Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, "We Honor the Gifts," 2 Corinthians 5:11-21

 Sermon 6/13/21

2 Corinthians 5:11-21

We Honor the Gifts

For the past year, I’ve been using a devotional book called Renew My Heart: Daily Wisdom from the Writings of John Wesley. I consider myself a bit of a John Wesley nerd, but I’m learning a lot about the nuances of Wesley’s prolific writing. I’m currently in a section that is reading through his sermon called “The More Excellent Way,” which I’m mostly finding challenging and inspiring. But I got frustrated with one particular section, because Wesley describes those who fail to embrace the “more excellent way” of discipleship as a “lower order of Christians.” And while he says that they are not “in the high road to hell” for failing to consistently choose the more excellent way, he does say that they will “not have so high a place in heaven” and they will have “fewer stars in their crown of glory” than if they’d chosen better. (1) Apparently, in Wesley’s mind, there will still be a hierarchy in heaven. That sounds kind of terrible, doesn’t it? Even in God’s eternal home, to be worried about who has the best place? Of course, thinking of hierarchies in heaven isn’t entirely an unknown concept even in the scripture. Remember when James and John want to make sure they get the best places - at Jesus’s side - in eternity? I can’t imagine the “confidence” needed to assume I’d get to be closest to Jesus. I’m thankful, though, that hierarchies and Jesus don’t seem to mesh well. Whenever we’re sure we’ve figured out who is best and who is worst, who is first and who is last, who should be exalted and glorified and who should be humbled and brought low, who should be served by others and who should be serving others, Jesus encourages us to flip our assumptions upside down. And he does, as always, by example. People - like we do too sometimes - wanted Jesus to be a king, a mighty ruler - but Jesus said he came to serve. People wanted Jesus to use his power and authority to fix everything - but Jesus showed instead the power of vulnerability, of pouring one’s self out for others. 

And yet, even if we agree that we don’t want hierarchies in heaven, it is really hard not to have our society built around hierarchies. Everyone in their place. Maybe we’re content with not being the best, the top of the heap, but I think we’re more attached than we want to admit to making sure that there’s at least someone we’re better than. I think it’s hard for us to let go of the idea that the only way we can be good enough - for our own sense of self, to measure up for others, to be “successful,” to be good enough for God’s love - is by being better than someone else. We’re always trying to get ahead. But we forget to ask: Get ahead of what? Get ahead of whom? What happens to those we pass by? At what cost do we get ahead? We’re climbing the ladder, and it is exhausting, and harmful, and all for the ultimate quest of being good enough, even though God tells us repeatedly that God doesn’t measure the same way we do. 

That’s our theme today. God chooses with different criteria than we do. God values differently than the world does. God has a point of view that is more than our limited human view. Too often, we try to fix this discrepancy - the difference between God’s point of view and ours - by putting God in a box and trying to make God perceive things and situations and people the way we perceive them. But our perspective is limited. Instead, the invitation to Christian discipleship is about learning to share God’s expansive, inclusive perspective, rather than limiting God to our narrow point of view. 

That’s the message of our epistle reading from 2 Corinthians. Paul is writing to the church at Corinth again. His relationship with them has been both committed and contentious. The young church at Corinth has had a lot of conflicts, a lot of people vying for authority in their congregation, and they’ve laid a lot of accusations at Paul’s feet, unhappy with some of his leadership, questioning his motives. In response, Paul writes both to explain himself and his actions and to call the Corinthians to accountability for their actions, trying to communicate with them how transformative following Jesus has been for Paul and how transformative it could be for the Corinthians if they gave themselves more completely to discipleship. In our text for today, Paul is speaking on the theme of reconciliation. Because of the love of Christ, Paul says, because of the love of Christ, exhibited in Christ’s death, a pouring out of self in which we are all called to participate, we are meant to regard each other no longer with a human point of view, but instead with God’s point of view. If we’re really in Christ, we’re new creations. Everything old has passed away, everything has become new. And as new creations, we’re ambassadors for Christ, reconciled to God in spite of our sins, so that we might practice God’s ways of justice and righteousness.

So, how can we let go of our limited human point of view, and realize that God uses a different perspective, different criteria, different values than the ones we see lifted up in so many places, than the ones we fall back on ourselves? I’ve been thinking about how hierarchies go hand in hand with categories and categorizing. If you’ve been through the conference’s Imagine No Racism training, you probably learned a lot about implicit bias. Implicit bias is the unconscious way our brains group things together in our heads, so that we can think and process and react quickly. Implicit bias is usually hidden to us - we’re not aware, moment to moment, of the associations our brains make. It is automatic. And we can’t really function without putting things into categories. We need to, to process the enormous amounts of information that come at us every day. 

