Scripture: Psalm 51
I have some words to say about apology this morning. Actually I’ll have quite a few words to say about apology before I’m done, and they’ll carry over into another sermon or two after the intergenerational event next Sunday. Why “apology”? Where is this idea coming from? Well…
It seems there has been a bit of a hubbub generated in the Virginia General Assembly recently around a proposal that would have the state apologizing for slavery and the response of one delegate that African Americans should just “get over it”. It seems that Virgil Goode is not the only person capable of making statements that might be funny if they weren’t so offensive, and if they didn’t have disturbing implications and represent a more widespread point of view. When combined with the beginning of Black History Month, this little incident and the minor media frenzy that has surrounded it might be enough to get me to talk about apology in church, especially the question of apologizing for slavery. It is after all a spiritual issue, not a narrowly political one, this question of apologizing for slavery, or expressing profound regret, or however we’re going to deal with this past that is not past.
As I say, the current commotion in the general assembly would by itself be sufficient reason for me to talk about apologizing for slavery, especially since it’s Black History Month, but actually I’ve been thinking about this for some time. Apology, that is. Not just apologies for slavery, but apologies in general. For one thing public apologies for other social evils in addition to slavery.
A few years ago John Thomas, the president of the United Church of Christ, made a special trip to Hawaii (I don’t remember what the occasion was), but he gave a speech there that apologized to the indigenous people of Hawaii for the role the church played, the Congregational Church, now part of the U.C.C., and its missionaries, the role our ancestors played in undermining the political structure and the native culture of the islands. I remember being glad for this gesture and grateful to John Thomas for representing me in this way. But I also remember wondering about such apologies, how they were received, what good they might do, if any, whether this apology had any purpose other than making us spiritual descendants of missionaries feel a little better that we now recognize the ambiguity of the missionary enterprise and how misguided and sinful some of what was done in our name was. I was glad for John Thomas’ apology… but I had lots of questions about it at the same time.
And speaking of indigenous people, what about apologizing for what Europeans have done to the indigenous people of North America? Will that be part of the Jamestown observances? Will that be adequately part of the Jamestown observances? What would adequate mean, what could adequate possibly mean in that context? Now is not the time or the place to be specific about everything that might cry out for an apology, but we all know there is plenty. So much that in the face of everything that has been done, the idea of an apology seems pitifully inadequate. What is it, I ask myself, that would give such an apology any meaning at all in the light of what happened here right in front of the eyes of God? Karenne Wood is a Monacan Indian who, in addition to the many other things she does, writes poetry. Her book of poems, Markings on the Earth, includes one called “Jamestown Revisited” which it is noted was written a few years ago, on the occasion of being asked to attend a church gathering on the site of the Jamestown Settlement where some well-meaning church people intended to apologize to Virginia Indians for everything since 1607. She writes:
Here you come again,
Asking if I will come to your apology…
You would spread us on your
Platform like graven images.
You could repent to us,
Weep into your robes an
Emotional, talk-show-like
Moment to absolve almost
Four hundred years, then
Go home to mow your lawn…
Is that also a way to view apology, maybe even a truer way, so called for, yet so uncalled for at the same time? What would make such an apology the right thing to do?
Or speaking of the general assembly, I believe the delegate who suggested that African Americans should just get over slavery also was quoted as asking whether we were going to ask Jewish people to apologize for killing Christ, to which the obvious answer, obvious to me anyway, is that “no, we aren’t going to do that, but we might well consider apologizing as Christians for scapegoating Jewish people as Christ-killers, as well as all the other horrors perpetrated by Christians against Jews. Have the Papal statements about this been adequate? Do they relieve us of the need to make our own?
Those are just a few examples. There are, of course, lots of others, and they have all caused me to be thinking about apologies now for quite a while, and not just in connection with these large historical misdeeds, slavery and the way colonizers have treated indigenous people, but also in connection with more personal matters. When do apologies bring healing and when do they not? What makes some apologies genuine acts of reconciliation? When, on the other hand, might an apology simply add to the offense? I’ve been thinking about such things for quite some time now—or at least wondering about them—and I’ve been meaning to try to put together some thoughts into a sermon or two long before the most recent events in Richmond. Today is the beginning of that effort.
In what I’ve said already, I guess you’ve picked up that I don’t think apology is just obviously and always a good thing to do, even if a wrong has been done. To illustrate this further, let me talk for just a few moments about something that has nothing to do with slavery or other social evils but with worship. I’ll get back to the question of apologizing for slavery and other kinds of public apologies a little bit later today and more in a future sermon.
