Sermon: "Getting It Together"

The Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia
Congregational Church of Brookfield (UCC)
May 18, 2008

Race Relations Sunday

Getting It Together

Matthew 28:16-20, [Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a]

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

 

This powerful vision statement of Jesus, for many of us, sums up why we do the things we do as Christians.  God is still speaking, and we are still listening to the call of this “Great Commission” of Jesus – to “go and make disciples of all nations.”  We in the United Church of Christ, especially, see ourselves as a church that is united and uniting.  Our denomination was formed in the 1950s from two other denominations – one that was originally made up of primarily German-Americans, and the other one was mostly Anglo.  That was a bold thing to try to do only a few years after the end of World War II.  Today, our church is known for extending “extravagant welcome” to outcasts and strangers. 

This is why we go out into the world and try to bear witness to the Good News of God’s love. We are called to go out and peddle hope to the hopeless, but we don’t generally in our churches hold tent revivals or thump the Bible to do that.  These days, at our end of the Christian spectrum, we’re not so much going out and literally baptizing the so-called “heathen” – as our foremothers and fathers once did, like the Ruggles who set out from this very church to become the first white missionaries to reach Hawaii.  Instead we are more likely to be out in the world proclaiming the Gospel with our actions.  We are a church that responds to the call of St. Francis of Assisi, who said Christians should “preach the Gospel at all times, and when necessary use words.”  

We busy, hard-working Christians are always taking on projects that people who don’t yet see Matthew’s global vision of Jesus will dismiss as none of their business, because they don’t see it as having anything to do with themselves, their personal morality, or their immediate family.  We build homes for low-income strangers, as we dedicate our Brookfield Habitat House this week. We resettle refugee families from overseas, like Nafie, Suhair, and Mutaz from Iraq and Annie and Lloyd from West Africa. We send our mission trips to the Dominican Republic, Florida, West Virginia, and this year, to New Orleans to rebuild wrecked and run-down houses and restore shattered lives. We share our space with the Danbury Chinese Alliance Church, and they give back generously to our ministries with their offerings in support of us.  We are in mission partnership, throughout the United Church of Christ, with churches across the world – most have people of European ancestry, but others are Chinese- and Japanese-American, African-American, Native American, Pacific Islander.  Through the eyes of God, we are called to see one another as family, no matter what our national origin or color of skin or the tilt of our politics.  We are called just to see the mud of Holy Creation on each of our faces and remember the tender touch of the hands of God who created us, who made each one of us and calls us to get together and live as his body in this broken world.

That brings us to today’s lectionary text from the first two chapters of Genesis, which I decided not to take the time to read BEFORE the sermon, because it takes about 5 to 10 minutes.  I’m guessing you’ve read it all before, but if you haven’t, you can find it in your pew Bible.  It’s on page 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”  This is some of the most beautiful poetry in the Bible, and I dearly love it.  I regret that Christian fundamentalists have nearly stolen it from us by insisting it must be “Creation Science.”  I believe you can ruin Genesis if you try to make it into a factual historical account.  I think, though, that no myth could better capture the truth of our reality here on planet earth.  Because Genesis tells us, in no uncertain terms, that we are all one family, as we are all descended from one common ancestor, Adam.  Genesis 1 holds a powerful affirmation of our common humanity in verse 27: “So God created man, or humanity (some new translations say “earthlings” because the Hebrew adam comes from adamah, which literally means “earth” or “ground,” the substance of creation)  … So God created earthlings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”   This was revolutionary thinking – all humanity in the image of God – even slaves, foreigners, and women!  This idea was both illogical and dangerous to many great minds of the ancient world.  It was obvious to most ancient peoples that KINGS were created in the image of God, were children of God, but if the King’s SLAVE or the King’s concubine was in the image of God, there were serious political implications to that.

You see Genesis flew in the face of conventional wisdom back when it was written, back during the Babylonian exile just some 500 years before Christ.  Even though it’s first in our Bibles, it’s not the first text of Holy Scripture to be written down.  The world back then, much like the world today, tended to believe that “might makes right.”  In other words, if you wanted to know which nation had the true religion, you could just look to see which nation was on top politically, which had the most military success – and it was clear to most people that it was THAT nation or race that the gods had blessed. 

