The past four years have changed me. I changed because of what I saw, felt, heard, and lived over the past four years as both a pastor and a citizen in the United States.

You’ve likely heard me reference (many times) the one, tremendously significant day I was able to spend with Gordon Cosby, pastor and founder of Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. Each time I continue to catch myself saying I have become disillusioned by the church, I then hear Gordon Cosby’s animated voice reply, “Good! That means you’ve been living under and illusion and now you see things for what they really are!”

It can be painful to recognize just how many illusions guide us, comfort us, entice us. How many illusions must be shattered?! The past four years have shattered more illusions for me as to what the church is in the United States, and particularly the language Robert P. Jones uses in his book, White Too Long, of White Christianity as American Civil Religion. So much of the faith that raised me, the Christ-haunted culture that shaped norms and mores around me, and even my professional life, has been more formed by American Civil Religion than the radical Way of Jesus the Christ.

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Thank you to each one who stops by this spot looking for sermons and seeking to follow along in the life and work of the St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church. I am slow in updating consistently and apologize to those who have waited since October for new words and thoughts. I will also confess—I am finding it even more challenging to create fresh, new content each and every Sunday. I’m amazed as I think back to the pastor of my childhood and teen years, Dr. James F. Walters, who preached Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. I am confident he leaned heavily on the brilliant work of others as well as his own past writing, and I have done a fair amount of both in recent months. Credit is always given where it is due, though I have not linked footnotes from my manuscripts to the website. I’m glad to provide source details upon request.

On October 25, we joined other Alliance of Baptists’ congregations in welcoming the Rev. Dr. James Forbes for a virtual sermon on Reformation Sunday. I do not have a transcript of that sermon to share. The following Sunday, November 1, was All Saints’ Day. In New Orleans, it was also the Sunday after a hurricane, and many of our congregation were still without power and/or wifi. We honestly weren’t even sure we could have a virtual worship service until the last minute, so there was not a traditional homily that day. However, I shared some of my favorite funeral poetry as part of our All Saints’ remembrance, and those are posted below.

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For weeks now, many of us have been reading and wrestling with Robert Jones’ book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. And Jones will be with us on Tuesday night at 6:00 p.m. via zoom, so we can hear him engage more of these themes in person.

Part of what has been so deeply disturbing to read is Jones’ well-crafted timeline of how white Christians in the United States purposefully and consciously aligned themselves with the power of the government, many of them hoping the Confederacy would be the sustaining government of this nation. To ally themselves with that kind of power and purpose, they twisted and massaged scripture and theology to match the power and influence they were so pursuing and enjoying.

All of this is obviously on my mind and heart even more as we near the conclusion of the 2020 Presidential campaign with the election now underway. I continue to find myself at odds with the loudest and largest Christian groups and their leaders—white evangelicals. I have even less patience now than I did four years ago with people who profess to be about the Way of Jesus and also the Way of the White House, particularly this one. I almost changed that to say “clergy” or “faith leaders” instead of all people of Christian tradition, but I knew that wasn’t what I was trying to say. I mean all people who profess to be actively and earnestly pursuing the path of Jesus the Christ yet are also somehow encouraged and bolstered by the most recent years of our dominant political regime in the United States. The two ways are diametrically opposed, and I really do believe that. In fact, I also believe that’s what Jesus is getting at in the gospel lesson today.

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Four weeks ago now, we began an introductory study on the Greek word doulos and some of its uses in the New Testament. We entered this study through the letter to the Philippians, chapter 2, with an ancient hymn and a word to this early gathering church to model themselves after the self-emptying Christ:

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, 2 make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. 5 Let the same mind be in you that was[a] in Christ Jesus,

6 who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

7 but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

Be of the same mind, have the same love, be in full accord, be of one mind. Do not act from selfishness or arrogance. Humble yourselves like Christ humbled himself. Let that be the mind that is in you. We return today to this same letter, just two chapters later, and continue Paul’s words to a divided people. Even before we get to Euodia and Syntyche, we suspect they are divided based on how hard Paul has pressed for them to be unified.

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Today we conclude a 3-week series that merely counts as a brief introduction to the Greek word “doulos” translated as slave/servant. In no way has this been a comprehensive study as we’ve spent this time looking at a handful of passages in Christian scripture that refer either to literal or metaphorical enslavement of people. We took this time right now because there are many references to slaves in our sacred text, and we tend to overlook them or think nothing of them when we hear them read in worship. Slave/servant language is common not only in our scripture but in our hymnody and choral music, and also in our own metaphors for Christian leadership and Christian posture in life. The words we use matter, and we need to give attention to them.

How did we get here? Why did I decide now is the time to address problems in our sacred text? In this decade of a year, one of the commitments we have made has been to our increased and earnest efforts at becoming anti-racist. That work involves more than just verbally acknowledging all people are equal or that black lives matter. We are very slowly doing the work of understanding the systems and structures of white supremacy that make white lives easier. Then we are doing the uncomfortable work of dismantling the systems and structures what we maintain because they protect white comfort. Oof.

It’s like this. In a 2014 call to churches in response to no-indictment decisions in Ferguson, MO, Austin Channing Brown wrote: “Its time for churches across the country to break the silence on racism and racial injustice. There are many who have chosen the way of silence, believing it to be an apolitical stance. Except that we all know the truth. We all know that silence is a political tool used to plead ignorance or plan avoidance. In this moment in history, there are many tools made available to you, and silence is certainly one of them, but I encourage you to smash silence into pieces.

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The more I study and research for this brief sermon series, the more I realize how inadequate my library is, how white my library is, and how dominantly cis-male my library is. That is not to say there is no good content available to me in my study but to remind us all that our tradition has largely been passed to us through a very specific framework. If we hope to understand Christian scripture and Christian tradition differently, then we will need some new teachers. I want to start with that word of confession today. I’m working on my own study so that my teaching and preaching will be informed by more than one dominant voice (even if I have loved that dominant voice and miss many of those good, good folks who helped shape me.) My goal for now is to build out the very empty shelves of Black, Indiginous, People of Color, Queer, and Feminist writers as we move forward together.

So. With that, we take a second look at texts in the Greek New Testament using the word doulos—either metaphorical or literal stories about slaves. Today, we come to Onesimus who was a literal slave. And if we are to trust this letter as being a 1st century communication between an imprisoned Paul and church leader Philemon, then we are reading a founding document of the early church that appears, on the surface, to be sending an estranged (perhaps even a runaway) slave back to his owner.

Let’s pause there. I don’t think I have to even lay out the ways this text has very likely been used and abused in more recent centuries. I am quite certain you can hear it already. I’ve come across a number of preachers who don’t ever plan to reference the letter again and scholars who say the cost of putting Onesimus’ story in a 1st century cultural context is too high against the way his story hits contemporary ears. Let’s consider how stories like this one might have been weaponized in recent history.

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