You can see implicit bias at work by doing a simple test of something called the Stroop Effect, which demonstrates how our reaction times can be slowed when our brains are confronted with information that doesn’t belong together in our minds. You can find this test online if you want to try it yourself. In a Stroop test, you see first a column of block letters of all different colors, spelling out different colors. So you see some red block letters that spell RED, or the word BLUE made up of blue letters. Our brains can process that very quickly. It makes sense to us. But it doesn’t take much to confuse our minds. The next column also shows colors spelled out, but now the word and color don’t match. So you might see the word RED but the letters are colored white. Or the word BLUE is spelled out, but filled in with green coloring. If you ask people to say aloud what color these words are, not what the word spells, most people hesitate. We can do it, we can see the letters that spell RED but are colored white and eventually say WHITE, but we can’t do it as quickly as we can when the colors and words match. Our brain has associated the color and the word and we just can’t undo that association as quickly as we can do it when they’re paired together. This is implicit bias at work. We need it for our brains to function as quickly as they do. 

The trouble with our rapid categorizing comes when our brains slap together value-laden messages for us along with our categories. In Implicit Bias tests developed by social psychologists at Harvard, results of thousands of participants over time show that many people who have no explicit bias - that is, they express that they do not have feelings of racial bias - still have implicit bias. When shown images of black faces and white faces, for example, test participants more quickly and more consistently are able to match white faces and positive words like good and beautiful. Conversely, participants are speedier at matching black faces and negative words like bad, ugly, or weapon. These aren’t always explicit feelings. They don’t represent what we think we believe. But they represent how our brain has learned to group things together. Our brain does that because of messages we receive from culture, from news, from experiences, from stereotypes - all of these things that gel together in our brains. And these biases can sometimes make a difference in how we behave, even when we don’t realize why we’re behaving that way. It can make us more likely to feel afraid when we meet someone on the street whose skin color is different than ours. It can make us more likely to give a second chance to someone whose skin color our mind has paired with the idea of “good.” It can make us more likely or less likely to see someone as professional and competent at our work, without even realizing why. It can make us more likely to interrupt people if our brain has sent us the message that their words are less important than our own. It can make a police officer quicker to respond with violence rather than reconciliation when encountering black and brown faces.   

The good news is that we can have an impact on our implicit bias. We’re not just stuck with it. And we don’t just get to say we can’t help ourselves, either! We can. It turns out that the more we come into contact with people that “don’t fit” the associations that our brains tell us go together, the less power those associations have for us over time. Our implicit biases change when we are exposed to stereotype-busting images and experiences. And we don’t have to be passive in hoping we encounter things that fly in the face of the subtle messages we get elsewhere. We can mean to expose ourselves to other perspectives. We can be intentional. We can pay attention and be purposeful about not discounting voices and experiences and lessons that will help us expand our way of thinking. We can be intentional about seeking out voices and perspectives - in the books we read, in films and TV that we watch, in the relationships we build - that are different from our own, that go against what our brain is telling us to group together. 

This past year, my dear friend and roommate Hunter has been wrestling with their gender identity, and they’ve begun using they/them pronouns. After growing up in a conservative, evangelical church tradition in Oklahoma, being in the progressive setting of Drew Theological School has been both hard and liberating. I’ve found myself struggling sometimes - it’s hard to learn to see outside of the gender binary of male and female. My mind has had lots of  years of seeing gender in a certain way. I stumble with my language, sometimes using the wrong pronouns. And I’m not always good at speaking up when I hear others using the wrong pronouns. But I know my struggle to adapt is nothing compared with Hunter’s own struggle to be fully themselves. And I know that the more I practice, the more I learn, the more I commit to supporting and advocating, the more I will be able to retrain my brain to perceive in a new way. I like to think that this retraining of my brain is learning to see Hunter from God’s point of view instead of my own, limited human point of view. 

God doesn’t have implicit bias, unless in this case we’re talking about a bias of love. God’s way of looking is to encounter us and immediately encounter us in our fullness, our whole person, and then categorize us as beloved, as belonging to God, as God’s children, as of sacred worth. No hierarchy necessary, no ranking us best to worst. Jesus flips our categories inside out and our hierarchies upside down. We can resist, stubbornly insisting on finding our place in the world by figuring out what rung of the ladder we’re on and who we need to move out of the way to get to the next one. We can keep trying to put ourselves and each other and God into boxes that are uncomfortable, too small, and suffocating the life right out of us. Or we can embrace the good news that God wants to share with us a different point of view. What will we do? 

We honor the gifts that each treasure holds, make room for the light of the collective soul. Hierarchy dissolves. (2) Categories melt away. Our being in Christ remains. New creations. Thanks be to God. Amen. 

1. Russie, Alice, compiler. Renew My Heart: Daily Wisdom from the Writings of John Wesley, Barbour Publishing Inc., 2002, p. 165.

