How did we get to where we are so racially divided? - The Rev. Canon Dr. Stephen Fields

"Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man" (Luke 6:22).

I want to thank my sister Canon Lucy and brother Jeff for their invitation to share with you this morning. I am happy that you have acknowledged that Anti-Black racism exists in our society and in our Church, that racism in all its forms is a sin against God and against our neighbour, and you have committed yourselves to work to dismantle racism and to include all races in our common life.

I have been asked to reflect on the question, “How did we get to where we are so racially divided?” I can answer that question in eighteen words. “We got here because the white church chose to exclude those who were not white from their company,” and allow us to continue with the service. However, I was given 15 minutes to reflect on the question with you.

The Beatitudes go to the heart of the gospel story. They describe the reversals which were inevitable in the Kingdom of God. Today’s gospel, like that portion of Matthew’s account, describes the nature of the Kingdom of God, the Reign of God.

What is this Kingdom of God? It is the expression of the transformation that is realized when the Reign of God is experienced in God’s creation. Kingdom time means change; Kingdom time means justice; Kingdom time means conversion to the mind of Christ.

The Kingdom of God speaks of the nature of God. It is love expressed in and through Jesus as an authentic engagement and understanding of others different from us. The Reign of God was more than a reality that was to be experienced in the future. Jesus demonstrated that it was present at every time and in every place where people lived out the command to love each other as God loves us. It calls us out of our self-centeredness into a radical fellowship and solidarity with others. Jesus crossed boundaries of gender, age, religious tradition, culture, race, and nationality for the sake of the Kingdom. So racism is in direct opposition to the nature and message of the Kingdom of God.

Racism makes it possible for one group to thrive at the expense of another. It reflects the ability of one race to dominate other races based upon the logic of superiority and inferiority. Such power is vested in those systems and structures that create, perpetuate, and re-create the divisions that destroy lives and livelihoods. The church is no exception.

How did we get here?

I don’t know when it first raised its ugly head. Perhaps it was in 1619 when the Portuguese slave ship, the São João Bautista, sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with a hull filled with captive Africans, destined for a life of enslavement in Mexico.

It is with this ill-informed understanding of who they were that the leadership of the church and its membership began to exclude Black people from its community. To this day “Black people are the only people in the world whose claim to be fully human have not yet been universally accepted” (Kortright Davis).

Let us remember some of the sins or failures of the Church as she denied the existence of Black people or denied them a place in her fellowship. What are some of these sins?

She concealed the truth of the contribution of Black people to our Christian faith, especially during the days of the Early Church. E.g., Simon of Cyrene, the Black Evangelist from Ethiopia, who was baptised by Philip, the great Bishops and scholars, Cyprian, Augustine, and Tertullian, women like Perpetua and her companions.

This is true in the arts. Jesus continues to be portrayed through the eyes of the European artists and thinkers, as a blue-eyed blond man.

It is true with the denial of the language and culture of the Black people, the denial of the use of the drum.

Today many well-meaning white people say, “I don’t see colour”. If you don’t see colour this morning, my friends, you are telling me that I am not here.

One is reminded that following the Second World War, Britain sought the labour of Caribbean people to assist in the rebuilding of the country. The majority of these immigrants were members of the Church of England, the established religion in the British colonies, with certain benefits and privileges. It was common for new immigrants on going to worship in the Church of England to be advised that they would feel more comfortable worshipping “down the road” where others like themselves gathered. They were excluded. These immigrants who were good enough to drive their buses, nurse their sick, care for their infants, and rebuild their city, were not good enough to worship with them. There were similar experiences in Canada in the 50s, and 60s, and 70s, and 80s.

We often hear people say, we are not like America. That’s another denial. In many ways, the Canadian and American contexts are the same. It can be more dangerous here since we are nice about our racism. There are many examples in our own church here. This is not the place or time for that. Suffice it to say that Black people continue to endure the same pain visited upon us by the systemic racism that has infected every institution, including our church.

How do we correct these injustices? By Remembering two words: COMPASSION and CROSS.

Before we talk about these two words, we must first revisit our understanding of the NATURE OF GOD. What do we understand about God and the way of God?

