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.
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