FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: Teach us, good Lord God, to serve you as you deserve, to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labor and not to ask for reward, except that of knowing that we do your will, through Jesus Crist, our Savior and Lord.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” Matthew 10:34-36.
Today was Juneteenth, a day that was established just last year as a federally recognized holiday by the United States Congress. Juneteenth commemorates the day on which federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed. Thankfully, we have reached a point at which we acknowledge publicly the dark history of slavery in our nation and the point at which it was formally terminated. Sadly, it took us over two hundred years of slavery, a century of Jim Crow, a relentless fight by Black citizens to obtain the civil liberties the rest of us take for granted, a pandemic laying bare the stark discrepancies that still exist between Black and white citizens in terms of health care, credit and land ownership and the murder of an innocent Black man by a police officer in order to get there. Truth be told, we still are not there.
Coincidentally (or not) I have been reading The 1619 Project, a book that expands upon the Sunday, August 18, 2022 New York Times special magazine bearing the same title. To make a long story short, the magazine article sought in an abbreviated way to shed light on the pivotal role played by the institution of slavery in the formation of our country, the perpetuation of white supremacy throughout the country and especially in the American south for over a century thereafter and the continuing detrimental effects of systemic racism in contemporary American society. As one might expect, the project met with sustained backlash. U.S. Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill in the United States Senate entitled the “Saving American History Act.”[1] Similar legislation has been introduced in several Republican dominated states.[2] Suffice to say, there is a determined effort by a significant part of white America to prevent this dark aspect of our nation’s history, too frequently excluded and downplayed in our nation’s mythology surrounding its origins, from coming to light.
Coincidentally (or not), Sunday’s gospel speaks directly to our penchant for self deception and falsification, personal and collective:
“…nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.” Matthew 10:26-27.
To be a disciple of Jesus is to speak the truth, even when it disturbs the peace, even when it elicits hostility, even when it divides churches, splits families and ends friendships. Discipleship is about speaking the truth even when you feel you cannot do it articulately, even when you wish there were someone else that could speak better, even when your voice is shaking. And the truth is that systemic racism infects our educational institutions, our workplaces, our system of justice and, not least, our churches. It is a truth of which we have always been vaguely aware. But the election and presidency of Donald Trump have made unavoidably clear the breadth, depth and persistence of white supremacy and the pain it inflicts on people of color every second of every day. Indeed, that much needed clarity might be the one and only positive contribution of the Trump legacy.
Naturally, I applaud efforts such as the 1619 Project to tell the American story and the story of American Christianity[3] truthfully. But public witness only takes us so far. As Jesus noted, a prophet is without honor in the prophet’s own home and among the prophet’s own people. Yet that is precisely where the witness to truth is most needed. There are, of course, potent reasons for letting Uncle Ned’s racist remark pass without comment in the interest of not spoiling Thanksgiving dinner for everyone else. There is an argument to be made against introducing the issue of racial justice to a congregation that is struggling to sustain itself financially and is already divided and demoralized. One might question the wisdom of a denominational church body already in decline and hardly able to maintain its own ministries tithing a substantial portion of its income to support Black churches as a step toward reparations owed by American society as a whole. Given the fragility of our families, congregations and the churches of which they are a part, we might rather settle for peace at home, peace in the congregation and peace in the ecclesiastical household than the peace won through the hard work of doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God. But the peace of silence comes at a terrible price, a price that is paid by victims of exclusion, intimidation and violence required to maintain it.
If it was not clear to us before, the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and all that followed should convince us that evil does not go away simply because we choose to ignore it. The people we witnessed storming our capital two years ago chanting racist and antisemitic slogans, displaying hangman’s nooses and flying the confederate flag of racism testify to the sickness of our culture and the pervasiveness of the lies our nation has been telling itself about itself for the last couple of centuries. The false mythology of America that we learned in school as history, a mythology that has ignored, downplayed and minimized the role of racism and the creed of white supremacy, needs to be exposed.
Unfortunately, the people who most need to hear the testimony given voice in the 1619 Project are not likely to read it. Many of them are ingesting a steady diet of right wing propaganda from the likes of Fox, One America News and Truth Social. Nevertheless, they have neighbors like you and me. They have family members like us. They use the same nail salons and barber shops we do and frequently attend the same churches. You might not change Uncle Ned’s mind at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But by calling him out on his racism, you let the rest of your family-including impressionable children-know that his bigotry is not acceptable and has no place in your home. You may not sway the loudmouth in the barbershop, but by speaking out, you might well open the minds of others standing by or encourage those who might have been fearful of speaking up.
