Racism: Moving Beyond the Past

Mark 7:24-30

Rev. Monte Marshall

A little over a week ago, a meeting of four historically African-American Methodist denominations in Washington, D. C. issued “a clarion call…to end racism.”  Churches were also encouraged to observe September 6, 2015, “as a Sunday of Confession, Repentance & Commitment to End Racism.”  Today’s service is a direct response to this call. 

Bishop Reginald Jackson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church told this historic gathering:  “It seems that 239 years after our nation’s founding, and 151 years since the Civil War, we are still not ‘One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all….It is also discrimination and bias built into laws and policies:  the racism of being stigmatized and targeted because of the color of our skin…that must be confronted.” 

In a follow-up news release from The United Methodist Church’s General Board of Church and Society announcing the call, it was noted that “Over the last six years [since the election of President Obama and at the beginning of what some have called a “post-racial era”]…there has been an increasing and polarizing spirit in the nation motivated by race and racism seen in every area of American life.”  The news release then cited a recent New York Times poll in which “over 60% of Americans” indicated a belief “that race relations have gotten worse during this period.”[1]

For me, confronting racism means dealing with my past.  The truth is:  I learned the basics of racism from my parents and from other family members, and from the people in my church and from others in the larger community.  I heard my mom and dad and other adults I respected, use the “N-word” and other racial and ethnic slurs.  My mom made it clear to me that dating outside of my race was not acceptable to her. 

As a child of the South, and without really understanding the full implications of my actions, I did my part to keep the Civil War alive by taking up the rebel cause on backyard battlefields while playing at war with my brothers and cousins and neighborhood kids.  I grew up under the influence of Southern icons like the Confederate flag and a cartoon character called “Johnny Reb.”

And frankly, I learned the basics of racism simply by being steeped in the system.  And my position within the system shaped what I learned.  And that position was one of white privilege.

As an adult, I now understand exactly what Oscar Hammerstein meant when he wrote the lyrics to the song You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught from the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, South Pacific: 

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,

It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught![2]

There’s a scene in the movie 42 that underscores the point.  The movie is about Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play professional baseball in the previously all-white big leagues.   He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The movie depicts a ballgame played at Crosley Field in Cincinnati, Ohio on June 21, 1947.  Attending the game is a young boy and his father from the neighboring state of Kentucky.  When Robinson steps onto the field, he’s met by the usual vicious chorus of boos and racial slurs.  The boy’s father joins in.  The boy looks uncomfortable; he seems unsure of what to do.  He looks around at the other fans; he pauses for a second, and then, with a new found conviction evident in his face, he joins the crowd, shouting the same racial slur and derogatory phrase that he’s just heard from his father and others in the crowd.[3]

Now I confess that the racism I was taught from my earliest days has been like a persistent, toxic pollutant in my life.  I deal with the lingering effects of this pernicious evil to this very day.  Despite my best efforts to expel its poison from my life, unwelcomed, bigoted thoughts still manage to invade my consciousness.  I have to be ever vigilant.  Even then, I’m certain that racial prejudices still influence my actions in ways that I don’t even know.

But there is something I do know.  To end racism means moving beyond the past.  This is true for our society and for our individual lives.  To end racism, policies must change; practices must change; and hearts must change.  And yes, our African-American Methodist siblings are correct:  If we are to make a commitment to end the scourge of racism, confession and repentance are required.   

   And it seems to me that this morning’s scripture reading points us in the right direction, but in a way that many of us may find disturbing.  The text is from Mark’s gospel and the issue is not prejudice based on skin color, but prejudice based on ethnicity.  And as we’ll see, there are commonalities between these two forms of discrimination. 

Now to the disturbing part of the story:   Jesus utters an ethnic slur as if he too had been “carefully taught.”  He says to a desperate, Gentile woman lying prostrate at his feet, and begging him to deliver her daughter from a serious affliction:  “’Let the children of the household satisfy themselves at table first.  It is not right to take the food of the children and thrown it to the dogs.’”  And isn’t this always the word of the oppressor to the oppressed:  “Wait!  The time for your deliverance is not yet!” 

