Freeing Our Hands and Hearts at the Portal Gate
A Homily on Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, and 58-67
by Griff Martin
For the Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time (and the Sixteenth of Covid Worship)
For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
July 5, 2020
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
There is an old parable that is worth hearing again… about a family recipe for chicken which began with these instructions: "take an entire chicken and cut it in half," then details on how to marinate it and cook it and the sauce that goes, etc. One day, preparing the meal, a grandchild asked the question, "why do we cut the chicken in half? This does not really seem to help with the recipe, it seems an unnecessary step." The grandchild began to explore this, calling his mom who replied, “well, that is the way we always did it -- let me call my mom and ask why we do it that way.” The conversation went from the great-grandchild all the way up to the great-grandmother living in assisted living who simply said, “Well, you cut the chick in half because my mom’s pan could only hold half a chicken, of course… it’s silly to do that if your pan can hold a whole chicken.”
What had been sacred was nothing more than a practicality for a generation long passed.
Another example… I often think of the drive I frequently make to Breckenridge, Colorado when you go through the Eisenhower Tunnel on 1-70. This four-lane tunnel goes under the continental divide, it is the longest and highest tunnel in the United States highway system. It opened in 1973 and it takes about 5 minutes to get through the tunnel. Prior to this tunnel, you had to take Loveland Pass, which is a beautiful drive but a difficult drive and on a good day it adds 30 minutes; with traffic or bad road conditions you added literal hours onto your trip. As in, once I was traveling with friends and we were ahead of them and I was one of the last cars allowed in the tunnel because of weather and I got to the cabin hours before they arrived because they had to take Loveland Pass.
Each time we get to the tunnel after a long day of travel, I am glad for the creation of something new.
Right now I believe we are in the creation of something new. I heard this metaphor the other day and I really like it: we are entering a portal right now. It comes from an article in the Financial Times, written by Arundhati Roy, titled “The Pandemic is A Portal.” She is very blunt about where we are, stating, “The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it is not new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years.”
Sit with that.
And then this is how she ends the essay: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
Sit with that.
I do think that is our decision right now, what will we carry into this better normal we are walking towards?
That is the thought I brought with me to this text this morning… The story begins with one of Abraham’s servants who is sent off on a task to find a wife for his son Isaac. Now Abraham has insisted that the future wife not come from Canaan where they are currently living but from the land of his own people. This is the passed-down wisdom, tradition.
And of course we know that the servant finds Rebekah, which creates an entire new chapter in our biblical text which we will explore in the weeks to come as we move further and further into the story of Genesis.
But the question I have for us this morning is that as we are entering a new chapter, what will we bring from our ancestors? How do we know when to carry forth their ways and their thoughts, the traditions and when do we need to let go of them?
Traditions are tricky, very tricky. My feeling is that traditions need to always be handled in moderation, that traditions have a vote but they do not have a veto. I think they need to be examined carefully to see what they are… Are these simply practicalities from another generation that no longer make sense? Is this peer pressure from the past? Is this wisdom? Is this a practice that is life-giving and sustains us still? Do we know better today? Does this add value to what we are doing? And this question, which is key, is this helping us grow or hindering us from growing?
Because if this is not helping us grow, then it is helping us die… Hear that: if it’s not helping us grow, it is helping us die, because if you are not changing and growing then you are dying… It’s a biological reality of life.
The late great Phyllis Tickle predicted this in her most important book, The Great Emergence, where she predicts that every 500 years or so the church goes through what she calls a big rummage sale. We look at everything we have accumulated throughout the previous years and then we mark what we are going to keep and what we are throwing away. I think we have finally reached that point, a few years later than she predicted, but we are now here.
And there are certainly some things which we need to look at and decide that they are going to the garage sale because they are not doing us any good right now, they are simply things we are hoarding, and hoarding is not helping. Remember that the more we hold in our hands from the past, the less space we have to be in the present, which is the very home of God.
