Life Is Too Short to Be White
January 13, 2008
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

Today is two years from the day I started at Judson.  The time has flown by―and the plant that Don Morlan gave me upon arrival has been repotted with the plant that Tim gave me, left by Don for me when he died, into one large planter.  The welcome plant is thrice its size; the memorial service one twice its size.  Some plants just won’t take death for an answer.

Likewise, Judson.  When I got here, I thought of you all as in a bit of a turn around.  You were saying to me that you had lost your way―and many observations reflected that.  In the renovation you kept the Sunday School rooms small.  You didn’t really see a need for a kitchen.  Since I have come, I have watched you prove yourself wrong, and I’m not talking about the kitchen.  Rather than being a congregation that has lost its shine, you are shiny and shining.  Your renovation has positioned you for an extraordinary ministry by what we sometimes unattractively call “Space Use.”  Last night domestic workers of half a dozen nationalities gave themselves a party, right here in this space.  Earlier in the day, a group of Native Americans filled up the place with incense and conversation that lingers.  Next week Susannah Heschel will speak and hundreds of people will recommit to healthcare reform.  I could go on.  Read your bulletin.  This congregation has turned around into a life-giving use of time and space and each other.

How did we do it? By not getting stuck in the obvious paradoxes of contemporary congregations.  Here’s one for you: you can’t be diverse or prophetic and grow.  Yes, you can.  You can’t be cutting edge and fiscally responsible. Yes, you can.  You can’t have a small staff and do a large ministry.  Yes, you can.  Look around sometime at how many volunteers we have who are doing ministry here.  They make most associate pastors look like wimps.  And again, I could go on.  I’m less interested today in a mutual congratulation society than what we do from this platform of success.  It’s time to stretch a little.  In fact, the more success we have, the more we should stretch.  Jesus says you can have anything you can give away; if you can’t give it away, you can’t have it.  I believe that.  Thus, these aerobics and stretches today.  Life is too short not to stretch.

For a variety of reasons, the issues of 21st century diversity, racism, and multiculturalism are on our table.  The main one is that people who are not white are coming to us and pointing out how white we are.  We are so white that without external observation we would probably not bother to notice it.  Why would we?  Being white is something you don’t have to notice, that’s why.  That is one of the privileges of being white.

Most of us have been through enough anti-racism trainings to shake a stick at―and here we are: a mostly white, but changing, congregation.  Are we no longer racist?  Or just becoming diverse?  Or practicing multiculturalism?  Bill Webber, former president of New York Theological Seminary, always said he was a “recovering racist.”  But for me, even that moderately confessional, leaning forward language has become dusty.  I don’t know what it means.  If I am a recovering racist, do I go to weekly meetings?  Do I make sure you know that I drink whiteness and that I often don’t know how to stop drinking it?  Or does it mean that I am re-covering racism, as in re-covering it up every time I get an opportunity to be in a mixed group, making the usual “I’m not racist but” kind of comments, or at least feeling them and not trying to say them. 

I think most of us would agree that racism remains a social, political, and economic issue in schools, housing, healthcare, and the like.  Think Katrina, if you can bear it.  Few of us really think that has anything to do with us.  Or if it does, we are hopeless, helpless, out of the loop, living in the land of I don’t know what to do and if I did, I might not have the courage to do it. 

Back to Judson.  I tried to write something for the website about a goal I have for this year.  It is the goal of developing our multicultural capacity here at Judson.  To get beyond recovering and into opportunizing.  To change the conversation about immigration as a problem to immigration as a gift.  To really be a space that doesn’t brag about how many women of color we put in our meeting room on Saturday nights but is a place where women of color might feel a sense of ownership and belonging.  To move from tolerance and self-congratulation to struggle and welcome.  To get out of our own way.  Think open and affirming as the logic: not just to see anti-racism as a problem but also as an opportunity and gift.  Not just to tolerate, but to fertilize.  I fertilized Don’s plants a lot.  I repotted them several times.  You should have heard them scream the first time I opened their roots to the air.  It wasn’t pretty.

One of the mythologies about racism is that it involves struggle. It’s like saying prophetic congregations can’t bring in new members or grow.  It isn’t true until you find out whether it is true or not in your own experience.  I am enough of a sixties person, as are many of you, to have earned the right to self-criticize.  I am bored stiff by the sixties version of anti-racism, anti-sexism, and the like.  They are Calvinist, not Christian.  They involve so much criticism and atonement theology that it makes me shiver.  How do we know we are making progress against racism?  We suffer.  How would I imagine Judson looking like if we made progress against racism?  We would sing it, not suffer it.  Our theme song: “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”  It ain’t necessarily so.

So for today, since I can’t possibly get too far in my anniversary sermon, let me suggest a picture that sings, one that makes art out of the junk of our stuck-ness.  It is one that refuses dichotomies and accepts suffering, but only as a route to joy.  I can say a little more of what I mean like this:  I failed to write the website blurb introducing my theme of diversity deepening.  I wrote it about ten times and every time I ended I could hear some of you saying, “Oh, God.  What’s in it for me?  Haven’t we done this before?  Aren’t we finished with this topic?  Plus, what does she want?  Doesn’t she like us just the way we are?  Who said we were too white?  It’s probably some of those meddling Community Ministers, all of whom have read too much Jim Cone.  How dare they tell us we are no good,” etc.  (They are a pain, these Community Ministers, but I hereby absolve them of responsibility for this conversation and claim it as my own.)

