After Charlottesville

Romans 8:31-39

August 13, 2017

 What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
   we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

When we sang, “blessed are they who seek peace” a moment ago I was thinking of clergy friends and colleagues who marched yesterday in Charlottesville. I wasn’t able to be with them this time, but I suspect that I will have a chance to be blessed in their presence down there before long.

Racism and white supremacy have been called America’s Original Sin, and clearly we remain as broken by that original sin as Augustine ever imagined humankind to be broken by the original sin of Adam.

I find good news in making that comparison because I think Augustine was wrong. I think the Genesis story tells us that God looked at creation and called it “good,” and that we are born and born again into that original blessing. That doesn’t deny our history – as human beings, as Americans – but it does insist that the power of God lies in redeeming that history.

That is to say, we are not bound by it. If the story of Jesus is about anything at all, it is about the power of God to absorb the great “no” of human violence and hatred, and speak, instead, a persistent, insistent “yes” in response.

Thus, when two-bit Klansmen and white nationalists with their history of hate and their theology of blood and soil trample across the lawn of one of the country’s renowned centers of learning, we must turn from their scowls and screeds and violence, and seek, instead, to align ourselves with and amplify God’s great “yes” – yes to wisdom, yes to community, yes to grace, yes to radical hospitality, yes to wildly inclusive love.

As Ellie Wiesel said, “We must take sides …. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”

I don’t know, this morning, exactly what such interference looks like. I haven’t figured that out for myself at this moment, so I am not going to pretend to make suggestions for us, as a community.

I know this much: come Saturday we will take our youngest child to Charlottesville to move in to her dorm at UVA. The violence there is, obviously, deeply disturbing on a deeply personal level for us.

So I know this much, as well: the vague sense of unrest that I feel about the violence in Charlottesville is how my African-American sisters and brothers feel about every single fucking day of their lives.

And, as Rev. Sekou told the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship last summer in Portland, if you are more offended by that language than you are by the conditions that prompt it, then it’s time to look in the mirror for the source of your discomfort.

My friends who are black are the least surprised of any of my friends about the violence perpetrated by white supremacists. They have been being victimized by such violence for, oh, about 400 years in these parts.

They don’t want to know why we are surprised. They want to know when we’re going to wake up and resist. We must take sides. As for me and my household, we will continue to try to stand on the side of the oppressed, the marginalized, those who for far too long have cried out for justice to roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

My friend and colleague Allison Unroe – a clergy woman I’ve known since she was an undergrad at Virginia Tech and counselor at Camp Hanover – was part of the clergy presence in Charlottesville yesterday, and last night she posted on Facebook:

“Today I stood helpless in front of a group of angry white men who wanted to harm me simply for standing for peace. I said nothing to them. I did nothing to them. I just showed up and prayed and sang, and afterwards I happened to walk to my car on the same street they were on.”

Allison was lucky to escape unharmed. Other clergy colleagues were not so fortunate. Some of the folks that Martin and I interviewed in Chattanooga last month for our film project were also present yesterday in Charlottesville and several of their number wound up in the hospital receiving stiches for wounds suffered at the hands of violent white men.

“We must take sides …. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”

As I said, I don’t know what that looks like right now, but I do know that silence in the face of injustice is acquiescence that aides and abets the oppressor. If my voice is silent, then my hands are dirty with the grime of hatred and violence.

White supremacy is spiritual violence that destroys everything it touches. It is powerful and it has distorted American life and history from our founding. If we were a more theologically orthodox community we’d take talk about the “powers and principalities” seriously. The apostle Paul did, and maybe we can learn something from him on this.

There is power in hate. “Blood and soil” is not just a Nazi propaganda slogan; it is a theological claim through which white nationalists seek and claim divine justification for white supremacist aims. But such power is not divine; it is demonic.

The good news, though, is quite simple and clear: love wins. Love is a force more powerful. The arc of the moral universe is mighty long, and sometimes it seems like it goes on forever. But when we do the work of love it bends the whole world round.

We began this morning with words from the Belhar Confession – formally adopted by the PCUSA last summer into our Book of Confessions. I’ll move toward a stopping place, if not a conclusion, with this from the same source: We believe

·      that God has entrusted the church with the message of reconciliation in and through Jesus Christ;

·      that the church is called to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, that the church is called blessed because it is a peacemaker, that the church is witness both by word and by deed to the new heaven and the new earth in which righteousness dwells.

·      that God’s lifegiving Word and Spirit has conquered the powers of sin and death, and therefore also of irreconciliation and hatred, bitterness and enmity, that God’s lifegiving Word and Spirit will enable the church to live in a new obedience which can open new possibilities of life for society and the world;

·      that the credibility of this message is seriously affected and its beneficial work obstructed when it is proclaimed in a land which professes to be Christian, but in which the enforced separation of people on a racial basis promotes and perpetuates alienation, hatred and enmity;

·      that any teaching which attempts to legitimate such forced separation by appeal to the gospel, and is not prepared to venture on the road of obedience and reconciliation, but rather, out of prejudice, fear, selfishness and unbelief, denies in advance the reconciling power of the gospel, must be considered ideology and false doctrine.

Therefore, we reject any doctrine which, in such a situation sanctions in the name of the gospel or of the will of God the forced separation of people on the grounds of race and color and thereby in advance obstructs and weakens the ministry and experience of reconciliation in Christ.

I do not know, in the present moment, how to map a clear path through the present darkness, but I do know that a light shines in it. As my friend David LaMotte sings, “you may say love is a powerless tool, that the real world is heartless and hope is for fools, but I’ve watched for the sunrise and the truth is I’ve found, it’s not light that is fragile. It’s the other way round.”

All the darkness in the world can’t extinguish the light of just one candle. We will light candles in the present darkness, and the light will overcome the darkness. We shall overcome. Amen.

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