racism – Inspiring Change LLC

Called to Generosity

Not long ago our small congregation held a potluck lunch. While thinking about what to bring, I decided to bring Helen Swanson’s rice pudding. It’s a food I cherish because it brings back memories of my life as a young rural Wisconsin pastor. I found the recipe that she had written for me in my recipe box and set about to make it.

Helen died over a decade ago, but seeing her handwriting and lying under the crocheted blanket she made me brings her presence back to me. What I remember most about her, though, is that she lived a generous Christianity. As she understood our faith, to be a Jesus follower meant to be someone who both rested in the love of God and embodied that love wherever she could. As I prepared her recipe, I felt her spirit, how she welcomed me, a newly ordained pastor, into her life and the life of her family, and what a quiet witness to the love of Jesus she was.

What is the essence, the core, of being a Christian? Who is that preacher Jesus, whose life so changed the course of the western world, and to whom so many confess loyalty? The New Testament gospels tell four different versions of the story of the historical Jesus, written to different audiences and in different decades following his first century death and resurrection. Each has at its core the religious message that the creator God loves the world and yearns to have all human persons know that love and forgiveness. Each tells of young rabbi Jesus seeking people out on the edges of Jewish culture for conversation, healing, teaching and friendship.

And the people Jesus most sought out were the vulnerable and cast aside of his time: the mentally and physically sick, women, children, the elderly, widowed and the chronically poor.

Jesus was also a prophet to his religion, speaking words of criticism and anger at those who labeled themselves of God and used it to cloak their own grasping for security, power and ambition. It was this same group of religious men who demanded the Roman occupiers to put Jesus to death as a threat to Jewish life and to the supreme power of Rome. In three short years his preaching, healing and growing band of followers became so threatening to the entrenched powers of the empire, he was crucified in order to be silenced.

So little has changed in the human condition: as the centuries pass, the principalities, powers, and empires simply put on different clothes. Today in America, a large portion of those who claim Jesus as their spiritual guide or savior use that label to cloak and mask all kinds of abuses of human power. Using scripture as a weapon, and under the guise of the Christian church, they promote a malignant individualism, a poisonous masculinity, unbridled greed, deep racism, love of warfare and military-style weapons, a biblical gender and sexual hierarchy that enforces their disdain for women and anyone who questions this worldview. They have aligned themselves with political power, winning elections and writing laws in every corner of the country. Does this sound like Christian discipleship to you?

Your neighbor is not just the family that lives on the other side of your interior wall or property line. Not just your difficult brother-in-law or your classmate. Your neighbor, teaches Jesus, is also the one you have trouble seeing. The one you want to walk by, the one you can’t quite understand.

June is Pride month. A month that recognizes and celebrates the diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity across the human experience. It is a hard won, bitter battle for those who don’t feel they fully fit into the heterosexual or male/female either/or that we have baked into our culture. To finally be freer to be themselves, to live their life without fear of shame, fear of even death. LGBTQIA people are your neighbors. They are among those we are called by Jesus to see, to understand, to support, and to love.

Christians are always called to decide: to align with the principalities and powers that promise a return to old values, old beliefs, security and belonging; or to know what power is for and to live as best we can with compassion and curiosity. To live with concern for the natural world, for the life of all our neighbors, for well-being of the weak, the left out, and the vulnerable.

God in spirit calls us who profess the name of Christ to know what that can look like in our time and place. I know this is how Helen lived her faith. May it be the way you proclaim Jesus, too.

Written for and published in the Savage (MN) Pacer newspaper, June 25, 2022.

Why Call Yourself a Christian

A couple of weeks ago our small congregation held a potluck lunch. While thinking about what to bring, I decided to bring Helen Swanson’s rice pudding. It’s a food I cherish because it brings back memories of my life as a young rural Wisconsin pastor. I found the recipe that she had written for me in my recipe box and set about to make it.

And the people Jesus most sought out were the vulnerable and cast aside of his time: the mentally and physically sick, women, children, the elderly, widowed and the chronically poor.

God in spirit calls us who profess the name of Christ to know what that can look like in our time and place. I know this is how Helen lived her faith. May it be the way you proclaim Jesus, too.

What the Church Must Now Do : Listen

The Church is so accustomed to preaching to the culture. It needs to listen.

