Why Does the Church Keep Talking About Race? - Sermon Transcript

It's been a beautiful season in the life of our church.

We had an incredible, I think, season of Lent where we talked specifically about love and what that looks like in our daily life.

Easter was incredible, absolutely incredible.

Last week, the choir did an

 an amazing job, and it was such a gift.

And so it sort of feels a bit anticlimactic to start a brand new worship series, especially one called Facts, since we did that one last year, and it's the sequel that no one asked for.

But we know sequels are almost always better than the original, so...

 I actually argued for the name More Facts, but I was outvoted in the room.

So Facts, we get to use the same graphic that way.

I think that was a real deciding vote.

So here we are again.

And last year, the reason I think it was so popular is because we're trying to answer honest questions that you all have.

 We opened a survey last year, and the reason we didn't do it this year is because you all submitted 90 questions.

So we have plenty to work on, but we're only going to go for four weeks, okay?

So we're not doing two years of this, but we're going to spend the next four weeks trying to honestly wrestle with the questions that you've been asking.

And we're going to do that in a real way.

 not with like talking points or bumper sticker theology or trying to come up with a slogan that Anna can put on a coffee mug.

We're gonna try to do it faithfully by using scripture, some humility, and with a particular Wesleyan conviction that we all share, right?

We are Wesleyan in nature.

 And so here at FUMC Dallas, if we're gonna be a place that magnifies God's love for all people, part of that is being comfortable with asking very hard questions.

Now,

 That's not a threat to our faith.

That helps us grow in our faith.

It's an invitation to deepen our faith.

And so the questions this year, you know, hard-hitting ones like, will I see my dog in heaven?

Which is actually a deeper theological question than just that.

Or why do I even need the church?

Seems particularly relevant.

 in today's culture?

What do we do with other religions?

And our question though for week one this week is, why does the church keep talking about race?

And I wanna be honest with you about something before we go any further.

Of the four questions of this series, this is the one that I've been asked the most.

But you all didn't put that question on the survey.

 It's almost always asked to me sort of quietly, like in the parking lot or a text message after an event or an email and a one-on-one conversation.

And most of the time it's prefaced by saying something like, I don't want to cause any trouble or I'm not racist.

 But why does the church keep talking about race?

And truthfully, I understand that question.

I want you to know that I understand it from people who are exhausted and feel like we've been circling this conversation for years without really arriving anywhere.

 I understand it from people who worry that talking about race has become more about partisan or identity politics than about the gospel.

And I also understand the people in this room who have devoted years of their lives to this work and still feel like we're barely moving at all.

All of us, in the variety of ways that talking about race makes us feel, are in this room this morning.

And so I want to start by saying I see you and I get it.

 And the reason the church, though, keeps talking about race is not because we are partisan.

It's not because we're captured by a particular ideological agenda.

The reason the church keeps talking about the race is because the Bible does not let us off the hook.

So there's the sermon, and we're done for the day.

The Bible doesn't let us off the hook.

Scripture doesn't let us off the hook.

 And today our witness comes from a shepherd from Tekoa who's been dead for 2,700 years.

And Amos, he's not going to let us off the hook either.

And so once again, let's take a deep breath.

And let us hear this reading from the prophet Amos.

The fifth chapter, verses 21 through 24.

 Amos speaking on behalf of God.

I hate, I despise your festivals and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

And even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them.

And the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals, I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs."

 I will not listen to the melody of your harps, but let justice roll down like water, righteousness like an ever-flowing stream for the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

Will you pray with me?

 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be truly pleasing and acceptable to you, oh God, our rock and our redeemer.

Give us the courage to hear what we would rather avoid.

The honesty to see what we have learned not to notice.

And the grace to be changed.

Amen.

Okay, so Amos.

 Amos is not a professional prophet.

There actually were those professional prophets.

He's not a priest.

He's not been trained as clergy.

He has no formal training whatsoever to speak on behalf of God.

He is a shepherd.

 He's a shepherd from the southern kingdom who raises sheep and tends to fig trees.

So he's a fig tree farmer.

And God calls him north.

So Amos is in the southern kingdom.

God calls him north to deliver a message to the northern elite who don't want to hear the message that he's being asked to deliver.

And so Amos arrives in Bethel, which is a religious center, a place of worship.

 a place where the prosperous gather to offer their sacrifices and sing their songs and feel good about their standing before God as they see all that they have and the wealth that they have accumulated as a

 blessing from God, and Amos begins to preach.

And it gets interesting pretty quickly.

He does not actually start with Israel.

Great, great homiletical trick.

He starts with all the nations surrounding Israel.

Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab.

And so one by one, Amos is announcing God's judgment on the neighbors.

 Nothing pulls people together like focusing on others.

And the crowd in Bethel is cheering.

