Guest Sermon by Jeff Spiehs
Scripture
2 Timothy 1:7-8
7 for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.
8 Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God,
Sermon
Our family has had a fantastic time being part of the Abbey community. It is great to see such support and validation for the things that we are deeply connected to and passionate about. We’ve learned so much from you and the voices that are brought to the Abbey to teach us. These social principles and the idea of the integrated social community strives to bring about justice in our everyday lives locally and globally. The Methodist social principle today is the social community and the rights of racial and ethnic persons.
The passage from 2nd Timothy is often understood as a pastoral letter meant to encourage the church and offer practical advice. We’d be wise to take to heart what it means not to have a spirit of timidity, but of power and of love and a sound mind.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that religion and education must change one’s internal feelings, but it is scarcely a moral act to encourage others to patiently accept injustice until a mans heart gets it right. With the wisdom of our social community, we can know what power, love and a sound mind can do.
Social community:
We affirm all persons as equally valuable in the sight of God. We therefore work toward societies in which each person’s value is recognized, maintained, and strengthened. We deplore acts of hate or violence against groups or persons based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, age, gender, disability, status, economic condition, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religious affiliation.
To deplore these acts and support human rights means that we have the opportunity to provide real stability in the lives of our community. Stability can be a real, tangible thing for us. Sometimes there is a conviction that can come along and disrupt our day to day lives, and that conviction is the desire for community.
The realization that we all need each other and committing to community and stability is never easy, but always worth fighting for. In todays society, sticking around is not a hot commodity. In some ways community and stability are the antithesis of the relentless seeking that is so prominent in the american dream. Community is a chance to settle down and find out who we really are. Community’s wisdom insists that growth depends on all of us rooting ourselves in a place with others. Most of us as modern people get uncomfortable talking about commitment and stability, we worry that vows like community can be dangerous.
Should we ever leave the place we are? I don’t know, but I trust we are able to best discern the call of God in the company of friends. The trouble is we can’t find community within ourselves alone. We have a desperate need to find something solid to give us bearings. Left to ourselves we will simply float along without something greater to ground our existence. Our fragmented lives easily become like that of an old house sitting on a poor foundation.
When we commit to community, which we can feel strongly the urge to do so, we are called into a tension. We are asked to commit to the practices of hospitality, listening, forgiveness and reconciliation, the daily tasks of life with other people.
Poet, author and agrarian Wendell Berry says, “Stability demands that we do the long, hard work of life with other people in the place where we are.”
I recall an experience about 10 years ago when my community had a coffeeshop/art gallery/church in the Benson neighborhood. We were coming to a time when we realized after 5 years that it was time to close up our physical location. We were out of money and felt burned out but were looking for the next evolution in our work in the Benson neighborhood. Two of our friends who lived above the coffee shop, Brad Hoshaw and Dan Cummings were sitting with me on the couch on a hot July day in the coffeeshop. I vividly remember Dan suggesting that we split the one beer he thought he may have in his fridge. So, he brought it down and the three of us split the 12 oz 90 shilling by O’Dell’s in little plastic kids drink cups. We reflected on our time together, the meaning that it had on our lives and how good it felt to sit in solidarity sipping on sort of skunky beer at 2 pm on a Tuesday. The moment on the couch reminds me that we don’t exactly know the plans that are ahead of us. Just six months before sitting together on the couch, I tweeted out “this year is going to be a great year for us in Benson. Exciting things to come!” We had no idea that just six months later we’d be closing our shop. That time on the couch was a distinct marker of a transition for all of us, that we were outgrowing one ideal and letting the intentionality of social community take us where it needed to lead us, which for me meant getting a “real job” for awhile, but staying rooted in community.
In a fast paced and fragmented world, we feel our need for community intensely. But the paradox of community is this: those of us who long for it most intensely are least capable of making the kind of commitments that make community possible. We feel the need for community because we sense that something is missing-that we’ve lost something essential. But like children who have never known their parents, the lack we feel so strongly makes us afraid, slow to commit, and unable to find the very thing we most want.
It doesn’t take long in community to realize that people are at times broken and in need of repair. The minute we realize this we are liable to think “I can name this problem much better than they can. Maybe I can fix them. We do this because we love them and we want these communities to be better. The problem is that people and communities are not like cars, they aren’t made to run just fine on their own.
This work of community is the work of everyone. In todays political climate it is easy to find your side and assume you are right. We can easily become defensive when called to check our assumptions or to recognize our own place of privilege and power. We assume God must be on our side. When we fall into this temptation we can start to build up fear based ideas about others and build up fortresses that keep us from interrogating ourselves.
When we isolate ourselves we are no longer able to bear witness to hope, hear the voice of those so often left on the sidelines and begin to convince ourselves that we’ve got it together. One of the most pervasive places I’ve seen this is when we talk about race.
It is easy to hear chants of “send her back” or read tweets about rat infested places and s-hole countries and pat ourselves on the back and say “I’m not like that.” Like most of you, I am concerned about the blurring of the lines between white nationalism and evangelicalism.
But this has always been the case in the history of the church, searching for power and control and keeping and building empire.
