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    Jan 21, 2018

    Just How Far Have We Come?

    Passage: John 13:34-35

    Speaker: Rev. Vivian McCarthy, Pastor

    Series: We Are One

    Category: Discipleship

    Haven't we come a long way through Emancipation and the Civil Rights Movement? Wasn't Jim Crow struck down? To many, we seem to have achieved equality among the races in the US. To others, however, the sting of racism continues to cause fear and even brutality. Jesus was clear that we are to love one another, and until we face our own racism, our claims of love for others ring hollow.

    So, lest you think I’m completely and totally clueless about where many of our heads are pretty much every minute from early September until Super Bowl Sunday, I want you to know that I read a book in preparation for this series that was written by a – wait for it – a Baltimore Raven!!!!

    [There was light applause when I said this, and I retorted]:  Well, darn! I thought that would get a standing ovation!

    In 2014, Benjamin Watson was a tight end for the New Orleans Saints when the verdict was announced in the case against the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old who lived in Ferguson, Missouri. The police officer was found not guilty, and Ferguson erupted. Watson wrote a stunningly insightful Facebook post that eventually became a book, Under Our Skin.

    His Facebook post begins:

    At some point while I was playing or preparing to play Monday Night Football, the news broke about the Ferguson Decision. After trying to figure out how I felt, I decided to write it down. Here are my thoughts:

    • I'M ANGRY because the stories of injustice that have been passed down for generations seem to be continuing before our very eyes.
    • I'M FRUSTRATED, because pop culture, music and movies glorify these types of police citizen altercations and promote an invincible attitude that continues to get young men killed in real life, away from safety movie sets and music studios.[1]

    He goes on to say that he is fearful, embarrassed, sad, sympathetic, offended, confused, introspective, hopeless, hopeful, and encouraged, and then says why for each of his points. In his book he reflects further on those feelings with stories and relates these insights and understandings to his deep faith. (In case you’re interested, there are a couple of copies of his book in our library, and we are using portions of his book as well as other resources in the small group experience on Monday nights.)

    Benjamin Watson begins his book by telling the world about five generations of Watson men. Benjamin’s great-great grandfather was born in 1860, at the beginning of the Civil War. His grandfather, whom he called Pop Pop was born in 1920.  Watson writes:

    A full six decades after the abolition of slavery, Pop Pop’s world still had separate toilets and drinking fountains for blacks and whites, a distinction validated by the ‘separate but equal’ standard approved by the US Supreme Court.

    He goes on to describe how his Pop Pop lived with the fear of KKK cross-burnings and the ceiling that kept black Americans from moving too far up in the socioeconomic system. He wrote:

    …Pop Pop’s thirty-fifth birthday was September 24, 1955. Rosa Parks had not yet refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That wouldn’t happen for another two months. Ninety years after slavery, blacks were still segregated from whites.

    Though the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the post-Civil War union, it really didn’t end it. A new era of slavery – or as Douglas Blackmon so poignantly describes it, an ‘age of neoslavery’ – had begun. This became an age of human trafficking, forced labor, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and the ever-present terror of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
    Watson continues:  There’s a feeling in white America that everything is equal now. But black people know in their bones that there’s still a residue of neoslavery that sticks to so much of life.

    Yes, today, 150 years after slavery, it’s true that we’re not as segregated as black people were in Pop Pop’s day. But perhaps I should say ‘not segregated in the same way.’

    When I was a young pastor, it was still in the early days when the church was ordaining women. I wasn’t among the first, but it was still early, and quite a few – if not most – of the women experienced disrespect and sexism of the worst kind.

    One of my friends, Jan Powers, wrote a song titled Don’t Loose My Chains. It was based on a quote by Sally Motlana, leader of the Apartheid movement in Soweto, South Africa, who said: “I don’t want my chains loosened. I want them off.” The chorus goes like this:

    Don’t ya loose my chains. Don’t loose my chains.
    Don’t ya loose my chains. Don’t loose my chains.
    Good intentions make excuse when by complacency we’re seduced!
    But don’t you loose my chains, set me free!

    Ben Watson’s story bears witness to the sad truth that racism is alive and well in our land – that the chains may be loosened but they surely are not completely off.

    A lot of us could go through life ignoring what racism is doing in our country. Many of us who are white believe there is a new dawn of color blindness. Friends, when we believe that, we are in danger of overlooking reality. We could just go along believing that everything is equal, that everyone has the same opportunity as the next person. We could figure that when someone is stopped by the police they have to have done something wrong and if someone is sent to prison, they must have deserved it.

    Then how do we explain the numbers? How do we explain that six times as many black people are incarcerated than white people? How do we explain how so very many young Black and Brown students are in schools where they do not receive adequate preparation so they can get into college – or if they DO get in, they find they aren’t anywhere near ready for the challenge? How do we explain that 8 out of 10 churches in the U.S. are made up of one predominant racial group?

    Now, before anyone runs for the hills, mad at me for preaching a “political” sermon, please consider the message of Jesus Christ – the Savior who came to free, to make whole, to give every one of God’s children the freedom to be fully alive in Christ – and to challenge his disciples to work toward that goal.

    I’m going to try to keep this simple. You know the greatest commandment: Love God and love your neighbor. And as Jesus was with the disciples the last time, he prayed fervently that we would be one as he was one with God. How can we say we are one unless we concern ourselves with the injustices that play out every day all around us?

    Many of you are deeply committed to ministries of mercy. Our community frequently voices thanksgiving for the ministries of this congregation. And you know that I am so grateful, too, to serve in a place where needs are addressed.

    What we don’t always see, and sometimes we just don’t want to see is what needs to happen on a broader scale. Or to admit that there are ways that we contribute to the issues when we make assumptions or ignore how our social systems contribute to keeping people down instead of lifting them up.

    Today I am going to ask you to do something important. To open your hearts and minds to explore how you may, unthinkingly, contribute to the racism that has millions of our neighbors in its grip. Careless words. Thoughtless reactions. Denial. Bias.

    The truth is that all of us contribute in one way or a hundred ways. And we can all grow in grace. What can you do to open your heart and mind?

    Read Ben Watson’s book. Read Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult. Read Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Watch tv commercials or shows and see how many of them portray African Americans as lazy or stupid or silly. Start watching a show produced by a Black team – and try to understand -- a show like Black*ish – see what you can learn.

    This is not an exercise in Black History. This is not an exercise in being politically correct – which is code for making sure you don’t get sued. This is an exercise in discipleship – in recognizing that every person is a brother or sister in Christ and precious to God. And it is an exercise in recognizing our own personal sin and our corporate exercise of injustice. It is tied to the very heart of the text I shared with you a couple of weeks ago from Micah:

    What does the Lord require of you? To do justice. To love kindness. To walk humbly with God.

    Footnotes:

    1.  Benjamin Watson and Ken Petersen, Under Our Skin: Getting Real about Race. Getting Free from the Fears and Frustrations the Divide Us (2015, Tyndale House)