All the Children of the World: A Sermon for June 7, 2020

 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

 

Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.

Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight,

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

 

This is what the faith communities that raised me taught me about race:  Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.

Those faith communities also taught me that my job was to be like Jesus, so while I don’t remember them every saying so explicitly,  to follow Jesus meant to love people, regardless of their skin colour.

Jesus loves everyone, so I am supposed to love everyone. Sounds simple enough, except it isn’t.

The faith communities that raised me never taught me HOW to love all the children of the world and sometimes, implicitly or explicitly, they taught me that Jesus might love all the children of the world, but he also loved me just a little bit more than the red, yellow and black kids.

And it wasn’t just those faith communities that taught me this. Colonial thinking and white supremacy were everywhere I went – my school, my  TV, the institutions that governed my life. It was the air I breathed, and so I didn’t notice it.  It felt normal.

It felt normal to think that my point of view was the best point of view – as long as a white man didn’t have a different one. Race is one piece of a complicated puzzle. It felt comfortable to think that my ideas were the best ideas and if I thought it was helpful and loving… well then it was.  I didn’t need to ask the people who were the recipients of my help what they thought, I just needed to sit back and bask in their gratitude.

It felt normal, but it wasn’t true. My worldview was rooted in colonialism and white supremacy.

Growing up thinking I could abstractly love other people without learning how to do so practically has hurt me and others.

It’s Trinity Sunday 2020 and a lot is going on right now. It’s tricky to preach on a Sunday dedicated to a doctrine and not a story from the life of Jesus, but I think that if ever there was a time to declare that we believe in a God who is both a mystery and a relationship, that time is now.

There are three plants that many indigenous people describe as three sisters: corn, beans, and squash. These plants share a lot in common: they all require sunlight, soil and water to grow, but they are also very different, with distinct qualities and strengths – it is easy to identify which plant is corn, which are beans, and which is squash.

You can plant each separately, but if you plant them together, they grow interdependently – the corn serves as a strong, solid base and also as a trellis for the beans. The beans fix nitrogen in the soil that the corn needs to grow, and the squash surrounds both plants acting as a ground cover to help retain moisture and protect against weeds

If you grow them together they become strong, interconnected plants and yet they never become the same plant –the beans retain all of their beaniness, the squash its squashiness, and the corn retains all of its corniness.  They remain separate, yet deeply inter-connected, things – each growing stronger, and healthier because of their connection with each other. They do not lose their individuality, and yet they are connected to each other in a profound way, and they make each other better.

That’s not a perfect image for the Trinity – there is the whif of heresy in it – God is one and three, not just three, but it is a good image for how we should model our lives on the relationship God has with themself.

We are all unique individuals, made in the image of the triune God, and we are at our best when give of our best, for the betterment of others.

I don’t always give my best for the betterment of others. Oftentimes, I get more than my share and do nothing about it. I benefit from a racist system and I am a recovering racist.  I have a lot of work to do.

But rather than offer an extended confession here or tell you about all of that work, I’m going to tell you three stories in the hope that they may spark good questions and good conversations as we go forward together.

There is an excellent documentary on Netflix about Toni Morrison called “The Pieces I Am,” and in it Toni talks about her interest in asking the questions, “How does a child learn self-loathing? Where does it come from? Who enables it? How does it affect us? And what might be the consequences?”

She said she wanted to read a book about that and no one was writing books like that so she needed to write the book that she wanted to read.

That book was “The Bluest Eye” and the idea for that book began with a story from her own childhood.

She was walking down the street with a close friend talking about whether or not God existed.  Toni said God did exist, the friend disagreed, and not only did she disagree, she had proof that God didn’t exist!

Toni’s friend said that she’s been praying to God for two years for blue eyes but God didn’t answer her prayer, so obviously God did not exist.

Toni says she remembers looking at her friend who was very, very black and very, very beautiful and thinking, “How painful. Can you imagine that kind of pain? About that, about colour? So I wanted to say, you know, this kind of racism hurts. This is not lynchings and murders and drownings, this is interior pain, so deep for an 11 year old girl to believe that if she only had some characteristic of the white world, she would be OK.”

Toni talks about a master narrative that’s imposed by people in authority on everybody else. As an example, she pointed out that the most prized gift a little girl could receive for Christmas was a doll with white skin and blue eyes . There’s a story there, a story that tells little black girls, “This is beautiful, this is lovely, and you’re not it.”