As for preaching the truth about America’s racism to the church, what is the worst that could happen? You might lose members. You might lose your job. But while you are thinking about that, thing about this: In the sixth chapter of John’s gospel Jesus went from an adoring congregation of over five thousand to a following of twelve in a matter of days. The truth does not always win converts. Sometimes it makes enemies. Despite what our churches say on their marques about everybody being welcome, if the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers would feel welcome and comfortable in your church, you are probably not doing your job. The good news that God’s limitless love does not recognize borders, require documentation, distinguish on the basis of humanly concocted categories of race, have any regard for class or respect for cultural measures of worth and achievement is mighty bad news for white people desperate to hang onto their societal privilege. But these are the words of eternal life. Those who do not recognize them as such are the ones who need most to hear them.
Jesus warns us not to fear human retaliation, but rather to fear God. Fear of God does not go down well in my ever white, ever polite progressive protestant tradition. But it strikes me that if we really did fear God, there would be a lot less other things to fear-such as ruining Thanksgiving dinner, creating an uncomfortable scene at the nail salon, offending one of the church’s biggest contributors or failing to be re-elected bishop. Indeed, if these are the only consequences we face for telling the truth, we should count ourselves blessed. Throughout history and to this very day many have paid and continue to pay a higher price. Jesus tells us frankly that speaking truthfully about what the rest of the world would rather ignore, deny or erase will bring us into the same struggle to which he gave his life. He reminds us, however, that all who lose themselves in that struggle will find themselves. Matthew 10:39. The truth, painful as it is, makes us free.
Here is a poem by Denise Levertov dismissing the peace which is merely tolerance of evil.
Goodbye to Tolerance
Genial poets, pink-faced
earnest wits—
you have given the world
some choice morsels,
gobbets of language presented
as one presents T-bone steak
and Cherries Jubilee.
Goodbye, goodbye,
I don’t care
if I never taste your fine food again,
neutral fellows, seers of every side.
Tolerance, what crimes
are committed in your name.
And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread,
blood donors. Your crumbs
choke me, I would not want
a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped
by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never
falter: irresponsive
to nightmare reality.
It is my brothers, my sisters,
whose blood spurts out and stops
forever
because you choose to believe it is not your business.
Goodbye, goodbye,
your poems
shut their little mouths,
your loaves grow moldy,
a gulf has split
the ground between us,
and you won’t wave, you’re looking
another way.
We shan’t meet again—
unless you leap it, leaving
behind you the cherished
worms of your dispassion,
your pallid ironies,
your jovial, murderous,
wry-humored balanced judgment,
leap over, un-
balanced? … then
how our fanatic tears
would flow and mingle
for joy …
Denise Levertov (1923–1997) never received a formal education. Nevertheless, she created a highly regarded body of poetry that earned her recognition as one of America’s most respected poets. Her father, Paul Philip Levertov, was a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity and subsequently moved to England where he became an Anglican minister. Levertov grew up in a household surrounded by books and people talking about them in many languages. During World War II, Levertov pursued nurse’s training and spent three years as a civilian nurse at several hospitals in London. Levertov came to the United States in 1948, after marrying American writer Mitchell Goodman. During the 1960s Levertov became a staunch critic of the Vietnam war, a topic addressed in many of her poems of that era. Levertov died of lymphoma at the age of seventy-four. You can read more about Denise Levertov and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation Website.
[1] This bill never became law.
[2] One interesting permutation of these measures is a relentless effort to keep “CRT” out of public schools. CRT is an acronym for Critical Race Theory, a catch all phrase for a diverse group of legal scholars whose writings explore the relationship between race, racism and power as it pertains to the evolution of American law. Though I am neither a legal scholar nor an expert on Critical Race Theory, as a law school graduate I have some familiarity with it. As with any scholarly movement, there are many diverse and sometimes conflicting voices within it. There is no one single “theory.” Moreover, anyone with the slightest understanding of what Critical Race Theory actually is and more than two brain cells to rub together has to know that it is not being taught to primary or secondary students. Thus, legislation to put an end to this non-event is rather like outlawing the keeping of unicorns within city limits.
[3] The 1619 Project includes an essay by Anthea Butler on the Black church and the critical role it has and continues to play in the struggle for freedom, equality and civil liberties that has defined African American existence in the United States. See 1619 Project, (c. 2021 by The New York Times Company) pp. 335-353. That an enslaved people were able to take the religion and Bible of their captors, liberate it from its Constantinian captivity to the instrumentality of oppression and recapture the radical message of the Exodus, the Return from Exile and the Cross and Resurrection of the Messiah for the downtrodden is one of the most remarkable facts of history.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 
Amen and thank you.
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