March 8, 2015
Text: Mark 1:21-28, 35-39
Some time ago Gail Arnall asked me to speak during Lent and share something I am working on. A couple of weeks later, Harold Vines asked me to speak to Friends of Jesus on the topic “A white man speaks about race.” He added, “And make it personal.” Today I am adapting what I shared with Friends of Jesus.
While I feel honored by both of these invitations, I must confess that the same question arises for me that is likely to be stirring in some of you – namely, is it possible for a white man, any white man, to speak with authority and emotional truth about race and racism? White men represent the problem. We have been the main opposition to change all along. How can we offer trustworthy perspective and even a bit of leadership toward resolving and healing this ugly, still festering wound in our common life? All I can say in my defense is that I am here because Gail and Harold asked me and my goal is to be as faithful as I can to their call.
As I see the big picture, the time has come when authorization and, indeed, also the preparation to speak about race and the diabolical evil of racism must come significantly from black men and black women and not solely and primarily from whites. There is a lot to unpack in that statement but for today I put it out there as a conviction and simply let it stand. At another time I can explain why I believe this is true.
A brief defense of this growing conviction is that if the church is to be an instrument of God in “casting out” racism, our words and actions must be grounded in the depth of emotional truth; and those with personal experience of being the recipients of the overt and covert assault of this diabolical evil must pass muster on authorizing trustworthy speakers from the side of the oppressor who wants to switch sides.
The question therefore must be put to every white speaker “does this person know what he or she is talking about? Do their words ring with truth?” Many people have pretty good antennas for discerning when someone is speaking from emotional truth. It draws us in to a place deeper than putting out information. To put it another way, the speaking of emotional truth draws the speaker and hearers into a dialogical encounter. Real change is possible when that happens.
Our scripture text today tells the story of such an encounter with emotional truth. Jesus is speaking in a synagogue in Capernaum in a way that stirs heartfelt admiration and rapt attentiveness among the audience. As they listen, the people find themselves engaging with both the speaker’s and their own emotional truth. They say to one another with their eyes and whispers that they are astounded at his teaching, ”for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.” The scribes were masters in giving information about the tradition and in instructing others what to do. What was missing was heartfelt connection of deep to deep.
This encounter reminds me of an exchange in a classic movie scene when the villain, played by Jack Nicholson, a cynical, battle hardened Marine commandant at Guantanamo, replies to the kid naval prosecuting attorney played by Tom Cruise. In the movie’s climatic scene, Cruise confronts Nicholson, “I want the truth.” The Nicholson character who is responsible for the cover-up of the murder of a physically weak and un-Marine-like Hispanic private who was trying to expose corruption shouts at Cruise, “You want the truth. You can’t handle the truth!” Our text involves a similar no-holds-barred encounter.
I joined the Racial Justice and Healing mission group out of a felt need to understand race, racism, racial justice and healing more deeply. I was seeking emotional truth. I joined when the group was studying a book by Joseph Barndt How to Become an Anti-Racist Church. As happens in any new situation, people in the group look over the newcomer and the newcomer looks over the group and both ask, “Can I trust this person or this group?” For a few weeks I wasn’t clear about that, and I didn’t sense any clarity as far as their feeling toward me. Then one day I shared a passage from Barndt that really spoke to me. He was writing about the opposite internalized effects of racism on black people and on white people. As a white man I knew I was raised in a culture which planted indelible images of white superiority to black people in my brain. I had and still have no control over the appearance in my brain of these images. Every time they show up emotional truth confronts me with the question: do I allow these images to define me? Yes or no? There is no middle ground.
Barndt offered me this liberating confession “I am a racist AND I am more than a racist. I am a white supremacist AND I am more than a white supremacist.” When I shared this as my own confession, I looked across the circle to the black members in the group and saw in their faces and then heard in their words, “Welcome. This is what we need to hear. This is what we must hear to trust you. Now let’s move on together.”
