Conference on Lived Theology &
Civil Courage
"Spirit, Power, and Social Progress"
Cheryl Sanders and Ray Rivera
July 14, 2003
Questions & Answers
Ray: Obviously, I think that I had the opportunity of, you know, we went around when we met with Bush and everyone could ask him a question and I was intrigued by the fact so I said it, I said, look, you know, our communities, every time someone gains the presidency they're born again, so you know, there's a lot of suspicion about people that use "born again" terms and could you tell us about your experience. And you know, the man said that he was an alcoholic and his marriage was on the rocks and stuff like that and at some Billy Graham Crusade he accepted the Lord and that he had a change of—I'm not going to judge that, I'm going to leave that, but do I think his ideology follow that? Absolutely not. He may have some Christology, I'm not going to judge that, but his ideology is a right-of-center ideology that is diametrically opposed to everything in our communities. So that's kind of my take on that. I'm not going to judge his vertical but I certainly judge his horizontal.
Brian: Brian VanderWel, Assistant to the Rector here in Charlottesville at Christ Church. I was really encouraged to see this passage in Ezekiel where you talk about how he was carried away in the spirit and was carried away in bitterness. I have been reading for the first time with this whole trilogy of the movies of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series and I own The Simarillion which is the kind of pre-history to this and I've been reading through it and shocked in some respects to find a character there whose name is Neana, and Neana's purpose in his mythology is to be the one who weeps over the broken wounds. In fact, there's a scene where these great trees have just been uprooted from the land, these trees of light, and Neana goes in, and through her tears into the wounds of the tree, healing is brought. I want to connect that issue of lament and sorrow into what you talked about with Esther in that Esther kind of understood that there's kind of a spiritual reality to what we confront, and so what I'm wondering is there a spiritual reality to our lament and sorrow, for what we encounter and what we experience in the brokenness of others?
Cheryl: I really don't know any other way to think about that than as a spiritual transaction, particularly if you're going to regard, I'm not familiar with the Lord of the Rings, but I'm assuming that is the case with a lot of great literature there are allusions and ideas and metaphors that are borrowed from the scriptures, but certainly this story represents ways in which wounds are healed by what—when I was talking about mutuality, that's a dimension of that. The acknowledgement, I am not the savior, and see we have to deal with this and in my community because of the fact that we have so many of the groups that come to volunteer, some come for a day or a week, and they come from a far away, but for the most part they're white groups, particularly white young people. And it's sort of like, "Okay this is our mission trip to Washington." And we receive them, but for many of them it's not about thinking of—it's like the homeless are just, you know, this project and they're not people. And so we do what we can to help them understand that while, you know, you may pat yourself on the back about all the wonderful sacrifice you made to spend a day or a week in Washington, these are people's lives. And it just may be that by just sitting with them and listening to their pain, you can offer a measure of healing but it has to be a spiritual transaction, which is to say, doesn't even require the words, necessarily. But mutuality for me is how I name that, and a willingness to hear, to listen, and to respond, and also to realize I don't have to have all the answers. And in fact, I'm pretty clear that I don't have all the answers, but I do care.
Ray: One of the things that we do have is that we have is we have a residential facility for 60 men and women who have HIV/ AIDS and they're homeless, and it's a contract with the city. And we don't, we just have to provide transitional housing for them. In other words, it's not a program, so we have rules where you can't smoke, you can't drink, you can't use drugs in the house, but all they have to do is get back there by 11:00 at night, they have a curfew, so they can do whatever they want, they don't have to accept any treatment, so what we've done is we've created prayer services in the house, we've created services in the house, but they're not mandated to come. So sometimes, when the people come back at 11:00 at night, they're all blasted, drugged up, so it's almost a theology of presence, and before in my old tradition, I didn't understand that too much because you know, kind of the Pentecostal tradition, a lot of the motivation is kind of spiritual notches on your gun, how many souls you're going to save, that kind of motivates you in the beginning, I used to laugh about that a lot because they used to say for every soul you save you get a start on your crown. And I, in my ignorance, used to try to imagine Billy Graham's crown, if it was true that he'd won all those people in the Crusades, but I didn't understand that it was metaphoric. But to me, sometimes, you just have to be there, and cry and weep and do all the witness, and some of those people the Lord has dealt with and saved, but others, it hasn't, but even if it hasn't, I think being there and weeping and being present is also a witness.
