This is a sermon that I preached at Trinity Cathedral on Sunday, July 24, 2011, following two days of conducting Anti-Racism Training and Train the Trainers hosted by the Diocese of Northern California's Commission on Intercultural Ministries. You may also watch a podcast of the sermon at http://bit.ly/nWYj5L.
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The
words of the Gospel passages of this week and the last two weeks resound in my
heart and mind. As Jesus said repeatedly in Matthew 13 when he sat in a boat
and told parables to the crowd standing on the beach, “let anyone with ears
listen!”
Me
Ke Aloha Pumehana. Aloha Kakou. Mahalo E Ke Akua No Keia La. Amen’e
~ I greet you with the warmth of my love.
May there be love between us. Thanks be to God for this day. Amen.
We
are fortunate, indeed, to be seated in this beautiful cathedral on this warm
California summer day, basking in the delight of fellowship and shared worship.
I
come from the Diocese of Colorado where I serve on the Standing Committee. I
also serve as the Province VI Lay Representative to Executive Council where I
am the team leader for the ongoing Racial Justice formation work Council is
doing among its own members. I also serve as an Anti-Racism Trainer in The
Episcopal Church.
I
have been richly blessed and truly humbled to have spent the past two days here
at Trinity Cathedral conducting an Anti-Racism Training for almost 70 of the
leaders from four California dioceses hosted by your Diocese of Northern
California as well a Train the Trainers workshop for 8 of the members of your
Commission for Intercultural Ministry.
I
applaud Trinity Cathedral and the Diocese of Northern California for your
exemplary commitment to hospitality, invitation and welcome, and the work you have
seriously undertaken of dismantling racism wherever you encounter it, and your
encouragement and advocacy of anti-racism training for your lay and clergy
leaders as well as your generous sharing of that work with three of your
neighboring dioceses – California, El Camino Real and San Joaquin. Your
leadership is to be commended.
I
am passionate about doing the work of deconstructing racism, breaking racism
down through analysis, reflection and conversation, in order that we, the
church and its members, can more fully live into what it means to be members of
the Body of Christ together, and equal, mutually respected and mutually
accountable Beloved Children of God. Anti-Racism Training is very much about
the work of equipping the Beloved Community to do Gospel work, work that we
covenant to do when we are baptized into Christ’s holy Body, work that we
reaffirm doing when we recovenant each time we worship in an Easter,
Confirmation or Baptism service.
Today
and on the two Sundays prior to today, we have heard much of Chapter 13 in the
Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus tells many parables about sowers and seeds,
and the kingdom of heaven and what it is like.
The
parables of sowers and seeds are a lot like the work of racial justice and
reconciliation. In biblical days, one had to sow, to scatter seed and tend its
growth, in order to eat. Today, we go to the supermarket to buy what we eat,
and most of us are greatly distanced from the work of obtaining our food from
the actual fields where it is grown and harvested. It might be the case for
you, as Californians, living in a state where much of the produce of the U.S.
is grown, that you are somewhat less distanced from the sources of your food
than the rest of us.
Regrettably,
we church members are also largely distanced from paying attention to and doing
the work to interrupt racial injustice – that’s what the word “anti-racism”
means: to interrupt racism - wherever we encounter it, and showing our love for
our neighbors whose skin color is different than our own in the way that Jesus
commanded us to do, when he gave us his new commandment in John 13:34-35: “Love
one another as I have loved you. By this everyone will know that you are my
disciples.” This is a higher calling to discipleship and accountability than
that given in the summary of the law which we hear every Sunday in Rite I of
the Holy Eucharist, “Love God with all your heart and soul and mind, and love
your neighbor as yourself.”
The
reason that I am passionate about conducting Anti-Racism Trainings and
empowering laity and clergy to interrupt and dismantle racism (and all the
other “isms” such as sexism, ageism, ableism, heterosexism, nationalism, etc.)
is because I believe that Jesus has called each of us personally through our baptisms to be his disciples and to be
mutually accountable to one another as members of his Body. Among the five
Marks of Mission recognized by the churches in the fellowship of the Anglican
Communion is the one that says, “To seek to transform unjust structures of society.”
