John 20: 19-31

“Peace be with you!” The man was there, inside the locked door!

He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” They knew it was Jesus.

He began his post-resurrection appearance with a reassurance: “Peace be with you,” Otherwise his terrified friends might have bolted away like a flock of frightened deer.

It had been a long strange day and the disoriented disciples didn’t know what to do. So they had locked themselves in to a small familiar space, and hunkered down in fear… until he appeared. In Jesus’ breath was “pneuma”, divine spirit, fortitude, courage. Breathe! Take a deep breath, my friends!

“If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins, they are retained.”

Huh? What was he talking about? Tradition says this scripture is about the source of authority in the Church, about the priesthood and the keys to the Kingdom (as in Luke.)

But what if this sentence is really about something else? What if it is really Jesus’ way of insisting that forgiveness is at the core of God’s Kingdom? Even though he himself had been unjustly executed three days before, the transformative response he modeled for them was not vengeance but rather non-violence. Forgiveness is the Way, capital W, the way to get past fear, the way out of that cramped room behind locked doors. The disciples have good reason to fear the evil minions of the Roman empire. But hiding and clinging to fear, anger and vengefulness isn’t going to get them (or us) into God’s Kingdom

“Father forgive them for they know not what they do,” Jesus had said from the cross.

• Desmond Tutu, Archbishop of South Africa and Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission there, also has a lot to teach us about forgiveness:

  “To forgive is not just to be altruistic,” he says. “It is the best form of self-interest. It is also a process that does not exclude hatred and anger. These emotions are all part of being human. You should never hate yourself for hating others who do terrible things: the depth of your love is shown by the extent of your anger.”

  “However, when I talk of forgiveness, I mean the belief that you can come out the other side a better person: a better person than the one being consumed by anger and hatred. Remaining in that state locks you in a state of victimhood… If you can find it in yourself to forgive, then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator. You can move on, and you can even help the perpetrator to become a better person too ….”

  “The process of forgiveness also requires acknowledgement on the part of the perpetrator that they have committed an offence.” Tutu concludes.

Yet the airwaves of our country these last few weeks have been quite stuck in one place, on the topic of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s preaching: whether or not his angry words are forgivable or prophetic or completely reprehensible, and what impact they could have on the presidential campaign.

Many may think of the whole matter as a tempest in a teapot. We tire of reading endless op eds and blogs, watching panel discussions on TV, receiving email messages from friends. But even in an era when hot news topics come and go within 24 hours, this one refuses to disappear. We have to ask ourselves why.

Cynics may blame the pot-stirring media which hangs on like a pitbull to a profitable subject; those even more jaded may suspect negative campaigning. But the main reason Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his words have stayed on the front burner is because it’s struck a raw nerve about racism in the conscience of our nation. In our peaceful white and purple bubble, as in so many other predominantly white neighborhoods, we would rather pretend that all that nasty stuff was settled and left behind after the Civil Rights movement of the sixties. Such pretense is itself a lie, we know in our hearts, even as we get ready to mark the 40th anniversary of the assassination of MLKing, Jr.

There are several themes to untangle: First the question: are the sound-bites from Wright’s sermons representative of a hate-mongering way of life at Trinity U.C.C. or are they taken out of context so that we are unable to see the numerous gifts of our denomination’s largest church, a place where so many ministries have been launched that have made a huge difference in social justice, education and health care in Chicago. Secondly, Martin Luther King, Jr, said that 11 a.m. on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week: are we even aware of the historic differences in the style of prophetic black preaching, its tradition of calling down God’s power on erring people, and its role in empowering those who seek true equality in our society? Probably not. The third question strikes even closer to our home pew and that is this: if an individual church member does not agree with every single word heard from the pulpit, does she/he have an obligation to go church-hopping and find a less controversial place?

Diana Butler Bass, who is one of the “hottest” and most-read white theologians in the mainline progressive church these days, says she finds the whole thing strange. She says “Being a church member is not some sort of mindless cult, where individuals believe every word preached. Rather, being a church member means being part of a community of faith—a gathered people, always diverse and sometimes at odds, who constitute Christ's body in the world.” After dismissing the idea of cookie-cutter doctrine, she continues: “But the attack on Rev. Wright reveals something beyond ignorance of basic dynamics of Christian community. It demonstrates the level of misunderstanding that still divides white and black Christians in the United States. Many white people find the traditions of African-American preaching offensive, especially when it comes to politics.I know because I am one of those people”

She describes her experience as a graduate assistant in a seminary class on the history of African-American preaching and how it opened her eyes to the role of the black church in affirming and liberating its people.

Butler-Bass takes what Archbishop Tutu might see as a first step in reconciling: admitting that there is a problem. We white folks have too often made the assumption that black folks ought to forgive the history of slavery and Jim Crow in this country because it is so far in the past. At the same time we have been very unwillingly to admit to the grievous offense on the part of our white predecessors, whether or not they were our ancestors.

