September 6, 2015
Mark 7.24-37
+ A week
from tomorrow, I will be commemorating a hard anniversary. It will be the fifth
anniversary of my father’s death. Five years. It’s been a long, hard five
years. Many of you have traveled with me on this journey. I thank you for your patience.
Now, some of you might remember my
father. And the last thing anyone who knew my father would have guessed about
him was that he could get angry at times. Not angry in the conventional sense. Not
anger like I preached about last week when I talked about how angry I get when
I drive a car. He got angry in the way that I called last week “righteous
anger.” He would get angry at things he saw as wrong.
One of the first times I ever heard
of this anger in my father was one time, many times years ago, when I was
headed to the South. My father was not a fan of “The South.” He lived there at
a time when things were a bit crazy there. In the early 1960s, when my father
was working for the Air Force, he was stationed in two places in the South—Tampa,
Florida and Greensboro, North Carolina.
I could never understand why. I LOVE
Tampa. And every visit I’ve ever made it to North Carolina has been wonderful. But
of course I wasn’t visiting them in 1961 either.
When I pressed my father about why he
disliked these places, he told me of the prejudice and racism he saw firsthand
those places. He shared the story of how, as he and a group of friends were walking
along the street, in Greensboro, one of the guys in his group made a pair of
black men walk in the gutter while they passed. My father was shocked by this. But
he said, “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. I had never seen
anything like that in my life and didn’t know how to react.” But it stuck with
him and he soon found himself resenting the “friend” who did it and refused to
do anything with him again.
Also, while in Greensboro, he saw
the lunch counter sit-ins, and saw white people pouring sugar on the
protesters’ heads. Again, he said, he
didn’t know what to do.
In Tampa, he and a group of friends
attempted to enter a bar. Because one of
his friends was Native American, the bar tender refused to serve him and told
him to get out. This time, my father got so angry, he raised a huff, and was
himself thrown out of the bar.
He was then stationed in Texas and as
he was driving from Tampa to Dallas, he passed through New Orleans, where he
witnessed another lunch counter sit-in with unpleasant results.
To his dying day, those incidents
haunted my father. When he would see those events reenacted in movies (I
remember going to see Mississippi Burning
with him), he would tense up and become very uncomfortable.
And he would to say: “I should’ve done
more.”
This past week, the Presiding Bishop
of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, issued a letter. In it she called
on Episcopal congregations to participate in “Confession, Repentance, and
Commitment to end Racism Sunday.” Which is today.
Now I think such a Sunday is an important
Sunday. And I’m disappointed that we were not given more time prepare and build
up such an important Sunday. But the
intention is right.
As followers of Jesus, this is what
we should be doing in response to the racism we find in the world. Hopefully,
one day, we will not feel like my father. Hopefully we not come to a point in
our lives when we realize we should’ve done more to stop racism. And yes, it is
noble and wonderful to have a Sunday wherein we all get together, admit to the
terrible things people have done and to promise to end it.
But…ultimate we must actually be doing
something in our own lives. We ourselves, as individuals, must be actively
trying to make changes. And unless we do, one such Sunday on occasion is not
going to ultimately do much. This is not
an issue we do on one Sunday of the year. This is not something we only do when
there is a tragedy like the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.
If it is, then we’re really not doing much. If that is all we’re doing, then,
let me tell you, there will be a day when it will happen again and we will say
to ourselves and our loved ones, “I should’ve done more.”
For us, as followers of Jesus, as
people who are striving to live out the promises of the Baptismal Covenant, we
don’t get to make that excuse. For us, we ARE doing this—all the time.
For us, we are like the deaf man in
our gospel reading for today. Racism and our response to it is like being that
deaf man. The easier thing to do is to
allow our ears to be plugged when we experience such inequality in our lives.
It is so much easier to walk around not really
hearing. Because when we really hear, we
must look around and see. When we really
hear, we must react. When we really
hear, we can no longer be complacent. When
we no longer have a speech impediment, we must actually speak out.
Well, Jesus is touching our ears and our tongues. As followers of Jesus, we don’t get to be deaf and
have speech impediments when it comes to issues like racism. We, as followers of Jesus, as people who strive
to live out the Baptismal Covenant, we can’t be like deaf people, but we must
be like people whose hearing has been restored.
The Presiding Bishop, in her letter,
cites a resolution made at our General Convention:
“The
Church understands and affirms that the call to pray and act for racial
reconciliation is integral to our witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to
our living into the demands of our Baptismal Covenant,”
It IS integral to our witness of the
Gospel and our living out of the Baptismal Covenant. Our Baptismal Covenant,
which you can find beginning on Page 304 of the Book of Common Prayer, is clear
and emphatic about issues like this. On
page 305, the last question asked of us is,
“Will you strive for justice and peace
among all people, and respect the worth and dignity of every human person.”
To which we respond, “I will, with
God’s help.”
Will you strive for justice and peace among all people? Justice.
Righteousness. Just treatment. Among all people. Will you respect the worth and dignity of
every human person? The WORTH and DIGNITY of every one. Not just the nice ones.
Not just the ones who are easy to like.
But everyone. The person who bugs
us. The person who irritates us. The person who we innately just don’t like. Your
priest….
Everyone.
And we respond with, “I will, with
God’s help.”
We can’t do these things without God’s
help. But with God’s help, we are able. That
means that we must strive to do these things ALL the time, not just on one
particular Sunday of the year. That means living it out in our daily lives, in
our minute to minute, hour to hour lives. That means we don’t just get to have
our hearing and speech restored to us on one occasion, but then we get to go back
and be deaf and speechless the rest of the time. It means respecting the worth
and dignity of all people, all the time. It means actively working and
proclaiming and speaking out for peace and justice for all people all the time.
And for us who do this, we know what
it feels like when we fail to do this, or when we see others blatantly deny
people of justice and dignity.
When we do, we ask forgiveness of
our God, of those we have wronged and we speak out when we see others doing it.
This is a daily, moment to moment issue
in our lives as Christians.
So, let us allow Jesus to touch our
ears so we can truly hear. Let us allow Jesus to touch our tongue so we can
truly speak out. Let us be a follower of Jesus with all our senses of justice
and peace. Let us work hard, not just here in church, not just now on this particular Sunday, but all the time, for the worth and dignity of all human beings. When we
do that, that is truly when the Kingdom of God comes in our midst and is uniquely present.
Let us pray.
Grant, O God, that
your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart and especially
the hearts of the people of this land, that barriers which divide us may
crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being
healed, we may live in justice and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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