What’s Sacred About a Sacred Conversation on Race?

May 28, 2008 By Development

On May 18th, pastors across the United Church of Christ began a sacred conversation on race. On May 25th, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, President of Chicago Theological Seminary, delivered a sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ. Below is the text of her sermon.

Scripture:
Genesis 1:27
1 Corinthians 12:12-27

What’s Sacred About a Sacred Conversation on Race?

Our Board of Trustees, faculty and staff at CTS discussed1 the topic of a “Sacred Conversation on Race” at the recent board meeting. Dr. Lee Butler of our faculty contributed that what he thought made a conversation on race “sacred” was the foundational theological concept that all human beings are all created in the image of God and thus of equal value in the sight of God. I agree that this is foundational; I would like not so much to go in a different direction, but to add the doctrine of the church and the doctrine of the saving work of Christ, this is, ecclesiology and Christology, to this fundamental insight.

When I last stood here in this pulpit, I and many others came to stand with Trinity UCC against intrusive and really unethical practices on the part of the media. We are one church, we declared, and when you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.

This is another way of saying what I think Paul was trying to get at in his first letter to the Corinthians, though he said it in a far more elegant way. “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (v. 27)

There is no way we can have a sacred conversation on race and not have Christ be the center of it. No way at all.

Now there are many conversations on race. Libraries and bookstores have whole huge sections on ‘race.’ Sociologists weigh in, psychologists, social workers, economists, political scientists, educators and a host of others have said plenty over the years, some of it just blather, some of it helpful perhaps, but none of it sacred.

There are some who think that we should not be having this sacred conversation on race in this election season. “Spare Us the ‘Conversation’ on Race” wrote Timothy Shriver in the Washington Post early this week. Now, this column is not quite as bad as its title would suggest; what the writer says he really doesn’t want is a bunch more talk and no action. “What we don’t need at this time is another “conversation” because our national conversations on race feel like bad marriage counseling sessions. We vent, we point fingers, we name the problem over and over again only to find ourselves getting up off the couch in the exact same state of mind as before we sat down.”

I don’t know where Shriver spends his time that he, who from his picture appears very much to be a white man, is having all these intense conversations on race that aren’t going anywhere. I know from my personal experience as a white person that it is like pulling teeth to get other white people to take five minutes to think seriously about race. Shriver’s day job is the CEO of the Special Olympics. It is instructive that he dedicates his Post column to “religion from the perspective of the inner life.” From this I conclude that perhaps he is simply having these conversations with himself. No wonder it’s not really going anywhere.
But seriously, it is instructive that he leaves out the word “sacred” when he talks about the work the UCC is trying to jump start in a Sacred Conversation on Race. I do think that secular conversations on race, when they happen at all, are kind of stuck in a rut and don’t much get us anywhere. And if Shriver wants to promote volunteerism as a better alternative, he’s probably right.
But what we really haven’t tried with any seriousness is a sacred conversation on race. We need to do that together as a church and then turn we can turn to the larger culture and address them from a church perspective.

In the UCC it is distressingly, however, often the other way around. As a liberal church, the UCC in general is more inclined to consult the social sciences rather than the scripture to address a problem. I’m not saying that the social sciences are useless; far from it. We need all the real science we can get these days.

But science (that is real science, not, for example, intelligent design) works by empirical method. It describes what is.
Paul, in Corinthians, is talking about the church as it ought to be.

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

So it is with Christ that we move from the is to the ought. The world may give us division, strife, and racial conflict. But Christ does not give us this division. Christ gives us wholeness. When we are baptized into the one body, then we are of one spirit and racial division, religious division or social division cannot stand. Or, should not be allowed to stand.

The fear that baptism set a slave free was undoubtedly present among the early French and English planters of America including the West Indies. In 1639, Maryland became the first colony to specifically pass a law stating that baptism as a Christian did not make a slave a free person. In 18th century Britain and in the colonies, it was popularly believed that baptism made African slaves free. Some early legal judgments on slavery referred to slaves as “heathens” as a justification of the slave trade, and passages from the Bible were used to suggest that becoming a Christian conferred freedom.

As a result, many plantation owners refused to allow their slaves baptism until the American colonies passed laws that explicitly outlawed freedom by baptism.

