A sermon for when the bells stop ringing (1619 Commemoration)

Today at 12 pm Pacific Time we will take part in a nationwide 1619 Commemoration sponsored by the National Park Service and endorsed by Presiding Bishop Curry.

We’re remembering that, 400 years ago today, the first enslaved Africans who were brought to “English North America” landed at Point Comfort in Hampton, VA. 

We will participate by ringing our bell for one minute. The Park Service website gives this rationale in their invitation:

Bells are symbols of freedom.

They are rung for joy, sorrow, alarm, and celebration…universal concepts in each of our lives. This symbolic gesture will enable Americans from all walks of life … to capture the spirit of healing and reconciliation while honoring the significance of 400 years of African American history and culture.

As it often does, our lectionary has cooperated. 

We just heard Luke’s tale of “a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years.” She was “bent over and … quite unable to stand up straight.” 

And so Jesus does what Jesus does. 

He liberates. He heals. 

And he stands up to the authorities when they question his tactics:

You hypocrites! [he says.] Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?

The sabbath is for freedom, he says, and even one day more of bondage in the name of a selectively enforced rule of law is at odds with God’s liberating imperative.

Still, neither the press releases nor the scripture study, the bell ringing nor the singing of spirituals—not even the trust in “a spirit of healing and reconciliation”—in isolation, none of these actions will help or heal. None of them will make an immediate and concrete difference for the plight of black people in the U.S. None of them are enough to help us glimpse or realize the Dream of God.

**

One of my mentors has a ministry motto that she shares often. To church audiences around the country who invite her to speak, she issues this threefold challenge: “Show up. Listen. Tell the truth.”\

By agreeing to ring our bell at noon today, and to make some stylistic changes to our usual worship choices, I think we have met that first challenge, as well as we can meet it in this time and place. We’re here, together, and that is a start.

Step 2 is trickier, firstly because I’m certainly not suggesting that you listen to me. 

I am a halting and unreliable anti-racist—too timid, too willfully ignorant, too addicted to the privileges of my status as a young, fairly-compensated, able-bodied, over-educated straight white male priest. My job is to do my best to get out of the way.

I invite you to listen to the voices of experts on race and social change, and of African Americans willing to tell their stories of life in this nation, despite owing no one such an account. 

If, like me, you are a white person, listening and being changed is especially important, because white privilege insulates us from these important stories. It teaches us to avoid at all costs the discomfort of hearing, acknowledging, and engaging with experiences of racial inequity and oppression.

**

Right now we have what I see as an unparalleled opportunity to hear these stories from willing and wise storytellers. This is thanks to the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which I highly recommend. 

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, this package of extensively reported economic, social, and cultural analyses aims to [quote] “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”

Contrary to some of the pushback I read this week, the point of this reframing is not to raise and settle some non-existent argument about when America officially became a separate nation-state. 

The point is that this land had slavery for 250 of the last 400 years, not just 90 out of 250. We’ve had slavery or Jim Crow for almost 350 of the last 400.

And for fully 400 years we’ve had slavery, official and de facto Jim Crow, or their variously “legal” modern descendants, which affect many marginalized groups but hit black people hardest:

• a vast and devastatingly unequal prison-industrial complex; 
• shockingly unaccountable police brutality; 
• unequal political power and representation;
• unequal access to quality education and healthcare;
• unequal unemployment rates, wages and salaries, and advancement opportunities;
• predatory lending and other means of targeted financial exploitation; and 
• urban neglect followed by rapid displacement through gentrification.

This nation has never dealt honestly with these realities. 

**

Today we remember Jesus’s controversial healing of a woman in bondage, on the sabbath, a day set aside to recognize the end of generations of slavery in Egypt. 

We also pray on this our Christian sabbath for the healing of an entire people in bondage, on a day set aside to recognize the beginning of generations of slavery in America.

We can picture a woman standing upright in the synagogue. We can imagine the Hebrews singing songs of gratitude on the far side of the Red Sea. 

It is harder to form a fully comprehensible mental picture of what liberation will look like in this country.

But we have an abundance of evidence—stories, photos, films, statistics—that we are far from the promised land. The work was not fully accomplished in the mid 1860s, nor in the mid 1960s, nor in the years that have past since. 

As I took stock of the signs of white supremacy manifesting in our national discourse this week, and in our city, and in my own consciousness, I came to a new appreciation of how Jesus describes the woman he heals: “a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound.” 

Systemic racism is truly demonic: slippery, seductive, opportunistic, invisible to those unwilling to see it.

Jesus doesn’t sugarcoat his diagnosis, and he doesn’t sugarcoat his rebuke of the people who disapprove of his liberating work. 

He tells the truth. He is the Truth.

**

If it’s really the case that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, I believe it is the very force of truth that in every moment is straining to bend and displace the arrow-straight status quo.

By itself, ringing our bell today will not bend the arc. Thoughts and prayers won’t get the job done.

But if anything we receive or offer in this place helps us tell the truth more often, to more people, to greater effect, with more courage and more conviction, then we will glimpse the promise of the Dream of God becoming a waking reality for all of God’s children.

We have what it takes. God is giving us what we need. I’m amazed and inspired by the financial commitments The Episcopal Church as a whole and individual congregations and dioceses are making to the work of racial healing and reconciliation. We’re showing up, listening, telling the truth.

The educational and liturgical resources, the study groups and pilgrimages, the local partnerships and coalition building, increasingly good faith conversations about the need for reparations—these efforts are mostly in their infancy, but they are growing. The “[S]pirit of healing & reconciliation” moves.

Whatever the catalyst, I urge us all not just to examine our own roles in systemic racism, especially anti-black racism, but to dig deep and explore our motivation for ending it. 

For some of us that will involve grappling with our own demons and inner conflict. I am deadly serious when I say that Jesus can help us, is longing to help us, to lift us up together to our full dignity and full integrity.

Whoever we are, we can learn to help God realize the liberation of those in bondage.

So in the months and years to come, at Trinity+St. Peter’s, around the city of San Francisco, across the Diocese of California, along the entirety of the Golden State, and throughout a nation that believes in spite of itself that all persons are created equal: as we will at noon Pacific time today, let us continue to choose to let freedom ring.