Sermon for February 7, 2021 - The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany - Year B - The Rev. Isaac P. Martinez

Lections: Isa. 40:21-31; Ps. 147:1-12, 21c; 1 Cor. 9:16-23-19a; Mark 1:29-39

As many of you know, I am originally from southwest New Mexico and in my predominantly Hispanic small town, I never had to think too deeply about race. Even through high school and college, I became more conscious of it, but I never had to feel anything about it.

Fast forward to late November 2014, when a grand jury in Missouri declined to indict a white police officer for shooting an unarmed Black teenager. “How unjust,” I thought to myself, “someone should do something.” And as someone my age does, I accepted a Facebook invite to an event I wasn’t really intending to go to. But then my roommate commented that she was looking forward to seeing me there and that’s how I found myself at my first real protest to stand against the injustice done to Michael Brown in Ferguson. As we marched from Roxbury through the Back Bay, I noticed I was surrounded on all sides by people of all colors, ages, and backgrounds. I heard my voice leaping out to chant “Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter.” For the first time in my life, I felt something about race and it was euphoric, as if I and the thousands of people with me had just made justice roll down like waters.

Not even two weeks later though, another policeman was not indicted, this time in New York City in the case of Eric Garner. The euphoria was replaced with such a rage, I can’t even describe it for you. I didn’t know what to do. 

And then I remembered that it was a Thursday, a night where I worshiped with the Crossing community at St. Paul’s Cathedral in downtown Boston.

So I make sure the staff there knew about the protest starting across from us on the Common. I rush from my last meeting to downtown. It’s the first Thursday in Advent, so we read the Magnificat, that wild reversal where the hungry are fed, the lowly are lifted up, and Black Lives do Matter. As we join voices to recite the familiar words Jesus taught us: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, I can’t get past the next line before breaking into sobs. Thy kingdom come. Thy kingdom come. 

We carry the liturgy into the street with signs proclaiming Jesus’s last words: I can’t breathe. The dozens of us have become 7000. Hand in hand, arm in arm, we shut down street after street, bridge after bridge. We go through Charlestown and Cambridge. We cough as we walk though the remnants of pepper balls. We split off and we merge back like streams of righteousness. I hop on the Red Line to head home with some friends from the Crossing, simultaneously exhausted and exhilarated.

Those two weeks in late 2014 changed the course of my life and ministry. In the six years since, I have become an avid student of race and racism in this country. From the shining city on a hill to slavery, from Manifest Destiny to Jim Crow, from redlining to mass incarceration, I can name for you the overlapping and overwhelming causes of continued inequality, disparity, and discrimination between the white majority and people of color, foremost among us Black and indigenous people.

But I do not approach this topic as a historian or sociologist. And as real as the effects of racism have been for me, I do not approach it as a single individual with brown skin and a Spanish last name. Instead, I try to approach it as a Christian and as a priest in community.

In her sermon last week, Elise so beautifully and rhythmically taught us about the nature of evil spirits, that an evil spirit harms, it hides, and it hollers on its way out. Like Elise said, evil can harm because it shape-shifts so easily. Spiritual evil that opposes the will of a good and gracious God takes the form by which it thinks it can go unnoticed. 

Since the moment that European Christians saw this continent and its people as theirs by right of conquest in 1492 and since the moment the first ship carrying enslaved people from Africa arrived in 1619, there has been a singular evil spirit, a demonic force, at work in this country, and its name is white supremacy. It is because white supremacy so easily hides behind masks of supposed progress that I am confident naming it a demon. After all, hasn’t each generation of white Americans been convinced that it was more enlightened than the one before? Undoubtedly, someone in the 1700s thought chattel slavery of Africans was so much less barbaric than the genocide their ancestors perpetrated on the indigenous people of this land. And surely, someone in the late 1800s thought Jim Crow was an improvement over that, and so on.

And this is why I insist on being this blunt here, in church, in a sermon. Because if we treat the latest iteration of this wily demon as merely a social or political or ideological problem and ignore its spiritual nature, then we will continue to fall into its tempting trap of thinking we can solve it only with more education or new policy. Now, hear me true, St. Paul’s. Those things are necessary, but they aren’t sufficient. Education, policy change, and progress can and do address the effects of white supremacy’s possession of our culture, instititutions, and the people who comprise them. But when we fail to name and confront white supremacy as a spiritual problem, then we fail to get to the true cause of why it perniciously persists in our society.

So our question today is “how.” How do we confront this spiritual evil? 

First, we start where we are. In our Gospel reading today, we see Jesus still at the beginning of his ministry. He goes from the synagogue where he cast out his first demon to the home of his disciple Simon and does his first healing. And it is only there, from that single place, that specific house in Capernaum, that word about him begins to spread. From that single house, people start bringing him the sick and possessed from across the city. It is only after doing all he can in this one city that Jesus tells his disciples that he will go to neighboring towns to preach and teach and to heal and to liberate.

White supremacy possesses our entire country. But St. Paul’s, we have to start where we are. In our own congregation, in our own families, and in our own neighborhoods.

And start with what? 

The single most powerful, most effective way to confront spiritual evil is to repeatedly turn to the source of all spiritual strength we have, we turn to God. There at least three ways to do that. The first is praying. I don’t know if you noticed this line in the middle of our Gospel reading: “In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” When we pray, whether on our own or as a church six days a week, we reconnect ourselves to the God who gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless. 

Second, we turn to scripture. A regular practice of reading and engaging with the Word brings us face to face with a loving, liberating, and life-giving God who gathers exiles and restores outcasts.

Finally, we join with each other in community. As, I said earlier, learning and outward action are important ways to help heal those harmed by white supremacy. In the weeks and months to come, many groups here at St. Paul’s, like our Anti-Racism Working Group and our GBIO ministry will have opportunities to learn and act. Be in touch with any leader or one of us clergy for more details.

My friends, by doing all of this, we surround ourselves with the One whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Because in the end, it is not you or me who will finally cast out the demon of white supremacy from ourselves or our society. Only the One, Holy, and Living God can do it. And They will. 

So let us pray: Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.