The Church and America's Original Sin, A sermon marking the 88th birthday of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer
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Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford, Connecticut
Second Sunday After The Epiphany
Birthday of The Rev Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
January 15, 2017
Isaiah 49:1-7 Ephesians 6:10-20 John 1:29-42
GOD IS GOOD. ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME. GOD IS GOOD.
It is good for us to be here today, together, to celebrate the actual birthday of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Yesterday, in honor of the holiday, our Brotherhood of St. Andrew co-sponsored a Day of Reflection for the men to consider how we can have a positive impact on the church and our communities, make a difference when it comes to the issues of social justice to which Dr. King devoted his life. Even as this nation has seen an expansion of individual rights and advances in civil liberties for many over the past six decades, we are also witnessing an alarming and increasing presence of the so-called "White Supremacist" movement at the center of our national life and politics, a presence that, sadly, threatens to gain strength rather than diminish. And while this phenomenon is generally reported in the public discourse at large, I would like for us today, as we observe the birthday of Dr. King, to reflect, in an age of heightened divisions, on how people of faith, and we as Christians and members of the Episcopal Church, might keep alive and promote that vision of "a beloved community" which was at the heart of Dr. King’s dream
In one of his first published articles Dr. King stated that the purpose of the Montgomery bus boycott "is reconciliation . . . redemption, the creation of the beloved community." In 1957, writing in the newsletter of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he described the purpose and goal of that organization as follows: "The ultimate aim of SCLC is to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality. . . . SCLC works for integration. Our ultimate goal is genuine intergroup and interpersonal living -- integration." And in his last book he declared: "Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation . . ."
Dr. King’s was a vision of a completely integrated society, a community of love and justice wherein brotherhood would be an actuality in all of social life. In his mind, such a community would be the ideal corporate expression of the Christian faith. And he had no delusions that this would be a quick or easy process.
It was on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on April 17, 1960 when Dr. King made the observation that 11 a.m. on Sunday mornings is the most segregated hour in America. At the time he said it, many parts of The United States were still segregated by law, what is known in legal terms as de jure segregation. But then was then and now is now, and you know what? Even without those laws, 11 a.m. on Sunday morning – now I’m not talking soccer fields and hockey rinks and basketball courts and baseball fields – but I’m talking about in places where Christians are supposed to be on Sundays, Sunday mornings are STILL the most segregated time in America.
A recent study just done in 2015 by LifeWay Research, a Tennessee-based research firm, paints a picture of an American church that hasn’t changed much in half a century:
n Two in three Americans have never regularly attended a place of worship where they were an ethnic minority
n 67 percent say their church has done enough to become more ethnically diverse.
n * 71 percent of evangelicals say their church is diverse enough.
n * Among 1,000 American adults, 82 percent say diversity is good for the country — but not necessarily in their church pews.
n 22 percent have never experienced being a minority at church, but they think it would make them uncomfortable.
n There’s not much urgency about diversity. Half of those surveyed think the churches are “too segregated,” but 44 percent disagree.
n A survey of 1,000 Protestant senior pastors found 43 percent say they speak about racial reconciliation once a year or less.
“People like the idea of diversity. They just don’t like being around different people,” said Ed Stetzer, executive director of Lifeway. “Maybe their sense is that church is the space where they don’t have to worry about issues like this,” he said.
Now, I personally think that poses a problem, because if you don’t like diversity very much, it seems to me you’re probably not going to be all that happy in Heaven either.
In the recent issue of the academic journal Sociological Inquiry, two professors dug deeper into why Sundays remain so segregated.
The article, “Race, Diversity, and Membership Duration in Religious Congregations,’ said that nine out of ten congregations in the U.S. are segregated, where “segregated” was defined as- a single racial group accounting for more than 80 percent of their membership. That is only one in ten congregations are NOT segregated.
Kevin Dougherty , a sociology professor at Baylor University in Texas, and a co-author of the article, says churches haven't kept pace with other institutions. Socially, we’ve become much more integrated in schools, the military and businesses. But in the places where we worship, segregation still seems to be the norm.