Question: I actually talked to you a little bit before; this question is for Ms. Sanders. I heard you speak at the Impact National Conference in DC about, I think, race relations and something else. But I was particularly interested in your work with reconciliation because it's something that I've had a lot of experience here with as well. My question has to do with how a lot of times on these trips, I think a lot of times, reconciliation, the concept can be very mushy and over-idealized, and I don't know how much, like how effective that kind of viewpoint is. I was wondering if you could share some of your experience with that and what it kind of looks like in your ministry and kind of your opinions on that.
Cheryl: On the mushy aspect of reconciliation?
Questioner: Yeah, not just on the mushy aspect, but on your work and what it has looked like, like what reconciliation has looked like in your mission in particular, and in your work.
Cheryl: Well, I think it looks like inviting the poor to be at a table with everybody else. I'm not sure what you're asking me beyond what I've already said. Reconciliation means you, first of all, open the door to welcome them and that's a major step that many churches are not willing to take, and once you welcome them, you have something for them. And you make an effort to know their names and to know their situations and to see how you can be helpful to them and to see how they, what they have to contribute to who you are and what you are trying to become, that's the mutuality piece. But reconciliation assumes that there is estrangement, alienation. It's helpful to have an analysis of that, but even if you can't analyze it, you have, it's really a faith perspective that says this is the will and purpose of God. And that God brings people together from these disparate places for a particular purpose and that purpose has to do with the kingdom of God, yes, but also being able to affirm our equality, our common humanity, and also the work that we're called to do, to bring about transformation individually and also in the society at large.
Questioner: I think what I was also kind of talking about has to do with racial reconciliation. That's specifically having to do with the mushy over-idealism that I feel like is often incorporated. I was wondering if you have had any work with that.
Cheryl: Well, I think I just mentioned in the previous question that we have whites, a lot of whites, most of the, the vast majority of the homeless people who come are African American, some of the them are Hispanic or Native American or white, but most of them are African Americans. Most of the volunteers that come to us from outside of the church are white and so the problematic paradigm is the view of missions that says, "We are privileged white people who are going to spend a day or a week or a month or a year in the ghetto in the inner city learning about ministry," and even though, you know, sometimes it's kind of hard to accept that, we accept those people with the hope that we can show them something beyond that very narrow mindset. In some cases, they haven't even dealt with their own racism, they're afraid of the people, particularly the kids, the youngsters, like, I guess their youth pastor or their mother or somebody made them come and, you know, they're scared to death, they don't even want to hand the people a cup of juice, but we try to help them to understand that, you know, these are people, and just, you know, that sounds like simplistic, right? But very often we don't see the humanity of the people we're trying to help, we just see them as an issue, as a problem, and then we see ourselves as either having the answer to the problem, or unloading a little measure of guilt because we tried to do something, and so what we try to get at is to try to help people understand that whoever you are, whether you're rich or poor, whatever your color, whether you're male or female, whatever your nationality, that you have a place at God's table.
Josh: My name is Josh and I work with Mission Year, and I had a follow up on the white folks in the city. Anyone that's familiar with Mission Year, we train young people to go and spend a year in the inner city and primarily white folks, and I happen to be an extra large white folk myself, so, um, I have a framework that I use in my training that I'm interested in your reaction to. Or feedback from anyone else's for that matter. I use the story of the Good Samaritan and obviously a very familiar story, however, the way that I reverse the story is to help white people recognize that their grandfathers were the robbers, and that we have the chance now to be the Good Samaritans only because grandfather gave us the money to do so, and that's a helpful way, I've discovered, anyway, a helpful way for these young people, these white young people to begin to recognize the reality of America. We've talked about slavery a few times in this context. Another story that I find really helpful is the story of Zaccheus. Obviously, Jesus meets with Zaccheus and Zaccheus finally says, out of nowhere, we don't know what Jesus said, he says, "Anything I've taken unjustly, I'll return fourfold and I give half of my money to the poor." It's interesting that he didn't wait for the rest of the Jews or for the Roman state to come along with him on that, he didn't kind of coerce that project, he just did it himself, but the question I came to ask is if Jesus were to encounter the children of Zaccheus, if Zaccheus chose not to repent, and the children of Zaccheus inherited that money, would Jesus then also say this is an invitation then for you to deal with this historic injustice and if you want salvation to come to this house, which is the phrase Jesus uses, would you then, would the children of Zaccheus need to respond in some way? So, I used to identify myself as the White Knight of the Good Samaritan story, without my recognition that my grandfather was the robber. And now, I identify myself as a child of an unrepentant Zaccheus who has to deal with the fact that a tremendous amount of wealth, culturally, economically, has come my way as a result of historic injustice, and I have to ask myself and I invite others to ask themselves, what does it mean to be invited to Jesus' table and to hope to hear that salvation has come to this house, in light of that historic injustice? I'd just be interested in your reactions.
