Balancing Act - What is the balance of nostalgia and justice?

 Scriptures
Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12 

When I named this message, I called it, “Balancing Act,” because I was thinking about today being our Heritage Sunday[1], and about the temptation I find myself answering when I’m doing genealogical research or just thinking about my grandparents and great-grandparents, to feel purely nostalgic.

It’s not as though things were better, back then, and the problem also isn’t balancing nostalgia with hope. So, what I’m going to say may not have a whole lot to do with that title. (As my friend the Rev. Janice Barnes[2] has told me, the title you give to a sermon in advance is often a placeholder until you can get an actual message together.)

To begin, I want to acknowledge, this morning, that we are a violent people in a violent society wrapped up in a violent world. And I want to say what I believe: that this need not be the condition in which we must, or our children must, or our descendants beyond our children and their loved ones must, live. We live in a violent world, but this world need not remain this way.

It is also simply and plainly true that, to prevent such violence, we will have to get to work. And hard work! Work that infringes upon our comfort, our daily comfort.

Friday, the Memphis Police Department released video of the lethal beating of Tyre Nichols by police officers and the evident compliance of other first responders with the brutality of those officers. Media have played back audio and video of the incident, and it is difficult to argue with the insistence of many Americans that the culture of policing in the United States must be fundamentally changed, so that incidents like this no longer occur. Yes, we have some hard work before us.

Last Sunday, I mentioned two incidents in California of gun violence against multiple people celebrating the Lunar New Year, and yesterday in Los Angeles there was another such incident. In just the first three weeks of 2023 there were 40 mass shootings (shootings in which at least 4 people were shot). Also, an average of 110 Americans die each day because of gun violence. We and all the people of this planet must come to believe genuinely that we cannot successfully solve our problems through force of arms.

No one has said this clearly enough: You do not win by force of arms. You subdue, perhaps, or you tyrannize, or you terrorize. But you do not win. Haiti is besieged from within by gangs. In Myanmar the government outlaws voices of freedom, but those same freedom voices when in power persecuted the Rohingya ethnic group. Holocaust Remembrance Day was this past week, recalling the state-sponsored murder in German-occupied territories of 6 million Jews and Roma and LGBT people during World War II; and somehow, anti-Semitic hate and racism and homophobia and transphobia are on the rise.

And Russia remains intent upon taking over Ukraine.

So you see… This is going to be hard work.

Where shall we begin? Because, you know the problem isn’t just angry people or fearful people or people who will take unfair advantage. There are also problems like poverty and disenfranchisement which so contribute to conditions of violence that they may be identified with violence themselves.

There is a movement among people of faith in Webster Groves not just to ignore red-lining and racial covenants anymore but to get actual legislation passed stating that discrimination is illegal. In Evanston, Illinois, a city in which I served two different churches and attended another, programs are being created and administered today for the sake of restorative justice (call it, reparations) for people of African descent who experienced Jim Crow laws between 1919 and 1969. This justice is available to their descendants if they themselves are no longer living. The City government is funding this municipal initiative through a marijuana sales tax, but there is also an initiative of the Evanston Interfaith Action Council in which churches and synagogues are committing major portions of their endowments, or just making commitments, to a central fund being administered by Black Evanstonians.

Poverty is violence, and economic development can mean healing and restoration.

What does our God require of us?

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

What does our God require of us? Where should we begin?

Dare I say, we ought to begin by remembering. Ancient Europeans believed that memory resides in the heart. We’ve put it in the head, but I want to ponder with you for a moment the possibility that your memory is heart-centered. Just rest in that idea for a moment: that the same place prayer comes from, the same place that healing comes from, the same place that will identify for you whether or not you feel whole, is the place where your memories live.

I’m not saying that this is the perfect way to address our problems, but I want to put you in your hearts. I mean, most of us have at least some European blood in us, however it got there, so why not take advantage of that perspective. You know the saying that goes with this: “Home is where the heart is…”

Now, while you’re contemplating that, let me take you a little south from Europe, to a place where people actually have a saying about the importance of remembering in order that we may imagine a generative and productive future. The Akan people of what is now Ghana in West Africa have a concept – sankofa – which is depicted on the cover of this morning’s bulletin. As Cliff Aerie[3] explained in his August edition of last year’s Jazz for the Journey series, sankofa means, “look to the past to inform the future.” This is symbolized by a bird, sometimes flying and looking back over its shoulder. In our depiction, the bird has reached back to take up its egg which will become a new life.

You have to see what’s behind you, in order to decide your most positive direction. Sankofa.

There is so much about Christian faith, and the Jewish faith before it, and the Islamic faith as well, that is centered in remembering. Our major holidays are rooted in studying memories – Passover, Holy Week, Ramadan. The past informs the future for us, by reminding us of the faithfulness of our Creator and Sustainer, our Savior and Redeemer. The Holy One has brought us up out of bondage and given us the word of life. And we are thankful.

One hundred fifty-seven years we have been meeting here in Webster Groves, as this manifestation of the Body of Christ. And practically every year we have sat ourselves down, and we have remembered – William Plant and the Porters and the Martlings and the Helfensteins and the Monroes and the Studleys and the Prehns[4] and Jennie Davis[5] and the Moodys[6], and Dr. Kloss who wrote Our Creed, and Edward Hart[7] and whoever those women were who modeled for Sylvester Annan, the stained glass artist who created our “Sermon on the Mount” window, and Dr. Inglis and the Obatas[8] and Robert Parker[9] and Arno Haack who led the Board of Deacons when the Obatas and Rev. Parker asked to join the church so that this white church didn’t say no. And so many we’ve bade farewell just since I’ve been here – Tremayne and Parker and Morley and Patterson and Davis and so many others who helped us define who we are.

