Racism's Legacy and Biblical Restitution

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.  Matthew 23:23-24

“Perhaps we, as folk of simpler soul and more primitive type, have been most struck in the welter of recent years by the utter failure of white religion. We have curled our lips in something like contempt as we have witnessed glib apology and weary explanation. Nothing of the sort deceived us. A nation's religion is its life, and as such white Christianity is a miserable failure.”  (W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” 1920)

W. E. B. Du Bois, who passed away in 1963, was a scholar and sociologist who provided an intellectual analysis of racism as it affected the souls of both black and white folk.  His assessment of the failure of white Christianity underlines my own reflections on my vocation as a pastor in United Methodism for over thirty years.  As the son of a Methodist pastor, my reflections go back even further.  In fact, I count one of my ancestors as Bishop James Osgood Andrew, who found himself at the center of ecclesiastical controversy in 1844 over the issue of slave ownership.  Through inheritance and marriage, Bishop Andrew owned a number of slaves and this fact became the catalyst for the schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church leading up to the Civil War and thereafter.

The southern church’s justification of slavery was not an aberration.  The Church, not only Methodist, and not only southern, has regularly condoned the status quo of racism, if not in words, then in practice, giving a tenth of our spices while neglecting the weightier matters of the law.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., offered this gem:  “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”  Too often white Christians in the U.S. have been silent, carrying on our fellowship dinners and Bible studies while allowing our institutions to do our sinning for us.

The antidote to this historic failure of white Christianity is repentance, atonement and restitution.  Recent public discourse has conjured up the word reparations, to the dismay of some.  And yet, the Bible makes a strong case for restitution, reparation’s cousin.  From Leviticus 6:2-5:

When any of you sin and commit a trespass against the Lord by deceiving a neighbor in a matter of a deposit or a pledge, or by robbery, or if you have defrauded a neighbor, or have found something lost and lied about it—if you swear falsely regarding any of the various things that one may do and sin thereby— when you have sinned and realize your guilt, and would restore what you took by robbery or by fraud or the deposit that was committed to you, or the lost thing that you found, or anything else about which you have sworn falsely, you shall repay the principal amount and shall add one-fifth to it.

We also find the New Testament example of Zaccheus, who upon receiving the largesse of Jesus, promises four-fold restitution to any he has defrauded.  As a friend said to me, the intent of restitution, or reparations, is not to impose guilt upon the transgressor but to repair that which is broken.  The legacy of slavery and racism continues into the 21st Century.  While I have not personally intended harm or oppression to people of color I nevertheless can see the brokenness of our caste system, and the burden that people of color still bear.  How do we fix that brokenness except by some form of restitution?  

Until the Church comes to terms with its (our) failure to address the evils of racism, we will continue to be as the Pharisaical hypocrites of Matthew 23.  Christ has atoned for our sins, individual and collective, but in response there remains for us the necessity of repentance and restitution - the weightier matters of the law - justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

No More Azazels

For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.  Hebrews 10:14

Steve Bartman was sitting in Seat 113, Row 8, Aisle 4 at Wrigley Field in Chicago, wearing his ball cap, during the sixth game of the NLCS between the Florida Marlins and his beloved Cubs.  The Cubs were up 3-0 in the eighth inning with one out when Marlins batter Luis Castillo hit a fly ball into foul territory in the direction of Steve Bartman.  Focused on nothing else but the ball coming his way, Mr. Bartman, along with others, reached over the rail to attempt a catch only to deflect the ball enough to spoil left fielder Moisés Alou’s chance of catching the ball for the second out of the inning.

What followed was a series of fielding errors by the Cubs in an apocalyptic meltdown, with periodic camera shots of Mr. Bartman, leading to an 8-run inning and eventual win for the Marlins.  Cubs fans jeered Mr. Bartman and grew increasingly more hostile, throwing drinks and other items at him until he was eventually escorted out of the stadium by security guards.  After the Cubs loss of their next game, disqualifying them from the World Series, Mr. Bartman and his family became a target of threats as his personal information was spread in various media.  The governor of Florida even offered him asylum.

It seems there is a human need to place blame on someone for society’s woes.  When bad news strikes, or events turn tragic, we apparently want to find a scapegoat to take responsibility, to be the victim of our anger, our fear, our despair.

In the early 1930’s, Germany was still struggling to reconstitute itself after World War I.  Adolph Hitler took advantage of the societal unrest to blame their woes on the Jews.  The more he raged, the more unified the population grew in their common distrust and suspicion of the Jewish people.  Their utter annihilation was Hitler’s ultimate solution, as they became the victims to satisfy Germany’s need for a scapegoat to blame for the nation’s troubles.