2. These words are drawn from the theme song for the day, "We Will Walk" by Elisa Sciscioli Keeler.

Sermon for Pentecost Sunday, Acts 2:1-24, 37-42

Sermon 5/31/20

Acts 2:1-24, 37-42

Pentecost

Today, we celebrate Pentecost, a day when we remember the gift of the Holy Spirit, promised by Jesus to the disciple, sent by God after Jesus’ ascension as comforter, advocate, empowering agent that enables the disciples to stop hiding and start doing the work of Jesus in the world. The word for Spirit in both Hebrew and Greek also means both Wind and Breath - Spirit, Wind, and Breath, all the same word. And so Pentecost is a day when we think of those images and more: the violent rushing wind that produces tongues of fire; God’s breath filling the disciples, giving Peter a voice to preach; the Spirit being poured out on all who gather. 

And we wonder: What is this Holy Spirit thing, exactly? What does it mean for us, what does the Spirit do for us? Sure, God is always larger than our understanding, but I think we can relate to God as creator and parent and ruler, and we can relate to Jesus walking by our side, teaching and healing. But even if Jesus calls the Holy Spirit a Comforter, the Spirit has always felt much more nebulous to me. A Comforter is the delightfully fluffy blanket I can get under to snuggle in my bed on a cold night. The Spirit? The Spirit is weird, elusive, slippery, hard to grasp, even though sometimes I catch glimpses. 

So I’ve been thinking about some of the imagery we use for the Spirit this week. On Pentecost, we celebrate God’s Holy Wind. The wind can cause a turbulent, stormy sea for a ship, putting people in danger. But a sailboat without any wind is powerless. The wind across sand dunes shapes beautiful works of art out of the terrain, and wind also churns sandstorms that congest and blind as sand whips through the air. We’ve learned to use windmills and wind turbines to harness the wind and convert the energy to power our world. At my birthday lunch this year, where I gathered with my mom and brother at a park so we could keep socially distanced, we were delighted when the forecasted rain didn’t come - but then realized the wind was our bigger challenge. My mom’s whole lunch plate got turned upside down, and the balloons she brought had to be tied to a tree, and my brother Tim was chasing my birthday napkins all through the park. The wind, though, was the only thing making some of my outdoor visits this week tolerable in the extreme heat - the wind was a relief, a gift. What kind of wind is God’s Holy Spirit in our lives, in our world? 

This week in my video devotion, I sang for you the song we just shared a few minutes ago: Spirit, Spirit of Gentleness, by James K. Manley. It’s a beautiful piece, and I told you that I especially loved the refrain: “Spirit, Spirit of Gentleness, blow through the wilderness calling and free; Spirit, Spirit of restlessness, stir me from placidness, Wind, Wind on the sea.” It reminds me that the Holy Spirit is not just one thing. Sometimes it is like the gentle wind, and sometimes the spirit is restless, stirring us up when we’d rather be complacent. What kind of spirit do we need moving through our lives, our world, right now? I think usually I’m longing for the gentle spirit, but what I need is the spirit that won’t let me be, the spirit that says my placidness is really complacency, apathy, inaction, and God is calling me to move with the Spirit. 

And I think about breath, God’s Holy Breath. The Spirit as Breath is an intimate image: God wants to give us the gift of God’s own breath! That’s amazing, humbling, overwhelming! God’s breath is in you. God’s breath is what created you, God’s breath is what resurrects you, God’s breath is what gives you life in this world and enables you to embody the work of Jesus, to be the hands and feet of Christ. The Creator of the Universe has given us God’s own breath. How are we breathing, right now? And I cannot think of God’s Holy Breath filling me up without thinking about George Floyd, a black man who we watched die at the hands of a white police officer, who knelt on Floyd’s neck while Floyd gasped for air, for life, for breath. “I can’t breathe.” Lord, have mercy on us. We are so broken by the sin of racism. What does it mean to celebrate Pentecost, to be offered the Holy Breath of God, when we have to reckon with the atrocity of snuffing out the breath, the life, the fire, the Spirit of God in God’s black and brown-skinned children? Baptist Pastor and Harvard University Chaplain Cody J. Sanders writes, “We are asphyxiating the Body of Christ by the violence and violation that has become our way of life” a way that we’ve accepted, he says, as an everyday reality of our world. “We expect,” he continues, “– even as we dread – news of another murder of a George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Ahmaud Arbery to come across our screens any day. And among the myriad feelings we have when it happens, surprise isn’t one of them. ‘We can’t breathe.’ We’re suffocating in our systemic legacy of white supremacy, and we’re killing our black siblings in the process.” (1) 

What kind of Pentecost do we need today, church? What does the Spirit at work in the world right now, right here, look like? In the midst of a pandemic, one more thing that’s become a source of division, in the midst of our sinfulness, in the midst of pain and suffering and such brokenness, how does Pentecost come to us? What does it mean for us? 

