The human line
Matthew 10: 24-39
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
June 21, 2020
The last time I preached on this passage I ended with “Jesus chooses everybody”. Then I remembered these words by Mennonite pastor Hugh Hollowell, based in Jackson, MS: “Every time we use religion to draw a line to keep people out, Jesus is with the people on the other side of that line.”
Jesus does choose everybody but because we don’t, and we really don’t despite what we call our ‘higher ideals’, Jesus chooses Black and brown and Indigenous lives. Jesus chooses trans lives, gay and bi and queer lives, children’s lives, disabled lives, refugee lives, battered and raped lives, poor and sick and hungry lives, lives without clean water, without a home, without a job, with less than a living wage. Jesus chooses the lives without power, the lives we wouldn’t want to trade places with.
But we want to count ourselves on the right side of that line. We want to be in solidarity, on the side of justice, the side of mercy, we say we want to be where Jesus is.
And yet Jesus says that he came with a sword, a sword that divides but that’s only because humanity has always been ready for a fight; the knives have been out since there has been food and water and land to control and fight over. We fear there won’t be enough. We fear difference and the unknown. Most of all we fear death.
In order to not feel our fear but also to find purpose and meaning, we do all sorts of things to distract and busy ourselves. We forget that there’s nothing we have to do to deserve this life and neither does anyone else. We forget we’re as alive as the sparrow and the chickadee, that our bodies hum like the bees, like blades of grass in a breeze, that we have deep emotional tides within us that ebb and flow, that we’re connected at the level of flesh and blood and bone, atom and molecule and genome, that there is nothing we can do to escape this.
And yet none of this really matters if our neighbor suffers because of systems we benefit from that are orchestrated for their suffering; if we keep most of what we have because we say we earned it, because we’re afraid to let go; if we allow evil to continue by our inaction, our collective moral failure. Once again the lines are being drawn—good and evil, the right and wrong sides of history—and they’re becoming more distinct, harder to avoid. We are either racists or anti-racists. Fascists or anti-fascists. There really is no middle ground. Silence is violence. Elie Wiesel wrote, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever [people] are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.”
We want to count ourselves on the right side of that line. We want to be where Jesus is.
But that’s not where Jesus needs us—we who have privilege, we who have more than enough, we who also hunger and thirst for righteousness. Authors JLove Calderon and Tim Wise write, “We do not fight racism on behalf of people of color, or as an act of charity. We oppose white supremacy because it is an unjust system, and we believe in the moral obligation to resist injustice." Whiteness can only be deconstructed by white people. White supremacy can only be dismantled by white people. We all have prejudices but structural racism belongs to white people. Transphobia and homophobia can only be disrupted by straight people and cisgender people. And for too long the Church has been propped up by all of its sins and wounded those forced to carry a cross that was not of their making.
As much as we want to atone by being straight allies, white allies, we cannot confer that upon ourselves. We want to be in solidarity but the way we do that is by defunding our privilege and investing in the well-being of Black and brown and Indigenous lives and communities. We put ourselves on the line by speaking truth to that racist neighbor, that homophobic relative, that well-meaning friend. Yes, it feels horrible. Yes, we will probably offend someone. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. Yes, we could be divided from people we love. But we need to remember that this isn’t about us. Or them. It’s about saving lives. It’s about accountability, ours included. It’s about ending the power hate has and supplanting it with connection. Connection to the hard truth but also connection to their humanity and our own.
We can’t afford hate anymore. We can’t wish those who are reckless would contract the virus, because we want the pandemic to end. And the pandemic of racism, the pandemic of hate. We can’t curse those who curse us. Author Sally Kohn reminded me that we can’t hate the haters for being hateful just because our anger is righteous. And we won’t stop hate, ours or someone else’s, by virtue-signaling—shaming others by showing off how good or moral or right we are.
Martin Luther King was right: “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” And love’s accomplices: compassion, kindness, justice, courage, resistance, resilience.
In truth there are no lines; there is only the human line, it runs through each one of us, and it’s messy and complicated and still evolving. Our salvation is collective and connected; it is in all of our hands and every day we all have to pick it up and carry it. But the chains of racism and every bigotry and hatred are on white people and now ours to bear and destroy. The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis of Middle Collegiate Church reminds us: “And so we who believe in freedom must come to understand that when a Black body is killed, we have been murdered. When a Black child is hungry, our nation’s stomach must growl. When a Black grandmother goes to the polls and can’t vote, our rights are being dismantled. When it is done to the least of us, to the marginalized ones of us, it is done to us. To you and to me.”
None of this, none of how we have organized and systematized life on this planet is divinely ordained or constructed. We did this. We have made life a living hell for most and a sweet comfort for a few, and we could all go down because of it. White supremacy, patriarchy, empire, human domination of this planet is killing us but it isn’t inevitable. As much as we got ourselves here, we can also undo it. But money, convenience, power, control, and being right are some hella drugs in our system and they ensure that white violence will continue.
We ask ourselves “what can I do” but the question really is “what can we do”. These are systemic problems and they need systemic answers. We are at a moral reckoning of the Church, this nation, and our world. “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive... it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” We wrote that. We did that.
It’s time to do it again, this time for the sake of humankind, for the sake of the earth, for justice’s sake. Amen.
Benediction – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice; we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
June 21, 2020
The last time I preached on this passage I ended with “Jesus chooses everybody”. Then I remembered these words by Mennonite pastor Hugh Hollowell, based in Jackson, MS: “Every time we use religion to draw a line to keep people out, Jesus is with the people on the other side of that line.”
But we want to count ourselves on the right side of that line. We want to be in solidarity, on the side of justice, the side of mercy, we say we want to be where Jesus is.
In order to not feel our fear but also to find purpose and meaning, we do all sorts of things to distract and busy ourselves. We forget that there’s nothing we have to do to deserve this life and neither does anyone else. We forget we’re as alive as the sparrow and the chickadee, that our bodies hum like the bees, like blades of grass in a breeze, that we have deep emotional tides within us that ebb and flow, that we’re connected at the level of flesh and blood and bone, atom and molecule and genome, that there is nothing we can do to escape this.
We want to count ourselves on the right side of that line. We want to be where Jesus is.
We can’t afford hate anymore. We can’t wish those who are reckless would contract the virus, because we want the pandemic to end. And the pandemic of racism, the pandemic of hate. We can’t curse those who curse us. Author Sally Kohn reminded me that we can’t hate the haters for being hateful just because our anger is righteous. And we won’t stop hate, ours or someone else’s, by virtue-signaling—shaming others by showing off how good or moral or right we are.
Martin Luther King was right: “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” And love’s accomplices: compassion, kindness, justice, courage, resistance, resilience.
In truth there are no lines; there is only the human line, it runs through each one of us, and it’s messy and complicated and still evolving. Our salvation is collective and connected; it is in all of our hands and every day we all have to pick it up and carry it. But the chains of racism and every bigotry and hatred are on white people and now ours to bear and destroy. The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis of Middle Collegiate Church reminds us: “And so we who believe in freedom must come to understand that when a Black body is killed, we have been murdered. When a Black child is hungry, our nation’s stomach must growl. When a Black grandmother goes to the polls and can’t vote, our rights are being dismantled. When it is done to the least of us, to the marginalized ones of us, it is done to us. To you and to me.”
We ask ourselves “what can I do” but the question really is “what can we do”. These are systemic problems and they need systemic answers. We are at a moral reckoning of the Church, this nation, and our world. “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive... it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” We wrote that. We did that.
It’s time to do it again, this time for the sake of humankind, for the sake of the earth, for justice’s sake. Amen.
Benediction – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice; we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
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