Lectionary Readings (with Romans expanded to include verses 33-36)
In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, which I wouldn’t blame you for doing that, you’ve probably noticed a bit of tension in the air recently. It seems as if we’re entering a Cold War with nuclear weapons with North Korea. The effects of climate change are becoming more and more noticeable, especially in coastal areas. Parts of Africa are reeling from violent civil wars and severe droughts and famines. Young people are literally dying in the streets of Salisbury from both gun violence and opioid addiction. And the scourge of racism has raised its sinful and ugly head in Charlottesville. And that’s just the stuff that makes the newspaper. You all have tension in your personal lives – some of you are dealing with the declining health of parents, some of you are fighting cancer, some of you had a water pipe burst in your home.
We’re in the right frame of mind to hear St. Paul’s words this morning from Romans – “I ask, then, has God rejected his people?” Because, the simple truth is, sometimes it does seem that God has forgotten us, and it’s okay to feel that way. One of my favorite lines from Scripture is used at the end of Morning and Evening Prayer – that “God’s power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” Why then are Nazis marching in the streets and children going hungry? Has God rejected us?
By no means! As Paul proclaims, “the gifts and the calling are irrevocable.” In chapters 9 through 11 of Romans, Paul writes to make this point, that God does not take back or neglect promises. As Paul notes, disobedience abounds, but there is always more mercy in God than there is sin in us. We can reject God, but God will not reject us. God, though, is not a vending machine that gives us whatever we want – so, no, things aren’t always going to work out the way that we might choose. But God’s promise to love us is steadfast. God’s promise of peace is always there for us, if we can find the courage to pursue it. God’s presence with us is non-negotiable and irrevocable.
Those of you who have been here over the past few months know that I’ve been preaching through Romans this summer. And if this were a regular Sunday, the rest of this sermon would dive deeper into these words from Romans 11. But this isn’t a regular Sunday, it’s the Sunday after the dust has settled from Charlottesville. I can make all the plans I want for a sermon, but I always give the Holy Spirit veto power, and she exercised that power this week.
The central question that a preacher has to ask each week is “What does the Holy Spirit want me to say to the people of God on this occasion through these texts.” I want to be clear, what I preach, to the best of my ability, isn’t my opinions. The things that I might say on Facebook or at dinner with friends aren’t the things that I would dare say in this pulpit. Only through deep prayer, preparation, and discernment, and with much fear and trembling do I dare to attempt to speak the word that I believe God has given me on your behalf. May you and God have mercy on me if I err in doing this holy work faithfully.
In Matthew, we heard today Jesus say “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.” The Church must proclaim clearly and consistently, what we saw last week in Charlottesville was defilement. Racism is a sin. White supremacy is contradictory to the Gospel because the Gospel proclaims that in Jesus Christ all are one, and if all are one, then no one is superior to anyone else. And I can’t believe that this point even has to be made after 400,000 American lives were lost in World War II, but being a Nazi isn’t compatible with being an American. The Church of God must be on the record as standing against hatred and all forces of evil which frustrate the love of God.
Many of you know that I was involved in planning the liturgy for the service of remembrance a few weeks ago for the victims of the 1906 lynchings in Salisbury. One of the tensions in the committee was about whether or not we should use the word “repent.” One person felt that it wasn’t possible for them to repent of an action that they didn’t commit. I disagreed – and I know it’s a complex and debatable issue. The Greek root of the Biblical word “repent” means to change your mind, and God knows that my mind isn’t perfectly fixed on the Gospel and I always have new perspectives to consider, new lessons to learn, and old lessons to re-learn.
Now, I won’t dare to speak for any of you, but I’ll tell you what I’ve come to see through prayer and conversations with people. I know that I am the recipient of immense white privilege. I’ve never used drugs, but I know that if I had, I’d be six times less likely to go to jail for it than someone who is black. I know black priests who have been harassed during routine traffic stops, something I’ve never experienced. I know that because my parents and grandparents weren’t prevented from getting a mortgage because of redlining that I grew up in safe neighborhoods, attending good schools. I know that on average, white families have 14 times more wealth than families of color, and I know that wealth gets passed down from generation to generation. My ancestors never had their land stolen by settlers, my ancestors did not come to this country on a slave ship, my ancestors were not considered to only be 3/5 of a person by the Constitution. I have been incredibly blessed by America because I was born into a white family.
