Pain and Words Matter - Sermon from February 8, 2009

Matthew 18:1 - 7

When I was training to be a hospice chaplain one of the first instructions they gave was, "If someone tells you they feel pain, believe them."

How often we dismiss someone's pain as being "not that bad" or "in their head." Often when someone says they are in pain - physical, emotional, spiritual, or intellectual pain - judgment follows. The person is seen as "looking for attention" or not being "tough enough." The more I thought about the instruction, "If someone tells you they feel pain, believe them," the more I realized that this obvious thing to say was actually necessary.

How sad. How amazingly sad. What a shock it was to realize that words acknowledging pain too often become immediately overlaid with judgment.

Years ago I started to hear words of pain being expressed by people of colour regarding Biblical and religious language. I heard my dark-skinned colleagues and friends share that white and light being good and black and dark being bad was not helpful to them. Not all people of colour were saying this, but there were voices in the room agreeing that this language was painful.

I have heard lots of white people dismiss or negate that pain saying these sisters and brothers are being too sensitive or that they are missing the point of the metaphor. I have also heard justification of these metaphors based on facts like, light really does help us see in the dark. And while it is true that light helps us see in the dark, it is equally true that when the light is in my eyes I put on "shades."

A metaphor is just a metaphor. It is limited. We need lots of metaphors of different kinds to understand the fullness of things like "God" or "holiness." Unfortunately Christianity is overloaded on the metaphors for light and white. I think this is true because of systemic racism. The power structure privileging light skinned people goes way back.

We could deconstruct the historical foundations of white privilege. We could talk about how worshiping the sun and light has grounded us in a pattern of systemic racism. All those things are interesting and important to me. If they are to you too then maybe we can develop a six week study on the foundations of racism in religion.

But for today, this 2nd Sunday of Black History month, I want to talk about the pain I hear people feeling today. I want us to believe it when someone says the words in our worship hurt them.

In the 1940's, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, did a study on racial biases in education. You have met both Dr. Kenneth Clark and Dr. Mamie Clark, in the bios I read of them from Columbia University. You have also heard some of Dr. Kenneth Clark's words in the excerpt read from Dark Ghetto.

Their most famous study was the doll study. In this study, African American children were shown two white dolls and two black dolls. They were each asked question about the dolls such as, which doll would you like to play with and which is the nice doll? They were also asked what colour the dolls were. Finally they were asked which doll they looked most like. Overwhelmingly these African American children chose the white dolls as the nice dolls and preferable to play with and when they were asked to identify which doll they looked most like, they became upset, some did not answer and some left the room. This study was used in the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education case and was instrumental in bringing about the ruling that public school segregation is unconstitutional.

But I said I was going to talk about today. In 2005, Kiri Davis recreated the Clark doll study. Ms. Davis is an African American filmmaker. At the time she filmed this study she was 18 years old. She created a seven-minute documentary called, A Girl Like Me. I'd like to show you a clip from that.



The first time I saw this, I was devastated. The devastation only deepens with each sequential viewing. This is the pain I heard in those conversations when we talked about the light and dark metaphors in religious language. This is the pain that my sisters and brothers of colour were talking about. I had to hear it from children to get it in my gut. My head was processing like crazy but to feel it I had to see this.

This documentary shows the impact of our culture, and I believe that our language in worship is part of that. When kids are surrounded with the notion that white is good and black is bad it easily become transferred to people and what colour they are. The metaphor of the sun bursting through the darkness so that we can see in the daytime is fine on its own, but it isn't on its own. This language is accompanied by the history of slavery in this country and by Jim Crow laws and lynchings and nooses being hung in trees as a supposed joke at a high school in Jena, Louisiana. Nothing is done in a vacuum.

The metaphor of our need for shelter from the bright harsh sun is rarely talked about. Metaphors about flowers and vegetables in their surprising array of colours are not used much either. The metaphor of the brown earth from which our creation story says we were made - that doesn't get much play either.

It is in my heart to write songs and liturgy that explore all these amazing images. It is also in my heart to eliminate the harmful images as best I can. Here is the Streams songbook that I use at home when picking songs. I have gone through the book and noted the light/white and dark/night metaphors. I don't use those songs. I think these metaphors have become stumbling blocks. In verse 7 of our reading in Matthew today it says, "Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!"

Is my choice a little over the top? Some say that it is. I don't think I'm quite over the top yet though. I don't think I've come close to the top of this mountain. If the words that I use hurt somebody, if the words that I use cause someone to stumble - and by stumble I don't mean sin - If what I do causes someone pain, I want to know that and I want to stop. Woe to me if I don't.

More needs to be done than just altering these images of dark and light, but if I can do this small thing, it might make a huge difference in someone's life. More liturgy needs to be written ... more songs need to be written that explore the abundance of colour images. I am working on that too.

This is important to me at my core. It drives me and it impacts the choices that I make. The words that we say matter. People's pain matter.