The Zimmerman verdict: black church, white church
Monday, July 15, 2013
Every context-sensitive preacher’s nightmare is the Saturday night special: i.e. the huge news story or local event that knocks the just-finished sermon into a cocked hat. My sympathies go to all the preachers this morning who either went to bed with or woke up to the Zimmerman verdict.
The preachers I really admire are the ones who stayed up half the night reworking their sermons. I’d like to think that’s what I would have done had I been preaching. I don’t want to sound overly self-satisfied there, but on the other hand I do think it is a preacher’s responsibility to face up to the important events of the day and allow the Word of God to speak directly into the current situation. I doubt if there were many churches anywhere on the Sunday after 9/11 that failed to address the atrocity and its effects. The pulpits of New England surely rang with biblical wrath and sorrow after the Newtown massacre and the Boston Marathon bombing. But how many white churches, this morning, gave up a significant amount of time for prayer and preaching about the continuing struggle for racial justice and the pain of African-Americans following the verdict? Or was it just business as usual?
It is a certainty that the African-American preachers of the US were primed to preach on the Zimmerman verdict, whichever way it had gone. The proceedings have absorbed the attention of large percentages of the black community for several weeks. The receptionist in my erstwhile office suite, a spirited black woman, was checking out the trial on the office TV at every break she had. Al Sharpton devoted most of his nightly program to the subject for months. The problem with so many white Americans is that we simply don’t understand, and often don’t even try to understand, what this sort of thing means to the black community.
It seems to me that the white church owes it to the black church to try to understand. Early this morning on WNYC (NPR), the host interviewed a black pastor who was getting ready to preach to his congregation later in the morning. The pastor spoke of “healing” and “reconciliation” in the name of “our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” On WNYC, no less, where this devoted listener has never heard a single appreciative or even tolerant word said about Christian faith (I have had several exchanges with host Brian Lehrer about this, to no avail). So there are two important things to note in the testimony of the black pastor: 1) his unabashed evocation of the great Name, and 2) the traditional and continuing emphasis in the black church upon reconciliation even in the face of great provocation. The witness of the black church to the transforming, universal power of our Lord never fails to astonish.
What white people just don’t seem to get is the great difficulty that black parents have in raising black children, especially boys, in our communities. They have to be taught things from an early age that white boys never have to worry about. Walk, don’t run. Keep both hands in sight. Look purposeful, not shifty. Be excruciatingly deferential to the police—they are not your friends. I heard about a survey of a large group of young white men and young black men, who were asked if they had been stopped by the police for no obvious reason. Every single black men said they had, every single white man said they had not.
I have always regretted that I have not had the opportunity to lead a congregation to be a partner with a black church—not as in “let us help you in your need out of our great bounty,” but as in “we need your help to explain to us what we can do.” We need to let the black church help us. What a tragedy that even after all the progress, we are still so separated. May the Lord help us to rise to this occasion.
