A Sermon Delivered by Rev. Tamara Lebak, Assistant Minister
At All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, OK
on June 8, 2008
You all know the saying right? “Everything will be ok… God willing… (and
the Creek don’t rise.)” I used to
think that was just a cute, southern, Christian saying about the rising water
getting in the way of God’s plan, although it never quite made sense to
me. The poor grammar just made me
believe it was a saying native to Oklahoma, or that originated in Alabama or
Arkansas. How many of you know what that
phrase actually means? Not many actually
do. That saying, as you probably do
know, comes from a letter written from then U.S. ambassador to the Creek Nation,
Benjamin Hawkins, whom Marlin read about earlier.
Hawkins was college-educated and well-written. He would likely not have made the grammatical
error (the creek don’t rise.) So the
capitalization of Creek is really the only way this saying would make sense. Benjamin Hawkins was writing to the President
of the United States when he said that he would return to our Nation's Capital,
“God Willing and the Creek Don’t rise.” which, of course, had nothing to do
with a stream overflowing its banks. Truth,
once again, is all about context. You
see, if the Creek Nation "rose," Hawkins would have to remain with
them to try to keep the peace. The
phrase really suggests that the Creek Nation is violent and war mongering,
an assumption made by the U.S. about most native peoples. The Creek people were forcibly evicted from
their homeland following the Treaty of Indian Springs in 1825 and historically,
they did indeed violently protect what they believed was theirs.
Benjamin Hawkins did do a lot of good in trying to bridge
the gap between the U.S. government and the Creek Nation. He learned their language, he negotiated for
them in English with their needs in mind, and he brought them methods of
building and ways of life they did not know.
But, as we can decipher from the reading from Creek history, written
over 200 years ago, he and others like him were trying to do good. They had very good intentions, but they made
some very obvious assumptions that were not so helpful, and are now even painful
to hear. Assumptions about what is
right, what is normal, and what is civilized.
Because we have seen the outcome of these negotiations some 200 years
later, we know that the results were particularly one-sided. The U.S. very openly tried to dissolve the
Creek Nation’s culture and their government.
So although this interpretation of the Creek people being
particularly violent may have appeared to be factual to Benjamin Hawkins, it is
an historical relic. It is an artifact
of another time that most people unknowingly perpetuate, when they say “God
willing and the Creek don’t rise.” And for
me it feels particularly icky to know that. It feels terrible to know that I have
participated in maintaining a racist or ethnic stereotype. If I said this phrase in the presence of someone
who was Creek, I might even feel worse.
This morning though, I am less interested in whether or not
we have a mile long list of phrases that we know we cannot say for fear of
offending someone. This morning I am more
interested in what happens when we are made aware that we have
unintentionally offended someone? Do we
blame our ignorance? Or their
sensitivity? Do we own our mistake? Do we say some things in private and others in
public? Does our awareness prevent us
from wanting to be in relationships?
I want to tell you a very difficult story about someone
among us, a member of this church who agreed that I could tell her story for
the benefit of the teaching point. Someone
who came face to face on a personal level with her own covered racism and
assumptions. This person is educated,
spiritual, and considers herself open to new experiences. She grew up in the south, comes to church
regularly, has donated her money to many worthy causes. She considers herself very open minded and
tears up when she hears Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. And she is pretty savvy when it comes to
understanding the dynamics of power and influence. For the sake of this story, it is important
for you to know that she is white.
Several years ago, when she was working for a company that
required her to do a lot of traveling to small towns in Kentucky, she would
spend weeks at a time at the same hotel. She got to know the hotel staff in this small
town pretty well. On one particular trip,
she informed the person at the desk that while she was there for the week, there
was no need for them to change her sheets everyday, no need to waste the water,
or the energy, or the soap. One morning,
as she was exiting her room and about to step on the elevator, she saw a woman
leaving a room down the hall and coming toward her. She assumed that this woman was cleaning the
rooms on this floor. So, as she got on
the elevator, she said something like “Don’t worry about cleaning my room… I’m good.” As the words left her lips she realized her
mistake. This woman was not in a hotel
uniform. She was not wielding a cleaning
cart. She was simply African
American. The hotel guest furiously said “I am not a maid!” Our member said, “I am so sorry.” But the damage was done. It was as though time had stopped and then
reverted. Hundreds of years of progress had
been stripped away by a single assumption.
The elevator doors shut and our member was mortified, ashamed,
and had no idea what to do next. The
event consumed her all day long and when she returned home that evening she
knew that she had to apologize again.
