Exodus 12:33-42 On Race 10 September 2017
Ephesians 2:11-22 First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL Ordinary 23
J. Shannon Webster
Wanda sat next to me in 7th grade math class, at Tibbets Jr. High in the oil patch of northwest New Mexico, in 1964, and we were friends. Wanda and I were assigned work partners on the math problems. She was fun. Our school held a diverse population: lots of white kids, lots of Hispanic kids, lots of Navajo Indian kids. But Wanda was Black, African-American, and therefore exotic. There were only two Black families in the whole town. We white people were called Anglos, there, and the Navajo saw white and Black people both as Anglos, from the same culture. I wasn’t used to the diversity. My family was oil and gas people, following the oil booms and busts, and my most recent elementary school had been a segregated school in Texas. I used to get in fights at school, defending Black people, “Negroes” we said in those days, because my parents were both very liberal for their time and ardent about civil rights. I knew Spanish folks, but I had never actually met a Black person for real. However, I knew what my Daddy said, and I would defend that with my fists from cafeteria to playground.
There was not “dating” among Jr. High kids in that era, but our version of it was to ask a girl to connect at the school “sock-hops”. So I asked my friend Wanda, who was very beautiful (in my mind then), to meet up with me at the sock hop. She said “No.” Wanda knew something that I didn’t – that even in that diverse and seemingly more liberal place, it was not going to be all right. I remembering pleading with her to tell me why not, until she put her hands over her ears and yelled, “I don’t wanna hear you!” Wanda turned out to be right. Some years later the point was driven home for me when the Guidance Counselor at our High School insisted on advising Paul, a graduating Black student, to apply at the Vocational-Tech school in Albuquerque, instead of the University. Except Paul graduated Salutatorian of his class, and blew through college and law school to become a very successful attorney.
Those of us of at least a certain age, all have these stories, of how it was back then. And we’ve come a long way since the 1960’s. Or have we? Maybe not nearly so far as we’ve thought. This is the first of 6 sermons I have left with you before my retirement date. I’ve planned those out some – identifying topics I want to address during this probably last time I will be in ongoing dialogue with a congregation. And I want to talk about Race, because it is still the elephant in the room in everything we try to do in this country. Faith in Action Alabama has identified “systemic racism” as the primary problem we are going to have to address in this state.
But as a first step let’s get our religion right, because for too many years (too many centuries) Christians have been standing around with rocks, ready to cast the first stone. A good place to start is with this Exodus text and the wonderful story of Moses, Passover and Exodus. The descendents of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob got to Exodus when there was famine where they were. You may remember the story of Joseph and the cot of many colors, left for dead, but carried off to Egypt where he became Pharaoh’s Chief of Staff. His kin moved down there for 430 years. Moses (Egyptian name Moshe) found in the bulrushes of the Nile, grew up in the royal court, and one day killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave. He fled to the desert where he encountered God in a burning bush, who chose him to go tell Pharaoh “Let my people go!” There followed a contest of wills, there were plagues. The Egyptian first-born were killed by the angel of death, but passed over the Hebrew homes that had lambs-blood on the doorposts.
So in the text we read, the Egyptians caved, and said “Go! Get out of here!” The numbers who left were 600,000 not counting women and children, AND a mixed multitude went up with them. What are we talking about, maybe 2 million people? We know the Bible always exaggerates numbers. But the story is the point, and seriously, not even rabbits cold have reproduced that fast in 430 years. But this is the Passover we’ve celebrated since that day.