Compassion is not an intellectual enterprise to an encounter with suffering and injustice. Compassion is an ever-evolving encounter with those who suffer and an opportunity for conversion in the process. Compassion represents the convergence of divine attribute, divine action, divine demand, and the total human response of faithful obedience to, and acceptance of, the divine reality. Compassion is a virtue that circumvents thought since it prompts us immediately to action (Kortright Davis).

The compassionate is one disposed to listening, open to being transformed by the reality of suffering, and accountable for being contributory to the situation, where that is the case. There must also be a willingness to be vulnerable and to respond to situations of brokenness and injustice, intent on restoring the broken to wholeness and full participation in the human enterprise.

• Interrupt our journey and reorient our trajectory.

The way of compassion demands that we

• Interrogate

•   our values to discern how we have given fuel to injustice

•   our attitudes and see how they contribute to unjust practices

•   our systems, and structures that create injustice and accept the

  challenge to create policies and programs that will promote a more wholesome and just experience for all God’s people.

  The way of compassion demands that we

 Intervene on behalf of the other and become allies with those who suffer injustice and work with them to ensure the restoration, total transformation, and ultimate flourishing of all who suffer.

The model for us is God's enduring incarnate presence throughout human history, fully realized in the life and work of Jesus. Paul tells us how Christ Jesus “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:7-8).

THE CROSS (our second word)

The mystery of the Incarnation finds full expression in the cross and the good news of the Kingdom of God. It is ironic that notwithstanding the burning crosses of the Klu Klux Klan, and the white racists who preached a dehumanizing, segregationist gospel in the name of the cross of Jesus, Black people still summoned a passion and energy whenever their preachers talked about the cross of Jesus. “They sang more songs and preached more sermons about the cross than any other aspect of Jesus’s ministry" (James Cone).

The cross places God in the midst of oppressed and crucified people, in the very midst of a people who lie on the ground with a knee on their necks, as they struggle to breathe, as they call for their dead mothers.

But, there is more to this cross. The message of the cross is not only for the victims of exclusion. Through the cross, just as the oppressed are liberated from the suffering visited upon them, so the oppressors are liberated from the injustice which they have meted out. On the cross, the love of God is expressed for all, even those who cause pain, for oppressed and oppressor.

Partners in the pursuit of racial justice must understand that the power that they may have is not theirs to be wielded over others, objectifying them as lesser beings who ought to remain subjected to hate, hurt, and marginalization. They must disabuse themselves of the notion that they have total power over others and, with contrite, penitent, and loving hearts, begin to see each person as a gift from God, and not someone over whom they have a right to rule, but with whom they are free to interact in ways that can empower and affirm their community.

I circle back to compassion, for at the heart of compassion is mercy and justice. The miracle of the Incarnation is the divine story of compassion. It is the story of the cross. It is the way of Kingdom. It is the way of justice. It is in following these two paths, compassion and the cross, that we are endowed with the capacity, like Jesus, to change the conversation, refocus the narrative and take the discourse away from our narrow and biased conventions and customs to dare to say, to dare to hear, and dare to do something new, and life-giving; indeed dare to begin to dismantle the sin and evil that racism is.

The sin of racism, expressed in ways such as exclusion, continues to be a source of trauma for Black people. Reinhold Niebuhr said, “I do not see how any church can be so completely disloyal to the gospel of love as to put up bars against members of another racial group who apply for inclusion in its fellowship” (James Cone).

As I conclude, I leave these parting words with you. We affirm in this Black History Month and every month this truth. We affirm it with all those who genuinely live lives of compassion under the shadow of the cross. We affirm that when God created us Black, Black, Black, God saw what God had made, and said,

• “What a Good God am I!"

• "How beautiful they are!"

• "How blessed they are!"

• "How bountiful they can become!”

  As we survey the many faces of Canada and those across the world, with millions of Black faces among them, let us always remember, let us never forget that “Diversity is by divine design, but division is by human action. Diversity does not mean division. It does not mean that one group is inferior and the other superior. All it means is that in the beauty of God’s created order we are members one of another not in spite of but because of our diverse endowments” (Kortright Davis).

  Dismantling the sin of racism, my friends, is the work of the St. Aidan’s; this is the work of our Diocese; this is the work of our church, because it is the work of God.