A Sermon on American Racism

Today, October 14, 2019, I saw that a couple of viewers of this blog had seen my sermon "A Sermon on American Racism" that I gave back in 2014. Sadly it is more relevant today than it was five years ago. I think it's good work worth paying attention to, so I'm reposting it here.

Really? I Don’t Think So

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

August 17, 2014

Scripture: Matthew 15:21-28

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

New York City police strangled Eric Garner to death. Los Angeles police shot and killed Ezell Ford as he lay on the ground. Ferguson, Missouri, police shot and killed Michael Brown. All three of these victims were unarmed Black men. They are just recent examples of police violence against Black men that got some publicity. Various Internet sites report that a Black man is killed by police or vigilantes every 28 minutes in this country. Remember Trayvon Martin? He’s just another one we heard about. Police violence against Black men doesn’t always result in death. Recently in Seattle a Westlake Mall security guard maced a Black man while ignoring white law breakers. Remember Rodney King? I used to work at Catholic Community Services in the Central District of Seattle, where the population is mostly Black. One day I was looking out a window from which I could see our parking lot. There was a Seattle police car there, and a Seattle police officer was talking to a Black man he apparently had pulled over. There was no struggle. The Black man wasn’t threatening the police officer. Nonetheless, a second police car showed up. Then a third. A co-worker who also saw what was going on said “It’s the Central District.” These are but a very few examples from America’s shameful and sinful culture of racism.

Most of us are white, and I need to ask those of us who are: Do we get it that Black Americans are afraid of the police and have good reason to be? Pastor Jane tells a story from a seminary class in which the teacher asked how the students would react to the police knocking on their door. The white students said they’ be curious and want to cooperate and help. The Black students said they’d be suspicious. Those Black students weren’t being irrational. They weren’t being paranoid. They were reacting out of their experience and the experience of Black people generally, just as the white students were reacting out of their experience and the experience of white people generally. Of course no generalization is true of every member of any group of people, and certainly not all police officers are a threat to Black people, but it is still true that on the whole Black Americans experience the police differently than white Americans do. They experience them in significant part as a threat. That’s because the police represent society at large, and our society at large is racist. It was in its origins. It still is.

Our society is racist, but just how does racism work? That’s a crucial question for us Americans today. Here’s a good answer to that question from an African-American pastor. The Rev. Tony Lee, identified in an article on The Huffington Post’s religion page as an African-American pastor of an AME church in Maryland, says that the problem of young Black men dying at the hands of the police  is an example “of daily antagonisms felt by black people on the street.” He said “This is part of a wider school-to-prison pipeline and the ghettoization and de-humanization of black bodies.” There’s the crux of the problem in one word—dehumanization. American racism does nothing less than deny the full and equal humanity of Black people. That’s how racism works.

It doesn’t just work that way in our country. We see it at work in our passage from Matthew this morning. In that reading Jesus has an encounter with a woman identified as Canaanite. That means she’s not Jewish. It means she’s from a different people than Jesus is. In this story Jesus calls the Canaanite woman a dog. Hard to believe perhaps, but Jesus calls another human being a dog. The way Matthew tells this story, for Jesus, at first at least, the Canaanite woman who asks him for help isn’t even human. When he calls her a dog he makes her less than human. He gets over it by the end of the story, but in the story he denies the full humanity of the woman with whom he’s speaking.

That’s how racism works. For a racist a member of the other race isn’t fully human. That’s how human cruelty usually works, especially when it’s practiced on a huge scale. For the Nazis the Jews were less than fully human. How else could they slaughter so many millions of them? For American racists Black people aren’t fully human. How else can we lynch so many of them? How else can we deny them equal opportunity in employment, housing, health care, and especially legal justice? If a leader wants people to brutalize another people that leader has to start by dehumanizing the people he wants brutalized. Back in the 1960s we called Vietnamese people “gooks.” I did it myself. We were killing Vietnamese people in huge numbers, so we dehumanized them. Dehumanizing them made it easier for us to kill them. It made it possible for those of us who weren’t personally directly involved in killing them to live with the way our country was killing them. Racism dehumanizes. That’s its primary sin. It makes human beings less than human. It calls people dogs.