***

Normally when we gather for Bible Study, even our online version, I ask for someone else to read the scripture. I already do a lot of talking in the study - it’s nice to hear some other voices! But this week, when we read through Acts 2, I told the group I would read the first part of the text. Why? Well, because Acts 2 near the beginning of our reading includes a long list of place names that sometimes don’t roll off the tongue so easily. I’ve read this text in worship enough years as a pastor that I can barrel through, even when I’m not sure, but sometimes for readers, all these place names stop folks in their tracks. When Luke, author of the Book of Acts, is describing the events of Pentecost, he tells us that the disciples are gathered together in one place. Pentecost was - is - an important festival and part of the Jewish faith. Shavuot - the Feast of Weeks - is a harvest festival, and also a remembrance of the receiving of the Torah - the law by the Israelites at Mt. Sinai. When the Holy Spirit arrives, it shows up where the disciples are with a sound like the rush of a violent wind. What looks like flames rest over each disciple, and they begin speaking in other languages, enabled by the Spirit. This is important, because people from all over lived in Jerusalem or had come to celebrate the holy day. And everyone, no matter where they’re from, can understand the disciples. Now, Luke could have just stopped at that - telling us that there were Jews from every nation gathered together, and they could all understand. We’d get the point, right? But Luke insists on going into detail. And that’s where the list of places comes in. Who is gathered? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Judeans, Cappadocians, Pontians, Asians, Phrygians, Pamphylians, Egyptians, Libryans, Cyrenians, Romans, Cretans, and Arabs. Wow! All of them are hearing about God’s deeds of power in their own language. 

Why does Luke need to list out everyone of these places? Why not just leave it at “people from every nation” and save us from the tongue twister? I don’t know Luke’s heart, of course, but here’s what I think. Luke wants us to know that the message Peter shares about Jesus Christ and the gift God shares of the Holy Spirit is for everyone. But not just everyone as a generic, catch all term. Luke lists out all these people to make it clear: Every. One. Luke gets very specific. Luke makes it clear that this message is for each one of the everyone. Sometimes, the broadness of saying “everyone” glosses over the wonderful unique particularness of each person included in that everyone. The generic “everyone” allows us to gloss over the particulars we'd really rather not include. It’s like when we know that we’re supposed to “love everyone” and “love our neighbors” but it gets harder when Jesus starts telling us exactly who he means by everyone and who he means by neighbors and it turns out when it gets specific it also gets really hard. Who is there on Pentecost? Each and every one. Theologian Willie Jennings says that Pentecost prods us toward a Spirit that is “boundary-crossing and border transgressing.” The Spirit prompts the disciples to “go to those to whom they would in fact strongly prefer never to share space, or a meal, and definitely not life together.” (2) And when they do, when the wind and breath and fire of the Holy Spirit takes hold of them, it changes the world. 

It fits, then, that Peter uses words from the prophet Joel as the text for his Pentecost Sermon. Peter shares Joel’s vision: “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.” But for Joel, for Peter, for God, all flesh is not some generic that allows us instead to leave people out. Joel’s words get specific about just what all means: sons and daughters. Young and old. Even slaves. Even those who had no rights, no status, no position, no power. All of these, each of these - they have dreams and visions and truth to share. Peter’s sermon preached to each one of these in the crowd is effective. Thousands respond to a message about Jesus Christ, who cannot be held by the power of death. They respond with repentance. They respond with baptism. They respond by committing to life together - sharing in learning, prayer, and food and fellowship. And together, each one as a part of the one body of Christ - full of life and breath and Spirit - they change the world. 

How will we respond? If we take our cue from Acts 2, we find some direction in our own baptismal vows. We answer these questions when we’re baptized, confirmed, when we renew our baptismal covenant, when we join the church: "Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sin?" and "Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?" Can we say yes with our whole hearts? Can we say yes not just with words, but with deeds? Sometimes, friends, I long for the Spirit to be at work in my life - but I have to admit I’d rather it just ruffle my feathers like a gentle breeze, the soft breath of God, moving on the air. And sometimes, God’s Spirit might fill us just like that. But most days, I know that what I need is a wind so strong that it lifts me from my complacency, lifts me from my sin, lifts me from my apathy. I need to open my heart to the Spirit that sets my heart ablaze with a commitment to seeking God’s justice, to seeing each one, to working to ensure that the breath of God is not snuffed out in violence and hatred, to preaching the good news of Jesus’ boundary-crossing love. 

“Spirit, Spirit of restlessness, stir me from placidness.” Come, Spirit, come. Amen. 

 

(1) Sanders, Cody J. , “‘We can’t breathe’: an apt Pentecost prayer for white Christians,” Baptist News Global, Accessed on 5/30/2020.

https://baptistnews.com/article/we-cant-breathe-an-apt-pentecost-prayer-for-white-christians/#.XtJghIjYqEs.

(2) As quoted by Cody J. Sanders.

