Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:1-9
Ordinarily on this Sunday in the middle of January, the Sunday closest to the holiday honoring Martin Luther King, my sermon—sometimes the whole service, but at least my sermon— would be related to Dr. King and the issues he was associated with. This year…will be no exception. I have Dr. King on my mind today. As I prepare to retire from being an active minister, I am aware that if it were not for Martin Luther King, Jr., I probably would never have become a minister…or a Christian for that matter. I won’t take the time to go into why I say that, and there is certainly a lot more to that story than Dr. King, but I have had that thought about King’s role in my life, not just this week but often over the years. And so when the King Holiday comes around every year, I can’t ignore it, I can’t ignore it in my preaching, not just because of Dr. King’s importance as a public figure but because of his importance to me personally.
Nor is it a matter of just this one Sunday of the year. There is a sentence in the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that I have never forgotten from the first time I encountered it. Stuart read it; it says: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people.” That phrase hit me in the gut when I first encountered it, and it has never left me. “The appalling silence of good people.” He was talking about the church, you recall. “The appalling silence of the church” is what he was talking about. Later, in the 1990’s, when I was introduced to the concept of white privilege, it was pointed out that one of the advantages white people carry around with them, whether they are conscious of it or not, merely by virtue of being white, is that they don’t have to even think about race or racism if they don’t want to. It is the questionable privilege of white folks that we can pretend the issue doesn’t exist, ignore it, think about something else, not say anything about it, no big deal. That concept reinforced what I had heard from Dr. King thirty years earlier. The silence of good people, the silence of good, white church people in the face of racial injustice is indeed nothing less than appalling, is always appalling not just in Birmingham in 1963 but everywhere and all the time.
It was with that in mind that the seventh sermon I preached at Sojourners was entitled “Racism”. It wasn’t that there was some particular event at the time that called for a sermon on racism and it wasn’t that I had something specific really that I felt I needed to say on that particular Sunday. It was less important to me what I should say than that I should say something. The subject of racism should not wait until sometime when it seemed appropriate, like the next King Holiday, which would have been almost a year away. When you put off talking about racism, it becomes all too easy to make a habit of putting it off and getting around to it only in a kind of ritualistic way on certain designated occasions, if at all. I didn’t want that to be my pattern or our pattern at Sojourners.
Of course silence in the face of any kind of injustice is a problem. In the past few days there have been news stories about the silence of the Pope during World War II in the face of Nazi death camps and the deportation of Italian Jews from right under his nose—the news stories being occasioned by the protests over the fact that the current Pope is proceeding with the process of sainthood for Pope Pius the silent. Dr. King himself acknowledged his sense of guilt over remaining silent for so long in the face of the Vietnam War. It is a sentiment that has been voiced by many thoughtful people regarding a wide range of issues, but it first hit me in a kind of existential way through what Dr. King had to say about white religious silence in the face of racial injustice.
Now, ten years later, ten years after that first sermon I remember giving on racism, I still feel the same way. Churches should not be silent about race, or about lots of other things as well, but today I’m thinking particularly about matters of racial justice. But, times have changed, or at least some things have happened in the meantime, and I also need to acknowledge some issues that I find I am having to struggle with a bit these days, these ten-years-later days.
I am being made to feel old these days—imagine that. It has been said to me and said in my presence that we are living in different times now. It’s a new day. We live in post racial times now. Barack Obama has been elected president, a man who somehow represents the ultimate inclusion of black people in American society and at the same time is someone who transcends race. A poll comes out (speaking of items in the news this week) that says more African Americans now believe things have improved over the last five years and more also now have hopeful attitudes about the future, attitudes that have no doubt been affected by the president’s election. But Obama or no Obama, it is said that young people today have different attitudes. Diversity is taken for granted. Inter-racial friendships are common; interracial dating and marriage no big deal. Race is just not as big a factor in people’s lives, racial issues not as big a concern. The age of Barack Obama is different from the age of Martin Luther King or Jesse Jackson.
