PREACHING RACIAL JUSTICE AND RECONCILIATION FOR THE LONG-TERM
"03012006-212712" by T Hall is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The Black Lives Matter protests throughout our country in response to the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery have raised awareness about our nation’s systemic injustices of racism and white supremacy. For preachers, this moment of clarity has provided a challenge to be clear about the gospel call to racial justice and our church’s need to repent for our own complicity in racial injustice. We know, however, that when cameras have moved on, the work will not be done. Many of us have entered pulpits or Zoom screens to proclaim messages of social transformation at the edge of our congregation’s capacity to hear. We have marched with protesters, written statements, and re-directed outreach funds in response to the undeniable needs of the moment. Our churches have longed for a theological understanding of the crisis gripping our nation. Important and significant steps have been taken, and we know that miles of road remain before us.
To lead our congregation to a place where we see justice rolling down like mighty waters requires a long-term commitment to preaching about racism and how we can overcome it. To be effective, such a commitment requires a creative and sophisticated strategy. Our congregations need to hear consistently how we can do the hard work to become a beloved community while also engaging the broad scope of our lectionary’s scripture readings and practical applications about evangelism, discipleship, stewardship and other core Christian teachings. The good news is that we can successfully do this work as preachers.
Understanding the Preaching Task of Transforming a Congregation
Any significant congregational change is going to take time and leadership. Helping a church understand the sociological and historical complexities of racial injustice, own their own participation in structures of racial oppression, and make positive changes in their individual and corporate lives is an enormous undertaking. A single sermon, however expertly crafted and powerfully delivered, is not able to do such work. Even a dynamic sermon series will only move so far. When we as preachers feel like we have said everything we have to say, we have probably reached the point where the message is beginning to sink into the souls of our congregation. At that moment instead of moving on we need to keep going.
Too often, we think of our sermons as individual events designed to elicit a particular congregational response. Many homiletics courses and books teach this model by mandating a single sermon focus. As church leaders, however, our conversations with our congregation don’t end after twelve minutes on Sunday morning, nor are our pews filled with entirely new people every week. Just like any conversation with a loved one might have a particular focus while weaving in the events of the day and the season’s key concern, so those listening to our sermons can follow more than one important thread each week, assuming those threads are clearly articulated. Instead of school essays, we can think of our preaching as another movie release in a cinematic series. To be effective, each film has to have a coherent story and focus while also including enough elements of the overall storyline to move the franchise ahead. We can certainly keep a sermonic arc focusing on racial justice while a particular week’s sermon focuses on Advent, the doctrine of the Trinity, Paul’s theology, an Old Testament prophecy, or a gospel parable. Without an ongoing strategy, most of the good steps taken in the past weeks will slip away as we turn again to the church’s business as usual.
A useful way of imagining the work we are doing is teaching people a new language, in this case a language of racial justice and reconciliation. We aren’t trying to get people to take on a single new practice and move on. We want them to see their own actions and the world around them from a different perspective. This change requires a new vocabulary, and we only learn and appropriate a new vocabulary by using it repeatedly over time. This change requires hearing different voices, and those voices have to speak often enough that they go from being novel to being normal. This change requires learning practical steps forwards, beginning with the kind of work St. Paul refers to as milk and moving over time into solid spiritual food. This change also requires that we as preachers continue to grow so we can lead our congregations beyond where we are now. Especially those of us who are white preachers need to recognize that we do not have all the experiences and information our congregations need. We can’t transform our churches without listening to those who differ from us and being transformed ourselves.
Ideas for Creatively Preaching Racial Justice and Reconciliation Over the Long-Term
Preaching racial justice and reconciliation over the long term will occasionally involve sermons whose key focus addresses racism. Most weeks, however, our long term theme will be addressed for a few minutes within the context of the day’s focus. Those minutes might even come in a different portion of the liturgy than the specific words spoken in the sermon. Here are some possibilities.
Highlight justice themes in the day’s scriptures. The Bible is full of passages that offer a vision of a beloved community, critique human divisions, or otherwise call us to a world of justice and righteousness. Those themes can be addressed as part of the scripture exegesis even if the sermon focuses on a different aspect of the text. A sermon on Namaan could focus on the power of God to heal and still manage to note the importance of listening to the voice of the slave in Namaan’s household. A Pentecost sermon on the various activities of the Holy Spirit can spend a few minutes on overcoming ethnic divisions.
Bring diverse voices into preaching and worship – and sometimes take worship out to diverse voices. The only way to master a new language is by hearing native speakers. A white congregation cannot do the work of racial justice without hearing black voices. Sometimes those voices need to be physically present. We can invite African American pastors to preach to our congregations. Sometimes this requires creativity since most pastors are busy Sunday morning. Often, however, different traditions have a different line-up of services for Holy Week, Christmas and other feasts. Allowing a colleague to come on Good Friday also sends a stronger message than just looking for someone to fill a spot on Martin Luther King weekend. We can also take our congregations to other churches. I have at times done a streamlined 10:00am service at my church to allow the congregation to attend the 11:00am service at a local African American church. Watch Night, which commemorates slaves staying up on December 31, 1862 to watch for the Emancipation Proclamation to come the next morning, is also a time our congregations can join a local black congregation. Beyond having local pastors join us, we can hear other voices by sharing another church’s concerns and passions. We might add their prayer list to our own, or take up a collection and ask for volunteers for one of their ministries, even inviting a representative to speak to us for a few minutes. With a little effort, we can have a voice from a congregation that doesn’t look like us speak to ours. In return for the gifts offered to us, we offer prayer and generous financial support.
Highlight practical examples of racial justice and reconciliation efforts. We can’t expect our people to know what to do next unless we take time to show them. Our social media feeds are currently filled with resources, ideas, and exemplars of how we can successfully undertake this work. Sometimes we will be teaching a new behavior as one of a handful of applications in a sermon. Sometimes we will be explaining concepts like implicit bias and how that has affected scriptural figures or our public discourse. Sometimes we will shorten our sermon to spend five minutes during announcements explaining why we need to attend a local bystander intervention training. When our parishioners are engaged in positive changes, we want to lift those up to the entire church. Over a couple of months, our congregation needs multiple ways that they can undertake anti-racism work in different aspects of their lives.
Most of you reading this blog probably have numerous other examples of ways that we can preach and lead our congregations in the work of racial justice and reconciliation. I hope you will share them. This work is impossible to do on our own, and it is too big for any of us to figure out ourselves. We are also not going to address it in a single sermon, or sermon series, or season. We need a creative commitment to preaching God’s righteousness that will involve our own growth as we lead our congregations. Gratefully, we are called to nothing less and, with God’s help, we can live into that call.
