Sermon Series: Part IV – Religious Identity & Community: Accountability
Reading & sermon preached by Reverend Carolyn Patierno
May 19, 2008

From:  A Struggle to Inhabit My Country by, Rebecca Parker
From:  Soul Work:  Anti-racist Theologies in Dialogue, Edited by Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley & Nancy Palmer Jones

The struggle for racial justice in America is a struggle to inhabit my own country, a struggle to become a participant in the actual history and social reality of the land in which I have been born and to which I belong.  The struggle for racial justice is a struggle to overcome the numbness, alienation, splitting, and absence of consciousness that characterize my life as a white [person] and that enable me to unwittingly, even against my will, continue to replicate life-destroying activities of my society.  It is a struggle to attain a different expression of human wholeness:  one in which my inner life is grounded in a restored communion with the transpersonal source of grace and wholeness, and the primordial fact of the connectedness of all life. 

My commitment to racial justice is both on behalf of the other – my neighbor, whose well-being I desire – and for myself, to whom the gift of life has been given but not yet fully claimed.  I struggle neither as a benevolent act of social concern nor as a repentant act of shame and guilt, but as an act of desire for life, of passion for life, of insistence on life – fueled by both love for life and anger in face of the violence that divides…  

Today’s sermon is the fourth installment of a series on religious identity as individuals and as a community.  Last week I reflected on this, the most racially segregated hour of the week in this country concluding that although for reasons that are indeed sad and deeply ingrained, there are valid reasons of safety and identification that translate to fewer racially and culturally integrated congregations than we might hope.   However, as religious people, as a religious community our commitments to interconnectedness and justice require that we keep on in the arduous and live giving task of anti-oppression work. 

Today I chose to preach again on race and racism because frankly, a year of sermons wouldn’t cover it all.  As well, the congregations in the communion of the United Church of Christ have all been encouraged to take on this issue today and I choose to stand in solidarity with our historical cousins.  The UCC is calling these “Sacred Conversations.”  I went onto the UCC denominational website to see what I could see and was led to some interesting and telling on-line dialogue.  There were many comments that expressed frustration and fatigue in talking about race and racism.  There was anger directed at Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  All of which served to underscore the difficulty in engaging in these issues.

And then there was this congregation’s personal response to last week’s sermon.  Last week’s sermon inspired more feed back than any other sermon I’ve preached.  There were expressions of relief and gratitude that we’re taking the topic up so intentionally.  There were questions about guilt and the ways in which guilt is both useful and not so useful.   There was enthusiasm.  There was misunderstanding, anger, and further questions.  And there was some fear expressed as well. 

For white folks, these issues can be confusing and because we are confused, we become afraid.  We are afraid to offend people of color; we are afraid that what we say may be construed as ignorant at best or racist at worst.  We may have a nagging and bewildering sense of guilt but we may not understand the source of that guilt.  Whatever difficult feeling we have, whatever its root, we know that it doesn’t feel very good.  Better that we avoid stirring the pot.

In conversations with people of color, I have learned that it is sometimes even more difficult to brooch these subjects within the communities to which they feel most attached, where there is more at stake.  These communities include school, work, and certainly faith communities.  These are places where we hope to be known and understood.  But sometimes these institutions fall short, as well as the people who inhabit them.  And that’s particularly hurtful and disappointing.

Yet, if so few of us are up for the pot-stirring of deeply reflecting on these kind of inadvertent yet insensitive slights because of our fear, guilt, ignorance, shame, exhaustion, how will we ever look closely and well at the reality of racism? 

Last week was a full and very good week for thoughtful engagement.   The good news is that the conversation has been jump started.  As well as some additional thoughts, today I will also offer a suggestion on how we might go forward together in our approach to our learning, discernment, and action.  

I appreciate that “sacred conversations” puts this issue in an appropriate context for congregations.  We are called to wrestle with the theological underpinnings of racism and our yearning for its eradication.  In the essay from which our reading today is taken, Rebecca Parker wrestles with the scriptural text from Genesis – the story of the tree of knowledge.  She questions the traditional interpretation of that story that implies that knowledge is bad and a lack thereof is somehow innocent and better.   Parker wends her way to what she names as a false innocence that many white folks live within, never really undertaking the reality of the world in which we live, and further, the reality in which people of color live.

