The Other Six Days: No Longer Jew or Greek
A Sermon in The Other Six Days Series
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 20, 2005
Genesis 9:18-29; Matthew 15:21-28; Galatians 3:23-29
Genesis 9 18 ¶
The sons of Noah who went out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was
the father of Canaan. 19 These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the
whole earth was peopled.
20 ¶ Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. 21 He
drank some of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent. 22
And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his
two brothers outside. 23 Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both
their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father;
their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness.
24 When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to
him, 25 he said, “Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his
brothers.” 26 He also said, “Blessed by the LORD my God be Shem;
and let Canaan be his slave. 27 May God make space for Japheth, and let him
live in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.”
28 ¶ After the flood Noah lived three hundred fifty years. 29 All the days
of Noah were nine hundred fifty years; and he died.
Matthew 15 21 ¶ Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22 Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” 23 But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” 24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 26 He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 27 She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 28 Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.
Galatians 3 23 ¶ Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. 24 Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27 As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.
INTRODUCTION
There is a great Seinfeld episode where Elaine is dating a new boyfriend. She begins to wonder whether her boyfriend is black, based on his ambiguous appearance and his own ambiguous comments about collecting African art and other things. As she and Jerry are talking about this, Jerry, in one of the more telling comments in the show, asks: “Should we be talking about this?” They both are clearly uncomfortable about talking about issues of race. Her discomfort is so great that she cannot even ask the man she is dating for fear of crossing over into forbidden territory.
We’re a lot like that. Race is not something we’re always comfortable talking about, and when we do talk about it, it is often in abstractions and generalizations. Or sometimes we talk about race without talking about race, talking instead about various policy decisions that have everything to do with racial justice and yet are conceived of as neutral and therefore “safe”.
THE TEXTS
And yet we find that the reality of race and ethnicity are all around us. Sometimes in places that embarrass us, like in Scripture. First, we encounter it in Genesis where we read the story of the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In the story, Noah gets drunk and is passed out in his tent uncovered. Ham sees Noah in this condition and tells his brothers. They take it upon themselves to cover their father without looking upon him. When Noah awakens he blesses Shem and Japheth and curses Ham, especially Ham’s son Canaan, and remarks that Canaan shall be a slave to Shem and Japheth.
While this could remain just a strange story for us, the fact of the matter is that each of these brothers is associated with a different ethnicity. Shem, the father of the Semites (those who would become Israelites), Ham the father of Hamites (Egyptians and others), and Japheth the father of other nations in the surrounding area.
What was probably an attempt by the Biblical author to explain the then current geopolitical situation, eventually would be used by others to justify discrimination based on race and, worse yet, the institution of slavery (never mind that the Hamites weren’t black Africans). In the minds of some, the text legitimized making distinctions according to race.
And then we get to one of the most uncomfortable Biblical examples: Jesus and the Canaanite woman. The Canaanite woman comes to Jesus pleading for help for her daughter. He answered:
“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 26 He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 27 She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 28 Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.
I don’t really like hearing Jesus compare non-Israelites to dogs. Especially given the bias in Middle Eastern cultures against dogs because they were seen as unclean and scavengers. We have a much friendlier attitude toward dogs today that takes away some of the harshness of this statement. Looking at this text, it’s hard not to see the legitimization of distinctions according to race or ethnicity. And certainly a lot of people have seen that.
THE SHAMEFUL HISTORY
We’ve done a pretty good job of discriminating in our history as a Church. Far too often we have reflected the dominant culture rather than challenged it. This is certainly true in our protestant churches in America, and can be seen in the history of The United Methodist Church.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was staunchly opposed to slavery and racial injustice. He forbade his clergy from owning slaves and that was the Methodist rule for a long time.
Wesley had seen slavery in Georgia. The very last letter that Wesley ever wrote was to William Wilburforce, the person who succeeded in outlawing slavery in all British territories. “Please work for the elimination of slavery and especially American, the vilest whichever saw the sun.”
But Wesley’s objections to slavery didn’t prevent the Methodist Episcopal Church (as it was then known) from finding other available means of treating blacks poorly.
In the early 1800s, the population of the United States was 20% African-American. The early Methodists had large numbers of African members. Asbury and Whatcoat had a specific concern for the welfare of black people and organized special classes and outreach.
Early Separations
Richard Allen (1760-1831) was a former slave. In 1784, he was licensed to preach. He was at the Christmas Conference, but without vote. In 1789, Francis Asbury licensed him as a deacon.