Jesus got over it in our little story, thank God, but how he did raises an important issue for us. In the story the Canaanite woman basically outwits Jesus. When he calls her a dog she says yes, but even the dogs get the crumbs that fall from the table. Jesus is impressed, calls her a woman not a dog, and gives her the help she has requested. In the story the dehumanized one brings about a change of consciousness in the one doing the dehumanizing. I’m really glad Jesus gets over his dehumanizing of this woman in our little story, but we need to be really careful about how that happens. You see, the racism of white Americans isn’t a problem for Black Americans to solve. It is a problem for us white Americans to solve, as our colleague the Rev. Dr. Marsha Williams, a Black pastor in our Conference, recently reminded us. Jesus’ failure to recognize the full humanity of the Canaanite woman was really his problem to solve, not hers. So let’s take this story as a warning, not as a model.

Speaking now as a white person and to those of you who are white, if our racism is our problem to solve, how do we do it? I have no magic answers to that question. We’ve all grown up in a radically racist culture. Yes, racism isn’t as bad—or at least isn’t as overt—as it used to be, but our culture is still radically racist. You don’t get over a history of centuries of virulent racism in a few decades, maybe not even in a few centuries. So getting over American racism is not a simple task, and there are no simple means of doing it. This morning I want to suggest just one basic but indispensible step.

You white folk among us, how many of you, how many of us, understand that we have white privilege every moment of our lives? We’ve all got it whether we’re aware of it or not. If you’re not doing anything wrong, like speeding say, do you get nervous every time you see a police officer? No? That’s white privilege. When you apply for a job do you think that you have to be much more qualified than the applicants of another race if you stand a chance of getting hired? No? That’s white privilege. Have you been turned down for rental housing on some obviously made up excuse? No? That’s white privilege. If you’ve ever been involved in any kind of court case civil or criminal, have you thought the court was going to rule against you just because of the color of your skin? No? That’s white privilege. We white people have it, every last one of us.

It is so easy for us white Americans to convince ourselves that racism is a problem of the past not of our present. Heck, we’ve even got a Black President, right? So how can our society be racist? Well, whether we like Obama as a President or not I trust we’re all glad that his race didn’t stop him from getting elected, but one election doesn’t wipe out racism. Lots of people still voted against Obama quite without regard for his politics just because he’s Black. Moreover, it’s so easy for us to point to Obama as proof that we aren’t racist, then go on with our usual racism with nothing really changed. It is white America’s denial of its racism that is the biggest obstacle to overcoming it.

We’re not going to solve American racism here this morning. Far from it. We can however stop lying to ourselves. We live in a racist culture. It’s not our fault that we do, but we do. Overcoming racism has to start with us becoming more aware of that foundational fact of American life. We white people have to start admitting our white privilege. And we have to stop dehumanizing people of color. I’m sure we would all say yes, of course, Black, Red, Yellow, and Brown people are all human beings. We’d all say it, but do we really get what it means? Do we really get what true equality means? When you see a Black person on the street who you don’t know can you really say to that person Namaste, the God in me greets the God in you? Maybe we’d all answer yes; but when I hear that yes part of me wants to say Really? I don’t think so. I think we’ve all got racism in our bones because we all grew up in a racist culture. The only way we’ll ever get over it is to start by admitting it. So let’s admit it, shall we? Maybe if enough of us do fewer unarmed Black men will die at the hands of the police. Amen.

This Unwell President

This Unwell President

I am not a mental health professional. I am neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist. I make no claim to being able to make a professional diagnosis of anyone’s mental health, not even Donald Trump’s. Yet one need not have had professional training in mental health issues to notice a mental health deficiency when a person’s words and actions are just plain abnormal. When a person speaks and behaves in obviously abnormal ways any intelligent, observant person can draw some well-founded conclusions about that person’s mental health. Sadly, President Donald J. Trump’s words and behavior are so obviously and extremely abnormal that it is apparent to me and to any observant, reasonably healthy and informed person that he is psychologically unwell. I want here to consider some of the ways in which he appears to me to be psychologically unwell. Those ways include at least the following:

He lies with almost every public word he speaks. He does not operate within the categories true and false. He operates (or at least appears to operate) within the categories “I think it’s beneficial to me” and “I think it’s not beneficial to me.” Whether what he says is true or false is irrelevant to him; and what psychologically healthy people perceive as true is so often not beneficial to him that he utters falsehood after falsehood. It matters not to him that what he says is untrue. It matters not to him that one of his falsehoods can easily be shown to be false or that one of them has already been shown to be false. All that matters to him is that he believes a statement to be beneficial to him.

