You’ve no doubt noticed that this is no ordinary Sunday - I’m preaching from a manuscript in the pulpit. This doesn’t usually happen. But, today it does because I want to be sure that I deliver the message that I feel, down to my very core, is the one that God has for us today.
I grew up in the Deep South’s southwest corner - the furthest extent that the slave-fueled, plantation economy reached before the Civil War. I grew up where cotton and sugar cane were the biggest crops grown, in a town named for a plantation where Dixie Drive and Plantation Drive intersect. I grew up knowing I had ancestors, on one side of the family, who fought - and even died - for the Confederacy. I owned a Confederate flag, a gray Civil War soldier’s cap, heard all of the old family stories from life in the rural South…and insisted that none of it, none, had to do with racism or white supremacy. The war had been about states’ rights, not slavery; the flag was a symbol of our history and heritage, and had only been co-opted by some hate groups. Because I didn’t feel any conscious-level prejudice, I assumed that racism must have just been something that old rednecks off in the deep woods of East Texas did.
In 10th grade, I read a novel whose main character was African American. The character discusses, at a few points, what being black in America was like. He says, at one point, how he’s become used to the fact that, as a black man, every white person he walks by on the street instinctively clutches their purse tighter or puts a hand down to touch their wallet (depending on their gender).
A few weeks later, good old non-racist me was putting gas in my car, perhaps appropriately in Lee County, Texas. A minute or two later, an African American man pulled up at the next pump and got out of his car. I realized a few seconds later where my right hand was at. Wrapped around my wallet. It was the moment that my eyes were opened to the fact that racism is not just what they used to do in the Old South before Martin Luther King had his dream.
We have had the reality of racism thrust back into the public spotlight this week. Regardless of one’s feelings about Trayvon Martin, or Ferguson, Or Baltimore, or the blacklivesmatter and IcantBreathe hashtags, it is impossible to deny that the murder of nine African American churchgoers in Charleston was all about racism and its continued existence in our society. It is also impossible to paint it as a one-time exception; in the years 1995-1999 alone, 827 government investigations were launched into cases of church arson, mostly of predominantly black churches. In the last week, several black churches have been victims of such acts, completed or attempted.
In the ELCA, we have a special connection to the Charleston shooting. Two of the slain, including Pastor Clementa Pinckney, were not Lutheran but were educated at our Lutheran seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. However, most importantly, the alleged shooter was an active member of an ELCA congregation. He was one of us. He was baptized and confirmed in a church like this. He sat in the pews of a church like this. He heard sermons, sang hymns, and took communion in a church like this. He nurtured hatred and sin in his heart in a church like this…and he went and murdered nine people because of the color of their skin.
We have to let go of the belief that we are somehow immune to the sin that we see in the world around us simply because we come to a church like this on Sunday morning to pray and worship. So did Dylann Roof. We cannot persist in the belief, however well-intentioned, that we are not a part of systems like racism - racism does not have a geographic boundary or an age limit. We have to do the hard, uncomfortable work of self-reflection, prayer, and repentance because it is what Christ calls us to do.
There has been a lot of confusion about just what that means. For some, repentance has come to mean something like “feeling bad and apologizing.” I feel guilty that this bad thing happened, so I’m going to apologize. But…that’s not what repentance is about. Repentance is more than issuing an apology, or making a sympathetic Facebook post, or taking down the old Rebel flag bumper sticker from your car…or having a special worship service one Sunday. The word repentance means turning around, going down a different path - not just feeling bad and apologizing. Christ didn’t begin his ministry by saying “Apologize, for the Kingdom of God is drawing near.” He invites us to repentance - to experience his powerful presence in the work of rejecting sin and death and finding forgiveness and new life in him - resurrection, even, a rising again from the death that sin places upon us.
And what does that resurrection look like? I think it might just look a lot like the responses of the families of the nine people slain in Charleston. These are people who have had their loved ones murdered in an act that I’m willing to call a domestic terrorist attack - people slain because they were black by a white man who believes that all black people should die. Yet, these families spoke powerful words of truth and forgiveness to the face of the one who killed their loved ones, and who would have killed them if given the chance. Grace. Forgiveness. Truth. These are the hallmarks of God’s Kingdom; these are things that flow down from God in that mighty tide of justice and righteousness that will come down upon us from God, ready or not.
This is not an easy word to preach, nor an easy one to live out past the church door. I can tell you that from my own lived experience - committing to the path of repentance, especially when it connects to such a fundamental part of life in our society, is a difficult journey. Following Christ has meant looking into some of the ugliest, darkest corners of my own being, and some of the ugliest, darkest corners of my own family, and some of the ugliest, darkest corners of my own nation’s past and present. This work of repentance will break your heart.
But resurrection is the reward. The richest, most profound sense of forgiveness and new life you can imagine is the reward. Discovering how Christ is at work in you, in others, in the world is the reward. Experiencing the rivers of living justice by which God is renewing and refreshing this weary world - and getting lost in their mighty tide - is the reward. New community, built upon the fundamental truth that we are all one in Christ Jesus, regardless of where we’ve been or what we look like, is the reward. Resurrection into God’s Kingdom - that’s the reward.
This is the promise that sustained the faith of Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Sharonda Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Myra Thompson, and Daniel Simmons. That this life and its ugliness is not all there is, and that God’s Kingdom is drawing near to remake the world in justice and peace - this the promise. In our baptisms, this is the promise to which we are joined….and this is the promise which we are invited to live out. By turning from sin where we find it in our hearts and lives, and seeking not just forgiveness, we find not only that but new life…new life that is already there, waiting to be born in us that we might grow into a new creation, one people of God discovering the amazing grace that alone can transform our hearts and this world.
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