Sermon 05/18/08 (Genesis 1:1-2:4a)

“Sacred Trinity, Sacred Humanity”
Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a
Rev. Désirée H. Gold
St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, 18 May, 2008
Trinity Sunday - Sacred Conversation on Race
----
 I’ll admit it. I am really tired of the news stories. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright said this. Senator Barack Obama responded with that. Jeremiah Wright did this. Barack Obama did that. Jeremiah Wright is an un-American [insert expletive here]. Jeremiah Wright is speaking prophetically out of his experience as a black American. What Barack Obama’s pastor says shouldn’t have anything to do with his presidential candidacy. We shouldn’t vote for someone who would keep going to a church with such an un-American pastor. (Oh, but did you hear that his middle name is Hussein?! This whole church thing must be just a cover-up anyway. He’s probably really a Muslim.)

My guess is that those of us sitting here today fall along the spectrum of the responses I have just named. Regardless of whether you voted for Obama, Hilary Clinton, John McCain, or somebody else, my guess is that you have some feelings about the recent controversy involving Senator Obama and his former pastor.

The issue may be more muddled for those of us who belong to the United Church of Christ, since Obama is a member of Trinity UCC in Chicago. Regardless of who we voted for in the primaries and who we intend to vote for in the general election, many of us have experienced confusion or strong emotions about the fact that these issues revolve around a pastor from our denomination. I know some of you have questioned the statements that Rev. John Thomas, the general minister and president of the UCC, has made in support of Trinity UCC and Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “How could he support that guy?!” you wonder. You may even feel embarrassed or ashamed to tell people that you belong to the UCC right now. You may simply feel confused.

In light of the strong emotions and harsh words that have been flung in all directions, the United Church of Christ has invited congregations to devote this Sunday to a Sacred Conversation on Race. Much of what has been said so far has not been very helpful, and it has been taken so completely out of context that there is no shred of the original meaning left. Racial tensions have been simmering. It is time now to sit down and have a conversation about the issues underlying the recent controversy. It is time to have a conversation that is not only civil, but sacred. There is no way that this conversation can begin and end with one sermon or on one Sunday, but I pray that today will be a beginning of the conversation.

Before we get to the issue of race itself, I want to cover a few things. First, there is the issue of context. What Rev. Wright said sounds so horrific in part because we have heard only tiny soundbites from sermons that are a lot longer than mine. Several weeks ago I asked Ben to do something for me. I asked him to look through my sermons and see if he could find offensive bits in them. Now, I don’t preach as “prophetically” as Jeremiah Wright, but upon scrolling through a random selection of my sermons Ben was able to pick out things that would probably seem offensive if taken out of context. Yes, even in MY sermons!

Second, there is the issue of the relationship between pastor and parishioner. Jeremiah Wright was the senior pastor at Trinity UCC for 36 years. Obama has been a member of that church for 20 years. That’s a long time to be in relationship, and there are bound to be disagreements between pastor and churchgoer. You have had long-term pastors here at St. Mark’s. My guess is that you have not agreed with everything they have said or done. I read a very wise statement this past week: We do not go to church because of the pastor. We go to church to worship God. Sure, a good, likable pastor is very important to the life of the church, but pastors come and go. It is the community that lives on.

Finally, and to the point, there is the issue of race. None of us in this room knows what it is like to be an African American. We may have experienced prejudice because of sexual orientation, gender, or something else. Prejudice in all its forms is frightening and evil. It invokes anger and sadness and may, indeed, cause us to use choice language in reference to our persecutors. Still, none of us knows what it is like to be black in America.

Jeremiah Wright is 66 years old. He is a little younger than the average age of the parishioners at Faith Community UCC, the interracial church I served in Sacramento, California. Unfortunately, he is not too young to experience atrocious acts of racism. The chair of the church council at Faith Community was an African American woman in her 70’s. She was an adult by the time of the Civil Rights Movement, and she experienced plenty of racism before that. However, the racial tension never really went away. Someone burned a cross in her front yard in the 1990’s.

Americans, both black and white, tend to think that racism is a thing of the past. After all, we have an African American running for president! Affirmative action is reaching the White House! The brand new president of the NAACP, who was voted in just this Friday, made the statement that “Those of us who are 45 and younger were told, ‘The struggle has been won. Go out and flourish. Don't worry about the movement.’” Yes, we think racism is a thing of the past, and we get complacent about it. Racism is still alive and well. There are, even in our day and age, cross burnings in the yards of African Americans. In the past several months swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti have been discovered in a dorm at the University of North Dakota. Just this morning I read that an American soldier in Iraq was caught using the Q’uran for target practice. Truly disgusting.

Then there are the more subtle things that may not appear to be racism to us but sure seem like it when you have the short end of the stick! There is the question many people asked after Hurricane Katrina. If the most heavily damaged areas had belonged to rich white folks, would the hurricane recovery have happened a lot more quickly? Many people think so. There is the question of inner city education. If they weren’t poor black folks, would we be more willing to fund their education?

In addition to modern acts of racism, large and small, against people of African descent, Arabs, Jews, Latinos, etc. there are the memories of past racist acts that remain in the minds of the persecuted and understandably cause paranoia. In his statements about AIDS, Rev. Wright has invoked memories of the Tuskekee Study. When a crime like that has been committed against a community, it is unlikely that the community will forget about it any time soon.

I believe that some of the things Jeremiah Wright said were stupid and some of them were wrong. But he is expressing anger out of an experience to which I will never be truly able to relate. Some of the things he said did not come across as sacred to me. But the things that have been done, and are being done, to African Americans (and Arabs, Jews, Latinos, etc.) sure as heck aren’t sacred either. Threatening to bomb Trinity UCC or making death threats against parishioners (both of those things have happened) are certainly not sacred. Even calling him or Barack Obama or Rev. John Thomas or the United Church of Christ or anyone else who may or may not be involved un-American is not helpful or sacred.

The truth is, we are all created in God’s image. Yes, yes, we know we’re supposed to believe that the color of our skin doesn’t matter, but it goes further than that. People who make statements that seem “un-American” are created in God’s image. People whose middle name is Hussein (whether they’re Christian or Muslim or what) are created in God’s image. Acts of racism and prejudice of any kind perpetrated by any one are not sacred; they are evil. But even the people who commit those acts are created in God’s own image. (See, there I go bein’ all controversial.) Yet we treat each other like dirt. Sadly, I don’t know if we will ever be able to truly love each other for who we are, but for the umpteenth time, we need to try. We need to talk about why we have these issues (yes, even if we think we have never committed a racist act in our lives) and how we can do a better job of overcoming them. If you want to talk more about these issues here, then let’s do so. But the church is a starting place. Ultimately, we need to bring peace and love to the world.

Today is known as Trinity Sunday in the church calendar, when we lift up the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. We remember that God, in all God’s glory, is manifested in three different ways. We human beings, too, are manifested in a multitude of ways, yet we are all the same being. Let’s start acting like it.

Now let us pray.