Such a Time as This
Esther 4:1-17
Advent 2a
December 7, 2014
Advent 2a
December 7, 2014
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
I’m glad to be back
in Iowa and back in Decorah. We enjoyed
almost everything we did in Houston. We
certainly were glad to see Peter and his family again and especially to see
them in their new surroundings. We
enjoyed our visits to the aquarium, the zoo, and the museum of natural science that,
oddly, includes a really excellent display of artifacts from ancient
Egypt. It was there that our six year
old grandson Ian informed us that the Rosetta Stone, of which they have a
replica, was written in “ancient Egypt talk” and in hieroglyphics “to keep it
secret.”
The high point for
me as a tourist was a visit to the Johnson Space Center and especially seeing
the Saturn V, to date the most powerful launch vehicle ever used to put people
in space. I was awestruck by the sheer
audacity of the project and the courage of the early pioneers of space flight who
understood the systems, knew how precarious they were, and did it anyway. It took me back in time to when I was a
school boy, space was indeed a new frontier, and the future beckoned with
promises of deep space exploration and jetpacks for everyone. I’m still waiting for mine.
The Sixties were not
just about the space race. The shackles
of gravity were not the only chains being broken. Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, women,
gays and lesbians began, one after another, to make claims on the promises of
our nation’s founding myths. The stories
they told revealed that the conditions and expectations I took for granted were
no part of their experience. They were
no longer willing to have it so.
In my family, we
believed that racism only happened in the South. In the North, there might be racists, but
there was no racism. Therefore, African Americans had no excuse for
their poverty and lack of progress. The
myth of equal opportunity was unchallenged in our little world.
But I was clear,
even then, that others, especially members of racial minorities, did not see it
that way. Rochester, New York, where we
lived, exploded in the summer of 1964 when I was twelve. In mid-July in the Harlem neighborhood of New
York City a riot had broken out when a fifteen year old African American boy was
shot and killed by a white police officer.
In Rochester, the
next Friday, July 24, and through the weekend, as many as two thousand rioted
in the city’s 7th and 3rd wards. About a thousand people were arrested, 85% of
them black, most between 20 and 40, most of them employed with no prior
criminal records. My family was
mystified. Why were they rioting? It couldn’t be because of racism. After all, racism doesn’t exist in the North. But then there was rioting in North
Philadelphia the next month. Watts
burned the next summer. Two years after
Rochester, Detroit and Newark burned.[1]
Six major riots in six major cities and not a one of them in the South.
Every summer we
braced for more rioting, wondering which city would be next. In the meantime, every summer I made money for
college by caddying at the premier country club in Rochester, where there were
no black members and no black caddies. It
wasn’t a policy. That would have been
racist. And racism only existed in the
South.
“I am not a racist,”
I have told myself, anyone else who will listen, and even those who won’t. I try to treat everyone the same, regardless
of their race or ethnicity. Furthermore,
I reject notions that there is no systemic racism in the United States, even in
the North. I know that there is a great
deal more to do if we’re ever going to have a country that lives by its creed. But I always thought the problem lay
somewhere else and not with me.
Then I had what
could have seemed like a trivial experience, something that happens all the
time to all sorts of people. It was
about twenty years ago. We were living
in a “mixed” neighborhood in Syracuse, NY, a neighborhood where most families
struggled to make ends meet and to keep their sanity under that pressure. It was late in the evening and I had taken
our dog Molly out for her last pit stop of the day. It was a summer evening and people were out
on their front porches, because they couldn’t afford air conditioning, and,
besides, it doesn’t get that hot in Syracuse.
Above the usual
evening buzz of music and conversation, I heard a group of boys, teenagers by
the sound of the voices, at the top of the street coming toward me. I couldn’t see them clearly, because they
were between street lights. It sounded
like there were five or six of them. They
were talking loudly, as teenage boys do when they’re hanging together. Then they walked under a street lamp and I
could tell that they were black kids. Instantly
my stomach twisted into a knot. I could
feel my pulse quicken, and my breathing become rapid and shallow. They were still half a block away when I took
Molly back inside the house and locked the front door. As I said, it was a trivial event.