Allen and others were pulled from their knees in mid-prayer and asked to go to the gallery. They refused. Eventually, he and his followers worshipped by themselves. He and Absalom Jones formed the Free African Society.
In 1794, Asbury dedicates a church for the use of the members of the Free African Society, whom he still considered to be members of the ME Church. They felt that they were dedicating a new congretation: Bethel ME Church. Allen was the pastor of this congregation.
In 1796, nine people signed articles of association for Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church—an independent congregation, not a new denomination—but it would eventually become the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.
The Discipline of 1800 permitted the ordination of blacks as deacons, but they did not publish the rule in the discipline for fear of offending southern Methodists. The 1812 Discipline authorized the ordination of blacks as elders.
The North-South Split
At the 1844 General Conference, tensions surrounding slavery reached a crisis point. Bishop James Andrew inherited slaves from his wife’s estate. The general conference wanted him to get rid of them. He pointed to the rule about the laws of his state. There was a great debate as to his censure. The vote centered on that issue.
Northern Moderates realized that if there were no disciplinary action against Andrews, the whole New England Conference would defect. They did take action. The Southern Conferences agreed to meet the next year, and in 1845, they formed their own denomination: the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.
The churches would not reunite for 94 years.
Reunion and Segregation
Even after the churches reunited in 1939, there were still injustices. As part of the reunion, all the black churches were placed in a completely separate jurisdiction from the white churches. Churches that were down the road from one another had different bishops—they were jurisdictions based on race and not on geography, as is the standard model. This “Central Jurisdiction” remained until the Methodist Church’s merger with the Evangelical United Brethren in 1968 to form The United Methodist Church, when it was at long last abolished.
We have much to be proud of in our Church: we were involved in the Civil Rights movement and have in recent years been staunch defenders of racial justice. But that does not change the fact that we also have much to atone for.
PREJUDICE
Of course, you could say that the Church has always been populated by flesh and blood human beings and those humans are often fraught with prejudice and bias. And you’d be right.
Somewhat serendipitously (providentially?) I’d been carrying around an issue of Washington Post Magazine for the past two or three weeks in my briefcase. When I was waiting for a table at the coffee house where I write these sermons, I pulled it from my bag and began to read it. There was an article about a stunning test developed at Harvard to test for bias. [1] It’s an online test that you can all take at http://implicit.harvard.edu. In the test you are asked to press a key on the left when you are shown a white face and on the right when you are shown a black face. Then you are asked to press a key on the left for a positive word like “happiness” and on the right for a negative word like “failure”. Then you are asked to do both at the same time. Then the rules are switched: press a key on the left for a positive word, as before, but now press a key on the left when you see a black face. What the test reveals is that many more people have biases then believe that they do because of their reaction times and the difficulty with associating black faces with positive words.
The article goes on to point out that even civil rights activists—of both races—would test for bias. It appears that everyone—in varying degrees—from liberal to conservative is affected by bias. The researcher who developed the test says, “Is the [test] picking up something about the culture? Yes, but it is picking up that aspect of the culture that has gotten into your brain and mind.” (p. 39)
It seems we all have our prejudices and biases. It seems that it is engrained on a much deeper level than we realize and that no amount of protesting our racial innocence can change that.
RACISM
This is the fourth Sunday in our year long social justice series as part of
our “The Other Six Days” program. We
have looked at issues of homelessness, hunger, and AIDS. This month, in connection
with Black History Month, we look at racism and reconciliation and the Christian
response to racism. In looking at racism, I want to be clear about what is racist
and what isn’t.
I want to be clear that when we talk about racism, we are not talking about
our biases, our prejudices, and our bigotries. One of the great stumbling blocks
in talking about race in this country is that we are using different vocabularies.
When whites use the word “racism” they tend to mean “prejudice”
or “racial feeling” and so you’ll hear whites protesting that
they’re not racist because they harbor no prejudices against blacks and
other minorities. Whether that’s true or not—we’ll need the
Implicit Attitude Test to know for certain—let us say that in one person’s
case it might be: Mr. Smith, a white male is completely free of racial bias
or prejudice.
According to the definition of racism as used by many Black Americans, that individual can still be a racist. Most whites are incredulous when they hear this.
