Black Lives Matter: A Sermon on the Third Sunday of Advent
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ross, CA
In the name of the God of justice, peace and mercy.
A dear friend of mine, Mike Kinman, is the dean of the cathedral in St. Louis. He has been serving as a clergy peacekeeper during the protests in Ferguson. He and other clergy stand between the police and protestors. Mike opened the cathedral up as a sanctuary for 24 hours after the grand jury decision over the death of Mike Brown. Following that, Mike issued a preaching challenged to other cathedrals and churches in the Episcopal Church to devote the preaching and a forum on one Sunday in Advent to the topic of racism, the protests and myriad black voices saying they live in a society in which their lives are valued less than black lives. We are doing that today.
Two of the largest Pentecostal denominations, one predominantly black, the other predominantly white, issued a joint statement calling on their churches to observe today as Black Lives Matter Sunday. Their churches have over 9 million members, which dwarfs the Episcopal Church.
In the wake of the protests, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church issued a statement: “The racism in this nation is part of our foundation, and is not unique to one city or state or part of the country. All Americans live with the consequences of centuries of slavery, exploitation, and prejudice. That legacy continues to lead individuals to perceive threat from those who are seen as “other.” The color of one’s skin is often the most visible representation of what divides God’s children one from another.
I agreed to the preaching challenge because I believe it is important for an almost entirely white congregation in a very white county have this conversation. I agreed to the preaching challenge because addressing racism and striving for justice is how we can live out Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves.
We often refer to John the Baptist, but John is called the Witness in today’s Gospel. He has come to bear witness to the truth about who Jesus is. This title, the witness, seems painfully ironic in light of all the controversy over eyewitness testimony and video taped by witnesses in recent grand jury decisions. John preached confession and a baptism of repentance. So I want to address Black Lives Matter in the form of a confession.
I’m not overtly racist, but I confess to habituated racism and unconscious bias within me. My parents were openly opposed to racism, but still I was socialized to think differently about black people and to fear black men. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s there, and the foundation for it was laid before I was born. My mother is Greek. Her parents were immigrants. She has olive skin and black hair. When she and my father were engaged my paternal grandmother and a friend hosted a shower at a club in Salt Lake City. Concern arose about my father marrying a woman who was half black. This says something about the white context in which I was raised in Salt Lake where an olive skinned Greek is mistakenly considered half black. And I suspect the Greek side of my family in Ohio was just as racist as the ones in Salt Lake.
I had a shamefully embarrassing revelation of my habituated racism on my first trip to Africa to visit our sister parish in Malawi. We would visit these extremely poor, rural villages and I found myself surprised that the people there were so smart and articulate and hardworking. I didn’t even know I had that bias. It is shamefully embarrassing, but it is in me. At the same time, I felt perfectly safe walking around alone in unfamiliar cities in Malawi, but don’t feel safe if I’m the only white person walking through parts of downtown San Francisco.
I confess that I’m rarely aware of the privileges I enjoy as a white person, especially a well-educated, well off white male. This can keep me from seeing how racism works in our society. I had an eye opener about privilege in seminary. I was one of three straight, white males in my entire seminary class. Yet, I was the first one to get a job at a church. Can you guess who the next two to get jobs were?
One of the most important things I learned in seminary is how social context or “social location,” especially, race, class, gender, nationality or where you live in the world impacts how you hear and interpret scripture. We tend to see ourselves in scripture and identify with figures in the Christian narrative. I want to challenge that today for those of us who are white, at least in the context of racism.
We are not with John the Baptist in the wilderness. We are not the oppressed, brokenhearted or enslaved returned from exile in the reading from Isaiah. We are the people on whose behalf John is being questioned as a threat to our authority and privilege.
Complicity and indifference is the sin of the white church. The way of the Lord is not straight because of us. Recreate this passage in our day and John is a non-violent, black protestor holding a “Black Lives Matter” sign being questioned by the cops: “Who are you?” “Why are you doing this?” “What authority do you have?”
Let us remember that John the witness and Jesus about whom he testified were killed by those in power to preserve the status quo.
So what do we do? How do we become witness to the light? Isaiah offers a vision of God’s desire for human community, where oppression and servitude end, where all lives matter equally. Our salvation is to make God’s desire reality.
I have a friend named Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows who is an Episcopal priest and a black woman. We had a Facebook conversation in August shortly after Michael Brown was killed and his body left in the street for 4.5 hours. Jennifer wrote:
“One of my greatest fears is that one day [my son] Timmy will grow up to be feared by my white friends. God willing, he will grow up. And God willing, my white friends will not fear him or my husband or my brother or other male relatives or any other person who looks like ME just because we share the same hue. All of this, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, all of them, all of this is deeply personal because I need YOU, Chris, and all my other white friends to make it as safe for me and my family to exist as it is for your own.”
Can we hear the voice in the wilderness? Can we go to the wilderness to have our eyes and ears opened? Can we make the way of the Lord straight?
May we who enjoy white privilege confess the sin of racism. And may our repentance be to live lives that affirm and proclaim: Black Lives Matter.