This sermon is based on Galatians 3:26-29

In case you hadn’t guessed from the 1500 words I shoved into your email inbox on Friday, there are two sermons I want to give today; two thoughts are vying for first place in my mind as I listen for the word of God to share with you this morning.  Today is the day of my daughter’s baptism. In just a few minutes, Evelyn will be marked with the sign of God’s grace and her place in the kingdom, and whenever I think about what is about to happen, I am filled to overflowing with words of gratitude, wonder, hope, and humility.

At the same time, another word is burning in my bones, a word that has come to me through you.  Last June, when I asked each you to share with me the topic that you wanted to hear addressed in worship, two particular themes showed up most often in your responses. By far, the most common question submitted was “what happens to my loved ones when they die?”  Do they go straight to heaven? Do they become angels, and are they really watching over me?  Can their presence be here with me here on earth? We will talk about that question in a couple of weeks. The second most common theme in your questions was “race.” It came in just ahead of “Did God send the tornadoes?” which is something we’ll talk about during Easter. You asked questions like “Are inter-racial relationships Godly?” and “How should we love others no matter who they are: whatever their social/economic status, race, or background”? In addition, many of you have studied the book of Genesis in the past year and have asked about an old theory of race you once heard, based on the so-called “curse of Ham.” And so, some time ago, I set aside this Sunday to try and open up a biblical conversation about race, and I am loath to put aside those words on this Martin Luther King weekend just because it happens to be a day of baptism.

But the word that we have heard today suggests that there is some Providence – some holy leading – in these two words that I keep thinking of: race and baptism. Because the word that God has given us through the Apostle Paul reminds us that whenever the question pops into our mind – “Race?” – the answer that ought to pop right up with it is “Baptism.” In the book of Galatians, you will remember, Paul is dealing with the closest thing the New Testament has to a question about race. He is addressing a congregation that is not sure how or whether Gentiles – non-Jewish people – can belong to the church.  “Isn’t the messiah for Israel?” the people ask.  “Shouldn’t salvation be for Jews, or at least, for those who will let themselves become Jewish by circumcision?”  And how does Paul respond? He says, “Whose name was put on you at baptism? Jesus.” So, Paul concludes, if you have been baptized, you are clothed in Christ. You are wearing Jesus.  You don’t get to go out in the world and wear your white skin, or black skin, or brown skin, or foreskin, or the lack thereof the way you would wear your Roll Tide hat and the look for folks in houndstooth. You don’t get to figure out who belongs based on their color of skin or color of clothing. Your Jesus coat covers up all of that.  All you get to look for is Jesus. When you see someone wearing Jesus, you know that’s your people.  And, incidentally, when you see somebody without their Jesus on – when they are shivering under thin layers of loneliness, when they put on an awful scratchy sweater of meanness, when they are absolutely naked and exposed by their own self-destruction, then you get to look at them and think, “I’ve got a soft, warm Jesus coat that would fit them just right.” And you start thinking about how you might get them to put it on.  When you’ve been baptized, Paul says, the only people left in this world are your family and those who might be.

But alas, our history doesn’t always live up to God’s reality.  Sometimes, it just seems so much easier to believe what our eyes tell us, that there are divisions and distinctions among us that are a lot more visible than baptism. But our eyes are tricky things, and what we see with them often tells us more about the reality in our heads than reality in the world.

For example, the Scriptures don’t have much to say about race or racism because for the ancient Hebrews and Christians, race did not exist.  This wasn’t because these people were somehow morally superior to us; Bible folk fall into all kinds of prejudices along with all their other sins. It’s just that the in the world of Jesus and his ancestors, no one would have thought skin color, or hair type, or any other physical characteristic told you much about who a person was.  For the Jews – and all their contemporaries – a person’s belonging had nothing to do with their physical appearance. Identity came from three things: your land, your people, and your worship.  The Scriptures introduce us to people from all over the ancient world – e.g. Rome, Babylon, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the vaguely designated “Wise men from the East.” It never occurs to the biblical writers to lump any of these groups together.  The Hittites and the Philistines and the Ammonites are not “Semitic” or “Middle-Eastern looking.”  They are Hittites and Ammonites and Philistines, and they live in different places, under different kings, and they worship different idols. And nobody gets any points for looking more like the Israelites than the Ethiopians and the Persians do. One important consequence of building identity around land, people, and worship is that anyone might change their identity.  If an Ammonite would move into the Promised Land, live by the Jewish law (including circumcision for men) and worship Yahweh, that person could marry a Jew and be just as much Jew as anyone else.  Nowadays, we tend to ask questions like “is Judaism a religion, or an ethnicity”; in the biblical times the question would have been nonsense.  The only question mattered was “who are your people.” If you were willing to change your people – who it was you worshipped with and lived with – you could change your identity.  One of the insidious evils of thinking that such a thing as “race” exists it tempts us to “understand” or identify someone without knowing their land, their worship, or their people.  The most insidious thing about thinking that “race” exists is that we believe some part of us in unchangeable because it is embedded in our skin. And baptism has a thing or two to say to that.

