Sermon
By Rev. Robert Shearer
Last Epiphany • February 14, 2021
In the Name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
My beloved friends. This is Black history month and I would like to
address the issue. I am not competent to talk about black history itself, but
I can talk about the other side of the street, the experience, life experience,
of a white boy from the Pacific Northwest and Texas.
The sermon will not be the kind I usually preach, an “expository,” based
on the lessons for the day, usually on the Gospels. This sermon will be
more in the form of a “witness,” or perhaps a “confession.” My profound
hope is that you will be able to hear it as the Word of God, for it is in
God’s Name that I deliver it to you.
I grew up until the age of twelve in Western Washington State, the far
Northwest. In the late 30s and 40s that was a pretty white society; I only
ever saw one African-American in the whole time. And even then I never
actually met him or knew his name—just saw him at a distance. I was
envious because he was different in my child’s mind “different” was special
and I desperately wanted to be special.
When I was 12 we moved to Dallas, Texas. The culture shock was severe.
Segregation was still in full force and I found it outrageous, but under the
impact of the culture I accommodated myself to it. So as far as face-to-face
contact, there was none; the situation was the same as in Washington
State—I lived in a white society and never met a black person. Not in
church, not in school, not in the grocery store or the department stores
where we shopped.
I did imbibe however, a certain southern defensiveness, so that when I
returned to the Northwest for college, I took with me Confederate flag.
Somewhere I had found an old saber and I mounted the saber and the flag
on the wall of my room. It was just an adolescent defensive statement of
defiance and also staking a claim to difference. Again however I still didn’t
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know any blacks. If there were a black at the small college I was attending,
I never met him.
From my lily-white college I went to another pocket of whiteness, General
Seminary in New York. Again only white men were at the seminary, either
students or staff. I still had that Southern defensiveness , but I graduated
and returned to Dallas where I was ordained and given a brand new
mission to grow. After a year it was clear to me that I did not know what I
was doing so I excepted an Assistant’s job in Kentucky, an upper-middle-
class suburb of Louisville—again in a white envelope. There were blacks
around of course, but they were servants and they had work to do and I
never got to know them. I was offered a chance to fly to Selma for the
great march but I turn the bishop down knowing that it somehow would
not go down well in My parish. It was not, after all, something I cared
about anyway.
And then came the moment of transformation. There was some interfaith
clergy meeting where I met a very nice Black man, a minister in the
Disciples of Christ Church. We went out for coffee afterwards. I asked
about his family and said I would like to meet his wife at some point.
“Oh,” he said, “that I won’t be possible. She will not be in the same room
with a white person.”
I was shocked, stunned, appalled. It was unfair! She didn’t even know me. I
had done nothing to her and just because of my skin color she wouldn’t be
in the same room. And then, by the grace of God, I found myself flipped
around and standing in her shoes, this lady I didn’t even know. In her
shoes she was mistreated only because of the color of her skin and I got it.
From then on, it was matter of slowly unwinding the cultural drift I had
grown up in.
In one of those I wonderful ironies that God places in our lives, I got a job
in New York City in no other place than Harlem. There I served in two
churches and discovered the other side of being not in the majority. About
that experience I can only chuckle. But I am very grateful for it, because I
have served in mixed congregations ever since in New Jersey and New
York.
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So, looking back over my young life prior to the shocking event of the lady
who would not be in the same room with me, what was missing, what was
wrong, why was I so totally out of the loop?
The clue to be found is something I said when I declined to go to Selma
Bridge. It was not something I cared about. And there it is. I didn’t care.
Jesus’ great commandment is to love one another—“As the Father has
loved me, and as I have loved you, so you should one another.” Love is
about caring. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite is “not caring”
and it is one of the Seven Deadly Sins—acedia in Latin. The opposite of
love is indifference. Love is caring, entering into the life of another,
empathy, yes.
Love is about getting into the shoes of another. You’ll never understand
another fully, but you can look at the world through their perspective. You
can see where they’re coming from. And we can act when they ask for
help.
The Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. is a saint in our calendar and
now a hero for me. He gave his life for this possibility of us human beings
loving each other. And we can go to extreme lengths to do just that.
Amen.