You could say it's been interesting

Psalm 122

A Song of Ascents. Of David.
¹ I was glad when they said to me,
   ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’ 
² Our feet are standing
   within your gates, O Jerusalem. 

³ Jerusalem—built as a city
   that is bound firmly together. 
⁴ To it the tribes go up,
   the tribes of the Lord,
as was decreed for Israel,
   to give thanks to the name of the Lord. 
⁵ For there the thrones for judgement were set up,
   the thrones of the house of David. 

⁶ Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
   ‘May they prosper who love you. 
⁷ Peace be within your walls,
   and security within your towers.’ 
⁸ For the sake of my relatives and friends
   I will say, ‘Peace be within you.’

(The New Revised Standard Version (Anglicized Edition), copyright 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=356611975)

I think I've been a little lost, somewhat sad, and drifting along. I'm feeling that blessing/curse, "May you live in interesting times." Interesting times are varied, changeable, unusual, unexpected.

I know that many of us have been stunned by the national events of the past six months. At the same time, many of us have also gone through personal life changes that have increased our emotional stress, despair, and/or depression. 

I left the congregation I'd been serving for over 6 years in August of 2016--a decision made because there were barriers arising. I believe that they were signs of the end of a fruitful relationship between us. In spite of some glimpses and glints of green sprouts, there were those determined to stamp them out, purposefully and not.  If you've been a pastor or other leader in the church, you might recognize those times when the same mouth speaks both words of affirmation and death. You might know the one(s) who both recognizes your gifts and rejects them--God only knows why. 

So . . . I've been lost, sad, and drifting for the reasons I share here. 

Woman traveling in pear.

And I struggle with spiritual disciplines--I always have and suspect that I always will. I love the idea of sitting down at the same time several times a day and working on my conversation with God in several creative and exciting ways. The reality is different. I'm not sure I have a scheduled discipline gene, but I still try and hit the mark about 30% of the time--more often if my discipline is helping another be disciplined. I think, as my mother and I used to joke, that's why we travel in pairs.  

It's not that I must be always accountable to someone else--someone with skin on, someone incarnate maybe? But it certainly helps.

It helps me because relationships help me reach goals I've set. I stay accountable to promises made within a relationship with someone else--more accountable than those promises I make to myself. I'm sure that says something about me, about my self-worth. I also think that it says something about what I find important. It is important for me to live up to the expectations and promises that I have made to other people. This may be done out of a need for approval; it may also be done because I deeply when someone doesn't live up to a promise or a responsibility in my life. So when I fall short, I anticipate the disappointment felt by that person. I know how much it hurts me when people ignore a commitment to me--a commitment of any size--that I don't want anyone else to feel that way. 

So, right now, feeling adrift from the church as a part of a regular congregation and and having few concrete nearby relationships I am adrift from discipline--spiritual and otherwise. But I've decided to work on it through this blog and hopefully in ways that move me into communities where I can form and re-form relationships.

Psalm 122 reminds me that God's people have needed a place, time, or people to help us maintain our connections to God and one another. The biblical witness of God's relationship with human beings is rarely (if ever) a matter of an individual's relationship to God. God approaches individuals--Noah, Abraham, Moses, etc. with the purpose of creating a people whose existence will be a witness to God, who will be a light to the nations, who will be the conduit of God's word for all generations. The way that God relates to people is to extend God's presence into the people and through their lives into a community. God's covenants establish God's desire to relate and God's promises and expectations establish what it is that we are to reveal about God's desire to be revealed as peace, as love, as a light to all peoples.

"Transformed by Extravagant Welcome"

Sermon December 20 2015

Micah 5:2-5a

Luke 1:39-55

As I read today’s gospel text about Elizabeth and Mary, my mind was full of thoughts about the women in my family and I immediately began to realize the structure for relationship and connection that they had been. I struggle with some stories about family, kinship, connection, and generational family support in people’s story and in scripture because my family has experienced a lot of disconnect, especially after my grandmother died. I remember the days when we’d gather all together for holidays—and on summer vacation times—just to be together as a family. I’m sure I wasn’t aware as a child of all that it took to do that: all the shopping and cooking and cleaning. But I was aware of the laughter and tears and occasional shouting and arguments in the children and in the adults. We used to gather and find connection to one another through the agency of my grandmother and my aunts and uncles and parents, but after my aunts died, my mother died, and my grandmother died, it was very difficult to be connected to each other in significant ways. It was as if we lost the heart to do it anymore.

