Rivetti's Blog

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Hebrews 11; Luke 12:32-40

This has been a week filled with commemorations and holy days. A newly published book, Holy Women, Holy Men, lists the days and commemorations throughout the church year – saints days from the earliest moments of the church, new commemorations of people whose history is not so very far removed from our own – over two hundred days each year that mark, “not models of absolute perfection, but men and women whose lives, with all their diversity of gifts and graces, were reshaped by God’s redemptive activity.”¹ So this past week, we recognized not only the 16^th century northern European artists Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Lucas Cranach the Elder, but also W. E. B. DuBois, and George Freeman Bragg, Jr., leaders and chroniclers of the ongoing struggle for equality and dignity for African Americans, who were nurtured by the Episcopal Church as much as they were challenged and dismayed. Capping them all on Friday was the Feast of the Transfiguration. That day when we tell again the story of the white light on the mountain top revealing Jesus to his inner circle in all his glory– that is one of the very few feasts on the church’s calendar that can “bump” the regular celebration of creation and redemption that is our worship here on Sunday. Forever that feast of the brilliant light on the mountain, celebrated for centuries on August 6, is tied to another blinding light, one that sixty-five years ago brought both destruction and hope at the end of the war in the Pacific. And since today is the anniversary of that second bomb, this one on Nagasaki, it seemed like it would be good to take a moment to reflect. Not at all to step away from our thanksgiving for creation and redemption, but to step back a little and look around.

As you may know, next weekend I will be in Moses Lake at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church as part of a team presenting a training in anti-racism called Seeing the Face of God in Each Other. In anticipation of the weekend, I sent a mailing out to our participants and the other trainers with a little light reading: a collection of General Convention Resolutions from 1991 forward requiring the training; pastoral letters decrying the sin of racism, sent out by the House of Bishops over the decades; a sermon by our Presiding Bishop preached at St. Thomas’ Church in Philadelphia in October 2008, and a report on the General Convention’s repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery at its session last year. With all that work already on paper, why should our diocese expend money, time, energy on the gathering that we will be holding next week? I should say that Roy Johnson is going to be there with us as part of the group – so he may well be wondering the same thing.

The news cycles of the last several weeks, and in particular the incident involving Shirley Sherrod, make clear that our national discourse is based largely in widespread ignorance of our national history. You may recall that the 45-minute speech Ms. Sherrod made on receiving an honor from the NAACP was edited to a two-minute clip that appeared to show her abusing her authority to prevent a white farmer from receiving his due. The edited clip was posted and publicized as evidence of wide-spread anti-white sentiment among members of the Obama administration. To make the fabrication worse, she was let go by an administration that is hyper-sensitive to charges of so-called reverse racism. Once the truth surfaced she was offered her job back, and a public apology from the Presiding. I don’t know if she has agreed to return to the new position being created for her in the Department of Agriculture. What I did learn in watching her 45-minute speech, in which she described the growth in her understanding over the years prompted by that very encounter with the white farmer, was that Shirley Sherrod is the wife of a man who helped organize voters in the south. Further, she is from a family that was the victim of the systematic racism in the department of agriculture over the decades following not only reconstruction in the south, but the civil rights act of 1964. The blatant abuse of African Americans by the government agency that was supposed to help them become self-sufficient was documented in the 1990s; Shirley Sherrod is the surviving heir of a family that was owed settlement money from the Department of Agriculture. And that is the woman that the Department of Agriculture and the White House ordered fired rather than risk appearing anti-white.

As the Presiding Bishop’s sermon points out, the consequences of our particular history of slavery, and the subsequent re-enslavement of black men in the Jim Crow era, continue in every aspect of our lives. “Most of us, white and black, put our money in banks whose history is in some way connected to profits made from slave labor. Most of us benefit from steel made by companies with some connection to those slave-driven mines of the industrializing south.” And, as is made clear in the research leading to the repudiation of the Right of Discovery – the 15^th century international law that made it possible for Christian Europeans to lay claim to the so-called New World – we are all living on land that belonged to someone else; we are all worshiping in churches that are built in places that others once claimed as their own. In yesterday’s paper was an article about a retired neurophysiologist reconstructing maps of local history. Tracing the paths of Generals Steptoe and Wright in forcing the Nez Perce into treaties I the19th century, Mahlon Kriebel notes, “The Northwest wouldn’t be the way it is without the Wright campaign and subduing the Indians.”²

Our ancestors may have come to this country after the Civil War. But none of us can claim to be free from participation in the system that continues to distort our humanity. There is, as we say in the old words of confession, there is no health in us. But.

Here is where the creation and redemption, where the dazzling light of transfiguration shoots through our heart. Here is where the dream of God, the dream the prophets proclaim, can be lived out in our commitment to justice. The group that we will be training in Moses Lake will join others in the diocese who have already engaged in this training with a hope to creating alliances in our churches and in our communities to dismantle racism. We have resources here in our community – the Human Rights Commission of Idaho; the Human Rights Education Institute – that we can join in supporting and defending their work. We can wash ourselves, make ourselves clean, remove the evil from before our eyes, seek justice, rescue the oppressed. The waitress in a local restaurant saw me leafing through the materials and told me of her church’s exorcising prayer when they learned they were meeting on the site of the last Klan meeting in Whitman County. Right then and there the two of us broke protocol and offered our prayer for the success of our ventures to place our treasure, our time and our talent where our heart is calling us to wholeness and healing.

The saving act of Christ is to include us all, beyond our national origin, beyond our history, beyond our age or our sex or our status – all of us included in the heavenly banquet, the celebration of life. Inclusion at that table does not mean we are all made exactly alike. In Christ we don’t instantly become stripped of our history, our story, our person-hood. In Christ those differences are pieces in the glorious mosaic that is the Body. When we look around this room and we see mostly people of one ethnic background, mostly people of one age group, mostly people of one social class – when will we be eager to be uncomfortable? When will we embrace being made different, being transformed by embracing those who are not like us? That flashing light from the mountaintop of transfiguration is not to lull us into sameness. It is dangerous, not comforting. It is fire and judgment and the pain of Calvary. It is also the promise, the evidence of things unseen, that guides us through times of uncertainty, times of disruption, to the true home that awaits us, the banquet of creation and redemption laid out for us in love each week, the dream of God that feeds our heart.