At its institutional best, the Church serves as a mediating structure between powerless individuals and the megastruchsures of society and government when they practice injustice and oppression. As a mediating institution, the Church identifies herself with the poor and oppressed.
Such identification means that the Church is called to a pastoral-prophetic ministry of confronting injustice and working toward reconciliation. As such, the Church is called upon to speak out both against apartheid in South Africa and silent apartheid within our own country.
Beyond preaching to teaching and empowerment
Good preaching gives way to and results in sound teaching. Sound teaching is the basis for Christian living.
Racism is taught. In order to persist in time, it must be taught anew to each child. The most effective way to teach racism is through ignorance. Ignorance, perhaps better, an ignorance of ignorance, is born of separation and segregation of racial groups.
Separation results in ignorance and gives rise to fear and misunderstanding. Such ignorance, fear and misunderstanding are the stuff of stereotypes and typifications. At a preconscious level, typifications guide behavior. Stereotypes are taught at a conscious level through racial slurs and jokes.
While ignorance is a problem to be confronted in racism, fear is the deeper feeling that needs to be recognized and addressed. Recalling our basic understanding of sin as separation helps us to understand fear and its relationship to ignorance.
We fear that from which we are separated, be it God or other human beings Alienation is living in a state of separation. Within alienation, the alien, foreign, strange or unknown is a source of both awe (curiosity) and fear (chaos).
We stand before God awestruck and trembling with fear. The awesomeness of God draws us, the fear of God causes us to seek refuge.
Religions that work on fear and guilt are powerful because they recognize and employ the dynamic of alienation and separation. Racism, as a form of socialization (teaching) is powerful for the same reason.
Teaching righteousness
The Church is called to confront racism by teaching righteousness (relatedness, a just and loving relationship) in the face of racism born of stereotypes and typifications grounded in sin and separation.
Preaching repentance is not enough; righteousness needs to be taught, cultivated and practiced by the Church.
Our Presiding Bishop’s remarks (in quoting the Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop of Brooklyn, Joseph M. Sullivan) aid in understanding the need to teach in the face of racism: “The major problem of the Church is internal. How do we teach? As much as I think we’re responsible for advocating public policy issues, our primary responsibility is to teach our own people. We haven’t done that. We’re asking politicians to do what we haven’t done effectively ourselves.”
How do we teach?
How does the church teach relatedness, reconciliation and righteousness?
If we have rightly identified fear as the source of racism, and if fear is the result of separation, then teaching within the Church must address the “ignorance of Ignorance” which gives rise to fear.
Within South Dakota this means challenging stereotypes, getting rid of typifications and opening ourselves to an appreciation, acceptance and celebration of difference and diversity within the Church.
Such sound teaching avoids both cynicism and sentimentality. Such teaching distinguishes the corrupt and sinful from the creative and wholesome in any and all cultural expressions of religious truth.
Lakota spirituality and native religion have much to teach the Church, given our incarnational understanding of theology and the Church. Little has been done to explore the insights of Lakota culture and religion owing to a basic “ignorance of ignorance”. For too long our appreciation (and stereotypes) have been limited to “beadwork and feathers”.
Sound teaching requires that, if we are to be related and in a right relationship, we must be open to learning Lakota culture, history, language, and spirituality.
Sound teaching and learning requires that we look beneath the poverty and despair in order to better understand, before prematurely offering another program as a way of placating collective white guilt.
Buying off the problem?
Sound teaching and learning also require that we look directly at the poverty and despair and ask what we have done to address the suffering that continues and grows worse despite the various programs and vast amounts of money that have been spent to solve “the Indian problem”.
Perhaps we might realize that it is time to empower our Native American brothers and sisters rather than “buying them off” at a safe distance.
Such understanding and empowerment, while sounding lofty, will not be easy owing to the destructive and demoralizing dependency that has been “taught” and learned over the past one hundred years.
Empowerment means teaching interdependence rather than dependence, cooperation rather than the ongoing manipulation of white guilt by Native Americans.
Mutual responsibility and accountability must be taught and practiced in the face of white paternalism and Indian dependency. Such mutuality, interdependence, relatedness begin with the breakdown of segregation and separation that we have named “silent apartheid”.
The silence must be broken by moral discourse. Moral discourse presupposes sound teaching. The Church at its institutional best is a community of moral discourse. The communication that results from moral discourse is the basis for communion within the Church.
Teaching wellness and empowering indigenous leadership
Late last year, a week-long event sponsored by the National Committee on Indian Work entitled “Oklahoma II” took place in Oklahoma City. Of the eighty-six participants representing Native Americans from all parts of the Episcopal Church, South Dakota had the largest delegation owing to the size and scope of Lakota/Dakota membership in the Diocese of South Dakota.