The work of anti-racism and dismantling white fragility is not only about the obvious racism, but in everyday racism, personally and structurally. It comes in subtle and sometimes invisible ways. Then events like yesterday happen and we still see the misery of racism. We had another senseless mass shooting by a terrorist. A white man walked into a mall and began shooting because of his racist motives. May the Lord have mercy on all of us and may we do more than we can imagine to dismantle the fear and intimation our leaders are pushing to keep their empire.
Are we okay with pay disparity? Housing discrimination? Preferring the candidates resume who has a name that is white sounding?
Our call is to not ask if God is on our side? We know the side that God is on, God stands with those who are on the other side of power, who are fighting against empire. Our task is to join them, lift and center their voice and provide resources and stand behind.
It is personal, social, political and therefore spiritual.
This past week I was part of design workshops along the N. 24th Street corridor. We were working with the community to develop strategies of housing affordability, racial justice, and access to transportation, jobs and public health. I met Lynette.
Lynette shared with me that she has lived in North Omaha her entire life, her grandkids also live in North Omaha. At this workshop was the first time she had heard of redlining, and structural housing discrimination. She and her community have been deeply and severely negatively impacted by racist policies and tactics that were sometimes overt and most of the time covert.
Fighting white fragility means asking ourselves how we feel knowing that for most of us, our wealth, stability and sense of place is due to the fact that we had access to credit, infrastructure and so on that others did not have and still today are missing. We are busy building our lives, preparing for college, sending our kids to school while others are just trying to survive and fear for their lives when pulled over by the police.
As a cisgendered white male, I must be the ideal person to share about racism. The theology of liberation is not a special interest theology. We all have a role to play. Pay attention to the lives of people who are experiencing grace under pressure. Paul says in 1st corinthians that we are a body, when one part of the body is suffering, we all suffer.
Centering whiteness, being complicit in everyday racism is part of contributing to the suffering of the body.
Why is it so difficult for us to talk about race? We get defensive. “I have a black friend!” “I voted for Obama!” We’ve allowed ourselves to be isolated from the impacts of racism. We rarely lament about the segregation in our communities and what we are missing. We can think we are exempt from the root causes of racism. We can have guilt that paralyzes us from taking action.
Standing in solidarity can help us find ways to make use of our differences for the common good. To see our role in making the body healthy.
God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power and love. This power fuels us to see racism and seek ways to take action. Once you let yourself see racism, you begin to see it all the time.
What can we do? The Methodist social principles give us some structure and guidance:
Rights of Racial and Ethnic Persons
Racism is the combination of the power to dominate by one race over other races and a value system that assumes that the dominant race is innately superior to the others. Racism includes both personal and institutional racism. Personal racism is manifested through the individual expressions, attitudes, and/or behaviors that accept the assumptions of a racist value system and that maintain the benefits of this system. Institutional racism is the established social pattern that supports implicitly or explicitly the racist value system. In many cultures white persons are granted unearned privileges and benefits that are denied to persons of color. We oppose the creation of a racial hierarchy in any culture. Racism breeds racial discrimination structurally and personally.
We assert the obligation of society and people within the society to implement compensatory programs that redress long-standing, systemic social deprivation of racial and ethnic persons. We further assert the right of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic persons to equal and equitable opportunities in employment and promotion; to education and training of the highest quality; to nondiscrimination in voting, access to public accommodations, and housing purchase or rental; to credit, financial loans, venture capital, and insurance policies; to positions of leadership and power in all elements of our life together; and to full participation in the Church and society.
What can we do?
We can start by recognizing all Biblical reading and interpretation is affected by the situation of the reader. but they continue to be dominated by ways of thinking in male-centered, white, European heritage. Especially in the case of race/ethnic identities, these points of view may not lie at the surface of the consciousness of the reader. But they must be probed in order to acknowledge the difficulties of recognizing privilege that racism causes.
Don’t silence marginal voices-lift them up, center them.
Confess your privilege.
Use your platform for anti racist policy and advocacy.
Transfer resources.
MLK letter to American Christians:
Yes America, there is still the need for an Amos to cry out to the nation: "Let judgement roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream."
May I say just a word to those of you who are struggling against this evil. Always be sure that you struggle with Christian methods and Christian weapons. Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love. Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. Always avoid violence. If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.
In your struggle for justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for injustices that he has heaped upon you. Let him know that you are merely seeking justice for him as well as yourself. Let him know that the festering sore of segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro.
Many persons will realize the urgency of seeking to eradicate the evil of segregation. There will be many Negroes who will devote their lives to the cause of freedom. There will be many white persons of goodwill and strong moral sensitivity who will dare to take a stand for justice. Honesty impels me to admit that such a stand will require willingness to suffer and sacrifice. So don't despair if you are condemned and persecuted for righteousness' sake. Whenever you take a stand for truth and justice, you are liable to scorn. Often you will be called an impractical idealist or a dangerous radical. Sometimes it might mean going to jail. (sometimes there may be protestors on the sidewalk-emphasis mine) If such is the case you must honorably grace the jail with your presence. Don't worry about persecution America, but stand in power and love.
Are we standing in power and love? Are we on the side of God?
I’d like to finish by reading the lyrics of a Bob Dylan tune, "With God On Our Side":
Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.
Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.
But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.
May we have the courage to ask questions, speak truth to power speak not out of timidity, but of love and stand on the side that God has been all along. Amen.
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