As soon as I accepted Ed’s invitation to speak today, I heard a tell tale “uh-oh” in my head.  I was a little worried about what I was going to actually say, but the bigger fear was I am 2 classes into a degree in theology.  I am no expert, not even a studied scholar – and yet, here I stand.  You are warned:  A little knowledge is a dangerous thing!

Now, to be fair to Ed, he isn’t just taking off a weekend from writing and speaking.  After meeting for coffee, and discussing things I had been reading in school which resonated with his own passions, he suggested that perhaps I was ready to give the sermon.  Here I was wired on caffeine telling him “no, no, I think the service should go in this direction, this song could be played here, and perhaps we could do another on this topic…” For those of you who know me, it may be a surprise that he had to encourage me to take this challenge on.  I have to say it was probably a wise move that he did.  I like to think it was a move to safety, like he was stepping aside to let a freight train go by. 

So what is it that moved us to stoke our bellies with caffeine and talk of justice and God?  Why might it be important that I talk at this time of the year? I am taking Black Theology at Xavier, and it has been quite the  wake up call.  So, it seemed to us that perhaps at the end of Black History month it might be good to share some other voices and reflect on who we are. 

But before we dive in, let me backtrack to our annual meeting and to the results of our communal inventory.  I shall paraphrase a bit in summary: we learned that we are tired and beat up,  and yet some think that we’re resting on our laurels.  We want challenge and comfort in our sermons and progressive Theology in our service.  In the national survey we found that we are an incredibly active church, highly educated, and determined to make the world better.  Which is wonderful news, and a great place to move forward.  In short, we want to do good things and walk away from church feeling energized.  But perhaps being Christian is supposed to be more than recharge our batteries on Sundays. 

Our reading in Deuteronomy tells us that we are to “walk in all Gods ways, to love God.”  The reading continued with another directive “you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”  I can say that for me, this has always been one of those directives that led to extreme guilt, since I was never going to love the stranger as well as God did.  Perhaps it is because I grew up gay in a straight world, or that I’m a perfectionist, or maybe it’s because I grew up Catholic; anyway I saw it, I would not measure up.  That is a HUGE challenge to put to a person!  Paul stated is a bit differently in our second reading, when he tells the Galatians “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”   

Ok, great!  The little voice was going off in my head again saying: “Now you’re doomed, because you can hardly bear your own burdens let alone someone else’s – and what if you don’t like the person!? ”   

When I first came to Mt. Auburn, I hadn’t been to church in years…I mean years!  So there was a lot of remembering to be done of things I supposedly knew.  Much to my surprise, in my New Member class I learned about a radical Christ.  Who was he?  Never heard of him before?  Hanging out with the poor, upsetting the social apple cart of his day, and generally doing stuff the Romans didn’t like. I was also asked what I thought about Christianity, why I was Christian and how I might interact with Jesus’ legacy.  What was this place?  I could like this Presbyterian stuff – you know, where we live: “faith informed by reason, and reason enlarged by faith.”  Good stuff!  In that New Member class, I got to write a faith statement – another novelty to me – and in part is said: 

“Recently, listening to a Mt. Auburn sermon, I realized that for me it means a choice.  A choice to follow the teachings and ways of Jesus, as a way to express and show God’s love to others.  It is, for me that simple.  There are many paths to knowing God’s love, and I choose to live my life exploring and living the lessons of Jesus as learned through the Scriptures.”  

This was a big deal for me to say the words.  Could be because I’m naïve, but I remember growing up thinking everyone was Catholic – or Jewish, I did read the Bible after all!  I just thought you were born that way, but now I got to think about why I might be Christian.  Whoa! 

Fast forward to now, my study of Theology, and my reading of parts of Black Theology and Black Power. James H. Cone, a distinguished professor at Union Theological Seminary and a pioneering author and thinker, laid out being a Christian a little more bluntly in 1969 by writing “To be righteous through Christ places a man in the situation where he too, like Christ, must be for the poor, for God, and against the world.”  I thought, “All right – radical Christ fighting for the poor!”  You see, that’s what I loved about Mt. Auburn when I joined.  Taking on the world for justice, is a very cool thing!  But wait, what does that mean?  We might take a look at Black Theology for an answer.   