She knew that she had to do something to let the woman know that she
wasn’t “that way.” She wanted to tell the
woman that she had worked hard to “not be that way” and to let the woman know
that she would work harder than ever to prevent it from happening again. She confessed to people she knew all day and then
asked what they thought she should do. Most
told her to forget it. They said they knew her intentions were good, it was a
mistake, and that there was nothing she could do to change what had happened. They believed it would only make it worse to
try to apologize. She just could not leave
it alone, she had to respond.
Back at the hotel, this congregant tried to get the woman’s room
number from the all white hotel staff. It
was a small Kentucky town. The
Hotel desk informed our member that the woman had checked out. She told the clerk the story. She told the clerk that she had to do
something to make it right, and the clerk, trying to help our member, gave her
the woman’s home address (something that would likely never have happened had
our member been Black.) When this
congregant looked at the address, she was stunned. The woman lived in Tulsa on the other side of
town. That night our member sent the
woman a letter. The letter was brief and
in it the congregant admitted that this would have never happened if the woman
had not been black. Our member owned her
racism and said how ashamed she was. She conveyed how disappointed she was in
herself, believing that she was better than that. She let the woman know that she was expecting
nothing in return, but just wanted to own what had happened.
Several days later, a letter came for our member. The woman wrote that she had been in Kentucky
to bury her brother. She was grateful our member had taken the time to write and
admit that she was wrong. She had never
received such an honest ownership of racism. In the letter the woman assumed that our
member must be a Christian to have owned up to such an error. The woman explicitly forgave this congregant
in the letter. Although it was clear to our
member that she certainly didn’t have to. This woman did not owe our member forgiveness;
she really didn’t even owe her a response.
It was an act of mercy.
Bumping into each other in this way causes so much damage. It is when people meet category to category, instead
of face to face. And yet we need each
other. Because these two people risked
opening their hearts to one another, beyond their uncomfortable, initial
contact they both walked away changed, with a bridge, instead of a creek
between them.
We are always in the process of becoming. No one lives fixed in time unchanged. As Unitarians we believe that the revelation
of God is not sealed. It is open and
available for us to experience in the moment right now. It is not fixed in a creed or static and
unchanging. So, why should we encounter
one another as static, only this way or that way when every one of us is
always subject to time and influence?
We are all in the process of becoming. Learning more about ourselves as we encounter
one another. Though we may not see the
promised land, we can live our lives well trying to arrive as close as we can. If the revelation of God is ever unfolding in
our lives, than we too, must be prepared to unfold with it. We must risk being open to be influenced by
one another in our differences. Step
outside of how we usually are, how we have been, and risk being vulnerable with
one another. We must risk assuming the
good intentions of others overall for they too are children of God. We must risk meeting them in the moment person
to person for that is when real contact is made, when people meet soul
to soul, when the divine in me meets the divine in you. When categories and culture and expectation
fade away real contact is made. When we are Christian in the true sense
of the word for that, I believe is the kind of radical message Jesus was
suggesting.
I want to retell the Pharisee and the tax collector parable that
Marlin read to you this morning, in a way that might make it as radical as it likely
was likely heard in Jesus’ time.
(This
is adapted from a version from William Barclay)
Two women came to All Souls in the
middle of the week. One was a Religious Education teacher who came by to pick
up her curriculum. The other a thirty year old woman, addicted to cocaine, who
dealt drugs to support her habit. The
addict just wanted to use the bathroom as she wandered by our church on her way
from Monte Casino where she had just sold Oxycontin to two eighth graders. In the church, on her way to the bathroom, she
noticed the sanctuary door was open and she stepped in.
It was a coincidence that both women
came into our church at the same time. They couldn't help noticing one another and
their eyes met briefly as they moved apart in the sanctuary. The teacher took a seat near the front and
opened the hymnal looking for a reading of inspiration to ground her. She read
with concentration and then sat quietly. Her eyes lifted to the chancel window. Her heart filled with
thanksgiving as she breathed this prayer,
"O God, I am [so] grateful that I have the inner
resources to be a helper. I am glad that I can be of service to you-to be in
church each Sunday, teach my class, and contribute financially to the needs of
the church. Thank you God for not making me a drug dealer or a prostitute. Thank
you, God, for my strong faith which helps me deal with the difficult moral
issues that surround me and my family every day. Amen."
The young woman stood at the back of
sanctuary and leaned against wall. She
slouched over and squeezed her big canvas handbag to her chest. Tears streamed down her face, as she looked at
the carpet near her feet. And her whole
body shook as she prayed,
"O God, I'm soo sorry, that I am so screwed
up."
Can you imagine Jesus saying, "I tell you, this drug dealer
went to her home justified rather than the teacher?"