Sermon, "Racism and People of Faith: Log Removal," Matthew 7:1-5

Sermon 9/2/18

Matthew 7:1-5

Racism and People of Faith: Log Removal

Our scripture lesson today is a short but powerful excerpt from Jesus’ longest chunk of teaching. It comes from the gospel of Matthew in what we call the Sermon the Mount. For three chapters in Matthew, Jesus teaches the disciples and the crowds who have gathered to hear him, teaching from a spot on the side of a mountain. He covers a huge range of topics, starting with the Beatitudes, the Blessings, and covering prayer, money, worry, anger, adultery, relationships with our enemies, and more. In the midst of this teaching, we find our text for today. Jesus says, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. The measure we use to judge others is the measure that is used to judge us. Why,” Jesus asks, “can you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but not the log in your own eye? Why do you tell them you’re going to help them fix themselves, when you yourself have a log in your own eye? You hypocrite!” he says. “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” The image is vivid and compelling. Does it persuade us?

In my experience, we - and I most certainly am including myself here - we have a remarkable knack for reading the scriptures and seeing so clearly exactly how they apply - to someone else’s life. We hear Jesus speaking and know exactly what our neighbor should do, what the person we’re fighting with should do, what our foes and enemies should do, if only they would listen to Jesus. And then I read this passage, I know Jesus is onto us. Perhaps, even now, we may be saying to ourselves that we know a lot of people who are trying to take a speck out of our eyes, all the while not seeing that they have a log in their own eye. But I want us to try to stop in our tracks right there. Jesus has invited us in this text to self-reflection, self-examination. He has invited us to see that we are not up to the task of judging others, that it is not our task to manage, and that rather if we think that we sincerely, lovingly want to help someone else see things more clearly, we have to first check our own vision, check our own behavior, check our own hearts. Jesus is telling us, telling me, telling the listener, telling the reader, that we may have some logs in our own eyes to remove. The work of honest self-examination is hard. It can be painful to search our spirits and see where we don’t measure up to what we believe is God’s hope and vision for our lives. It can feel overwhelming, like we will never be enough. Or like change it too hard. Or like we’re really more comfortable with our ways than God’s ways when it comes right down to it. And so sometimes, we don’t try very hard to look deeply at what’s in our own souls. We walk around with logs in our eyes.

Today we’re wrapping up our sermon series on Racism and People of Faith. I can tell you this has been a hard series to preach, and I know that it has been sometimes challenging to hear. Today is a little harder still! We know that racism is wrong, and most people rightly reject racist actions and attitudes. But sometimes, our knowledge that racism is wrong and unacceptable prevents us from examining our own attitudes about race. Sometimes, we don’t want to dig very deeply into our feelings related to prejudice or stereotypes. Deep self-examination is hard work, and it certainly isn’t something we can “fix” or “complete” over the course of one sermon or a three-week series. But I hope that today we can give ourselves some courage to look in the mirror and see if there are some logs that need removing.

When I was in college, I was blessed to be part of a small team of young women who got to plan a national gathering of college and university women who wanted to learn more about the United Methodist Women organization. Over the course of a couple of years, we met periodically to plan an event we called, “Young Woman, Rise Up.” Once, during a weekend of meetings, the adult leaders called us back together as a group - we had been meeting in some small teams - to talk to us about something they had observed. They’d observed that the young white women in the room were consistently interrupting the adult women of color in the room. They encouraged us to be more mindful of our interactions, of our ways of speaking, of our habit of speaking over people. They asked us to reflect on patterns, and to consider whether or not and why we were interrupting. And they shared with us that racism - overt or subtle - had no place in our gatherings.

I was so angry. Why? Because I was not a racist, and these people were telling me that I was a racist, and making something out of nothing. I was self-aware enough to be sure that’d I’d interrupted some of the adult leaders - I had lots of brilliant ideas to share, after all. And yes, some of those leaders were black women. But I wasn’t interrupting because they were black. It just happened that way. My intention wasn’t to imply that I didn’t care about what they were saying. I was just excited to share my ideas. I was not a racist. And I resented, strongly, being chastised like a child in this way. When we went back into our small groups, I looked with suspicion, I will admit, at the black woman who was the leader in our group. Was it her? Did she complain about being interrupted? Was she thinking of me when she raised the concern?

Somewhere, though, in the midst of my seething, I tried to pull myself together and listen to my own impulses. I found that I did often want to step in and talk over some of the adult leaders, and it seemed to be women of color more often than not when I felt compelled to interrupt. Why did I do this? What made me, despite my desire, of course, not to act in racist ways, be more likely interrupt a speaker who was black than a speaker who was white? I wasn’t able to answer my own question just then. But I think asking the question was the first time in my life I began to do some true self-reflection when it came to racism. It was the first time I had looked in the mirror to see if there were any logs present. One of the hardest things we will do if we are committed to the work of eliminating racism is self-examination. It is so hard not to be defensive. I believe our intentions our good - we don’t want to judge others based on the color of their skin. But sometimes our good intentions actually stop us from getting to the destination we seek.

