The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.                                                       Matthew 9:38

How often do we ask the Lord of the Harvest to do this? I’m not going to call for a show of hands to see who has or who has not asked this of the Lord. I’ll just speak for myself. Every morning as a pray the Daily Office I ask for that very thing to happen. The ‘harvest” in question is described clearly in the Acts of the Apostles (2:44-47), which reads:

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

“The Lord added to their number those were being saved.” That’s “the harvest,” which Jesus tells us is “plentiful” and for which we need “laborers.” “The harvest” is still quite plentiful these days since fewer and fewer people in the U.S. at least publicly acknowledge a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.

So, we lack only one thing for this human harvest: Laborers and that’s you and me.  Jesus calls us over whatever tumult we’re currently facing and commands us to go out for the harvest.

Of course, not everyone in the Church sees the church’s mission that way. Some don’t see any compelling need to labor for the harvest. They see the mission of the Church as primarily taking care of the people in the pews.

In fact, if you look at the budgets of our congregations, as I do, you’d conclude just that. The financial priority of our congregations seems to be taking care of ourselves. Now I’m open to anyone who can prove me wrong about that, so feel free to correct me, but do it later.

So the question must be asked: Do we really see taking the Gospel of God’s undeserved grace and mercy to others as being the main thing for our congregations? Until it becomes the main thing, we’ll only be an inward-looking lot. Now I’m all for ministering to the people of our congregations as long as it results in their being formed and empowered so they’ll take the Gospel to the world around them.

If there has been one main failure of my episcopate it is that I have not emphasized that enough as the main thing. That’s not my only failure, but it’s the main one.

Being the Diocese of Georgia shouldn’t be about loving the Episcopal Church, or loving this Diocese, or loving our local congregation.

Being the Diocese of Georgia ought to be about us going out to the harvest, armed only with the grace of God and the mercies of Jesus on our hearts, in our words, and with our actions. It ought to be about loving those who have not yet heard the Good News of Jesus and the amazing grace of his cross.

If the Church’s main thing isn’t the harvest business, then it’s not being the Church of Jesus Christ.

This is my last time addressing you as the elected lay and clergy leaders of this Diocese. My fervent prayer is for our renewal in this mission as our main thing. As Jim Collins has so clearly stated: the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.

As you walk together with your new bishop, I pray that y’all will ask God to renew your passionate commitment to keep the main thing, the main thing.

What might that look like? Well, first we should own it, then we should share it, and then, most of all, we can live it.

What does it mean to own the main thing? It means understanding what the Gospel is and what it is not.

Last month, I was visiting one of our seminaries and had a chance to get into a great conversation with a seminarian there (not one sponsored by our diocese). Toward the end of our conversation, I asked him what he understood the Gospel to be. Without hesitation, he said it’s “to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and your neighbor as yourself.”

I replied: “excuse me, but that’s the Old Testament Law. It’s not the Gospel. The Gospel is this: ”the saying is sure and worthy of all, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost (1 Timothy 1:15).”

We must own the truth first if we’re ever going to be able to share it with others, otherwise we’re only adding to people’s burdens rather than relieving them. If we tell them that they have to love God and their neighbor if they want to follow the Gospel, then we’re only adding to their burdens. Plus we’re lying to them.

The Gospel truth is that God has pre-emptively loved us in the cross of Jesus and the only hope we’ll ever have of loving God and our neighbor is first owning and then resting in the love and forgiveness God freely gives us. As 1 John puts it: “We love because he first loved us (1 John 4:19).”

Once we own this Gospel truth for ourselves, then and only then are we truly in a position to share it with others.

Sharing the merciful and forgiving love of God can take many, many forms: feeding the hungry, tutoring a child, knitting warm hats for those in need, planting a tree, sitting by the bedside of a lonely elder, or telling an acquaintance just why God’s love is so amazing. As a church and as a diocese, we can create so many opportunities for our people to share God’s love with others. But we can’t share what we first haven’t owned.

Owning and then sharing God’s love leads us inextricably to living that love in the world.

In my eCrozier last week, I wrote that every person’s life is a sermon that’s constantly preaching to others. That’s true also for the church as a whole and for a diocese in particular.

