Sermons

“Stories, Dreams and Alternate Plot Lines”

Matthew 13:10-17 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – September 24, 2017

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that your Spirit of Love might take hold of us and transform our hearts and your world. In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.

So last week, as we began our focus on Reconciliation Ministry – our denomination’s ministry for dismantling racism – I told you some stories about growing up in Eureka, Illinois, population 3,500, two of those people being Becky & Beth Kennel, the only black kids in my school, and about the stories my church told me that broadened that context for me. This year’s Reconciliation theme – “Everyone Has A Story” – encourages us to get to know one another more deeply, by opening our hearts to others’ experiences. Today I want to tell you some more stories, mostly from a little later in my life, when I was in college.

The first story is intended to help us realize how much our context shapes who we are. I got my undergraduate degree from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, a small town about 40 south of Minneapolis-St. Paul. It was a fairly idyllic place; the city’s slogan was “Cows, Colleges and Contentment.” Most of the time I was in school, I participated in an extracurricular group called Kairos that was sponsored by the Dean’s office. Kairos was intended to help students have deep and meaningful conversations about race. One of our most commonly used ice breaker conversations was around a simple question – Was coming to Carleton an experience of more of less diversity than where you came from? Much like our Reconciliation theme this year, this question aimed to respect each person’s perspective and help us understand how very different those perspectives could be.

For me, as you might imagine, being at Carleton exposed me to way more people of color than I’d been around before, offering me all sorts of new opportunities. But I remember very distinctly another student’s response. Jordan McEntyre had grown up in Berkeley. He looked like a stereotypical California boy – blond, laid back – honestly, even now, if you look at his Facebook page, you might confuse him with Ryan Gosling. But what I really remember about Jordan was how emphatically he made clear that, compared to what he was used to, Carleton and Minnesota in general were basic white bread. He had never felt so surrounded by only white people in his life. I remember being fascinated by that and trying without much success to imagine what that must be like.

Thinking back on it now, I realize that I was eased into experiencing and thinking about race relations in as gradual a way as probably exists. When I graduated from Carleton, I moved to Berkeley. Turns out Jordan was right. What struck me when I arrived at seminary was that despite the depth of conversations on race I’d been part of at Carleton, there had always been an underlying reality that it was mostly a black vs. white issue. Coming to California complicated that, with Hispanic and Asian and Pacific Islander folks being added into the equation. If you grew up here, no matter how much we still self-segregate at school or in stores or even in church, you’ve been shaped by a very different context than the one I grew up in. And though I know many of you grew up in small, mostly white towns like I did, without the benefit of those intentional conversations about these differences, I would think the transition from Small Town USA to San Diego or Berkeley or wherever may have been more jarring than mine was.

Telling our stories makes a difference. Scientists have studied how we talk about race with our children, or rather, they’ve studied the effects of the fact that we mostly don’t talk about race with our children. Kids start noticing differences from a very young age. And we talk with them – probably way more than is healthy – about the differences between boys and girls. But they notice racial differences too, and they see that we don’t talk about those, and thus, discussing race becomes a clearly taboo subject before we even realize kids are old enough to understand what a taboo subject is. We’ve got to start telling our stories more, whether our children are growing up in big, racially diverse cities or in tiny monochromatic towns.

So we’ve got stories about context, but we’ve also got stories about different contexts bumping up against one another. As I’ve already said, the stories I was told from a young age by my church created a readiness within me to be involved in racial reconciliation. But an experience I had in college pushed that to the next level. During the spring of my sophomore year, our campus was in a bit of an uproar. The College had invited Charles Murray to come speak. In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, let me sum up for you what that meant. Charles Murray was on a book tour, for his recently released book “The Bell Curve” which was basically a warmed-up re-tread of what is best called “scientific racism”, that is, when scholars try to manipulate data to justify their prejudices, in this case, that black people just aren’t as smart as white people. I still don’t know who invited him to speak or why; I suppose it was one of those “hear all sides” arguments. But as you can imagine, our small, progressive, liberal arts school was pretty het up about it.

That spring term, I was taking a New Testament course, a sociology class, and “History of the Civil Rights Movement” with Harry Williams, who was just one of those professors you don’t fail to mention. So as you can imagine, this upcoming convocation was being discussed in all my classes. Not just that, but our Resident Advisors were leading floor meetings about it in all the dorms, to make sure everyone’s perspectives were being heard. There were specially scheduled after-class forums, with faculty panels and the like, many of which I attended as well. For a few weeks there, it was Charles Murray on every channel 24/7.

In the midst of all that, I went to sleep one night and had a dream. And in my dream, guess what was happening? Yep, we were still discussing the scandal of Charles Murray coming to campus. And I woke up angry. “I’m so sick of this! I’m tired of talking about it! It’s been so omnipresent it’s even taking over my dreams! That’s ridiculous! I’m sick of dealing with this every minute of every day!”