We lost the magnet that drew us together. Every single person wasn’t always there when we gathered, but when my matriarchs were alive, most were. They created within them and between them a net that caught us up and held us together, sometimes whether we wanted it or not. It was transformed for the worse when our main connection became more patriarchal and financial. What we had was a difficult thing to replace when it was lost—it may be impossible with some families.

So, sometimes I wonder we need to stop trying to recapture the past and instead create a new kind of connection for the future based in love and relationships that may include family and expand relationship and hospitality means.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t have relationships where people in families are connected to one another. It does reminds us that the kinds of connections we have in families and beyond are more fragile than we seem to act and that every kind of relationship takes work. We cannot take one another for granted, but live and act knowing that every bond and every gathering and every system of relationships we build must contain a very deep sense of hospitality and actions of extravagant welcome.

Within our particular faith system, we celebrate a tradition of extravagant welcome within the teachings of the Bible and within the traditions of our Christian faith to greater and lesser degrees over time.

We may not think of the teachings of the first testament of the bible when we think about hospitality and welcome or inclusion of many kinds of people in communities. But not only does the law provide for those born outside of the tribes of Israel, there were often times that God’s call to the people was very wide. The prophets saw God working in all kinds of people and called leaders and those with power to treat the poor, no matter who they were, with justice and mercy.  That’s just to say that hospitality didn’t start in the New Testament; it was and is a matter of survival and joy for people who live in a harsh environment and really for us all.

The story we read in today’s gospel lesson—a lesson that includes both a story and a song—is about what happened in Mary’s life right after God called her to be the mother of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Mary and Elizabeth create a mutually supportive commu­nity, which in turn acknowledges ties to a communal his­tory. Their brief, but meaningful encounter in today’s scripture creates a picture of the community and family into which Jesus would be born. Just before this text, Mary meets Gabriel who tells her that she has been chosen to bear the child of God, born of the Holy Spirit, and she agrees, “Let it be done to me as you say. Then a few days later, she left and went quickly to a town in Judea where Elizabeth and Zechariah lived.

We can speculate about why Mary left Nazareth so quickly, but it’s probably not too strange an act considering that she just found out that she, a single young woman, found out that she was going to have a baby. It may be a situation we don’t worry too much about here today (whatever our level of approval), but one that just a few decades ago would have been a scandal full of shame and in Mary’s day it was a family, faith, and cultural problem for her that might have been fatal. We have legends and stories about Mary’s parents, but nothing in the bible that names them. If I were looking at this like a story from my family, I’d say that it looks as if she went to Elizabeth for a more sympathetic face—one that could see her situation with a little more objectivity and distance than her mother and father might have. We are only told that Elizabeth is a kinswoman with no clear relationship, but I know that there were times that my sister or an aunt or older cousin was a much less judgmental face than either of my parents.

Mary may have known from prior experience that Elizabeth would provide her welcome, time, and space to understand her situation without parental pressure for explanations or decisions. Sometimes those we know best, daughters, sons, grandchildren, parents, close friends are judged more critically because of our disappointment or how their situations cause us pain. 

When we speak or act out of a belief or story that our church is a family, we sometimes carry the same kinds of expectations, disappointments, and assumptions we have learned in our families. We might have learned who to welcome and who to reject and in church we have to learn to welcome all or we might experience the different kinds of judgment or welcome that we and others have learned in all of our families.

Certainly the pregnant Elizabeth’s reaction to Mary and her pregnancy was a matter of faith—yet I also think it was a matter of knowing how much Mary needed her radical welcome, embrace, and approval. Mary needed her blessing and she got it in ABUNDANCE! Elizabeth greets Mary with three blessings: “blessed are you among women,” “blessed is the fruit of your womb,” and “blessed is she who believed.”

