A SERMON TO MYSELF AND MY WHITE COLLEAGUES
MARK 5:34
He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
Sometimes the Spirit leads us to apparent contradictions. That being the case, I’d like to talk about listening; specifically, listening for Black lives. For a White preacher like myself, the challenge of this book, Preaching Black Lives (Matter) is an inherently thorny one. My people are the producers and beneficiaries of White Supremacist structures that demean both Black lives and the importance of those lives. This is not solely a historical matter. Consciously or otherwise, we participate in and reaffirm these structures every day. Therefore, we have a special moral responsibility to bring them down.
But all too often when we raise our voices to denounce White supremacy (if we raise them at all), we do so in ways that re-inscribe patterns of White supremacy. All too often, the very act of raising our voices draws attention away from Black witnesses, who are more capable than we to testify about the importance of their own lives. Speaking from a position of power, like a pulpit, only amplifies this effect of re-centering Whiteness. So we work at cross purposes, undercutting the very people for whom we aspire to advocate.
If we are silent, we tacitly support the forces of White supremacy, and the unjust profit they deliver to us. If we speak, we repeat patterns of White supremacy that perpetually privilege White voices. We are in a devil’s bind. What is to be done?
There is no easy answer, but we might begin by taking a cue from one of our own, a White man, indeed a very White man, who was nonetheless a foster child of the Black church,1 one murdered for his witness on behalf of those whom Whiteness demeaned:
It is God’s love for us that He not only gives us His Word but also lends us His ear. So it is His work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they have to render. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking.2
If we do not listen, we will not understand what is required, for Black lives alone can tell what justice they require. If we do not listen, we will never know our own blind spots. If we do not listen, and indeed, allow ourselves to be transformed by the voices we hear, there is no hope for us.
We who are called White must preach for Black lives. The sin that threatens them is ours, and our Savior will not excuse us if we fail to raise our voices. But if we are to preach for Black lives, we must first learn to listen for Black lives. Reading the witnesses of this book might be a good place to start. But for us, listening, rather than merely hearing, is no easy feat.
In her book White Fragility, the secular educator Robin DiAngelo describes and critiques the defensive responses we (that is White people) deploy when encountering, and especially when challenged on, the issues of race and racism.3 She makes the point that while these defenses are often unconscious and reflexive, they are not innocent, but rather, weaponized. They work to derail honest conversations on racism, and thereby obliterate even the possibility of confronting and dismantling the structure of White supremacy.
DiAngelo is an atheist, but if we were to translate her ideas into a theological framework, we might say that White fragility represents sin’s effort to remain unexamined. In the face of such dissembling fragility, DiAngelo’s prescription is simple: “toughen up.” Her central argument is:
Stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing. An honest accounting of these patterns is no small task given the power of white fragility and white solidarity, but it is necessary.4
And it is necessary. White fragility shouts like hell to drown out Black voices. We must learn to muzzle it, if we ever hope to listen for Black lives.
When Christians encounter a new moral claim, it’s almost reflexive to ask ourselves: “What would Jesus say about this?” Often, this question leaves us sorting through complicated and conflicting testimony. But there are those blessed, startling moments when Christ’s witness is so clear as to silence all debate.
As we consider DiAngelo’s claims regarding White fragility, the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Syrophoenecian woman offers just such a testimony.
[Jesus] set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “[Lord], even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. (Mark 7:24–30)
For many Christians, myself included, this is one of the most cringeworthy passages of the Bible. There are multitudes of verses of scripture that we weaponized to support discrimination, disenfranchisement, even genocide. But this may be the only time we hear such words come explicitly from the mouth of Christ. Hearing what sounds like racism from a man we proclaim as Messiah should give us pause.
Before proceeding, let me offer two disclaimers. First, historically, it’s not quite accurate to label Jesus’s rebuke as “racist.” Both racism and race are recent inventions, scarcely more than five hundred years old. As Du Bois famously noted:
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.5
Racism—that is, the project of sorting humanity into a small number of groups based on an arbitrarily chosen set of physical attributes, with the purpose of establishing and enforcing a universal hierarchy among them—is a decidedly new idea. But ethnocism—that is, the project of arguing for and enforcing various hierarchies of human ancestry—is certainly ancient. And it can fairly be described as a kind of antecedent to racism.
This distinction is more than simply academic. One of racism’s fundamental lies is that race is both eternal and natural. In fact, it is neither. When we uncritically and anachronistically read racism and race back into scripture, we contribute to the lie of race’s inevitability and immortality. And if we attribute divine characteristics to human constructions, we are rightly called idolaters.
That said, while Jesus’s comment to the Syrophoenician woman is not racist, it is decidedly enthnocist. Mark is content to imply this fact (though it takes very little inference to catch his meaning). Matthew’s