Listening to our children

 

Psalm 1
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
May 12, 2024 (Mother’s Day)

Rows of dark-skinned children dressed in white dresses, wearing hats and holding hands marching down Fifth Avenue in New York City, 1917. A detailed account of the march and the slogans on the signs they carried can be found here.
https://blackbird-archive.vcu.edu/v16n2/gallery/1917/silent-page.shtml

Earlier this week I learned for the first time about the Silent Protest Parade or Silent March that took place in New York City on July 28, 1917—more than 50 years after the end of the Civil War. It was organized by the NAACP in response to race-based violence and lynchings in Texas, Tennessee, Illinois, and other states. A few weeks before this march, in East St. Louis, Illinois, city-wide racial violence resulted in almost 6,000 Black people driven from their homes set ablaze and several hundred dead. 10,000 Black men, women, and children all dressed in white marched down Fifth Avenue in silence, the first major racial protest of its kind in U.S. history, and the children led the parade. Cole Arthur Riley, in her devotional prayer book Black Liturgies wrote of the march, “It was a way to say, our power doesn’t look like your power.”



More than a century later and both our protests and our children are a lot louder. More often than not, voices get louder when they aren’t listened to. It was Martin Luther King Jr. who said, “A riot is the language of the unheard”. Chants of “All lives won’t matter until Black Lives Matter” may disturb us, but it became a rallying cry because no one really listened when Eric Garner said “I can’t breathe” eleven times as a New York police officer had him in a chokehold.



Now we hear provocative chants at pro-Palestine protests on college campuses:


“From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada!”

“Every time the media lies, a neighborhood in Gaza dies!”

“Stop the U.S. war machine, from Palestine to the Philippines!”



And others that tell Zionism and Israel exactly where to go. So, no wonder Republican members of the House and a fair number of Democrats equate that language with anti-Semitism, because it appears we have lost our ability for the complexity of nuance. To criticize a nation and its government is not the same as hate speech against its citizens or those who call that nation home. Where was this legislation whenever neo-Nazis have marched in our towns and cities with the flag of the Third Reich or when a gunman attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh? How does free speech get confused with hate speech?



When accused of being too loud, too sweeping, too preachy, Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, “When I criticize a system, they think I criticize them—and that is of course because they accept the system and identify themselves with it.” Or as pastor and activist Carlos Rodriguez puts it, it’s not Christians that are the problem, it’s Christian nationalism. It’s not White people, it’s White supremacy. It’s not heterosexuals, it’s homophobia. It’s not men, it’s patriarchy. It’s not individual police officers, it’s policing as a system, its roots in slavery, and its oversized militarized budget. When I say “we” and “us” and “our” children, it’s not about you and me and our kids, it’s about humankind and our life together.



We have this love/hate relationship with binary language: right/wrong, good/evil, righteous/wicked. There are times when we can’t help but acknowledge the gray areas, the complexity of nuance, and we teach our children that most things are not that simple. Then there are other instances when we must choose one path over another. The first psalm, the introduction to the other 149, presents one such choice. The way of righteous versus the way of the wicked. We’d like to think that it’s as straightforward as that, but we know from our own lives all the way to those of our heroes that we’re all a thorny combination of both. Even the author of this psalm, attributed to King David, was himself both a victim of violence and a perpetrator.



The righteous are not necessarily good people, and the wicked are not altogether unloved, but not according to this psalm nor to our children. There are no “good people on both sides”. Just as in our own youth, in our own time, they have witnessed time and again the failure of systems that were supposed to protect them, the failure of our government to stand up for what we say we believe in. An increasing sense of urgency comes with each new generation, that we are running out of time to live in the gray areas and hard choices must be made.



I don’t like forced choices, how authoritarian they can be. I’m not convinced that their outcomes will take us where we want to go. And yet I opened to a random page in this book of pithy sermons that one of you gave me and read words like, “In the war of right against wrong, we can’t afford to be neutral” and “Anything is wrong that is almost right” and “You are the very best Christian somebody knows.” I’m all for grace, but it doesn’t come cheap. That last one brings me up short.



We all do bad things. We all make mistakes. We all fall short of our own values. The instruction of this psalm is that we don’t make a habit out of it or prosper from a system that harms others, which is what these protests are all about. In 1971 Howard Zinn said this about the protests against the Vietnam War: “They’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we’re disturbing the war.”



It is the main character of younger generations to disrupt their elders, to show us, thank goodness, that the path of transformation doesn’t end when we turn 50, 60, 70, 80, 90. There is still time to be transplanted by streams of water. At some point we stop raising them and instead they teach us. If we have the courage to put aside what we identify with and what we think we know and listen with empathy to a generation of digital natives raised in the shadow of 9/11 and active shooter drills, we see that they are asking, demanding that we would help them do what we asked of the generation that raised us. Make a future for us worth living, a world we can be safe in, especially those who are not safe now.



In the words of writer Madison McClendon, “It is a world that does not simply celebrate the changed minds of the powerful. It is a world that heals the unjust pain of those who have had cause to mourn.” I have had cause to mourn but my pain is not unjust. Yes, it often hurts to live in this world, but it’s not because I’m White.



Kindred One, draw us deeper into community and solidarity with one another. Heal us from our wounds so that we can listen without the filter of our pain. Guide us into gentleness with one another, with a love that carries us through. Transplant us by streams of living water that we may be fruitful in the fullness of time. Strengthen our bonds of friendship and love, especially in those times when we feel alone, for you are always with us. And may we practice your peace that it would grow in us each day and transform us. Amen.

Benediction – enfleshed.com


Go forth delighting in Holy Interdependence—
meditate on it day and night,
that we may become wise like elder, oak tree,
like a wave of young people
determined in their hope.