My failure at the website was just exactly what I needed.  It told me how much I don’t know about where we need to go.   Once, in an interview with a la-di-dah church, even whiter than this one, someone asked me a smart question.  Before that, all the questions were the usual: “Can you make us grow?  How would you get us more young people?  How would you get us more money?”  You know the interview; you’ve probably had a version of one yourself.  Anyway, someone wise interrupted the commandments to succeed and said, “Are you weak enough to be our Senior Minister?”  Now that was something I could get my teeth into, and not just because I happen to think St. Paul is right about our weakness being our strength and vice versa.  It said I might have a place for grace with these people.  I might not have to be perfect.  I could put things at risk.

We have already talked about how most people will do anything to avoid criticism.  What I have found so far in discussing this as yet unnamed topic―for now just call it Judson’s predominant whiteness―is that people are afraid they are going to be criticized.  To that, I respond with praise.  This congregation is a knock out.  What it has already done is incredible.  What it did last week and last night is incredible. I think you are the best nearly-all-white congregation I have ever worked with. I mean the best.  And I am not kidding you.  I am saying something very different, which is that life is too short to be white. 

What is “white?”  White is the privileged tendency not to have to notice some things or people.  Whiteness is self-protection.  It is that always handy shield we put up in front of ourselves if a person of color says something that makes us uncomfortable. Western whiteness is also the bland, nearly unconscious, color-devoid externalization of fault.  James Cone puts it well when he says, “White Folk want everything but the burden.”  What we do to black people (and gay people and other convenient others) is to blame and goat―that is scapegoat―them.  It is dull. It keeps us beige and vanilla, as well as white.  Self-protection, scapegoating, and privileged blindness work well as strategies to keep racism alive in us and through us.  Invisibly, but only if you are white, they do their work.

A few more strategic observations and then I am going to stop.  In our text today, Peter is trying to build a church. That’s what I am trying to do, too.  Read it all at your convenience, but for now just note two lines that he puts in the same sermon.  First, “God shows no partiality.”  Then, we are God’s chosen people.  Of course, I have already used that ruse in this sermon: You are the very best congregation I have ever seen, and life is too short for that.  God is not so much interested in our success as in our failure at something large.  Are you weak and partial enough to serve God?   When we get into the world of the ultimate, we are bred to a higher thing than triumph, as Yeats would say.  We are bred to give away every success we have on behalf of more fertile failures.  In fact, as I read this text, I say that it is a brilliant failure.  Even Peter, founder of the church, blew it.  We are in good company.  Peter blew it by setting up a contradiction, which he could not resolve.  That contradiction is this universality business, God showing no partiality, and the scandal of particularity, which is the chosen-ness.  He sets it up but does not resolve it, and I think congregations, movements, and reformers have been messing it up ever since.  We either go into a boring universality or an interesting individuality or get stuck and shut up.  We decide that things that are not true are true and live in them, like the self-fulfilling prophesy that prophetic congregations are not able to grow.

Watch for some more interesting and related contradictions.  Clinton will be for grubby deals and Obama will be for impossible dreams.  Hmm.  Most impossible dreams I know of have grubby compromises behind them, before them, and in them.  We will be asked to see Obama as a child and Clinton as an adult, when it is very clear that Obama has some capacity for compromise and Clinton has some capacity to dream.  If politics is the art of the possible, and child and adult brilliantly mix in the best of us, would it not be possible that Judson’s new direction be neither mature or youthful, compromised or visionary, but both?  Might we, in avoiding Peter’s problem, sketch out a place between partiality and chosen-ness and act like both are true all the time?  I know it’s a stretch for reason, but reason might also take us there.  We aren’t doing so well on one side of the road or the other.  “Dreamers, here please.  Pragmatists there please.”  Never the twain shall meet.  “Universalists here, selfish individualists there, please.”  Never the twain shall meet.

So in my muddle about how terribly short life is and how it is surely too short to be white (self-protected), I offer this idea for us, for a while: our goal might be to become colorful, to deepen and to intensify the passion we have for the possible.  Intensification is not going visionary or pragmatist or universal or particular―neither small nor large, neither institutional nor personal―so much as going toward all of them at once.  Instead of using the language that I keep gagging on, like anti-racism or diversity development or multicultural capacity, why not use the language of an intensification?  A deepening?  A coloring?  Anyway, I put that on the table for our consideration as a goal for a year or decade or two.

And secondly, I want to bring in something that our talk-back speaker, Lada, will develop more fully out of her own experience.  It is the methodology of making art out of junk.

We live in a near junkyard of failed hopes for housing, schools, personal friendships (when I analyzed the guest list for Isaac’s wedding, I was humiliated at how white it was, just humiliated), jobs, New Orleans and Jena, and I could go on.  It’s a junk yard.  It stinks.  It rots.  Hatred piles high on top of earlier hatred―and what do most whites do?  Drive around the junkyard, that’s what we do.  Keep away from the smell of it.  Protect ourselves.  Whiteness is self-protection at its core.

What about making art out of junk, connecting to the actual pieces of the actual mess, and doing something beautiful with them?

Our intensification and deepening toward a more colorful life together are as artistic as they are political, as systemic as they are personal.  How would I know if the intensification was working?  Each of you would change a pattern or two and be involved in something as small as conversation or as large as a movement.  The plant would look and feel healthy and like to be turned toward the light.  It would grow.  Two years from now, we would look back on today and say we made art out of junk. We deepened.  We got colorful.  We were weak enough to grow.  We repotted ourselves as often as was needed.  We demythologized and avoided weapons of mass distraction on behalf of what we knew and saw and felt and hoped.  Most of all, I would know if it “worked,” if it played.  If we found ourselves giving away all that we had, so that we could keep it.  If we gave away white self-protection in order to be truly colorful and safe.