Do You Dream and Weep Sometimes About the Way that Things Should Be?

A friend of mine is spending much of the summer rethinking and discerning what is most important and what is possible to make the most of the next season of life. Looking up people who can talk about our lives and who will have our best interest at heart can help us to catch a vision of what our lives can be. So often we feel closed in by our past decisions, kind of like a train on a track or a wagon in the trail ruts. Composer Ken Medema shines a helpful light on this struggle in the lyrics of his song, "A Place for Dreaming," and the title of this post is the first of several excerpts from this song that I will quote.

Is there a place for dreaming in the corner of your mind?

Richard Rohr comments in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, about the danger that as people get older they will fall into “cognitive rigidity and love of their own status and privilege.”  It means we find it harder to consider a change that can make all the difference for us and for others. Too much is at stake and too many constraints close our minds and block our vision.

Is there a place for dreaming...
In a world where dreams are broken, and dreamers hard to find?

I remember a few years ago telling another friend about a situation on my life that I thought would probably never change in the direction I had hoped, even though I had spent almost 15 years trying to influence that change. Then last year a door opened. An opportunity arose for me to share a vision. I’m still shocked and challenged to imagine what it might mean for me and for the communities I am in.

In the almost six years since Everly died, I have found myself circling back to these same questions over and over. Now that I will not have the life that I had expected for so long, what should my life count for in the remaining years?  Today Shaw University recognized me for 25 years of service. I am halfway through the 26th year already now at age 61. I have worked under eight Presidents and at least nine Vice-Presidents for Academic Affairs. In my six years of undergraduate teaching, I had two department chairs. In my 19-1/2 years in the Divinity School I have worked with four Deans.

I’ve seen the good and the not-so-good. I’ve fought for pay raises and felt across-the-board pay cuts. I’ve been “let go” a couple of times, only to be asked to come back a few weeks later. I helped rewrite a faculty handbook to provide support and protection to faculty employees, only to watch a series of new administrators remove all those protections and back away from habits of commitment to long-term, but all untenured, faculty.  I revised the constitution of the Faculty Senate and helped to bring it back into existence, seeing it initially flourish and grow in strength.  Then I watched leaders become frantic in their confrontations until they forced the kinds of conflict that can only end with faculty dismissals, draining away the organization's power and the morale of the community.  I've dealt with dominating administrators as well as empowering leaders.  I've seen Presidents and Vice-Presidents battle to keep faculty and employees on the payroll, and others seemingly callous to laying off people with one day's notice.  These are bits and pieces of working at this plantation.

There are different goods and not-so-goods of working at the Duke plantation down the road.  I've usually preferred the Shaw plantation to the Duke plantation in my evaluation.  I've worked through personal achievement and personal tragedy, and I've found this community to be one that would hold me up when I felt I would fall, and encourage me when I was able to soar.

Do you dream of another country where there is no push and shove?
Where the rich don't rule, and the poor are fed, and the only law is love?
Where a neighbor is a neighbor, and there is trust and loyalty?

One of the questions I have been asked often during my time at Shaw, by students, by colleagues from other schools, and by friends and associates wherever I go (including last year in Hong Kong), is this one:  "Why have you stayed at Shaw for so long?"  Sometimes it comes as, "Why did you decide to teach at Shaw?"  To the latter formulation, I think that many readers can agree that we don't necessarily "decide" where we will get a job.  This job walked up to me when I was trying to find work.

My good friend Jim Kirkley had answered an ad for an ethics professor at Shaw University during the summer after I had finished my dissertation.  He was hired to help design and lead a new and innovative ethics program, and in order to fulfill the university president's ambitious curriculum initiative, he recognized that Shaw would need more faculty trained in ethics.  By God's grace, Jim saw me as a promising candidate, and that fall he urged me to apply immediately.

I had made a prior decision that meant Kirkley's invitation was crucial for my employment future.  Rooted in my undergraduate years, I had accepted the view that men had undue privilege in society.  I had determined that I did not want to be the kind of man or husband who assumed my life and career were inherently more important than any woman's, and particularly that they did not take precedent over the life and career of whomever might become my wife.

