August 30, 2015
Text: Mark 7: 1-23
Good Morning –
Sharing my reflection on God's word with us this morning, I want to acknowledge and give thanks for fierce, heartfelt reflections by Austin Channing, a young African-American pastor for her meditations on being an angry Black, Christian woman. I also honor Dr Cornel West, for the refiner's fire that burns within him, that is his light.
The last time I shared with you on a Sunday morning, I shared how, thanks to my former colleague, Blossom Williams, an African-American woman about my age, I came to realize how my world view – if we think of our world view as an umbrella – my world view was actually only big enough for me. Thanks to Blossom, I woke up and knew that I want my world view to be much bigger – to cover and include the world views of my sisters and brothers of color as well as myself and others who grew up unconscious of the privilege that comes to us without our asking – just because we are so-called White. The last time I shared with you on a Sunday morning, I spoke about how God was putting people in my life who are helping me get a bigger umbrella.
This morning I am grateful to be able to share with you another aspect of my journey. I want to tell you what I'm thinking and feeling and praying about.
When I pray, I sometimes ask God to help me to live in alignment with God's will – to help me respond concretely, with God's love to the racism, oppression and suffering I am increasingly aware of.
The suffering I am speaking of is mostly local, the every-day suffering here in our city, oppression and violence experienced by men and women and children of color, particularly through racist practices of law enforcement. But not only law enforcement… This summer the adopted son and the cousin of two friends of mine were murdered in the streets. When one person (me) knows two people whose loved ones were gunned down in the same city in the space of a just a few weeks – this feels like war, and it feels close.
When I pray I also ask God to heal and forgive me. For all of my life, almost no structural violence has touched me. Even my close relationships with men and women of color at Joseph's House – because our relationships have been mostly at Joseph's House – an interracial community undergirded by white privilege – I have unconsciously held myself at some distance from the oppression of my African-American neighbors and friends.
In recent years I have become aware of that distance between me and the people I love. It hurts. I want to close that gap. And my prayer has been something like: "Lord, let my heart break for the things that break your heart." In this prayer I acknowledge the distance I feel from my suffering brothers and sisters. I'm asking God for more empathy toward those who suffer injustice, who suffer racism. I'm asking God to help me to not turn helplessly away from racial injustice as I become more and more aware of it.
But it occurs to me today that the assumption that God is heartbroken over injustice can't be entirely true. God is not sad about the injustice; God is angry about it.
I don't know about you, but I think I might be comfortable thinking of God as sad, as mournful about injustice; God shedding tears, going through the same shock and sadness I experience during the slow dawning of recognizing how injustice affects real people, some of them people I know and love. This isn't good enough. It's not true enough.
In today's reading of the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 7, Jesus is angry with the Pharisees and impatient with his own closest friends - who were struggling to understand him – Jesus' tone and the tone of the Prophet Isaiah who he quotes was, "woe is you!" Anger; judgment. Not sadness. In Jesus' response, I feel fire. This is not a sad God. This is a description of a God who is outraged.
In his book Black, Prophetic Fire, Cornel West calls black prophetic fire the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom.
To be whole we must acknowledge God's expectations of us. God becomes angry regarding injustice because God expects better of us, expects better of me. Time and again, God tells us to stand against oppression – I am with you, God tells us! Be more than "religious"!
When God's expectations are not met, the prophets - and Jesus in Mark, Chapter 7, proclaim God's anger. To acknowledge God's anger is to acknowledge the source of that anger: God's reaction to our participation, conscious or unconscious – to my participation – in oppression.
If only this acknowledgement could stir within us, a sense of urgency! I have a feeling I can live with the knowledge that I've broken God's heart. For some reason, the idea that God is sad doesn't seem to move us to action. Would it be harder to continue the behaviors of distancing, of silence; of helpless overwhelm; if I honestly believed, if I knew in my soul that these behaviors provoke God's wrath?
I read an essay recently by an African-American writer whose name is John Metta. He called the piece, I, Racist. It's about why it is so very hard for White people and African Americans to speak meaningfully together about race. He writes, "I don't like the story of the good Samaritan. Everyone likes to think of themselves as the person who sees someone beaten and bloodied and helps him out. That's too easy."
"If I could re-write that story", he says, "I'd re-write it from the perspective of Black America. What if the person wasn't beaten and bloody? What if it wasn't so obvious? What if they were just systematically challenged in a thousand small ways that actually made it easier for you (people who are White) to succeed in life? Would you be so quick to help then, or would you, like most White people, stay silent and let it happen?"
I want to move from not noticing, move from feeling helpless, move from being heartbroken over injustice - to feeling anger and living and dying consciously, for freedom!
I am paying attention to angry, Black, Christian writers and activists. Those who resist, protest, write, march, organize and advocate out of a deep belief that no one is worthy of oppression. This is strong love. I want to love like this.
May we become angry at the powers and principalities that let injustice thrive!
Amen.