The System
To Black Americans, “racism” is another “-ism” like Communism or Capitalism—it is a system of economic and political order. Those who uphold the system are racist. It would be hard to deny that we live in a system that gives preferential option to whites. For all the complaining about affirmative action and so on, the life of the average black in this country is radically different than the average white, and that has little to do with people’s “feelings” one way or the other.
The fact of the matter is that whites are rarely pulled over for driving cars that appear to be out of their price range. White murderers do not receive the death penalty in the same proportions as their black counterparts. Particularly in cases of cross racial crime: a black male who murders a white is far more likely to get the death penalty than the white who murders the black.
Economic disparity abounds, and if we were to develop a pill that would remove every last ounce of racial prejudice from every single American and we’d all be strictly rewarded on merit alone from here on out, the Black community would be justified in protesting: “Wait, we’re not starting from the same place you are—we’re a few squares behind!” Such is the legacy of not only the institution of slavery, but the institution of racism: the systematized and legalized prejudice built into the system that most white Americans take for grated as the status quo.
In fact, those of us who are white cannot imagine that the system we find ourselves in is not “normal” by definition. It seems perfectly fair and objective to us, so much so that we can protest the idea of reparations or affirmative action as having nothing to do with us, because “we’re not racist.” But I have news for my fellow whites, to the extent that we accept the current political and economic system as it is, and do not question the bias built into the system, then we are racist. It is not enough never to have personally discriminated against someone or even harbored any ill will to a person of a different race. We are benefiting from a system that routinely discriminates against others on the basis of race.
There’s another consequence of institutionalized racism. That’s the consequence that we see in the bias test. The institutions of racial injustice can permeate our consciousness in ways we have not considered, perpetuating bias in us unwittingly. Finding echoes in our own psyches of the racist legacy in this nation.
Galatians and the Rejection of Racism
It can be hard to imagine changing the very structures of our society that seem to us not to be products of our own making, but rather the result of some immutable natural law. It’s just supposed to be this way.
Paul was faced with that situation when he was writing to his congregation at Galatia. The Galatians had been visited by some other apostles who told them that they would need to keep the ceremonial elements of the Jewish law, now that they were Christians, including circumcision and food laws. The Galatians, like most Roman citizens lived in a society driven by merit and accomplishment. They looked at these new rituals as “things they needed to do to obtain salvation.” Paul, in a very angry letter, points out that these things are not necessary to the Christian, because we are saved by the faith of Christ. These laws serve only to identify who is a Jew and who is a Gentile. And since our salvation is accomplished by Christ for Jew and Gentile alike, these old distinctions no longer apply:
for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27 As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.
The Christian is not bound to recognize the distinctions of the world. We are called to challenge those with a radical inclusiveness that scrutinizes any distinction that would set one person above another, and thus give lie to the fact that we are all equal before God.
THE RECONCILIATION OF CHRIST
It is our duty to speak out against prejudice: not to remain silent when someone judges another based on race, or when someone tells a racist joke or utters a racial slur. It is also our duty as Christians to speak out against racism—not only the individual biases and prejudices of people, but also the systemic institutionalization of bigotry and prejudice that continues to keep some others unfairly down and grant others privilege. That is what it means for those of us who are ‘in Christ’—for those of us who claim the title Christian. Ultimately, for us as Christians, the answer to Jerry and Elaine’s question: “Should we be talking about this?” is a resounding “Yes!” Talking, and much more.
The Canaanite Woman’s Faith
The more I think about it, the more I wonder about the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman. What was the “faith” she had that Jesus praised so strongly? Could it be that her faith was in a God who does not see the distinctions between Israelite and Canaanite? So much so that she goes boldly to Jesus confident that God’s mercy is available to all?
What would our world look like if we acted out of that kind of faith? What would it look like if Christians understood that being a Christian requires determined opposition to racism and racial injustice in whatever forms they present themselves? What would our world look like if we stopped viewing racism as an individual bias and viewed it as a collective sin, for which we are all collectively responsible? What would it look like if we like Paul realized that we are all of us reconciled by Christ, who shares his love for us without distinction? What would our world look like if we truly had faith that in Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, black or white—and that we were all children of God? And what would the world look like if we, like the Canaanite woman, acted on that faith?
[1] “See No Bias” by Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post Magazine, January 23, 2005, p. 12.
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Copyright © 2005. Mark A. SchaeferNo part of this text may be reproduced or otherwise disseminated without the express written consent of the author.