The Oklahoma II consultation resulted in a new covenant which stressed the need to heal racism within the Church, empower Native American lay and ordained leadership and move beyond crisis intervention to cultural wellness.
Teaching wellness and empowering indigenous leadership disclose a common need and point to a fundamental issue. Teaching and empowering as methods of enablement and care are different from doing “for” or “to” an individual or culture.
If the Church is to fulfill its call and vocation as a mediating structure to empower and enable, it must do so through trust, support and openness. Imposing solutions, no matter how well intended, is paternalistic. Trust, support and openness require honesty and a willingness to risk new behavior.
Said differently, a covenant is not a contract. A covenant allows for the “slippage of grace”. Within covenants, partners are mutually responsible and accountable. Covenant relationships allow for forgiveness and new beginnings. In short, covenants, unlike a strictly legal contract, are based in steadfast and abiding love (hesed).
Covenant will be tested
The Covenant of Oklahoma II will be tested in the years ahead. Can the larger Church enable wellness and wholeness without imposing cultural conditions, or non-Indian answers, in empowering her Native American brothers and sisters?
Is the larger Church willing to consider new forms of structure and governance as a way of allowing for greater Native American autonomy and self-determination?
Is the non-Indian Church open to the insights of Native American spirituality in the areas of stewardship, conceiving of the Church as an extended family and teaching the centrality of religion in everyday life?
Conversely, are Native American congregations willing to look at the destructive effects of the idolatry of family, bath and tribe?
In the words of the Ven. Noah Brokenleg, can Lakota/Dakota Church members stop “hiding behind their “Indianness” as an excuse for blocking unity?
Is there a willingness to accept accountability and responsibility as necessary ingredients for interdependence and mutual respect and care?
Can indigenous Church leaders model behavior which promotes wellness, such as caring confrontation, without succumbing to cultural pressures and family loyalties?
Will Native American leaders be valued and followed, or crippled by slander, gossip and jealousy?
These and many more questions will be asked and tested in the days ahead. New covenants mean new beginnings, without forgetting the past: past sins and offenses must be confessed and acknowledged both within Indian and non-Indian churches if the Church is to be a model and agent of reconciliation to the wider community.
The “litany of despair” can no longer be simply rehearsed as an excuse for apathy and inaction. We are mutually called to address the elements of such a litany and, as covenanting partners, work toward celebrating a ‘litany of hope”.
Such work will be neither easy or painless. Changed attitudes, behaviors and interpersonal relationships require courage and resolve.
Repentance and forgiveness as aspects of care are the foundation for covenant existence, life within the Church.
Proclaimed righteousness or silent apartheid?
There is a common misunderstanding of covenant and the process of making a covenant. Many people think that covenant partners come to covenants with everything resolved. The opposite is true: covenant partners come to covenant agreements with everything yet to be resolved. Covenants are founded on trust, not detailed conditions.
The New Covenant is an example of such trust grounded in love. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Very exact but hardly detailed: a descriptive, not prescriptive, way of life that we call Christian vocation.
The details of covenant vocation an worked out in the way we live our life on a daily basis. An important part of such a vocation is to reflect with others, as a community of moral discourse, in light of the covenant promise and mandate.
Are we, who call ourselves a covenant community, living a life of righteousness or apartheid? Are we vocal or silent when confronted with injustice and oppression In others and ourselves?
Different, yet bound together
Race and ethnic origin point to our uniqueness as creatures of a loving Creator-God. Race and ethnic origin reveal the rich diversity of God as a God of unity whose plan for human beings is universal salvation. Unity, to include Christian unity, presupposes diversity. We are called to celebrate our diversity, our ethnicity, as a gift from God. Such celebration allows us to celebrate more fully our unity and universal salvation.
Religion from the word religio means to “bind together”. When qualified by the word “Christian,” religion means that we are bound together in Christ. To be bound together in Christ presents us with the radical nature and message of Christianity.
Jesus the Christ came to seek and save all of humanity. No exceptions.
While religion, any religion, is always culturally transmitted and practiced, Christianity celebrates cultural expression but transcends any attempt to bind it to a specific culture. Jesus was not only “the Man of others”, He was the Man for all others. Racism and apartheid is a “tearing apart” of that which was bound together by God in creation and revealed in Jesus.
Righteousness as relatedness is the binding quality of covenant existence. The apartness of racism is the breaking of covenant. Our “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” is grounded in our covenant relationship with one another. The binding quality of Christian belief and religion is love, covenant love. As members of the covenant community, the Church, we are called to love God and one another. Love of God and one another is inseparable.
In Christ,