Dear sisters and brothers of such a blessed congregation, please pray with me.
O Wonderful Trinity, made known to us as,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and as
Lover, Beloved, and Love, and as
God our Father, Jesus our Mother, and the Spirit our Lord
You are the beginning and ending of our existential philosophy of life; you are the visionary held captive within us as burning hope; you are the fire of imagination that reaches out beyond us to other brothers and sisters in the Spirit and by the power of the cross; you are limitless compassion and unequivocal freedom; you are the inspiration welling up in brother Moses and the daring operatic prophecy of sister Miriam empowering a slave-people to follow the God of freedom out of the hands of the dead gods of empire; you are raging fire and stormy sea; you are expansive prosperity that crosses class-structured society; you are prescient creativity expounding from the spirits of oppressed peoples everywhere.
Today we just come together, summoned by brother Jesus, to witness to the unarmed truth of love; a love made known to us in the self-giving of leaders and lovers who came before us to blaze a trail toward expansive and explosive peacemaking and well-being. We have come to hear a word from you, O Lord of Life, to testify to that love that not only delivered sister Harriet and brother Josiah from slavery, but also steeps us in the prophetic tradition that we might become captive, not to political oppression and trigger-happy policing, but enslaved to, and held captive by the vision of the cross; a vision that enslaves us to hopefulness and generosity of spirit; a concept that inspires the oracle of understanding in us as we seek to fortify within us a passion for justice and respect that reaches beyond ourselves and our own races and our own ethnic groups and our own worldviews and our own classes and our own genders and our own interests and our own orientations to touch and share in bearing faithful witness with the further brood of Adam and Eve living in the struggle across this planet, this people, and this creation that brother Jesus so truly loved.
We pray all of this in the name of the Trinity – our Lover, and our Beloved, and our Love – Amen!!!
SILENCE
I like to think of my own Black liberation theology as eclectic – conservative, liberal, Black, Aboriginal, mystical, spiritual, political, affirmative, substantial, ecological, liberating, captivating, sensible, rational, material, perennial, original.
I like to think that where my own Black liberation theology connects and intertwines with the faith of others is in a space of generosity, verbosity, philosophy, eschatology, shared mythology, soteriology, peace, hope, laughter, joy, play, concern, return.
But as Black peoples – as peoples in the struggle – we are forced to come to terms with our existential reality. We call upon our friends of encounter around the world, who know what it’s like to live as niggers in your own house, for solidarity and support. We look to our indigenous sisters and brothers held as hostages on the very land the Maker graced them with and we cry out!!! We look to our brothers and sisters from Mexico and the Caribbean lands who travel to the breadbaskets of this land to give a good life to family back home. We think about and dream with our sisters all across the world shackled by male-domination and extreme material poverty. We say many prayers for our overlooked sisters and brothers who have yet to mature as human beings, but have already been forced to wield powerful weaponry in government and rebel armies around the world; we also have nightmares for our sisters, particularly in southeast Asia who have become sex objects primarily for rich Westerners who go to visit their countries for sickening pleasure.
You see, folks, you may not know it, but this is the story of the Black humanity. There are Negroes on every part of the planet. It just happens that though the empire fashions itself to contain prophetic imagination, the Negro people of the world cry out in lament. We cry out to the God of freedom frustrated by the way the world is. The offerings of this God are such that our prophets in the Black world have been formed and informed by the words of Holy Scripture:
Don’t tear your clothing in your grief; instead, tear your hearts.
We have let our hearts be broken and we are wailing now. The outpouring of grief becomes our opportunity to consider a better way of looking at the world and partnering with the Maker that we might be people of audacity and conspiracy. As we capitulate a desire for power, we rear our community to envision a rise to greatness that seeks to blossom expansively upon not just oppressed peoples, but upon all peoples. For our lament, and the laments of our other struggling communities – like our indigenous peoples and immigrants – have often come at the hands of the vanilla majority, but we seek not the humiliation of that people, but rather the symbiosis of the spirit of the White and the Black; the yin and the yang; the oppressor and the oppressed. We seek shalom; we seek harmony; we seek generosity, and as the Scripture says:
Spare your people, YHWH! They belong to you, so don’t let them become an object of mockery. Don’t let their name become a proverb of unbelieving foreigners who say, “Where is the God of Israel? He must be helpless!
But Black peoples know that this God of freedom is not helpless, for there was a time when our ancestors were visited by this very God to enact an exodus from Pharaoh’s land into the Promised Land. And the name of these hurting people was no longer “Negro”, but rather “Israel” for as one people together we have acknowledged that, “I struggled with God” just as brother Jacob did as he wrestled that angel in the middle of the night demanding a blessing; a word of hope from the Liberator.
My own Black heritage is rooted and centred in the slave trade, and because of that I have never had difficulty identififying with African Americans – their struggle is my struggle. To that end, I want to invite you into the current context of the chocolate Canada as we hear Gospel and resurrection proclaimed on this beautiful Wednesday morning.
Our people are suffering even generations after the long journey to freedom in Canada. People of African descent, according to Statistics Canada are:
overrepresented among those with post-graduate degrees. In 2001, 7.3% of people aged 15 and over who reported having African origins had either a Master’s Degree or an earned doctorate, versus 4.8% of all Canadians in this age range.
The same report says that people in “the African community in Canada are slightly less likely to be employed than the rest of the population” and this has had a devastating effect on my people and on your people. I was born to a 17 year-old in Windsor, Ontario who had no job, no education, and no vision for her life. But in these days I have begun to realize that the words of the Psalmist are, in fact, true:
You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. (Psalm 139:13)
The hands of YHWH must have been knitting something spectacular for within my first year of life I was placed in the gentle hands of a loud, obnoxious preacher’s wife to be fostered in the prophetic tradition of love. To her I was Jimmy Co-Co Pot, the last infant she would foster, but not the very last of over 175 children she fostered in the Windsor-Detroit area. Erma Vinson, the pride of Black folks in Canada, the wife of a Methodist preacher, and then, after his untimely death, the wife of a Baptist preacher, knew the God of freedom personally, and so she cradled me in blankets of liberation.