For the first time in Minnesota history, a white police officer has been found guilty on three counts of murder of a Black man. The killing of George Floyd, captured on video, ignited a year of protests and riots, memorials, local distress and international outrage, all during a historic worldwide pandemic. It was horrible, and the impact, frightening and exhausting. The verdict, braced as we were for more violence, gave a sense of victory and relief.

Many are hopeful that this verdict is the signal that white Minnesotans are finally ready to confront innate racism, an implicit fear of people of color in general, and Black men in particular. But while we celebrate this milestone of difference and change, the deaths of Black citizens during interactions with police has not stopped, and the trials continue. Several weeks ago, 20- year-old Daunte Wright was killed during a traffic stop and arrest in Brooklyn Center.

How did Minnesota, a state proud of its progressive politics, the land of Hubert Humphrey and Paul Wellstone, a culture that continues to claim the Christian value of welcoming immigrants and refugees, and is proud of its tolerance and high quality of life, create a culture where darker skin color seems to automatically signal inferiority or threat, even to police officers who carry weapons and are trained in use of force?

Implicit bias began long ago with European colonialism, its slave trade, and 250 years of slavery in the South. The struggle to end slavery sparked our Civil War. What followed — Emancipation, the South’s surrender, Lincoln’s assassination, federal Reconstruction, and Reconstruction’s reversal — soon made room for the policies of widespread legal racial discrimination.

Inequity based on skin color was routinely written into American family and marriage law, banking and mortgage lending, employment, voting rights, education, housing, public transportation and accommodation laws. All of which was routinely supported by teachings, sermons and policies of most Christian churches. These practices and attitudes effectively created a two-tiered American society, based solely on perceived skin color.

Minnesota was not immune. That century of legal segregation and migration out of the South shaped where children attended school, what families lived near whom, and where Americans worshipped, worked and played. It shaped where poverty was concentrated, where resources were located, how schools were funded. It has been such a part of our culture that our religious life has unwittingly reinforced these racial divisions.

What can we do as people of faith in response to this terrible legacy? We in the Christian church are quite accustomed to speaking to our larger communities with the words of our faith and traditions. Many of us are coming to realize we have been tone-deaf to the impact of our attitude and practices on people of color. It’s time we listen more than we speak.

Remember when most churches taught that homosexuality was an aberrant, shameful, sinful lifestyle? That majority religious opinion changed only when many of us began to really listen to the life experience of gay neighbors and friends. Opinions about sexual orientation have changed faster than during any other social movement in American history. While racism is decidedly different, it is our calling, as Jesus followers, to repent and renew ourselves for the sake of our neighbors’ lives and dignity.

These times call for the courage to relax our loyalties to the past and wonder how we might better embody the grace of God in a world of diverse history, race and experience. I believe we are being called by God’s spirit to humility as we consider how Christianity has been used to bolster the cause of slavery before the Civil War, and again, during the generations since. Even in our own state, in our churches, and in our families.

It’s not easy to shift our primary focus from indifference to curiosity, from speaker to listener, from confidence to humility. It means working against our own mental habits, our language, our assumptions about people and their experience in the world. But if we want to live lives of authentic discipleship, we must respond to the world around us as it is. We can work to listen and learn from neighbors we have excluded, judged and dismissed. Even when what they tell us confuses us. We may have tried to create churches that embody the gospel of Jesus, but our own history, revealed in eyes of those we have systemically excluded, shows us all otherwise.

Originally published as Spiritual Reflections column, The Savage Pacer, May 8, 2021

A Divided House

Perhaps like you, I have been thinking continuously of how we have failed to overcome our national crisis of pandemic while other countries, such as New Zealand and Canada have had such different progressions of disease. There is a reason the pandemic continues in our country: we haven’t found a way to come together and fight this virus as one people.

Over the last 5 months our nation’s leadership seems split in two camps, one urging attention to strict social mitigation strategies, and the other minimizing the severity of the danger and ignoring the direction of our nation’s public health and infectious disease scientists. A portion of the population protests wearing cotton masks in public while others in their communities die. So, this is how we are going into a new school year: attempting to get back to in person learning, while trying to be safe, generally assuming that teachers, staff and families may all, at various times, come down with Covid19.

I have run out of words to describe my feelings about the sorry state of our national attitude toward science, public health, the vulnerable, the poor, and necessary sacrifice for the common good. I am so sorry that you and I are kept from friends, from grandchildren, from vacations, graduations, weddings and normal on-campus college classes. But it’s not just our summer we have lost. Service and medical workers are exhausted and getting sick. Seniors are suffering from isolation and deep loneliness in nursing homes. Indigenous people on far flung reservations are falling ill without adequate fresh water sources or health services. Young adults are frozen in their job searches, businesses declare bankruptcy and millions have lost their jobs and benefits. And just this past week, current efforts to re-size the Postal Service come just as millions of Americans plan to vote by mail, threatening to impact the outcome of our November presidential election.