While she certainly was a supportive family member and maternal/feminine role model and figure; Elizabeth acts a prophet here. Elizabeth loved God, and she loved Mary. She was a prophet of the Most High, for she prepared the way for Mary to praise God. I can imagine and this text feels like Elizabeth’s words created a way for Mary to be grateful, exuberant, and full of anticipation in her pregnancy and not just obedient and willing to serve God’s will. The second would have been adequate, but to be an eager participant in God’s plan of salvation and life made God even more present to all those involved.

Mary’s life—body, mind, and soul—was changing radically with the birth of her child. What she taught him and how her life was centered was important, I would say vital, to all that Jesus would accomplish in his life. With this initial blessed welcome and embrace of her situation by Elizabeth, Mary sang her song of God’s salvation; a song that would be echoed in Jesus’ teachings, especially his first teaching in Nazareth where he read that the blind would see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, and the imprisoned would be free.

Elizabeth’s welcome ushered in Mary’s embrace of her pregnancy, which in turn led to her song of praise to God:

⁴⁶ My soul magnifies the Lord,
⁴⁷   and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
⁴⁸ for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
   Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
⁴⁹ for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
   and holy is his name.
⁵⁰ His mercy is for those who fear him
   from generation to generation.
⁵¹ He has shown strength with his arm;
   he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
⁵² He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
⁵³ he has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty.
⁵⁴ He has helped his servant Israel,
   in remembrance of his mercy,
⁵⁵ according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
   to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’

The birth of Jesus happened in the life of one young woman who lived in Nazareth; it happened in the lives of Mary’s family and friends, yet it also happened in the midst of the Roman occupation and oppression of the lands called Galillee, Judea, and in Ephrathah and Judah. And it happens to us as we accept and extend the extravagant welcome of the Elizabeth and Mary in our story.

And God’s promises are brought to life as we and others live out the presence of Christ in our lives and live Christ’s presence for all that it means.

It might mean embracing a young woman who might be rejected by some for her radical decisions and desire to thrive. She and others might need to throw off a family’s well-meaning, but restrictive expectations. We can create a situation for Jesus to be present in our lives and in the lives through our welcome and hospitality within our families and certainly within our churches. In our welcome and hospitality, we reveal our love and God’s love like Elizabeth, like a prophet, like one who sees the power of love and makes it real in others’ lives.

Mary’s song, the ‘Magnificat,’ invites us to be and become a community that celebrates God’s will for justice, hospitality, and peace. Mary sings the story of how the world changes for the good of all – there are still lowly ones to be lifted up and there are still thrones of power in need of bringing down. May we follow Elizabeth’s blessing and embrace how God is transforming us, our community, and our world.

To the glory of God this day and always. Amen.

"Born of Fire"

Sermon  December 6, 2015

Malachi  3:1-4

Luke 1:68-79

God, we turn to you for the peace that we cannot find by ourselves. We want to live in your light as your beloved children. Open our ears to the prophets of scripture and to the prophets in our midst. Lead our feet in the ways of peace that we may walk more and more closely with you. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Through the Prince of Peace, we pray. Amen.

For hundreds of years in the early church there was no celebration of Jesus’ birth. People worshiped on the first day of the week for a weekly celebration of the resurrection where they celebrated the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper or Communion and when they remembered Jesus’ crucifixion around the time when the Jewish people celebrated Passover.

For a long time, people didn’t commemorate Jesus’ birth. There is no story about Jesus’ birth in Mark’s gospel or in John’s gospel. But after a few hundred years, a bishop or two decided to create a celebration of the birth and God’s incarnation in Jesus. And to prepare for this celebration, as Christians prepare for the remembrance of Jesus’ death and resurrection, there was to be a time of preparation—a time to think about Jesus’ coming: yesterday, today, and forever. So Advent began as a little Lent. A time to discipline ourselves, deny ourselves, and repent of our sins as we prepare for a terrific joy when God erupts into the world in a howling baby.

