New Traditions

Reagan Gonzalez
9/2/18
Proper 17 Pentecost 15
St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church
Lincoln, NE

This past May I had the privilege of attending a classmate’s ordination to the diaconate in Montgomery, Alabama. The day before her ordination we decided to go into downtown Montgomery and visit the new Legacy Museum, opened in partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative, the museum seeks to educate on the enslavement of African Americans and the US’ subsequent racist history. The museum is only a few blocks from the original slave auction block and the museum itself is in the building that once held slaves prior to being auctioned off.

Once you pass the ticket booth you are greeted by an old red brick wall. From floor to ceiling words painted in white read, “You are standing on a site where enslaved people were warehoused.”

You then enter the first exhibit, the slave pens where holograms of enslaved peoples tell you there story. You continue weaving through history, from enslavement, to the days of Jim Crow and lynchings, and finally to the realities of mass incarceration, where it is noted that while African Americans make up 11% percent of the United States population they represent 40% of our prison populations.

The last room you come to contains wall to wall shelves that hold glass jars. Each jar is filled with soil from around the US and so the room is filled with a warm glow of earth tones from green moss to yellow sand to dark brown mud. The soil was collected by local communities on sites where a lynching had taken place, and each jar had the victim’s name written on it.

The jars are arranged by date, and I quickly began to scan the rows looking for locations that were familiar. I found several jars containing soil from counties near where I was born in West Texas and where I went to seminary in Austin.

I couldn’t find jars from Montana or from the state I was about to move to, Nebraska when a docent of the museum approached me and showed me the way to a touch screen computer in the corner of the room. The screen contained a map of the United States, “These are only the lynchings where people have collected soil on their own accord,” he said, pointing to the jars, “This map will show you all the lynching sites that have been reported across the United States.” I could tell from his inflection that ‘reported’ was a key word in his sentence. I hesitantly clicked the state of MT and the number 2 popped up with red highlights around the counties where the lynchings took place.

I backed up and pressed Nebraska. The number 5 appeared on my screen. No names or details were given, simply three red outlines. Cherry County, Douglas County, and Otoe County.

When we look at the gospel of Mark using narrative criticism we will find that all authority figures in the gospel in some way embody the opposition of the rule of God or what God intends for the world.

The character of Jesus through interaction and dialogue often reveals this rule of God and rebukes those who aren’t comprehending or living it. This is true of both Roman and Judean leaders, such as King Herod, and in today’s gospel the Pharisees and Scribes.  

They witness some of Jesus’ disciples not following ritual purity laws and they quickly point this out and ask Jesus to explain why some of his disciples have neglected to follow the tradition of the elders.

Before I go any further I would like to clarify two things about this passage. The first is that in first century Judaism there was a stark difference between being ritually impure and being morally impure. While the disciples who did not wash their hands made themselves known as rebels of a ritual tradition, it did not mean a rejection of their moral character or expose them as individuals of questionable faith. This is important to note because Christians have unfortunately frequently used this passage along with others to condemn and judge those who think or worship or live differently than themselves.

The second important note is that Jesus is not teaching the Scribes and Pharisees why their Jewish traditions are irrelevant and therefore why they should become Christians. Jesus was Jewish and was theologically quite in line with the Pharisees, that is why they bickered so often, much how we often quarrel with those we almost agree with. Therefore, this passage is also not meant to berate or denounce the Jewish faith for a superior one.

Jesus’ reply includes the naming of the hypocrisy that is present. Pointing out that it can be a slippery slope to abandon the commandments of God in exchange for human tradition. “It is what comes forth from the heart that defiles humanity: wickedness, envy, pride, not what goes in it,” he says.

This Gospel, although our earliest, was still written down around 70 years after the time of Jesus. The fact that this story was included and written down for the sake of being read over and over again, heard by generations of Christians means that hypocrisy is not just something that was in Jesus’ time, but in the early church, and in today’s church as well.

The lesson for today is to ask ourselves in what ways do we choose human traditions over living God’s rule in our lives?

When I learned about the lynchings in Texas, Montana, and Nebraska, I wondered who would fill those victims jar with soil not yet collected, not at first understanding that perhaps with God’s help that person could or should be me.

After hearing the story of Mollie Tibbets, the Iowa woman who went missing while out on a run and who is now a household name, I began looking up statistics of missing women across the country. I learned that over a dozen indigenous women from Montana alone have gone missing in 2018. I stand here before you as a woman of God and a priest in the church and with remorse tell you I didn’t know any of their names.

All of these situations are tragic, but it has become apparent that we have and continue to leave those who are most vulnerable within our society to fend for themselves. We have permitted their stories to end too soon, or in some cases we have left it up to God to be the only one to remember them.

We have made it a human tradition, an American tradition, and too often a Christian tradition to forget our violent history and to remain bystanders in a world that says certain lives don’t matter as much as others. This is the hypocrisy that Jesus is speaking about and against in today’s gospel. The Pharisees are restricting access to the sacred by emphasizing tradition over people.

So where do we go from here? How do we live into a resurrection narrative that we believe means that when God sees violence, suffering, and death God says, this isn’t the end. How do we take our faith seriously enough to admit that human tradition is not always in line with God’s intentions for the world and where is our hope for another way?

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, says that, “We must get “proximate” to suffering and understand the nuanced experiences of those who suffer from and experience inequality.” Stevenson’s understanding is that ‘if you are willing to get closer to people who are suffering, you will find the power to change the world.”

So today, in our small way we will begin, and we will do so with God’s help.

It took me a long while of searching through article after article of Nebraska history, but I finally found the names of the 5 black men killed by white angry mobs in this state.  

They are:

Will Brown

George Smith

Henry Jackson

Henry Martin

Jerry White

Today, it is not only God or those who were close to these men who remember them. We will too, and by doing so we are in a very small way coming close to our somber past, becoming proximate to a suffering that needs to remembered in order for it to be reconciled to God for healing.

While we were not in control or responsible for the evil that infected the hearts of those who hurt these men, we, as disciples of Jesus are called to name and stand against any similar evil we see today.

To come close to our uncomfortable past that we may start a new human tradition, one where we live out our Christianity by seeking justice and hope for all the people of God.

May we, being sanctified by the Holy Spirit, put aside the comfort of human tradition, in order to be God’s new creation, the body of Christ, given for the world God is still creating. 

While we know that hearts can be full of evil things, let us show another way, where hearts are full of love, justice, and mercy.

Amen.

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy. New York, NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

https://www.carnegiefoundation.org/blog/empathy-and-social-justice-the-power-of-proximity-in-improvement-science/

https://eji.org/