Babylon, then, was the conquering nation of the day – where the Jews had been taken away in chains.  And Babylon had a creation myth where the hero Marduk creates the world by slicing open the belly of the pregnant goddess Tiamat with his sword.  Humanity sprang up from the ground from her splattered blood, while the kings of Babylon were said to be descendants of Marduk, the slayer.  In that worldview the people knew their place – they knew they were only insignificant flecks of blood flung to the ground from the tip of their great ruler’s sword.  So the Jews, an oppressed race of second-class citizens in what is now Iraq, told a different story around their tables, to their children.  They shaped a profoundly different worldview that endures to this day.  It is our heritage.  In the second creation account, which follows in chapter 2, humanity springs up from the ground, but in a much, much, MUCH different way.  God is seeking a companion.  “Mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground – then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”  There was tenderness in that Creation.  God holds the baby Adam as a midwife, admiring the tiny fingers, the tiny toes.

So this story from Genesis is more than one ancient people’s explanation for how science really did things: this is a powerful and revolutionary theological statement. This statement is the one on which our very nation was founded – as our Pilgrim ancestors fled England, where the King claimed that divine right of all kings – that his family and his royal line had preference over others, and his rule was divinely ordained over both church and state.  So Genesis, still today, has a challenge for us in our conflicted world.   How might we treat one another differently if we truly held this text sacred – if we all were “Creationists” and believed we were ALL God’s beloved children, shaped from the earth by God’s own tender hand?  

In the light of Genesis, this “Great Commission” of Jesus to go out and make disciples of ALL the nations looks a lot different.  For the Jews, “the nations” were those enemy peoples that surrounded them.  So to go out and make THEM disciples is all a part of Jesus’s call that we “love one another” – his call that we love, especially maybe, those people who don’t look or think like us, because Jesus broke through all kinds of barriers by calling us to love our enemy.  Jesus calls us to love even those who revile us and persecute us, and say all manner of evil and wrong-headed things about us.  We profess Jesus as Lord, and it is to that “Lord of all” that we pledge our allegiance first. Red, yellow, black, and white, all are precious in His sight – for we were created in God’s image.  We even receive our baptism in the name of God the Father – which to me is not a proof of God’s gender but a reminder of God who is the same one Holy Parent to us all. 

I want to close with a story from my childhood.  As you I think know I grew up in Greensboro, NC, where the lunch counter sit-ins of the Civil Rights movement began.  They were started at the downtown Woolworth’s by a group of students who our civic leaders would have called “trouble makers from the college,” from North Carolina A&T University, where Jesse Jackson was the student body president.  And after the first sit-ins, which started to spread to other black colleges across the South, those students were emboldened to lead a march down the streets of my hometown.  And naturally, the civic leaders and business owners were nervous that some kind of riot might break out, so they sent the police with billy clubs – all white police, of course – to meet them and to stop them at all costs. 

So this tense moment arose as the students started coming down main street from one direction and the police from the other.  And this was before the great march from Selma to Mongomery, you know – this was early – so they’re coming down the street and they meet at the center.  And there’s silence.  They stop.  Nobody knows what to do at this point, because it’s never been done before – it hasn’t happened yet.  But the young man who was later to become THE REVEREND Jesse Jackson told his group of students to kneel there in the street, and to pray.  And they prayed, “OUR Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.  THY Kingdom come; THY will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven…”  And to that, the police captain looked up and said, “Well, Jesse…. I believe you’ve made your point.  I think we’d best just all go home now, don’t you?”  And they did.  No headlines were made that day in the Civil Rights movement, because NOTHING HAPPENED.  But I say, a miracle happened. 

I wanted to talk about race today because my very faith springs out of those miracles that I have seen in my life.  In MY day, I have seen the Red Sea part, and I am still alive to tell you about it.  I didn’t want to enter into this “sacred conversation” on race today because we had to, or because our national denomination SAID we should.  I’m a stubborn Congregationalist, just like you, and I won’t let anyone tell me what I can say from MY pulpit!  And I didn’t want to talk about race today in our predominantly white community of Brookfield because I think we’re all a bunch of racists – or that YOU’RE all a bunch of racists but I, because I went to an integrated school, am not.  I wanted to speak about race today because I KNOW we are not all racists here in this room.  And because we are not, we are called to listen, to still listen to the voice of God today when it is spoken by people with whom we may disagree, whose experiences may not be our own.  And we need us to stand in solidarity with them – because others need us to speak up in the face of a nation that is tempted to say racism is all over now – that the Civil Rights movement came and went, and thank goodness, we now all have a level playing field.  If it’s true, let people of color proclaim it from the mountaintops – let us not ourselves, as white people, proclaim it.  We have to stand up also against those, even in our own denomination – black as well as white – who would try to split our church family and our nation apart.  We are called to be OBEY our Lord Jesus, who has commanded us that, above all, we are to “love one another,” to love one another as Christ has loved us. 

Thanks be to God for first loving us, so tenderly, and who still leads us in his way today.  Amen.