Unity in Humility

Click Here to Listen to This Sermon

Ephesians 4:1-16
August 2, 2009

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.
But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it is said, 
‘When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive;
 he gave gifts to his people.’ 
(When it says, ‘He ascended’, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

I’ve been fascinated and irritated this week by an incident that took place last week. It’s captured the attention of all the news media, so if you’ve missed it, it probably means that you just haven’t been paying attention to the news—which may be a good thing. The incident I’m talking about is something I’m calling Gates-gate. Of course no one else is calling it that, but I’m hoping that it catches on ☺.

Basically, here’s what happened. Upon coming home from a long trip overseas, Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University, an African-American, found that he could not open the front door of his house. He asked the driver of the airport car to help him, but neither could get it open. Gates went around to the back, entered the back door, and came to the front. With him pulling from the inside, and the driver pushing from the outside, they finally managed to get the door open.

Meanwhile, a neighbor called the police to say that two men looked like they were breaking into the house. The Cambridge police dispatched a patrol car. The story gets muddled after this, but from what I can piece together, Sgt. Crowley, the responding officer, asked Gates what he was doing. Gates said that he was the owner of the house, and then explained what happened. Crowley asked for his identification. Gates became upset, explaining that it was his house. Crowley asked him to step onto the porch, which Gates refused to do, asserting again that it was his house and that he didn’t have to step outside. Eventually, Gates did get his identification, but he was irate and accusatory toward the officer. According to him, he believed that he was being racially profiled, and that if he were white he would not have been treated that way. Eventually, Sgt. Crowley arrested him for disorderly conduct.

The incident sparked opinions from people supporting either Gates or Crowley. Many considered Gates to have been treated fairly, and saw the incidence not as a case of racism, but as a case of a man acting irrationally and uncooperatively. Others saw this as a clear case of racism.

Unfortunately, President Obama inserted himself into the issue by saying that Sgt. Crowley had acted “stupidly,” thus magnifying the incident greatly. He tried to apologize, but by then many supporting Crowley were sniping at Obama. Eventually, he decided to have what has since been called a “Beer Summit,” bringing Crowley, Gates, and himself together at the White House to talk about the incident.

My focus here isn’t on whether or not the incident was a case of racism. I have another agenda that I’ll get to in a bit. Still, the first thing everyone latches onto is issue of racism because of the nature of the event. Personally, I don’t think the officer was racist. I think he was doing his job, and from everything I’ve read it appears that he was acting fairly professionally. Now, I can’t say the same thing for another police officer, a Boston police office named Justin Barrett. In response to a Boston Globe opinion piece that said the incident was a racist incident, Barrett sent an e-mail to the paper and to friends stating, among other things, that had he "been the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC [oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray] deserving of his belligerent noncompliance." He referred to Gates several times as a jungle monkey. When confronted with his comments, he vehemently defended himself, saying that he wasn’t racist. Yeah, right!

As I mentioned before, I don’t think Crowley was racist, but when an African-American says that she or he has been the victim of racism or racial profiling, we need to be sensitive to it. What many of us whites don’t appreciate enough is that when you experiences racism your whole life, you become overly sensitive to it, to the point where non-racist events feel racist. I learned this through my best friend from high school.

His name is Ty, and he is African-American. Even though he has always had an ability to let bigoted comments and acts roll off his back, I’ve been with him a number of times when he experience active racism. To his credit, he always dealt with it better than me. He has always been incredibly dignified. I remember in high school that occasionally other students would tell him inappropriate black jokes, almost as a way of being cool, that they could say a black joke to someone who is black. Ty would always smile, but not react much other than that. The first overt racist incident I experienced with him came in 1984. I had been living in Roanoke, Virginia, and I needed help moving my stuff from Roanoke back to this area. So we drove down to Roanoke to rent a U-Haul and drive back. I had made reservations for our night there in a small, mom-and-pop mote that I had stayed in before. When I made the reservations, I had asked if I could stay in a room I had stayed in before. The owner said, “Why sure. We have almost nobody staying here this weekend. You can have whatever room you want.”

Late in the afternoon of that day we pulled in, Ty in the passenger seat and me driving. The owner came to our car window, and I said, “I’m Graham Standish, and I have a reservation.” She said, “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place.” I told her that I had a reservation, and she said, “We are all booked up.” I was stunned. How could she mess up the reservation? I argued with her a bit, and then it dawned on me. The reason she had no room was because of Ty. So I decided to explore this a bit. “What about next week, do you have an opening then?” “I’m sorry, we are all booked up,” she replied. “What about next month?” “We are all booked up.” Finally, I turned to Ty and said, “Sorry, Sweetie, looks like we have to go somewhere else.” I figured that as long as she was being a bigot and a racist, I should double her bigotry by letting her think that we were gay. It helped that I had long hair, an earring in my ear, and cut off sleeves on my t-shirt. We found a Holiday Inn and stayed there, but the incident has always bothered me. Ty and I used to kid about it, saying to each other, “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place.” But the fact is that what she did was plain wrong.

Now, perhaps you think these kinds of things only happen in the South. Back in 1987, I helped Ty move into an apartment in Penn Hills. As we were moving stuff into the house, a group of about six or seven white men stared at us from across the street with their arms crossed. I said to Ty, “This isn’t good.” He said, “It’s okay. You get used to it.” A few days after moving in, the landlord called him and told him that a mistake had been made, and that he had to move out. This wasn’t the only time. Over the years it happened two more times when Ty, who by then had a family, had to move out of apartments after moving in. Once was in Coraopolis. I don’t remember where the other place was. Eventually after one of them he actually sued the landlord. What would it be like for us if we were told to move out of places once we moved in because of the color of our skin?

