A Call to Repentance (Mark 1:14-15; Pentecost 15; September 6, 2015)

A Call to Repentance

Mark 1:14-15
Pentecost 15
September 6, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Let me tell you a story,  and not a particularly pleasant one.  Just so you know.

For convenience’s sake I’ll say that  the story begins in Philadelphia in 1787  in a Methodist church called St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church.   This was just three years after the formation  of the Methodist Episcopal Church  on Christmas Day in Baltimore.  There was a sizable body of free African Americans  living in Philadelphia  and some of them,  including the Revs. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones,  both of whom had been ordained as deacons  by Francis Asbury,  were members of St. George’s.  These African Americans had been attracted  by the simple good news proclaimed by Methodist preachers,  and especially by their insistence  that God’s grace was freely available to all without exception,  regardless of their church membership,  their social status  or their race.  It was an inclusive gospel  and they responded gladly.

Perhaps they expected that  the mostly white congregation of St. George’s  would live up to the promise implicit in its preaching.  But that’s not what happened.

At first they sat where they pleased in the sanctuary of St. George’s,  but then the Trustees began to segregate them.  First they were required to sit near the walls,  rather than in the center of the nave.  Then, when their numbers grew,  a gallery was built in the back of the church  and they were told that they must sit in those seats.  They had already been required to receive Communion last,  after the white people had their turn.  Revs. Allen and Jones were not allowed to preach to whites.  They bore with these indignities and slights,  what some people today refer to as “micro-aggressions,”  part of the cost of being black in the United States.

One day Absalom Jones  (who later became the first black Episcopal priest in the United States)  and William White were kneeling during a prayer meeting,  kneeling with other (white) members of the church.  A Trustee told them they were not allowed to kneel where they were,  but had to go to the gallery.  When they refused, the Trustee returned with a colleague  and began to physically remove them from the building.

Richard Allen and the other African American members of St. George’s  walked out,  never to return.  They met separately for several years.  They asked the Conference for a preacher,  but none was sent.  After several years,  they decided to resign their memberships in St. George’s  and build their own building.  The pastor in the meantime decided  that the root of the problem was that  the African Americans were refusing to keep to their vows  and if they resigned he would have their names read aloud  and they would be expelled. 

Accordingly, the African Americans from St. George’s built their own church, Bethel AME, in 1794.  Still for a time they tried to get preachers from the Conference,  to no avail.  Similar stories had played out in Methodist Episcopal churches  in other cities. 

Finally, in 1821 Rev. Allen organized  the African Methodist Episcopal Church  together with other African American bodies  at the fringes of Methodism in the Philadelphia and Baltimore areas.  They planted AME churches up and down the eastern seaboard,  including one in Charleston, South Carolina.

From the very beginning of our denomination’s history,  black Methodists found it impossible  to follow a path of discipleship to Jesus  in congregations unwilling to embrace them  as brothers and sisters in one family of God  and as equal members of the Methodist Episcopal Church.  Now, I don’t know that the Trustees were racists  in the way that we usually mean that word.  I’m sure they were nice folks,  good folks.  They might well have sincerely believed that it was better,  less distracting for both white and black folks,  if they sat and knelt separately.  So they had a rule and,  when it came to Rev. Jones and Mr. White,  they were simply acting to enforce the rules,  because the rules, you know, are important  and no one should break the rules.  So Rev. Jones and Mr. White were not removed because they were black;  they were removed because they broke the rules.

Let’s fast forward to the 1930s.  Ecumenism and talks of church mergers were in the air.  The Methodist Episcopal Church  had suffered its own slavery-related split in 1848.  The Methodist Episcopal Church (South) was the result.  But it seemed like time to bury the hatchet.  The talks were going well.  A major sticking point was a large number  of African American Methodist Episcopal churches in the South.  They were typically, but not always, in their own annual conferences.  If the churches merged,  then there was a possibility that  white conferences would have black bishops  or, even worse, that white congregations would have black pastors.  The southern church would not abide this. 

They proposed that,  between the annual conference and the general church,  there be another layer of organization called the jurisdiction.  Jurisdictions would elect and appoint bishops to annual conferences.  There would be five geographical jurisdictions  and a Central Jurisdiction composed  of African American annual conferences.  To our everlasting shame,  the white northern church regarded this as an acceptable price  (for African American Methodists to pay)  for church union.  This how it happened when the Methodist Church was formed in 1939.

