Jeremiah 51:50-51
I Corinthians 11:23-26
I want to speak for a few minutes this morning about race and racism, about bias and violence, and especially about how both memory and hope are needed as we think and speak and act. Several things have happened over the past couple of months and I’m struggling to put them all together in some coherent way. I don’t know that I have succeeded, but in situations such as this, I am mindful of the Puritan minister’s prayer: “When I preach to others, let not my words be merely elegant and masterly, my reasoning polished and refined…but may I exalt God and humble sinners.”
As one sinner speaking to others—all of us before the living and exalted God—let us see what I might do.
A week ago yesterday, the Rev. Dr. James H. Cone died in Manhattan. For most of his career, Cone taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He was a central figure—probably the central figure—in the development of black liberation theology in the 1960s and ’70s. One of Cone’s final books, written earlier in this decade, was The Cross and The Lynching Tree, in which he looked at Jesus’ death on the cross and the lynchings of African Americans by Southern whites, most of whom would have called themselves “Christians.” Those blatantly public acts of terror were regarded, Cone said as “the moral and Christian responsibility of white men to protect the purity of their race by any means necessary.” It is a repugnant part of both American history and church history.
As Cone saw it, the suffering and death that was so much a part of everyday life for African American men and women allowed them to identify with the God of the cross. He wrote: “Black Christians believed that just knowing that Jesus went through an experience of suffering in a manner similar to theirs gave them faith that God was with them, even in the suffering on lynching trees just as God was present with Jesus in suffering on the cross.” This faith in the God of the cross gave African American Christians the courage to bear the suffering they were forced to bear, the courage to find meaning and hope in a desperate situation, and finally, the courage to fight against the political and social structures that enslaved them.[i]
In an interview in 2008, Cone said: “Christianity was seen as the white man’s religion. I wanted to say: ‘No! The Christian Gospel is not the white man’s religion. It is a religion of liberation, a religion that says God created all people to be free.’ But I realized that for black people to be free, they must first love their blackness.”
There are, of course many people that do not love blackness.
You remember that in August of 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri. It sparked national outrage. And at the time I thought that maybe, maybe, this time things would start to change. They didn’t, of course. In March of this year police shot at Stephon Clark 20 times in his own yard, thinking he had a gun. He was holding an iPhone.
There were many other similar shootings in the time between the deaths of Brown and Clark.
The Washington Post reported this past week that the number of deadly police shootings of unarmed people has generally declined since 2015 even as the tally of fatal shootings by law enforcement is on pace to hit nearly 1,000 for the fourth year in a row. Fatal shootings of unarmed black men…are among the kinds of killings that have fallen.
And yet we must recognize that since The Post began tracking fatal police shootings, blacks have been shot and killed at rates significantly higher than their percentage of the overall U.S. population. Criminologists said the downturn in the number of cases and their own analysis of the data indicate that evidence of racial bias by police who shoot and kill unarmed blacks has also declined but not disappeared.
Even when not met with deadly force, people of color confront racial bias and a presumption of guilt on daily basis.
You probably heard about Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, who on April 12 arrived 10 minutes early for a business meeting at that Starbucks in Philadelphia and wound up leaving the location in handcuffs. Within a few minutes of their arrival, the manager called the police to report “two gentlemen in my cafe that are refusing to make a purchase or leave.” Officers arrived a few minutes later and arrested them.
And it can happen here.
Last Wednesday there was a column on the front page of the Daily Iowan by Wylliam Smith, a student who came to Iowa City from Grand Rapids, Michigan. There was never any question in his mind about where he would attend college. He wanted to be a writer and Iowa is where you go if you want to write. He came to Iowa even though his mother said: “Enjoy all the White people and the corn.”
You see, Smith is African American. And while he says it never occurred to him that “Being one of 1,035 Black students in a school of 33,564 students would be a problem,” during his two years as a student here he has seen what he calls “the uglier side of Iowa.”
Some told Smith that he was being overly dramatic, that he was looking for racism in society and that’s why he kept seeing it.