Ty works for USAirways, and he has said that over the years he has received nasty, racist notes in his box at work. They are always anonymous. I learned from him that we whites are often ignorant of what it is like to grow up African-American. When you grow up experiencing racism and bigotry, it becomes hard to tell what is and isn’t racist. As I said before, I don’t think that Sgt. Crowley was acting in a racist way, but I am also sensitive to Professor Gates. Just as a child of abuse will recoil anytime a hand is raised, even when someone is just brushing aside a hair, to grow up experiencing racism means to grow up not knowing when whites are acting normally or racially. To be gentle and humble, as Paul teaches in our passage, is to be sensitive to the experiences of others.

Even though I’ve just talked about racism, that isn’t really the aspect of the incident that intrigued me. What intrigued me was how the controversy progressed so that every step created more controversy. As the Beer Summit was being prepared, Congressman Richard Neal of Massachusetts complained about the beer choices. President Obama was going to drink Bud Light. Sgt. Crowley wanted a Beck’s beer. Gates wanted Red Stripe. Neal was outraged. Since the incident took place outside of Boston, they should be drinking a Boston beer such as Samuel Adams, not beers owned by European corporations.

Then the Republican National Committee Co-Chairman, Jan Larimer, complained that the beer summit was taking place at all. She said that with all the problems with the economy, health-care, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama shouldn’t be drinking beer with anyone. Now, you’re free to think what you want about the issue, but one thing is certain: it reveals how easy it is for Christians to ignore Paul.

Go back to our passage for this morning. Paul offers a completely different vision for dealing with controversies like this one. Here’s what he says: “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Wow! What an alternative vision. Instead of being offended, sure that the other is wrong and we are right, Paul calls on us to respond to others with humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. What a difference.

What if everyone in the incident had acted that way from the start? What if Crowley had acted that way, not just acting professionally, but lovingly understanding the outrage of Gates? What if Gates had acted with humility and patience to Crowley, understanding that he was doing a difficult, and often terrifying. job of keeping people like him safe? What if Obama had acted with humility and patience, bearing with both Gates (a friend of his) and Crowley? What if all the critics from one side or the other had responded with humility, gentleness, and unity, recognizing both sides, rather than jumping in on one side or the other? What if Congressman Neal had reacted by saying that he was just glad there was an act of humility, gentleness, and unity on the part of everyone in the Beer Summit, regardless of the beer? What if Jan Larimer, a Presbyterian elder in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, had responded with gentleness and humility, praising any effort to “maintain unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace?” What if we reacted to all controversies in the way Paul calls on us to act?

Paul has a challenge for us in life. Basically Paul is inviting us to respond to controversy with humility, a humility that leads to unity. Ironically, the person who taught me the true meaning of humility wasn’t a Christian, although he wanted to become one. Mahatma Gandhi, who lived a life of humility, patience, gentleness, seeking to maintain unity of the Spirit, lived what Paul taught. Gandhi wasn’t a Christian, although he tried to become one. He was very much influenced by the New Testament, especially the Sermon on the Mount. When he started his career as a lawyer in South Africa in the early years of the 20th century, he decided to go to a Christian church. He entered, sat down in a back pew, and waited to experience Christ. Soon a firm hand was placed on his shoulder, and he was escorted to the door. The white ushers told him that there were other churches for his kind, and that he wasn’t welcome there. That did it for Gandhi. He couldn’t reconcile the message of unity he found in the New Testament with the bigotry he experienced in that church.

Still, Gandhi lived as Paul taught. There was one particular incident, recreated in the 1982 film, Gandhi, that brought home what Paul taught. It was in the middle stages of the Indian struggle for independence from the British Empire. Gandhi had just been released from prison for leading a non-violent movement to stymie the British. He had become something of a national hero for standing up to the British. He had been invited to a meeting of members of the Indian National Congress at the home of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who eventually would become the first president of Pakistan. Also in attendance was Jawaharlal Nehru, who would eventually become the first prime minister of India. Other powerful Indian figures were in attendance. They were gathered to talk about what the next step toward Indian independence would be.

Each of these men, having grown up in wealthy families, were atop the Indian caste system, a rigid system in which everyone belonged to a certain strata of society, never to move up or down. Servants were among the lowest in the system. Surprisingly, Gandhi came to the meeting wearing a sarong and a loincloth, the clothing of outcasts and servants. As they talked about what to do next, Jinnah proposed stepping up violent, terrorist acts. Others weren’t so sure. Gandhi offered his view. They should engage in active, non-violent resistance in a way that would paralyze the British. His way, though, would be a spiritual resistance. They would call on all Indian people to engage in a day of prayer and fasting, praying for Indian independence. Of course, with everyone praying and fasting, there would be no police, postal service, transportation, or manufacturing. For one day the British Empire in India would be paralyzed.

Gandhi was calling on everyone to act in a humble, gentle, and unifying way. As if to underscore his idea, he walked up to a servant with coffee and tea, took the tray from him, and began to serve the others. This was shocking! Men of power and wealth did not serve. But Gandhi was giving them an example of humility. He was showing them literally what would be required of them. That they become humble, gentle, and patient as leaders, and in that way unifying India. He was embodying our passage. And it worked. India shut down for a day, and the British were petrified. Eventually, this non-violent way led to Indian independence.

Paul offers a radical vision of how to live life. It is the way of humility. Do you want to know the quickest way to find unity with others? It comes from humility. It comes from refusing to see ourselves as better than others, and by refusing to act as thought we are better than others. It comes through a willingness to serve others. It comes through humility, gentleness, and patience. And it leads to God.

Amen.