If we imagine that this sort of racism,  again, as we understand the term,  was confined to the South,  then we will have to explain why,  in the North Central Jurisdiction,  the first black bishop wasn’t elected until 1964  and, when elected, was refused  by every annual conference in the jurisdiction.  Iowa blinked first and that is how we received Bishop James S. Thomas.  Apparently the experience wasn’t so bad,  since of the six bishops we have had since then,  the last three have been African Americans.

So, a happy ending, right?  No more racism in the United Methodist Church, right?  At least in Iowa, right? 

That fails to explain why appointments of racial minority pastors  are still often resisted by our congregations.  It fails to explain why,  when our Annual Conference has committed itself  to finding “new people in new places,”  the Hispanic/Latino Ministries Standing Committee struggles  to keep its very modest budget from getting axed.

Even in the church, our church,  there is racism, ugly and pernicious. 

But right there I have to pause,  because that’s a red flag word.  When we hear the word racism we think  of uneducated, Confederate flag waving white folks using the n-word.  And, to be sure, there are such people.  There are people like Dylann Roof,  the North Carolina man who walked  into a Bible study at Emanuel AME church  in Charleston, South Carolina,  talked with people there,  and then killed nine of them.  He’s what a racist looks like to us,  or at least what we think a racist should look like.

But stopping people like Roof won’t get rid of racism,  because racism is built into our shared life  in more ways than I have time to recount this morning.  It’s reflected in the higher arrest, trial, conviction, and sentencing rates  suffered by blacks over whites  for crimes that are committed at the same rate.  It’s reflected in the informal red lines  drawn around high-African American neighborhoods.  It’s reflected in the fact that  an African American man with a clean record and a college degree  has the same chance of being unemployed  as a white high school dropout with a criminal record.  Its reflected in the higher rate of school suspensions  for black and Latino students  than for blacks for the same offenses.  Remember that even a single suspension  doubles a person’s chances of dropping out.

Racism isn’t just built into our institutions;  it’s a part of our language and thought.  A white man who kills nine people in a church  with the intent to terrorize all African Americans  is described as a “troubled loner”  not a terrorist.  The term terrorist is reserved for people with brown skin.  We imagine that most people on welfare are black.  We see black men as scary  and violence against them as justified. 

The Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church  have called for this day of  “Confession, Repentance, and Commitment to End Racism.”  I am especially inclined to heed their call  because of the shared history of our two denominations.  If we had listened to Richard Allen’s grievances so long ago,  their history and ours would have been different.  Perhaps even our country might have had a different history.

It was a time when the Spirit called to us,  “The time is fulfilled,  and the kingdom of God has come near;  repent, and believe in the good news.”  We didn’t listen then,  but now is another such time.  Racism is no part of God’s dream,  whether the overt racism of a Dylann Roof  or the subtle racism ground into the pores of our cultural skin.  But God’s dream has come near in the Bishop’s call.  It’s time for repentance.  And it’s up to us.  Racism is a system that whites put together for our benefit  and it is a system that we will have to dismantle.  None of it will be easy,  but there is one thing especially that won’t help: guilt. 

When someone says racism,  we white folks either start feeling guilty  or we start getting angry  because we think someone wants us to feel guilty.  Both that anger and that guilt are ways we have  of avoiding dealing with a racist present  and they aren’t helpful;  they don’t move us forward.

In fact, repentance isn’t about feeling guilty.  Jesus wasn’t asking anyone to feel anything.  He was asking them to change,  to change their ways of thinking and acting,  their ways of relating to each other and to the world.  There might or might not be feelings along the way,  but they were not and are not the point.  The point is change.

That’s not easy for nice white folks living  in a segregated community like ours.  I don’t mean to suggest that someone set out  to keep our community white,  but by whatever accidents and/or incidents of history  for all intents and purposes it is nearly all white.  We live segregated lives  so we don’t spend a lot of time with African Americans  or any other racial or ethnic minorities  whether long-time Americans or recent arrivals or visitors.  All the worse because our children have grown up  with a sense of the world that does not correspond to the real world.  Our responsibilities toward them are enormous. 

But first we have so much to learn ourselves.  Fortunately for us, we like to learn.  We just need to turn our love of learning  in the direction of learning uncomfortable things.  We can read.  We can put Ta-Nehisi Coates’s  Between the World and Me on our reading list, or, for the even more ambitious,  Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life,  by Karen and Barbara Fields.  We can read and hear testimony  about what life is like in the United States  for African Americans and others  and, even more importantly, we can believe them.  It’s a start, anyway,  one that would make a huge difference in time.  It’s a first step toward the change of mind and life needed  if we are to trust the good news that God’s dream has indeed come near.

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