You may have noticed that Jesus doesn't always follow the
rules of logic. The first will be last,
the sorrowful will be happy, the humble exhaled, but he always follows his
heart, one big enough even to include his enemies. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
What this story tells us is that life is not about being a
GOOD Christian. It is not about being a
GOOD anything. It is about showing up
with our hearts open. It is about our
need for humility, the need for EVERYONE to recognize that they make mistakes. That even with the best of intentions, we will
err. For we are part of a system that
errs, a culture that is in error. It is
a parable that reminds us that even if it appears that some people have figured
out this morality thing better than others EVERYONE still needs humility. Inside of each of us is a Pharisee and a tax
collector, a Religious Education teacher and a drug addict. We all have the potential for every sin. When
we remember that, we walk humbly before God, hearts and minds open.
We will bump up against each other and sometimes it will be
painful, sometimes it will be gentle and loving, and sometimes it will feel
like a train wreck. What is church about
if it is not about the transformative power of God revealing Herself in our
lives, if it is not about making meaningful contact with another? What is church about if we are not learning
about justice and mercy, our capacity to love, and our capacity to embrace, if
we are not learning more about ourselves, if we are not awakened to the idea
that we are all becoming? We are all
brothers and sisters on this path to becoming.
Let us walk together in love. In
order to do so we must make contact with one another, heart to heart and soul
to soul. So as Marlin said last week, you
might want to bring a hard hat to church or you might get a bump on your head,
or your heart!
I want to tell you one last story that might surprise you. There is a knot on the back of my head that protrudes
at the base of my skull. I used to
imagine that I had caused it, some old wound that never went away. In seminary, I would often joke that it was a
welt formed when I was hit over the head with what I called the “Holy Two by
Four.” (You know, when God or Life
smacks you upside the head with the same lesson that you thought you had
already learned over and over. That
might leave a knot, right?) Well
actually four generations back, on my father’s side my great, great, great, grandfather
married a Creek woman and that is why I have this bump on my head. It is called
a Creek knot. Almost all Creek people
have this knot on the back of their head.
[Go ahead feel the back of your head, I know you are wondering]
My great, great, great, grandmother’s name was Mahala. And she is one of the reasons why I walk on God’s
creation this day. For her, I am
thankful. I think about her when I notice
that spot on my head. What was she like?
What were her struggles? Whom did she love? Her brown skin has been lost in what has
become my gene soup but her life and the Creek culture is part of who I am. It is connected to my history.
I have been learning a lot about their history. As I have been researching my heritage what I
have discovered is that you all also have a connection to the Creek
people that you may not know about. How
many of you know about Chief Tukabachee? Chief Tukabachee was forced from his home in
Alabama and survived the trail of tears in 1835 to arrive at Oklahoma Indiana
territory where he was given an allotment of land of nearly 120 acres. The land was situated between 21st
and 31st from Peoria to the Arkansas River.
Tuckabachee was a soldier who fought in the Mexican American
War and in the American Civil war for the North. It was unusual for the time, for a Native
American to support the US in the way. He
was a Mikko, or a medicine man, a fellow minister of sorts. Tuckabachee lived to be 95 years old, only
speaking his native tongue, and outliving several wives and all of his
children. This land, including the land
we sit on right now… was divided in the early 1900’s and the property that
contains All Souls today was held up in probate court until we acquired it in the
1950’s. This corner of the allotment where the church is now, was where
Tuckabachee had a cabin. As a matter of
fact the cabin was right about where the stage is in Emerson Hall. According to our Minister Emeritus Rev. Dr.
John Wolf, the basement dug for the cabin is still below that stage. You can find Tuckabachee’s grave in Oaklawn
cemetery, down the street on 11th and Peoria
So the Creek are among us. We are residing on their former land. Their blood mixes with some of our own, The
Pharisees and the Tax Collectors are also are among us, as well as the
pious and the addicted. We are all
becoming. We need one another. And what
we are called to do is to see one another through this lens of becoming, this
holy lens of Love that assumes good intentions and stays open to the dialogue, open
to our own mistakes, open to be changed. We are all called to see through a lens that
reminds us that we too are always in discovery about who we are.
God willing, when things are difficult, doors will open that
we did not know were there. If we come
with eyes to see, God willing, we will be shown mercy by one another when we
err. God willing, when the waters are
rising around us, when times are difficult and mistakes are made, we will throw
one another a lifeline of mercy deep from within our own humility. God willing, we will come away from contact
with one another becoming, feeling as though we have touched a holy
place in ourselves and seen the holy in one another. For it is then when we are connected to
God. May we carry with us this holy lens
of becoming and from it know that God is among us, among All SOULS guiding our
feet, holding our hand, and touching our heart.
Amen
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