My mother had a turn of phrase that she picked up from my grandmother that has stuck with me. When I was little, I would sometimes say, “I didn’t mean to” after I did something wrong, or made a mistake, or did something that resulted in harm to someone or something. And Mom - or Grandma - would respond, “Well, mean not to.” When it comes to racism and prejudice and stereotypes, I think we “don’t mean to” engage in attitudes or actions that are hurtful. But I wonder if we can learn to “mean not to,” to actively check ourselves for logs that need removing.

As I told you during the first week of our sermon series, all the clergy and interested laity in our annual conference are currently attending small group meetings to address the themes of the Imagine No Racism initiative. At our most recent gathering, we watched a Ted-Talk video (http://jerrykang.net/2013/12/11/tedx-immaculate-perception/) about implicit bias. Implicit bias is the unconscious way our brains group things together in our heads, so that we can think and process and react quickly. Implicit bias is usually hidden to us - we’re not aware, moment to moment, of the associations our brains make. It is automatic. The speaker showed us implicit bias at work by doing a simple test of something called the Stroop Effect, which demonstrates how our reaction times can be slowed when our brains are confronted with information that doesn’t belong together in our minds. You see first a column of block letters of all different colors, spelling out different colors. So you see some red block letters that spell RED, or the word BLUE made up of blue letters. Our brains can process that very quickly. It makes sense to us. But it doesn’t take much to confuse our minds. The next column also shows colors spelled out, but now the word and color don’t match. So you might see the word RED but the letters are colored white. Or the word BLUE is spelled out, but filled in with green coloring. If you ask people to say aloud what color these words are, not what the word spells, most people hesitate. We can do it, we can see the letters that spell RED but are colored white and eventually say WHITE, but we can’t do it as quickly as we can when the colors and words match. Our brain has associated the color and the word and we just can’t undo that association as quickly as we can do it when they’re paired together. This is implicit bias at work. We need it for our brains to function as quickly as they do.

The trouble comes when our brains slap together value-laden messages for us without our conscious input. In Implicit Bias tests developed by social psychologists at Harvard, results of thousands of participants over time show that many people who have no explicit bias - that is, they express that they do not have feelings of racial bias - still have implicit bias. When shown images of black faces and white faces, for example, test participants more quickly and more consistently are able to match white faces and positive words like good and beautiful. Conversely, participants are speedier at matching black faces and negative words like bad, ugly, or weapon. These aren’t explicit feelings. They don’t represent what we think we believe. But they represent how our brain has learned to group things together. Our brain does that because of messages we receive from culture, from news, from experiences, from stereotypes - all of these things that gel together in our brains, but are hidden from our conscious thoughts. But, our hidden-even-to-ourselves biases can sometimes make a difference in how we behave, even when we don’t realize why we’re behaving that way. It can make us more likely to feel afraid when we meet someone on the street whose skin color is different than ours. It can make us more likely to give a second chance to someone whose skin color our mind has paired with the idea of “good.” It can make us more likely or less likely to see someone as professional and competent at our work, without even realizing why. It can make us more likely to interrupt people if our brain has sent us the message that their words are less important than our own.  

What can we do then? Can we have an impact on our implicit biases? The answer is good news: yes we can. It turns out that the more we come into contact with people that “don’t fit” the associations that our brains tell us go together, the less power those associations have for us over time. Our implicit biases change when we are exposed to stereotype-busting images and experiences. And we don’t have to be passive in hoping we encounter things that fly in the face of the subtle messages we get elsewhere. We can mean to expose ourselves to other perspectives. We can be intentional. We can pay attention and be purposeful about not discounting voices and experiences and lessons that will help us expand our way of thinking. We can be intentional about seeking out voices and perspectives that are different than our own, that go against what our brain is telling us to group together. Some simple things have a big impact: One of my niece’s favorite things is Doc McStuffins. Doc McStuffins is a Disney show about a young African-American girl who is the Doctor to all her toys and toy friends, just like her mom is a doctor. If Siggy could be Doc McStuffins, her life would be complete. She’s got a strong association in her 4-year old mind that young black girls are smart and competent and she wants to be just like them. My personal commitment this year has been related to the books I read. I try to read a certain number of books every year, and I’ve noticed that if I am not intentional, most of the books I was reading were by white male authors. White male authors aren’t bad! But there many other voices and perspectives that I’m hearing less frequently. I’m trying to correct that, intentionally looking to read more books authored by women and people of color. It’s not a solution, but it is a starting place, helping me to see others, and see myself more clearly.     

Jesus calls us to examine our own hearts. Let’s try to raise the veil on the hidden messages our brain receives all the time about race, and to acknowledge the explicit stereotypes and judgments we hold about people who are different from us, who are of a different race, or ethnicity, or nationality than we are. Jesus calls us, too, to be gentle with each other as we do this hard work. We’re learning. Transformation rarely comes from banging each other over the head in judgment.

