"From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded" (Lk.12.48b)

I. One might wonder, I suppose, why we are having a sermon on Racism today. It may sound like the 1960’s rather than the 90’s.

I can remember, and so can many of you, those amazing days: Bull Connor and his police dogs and fire hoses unleashed on civil rights demonstrators, Ross Barnet and George Corley Wallace standing in college doorways to block the entrance of black students, President Eisenhower sending troops to integrate the Little Rock schools, a black woman named Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, saying "my feets are tired, but my soul’s at rest."

Civil rights in the 60’s was a religious movement, run by churches. From the oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the busloads of white ministers headed south to demonstrations, it was a Christian crusade, fought with all the fervor of the earlier crusades but in a better cause. I remember attending my first NAACP meeting in the early 60s when I was in high school, maybe even junior high: we met in the basement of a black church, there were barely a dozen of us, mostly black students, a couple of whites; I don’t remember the topics discussed, but I remember vividly the end of the meeting, when we crossed arms and sang "We shall overcome." There have been few times in my life when heart and mind saw so clearly what was right and good. It was a religious experience.

The whole movement was like that: the churches, white and black, brought the sheer weight of moral authority to bear on the cause of racial equality. (I’m not sure that churches have the same moral authority anymore; the society listens to churches less; but it was a grand expenditure of capital, the history of which has not been written fully even yet.) This church played fully its own significant role, including putting our own resources on the line – in housing the Roxbury-Weston preschool for now over 20 years.

It all changed the face of America. I don’t know whether you caught the article in the Globe last week reporting that, for the first time ever in this country, black and white students have parity in high school graduation rates: the Census Bureau reported that among young adults ages 25 to 29, about 87 percent of both blacks and whites have earned high school diplomas. They also reported that "the percentage of black students attending college is increasing, as are their scores on achievement exams," ‘though in both areas, "minorities still lag behind whites."

But I think the most important change, the most significant achievement over the last 30 years, has been a change in attitude: there are still bigots, to be sure – loud, obnoxious and frightening bigots – but almost no one thinks racism is socially acceptable anymore. You may still be a bigot, but you probably know to keep your mouth shut – a David Duke does not get elected to office, outrageous behavior is not tolerated in workplace or school or social gathering, for the most part. That is a sea change from the world many of us can remember.

So I begin this sermon with good news: things have gotten better. The question then is: are things good enough?

II. Here is a dictionary definition of racism: "a belief that some races are by nature superior to others, (and the) racial discrimination based on such belief; Racism confers benefits upon the dominant group that include psychological feelings of superiority, social privilege, economic position, or political power."

This is a somewhat different focus than we had in the 60s. THEN we were looking at the specific acts of discrimination – not letting someone vote, or eat at your lunch-counter, or sit wherever they wanted on the bus. But now we’re talking about something not quite as blatant, but perhaps more insidious – "an unconscious and unacknowledged system of unearned white privilege and advantage . . . a system of valuation and perception that takes white experience as normative."

Do YOU think that you have benefited from a system of white privilege? Let me ask it another way: do you honestly believe that everything you have – and we have a lot here in Weston – do you honestly believe that you got it all JUST by your own hard work, and native intelligence, and good looks? (Well, a few of us, perhaps!). But what about those who have worked just as hard but are not doing so well? Life is unfair, of course . . . but what about those who have tried equally hard but are knocked down, held back, or simply discouraged by the systematic and endemic sense of failure around them and their families and their friends who all just happen to be black, or Asian, or American Indian? Would we have achieved as well as we have if we’d begun in their situation, or have we been recipients of good things we did not earn, of privilege?

I attended a fascinating program last summer with an Asian American film-maker named Lee Mun Wah, who helped us see the world through eyes other than our own. He came out from behind the podium so we could see him, noting that podiums in America are not built for Asian Americans. What would you think, he said, if you walked into a congregation, or a corporation, and 90% of the people did not look like you? What would you think if you learned that your father put a different name on your birth certificate, as his father did – listing Lee Mun Wah’s name as "Gary"– to try to protect you from discrimination? What would you think if you were a black child who when he watches TV sees guys being led away in handcuffs who look like him, and he begins to wonder "maybe that IS me." What does it feel like for a black child or an Indian or an Asian to take a box of crayolas and pull out the one labeled "flesh"?