In our world (and in the ancient world, to some extent) Advent as a time of preparation has competition with the chipper, exuberant, fun of Christmas music and celebration. Events usually cleansed of specific religious content, though chock full of fun and sentimental anticipation or remembrance. And celebration is great! Advent can be joyful; it is also pensive, penitent, and a call to prepare. And not for dinner, gift-giving, or company. We are called to prepare our lives for the presence of Jesus by getting rid of or allowing God to get rid of the worst of who we are.

In the book of Malachi, which means “messenger,” we receive a message that most would not consider terribly cheerful, but some understand to be a necessary way of getting ready for joy, health, wholeness, peace, grace, love, serenity, contentment to come. God’s messenger comes to call people to repentance—to call, in this prophetic book, specifically the “Sons of Levi,” the priests and other servants of the temple to repent of anything that stands in their way of standing before God in the temple.

And in the New Testament, as people await the Messiah, as wait for the story of Jesus’ birth and the story of his life, we hear about the Messenger—the prophet—the preacher of repentance who will get people ready to stand before the Son of God as God sends Jesus with his teachings, his love, his life, and his death and resurrection into the world. On this day of preparation and anticipation, when we still await Jesus, then, now, and into some future, we hear from the father of another baby.

All of the gospels tell us that John the baptizer leads in the ministry of Jesus. In Luke’s gospel we hear about his family, too. His father was Zechariah, a priest who served in the temple in Jerusalem. All the priests rotated in to their duties, as I understand it, and 9-10 months before our scripture he’d been serving in the Holy of Holies/the inner sanctum/the place of the altar and sacrifice. And as he served, a terrible angel appeared to him and he was afraid.

This is another clash of culture we get from the Christmas celebration and cards. Angels, according to every reaction described in the scriptures, weren’t all that friendly looking or seeming. Here and elsewhere, the first things most people did when accosted by an angel was shake and nearly pass out.

So in our Advent preparation story, Zechariah heard—from this scary angel—that he and his wife were going to conceive and have a son that he would name John. And he would be like the nazarites, not drinking wine or other spirits. He would have the power of the Holy Spirit to call people to repent from their sin. But Zechariah was doubtful and the angel made him unable to speak until John was born—actually until John received the name the angel gave him.

And that’s the story that Luke tells, even before he tells the story of Jesus’ birth—even before he tells the story about the angel visiting Mary to announce his birth—Luke prepares us to be prepared by repentance, even before he prepares us to prepare for the birth of the Savior. We don’t have to stay all frowny faced and judgemental, like the words of Malachi can feel, but we do have a call to prepare, to realize what it is that God was/is/will accomplish through the people God calls.

In the time when Jesus was about to be born, life was difficult for the Jewish people--life was often difficult for them. The Hebrew people, throughout their history, experienced “the hands” of foreign domination: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks and – in the time of Jesus – Rome. All had their effect on the suppression of culture, religious traditions, and a sense of peace. They felt, at these times, unable to serve God freely and fully.

They were looking, as they had always been looking, for the fulfilment of God’s promises to Israel. Zechariah, as a priestly servant, as a man steeped in God’s word and ritual knew this and when, finally, his son was born, he saw in him—as Mary saw in this first part of Luke—God’s action, God’s breaking into the world through these two infants that God had sent and that God would call.

Sometimes, we think we are too old, too young, too inexperienced, or not smart enough to be able to be a good servant of God. We think that is a job for someone else to do and not something we can accomplish. When we think of prophets, we think of people who look and act very different from us. But in the gospel, we have a husband and wife who are simply living out their marriage—Elizabeth and Zechariah—and their son, John, born and then called to be a prophet. The texts today invite us to put on the robe of the prophet and see how it fits. God wants us to embrace our special role as messengers who will deliver God’s word and light to people who are in need.

Imagine Zechariah’s joy at the birth of his son. He holds his child in his arms and he sings praises to God. He doesn’t just trust in what God has done in the past to save his people from those who want to do them harm. He sees God’s promise for the future in his newborn baby. Zechariah knows that God is not just the God of his ancestors but that God is God of the today and tomorrow, and makes a prophecy about his son.
What might God be calling you and me to do? What kinds of oppression to we live under in today’s world? I think we live under various kinds of oppression, some of it that concerns more of our personal lives and more that causes pain, suffering, and even violence in our culture and world. Zechariah’s song concerned how God was addressing the kinds of societal oppression and suffering that suppressed the Hebrew people and many nations in all times and places.