His disregard for truth and falsehood is one way in which Trump fails to deal constructively with reality. Another way in which he will not deal with reality is the way so many of his statements against people and facts he doesn’t like address (and attack) the person who has said something he doesn’t like rather than addressing the truth or falsity of what the person has said. That is, he constantly engages in ad hominem attacks rather than rather than addressing what a person has actually said. The problem is not only that ad hominem attacks are a classical logical and rhetorical errors. A deeper problem is that his constant use of them suggests that he is incapable of actually dealing with reality at all. At the very least it suggests that he is unwilling to deal with reality. There are many reasons why a person may be unable or unwilling to deal with reality. She may be afraid of actual reality. Or perhaps his reality actually is very different from other people’s reality as is the case with people suffering from dementia. Or perhaps a person avoids reality by resorting to ad hominem attacks simply because he either doesn’t understand their logical and rhetorical fallacy or because he thinks they will be more convincing to people he wants to convince than dealing with reality would be. Donald Trump may well be avoiding reality because reality as other people perceive it is often so harmful to him. Perhaps he thinks (sadly probably correctly) that his badly informed or misinformed but fanatical supporters will find ad hominem attacks more convincing than actually addressing the facts would be. Moreover, Trump’s ad hominem attacks are often so vicious and so factually ungrounded that they seem more to be lashing out from a place of deep psychological insecurity than anything else. In any event his refusal to address actual reality certainly seems abnormal to me and perhaps to a lot of other people as well.

Beyond that, Trump is a narcissist. By that I mean that he cares only about himself. He may also be a sociopath or have borderline personality disorder. By that I mean that he seems utterly incapable of caring about anyone but himself. Of course it takes a huge ego for anyone to think they could be president of the United States. It may be the most difficult and the most sensitive job in the world. But having a big ego or an overabundance of self-confidence doesn’t have to mean that a person cares only for him or herself. Yet in the case of Donald Trump that seems to be precisely what it means. He repeatedly uses the power and prestige of his office for his own personal and political aggrandizement. To him being president is more about him than it is about the country of which he is chief executive.

Finally let me return to a point that I at least suggested above in my comments about his constant ad hominem attacks on his critics. Donald Trump simply comes across as psychologically unstable. He lashes out apparently without having considered the consequences of what he says and does. He operates from emotion not from considered contemplation of the matters before him. He sees no need actually to be informed about the matters he addresses. He seems to become uncontrollably angry at times. He seems incapable of considering that people who disagree with him or who criticize him are simply acting in good faith because they have a different view of a matter than he does. Our political system depends on a give and take between different political, economic, and social perspectives. Donald Trump seems incapable of working within that system. It’s not always easy for me to do either, but I at least understand that our political processes involve disagreements between people of good faith. Trump can’t see that anyone who opposes him is acting in good faith. Criticism threatens him, so he goes into emotional outbursts that can hardly be the products of a well-developed, healthy psyche.

All of these points along with several more that could perhaps be raised establish that President Donald Trump is not psychologically well. He is so psychologically unwell that Vice President Pence and the Cabinet would be well justified in removing him from office under Amendment 25 to the US Constitution. They won’t do that of course. Trump put them in the positions they hold. The benefit from his presidency and aren’t about to give those benefits up. Still, Donald Trump is psychologically unfit to be president.

We have two ways of getting rid of him, impeachment or the election of someone else to the presidency next year. Impeachment is preferable because it could happen more quickly and because it would be a statement by Congress that Trumpism is not our norm. It could be a reassertion of traditional American political values. It could be a solid defense of the Constitution that Trump has sworn to protect and defend but which he violates daily. Either way, the important thing is that we be rid of him absolutely as soon as possible. The future of our nation and of the world demands no less.

A Letter to the Editor

This is the text of a letter I sent to the Everett, Washington, Herald on September 23, 2019:


President Donald J. Trump is a criminal. He has violated numerous federal laws and his oath of office. He has obstructed or at least attempted to obstruct justice. He has violated campaign finance law. He continually violates the emoluments clauses of the Constitution. He puts himself above the law when, just to cite one example, he blocks the disclosure of a whistleblower complaint to Congress as required by law. All of those matters are in the public record, and the Democrats in the House of Representatives where impeachment proceedings do nothing. They dither about needing more evidence. They fret about political consequences, and our legal and Constitutional procedures for holding a president accountable become meaningless. It is way past the time when President Trump should have been removed from office. I wish I had any confidence that Congress would do its Constitutional duty and remove him.

Why Praise

Why Praise?