The Old Testament outlines a ritual practice on Israel’s Day of Atonement in which two goats would be chosen - one to be sacrificed on the altar to God (YHWH), and the other to be the azazel, to be destroyed after the priest had laid hands on it signifying the transfer of the people’s sins.  That goat was then led into the wilderness with a red thread tied on its horns.  It was the azazel, the scapegoat.    

Maybe having a scapegoat to bear the blame for our sins, our ills, our troubles, is cathartic - releasing us from some existential burden.  Or perhaps having a victim to blame helps unite society around a common purpose.

After 9/11 the U.S. was united in grief, but also in our suspicion of Islam.  Middle Eastern, Arab, and Muslim people became targets of U.S. anger.  Our national hunger for a scapegoat coalesced around a common enemy, stereotyped in ethnic and religious terms.  Our country’s mourning turned to hatred and the victimization of entire peoples regardless of their innocence.  Travel bans and public humiliation of people from certain countries or who fit a certain profile became common.  The nation was united in its destructive prejudice and perverse hatred.

We have seen this repeated throughout human history.  Black men have been targeted for lynching, declared guilty without being tried, providing a scapegoat for community anger.  There is a phenomenon of police arrest known among African-Americans as “driving while Black,” which attests to the tendency of Black people to be considered guilty of something regardless of the facts.  Before Anthony Spearman was elected President of the North Carolina Chapter of the NAACP, he was a pastor of an AME-Zion congregation in Hickory, NC.  He tells of arriving in Hickory driving his car which he described as a “hoopdie.”  This is a car that, when new, merited some status, but which is much older, yet retaining some of its original cachet.  For no reason whatsoever, Reverend Spearman was pulled over by Hickory police because he had obviously been profiled.  Not the first time he, and many other African-Americans, had been stopped for driving while Black. 

This victimization and stereotyping of people happens to minorities on a regular basis:  Latinos often blamed for job losses, or Asians blamed for the pandemic.  These scapegoats often experience violence at the hands of those who blame them.  White supremacy feels justified in its desire for an azazel, just as the Nazis felt justified in their extermination of the Jews.

Christianity has often been hijacked by the supremacists, the victimizers, and blamers, to serve their self-justifying needs.  However, there is no theological foundation to do so.  Indeed, the Christian gospel suggests the exact opposite of scapegoating.  The doctrine of Christ’s atonement, in which he became the crucified one, the victim, the azazel, heralded the end of all scapegoating.  As Paul writes in Romans 6:10, “The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.”  And as Hebrews 10:14 expresses with even greater clarity, “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.”

The priests of Israel offered sacrifices routinely for the redemption of the people.  Day after day, the sacrificial victims - sheep, goats, turtledoves - were slaughtered and offered up.  But Jesus, the Son of God, helps us see the futility of these sacrifices and by offering himself as one final victim, he essentially declares all further scapegoating as both unnecessary and destructive.

In today’s political climate this is particularly relevant.  As people on the Left and Right castigate each other we splinter into factions of victims and victimizers.  Rational, civil conversation is forfeited in favor of self-righteous ranting.  Both extremes cancel each other, scapegoating the “other” while turning a deaf ear to one’s own complicity in our current problems.  Is there no humility left?  Whatever became of the common good?

How ludicrous to think that when Steve Bartman reached for that foul ball at Wrigley Field he caused the Cubs to lose.  No, the Cubs lost all on their own.  Whenever we assign blame to anyone person, or peoples, for society’s ills, we are participating in destructive scapegoating which is a distraction from what we need to do - engaging in community action for the common good.  That’s what politics was supposed to be about.  There’s more than enough blame to go around for the troubles of the world.  Let’s stop making people into victims, including acting like ones ourselves.  Let us clasp hands together to join in with what God is doing in the world - a world with no more victims.   

   

     

No Sure Thing

Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
    or you yourself will be just like him.

Answer a fool according to his folly,
    or he will be wise in his own eyes.

Proverbs 26:4-5

Father Roland Murphy would call on my seminary classmates at random at the beginning of each Intro to Old Testament class and ask for a reading.  He laughed at the choice of the passage above and proceeded to warn us to not take verses out of context.  After all, both sentiments are true, even if they seem to contradict each other.  “You need to understand the whole story,” he’d say, as a warning lest we go off on some tangent.

