A sermon by Senior Minister John B. McCall, April 6, 2008
Luke 24:13-35
I’ve always loved this story about the disciples on the road to Emmaus – tired, disheartened, frightened, vulnerable, utterly human – filled with feelings that tumbled all over each other. As they walked along they encountered Jesus – the risen Christ. But they didn’t recognize him. Why do you suppose? Luke doesn’t really tell us. Maybe this was the author’s way of saying that Jesus looked really different. He must have sounded different, too, if his long-time disciples didn’t recognize his appearance or his voice.
But I suspect it was something else. I’m quite sure it didn’t have anything to do with their eyesight. I think it had to do with their heads and their hearts. Have you ever been so engaged in your own thoughts and feelings that it’s as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist? You’re tuned out – but more than that – you’re in a different world. It’s like the twilight between deep sleep and wakefulness, a gentle place where dreams and reality blend together.
Or maybe it was like PTSD where everything the disciples experienced was filtered through the tragedy and travesty they’d just witnessed. Or maybe it’s like the Italian tailor from a little village who had an audience with the Pope. And when he came home all his neighbors gathered with great excitement and said “tell us everything…” and he answered: “He’s a 42 regular.”
This story of two disciples on the road to Emmaus reminds us we can easily get drawn so deeply into our own world view, that we wouldn’t even recognize Jesus if he walked beside us. Not only do we miss the messenger… we miss the message.
There’s been a lot of debate recently about messengers and messages. It won’t surprise you that I been asked many times what I think of the furor over video clips taken from sermons by the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, recently retired as minister of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Until January he was pastor to Barack Obama, the first African-American candidate for president of the United States.
However, it may surprise you that I’m walking right into that minefield this morning, and invite you to come along. I believe it’s better for me to try to reflect on such issues, however imperfectly, than to ignore them. I know you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt that I’m not in the pulpit to endorse a political candidate or even to talk partisan politics. But I want us to ask together what the real, underlying issue is.
I first met Jeremiah Wright 36 years ago when I was a newly-ordained pastor in Chicago. I chaired the committee that examined him as a young Baptist preacher whom the members of Trinity UCC had called to their pulpit. The church had about 80 members far on the south side of the city, and this was just four years after Dr. King had been assassinated. Trinity Church now has about 8,000 members and a vast array of ministries that serve God and serve the community. But let’s be honest: until an African-American member of that church became a serious candidate for President, few people beyond the neighborhood cared very much about what Jeremiah Wright said from the pulpit.
Now, 30-second clips from his sermons have surfaced and have been played endlessly on TV and on the Internet for a single purpose – to discredit presidential candidate Barack Obama – guilt by association. Talk show hosts and political pundits will continue to fuel the fires labeling Dr. Wright’s sermons hate speech and condemning a member of his congregation for failing to condemn his long-time pastor.
I suggest this is a perfect example of the old adage “don’t kill the messenger.” It means we’re content to blame bad news on the one who brings it. This idea was expressed as early as the philosopher Sophocles in 442 BCE. And it continued with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, 40 years ago… forty years ago this week. We know the bullet didn’t silence his message, and we’d like to believe the racism he decried has been rooted out and destroyed.
But friends, it’s still deep in our culture. Only you and I, way up here in Northern New England, don’t have to face it most of the time. The uproar points to the deep division that still exists between Caucasians and people of color. If we can kill the messenger we can pretend the message is bogus.
I don’t think about it very often, but I understand I’ve have grown up with the privilege of being a white, educated male in a society where my kind rules. So it’s obvious that my daily experience is profoundly shaped by that fact. Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts (also a member of the United Church of Christ) wrote this past week in the Miami Herald:
Whites and blacks use different measures in assessing racial progress. Whites judge it by looking how far we have come [for example] (“How can you say there’s still racism when we have Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama?”) Black’s judge it by how far we have yet to go [for example] (“How can you say there’s no racism when police keep stopping me for no reason?”)(Click here to see the column)
Do we argue that there’s no longer the taint of racism in our culture? Or do we argue that no one has the right to point it out to us? Or are we simply arguing that the prophetic voices among us should stop being loud and abrasive and start being nice and kind and polite when they point to scripture and tell us we’re betraying God’s intentions?