So when I finished my PhD during a time when Everly's career was on a rapid rise, we decided I should try to stay put in central North Carolina so that she could continue her career path.  I wrote to every university with a religion department within driving distance of Durham and explained my situation, offering my availability.  I taught at four schools during that first year.  Kirkley's influence helped determine that Shaw would be one of those four.  I had not particularly pursued Shaw.  I was white, living a white life, and barely knew that Shaw existed; nor did I understand much about why it should exist.

The Department Chair at Shaw interviewed me as classes were beginning in January, and I started teaching as an adjunct immediately.  There are far many more stories to tell, but one has to do with my first day in class.  An adult student beginning his undergraduate education asked me a question concerning the syllabus.  "Why do our readings begin with Socrates and focus on European philosophers of ethics?"  I explained that I had been given a set of books and a syllabus to teach from.

He was starting what became a slow and difficult process of awakening me to the breadth and depth of white supremacist culture in education and in my socialization.  He woke me up enough that day that I told him I thought he had a good point.  I promised to do my research and, as I was able, I would bring to class additional readings from African and African American sources that would be relevant to our subject matter.  From that point I started another phase of my education, something that public schools, Baylor, Golden Gate Baptist, and Duke had not taught me.

Do you dream and weep sometimes about the way that things should be?

I'm not going to drag this long story out.  The main point I want to make is that coming to Shaw made me a better person.  By responding to the student in my class that day, I was becoming a better scholar.  By learning what I was learning in black studies sources and among black students and colleagues and as a member of a black church, I was being changed.  Yes, I went through periods of thinking that I had become quite "woke" only to discover all over again just how parochial my thinking, embedded in whiteness, remained.  Ultimately, I came to realize that it would only be when I could know and feel that my brothers and sisters at church and at work and in the classroom were truly my people, not "those" people, but my people, that I would begin to approach the change that must come for me and for the world.

I didn't become black.  I'm not the great white hero, the great white hope, or the bearer of the white man's burden.  But my people are the ones whom God has sent my way, regardless of families of origin or cultures of separation.  It's a theological argument that Willie Jennings has helped so many of us see:  all of us Gentiles, whether European or African, Anglo-Saxon or Zulu, have been invited in Jesus Christ to love and be loved by a God who first of all was not ours.  We are the grafted in, yet fully received as friends and as joint-heirs.

When I was a child, I used to daydream a lot,
But they told me that it would not last.
I wouldn't have time for such a waste of my mind
When my life started moving fast.
Now that I'm grown, I find that life with no dreams
Is a hell that I simply can't bear.
If it's all right I'd like to open my mind
And see if my dreams are still there.

The contextual possibility of learning that sort of theological anthropology and soteriology of invitation into the Jewish specificity of the God of Jesus Christ is why I have stayed at Shaw.  The socialization necessary to try to become that kind of grafted-in person is why I have needed to be at Shaw.  It would be nearly impossible to have done so in very many places.  And for that reason, I hold the deep conviction of the Alma Mater, "Long may thy works be proud, undimmed thy fame."  I've learned to sing the words of James Weldon Johnson, standing between people of darker skin than mine, understanding the truth about us and our ancestors, who in different ways "have come over a way that with tears has been watered....treading a path through the blood of the slaughtered."  It is my colleagues' and my students' history, and it is also my history, although our forebears lived through it in different roles, with different power, and perceiving it from very different worlds.

This is a truth that teaching at Shaw has helped me to see.  Teaching theology, filtered through my heritage and my hermeneutical strivings to make sense of it in black church settings, is something I learned to do by looking into the eyes and faces of my students, listening to their responses, and contemplating what we are together learning.  That is why I have stayed at Shaw.  And staying at Shaw has made me to be who I am.  I can't predict how much longer I will be teaching at Shaw, as my retirement age approaches. Like my friend mentioned at the beginning of this post, I am wondering what the next part of my life should be about.  Maybe a change is coming, or maybe I will remain here in assurance that the path I have been on is the one that will continue to lead me home.  But I can be sure that I will never be away from Shaw wherever I go, for this community has made all the difference in who I am, and they are in me.

Come dreaming with me, dreaming with me, admission is free.

