A sermon for Nativity Lutheran Church in Rockport, Maine.
Text: Paul’s letter to the Galatian’s 3 1-9, 23-2
Other texts, from previous weeks in the Narrative Lectionary:
Controversy about conversion of the nations, Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 15:1-18
Amos 9:11-12 quoted by James in Acts 15.
Philip and the Ethiopian courtier. Acts of the Apostles, 8:26-39
Grace, hope, and peace to you from God our Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Back in Newburyport (in northeastern Massachusetts), on the Monday holiday in January marking Dr. King’s birthday each year there is a public forum – well attended – on racial equality. It’s organized by the city, local high schools public and private, and the YWCA, with the support of our local clergy association. In that town the YWCA plays the role the YMCA plays here: they operate the gym and swimming pool, offer emergency housing and child care, those vital programs. The YWCA’s mission statement is “Empower women, eliminate racism.” We’ll come back to the second part of that.
Now in Newburyport, racism is, for students of colonial-era history at any rate, a fraught subject. For one thing they have about the same amount of racial diversity as we do here: almost none. Non-Euro-American people are rare and stand out. For another thing, the historic wealth of that town came from profits of the triangle trade: you know, sugar from the Caribbean to New England, rum and weapons from New England to West Africa, and enslaved people from Africa to the Caribbean. That history is largely whitewashed and forgotten these days. People don’t want to be reminded that the nice city hall auditorium – the venue for the forum – was built with profits from the misery of forced African laborers. Planning the forum can be a tricky business: the planners (I was one) want that “eliminate racism” message to be heard and acted on. Every year some planner suggested we get a speaker who could guide that assembly in working out how to make reparations. Less uncomfortable topics prevailed: literature, culture, education, health care unfairness; the planners want participants to be uncomfortable but not to tune out.
“Eliminate racism” is the goal. The puzzle is how to get there. Dr. King talked about the long arc of the universe bending towards justice. The question is how to help bend it, how to get enough people reaching up, grabbing it, pulling it in the right direction, and not letting go. If there are simple and good answers to this, the planning teams I was on couldn’t figure them out. In Lutheran lingo, we tried to formulate ways to repair the racist damage of our past as joyful responses to God’s grace. “Racism is illegal. Discriminate and lose business or go to jail” – anti-racism as a matter of law instead of grace – well, that approach presents some problems. Somebody gave me this t-shirt that says “make racists afraid again.” I won’t wear it.
But working out response-to-grace approaches proved frustrating to put it mildly. Appreciating the literature of our neighbors who don’t look exactly like us is good, but it doesn’t get us very far.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could put Paul’s words into action? Wouldn’t it be great if the miracle of racial harmony came from simply having the right message? Paul wrote “does God supply you with the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard?” Have we not yet come up with some magic words everybody can believe, so we can eliminate racism by believing and then joyfully doing the work?
Let’s turn our attention to the early post-Pentecost church. In our narrative lectionary we’ve been hearing various accounts of a big disagreement. Peter (called Cephas in some of our readings) and Paul are going at each other hammer and tongs arguing about the role ethnic identity, economic status, and gender – in the newly forming Way of Christ. To be fair, Paul is going at Peter: Peter’s approach to controversy is milder than Paul’s.
(An aside: have you noticed how Paul’s writing is easier to understand when he’s annoyed, when he’s on a rant? Actually it’s Judy’s reading that makes him easy to understand. Thanks Judy.)
The starting point of this controversy is clear: the Good News of Jesus Christ is for everybody. The apostles seem to be in violent agreement about that. A couple of weeks ago we heard about Paul and Peter, without working together, independently discerned that nobody’s disqualified from following the Way of Christ by their circumstances of birth. Paul spelled it out. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” A couple of weeks ago we heard a similar statement from the apostle James quoting the ancient prophet. “I [the Lord] will set it up so that all other peoples may seek the Lord—even all the gentiles over whom my name has been called. Thus says the Lord, who has been making these things known from long ago.’ “
“Gentiles” is the biblical word meaning “tribes”. “Ethnic groups”. In much of the Hebrew Bible it refers to the “other” – Philistines, Baal worshipers, the Ammonites King David sent his army to fight, you name them. There were, and are, plenty of tribes. It’s only recently in the long arc of history that most people have routine contact with other tribes than their own.
