All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it – Flannery O’Connor
I found out a lot after I wrote Because I Don’t Want This to Happen to Anyone Else. After ten years of being frozen out of the church, I found out that what happened to me wasn’t unusual at all, and in fact, had been happening all over the ELCA, especially to people of color. It turns out that BIPOC folks had been telling their stories repeatedly – as they were asked to do - and almost always, they were not believed, and they were subsequently silenced. As someone whose skin is white, I have thoughts about this. First, I realized how much a part of the problem I am. Second, I have further clarity that stories about racial injustices make us - white people - feel bad. How can I be a part of a system that oppresses others? For me, with this awareness comes shame, that awful, uncomfortable growing realization that I am part of a system that oppresses other human beings and I benefit from this system because of my skin. Shame is a demanding emotion. It makes all of us feel bad about ourselves. Often, to relieve ourselves from that shame we dismiss the truth teller rather than addressing our sin and complicity. We attempt to justify ourselves and our good intentions.
Many of these stories are not public due to people of color being forced to sign NDAs, or just generally being shut out of the church, but they might have privately reached out to me. After hearing their stories, I felt sick. So many beautiful, gifted people silenced. Was my story heard because it was the final straw, the story that finally broke through the dam, a blow that finally bruised the system? Probably not. I think my story got traction because my skin is white. This is what I think happened: After I told my story, a lot of white people suddenly realized that what happened to me could happen to them as well. Ambient white angst about injustices were now viewed as a possible existential threat. Did my story happen to other white people? Of course, but in the last month or so I heard a lot of stories, and I grew to realize the magnitude and scope of the racism within the ELCA. I think my story took off because maybe white people started to fear that their skin won’t always protect them. Baynard Woods writes in Salon magazine, “Whiteness only exists as a way to exercise power. It is part of America's conspiratorial agreement on what matters and what counts as success, including the color of our skin. And like most conspiracies, it contains elements of both silence and violence, which work together and feed into each other.” It’s always a dangerous thing to tell the truth in systems. It’s a lot more dangerous to tell the truth if you’re a person speaking from the system’s margins. Just ask Jesus.
Jesus told the truth and look what it got him. Jesus pointed out that our human ignorance is also our human sin. For years, my experience of whiteness was that I didn’t have to think about race every day. I could bask carelessly in the comfort of cultural white dominance. Even now, I don’t have to think about my race when I go to the grocery store or when I drive in a predominantly white part of the city or when I turn on the TV. One approach from white people is to dismiss race altogether because after all, isn’t racism a BIPOC problem, not a white one? Both neoliberalism with its free-market capitalism/pride in their tight bootstraps, as well white progressives with their blind adherence to ideology and their personal exemptions from systemic hegemony can be faulted. Some of us white people believe we are exempt from being racist because we have “good intentions”, and that the blows we strike somehow hurt others less because we “didn’t mean to”. We continue to hold fast to the belief that we’re inherently good, and that our good intentions matter. Martin Luther trashed all that a long time ago in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518. Luther takes aim at our good intentions in Theses 3, although the works of man always appear attractive and good, they are nevertheless likely to be mortal sins, as well as Theses 21, the famous, a theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the things what it is.
After walking back into this stew after ten years, I’m not sure whether the ELCA is in a long-awaited revolution or death throes. Maybe they’re one and the same. But something I can see from being absent for ten years is that there has been some movement. BIPOC folk are shaking us out of our Scandinavian Janteloven stupor, a stupor which prizes social conformity above all else and clings desperately to whiteness. It’s not unlike Moses in the book of Numbers after he made a bronze serpent and put it on a pole as a reminder of the Israel’s sin. What kills us just might save us. And one of the things that Jesus taught us is that some things need to die before there is resurrection, and we really don’t need to be afraid. Lutheranism is thriving, just not here in the United States. Although global Lutheranism is declining in the northern hemisphere, it is growing in the southern. The global Lutheran church already has far more people of color that what we might be seeing in our pews. Tanzania has almost three times the Lutherans than the United States. The voices challenging our whiteness just might be voices of grace, the ones who invite us to the table.