In Honor of Stella Goldston and Grady "E.P." Goldston

At Shaw University Divinity School, for the entire time I have been on faculty (almost 19 years), there has been one glue that has held all things together.  That is our administrative assistant/registrar/student counselor/information center/receptionist/faculty support staff Stella Goldston.  Before Shaw Divinity became only the third ATS accredited theological school in North Carolina, following only Duke Divinity and Southeastern Theological Seminary, Stella was already carrying a load of duties to support the faculty and students in their education.  Since that time, we have seen five deans come and go.  Stella has learned how to work with each one to accomplish his goals and keep the program steadily moving.

Last Wednesday, September 19, 2018, Stella's husband "E.P." died after they had shared 50 years of marriage.

Just over five years ago when Everly died and I became a widow, I'm sure that for some moment I felt I was the only person who has endured such a devastating loss.  Part of the awakening of my humanity that I underwent during that period of Everly's illness and dying involved becoming deeply aware of the struggles that my students and colleagues, my fellow church members and friends, and people all around me were also enduring.  Previously such things had seemed so distant, so irrelevant, to the life I was living.  It is a sad thing to realize about oneself, having already reached one's mid-fifties in age.  Let's be satisfied to say that I have grown somewhat beyond that now.

A result is that the stories of others' lives, whether fictional stories of lives in books and media or lives of the flesh and blood people around me, take me to a place of memory and empathy.  I've been struggling with my schedule this week, preparing to leave for Hong Kong tomorrow, and having so many details to tie up.  Unable to make the trip to Sanford for the funeral, I found myself suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of Stella Goldston's loss.

I had met "E.P." briefly on occasions when he had driven Stella to work from their remote home near Pittsboro, NC.  His health had been declining in recent years, and we had feared for his life at times before.  Yet he continued to be blessed with more days, and Stella showed great devotion to support him and care for him in the ups and downs of his physical condition.  She has had to take more days away from the office in recent months, and the entire ordeal of their lives as they passed the end of their seventh decade has been a struggle.  Yet Stella remains an encourager of the faculty and students.  She offers her assistance quickly and without reservation.  She lifts our spirits and keeps us together.  She is a committed servant leader in our community.

Therefore today, in honor of Stella and of her marriage, and in memory of her beloved husband "E.P.", I will repeat the words I overheard that swept me into the moment of empathy and memory.  Hearing them helped me realize my debt of gratitude for Stella's life and my care for the depth of loss she now faces.  Perhaps with a bit of self-centeredness, I also confess that these words reminded me of how much loss I feel that Everly is not able to share the joy of this trip to Hong Kong with me.  Thank God for the Psalms.

From Psalm 22:14-15

I am poured out like water,
  and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax;
  it is melted within my breast;
my mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
  and my tongue sticks to my jaws;
you lay me in the dust of death.

Staying still in the devastation of this moment is a way of recognizing and honoring the value of a person's life and of a loving, caring relationship.  And so we sit in the condition of being poured out, out of joint, melted, and dried up.  Grateful--yet overwhelmed by the loss.

May God, the Source of All Goodness, bless Stella and her family in this time of grief and loss.  May the Eternal Son receive "E.P." in loving embrace and joyful celebration of a life well lived and a wife well loved.  May the Holy Spirit of God surround, accompany, fill, uphold, and lead Stella Goldston in the coming season of her life.  And may we, the ones with whom "E.P." shared his beloved Stella, be to her a shield and staff through her time of grief.  Amen.

**************
For those who would like to show support for Stella Goldston in this time of grief and loss through concrete and monetary support, let me offer the following opportunity.
https://www.gofundme.com/stella-goldston-fund

If You Are Coming for Me...

This is a sermon first preached at Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church on October 29, 2017.

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18
19:1 The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:
19:2 Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.
19:15 You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor.
19:16 You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD.
19:17 You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.
19:18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.

Matthew 22:34-46
22:34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together,
22:35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
22:36 "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"
22:37 He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.'
22:38 This is the greatest and first commandment.
22:39 And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'
22:40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
22:41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question:
22:42 "What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?" They said to him, "The son of David." 22:43 He said to them, "How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,
22:44 'The Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet"'? 22:45 If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?"
22:46 No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

Recently Congresswoman Maxine Waters found herself under attack in public because of her strong stands taken against white supremacists and her criticisms of the President. She has gained quite a reputation for her outspokenness, and as a matter of both personal defiance and of encouragement to young women to speak their minds, she has been famously quoted as saying, “If you come for me, then I’m coming for you.” They’re a version of what we might call “fighting words.”