It is plain that all the apostles understood what the Holy Spirit showed them on Pentecost. Next week when we celebrate Pentecost, we’ll read Acts chapter 2, where there’s a long catalog of tribes. “Parthians, Medes, Elamites”, and on and on. Our Pentecost readers have to practice to even pronounce the names of those tribes. Still, the Holy Spirit somehow provided translation services so everybody understood Peter proclaiming the Gospel. Everybody. The Spirit even pushed Philip, alone on a desert road, to speak to the Ethiopian queen’s courtier, and pushed that courtier to ask to be baptized. The good news is for everybody.
Our readings show that Paul, and Peter, and James and the other apostles all knew that the Gospel transcended tribal differences, as well as gender and economic differences. The Holy Spirit made that plain to them. They were arguing about how to organize their new movement around that central truth, not about whether it was true.
That struggle with tribalism was then, but it’s still going on. For a Lutheran history term paper on the 1917 Spanish Flu pandemic I hit the public library’s microfilm room and dug out Philadelphia Inquirer stories about how our churches coped with it. And I stumbled across a lot of printed vile anti-German-American conspiracy theory rubbish (World War I was going on of course, and the German state was the enemy). And, in that era a lot of our German-language congregations reluctantly put away Luther’s Bible and switched to English. One preacher even said “we’re not German, we’re white.” Oh.
To fear and loathe people from other tribes is human nature, It’s recounted in the Bible over and over again. It’s recounted in church history “in the tumult of her wars” that seem never to cease. We see this loathing and fear of “the other” in the news all the time. We are comfortable living in places without much tribal diversity because it saves us from coping with that nature in ourselves. It must have been somehow adaptive for our ancestors ten thousand generations ago to fear, and to want to conquer, the people in the next tribe. It’s bred in our bones. Theologians like Rene Girard even make the case that this stranger-danger fear is humanity’s original sin.
And the Holy Spirit is having none of this. None of it. The good news transcends our innate tribalism.
That Spirit imperative confused the apostles. It confused that Philadelphia preacher in 1917. It confuses me, and I daresay it confuses you. We all struggle with it. That’s the reason I won’t wear this T-shirt: I am racist myself and so are the people whom I love. It’s part of our human heritage. Fear can’t dispel loathing, only love can do that. Law, even divine Law, can’t compel us to overcome distrust of people who don’t look or act like us. We need God’s grace for that.
Here’s a possible solution to the problem: make the case that all humankind is one tribe, an expansive tribe, the tribe of Abraham. The apostles were arguing about whether the expansive tribe should require a painful initiation ritual or not. Paul’s position, which thankfully prevailed, is that by being human we are all members of that expansive tribe. That’s a workable approach. But it’s easily misunderstood: witness the Philadelphia preacher’s unfortunate use of the word “white”. “All one tribe” often leads us to pretend our human nature doesn’t have this mean streak.
How do we cope in a crowded world where we depend on each other? How do we respond to that Spirit imperative? Well, a good start is facing up to the problem in ourselves. “When we say we are without tribalism we deceive ourselves. But if we confess that sin, God who is faithful and just will forgive our sin and free us from all unrighteousness.” That’s a start. That nasty part of our human nature doesn’t have to weigh us down. “Eliminate Racism” is a worthy goal. We believe that Jesus will come in glory one day too. In the meantime, facing up to that part of our nature and asking God to help us lay it down, that is not a once-and-done dealio. It’s part of our faith practice. We need each other and God to do that, often.
Let’s go a little further. We get a lot of visitors at this time of year around here. Let’s be thankful to strangers who encounter us. Let’s celebrate that Holy Spirit that dwells within them and in the spaces between them and us, and rejoice that the Spirit brought us together.
Our welcome to visitors here at Nativity says “with you here we are closer to who God is calling us to be.” Let’s remember that is also true of all the people in all those cars that make it hard to turn left on Route 1 in the summer.” Let’s respond to the grace of God and the grace strangers with joy. Let’s rejoice that they chose to visit our communities and offer the Spirit to us, as we offer it to them.
Amen.