I hope to shed a little more light on that in a bit. But let me first point out that I am 7 weeks into a class which goes another 8 – each week I am having more and more “aha” moments.  This “kick in the pants” each week shows me how much I don’t know, and how limited my own education has been until I sought out this class.  I’m offering this synopsis today as a minute history lesson from the limited knowledge I have in Black Theology and Black History.  I encourage you to go seek more.   

Black Theology, let me point out first and foremost, is not what Black people do in church. It arose in the late 1960’s when Black theologians were walking a tightrope, trying to balance their desire for social and political justice for poor blacks against their faith which promoted love and tolerance.  Following the footsteps of Barth and Luther, they mined scripture for a central message but also studied the history of the Black Church. What they found inspired them, and offered a direction in which they could move.  Some of you may have had a much more enlightened education than I, and might know this story.  I, on the other hand, was new to this information – again, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. 

In the early 1800’s Christianity had typically been a tool to keep the enslaved under their masters’ watchful eye – a white religion, handed to slaves, which offered the vision  of a better life after death. Searching history, Cone and others found folks like Denmark Vesey and Gullah Jack, of Charleston, North Carolina.  They were insurrectionists who from 1818- 1822 planned a revolt.  Vesey was a former slave to a slave-ship captain, and now was free and an active leader in the African Methodist Episcopal church. Their base of action was in church, and Vesey was one of the first to use the Exodus stories to keep the message of liberation in front of the enslaved. Vesey found rebellion and escape in the Old Testament, and liberation in Jesus, which offered hope and turned the masters religion into their own.  

Christianity then, became a way to keep the slaves hope for freedom and a better life alive; it was a way for them to recharge and get up after they were beaten down.  At church meetings and through correspondence, Biblical passages were utilized to pass along messages to thousands of others fighting with Vesey and Gullah Jack.  But the rebellion was not to happen.  They were betrayed by a Charleston slave, brought to trial and executed.  One of the largest debates in the white community at the time regarded baptism; if baptism sets slaves free in Christ, then slaves would see themselves as free. There could be none of this, so after the trial, the AME church was torn down. 

The Black Church, institutionally, formed after 1865 because blacks had been rejected by white churches. The white church also emphasized elements that tried to suppress the African elements typically incorporated by blacks. Imagine trying to follow your heart as a Black individual then: choose the cultural identity you were born with or religion.  I think some  of  us  in  this congregation can relate a little to this predicament.  A sense of personhood is an extremely hard struggle. 

From this history, which is more plentiful and much richer than what I have shared, modern Black theologians constructed Black Theology.  Theology is man’s language about God.  As most theologians do, James Cone and his colleagues asked the question:  how does the Christian tradition relate to the major issues of our world in our times? They then asked:  what might Jesus look like and in which community might he be acting today?  The New Testament Jesus was defined by Cone as “the liberator whose ministry was in solidarity with, and whose death was on behalf of, the poor.”  The central theme of Black Theology was liberation of the poor and oppressed, and one of the main messages Cone was trying to hammer home was that Christianity and racism should be incompatible.  For Cone, if you employed racism in the Church (and he was considering the whole church – capital C), then the Church wasn’t truly Christian.  Only Black Theology was true to scripture and true to Christianity.  Black Theologians utilized the language of the Black Power movement because it framed the contemporary social and political crisis of blacks in America, and was also the only language which best expressed the liberation they sought.   

This was huge!  Not only did this theology reframe the theme of Jesus’ message in contemporary times, but they learned their “non-academic” voices were just as important as any other in defining what they believed.  Cone is clear that he learned from Gutierrez that theologies cannot be defined by intellectual statements but by practical actions.  Creating a theology that was by Blacks  and  for  Blacks  took  Martin  Luther King’s Christianity and embedded it with Malcolm X’s actions.  Black Theology was written for change.  It remains a strong critique of the Christian institution as a whole.  Think about it: this was not something that was written for white approval in the scholarly havens of upper academia, but was written for a specific audience and the authors did not care what whites thought of it. The audience was very clear: blacks and the oppressed in current society.  It is a kick in the pants to the Christian church, challenging the very structure of Christianity.   