I shared with you the first week that Bishop Webb asked those of us participating in Imagine No Racism to consider signing a covenant. Today, you have a copy in your bulletin. It reads, “Before God and with my family in Christ, I vow, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to oppose and work to eliminate the influence of racism from systems, institutions, relationships, and my own life.” If you are ready, I ask you to consider signing this covenant too. I’m not going to ask you to turn them in, or to raise your hands if you plan on signing. It’s a covenant to encourage your own self-reflection today. But I hope you will seriously consider signing the covenant, or figuring out what might be holding you back. I hope you will read it more than just today. And I hope that together, we will do just as we vow: Work to eliminate the influence of racism from systems, institutions, relationships, and our own lives. With the help of God, may it be so. Amen.

Sermon, "Racism and People of Faith: Crumbs," Matthew 15:21-28

Sermon 8/26/18

Matthew 15:21-28

Racism and People of Faith: Crumbs

Today we’re continuing the hard work of thinking and talking about racism and our life of faith. It isn’t easy, but you’re already doing something meaningful to address racism: you’re here today. I’m not kidding - unless you weren’t here last week, and didn’t know what we’d be talking about today, you’ve already made a choice that’s important: you’re here again, while we engage in this conversation about racism. Last week was hard! Talking about racism can be hard. But you came back! That has meaning, and I’m thankful that however you’re feeling, you were willing to come and be here again.

I had a clear sense of where I wanted to start last week. And I have some clear ideas about what I want to say next Sunday. But for this Sunday, I’ve been struggling. I imagined that I might share with you some statistics or comments about racism today. I was looking up facts to share with you - like how people of color are more likely to receive longer jail sentences than white people for the same crimes, or how people who have “black-sounding” names are less likely to get called for a job interview than applicants with “white-sounding” names, or how people of color regularly get charged higher interest rates on loans than white people of similar financial means. (See, I snuck some things in there anyway.) But, facts, as clear cut as they sometimes might seem, do not usually change hearts. Our experiences change hearts. Stories draw us in and change our hearts. And encounters with Jesus change hearts. As usual, if we stay with the scripture, we’ll find our place and our call to action and transformation.  

Our gospel lesson for today is a challenging one. We read that Jesus is traveling to Tyre and Sidon. We’re not given any reason for his journey, and it is out of the way from where he was - Gennesaret - and where he goes - back to the border of the Sea of Galilee. Tyre and Sidon were mostly populated by Gentiles - that is non-Jewish folks - and more specifically it was a region populated by people the Bible refers to as Canaanites. Back in Genesis, when God first tells Abraham that he will be a great nation, and that God has a new home for what will become the Israelite people, the land God is talking about is already full of people: people called the Canaanites. The meaning of the name Canaan is a little unclear, but some suggest “to be low, humble, or subjugated” as a possible meaning. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaan) When the Israelites eventually occupy the Promised Land, the Canaanites, who had already been living there, are defeated by Joshua and his army, and pushed out. They are never wiped out entirely though, and by Jesus’ time, Canaanites are a large and diverse religious ethnic group that live in close proximity to the Jewish people. Today, descendants of the Canaanites make up a large part of the population of Lebanon, neighbor of Israel.  Race isn’t present in the Bible in the same way we would speak about it today. The categories of race that are common to us today are fairly recent ways of thinking about populations of people. But ethnic division was certainly present in the scriptures, along with hatred and animosity based on ethnic differences. Canaanites and Jews had different religions, different practices, different traditions.

So, Jesus travels to a predominantly Canaanite region, far outside of his usual path of travel, for some unknown reason. A Canaanite woman immediately approaches him, saying, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” We don’t know how she knew to seek healing through Jesus - she must have heard something about him, his reputation. Jesus ignores her. Ouch. The text says, “He did not answer her at all.” But the disciples aren’t satisfied with that - they want Jesus to actively discourage her, sending her away, to stop her shouting. Now, at least, Jesus responds to her. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Has Jesus ever before turned anyone down for healing? Still, the woman persists. She kneels before Jesus and pleads, “Lord, help me.” Jesus answers her, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Some biblical scholars try to soften the blow, pointing out that the word here for “dogs” is diminutive: “little dogs.” But insinuating that someone is a dog was as insulting then as it is now. Jesus says his work, his mission is for Israelites. And still, still, this Canaanite woman who needs healing for her daughter is not deterred. She doesn’t disagree with Jesus. She just stretches what he’s said, turning his words back. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” “Woman, great is your faith!” Jesus responds. And her daughter is healed immediately, and Jesus, apparently accomplishing what he intended in the region, heads back to the Sea of Galilee.

