Scripture: Matthew 5:21-26
Let me try to pick up from where I left off two weeks ago. I was talking about apologies, mostly the public sort of apology where an official pronouncement is made apologizing for some collective historical sin, like the proposed apology for slavery that caused such a stir in the Virginia legislature recently. I said I was inspired to talk about apology partly by that current controversy and by the fact that it is Black History Month, but also because I have had mixed feelings about the whole question of public apologies for some time and around issues other than apologizing for slavery. I tried to talk then about some of the ambiguities that are involved in apologies, using the issue prayers of confession as an illustration. I want to explore those ambiguities a little more today, and also get back more specifically to the question of apologizing for slavery. But before I do that I want to also get back to the question of why I’m talking about this. I don’t think I did that very well last time, so let me take another stab at saying why this is important to me and why it deserves to be talked about in the context of worship.
Jesus has some words that might apply here, the words we heard a moment ago from the Sermon on the Mount. “So when you are offering your gift on the altar,” he says, “if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister and then come offer your gift.” Anyone who has had the experience of having a fight with a partner or friend before coming to worship can probably attest to the fact that such a rift interferes with worship, makes it less genuine, makes it hard to worship at all. It’s hard to get into getting close to God when angry words said to you or by you are still ringing in your ears. It’s hard to say or even hear all those nice worship words when your feelings are anything but nice. And it’s not just that it may seem hollow or hypocritical to be talking about love and peace when what’s really in your heart is hurt and anger. It’s more just that we are burdened by that wound and/or by the need to be reconciled. The space inside us is taken up with unpleasant and what we might think of as unworshipful feelings.
I hear Jesus saying not only that that’s the reality, the way things are, but also that that’s the way they ought to be. That is, unfinished tasks of reconciliation take precedence over religious ritual. I don’t take Jesus literally, nor do I think he meant to be taken literally, when he says that we are just supposed to drop everything and go and be reconciled before we go on with our worship. That is generally not possible for lots of reasons, most of all because reconciliation is not such an easy thing, hardly ever an easy thing, even when it involves just two people and even when you think maybe it ought to be easy because in the big scheme of things the issues at stake are not all that important. But if we can’t just flick the hard feelings away or achieve reconciliation with a snap of the fingers, then that need for reconciliation needs to become part of worship itself, not interfere with it. That lack of reconciliation needs to burden our worship.
And you may see where I’m heading with this. It’s not just a matter of whether you’ve had a fight with a friend or a partner. It can also be a matter of wounds so profound and widespread that they burden everyone in society. It can also be a matter of reconciliation on a vastly larger scale, meaning also that the difficulties of achieving anything resembling real reconciliation are that much greater and the process that will lead us in that direction that much longer.
To be more specific, the wounds that are the result not only of slavery but of the whole history of oppression, bigotry, discrimination, and racism in this country burden all of us, white folks and people of color both. They burden us differently in many ways, maybe the same in some ways too, but in any case that history, which is an ongoing history and is not in any way over, burdens all of us. And it burdens our worship. When Jesus implied that, he was echoing Amos, the prophet Amos who said, “I hate, I despise your feasts, I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…Your burnt offerings I do not accept…Take away from me the noise of your songs…but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” Unfinished tasks of reconciliation on a human scale take precedence over religious ritual or any other kind of officially spiritual activity any time, all the time. And because, in the case of racism, we cannot just go out and take care of the work of reconciliation before we come to worship, our worship is therefore burdened with those unfinished tasks.
Our worship is burdened with those unfinished tasks all the time. Not just when it is Black History Month. All the time. Not just when we are talking about it openly. All the time. My spirit is burdened by our racial past and by the unfinished tasks that lie ahead of us, not just when I decide to speak out loud about it, not just when I have some thoughts I can shape into a sermon, but all the time.
Of course we can be in denial about this. We can pretend it is not so. We can—some of us can—try to shove it way down in our consciousness so that it doesn’t seem to trouble us right now. We can—some of us can—try to put it aside as something that is “not the topic for this morning”. We can do our very best not to let our worship be burdened in this way. But it would be good if we failed at all those efforts.
It would be a good thing if none of us were in denial. It would be a good thing, and a major step forward if all Christian churches, all faith communities for that matter, when they met for worship, whenever they met for worship knew in their hearts and in their bones that their worship is burdened by the past and present of racism, because our worship is haunted with unfinished tasks of reconciliation. It is the spirit of what Jesus has to say to us in the few verses we heard today that we do not just neatly bracket those tasks and put them aside so that we can worship in peace and then get back to them later. It would be a good thing, and a major step forward, if even just we at Sojourners knew in a deep down sort of way that every time we gather for worship, our worship is burdened by our history and by the unfinished tasks of reconciliation that belong to us.
