The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick sermon
Posted on
August 2, 2015
Proper 13, Year B
Trinity, Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
In his letter to the Church in Ephesus, Paul urges his fellow Christians to “bear[ing] with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” This is a vision, as he goes on to say, of “one body and one Spirit, [just as you were called to the] one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” Notice the frequency of the word one, synonymous with unity, commonality, of oneness together in God.
But, Paul goes on to say, there will be differences within that unity because each of us was given a different gift “for building up the body of Christ.”
As members of Christ’s kingdom, lived out at least partially in our church communities today, we have the hope of love and unity, of oneness together to which each of us is contributing in his or her own particular way, striving to let our differences make a positive contribution to the whole body.
Unfortunately, however, as members of a conflicted society in America today, we have the reality of differences which are being exploited by the masters of jingoism, and race-baiting, those who, in the heated rhetoric of political campaigning, attempt to toss us to and fro by blowing what Paul calls the winds of doctrine. These winds are accompanied by the “trickery, [and] craftiness in deceitful scheming” through which the instigators of division intend to turn our racial, ethnic, sexual, and class differences into weapons of divisiveness which set us apart rather than bring us together.
The deceit in our own time often takes the form of an ugly and aggressive denunciation of the foreigner in our midst, the “Other”, the person who doesn’t look like us or doesn’t come from where we and our ancestors came from: this rhetoric of denunciation stokes our fear of the different person, especially if he or she has brown or black skin or Latino accent and who crosses our national border without credentials.
And the trickery to which the masters of manipulation resort is to suggest that these differences of ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation, are essential to our very identities and to how we should relate to each other.
Differences can be the catalyst for wonderment and joy at the glorious multi-hued richness of God’s creation or they can be the fuel for the flames that would divide us from each other while we hunker down in our bastions of isolation from those whose differentness we perceive as a threat to who we are.
As Christians we have the vision of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-sexual community of oneness in which difference is a gift which only adds to the richness of our unity. And yet, despite this vision, we must not in our eagerness to celebrate our oneness and unity, ignore those differences that still define reality for many people in much of our society. It is not enough for those wearing the lighter skin of social privilege and power simply to preach vague appeals to love or to claim that they are beyond the divisions based on race that presently define much of race relations in our country. Demeaning racial policies and practices still define the experience of being black in this country and feel-good rhetorical appeals to holding hands and singing kumbaya will not obscure the ways in which racial differences are still exploited by those whose privileges are built on racial difference. While in God’s kingdom race will be irrelevant it is clearly not irrelevant today in a society still based to a large extent on the privileges that come to those whose skin is lighter than their darker skinned brothers and sisters.
If Paul’s vision of community is true then what we need is a basis of identity that does not glorify differences for their own sake but instead for what they can do to enhance and enrich the reality of love, which is not subject to border patrols, or skin color, or differences in sexual expression.
The most difficult challenge we face today is acknowledging the differences that have in fact divided us, acknowledging the painful reality of the destructive practices, based on skin color, or ethnicity, or sexuality, that have kept us apart.
Perhaps it is time for those of us who, by reason of DNA, biology, or inherited advantage, are in a position to control the structures of social power, to step back for a moment from our tendency to dominate the conversation and to listen to the voices and experiences of the other without insisting that we truly know their experiences because we simply do not.
The ambiguities and complications of racial difference in the context of working for reconciliation was poignantly revealed in a recent New York Times interview with Jimmy Carter and award-winning African-American writer Jacqueline Woodson:
Carter: You know, intimacy and knowledge and mutual affection permeated some parts of the South when I was growing up during the depths of the civil-rights troubles. And we were not atypical. Every white family who farmed and had black neighbors, they knew each other, they cared for each other. They shared garden plots and wood to burn in the fireplace.
Woodson replies: But that also came from a sense of place and knowing our place — not disrupting it. From the time we were enslaved, there were complicated relationships between black and white people. There was love, and there was family, and so many ways in which it’s impossible to be on the outside and understand it.
Woodson reminds us that race is still a reality exploited for reasons of divisiveness, and the bloody history of our country including all the recent shootings of unarmed black men, based on the exploitation of racial difference cannot be ignored. It is only by staring racism in the face and acknowledging its reality that we can begin to get beyond it.
But to acknowledge these things does not require us to believe that such differences are always going to stand as barriers to true love.
Paul understands that the true community is full of difference: we are not all intended to do the same things or occupy the same positions. But he also understands that those differences are ultimately subordinate and subservient to a higher reality: the reality of love in which the most important thing about others is their ability to love and be loved in return.
The actuality of Love has shown us that differences in sexual orientation or racial background are irrelevant to the love people of the same or opposite sexes or races or ethnicities can and do feel for each other. Whatever the winds of expedient political doctrine have said otherwise, real-life experiences show that love can be the difference-embracing but also difference-transcending truth about human relationships.
Christians have a glimpse of a borderless community into which all are invited without passport or documentation.
What we should bring to that community is our ability and willingness to love: to accept the other as other, resplendent in his/her uniqueness, but whose uniqueness is not an obstacle to love but an invitation to it.
Paul’s letter this morning can allow us to answer that invitation: As he says:
“We must no longer be children, but speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.”