Scripture: Luke 9:57-62
Let me get right in to where I’m coming from this morning. It’s Columbus Day weekend; tomorrow is the day most people refer to as Columbus Day, and many people observe it simply and innocently enough by taking advantage of the three day weekend in some way or another, just enjoying the extra holiday thrown into the fall season.
It’s been quite awhile, I’m afraid, since I’ve been able to acknowledge Columbus Day in such a simple or innocent manner, however. In fact, as I think about it, there aren’t too many holidays that I seem to be able to celebrate innocently these days, not if I give them a moment’s thought. The patriotism of a Fourth of July is not a straightforward matter for me. I can’t have a Memorial Day or a Veteran’s Day pass without wrestling with issues of war and peace. I won’t go through the whole list of holidays, but you get the idea. I don’t seem to be able to observe holidays of any kind in an uncomplicated manner these days, unless I just resolve to “sleep in” in a metaphorical as well as actual way, just be sort of intentionally oblivious and take a vacation from thinking much at all, which I admit is always an option and maybe not even such a bad option…once in a while.
In any case, some of you may have already anticipated the complications I’m going to raise about Columbus Day. It was quite a few years ago when I was first made aware that not everyone celebrated Columbus Day, “celebrated” being the key word here. Some people, I found out, didn’t celebrate the arrival of Columbus in the western hemisphere; they mourned it. It was pointed out to me that from the perspective of the native peoples of the Americas Columbus didn’t “discover” the New World, since the people who already lived here were well aware of their own existence and didn’t need anyone to “discover” them or the land they had been living on for thousands of years. It was pointed out to me that from the perspective of the native peoples what Columbus did was less like a discovery and more like an invasion. It was pointed out to me that from the perspective of native peoples what Columbus brought with him was not only Western civilization and Christianity but devastating disease and the practice of slavery, not only the notion of progress but the notion of European racial superiority, that he not only initiated a process of exploration and mass migration and settlement and nation building but a process in which native peoples lost their lives, their land, and their culture. From the perspective of native peoples the history that Columbus initiated was a history filled with defeat and sadness for the native not with proud accomplishments and serial successes on the part of the newcomers.
It was no surprise to me that when the 50th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage came around in 1992 that there were some people who no longer even appreciated the name Columbus Day and proposed instead that we celebrate the day as Indigenous Peoples Day as a way of recognizing the existence of indigenous people in the Americas at the time of Columbus, their continuing, if much altered, existence today, as a way of recognizing that the story of the Americas includes many stories, not just the story of the Europeans and the “history” they made, and as a way of recognizing that even that history has not been told honestly. I haven’t made a study of it; I don’t know how widely the term has come into use or how many people actually think of the day as Indigenous Peoples Day. But I do know that the United Church of Christ on the calendar it prints lists October 12 as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Some people, I’m sure, will see this as evidence of just how far out of touch the UCC is with mainstream American culture and/or as evidence of some kind of political correctness gone to the extreme. Personally, I’m grateful for it. It serves as a reminder to me and some other of my UCC sisters and brothers not to ignore the complications, not to sleep in and sleep through Columbus Day, as it were.
But why do I bother to bring this up in a worship service? I don’t suppose I really need to justify or explain myself for talking about something that could certainly be considered a social justice concern in a congregation where we say we are committed to social justice and where we not only say we are committed to social justice but where we understand Christianity in a way that naturally includes social justice concerns. If faith is about God’s dreams and our dreams for the world, and is not about just some narrowly defined religious “stuff”, then surely we don’t need to explain why we would talk about the ways we live together and the ways we make a mess of our living together. But let me be more specific about the way in which this matter is touching my somewhat Christian soul.
I was talking two weeks ago about the text at the beginning of Luke’s gospel where Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah and then took the words of Isaiah and used them to describe the broad and basic themes of his own ministry, then just beginning: to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed. I was holding that passage up as one of those that gives us a certain vantage point through which to understand and interpret all of scripture and indeed that gives me a way of looking at my own faith and what it is all about, or that I might pray it would be all about. All of the phrases are pertinent of course—good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind—but I chose to focus on “release to the captives”, and I said that if that phrase was to apply to our own faith as well as to the ministry of Jesus, that it would be important for us to recognize ourselves not just as agents of liberation, which by the grace of God we might sometimes in some small way be, but also as people who are ourselves in need of release. We are all, in some way or another, among the captives, and I said that in October I would talk more specifically about some ways that I felt myself to be a captive in need of release.