The days are long past that people of faith can say politics is not appropriate in church. White clergy have kept silent long enough. Many in our country seem intent on returning our nation to some kind of nostalgic vision of its past self, where we can pretend that black lives don’t matter, that individualism cloaked as “freedom” is the highest good, that we can build walls to keep out anyone who isn’t here already, and that white wealthy business owners know what is best for every American. If that is what Christianity looks like to you, you have only come in contact with a kind of white cultural American Christianity, one that worked hard to insulate itself from the actual life of Jesus Christ.

The God I believe created the world is the same God who, in Jesus, sought out the powerless, healed the sick, blessed the forgotten and challenged the way some accumulated wealth, privilege and power at the expense of the weak. He spoke of God’s kingdom as the power to free us from selfishness and fear and turn toward healing the world. This kingdom talk so threatened the men in power in Israel 2000 years ago that he was whipped and publicly crucified in order to silence him.

I believe many Christians are so offended by Jesus they don’t want to hear how his priorities judge human politics. The values and policies we vote for and fund are exactly the way that we live our faith in our hometowns and states. Jesus called us to recognize the dark powers of sin that exist in us all, to turn from their illusions and be sent to live courageously in community with one another. What that means to me is that I’m called to be consistently for my neighbor and not against her.

In a few weeks’ time, voters will again get a chance to choose a direction for our nation at the highest levels. No set of candidates is perfect because perfection isn’t humanly possible. But I urge you to reflect on how your faith intersects with politics, because if we claim to be Jesus followers, his kingdom critiques how we live together, how we solve problems, set laws and create vision for our nation. May we find a renewed commitment to become one people from many, as we seek to recover from such a difficult year.

Racism & Me

How I have come to understand my own racism through my life experience of sexism in the church.

We value learning in our church community. I hope yours does, too. In our small Tuesday night book group we have been reading the new book “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” that is challenging us to see American culture and our participation in it with new eyes. The author, scholar Dr. Ibram Kendi, candidly recalls his own struggle as a young black man to see his own participation in the racist structures in our culture. He then encourages us to become people who stop using the term “racist” as a personal slur and instead see how we all, majority white and minority persons of color, live in a society that has organized itself around the myths and values of white control and racial superiority.

This is not a comfortable critique. I grew up in the 1960’s in a solidly middle class, white Protestant, small town family, with two working parents and a public-school education. I was taught to believe that we are all equal though different. That with the right skills and education anyone can succeed. That we may have different skin color, but that somehow, we should overlook that and carry on. I remember my parents and their friends saying things like “We don’t see color” as evidence of racial sensitivity. The only persons of color in my high school classes were foreign exchange students. Racial issues like Jim Crow segregation, civil right demonstrations, lynching and race riots were far removed from my day to day experience in Connecticut: those were the terrifying problems of the post-Civil War south and impoverished inner cities, where true bigotry was on display.

When I spent a couple of summers working at a church camp in the lakes region of New Hampshire, I didn’t anticipate the tension and fear that descended upon us one week when two busloads of children from majority black Roxbury, Massachusetts were dropped off. Years later I wasn’t sure what to think of the dozen or so black classmates at my very white Lutheran college who stuck together like glue everywhere they went and who seemed to shrink into the background when in class, or my black friend who became his class president and seemed to hold that same group of black kids at a distance and with some distain.

I take my education and spiritual life seriously. I never in my life have consciously belittled or spoken words of hate toward a person of another race because of their skin color. But I have participated in the way our majority culture can’t or won’t see the way we have historically created a rigid racial hierarchy; whites at the pinnacle of this value system, and persons of various shades of skin tone, from light to dark, in descending rank. I didn’t spend much time wondering why Native reservations or black urban neighborhoods were chronically poor and underserved. I have not been seriously concerned that my Lutheran denomination is the whitest church in America or why. I have given modest intellectual ascent to preferential hiring of persons of color or college admissions while wondering if it does any good.

