February 20, 2022 Sermon for Black History Month

By the Rev. Louis Mitchell

Alki United Church of Christ (Seattle, WA)

Contemporary Voice:

Open unto me, light for my darkness
Open unto me, courage for my fear
Open unto me, hope for my despair
Open unto me, peace for my turmoil
Open unto me, joy for my sorrow
Open unto me, strength for my weakness
Open unto me, wisdom for my confusion
Open unto me, forgiveness for my sins
Open unto me, tenderness for my toughness
Open unto me, love for my hates
Open unto me, Thy Self for myself
Lord, Lord, open unto me!

- Howard Thurman, from “Meditations of the Heart”

First Reading: Exodus 1:8-14

Second Reading: Psalm 1

Third Reading: Luke 6:20-26

Sermon:

“Passage, Punishment, Prayers, Praise, Purpose and Possibilities – Living the Dreams of our Ancestors!”

Greetings, I’m grateful to God to be here with you today!

Soon we’ll be heading into our Lenten season.  But let’s stay in the moment – Black History Month.  A hard to come by national holiday and one of the rare moments when many non-Black people are paying heed to the accomplishments and deeds of Black people. And even in these moments, rarely do we talk about the painful reality of being othered as a way of life. 

Please pray with me:

Gracious God – you’ve seen us all through centuries of misunderstanding and we’re thankful for You bringing us through. You’ve guided us to this day – A day that would have been unthinkable and illegal not that long ago. Hold us close and tender as we continue to wrestle with the ways that white supremacy affects all of us.  Be a balm in our lives and in our country and all the world. Open our eyes, minds and hearts –  Thy kin-dom come, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart  be acceptable to you, God – my rock, my redeemer, my grace, my solace and my guide.

Amen.

I agonized over this week’s sermon – not because there isn’t a lot of material, there’s more than I could digest in a week. But because there is special tenderness, terror and vulnerability.

When you’re the Black Pastor of a mostly white church there’s nakedness and fear,  a willingness and a wariness. Am I going to alienate someone? Am I going to be “too Black”? Am I going to be too real? I accept all of those possibilities today. 

Because from our first moments together, I have been my entire authentic self and I ‘ve encouraged you to do the same!

A brief word on the inclusion of Passage in my sermon title – the souls that were lost on what we call “the middle passage” may have been better off than those  shipped like the chattel they would become. Trapped in the tepid air, filth and degradation of the bellies of overpacked ships, only to be probed, marketed and further dehumanized when they finally were able to breathe clean air. I reach for those ancestors, freed by the ocean, celebrating their agency and courage.

From my earliest memories, in the Black churches of my upbringing  there seemed to always be a special affinity, resonance with the Exodus stories.  Pretty understandable for a people denied and fighting for freedom in the land of their bondage and of their birth. The fear of this new king in our reading in Exodus was also the fear of the founding fathers.  “He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. 

10 Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will
increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight
against us and escape from the land.” 

11 Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress
them with forced labor… 

12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they
multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread
the Israelites. 

13 The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the
Israelites, 14 and made their lives bitter with hard service in
mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were
ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.”

There was fear that we would join  with other oppressed immigrants, native born poor white people and indigenous people. It was a political necessity to create a rigid race-based caste system to ensure that others would always be able to say, “no matter how bad off we are, at least we’re not niggers”.

I know that word is shocking and offensive. But I want you to feel what I feel. I don’t think I’ll ever really understand what kind of human can treat another human being in those ways.  I guess the key was to legally and in all other ways, make negroes 3/5 of human, a human-like animal, in order to not feel the pains, guilt and shame of cruelty. 

Though slavery and entrenched racial bias is often framed as far away history, a long ago world – they are not. Jim Crow, sundown towns and redlining are quite recent – in our life times. 

And while laws, media, and some access have changed, make no mistake – racism and white supremacy are alive and well in 2022.

Our second reading from the Psalm of David is much more of a hope, dream and plea than a reality.  Because as we know, the wicked do prosper.  Some murderers do not face judgment. Regardless of their faith identities – and sometimes with the cross of Jesus as their standard.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, the bible and the cross were venerated at Klan meetings. Meetings of the Citizen’s Council were opened with prayers.  And in the midst of domestic terrorism, the tearing apart of families, the rapes of every gender, the breeding of Black babies for sale and profit - colored people, negroes, African-americans, Black people - still managed to escape,  rebel to assert their freedom, survive, create, build and even prosper. But at what costs to our ability to be tender, trusting. 