It’s been a long time since I could classify myself as a person who knows all the latest slang and popular phrases. By the time I figure them out, my kids are happy to tell me that I’m so far behind that “nobody says that any more.” So I don’t know if Maxine and I are out of fashion to use the phrase, “If you are coming for me…” to state a challenge to potential critics and enemies. I have a colleague in another city at a university not to be named who can be expected fairly often to offer up challenges to people who would dare to question or challenge her. I think she is the one I first learned the phrase from because she used it quite often. I’ve noticed several other younger academics inclined to take offense at people they think are looking for trouble, and they have started their responses with this phrase, “If you are coming for me….”

When I was looking at this familiar passage in Matthew 22, it struck me that Jesus was surrounded by challengers and enemies who were scheming and making plans about how they were coming for him. The beginning of chapter 22 continues a sequence of similar scenes. A day before, Jesus had thrown the whole city into an uproar, taking over the temple, chasing away moneygrubbers and cheats who were exploiting the poor by jacking up prices on supplies for worshipers hoping to offer sacrifices.

 It was probably a fine-tuned system of outsourcing public business to private contractors. The highest bidders got to set up their tables and animal pens in the temple for a fee, and maybe an extra kickback to the officials to secure their favored position as a preferred vendor. Jesus messed up the furniture, scolded the vendors, chased away the animals, and then would not let anyone walk through the temple. Both the priestly leaders and the Roman occupiers held emergency meetings to consider what kind of response they should make. The may have met all night to get ready to come for Jesus when the morning broke.

At the beginning of the day, when Jesus showed himself in town again, the leaders of the temple were coming for him. They asked him why he thought he had authority to act the way he had been acting. Jesus was a shrewd political operator. He knew that the crowds were on his side, so on this next day after the big confrontation in the temple, he made use of that. This time he turned the metaphorical tables on these priests by asking them to weigh in with their opinions about John the Baptist. They were trapped. John was a popular figure and now a martyr. The crowds would not take kindly to the priests trashing one of their heroes. Jesus outmaneuvered them, and they went away frustrated and angrier.

For the rest of that day, groups kept caucusing, trying to come up with a way that they could come for Jesus and show him up. They were sure they could outwit him. They knew he had to be just a backwoods bumpkin who they could eventually humiliate and get the people to turn on him. Sure of themselves, each group would come with a question or puzzle, only to be caught up by Jesus and have to walk away. It almost became a contest between various cliques and factions to see who could get to Jesus first. After the chief priests and elders failed, the Pharisees gave it a shot. When they couldn’t trick Jesus, the Sadducees gave their best try and failed as well. So at the beginning of our reading today, we learn that after the Sadducees failed, the Pharisees got up their nerve again and came with the question about the greatest commandment. Jesus’ answer was so good, they had nothing to say in reply.

I guess they thought he might say the law was of no value or something similarly rebellious. Instead, he went to the deep meaning of the law, quoting two of the most beloved teachings of the Torah which were revered by the rabbis. They had come for him over and over, and to no avail. So when they had nothing left to argue about, Jesus came for them. He posed them a puzzle from the Psalms, a hermeneutical conundrum about the Messiah as the Son of David, but also as the one whom David himself called Lord. They were mad as hornets at the trap Jesus set for them, and again refused to answer his questions because they feared the crowd’s reaction if they condemned Jesus publicly, even though that’s what they wanted to do.

It’s as if Jesus had said to them, “If you are coming for me, then you had better be ready to face the truth.” “If you are coming for me, then you had better realize who it is you are dealing with.” “If you are coming for me, know that I am calling all God’s children together.” Jesus was fine with their challenging questions, but they weren’t ready for the kind of answers he brought.

What made Jerusalem such a center for turmoil and political controversy? Why was the temple such a focal point for conflict when Jesus came to town? Probably any of us who have read and studied the gospels have raised these questions from time to time. We recognize that Jesus had enemies. We may be puzzled as to why anyone would not like Jesus, whom we have boxed into an image of sweetness and meekness. But if that’s as far as our thinking has gotten us, then we need to dig deeper and ponder further.