On this day, the first thing that comes to my mind is the oppression stemming from the violence of the past few weeks. As we mourn deaths committed by people with guns in places that are undeclared warzones, I believe we are called to stand up and speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves. Let us speak for those most recently dead and for those thousands since the victims of elementary school children at Sandy Hook Elementary.

We may not be under the oppression of a foreign power like the Assyrians, Babylonians, or like the Romans, but I feel a persecution from a culture that reacts to violence with violent desires of retribution instead of the ways that Jesus has taught us to react. The birth and then the teachings of John the baptizer paved the way for Jesus’ teachings by telling us to repent. The words of God in Malachi teach us that there are ideas in our lives that have to be burned away, washed away, to make our lives the valuable things with worthy purposes that they can be.

Reacting to violence with violence shows us and everyone that we are afraid of the violence.  If we are blind to how fear oppresses us, we are no less oppressed. We are agreeing to the fear, agreeing to the process of violence against violence, instead of seeking out answers, responses, or actions that produce less fear and better futures.

Imagine your own parent holding you in his or her arms and looking into your newborn face, as you hear these words:  You, child, will be called a prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare the way.

What is God preparing you to do; to be?
Maybe God calls you and me to speak up against violence. Maybe God is calling us to speak up for the children of this community and our surroundings whose educational futures are getting more and more precarious because our state government can’t agree to pay for it. Maybe God is calling us to speak up for the sake of the lowest wage earners who will suffer most if social security and retirement ages are raised because those with lower incomes live shorter lives. Maybe God is calling you and me to really see the living conditions of those whose lives are marked by the chaos of poverty and look beyond the mess and see that it isn’t more responsibility that is needed but more support and compassion. Maybe God is calling us to open our eyes to a life without fear of other humans and a life full of love for God and all of God’s children.

Imagine that this parent looks at you and says, “You will tell God’s people about forgiveness of sins.” What word of grace might God be wanting you to share with another?
Yes, we have done things that need to be forgiven. And God forgives without hesitation everything and anything that we have done or will do. Can we look into the eyes of the criminal, the sinner, the annoying and the messy, the irresponsible, the addict, and the life without hope and embrace the person, the human being that lives that life.

Because of our God’s deep compassion, the dawn from heaven will break upon us, to give light to those who are sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide us on the path of peace.

Who do you know that could use God’s light in their lives? Where is there brokenness that you may be the one to bring healing?
Maybe it’s your life that could use a little of God’s light and maybe there are few people who can see it. Maybe you know someone else who could use your support and encouragement and you have a little light to share. If you help light their candle, there is more of God’s light to shine.

If you are broken, if you need time to heal, if you need someone to listen and to care, then call upon God and appeal to the church as your community of love to help. If you can see the brokenness and you can sit with the hurting—you don’t have to have solutions or special powers, the presence of God’s people is enough.

Zechariah’s song—often called the Benedictus—announces with a past tense kind of certainty that God has already kept God’s promises to Israel. And then as he looks at his newly born son John he sings the promises of God for a “kin-dom,” a dawning, a pathway, full of the lovingkindness of God’s own heart. It’s a big promise to hang on a new little one—but there’s a bigger promise about to be hung on another little one, another tiny child soon to be born.

The season of preparation—a birth by fire—of Advent—and the seasons of life—are full of collisions of joy and sorrow, love and painful transformation; sorrow at the way things are; joy at the world God is bringing; love in the eyes of our heavenly parent; and transformation in a rebirth of ourselves and our communities. Advent is a reminder to see that all are happening in our worship and in our world and in our hearts. As our holy parent looks at us and speaks to us with joy and hope, may we hear and know the expectations and gifts and love we are being given.

To the glory of our ever-living, ever-loving God. Amen.

Sermon September 13, 2015

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.