That’s why I have with other lay and clergy leaders of our Diocese, formed a Resource Team for Racial Reconciliation & Healing. These leaders are ready and equipped for a very Jesus-like harvest of racial reconciliation and healing. There’s no more important harvest ministry than reconciliation and healing for America’s Original Sin of racism.

So, we’re forming the St. Anna Alexander Center for Racial Reconciliation & Healing. And we’re going to live this out and not just talk about it. Before I retire, I’m committing 3% of our diocesan endowment to begin this new Center, which will have two locations, one at Diocesan House and the other at Good Shepherd Church in Pennick. My seminary, Virginia Theological Seminary, has 1% of its endowment for this. Recently, the Diocese of New York committed 2.5% of its endowment. We’re commiting 3%. And I call on all congregations in this Diocese with endowments to commit 3% of their endowment to this work as well.

If we wonder why people, particularly young people, aren’t attracted to Christianity, then our persistent inability to repent of racism in the church is a good place to start our wondering.

I’m convinced that nothing breaks the heart of God more than our persistent inability to repent of racism in the church and then also to stand idly by while we see it growing once again in the larger culture.

As 1 John also says: “Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20).

If we don’t love people who are different than we are, then the Bible says we’re “liars” if we also claim at the same time to love God. It’s as simple as that, we’re liars.

My sisters and brothers, the Lord’s “harvest” is about owning, sharing, and living the Good News of Jesus’s unmerited grace. That’s the “main thing” of the church. I plead with you to keep the main thing, the main thing.

Sanctus bells have served an important role in the Church’s worship. Traditionally, they were a call for the congregation gathered to pay attention to what was happening at the altar. In a time before pews and when the mass length was much longer, Sanctus bells called people out of whatever distraction, or dare we say sleep, to give their attention to the Blessed Sacrament of the Church that was being celebrated at the altar.

Our culture receives the ring of a Sanctus bell from time to time to call us to attention. It can call us to a deeper awareness of the kind of culture we’ve nurtured over hundreds of years. Such a ring can also sound out a truth about ourselves we may not wish to hear (e.g. we’ve been asleep). We’ve received a number of clear Sanctus bells over the last year. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and now Walter Scott were all unarmed African-American men killed by a member of the police force. They’re not the only ones. There are many others who have received less notice and media attention.

A simplistic response to these particular Sanctus bells would seek only to blame the individual police officers involved. They’re the few so-called “bad apples.” To solve this problem then means to get rid of these policemen. But that is akin to a physician treating a cancer in someone’s leg deciding just to cut off the leg and not look at the patient’s whole body for other signs that the cancer might be present as well. The cancer of racism has infected the whole body of America. For generation upon generation it’s infected us all with irrational fears and false conclusions about one another. It’s distorted and deranged our ability to see and understand clearly.

Police officers have a difficult, dangerous vocation. We can’t expect them to be social workers or clinical psychologists. They’re formed and shaped by the same culture in which we were raised. Their police training can’t trump the culture of racism. It’s too big and pervasive. They’ve become a reflection of the deeper problem racism creates. That helps explain what happened when Officer Thomas Slager of the North Charleston Police Department stopped Mr. Walter Scott for having a broken car taillight. Because of racism’s cancerous effects, each one “knew” something about the other. Mr. Scott “knew” of the historical power of the police to kill black men, even for a broken taillight. So, he fled. Officer Slager “knew” of the power of black men, even an unarmed one much older than he, to possibly kill him. So, he shot Mr. Scott in the back four times as he fled. What they “knew” about each other led to this tragedy.

Officer Slager should face criminal consequences for this murder. It will be overly facile, however, if we believe that’s all that needs doing. We must learn to “unknow” the distorted and deranged “knowledge” that racism has bequeathed to us. That’ll be hard work for us all, but it’s work we all must do. We haven’t done this work either because we didn’t want to believe it was still necessary or because we never believed it was necessary in the first place. I hope it’s the former and not the latter. Because if we remain willfully ignorant of what racism has done and is still doing to our body politic, we’ll ignore the cancer that infects us all. The Sanctus bell is ringing loudly and clearly.