Who left Egypt with Moses? We would be mistaken to believe that that entire population were racially descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This is the story of a slave-revolt, or at least a working class revolt, rejecting tyranny for a dream of freedom, and walking out of Egypt with their heads held high! And along the way they were turned into a people at the foot of Mount Sinai, when Moses brought the Commandments down the mountain and we learned that Yahweh God, not Pharaoh, was King and Lord of all. “Hebrew” itself is an interesting word. Abraham is called a “Hebrew,” but the next one to carry the description seems to be Joseph in Egypt. In the Hebrew language, it is ivrim, which is “Dusty Ones”, or “Outside the Camp”, or we might say “outlaws.” When they finally reached the Promised Land, after the Exodus, they occupied it. Joshua has divine direction to slaughter everyone in Palestine and possess it, but there is no indication that ever happened. We DO have Egyptian letters, from the Palestinian Vassal states asking Pharoah for reinforcements, saying, “Help! The Ivrim are taking the cities of the King!” Or more telling, Help! Such and such city has “gone Hebrew!” In other words, to be Hebrew was a choice. It was to choose freedom over slavery. Who left Egypt? A mixed multitude of rebel slaves, and the fallout of freedom was that it was for everyone. God’s redemption was not just for a few. It was not just to overthrow the tyrant, but was a transformed life under the covenant. That should not have been a surprise. The Torah says that the blessing of Abraham included, in the end, a blessing for all the nations.
Paul describes the New Covenant in Ephesians as a new Sinai, making a new people from a mixed multitude. Ephesus is in Asia Minor (think Turkey), and he wrote mainly to Gentile Christians, and perhaps some Jewish Christians scattered by the Empire. He tells them they were Gentiles by birth, separated from the house of Israel, but in Christ Jesus you have been brought near. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between us...so that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, a holy temple;in whom you also are built together spirituallyinto a dwelling-place for God.
We are reminded of Galatians 3:27-28, There is no longer slave no free, Jew nor gentile, male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus and heirs of Abraham. The strains of this were caught up in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, when he wrote: “We are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied together in a single garment of destiny.” Christians don’t magically show up with automatic peacemaking skills; that was not a prerequisite for church membership. We have to learn it, to work at it. And yet the church carries the message of the gospel in our life together. We make peace with each other because Jesus Christ himself IS our peace.
It is true that walls have sometimes made for more peace, temporary peace. The wall in Israel reduced terrorist attacks. Border fencing at El Paso/Juarez and Tijuana cut down on smuggling through those points. And as Robert Frost wrote, “Good fences make good neighbors.” But that’s a temporary reality; it is not the Biblical answer or the Christian answer. Eliminating boundaries does not make peace by magic; we must end hostility. Christ’s work, said Paul, was not making walls to separate us, but building us together into a temple where God can live. Auburn Seminary President Barbara Wheeler wrote: “God hates walls and divisions and intends to save the world by breaking them down.” If we want to stay close to God we have to participate in that barrier-breaking, and we don’t have to be perfect to do that. She says: “Christ died for us while we were yet sinners. He didn’t wait until we got over it!”[i]
This is not arguable, I will say, despite the fact that the churches, the white churches, were for too many years on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of truth. And we thought it was getting better but these days it doesn’t look like it. Racism is very real, and it affects everything around us. Race is not real, but is a human construct.
Atlantic magazine correspondent Ta-Nehesi Coates wrote: “Race is the child of racism, not the father. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society… is (a) new idea at the heart of... people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”[ii] Racism is very real. Race is not real. There are no scientific, measureable, genetic markers that can establish race as a definable category. Scientifically, there’s no such thing. Genetic differences are not fixed along racial lines, scientists are pointing out.[iii] So, it seems there is not such thing as Race, and no theological or Biblical reason for divisions. (What are we going to do for fun now?)
We have to Speak Up, as our Going Forward vision plan urges us. Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of our denomination, J. Herbert Nelson (who preached from this pulpit in 2013 on our 50th anniversary commemoration of the civil rights struggle) said recently, if we are silent about this, we are giving tacit approval. “We are complicit through what we do and what we refuse to do.” He reminded us that White Supremacy is not just individual acts but society’s structural “isms” that maintain racism. “Racism doesn’t always mean people doing things; it’s not always over racial prejudice,” said Mennonite theologian Drew Hart. “There are other forces at work in society and in our lives that we are sometimes unconscious of.”[iv] It is easy to think of it as something existing outside ourselves. But Black or White, we were all raised in a racist society. (Okay, maybe not Kazuo or Hye-Sook.) And we who are white in skin tone have benefited from it, are shaped by it, like a fish in water. And we have the luxury of, if we choose, living in a bubble. Or we can choose to live more honestly.