Until I became a woman pastor, that is. I was ordained into public ministry 35 years ago. A young, idealistic, energetic minister, eager to begin serving Jesus as a preacher and community leader. But I immediately began to understand in my bones what systemic prejudice looks like and how it functions every day, in every situation, because I was now the unwelcome minority. I was the female body, the female voice, the female profile, who was getting up every morning to lead an organization that was founded, organized and imagined at every level by white men. Many welcomed me and cared for me. But that welcome was a weak counterweight to the attitude, comments, assumptions and barriers I faced every day in the church. It became clear to me quite quickly that in virtually every way, women are not conceived to be legitimate religious leaders. And that men and women, of every age, economic status, educational level and perspective participate in this gendered culture. I am still amazed I lasted 20 years in this system. It became such a personal burden and just wasn’t getting better the longer I stayed, I finally decided to leave the pulpit, change careers, and re-enter the pew.

It has taken me years to better understand the ways race and gender have organized everything in America from neighborhood real estate and poverty, educational disparity and health care, pregnancy leave and lack of childcare support to the lack of diversity in corporate boardrooms. I am still learning and repenting. I believe these are the groans of our culture, struggling in these days of amazing political polarity around issues of race and immigration, to recognize the hierarchical systems we live under and must reorganize if we are to become a real democracy. My prayer is that if you have read along this far, you will join me in this continuous personal and structural awakening.

It takes a commitment to be open to experience we don’t share. To put down our automatic defenses and listen to voices who are trying to express their experience. To tolerate the discomfort when we feel unsettled. Where can you begin? Try listening to new podcasts like “1619,” watching videos like “13^th” on Netflix, reading recent books like “Between the World and Me” and “How to Be an Anti-Racist”, and innumerable fiction works by minority authors like “Medicine Walk” and “Indian Horse.” We can help make our country better for everyone if we begin to understand that racism is built into our society, and it is going to take some deconstruction before we heal.

(originally published Savage Pacer, Online/print 11/13/19)

Racism and Trauma

For decades, family therapists and other mental health professionals and researchers have believed that trauma in one generation can be expressed in the genetic code and passed as psychological suffering and vulnerability in following generations. This fact has been demonstrated in animal studies for years, but few human trials have followed.

A research team at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, studying the DNA and mental health of survivors of World War II Nazi atrocities and their children, have newly demonstrated genetic changes in the children of these survivors. The Guardian article of August 21, 2015 describes the changes in a specific gene sequence associated with the regulation of stress hormones. What therapists have seen in their practices has begun to be proven in the laboratory: when emotional and mental trauma happens to us in our early life, it can change our genes, and those changes can be passed down to our children.

It helps to explain the increased mental health issues in children of Holocaust survivors, victims of political terror, accidental trauma, severe poverty, famine and the progeny of African slaves in the United States. This “epigenetic inheritance” can linger for generations and effect the culture, as it has done in the Jewish communities around the world after 1945.

The continuing hurt, vulnerability, anger and rage expressed in Native American tribes and African American communities in the United States against the majority white population can be understood as both cry for justice in the present, and a echo of generational trauma that was endured for nearly 300 years on our nation’s shores.

We have a responsibility as a nation to be struggling to heal the racial injustice and majority privilege that still stains our daily interactions. And therapists need to recognize the layers of trauma that their clients of color may bring to their offices, seeking healing for individual pain that may have been generations in the making.

UPDATE: Here is the link to the mouse study with traumatic epigenetic changes in following generations : Nature Neuroscience, Volume 17, Number 1, January 2014:
https://tinyurl.com/y7zblcwe

“Bound Conscience” is Theological Bullshit

SERIOUSLY? I won’t start fights on Facebook. But a post I read has me fuming.

A female pastor claiming that being against women clergy in the church isn’t really sexism, it’s just “bound conscience,” and we have to respect those folks who believe this way. I have been trying to craft a response to her post for an hour and I have just come to this:

I see “bound conscience” as racism, sexism, and homophobia all dressed up in fancy theological clothes. The incarnation of Jesus isn’t just about God’s love for the male, privileged body. It is about God’s redemption of all human flesh – whatever color, race, gender, ability or age. And those who preach this gospel ought to reflect the diversity of this God-loved human race.

Bound conscience?! That is the power of discrimination : it creates self-hatred in those who are hated by the majority. Our blindness to our own condition continues to amaze me.

Here’s my bottom line: It is not OK with me that an ELCA pastor, called to preach and teach, misstates or misunderstands the power of discrimination about gender, race or sexual orientation, when talking about Scripture.