Summer Sermon Series June 21, 2015
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie G. Hutson
Ecclesiastes 7: 8-14 + Philippians 3: 7-14 + Luke 12: 16-34
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Her email was the first one I read Thursday morning. “What will you do, Pastor?” she asked “Do you have something besides vacant prayers to offer my generation? Where will we find hope?” Her challenge hit me in the gut and rang in my ears as I watched the news coverage surrounding the shootings in Charleston. What could I say in response to her challenge? How could I redeem the power of prayer for her? And what else did I have besides my prayers? What did this crime call for from a pastor?
Throughout the day Thursday I moved as though I were in a fog. My prayers felt impotent in the face of the act of terrorism playing out in the news. I posted a prayer on Facebook and received a private message: Why do you care? It read. This has nothing to do with us. We are white. Why do you care?
Thursday evening, it was my privilege to attend a prayer vigil at the Seattle African Methodist Episcopal Church, a sister congregation to Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. Bruce went with me to offer his support as well. When I received the invitation, I was moved by the radical hospitality of this congregation. If I were in their shoes, if members of one of my sister congregation’s had been brutally murdered for the color of their skin, for being black, shot by a white man during Bible Study, I might think twice about inviting white folks to come pray in my church house. I might want to mourn with my black sisters and brothers, not with those who raised up a young man who would walk into a church Bible study and kill fellow Christians because they were black.
Because you see, my sisters and brothers, as I sat in that pew on Thursday night and as we were listening to songs of hope pour out from their choir, I received a statement via email from the ELCA presiding bishop. The shooter is a member of an ELCA congregation. As I showed the email to the other Lutherans sitting with me, tears sprang to my eyes. I had an urge to apologize on behalf of a church that somehow did not manage to make the message of the wide love of Jesus Christ for all people, regardless of the color of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation….a church body that did not make that message clear. That did not make that message strong enough to overcome the message of systemic racism that is perpetuated in this country.
Before you imagine that we in the progressive, tolerant Pacific Northwest are exempt from this system, let me remind you of an article in the Seattle Times just this month, that reported that 13 rental properties, including new buildings just down the way in Ballard, were found to discriminate against prospective tenants based on their race. Black undercover testers were shown fewer available units, quoted higher prices, and told more often about credit and criminal history checks than their white counterparts. [1]
Still, it’s tempting to think that we don’t participate in racism, but the reality for most, but not all of us gathered her this morning, is that the color of our skin has garnered us privileges in this country that our black sisters and brothers have never experienced. And a further reality is that, no matter how hard we try, we are implicit in the systemic racism that infects this land we so love when we sit silently. When we sit silently when a joke is told, or a comment is made, or a person wonders aloud in our narthex about the role of our black sister. When we sit silently when police treat black men and women differently than they treat white men and women.
Why do you care? What will you say, Pastor?
First, I will confess to you the times I have held my purse a little bit tighter when a black man walks toward me. I will confess to you my silence in not calling out racially insensitive remarks when I have heard them in this place.
And second, I will answer that person’s question: I care because the Gospel compels me. I care because Jesus said that we are to love our neighbor and that we don’t get to define who that neighbor might be. I care because I serve a Church that has officially spoken out against racism and injustice for years….but as a called and ordained pastor in that church I never want to hear another joke/remark/question that does not honor all people spoken by someone who worships in this place NOR do I want to imagine that another hate fueled rampage might happen because I could not find the courage to speak.
Thursday evening at Seattle AME Church we heard many speakers. Mayor Ed Murray and the Chief of Police, Kathleen O’Toole. Seattle City Councilman Bruce Harrell spoke and welcomed us into his church home and the president of NAACP and a member of the Supreme Court of Washington added her comments. But the words that resonated with me came from Sister Julie Burrell, the Steward Pro Tem, who spoke to us in the absence of their pastor who was in Alaska on a church trip and en route back to Seattle. Sister Burrell opened the evening with this passage from Ecclesiastes 4: 9-10a: “Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up the other…”
Our task as the people of God is to reach out across all racial boundaries, confess how we have fallen short, and ask how we can do better. I do not have the answers because they are not my answers to offer. I have no idea other than prayer and repentance what it will take to move us toward living into Christ’s call to us. I have some thoughts: Open hearts and minds. Conversation and interaction. Less access to guns. Persistence. Courage. Humility.
Two are better than one, she read to us as we were warmly welcomed into their church home. Even this pastor who represented the very body that had raised up the person who had slain their sisters and brothers.
One of the ways we will reach out, and it’s a small way, but it’s all I’ve got this morning, is to write notes of condolence and support and love to our sisters and brothers at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. You will find note cards and pens in the narthex. I won’t send them until June 29th, so if you want to take the time to compose them at home, please do, or you can certainly write them this morning.
If you have other thoughts about how THIS congregation might reach out, please share them with me.
As your pastor, I call on us all to deeply examine ourselves, to hold our sisters and brothers in prayer. The names of those killed are printed for you and also available in the narthex. Take them home and include their families in your prayers. The Pastor of Mother Emanuel Church, Clementa Pinckney and Associate pastor Daniel Simmons were graduates of Lutheran Southern Theological Seminary.
Pray for Mother Emanuel AME church and in the love of God, pray for the congregation of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Columbia, SC, who raised up Dylann Roof.
Hear this from our Presiding Bishop, Elizabeth Eaton: I urge all of us to spend a day in repentance and mourning. And then we need to get to work. Each of us and all of us need to examine ourselves, our church and our communities. We need to be honest about the reality of racism within us and around us. We need to talk and we need to listen, but we also need to act. No stereotype or racial slur is justified. Speak out against inequity. Look with newly opened eyes at the many subtle and overt ways that we and our communities see people of color as being of less worth. Above all pray – for insight, for forgiveness, for courage.
Finally, this….again from Sister Julie Burrell….as she closed our service together on Thursday night, as we stood hand in hand, she said: There is a lesson in the valley. There is a lesson in the valley. These were her words of hope to her community of faith, struggling with loss and hatred. But they are words to us as well, as we sit in valleys of our own, surrounded by what we have done and what we have left undone. May God help us. Amen.
[1] The Seattle Times. June 13, 2015