While the world of Jesus was in many details very different from ours, there are also many ways in which we need to look at his world as similar to ours. We don’t have a Caesar or occupying Roman legions. We don’t have the same kind of Ruling Council of Priests, Scribes, and Elders, the Sanhedrin, or partisan groups called Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, and Zealots. On the other hand, we do have Presidents and Governors and Mayors. We have Capitol Police and State Police and Sheriff’s Deputies and ICE Detention Officers. We have a City Council and County Commissioners and a General Assembly and a Congress. We do have Democrats and Republicans, a Tea Party and Anarchists and the Alt-Right. We have the Chamber of Commerce, Bank of America, Walmart, AIG, Amazon, and GlaxoSmithKline.

In our world, as in Jesus’ world, the people who are claiming the most power are scheming together to make sure that anyone else who might want power will have trouble getting hold of it. They look for wedge issues, and they make up ways to divide communities against one another. The Sanhedrin was trying to drive a wedge between Jesus and the crowds of people who had come to the Passover Festival. They were hoping their provocative questions would break down the popular consensus around Jesus and get people arguing with one another. As Jeanne DeCelles has written (New Heaven, New Earth),

Jesus did not get into trouble with the powers of his day simply by challenging the individual behaviors of his hearers. His downfall came from challenging the very systems of his society. He challenged the cornerstones. Just as the values of Madison Avenue, Wall Street, and the Pentagon conflict with the gospel, so too with Jesus and the institutions of his time: he was in conflict with the power structures of his own day, religious and civil alike.

Yes, on the day after Jesus cleared the temple, they came for him. They were set on bringing him down by dividing the crowds against him. On this day, they would not succeed. But they would keep trying.

 Ironically, the Roman Empire’s agents were using the same strategy against the Jewish leaders that the Sanhedrin was using against Jesus and his followers. They played favorites and offered benefits to some and not to others. Some Jewish leaders were called Herodians because they had signed up to play along with the Roman appointed kings in the family of Herod. Others, the Sadducees and Pharisees, had originated when the previous empire’s Greek rulers worked to divide Jews against one another before the Maccabean uprising. Now the Romans played Sadducees and Pharisees against each other, and here they were taking turns at Jesus. All the while, they were maneuvering for power against one another. And the Zealots were lurking on the margins, looking for the chance to stir up turmoil in hopes that it might lead to a revolution to overthrow Rome.

 This strategy of empire to divide God’s children against one another is a perennial and highly successful means of keeping the rest of us down. Rev. Dr. Barber regularly instructs whoever will take time to listen that the strategy of the powerful and wealthy has always been to convince poor whites that no matter how bad their lives are, at least they aren’t black. Now they also try to divide blacks against Latinos, white men against minorities and women, and any potential crack in the social fabric they can capitalize on.

Barber calls on us to remember how the fusion politics that brought black and white farmers and business owners and families together to stand up for their common interests and the common good managed to overthrow the plantation politics that concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few families. The last thing the empire wants the rest of us to do is to figure out that we could work together to make things better for all of us.

Some of you were here at Mt Level last Thursday night. If you arrived near 7 pm, you may have had to park far away. The sanctuary was full to overflowing with people from many different parts of Durham. There were Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, Holiness, and some who claim no denomination. There were Unitarians and Reform Jews. There were members of non-profits organized for the environment, for helping students, for supporting the unemployed, for promoting affordable housing, and for building community solidarity. There were African Americans, Latinos, pale-skinned folk, and Asian Americans. There were students from Duke and Carolina, from Central and Shaw. There were people from different neighborhoods, different professions, and different socio-economic classes.

We had every reason imaginable to divide against one another, create rivalries, look down on one another, and try to get an advantage over one another. But in this case, we did not do that. Not only the current member organizations, but a dozen more churches and community groups who hope to become members crowded into this hall. They came together, WE came together, because we realized that it is not our differences but our ability to build trusting relationships for mutual benefit that make us strong.

Moneyed interests and political powers of another sort may wish to tear us down by trying to divide us. They might try to make the Durham Committee or the People’s Alliance shun us or treat us as rivals. They might try to get the DCIA or the Ministerial Alliance to see our clergy leaders as a threat. They might encourage a new group like Durham for All to see Durham CAN as a giant to be knocked down and defeated. Durham CAN could act superior and ignore other potential partners in the struggle. But that’s not what happened here on Thursday.