It’s a persuasive exegesis of the text even for those Unitarian Universalists who don’t consider biblical text to be the center of religious life.   Part of this learning – or unlearning, in a way – is to come to grips with the ways that we are formed by our country’s prevailing culture.  Ways in which we may not even be aware. 

So, theological reflection gives us pause.  And as a religious community I consider theological accountability to communities of color to be as critical as relational accountability.  Which is why I shared the story about my preaching professor who asked me what would I have to say to the black woman whose son had just been gunned down in the street.  What would I have to say as a UU preacher, minister, to that woman and others like her?

That is a theological question with which all of us must wrestle.   What would you say?  How would you respond to that depth of tragedy, loss from a Unitarian Universalist context?

From last week’s reading, we heard UU minister, Rosemary Bray McNatt, ask the following, “Are we prepared to know what it is that informs the survival strategies used by people often on the margins?  Are we prepared to accept that even among people of color at comfortable economic levels – as opposed to those poor, uneducated people who don’t know any better than to praise God – there may be not only a theological but a cultural understanding of the divine …?” 

Consider these probing questions and imagine: it’s you and her and she desperately needs the support of a compassionate and powerful soul.  What would you say as a Unitarian Universalist committed to a trust-worthy, sincere, caring and accountable relationship with this woman?

I believe that this quality of theological wrestling brings us closer to accountable relationship.  That is one part of the journey outlined by Rebecca Parker.  Here’s the rest …
 
Remedial education or, as Parker describes, “claiming forbidden knowledge.”  In concluding her own meditation on race, Bray McNatt  says that she is, “as eager to see [her] congregants – and [her] ministerial colleagues – emerge from their massive blindness to the last thirty years of theology as I am to see what we might do in a religious community in which praxis is a given.”

In general in this country, we have been taught in a certain way and a raised by a certain set of stories neither of which reveals the realities or histories of all Americans.  Let us together endeavor to know more about our country so that we may claim it more fully.

To this end, I am suggesting, as Parker does, that together we read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.  Like me, you may have put that book on your shelf but not taken it back off again.  I’m going to commit to reading it this summer and to craft a study approach that will be offered in the fall.  I hope you’ll all join me.  And then we’ll continue … reading texts from African American; Latino/a; Asian, American Indian experience.  And as Parker encourages, we’ll read these texts – over time – in a context that we inhabit a country in which we must continue to deepen our world in order to continue to grow.   We’ll talk together about this emerging idea.

The third approach Parker describes is soul work in which we take to the journey of deeper understanding within ourselves … in which we consider the places in which we are broken.  Parker says, “This work cannot be done by others for us.  We must find an internal blessing.”  Wholeness.  Connection.  Grace.  All of these are the gifts from such introspection.  We’ll talk together about this emerging idea.

Finally, engaged presence.  Racial injustice will fail to thrive if more and more individuals, certainly, but in our case I say if more and more congregations show up to decry such instances.   As an institution we may use our power to name injustice and then do something about it. Again, we’ll talk together about this emerging idea. 

Already, the seeds of this effort are sprouting.  There is a great deal that is likely to emerge.  What better place than here, within a religious community of shared commitment?   And the increased richness of our congregational life will be immeasurable, I believe. 

Accountability.  That is the word that runs deeply through this sermon and the last. 

So, what would I have to say, to preach to the mother who has suffered the most appalling loss, that of the violent death of her child?  This is what this Unitarian Universalist would say.

“I am sorry.  I am sorry that your child suffered this unjust and unacceptable death.  God bless your suffering heart.  And God will.  God will be there in the blessing but know that God was nowhere in the violence that took your child.  God did not call your beloved child from you, his mother, and from this life.  Your boy’s death was born of human madness.  And like you, God is weeping.  And with you, God will suffer.  And for you, God will bring you comfort and strength.”

And then I would say to that woman,

“You have my word that I will not rest, until every mother’s child has the same opportunities to live in peace and safety.  God bless you.  Bless your heart.  And may your child rest in the kind of peace he did not come to know in this life.” 

That’s what this Unitarian Universalist would say.  What would you say?

Rebecca Parker writes:  I struggle neither as a benevolent act of social concern nor as a repentant act of shame and guilt, but as an act of desire for life, of passion for life, of insistence on life – fueled by both love for life and anger in face of the violence that divides…  

We insist on life.  We stand on the side of love.  Let the sacred conversation continue, begin, and carry our beloved religious community forward, Friends.

Amen.

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