Biblical interpreters have tried to dance around the offensiveness of this reply, but there is really no way around it.  As one commentator David Henson puts it:  “Jesus calls the unnamed woman a dog.”  This was a common ethnic slur at the time used by Jews to demean non-Jews. 

And it’s a slur spoken by the one who holds the powerful position in the exchange.  Hansen notes:  “In our modern times, we know that power plus prejudice equals racism.”[4]

Now the “children of the household” who are to be satisfied first at the table, are Israelites—the people who are of the same religion and ethnicity as Jesus.  Jesus indicates that they are to eat first at the banquet.  This implies that eventually, the gentiles will be able to eat at the table themselves.  But in the meantime, they have to wait their turn, no matter how desperate their needs may be. 

Now it seems to me that in the second comment that Jesus makes, what he gives in one breath, he takes away—or at least calls into question—in the next.  Jesus makes a comment about the inappropriateness of taking “the food of the children” and throwing it “to the dogs.” 

Hansen offers this comment:  “When confronted with the gentile pagan in this story, [Jesus] explains that his message and ministry are for Israelites only, a comment of ethnic exclusion and prejudice that calls to mind a similar refrain from a more modern time—whites only—that reverberated through the South not too long ago.  It wouldn’t be fair, Jesus explains, to take the banquet prepared for his people—the children, the humans—and give it to gentiles—the dogs, the less than human.”[5]

Hansen then asks the question:  “So what are we to make of this exchange?”  And his reply is worth considering.  He writes:  “This, I think, is the great lesson of the Syrophoenician woman.  It teaches us the dynamics of power and prejudice, of how even the best of humanity—the Incarnation himself—can get caught up in systems of oppression, in a culture of supremacy.  Like many of us today, Jesus would have been reared into a prejudiced worldview.”[6]

But now for the rest of the story:  Thankfully, Mark’s narrative takes a redemptive turn.  The woman confronts Jesus by taking his dehumanizing ethnic slur, and turning it to her advantage:  “Yes, Rabbi, but even the dogs under the table eat the family’s scraps.”    

And how does Jesus respond?  He moves beyond his past.  He does what Hanson calls “the most difficult thing for those of us born into prejudice and power.”  He listens.  He hears.  And he changes his mind.  According to Hanson, “It is the only time recorded in the gospels in which Jesus changes his mind.”[7]

And it’s an amazing transformation.  To quote Hanson:  “Jesus is astounded, the holy wind knocked out of him.  A moment before, she was but a dog to him.  In the next, the scales fall from his eyes as he listens to her and sees her for what she truly is, a woman of great faith.”

And when this sort of thing happens to us, we too will be changed.  As Hanson says, “When…we finally have ears to hear, we will never be the same, will never be able to listen to the lies of the dominant oppressors the same way again.

“You see, when Jesus listened to the Syrophoenician woman, he heard not only the truth of her reality.  He also heard the brokenness of his own reality.  Both must happen in order to confront ethnic prejudice in any time—and yes, racism in our time.  We must be able to hear the realities of the oppressed and disenfranchised as true.  This, in and of itself, can be difficult for those of us who are members of a privileged race or gender, to accept a foreign reality without qualifications, to listen without interrupting, to hear without reworking their experiences into the dominant cultural narratives embedded within us.  But we must also be able to hear the brokenness of our own realities and our own stories.  We must hear our own incompleteness.

“So, in the end, Jesus’ exchange [with a Syrophoenician woman] offers us perhaps the most powerful story for white people like me who seek to stand against oppression.  It compels us to listen to the narratives of the oppressed we devalue implicitly.  It requires us to listen to our own prejudice.  It asks us to do the unthinkable:  to own our culture’s hate and to be changed by the realities of the marginalized.”[8]

Dear friends, isn’t it time—no, isn’t it past time—to heed the call of our African-American siblings and follow Jesus in moving beyond the racism of the past and into a new day of liberation in which there’s finally, liberty and justice for all?  And may God help us!  Amen.