5th Sunday of Easter
Texts: Acts 11:1-18;
John 13:31-35; Rev 21:1-6
YouTube: https://youtu.be/ywOUJFJDMng
FUNDAMENTALS OF 21ST CENTURY CHRISTIAN MISSION: RACISM IS THE ENGINE OF
NATIONALISM AND WORKING TO HEAL RACISM IS THE HEART OF CHRISTIAN MISSION
I’d like to talk with you this morning about racism. If you just had your gut clench inside, I understand. As myself a white male in our society, I’ve certainly been conditioned to react with discomfort at the very least — sometimes panic, fear, and defensiveness — to the mere mention of the r-word, racism. But I’d also like to share with you why I’ve found good reason in my life to not only get past the discomfort but to find fighting racism as foundational to my sense of mission as a disciple of Jesus. Now, the r-word can even get me feeling energized and motivated. I hope you might find this change in response to the r-word, too, as I share my views with you.
First, full disclosure: there is a specific occasion that’s come up which prompts the issue of racism with you this morning. About ten days ago, at a high school track meet in nearby Waterford, the Rufus King High School track team from Milwaukee, mostly athletes of color, felt so unwelcome and even unsafe that they left before finishing the meet. The details are still being sifted, but from early reports it involved hearing constant heckling of a racist nature from the Waterford crowd — stereotypes about what African Americans eat, like chicken and watermelon, and much more hurtful name-calling, like being called “monkeys” and the n-word. Very disheartening, to say the least. For many others, much more than disheartening. As a community here in Racine and Milwaukee counties, how should we respond? Many or most feel there’s no place for incidents of hate like this in our community, and we’d like to continue to work for their cessation. Together, we need to work to see these things stop, heaven forbid, before they get even worse, or lead to even worse.
Many of you know that I participate locally in the Racine Interfaith Coalition, or “RIC.” It’s a faith-based organizing group working for greater justice and peace in our community. Naturally, this Waterford incident of racist hatred is something we’d like to respond to in helpful, healing ways. Something we’d like to work to see stop. Some of my colleagues at RIC know that in my adult life this is one of the things I’m most passionate about — not just fighting racism as a point of community justice, but as a fundamental issue to my Christian Faith. They’re aware that I’ve come to see working to heal racism as central to our Christian mission. So here’s part of the reason I’m bringing it up to you this morning. I’ve been asked to write or present things to RIC congregations about racism and Christian mission. How can we make it a regular part of perhaps even our preaching? Should standing against racism even be part of our preaching? Yes, I firmly believe so. So, if I’m going to make that case to the member-congregations of RIC, I thought it important to begin with you, the people I love here and the place I find myself preaching these days. Lucky you, right? I hope we are all blessed if together we can find racism to be central to our mission.
In our case here at Bethania, tackling racism also goes well with our efforts to undertake the Reconciling in Christ process, the other “RIC” (hope it doesn’t get too confusing). As we strive to be more welcoming, focusing especially on LGBTQ people, I believe that we can see how that task goes along with healing any of what-I-will-call “mechanisms of division.” Homophobia and transphobia are examples of these mechanisms which divide us. Racism is another huge one that has dominated our history for 500 years now.
So let me make my case by beginning with a bold statement: I believe that, in today’s world, the heart and soul of God’s gracious Gospel is the healing of racism. Racism is not a side issue. It’s the very center of what God’s reign coming into world looks like in our historical moment.
Why do I believe this? The first reason I offer is by analogy. Analogy to Christian Mission in the First Century. Here’s what I mean. When we examine the New Testament, how did their sense of mission orient and manifest itself? In this morning’s First Reading from Acts 11, we see Peter explaining why in Acts 10 he broke the usual social barriers as a Jew to eat at the home of a Gentile centurion named Cornelius, where he even ends up baptizing the entire household. A voice from heaven, tells him, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ The center of what I’m calling a “mechanism of division” was for Jews in the First Century the Jew-Gentile division. As part of their religion — similar to other religions, I hasten to add — Jews were often taught to consider themselves more pure than others. Judaism is the right religion, and as such Jews are the clean ones, the most pure and holy ones. All others, the Gentiles, are profane and impure. This is all-too-familiar, right? Isn’t this the main teaching of the so-called Christian Nationalist movement right now? That only Christians are right, and so we are the clean and pure ones? That everyone else is unclean and impure? And so as Christians we are right to purge the others, to persecute them, to even use violence against them.