So if we can’t find the word or the idea of race in the bible, it must come to us from somewhere else. It is hard to pin down exactly when it first occurred to humanity that skin color was a classification and not just a characteristic.  From what I’ve read, it seems the change has some connection to when “the known world” began to expand south of the Sahara and well east of Persia. Once the world contained more lands and peoples and gods than folks could know well, folks reduced the world by lumping people together as races.

However it happened, there’s no denying that in America the invention of “race” held particular sway because this was a country full of people who had explicitly left behind land, and people, and who wanted to worship in all sorts of ways.  If you needed to get along in this new country without having a homeland or culture or worship in common, it was really helpful to invent whiteness as the thing that the Scots-Irish and the Italians and the Germans all have in common, even if they would never have guessed it back in their homelands. And if some folks become white, then some folks become un-white, and the original sin of our country is born.  Our tendency to think and see racially led to the abomination of slavery and the distortions of racial thinking that plague us still today.

Along the way, these sins began to distort our worship and our faith.  Some folks began to teach that God created race. Among the most common justifications of racial thinking (mis)used the story of Noah’s dishonored son Ham. You may know the story. One day, Noah gets a little too deep into his vineyard, makes a fool of himself and passes out naked. His son Ham calls attention to Noah’s humiliation and so Noah curses Ham and Ham’s children.  Never mind that the Scripture never once hints at Ham’s skin color. Never mind that the Scripture goes on to say that Ham’s children included people in every region of the world. Somehow, someone began to teach that the “curse” Noah had placed on Ham was the beginning of certain races.  We don’t know exactly when this teaching began; we don’t even know that it was originally a Christian teaching.  Historians have found Islamic and Jewish sources to go with Christian ones.  It may have begun in North Africa as a way for northern Africans to justify enslaving folks from south of the Sahara.  This teaching, without a shred of sound logic or Biblical evidence to support it, became widespread in the American South, and was eventually included in the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible (the most popular study bible of various fundamentalist churches).  There is dark comedy in noting that when the fundamentalist Bob Jones University came under fire in this decade for its ban on inter-racial dating, the university was caught holding a teaching that was not only unbiblical, but may have come from Islam. And this is what they call taking the bible “literally.”

But the more we believed in racial identity, the more it became real, so that we cannot say that racial divisions are imaginary. They are real, even if they are in our minds.  They are most real in the church. We all have to shop; we all have to go to school; we all (apparently) have to play or follow sports, and so these realms have made huge advances in overcoming racial divisions. But, because the church is still entirely voluntary, we remain divided. 90% of white Americans attend an all-white church. 95% of black Americans attend an all-black church.  Some of this is for reasons that appear good; the churches that carried each community through tough times are still alive and kicking, and folks don’t want to abandon the people and churches that have made them.  And yet, that cannot change the fact of our division. And there are even less holy reasons for these divisions.  We continue to distrust “the other.” We continue to see others’ ways of worship as “less than.” We continue to make broad generalizations about each other. Or, and this may be worse, we pretend that nothing is wrong because the problems seem too big or too explosive to mention.

But we, as Christians, who have been given freedom in Jesus ought not be afraid. We must be willing to confront and talk about the sin of racial thinking even when we’d rather not.  And as we do so, I think two things should guide our speech.

First is confession. We must continue to confess that all is not as God wants it and that God’s people do not yet fully live as “one in the Spirit.” We do not live according our baptism, and we have not for a long time. We must confess the part that we have played in this division and keep confessing until God heals it.

And, as we confess, we can begin to overcome. We can begin to acknowledge the reality of race without giving into it by asking each other about his or her land, people, and worship.

Race makes a difference in how people experience life, but the differences are not universal.  I long ago gave up assuming I know anything about white people. Because I am one and have spent so much time around them, I have seen too many variations on “white” to assume anything about a person’s intelligence, history, culture or faith.  So what makes me think I can presume to know anyone else?

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a friend from seminary named Victor-Lamonte, who grew up in inner-city Pittsburgh. One day I mentioned as part of a story that I and my wife had been cooking collard greens a few days before.  Victor-Lamonte cut me off and said, “Wait, what white folks know about greens?” To which I replied “What does a Yankee know about them?” Race tells us nothing about each other when compared to knowing the towns and neighborhoods and homes in which we grew up. If you want to know someone, ask them about the house, and the family, and the neighbors that shaped them. Ask about the farm or the neighborhood.  In the asking and in the answering, it will become clear that we all come from diverse places, and the race is just a lazy way of summing up what those differences are. People and place do much more to tell us where someone comes from.

And if you want to know where someone is going, you need to know their worship. What are they striving for, longing for, where do they find and place their hope?  If they are worshipping the God of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Esau, Jacob, and Jesus, then you and they are headed in the same direction. When we ask others “What do you love about God; why and how do you worship him?” we are bound to learn something about the One to whom we ourselves are headed.  And when we find ourselves in His presence, we realize that our place and our people are theirs too.  We find that we all come from the blessed waters, and we know that all God’s people are the ones with whom we belong.