Maybe you noticed there was a prayer of confession at the beginning of our worship service today. Maybe you have also noticed that there is seldom a prayer of confession at the beginning of our worship service. That is, I mostly choose not to call the opening unison prayer a prayer of confession, even if it has elements in it that might be thought of as confession. Once in a while I do, but mostly not. This reflects my sense of the mixed feelings about confession and about the concept of sin that I read as being present in the congregation maybe the mixed feelings some of you may have within yourselves but at least the different feelings there are among us. It also, honestly, represents my own mixed feelings about something as apparently simple as a prayer of confession.
I have had the experience in Christian churches of feeling like the main point of the worship service was to convince me of my sinfulness, in fact my complete worthlessness, and therefore of the need that Christ suffer for my sins and of the greatness of God’s gift of forgiveness that saved a wretch like me (we’ll be singing Amazing Grace in a few moments). One of the historic prayers of confession says something to the effect that we confess that we are sinners and that there is no good to be found in us, which always seemed to me to be just a tad of an overstatement. In more than one Christian church, more than a few Christian churches, I felt like there was this major effort being made to drum into me the idea that I was above all a sinner, that there was no good in me, or anyone else for that matter, to impress this very dark view of who I am and who human beings are. Some of this came at a time when I was trying to decide whether I was a Christian or not, and it almost succeeded in convincing me that I wasn’t. And I know some of you have your own versions of a threatening condemning style of Christianity that may define you as a sinner because of your sexual orientation, or that may define you as a sinner just because you’re a human being. I realize that having a prayer of confession at the beginning of a worship service doesn’t necessarily carry all those connotations, but for me it does a little bit, and that’s a road down which I don’t want to go, not even a little bit.
On the other hand, we are not perfect and it does seem appropriate to come into a time of worship with no pretenses about our own wonderful-ness, with no trumpeting of our goodness or our faithfulness, with as little defensiveness and as little pride as possible, and for some people prayers of confession are important in establishing that kind of a tone to the worship service. For me, they work well if I think of them as an acknowledgment of our common humanity, a humanity that is flawed and broken in many ways and in need of healing and that we all share in, which is part of the power of the symbolism in communion, the brokenness of the bread reminding us of Christ’s humanity and of our own brokenness and of God’s presence within that brokenness. For me prayers of confession do not work so well if I think of them as a kind of apology to God, expressing my remorse for things I have done or not done and asking God’s forgiveness. There are several reasons for this, I think, but here’s the one I want to suggest for this morning.
If apologies are something more than good manners—apologizing to someone for carelessly bumping into them—if apologies have to do with important matters that require some mending or healing, matters that require a change in behavior or a righting of wrongs or a future that is different from the past, then apologies do not stand on their own. They are part of a process, just one step in a much longer and more difficult process, and if they are not part of such a process, they are not worth very much, or maybe much worse than not worth very much. I called this sermon “first steps” with that in mind, but really that isn’t right either. Sometimes apologies are not even the first steps. They need to come later, after some healing process or some justice making process or some restorative process has already credibly begun. I realize I am not a great fan of prayers of confession because it is not clear that they are part of any process, a mere matter of manners, a formality, and then we move on to something else, like Karenne Wood’s apologizers who go home to mow their lawns.
Whether or not we have prayers of confession may seem like a relatively minor matter anyway. But the issue is one that spills over into so much else. What about apologies to God for sins that we can’t be very specific about in a few lines we all say together? What about apologies for slavery, or anything else? Well…we need to talk. We need to talk about what will make the future different from the past. Yes, in order for there to be a different future, the past needs to be acknowledged, not gotten over. But there needs to be more. And without the more, apologies by themselves are likely to be empty formalities, accomplishing little more than perhaps making the apologizers feel virtuous. For that matter, the same could be said about Black History Month. Is it a kind of formality that can make its observers feel virtuous, or is it part of a much broader conversation, acknowledging a past, both positive and negative, that has been left out of history books but also looking toward creating a different future? There’s more to be said on such questions, but it will have to wait.
In the meantime, we come to the communion table today, confessing the brokenness of our lives, sharing the brokenness of lives, praying for healing but knowing in our hearts that it’s all part of a long journey, a very long journey. May God strengthen us for that journey. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 4, 2007