Robert
Berra
1/19/14
Sermon,
on the observance of Martin Luther King Jr.
St.
Matthew’s Episcopal Church, Chandler, AZ
Old
Testament: Isaiah 58:6-12
Psalm
40:1-12
Epistle:
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Gospel:
Matthew 5:1-11
I grew up in Mobile, AL. The Deep South. You cannot go further South without wading
into the Gulf of Mexico. Mobile was the
home of the last
slave ship to arrive in America, which docked in the delta north of Mobile
Bay just before the Civil War, fifty years after the importation of slaves had
been outlawed in the US. After the Civil
War, segregation, and Jim Crow, and white supremacy left a long legacy. Facing the prospect of freed slaves using
public transportation, streetcars in Mobile were fitted with something like chicken
wire to mark off where black people were allowed to sit.[1] In 1901, as Alabama was in the process of
writing the current state constitution, the state briefly considered giving
women the right to vote, 18 years before universal women’s suffrage in this
country, in the hopes that it would dilute the black vote. When
the delegates discovered other ways to disenfranchise the black vote
through literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and poll taxes, the vote for women
as a possibility disappeared.
Lynching—the hanging and burning of black individuals who broke the notorious Black Codes that maintained white supremacy, or to punish black individuals for perceived violations of their “proper place in society”, or because the person was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time— were an open secret and a device of terror. It is possible to find postcards—postcards!—showing crowds of white people gathering around the bodies of lynched men (please note this link leads to a graphic website of these postcards). The lynching of Michael Donald in 1981, in Mobile, my hometown, two years before I was born, is considered the last recorded lynching in the U.S. And from 1954 until the end of the 1960s, civil rights activists fought to make the southern states follow federal orders to desegregate, in cities and towns whose names became known as bombs were exploded in black churches and homes, and blood was spilled on streets. Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma—all within three hours’ drive of my home. And the fight over formal segregation was the legal matter. Changing people’s minds and hearts takes longer, as evidenced by the slow response to calls for the South to legally desegregate.
Lynching—the hanging and burning of black individuals who broke the notorious Black Codes that maintained white supremacy, or to punish black individuals for perceived violations of their “proper place in society”, or because the person was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time— were an open secret and a device of terror. It is possible to find postcards—postcards!—showing crowds of white people gathering around the bodies of lynched men (please note this link leads to a graphic website of these postcards). The lynching of Michael Donald in 1981, in Mobile, my hometown, two years before I was born, is considered the last recorded lynching in the U.S. And from 1954 until the end of the 1960s, civil rights activists fought to make the southern states follow federal orders to desegregate, in cities and towns whose names became known as bombs were exploded in black churches and homes, and blood was spilled on streets. Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma—all within three hours’ drive of my home. And the fight over formal segregation was the legal matter. Changing people’s minds and hearts takes longer, as evidenced by the slow response to calls for the South to legally desegregate.
So I stand before you in fear and
trembling to speak about this because I am a product of this history. You see, history is not a series of facts
about the past to be learned. History is memory—memory embodied and remembered
by individuals. The time when
segregation in the South existed is not simply history, it is memory. People still know what it was like.
People remember marching
against it. People still suffer the
wounds against them, and their parents and their grandparents. And some in the
South still long for the days in
which black people knew their place.
I stand before you in fear and trembling
because these memories still have profound effects on how I navigate incredibly
complex realities and relationships.
You see, in the South, and probably
elsewhere, there are conversations that white men will only have with other
white men. Nothing but my skin color
grants me entrance to these conversations, and they are not pleasant conversations. And these conversations make me a party to
continuing a conspiracy of white supremacy that I want nothing to do with and
cannot easily avoid.
I’ll give you an example. In 2002, I was starting my undergraduate
degree, and hoping that after military service, I might find a career in the
FBI or some other law enforcement organization.
Sitting in the office of the college recruiter, he looked at me, and
began the conversation that white men only feel comfortable having with other
white men.
He said to me, “Robert, you have two
things going against you in this world; you are white, and you are a man. You should consider taking a degree in
finance instead of criminal justice; that way you will be more hire-able than
those who will take a degree in criminal justice.”
In a world in which women earn at best 77 cents for every dollar a man
earns, and in which the poverty gap between whites and blacks is steadily
increasing with black unemployment double that of white unemployment, I was
shocked and frozen by what he said. For
this man and many like him, any perceived loss of power is considered a threat.[i]
It was a wake-up call for me; yet while
I did not challenge him then and there, I never took a class in finance. I’ve always wondered what he told women and
African Americans he counseled.
