Scripture: Galatians 6
I’ve been reading a book recently. It’s a book that’s not yet published, and I’ve been asked to read the manuscript and make comments on it in order to give the authors some feedback before they make their final revisions and the book goes to print.
The book is about multiracial congregations. It’s called United by Faith, and it’s part of a much larger project being funded by the Lilly Foundation relating to multicultural, multiracial congregations in the United States. Since I’ve been immersing myself somewhat in the book over the last few weeks, and since I’ve been thinking about both the book and the subject matter quite a bit in the process of making comments, and since it has something to do with life here at Sojourners, I decided I needed to preach on it today, not so much on the book itself but on what the book is about. I’ve been thinking about it anyway, so rather than keep my thoughts to myself, I thought I would share them with you.
I do this with some reservations though. Although the book is readable, and although the authors are not just writing for other scholars, and although they care about what they are writing about, still it is a study that presents a lot of information in an organized and objective manner. Since I am giving feedback to the authors on their work, there may be some tendency for me to fall into the same style and give you a book review or a lecture about a book that no one except me has read. I don’t want to do that.
Nor do I want to sort of make pronouncements about the virtues of being multiracial or just pat ourselves on the back that we happen to be somewhat multiracial. Being multiracial is an important part of who we are at Sojourners, but as I begin the sermon, I’m not sure what more I need to say to you about that, or what we need to be saying to each other. It may in fact be better, I think to myself, not to be too self-conscious about being an interracial congregation. But just because I’m not sure about all these things is no reason to be silent either.
We have promised ourselves here at Sojourners to talk, whether we are talking to ourselves or to others, about “things that matter”. This, whatever your thoughts, or mine, may be about it, is something that matters—multiracial congregations. How we think about it, whether we think about it, how we deal with it in our own life—these are all things that matter, and so I feel committed to talking about them, even though I’m not sure how best to do that.
Many of us are familiar with the saying that Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week in American society. That statement was manifestly true at the time it was first made many years ago, and given the fact that American society as a whole has practiced segregation with determination and persistence and has done so legally and illegally and extra-legally and formally and informally and in every way it could think of over the years, to say that Sunday morning was the most segregated time of the week in American society was saying something. It was not just saying something. It was a devastating indictment of the Christian church in the United States. (We’ll leave aside other faith traditions for now and just talk about our own.)
Things have changed—a little. Today when we walk into Sojourners on a Sunday morning we are very much aware that that old general statement still pretty much describes the reality we live in. We are at least somewhat aware that we are attending a church that is more racially diverse than most in our community. There are a few others that can lay claim to being racially diverse, maybe a few more than we think, but not too many. In fact, whether we are truly a multiracial congregation might be an interesting discussion and might be open to some question. There may be some of us who would say absolutely yes we are, given the context in which live. There may be some of us who would say no, not really. Certainly some who look at us from the outside would say no, not really. The authors of the book I am reading might say “close” or “close enough” or “almost”. Their definition says that a church is multiracial when no more than 80% of membership is of one race.
Today when we walk into this room on Sunday morning, some of us may come with the attitude that we are just coming to church, for whatever those many and deep reasons are that people come to church, and those some of us may come with the attitude that the fact that we are to some degree racially diverse is a noticeable fact but requires not so much attention. It’s just the way things are and the way they ought to be, and the question of how diverse we are is of no great importance. The fact that we are a congregation with an inclusive spirit is all that matters. Beyond that we are all just here, for our various human reasons, and we are here in all the variety of our humanness. It so happens that some of us are white and some of us are people of color, but that’s of little importance since all of us are children of God.
On the other hand some of us may come very much aware, or hopeful, that what is going on here on Sunday morning is in significant part a self-conscious effort to build an open community of faith where that openness is lived and not just spoken. We are a faith community, but we are not just a faith community. We are also an intentional community. We are trying to be a faith community of a very specific kind, different, sadly, from most other faith communities, and different, sadly, from the world around us. When we walk into this room on Sunday morning it is important to us to be walking into a room where there is a community being built that is significantly diverse and therefore different from most other places. I count myself as one of those people who is here in large part because this is a diverse faith community. After struggling for many years in all white congregations wanting in some ways to change but in other ways wanting not to, I wanted very much to be in a place where you didn’t have to struggle so hard just to get to the starting line.
What I’m trying to describe here are two different attitudes that may broadly and very roughly describe different groups of people, but that also may describe different parts of ourselves. Maybe I can illustrate this by referring to the statement in the bulletin that describes us as a congregation where we talk about things that matter. That statement goes on to say that “your race doesn’t matter” and that “your age, your gender, your sexual orientation—these are all things that do not matter. That what matters is our common effort to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with God. And of course we all know what that statement is trying to say, that none of those things are grounds for being treated poorly, none are grounds for exclusion, none are grounds for separating people or keeping people apart. And at that level we not only know what is being said but we surely agree with it—at that level.