For First Congregational Church of Bellevue, UCC

September 22, 2019

Scripture: Psalm 113

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Praise the Lord! We hear it all the time, and it certainly is what Psalm 113 is calling us to do; but I have a confession to make. I used to have a really hard time understanding what the purpose of our praising God is. I mean, it’s not like God needs our praise. God is, I am sure, far above needing praise or much of anything else from us. I suppose the point is that we need to praise God not because God needs it but because we do. Praising God is an important part of worship and of prayer. When we praise God we are giving God thanks for the ways God has blessed us and has blessed the whole world with God’s love. Praising God connects us with God. It brings God into our hearts and into our lives. It makes God, God’s unshakable solidarity with us, and God’s grace-filled blessings real for us. Sometimes that’s what it takes to g?et us through the night in these troubled times. So yes indeed. Praise the Lord! It is a vital and necessary thing for people of faith to do.

But there’s a problem here, isn’t there. Calling us to praise God isn’t all that Psalm 113 does. It also says that God raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap. Whenever I read scripture saying that God does things like that I want to say: Really? To be honest about it, it isn’t at all apparent that God does that. I mean, both our nation and the world are full of poor people living actually or metaphorically in the dust and on the ash heaps of the earth. The policies of our federal government these days seem intent on not just keeping them there but forcing more and more people into that dust and onto those ash heaps. God cares for the poor and for all people spiritually, but physically? Really?

So are Psalm 113 and so many other passages in the Bible just wrong when they say that God takes care of the poor and needy in very real, physical ways? It sure would be easy to answer yes to that question given how, as Jesus says, the poor we always have with us. So what are we to make of verses like Psalm 113’s that say that God rescues the poor and the needy?

Here’s what I think we’re to make of them. Consider that what Psalm 113 is really saying is not so much that God does good work for the poor on God’s own. Consider that what Psalm 113 is really doing is telling us that our lives of faith aren’t finished when we leave worship. In worship we come closer to God. Ideally at least our spirits are refreshed and strengthened. And then. Then God calls us to get to work. To get on with the task of raising the poor from the dust and the needy from the ash heap. God does that, but God does it through people like us. We are God’s hands for that work. That’s how I think we should hear Psalm 113.

That work isn’t easy. The need is so great and the opposition to policies that would really work to relieve poverty are so powerful. Some of that opposition even claims to be Christian. It says if people are poor it’s their own fault. It says God is punishing them for some sin they committed. Well, that’s what the Pharisees said in Jesus’ time, and Jesus said no. He said no then and he says no now. He said blessed are the poor, and he called his people to do something about people being poor. He calls us to do the same. And yes, I know that many of you do a lot of that work already. But there’s always more to do. God always calls us to that more. That, folks, is how I think we need to understand our scripture this morning.

So listen now to the words of Psalm 113 not read but sung. Perhaps the music will take those words deeper into your heart. Perhaps the melody will make them more real for you. Perhaps then those words will prod all of us to do more to make what the psalm says God does more real in the world. May it be so. Amen.

On One of America's Tragedies

On One of America’s Tragedies[1]

When I was a kid in the 1950s cowboys and Indians was a thing. We played cowboys and Indians. There were cowboy and Indians movies. There were cowboy and Indians television programs. In every context of cowboys and Indians the cowboys were always white, and they were always the good guys. The Indians were the bad guys. Indians attacked white people for no apparent reason. They were brutal. They scalped people. They kidnapped women and children, and white men always came to the rescue, usually by killing Indians. I was young in the 1950s, having been born in 1946. It never occurred to me to question the stereotypes of the cowboys and Indians genre. No one ever told me that in fact the Indians were the good guys and the cowboys and other white people were the bad guys. It’s only recently, late in my life, that I have come to understand the enormity of the calamity my white ancestors inflicted on American Indians. Only recently have I come to understand that the Indians were fighting to retain their land and their cultures from Euro-American attempts to steal the land the destroy the cultures. I want here to reflect on that calamity in hopes perhaps of clearing my soul or at least doing what I can to clear the air.