That moment brought back for me a couple of memories. One was as a ten-year-old water boy on my father’s construction job. I entered a room where five black laborers were off to themselves and cleaning the room. When I entered to offer them water they were having a heated discussion. It was the summer of 1942. I remember one clear voice saying, “This situation is wrong. The good Lord hates it, and he is not going to let it go on forever.” That was my first exposure to black anger.
Sometime later that summer I was with my mother and an older white woman friend of hers whom I liked and admired. The other woman said (and my mother did not object), “Colored people around here are satisfied with the way things are unless Yankees come down and stir them up.” I immediately thought of the contradiction between what she was saying and what I had heard from those black laborers. That was my first encounter with white people I admired accepting a lie as truth.
Twenty-one years later in 1963, I was checking on the latest reports on the March on Washington planned that day for the Mall. The early reports were discouraging as to attendance and to the possibility of violence. Although I was in sympathy with the march I had not planned to go. When I heard that discouraging report I said to my wife, “I’ve got to go to the march. Will you and the kids (who were 6, 4, and 2) drive me to Memorial Bridge?” They dropped me off at the Virginia end of the bridge which was lined with soldiers in combat gear and weapons. I walked across the bridge without incident, ran into an acquaintance in the woods alongside the reflecting pool, sat down for the afternoon and had one of the most elevating experiences in my life. When I walked back across the bridge to Virginia to get home a new awareness came upon me, “There is no turning back.”
Recently Kayla McClurg printed the following two paragraphs by Wendell Berry in her daily blog Inward Journey – Outward Journey. In the first paragraph Berry says,
If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge it or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and it is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society. This wound is in me, as complex and deep in my flesh as blood and nerves. I have borne it all my life, with varying degrees of consciousness, but always carefully, always with the most delicate consideration for the pain I would feel if I were somehow forced to acknowledge it.
But now I am increasingly aware of the opposite compulsion. I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it. And I want to be cured; I want to be free of the wound myself, and I do not want to pass it on to my children. Perhaps this is only wishful thinking; perhaps such a thing is not to be done by one man, or in one generation. Surely a man would have to be almost dangerously proud to think himself capable of it. And so maybe I am really saying only that I feel an obligation to make the attempt, and that I know if I fail to make a least the attempt I forfeit any right to hope that the world will become better than it is now.
Both Brandt and Berry are saying that, whether we are black or white, we have in-depth work to do to cope with the cancer of racism in our society and in our lives. The struggle is different depending upon whether we are black or white and that makes the benefit of blacks and whites doing this work together huge.
Let me now turn a corner. The casting out of the demon of racism requires a different spirit and a different power than that of the demon and the culture in which the demon successfully implants itself. We are dealing here with what Paul calls “principalities and powers,” not simply good intentions. As I was putting these thoughts down on paper I wrote in my journal, “I feel a rush now to shift from focusing on the awesome power of racism to the more awesome power of God because I can’t see us, however committed, casting out this demon by ourselves.
Racism is a condition of bondage. You can’t pin it down neatly and talk about it like an idea. The New Testament tells us that we can only confront a complex power like racism with a power that is wider and deeper than this demon.
In our text, in the midst of the curiosity about Jesus and wondering about the source of his authority, a strange and disconcerting incident occurs. A man stands up to speak and as he does, his spirit and his vocal chords are taken over by an alien force. The demon takes over the victim’s personality. The presence of Jesus puts it on the defensive. It shouts “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Notice the shift back and forth between the plural and singular – us and I. This demon belongs to a community of demons. They live and move in packs.
There is a mutual recognition here -- usually lost on the human audience -- relayed to us by the narrator. Jesus and the demons know each other. They have squared off before during Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness. It is also very clear that that they cannot occupy the same space. One or the other has to yield and the fearless Jesus is not about to abandon the human being in that synagogue who is being smothered on this occasion by that demon. Moreover, as far as the demons are concerned, Jesus represents an agent of violence toward them. This is no ping-pong encounter. At the least both sides are hurling bowling balls. The demon shouts defensively, “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”
This is off-putting to the modern ear. This doesn’t mesh with our view of the non-violent Jesus and the common view of Jesus as simply a good man, even a great man but nothing more. The demons detect a power they cannot control, a power that in their presence is fearless. Something is going to give way, and it is not going to be Jesus.
