Sam Adams
Bend Mennonite Church
May 31, 2020
Last week the church celebrated the Ascension. When Jesus left us. Today is Pentecost. When God’s active presence in the Spirit is given to the church for the sake of the world. Even though we have the Spirit, we still await Jesus’ return. And some weeks, when you look around at the world, we can’t help but cry out with the Psalmist, “How long, O Lord?” Sometimes that is not just a question, but it swerves into the declaratory: “It’s been too long! O, Lord!” Such confrontational speech is not faithless, but it proclaims the most profound faith: “this is not right, O God…you know it’s not right. Why are we waiting so long? Why do we suffer such brutality? Help us!”
Of course, my thoughts are, with so many this week, on another black man killed at the hands of police and, again, caught on video. It was just a few weeks earlier that we were all watching Ahmaud Arbery cornered by two armed white men and one filming it, shot and killed in the middle of the day, in the middle of the street. When I think of the unforgettable images of that young man running toward that pickup truck, I think of the fear and horror seared into the identity and memory of a people who, in living memory, experienced regular lynchings at the hands of upstanding white folks. The way we watch the news struggle to make sense out of these deaths—looking for reasons beyond just racist hatred—is just like the lynchings in our past. Lynchings were always ‘justified’: some sort of crime was identified and used to stir up the mobs. This past week we witnessed again a black man, accused of ‘forgery’, pulled out of his vehicle, thrown to the ground, a knee pressed into his neck as he cried those now famous words, “I can’t breathe.” They’re famous words not because they were chosen for impact, but because they are the most honest words that can be gasped out as one dies, faced pressed into asphalt, knee on neck, until it’s over.
I’ve been thinking about these things this week and, although it’s Pentecost, I chose the alternative readings for today: the visit to Elizabeth by Mary, and the Prayer of Hannah when she finds her barren womb has been blessed with a child. Why these texts? Because as white people in a world that privileges whiteness, we need to read stories from another perspective. These are not our stories. I don’t care how long you’ve been reading them, even if you grew up in the church and heard them every year. These are not our stories. Like reading the stories of the Montgomery bus boycott, or the march from Selma to Washington, or any number of stories that come from the African American experience in the United States, we read those stories as outsiders. The experiences of George Floyd, or Trayvon Martin, or Atatiana Jefferson, or countless others, we can only see from the outside. We do not have the collective memory as a people to truly identify with their terror. For most white Christians we read stories in the Bible from positions of privilege, having inherited a culture in the West formed by the reading of these stories from a position of power.
These are stories that come from people on the margins. Hannah, who lived during the time of the Judges in Israel, and during a time when a woman’s only hope for social dignity was found in bearing children, is someone who’s barrenness marginalized her in a way that we can barely imagine today—so removed is that world from our own. She absolutely exults in the grace that she finds in her pregnancy,
Hannah prayed and said, "My heart exults in the LORD; my strength is exalted in my God. My mouth derides my enemies, because I rejoice in my victory.
There is no Holy One like the LORD, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God.
Talk no more so very proudly, let not arrogance come from your mouth; for the LORD is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed.
The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength.
Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry are fat with spoil. The barren has borne seven, but she who has many children is forlorn.” (1 Samuel 2.1-5)
Her pregnancy is to her, and to the people of Israel, a sign that the tables are turning; the social and political world of privilege and power is being upended and there will be a great reversal of fortunes. This most personal of events is a sign that God is working justice in the world.
Mary and Elizabeth are both women experiencing the news of pregnancy; one, once again in the story of Israel, having been barren and childless, the other a virgin gifted with the most unexpected of gifts. Hear how Mary experiences this news:
My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever." (Luke1.46-55)
We cannot enter into the words of Mary’s song, what the church calls the Magnificat, without also entering into the social, economic, and political experience of Israel under Roman occupancy and oppression, and with the memory of exile a key part of the Jewish identity. Mary doesn’t let her pregnancy be experienced in any other way; this miracle is tied to the hope of her people.
We have a hard time reading the story of Jesus faithfully from the perspective of whiteness and privilege in America. If Jesus is white, his death makes no sense—or at worst it gives us a false sense of persecution. In its most hideous consequence, the whiteness of Jesus led Europeans to hate the Jews who, it was believed, killed Jesus. But, the African American church, and black people around the world, have often allowed their artists, from writers to painters, to imagine Jesus as a black man. For those of us white Christians who want to know Jesus, we should receive this as a gift.
If it is hard for us to imagine Jesus as a black man, it ought to be equally as difficult to see him as a white man. As a matter of historical fact, he was neither. He was a Jew. And as such, he was closer to being black than he was to being white. And I mean that more than a comment on the color of his skin; I mean that as the social identity he found himself to have in 1st Century Palestine. Of course, European racism hadn’t been invented yet, and the racialization of skin color was still a millennium and more away, but he was a Jew, and as such his existence in the world was tenuous. To that extent, the African American church is right to say Jesus was black—and unless we are willing to see him as black, as marginalized and abused, we will fail to really see him. What it requires of us is that we give ourselves to a story and a people that are not our own; and learn to be loved and saved by a savior who is not white, who is not from us, who is, socially speaking, ‘below’ us. On second thought, no, we do not give ourselves to this story and a people that are not our own; but rather, by God’s grace, God gives us this story—it comes to us as an act of God to change and save us from what we would normally choose.
This is the great challenge for white Christians today. We have been saved by a Lord who came from a people we have been taught to culturally despise. We have been freed from our story and, in the words of Paul, grafted into this story. We are Gentile guests in the story of Israel. In the urgent idiom of today, we have been, by the Spirit, grafted into the story of George Floyd so that in the Spirit of Jesus Christ—and only in the Spirit of Jesus who is there suffering with Floyd as his face and neck are pressed into the asphalt—can be with him too. And it is from that vantage point, from below, eye-level with the pavement, that we breathlessly cry out to God for our black brothers and sisters, “How long? It’s been too long!”