My wife Jane and I recently got home from a long car trip to the southwestern US. We drove from our home in Washington state through Oregon, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico. Colorado, then back home through Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. It was quite a trip. We went to see certain natural wonders, Zion National Park and Grand Canyon National Park tops among them. We saw a friend in New Mexico and family in Colorado. All of those things were good, some of them very good. Yet something else occupies the first place of prominence in my memories of the trip. It is what we experienced of Native Americans, that is, the Indians of the cowboys and Indians genre of my childhood. We heard about Native Americans at virtually every stop on that trip. He heard about the Native people from whom we took the canyon of the Virgin River in Zion National Park. We heard about how the Grand Canyon had been home to many Native Americans and was sacred to them. We saw Indian petroglyphs in New Mexico. We visited Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. We visited the Museum of Indian Arts and Cultures in Santa Fe and the Tsamastslikt Cultural Institute outside Pendleton, Oregon. Both of these institutions are beautiful presentations of the cultures and histories of the Native peoples of their areas. In all of those places we learned of the genocide of Native Americans inflicted upon them by Spanish and other Euro-Americans.

The genocide started in Mexico in the sixteenth century. It continued uninterrupted throughout the United States from then into the twentieth century. Diseases Europeans introduced to which Indians had no natural immunity killed as many as half of them or more. We took their land, then presumed to give some of it back to them in the form of reservations. We desecrated sacred Indian sites, Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota being but one example. We looked down upon their culture and their spiritual traditions as primitive, savage even, and full of superstition and evil. We tried to educate their cultures and their languages out of their children. We forced some of them to convert to Christianity, which we insisted was the one and only true religion. We forced entire nations from their homes and resettled them in distant foreign places, the Cherokee Trail of Tears being one of the most egregious examples of this policy but hardly the only one.

We thought they were primitive savages. We treated them as essentially less than human. We thought we were culturally superior. We thought we had true civilization and they didn’t. We thought we had true religion and they didn’t. We thought it was our God-given mandate to “civilize” the Natives of this continent. We were quite content to kill them in the process, the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 in which the US military killed hundreds of helpless Indians, mostly women and children, being a prime example but again hardly the only one. At Taos Pueblo we learned how in 1847 the US Army shelled a church in which Indian women and children were seeking refuge until the roof collapsed killing around 150 of them. We learned of treaty after treaty that the US government signed with Indian nations and never complied with. We took back land we had given to them. We refused to make payments promised to them. We saw example after example of magnificent cultural creations by Native Americans, and we knew that only recently have we white Americans recognized the beautiful creativity of so many Native cultures. We learned of the sacred relationship so many Native nations had, and have, with the land, something we Euro-Americans mostly lack to the great detriment of ourselves and of the earth.

As I admired the beautiful artistic creations of Native people my heart broke. I felt like crying because my white forebears in this nation stole the land of Native people to build my country. Every square inch of the United States of America is ours only because we stole it from the Natives. Every bit of ground on which I walk belonged to other peoples until we stole it from them. My house is located on land we stole from Native people. Every house, every building in this country is located on land we stole from Native people. And my heart breaks.

I know that the history of humanity includes many broad migrations of peoples that involved some people occupying land that once was the home of others. When teaching the early history of Christianity I have constantly to remind people that in New Testament times the people of Anatolia were Greek not Turkish, the Turks occupying that land only many centuries later. The Magyar people of Hungary came from Asia and settled in and dominated land that was not at all Magyar. I’m sure many other examples could easily be cited.  I know that all of that is true, and when I consider what Euro-Americans did to Native Americans my heart still breaks. I know that I cannot undo what white Americans did to Native Americans. What we did we did. What is past is past. Yet it is still very much with us.

I take a little bit of satisfaction in the way Indian nations today are bilking millions of dollars out of gullible white (and other) Americans in the casinos that have sprung up on so many Indian reservations where the white man’s law against gambling does not apply, yet it isn’t anywhere near enough. We could and should pay reparations to all Native nations. That would be something, but it wouldn’t be enough either. Since we can’t undo what we did there is nothing that would be enough. And so we live with a history that we would rather ignore and of which most of us are woefully ignorant. We can beg forgiveness, and some Indian people will be gracious enough to give it. Beyond that I have no answers. I live with a broken heart and a sense of guilt though I myself have never done anything to harm any Indian person and never would. I don’t know what the answer is or even if there is one.

I do know that we white Americans need to stop lying to ourselves about what the establishment of the United States of America meant to the people who were here when we arrived and whose ancestors had lived here for millennia by that time. We need to start being honest. We need to admit that every square inch of land in our country is ours only by right of conquest. Even that won’t be enough, but it could at least be a start in righting the wrong upon which our country is founded. May it be so.

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[1] I was going to title this post “The American Tragedy,” but we have many tragedies in our history and in our current life. So I settled on this title instead.