So what is this text all about? It’s hard to read about Jesus in this exchange. It doesn’t mesh well with our picture of his kindness and compassion, his love, his constant work to draw marginalized people to the center. There are two primary schools of thought about this passage. Some scholars think that we get to witness Jesus learning. We get to see his idea of his mission expanding. The Canaanite woman teaches Jesus about the broadness of God’s mission. I’ve sometimes been drawn to this interpretation, even though it is uncomfortable, because I’m hesitant when we try to explain away uncomfortable parts of the scripture, and I think that we have to be careful not to let our interpretation of the text be motivated by our desire to find a way to get Jesus off the hook for the way he interacts with this woman.  

But there’s too much “set up” for me to rest with that interpretation either. This passage takes place in Matthew’s gospel right after Jesus spends time talking about how it is what comes from inside of us that makes us clean or unclean, what comes from our hearts that defiles, and not what comes from the outside in, external things. It seems strange, then, that he immediately goes from that conversation to a Canaanite region to insist that the woman’s exterior wrappings make her ineligible for God’s healing. Also, in both Matthew and Mark, the other gospel where this story appears, Jesus has already healed people who are not Jewish by the time we get to this story. He doesn’t hesitate in those other accounts or talk about “the lost sheep of Israel.” And again, he goes way out of his way to get to Tyre and Sidon for no reason that we know of other than this very interaction. The whole thing reads like a lesson, a demonstration that is set up for our benefit. Jesus is letting us see the breadth of God’s mission in action. The text may never settle smoothly for me or for you, but hopefully, we can focus on what it is Jesus might want us to learn.

Here’s what I come away with: First, Jesus is intentional about crossing some boundaries, going out of his way to put himself in a place where he can build a connection with someone from a different culture than his own. He doesn’t say that he wants to be in relationship with all kinds of people, and then sit and wait for these relationships to fall into his lap. He is intentional, and enters into spaces and places where he will be the one who is the stranger, where he will be the one who doesn’t fit in, where he will have made the effort to break down barriers. Second, Jesus is open to what he hears from this woman, and changes his actions based on what she says. Jesus, or at least Matthew, apparently wants us to see this demonstration of Jesus having a change of heart, and being impacted by the witness of this Canaanite woman. And third, this brave, bold woman refuses to let go of her place at the table, even if there are only crumbs left to be offered to her. She insists there is room for her in God’s plan, and she’s right. I love the way that she advocates so fiercely on behalf of her family.

I think that we can take these lessons from this across-ethnic-lines conversation and draw on them in our ongoing quest to confront racism. If there was one “learning” action I could get you to take away from this sermon series, it would be to convincing you to read Anxious to Talk about It: Helping White Christians Talk Faithfully about Racism by Carolyn B. Helsel. I found this short book to be extremely helpful, and a great starting place particularly if you’ve found thinking about and talking about racism to be challenging. In her book, Helsel talks about being responsible vs. response-able for racism. She says, “Often, persons sharing their frustrations about racism need you to simply hear them, not to take personal responsibility. You can be response-able, having the ability to respond with compassion and care … Alternatively, responding by trying to explain, rationalize, defend, or otherwise dismiss their experience limits your response-ability, and you are less likely to build a meaningful relationship with them.” (25) She continues, “Building relationships with people of color involves being able to respond to anger without becoming overwhelmed or afraid or defensive … Building relationships with people who have been discriminated against means believing that their experiences of discrimination are real, and that their feelings are what we would feel if we were in the same situation on a daily basis. … We are called to respond by being witnesses, accompanying our brothers and sisters, [our siblings] and supporting them in whatever ways we can.” (28, emphasis mine.)

What do we do to bear witness to racism in the world? I think Helsel’s suggestions sound remarkably like what Jesus does in our gospel text. She says that the spiritual practice of bearing witness involves two key components. First, she says, to bear witness, you have to be aware of the experiences of others, and to be aware of the experience of others, you have to have close enough relationships to witness the things others experience. If you are white, you cannot bear witness to racism unless you have real relationships with people of color. We have to intentionally cultivate relationships with people who have different experiences than we do, something we see Jesus do in the gospels all the time, including today’s text. Second, she says, to bear witness, you have to “bear” something. You have to bear someone’s experiences alongside them. That doesn’t mean, she writes, that “you know exactly what they felt like when things happen, but it means in that moment you are recognizing the pain these experiences caused them, and you are not dismissing their experiences. To bear witness means to sincerely bear what they are telling you, not to suggest how their experiences could be reinterpreted … You are honoring their sharing of these experiences with you.” (114)

We must cross boundaries on purpose, with intention. We are called to listen to and believe the experiences of racism that people are vulnerable enough to share with us. And we must be willing to learn and change based on what we hear, bearing witness. I am thankful for the witness of people who, experiencing the harmful pain of racism, boldly speak up to claim a place at the table, when we’re tempted to insist there is no room. In response, I hope those of us who are white listen, connect, open our hearts to transformation, and get ready to offer more than crumbs. Our God of abundance always has more than crumbs for us. May we offer a feast of love to others in God’s name. Amen.