On Thursday, when they came for us, we stood together to fight for better housing for all, for better wages for all, for a first and a second chance for all. The full parking lot and the full house of people on Thursday night is a glimpse of what it means to live up to the great commandment to love one another. It is love in action that stands up for those who struggle even when they don’t look or talk the way we do. It is, as our own pastor, Dr. William C. Turner, Jr., told the gathered masses, “the measure of who cares.” Which of the people in our community will bear the mark of those who care?

Of course, just because Durham CAN had over 600 people uniting around an agenda on housing and jobs does not mean we have arrived at heaven on earth. Maybe there is a small glimpse of what could be, but the powers of this world have many tricks and traps to continue to break apart what is strong and healthy and flourishing.

Even after a success, we can easily fall back into the trap of letting ourselves be divided and then trying to protect our little bit of turf from others. This is the nature of sin. Sin is the decay and even destruction of the good that God has accomplished in our lives and in our communities. Sin is turning away from the path of hope that we set out on. Sin is rejecting the best possibilities that God and our neighbors have to offer us. And it does not only happen in our cities and suburbs and countryside. It happens in our churches.

Jesus reminded the Pharisees and the crowds in the streets on that day that what God wants for us can be stated in a few crucial sentences. These two commandments represent the revelation in the Torah of the very purpose and meaning of creation and human existence. Late in the night when we can’t sleep, we may find ourselves asking why are we even here? What is the meaning of life? Well, Jesus answered those questions on this day in Jerusalem.

He told all who would listen that the God who is Love spoke the world into existence as an expression and fulfillment of the love that flows in eternity from each person of the Trinity, mutually and reciprocally, perfectly and unendingly. God made the world out of love and for love. We are here in the world to love. We are made to love God and to love one another. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Wayne Gordon says that when he was a young coach and school teacher, leading Bible studies with high school youth, those kids grew very serious about their devotion to God. One day, they brought an insight to him that powerfully changed his reading of this text.

They called his attention to the commandment to love your neighbor. They said, “If the individual Christian is supposed to love our neighbors, wouldn’t it be true that a church full of Christians is supposed to love our neighborhood?” Their deep insight helped him to recognize the call of God to start a church and make a long-term commitment to transforming a run-down, poor neighborhood into a place fitted to God’s purpose of abundant living and beloved community.

But few churches in our day share that kind of vision. We lock our buildings against the neighborhood and flee away to distant places to live. Church people don’t know their neighbors, and when they do know them, they don’t like them or want them inside their church buildings. The original families in a church grow suspicious of newcomers, and new members resent the people who try to hold on to power and position.

Churches start to function as subsidiaries to social power. They occupy socio-economic strata in the social order, so that executives and managers go to this congregation, professionals and academics go to the other congregation, laborers and factory workers here, schoolteachers and public employees there, and the unemployed or homeless don’t feel welcome at any church.

Erika Edwards, a professor at UNC-Charlotte, spoke to the Shaw Divinity School Women’s Conference about the heritage of scientific racism. In earlier eras, biologists, medical doctors, anthropologists, and various other scientists sought to prove what everyone already had decided was true—that white Europeans were superior to people of darker skin from other parts of the world. Very few scientists would be willing to make those kinds of claims in public in our time, but the residual effect of that era continues to operate in the thinking and structures of our culture and our churches. Edwards talked about ways in which ranking—from darkest to lightest skin—functions to classify people’s beauty and intelligence even today. Dividing and conquering even within communities of color prevents the kind of loving cooperation that would lead to the uplift of all.

Ruby Sales talked to us at the same conference about the way that generations are being divided against one another in the current political climate. On the one hand, she said young people do not know the history of the struggle and the costs paid by those who have gone before them. All they can see is that too many seem satisfied to have gotten a small piece of the pie, to have climbed up a few steps of the ladder, and no longer have a vision of change for the better.

On the other hand, older folks have become accustomed to their strategies of respectability politics to the point that the patterns of respectability have replaced the ideals of freedom, hope, and community. Wearing braids, getting tattoos, sagging pants, or short skirts are interpreted as evidence that young people have no dreams or care too little about themselves. They may blame the young people for the lack of knowledge of their history and of the costs paid for every advance, when it was the responsibility of their generation to pass down the story.