But it’s scary to think of dying. Most people are afraid. Yet in my years of being a hospice nurse, when people neared the very end of life, death wasn’t their biggest fear. They worried about pain. They worried about incontinence. They worried about smelling bad. They worried about forgiveness, sometimes needing to be forgiven, sometimes needing to forgive others. (Funny this, the forgiveness thing was especially true for white men). But for the dying, what happened after death wasn’t their biggest concern. If their tradition was Christian, they took heart in knowing Jesus had trounced death, although they also knew it was real and still God’s final enemy.
Dying people are already vulnerable. But to those in power, to a lot of white folks in the ELCA, it’s death they’re afraid of. Dying terrifies them. But maybe the ELCA as a white institution needs to die as we know it so something new can rise. Maybe the ELCA needs to lead in downregulating the existential threat that white people may experience from the racial demographic shift that is happening in North America. Whiteness must die in the ELCA because white people don’t own the Church. White people are not going to be replaced; there’s plenty of room at the table. There’s plenty of room for small, rural congregations to do their thing. Or urban, or suburban. Geez, there’s plenty of room for everyone because we’re talking about the table. We’re talking God stuff. We’re talking God in whom all things are possible. We’re talking about the promise that the Gospel bears.
Still, we’re an institution and there’s a lot to do. It’s a big cargo ship to steer. And the institution wants to protect itself so I worry about one more thing. I worry that the institution will continue to minimize the issue of silencing marginalized voices. One of the other things I learned in hospice was that when people at the end of life did not deal honestly with issues like repentance and forgiveness at the end of life, they often had difficult deaths. Rough ones where they were terrified, hallucinating about unfinished affairs. They were so angry, and in their desperation and fear they lashed out at others around the bedside. If it is true the ELCA is dying, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the institution lashed out, saying the right pc words but also minimizing the inherent racial malignancy. After what happened to me it might sound something like this, “See, we aren’t racist. We don’t do this only to people of color, we do this to everyone. See, we even do it to White people.” They may try and use my situation to dilute and dismiss the damage they did to so many people of color. (A friend suggested this to me, and I think she’s right). Yes, what happened to me isn’t right, but if the institution responds as I fear it might by attempting to normalize the intrinsic racism by including me as a White person, it only highlights the problem does reside in the ELCA.
No one from the institution has reached out to me. I’m not surprised. It’s very on brand with how the ELCA manages issues (see Janteloven stupor again). The truth is all I’ve ever wanted to do is tell people about Jesus, about how much Jesus loves them. I’m not sure I’ll ever be welcomed back in the ELCA. But I’ll keep speaking into it, because Jesus loves it, and because I love it. This is not because the ELCA is so good, but because Jesus has a fondness for sinners, and (sometimes) so do I.
Our power is tied to our color. But if we are going to be authentic disciples, we must bind our lives to those who experience discrimination, marginalization, and oppression. The story of the cross is not an abstraction, nor is it an idea; rather, it is a painful demand to listen to what challenges us – as difficult as it is to hear - and stand in solidarity with the suffering of real people who have known crucifixion. It is in the cross that the character of God is revealed to us through Jesus Christ. The law can only partially help us thrive; we need the Gospel and that means we need to open our ears and hear. And so we shut up and listen and name our sin and learn and change. And we believe people. We believe the truths they are telling us, and maybe the hard truths they are telling about us. Just like all work of confession, confronting our own inherent racism is a lifelong endeavor requiring ongoing personal assessment as well as acts of really listening, and being open to transformation. But in the strange, subversive work of the cross and resurrection it is through these stories of grace that promise and hope emerge.
It is this awful grace, that implausible promise that comes through others that is our undoing and our hope. We’re not going to realize any sentimental comfort in this calling. Because the grace of God which emerges requires death. Our lives are cruciform. And the grace that emerges exposes our sin while simultaneously exposing God’s mercy. It may feel brutal on our end, but it is not our God who is the violent one. We find grace disruptive because death always is. Because of the cross and resurrection, God knows in God’s being our story of death, and has given us life in return. The loopholes have closed. It is an unusual story that a god should become a victim to the very thing God created. And then keeps loving us, doing the whole thing over and over, each time an absolution is spoken, each time bread bears promise, each time someone’s head is dunked in God’s name, each time we hear our neighbor, and recognize the voice of the One who beckons us.