 

***

 

About 10 years ago I volunteered at the first event held by the Truth and Reconciliation commission here in Winnipeg. I did a number of things, but my main job was to provide support to elders at the press tent.  There were lots of places where survivors could tell their story away from the media cameras but it was understood that if you came into this particular tent, you would be filmed, interviewed etc.

I held shells and feathers and purses. I got water bottles and chairs when they were needed but mostly I stood silently and listened to people tell their stories.

Most people who spoke shared from places of deep pain. I will never forget the sound of them keening and wailing.

I won’t forget the anger either.

It all made me uncomfortable and it would have been easy to say, “I will listen when you calm down, are less emotional, behave in ways that make me feel more comfortable,” but I understood that the expressions of pain, and of anger are essential to the healing process and it was not their job to try and make me feel comfortable.

One story in particular has stayed with me.

An older man came forward and began to talk about what is was like to be taken from his family at a very young age, as he spoke, he seemed to become that child. He talked about the strangeness of the school and how at that school he learned that there was a God who both loved him, and hated every single thing about him – his skin colour, his language, his way of being in the world.

He was allowed to go home for the summer but at the end of the summer, the officials came to take him back to school.

He told us that he dropped to his knees and began praying fervently to God. “Please Jesus,” he begged, “if you let me stay with my family I will be a good boy. I will do everything you want me to do just please Jesus, please, let me stay with my family.”

It didn’t work, he was sent back to school.

 

***

 

About 10 years ago or so I attended a workshop with the goal of helping settler people and aboriginal people become better neighbours.  It was mostly led by indigenous people and the participants were largely white church leaders.

In one session, we began to talk about the possibility of including some elements of indigenous spirituality in our church services – what if we included smudging for example? Was that a good idea or not? How would that work? How would we explain it to people? There was a buzz of excitement in the air as people began to discuss the possibilities until one of our teachers, who was also a pastor, called us to silence and said, “Back off. These are not your questions to answer. They’re ours as indigenous Christians and we need to be given the space to answer them ourselves.  For too long, we have been trained to view the white person in the room as the expert and to defer to their opinions. For too long, you have been trained to believe you are the expert in any room you enter.  It needs to stop. Back off.”

God is a mystery. God is a relationship.  We call this mysterious relationship the Trinity. My colleague Scott Sharman wrote such a succinct summary of doctrine of the Trinity that I am going to quote him at length.

“One of the mysteries we are invited to learn from the concept of Trinity is about the coinherence — the overlap, so to speak — of persons. The three persons of the Godhead share one and the same essence. We can say, therefore, that Divinity is so perfected in love that the three persons are not in fact able to be divided from one another at all, even if they are still rightly able to be distinguished.

From this it follows that if we, as human beings, are created in THIS image, we have the basis for some pretty radical conclusions about social justice: We are called to be persons who come to understand ourselves to be so deeply interconnected with all others that the idea of using someone’s race (or gender, or sexuality, or anything else) as a reason to hate or exclude them from us becomes nothing less than a form of theo-anthropological heresy.

Another principle we can receive from Trinitarian thought is that the persons of God are mutually kenotic. In other words, they exist to give themselves over entirely for the sake of the good and glorification of the others, even at personal cost.

Here again, if we, as human beings, bear THIS Divine mark in us, than our lives ought also be marked by a willingness to give ourselves away in compassion for everyone else; especially those who are neglected, excluded, and oppressed; even when facing up to this reality is hard.

I think it comes down to this – Scott says -: One of the best ways to honour the great mystery of the Triune God is to put it into creaturely actions — to tell the truth about racism in our midst (and all the other isms that keep people apart), and to pour ourselves out to dismantle systemic abuses…”

God is three in one, one in three, an interconnected, indivisible relationship.

We are made in the image of God, and we can be like that, but all too often we are not like that.  The events of the past little while, from the pandemic which has exposed a myriad of inequalities, to the violent and unnecessary deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Chantel Moore, and many others.   We are interconnected, but those interconnections are not always for our mutual good and glory.  Too often some of us rise by pushing others down.

And it’s making us all sick.

The faith communities of my childhood taught me that Jesus loves the little children, all the little children of the world, they did not teach me how to love them too.  They didn’t teach me to listen, to learn, to ask, “What do you actually need?”

That’s the work I am trying to do now, in relationship, with our God and with each one of you. Because there is a better, more beautiful, more God-honouring way to live, and we all have a role to play.

May we all take the next necessary step, and then the one after that.

In the strong name of our Triune God who creates, redeems, and sustains. Amen.