Category: Colonialism

Sermon Manuscript 17 October 2021

Pupils at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School ca. 1900

(Note: Normally my sermon manuscripts are a jumping off point for the sermon itself. The words spoken don’t always match the words on the page. Last Sunday, however, the following is more or less what I said.)

Rev. Dr. Todd Grant Yonkman, Transitional Senior Minister

First Congregational Church of Granby

Sermon Series: Dreaming Together (in the Circle of Blessing)

17 October 2021

Text: 1 Kings 3:1-15

Solomon’s Dream

My wife, Nicole, and I signed the mortgage on our first house while she was in labor with our first child, Fiona. Looking back, it’s tough to recall the mix of excitement, stress, and exhaustion that I know we felt when we brought our newborn home. I will never forget the gut-wrenching fear and shame I felt when after a routine infant wellness check we found out that our perfect daughter had tested positive for lead poisoning. After the initial shock, we immediately mobilized all of our resources to locate the source of the lead in our house and remove it. We figured out that the old woodframe windows, which had been painted with lead paint, were the culprit. We did not have the money to replace all of the windows in our house, so my mom–who worked as a hospice chaplain–somehow found the space in her budget to loan us the cash. Within a month or so of our remediation efforts Fiona’s lead levels began slowly to go down. The doctor was hopeful that we had caught it in time to avoid any lasting effects. 

I’m happy to say that today Fiona is a successful software engineer living in California. She’s healthy, happy, and strong. Thank goodness that the State of Illinois had mandatory lead testing for infants. Thank goodness we had access to resources to protect our child. Because when your house is poisoning your child, you don’t say, “Someone else put lead paint on those windows. It’s not my responsibility.” When the cost for protecting your child seems beyond your reach, you don’t say, “It’s too expensive. I’m not going to fix it.” No. When there’s poison in your house you move heaven and earth to protect your child. Period. Our churches are like a house with lead paint in them. That lead paint is systemic racism. We didn’t put it there, but it’s our house now and it’s our responsibility to fix it.

The First Church South Church collaborative theme for this fall is Dreaming Together in the Circle of Blessing. Dreaming together has to do with our work to bring our two churches together to create a new UCC presence in Granby–one that is vital and healthy and strong. The Circle of Blessing is taken from South Church’s stewardship theme for the fall which draws on Native American cultures to teach about generosity. Whatever we imagine the circle of blessing to be, my guess is that deep down all of us long to stand in it; however, the Bible teaches us that before we can stand in a circle of blessing we need to reconcile with our neighbor. Unacknowledged, unresolved harm poisons our relationships; therefore, before we can reconcile with others we need to acknowledge harm, repent, and repair. All of this requires a “listening heart.” Our Scripture this morning tells us that God came to King Solomon in a dream. God said God would give Solomon whatever he wanted. Solomon wisely prayed for a “listening heart.” I’m going to invite us to listen with our hearts this morning to the story of Native American Boarding Schools in the U.S. 

The past weeks have offered us as Christians several opportunities to uncover our history of racial harm here in the U.S. September 30 was the National Day of Remembrance for U.S. Indian Boarding Schools. Perhaps some of you heard in the news recently about the hundreds of Native American children buried in mass graves on the property of boarding schools operated by Christain churches in Canada. You may or may not be surprised to learn that churches operated Native American boarding schools in the U.S. as well. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Center has a Website that documents the traumatic legacy of Native American Boarding Schools including a list of those Christian denominations that operated them. The Congregational Church operated three boarding schools with a total of 14,476 students. What were Indian Boarding Schools like? 

“Kill the Indian, save the man”: This was the policy of Native American boarding schools, articulated memorably by Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the first school known as the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. From 1879 to the 1970s 376 schools in locations around the U.S. took Native children as young as 4 or 5 years old from their homes. Once at the school, their hair was cut, they were made to wear European style clothing, and they were prohibited from speaking their native language. At first the schools were located on reservations. When native children started fleeing the schools en masse, the schools were relocated far away from reservation land. Because of the cost of travel and the poverty of indigenous families, most children rarely, if ever, saw their families again. When the children did return they could no longer speak with or relate to their families. 