And they do belong to us of course. That’s why the argument that some people make saying apologies are inappropriate because the people making them are not the ones responsible, did not own slaves, did not create the institution or the economy based on enslavement, did not create the horrors of the middle passage…that argument doesn’t hold up because the question is not whether we accept responsibility for the past, but whether we accept responsibility for the present. An apology could say that we recognize that the unfinished tasks of reconciliation do belong to us, that they are our very own.
And so apologies for slavery. Some thoughts in the light of what I’ve been trying to say so far. And I should say in this regard that the point of offering these thoughts is not to arrive at a conclusion as to whether on the whole an apology for slavery would be a good thing. I’m inclined in fact not to arrive at a conclusion, or in any case to state a conclusion, because what I think we are called to do is dwell in that uncomfortable place where conclusions have not been reached and where our business remains unfinished.
So the first thought, and this is in line with what I was trying to say two weeks ago, is that if apologies are thought to be some kind of answer, to provide some kind of resolution on their own, if an apology is offered in the spirit of saying something that will smooth over the pain, make people feel better, put this issue behind us so that we can move on to something else, then an apology for slavery is not a good thing. Sometimes apologies work that way in our personal lives—probably not as often as we think, but sometimes they work that way in our personal lives, where an apology sincerely offered is really all that is needed to put some matter behind us and move on. In the case of an apology for slavery, it is clearly not the case that the apology all by itself accomplishes much of anything. And in this case, it is not even a desirable goal to make anyone feel better. We need, on the contrary, as I was saying, to have our spirits remain burdened, not to find a way to feel better. In that sense the idea that anyone should just get over slavery is out of bounds. Not only is it offensive for a white legislator to suggest that black folks should get over slavery. It is offensive to suggest that white people should get over it. Of course he didn’t think to actually say that, but maybe that’s what he meant, that he wanted white people to be over with slavery, not to have to deal with it.
Of course few people would suggest that an apology for slavery all by itself really solves anything. But there is this more subtle thing that can happen. We talk easily about the goal of reconciliation. I’ve been using that word freely this morning. It’s a fine word, and apology seems to fit nicely within that framework. It moves us toward reconciliation. But we need to beware of using the term reconciliation casually. Reconciliation may be a goal only in the long term. In the short term there are issues to be addressed before reconciliation can even be thought of. Again, this may not always be true in our personal lives, though it is often true that in order for apologies to be effective and for reconciliation to take place, we first need to work through some issues and moving too quickly toward reconciliation may short circuit that necessary process. In the case of slavery and the whole history of racial oppression, there is a lot of working through to be done before reconciliation is even remotely a possibility. An apology that imagines some feel-good approach to reconciliation leads us in the wrong direction. When Jesus invites to “go and be reconciled” it is no small thing he is asking. It is probably just as well that in Richmond recently the process of apologizing did not go smoothly.
If, on the other hand, an apology for slavery and for the rest of our history including the part that is ongoing, if an apology can serve to increase our awareness of the ways our lives and our worship services are burdened by our unfinished business, if it is an acknowledgement of past and present realities without reservations and qualifications and modifications and rationalizations and obfuscations, then it can be a good thing. If it serves to place us and keep us in an uncomfortable place, then it can be a good thing. And in that regard, the idea that an apology is a good idea as long as it doesn’t lead to considering the idea of reparations is, from where I stand, a wrong idea. We may not know what the idea of reparations looks like. We may not like some specific proposal we have heard of that goes under the name of reparations. We may not have an idea of what a constructive program of reparations would be. But there is repairing to be done, and if apology is conditioned on not having to talk about or think about the need for repair, it is probably worth a lot less than very little. If it serves to confront us with the need for repair and increase our consciousness of the need for repair and burden us with the need for repair, then it does have some value.
That place that genuine apology needs to lead us is a wilderness place—which is to say that it is uncomfortable, it is without clear paths to travel on, it is a bit scary, it makes us vulnerable. That image of being in the wilderness comes to mind maybe because Lent begins this Wednesday with Ash Wednesday and at the beginning of Lent it is common to recall Jesus in the wilderness and the story of his being tempted by the devil. For me this most often leads me to consider the ways in which I might think of myself as residing in the wilderness. This is one of them. This is most certainly one of them, a place where slavery, the legacy of slavery, and a history filled with discrimination, bigotry, and racism continues to haunt us and burden our spirits. I know myself to live in that wilderness, and I pray that I may be willing to dwell there. I’m frankly not so sure about the question of apology, whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, what role it has to play in all this. I do know that this wilderness I have tried to describe is a place where I belong. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 18, 2007