The implication—I often feel this is the message I am supposed to get—the implication is that prejudice, discrimination, exclusion are no longer the issues; Bull Conner and George Wallace no longer represent the enemy; and civil rights laws, quotas, and affirmative action are no longer the order of the day. We celebrate Dr. King’s birthday—this is the sense I sometimes get—precisely because what he did, the movement he led, brought us to a better place, if not quite the Promised Land or an entirely post racial society then at least a very different and much better place than where we were before. And those of us of a certain age and era may have attitudes that are no longer quite in tune with the times. Racism is no longer such a pervasive and overwhelming reality. Even the use of the term may very well be seen, even by people of good will, as inappropriate, incendiary, or playing the race card. In this new area, it is best not to assume that racism is the issue of our society. In this new era, it may be time to move on. In a time when black Americans couldn’t sit at the front of the bus, at a seat in a lunch counter or at a desk in a so-called public school, couldn’t walk into a voting booth…at a time when Emmett Till, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, four black children in Sunday school, not to mention countless others less famous could be murdered with impunity, the silence of white Christians in the face of it all might very well be called appalling. In these later times silence about racism may be much less appalling, may be to a degree understandable, since what needs to be said is no longer so very clear. We’re in different times now. Other issues demand attention. Time to live in the 21st century, not the 1960’s. Those are messages I’m hearing from a number of quarters these days.
And…well…I am not completely closed to hearing messages such as the ones I have been reciting here for the last few minutes. There is some truth in all of that, I think, or at least in some of it, enough truth that I do wonder about how things have changed and how much the times we live in are different and whether there might be ways in which the way I think is more appropriate to some past time, whether I might in some ways be stuck in the past. Undeniably the second decade of the twenty first century is a different time from the 1960’s when I was coming to the conclusion that race was what a famous book called “the American dilemma”, that race and racism was such a pervasive and deep seated reality that it was unlike any other “social problem” we had to deal with, that in fact it wasn’t a social problem at all but something much deeper than that, and that the nation as a whole and the Christian church in particular could never be anything close to who they wanted to be and would be troubled at the core of their being until they had confronted and to some significant degree had dealt honestly with the racism that is so deeply ingrained in us and that none of us, even the best intentioned of us, escapes the effects of.
It is undeniably a different time now, but is it different in those basic ways, I ask myself? I thought of the verses from Ecclesiastes that Faye brought to our attention some weeks ago in quite a different context. I thought of them for this week because I do sometimes wonder if in the natural course of things, just as there is a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, I do wonder if fifty years ago it was a time for one thing but now it might be a time for something else, and what might we say that something and something else might be? How am I supposed to fill in those blanks? I do try to be open to such questions. I do try to listen to the voices that urge me to think we live in a different time, a post racial time. I try to hear whatever truth there might be in that idea.
But I can’t get there, not all the way there. And in the end I have to resist the direction that line of thought takes us. I know I have to resist it when I read that one phrase in Ecclesiastes that takes me back to the words of Martin Luther King. “A time to keep silent and a time to speak.” Have we come to the point where with regard to race in our society it is a time to keep silent rather than a time to speak? The times may have changed, but they haven’t changed that much. Race is still a profound and pervasive factor in the public life of our society, in the life of our churches, and in our inner lives. Racism has not gone away.
In this new age when racism takes different forms, often less blatant forms, than it did fifty years ago, new issues will need to be addressed, new ways of speaking found. We have changed our approach at Sojourners in the last few years. As recently as a few years ago and going back almost ten years we essentially had two areas of social justice work we said by consensus we would focus on: racial justice and issues related to our open and affirming stance—justice for sexual minorities. Now we have several handfuls of social justice groups covering a variety of issues. It was a change that was called for. But if that change means that in these new times we live in racial justice is no longer so important, if it means that it is now just some small fraction of things that concern us and a not very prominent one at that, if it means anything like that, then it was not a good change. If we do not recognize that racial justice is a part of peace work and poverty issues and eco-justice concerns and prison ministry, if we do not recognize that race has sometimes played a not very constructive role in the peace and green and gay movements, if we do not see it is a dimension of all our social justice work, we will have taken a wrong turn.
No doubt there come times when new approaches are called for, but with regard to race in our society and in our churches silence is still not an option. It is still not OK. It would in fact still be, to use Dr. King’s word, appalling. I don’t have the time or the desire to say very much more than that today. It is essentially what I wanted to say ten years ago. It is essentially what I want to reaffirm today.
Along with just one more thing. This is not just a social justice issue. It is a spiritual issue, and by that I do not mean simply that it’s appropriate for us to talk about it in church. I mean that in my most personal and intimate conversations with God, race, racial justice, racism it’s all part of it. It is part of what I bring to God. It’s part of what I talk to God about. In that sense too, for me, silence is not an option. It is not just a matter of what we talk about out loud, what we may speak out about and let our voices be heard about. It also, for me, a question of whether it is part of my speaking with God. In that sense, too, I believe, not being silent about matters of race is very much part of what it means to be the people of God.
Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 17, 2010