Sermons

“Embracing the Call”

Micah 6:6-8; I Corinthians 12:12-14, 26-27 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – September 23, 2018

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that our hearts might be open to the suffering of sisters and brothers in our midst and moved to embrace your call. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

Before I begin this morning, I want you to look around the room. Look around at who is here, who it is that makes up this community of faith we call Vista La Mesa Christian Church. Who is here? Who is not here? Think about how this congregation compares to the one you grew up in, if you grew up in church. If you didn’t grow up in church, think about how this congregation compares to the communities you were generally surrounded by in your early years. What kinds of people were “normal” in your life? What kinds of people were you simply not exposed to? Who were the role models you identified with? Whose problems felt like your own, and whose felt far removed from your life? Now look around the room once more, and give thanks for the people who are here with you today.

Today and next Sunday, we are lifting up Reconciliation Ministry, the portion of our denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), that is dedicated to addressing and dismantling racism. Every fall, for two Sundays in a row, our Church encourages us to consider issues of racial justice and to receive a special offering to support this work within our denomination. To be honest, it’s never occurred to me that this is optional.   Considering the impact of racism in our country, talking about it two Sundays a year seems like a pretty minimal obligation. And as I’m sure some of you would like to point out right now, I’ve rarely limited myself to these two Sundays! But to realize that it is our wider church that calls us to do this makes a difference.

I have been preaching on racism for Reconciliation Sundays for 17 years now, beginning in 2002 in Anniston, Alabama. I remember one year, when someone got particularly riled up and started an indignant “reply all” email thread. At some point in that “conversation” another church member wrote, “Why does Rebecca always make reconciliation about race anyway? It’s about so much more than that.” Fortunately, another church member was able to answer her question and remind everyone that the denomination started Reconciliation Ministry in the early 70s before I was even born, precisely for the purpose of addressing the systemic marginalization of the poor and racial minorities. This isn’t just some annoying obsession your particular preacher has, though I will claim that it is one of my passions in ministry.

So here we are in 2018, and the Reconciliation Offering theme this year is “Embracing the Call” and invites us to reflect on Micah 6:6-8, a much beloved scripture among Disciples. Despite the fact that this passage is all over the place – it was our theme at Friday night’s youth group lock-in and it will be the theme of our Regional Assembly next month – I have to say, I’ve never thought about it in the context of our Reconciliation focus before. What does it mean to “do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with God” in the context of pursuing racial justice? What would it look like to embrace that call? This is a wonderful new way to look at this verse. And at the same time, it’s what we’ve been doing with these special days for decades.

As I was thinking about the years over which I’ve tried to encourage Disciples to “embrace the call” of Micah 6:8 in relation to racial justice, I realized something important. My audience has been shifting, in a very specific way. In my early years, I was preaching to a congregation that was almost entirely made up of white people. And let’s be honest, it’s white people who need to hear this annual reminder. One of the many benefits of being white in America is that you don’t really have to think about race or racism unless you feel like it. Because white has been set up as the “norm”, many white people live most of their lives without considering how their race has affected them. So when you’re speaking to a white congregation about race, you have the obligation to say some pretty specific things that don’t apply to people who are not white.

This got a little awkward as the congregations I was serving started to include more people of color. For a while, with just a couple here and there, I think I assumed most folks would naturally assume they were listening in while I addressed the people in the room who needed to be reminded that racism is still a thing that we need to deal with. But the process is continuing. Our church has continued to look more and more like the communities in which we live. Vista La Mesa Christian Church is in many definitive ways still very much a “white” church, with regard to structure and culture and worship style. But we are no longer simply a white congregation. I cannot stand up here and talk just to white people, without making invisible a sizable portion of the people in the room. If we remain committed to growth, this will become more and more the case. “The future is mestizo,” as theologian Virgilio Elizondo has declared.

So what does it mean to talk about race and racism in a multi-racial congregation? What would it look like the “embrace the call” to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with our God, in the context of a multi-racial community of faith? For me, as the preacher today, turning to another scripture helped me make sense of this. And the short excerpts we read from First Corinthians 12 made me realize this is really a matter of distance, and distance being shortened.

Disciples, both white and non-white, have known for years that we are connected with all Christians around our community, our nation and our world, in a mystical bond of unity. We love to preach on the Body of Christ passages. But sometimes we struggle to fully absorb them on a visceral level. We accept, and at some tentative level even celebrate, the burden of the struggles of the Community of Disciples of Christ in Congo, because we know they are our brothers and sisters in Christ. But it’s so much easier to understand what that means if Paul Turner comes to visit and tells us first-hand his experiences there. We know and struggle with the fact that the human rights of Palestinian Christians are being violated daily and we are called to respond to those violations. But we’re so much more likely to respond once we’ve had Rachel Shomali in our midst to give us a face and a name and a personality to put to the issue.

The same is true about the hot mess that is racial injustice in the Unites States. No one in this room can pretend any longer that issues of pay gaps or racist bullying in schools or police violence against people of color don’t affect your family. White Christians have paid occasional lip service to this reality for years, but when the people in our family affected by these issues are right in front of us, instead of in the newspaper, it becomes harder to ignore. “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it,” Paul tells us. It’s harder to brush off that call when the suffering is right here in the room.

I sincerely hope that all of us were horrified to learn that Botham Jean, a black man living in Dallas, Texas, was murdered in cold blood, in his own apartment, by a police officer, who claimed she was confused about where she was. But some of us in this room were affected by that story in more visceral ways than others. Are the rest of us willing to open our hearts to absorbing the pain and terror inflicted by each story like this, stories that remind a brother or sister just how expendable their life might be? Earl McNeil was killed in police custody, after showing up at the National City Police department in late May asking for help. Earlier this week, the DA cleared the department of any wrongdoing in his death. Here in this room, people are affected by this news differently perhaps; we need to consider how this is impacting those among us who are most directly affected, so that we can live more faithfully as the Body of Christ.

In many ways, the church was my first exposure to racial diversity. And I give thanks for that, because I believe this is the best place for us to wrestle with the historic and systemic sins of racism that have shaped our lives. If we don’t do that wrestling, we are failing in our call to be the Body of Christ. If we don’t attend the suffering of each part of the Body, we are not really being the Body. How do we embrace the call to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with God, when it comes to reconciling the sins of systemic racism? Perhaps it starts with listening to the stories of the sisters and brothers among us who have first-hand experience with the affects of racism. Reconciliation Ministry started an initiative last year called “One Bag of Tea”, which is intended to call us into conversation with people about these issues. Relationships are what change us. Getting to know people and reflecting on their life experience can have transformative impact on our understanding of issues we thought didn’t affect us directly. Meanwhile, we have another Sunday to reflect this year. Next week, Lace Watkins will be sharing the message with us, enlightening us from a perspective I could not, on how we can “Embrace the Call”. This is just the beginning of what we can learn and share together, as a multi-racial community of faith, struggling to faithfully and authentically live together as the Body of Christ, seeking to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God. Alleluia and Amen!