Our nation rightly celebrates its greatest attributes of democracy, freedom of speech, opportunity and education; we get very riled up when someone attacks our civil religion by saying “God damn America.” (It’s too bad he didn’t say “Woe to America” because then we could have compared him to Jesus on the Sermon on the Mount.) But we don’t seem to have the same sharp memory when it comes to remembering less admirable parts of our history.

How do we think that, as a nation, we developed such a strong economy based on our natural resources? First, we took the land from its original inhabitants and committed genocide on those who remained. That land was made profitable by the stolen lives and labor of millions of kidnapped Africans, who were never compensated for the value of their work or the loss of their social and family networks. The romantic notion of manifest destiny continued to carry us westward absorbing land and kingdoms in its wake mostly through war or threat of violence. Even in Hawaii the rightful queen was deposed with the threatened help of U.S. marines offshore. This may sound like ancient history to the young in our midst, but the consequences of it still surround us every day.

If you think I’m radical in this one paragraph sketch of white domination of our nation’s history, there are many more radical white voices out there. Tim Wise, author of a book “White Like Me” about the privilege of white skin, has written a scathing article about the current controversy called “Of National Lies and Racist America.” Here is just a bite:

“Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation… Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyes at the sight of the flag the way white people do – and this is true even for millions of black veterans – for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a hard time singing these tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out like “God Bless America” for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr King and then cheering, as so many did, when they hear the news that he had been assassinated.”

Acknowledgement of white privilege comes an even from more surprising place, a white conservative voice: listen to what Mike Huckabee had to say about Wright’s preaching:

"As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, "That's a terrible statement," I grew up in a very segregated South... And I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you: We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, "You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant….. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus." And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had ... more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me."

Perhaps we think it’s not up to us anymore, that the ball has been hit into the court of the African-Americans of this nation. We’d like them to take action on Archbishop Tutu’s recommendation: Forgive, so that you no longer have to be victims, so that you no longer find yourself tied to those who perpetrated the crimes. But as a white Christian pastor, I think that is putting the cart before the horse. It’s not fair to expect the folks with the chip on their shoulder to be the first to act. Before there can be forgiveness, there has to be at least some acknowledgement of wrong-doing, an indication of at least a smidgeon of willingness to try and make it right.

As a nation we have never ever done that. The process of healing and reconciliation is long overdue, argues the Rev, Don Shriver, author of “Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember its Misdeeds.” The time has come.

Healing and reconciliation has to start with an honest look at history and an openness of communications, of feelings, including those of righteous anger. It has to be willing to empathize. It has to be creative about restorative justice, to seek new ways of finding balance. The 200-year-old mantra “all people are created equal” is actually closer than ever to reality. Hurricane Katrina confronted us with irrefutable visual proof of the endemic poverty and very unequal opportunity of black people in this nation. But maybe this controversy about Rev. Wright is the next prod urging us to act.

There’s an ironic full circle to my sermon this morning: as we return to this gospel and look at the people hunkered down in fear behind locked doors, to our horror we see that they are our brothers and sisters of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Rev. Wright and some of his parishioners have received numerous death threats. His speeches around the country have been cancelled for fear of his life. The church itself is in a state of lock-down, reporters camped outside around the clock, crowds gathering and chanting hate slogans.

"It saddens me to see news stories reporting such a caricature of a congregation that has been such a blessing to the UCC's wider church mission," said Rev. John Thomas, UCC general minister and president. “It's time for us to say 'No' to these attacks and declare that we will not allow anyone to undermine or destroy the ministries of any of our congregations in order to serve their own narrow political or ideological ends."

A few weeks ago we read the gospel story of Lazarus being raised from the dead. At the time I suggested that he might have been transformed into the most courageous of all Jesus’ followers. Maybe he was the one standing outside of the locked door that night, not afraid of death, standing guard over his more fearful brothers and sisters.

Maybe it is time for us to become the sentinels, to become the protectors of those who are hunkering down in fear. Maybe it is time for us to admit our own ignorance and avoidance of the legacy of white supremacy in this nation and to offer the first word of peace.

Archbishop Tutu quotes the African concept of “ubuntu” which means “I am human because you are human.” My humanity is caught up in yours and if you are dehumanized, I am dehumanized, and anger and resentment and retribution are corrosive of this great good, the harmony that has got to exist between people.

That is why our people (in South Africa) have been committed to the reconciliation where we use restorative rather than retributive justice, the kind of justice that says - we are looking to the healing of relationships, we are seeking to open wounds, yes, but to open them so that we can cleanse them and they don't fester; we cleanse them and then pour oil on them, then we can move into the glorious future that God is opening up for us.”

Jesus put the process of forgiveness and reconciliation squarely into human hands that evening in the Upper Room, and now the ball is in the court of those of us who are here, living and breathing together, on this earth. Let us be about that work.

(Comments to Carrie at rev.cbail@VERIZON.NET.)
Williamstown, MA.