INCLUSIVE OR DIVERSE

Text: Acts 10:34-48

Now I see
That in every nation
Any person
Who reveres God
And does what is right
Is acceptable to God.

My summary of the opening line of Peter’s speech in Joppa, after his dream of eating non-kosher foods, and before he welcomed uncircumcised Gentiles as gifted by God, was the bare bones of the message today, repeated with much commentary, some of which follows in these notes. Some of you may have missed the old King James language of ‘God is no respecter of persons’ or ‘fear’ toward God. Me too, but the goal is to hear, and hear anew, not simply to echo others.

This was Victoria Day long weekend, marking the beginning of cottaging and gardening seasons for some, or house hunting or beer drinking seasons for others. The week before we filled the place for Mothers Day, baptisms, and Doug Whidden’s preaching. Next week well fill the place for youth confirmations, as 9 teens speak on what it means to them. This was a ‘low Sunday’, a pause between the two more popular services.

Victoria Day is ‘the Queen’s birthday’. It’s not Queen Elizabeth’s birthday – but Victoria’s. Queen Victoria was born May 24, 1819 – and we celebrate on the Monday which is May 24, or the Monday before May 24 of it’s a different day. We shoot off fireworks, and march about a bit – but not as much as we did when I was a child. The map on the Sunday School wall showed much of the globe in pink, as part of the British Commonwealth, Victoria’s Empire. Not now!

Victoria was not the king’s daughter. William had 10 illegitimate children, but no heir – hardly a scandal compared with King George before him. He waited to die until Victoria was 18, old enough to succeed him, in 1837. These were troubled times for a young queen. There was rebellion here in Upper Canada, with armed men marching past this church (our congregation took both sides). The Americans were independent, our war of 1812 a recent memory, the Fenians urging Irish independence, and Napoleonic wars a recent memory.

By the time Victoria died in 1901, things had changed a lot. She had presided over the growth of an global empire, as ‘Britannia ruled the waves’. This was not an English empire – the Irish and Scots had enmity for English rule – but a British one. Victoria pitched a big enough tent that people could speak in their own accents, wear their own kilts, and serve in the same causes. Ours was a colonial and Victorian church and nation, melding ‘the thistle, shamrock, rose entwine, the Maple Leaf forever’. We knew how hard it was to integrate such an alliance.

What would they make of us today, those Victorians, and the common identity we share, and our relationships to our neighbours? How would they hear the lesson today, and how will we hear the lesson in our day? What would it mean for us, or others, to ‘revere God and do what is right’?

I invited you all to reflect with a survey, ‘TUC & Me’, about your own practice of ‘revering God and doing what is right. There are hard copies available where you get these printed notes – or go to: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=bqcVnGIKVLhxn_2fAwq1u2Ew_3d_3d

What do we celebrate, and why, in a United Church on a Victoria Day weekend? This weekend, the Sinhalese government finished off the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. That ethnic and nationalist fight has been going on for decades, arising from the dismantling of the old British Empire, and in that case the Raj becoming India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka in 1948. Middle Eastern conflicts share similar roots in European colonial transitions after two world wars.

We have been a great Victorian, colonial, and modern church and nation. We now live in new globalization, post-colonial and post-modern context. I nearly preached all that theory, but caught myself, as I do now in these notes, to return to the bare bones of the message, and to start again to put some flesh on those bones:

Now I see
That in every nation
Any person
Who reveres God
And does what is right
Is acceptable to God.

Our denomination was conceived at the height of the late Victorian age. The 20th century belonged to Canada, and we would win the world for Christ in this generation. Missionary movements were thriving – the World Council of Churches is celebrating a famous conference 100 years ago this week – and our founders actually thought everybody would join us in time, and we would be a ‘truly national church’. We were WASPs, and we were the ideal norm. Anybody who revered God, and did what was right, our way, could join us!

There was much to celebrate in our WASP and Victorian synthesis. It worked to unite us across many divisions we had brought with us from the old countries of the British Isles and Europe. Don’t make light of the courage and compassion it took to bridge those immigrants’ grudges in the next generations of Canadian-born Protestants building a United Church. We could do with more of that spirit and more of those community development and civil society skills today.

Assimilation, of course, has a shadow side. Our religious mission was inextricable from colonial and industrial political and economic powers of the time. Some of those ‘assimilated’ were coerced into joining us. Worse, perhaps was our attitude to visible differences of race. Even J.S.Woodsworth, one of our clergy, founder of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, later the NDP, saint of the social welfare state and parliamentary democracy, who was the only MP to vote against Canada’s entry into the second world war, got it wrong. He wrote Strangers Within Our Gates about immigration, arguing that European newcomers could be assimilated and integrated in one generation as white English speakers. But that Asians or Africans should be excluded since their colour could not be assimilated as easily.

We were never simply stupid, or ignorant, bigots following racist tyrants, even in assimilation. We still operate from an assimilation model, especially in public schooling. But it has limits, and for a church, can have unholy alliances with political and economic power. We must do better.

‘Inclusiveness toward minorities’ was our basic paradigm shift from ‘assimilation’ through the 20th century. We were operating dozens of ‘ethnic’ United church congregations, with Italian, Japanese, Hungarian, Chinese, and other languages and cultural identifications. First nations congregations maintained identity with their communities despite our assimilation ideology. We also ran our share of ‘settlement houses’, social service agencies directed toward immigrants. Over 25 years ago at one of those places, I met my first Tamil refugee, and offered advocacy.