And then it hit me. I was so indignant about being forced to talk and think about racism all day and night, because I wasn’t used to doing that. Because I am white, I normally don’t have to do that, unless I choose to. Because I am white, I can determine when I want to deal with racism and when I don’t. If I’m not in the mood, or don’t have the emotional energy, I can just walk around doing whatever else I want, because I have the privilege of being of the “default” race, the one considered “normal” and almost not a race, as opposed to any of the races that are seen as “diverse” and carry the conversation with them everywhere they go.

That was a big moment for me. It was my first experiential understanding of what white privilege really is, in a way that kind of punched me in the gut. And before I lose you, let me clarify that when I bring up white privilege, it’s not about making anyone feel bad about who they are, or making you feel guilty. As my college advisor, Sister Anne Patrick, said, “The poor cannot eat guilt.” Pretending a story about white privilege is about our feelings, whether of guilt or otherwise, is to continue to stay stuck in our own story, as if it’s all about us. The trick of white privilege is that those of us who have it spend most of our lives oblivious to its benefits. Like the benefit of not having to deal with race or racism unless and until we choose to. The point of a story about white privilege is to begin to understand someone else’s story. It turns out that’s not as hard as it seems, if we can cultivate eyes that can see and ears that can hear.

The longer you live a life (“you” here being me, a white person) in which you’ve committed yourself to self-awareness of your own privilege and active resistance to the systemic racism that shapes our society, the more people of color you get to know more and more deeply. Marcus Borg teaches us that being in relationship with someone means caring about what that Someone cares about. He’s talking about God, which works, but the lesson is broadly applicable. If we love God, we have to love God’s people because God loves them. If we love other people, if we’re in true relationship with other people, we care about their children as if they’re our children. When we hear stories about our friends having to have serious conversations with their kids about behavior when dealing with law enforcement officers, so that their children will come home alive, it is appropriate that our hearts be stricken. When we hear young girls saying they’ve come to terms with the “fact” that they’ll never be as pretty as white girls, as we did in our video today, it is appropriate that our hearts be stricken. When we see people taking actions that seem extreme, whether it be stopping traffic or taking a knee during the anthem, it is appropriate that we wonder about those actions as we would the behavior of a beloved brother or sister – “What is happening that I haven’t been seeing that would cause them to engage in this level of resistance? What story have I been missing?”

The more we seek out stories other than our own, the more we realize that our society is full of alternate plot lines. Not everyone is seeing things the same way we are. Often, our interpretations differ around the issue of blame. You can see this happening in the differences between our two scripture readings today. The version we read from the New Revised Standard translation is a little disturbing. It seems like it might be saying that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer because that’s how God set things up. It seems like, for some inexplicable reason, God is actively keeping people from understanding Jesus’ message. It’s confusing and mysterious. We can ask if what Jesus is saying and the way he’s quoting Isaiah is supposed to be proscriptive – that is, telling us how it will and should be – or descriptive, simply telling us how it is. And that might help a little.

But it seems Eugene Peterson took his alternate plot line even further. His understanding of God seems not to allow for any version of God that would work to keep people at a distance. And so instead, Peterson shifts the blame to the people. If they don’t understand the good news Jesus is bringing, it’s because of their own stubbornness; it’s because they’re putting their fingers in their ears to avoid hearing it. This is a much more comfortable reading, is it not? We know that this happens often enough. We know that we’ve done it ourselves. Even when we know that going to God could bring us healing, we confess that there have been times when we’ve done everything we could to avoid it.

To bring it back into our specific context today, we know that we’ve avoided truly hearing people’s concerns until something about their story touches our hearts and convinces us of their humanity. The stories create readiness within us, breaking down our defenses and opening our hearts. Is the truth Eugene Peterson lays out in these verses of his paraphrase the same one that’s actually there in the translation? Maybe not. But our hearts know that both are true, and the fact that both can convict us testifies to their truth.

The further I get into this sermon, the clearer it has become that it doesn’t really have an ending. Don’t worry – I am going to stop! But there isn’t really an ending. My chance to talk today is just the beginning. There are so many stories that need to be told. Each of us contains a multitude of stories. And when we listen to one another, we can begin to re-interpret our stories in the light of one another’s stories. When our stories begin to bump up against one another, we discover again and again the existence of alternate plot lines that we never knew were there. Suddenly, stories that seemed far-fetched and extreme start to make sense. Stories that were too painful to engage with become impossible to ignore. And the fact of our story-sharing becomes part of the story too, a sign and practicing of the Salvation story itself, the presence of the Living Word among us, continuing to reconcile us one to another and to our God. I hope that you will consider what your stories are. I hope that you will share them, with me, with one another, with someone whose story is likely to be different than yours. May we all have eyes to see, ears to hear, and stories to share! Alleluia and Amen!