SERMON FOR HUMAN RELATIONS SUNDAY

TEXT: Isaiah 49: 1-7

Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away! The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away. And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” But I said, “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God.” And now the Lord says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of the Lord, and my God has become my strength— he says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

Thus says the Lord, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers, “Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.”

TITLE: Growing Up Southern During Segregation

PREACHED BY the Rev. Caroline B. Edge at Carter Memorial United Methodist Church on January 14, 2007.

As our nation pauses this week-end to remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and how he lead our country non-violently to provide civil rights for African-Americans who lived in a racially segregated South, I commemorate this man and preacher for personally freeing me – a white person - from a racially segregated society.

Some years back I visited the Dr. King Center and Memorial where he is buried in Atlanta. There on a marble wall they have put a time line of his life and his activism. As I was reading through the time line, my heart stopped "figuratively" when I read that on such and such date Dr. King was in Grenada, Mississippi helping Negroes – as they were called in those days - register to vote. That is the town I grew up in. I remember one summer’s night sitting on my front steps with my boy friend listening to firecrackers and cherry bombs explode as black people marched for their rights around our town square, and "redneck" whites taunted them. I was imprisoned that night by my birth and culture as a white Southerner. In the years that were ahead I would experience freedom – liberation from that cultural racism – freed by Dr. King and those – black and white – who marched and sat in and took "Freedom Rides" and endured fire hoses and hostile dogs and mean white men.

But that is getting ahead of my story. I want to start at the beginning. Listen carefully, confirmands and youth and young adults, for I grew up in a world totally different from yours. Yet racism continues – in me and possibly in you. Hopefully, my story will give you a bit more personal view of this important part of the history of our country, and maybe my story will help you see how God works through people and events that help us mature as faithful followers of Jesus.

I was born in a tiny town in north Mississippi – a town so tiny that it did not have a hospital, but a town lucky enough to have one doctor. The Saturday morning of my birth my Daddy fetched Dr. Hill. Romail, our maid, as we called the black woman who worked for my parents, was there with my mother. My older brothers and sister had been sent to Grandmother’s some thirty miles away. In the midst of an August thunderstorm I was born. Dr. Hill cut my umbilical cord and handed me to Romail to be cleaned up. Those strong black arms encircled my tiny body and as I first opened my eyes in this world, I saw through the blur Romail’s excited face. We bonded. Forty-five years later on the day of my mother’s funeral, Romail stopped by our house to express her condolences. When she saw me, she grinned, "There’s my little girl!"

In that little town of 500 persons, the lives of blacks and whites were very intertwined. There was only one place in my pre-school world where I did not see black faces – that was in church. At the movie theater the whites sat on the first floor and the blacks sat in the balcony after entering by a different door. Probably 30 or 40% of the population in Coffeeville was black in those days. So I grew up with a visual sense of lots of black persons in my world. I remember when I first moved to New England in the ‘70’s – after living in Greece for a year – I was driving down the street in Westfield, MA where I worked and I saw a black person crossing the street. I did not know the person but had the strongest urge to stop my car and get out and hug that person. It was not until that moment I realized how much I missed that very present image of blackness in my life.

When I was about four, my father moved his automobile business from that town of 500 to a much larger town of 12,000 some thirty miles away. So I grew up in Grenada attending the segregated schools and church. Mattie was our maid. It was the custom that she would serve our dinner and then she would eat afterward. Often I would insist on waiting to eat with Mattie. I don’t think that was an act of social justice; I just preferred to eat with her. When she was trying to get me to clean up my room, she would often say, "Miss Caroline, your room looks like a tornado struck it!" That is the culture I grew up in – where a white child is called "Miss" by her black nanny and black adults were called by their first names. Black men were called "Boy," a word that became a potent symbol for subjugation.

In the ‘50’s The Methodist church began printing Sunday school materials with pictures of black and white children doing things together. The lay leaders in my church were very disturbed by those pictures and canceled the curriculum. Instead they ordered some conservative stuff with no pictures – I remember it as terribly boring! But I had seen the Methodist curriculum and was curious why there was such an uproar in church over those pictures. That controversy somehow taught me to begin to wonder what the elders were hiding from us children.

My first integrated experience of black and white teenagers together came when I went to Lake Junaluska, NC, to a jurisdictional youth conference when I was in high school. It happened to be the same week as Dr. King’s famous march on Washington. As we sat in small groups of black and white youth, playing the "rock" game together, - passing a rock around the circle, black hands touching white hands and vice versa, the stone was rolled away for me and I realized what I had been missing all those years in segregated schools and church. I learned that day – an epiphany - that God’s realm would be a rainbow coalition where all were equal regardless of the color of their skin.

Another event at that conference graphically taught me a lot about racism. My neighbor in Grenada had made me a little sun dress out of material that had rebel flags printed all over it. To me it was just another dress – I wore it at that conference – that was before teens wore blue jeans all the time. Someone stole my dress out of my suitcase and raised it on the flagpole on the day of the March on Washington. The adult counselors found me and began to rebuke me for this offensive action. I was innocent of the flagpole stunt but not innocent of being unaware of what the rebel flag symbolized to many in the civil rights movement. I learned painfully that day how innate racism was in the fabric of my life.