So often though we’re told that what we should feel in response to this is guilt. But I don’t buy that. White pride isn’t a good thing, and white guilt isn’t any better. You never, ever need to feel guilty about being the person whom God has made you to be – black or white, male or female or something in between, athletic or clumsy, tall or short. Never be ashamed of who you are.
I don’t know about you all, but when I feel shame or guilt, I generally look for an excuse or a scapegoat and playing the blame game isn’t the Gospel. When you’ve been blessed, the proper response is not to feel ashamed. Now I do want to be clear, being white isn’t a blessing from God, it’s a blessing from America. God has created all nations, peoples, and races and has blessed us all. It’s humans who have distorted this blessing and turned it into a commodity. But the thing to do when you have a privilege over others isn’t to feel bad about it, it’s to share it. The Gospel response to injustice and inequality is a yearning for that justice and equality for all of God’s children.
Think of it in terms of food. There are families in Rowan County that don’t have enough food to eat. Most of us do. What we do with this discrepancy isn’t to feel guilty every time we sit down to eat a meal, rather it’s to share food with the hungry and to work to ensure that they have access to food. The same is true of dealing with racial tensions. We don’t need guilt, we need compassion.
But the Church must stand for something, not only be in opposition to something. Saying that racism is a sin is a great place to start, but it’s an insufficient place to end. Saying that Nazism is bad really isn’t saying much more than “the sky is blue;” any reasonable person is going to agree with that statement. The Gospel asks more of us than simply standing against racism. Because there’s a danger in this – if all we can muster is hating racism, then all we’ve done is become good haters. And the world has enough hate in it already, we don’t need any more good haters. What we need are some good lovers. And I know you all well enough to know that you’re really good at love.
But the Church must stand for something, not only be in opposition to something. Saying that racism is a sin is a great place to start, but it’s an insufficient place to end. Saying that Nazism is bad really isn’t saying much more than “the sky is blue;” any reasonable person is going to agree with that statement. The Gospel asks more of us than simply standing against racism. Because there’s a danger in this – if all we can muster is hating racism, then all we’ve done is become good haters. And the world has enough hate in it already, we don’t need any more good haters. What we need are some good lovers. And I know you all well enough to know that you’re really good at love.
This, I acknowledge, really is hard work. Jesus says “bless those who persecute you” and “love your enemies.” It’s really, really hard to have compassion for those who have no compassion for others. I listened to a clergyperson in Charlottesville say that as he stood there in solidarity with others that his heart broke for those who carried torches and spewed hate. His heart broke for them because they don’t know the power of God’s love, because they are blinded by hatred, because they are missing out on the peace of God. But he also said that part of him wanted nothing more than a helmet and a baseball bat to club the members of the KKK with. And he said that had it not been for the other Christians around him, he may have given himself over to that violence. We need each other to do this work of the Gospel, of following a crucified Messiah.
It’s tempting to hate hatred more than loving good. It’s easy to feel shame or guilt when people are constantly telling you that you’ve been given more than you deserve. It’s easy to throw our hands up and give up, feeling like we’ve been rejected by God. But there are things that we can do. We can love first and ask questions later. We can work to dismantle unjust structures of society – like the school-to-prison pipeline. We can work to be less violent in our speech, in our driving, in our opinions so that the net total of violence in our world decreases. We can pray to God to have the strength to love our enemies instead of hating them. We can first acknowledge our privilege and then stand with those who have less than us, to learn from them and to share with them the abundance that we have so that no one has too much and no one has too little. We can listen before we form an opinion. We can strive for the highest ideals of our nation – liberty and justice for all. We can do the hard and holy work of changing our minds about things that we’ve always accepted as true.
I’ll be the first to tell you that I don’t have the answers. I’m not so naïve as to think that I can solve this problem. But I’m also not so hopeless as to think that God can’t use me, or you, or all of us, to be a part of God’s healing and reconciliation in this world. I know that God’s gifts, calling, promises, and love are irrevocable.
What’s so interesting about this eleventh chapter in Romans is that Paul goes from writing prose to erupting into doxology and praise. Sometimes all we can do is praise God from whom all blessings flow. Because if we can remind ourselves that we are never alone, that God’s promises are always secure, that there is no darkness that cannot be overcome by light then we will come to know more fully the power of God to teach, and heal, and love.
May God give us both the heart for justice and the courage to pursue it. May you never feel guilt for being who you are, but only compassion for those around you. May God blot out the sin of racism from our hearts and our society. For from him and through him and to him are all things. To God be the glory forever. Amen!
