A few weeks before Easter the local Unitarian church—who always do up the best church signs that you can imagine, “Lesson Of The Loons” winning by a long shot—advertised the following sermon title:
Racism in Religion
10:00 am
I laughed heartily every time I drove by it for a whole week and was sad when it went away. Contemplated skipping my own church so I could see them go at it.
I mean, I know what they’re trying to say. Or do I? Twitter postulates otherwise. In the bleak new world of shouting at other people about what they should think and say and believe, I came across all kinds of 240 character tweetsplains about what you have to say from your pulpit and in your life if you’re really a Christian. If you’re really a Christian you better say the following about white supremacy. If you’re really a Christian you better say such and so about women, and about abuse, and about…well, all the issues of the weekend. And racism particularly is on everyone’s mind because ethnic and religious violence are on the rise. Equal opportunity killing of people on the day of their going to worship the deity of their choice is turning into a sickening habit.
So the narrative after Sri Lanka (which was pretty funny, in a macabre depressing way) was that ‘Easter-worshippers’ had been slaughtered. This let Christians (I was one of them) bitterly point out that the technical word is, in fact, ‘Christian.’ And, you might remember in the remote distant past, minutes after the horrible slaughter in New Zealand, there was a general rush to furiously tweet that the the prime minister was the best and classiest person in the world and that there was no problem with her wearing a Muslim headscarf as an act of solidarity—No Problem At All. And as Notre Dame was still in embers, there was a hue and cry that nobody cared anything for burning black churches in the south and how dare you. And now, a person associated with a reformed church shoots up a synagogue, and it is incumbent upon every breathing religious person to denounce white supremacy, again.
Indeed, I saw a tweet somewhere or other claiming that if you don’t denounce white supremacy from your pulpit post haste, you are implicated in the sins of the white supremacy. Which must be what the Unitarians meant to say on their sign, instead of Racism in Religion 10:00am.
I suppose it would be important for me to say, unequivocally, that I am not a white supremacist. White supremacy is very bad. Racism is bad. Killing people is bad. Rape is bad. Lying and cheating are bad. Abusing people is bad. And this should certainly count because I’m going to tweet this link, so if you’re on twitter you’ll know that I’m The Right Sort.
Never mind that saying something on twitter doesn’t, as the French say, ‘impacté’ anything at all except my general sense that I must have ‘done’ something.
That’s the trouble. Racism really is a thing. But so is poverty—systemic poverty—and the deep misery of crumbling social structures that used to relate people to each other, instead of letting them float out individually, having to gather meaning and identity from wherever they can get it. Twitter does ‘impact’ so many people because it is a place to figure out who you are. And if you feel like you know who you are, it must mean you should tell someone else how to be. So the circle goes round.
I hope, though, that twitter does not increasingly determine what is said from the pulpit—or even the news of the hour. What you should say from the pulpit should come from what’s in the biblical text that you’re preaching from that morning. That’s the one way to tether the people in your care to a sure and certain reality, an identity that can never die or be taken away. So a better sign would be:
Exposition of a Biblical Text
10:30am
(If racism comes up we’ll denounce it and everything, same with lying and all that other bad stuff that God literally said was bad before you even managed to drink your coffee this morning—but also, if you’re a racist please come to church so we can tell you how evil you are which will surely lead you to repent in dust and ashes and cling onto Jesus, who was a person of color after all, but who also died for your sins—not just of racism but all the other ones too—and rose again, defeating death, trampling it under his heel, making a way for you to be reconciled to God and for your black hideous heart to be cleansed and made new, and also, you can have a community, a family if you will, who will help you along your way so that you an be less awful.)
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