Rev. Joseph Boyd
It matters what we believe. Our beliefs are attached to roots, roots which carry a legacy. They carry an intention. Right now the roots of our nation are showing in Charlottesville, and it’s a devastating, poignant, and heartbreaking sight. The picture on the front cover of your Order of Service shows a white man on the left carrying a confederate flag holding a sign that has a hateful message directed at Jews, and on the right there is another white man doing a heil Hitler gesture. And in the middle in the background are white men looking straight ahead in the direction of an African American police officer who is folding his hands, and even with sunglasses on his whole face and body expresses, “I’m tired of this. I will continue to stand here, but when will this kind of hatred be over. This is a question on everyone’s mind – When will this kind of hatred and bigotry be over?
There is another powerful image that stays in my mind. It’s an image that the Rev. Susan Fredrick Gray noticed of clergy across different denominations who walked strategically arm in arm to the front lines where Nazi sympathizers and KKK members were gathered, and they knelt and prayed. At first, clergy said that the hate group members didn’t know what to do.
Once they caught on to what was happening, they shouted obscenities, and called them weak, The clergy took a meek, a humble stance, and this act was confusing for some. But they didn’t stay on their knees for long. This group of faith leaders walked to the entrance of Emancipation Park, and without any police presence or support they stood arm in arm facing hate group members who were trying to get in to rally around the statute of Robert E. Lee. Emancipation Park is a very recent name for that park…it was called Lee park, to recognize and honor Robert E. Lee, the general who commanded the Confederacy. As the clergy stood there without protection arm in arm, many said that they had the palpable feeling that they were going to die. Anybody could approach them with a gun or knife, and they didn’t know what would happen. Fighting did break out, and the clergy were forced to disperse temporarily…nonetheless Susan Fredrick Gray made the statement “Love showed up today in Charlottesville.”
Love showing up did not get rid of hate. I think this is an important learning to digest. Love showing up as prayerful nonviolent resistance did not change the hearts and minds of everyone connected to hate groups. Love did not guarantee safety or protection for those on both sides.
An act of love often looks like a vulnerable and foolish choice. Love plays by different rules. I spoke with Dr. Cornel West who was one of the faith leaders on the front lines about the power of love, and he told me: “The power of love is that it can keep getting pummelled and it still finds a way to limp along.” This is an image that has stuck in my head – Love takes a pummeling, and keeping limping along, keeps limping onward. Limping for me means that love is not immune to violence and hatred. It’s vulnerable, and it can be injured.
That’s the feeling that many people have expressed to me – a feeling of being injured witnessing the events in Charlottesville. It hits us on a primal level – it’s repulsive, it’s an assault to our senses to look at it, and yet we feel we must look at it. We are looking at our roots, and we see both hate and love, bigotry and compassion, violence, and prayer. Charlottesville is holding up a mirror of ourselves, and it is challenging us to deeply consider who we intend to become.
If you want to see what somebody truly believes, don’t ask them, see what they do. My father gave me that advice. Don’t ask them to recite their credo, don’t ask them which church they attend, don’t ask them about the principles they hold dear – see what they do.
It matters what we believe. It matters which roots we connect to, which roots we nourish with our mind and heart. It matters how we let our roots inform our living. It is good to feel repulsed by the hate that is being expressed openly in our country. It’s good to feel how heartbreaking and painful it is. It’s good to feel that we are witnessing poison, because it is. The response of being repulsed, says to us viscerally, that’s not right – that’s not a way of being human that is life giving. Living with that kind of hate is painful, it’s a burden, and it can imprison us. And many people are asking the question – what will it take for us to be free – free of hate, free of violence, free of our history.
James Baldwin wrote “The Fire Next Time” after the civil rights movement, and he took the title from the story of the flood in Genesis. There’s a line where God tells Noah – “I have flooded the earth once, but in the future there will be no flood. It will be the fire next time.” Baldwin believed that the civil rights movement of the 1960’s was our flood…and he believed it would be the fire next time. We would need to to set fire to who we’ve been, to encounter who we were meant to become.
We’re in a burning season. Ecologists conduct controlled burns in fields and forests in order to stimulate new growth.
They set fire to a field to get rid of overgrowth, dead foliage, and plants which are sucking the nutrients out of the earth, killing the land. A controlled burn renews the soil allowing new plants, new life to grow. Without the burn, new plants would die or be unable to grow due to other plants sucking all the nutrients. I wondered to myself thinking of this in light of Charlottesville – what about the roots of these old plants? What happens to the roots in burning season? What I’ve found is that the focus of a controlled burn is on the health of the soil, and not about any individual plant or root system.