But here is the other part of that metaphor that I think has lacked the exploration needed: You know what else happens in a big rummage sale? Not everything gets sold. You go up to the attic and you start digging through stuff and you find things that you had forgotten you had that bring you incredible joy: a pair of candlesticks from your grandmother’s dining room table, a copper pot, an old lamp that is back in style, a photo album. And you don’t put that out in the garage sale… you put that out on the table or you sit and look through the photos because that is life and love and that you need to hold onto.
So right now, as we are walking into our new chapter, walking through the portal into the better normal, we need to all be doing some questioning of what we are carrying?
Now I can certainly think of things which we need to carry into the portal and into the better normal: all people, our sense of the holiness and sacredness of worship, our inclusion of the queer community, our insistence on gender equality, the importance of science and arts in our faith, our pulpit, our sense of Scripture, our belief in living like Jesus… But we talk about those things often. We know these things.
The question is what do we need to let go of today?
Now, hang with me because this is about to get rough, but this has to happen and I need you to go to a difficult place with me… There are things that we at First Austin need to finally confess and deal with as we enter this next portal because the weight of them and the deadly weight of our silence is killing us. When I arrived here at First, I paid a lot of attention to the history book, In His Marvelous Light. There is so much we are proud of in our history and I wanted to know that history because history repeats itself and only foolish leaders avoid history.
It’s a fascinating history, and then I got to a part that made me pause -- in particular, a name: Rev. Jacob Fontaine. His name is not officially listed as one of our pastors because he never actually preached technically at First Austin, instead he preached in an afternoon service at First Austin for Colored People. You see, before the creation of that church, black people were allowed to sit in our balcony during our morning service; to be more specific, enslaved Africans were allowed to attend this congregation with their masters. Something occurred which resulted in the decision that they were no longer allowed to attend Sunday morning services, so First Austin for Colored was created so that the enslaved Africans could worship.
Now, this is written about in a rather rosy way in our history book, as if this was an outreach plan for First Austin. I want to be very clear, this was not outreach, because outreach is about freedom and our outreach then would have been to stand against the evil sin of slavery and for freedom of all people, which we failed to do, part of our original sin. We did not stand up against the obvious sin of slavery.
Now let me make the connection for you… I think we know that all of our country is built on black bodies, that should not be news to us. But the direct connections still hurt like hell. The direct connection here is that if First Austin had a balcony for enslaved Africans, that means that our tithes come from slave owners, which means that some of the funds which were used to create this space are tithes of the black body, tithes that were not voluntarily given, stolen funds. Which means that yes, none of us owned enslaved Africans, none of us would ever dream of such a crime, however our very space is built on a history where we did not choose the higher, harder path and we are still benefiting from the funds and the space our slave-owning heritage helped build.
Deep breaths. I know this hurts but cleaning out a wound often requires reopening the wound so that the infection can finally be dealt with.
Almost two years ago, I started digging into the history of Rev. Fontaine. His history is really important. He is a huge name in black churches in central Texas; in fact, he is often referred to as the "godfather" of all central Texas black churches; it’s not an overstatement to say that he seems to have founded the majority of central Texas black churches, they all have roots in his ministry.
Now, when I have mentioned his name at lunches and meetings in the past few years with fellow pastors, this is the response I have heard: First, shock that a white pastor knows this name. Second, joy over his life and ministry; there is incredible gratitude and joy over his life and ministry (think the Saints we have made of Browning Ware and Carlyle Marney), and then third, this question: Griff, what is First Austin going to do with that information?
One of the things I realized when I read that history is that I had not heard the full story because when First Austin tells our story of race, we begin with another moment. We begin when a black family joined this church in the 1960s. Our inclusion and insistence that black families were allowed in worship is very important and it did take brave voices and we did lose folks who disagreed with us and I am thankful we made that move, but it is not truthful to only tell that story.
