Sermon: Bricks We Need

Ephesians 2:11-22

She’s had a long day, and thank goodness, it’s finally time to go home. She ventures back on her normal route. The scenery is familiar – different tables this time on the West Mall – but then again, that’s true every day. This campus has become home to her, and she’s more than ready to go back to her dorm and kick up her feet for a little bit. She opens the door to the building, walks down a hallway – posters and flyers of her campus are all over the place. She pushes the button for the elevator, and waits there. And then another female student approaches her – same age – walking toward her from the other end of the hallway. Maybe she’s had a long day too. Maybe she’s also more than ready to come back. The elevator doors open wide. They both push the numbers for their floors. Finally, time to come home.

But is it home? Can it feel like home? Because our first student sighs inwardly as she watches her white neighbor clutch her purse closely to her chest, a reaction of fear as she rides an elevator alone with a person of dark skin. As she sighs, she thinks to herself, “What? Does this person think I’m going to mug her? Don’t I live here too? Why should I be feared just because I am black?” This story is not from the 1960s. It’s also not hypothetical. It’s the experience of Lauren, an African-American student who currently attends UT.


“I need a haircut,” she thinks. She’s been putting it off, but she remembers a place she’s driven by several times. “I wonder if they’re open.” She gets in her car and discovers that they are. “Great. And there’s hardly anyone inside.” She opens the door and asks the person at the table, “So can I just walk in, or do I need an appointment?” The receptionist looks over her shoulder. There are employees available who could cut her hair right now. “You’re going to have to make an appointment,” the receptionist says.

“Okay. What do you have available?”

The receptionist sprawls open her book – her book, visibly filled with empty pages. “Sorry, we’re not going to have anything available.”

Anger and deep hurt rise to the surface. “Well, I want to let you know that you’ve lost a customer today.” She storms out the door, feeling frustration. “What? You don’t cut hair for people like me? Why should I be discriminated against because I don’t look exactly like you?” This story is not from the distant past. It’s also not hypothetical. It’s the experience of Mari, a Mexican-American student who currently attends UT.


“Hey, nice to meet you!” A hand is extended. “Oh, so you’re a student. That’s great.” They’ve had no time to get to know one another, but that doesn’t mean that assumptions haven’t been made. “I bet you like school. You look like you would.” He’s said nothing about his school experience. “So, what do you hope to do once you’re a doctor?” Again, strange assumptions made. Who said anything about being a doctor? “Actually, I’m majoring in advertising.” “Oh, okay.” The person asking the questions seems to think it’s no big deal, but the student is tired of assumptions like these. “Why do you put me in your own categorical box just because I look a certain way? Why do I always have to be a doctor or a scientist in your mind? Can’t I simply be myself? Or am I some cookie-cutter representation of who you think I should be in your very small world of stereotypes?” This isn’t an old story. It’s also a real one. This is the experience of Lance, an Asian-American student who currently attends UT.


Clearly, the issue of racism is not only a thing of the past. It’s alive and well and moves beyond our history books. It functions in our world. It manifests itself daily in the United States. It lives and breathes as part of the University of Texas. Our society has made great strides, no doubt. But racism remains – not only out there, not only in the words and actions of people we might label bigots -- it resides within. Racism lives within each one of us, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes even unintentionally.

And so, we might ask: What does our Christian faith have to say about this? As you might imagine, our faith has a lot to say. But it’s worth asking ourselves if we believe it does. After all, as people note from time to time, “Sunday morning contains the most segregated hour in the United States.” How can we understand each other and how can we live well with one another if we can’t celebrate and cherish together what is most central to our lives?

So maybe it would be helpful tonight to revisit an old story. Maybe it would be beneficial to revisit some of the ancestors of our faith. Perhaps they have something to say to us.

The earliest Christian disciples were Jewish people who followed Jesus. They followed him as their own Jewish rabbi. They also believed him to be the Messiah, more than a Rabbi. And they spread their deepest beliefs to others, including people they could have easily chosen to exclude – people of every nationality and ethnic background, people who were non-Jews, people otherwise known as Gentiles. And they had some precedent in doing this. The Hebrew Scriptures contain laws of inclusion. As we read tonight in Leviticus, the Jews of ancient Israel were commanded to treat others with respect – to love and include those who lived as outsiders in their land, because they had experienced hardship themselves as foreign slaves in the land of Egypt.

The Jewish ancestors of our faith invited Gentiles into their own Messianic expectations. But as you can imagine, some questions and difficulties emerged as well. This is often happens when cultures collide. Some asked, “Shouldn’t Gentiles have to undergo the rite of circumcision – a mark of Judaism - to follow Christ?” People disagreed on this. In Christians communities, Jewish believers and Gentile believers fought one another and clashed over the ways their faith would manifest itself. Animosities swirled around them, coming from both directions.

And the passage tonight from Ephesians addresses these difficulties. Would Jewish believers and Gentiles believers include one another? Or would they create walls of hostility – barricading themselves as segregated communities that had nothing to do with one another? The author of this letter believes there is no place for walls of hostility. In Jesus Christ, these walls are to come tumbling down.