Cheryl: Yeah, I think that one key that makes that work is a willingness to tell the truth and reconciliation without truth telling, I mean, a lot of times there are scenarios where reconciliation is you know, hugging, and you know, all of this, and you can do all that, and that's fine. I can hug with the best of them, but at some point, the truth has to be told about how we got to these places of disparity and discrepancy, and that's not just laying a guilt trip on somebody, but if you're going to have reconciliation, you're going to have to tell the truth about how you got to be estranged in the first place. And what happens is very often people in the dominant culture don't want to hear that and the irony of it—I've been doing some training at the church the past few weeks with the Sunday congregation with some of the homeless people have joined us too, we've been talking about an initiative, an evangelistic initiative, and just talking about a starting place, you're going to share the Gospel with people. At some point, you're going to have to get people to have some awareness of sin, but with some populations, that's an alien concept, and with the homeless people, we don't have to belabor people, we don't have to belabor that part of the Gospel that says "You are a sinner", don't have to belabor that, don't have to convince them that they're sinners, everybody tells them they're sinners, but as such, they're much more open to hearing the whole truth of the Gospel than people "I'm okay, you're okay, we're okay, we're not responsible for what happened some other time, even though yes, we're privileged, this and that, and we're privileged, obviously, that's a sign that God has blessed." Even if people don't say that, they think it. And so, one of the things you try to do in reconciliation ministry, and sometimes you have to soften people up, is listen to the truth. Even if you strategize, at some point, the truth has to be told, and you speak the truth in love, but toward the end of providing an opening for God to do the work of healing and reconciliation because as long as people are resistant because Americans, we specialize in denial. We specialize in that, and denial is our enemy, is an enemy to reconciliation, so the truth-telling piece can be very painful and sometimes you have to be really careful in crafting your language or even finding a language where you can have that conversation, but do you commit yourself patiently and courageously to do that work, and I would say as Christians we're people of hope, and so we have to hope that there's an opportunity that truth-telling will be done effectively, and it's not just me telling you the truth, but us together taking ownership of the truth.
Josh: To look at the sort of, as you both have said, the scriptures are foundational, if you can lead from the scriptures, then you're able to move people in the direction that you want to take them. That's true with these white Evangelicals that come to me. And if I can lead from Zaccheus and say, you know what Zaccheus paid reparations, that's what this is, if I've taken anything unjustly, I'll pay four-fold, all of the sudden, again he didn't wait for the state to do it, he did it himself, and all of the sudden the language of reparations is introduced through the scriptures in Zaccheus. Another thing that's very helpful and follows up on exactly what you said is keying on "salvation has come to this house" as the form of motivation rather than a bashing kind of guilt. Everyone wants to hear that internally, to hear Jesus say "Salvation has come to this house."