When I was 20 months old I was adopted by an Anglo family, the Kilners, who, by the late 1980s would have a large, multiracial family – and by large I mean 13 children. At adoption I lost my name, James Michael Vyncent Warren, and was given a new identity, named after Erma’s Baptist-preacher-husband, Rev. Adam Vinson. Of the over 175 children Grandma Vinson fostered, she tells me I am the only to have gone into the ministry. I became Adam James Kilner. I now look back at the story and realize that there are too many coincidences for my proclivities to accept as simple coincidence. Rather, I believe in my heart and soul that the love-cross of Jesus had oriented me toward true north as I began forming in my mother’s womb. I then was raised in the beautiful small city of Sarnia, on the southern shore of Lake Huron that flows into the mighty St. Clair River on its way through the Great Lakes water system. Our family comprised of 3 biological children and 10 adopted children who were First Nations, East Indian, Irish, Scottish, French-Canadian, British, African American, Jamaican, and Vietnamese, and we thrived even in the midst of the city’s vanilla homogeneity. Our family contributed to our city’s move from a vanilla town, to a neopolitan city.
When I was in high school I would often walk through the yard of a Catholic elementary school in order to have lunch at my older brother’s house. As I walked through that yard, the year I was in grade 12, I would have a young White brother and his hooligans gather round me every day mocking me by saying things like, “Well hey there; you look like a Hershey’s chocolate bar!” and, “Hi Michael Jackson!” Knowing they were just kids I would normally smile as I passed by them and wave. By the end of that year the derision continued, and in my frustration I walked over to that little boy as he told me which chocolate bar I resembled on that day and replied, “You’re right, son, I’m just that sweet and rich and mmmmmm...mmmmm...I’m just that good.” And as he moved into the Michael Jackson comment I couldn’t help reminding this dear child of how much, in his later years, Michael Jackson looked more like him than like this Black brother. The satisfaction that went with that experience was, to me, on par with Edmund Hilary on the day he became the first human being to climb to the top of the world on Mount Everest – it was a dazzling moment in history.
But I too have experiences that would make you cringe. In one time and place in ministry I received a forwarded email entitled, “Proud to be White” from a vanilla brother in my congregation, and I would like you to hear some of the content of that email as I work to wrap up this Gospel message for you. The following quoted material will not only offend some, but I expect will offend all, so I invite you into my life as a Black man in this White church during this Black History Month in which we become intentional about remembering our heritage as Canadians connected to Black peoples who were once our slaves along with some of our First Nations peoples as well. If you’ve ever wondered why Black folks and First Nations folks get along so well together, it’s because we was slaves together. Now listen to the first section of this forwarded email:
There are African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, etc. And then there are just Americans. You pass me on the street and sneer in my direction. You call me 'White boy,' 'Cracker,' 'Honkey,' 'Whitey,' 'Caveman'... and that's OK...But if I call you, Nigger, Kike, Towel head, Sand-nigger, Camel Jockey, Beaner, Gook, or Chink .. You call me a racist. You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you... so why are the ghettos the most dangerous places to live? You have the United Negro College Fund. You have Martin Luther King Day. You have Black History Month. You have Cesar Chavez Day. You have Yom Hashoah. You have Ma'uled Al-Nabi. You have the NAACP. You have BET.... If we had WET (White Entertainment Television), we'd be racists. If we had a White Pride Day, you would call us racists. If we had White History Month, we'd be racists.
To begin with, I always thought that Martin Luther King Day was for everybody. Second of all, I don’t even know what half of these derogatory racial slurs mean. Thirdly, in my household the cross is lifted so high above all other things that all I can think of is that there is some White brother somewhere in the United States of America who needs some love because he’s so filled with hate. You see, as Black folks our tradition, coming out of slavery, has never been to fight terror with terror; it has never been to fight lynchings with lynchings; but rather to seek freedom for everybody regardless of race, creed, orientation, generation, class, or colour. This is why, as the Scripture says, we have gathered together for a “solemn assembly”. We have gathered to lament that even in 2010, after in the United States a Black man has been elected to the highest office, and even in our United Church of Canada a Black man has been elected to the highest office, there continues to be a systemic force of domination at work in our churches. Cornel West says that “just because you elect a Black president doesn’t mean you’re post-racial; it just means you’re less racist. Just because you’re less racist doesn’t mean they should start handing out prizes.”
Somebody told me, after hearing such hate-filled content, that Jesus would be rollin’ over in his grave. Well let me tell you folks something; Jesus rolled over once in his grave already; they called it the resurrection! He won’t be rollin’ over anymore. He’s through with that!
But we continue in our hope and in our witness as Christians serving the God who uses that wicked execution device, the cross, to make wise and powerful people foolish. We keep our eyes fixated on such a deplorable image, for just as it bears the stains of Jesus’ humiliating defeat, it bears the many defeats that we have endured, even those of being kicked while we’re down. But though I lament, though I complain to God because change isn’t happening, I know that God hears my sobs of despair; I know that God wants to turn my whimpering into laughter, and I live prepared, for I know that God has done it before for my people.
When Harriet Tubman walked all those miles on her first journey across the Mason-Dixon Line from southern Maryland into Pennsylvania – from slavery to freedom – I just know that she said these words that keep our faith, as Black peoples, pointed toward possibility:
“When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”
Amen!
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