Our roots are under fire right now. Our personal roots, the roots of our faith community, and the roots of our nation are getting close to the flame. You can feel the heat, can’t you? It feels like at any time something is waiting to explode or implode, leading to a lot of anxiety about what’s going to happen next, and where, and to whom. Is Youngstown immune from having hate groups organize? Absolutely not. We can’t control hate, but we can choose love. But choosing love demands that we be specific. It demands that we become clearer about who we are, and how we can practically respond in our personal lives and as a community.
It is not enough anymore to define ourselves by what we are not. It is not enough anymore to have our primary identity be tied to negation, what we don’t want or don’t believe. We can no longer be satisfied with freedom of belief for the sake of itself. This is a shallow understanding of freedom. Freedom that is mature and vital is always using our freedom in the service of others. Our church and our country are not helped right now by a definition of freedom that is ambiguous and open ended. The flame has been lit, and the flames are asking us – what will you use your freedom for? What will you use your religion for? And we don’t have much time to dawdle about this. If we fail to heed to call to tie our personal freedom to the freedom of all people, we will have wasted our freedom. We would have wasted a gift.
It is not enough for us to stand against hate. This is only the beginning. For our efforts to remain vital and long lasting, we will need to construct and affirm what we stand for. Our churches and our country are both in constructive mode – trying to gain clarity about who we really are and what we’re committed to. We’re trying to express the best use of our freedom, including religious freedom.
We have spent many decades in deconstruction, in looking at our roots and deciding what we needed to hold onto, and what we were ready to let go. Everyone here including myself is here because of some kind of deconstruction, some kind of taking stock, and assessing what kind of community would best be able to nourish our spirit, and support us to become who we know deep down we are meant to be.
It is important to pay attention to what prompted hate groups to rally in Charlottesville. They came to prevent a statute of Robert E Lee from being removed. Cities across the country have been removing statutes that honor the confederacy, in certain places the confederate flag has been removed, and in certain places it’s been kept up. Cities are attempting to change the narrative of our country, focusing on being a union, one nation, rather than a divided one. In a time when partisan politics have divided families and communities so starkly, cities are putting themselves in the place of African Americans who have to see a Robert E lee statue on their way to work or school, and be reminded of a country that saw them as nothing more than property. Cities are attempting to move our country forward toward an understanding of ourselves that is more just and humane.
But what we are finding out is just as these changes are taking place, the past is coming to haunt us with a vengeance. We are being confronted with the roots of hate, and our task in this confrontation is simple but not easy. We are being asked to know our history without drowning in it. We are being asked to look clear eyed at who we’ve been, and what we’ve believed, without letting it delay who we are attempting to become.
This is true for us personally. Often when we try to make a positive shift, a change in line with our values, we are challenged – challenged by our habits, our past, and the stories we have about it. We can feel trapped by our past, unable to break free of it. Or we feel that the only way we can move forward is to disown our past, who we were, what we believed. Charlottesville is teaching us to respect our past, but not let it limit us.
Sophia Lyon Fahs, the author of our responsive reading, was a religious educator who believed that the primary role of a religious educator was to encourage children to ask better questions. I think it’s the same for us, no matter what age we are. I think we are encouraged now to ask better questions. We are moving beyond asking questions that limit and cut us off from others.
We are moving beyond drowning in our past. We are looking squarely at the most difficult roots of our history, a history of racism, and we’re asking ourselves and our communities – now what?
I told someone that you know things are really bad when the church becomes a home for radicals. Church is typically the last place people go to be on the cutting edge of change, and yet here we are. And I think the reason is because we are waking up to the fact that what we believe matters. And the litmus test for our beliefs is found in how we live our daily lives. As a culture we are given in this moment a temporary reprieve from an obsession with consumerism and an obsession with a personal sense of happiness…and we are being asked to think more expansively, to think about other people, and how our actions impact others. Without most of us being aware, we are being led to confront our deepest beliefs, and discern if they are enough. If they are enough for us to live, and if they are enough to allow others to more fully live. This is why we’re here. We’re here to more fully live. Death is real, and it can feel especially real when we embody our beliefs and carry them out in the world, meeting the world as it is, full of pain, full of hatred, full of possibility.
May we as a community be a beacon of light for those who are hurting, those in pain. May we be a beacon of light, a light for ourselves, able to honestly meet our past without being limited by it.