They're loving it.

And then finally, someone is telling the truth about these people.

And then Amos turns and he points at them and the trap sort of shuts.

Because the God who sees injustice in the nations also sees injustice in Israel.

 The God who judges the outsider is also the God who judges the insider.

And what God sees in Israel is a community that is separated in very real ways, separated its worship from the treatment of the poor.

A community that sings beautifully and prays regularly and gives generously and still worships.

 crushes the vulnerable beneath the weight of economic exploitation.

And God's response is delivered through this shepherd from the south.

And it is one of the most sort of startling statements in all of scripture.

Right off the bat in verse 21, we hear God say, I hate your worship.

 Not I'm disappointed in your worship.

Not that I wish you would do better.

The Hebrew word here saying is hate.

It's the strongest language of rejection that's available in the text.

God looks at worship that coexists with injustice and God calls it just noise.

Just noise.

 Take away from me the noise of your songs, the text says.

Now, here's the move that some of us may resist.

Amos is not talking about race.

 He's talking about the poor, he's talking about the economically vulnerable being ground down by the prosperous while the prosperous go to church on the weekend and feel just fine about themselves.

So why this text then with this question?

Because in America, regardless of how we think about it, race and economic mobility are not separate conversations.

 We can't separate the two.

They've never been separate conversations.

They can never become separate conversations because the racial wealth gap, the concentration of poverty in communities of color, the documented disparities in education, housing, criminal justice, these are not like abstract political...

 ideas.

They are present tense version of what Amos is describing.

They are what God sees when God looks at our city.

So when Amos calls for mishpat, which is right social and legal order, or when he calls for right relationship between people and between God, he is calling for the kind of structural faithfulness that does not leave an entire community outside the circle of flourishing.

 And that is the wrench that Amos churns.

It forces us to see what God sees.

And in Dallas in 2026, what God sees includes the faces of our black and brown neighbors, whose mobility no doubt has been structurally constrained, in some cases for generations, by policies and practices that this church and churches like ours did not always resist.

 and sometimes actively blessed.

Now, I don't think it's going to shock you.

I grew up in overwhelmingly white spaces.

My childhood, my adolescence, my early education, I did not choose that context.

The bishop did.

Most of us do not choose our context.

 But I've spent the better part of my adult life reckoning with what that context, in particular my time in Rockwall, gave me and what it cost me without knowing it.

Privilege of any kind, but specifically white privilege, does not announce itself.

By definition, that's what makes it privilege.

It's the air you breathe without noticing you're breathing it until one day someone opens a window and you realize that the room was not as clean as you once thought.

 I finally understood this after years of work, both in academic spaces, sure, but also in my social context changing.

But nothing did more for my awareness than taking a class at, you all know it well, the Iliff School of Theology called Disrupting White Privilege.

It was designed specifically for white students.

A space to work through the theology and sociology of race with people who shared a similar location.

 It was at the time a controversial class and some people thought it was too much, some people thought it was long overdue.

What I can tell you is that it gave me something I did not have before, a space where I was allowed to get it wrong.

To ask the question I was afraid to ask out loud, to sit with the discomfort of what I was learning without being condemned for the fact that I was still learning it.

 That experience in particular shaped how I think about this work and the work of dismantling racism in the church, because here is what I know.

People do not stop asking hard questions because they stop caring.

They stop asking because they got embarrassed.

 Because they got it wrong once and someone made them feel like that was unforgivable.

Because there's shame in those spaces and not grace.

Because the conversation moved so fast or ran so hot that staying in that conversation felt more dangerous than stepping away from it.

And the church has a theological responsibility to hold something very different.

Not a space where everything goes, but a space where you are accountable without being condemned.

 Where you are challenged without being shamed.

Where you are invited to keep going even when you get it wrong.

As United Methodists, we call this sanctifying grace.

The grace that does not wait for you to arrive before it starts to work within you and on you.

The grace that meets you mid-journey, mid-failure, mid-question, and still keeps forming you.

 into something more faithful than you were yesterday.

This is, I believe, one of the most important things that the church has to offer a conversation around race.

And it is something that the world cannot and will not ever offer.

 We do not have to choose between conviction and compassion.

We do not have to choose between prophetic clarity and pastoral patience.

We get to hold both.

In fact, we are instructed to hold both.

And if we do not hold both, we will lose people.

And we'll deserve to do so.

 Because I need this type of space as well.

I need to tell you something that I have not said publicly before.

Well, I said it about 45 minutes ago in modern worship.

But I want to say it very intentionally because it's not a confession that I make to perform like vulnerability or something.

I need to be honest with you about something because I think honesty right now is what this sermon requires.

I...

 I am a direct descendant, and Kelvin confirmed this, I'm a direct descendant of Thomas Auld, who was the slave holder of Frederick Douglass.