Dr. King called this separation one of the great tragedies of the Christian church. And it is one more example of just how far the institutional church has wandered from the Dream of God. The first century Christian church was known for its diversity. Jews, Gentiles, and Greeks mingled alongside women and slaves. Biblical scholars have long maintained that the early church’s diversity was one of the reasons it became so popular. Roman society was characterized by rigid ethnic and class divisions, and the church was a place where people were identified by their faith and not their race or wealth or occupation or station in life.
What can we as Christians do to address what Pastor Jim Wallis has called “America’s Original Sin” – racism? Yesterday at our Brotherhood of St. Andrew event, challenged by several presentations by our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, we entered into “sacred conversations” where we shared our own experiences with issues of race. As a congregation, we have had at least six or more such conversations over the past couple of years. Even in this safe place, it was hard for us to name the sin.
But sin it is. If we consider sin anything that separates us from God and from one another, then racism is indeed a sin. And we as Americans, proud as we are of our constitutional experiment in representative democracy, need to be honest with ourselves that racism IS our Original Sin because, just as traditional church doctrine teaches that Original Sin is with us at birth, so it is built into our system. White America needs to admit that the system hasn’t worked for everybody because it was never designed to work for everybody. In Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution, we find what is known as the Three Fifths Compromise, the compromise that was struck between the northern states and the southern states so that they could all agree on one document. It reads: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
This is actually even worse than it sounds, a kind of compounded interest on the sin of chattel slavery – which, we need to remind ourselves, was endorsed or at least tolerated by many segments of American Christianity as the will of God. Not only were persons of color considered less than fully human – to the extent they were counted at all, it was to give their white owners more power at the ballot box and in the halls of the federal government. By the time the rules gradually began to change, it was too late: Like a cancer that multiplies on itself and eats all the healthy tissue in its path and metastasizes through the entire body, chattel slavery left its ugly imprint on every aspect of our society, our government, and our commerce. It is from that sin of chattel slavery, institutionalized in our founding documents – that our society has yet to recover and for which our non-white brothers and sisters bear a disproportionate burden to this day.
Perhaps this is what the writer of the letter to the Ephesians means when he writes. Put on the whole armor of God… for our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. We are dealing with sin that is so much a part of the fabric of our society that it is difficult if not impossible to find one place to start attacking it. Perhaps this is the sort of demon to which Jesus was referring when the disciples were unable to exorcise a demon on their own. You remember, they come to Jesus and ask, “How come we haven’t been able to get rid of this demon?” And Jesus says: This sort of demon can only be removed with prayer.
As we seek to address the sin of racism and injustice, my brothers and sisters, we here at Trinity Episcopal Church in Hartford are indeed blessed, because we start with at least the beginnings of that Beloved Community of which Dr. King dreamed. Very few if any congregations in the Episcopal Church in Connecticut have the gifts of diversity and vitality that we enjoy. As Dr. King dreamed, we seek to grow together as brothers and sisters in Christ, recognizing that in Jesus we are neither Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave nor free, but we are all one in Christ. When we welcome the stranger, we welcome them not so that they can become more like us, but so that they can become most fully the person God desires for them to become, and that together, we can share and learn from each other’s journeys as we work toward forming a more perfect version of that Beloved Community.
God is the way of Jesus, and the way of Jesus is love. Love is God, translated into the language of life. As we celebrate today what would have been Dr. King’s 88th birthday, let us, as a congregation, commit to take up the charge given by the Prophet Isaiah: I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.
With God’s help, and making full use of the unique gifts that God has given us, let us become a light to other congregations even as we open our hearts to one another and come closer to achieving Dr. King’s beloved community in our own congregation. We can never undo the past; but in the love of God in Jesus Christ we can move forward. As Maya Angelou writes in her poem, On the Pulse of Morning,
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage,
Need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
AMEN.