Our story of our church and race does not begin with us doing the right thing, and if we start it there, we avoid the truth and we continue to carry a really ugly festering wound with us and hear me on this: as Christians, we better be demanding at the beginning of the portal, we better be standing there and saying: there is no room for racism in this better normal, so you stand here and deal with what needs to be dealt with because you are not crossing this threshold until you can cross it without the baggage that is killing our world. The better normal is better, and to get there we have some truth and reconciliation work we have to do.
It’s the work of Jesus. Who has a very real opinion about all of this. I keep thinking back to one of my favorite sayings from the Gospel of Thomas, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
We, the church and our country, have failed to bring forth what is within us and we are seeing the destruction today. It’s those words again, "the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years.”
And now is our time, our turn. We are called to do the very thing Jesus did his entire life: look at religion and the systems we have created and the politics around us and tell us what it’s time to drop and what it’s time to carry. Go back and read the Gospels in that light and you will see that story repeating itself over and over, Jesus is redefining religion, letting go of what needs to be let go and holding tighter to the ultimate, and Jesus is the ultimate portal and he’s standing there looking at us, looking at what we carry and saying, “this goes, that doesn’t go… step over to the side and deal with that and then you can cross through.”
It’s the very purpose of religion, which means to re-align to reconnect, in the words of Father Richard Rohr: religion radically reconnects us with everything.
This work is long past due and our time has come. We are at the threshold of the portal and we need to be asking what are we carrying forward and what are we letting go of and what does the work of letting go mean?
We need to all be asking that question. I hope today has begun the confession we have to start with, because we are guilty, our church is guilty. We can’t do that action without owning our part, our collective part.
And then we ask the hard question, what is the work we do as part of truth and reconciliation? I want to hear from you as you pray about that work. What I will tell you is that it’s going to be hard work… it’s not a pulpit swap or a potluck, it’s not even just simply hanging a Black Lives Matter banner in front of our church. In fact, talking with a friend last week I asked, what does it mean to you and your people if we hang a banner that reads Black Lives Matter, and he replied, "it means nothing if that is all you do and that gives you a pat on the back and makes you feel you have done your work; do the work Griff."
It’s time to do the work.
Here is where we are starting… I am realizing the importance of a word I did not know before this month, anti-racist. You simply can’t be not racist, that is not an option. You are either standing against systems of inequality and white supremacy and patriarchy or you are standing with them, there is no neutral here. You can’t be neutral here, you can’t just be not racist -- you are either actively standing against racism or you stand on the side of racism. Antiracism is actively fighting racism.
So, what are our actions? First Austin is going to stand against racism and that is going to change us and how we do church. It starts with education, there are groups being offered right now in this church to help us explore our whiteness and how we can fight our own white supremacy. We will keep forming these groups for everyone in the church who wants to participate. Education is important, listening is important. I can’t recommend the books White Fragility and How to be Anti-racist enough. Get them, read them, let them hurt.
But listening is not enough, there is work to do. I met with the Governing Board two weeks ago and proposed that we take one of our rentals and give it rent-free to a black-owned business and that we begin to explore ways to let anti-racism justice groups use our space free of charge. We are going to march in anti-racism protests, we are going to hand out water and snacks at marches. We are going to make sure our worship is not just inclusive but is engaging and inviting to all people. We are going to find ways to engage and showcase anti-racism artists and activists. There is a newly formed anti-racism team creating an action plan that we will soon share with you. If you want to be part of that work, let me know.
And we are going to finish the work we have just barely begun this morning, confessing our own sin and then doing the action required from that confession.
Because hear this… I am hopeful, ironically more hopeful than I have ever been in my life, the better normal is right in front of us and All People means something it has never gotten to mean and it’s a place of justice, equality, abundance and all the love that you can imagine. It’s right past that portal door.
But first, we have to free up our hands.
God help us. Amen and Amen.
*photography: photos in the public domain
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