II Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20

Back in April, the Rev. John Thomas, the president of the United Church of Christ, and others in national staff positions announced to the nation, through a full page ad in USA Today , that on this day, May 18, many UCC pastors would be preaching on the subject of race “in hopes of beginning a sacred conversation.”  

When I read that ad, I remembered the story that a couple at the church I once served in Milwaukee told me about “race Sunday” at their church. Back in the late 70’s they moved to Indianapolis and began attending a large, prestigious, liberal church. And they started to hear that “Race Sunday” was approaching—an annual event that required a lot of preparation. As “Race Sunday” drew near, they were told about streets being closed and special parking provisions. This was obviously a church that cared a great deal about this issue and put a great deal of effort into this special Sunday. On “Race Sunday” they arrived early, expecting overflow crowds, but found nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, they discovered, in Indianapolis, “Race Sunday” wasn’t about “race”—it was about the Indianapolis 500.  

Most churches would rather prepare for a day at the races than for a day looking at race relations.  
Even more difficult will be finding a way to talk openly and honestly about race and keep that conversation going.  

While I never like it when someone outside of the congregation tells me what I should preach about—especially when the topic is as difficult as “race:” a single word that carries so much baggage—maybe it is time for us to look once more at “race,” to start a “sacred conversations” of the kind suggested by our denomination’s national staff. It is time for people in churches to take the lead in finding ways to talk with one another and with our neighbors about our nation’s painful past and challenging present.  
In their recent pastoral letter inviting clergy to preach and members of congregations to speak with each other on race, national UCC staff members said:  

Racism remains a wound at the heart of our nation, a wound that cannot be wished away or treated carelessly. In this sacred conversation, we seek to engage one another in a deep and sustained dialogue that may be uncomfortable at times but is absolutely necessary if our nation is to find genuine healing of its past and present sins. Not only the health of our nation is at stake, but also truth-telling and racial reconciliation are crucial to our spiritual, physical, and emotional wholeness.  
They concluded:  “Our conversations will be sacred if we trust in the Spirit of the living God to do a new thing in our midst…Our conversations will be sacred if we pray for the grace and courage to speak the truth in love and to hear one another all the way through. Sound bites and simple answers cannot be the order of the day.”  

That’s how we came to where we are today, isn’t it? Sound bites.  

That USA Today ad came after the dust-up caused by those You-Tube clips of UCC minister the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That led to Senator Barak Obama’s widely praised Philadelphia speech in which he said, “race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.”  

In many ways we never ignore the issue of race in this country. It’s there in front of us all the time. And Senator Obama did not, as many think, call for a national conversation, or a sacred conversation or any other kind of “conversation.” Soon, however, the phrase was being tossed around by everyone. The Los Angeles Times was grateful that Obama “redefined our national conversation about race and politics.” On the other coast, William Kristol groused in The New York Times that “the last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race,” concluding, “Let’s not and say we did.”  

Well, I don’t know when the last time was that UCC leadership went along with Bill Kristol, so we soon saw John Thomas standing with Otis Moss, the new pastor at Trinity UCC in Chicago calling for clergy to preach on race, calling for a “sacred conversation,” and following up with that full page newspaper ad.  
For awhile it seemed as though maybe this was a good idea. If Jeremiah Wright did nothing else, he made a lot of people uncomfortable and made a lot of people start talking about race relations in our nation once more.  

The hope was that this time, we could talk in new ways, talk with new honesty. It felt like a breath of fresh air, didn’t it, when Senator Obama spoke in his Philadelphia speech about the rooms in which Blacks and Whites still gather out of eyesight and earshot of each other. He told us about the African American anger that isn’t expressed publicly to white friends and co-workers, but that “does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table…and occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning.”  

He also spoke of white anger and resentment that “aren’t always expressed in polite company” but that shape the political landscape and that most of us have no doubt heard or maybe even expressed.  
Black and white, Hispanic and Asian—with the doors shut for fear of one another we express our anger and resentment. Maybe it was time to speak with each other instead of about each other.

It even led me to wonder aloud, before this call for a “sacred conversation,” what might happen if we allowed the risen Christ to come among us in those secret places and call us out into new relationships and new conversations? What might happen if we stopped avoiding the issue of race in this country and approached it with honesty in the light of day?”  

Maybe we could talk.  

All of this took place before Jeremiah Wright’s second great media appearance—his speaking tour that resulted in Barak Obama’s “I don’t know that man,” denunciation and renunciation. Of that Bill Moyers wrote: “We’re often exposed to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this—this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner played out right in front of our eyes. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves.”  

It was sad and it was awful.  

After that, UCC president John Thomas issued a new statement, saying that “many of us today are trouble by some of [Wright’s] controversial comments.” After an initial hope that “the prophetic voice of the church would be more clearly understood by the public…that deep hope has turned now to unsettling despair for many. There is a collective and abiding sadness and anger in the presence moment.”  
Within a month’s time, it became apparent that neither “preaching on race,” nor starting a “sacred conversation,” were going to be easy tasks. It’s hard to get a handle on this. It’s hard to know what to say.  
So I take some comfort in the happy coincidence that clergy were asked to preach sermons on race on what the church calendar calls “Trinity Sunday.” The Trinity, of course, is a complex theological formulation. When we say that God is a Trinity, we mean that the mystery beyond us, the mystery among us, and the mystery within us are all the same mystery.  

Trinity Sunday reminds us—if we need reminding—that life cannot easily be put into neat little boxes. And try as we will, God is even harder to stuff into a box.  