+Scott

 

 

Recently I was talking with a young woman when a man about my age joined our conversation. When he learned the young woman was a 21 year-old college student, he said: “Ah, to be free, white, and 21!” I cringed. The young woman was probably too young to know of that saying. I wasn’t. It was the declaration of privilege by which I came of age. It meant that if you were those three things, then nothing could stop you. You had it made. You had all the privilege one needed in America.

Now the man who said this was well-educated, clearly a professional, and should’ve been aware of the import of his words. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, just assuming he was trying nervously to break the ice of our conversation. Words, however, have power. By repeating a saying of our common, racist past, he was unwittingly (I hope he was) perpetuating the sinful assumptions of one race’s privilege over another. It seems our racist past isn’t past. It’s still playing in our brain’s recording studio, occasionally spilling out when the mute button isn’t functioning right.

When he left I had to explain to the young woman the context and background of that old saying. She looked at me as if I were an anthropologist explaining the odd cultural practices of an obscure tribe from a distant land. And maybe that’s a good metaphor. My white tribe in this culture has assumed our privileges without realizing them. When my two sons were teenagers, I never had to talk to them about how to appease the police when walking down the street or driving a car. It never would’ve occurred to me then to think that I might have to do so. Not so with black fathers.

My oldest son got arrested for “stealing” two donuts from a grocery store when he was 18 years old. He’d gone to the store with his best friend, Jose, to shop for our family. While in the store, they did as we had done when they were children. They got two donuts out of the display case and ate them, intending to pay for the consumed donuts when they checked out, as we did when they were youngsters. They bought our groceries with our debit card, but forgot to pay for the two donuts. Security guards detained them as they left the store and the police arrived within minutes. My son, God love him, got a little mouthy and testy with the police claiming it was clearly his mistake: He simply forgot about the two donuts. After all, he’d just bought over $90 in groceries, so he’d pay for the two donuts now. The store manager would have none of it. The police arrested them. If his friend hadn’t looked like a “Jose,” my hunch is his white privilege would’ve been enough. They never would’ve been monitored as potential thieves while they walked the aisles of the grocery store that day.

And that brings us to Michael Brown’s horrific death in Missouri, which has dominated the recent news. The box of cigars he carried could’ve been two donuts. And maybe Michael Brown got a little mouthy and testy with the police officer? Or maybe he didn’t? But six bullets later he was dead in the street. Six bullets! Count each pull of the trigger. My son just celebrated his 27th birthday. I wonder if Michael Brown had been “free, white, and 21,” would he still be alive today? Our racial history says that’s highly likely.

+Scott

 

Dr.King and the Silence of Race (eCrozier #215)

My German ancestors were carpenters and brick masons. They arrived in the Over the Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati in 1872. By the time my grandfather was born in 1898, German was no longer spoken in the family home. They were thoroughly Americanized. My grandfather worked on the line for General Motors assembling cars.

One of my earliest memories of him was on August 28, 1963, when I was six years old. My parents had dropped me off at my grandfather’s house while they ran a few errands. I spent the day with him. I remember him giving me a booklet to read. I recall vividly sitting on the back stoop of his house and looking at the wild pictures in the booklet: men dressed in white sheets, burning crosses, and the like. My folks pulled into the driveway and saw what was in my hands. My father and grandfather exchanged loud, angry words and I was placed in the car’s back seat and we drove off. The whole incident was never talked about in my family.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned that my grandfather was a member of the Klan and that day, August 28, 1963 was the day of the March on Washington when Dr. King delivered one of the most important speeches in our nation’s history. I share this with you because my story is no different than millions of other white people. This is part of our cultural DNA. It’s America’s original sin passed on to each generation.

Years ago I was working as a consultant with a large parish. I asked the parish leaders to take a roll of newsprint and stretch it horizontally across the wall of the parish hall. On one end I wrote the date of the parish’s founding in the 18th Century and on the other end I put the word “today.” I then asked them to fill in their history. Many knew details of what happened centuries ago. They even listed a Revolutionary War hero buried in their parish cemetery. When they finished, I noticed there was a decade gap in the 1960s. Many in the room were members of the parish then. Why was it, I asked, that they had no history to record about that time? There was stone silence.

