St. Thomas Evangelical Lutheran Church
3800 East Third Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47401
(812) 332-5252
Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost (August 26, 2007)
Liturgical Color: Green
Reverend Doctor Lyle E. McKee
"Poetic Pep Talk"
Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The reading from Hebrews is a passage for weary Christians. The message cries out in compelling poetry to those who have experienced faith in Christ but who have, for one reason or another, lost heart. Whether these words were written to a church plagued by oppression by a persecuting Roman emperor or to a community hampered by fear and taking the faith for granted, the message is one of hope and inspiration. Now is the time to resist the inertia of lethargy and to plunge back into a renewing and passion-filled relationship with Christ.
In this attempt to encourage dispirited Christians, the author of Hebrews reaches back to a familiar technique in Jewish interpretation: the argument from lesser to greater. If something is true in a lesser case, then obviously it is true in the greater. For Hebrews the high dramas of the Old Testament serve as minor illustrations to the true greatness of the gospel. On Sinai when the Law was given, Moses stood in fear and trembling before God. If the giving of the Law filled Moses with awe, should not the Good News of Christ fill us with even greater awe and excitement?
Kierkegaard said that the church is in danger, not because of sin, but because of its lack of passion.
Hebrews uses dramatic contrast to speak to people who have already made a faith commitment. The author has already warned us not to drift away (2:1) or to develop an "unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God" (3:12); to become sluggish (6:12) or to "neglect to meet together" (10:25) as some were evidently doing. As it was during the first century, so it is today. We need the same wake-up call to avoid taking our faith for granted and slipping into spiritual apathy.
This book calls Christians to move away from drifting, sluggish, neglectful, and apathetic faith. Indeed, faith characterized by such words is something less than faith. We need a fire in the belly and a hunger of heart and soul—a passion for the gospel.
In his autobiography "Long Walk to Freedom", Nelson Mandela portrays such a passion, which developed during his 27 years in prison: "It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity." (1994, p. 544)
It is often in times of either forced or chosen quiet that we come to recognize just how important matters of faith are for us. For Mandela, his many years of imprisonment have led to historic changes. His fire has spread far beyond himself.
I know I may be risking that the message today may be overshadowed or obscured by the illustration I am about to use, but I find it illuminating. It relates to what Mandela wrote, but for me brings this insight home. It was written by Robert Jensen, a well-known Lutheran scholar. The topic is white privilege.
"Here's what white privilege sounds like:
"I'm sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support. The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that being white has advantages in the United States. 'Have either of us,' I ask, 'ever benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people?' 'Yes,' he concedes, 'there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege.' 'So, if we live in a world of white privilege-unearned white privilege-how does that affect your notion of a level playing field?' I asked. He paused for a moment and said, 'That really doesn't matter.' That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: the privilege to acknowledge that you have unearned privilege but to ignore what it means.
"That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about race and racism with students. It drove home the importance of confronting the dirty secret that we white people carry around with us every day: in a world of white privilege, some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear and anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk openly and honestly about white supremacy and white privilege. White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such privilege plays out differently depending on context and other aspects of one's identity (in my case, being male gives me other kinds of privilege). Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has played out in their lives, I talk about how it has affected me.
"I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern European heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all white world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because I didn't live near a reservation, I didn't even have exposure to the state's only numerically significant nonwhite population, American Indians. I have struggled to resist that racist training and the racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I "fix" myself, one thing never changes—I walk through the world with white privilege.
"What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me look like me-they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves-and in a racist world, that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After all, I'm white. My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some complain that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled with mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority faculty who are mediocre, though I don't know very many. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for the next hundred years, it's possible that at the end of that time the university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as an insult to anyone, but it's a simple observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology...
"But, all that said,
"I know I did not get where I am by merit alone. I benefited from among other things, white privilege. That doesn't mean that I don't deserve my job, or that if I weren't white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white. All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was accepted for graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a teaching position by the predominantly white University of Texas, headed by a white president, in a college headed by a white dean and in a department with a white chairman that at the time had one nonwhite tenured professor. I have worked hard to get where I am, and I work hard to stay there. But to feel good about myself and my work, I do not have to believe that "merit" as defined by white people in a white country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge that in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from white privilege.
"At one time in my life, I would not have been able to say that, because I needed to believe that my success in life was due solely to my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the heroic American, the rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by the culture's mythology that I couldn't see the fear that was binding me to those myths. Like all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I didn't really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege had more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I wasn't heroic or rugged, that I wasn't special. I let go of some of that fear when I realized that, indeed, I wasn't special, but that I was still me. What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when I know that the rules under which I work in are stacked to my benefit. Until we let go of the fiction that people have complete control over their fate-that we can will ourselves to be anything we choose-then we will live with that fear.
"White privilege is not something I get to decide whether I want to keep. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man and the security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from this society."
That is, I think, a powerful personal testimony to the oppression that continues to compromise freedom and it portrays a passionate commitment to the justice called for by the gospel.
It is this kind of passion, and that of Mandela, that the author of Hebrews is seeking to arouse in Christians. The clear message of the writer is that if we take faith for granted, if we have any inkling of apathy, if we flag in zeal in our showing of love for one another, then our faith is a poor and pale reflection of the abiding love of Christ. Grace is so amazing, so surprising, so far beyond what we might imagine or hope, that it calls for the ultimate in our trust, passion, and compassion. This grace, that transforms the soul, is what motivates the indescribable gratitude, the earnest and unceasing prayer, and the enthusiastic worship of those who have come to know the Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.
Amen.
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord, unto eternal life. — Amen
