Church needs 'new eyes to see' to reunite along racial lines, McClain tells Preaching Days group

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The Rev. Dr. William B. McClain

PHILADELPHIA (June 13, 2001) -- "We need another direction, new eyes to see, to look beyond the path we have been treading" if the Church is to reunite along the lines of justice in the modern day. That challenge was set before a Preaching Days audience this week during a sermon at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. The preacher was the Rev. Dr. William B. McClain, a United Methodist pastor who is the Mary Elizabeth Joyce Professor of Preaching and Worship at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.

McClain was the third 2001 presenter for Preaching Days, an annual continuing education and mutual support event for clergy from a variety of traditions.

Preaching on texts from Matthew and Micah, noted that the Church had become divided along racial lines in America before the nation had. The nation has also come back together along these lines, while the Church continues to struggle.

"The year 2000 was the year of confessions along racism lines," he said at the outset of his message. "The Southern Baptists confessed. The Roman Catholics confessed and in Cleveland the United Methodists confessed." An African American Episcopal Church Bishop told the Methodists, when asked to respond to the action, that he accepted the action and would not be a judge toward it, but ventured, according to McClain, "that the tree of repentance would be barren without fruit" and that "fruit inspectors" will be on hand to measure the commitment behind the confession.

"God has shown us what is required, to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God," McClain said. "What is good is not negotiable. There's no room for bargaining." Comforting the comfortable is not what is required, McClain said. "If we have never taken the Lord's requirements seriously, then we are settling for cheap grace. And cheap grace can include making an occasional trip to a food pantry, or visiting a shelter or an abuse center in the "other" part of town, or doing nothing when a police officer shoots a Black man in the back.

"Discipleship is costly, not comfortable," he said. "We are talking here of wounded healers, servants who understand the cross and who change their lifestyles, who see what is not seen, who hear the humanity of the city when their voices cry out for decent schools, love and dignity, day care and safe and decent homes."

Dr. McClain describes being beaten by the Ku Klux Clan in a Preaching Days lecture.

McClain said no class or group of people is exempt from evil and hatred. "Sin is no respecter of color. Hate is not the sole commodity of any one group. Racism begets and it eats away at all of its victims like a disease. We need a kind of no-fault confession and reconciliation. We need to practice what we preach and do what we teach." That includes participating in life with people who are "not like us, who don't talk like we do who don't live where we live and like we live. The challenge is to live the life we sing about." He noted that people tell other people they don't belong with a look on their faces and with what they do not say as well as by what they do say. "We need to be able to say to each other in each other's presence what we say in each other's absence," he said. "We can't continue to love God unless we love each other. It doesn't have to be the way it is. We can be channels of God's grace to each other. God comes to us in strange, awkward and mysterious angles, but God comes. We can miss the encounter with God and how God blesses us if we in the Church are not open and humble to meeting each other. We have been shown what is good and the time is right for us to follow through."

In a lecture, McClain movingly described his encounter with white racism in the south both as a child and as an adult. During the time period when Dr. Martin Luther Kind made his historic speech in Washington, he and an African American pastor colleague suffered a merciless beating at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan in Aniston, AL, after attempting to take out a book from the public library. "I was told there were 75 of them," he said. "But I wasn't able to count them. I was assaulted, beaten, stabbed and shot." He said just a few weeks ago, one of the perpetrators was finally brought to justice and sentenced to life in prison. It took 37 years.

McClain told his audience that preaching on the Old Testament is the approach most Black preachers have historically taken when dealing with the brutality and absurdity of their circumstances. McClain traced the history of African American figures who have been deliverers in American society and he described their motivation as having been framed by stories of oppression cited in the Old Testament, including the actions of the Philistines and the Hebrew children.

The belief has been, with the story of God's deliverance from the Exodus, "that what God did once God will do again," he said. The laments and praise of God as expressed in the Psalms likewise is repeated in songs and spirituals, he said. McClain was the conceptualizer of the noted book "Songs of Zion," a celebration of Black music.

In noting the centrality of Old Testament preaching to the Black preaching tradition, McClain expressed a lament of his own, that the Old Testament is not preached in African-American settings to the extent that it once was. "The re is a strong silence of the Hebrew Bible in churches which jeopardizes the romance between preachers, people and the Old Testament," he said.

The strong silence causes churches to submit to a kind of "marketplace theology" which makes churches "vendors of cheap grace and escapism." Churches he called "full gospel churches" are thus not truly open to providing "the full counsel of God."

"It feels good to come through the wilderness, but first we have to come through it," he said. He urged an approach that avoids making churches "quick fix stations, which jeopardize the romance with the Old Testament, and "trivialize faith with a kind of suburban etiquette."

"We need to acknowledge the struggles of life," he said passionately. "There's some nasty stuff out there that we can't always explain. To sing Glory! Hallelujah! When we have not faced those realities first is heretical."