During a break, an older member took me aside and said in a hushed tone: “That was when Father [Name] was rector. He was an alcoholic. We don’t like to talk about that time in our history. It was unpleasant for everyone. We’d just as soon forget it.” I felt like sending them all en masse to an AL-ANON meeting. They were in total denial and in co-dependent silence about how that period in their history had continued to adversely affect their common life even to the present day.

America is like a large alcoholic family when it comes to race. We’re complicit with one another in our silence, or when we do talk, we talk past one another and don’t listen. To preserve the family peace, we just don’t talk about it when it begins to hurt, or when it hits a little too close to home. 46 years ago today Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. was martyred because he insisted America face this peculiar and particular original sin in our national life. As Mark Twain famously said: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” We, as a people, are still a work in progress with a lot of unfinished work left to do.

+Scott

 

The outrage and then the counter-outrage over Paula Deen’s use of the N-word should have been predictable to anyone who has been paying attention to race relations and racism in our country. First comes the shock by well-meaning people that anyone in this day and age, especially a contemporary icon of the culinary arts, could possibly still use that word. Then comes the counter-outrage from other well-meaning people who either (1) want us to get over all this hyper-sensitivity around race, or (2) think those shocked by her comments are totally over-reacting, or, (3) excuse and justify her word use because she is merely “a product of her generation and where she was raised.”

All of those responses have some small kernel of truth to them. All people of good will, and especially those of us who attend ourselves to discipleship in Jesus, wish we could finally move on, be less reactive to mean-spirited language (no matter who utters it), and be more merciful to those who, like Ms. Deen, have yet to grow up emotionally and spiritually beyond the limits of the way they were raised.  We all wish this, but we as a culture still have too much unfinished business around race relations and racism for this wish to be realized just yet.

One of the reasons, I believe, we still have unfinished business is our collective self-deception and self-denial when addressing this subject. Our self-deception shows itself by all the heat that gets generated when someone like Ms. Deen makes such immature comments. We prefer to bask in the heat of outrage, rather than stand in the light of truth that comes from really listening to one another’s experience of race and racism. And because there’s more heat than light on this subject, our self-deception leads us to a collective self-denial about the pervasive power this persistent sin has over all of us.

C. S. Lewis’ Uncle Screwtape would be chuckling away were he to witness all this. In addressing his nephew Wormwood, he might write: “We now have them right where we want them. Keep them outraged by blaming one another and then by making further excuses for why no one should be outraged. That will keep them so resentful and so angry at one another that they will never stop, listen to one another, and then learn the emotional and spiritual maturity needed to deal with the sin faithfully together. So, Wormwood, keep up the good work!”

When the Devil is smiling and cheering us on, then we should wake up and take notice. And then we shouldn’t simply resign ourselves to it saying: “well, that’s just the way it is.” Race relations in our culture won’t improve, and we won’t faithfully address the sin of racism, until enough of us say “enough,” which will come by empathizing with one another’s pain, and fear, and hurt, and loss. It’s time to stop blaming one another. It’s time to do something about this sin. Outrage and counter-outrage will just continue to stir us up, distract us from the real work we must do, and make Uncle Screwtape smile.

+Scott

(The eCrozier is off to the wilds of the Galapagos Islands on an exotic holiday and will return around Labor Day)

 

This week we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the murder in Jackson, Mississippi of Medger Evers, the civil rights activist and NAACP leader. Mr. Evers had just returned home from a meeting late on June 12, 1963 when he was shot in the back and murdered as he got out of his car. When his children heard the shot, they did what they were trained to do: they ran and hid in the bathtub. Imagine growing up having that training and knowing the probability that people would try to kill your father?

Racism is, as some have called it, “America’s Original Sin.” It runs right through us all. There is no way to avoid it. My generation has seen segregation (I still remember a separate-but-not-so-equal swimming pool in my hometown that we to our shame called “The Inkwell”), and then desegregation, and then attempts at integration, and now, in many parts of our communities, re-segregation. 50 years after the murder of Mr. Evers we are still trying to get this right, to make this right, and we have not. There are doubtless many explanations for why we have not yet made this right. There are those who would offer political, or economic, or sociological, or psychological analyses as a way of explanation and each one of those might offer some insight or truth.