But I experienced a
kind of double vision. In the front of
my brain I was seeing a group of teenage boys enjoying being boisterous together,
talking loud and proud, and annoying their elders and neighbors in the
process. In the front of my brain they
were harmless; but not in the back of my brain.
In the back of my brain they were not a group of boys; they were a
gang. Their loud talk was
threatening. They were looking for
trouble. Fear gripped me while at the
same time I could see through the fear and know that it was not rational.
After the grip of fear
loosened, after my pulse and breathing settled back down, what I felt was shame. I knew in that moment that I was not who I
had thought I was. I knew in that moment
that even though I want no part of racism, racism has a part of me. I knew in that moment that it is possible to
have racism without racists. I knew in
that moment that I can think all the right things, say all the right things, do
all the right things, but the serpent that is our nation’s original sin can and
does still curl itself around my heart.
I enjoyed our stay
in Houston, even though I don’t like the city.
I am glad to be home, but I have dreaded this moment, ever since the
Monday before Thanksgiving when the grand jury decision was announced. Ferguson has forced into our consciousness the
fact that there is in our road not a just single traveler who has fallen among
thieves but a multitude of them: the dead, those whose lives are shortened from
the stress of the daily indignities of life as a non-white, and those who have
curtailed their own lives out of fear of having an encounter with the police, all
issues that in my place of privilege I do not have to face. I cannot simply cross the road to avoid
getting involved. I have a duty I may
not shirk.
It might be easier
if I had answers, but I don’t. You all
know me well enough to know that I don’t like not having answers. I have only some “hints and allegations,” as
Paul Simon put it, with or without the “angels in the architecture, spinning in
infinity.”[2]
We have been, both
in the church and out of it, like a family with an ugly secret. The family imagines that as long as no one
talks about it, they will be safe from their secret. But the truth is we don’t have secrets; the secrets
have us. From the very beginning, the
Methodist Church allowed racism to have its way. In Philadelphia in 1787, with the Methodist
Episcopal Church just three years old, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and others
established the African Methodist Episcopal Church when officials of St.
George’s Methodist removed praying African American members from their knees because
they were praying at the wrong time and in the wrong place. In New York City in 1796, at the John Street
Methodist Church, being denied communion until all white families had been
served led its African American members to separate and eventually to form the
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
We are long past due
for an extended conversation about race and its role in our denomination, our
congregation, our community and our nation.
I don’t know where that conversation will take us. But I do know that we are the ones who are
duty-bound to call for the conversation.
Why is that? Why can’t we just sit this out? Why can’t we let African Americans do the
heavy lifting?
We are duty-bound to
call for the conversation for the same reason that it is Esther who must speak
to the king. She has succeeded in doing
what most of her people had not: she is passing for Persian. She won the beauty contest—an early version of
The Bachelor—that gained her a place in the palace and marriage to the
king. She is the queen. She has a place of comfort and privilege.
The question she
faces, that her Uncle Mordecai forces her to face, is “How will she use her
privilege?” This really is the question
at the heart of the whole of the biblical story: “How do the privileged use their
privilege?” It is asked of kings. Will they use their privilege to defend the
widow, the orphan and the undocumented workers?
Or will they use their privilege to amass power and wealth? It is asked above all of Jesus who gave his
life’s energy to heal the sick, free the prisoners of spiritual powers, and finally,
to confront the establishment. All this
flows from the character of our God who does not dwell in the halls of power or
in corporate board rooms, but instead crawls in beside us behind a crowded inn,
and kneels beside the dying body of yet another black teenager bleeding out on
the streets.
African Americans,
Latinos and other racial groups can call for this conversation, but only white
people can make this conversation happen.
So it’s up to us. It’s up to us
to face our own fears and bad faith. It’s
up to us to decide to listen to the testimony of others whose lives are quite
different from ours. It’s up to us to
believe them. It’s up to us to connect
the blood of Christ in the chalice on our table with the blood that runs in the
streets, the blood of the wounded body of Christ. It’s up to us to connect the bread on our
table with the hungry stomachs and spirits of those who dwell in the desperate places
of St. Louis, New York City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Waterloo, and
Decorah.
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