He owned Frederick Douglass, he bought him, he sold him, he reclaimed him, and he is one of the central figures in one of the most important autobiographies ever written in this country.

 And he's very clearly in my family tree.

I share it because it's the truth and the truth about where I come from and because I think the church of all places should be a community capable of holding that kind of truth.

Now, what do I do with that?

I'm still working out, honestly.

But what I cannot do is pretend it's not there.

 What I cannot do is stand in this pulpit and talk about race and racism as if it's someone else's history.

It's my history.

It's stitched into my family's story.

And that means the work of racial justice is not for me an ideological position.

It is really reckoning with my own inheritance.

 I think some of you know something about that, not necessarily with the same specific history, unless we're family, but with the particular weight of realizing that your family's comfort or prosperity or social position was built in part on systems that did not offer the same to everyone.

And most of us, if we're honest and we look closely enough, we'll find something in our own inheritance that requires reckoning.

If you don't find it, just keep looking.

 And here's the gospel in that.

The gospel is not the gospel for those whose ancestors' hands are clean or that our hands are indeed spotless.

The gospel is that God keeps calling people whose hands are not clean.

Amos speaks the truth to power by revealing that God looks at Israel and says, your worship has become noise.

Essentially, God is not impressed.

 Not because worship is unimportant, but because worship that coexists peacefully with injustice has lost its connection to the God it claims to address.

So if our choir, and they certainly do, sound amazing, but we are not doing the work, God is not impressed.

 if our programs are flourishing, but we are not doing the work, God is not impressed.

If our pews are filled, but we're not doing the work, God is not impressed.

And if our building is beautiful, and it certainly is, and our budget is healthy, and thank God that it is, and our reputation in this city is strong, but we are not doing the work, God is not impressed.

 And this is not a new message.

This church has people who have been carrying this work for years, and some of them are weary, and some of them are frustrated, and some of them have pushed harder than the institution could move, and they have felt resistance, both personally and deeply, and I want to honor that.

The frustration is not a sign of bad faith.

It's a sign of genuine love for what the church is supposed to be.

And I also want to say gently that conviction without community will eventually burn out.

 The work of racial justice is not a project that some people in the church own and others support from a distance.

It is the whole church's calling.

And the whole church moves differently than a cohort within it, more slowly sometimes, more messily often, but with a different kind of durability.

And I remember a few years ago, it was my first year, I remember it very well, I made an offhanded comment in a town hall meeting.

 I said I thought we should chisel away the inscription on our front steps that reads First Methodist Episcopal Church South.

Now, I meant what I said.

I probably shouldn't have said it in that space.

And I still think it deserves a hard conversation.

But I've also learned, and part of what Pastor Anthony has taught me, is that what a pastor thinks should happen and what a community discerns together are two very different things.

 And this work belongs to you all.

And taking time to decide is not weakness, it is by definition the work.

The conversation about that inscription is still happening and there's a proposal now to keep it and add a plaque and that is being evaluated by lay leadership and I do not know how it will land.

What I do know is that a church willing to have that conversation at all is a church that has not given up on faithfulness.

 Which leads us to Amos and how he ends his oracle with a word that has outlasted everything else that he has written.

Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Martin Luther King quoted it at the March on Washington.

It's beautifully inscribed in monuments and it has become maybe one of the most recognizable lines in American religious and political history.

But notice what it is in context.

When Amos is speaking it,

 to the people.

It is not a dream.

It's a demand.

It is not an aspiration Amos is casting out into the future.

It is what God says is missing right now.

It is the condition God names for worship to be worship rather than noise.

An ever-flowing stream, not a seasonal creek.

 that relies on how much rainfall comes in any given year.

It's not a moment of inspiration that surges and then dries up.

What Amos is talking about is structural, it's constant, it's built into the landscape.

That is the kind of church God is looking for, not a church that talks about justice when it is merely timely or trending.

 A church where justice is structural, where it flows through everything we do, every decision we make, every dollar we spend, every person we welcome, every conversation we are willing to have.

It is the only way we can talk about magnifying God's love for all people and actually mean what we say.

That is the work.

And the work is not finished.

And the work is not comfortable.

 And God is not going to let us stop talking about it because the Bible's not going to let us stop talking about it.

So that, that is the answer to the question, why the church, our church, keeps talking about race.

But here's the good news in all of it.

The same God who says, I hate your worship when it coexists with injustice is the same God who keeps showing up anyway.

I don't know.

That's just what God does.

 calling shepherds from the South, calling preachers from complicated family trees, calling congregations like this one to keep moving, keep reckoning, keep trying, not because we have arrived, but because the God who demands justice is also the God who sustains the people who are trying to practice it.

And that is grace, my friends, and that is enough to keep going.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.