“Grounded!”

Ephesians 3:14-21

July 26, 2009 + Eighth Sunday After Pentecost

Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ

400 Glenwood Drive

Chattanooga, Tennessee 37404

Rev. David Brown

This is not the message I planned to deliver this morning, but something happened recently in our national life that calls for an answer from the pulpit. I refer, of course, to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for disorderly conduct by Sergeant James Crowley of the Cambridge Police department and the subsequent comments by President Obama.

I begin with a story I heard some years ago from one of my seminary professors. It seems that when European travelers reached a remote island in the South Pacific in the late eighteenth century, the native people told them an amazing story. Many generations before, after a violent storm, their ancestors went down to the beach and discovered that a white monkey had washed ashore. The monkey was still alive and their religious leaders told them it was a gift from the gods which they should cherish and protect. The people built a large cage of bamboo on the rocks near the ocean and put the white monkey inside. Every day they brought food and water to the white monkey until it died many years later. The European travelers asked to see the place where the white monkey had been kept and the natives took them there. On the rock where the cage had been, the travelers saw scratched on the rock in Latin, Dutch, and English the story of a Dutch sailor who had been shipwrecked on the island in the seventeenth century and who had been held captive by the native people. He was the white monkey!

Have we changed so much in four hundred years? Isn’t it still difficult for us to recognize the full humanity of someone who is different than we? That is what makes the incident of the Professor, the Police Department, and the President so important and makes it what President Obama rightly called “a teachable moment.” It should certainly be part of what we in the United Church of Christ are calling “A Sacred Conversation on Race.” What happened is clearly an example of what continues to divide us today as Americans.

I know you are probably aware of the story but let me ask you to reflect upon it again. It is a story full of ironies, those moments in life that are full of the unexpected.

Harvard University Professor and celebrated author, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was returning from a trip abroad. He was driven home from the airport in a car with a black chauffer. When he reached his home near the university, Dr. Gates discovered his door was jammed and he and the chauffer tried to shove the door open. A neighbor saw this happening and called the Cambridge police to tell them that two black men were trying to break into the home.

When Sergeant Crowley arrived, Professor Gates was already in his home. Crowley then asked Gates to step outside because he was investigating a possible burglary. This remark set off a verbal exchange that eventually led to Dr. Gates’ arrest. Gates told the policeman he was a racist and had no idea who he was arresting. The officer demanded that Gates show him identification which he eventually did, but the verbal exchange continued until Crowley arrested Gates for disorderly conduct.

As I said, this story is full of ironies. Professor Gates is a most respectable man in appearance, hardly the sort of man one would expect to find breaking into a home. Sergeant Crowley is a 16 year veteran of the Cambridge police who teaches rookie cops in the police academy the importance of not racial profiling! He also once gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis when he was struck by a heart attack. Hardly, the profile of the white racist cop, wouldn’t you agree?

What on earth happened? Clearly, (to me, at least) Dr. Gates was understandably tired after a long plane trip. He was also annoyed being asked why he was in his own home. Who wouldn’t be? And Sergeant Crowley was also probably tired after a long shift. He was trying to follow the usual protocols for an attempted burglary suspect despite the evidence of his own eyes and ears. As President Obama said Friday, after correcting himself for having said the police acted “stupidly,” both Dr. Gates and Sergeant Crowley “over-reacted.”

I agree with our President (who also over-reacted) but this incident lifts up once again one of the great unanswered questions in American life: race. The problem comes because all of us view life from inside our own skins. These days most white people tend to believe that race relations are getting better and better. The glass is half full and getting fuller all the time. What better example could there be than America electing a black President? But most black people do not see it that way. For them, the glass is still half-empty and, in fact, seems to be getting emptier as more and more black men are arrested and incarcerated and as more and more black people slip further into poverty.

The heart of the matter, as far as I am concerned, in this strange case of the Professor and the Policeman and the President, is that all of us, black and white together, come to this moment not only inside our own skins but also trapped by our own past experiences. Friends, as much as we may want to deny it, the past is always present and it shapes our future. That is true for us as individuals, as a church, as a community, as a nation.

Black people, particularly black men, have known centuries of prejudice and injustice. The sting of slavery and segregation and second-class citizenship has burned deeply into the collective consciousness of all black people. It hasn’t been that long since black and white people couldn’t drink out of the same water fountain, use the same bathroom, or eat in the same restaurants here in Chattanooga. While progress has certainly been made – and only a fool, black or white, would deny it – the memory of so many past humiliations had to affect Dr. Gates in his confrontation with the policeman. This moment only serves to remind us that we still have a long way to go before black and white Americans can truly understand the differences between us.

A moment ago, I said that race was one of the great unanswered questions in American life. There are others:

- the unanswered question of gender . . .

- the unanswered question of sexual orientation . . .

- the unanswered question of religious diversity . . .

- the unanswered question of economic and educational inequality.

There are so many questions we Americans must struggle with today if we are to be a united and not a divided nation. Will we find the ways to draw together in greater unity despite our diversity, or will we fracture into warring groups fiercely defending our own interests?

In addition, for me at least, one of the greatest unanswered questions is whether religious faith will help to unify our nation or only divide it further. Frankly, listening to what I hear these days, the smart money would be on religion as the great divider of America, not the great unifier. But I refuse to accept that.

The great principle of the Christian faith – as well as of the Jewish, Muslim, and every other faith worthy of the name – is that God is, indeed, the Parent of us all. We are all God’s children no matter our race, our gender, our sexual orientation, our economic or education status, our religious commitment. We are one human family on the face of the earth and it is high time we started to act like it.

As the unknown writer of this magnificent Letter to the Ephesians reminded his readers, we are to be rooted and grounded in love. Such a love is not a passing feeling or a wavering attitude. It is a deliberate decision which leads to concrete action. God in Christ does not ask us to love; we are commanded to love one another. We have no choice in the matter if we want to live as God’s children with our sisters and brothers. Only then will we begin to comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth of what it means to be truly human.

I am told that in England there is a church with a most interesting mosaic floor. Standing on the floor it appears to be only a jumble of lovely stones, but when one goes up into the balcony overlooking the floor the mosaic is seen for what it is: a magnificent portrait of the face of Christ. The challenge for the visitor is to gain the perspective that will reveal that face. The challenge for us as Americans today is to recognize the face of Christ in all our sisters and brothers. Only then will no human being be caged or kept apart from the rest of us because he or she is “different.” Only then will the love of Christ dwell in all of us richly. Only then will we be the people God intends us to be.

“Now to that God who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine, to that God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”