The hard shells we developed to survive also kept us away from a deeper kindness for one another. Having to swallow our feelings decade after decade has created the needs for all kinds of self-medication, our bodies have carried the wounds of our hearts in the sicknesses that get attributed solely to our diets and neighborhoods. The words in Luke were a prayer of hope for us – one that we dared to believe could/would come to pass:

“Blessed are you who are poor,
    for yours is the kingdom of God.

21 “Blessed are you who are hungry now,
    for you will be filled.

“Blessed are you who weep now,
    for you will laugh.

22 “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they
exclude you, revile you, and defame you[a] on account of the
Son of Man. 

23 Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward
is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the
prophets.

24 “But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have received your consolation.

25 “Woe to you who are full now,
    for you will be hungry.

“Woe to you who are laughing now,
    for you will mourn and weep.

26 “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what
their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

And while many of us are in a seemingly better place, we are still waiting and wanting.  In his first book, “Shoutin’ in the Fire- An American Epistle”, Dante’ Stewart, a young Black man of the south, writes of his journey as a “special, not like the others, Black man”. He came up at Clemson, feeling the pressure to represent the race. After being bumped from the spotlight of the football team, he followed his heart and became a star in the southern white Evangelical Christian movement. It’s an amazing book – I’d recommend it.

As a guest on “Beyond the Gatekeepers” a weekly Facebook offering  by The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries,  he lifted up a notion that resonated so deeply in my spirit.  He said that he felt “featured” but not cared about.  That’s the hook of being non-white in a white supremacist culture.  Seeking, acquiring the approval of white people – conservative or liberal – as a prophylaxis against being other, being hated, being feared, being largely unable to see yourself as worthy. Against still feeling unseen, unfelt and unheard. The ever-present dance of who we are, who I am and the question of can you see me? Will you share the burden of my fear and pain?

I grew up with well-intended but erasing sentiments “I don’t see color”,  “we’re all the same under the skin” And things like that. Kumbaya moments that skip over the unrelenting death and despair that are with me everyday. When you don’t see color, you also don’t see me – my joy, my fear, my courage, my conviction to just keep living in spite of being in a country that seems committed to my demise for one reason or another.

My first ministerial job, my Pastor called me while I was on vacation.  She wanted my council on how to address the Trayvon Martin murder. She said, “I don’t know how to feel”.  She lamented that the few Black members hadn’t shown up to church that Sunday. I can appreciate that she had those concerns, but at no point did she ever ask me how I felt or anything that didn’t have to do with her discomfort.

I won’t beg you to see me. I won’t deny my pain to make you more comfortable. I won’t pretend that I don’t have bone-chilling, hand-sweating terror every time I see the police behind me on the road.  I won’t always talk about how vulnerable I feel. I won’t always talk about my rage, or my loneliness.  I won’t admit that my love for you, the church and the denomination are still interwoven with the heartaches of past loves gone wrong.  I won’t share the many micro-aggressions still practiced in our majority white, self-congratulatory denomination. I won’t share my pain of acceptance for my gender and orientation in the white LGBTQ world, as long as I’m not an angry Black person.  I won’t share the quandary of my love for my Blackness but disdain of my gender and queerness in many Black settings. I can’t. 

Passage, Punishment, Prayers, Praise, Purpose and Possibilities – Living the Dreams of our Ancestors!

In the emotive worship of our churches - lives the spilled blood and scarred bodies of our ancestors, the many compromises that we made to stay alive, the echoes of dried tears with every news story of a Black person slain, or disappeared, the mixed emotions of joy and fear when one of us reaches a pinnacle of success,  the desire to leave our homes without putting on masks of joy, 

The textures of our skin and hair, the ways that we bring our sensuality as an offering to God through shouts and dancing, the audacity of bringing our whole selves to worship ts a living prayer for the lives of our children, the commitment to love ourselves even if nobody else will!

Black History month isn’t a month for Black people to celebrate our histories and accomplishments – we do that all year long.  It’s an invitation for you to see us fully without turning away from the pain, fear, pride and hope that lives in our bodies, hearts and spirits everyday.

Amen.