These all remind us why we are as we are. And in the cases of the Obatas and Robert Parker and Jennie Davis Sharp, we have come to recognize people who stood out from the main group but who called us to stand by our principles and follow our Savior’s example of humbleness and humility.

A few months ago, I became acquainted with another such person – Thyra Johnson Bonds, who was a member here from 1957 when she and her husband moved to Webster, until her death in 2005. It was up until the early 1970s that she was active, especially teaching Sunday School. Her daughters Kassandra and Gayle were active too, right up to about 8^th Grade.

Mrs. Bonds made her mark on Webster history when she brought suit against the City of Webster Groves. The Bonds had bought their house – a sweet little ranch with a carport – in 1957, in a neighborhood which was on the other side of the tracks from Tuxedo Park. Homes to the east and south of where they built had been popping up for 20 or 30 years. The Bonds, however, had built in the very southeast corner of a 13-acre tract of land slated for “redevelopment.” Now, when the Bonds heard “redevelopment,” they thought what any of us might have thought: that the houses to the north and west of them would be rehabbed or torn down and new houses put in their place.

You see, that 13-acre tract contained a neighborhood about as rundown as any you might ever see in Webster Groves. Directly across Kirkham Avenue from First Baptist Church, the homes there were either owned or rented by low-income African American families and individuals. Many of these homes had no indoor plumbing  (meaning that, yes, there were still housing units in our fair city as late as the mid-1960s with standing privies!). So, yes, redevelopment was needed.

But the City’s idea of redevelopment, flush as it was with new federal Community Redevelopment funds, was not the same as the Bonds. The City’s newly formed Land Clearance for Redevelopment Commission determined to clear out those homes, and the City Planning Commission elected to rezone that entire 13-acre tract from “residential” to “light industrial”… well, all 13 acres, that is, except for that sweet little, brand new ranch home with a carport.

And so, from 1964 through to the end of 1968, Mrs. Bonds and her attorney offered objection after objection, first to the City Council and then to whatever court would hear her, expressing her concern that the value of her property would tank, because what she and Mr. Bonds had imagined for themselves and their daughters – a neighborhood with actual neighbors all around them – had been prevented. She sued, for the sake of recapturing the value of that house.

And she lost. And then she lost on appeal. And finally, she couldn’t get a hearing before the Missouri Supreme Court.

Now that you know about Thyra Bonds, what do you think we might be able to do – as a city, as a church, as individuals – that can take the reality of being Black in Webster Groves, or wherever you may live, and empower restoration? Or is there something like this that we might be doing, individually or together, for the sake of making safe the lives of people of Asian descent in our country? Or of children and youth? Can we actually enable economic development, maybe even make sure that “redevelopment” means the same thing to everyone?

And before someone goes off and says that what I’m doing is preaching politics, remember what we read in Micah – that litany of instances in which God (unbidden!) turned things around for Israel and then asked, “What ought to be required of you?” And then Jesus in Matthew recited a similar litany of vulnerable people whom God is blessing (And I do believe that the unstated comment there from Jesus is, “God is blessing these… if only the world would too!”). Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are the peacemakers; blessed are you when you are persecuted and reviled. All of that, I want to believe, he said because he knows how hard our work is going to be – individually and together.

Are we relegated to a future that resembles the past? Or shall we be able to open our theological imaginations, our evangelistic hope, our remembering and expectant hearts, to a new future – a true and faithful future in which we study war and violence no more?

Amen.

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[1] The First Congregational Church of Webster Groves was founded on January 31, 1866, by the signing of a covenant by ten residents of the village.

[2] The Rev. Janice Barnes is retired clergy, a former staff member at First Church, and currently an esteemed member of the Congregation.

[3] Director of First Church’s Ministry of Imagination, Creativity, and the Arts (MICA), the Rev. Cliff Aerie is an ordained minister in our denomination, the United Church of Christ. MICA produced a series of musical, worshipful programs in 2022 which were called, “Jazz for the Journey.” It is also the creative force behind our Good Friday Blues services and Jazz Noel.

[4] Some of the church’s founding members.

[5] A First Church member from 1878 to 1883, and first African American schoolmistress of what would become Douglass School in North Webster, Jennie Davis would emigrate to Liberia and become the founder of the Women’s Department of Liberia College. She returned to the United States in 1903, including a stop in Webster Groves, to raise funds for a new, industrial arts education project at Mount Coffee, Liberia. The project was touted by such luminaries of the time as the writers Edward Everett Hale and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins.

[6] A prominent family of the church, now, for six generations.

[7] Mayor of Webster Groves at the turn of the Twentieth Century, in whose memory the “Sermon on the Mount” window is dedicated. Of the characters depicted in the window, all are female except for Jesus.

[8] A Japanese-American family sponsored by the church, 1943-1945, after being relocated to Webster Groves from the Topaz Mountain internment camp in Utah.

[9] First African American ordained in a Missouri Congregational church, in 1951.