Our experience of God begins with wonder and awe and ends with the worship that sings "Holy, holy, holy." Between wonder and worship we study and pray, we work together. But we don't come up with all the answers.  

This understanding is, of course, one of those things that marks us as Congregationalists. While we are passionate about action in the world and understanding the scriptures and the presence of the Spirit of God in our lives and work and worship, we put less emphasis on “getting it right” when it comes to what we believe. We are held together by covenant not creed, by how we act rather than our statements of faith.  

As a denomination we have called on ourselves to act as a multiracial, multicultural church. We recognize that all human beings bear the image of God. Yes, the surprised media in the past couple of months keeps pointing out that the UCC is a largely white denomination. We commit ourselves, however, to the full inclusion of people of all races.  

And that’s just where the problem begins.  

You see, the idea of race is as difficult to wrap our minds around as the Trinity. I remember learning years ago in my freshman Anthropology class that “race” was a faulty idea to begin with. How do we even decide what “race” we are? My own family history includes white Americans who, the story goes, when they moved into Illinois from Kentucky sold the couple of slaves that they owned. And my ancestry also includes Cherokees who were driven from their native land onto the “Trail of Tears.” Barak Obama, as you know, had a white American mother and a black African father. He is seen as “too black” by some and “not black enough” by others.  

No longer is “race” a simple matter of checking the one right box on the census form.  
Many say that it was the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus who first suggested dividing human beings into five “races” as part of his grand scheme for the classification of all plants and animals. Linnaeus was followed by what has been called a “long and dishonorable lineage of scholars who may have differed on the particulars but almost always agreed on one thing: that the division of humankind into races reflected differences in value, with whites at the pinnacle of human evolution.”  

The idea of race and the sin of racism seem to go hand in hand. By having a sacred conversation on “race,” we paradoxically risk perpetuating our racism. Even as we seek to eliminate our racism, we force ourselves to continue thinking in the failed categories of race.  

And yet we know that the color of one’s skin has immense impact on the rest of one’s life.  

If we dare to go forward in these conversations, we can be thankful that as members of the United Church of Christ, we have a rich history of spirited resistance to racism that can serve as both a resource and an inspiration for the work at hand. One such resource is the Pastoral Letter on Racism and the Role of the Church published in 1991 by the Commission for Racial Justice. The biblical, theological, and political analysis of this document names the “sin and idolatry of racism” and calls Christians to renew their commitment to be a people grounded in the love and justice embodied in Jesus Christ. [ Pastoral Letter ]  
And our denominational history reveals a very human mixture of good and evil in the ways people have dealt with each other.  

The Congregational stream of the United Church of Christ has roots that reach back to the Puritans who left Europe in the 1600s to found a “city on a hill” that could be a light to the nations. This, however, spelled death, devastation, and displacement for the Native inhabitants of North America. Those picturesque Congregational meetinghouses of New England were places of worship for both white slave owners and black slaves.  

We also have stories of spiritual forebears who were leaders in the struggle to end slavery and to create new institutions in the reconstruction era. Before the Civil War, African-American teachers from New England, the Midwest, and as far south as Virginia, went to Canada to teach fugitive slaves and prepare them educationally for life back in the United States. During Reconstruction, under the auspices of the American Missionary Association, men and women – Black and White – founded schools for freed men and women. These teachers were often reviled and hated, yet they persisted to carry out their work under the threat of violence or death. We remember that our ancestors’ ministries during the 19th century included the abolition movement and the creation of social justice organizations and churches that assisted immigrants new to our shores.  

During the Second World War some of our forebears spoke out against the internment of Japanese citizens, and some congregations helped to sustain their Christian sisters and brothers during their forced relocation. In the 1960s our church provided sustained support for civil rights organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and participated fully in the racial justice work of the National Council of Churches. As ambiguous as our history is, we find that we are, indeed, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses whose faith and witness can embolden ours. [ Pastoral Letter ]  

Maybe we can talk.  

Which brings me back to this Trinity Sunday.  

As difficult as it is to understand the Trinitarian nature of God and whatever else it might mean, in recent years many have suggested that the Trinity is about God’s continual and constant communication in love. And as human beings created in the image of this God, we might find it possible to communicate with one another in love. That is the hope in which we can start to speak honestly.  

Paul concludes his letter to the Corinthians with a blessing in the name of the triune God: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you."  
Now I have to admit to not liking the word "blessing." It sounds old fashioned and pious. "Count your blessings," we're told, and that often sounds like advice to settle for things as they are.  Or I think of people who are always gushing about this or that "blessing," which usually means they got something their way.  

What if, however, what if blessing were an active desire, a human echo of the divine wish that our lives be full, abundant. The blessing that we give, and those we receive connect us with the power of God at work in the world.  

If there is something like blessing in the world—something like the prayer that one person might have for the benefit of another; if God is a Trinity that works within me and you, and in this community to create people who can seek the good rather than return evil for evil; then we can hope to know some of the grace, and love, and communion that blessing offers.  

Trust in God looks to a Creator who knew weakness and death, who made weakness strong in resurrection, and who still gives strength to face each day. Communication and love become possible, not because of our own goodness or the forbearance of someone else. They grow out of God's own experience with being hurt and still reaching out to the world. Trusting in God's love is the only way we will learn to love. Trusting in God’s communication of love is the only way that we might speak and listen in love with each other.  

Maybe we can talk.  

Our nation is waiting for a new sacred conversation—one that we can begin.  

It’s up to us.  

Together we can talk.