Sermon: What God Expects of You

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Will You Be Ready? M. L. King Weekend

By Charles Rush

January 14, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 6.2Mb) ]

we pause for the celebration of Martin Luther King weekend, I was recently reminded just how things have changed. As some of you know, our own Lynn Forsell writes about the history of Summit and recently she started a paper on our historically black churches in town which is interesting reading if you are unfamiliar with the subject. Also, some of you know, Fountain Baptist Church is 100 years old this year. During the course of her research about the founding of the Church, she dropped on my desk a little tidbit she thought I might find interesting.

It turns out that the original members that founded Fountain Baptist church originally were members of our church. Now going back 100 years, we were not yet an ecumenical fellowship. At that time, we were the First Baptist Church of Summit. So it would make sense that a new Baptist Church would be formed by a bunch of Baptists as is the custom of so many Baptist churches.

I know when I was a child in the South, growing up in the Baptist Church, we had an inside joke that went, 'What do you call it when one group of church people become so angry with another group of church people that they decide to leave the congregation and do their own thing together? We Baptists call it missions.' There is, unfortunately, too much truth to the joke.

But this group didn't leave because the preaching was bad or they were fuming about the stain glass windows. As was the custom in those days, the black members of the Church sat together in a section of the church reserved for them. Usually, it was upstairs in the back of the church. No, these church members left because, in all probability, they were tired of being segregated.

That was a little jarring for me to read. When our young people think about Jim Crow laws, they probably think about the deep South. And if they have any image of segregation at all, it is probably from the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird" set as it was in South Alabama. But the fact is that our town was segregated too. Our movie theater was segregated. Our schools were segregated. Our YMCA was segregated.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that our church was actually progressive on the race front for it's time because we actually allowed African-Americans to attend. Not that there was any explicit ban, there just weren't any Black Episcopalians. There just weren't any black Presbyterians. Such African-Americans that actually went to the established churches probably mostly all went to the segregated section at the 1st Baptist Church.

In some ways, things have dramatically changed. Thank God for an end to that era. The days of institutional racism are largely part of our distant memory. And even though our church is not as integrated as we wish it was, I am regularly delighted at how multi-cultural our congregation is, especially for me, since I was born into the tail end of the segregated world. For me, what a delight it was to meet, a couple that came to our church for a couple of years, Derek and Chandra from India. I got a post card from their Mother upon her return to Delhi talking about how much the church meant to her. What a great morning it was to have coffee with Jamil Nazareli and talk over with him what it was going to be like for him as a Muslim if he joined Christ Church with his Christian wife Deanna Smeltz and tried to raise their children with the best of both traditions. Or Grace Saturnia, our native Hawaiian. Or Jasmine Ueng from Taiwan. Or Lai and Hong Loh who grew up in Malaysia.

No our world is much more interesting and diverse than it used to be. I was reading the ad in the Wall Street Journal, where Citigroup announced all their new Managing Directors. Wow! They were literally from all over the world. And that is the world that all of us gathered here now inhabit- an incredible rich, diverse world which is wonderful. It is a beautiful tapestry on the top half of the economic scale is it not?

But on the bottom half not as much has changed as we would wish it would. I was reminded of this last week listening to the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC, when he interviewed Eric Cadora of 'Mapping Justice'.[i] Mr. Cadora's organization did a simple thing, they took the addresses of our existing inmates and then they diagrammed a map showing concentrations of the neighborhoods where most of our prisoners come from. Far too many are from the Hood.

I had that experience a couple years ago -- perhaps some of you have too. I was on jury duty in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The judge had about 100 men file into his courtroom, I among them. It was a cross section of Union County, probably 20 white guys and the rest a pastiche of brown and black. He explained that they had a unique case and he began with a single question. "If you or someone from your immediate family has been arrested and had such a negative experience with law enforcement officials that you would not be able to give impartial judgment regarding a police officer, please stand up." I was half listening, half reading my paper which you are not supposed to do. But I almost dropped my paper when the vast majority of men stood up. I had one of those 'Whoa' moments like I don't know my neighbors anywhere near like I should. I don't know what I expected but the number that actually stood up was two- three- times whatever it was.

The context is jury duty. Surely, a bunch of them were lying. But still. As they filed out, freed from jury service, the rest of us were blinking around at each other, as there were a few browns and blacks but mostly it was guys holding papers furtively like… well, pretty much like you see at the Short Hills train station.

No, for the lower half of the socio-economic ladder, not nearly enough has changed. When I actually looked on the map of New York City to see the 7 neighborhoods where most of our imprisoned men actually live, it was depressingly familiar. I was thinking how little has changed since we first moved to metropolitan New York in 1972. East Harlem, a couple blocks in the far north of Manhattan, the South Bronx and 4 neighborhoods in Brooklyn- basically the same places as 40 years ago.

Mr. Cadora noted that our actual crime statistics are more evenly distributed across our fair city, indeed across our fair country. But the incarceration rates are concentrated in our poorest neighborhoods, where education rates are low, where transition and turnover is quite high -- [people moving in and out], where drugs and guns proliferate, where interest rates are higher and having a personal stake in the outcome for the neighborhood is lower. We have the persistent problems that attend the underclass.

All of this remains the legacy of the past and today is more complicated to directly address because we didn't directly address it originally. I remember hearing Jessie Jackson 20 years ago saying that after the end of slavery, one proposal that wended its way through Congress was to give all the freed slaves 40 acres and a mule. The idea was to give them economic independence. He went on to say, "We're still waiting."