Cheryl: Not unless we're convinced that we're already saved before we hear Jesus or before we hear the gospel. That's when it gets difficult, but you're right. And that invitation, and I'll just say also, the community that we're in, the neighborhood that we're in as is the case with other communities in Washington, is in transition, and we have had an influx of a much more affluent, predominantly whites, who can afford to buy the property values that are escalating so these are people, as has always been the case, who can afford to purchase the property. I don't regard them as invaders or enemies. I want those people to be welcome, too. In recent months, we've had three white members who've come from the community, from the neighborhood, and so, my job as a pastor is to try to position the church so that we can welcome whosoever comes, whether you're poor and homeless or whether they're affluent and got a fistful of dollars, whatever, we want to find a way to welcome them, there's all kinds of challenges in terms of your liturgy, etc, your music, and various kinds of things, but that's the challenge of the gospel, and see, when you say "Bible", see, I could, that's the thing, well, I won't say it's a red flag with me, with evangelicals, but see my problem with evangelicals is the skewed reading and interpretation of the Bible. Evangelicals think that all the people in the Bible are white. And they don't understand, it's not so much a dynamic of race, but you have an issue of color difference, ethnic nationality, all those differences that gets addressed in the Bible, but we have this mindset that, well maybe Simon who carried the cross is black, but other than that, they're all white, including Jesus. And until we have a better understanding and Curtis DeYoung, who has a new book of which he's the lead author, I mentioned the Divided By Faith but the sequel to that book is now out, it's called United By Faith and it's a book that shows how congregations make multi-cultural worship and membership work, and in that book, as in some of DeYoung's other writings, he makes this point about that if you could even look at the church in Antioch, where the believers are first called Christians, the Bible makes the point about the ethnic diversity of the leadership and that kind of thing is just off the screen for white evangelicals. In other words, the key, the answer, the solution to the problem of reconciliation is in the scripture, but we've got to take off the blinders when we read, and it's not just "oh, you're just trying to bring the race issue, well, no, race is isn't a problem in the Bible, race is a modern problem, but diversity, multi-culturalism, is a part, is in the picture of who God calls to the table, that's why whenever you see Jesus having these arguments with these scribes and priests and Pharisees, very often, especially in the Gospel of Luke, the argument is about who God invited to the table. Why? Because they're the riff-raff. The prostitutes, the point is that when you invite all this diversity and people to the table, then all of the sudden, you look around and say "oh, this is what Jesus did." I had a friend who came, one of my scholar friends, the few of them who will do this, who came to the breakfast, and we were sitting there, and actually we were sitting at a table for some reason on that day, and he looked around, and he said, "you know, actually, I understand why you write the way you do because you hang around with poor people." He looked at me and said that, and then he said, "and this is what Jesus did, isn't it?" He said, "He hung around with..." I mean, you see it in the scriptures. But we easily just overlook that and we paint some other picture of Jesus, other than sitting with the poor, healing them, listening to their pain, meeting their needs, and I, you know, I don't say that to try to acquire some kind of special accolade. It's just doing what the Gospel requires. And we're just trying to model that. Not that we're the experts, but the simple thing that we learned, we could have gone on for twenty-five years having weekly meetings of ministers praying about what to do, we could have, and I'm sure there are churches that have done that, they've spent weeks and years and months studying the problem, all we had to do was open the door and say to that one poor person, "okay, we have something for you." That was the whole turning point. Just open the door of the church. It doesn't have to be a breakfast, it might be a coffee house, it might be an evening thing, but typically people in our communities, they don't feel welcome to our churches, they just assume that the church is irrelevant. And maybe we are irrelevant, but we can try to be relevant and to begin is by opening the door.
Ray: Just to complement, I think, um, I didn't even address anything about this whole civil thing, but I think that part of the challenge also is for us to address the civil discourse in this country, in my opinion, whether it's on a conscious level or subconscious level is rooted in manifest destiny, and I think really, the heirs of Manifest Destiny kind of is the evangelical church to some degree because they actually feel that this is the new Israel. This is the land that flows milk and honey. So, the sign of being the new Israel is that you're blessed. And if you're blessed, that means that you've got money. You're prosperous, so if that's true, then the opposite is true. If you are blessed because you're part of the new Israel, then if you're poor, then you must be a sinner. Do you follow what I'm saying? I mean, in other words, how come you're not blessed if you're in the land of milk and honey? In other words, you must be the way you are because you what? You want to be. Because there must be something wrong. So in the civil discourse in this country, I think at a subconscious level, the poor are synonymous with sinners. Whether it's conscious or not. And especially in this new Republican legislation that we both said we supported, if you see some of the welfare reform laws, they say that the poor are morally flawed, if you read them, they actually say that in some of the legislation. And that, and so, the implication is that if you're poor, you're morally flawed. They don't say that the rich are that morally flawed, so, you see, I wouldn't mind if they said that we were that morally flawed because we're part of the human condition. But they don't say the rich are, you are too, but they kind of say that poverty is a result of being morally flawed. I think most, the civil discourses, I think most white people believe that, whether at a conscious level or at a subconscious level in the evangelical church unless you've been, you're what I call a progressive evangelical, you believe in holistic ministry, you understand systemic sin, I think you're going to the church and into our ministry, you go basically seeing us as objects of mission, not as part of the body, but if you have been enlightened, then you go as a member of the body, and you go not only to give, but you go also to receive.
Charles: Thank you so much, Pastor Riverra and Professor Sanders. Something amazing happens at this one o'clock slot, doesn't it?