Sermon January 18, 2009
“The End of the Beginning”
Deuteronomy 34: 1-12 and Luke 10 25-37 

Let us pray.

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, when we honor one of this nation’s greatest champions of racial equality for African Americans. And then the very next day we inaugurate -- as our 44^th President -- Barach Obama, our first African American President. We are always counseled not to over estimate the significance of events in the moment but to leave that determination to the judgment of history. I accept that and often recoil at how easily events these days are described as the “most significant”, “best” or “worst ever”. But I can’t help myself – the juxtaposition of these next two days highlights for me the historic importance of what we are doing on Tuesday. I simply did not believe that I would see in my lifetime an African American President. How wonderfully extraordinary!

I have passed out a rough timeline I put together which chronicles the place of African Americans in this country from our earliest years – highlighting how far we have come. As early as 1619 before our Puritan forefathers and mothers arrived, African slaves had already been forcibly brought to this country.  People of African descent were subjected to acts of oppression and inequality from the beginning -- our own Constitution decreed in 1788 that slaves were equivalent to only 3/5s of a white citizen. Later in the early 1800s Virginia made it a crime for blacks to learn to read while Pennsylvania, Mississippi and other states formally denied them the vote.

Yet there were bright rays of hope – the abolitionist movement began in 1775, and some states in the North by the early 1800s had abolished slavery. But the institution widely continued. And then in 1861 the Civil War came -- fought for a number of reasons but principally over the question of slavery.  With victory for the North the end of slavery seemed before us – the slaves in the South were emancipated by President Lincoln in 1863; the 13h Amendment was adopted in 1865, outlawing slavery everywhere and Reconstruction began. From 1866 to 1877 blacks voted, governed and owned property throughout this country, including the South. But by 1877 -- when US troops were withdrawn finally from the South -- these rights and privileges were mostly gone. Sure legal slavery was over but after reconstruction the South returned back to most of its old ways. As a nation we turned our backs on this issue. In 1894 the Supreme Court said separate but equal was OK.   And we became a segregated nation by law and even more in fact.   Waves of blacks migrated north hoping for opportunity – yes, there were jobs in Chicago, New York and Pittsburgh but not one’s white men wanted and yes, there were places to live, but not in white areas.

            But again there were rays of hope and progress. In 1948 Truman desegregated the military – seemed the least we could do, since so many African Americans had fought so bravely for this nation. Then in 1954 came Brown v. Board of Education and the Supreme Court held separate can’t ever be equal. And with that began a courageous concerted effort by blacks finally to end discrimination. Small and large acts they were -- a tired lady, Rosa Parks, refusing to move to the back of the bus and hundreds upon hundreds of blacks and whites marching and sitting in -- peacefully practicing non violent resistance in the face of bombings, beatings and lynchings.

And from this crucible, as often happens, leaders emerged -- Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps first among them. A man of enormous courage and even greater faith – not a perfect man– but perhaps the perfect man for this role – holding our consciences hostage until we began to do better as a nation. And yet he did not succeed fully -- cut down by an assassin’s bullet. But real progress continued -- though I am not sure most Americans saw it. Somehow by 2009 white America in numbers unthinkable 40 years ago voted for a candidate for President on the basis of the quality of his mind and character not the color of his skin.  All I can say is thanks be to God. And God be with him.

            It is as if we have come out of the wilderness as our Israelite predecessors did more than three millennia ago. That is, of course, what the passage from Deuteronomy describes. There is Moses taken up to the mountaintop and the Promised Land stands before him and the people. The Exodus is over or at least so it seems. But the Old Testament does not end there. Moses himself dies and never sets foot on the Promised Land. I can’t help but think of all of those who struggled for racial equality who did not live to see Tuesday, Inauguration Day 2009. The Israelites did not find the Promised Land particularly welcoming or tranquil -- even after they wrested control over it from the Canaanites. Think of the number of times they were sent into exile.   Crossing the Jordan River to arrive at the Promised Land was best understood as the end of the beginning for the Israelites.

            In many ways I think that is what Tuesday represents for us – the end of the beginning. As one commentator in the Christian Century magazine recently wrote, “Obama’s election was a moment of reconciliation … can the moment become a season of reconciliation?”[1] This inauguration will be a glorious moment but much remains. The security for that swearing in will be the tightest in history and not simply because of the threat of foreign terrorists. In the aftermath of the Obama victory on November 4^th –there were over 200 cross burnings and other hate crimes. We are not yet at the end but we can contemplate it. Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian at Duke, once suggested, “the greatest challenge in race relations is that most people do not believe there is a problem.”[2] To paraphrase Hauerwas -- perhaps the greatest obstacle we face is thinking we are at the end rather than at the beginning of the end.

Much has changed and Obama’s inauguration is the beacon of such change.