He has a point. African-Americans did not come to our country like other poor people seeking refuge here, they were enslaved. Their experience is unique and from a justice point of view, they were owed something for the oppression that they experienced here and they never got it. Of course, that raises difficult questions: How would you measure it? What would be fair? What would help them make up for systematic destruction of their families? How do you compensate systematic prevention of basic education? How do you rectify the personal damage done to an enslaved man's self-esteem and the collective dysfunction that slavery systematically inflicted upon their extended families? We never addressed this question. And we didn't do anything about any of it immediately.

So what actually happened is that freed slaves immediately segregated into ghettos and the social problems they had, they solved themselves with some very modest help from a few churches. What actually happened is within 20 years of the end of the Civil War. Most every state in the country developed their own set of Jim Crow laws that made African-Americans perpetual second class citizens, with almost no voting rights at all, and very limited economic opportunities. It was almost impossible to get a loan, extremely difficult to actually own property or a business, and the vast majority of work that was available in the white community was domestic or manual. And segregation was the norm if not the law pretty much all across the land.

By the time Jim Crow laws in our country began to fray and finally fail, the situation in our poorest communities had become complicated. There were now poor immigrants that lived alongside the grandsons of freed slaves. By the time that we came to see racism as a moral blight and develop a social consensus that it needed to be eradicated 10 decades had passed since the end of slavery. By the time that we came to a recognition that in terms of employment and employment, the systematic underdevelopment of African-Americans required some type of 'Affirmative Action' in order to even the playing field, we had also had 100 years of other poor immigrants who had moved to our country that complicated this social question enormously.

At all levels of government, at practically every college and university, at most every corporation, there started the knotty issue of Affirmative Action. Originally, we were trying to address one specific historic injustice that affected one group of people. But since we waited a century to start redressing it seriously, we found it almost impossible to articulate a coherent, abstract policy for everyone- freed slaves and immigrants, and then women, and then the handicapped- and pretty soon we were involved in a developed discussion on the merits of Affirmative Action itself. And this discussion went on, in earnest seriousness for 30 years. There were many notable achievements and those have largely defined the world all of us here have been privileged to live in. Our colleges are more integrated and diverse, our work places more diverse and interesting, our government inclusive, our communities more richly diverse, and some sectors of our society- like the military- just amazingly color blind and respectful toward all.

But Affirmative Action was, from the very start, an indirect recompense for the unspoken sin of the social effects of slavery and Jim Crow, now applied to all of society. So all along, thoughtful people noted how inexact it was. Thomas Sowell, thirty years ago, noted that the biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action were not the great grand children of freed slaves, but women. He was also articulate about how the people that needed help the most- the least educated, the poorest- got it the least. Affirmative Action had it's own set of social ethical questions as a social mechanism to promote fairness and these worked their way through our courts and we found ourselves in a protracted debate about it's merits versus it's demerits and just this year, the citizens of Michigan voted to overturn the use of Affirmative Action at the Universities of their state.

The article came out in the paper recently that the Board of Trustees at the University of Michigan were going to ban affirmative action and look for other ways to increase diversity, I thought to myself, "We have still not addressed the specific historical injustice, the spiritual malformation of slaves and the generational effects that has had on their families." The lingering after-effects of that systematic malformation are still with us. It is most concentrated and easiest to sense in our prisons and the poorest neighborhoods. It may be too hard to measure at this point in history, but it is palpable.

And socially, it is expensive. Mr. Cadora calls these seven neighborhoods in New York, 'million dollars' blocks. The people living there may be poor but socially this is very expensive real estate because all of society spends quite a lot of money to incarcerate the men that come from these neighborhoods. Doing nothing is not free, morally or economically.

You can cost out prison but there are other important social effects that are just as important, even if they are harder to put a price on. My wife teaches pre-school in Elizabeth. A few years ago, in the middle of class, somehow the subject of guns came up. Almost all the kids had a story about their Dad's gun. "My Dad keeps his gun under seat of the car." "My Dad keeps his gun in the drawer next to the bed." No child needs to be exposed to the whole social world that makes keeping a hand gun at the ready a part of daily life. You may not be able to quantify the cost of the effect of growing up in that world, but it is important.

Dr. King, at the end of his life, realized already that we probably need to change the discussion in our country away exclusively from race, not that race is not important, but that socially the most direct way we can deal indirectly with the lingering social malaise from slavery and Jim Crow is to focus on alleviating poverty and the interconnected dysfunctions that the Hydra of poverty grows.

Looking back, he is probably right. Despite the fact that it is complicated; despite the fact we can now only address it indirectly, it remains for a moral and social issue for which we are collectively responsible.

I understand the frustration of people who wish there was just something we could directly do and it would be over. This is not a problem which can be solved like that but that doesn't mean that it goes away just either.

Our scriptures are sometimes very realistic about these things. There is a line in Exodus (20 and 34) that says, 'The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the 3rd and 4th generation.' The consequences of our actions not only radiate out horizontally across our families and communities. They also contain implications that fall vertically down the line that affects future generations whether we intend them to or not. And that moral observation is truer the more you open the lens to the broadest social setting.

As we celebrate the considerable achievements that have been made, let us also pause briefly to remember just how socially expensive that original sin was and just how much moral interest has compounded that original sin by our collective inaction to redress it directly at the beginning. We have more to pay down on that debt. Amen.

[i] See www.mappingjustice.org for the tables. The Brian Lehrer show can be accessed on www.wnyc.org by clicking on shows and finding Brian Lehrer.