But as one who sees the world through the Biblical lens, I do not find any one of those explanations particularly compelling or complete. I think sin is the only truth that can adequately explain the persistence of racism after all these years. The truth of racism as a sin exposes such things like certain code language used by politicians. It explains the doggedness of the so-called “birthers” about our President. It reveals why so often we blame the other race for why racism persists. We are all guilty. Not one of us is innocent. Until that truth sinks home, we will never rid ourselves of this awful spiritual disease.

In the weeks after Mr. Evers’ murder in 1963, my parents left me with my paternal grandfather for the day. After lunch, he told me that now I could read so well, he wanted me to read the truth. So, he gave me a Klan pamphlet, told me to sit on the back stoop of his house, and read it. I did. The pictures showed men in white hoods and robes standing near burning crosses. As I was reading, my parents pulled their car into the driveway. My grandfather came to the back door, standing behind me. My father approached and saw what I was reading. Not a word was said by anyone, but much was communicated. My father quickly took the pamphlet out of my hand, threw it to the ground, put me in the car, and we drove off. It would be years before I would see my grandfather again. The topic was never allowed to come up again in my presence.

I now wish it had. For as disgusted as my father was in my Klan-member grandfather’s beliefs, he could not find a way later, when I was older, to discuss it with me. The sin of racism persists because we allow it to remain, unnamed, unexposed, and unspoken about. The power of this sin lies in the silence and shadows around it and our unwillingness to engage in honest conversations with one another. Naming the way it has shaped and molded us and asking God for the grace to amend our lives is the only hope we have that our children will not pass this spiritual malady on to their children.

+Scott

 

A recent study by researchers at Stanford University exposes just how deeply embedded racial constructs are in our culture. The study, “Race and the Fragility of the Legal Distinction between Juveniles and Adults,” asked participants to read about a 14-year-old male with 17 prior juvenile convictions who brutally raped an elderly woman. Half of the respondents were told the offender was black; the other half were told he was white. The difference in race was the only change between the two stories.

Participants were then asked two questions dealing with sentencing and perception. The first question was this: “To what extent do you support life sentences without the possibility of parole for juveniles when no one was killed?” The second question was this: “How much do you believe that juveniles who commit crimes such as these should be considered less blameworthy than an adult who commits a similar crime?” The study found that participants who had in mind a black offender more strongly endorsed a policy of sentencing juveniles convicted of violent crimes to life in prison without parole compared to respondents who had in mind a white offender.

That result hardly should be surprising given the racial history of our culture. What surprised me was that the study took into account racial bias and political ideology, so since the study controlled for those effects, it was clear that neither accounted for these results. One of the study’s authors said: “The findings showed that people without racial animus or bias are affected by race as much as those with bias.” This indicates how deeply seeded race is in our culture.

Recently Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, who I understand is considering running for Governor of that state, told a radio interviewer that it’s “possible” he’ll keep President Obama off that state’s ballot unless he gets proof the president was born in the U.S.A. “I’m not a birther,” he said. “I believe that the president was born in Hawaii, or at least, I hope he was.”

Secretary Bennett is a respected elected official in his state. He is well-educated and in his own words he disavows any racial bias or any participation in wild conspiracy theories. And yet, he might possibly withhold President Obama’s name from the presidential ballot in his state. Maybe the Stanford study could help explain how Secretary Bennett could possibly consider doing that? I have to wonder if President Obama were white would this be something he would even remotely be considering.

St Benedict in his Rule reminds us that we are called to a daily process of conversion of life. Such conversion, however, cannot truly happen unless we are willing to have the full light of truth shine on us and on the culture in which we live. It is clear to me that we are affected by our culture in ways that are so deep and unconscious we often have trouble recognizing the truth when it comes to us. This means rather than berating ourselves for our bias, racial and otherwise, we would do better just to keep awake to its reality and then do our best to account for it as we seek daily conversion to the Gospel of Jesus.

+Scott