (probably for those who already have and abundance). We could seek out gain, profit, try to save our own lives, pursue survival at all cost, live according to fear and the racism that leads to hate and lose our very souls.
Rejecting racism means for white people a reshuffling of power, a willingness to give up the advantage we (as white people) and our children have had historically for the sake of those who have not had those same privileges. It means really looking at our own stories and in spite of poverty in place and times in those stories, realizing where systems of advantage supported us like it didn’t others. Naming racism, naming racial prejudice paired with power, means taking control of our prejudice and allowing us to actively pursue repentance for this sin of racism that we carry.
Jesus walked the pathway that God called him to walk though it led him all the way to the cross and beyond. He showed us that the way that leads to the cross, to crucifixion—the way that leads to self-denial, to trusting in God beyond the ways in which we have learned to survive at all cost—leads through death and into resurrection. Though it seems that that the valley of the shadow of death has no hope and it is scary, we are accompanied by the one who has walked all the way through it and to the other side. Amen.