All over this country, young people are outside of the churches believing that those of us inside have become too elitist, too self-congratulatory, too closed minded, and too uncaring about the world around us. All over this country, people inside churches are wondering where the young people are, decrying how kids are so messed up these days, angry at the social forces they blame for undermining the lives and faith of our children. We have become divided against one another, and we are being conquered.

So even within our churches, we let the empire seduce us, divide us, turn us into parties and sects and cliques. But Jesus would have none of it. He turned the argument back around to the heart of the gospel. God has loved us. God made us for love. Love God with all that you are. Love one another. Love others by wanting for them everything good you would want for yourself.

Jesus was quoting from the Old Testament. Loving God who made us and loves us was the Shema, the core confession of the entire tradition of the Jews. Today’s text from Leviticus names many ways of thinking about what it means to love our neighbors. We must not harbor any hate. We must be willing to speak up and correct those who are bullying or cheating or doing harm to themselves and others. We can’t hold grudges or be happy at other people’s misfortune. We mustn’t be opportunists and getting advantage or money from what has hurt someone else.

Leviticus says that in graphic terms: you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord. We must deal justly and judge others with justice. We can’t be respecters of persons. We must aim to do no less than to display the love of God, the character of God, in the way that we live.

How is it that we can resist sin and the powers, thrones, dominions, and authorities of this world in order to live according to God’s purpose and calling to love our neighbor? At its most basic level it involves a surrender of our willfulness and our selfishness to God. What is best for us and what we ought to do may not always be what we first wish for and want to do. Our vision is limited, but God in Jesus Christ has revealed to us the way that we should go.

Jesus has called us to be peacemakers, to hunger for justice, to be pure in heart, meek, and humble. Jesus has shown us the way to lead by becoming a servant, to give of ourselves so that there will be no need among us. And he summed it all up by reminding us to love God with all that we are and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Turning away from our limited self-interest, toward the richness of God’s interest in the flourishing of all our communities, all our neighborhoods—this is the path away from enslavement to sin and domination by empire and the powers of this world that have refused to bow the knee to Jesus.

Have you come to worship today with a searching heart? Have you found yourself jealous of the good others have and bearing grudges every time someone else found success? Are you worried that you will lose out because someone else who is struggling might get some of what you want? Have you wondered if God even cares for you or is on your side?

Have you ever come to know that Jesus came into the world to show us that God is for us? And if God is for us, who can stand against us? How many ways might we keep on dividing ourselves from one another when what God wants for us is to live in loving community? The Holy Spirit is active and present to call you today to unite yourself to God, to follow Jesus down a path of love and servanthood. If you have never given your life to God by following Jesus, there is no reason to continue to delay. Be joined to Jesus so that you live in him and he lives in you.

Have you let your church become your social club where you want to pick and choose the kinds of people who are allowed to join? Has church become a place of status where we can look down on the people who don’t measure up, feeling smug that we are the ones God likes? Has church become an in-group busily defining how many others we can put into the out-group?

If the Holy Spirit has quickened in you a desire to become holy as God is holy, to be set apart by the generosity of your love rather than by the uppity angle of your forehead, then renew your vow to God to be an apostle of love in your neighborhood, in your family, and in your church. God is stirring in Mt Level, and wherever people have ears to hear, to raise up leaders and to raise up a new generation.

If we are not ready to respond and ready to listen, we will continue to quench that work of the Spirit. Will we someday look back on Thursday night, October 26, 2017, as the last day in the history of our church that we saw a full house? Lord help us to be ready to open our hearts and our doors to whomever you send to us, that we might shine as a beacon of love and fulfill our calling to be beloved community in this corner of Durham. Let us not divide ourselves, but unite ourselves to those who are brokenhearted, alone, and struggling, even if they are different from us in so many ways.

If you are in search of a church home, we pray that the Holy Spirit will speak to you about where your life should be united to the work of Christ in our city. If the Spirit is prodding you today to say that Mt. Level is the community of God’s people where you should be, then we welcome you to join with us in the service of God that we have also been called to do. The doors of the church are open.

Whosoever will, may come into the loving community of neighbors who are gathered today to love one another. If you are coming for me, let me be the first to acknowledge that God is calling us into community. Let us be reconciled to one another, and take on the ministry of reconciliation in this world so full of those whom God loves.