This is a cautionary tale in our search for some objective authority, some absolute foundation upon which to erect our ethics and decision-making.  Everybody seems to want a “sure thing,” like the gambling detective, Nick Yemana, in TV’s “Barney Miller,” but uncertainty seems to be endemic to the cosmos.   We may find ourselves to be fools if we claim certainty in the physical or the metaphysical universe.  In a recent book, “In Praise of Doubt,” the author begins, “You’re not as certain as you think you are.”  

Often the Bible is used as a blunt hammer to get one’s point across, preceded by the words, “The scriptures are clear . . .,” when the truth is actually less certain.  David Wilcox sings of a man who wields the scriptures, like a dagger doing damage.  Meanwhile, in Hebrews 4:12, we find a two-edged sword to describe the more positive way that scripture may be used to discern the “thoughts and intents of the heart.”  Arguments are often fought on two sides of the same coin and we can often find both sides in our canonical scriptures.

In the 1800’s scripture was used to justify the institution of slavery as proponents pointed to Genesis 9:18-27 (the cursing of Canaan) and Ephesians 6:5-7 (“Slaves, obey your earthly masters”).  On the other hand, Paul makes the argument that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free . . . we are one in Christ Jesus” - a theological building block which essentially eliminates not only the institution of slavery but also any partiality between human beings (Galatians 3:28).

The Ezra-Nehemiah cycle of scriptures denounces any Hebrews who have married “foreigners,” thus tainting the purity of Hebrew ethnicity.  Yet the prophet Jeremiah gives specific instruction to the exilic community (29:6) to do exactly what will later infuriate Ezra and Nehemiah (“Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters.”).  The theological emphasis in a particular portion of scripture is often very specific to the historical setting.  What seems necessary in one setting is contradicted in another.  Context.  Context.  Context.

Scripture describes a (G)od who seems bloodthirsty.  In just one of an incredible number of Old Testament examples, the armies of Israel completely annihilate King Sihon of Heshbon and his people.  As we are told in Deuteronomy 2:34, “We left no survivors.”  And just to be clear that this is done under (G)od’s authority we are hear (2:36), “The Lord our God gave us all of them.”

Yet we find Jesus, who Christians claim is the Incarnation of God, telling us to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek, and warning us that if we live by the sword we will die by the sword.  Jesus seems to take seriously the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”  But what are we to make of the numerous references to a (G)od who is all too happy to see blood shed.  Even the New Testament occasionally glorifies violence as Revelation 21:8 damns a list of folks (including “cowards”) into “the fiery lake of burning sulfur.”

Again, context, if not everything, is nevertheless essential to our understanding of how to weigh the scriptures.  And critical interpretation must be claimed afresh in each generation to take advantage of continuing scholarship, including an openness to the movement of God’s Spirit. My mother’s advice to me written as a dedication in the first Bible she gave me includes this passage from 2 Timothy 2:15, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.”  Interpretation of scripture is a task to be done not with bold bravado but with humility.

Of course, all of us need some authority in our lives.  There is within us a need for a compass to direct our paths.  As they say, if we don’t stand for something we’ll fall for anything.  In uncertain times we long for certainty and are uncomfortable with ambiguity.  There are considerable numbers of religious people who are distressed by uncertainty.  Unfortunately, this discomfort often leads to an uncritical acceptance of distorted and abusive authority.  Such authority is a contradiction to the gospel of grace which is central to the Bible.

Still, gray areas make us anxious.  But part of growing up from childhood to maturity is the recognition that life is nuanced.  There are few clearcut answers.  The good is sometimes tainted.  The dark cloud often contains a silver lining.  Things are not always as they appear.  There is mystery in the journey and we will do well to embrace the unknown and unknowable with wonder rather than with certitude.   

In my own search for an authority in my life I have been compelled by the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  So often, when his questioners looked to him for definitive answers, he told stories which allowed his listeners to draw their own conclusions.  This rabbinical approach frustrated his hearers then, and perplexes his hearers now, but provides us with a way of navigating our own search for authority.  Jesus exemplifies a state of wonder which accepts the reality of a nuanced world.  So, to follow his example is to be comfortable with a considerable amount of ambiguity.  

In Andrew Greeley’s novels featuring amateur detective and full-time priest Blackie Ryan, Father Blackie frustratedly admits uncertainty about much Roman Catholic dogma, but then says, “. . . but what I do believe, I believe with all my heart.”  That’s a good place to begin in our search for absolute authority.  Indeed, that may be a good place to end as well.