Shiprah and Puah, the splendidly bright midwives of the Scripture story were prophets, in their way. Prophets work from within the context of exclusion and injustice, name realities, and then show the justice ways. And as Prophets call out in the midst of injustice and enslavement, then there follow responses. As the Hebrew people grew in numbers and power, the empire’s response was to kill the slave babies. Shiprah and Puah responded in their way—by saving the babies with sly persistence. In the resistance hymn we sang earlier, based on the Exodus stories, God sends Moses to say,“Tell ole Pharaoh to let my people go.” Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, Harriet Tubman, MLK—the poets and sages and prophets of all the ages gone by have called. And today, new prophets are rising up. Among them the Women’s March movement, and the Rev. William Barber and the new Poor People’s Campaign, inviting a national response—what Barber terms a “moral revival” uniting thousands of people across the country to challenge the evils of systemic racism, sexism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation, and the nation’s distorted moral sensibility. So many people quietly and loudly are responding—so many of you in this room—working the dream–working it out.
Through the long, weary years, we have heard the call to cleanse hearts and minds and society of the evils of racism and there have been and are, as you well know, many who deny that call and death-dealing responses follow— lynchings and shootings, fire hoses and dogs, and epithets and unequal education, mass incarceration and voting rights suppression, micro-aggressions, internalized racism, hopelessness, fear, anger, and returning of evil for evil. Nevertheless the prophets persist. Dr. King and the others, yesterday and today, will not be silenced. Outlasting his own life, MLK is a prophet for our time—still dreaming, still marching, still calling. And all along the way arising every day are those offering myriads of life-giving responses—over time waking spiritually and continuing to press forward with resistance and poetry and protest and marches and immigration reform and protection for the vulnerable and voting rights restoration and believing. Holding on to the truth that borders can be crossed, walls of prejudice can torn down and that love wins and that life ultimately triumphs, but sometimes it does so, as the great song, puts it, as we wade through the blood of the slaughtered. It is always both.
As I see it, prophets call us to two, central life-sustaining responses to personal and systemic racism—to do the internal spiritual work of awakening to what has been and what is and then to respond together by taking up the call to action. The internal and external works are of a piece and it is essential that we who are in the majority culture especially keep on doing both. The outer work is more dramatic, but the inner work is foundational for real and lasting change.
And why is that? Because those of us in the majority culture live, move, and have our being behind the border wall of privilege–and like this wall, privilege blocks our view and limits our understanding so that, even if we do lots of good deeds—even then, it is easy to let walls of privilege keep us working away—but still inside the castles of power over. The prisons of unconsciousness can prevent us from listening and from sharing power, well-intended though we may be. Unless we carefully do our inner work, our privilege blocks us from the realities of our own racism, such that we may continue to experience it in the way that we do, which is mostly like persons growing up with secondhand smoke, thinking that if we don’t engage in the deadly behavior ourselves, we and others around us are not affected. But make no mistake, as we well know, secondhand smoke is profoundly dangerous. Without our inner work, the micro-aggressions illustrated in the reading that Gail and I shared from Claudia Rankine’s seminal work, Citizen, like a barrage of fire ant bites, will continue to happen every day, many times a day while many of us stay asleep behind the borders of privilege and white fragility and miss them entirely or perpetuate them ourselves. Doing our inner work is important because it isn’t enough to be well-meaning! I don’t want to be well-meaning–I want to be awake! (or in modern lingo “woke!”) I do not want to be complicit in racism because I have fallen asleep at the wheel of my soul in these dangerous times, lulled by my own self-justification, even while doing good deeds.
