Light Living - 1st John 2:11-17 (Remembering Emanuel AME - Charleston, SC)

I saw the headlines on Thursday morning and part of me wanted to cry out like the Psalmist, “How long, O Lord, how long will the wicked win?”  Charleston, South Carolina—a horrendous massacre, attempts at another racial uprising.  And while this happened in Charleston, South Carolina, 290 miles from here—it truly hits a lot closer to home.  Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and opened fire, killing nine of, not only our brothers and sisters in Christ, but our brothers and sisters within our Wesleyan Methodist heritage.  As the week moved on, I learned that it hit even closer to home, as I found out that in Roof’s confessed attempt to start a “race war,” two of those killed were the cousins of one of my colleagues and friends, Reverend Johnnie Wright, pastor of Mebane United Methodist Church, not 290 miles from here, but less than fifteen miles.  It is a heartbreaking story of a congregation living out the Gospel, welcoming the stranger, reaching out to him without regard to the fact that his skin was a different color, only to find out that it was not an open, searching heart that he possessed, but one that was filled with venomous evil, already set on reigning violence down up this loving congregation that had done nothing but offer him Jesus.

My brothers and sisters, I hope that you have as hard a time as I have trying to understand the kind of hatred that a person can have for someone whose skin color is different from their own.  However, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.  I have not lived in many communities where Satan had not grabbed hold of folks.  When I was in high school, some of those who have decided to sign up for service under Satan in a group known as the Ku Klux Klan, marched through my hometown—unhooded, I recognized half of the marchers as fellow students.  I had someone in northern Granville County tell me that I was preaching sin when I suggested that those who are white and black should be able to worship together.  In Northampton County I had folks try to convince me that I should not have my children in school with all of the black children and even offered to pay for them to go to the private school in the county, and I was severely chastised for offering a ride to a local, older black gentleman when it was cold and rainy.  In all three of those rural counties, the Klan was either alive and well, or had been in the not too distant past.  I had grown excited when coming to Burlington, thinking that I would be free from having to deal with racism as much as I had in the country settings.  Sadly, though, while I don’t hear the “N-word” as much here as I did in the country, I hear derogatory names used for the Hispanic population, the Arabic residents, and those of Asian descent.  At other times, even when derogatory names aren’t used for folks whose skin color or ethnicity are different from white folks, other ethnicities are referred to as “those people,” as if their ethnicity makes them less.  Sadly, in each case, the folks making those statements were folks that went to church somewhere.  Not only did they attend church, but they were folks that at some point had received the waters of baptism and claimed to follow Christ, and in the United Methodist Church that even includes the vow of promising “to serve [Jesus Christ] as your Lord, in union with the church which Christ has opened to people of all ages, nations, and races….”

My brothers and sisters, right now it would seem that in our nation the biggest controversy that threatens the unity of the church is disagreement over homosexuality—of ordaining practicing homosexuals or performing same-sex weddings.  However, I think that the greatest threat to the unity of the church of Jesus Christ is not whether or not to embrace the homosexual lifestyle, but the sin that remains “in the closet,” the sin of racism.  It is the sin that so many white supremacists want us to understand as acceptable and morally right, they don’t want it to be called a sin—in fact, having done research on the Klan and read their educational material, groups like the Klan will manipulate and misuse God’s Word to try and convince other white folks that the Caucasian race is God’s chosen race.  They were heralded in the history of the South as Christ’s great knights, however the beliefs and actions of the Klan and others like them make them not Christian knights, but soldiers of Satan.  I firmly believe that you cannot be a racist and a Christian.  You cannot claim to follow Christ and hate the children of God.  God’s Word makes this clear:  “Whoever says, “I am in the light,” while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness.  Whoever loves a brother or sister lives in the light, and in such a person there is no cause for stumbling.  But whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has brought on blindness.”   God’s Word says that we cannot hate a brother or sister and still claim to walk in the light of Christ.  John says that if we hate any brother or sister then we don’t walk in the light, but we are far from Christ and lost in the darkness.

The truth of the matter is that if we reject anyone who’s skin color is different from our own as less than human, means that we reject Jesus who was of Jewish descent and would have resembled someone of Arabic or African descent more than someone who is European.  Yes, we have a lot of pictures hanging in a lot of churches of Jesus with strikingly white skin, but those are not photographs, they are paintings by folks who had not seen Jesus but simply looked in a mirror to come up with an idea of what Jesus might’ve looked like.

I thank God that Jesus was not a supremacist.  I am thankful that Jesus reached out to and loved the Samaritans (themselves a mixed race people), bringing healing to the Samaritan lepers, lifting them as the exemplary neighbor in his parable of the Good Samaritan, and commissioning the Samaritan woman at the well as the first to declare to the world that He was the Messiah.  I am thankful that Jesus reached out to bring healing to the Gentiles, touching the lives of the demoniacs tossed out by their community to live among the tombs.  I am thankful that God sent Phillip to the Ethiopian eunuch.  I am thankful that God had Paul and others spread the hope of Christ to all the surrounding nations as God embraced the Gentiles as well as the Jews.  I am thankful that Jesus did not practice excluding folks based on their ethnicity.  Why?  Because if He had, none of us would be here—we would be excluded from the people of God by virtue of being Gentile, by being non-Jewish.

My brothers and sisters, racism is not Godly and it is not natural.  It is a learned belief—it is taught and passed down from generation to generation.  When we were in Northampton County I watched as Davey and Natalie attending Rich Square—Creecy Elementary.  Davey was one of two white children in his class, all the other kids were black.  They played and talked and enjoyed one another’s company without any attention to skin color.  They saw the color of one another’s skin for what it is…just another physical characteristic—like being tall or short—like being blonde or brunette or redheaded or grey-haired—like being freckled or freckle-free—like having blue or green or brown eyes—to them that is all skin color was, and my friends, that is all it really is.  It was not until the kids hit Conway Middle School that they began to separate themselves—because someone had taught them that they shouldn’t associate with folks that didn’t look like them.I heard many of the older members of the community talk about how growing up they would play with non-Anglo children, the children of the workers on their family’s farm and didn’t see any difference until they asked about their friend eating a meal with them and were told that they couldn’t eat at the same table with their black friend (though that was not the word usually used) because that kind of thing was just wrong.  See, separating ourselves based on the color of our skin is not an innate part of who we are, it is taught and learned—and it is sin, the sin of worshipping our ethnicity more than we worship God and honor all who are created in His image, it is the sin of not loving like Christ loved and loves all of His children.

So what are we—we who claim Christ as our Lord and Savior—what are we supposed to do?  John tells us.  We are to accept the grace of God who cleanses us from sin and choose to walk in the light.  How do we walk in the light?  We choose love over hate.  We walk in the light by loving our brothers and sisters, regardless of the color of their skin, regardless of the language they speak, regardless of their nation of origin…we are to simply love them.  How do we love them?  John shares that with us in His Gospel.  When Jesus tells the disciples to love one another, He shows that it is more than simply using words, He shows them that true love is shown in action, as he washed their feet.  As Jesus talked about loving one another, it was through a willingness to serve one another, it was in taking a position of humility that honors the other by seeking to meet their needs, it is through embracing one another, it is through sharing a meal with one another, it is through living with one another…it is through rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep, it’s through ceasing to call others “those people” and begin calling them our brothers and sisters…that we begin living in the light.  

My friends, today we are going to live into the light as we take a full minute of silence in honor of those who lost their lives to the evil hatred of racism and stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

60 seconds of standing silence…

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, let us commit to Living in the Light.  Amen.