‘Inclusiveness toward minorities’, of course, has its own shadow side. I used the example of ‘inclusive language’ to illustrate the problem: how dare clergymen like me recognize women as a minority, or presume to be the gatekeepers to ‘include’ women in our language and leadership? ‘Inclusiveness’ still assumes a norm that makes a ‘minority’ deviant, and retains the power to tolerate generously, rather than welcoming and equal. Our early good work on gender, sexual orientation, and multiculturalism has been overtaken by cultural trends, and found wanting.

None Is Too Many, Irving Abella’s book on Canada’s rejection of Holocaust refugees through the 1930’s and 1940’s, is familiar to most of us. He documents our political and popular rejection of refugees, even when shiploads reached this side of the Atlantic and were refused safe harbour. He argues that the churches said nothing – while privately, Christians in power led the anti-Semitic policies and practices of exclusion. He illustrates the shadow side of our first model of assimilation. We share the shame of the truth that he reveals, and say together ‘never again’.

Less familiar to us is the story of our ‘inclusive toward minorities’ reaction to the Holocaust, and also to Japanese internship. How Silent Were the Churches? Canadian Protestantism and the Jewish Plight During the Nazi Era by Alan Davies and Judith Nevsky, reviews Abella’s claim and concedes his point that the churches were too silent. It’s not, however, that nothing was said, but that the weight of the words was contradicted by their number and our inaction.

Great preachers from big pulpits like Bathurst and Bloor in Toronto, or Westminster in Winnipeg, spoke in sermons and from podiums at rallies – and so did many less prominent leaders. But the number of words, and the absence of our membership at those rallies, spoke louder about how we weighted our tolerance and inclusiveness within our comfort zones. Jewish and Japanese folks knew that there were some ‘safe’ congregations, some clergy ‘allies’, and some generosity of spirit from many United Church pew-sitters. But not enough.

If assimilation and inclusiveness have been overtaken by a truly diverse context of globalized postcolonial and postmodern culture, economics and politics, what are we to say now? Our denomination offers the new language of ‘intercultural’ ministry in dialogue with others, assuming that ‘we’ have more to learn than to teach. Perhaps that will be our next paradigm – or perhaps remain too few words, given too little weight or popular action. How will our children be embarrassed or proud of the witness we make and teach to them and to others?

Now I see
That in every nation
Any person
Who reveres God
And does what is right
Is acceptable to God.

What would Peter say? What would young Victoria see? How can we sin boldly in our turn?

Peter starts by admitting he may have missed something before: ‘now I see’. Eureka, epiphany, aha, oops – say it however you will, we start with re-viewing our reality. I asked you all to move a couple of feet in worship this Sunday, to see how your perspective changed, getting out of your familiar pew and position. We don’t have to reject the old position entirely, to test it a bit. We all grew up with assumptions, and took positions, some of which have served us well, including those related to ‘assimilation’ and ‘inclusiveness toward minorities’. What’s next: ‘now I see’?

Peter recognizes that ‘in every nation’ – the Greek worth is ‘ethnoi’, the root of our term ‘ethnic’ – he can find people acceptable to God. (And if they are acceptable to God, he ruefully says later, who is he to reject them?) Since ‘nations’ in our day are often in tension with states and ethnicities, we need to tread carefully through the minefields, real and metaphorical, of postcolonial and postmodern conflicts. But we should expect to find in every nation, in any nation, in any community or ethnicity, people acceptable to God. We can’t demonize groups.

Peter says ‘any person who reveres God, and does what is right’ meets the standard of what is acceptable to God. Of course, none of us meets that standard – not even J.S.Woodsworth, or the preachers on the podiums after Kristallnacht in 1938 – but none can be denied trying. The question is not one of how we are the ideal norms and gatekeepers choose to assimilate others or tolerate them as minorities – but how we meet them as generously as God does, and how we apply the same standard to ourselves as to others. How do you revere God and do right?

The Acts of the Apostles is a great record of the earliest church, moving in one generation, from the death of Jesus to the death of Paul in Rome 30 years later, from a wee band of Galileans to a cosmopolitan interracial intercultural movement from Spain through Europe and Africa to north India. How The original leaders got past their own religious and cultural assumptions about how to revere God and do right, to learn from new partners in faith, is a model for us.

On this Victoria Day long weekend, we celebrate and confess our roots as a nation and as a church in a British imperial and colonial modern context, and wonder a bit what that might mean in a newly globalized, postcolonial and post-modern context. I just kept repeated the bare bones:

Now I see
That in every nation
Any person
Who reveres God
And does what is right
Is acceptable to God.

Then I sent you off to put some flesh on those bones, get your own skin in the game. How will you revere God and do what is right? What will you answer to the ‘TUC & Me’ survey? How will you do it better, next? Come back next week and listen closely to what 9 teenagers will say about what it means to them. Go on, it’s your job, not just mine: you may be the only gospel your neighbour reads this week, so write the vision, and make it plain, that she who runs may read it. Christ within you, the hope of glory to come, go into the world with a tender and a daring love, for the world is waiting. And whatever you do, do it in love, and in the name of God who first loved you. And as you go, be strong and of good courage, do not be afraid. For it is the Lord your God who goes with you, who will not fail you or forsake you. Amen.
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