The earliest interpretation is certainly the one Paul intended. How can part of the body be enslaved and part free?
Race itself is not a religious category; it is a social construction, even a social fiction invented when the whole “heathen” thing collapsed as a reason that some could be enslaved. The Romans were more honest in their approach to slavery. You were conquered, you lost, you got made a slave. But slaves could be freed, could sometimes even earn their own freedom and become Roman citizens. Race did not enter into it.

It is the western Europeans and the American colonies that invent the fiction of racial inferiority in order to justify slavery as well as colonialism.

Biology supports Paul. The Human Genome Project, the mapping of the whole human genetic code, has opened up avenues for many new and promising therapies, but it has also demonstrated what a remarkable difference there is between biological race and the social construction of race.

A couple of years ago, my husband, who is a surgeon and medical scientist at the University of Chicago, and I taught a course called “Race, Gender and the Genome.” We looked at race and gender from a genetic standpoint, a social standpoint and a theological and biblical standpoint.

One of the things we did in the class was do a lab on our own genetic fingerprint. It’s not hard; you spit into a test tube, add some chemicals, spin it around and then send the resulting precipitate to a lab. Back comes your DNA fingerprint. We also received charts comparing our dominant genetic characteristics to those of people from Asia, Latin America, Europe, Africa etc. My DNA most closely matches that of the Asian profile. That’s right, genetically speaking, I’m Asian.

How could that be? Well, my grandparents immigrated from Hungary and where to do the Hungarians come from? Many Hungarians are descendents of vast Asian migrations to the West. Back in my ancient genetic past, I am Asian, though of course I look Western European. My genetic type is my genotype; the way I look is called my phenotype. And of course, everybody is a mix of a lot of things as well—these are only dominant trends.

Some African Americans students in the class were startled to realize how little of their genetic profile actually fits the African pattern. But when it comes to the social construction of race, of course, none of this matters. Society uses race to distribute and maintain certain power hierarchies—no actual facts are allowed to interfere.

But Paul was ahead of his time, way ahead apparently. His image of the body is really less image and more empirical fact than anything else, because at the end of the day, what the Human Genome Project shows is that we are more than 99.9% all exactly alike when it comes to race. We are actually all one body.

How can it be otherwise? Because we are all in Christ and because what Christ tells us is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we actually are one body and Paul says that you are really a fool if you keep refusing to recognize this simple truth. “If the foot would say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye,I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?” In other words, get a grip. You are all part of one another and while different, the difference is what makes the whole the body of Christ because Christ is not divided against Christ.

What happens when we don’t recognize that we are all one body in Christ? Conflict, alienation, and power hierarchies are the result. It’s right there in the text. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you…But God has so arranged the body…that there be no dissention within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.”

Well, you know as well as I do that Paul would not be bringing up dissention unless, in fact, the Corinthian church had dissention in its midst. We know that as well from the rest of the letter. But that’s not the church, then, Paul says. The point of the church is that the members care for one another. “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.”

This is what we have to say to the world. You would divide humanity by race, but we refuse. You would reward some by race and punish others, but we suffer together and we celebrate together. We do when we are in Christ.

I confess to you that for all the years I have been at CTS and lived and worked in such a racially diverse community, still I realized recently that I was letting the world set the terms on what I could hope for in terms of racial transformation in this society. If you listen to the sociologists, the psychologists, the social workers and the educators, you do have to see that race divides, that the so-called ‘post-racial’ America has not exactly arrived. That is the way the world is.

It was also the way the Corinthian church was. Paul gets right into it in the beginning of the letter. I’m not writing just to say ‘hello,’ but “it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters.”
But that is not why Jesus of Nazareth lived, taught, suffered, died and rose. Yes, the message of the cross is foolishness, except to those who are being saved.

A life in Christ Jesus is lived differently and is measured by different standards. “We have the mind of Christ.”

As one body in Christ we teach the world that our racial differences are our joy, our wisdom, our strength, and when you cause one of us to suffer, you cause all of us to suffer. And when a church stands, as you have, in the midst of utter chaos and stereotyping and unbelievable intrusions into your sacred space and you still stand with courage, and with honor and with a renewed spirit of love among you, then I say to you, I am honored to be in the body of Christ with Trinity United Church of Christ and I am honored by what I have learned from you and I have been immeasurably enriched by the spiritual depths of the African American experience in this country shared so generously with me by so many. And I thank God for you. Our lives, our church, our country and indeed the world would be so diminished without your witness.

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Posted in UCC, Social Justice, Culture