Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
Guest sermon preached
at Foundry UMC Sunday, July 19, 2015 by guest preacher Rev. Dr. Alton B.
Pollard III,
Dean and Professor of Religion and Culture at Howard University School of
Divinity.
Scripture: 1 Peter 3:15 - “Always be ready to give an
account … of the hope that lies within you.”
“In spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a
dream.”
Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr.
“God says to you, ‘I have a dream.
Please help me to realize it.’” - Archbishop Desmond Tutu
I am honored to bring you greetings from Howard University School of Divinity where it is my privilege to serve as dean. Foundry UMC and Pastor Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli, it is good to be with you this morning. I was humbled and surprised by the invitation to serve as an “Outstanding Preacher” for your “Summer in the City Series.” I find strength for my journey in your uncommon dedication to building beloved community in this your bicentennial year.
My wife Jessica and I moved to Washington, DC, eight years ago. We quickly learned that the District of
Columbia is really the Districts of Columbia, a city administratively divided
into four quadrants and filled with demographic fault lines as well, where
urban development has long been a means to human displacement and power and
privilege, dominance and division, inequity and disparity, systemic and
strategic neglect, amid the scandal and controversy of federal taxation without
representation are the order of the day.
Renting a house in the city, Jessica and I witnessed the changing landscape,
what many call progress: the uprooting of established homeowners and renters,
many of whom were Black and elderly, and the arrival of earnest young people,
most of whom were white, and ready to take their place. The many open houses we attended – all at
prices beyond our means – reflected the neighborhood “renaissance” and
population shift.
The history of DC’s urban makeover dates back to the late nineties, as a once
vibrant center city vacated and boarded up, was once again made ready for
business. For the first time in generations,
an infusion of development dollars poured into the District. Traditional family dwellings were converted
to luxury apartments and condo units.
Abandoned Victorian houses were renovated and Brownstones restored. The construction of new houses grew commonplace. Entire city blocks gave way to
microenterprise. Growth and expansion was everywhere – almost. Black
Washingtonians were largely excluded from the preferred lending practices and
opportunities now widespread.
In July 2011, Chocolate City unofficially became Caramel City per the U.S.
census and the New York Times:
This city, the country’s first to have an African-American majority and one of its earliest experiments in black self-government, is passing a milestone. Washington’s black population slipped below 50 percent this year, possibly in February, about 51 years after it gained a majority.
There is a common and self-congratulatory refrain that the United States is a post-racial society. The election of a two-term Black president and the popularity of the first family, on most days, are pointed to as evidence that we have overcome. Yet events of late from Florida (Trayvon Martin), New York (Eric Garner), and Ferguson (Michael Brown) to Baltimore (Freddie Gray) Houston (Sandra Bland) and Charleston (the Emanuel Nine) serve as stark reminders of what we already know. In communities and municipalities, suburbs and rural contexts, from sea to shining sea, racism is deeply and distressingly entrenched. Across the District of Columbia, the root causes of Black anger are not hard to find: from the exploding costs of renting or owning a home to troubled and closing public schools, from the spread of private schools many families cannot afford to chronic disparities in health care, from the epidemic of HIV/AIDS to endemic poverty, from police arrest strategies and youth incarceration patterns to structural unemployment assigned to select neighborhoods, precincts and wards.
Meanwhile, civic amenities known to cater to newcomers proliferate - street cars, zip cars, rideshare, bike share, Segways, dog parks, green parks, green grocers, corner bistros, and restricted parking, especially on Sunday morning – these may yet and still cause a riptide effect that exposes the raw racial, ethnic and socio-economic fault lines among us. Congressional veto power over the DC city budget and taxing authority only heightens the sense of distrust, that urban redevelopment and human displacement are really one and the same. Bi-partisan obstructionism and market forces dictate the new reality. Socio-cultural, political and economic, gentrification has many guises. Racism, America’s original sin, lives on.