One way the modern mind dodges the power of this text is to assume that righteous indignation at the injustice of the situation is all we need to make a difference. We get pumped up at movies like Selma and Twelve Years as a Slave. The problem is that as often as not our righteous indignation is fueled by that deep reservoir of stored up anger within us rather than the strength to love that the text shows us in Jesus. Our reactive momentary righteous indignation is too shallow and runs quickly out of steam. We settle back into our comfortable despair that nothing is going to change. I am speaking here of a condition I see in myself.
There is no real emotional truth at work here, and for that reason it is too shallow to last to make a difference over time. We need community for this fight, a community that holds us accountable for growing the strength to love, a community that helps us to discover and stand in our emotional truth. We need a grounding and support deeper than righteous indignation.
Note the prominence in the synagogue story of the term “authority.” Jesus conveys authority. Our culture gets nervous with the very concept of authority. We are taught by our liberal culture that each of us is our own authority. Isn’t that the American way? The very mention of authority sounds so right-wing, so fundamentalist. We are conditioned to deal with scripture by dwelling on what feels good and ignoring or refuting what offends us and what is hard to understand.
Demons love people like us. They by nature are anti-authority. With kindred spirits, each claiming to be his or her own authority, the demons fit in nicely. They work by dividing and conquering. They are masters at throwing a wet blanket over questions and initiatives that cause the group to go deeper. If we are serious about breaking out of the bondage of racism we would do well to revisit to whom do we belong and to whom do we want to belong. There is our real authority.
Those of us who reject racism are often seduced by thinking that the more pain-driven stories we hear and tell the closer we get to the power of emotional truth. Get in touch with the pain and reconciliation and healing will follow. Sadly, that is more likely to lead to despair rather than to possibility for change. We don’t get much help from mainstream culture in which the figure of Satan has become the equivalent of a Vaudeville comedian and sin as innocuous as Flip Wilson’s famous line “The devil made me do it.”
At the bottom of racism is something deeper than pain. It is the power of condemnation. How else do we explain how for so long the white majority have tolerated an unspoken license to kill, steal, rape, and abuse black people who have no capacity to effectively defend themselves. The Gospel that Jesus lived, died for, and was raised by God to continue counters the demonic in all its forms. At its core are two declarations. One is, as scripture says, “Vengeance is mine. I will repay, says the Lord.” Alongside this is Paul’s thundering announcement in Romans 8: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.” Condemnation of others along with its reciprocal virus, condemnation of ourselves, have been nullified by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is the Gospel in a nutshell.
Martin Luther King Jr., Congressman John Lewis, Wendell Berry, Mahatma Gandhi and folks close to us like Harold Vines and Mike Hopkins and our own Mike Smith have gotten this – refusing to buy into retaliatory condemnation. This brings me back to the question I posed at the beginning: “Can a white man speak emotional truth about race and racism?” If the Gospel is our teacher, it doesn’t matter whether we are black or white, whether heretofore we have been on the oppressing end or the oppressed end of the demon of racism. What matters is that under the guidance of scripture and the Holy Spirit we allow ourselves to be drawn more and more deeply into emotional truth.
One final point. I believe that the most underestimated resource we have in the mercurial encounter with racism is scripture. Our hope for casting out the demon of racism in ourselves and in society will gain traction by working with scripture as a living document rather than a book about a now dead past. This understanding dates back to the first Easter Sunday. It is grounded in the conviction that the beloved and, for the demons, the hated Jesus is risen from the realm of death to continue his mission to which he was ordained by God – that is, to empower us to continue speaking and living this good news. Note carefully how this announcement is repeated, “The Lord is risen!” – not was but is. This means to the followers of Jesus then and now that the ministry and mission of Jesus continues in a literal way through the active presence and power of the Holy Spirit. In II Cor. 5:16 Paul says, “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.” He is with us. He will not forsake us.