The forms of racism and racial
prejudice, indeed any form of discrimination, are not only legal, but
societal. There is work left to do, and
it is the work of changing peoples’ hearts.
We hear from Paul’s letter today that
“from now on we regard no one from a human point of view.” We now bear the
responsibility of reconciling all to God, and thus, we are granted the ministry
of reconciling all to each other, for we all bear the divine image of God and
are all the beloved of God. This
ministry of reconciliation gets to the heart of the vision Martin Luther King Jr. espoused,
called the “Beloved Community,” a community in which all are recognized as
having worth in of themselves and deserving of care. It is a community that lives out the
Beatitudes in the Gospel, in which the poor belong and find their place just as
much as the rich, the sorrowful find comfort, the
righteous see true justice enacted, the merciful see love reign, and the
peaceful rule instead of the militant and the powerful.
Compare this vision to my experience in
the college recruiter’s office, in which I was brought into a conspiracy to maintain
supremacy over others.
Beloved of God, even though of long for
it, I don’t know exactly what the beatitudes will look like when
perfected. I don’t know what the Kingdom
of God or the Beloved Community will look like when completed. We see through the mirror darkly. But I do know this: The Kingdom of God, which we pray will be on
earth as in Heaven, is not a society in which the dignity of many is expendable
for the comfort of a few who continue to live in suspicion of each other. That
world—in which fear, division, and suspicion reign—is the world Christians are
called to reject.
What might this mean in our lives
today? How might we begin to reject this
world’s maintenance of difference and isolation between and from those we would
rightly consider the beloved of God, as we all are?
And in the course of our work, our days,
and our lives, we may find ourselves in a situation in which someone we speak
to wants to know if we are a safe person to talk to about keeping and
maintaining these divisions, just as the college recruiter did with me. It comes in conversation: a sexist joke, an observation about how races
do certain things, a slang term for someone from a different country. When that happens, it is assumed we agree
with the other person, or we are essentially being asked if we are in the
conspiracy of this world to keep those divisions in place.
Might I suggest that if, as Isaiah says,
the fast that the Lord requires of us is to loose the bonds of injustice, to
let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke, then perhaps we may need to
declare ourselves as one who seeks to do just that. And if we wish to join Christ in the ministry
of reconciliation, and be known as “repairers of the breach”--the breaches and
divisions by which humankind separate themselves from each other--then we must
have an account of the hope that is within us, the hope that longs for the
Beloved Community, the Kingdom of God, the reconciliation of all of us with
each other and all of us with the God who is the source of life.
It may mean that we have to tell someone
why we cannot participate in such a conversation. It may mean remembering aloud to the other
person that our connection to all of humankind renders such divisions
meaningless at least, and malicious at most.
And that can be a hard thing to say.
My own track record in confronting such speech is not as good as I wish
it was. And part of the difficulty is
that to confront the powers that keep us separate and unreconciled introduces conflict. And I do not like conflict!
And isn’t conflict the opposite of
peacemaking?
No. Peace is not the absence of
conflict, and here are two types of peace.
One is a negative peace—a peace that is no peace at all. This peace is an absence of conflict because
fear and terror are enacted on the people, and the apathetic elite prefer
comfort to justice. This was the phony peace
of the South during slavery, the counterfeit peace of the South as segregation
was put in place and the Ku Klux Klan murdered black people, the sham peace of
the South that King and other civil rights activists threatened by having the
audacity to believe that righteousness and human dignity belong to all. The better peace is the peace of the
righteous, the peace in which justice and dignity are non-negotiable, and the
peace of God which passes all understanding, keeping us in God’s knowledge and
love and opening our eyes to truly see our neighbors just as beloved to God as
we are.
This is where I take comfort in the
example of Martin Luther King Jr. I also
take comfort in the beatitude’s promise that that peacemakers will be called
the Children of God. I take comfort that
on the other end of any conflict that seeks a positive peace by addressing the
powers and divisions of this world, we will find the beloved community. We shall see slivers of the Kingdom of God,
and in the name of this Kingdom, and
no other, we shall overcome.
Shall we
join this kingdom?
Shall we bring this
peace into being?
Amen.
[1] In
1867, In response to black protests to integrate street cars—and after brawls
erupting when black persons attempted to enter street cars, streetcar companies
designated separate cars (known as "star cars") for black persons to ride. Thomason, Michael. Mobile: the new history of
Alabama's first city. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001.