{Let’s remember: one of the traits of racism is that the dominant culture (that’s me and most of you) tells the minority culture they have to conform to our way of talking, dressing, worshiping, believing, preaching, and teaching.}
Countless preachers have said countless things in outrageous ways over the years – many of them absolutely true. Sometimes the listeners have denounced them and walked out the door. I know a little bit about that from experience. The Old Testament is filled with angry pronouncements that God has cursed the people for their sins. And the call of the prophet is to be that messenger who tells the people the truth …even when they don’t want to hear the message. “Woe to you,” said Jesus, “when everyone speaks well of you, for that’s what their ancestors said about false prophets.” (Luke 6:26)
I wonder: were it not for this furor would we, as a society, have talked about the elephant on the coffee table – racism in the US and the deep division that continues among Caucasians and various peoples of color? I wonder, even now, if we can get past the heated rhetoric and ask the urgent question of how we can heal the historic wounds which began when the very first immigrants from Europe – good Christians that they were – thought they could own the first immigrants from Africa.
I rarely see the wounds of racism today. I don’t really want to. I’d much rather believe that all of us thoughtful, open-hearted white folks have helped to heal this awful sin. I’d like to think that passive non-discrimination is sufficient to balance the great tables of justice. How easy it would be for me to say to my neighbors with darker skin: “that was then and this is now… get over it.”
That’s nothing new. In his remarkable Letter from the Birmingham Jail (April 16, 1963 – 45 years ago) Dr. King addressed the religious leaders in his community who told him to be patient and to stop making such a fuss; he wrote:
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
We can debate whether the sound clips from Jeremiah Wright’s sermons are truly hate speech or whether they represent a passionate, prophetic, powerful way of naming the evil that some see and others don’t. But first let us ask the same of the prophets like Amos and Ezekiel and Jeremiah. And then let’s demand the same of the screamers on AM radio talk shows. Which is hate speech and which is a cry for justice? When people of color tell us they experience discrimination and racism in our society we dare not dismiss them.
Jeremiah Wright doesn’t live in a vacuum. He represents a strong Christian tradition called Black liberation theology. This past week one of its authors, Dr. James Cone of Union Seminary, said:
It’s concerned about the Gospel for everybody and if everybody is for the Gospel in this society then they are concerned about the poor and the weak… It sees justice for the poor as the very heart of what the Gospel is about, and the very heart of what God is doing in this world, and God is taking sides with those who are forceless and weak, and he is empowering them to know that they were not made for slavery… but were made for freedom like everyone else in the world. (interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR “Fresh Air” – Monday, March 31).
There’s the problem: in a careful reading of the Gospel we really must see that God does stand with the poor and the powerless and the enslaved. And, friends, when someone shouts that message we want to silence the messenger. It’s a painful accusation.
But it’s nothing like the pain of having your ancestors brought in chains to the shores of this “land of the free and home of the brave.” It’s nothing like the pain of being taught to feel ashamed because your skin is dark. It’s nothing like the pain that God must feel in seeing us continue to hurt each other and then to turn away and refuse to listen.
Regardless of who becomes the next president of the United States is it possible that we’ll be willing to listen to the messengers who point out our failings? Is it possible that we’ll listen for truth no matter which side of the aisle it comes from?
When I look at this furor over Jeremiah Wright and what he has preached, and how some hope to discredit him, I recall the ancient wisdom in Genesis, chapter 50. You remember how Joseph’s brothers had sold him into slavery then years he sat in the seat of power in Pharaoh’s court as they humbly bowed before him. He said to them “you intended it for evil but God meant it for good.” [Genesis 50:20]
When all is said and done, those who have condemned Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United Church of Christ and everyone who has sat in those pews, may have given our nation a gift by pushing a painful but urgent conversation about our very soul as a people whose foundations include the horrible sin of slavery. That remains to be seen. But people of good will, of any color, can make it happen. We can do more to erase racism.
Long ago on a dusty road between Jerusalem and Emmaus, two disciples walked along in their own world, absorbed in their own memories and fears and pains. And Jesus, the risen Christ, joined them but they couldn’t even recognize him – until a little while later when he opened the Word in scripture, and then took the bread and cup and shared it with them. And then they knew the living Christ.
Don’t shoot the messenger… keep open to the message, and ask always whether it comes from God, no matter who delivers it.
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For Further Reading:https://fccucc.org/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=sermons
UCC.org more about Trinity United Church of Christ (Click here)
The Rev. John Thomas, General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ, spoke about the recent controversy regarding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Click here)
On Wednesday, April 2, the United Church of Christ ran the following ad in the New York Times. The call for donations to pay the $120,000 went out over the Internet and email. And more than $150,000 was donated in just over a week. To view the ad (Click here)