In this story of Peter and Cornelius which covers two chapters in the Book of Acts, Peter discovers that this nationalistic way of seeing the world is completely wrong. Jesus has shown them that what God has made clean, human beings are not to call profane, impure. How did Jesus do this? Principally, by letting himself be treated as a blasphemer, one of those impure ones that need to be purged. Peter sees that Jesus has taught them a new way to understand their Jewish faith: not as a barrier to people of other faiths, to Gentiles, but ultimately as a way to extend God’s gift of life to Gentiles. Way back in Genesis 12, God tells Abraham and Sarah that they and their descendants are to be a blessing to all the families of the earth (Gen 12:3). When Peter finishes telling his story to the believers in Jerusalem, they exclaim together, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”
I believe that Jesus has come to show the entire human race how to live into a repentance that leads to life. Primarily, we need to stop living by the mechanisms of division. All those nationalistic games of dividing between who’s in and who’s out they need to go. We human beings as a whole need to learn that the quickest way to promote life is to quit killing each other. And to do that we need to completely leave behind all those mechanisms of division, all those ways of thinking and acting which lead to division. When humankind ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we didn’t truly gain that knowledge of good and evil. No, when we ate of that Tree, we instead fell into the sin of thinking we know the difference and then using that false knowledge as a justification for hurting and killing each other.
How do we know that this, above all else, is what Jesus came to teach not only his fellow Jews but all human beings? Because it took the cross. It took the cross! Yes, the cross and resurrection stand as the promise of God defeating death. All death. But the cross also isn’t just any old way to die. Jesus didn’t simply die of an illness like cancer and then was raised by God — like he himself raised Lazarus after an illness (John 11). No, the cross is death by murder. It is death at the hands of other human beings. And it’s not just a random murder, either. No, the cross represents the killing we human beings undertake with supposed immunity. It’s sanctioned killing. It is killing we undertake and then justify to ourselves. When mixed with religion, as it most often is, it is sacred violence. Violence we believe that God wants us to do.
A couple weeks ago (Easter 3C; Acts 9:1-6), we read the so-called conversion of St. Paul. When the Risen Jesus knocks Paul off his horse with a blinding light, he doesn’t say to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why don’t you believe in me?’ As if simply coming to believe in Jesus is center of the Gospel. No, Jesus says, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ Why are you hurting my followers, and believing yourself to be justified in doing so? And on a mission from God, no less? No, what Jesus had in store for Paul was the opposite of sacred violence. He needed Paul to go out on the mission of healing the division between Jew and Gentile as the promise that God is working to heal all our mechanisms of division. Or as Paul himself puts it in Eph 2, a passage I share with you often, in the cross God is creating one new humanity in place of the two (Eph 2:15) — in place of all those ways in which we divide from each other, all the ways in which we believe our group superior to others as a means to justify our violence. The Risen Jesus needed Paul to stop persecuting and to bring in its place the healing offered by the cross’s forgiveness. The gift of life from God through the Jews is that all of humankind might repent of its killing each other and instead work for the repentance which leads to life.
So there’s my reason by analogy that healing racism is the central mission of followers of Jesus today. For Peter and for Paul, Jews in the First Century, that mission of repentance from the mechanisms of division took the shape of healing the divide between Jew and Gentile. Paul is known as the “Apostle to the Gentiles.” He’s obsessed with that mission. So if the central mission was healing the Jew-Gentile divide in the First century, what is our central mission today? Hasn’t the chief mechanism of division in our culture — over the past 500 years, in fact — been White Supremacist Racism? White people feeling they are superior to people of color? Seeing people of color as somehow less than human? As “monkeys,” for example? Isn’t it time that followers of Jesus see standing against such worldviews as fundamental to our mission in the 21st Century?
Siblings in Christ, if the central mission of Christ’s followers in any time and place is to work to heal the mechanisms of division which lead us to kill one another, then we have spent the past year, within the context of our current politics, naming that not just as racism but as “nationalism.” (For a complete catalog of preaching on this subject, see “Preaching God’s Reign under the Shadow of Christian Nationalism.”) I confess that I’ve been sensitive to the difficulties of using the r-word, so I’ve tended to bring up racism under the cover of “nationalism.” But here’s the truth: all nationalist movements have a fundamental faith in the mechanisms of division, leading them to use violence in maintaining their purity. A so-called Christian version of nationalism is no different. We see signs of its various divisions in multiple forms. Such as homophobia and transphobia. Nationalism sees its fellow Trans citizens as somehow impure, something to be purged. Let’s write some laws, they say, to ensure we don’t have to see them. Isn’t this bifurcated worldview even part of the anti-vax craze? Seeing the world so much in terms of pure and impure that it deems something like a vaccine as impure to the human body, even against the best medical evidence? And, of course, racism. All nationalistic movements in the modern era have allied themselves with some form of racism as the core to what they are promoting. Going forward, then, I commit to you that we will talk more often and openly about racism under the banner of “Preaching God’s Reign under the Shadow of Christian Nationalism.”
To close: What happens when that racism displays itself close to home, even in something like a high school track meet? I understand that there is a tendency for us white people, especially, to let our discomfort lead us to silence. But my proposal to this morning is that it is a central task of our mission as followers of Jesus to name the racism out-loud and to work toward its healing. It is our mission to offer to everyone the repentance which leads to life. Especially in the face of those mechanisms of division which lead to death. Which lead to us killing each other. Let us rather work for life by learning Jesus’ one commandment to us: to love one another as he has loved us. How was it that he loved us? He went to the cross to show us how to stop killing each other. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, May 18, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/ywOUJFJDMng