But I think you will agree that there is more to do. Quite clearly our challenge is not overt racism. The vast majority of Americans are open and tolerant. The challenges are the more subtle ones. In 1968 I was a senior at Columbia when it was a major hotbed of protests and student demonstrations. From the beginning of March to my graduation in June, I had only one class on campus. All the rest were in Professors’ apartments and local restaurants because the campus was in turmoil with many university buildings occupied.   

The main focus of the student demonstrations in 1968 was the war in Viet Nam. Except at Columbia, there was an addition issue – the building of a new student gymnasium. Doesn’t sound controversial but it was. The University -- this establishment bastion of white privilege -- had sweet-talked the City into selling the University land in Morningside Park for a new gym. Now understand that the park abutted a poor black section of West Harlem – and was the only park for blocks. In return for this land the University agreed that it would build a small separate gym for the local folks to use on the lowest level of the new multi-story gym. It would even have its own entrance -- one wonders whether for the ease of the public or to insulate the students.

Almost immediately after the announcement of this deal it caused a furor and back activists, H.  Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael, descended on the campus – taking over the main College classroom building. Why do I tell this story? I have thought a lot about it over the years – as we relived it along with other events of 1968 at my reunions. I tell it because it points out the challenges of the end game of racial equality in this country. Columbia was not overtly racist. It was trying to do a good thing but it did not have a clue what the local community needed or wanted and didn’t seek to find out. It knew best. The problem you see came from lack of contact and dialogue -- not meanness or prejudice. So long as we have separation among races in housing, employment, education, we can never fully know or understand each other.

Another challenge for the end game is the reality of the complexity of our world. Zygmunt Bauman wrote one of the most interesting books I have every read called, Modernity and the Holocaust. In it he talks about how the complexity of our modern world contributed to the holocaust. As Bauman saw it, many in Germany were not anti-Semites but in their own way -- often unknowingly -- contributed to the holocaust. For example the railroad traffic manger scheduled, at the request of the Nazi regime, the unusual routing of trains on to a small spur in Poland leading to a little known place called Auschwitz. He did not know directly what this was for and minded his own business never trying to find out. Of course, our situation is different.  But one of the challenges in our modern world is to look at how our structures reinforce outdated, unjust and discriminatory patterns and to change them.

The familiar parable of the Good Samarian has much to teach about race relationships. In it Jesus poignantly makes us all focus on who is the neighbor we are to love. The Samaritans were despised by the Jews. They worshiped the same God but through different rituals. Samaritans did not accept Jerusalem and the Temple there as the seat of the faith but found the holy of holies on a mountaintop to the North. But it was not simply religion that separated them. The Samarians were of mixed race – the product of Assyrian and Jewish intermarriage. To the Jews they were unclean – separate and unequal. And so Jesus was telling us that it is not your religion, your race, or your ethnicity that mattered but how you treated others. And what of the victim in this parable? Who was he? We don’t know. I don’t think that is an oversight. Indeed, the very point is that it doesn’t matter who he was – he was injured and he was a child of God. That’s the endpoint -- where none of those other things matter. Isn’t that what Martin Luther King meant when he said,

            I have a dream that my four little children
                        will one day live in a nation where they will not
                        be judged by the color of their skin but by the
                        content of their character.

We will get to the end. I believe the psalmist was right when he wrote the word of Psalm 46 we recited moments ago:

God is in the midst of the city;
            it shall not be moved;
            God will help it when the
            morning dawns …
            The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter;
            he utters his voice, the earth melts.
            The Lord of hosts is with us;
            the God of Jacob is our refuge…

The end is certain; it is simply the timing that is unclear.

My children and those of their generation are further along the path of racial equality and harmony than I am. For me when I act as the parable would urge -- seeing my neighbors simply as fellow children of God not as Blacks or Latinos, I do so through conscious effort. My openness and inclusiveness is learned and needs frequently to be reinforced. The movie “Crash” reveals how for many our tolerance is on the surface only and subject to being overcome by stress, fear and insecurity. But for the younger generations – growing up with greater exposure to diversity – with friends from different races and religions and cultures – their openness and acceptance is intuitive. It is not something they have to think about.

Before the election the surveys of the younger generation of potential voters revealed that -- regardless of party affiliation -- what mattered were the issues -- not race or religion and the other categories that often separate us one from the other. They were prepared to vote for whomever, man or women, black or white, Samaritan or Jew, who would help this country to be the best it could be.

I truly believe on Inauguration Day that the beginning of a long march seeking racial justice and harmony is over and that we are beginning the end game. That endgame will be challenging and, I suspect, will not come as quickly as we might like.  But we will get there through hard and courageous work just as we got to this day. In 1963 Dr King said it well in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, “progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men and women willing to be co-workers with God.” Let us rejoice in the progress we have made and redouble our commitment to finish the task. Amen