Now, I know we have some in the congregation who are saying with me “yeah, but what about women?  Gays and lesbians?” I can say to you that the study continues.  Cone, considered one of the founders of Black Theology, now includes other voices in the struggle and admits to being chastened by these other struggles and voices.  There is grace in speaking the truth, but also in hearing it.  As Thoreau said in an interview “it takes two to speak the truth – one to speak, and another to hear.” Therefore, I suggest that Mt. Auburn might consider Black Theology as another source from which to learn.    

I see much of our struggle as a church in the brief sketch I have shared with you today – although it is true that the timeline and atrocities are not quite as extensive.  We are a congregation comprised of gays and lesbians who make up approximately half the congregation. Our mindset is almost unanimous politically – I mean think about it, would you want to be an out republican in this congregation?  Based on survey information, we are mostly white, mostly college educated, and from what I’ve observed mostly progressive/borderline  liberal/extremely  liberal – take your pick.  We are privileged people- for the majority that means white privilege.  We look the same and voice the same opinions, on the whole.  We have been a pioneer in crafting documents and fighting for the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church.  We are a justice loving church, and I am proud to belong to this group of amazing individuals. I would venture to say that’s why a good number of us found our way here: fighting for justice, as well as being welcomed and included. But, we’re also amazingly homogenous and almost as rigid in our beliefs as some of those churches we rail against. 

I offer a recent example: we had an interim pastor come in with a different theological tradition and utilize it.  I know that I chafed in my seat, and I have a feeling I’m not the only one.  I’m not necessarily proud of it, but I can say I complained loudly.  I wanted to hear what I wanted to hear – didn’t want that old stuffy traditional stuff; that’s part of why I left the Catholic Church.  Not a very good example of being open to a different perspective, I’d say.  Some of you may have asked, along with me: Where’s our energizing inspiration to take action?  Are we supposed to bring that with us now? I wanted to hear I was ok, and that we were going to be ok.  Because I see us as beaten up and laying low, licking our wounds as it were.  I do not think we have found our energies and inspiration in our faith as well as black theologians have.   

We are still trying to determine in which direction to move:  continue to fight for justice issues/press forward, or rest a bit, regain our strength. Or another perspective is offered in the words of Simone Weil “The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any  bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.”  Are we still hungry?  I think we are. 

Our challenge may not be do we rest or move on, but our challenge may be to become a bit more diverse.  Expand who we are as church body, become involved in our church neighborhood.  I realize that’s not easy, as most of us drive 10 or more minutes to attend Sunday worship, and that makes for a long day.  Perhaps, then, it might mean seeking out and hearing different voices to enlarge our faith and our reason.  Don Rucknagel passed along a wonderful article to the listserv on war-mongering from Commondreams.org, which was brave in its ability to call Americans the “stiff-necked people” of biblical times.  It challenged the readers to “try all over again to follow the dangerous, nonviolent, troublemaking Jesus.”  Are we ready for that fight?  Are we ready to follow Jesus’ ways, and be true to the Christian tradition outlined for us in our reading for today? 

This is the third Sunday in lent, traditionally a time for us to reflect on who we are and what our faith means to us.  What it means for Jesus to have died for us, and for us to follow his example.  It is also the last Sunday in Black History month, traditionally a month with posters of the more famous in Black History.  Perhaps as we dig a little deeper into ourselves and our faith, we can dig a little further into our history as well, and learn from those pioneers in the past we typically don’t hear about.  Perhaps we can revision who our Jesus looks like – is he European looking or truly North African/Middle Eastern?  And what will that mean if he does look different?  Perhaps we need to think on if we could recognize Christ if we met him today?

From our readings being Christian appears deceptively simple:  love your neighbor, bear another’s burdens, etc…  What does that mean to us though?  And how do we live that out?  Can we imagine more than what we are today as Christians?  Martin Luther King Jr. said “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.”  Are we, as the church, fulfilling this mission?  Or are we still too weary?  

It’s Lent, we’re supposed to ask a lot of questions, right?  And I appreciate you listening to mine.  In that questioning, let us not forget we are a community.  Let us support and love one another as we struggle to understand the meaning of our Christianity.  Let us imagine a different way of operating and have a vision for full inclusion for everyone.  May you continue to grow with me in our Christian tradition, challenging me, pushing the Church, and furthering the mission of justice for all of humanity.   

I’ll end with our reading today from Galatians:  “so let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.  So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.”