Not long after that, my MYF group was responsible for a booth at the County fair in Grenada. I had a bunch of Methodist brochures which I donated to the cause, but I wanted them back so I scrawled across the top of each in my big round handwriting of those days, "Caroline Brewer" – my maiden name. Some of those brochures had pictures of blacks and whites doing things together on them. One of our devout church ladies saw them at our booth at the fair and took me aside and chided me for having such "Yankee propaganda." I was quite the student of the bible in those high school days and kept looking for places in the Bible to support this woman’s racial prejudice. All I could find was Jesus’ love command, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Questions about the culture in which I lived and its values vis-à-vis Christianity grew and grew in my rebellious heart. I grew up in such a good family there was nothing to rebel against there. But there was much in my society that was not right.

The ultimate point of that rebellion did not come until years later when I was in seminary in the late’60’s. A laundry mat near the campus in Dallas did not allow black students to wash their clothes there. A few colleagues and I made picket signs and stood outside and held them up to the traffic. That day I was one scared little girl – here I was fresh out of Mississippi where the picket sign was considered an anathema. As I bravely and terrifyingly held up my sing and withstood the taunts and honks of passing motorists, I developed some backbone in fighting for social justice.

In 1968 I did the radical thing – I joined a group of United Methodist students from Mississippi – three of us were black and three of us were white – in working in a black church in the Mississippi delta. We taught Vacation Bible School and told stories to migrant worker’s children. We worshiped in the black church. It was my job as the oldest among the group to make speeches at the white churches’ UMW’s about our work. As I entered these white segregated churches with my story, I discovered that the UMW’s who had faithfully done their mission studies were more ready to hear what I had to say.

When my father heard in the spring before that summer that I was planning to be a part of this group, he was horrified. He just knew his home would be bombed. I was driving a red convertible at the time and he could see us black and white college students driving around together and our getting show. It was the strength of God that Isaiah talks about in today’s text and the support of seminary classmates that enabled me to go through with this project against my father’s wishes. I kept communication open with him and within six months we were reconciled. After all it was he who when I was a child and our town was arguing about integrating the swimming pools, had said to me, "Black children need a place to swim too."

I thought in those days that reconciling black and white would be the major issue in my life and ministry. I chose my first church job after seminary because that congregation in Denver was successfully integrating some 200 black members into a 3000 member white church. One of my assignments on the staff was to represent the church at the integrated neighborhood group. But because of my marriage and ending up in New England other causes have been more my focus – women’s rights in the ‘80’s, gay and lesbian rights in the ‘90’s, affordable housing this decade. But I have tried, especially when I served on one of the General Boards of our church to be sure that ethnic persons were fairly represented and had extraordinary opportunities.

When I became the pastor at Christ United Methodist Church in Groton, Ct in 1990, I visited every household in that congregation. Because of the navy base there, we had a number of African-American families. As I was visiting in the home of Annette Belton and her mother Cora McBride, I asked them as I asked each family to tell me where they had been born and raised. Cora told me she had been born in Grenada, MS! I was so surprised. We compared notes and discovered that she had left with her husband during World War II just before I was born. She still had family there as I do and went back every summer. As we got more acquainted, we discovered our parents had raised us with the same values and even the same cultural foods. At that point in our visit, Cora offered me something to eat. She said "You can have ice cream or I just happened to be cooking some turnip greens!" I jumped for the turnip greens – one of my favorite Southern vegetables. As she sat my plate before me and asked me to "Return Thanks" , I bowed my head smelling the pungent aroma of the turnip greens and burst into tears. You see, my mother had died earlier that year, and Cora’s turnip greens smelled exactly like the ones my mother used to cook. In the ten years I was their pastor, I had the difficult task of journeying with Annette as she died of cancer – telling the family she was nearing the end as Annette’s daughter was preparing to deliver Annette’s first grandchild. Annette held on as people are able to do until that child was born safely, then she died. I did her funeral and got to meet some of her Grenada relatives. Later, I baptized her grandchild and received her mother – who had not joined the church before – into membership. Even later I did the funeral of Annette’s father – again seeing those Grenada relatives. What segregation had prevented when I grew up in Grenada– the friendship of the McBride family and me – was enabled in the ‘90’s in Groton.

This weekend as we remember Dr. King’s work, I remember him as the one who really built a bridge from a segregated world to an integrated world. We still have many racial problems in this country that are rooted in the fact that our nation once recognized and supported legalized slavery of Africans and their descendants. There is plenty of work still to be done by you young people and by us elders to make this a truly inclusive society. People like Governor Patrick will help us – but we are the soldiers on the front line in this battle – in our daily relationships, thoughts, actions. We must not let go of the dream. Amen.

In the words of James Weldon Johnson, let us pray, "O Lord, we come this morning knee-bowed and body-bent before thy throne of grace. O Lord – this morning – bow our hearts beneath our knees, and our knees in some lonesome valley. We come this morning like empty pitchers to a full fountain, with no merits of our own. O Lord, open up a window of heaven, and lean out far over the battlements of glory, and listen this morning. Amen.