Today there is as much talk about the unsettled state of affairs in our churches as there is in our communities, how to secure the future for our children and our children’s children, how to meet the needs of our families and our elders, and how to care for the least, the lost and the last. Tragically, our houses of worship, without regard to faith mirror society’s mistrust and territorialism. The largest reservoir of the un-churched are those who were once potential believers but who finally despaired of finding spiritual, moral and holistic fulfillment in communions where love, justice and compassion do not prevail. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the church became its own worst enemy, defenders of the status quo rather than beacons of hope, unable to dream God’s dream for God’s people everywhere. Memberships are in decline and congregations are in trouble. Indeed, families and communities are in trouble everywhere. Despite our human messiness, our calling as the people of God remains the same, to be faithful to the vision of One who is loving and just and a world where all of creation is set free.
God has a dream for us, a world and a way of life that embraces all people – black, brown and white, and every background, condition and circumstance – if we are only courageous enough to accept it. God calls us to proclaim the good news that leads to the transformation of our time. God calls us to be drum majors for justice and agents for peace. All too often, our lack of compassion confounds the disinherited of the world. Our unwillingness to love confuses God’s people. It disenfranchises them. It sends them away. As Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us in Stride Toward Freedom (1958):
Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men (and women) and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.
Today many of our nation’s citizens continue to suffer the indignity of social pathologies not of their making. There remains a culture of death and disprivilege and disparity visited upon persons who are more often than not Black, brown and poor and children, young women and men. In every city, suburb, and hamlet too many residents contend on a daily basis with all manner of inequity from racial profiling, unjust sentencing laws, and overwhelmed teachers to hostile civil servants, voting restrictions and disinterested social service providers. Others still, who are same gender loving, who are bisexual, transgender and queer find that because of matters of the human heart, for reasons born of sexual affection, because of whom they love and are loved, stigma and hate companion their lives and their sentence is to be silenced or turned away by the household of faith. Many of us, struggling with the frustration and alienation of this world, with our own shadowy and unfulfilled existence, with a kind of frenetic emptiness inside, are simply unable to make sense of life at all. Some of us choose to violently turn on one another, take the lives of others, and sometimes end our own. Rather than confront our contemptuous jailers, our physical and psychological chains hold us captive.
Ecclesiastes tells us that change is inevitable. Multicultural, bilingual, gender diverse, interreligious, telecommuting, and beautifully human, We the People of the United States are in the throes of birth pangs. How will the church respond? Will we hold steadfast to old and familiar patterns of the Christian faith, of winners and losers along the lines of religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sex and social class? Will we rely on spiritual platitudes and Christian clichés to placate us? Will we speak about reality unrealistically in order to convince ourselves that we have done enough? Will we sacrifice the beloved community on the altar of social conformity? The most entrenched evils of our day – bigotry, poverty, violence, rape, homelessness, unemployment, mass incarceration, anti-immigration, homophobia, global warming, genocide, child abuse, and human trafficking – await our deepest response. Are we ready to establish by grace and through faith a new and better world, a more just and inclusive one? Do we care enough for each other, for ourselves, for creation, for God, to act?
Through the years and across generations, there have always been those who in the time of crisis found ways to be resourceful, to mobilize, to advocate, to create moral and social networks based on their belief in the infinite worth of every human being everywhere. These are they who have demonstrated with a surpassing faith the capacity to entertain our better angels, to help us overcome our own worst fears, to advance the common cause, to advocate for the poor and dispossessed, to agitate for justice, to wage preemptive peace, to build a common humanity under a friendly sky, to beat swords into plowshares, to turn spears into pruning hooks, and to make the rough places plain; to engage in the kind of transcendent hope and prophetic advocacy that saves peoples lives and helps to make us whole.
Dreaming dreams and seeing visions, the fervent prayer of the people of God everywhere is for a better country and a better world. God’s dream for the church is that we build a more just and generous and loving community, that we overcome the great social barriers of our day with our very hearts and deeds and lives; that we embrace the infinite possibilities of the divine and expand the imperfect meaning of our democracy; that we transform ugliness and greed, poverty and squalor, alienation and disharmony, violence and hate into their glorious counterparts of beauty and holiness, fulfillment and security, equality and tranquility, love and life. Foundry UMC Church let us continue to covenant together, to reconcile together, and cultivate the qualities of love, forgiveness, humility, generosity and courage that will save our people’s lives. It is our sacred truth: We, all of us, belong to each other. We are of one blood all. We are sisters and brothers. We are one family. And God believes in us. Amen.
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