Well, it’s October…and although you most likely have not been making the connection on your own, you’ve been listening to me talk this morning about one way in which I feel myself to be in need of release. I feel burdened by the history of European interaction with American Indians and with the issues brought to mind by Columbus Day. Saying that, I should say right away what I do not mean to say. I do not mean to say that the history is any less complicated in one direction than other. If the story to be told is not the simplistic one of brave voyagers bringing enlightened religion and democratic ideals and technological advance and material prosperity to a sparsely populated and available New World, neither is the story to be told merely one of murder, mayhem, and conquest. The European incursion into the Americas is not a story of pure evil any more than it is a story of pure righteousness, and in saying I am burdened by that history, I do not mean to say or in any way to imply any such thing. Nor do I mean to say that I am, still less that all people of European descent ought to be, awash in guilt over the way Indians have been treated and mistreated. I do not feel burdened quite in that way, and I do not recommend guilt as a constructive starting point for launching a different kind of future.
Nevertheless, there is sin in that history, and although it is not a matter of my feeling personally responsible for it, it does cling closely. When I began thinking about what scripture to draw on in helping try to say what I wanted to say this morning, that verse from Hebrews came to my mind. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is before us…”
The sin that clings so closely. It seemed like an apt phrase, so much so that I decided to use it for my title. And it applies also, of course, to that different but related history I wrote about at greater length in the newsletter that has to do with the 50th anniversary of the integration of the Charlottesville public schools. There is a local story to be told in that regard about massive resistance and the closing of public schools and frankly the role of churches in that episode of our history. And as I said in the newsletter it is “our” history whether we lived here at the time or whether we were alive at the time. It is our history and it continues to haunt us…and burden us.
Beyond that, it stands for the larger history of race and racism that we are part of in this country, a history that is in no way uncomplicated but that is filled with the sins of bigotry, of prejudice, of discrimination, of violence, of deeply hurtful racial attitudes and of policies and practices that get built in to the ways we live and that sometimes we get so accustomed to we scarcely notice. All of that too is sin that clings so closely, partly because we have not completely outlived that history—we are still in the process of living it—and partly because this is an illustration of the saying (I’m not sure where it came from)…the saying that the past is not dead, in fact the past is not even past. It lives not just in questions of social policy but in our psyches and in our blood, in what we choose to remember and to honor and in the very land we walk on. The stories of how Europeans have interacted with African Americans and with Native Americans, and of course those stories are deeply intertwined and interwoven, are in no way uncomplicated, but they are filled with sin, and it is sin which clings so very closely.
I consider myself a captive to those stories and in need of release, but of course it’s not going to happen, not any time in this life, not completely. Not unless we think we can be released from the stories by simply ignoring them, which I don’t believe to be true. And so wondering where that leaves me, where it leaves us, I also remembered the scripture which we did hear earlier. It’s one of passages containing sayings of Jesus that may make you scratch your head a bit. I either don’t immediately understand what he’s trying to say, or I don’t like what he seems to say. Jesus says, “Follow me.” A man responds saying, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father,” to which Jesus replies, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Not exactly a very pastoral thing to say on the part of the rabbi. Your father dies and you’re not allowed to see to his burial? You’re not allowed any time for grief? You’re supposed to just sort of brush aside the personal grief and go join up for the kingdom of God? Doesn’t make a lot of sense. We expect Jesus to be more compassionate than that.
So maybe it’s not all about literally the death of parents and the process of grief. And maybe it’s not literally about leaving the dead to bury their own dead, which in a literal sense makes no sense at all. Maybe instead it’s about not allowing the dead to bury the living. Maybe it’s saying—and I think this is probably why this scripture came to mind—maybe it’s saying that the only way to gain release from the oppressiveness of the histories I’ve been talking about, the only way to stop being captive to those histories is to begin to make a different history, to turn if you will toward the kingdom of God. Maybe that’s what it means in scripture where Jesus says to leave the dead to bury the dead and to proclaim the reign of God.
But we do that of course only inch by inch. We do it painstakingly. The mosaic of God’s reign is created one small tile at a time, which is why I say we will never gain total release from the oppression of our histories. And part of that long slow process of gaining release is acknowledging the reality and the oppressiveness of the past, acknowledging our need for release from the stories that burden us. It is why none of us really are “saved” in the sense of a once and for all event. It is why salvation is not something that has to do with believing some certain thing about Jesus or a moment when you let Jesus into your life. It has to with the process of seeking release for the captive, the process of becoming free from the weight of a past filled with brokenness (sin) and seeking a different future. Salvation is a process. Salvation is a journey. May God bless us as we continue that journey. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 11, 2009