“Christ is our peace,” the letter proclaims. In him, two groups have become one humanity. There is only one humanity. No room for a dividing wall. In the faith, no one is a stranger or an alien. Believers of every ethnicity and culture are saints and members of the household of God. They are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

Again, “Christ is our peace,” the letter proclaims. Christ brings peace to people who have always known inclusion and he showers peace upon those who have wrongfully been labeled as outsiders. But there is no dividing wall from which Christ divvies up this group’s peace and that group’s peace. There’s one peace – one peace for one humanity. After all, what is peace if it’s not at work right within the intersection of what has been conflict!

What is peace if it’s not at work right within the intersection of what has been conflict?

And so the question comes back to us: Where will we be at work right within the intersection of conflict? To answer that question, we have to see the conflict for what it is, and then, with God’s help, we need boldness to go there – boldness to walk right in there and seek peace.

The conflict is not only out there somewhere. The conflict is within ourselves – within you and within me. Racism is taboo in our culture. And on a small level that’s good news, because it means our society has finally come to a place, by and large, where we can declare racism to be wrong and unjust. But because we know it is, we don’t want to believe that we ourselves have succumbed to its influence. Racism is horrible. We know it, and we don’t want to believe that sometimes we let it rear its ugly head in our lives, even in subtle ways. So instead, we brush it under the rug and assume that it exists out there somewhere. Even worse, we assume it’s someone else’s problem to deal with.

And another thing needs to be said: What may seem subtle and unintentional from our perspective, may be incredibly harmful from the perspective of another. We have no idea what went through the mind and heart of that young, white student, holding her purse tightly to her chest in that elevator. We don’t know and we can’t know, and we shouldn’t excuse that behavior. But just for a moment, let’s imagine that she had no intention to send the message she did. Maybe she’s the product of this society – a society where black criminals are disproportionately shown on t.v., infinitely more than their white counterparts. Maybe that induced fear in her. But here’s the problem: if people like her never question whether racism underlies her own behavior, who will confront the larger problems of society that create that behavior? We must address the conflict within our own selves.

So often when we think of making peace, we imagine ourselves talking. We imagine ourselves acting, making decisions, leading. But maybe we make more peace with listening. Years ago, I attended a church service, and I remember something the preacher said. He said this: “You know, maybe there’s a reason we have two ears but only one mouth.” I think he’s right. Maybe we need to listen more and talk less. I imagine that’s true for all of us – true for you and for me.

Our passage from Ephesians tells us that each and every believer is being built together. We’re being built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. Can God be divided? If the answer is no, then neither can we. We can’t afford it. As we think about the issues of racism around us, it becomes obvious that we need to listen to the bricks that surround us. We desperately need the stories of those who have experienced racism first hand. We need those bricks to become our teachers. There’s no dividing wall. We’re all God’s children, and we’re incomplete without one another.

Two years ago, I had this strange dream that had a big effect on me. In this dream, I was learning how to become multi-lingual in terms of people. And others were doing it too. We were all attempting to learn the different languages of the people in our lives. And by “languages” I don’t literally mean foreign concepts or vocabularies. In my dream, people were intentionally learning to converse in languages based on people’s dreams, anxieties, hopes, and experiences. I wonder if our Christian life of discipleship requires this kind of learning.

If you think about it, it’s like traveling to a completely new place. When we do that, commonalities between ourselves and others become cherished because we draw upon our common experiences to communicate. But if we’re willing to stay for a while, we also learn to value the differences, and we begin to learn the language that’s spoken there. Now we know the best way to do this is to get our noses out of the dictionaries and the phrase books because we need to have an immersion experience. In this way, our language-learning becomes dependent on the people who actually speak the language. We can know the phrases from the phrase books all day long, but if we stay stuck our books, we’ll end up putting a wall between ourselves and others, and we’ll never move beyond mere trivialities no matter how grammatically correct our phrases may be. What we need is to learn the slang – the unique ways that people understand their experiences. We can read books about racism all day long, but if we don’t talk to the people who’ve experienced it, we’ll never be able to converse in the broader language which is Justice. There are bricks we desperately need.

And if we continue in the discipleship of listening – of language-learning – we’ll discover that our experience can never be exactly like someone else’s. But as we continue to live among others and learn their languages, we’ll learn how to converse in their world. And we’ll discover that their experience – their world – becomes a part of ours too. We can’t claim that their experience is our experience, but through immersion, we can adopt their experience toward ourselves. And we’ll discover that our world will never be the same. We’ve been enriched through the dreams, anxieties, hopes, and experiences of others.

And so, how will we engage in language-learning here at Austin Agape? Who will we dare to meet? How will we challenge ourselves to listen, and what will we change within ourselves? How will we be become conversant in Justice, and what will we proclaim once we learn to speak it?

How will you do it, and where will we be at work right within the intersection of conflict? May God help us answer these questions with our very lives. May God send us to the people we so desperately need.

Amen.

- Renée Roederer, Campus Minister