Dear Andrew

Andrew,

You did a great job preaching a couple of weeks ago.  I think your sermon was well-crafted and well-delivered.  You were convincing and authentic and effective and engaging.  You seem relaxed and confident in your message to us.

I hated it.

Forgive my obliqueness. I ‘enjoyed’ it – for whatever that really means.  But the sermon, combined with Beth’s sermon the week before on Amos’ call for justice, placed me, as would have been said in earlier years, ‘under conviction.’ It doesn’t feel good to be under conviction. It makes me feel itchy and squirmy and uneasy – spiritually sweaty.

The upshot is this: To get serious about following Jesus I am called to look at the presence or absence of justice in my outlook and in my life.  I have been doing this and I am coming up short.

The first challenge in moving toward a just life is coming to grips with prejudice, and prejudice is about perception.  How clearly do I see? How accurate is my discernment? Do I see others as they truly are, or are my perception shaped by decisions I have already made about who and what they are?

I guess I didn’t hate your sermon as much as I hate the answers to these questions.

I have such a long way to go, and, clearly, we all do, some more than others. My prejudice seems to have ‘levels’ to it. 

The first level is a conscious rejection of the politics of hate. For most of us this is not a huge feat. To affirm that ‘all men [sic] are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights…’ is an affirmation most of us can and do make without much pain. So we support equal pay for equal work legislation and quit using words like nigger, kike, slope, and cracker to describe those whose ethnicity differs from ours. We encourage our daughters to be firefighters, cops, and truckers, if that’s what they want, and our sons to cook, clean, paint and sew. We vote African-American political candidates into office and even celebrate their success. We hire the handicapped. We  join the majority and come around eventually to supporting gay marriage.

Then there is the next level – the level to which we are brought, for example, by the Zimmerman trial. This level is usually hidden from our conscious notice, which makes us much more likely to deny its presence. It is visceral and deeply embedded in the places that fundamentally effect our perceptions, particularly our perceptions when under threat or stress. It, I think, is primitive and tribal. The guy who would never use the n-word in conversation walks sheepishly to the other side of the street when he seems the Trayvon-hoodie-wearing-kid coming the other way.  We lock our car doors when driving across the tracks. We scream ethnically-charged epithets in traffic that, when they spring out of our mouths, surprise and embarrass us even when there is no one around to hear them. Our churches are the most segregated places in the culture - still. We make snap judgments about folks when we see their clothes, their cars, and their dental work. Our ‘enlightenment’ does seem to have much effect on the social strata that shape our daily lives. We have no objection to interracial marriage but are quite relieved our child is not in one. Try as we may we can’t seem to fully accept the mixed ethnicity of our president and so subject him to absurd judgments. We claim that some of our best friends are gay.

I can’t make out who others are because of the filters through which I see them even though I ‘know better’ – filters that are known by another name: Prejudice. Premature judgments. I know who you are before I know who you are.

And now my preachers are telling me that my walk with Jesus demands that I face this and deal with it? Is this perhaps where justice begins? Is this lingering, visceral, second-level prejudice ungodly?

I will have to pray about this. Keep up the good work.