Text: Romans: 10: 3-13
Good morning, friends:
I’m here with you, wanting to be more vulnerable this morning, than I usually am. I want to share a word that is real, a word of encouragement on Valentine’s Day in the month of February, Black History Month. Every year I get deeper into the month of February because I want to experience and learn black culture and history and grow in my own self-awareness. The self-awareness I gain sometimes eludes me soon after I get it, so I’m hoping very much that what I want to share – how Love is Lifting Me – comes through this morning.
I’m remembering an African-American woman who worked at Joseph’s House early on. Her name is Mary Williams. Mary was fierce. She had street cred. She was smart. She hadn’t stayed in school long. Mary had worked since she was a child and she was very capable. She could cook. She could clean. She could give a thorough treatment to kill lice. She would tenderly bathe the body of someone who had died. Mary didn’t like many people. She definitely did not like me. I was afraid of Mary.
I have a memory from many years ago. There was a small bedroom at Joseph’s House, where we had cared for a man who died there of AIDS. Robert had lived in that room quite a while before he passed away. The room was empty now and Mary and I were in it. We opened the windows, pulled the bed and chest of drawers from the wall toward the middle of the room and got ready to make that room sparkle again - ceiling and walls to floor and baseboards. (All of us here would agree that making a room very clean, sparkling—ready for the next person to live there is a good thing to do, right? That’s part of my job, isn’t it; to make sure Joseph’s House is a beautiful, clean and welcoming home.)
Mary Williams is about 15 years older than I am. When I knew her she was a personal care aide at Joseph’s House and a lot of what Mary did at the House was … to clean. We were short-handed that day; I was multi-tasking. We were expecting someone to come to Joseph’s House from the hospital the next day. That little room would be his.
I noticed the blades on the overhead fan needed washing—and the walls!— and the floorboards that were somehow sticky dirty. I asked her to take care of it and I left to take care of something else.
I came back a little while later. Mary Williams was on her knees scrubbing the baseboards and floors from a bucket. She was weeping. There was a powerful sorrow in her tears. I didn’t understand. This was Mary’s job, wasn’t it?
I got on my knees, that bucket of water between us and I asked “Mary, what’s the matter, why are you crying?” Through angry tears and clenched teeth, Mary cried, “What choice do I have, Little Missy? I have to scrub your floors and clean your damned baseboards.”
It took me too many years to understand that the cost of getting down on one’s knees to scrub the floor had a higher cost for Mary than it did for me. It took me too many years to understand that the painful relationship that Mary Williams and I had—that the painful history of relationships between black women and white women—is rooted in history … and it is not yet “history.” Our relationships are rooted in pain and injustice. Rooted in no freedom to choose. Rooted in African-American women made to feel invisible, consciously and unconsciously, by white women. I didn’t grow up in the South or even in this country, but I could feel that what was going on between Mary and me was huge and unhealed, and I felt a sense of shame which has never left me.
This past December I was fortunate to find online, an African-American Philosopher who name is George Yancy. Last year Yancy did a series of interviews published in the New York Times with philosophers and public intellectuals on the issue of race. The interviews often express the experience of people who live as people of color in a white-run world, and that is something no white person can really know firsthand. If I had known Mary Williams’ experience firsthand, or wanted to, things would have been different between us.
George Yancy’s Letter to White America starts with this:
“I have a mighty request: As you read this letter, I want you to listen to me - with love - a sort of love that demands that you look at parts of yourself that might cause pain and terror, as James Baldwin would say. I want you to listen with love.”
If I had listened with love, there on my knees in front of Mary Williams in her pain, with the mop bucket between us, what would have been different? What might I have done?
As it was, I had no inner access to real love or courage or a desire to know why Mary was so angry and upset. In that moment, Mary’s pain was not my priority. Getting the room ready was my priority. I probably thought to myself something about how she was lucky to have this job—well-paid by the usual standards. I had bought into the labeling Mary had acquired at Joseph’s House: Mary’s such a drama queen!
Who can ever really understand a drama queen? I didn’t try. And. Rather than feeling compassion, I felt helpless. And I was determined to get that room ready for the man who was coming the next day. So I listened a little. And I left. Mary and I never talked about it. I’ve never forgotten it.
We don’t talk much about the urgency of love these days, George Yancy writes.
Of course he doesn’t mean the Hollywood type of love, but the scary kind, the kind of love in ordinary, everyday life that risks not being reciprocated, the kind that refuses to flee in the face of danger. The kind of love that would have stayed on her knees, would have opened her arms to Mary and said, “Mary, I am so sorry for your pain.” “I ask you”, George Yancy says, “to look deep, to look into your soul with silence, to quiet that voice that will speak to you of your white ‘innocence.’” My white “helplessness.” So, take a deep breath.
If you are white, Yancy says, I’m asking that you not to seek shelter from your own racism. “Don’t hide from your responsibility. Rather, begin, right now, to practice being vulnerable.”
I can feel my heart pound. I want this.
Take a deep breath, he says.
Use this letter as a mirror, [he invites] one that refuses to show you what you want to see, one that demands that you look at the lies that you tell yourself so you don’t feel the weight of responsibility for those who live under the yoke of whiteness, your whiteness.
My whiteness. (“Mary’s such a drama queen. She’s lucky to have this job.”)
The thing about that mirror is: sometimes it shows me more when someone I trust stands beside me and looks into it with me. Someone I trust can give me courage and persistence to see what I find hard to see by myself. I am blessed to have such friends. Friends of Jesus. Friends here at Eighth Day. Friends in the wider circles of racism awareness and racial healing and justice. White friends and black friends. I need them. Or I won’t see the lies that elude me. It’s through their voices, aware of their lives that I can hear more of what the voice in the mirror wants to tell me.
What lies do I tell myself? That I don’t tell myself lies.
Before I die, I hope to become so much more free. Really, really, free. Scary free! I want to love with the scary kind of love that can risk not being reciprocated, that refuses to flee in the face of danger, that refuses to flee in the face of the ordinary, everyday pain and dangers. I want that love! That’s how I want to love.
I’m old enough to be scared and sad, to feel shame … and to fool myself sometimes when I look in any mirror. I need the mirror George Yancy shows me. I need it. It’s my freedom.
It’s the word of faith, we read in Romans 10 this morning, that welcomes God to go deep in us and set things right for us. To heal us. No one who trusts God—heart and soul—will ever regret it.
I am trusting God not to take that mirror away from me. I am trusting God to heal me, heal me all the way.
This morning, on Valentine’s Day, this is how Love is Lifting Me.
This is my Valentine to you.
Amen.