Unjust
structures of society include all the instances of institutional racism found
in these United States where predatory lending in lower economic neighborhoods
has caused losses of homes, scattering of families and loss of hope; where
racial profiling has subjected people of color, especially Blacks and
Hispanics, to excessive surveillance and unequal protection of the law; and
where White flight to the suburbs, tax base erosion and standardized testing have
contributed to educational backwaters in inner cities and poor neighborhoods.
Perhaps
you have heard of Michelle Alexander and her book, The New Jim Crow, published earlier this year. In it, she
lays out the story of “Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”:
·
Where there are more African Americans
under correctional control today – in prison or in jail, on probation or parole
– than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began;
·
Where the United States imprisons a
larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height
of apartheid; and
·
Where, in Washington, D.C., three out of
four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can
expect to serve time in prison.
The
Episcopal Church has been paying attention to racism and the work that is
needed, that is fundamental to our faith as followers of Jesus, to become
educated about racism and its cost to people of color and indigenous people as
well as to Whites, to become conversant with how to interrupt racism whenever
and wherever we encounter it, to strive for justice and peace among all people,
and to respect the dignity of every human being.
The
House of Bishops, in Pastoral Letters of March, 1994, and March 2006, and a
recent September, 2010, Pastoral Letter and Theology Resource on Migration and
Immigration, has said that:
·
Racism wounds the Body of Christ;
·
We must name the sin of racism and
repent; and
·
We are grounded in our Baptismal Covenant
Since
1991, General Convention, the governing body of The Episcopal Church, which
will gather again in 2012 in its triennial meeting in Indianapolis, has
recognized the need for the church to address Institutional Racism, and since
2000, General Convention has required Anti-Racism Training for Lay and Ordained
Leaders. That was a large part of the impetus for your Commission for
Intercultural Ministry to host the Anti-Racism Training yesterday.
You
may be interested to know that among General Convention’s resolutions are those
asking the church through its dioceses to research, own and repent its
complicity in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, to extend its focus on racism to
all ethnicities and nations of origin, and to study and report on Holy Orders
recruitment and deployment of persons of color.
The
parable of the mustard seed is often explained as the story of how something
very tiny can grow up into something large and significant and good – a tree
that becomes home to birds of the air. The importance of the parable is often
described along the lines of “the little engine that could” or what Daniel G.
Deffenbaugh, Associate Professor of Religion at Hastings College in Nebraska,
calls “a kind of "camp song theology" – as in, "it only takes a
spark to get a fire going."
Listen
carefully to the passage of the parable again: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and
sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown,
it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air
come and make nests in its branches.’
The
mustard herb is a plant that doesn’t require a lot of cultivation. It grows
much like a weed does, taking hold and spreading wherever its seed is spread.
That a Hebrew farmer in the days when Jesus walked and taught among the people
would do something like purposely sowing a seed that would quickly overtake his
other crops in the way that a weed can overtake a garden is significant. What
does it mean? Is Jesus suggesting that planting weeds is like the kingdom of
heaven? And how is sowing the mustard seed like the work of racial justice, the
work of being an anti-racist, one who interrupts racism?
I
think that there actually is a great likeness between that tiny mustard seed
and those of us who decide to respond to the call of doing the work of
interrupting racism. We begin as small in number. We are tiny in comparison to
the racial injustice and systemic, institutional racism that pervades our
organizations, including, yes, even The Episcopal Church.
And
yet, if we approach one another as members of the Beloved Community seeking to
converse with other members of the Beloved Community . . . if the holy in me
seeks to greet and meet and engage in dialogue the holy in you . . . "How
would conversation be different when it starts with belovedness?"
One
of the important things that we learn in Anti-Racism Training, which is
actually a small thing that has huge consequences, is that we must converse
with one another, even when the conversations are about hard subjects like
racism, asking the image of the beloved in each other, "what can this
image of God teach you?" and “what can the image of God in you teach me?”
We begin by listening, seeking to see the image of God in the other. That
begins as a very small thing, and yet, like the mustard seed, has the potential
to grow into a tree that is large enough to shelter the birds of the air.
As
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has often pointed out, "You
need to listen with the expectation that you will learn something." My
prayer for you and your diocese is that your work in conducting Anti-Racism
Training and raising awareness of the structures of racism and how to dismantle
institutional racism will grow mightily, that from the small seed of beginning
to do the work of interrupting racism, your work will grow into the large tree
of friendship, community and love for your neighbors that is like the kingdom
of heaven right here in Northern California. Amen.