The good news is that so many of us are together in this dance of grace trying to figure out how to do life more justly and inclusively, as we struggle to become more and more whole as human beings. On this MLK Sunday, but not only on this day, but on any given Tuesday or Thursday in August or April, I believe it is imperative that we, as UCG vigilantly recommit ourselves to the courage that it takes—now more than ever—to keep on working it out—Martin’s dream… to keep on dismantling the walls, crossing the borders, and re-energizing our exhausted souls. And as we continue to do our inner work and as we examine the ways we respond, it seems to me that we squarely stand indeed at a prophetic border crossing for our time. MLK started his movement in a church. He profoundly believed that his work was rooted in the will of God who, according to the Scriptures in Acts, is no respecter of persons, whose attention is turned most especially toward those who have been pushed aside. A God who is, in the words of theologian James Cone, “empowering them to know that they were not made for slavery…but made for freedom, like everyone else in the world.” But when we cross that border into freedom together, it costs. We know that. MLK said,”freedom has never been willingly given by the oppressor.”
This week, my friend posted some excerpts from the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and pastor who resisted injustice, recognized, very early and very clearly, the dangers of Hitler’s regime. In the 1930-31 academic year, he was on fellowship to Union Theological Seminary in New York and his already growing awareness was expanded by friendships with his fellow students, including French pacifist Jean Lasserre and African American Albert Fisher. When he returned to Germany, he was changed and extended the conversations about race that had become familiar to him while visiting Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem during his fellowship. He quoted from Acts: “God has arranged it so that all races of humanity on earth come from one blood.” White nationalism is an affront to this God-given reality. As Hitler began his rise to power, Bonhoeffer wrote an essay entitled “The Church and the Jewish Question,” in which his inner awakening and his outer responses are clearly linked. He writes, “As much as we would like to remain distant from political struggle, nonetheless, even here the commandment of love urges the Christian to stand up for the neighbor. Faith and love must know whether the dictates of the state may lead us against our conscience.. He went on to say that the church has the right and responsibility to aid victims of the state and that there comes a time when the church has the right and responsibility to jam the spokes of the wheel of the state. Jamming the spokes, he wrote, ‘is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself. Such an action would be direct political action on the part of the church.” Executed by the Nazis for his trouble, still, like MLK, his challenging words linger on the air of our time. I wonder… Are they prophetic words written to us? I wonder.
This is a hard theme, “Border Crossing.” The wall here is a picture of our cultural reality… It is ugly and sharp and complicated, and yet, too, there are signs of hope—prayers and light and realizations and coming together for right action. Reminding one another by the way we live that Love wins. That is really the content of the message—that though the arc of justice and life and love is long, long, long, remember—it is bending toward freedom and life and love.
What is hopeful is that, inner spiritual work, anti-racism education, and then action for the highest good–traversing this challenging cultural landscape while AWAKE means that awareness grows and things are changing. When Black Lives Matter, lives are changed, lives are saved, healing happens, borders are crossed, walls come down. MLK called and there were many responses. Prophets of our day call and there are many responses—from the horrific and evil rhetoric and deeds of some of our leaders and others AND responses of justice and change from woke people everywhere joining hands, and women and men of strength and conviction running for office and pressing forward for climate restoration based on science, tireless work for voting rights and insistent advocacy, and new efforts at just housing and the small kindnesses and persistence shown by courageous educators every day who work with children and youth, and employers working to expand just hiring practices and living wages. And people are gathering to learn and to welcome and to offer sanctuary and to work for legal protection for the persecuted, all over our city, all over the nation, joining to learn, to listen, to march and saying to one another, “Do not lose heart.” The dream is working itself out. We are working the dream, a waking dream. It is painful, joyful, essential, costly life work–shaking ourselves awake over and over again as a community—it is not a one-and-done. To keep doing that—do join us next Sunday to experience the Rev. Dr. Bernice Powell Jackson, one of the seminal civil rights leaders of our time.
We know what to do–deep listening to and learning from, those with lived experience, reading, showing up, and working together. Our work together matters. Clarence Page writes in “Showing My Color: Impolite Essays on Race and Identity”: “Americans of all colors are PLWR’s—People Living with Racism. Sometimes we get it. Sometimes it gets us. Dreams have fallen out of fashion in our cynical age. But with a new racial vision for the nation’s future, we Americans might yet trade in our current anthem, “the whine” for the 1970’s disco hit, “I Will Survive.” It’s got a good beat. We can dance to it.” We shall overcome. Together. Amen.