GEC-Sermon-2017-07-23 - Pentecost 7

Grace Church Sheboygan

Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11A) Isaiah 44.6-8 Psalm 86.11-17 Rom. 8.12-25 Matt.13.24-30, 36-43 May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart, that I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Word. Amen. I have a Confederate flag in my basement. To be more specific, the flag is the “Stars and Bars,” the battle flag of The Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War. Before you think me to be a racist, let me give a little background information. I purchased the flag in 1977, as an undergraduate student at The University of Mississippi. Students used to wave these flags at football games, cheering on the Ole Miss Rebels to the fight song “Dixie”, while the school mascot, Colonel Rebel, led cheers from the sidelines. That was forty years ago, in a state with a sad history of racial segregation and oppression, and at a university that had only been racially integrated by force of federal power fourteen years prior to that. (And I mean real power. The U.S. Marshals enforcing federal policy ended up being supported by elements of the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army.) The flag is in a box. If I were to wave that flag now, or sing “Dixie” now, there can be little question that racial discrimination could be understood. Back then, no one could legitimately claim to not recognize a racial element in an identity centered on the Civil War, but the racial element was (for most people) unthinking. It was “background noise” that went unnoticed because most of us looked at the world through eyes that did not recognize our own privileged and blinkered outlook. In other words, we accepted as “normal” and as just a part of our culture, what was, in fact, a symbol loaded with messages and fraught with overtones of racial discrimination. I am happy to report that in the intervening forty years the atmosphere at campus sporting events has changed, and the makeup of the student body has certainly become far more diverse, but in these same forty years I have come to witness a very similar blindness about oppression. You see, like St. Paul—and like all of us when we pay attention—I encounter both symbols and the reality of slavery on a daily basis. Paul tells us that we have not received a spirit of slavery, to fall back into fear; to fall back into the same flesh: Spirit dichotomy in which life becomes a zero sum game of self-focus only. We have not received a spirit of fear, but rather the gift of adoption as God’s sons and daughters. So why do we tolerate and even celebrate slavery? If I wave a Rebel flag and sing “Dixie” it won’t take you long to infer a message. But what if, instead, I’m blessed with real beauty, and dance about, gyrating my hips in a half-time show? Leave aside that any picture of ...