How Long, O Lord? (Pentecost 4; June 21, 2015; Charleston, SC)

How Long, O Lord?

Pentecost 4

June 21, 2015

I had planned to continue my series on the Ten Commandments this week. Today I was going to speak some good news, since at the heart of the Ten Commandments, at its hinge point, is the call to rest, to lay down our burdens, to set aside our work, to be freed from the tyranny of the undone. The home visit that didn’t get made, the laundry still waiting in baskets, the lawn un-mowed, and the car unwashed–all of this will wait. It’s time for rest. We could certainly use it. Some of us, anyway. Some of us are tired, but some of us are weary from the burdens we carry: burdens of grief, burdens of guilt, burdens of care. The summons to rest can be very good news, indeed.

And then last week happened. We looked into an abyss as nine Methodists were killed in Charleston, South Carolina.

I have struggled to know what to say. Friday I went from staring at a blank piece of paper, to staring at a blank computer screen and back again. I had nothing.
Or rather, I came up with too much. There are too many voices, each hoping to control the conversation, for me to sort it all out so that I can be my usual rational restrained self.

Like Jacob, I’ve been wrestling with Yahweh’s night angel at the Ford of the Jabbok. The angel seems to have the upper hand, but I will not let go, because it is not only for my sake that I seek a blessing, but for yours. I am not allowed to let this go. I’m not allowed to let this go because I am your pastor, but I’m also not allowed to let this go because I’m white.

To be white in America is to occupy a place of privilege. I know it doesn’t seem that way. I know white people can have a rough road. I know white people can suffer. I know that white people can face what seem to be—and sometimes are—insurmountable obstacles. But every aspect of my life, every aspect of our lives, would be harder if I, if we, were black. White privilege does not mean that we don’t have a race to run; it only means that we run our race without the ankle weights that black folk were fitted with at birth.

So, I don’t have the privilege of deciding to ignore what happened in Charleston this week. I don’ t have the privilege of deciding when we can stop talking about race. I don’t have that privilege, if for no other reason than because I can step into this pulpit without a second thought about my safety or yours and I tell you the truth: there is isn't a single AME pastor nor a single black congregation in America who that can say that this morning.

My place of privilege as a white man is something I was born with. I didn't earn it and I can't give it away. I can only use it. So, the issue I face this morning is how to use my privilege. My undemocratic decision is to begin, once again, the hard work of looking into the abyss and facing without flinching what looks back at us.

Already, of course, the story-telling has begun, the myth-making that allows us to discount this terrorist attack in the service of racism. The NRA weighed in before the bodies were cold to tell the victims that it was their fault for coming to church without packing heat. Some pundits and politicians cite this as a case of the religious persecution of Christians as if Dylann Roof went to the Emanuel AME Church Wednesday evening to keep Christians from worshiping freely and not with the purpose of killing black people, as if this atrocity belongs on the same spectrum as a company forced to pay for birth control for its employees or a baker forced to serve all the public, even the gay and lesbian public. These clumsy and crude attempts to hijack the story are easy to dismiss.

Other strategies for leaving behind yet another of God’s summons to repentance without having to actually change anything are not so easily dismissed. Imagine if this story were about a young man from an Arab country who walked into a white suburban Christian congregation, say, St. Mark's UMC in Iowa City, and shot nine of its members. For one thing it is hard for me to imagine him being arrested alive. We would assume without any investigation at all that the attack (and we would call it a terrorist attack) was motivated by Islamic extremism. No one would bother to talk to his family. His state of mind would be irrelevant. We would tighten up security and increase surveillance.

In this case, though, we strip his act of political and racial context and try to fit him into the “crazy loner” narrative. We like crazy loners as killers because they let us off the hook. Craziness in this context means that it is irrational, so we can’t understand it. Since we cannot know and cannot understand, we don’t have to. We use unexplainability itself as an explanation. This allows us to express sympathy for the victims without ever having to question whether there is a wider context that makes sense of this act, a wider context that includes us, and our thought, speech, and action. So we observe the obligatory moments of silence and get back to our lives. Until the next time. And there is always a next time. And a time after that.

But this violence is not senseless. Roof’s actions are not meaningless. The President was wrong to call these “senseless murders”.¹ He should know better. These murders make all too much sense. This terrorist attack is of a piece with the long line of terrorist acts committed against black Americans throughout our history. It fits all too well into a story that lies at the heart of our story as a people.

On the one hand we have this idea that we are a community of equals. Some have a little more, some a little less. But those inequalities among us should not overshadow our basic equality or threaten that community.

On the other hand is an idea that was given its American expression by the Virginia House of Burgesses in the late sixteen hundreds. They invented racial privilege so that blacks would never be able to make common cause with poor whites against wealthy whites. The House of Burgesses (made up of wealthy whites) figured that if poor whites could see themselves as superior to all blacks, even the poorest of whites would never turn against the wealthy. They were right.

Our story is in large part the story of the struggle between these two ideas. The deepest struggle of our national psyche is the struggle to hold both of these ideas at the same time. We benefit from the hundreds of ways that racism is a part of our institutions and culture, but this is not how we want to think of ourselves so we do what humans do so well: we ignore the unpleasant. We repress the racist part of our national psyche, shove it down, cover it over, so that it’s out of view.
Wednesday night was what Freud might have called a “return of the repressed.” Our national neurosis has erupted again. We are trying with all our might to put it behind us, to get it back under control.

But God has not brought us to this moment so that we can evade our past and our responsibility yet again. Wednesday night’s terrorist attack was not God’s plan, but I won’t give up the hope that God has plans for us in the midst of this grief. I almost said shock and grief, but only amnesiac victims can claim to be shocked.

So what do we do to take advantage of the opening God has given us? Like David confronted with his wrong-doing by Nathan, we can say with him, “I have sinned against the Lord.” We, unlike David, might actually admit that we have sinned against people, too. We can stop claiming to be innocent.

The attack on Emanuel AME was not the first. We can learn their story, so intertwined with the story of the United Methodist Church. We can learn the story of the African American community in the United States. There are books and even movies that can help us.

We can listen to African Americans as they tell their experience of life and–this is vital–we can believe them when they tell us how it is for them. I know that there is no large black presence in Decorah, but that’s why God invented the “interwebs”.

We can stand ready to change. The Ten Commandments are about a people who had been delivered by God’s mighty acts who had to imagine and live into a new future. God is ready to lead us, too. God is ready to set us on the path to a new future, a future of a life and a world shared by all of God’s people.

I hasn’t been in the bulletin for years, but we still sing, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in God’s sight” when the kids come forward. One day, God willing, they will all be precious in all of ours, too.

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1Obama, “Statement by the President on the Shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.”