Lee Mun Wah showed us a film he’d made of a discussion between two blacks, two whites, a Latino, a Japanese-American and a Chinese-American. In the film, and the discussion afterwards, he had a remarkable facility for lifting up some experiences that are largely invisible to white eyes. There was the black man who said "in corporate America, if you walk with pride, you scare people, so you have to walk with the 1990’s version of a shuffle." He asked the blacks in the audience how many had ever been stopped by the police while driving for no reason except that they were black in a white neighborhood – and every single black in the audience stood; they were guilty, one man said, of "the crime of driving while black."

The discussion wasn’t just about white privilege either. In the film, the Japanese American told the Chinese American that he’d been raised to see the Chinese as businessmen who were always trying to take you, to cheat you; and the Chinese American spoke of how his parents remembered the Sino-Japanese war, and how the Japanese were brutalizing, repressive, arrogant people.

But one of the most powerful moments in the film came with a discussion between a middle-class, suburban, white man and the blacks: why, said the white, can’t you just be an American and be judged as an individual, why do you have to always talk about being black? The black man said "because it’s like I’m living in a parking garage with those spikes at the gate – you whites go to the spikes and they lay down, we come to the spikes and they’re against us." The white guy said "I’m sorry you feel that way; that’s not the America I know; I think you’re wrong." Then someone in the group said to the white fellow: "what would it mean if the world really is like the way he feels it to be?" There was a long pause, and tears came to the white American’s eyes, and he said "that would be the saddest thing I could imagine." And the black man said: "now I can work with him"!

III. In this morning’s gospel, Jesus is talking about being faithful and prudent managers, stewards really, of that which is given to us. That the story is about slaves reminds us, I suppose, that slavery was a part of his world 2000 years ago, and that slavery of African-Americans is a legacy we bear. But make no mistake here – Jesus is not talking about somebody else, he seldom talked about "them," but almost always about "us" – and in this passage WE are the slaves, he is talking to us. We may not like the image, but perhaps we are all slaves to something – slaves to our work, slaves to the clock, slaves to fashion, slaves to culturally-inherited biases and prejudices of our society. Compared to those, we are better off to be slaves to the Master, to God – and that is what the story is about.

In the story, Jesus speaks of the Master putting one slave in charge while the Master is away. Somebody is always in charge – everybody has bosses, managers, boards of directors, even stockholders or standing committees! But how well will those in power do? If the one in power abuses that power, "if he begins to beat the other slaves, men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk," the Master is going to be ticked-off, "will cut him in pieces and put him with the unfaithful" says Jesus.

The punishment, you see, is always greater for those who should have known what the Master wanted. And those who should have known are his followers, you and me, those of us who have been taught that humankind was created in the image of God, and that all human beings are brothers and sisters under the same Father in heaven; those Christians who have been taught that we are all one, all equal, in the Body of Christ and in the eyes of God.

Now, I am not going to tell you that we should give up all the benefits that we may have received from that "unconscious and unacknowledged system of unearned white privilege" – that we should somehow UN-learn what we gained from our college education, that inherited money should all be given to the poor, that we should somehow try to undo the past. But I DO want to urge that we take oh-so-seriously those powerful words of Jesus at the end of this morning’s reading: "From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded" (Lk.12.48b).

What this really suggests to me is that racism is primarily a white problem, not a black problem, or Asian or anyone else’s. I do NOT mean that it is something about which we ought beat ourselves over the head, or make ourselves feel guilty – my black colleague Mark Morrison-Reed says that we white liberals are SO good at feeling-guilty already(!). I mean that those of us who have received so much need to use what we have, as good stewards and prudent managers, to combat and eliminate racism as much as possible from those spheres where we have any influence at all:

• if we have the financial resources, to support with our dollars those groups and programs which promote what we’ve been talking about here;
• if we have the time (that is indeed a rare privilege!), to spend some of it as volunteers for things like On-Trac tutoring after school in Roxbury;
• if we sit on corporate boards, are involved with hiring people, or with school admissions, to be aware of how decisions are made, and whether they unconsciously reflect and perpetuate white privilege; in other words, if we have power, to not abuse it but to use it for good;
• and perhaps most importantly, to examine our own attitudes, and root out those unconscious assumptions that promote or allow privilege for whites and subservience for others.

That, in the eyes of God, may be what earns the blessing.

IV. It is an interesting thing, you know, my friends, that while Jesus spent a lot of time talking about conversion and repentance (which means literally "turning around"), he did not spend a lot of time talking about "feeling guilty." Perhaps he knew that feeling guilty eventually inspires despondency or anger as much as conversion. But he did talk a lot about gratitude and responsibility. "Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit" (Lk.12.35).

May we be grateful for the light that shines from the gospel, enabling us to see the truth, to recognize our brothers and sisters, and to follow the Master. That is the moral authority we need. Amen.