But Smith quotes Professor Jessica Welburn, a member of our congregation, who says: “As someone who studies race, I can say that things aren’t just in people’s heads.” Jessica told of her own experience: “I’ve gone into the CVS in the mall and felt like I was being watched and followed…And I knew that the [CVS employee] would never guess that I was a faculty member on campus.”[ii]
As the pastor here, I have heard similar stories from others in this congregation. And I’m also aware of the dynamic that Glenn Wooden and Joshua Housing wrote about in Thursday’s Daily Iowan: “It is nearly forbidden to ever tell white people the truth here [in Iowa City], but it is always acceptable to just smile and be someone’s black friend.”
All of this brings me to The National Memorial for Peace and Justice that opened late last month in Montgomery, Alabama. As its website says, it is “The nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.”
People of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt. This is an ongoing problem. It is the problem of our time that grows out of and continues a horrific past.
The Memorial lifts up 4075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950—although Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative that developed the Memorial says: “We identified over 4000 but we know there are thousands more.[iii]
Visitors to the Memorial first encounter a sculpture of enslaved people. Stevenson is clear that slavery is “the beginning of the narrative of what happened to people of color.” Without slavery, “it wouldn’t be possible for white families to gather their children and go downtown to the courthouse square and watch a black person be burned to death, to watch a black person be hanged, to watch a black person be tortured.”
At the center of the Memorial are steel monuments, organized by county, that, as one person put it “appear like gravestones at eye level. Then they begin to rise, until they are dangling overhead like vertical steel coffins.”
Stevenson says: “Lifting up those monuments was really important because the people who carried out lynchings could have murdered people and buried the bodies in the ground, they could have hidden the evidence. But they didn’t want to do that. They wanted to lift it up to raise it over the entire community so every black person would be menaced and traumatized and terrorized.”
The Memorial also has short, horrifying narratives about lynchings: “Dozens of black sugar cane workers were lynched in Thibodaux, Louisiana, in 1887 for striking to protest low wages.” “David Walker, his wife, and their four children were lynched in Hickman, Kentucky, in 1908 after Mr. Walker was accused of using inappropriate language with a white woman.”
Again, we need to remember that most who perpetrated and watched this violence went off to church the next Sunday.
When Brian Stevenson was asked why he, a lawyer who has worked tirelessly to exonerate people who, because of racism, have been falsely accused of crimes, took the time to develop this memorial and museum, he said: “It really springs from that experience of representing people in courts and beginning to see the limits of how committed our courts are to eradicating discrimination and bias. I want to get to the point where we experience something more like freedom. … I don’t think we are going to get there until we create a new consciousness about our history.”
And so I come again—we come again—to the Table this morning.
This sacrament is an occasion of memory. “Memory,” the German theologian, Michael Welker, says, “Memory not only specifies to a high degree the common past, but also the shared present and the expected future.”
Writing of the Lord’s Supper before any other record we have, Paul emphasized the suffering of Jesus—his body broken and his blood shed. And in Paul’s writing, Jesus tells his followers to eat and drink in memory of him. The future is suffering—but it is also resurrection.
We are to remember the worst so that we might be a part of God’s work to move the world to its best—to be a part of the coming of the realm of God. Each time we eat and drink together, we remember the death of Christ. Practicing this memory helps us to remember other events that we might otherwise ignore. This meal offers us the chance to once again look at the pain and suffering of the world—even the pain and suffering caused by those claiming to be followers of Christ—so that the expected future might be one of peace and justice.
There is space at the Memorial dedicated to Ida Wells, the journalist and early anti-lynching crusader. She once said: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth on them.” Memory turns the light of truth onto a horrific past. As we hold these unholy acts in sacred memory, we might yet move toward a new expected future in hope.
[i] https://www.elca.org/JLE/Articles/137
[ii] http://daily-iowan.com/2018/05/02/smith-the-reality-of-being-black-in-iowa/
[iii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/24/lynch-him-new-lynching-memorial-forces-nation-confront-its-brutal-history-of-racial-terrorism/?utm_term=.ca0ac3859bee