Yes, cooler weather is coming, and Thanksgiving is right around the corner, but today’s turkey talk is not about Thanksgiving. I want to share some thoughts with you about a conflict that I have carried as a priest for twenty-one years too long. It is a conflict between preaching the radical, disturbing, socially impolite, system-disrupting, polarizing, often misunderstood and too often misinterpreted message of Jesus versus not being perceived as “political.”

If I look back over my career, I could blame myself for backing down from the challenge, for sliding into the comfortable white-person role of being a priest and not upsetting people. In doing so, I have sold short my black friends, all black and people, and all white people in the United States. It doesn’t feel good to me. In the name of personal comfort and in the wider interest of preserving parish unity, I have come up short with what Jesus called me to do. I hope it is not too late.

Let me share a question two white Episcopalians posed to me not long after the tragedy of George Floyd. “What is our church going to do about racism?” they asked. It was an honest and heartfelt question. But without waiting for an answer, they went on to the predictably comfortable topics of their personal racism experiences and how we might get together as nice Episcopalians and talk about it. Since we were at the river fishing and the place was not conducive for a full, elucidative dive into the real problems, I finally replied, “The church will do something. You can be assured of that. But there are much deeper problems than personal racist confessions that need to be tackled. And I think we are way beyond the efficacy of talk therapy.” My two fishing colleagues did not completely understand what I was saying, so they politely went on to something else.

Today, we need to move beyond confessional talk therapy. The heart of the issue is kind of like asking the fish to understand the water she swims in. The fish is unaware of water just like most white people in North America are unaware of the systems and privileges that benefit only white people. In the post-Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s, we removed the “White” and “Colored” signs from above the water fountains, but we have not removed the systems that benefit white people at the expense of black and brown people. Those systems are called “systemic racism” or “structural racism” or “institutional racism.” In North America, white supremacy is part of the system, structure, or institution.

Before going down this road, I want to dismantle the counterargument. I call it the “outlier dodge.” White people will often take the name of a black movie star, athlete or businessperson and say, “Look, so and so made it big. Therefore, there is equal opportunity for all black people to be successful.” You cannot cherry pick a few examples to prove that equal opportunity exists. Equal opportunity is the lie we need to own and understand.

Consider housing. Black people are 50% of the homeless population and 13% of the population. Why? Redlining practiced by banks and real estate offices after WWII made it almost impossible for black people to obtain loans to own real estate. Black veterans returning after WWII were unable to get a GI loan by government policy. These are policies of de facto segregation. They are oppressive. I personally know several black families that suffered harm by this policy.

The inability to own homes and real estate meant that most black families were unable to accumulate wealth the same way that white families could. Even though redlining was outlawed in 1968, the areas that were redlined were much poorer as a result. There is a cascade effect of redlining that led to poor neighborhoods that led to poor public schools, poor health care systems, poor public transportation, all of which led to issues of public safety, and finally to over-policing.

For too many years, we have declared that civil rights laws are “liberal,” and that the government should not favor one color of people over another. All this time, white people have benefited enormously by government policies favoring whites over blacks. The issue is NOT liberal versus conservative, democrat versus republican. It is a moral issue.

Church goers of all kinds have resorted to calling these things partisan or political issues and therefore making them off limits for clergy or the church. Polite white people don’t talk about politics at church. After all, Jesus was spiritual, not political.

That’s a lie too. When he turned over the money-changers’ tables, Jesus was performing a spiritual act saying “my Father’s house is a house of prayer not profit” AND he was performing a political act protesting the dynastic temple system that enriched a few at the expense of everyone else. When he healed the Syro-Phoenician woman’s daughter, he was performing a spiritual act of healing AND a political act protesting the racist policies that oppressed her people and the Samaritans. In fact, this woman of another tribe or ethnicity changed Jesus.

It’s time we quit declaring moral issues as “political” and off-limits for the church.

It’s time we own the fact that white people in North America have benefited from government policies for decades.

It’s time we join Jesus and the prophets before him who stood for justice.

It’s time we “let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:24)

And, just how do we let justice roll?

The prophet Amos never answered that question, nor did Martin Luther King, Jr. Perhaps we should try.

These three things will get you started down the road to justice. Once you get started, the rest will become clear.