Princeton Seminary prof Yolanda Pierce described “white privilege” this way: “It allows you to turn bad news off and walk away.” She told a group of Presbyterians in Chicago, “There are groups that have been systematically sinned against… Saying ‘Sorry’ isn’t enough.”[v] We have to make it right. Laura Cheifetz, Director of the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, wrote: “Jesus didn’t die on the cross so I could become more aware my privilege and maybe give a little more to charity. Jesus died on the cross for restoration of order in the world, so people would not be demonized for their life circumstances.” If we, the church, are going to be useful, if we are not going to become irrelevant to a new generation in the years to come, we have to speak up, tell the truth, and equip people in their work and their lives to show grace in what they say and do.
We (no, let me own this and say “I”) have tip-toed around this thing for too long, as if because we are the church we cannot speak up on certain areas, that would be mixing politics and religion. But that’s not right. We cannot endorse candidates during an election. But the rest of it, for us, is not politics, it is morality. We are an immoral society, and we need to speak up. Who in the church is showing such courage? Dr. William Barber, pastor of the Greenleaf Disciples of Christ Church in Goldsboro, NC, and he is the clearest moral voice in the country today. If Christians do not weigh in on what matters, we have failed our Lord.
The most prophetic voice in Birmingham isn’t me, it’s John Archibald of the Birmingham News, who has it right. Oliver Robinson pleaded guilty (and he is) to bribery, fraud and tax evasion; he took big money to deceive his constituents in a dangerous way. (What? An Alabama politician is corrupt? Say it ain’t so!”) So the Black guy is going to jail, while no one has indicted his overlords. His conviction means nothing but business as usual, unless Drummond Company’s vice-president, David Roberson, and Balch & Bingham lawyer Joel Gilbert go with him.
Race is not real, it turns out, but racism is. And suddenly here in 2017, the Ku Klux Klan is back, marching with Neo-Nazis into the middle of an American University to spew their hate and filth and racism against Jews, Blacks and everyone else. Not grizzled old Nazi’s my age, but young ones, carrying Swastika banners and dressed like the WWII Brownshirts in Germany. Lest we forget, we fought a war to save the world from Nazi oppression. Some of you fought in that war. 70 million people died in 6 ½ years, 2/3rds of them civilians. If there is an absolute baseline in this country, some bare minimum of American pride, surely it is this – No Nazis! Not in our towns. We got a letter at the church here, signed by 18 former Moderators of the Presbyterian General Assembly, who pointed out not only did they walk into Charlottesville (and other places) under the swastika, but they blasphemed the Cross of Jesus Christ by carrying that too. I am deeply disturbed by white evangelicals who have entered the fray on the side of racists. (A lot of white evangelicals are themselves disturbed by it.)
Radney Foster, a country songwriter from Del Rio Texas, has a new album for the first time in 20 years, because he’s paying attention. One of my favorite tracks has 3 verses, each one about speech that demeans a group of people: Blacks, Women, LGBT folks. Foster’s chorus goes: “Not in my house, not from my mouth. You don’t talk to my friends that way. You don’t talk to my brother that way, and you damned sure don’t talk to my daughter that way!”[vi] We must begin to call things as they are. We have a national government right now that, in spite of the posturing, doesn’t get it, and has failed not just the Christian test but the American test. White Supremacists, racists, have been appointed to cabinet positions. The President himself has shown racist beliefs repeatedly, in what he says as well as positions he takes. Not in my house. Not in my country.