At another level we surely cannot agree that our race doesn’t matter, or our age or gender or sexual orientation. Those things matter enormously. They matter because people have made them matter, and people who have exercised power have enforced the idea that they matter, to the benefit of some and the harm of others. They matter because they are part of who we are, and not just in some incidental way, as though it were just a matter of some characteristic or eccentricity. They have to do with who we are in the very deep sense of describing what goes on inside us and what has gone on inside our parents and grandparents, and describing not just how we see ourselves and how other people see us but even whether other people see us and whether other people hear what we have to say. In this sense to say that race doesn’t matter is to say that the experience, the tears, the suffering of generation after generation of whole peoples doesn’t matter. It is to say that injustices done and cruelties committed and dreams deferred don’t matter. All too often it is what people who occupy the positions of privilege say in order to pretend that there is no need for change. And from this angle, from this way of looking at things, I doubt that any of us would dare to say that race doesn’t matter. In one way of thinking and speaking it matters tremendously. From another way of thinking and speaking it could be our most fervent hope and prayer to be able to say that it really doesn’t matter, that we are able to see beyond what makes us different from each other to the humanness that we share and the something of God that is in each of us.
Paul deals with the same thing, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that we have to deal with the same kind of thing when reading Paul. There was a conflict in the early church, a serious conflict between those who were of a Jewish background and those who were not, Gentiles. Many of the people in the Christian movement in its early years saw themselves also as Jewish. They worshiped in a Jewish manner, observed dietary laws, and practiced male circumcision. The question was: when someone who was not Jewish wanted to become part of the Christian movement, did that person have to become Jewish as well as Christian? Was the Christian church just for Jews? If you weren’t already Jewish, did you have to become Jewish in order to become Christian? This was an ethnic, racial conflict. It aroused intense passions. At stake was whether the church was to be inclusive or not.
Paul I know is not a favorite person for a lot of people. He had some not very enlightened things to say about the role of women, for instance. And there are lots of other grounds for legitimately not caring for Paul. But we have to give him credit, I think, for being on the right side of this issue. He not only defended the right of Gentiles to come into the church without giving up who they were. He lived and breathed that vision of a multiracial church. And in Galatians he wrote about it. He said in chapter three, in a famous passage, “In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free”. And in chapter 6, our passage for this morning, he said, “For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything, but the new creation is everything.”
Paul’s language here is the same as that of our bulletin. In Christ there is no Jew or Greek. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything. Your race does not matter. And as with our bulletin language, Paul’s language is both deeply true and at the same time very much not true.
The authors of the book I have been reading, who are themselves a multiracial team, recognize that race has mattered a great deal in church life in the United States. Every time an effort has been made to say forcefully that race does not matter in the eyes of God and should not matter in the Christian church, the demons of racism have sent in their legions and they have prevailed. At the beginning the Methodist Church said that slavery was a sin, said that slaveholders could not be Methodist, and tried to say that all God’s children got a place in the choir. But it didn’t last. Powerful people with different ideas won the day, and when a Methodist named Richard Allen was refused communion in the Methodist Church in Philadelphia, the African Methodist Episcopal Church was born. Revivals that started out as attempts to bring people, just people, to Christ, ended up bringing white people to Christ over here, and people of color to Christ over here. The modern day Pentecostal movement started out as an interracial movement but soon split into a white movement and a black movement. The Church of God in Christ started out as an interracial denomination, until white people withdrew to form the Assemblies of God. Every time there has been a sincere effort to say that race doesn’t matter, something happened to say more loudly and more convincingly that it does.
The authors also recognize that part of the reason there are so few multiracial congregations is that people of color have chosen to form single race congregations not because of some tribalistic tendencies but as an attempt to find a place of refuge from the racism of the larger society and the churches of the dominant culture, and to have church communities where they did not have to suffer indignities or adapt to someone else’s ways or give up being who you were in order to go to church. There would be no AME, CME, or AME Zion church if the Methodist church had truly acted as though race didn’t matter. The Church of God in Christ would be a different kind of church if whites had not withdrawn. There would be no First Baptist on Main Street if First Baptist now on Park Street had truly acted as though race did not matter. Race does matter. It has always mattered. It continues to matter.
The authors of the book I’m reading say that nevertheless, in spite of all that, in spite of all that anyone can say about why churches are so divided racially, in spite of the fact that there may even in some cases be good reasons why that is so, nevertheless, the effort to build and sustain multiracial congregations must be made. They argue in fact that this is not a matter of making an interesting experiment here and there but is a matter of spiritual obligation for all or nearly all congregations, that they should be multiracial whenever that is possible. I will put their argument into my own words: that this is so because it is not, cannot be the job of the church to reflect the society but instead somehow to reflect, even if only dimly, the kind of way of being together that God envisions, and which Jesus talked of in terms of the reign of God.
The authors want us to look beyond the past and the present, to envision a different future. I am less optimistic than they are, I think, about how quickly or widely this will happen. I am less convinced that this is the only model we should look to in our current situation. I am very much aware of how flawed our attempts to be multiracial and multicultural usually are. But I also know that it continues to be important for me to work at making such a thing possible. Here at Sojourners, anywhere, I don’t think it serves us well to claim we are doing more than that. We are not close to the ideal, or even a truly authentic multiracial community. But we have committed ourselves to continuing to work at making it possible. When we ask ourselves how we are doing, as I think we need to do often, it needs to be clear that this is not primarily a question of numbers but of attitude and of faith. We need to find a way to let our differences matter, to honor each other for who we are and not expect anyone to put aside who he or she is, but at the same time not to let those differences matter ultimately, not to let them matter negatively, and not to let them matter so much that they get in the way of our being human with each other. It’s a big job, I think, but also one that by the grace of God will be filled with joy and love. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 26, 2002