At the schools native children experienced malnourishment and abuse. Many died. They operated like labor camps. Native families resisted the taking of their children. They taught their kids to play “the hiding game” whenever the people from the boarding schools came around. In one particularly haunting story, a group of Hopi men in Arizona surrendered themselves to be imprisoned in Alcatraz in exchange for saving their children from boarding school.  The native families had little choice but to send their kids, but many still found ways to resist. This is just one example of the Congregational church’s problematic history with race in this country. It might feel better for us to ignore these and other difficult pieces of our history, but until we do, we will never be able to take our place in the circle of blessing. 

Indian boarding schools were the result of the systemic racism that is built into the very foundations of this country. It’s my understanding that First Church and South Church are considering coming together to create something new. Both churches are going through a process of looking at what is and what was in order to imagine what might yet be. We are taking down the drywall, looking at the studs, scraping back layers of attitudes, assumptions, and traditions to get to essence, the firm foundation of what it means to be a church so that the new thing can be a safe, life-giving space where all can thrive. 

Now is a great opportunity to lay a new anti-racist foundation for our congregations’ future. When there’s poison in your house, you do whatever you can to fix it. Racism is a poison in America. Our congregations are not immune from its effects. Now is the time to acknowledge the harm, repent, and begin the work of repair. It will cost us our comfort. It will cost us time and effort and resources. With God’s help we can do this. Like Solomon of old with a listening heart and hands willing to do the difficult work of healing we will one day find our place in the circle of blessing.

What’s Up with Pastor Todd 7-3-20

What’s Up with Pastor Todd 7-3-20

Monday I participated in two really wonderful Zoom conversations. The first was our joint First Church South Church Bible Study. The second was a New York Times Wellness conversation with Rev. angel Kyodo williams. Both conversations were wide ranging. In both conversations the theme of freedom arose repeatedly.

This is not surprising. Saturday, July 4, Americans celebrate Independence Day, a day commemorating one of our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, signed July 4, 1776. 

The Declaration of Independence formalized a process of political separation between the English colonies of North America and the British Empire. The process was long and bloody. American colonists fought a War of Independence from 1775-1783 and then a “second war of independence” known as the War of 1812 (1812-1815). In between the colonists wrote a Constitution (1789) formalizing a new political entity they called “The United States of America.” The preamble of the Constitution begins with the famous words, “We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union . . .” From the beginning our experiment in freedom on this continent has attempted to hold unity and separation in tension.

But “we, the people” did not mean “all the people.” In 1789, “we, the people” meant white, land-owning men, who were the only people allowed to vote at that time. What on the surface seems like a statement of unity in fact covered over the deep severing from our own humanity that was required to make the genocide of indigenous people, the enslavement of African people, and the second class status of women and impoverished people on this continent possible. This collective wound has been 400 years in the making. It will take some time to heal. 

Given this history it’s not surprising that COVID-19 has brought the tension between separation and unity, independence and freedom to the fore. Stories of people refusing to wear masks, for example, because it infringes on their “freedom” though disheartening are based on an idea that freedom is fundamentally about “separation.” This is the freedom of “no one can tell me what to do.” I find this understanding of freedom incredibly narrow–childish, even. It makes me sad that freedom as separation and division has reached such a level in America that behaviors to protect each other from a deadly virus are framed as a partisan “culture war.” What have we become?

But freedom as separation or “independence” is not the only way to understand freedom. Christian freedom, as defined by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Galatians, is freedom from the “flesh.” The “flesh” is Paul’s word for the human ego, selfish desires, human sinfulness, willful ignorance, and negative emotions such as fear, greed, anger, and hatred. Christian freedom means our lives no longer need be controlled by these powerful internal forces and we can instead freely give, freely receive, freely act out of our moral commitments all because of our relationship with Christ.

COVID has revealed that the fundamental nature of the universe is connection. COVID does distinguish Democrat and Republican, American and British, rich and poor, Black, white, or Indigenous. As long as we in America continue to demand our “personal freedom” regardless of the cost to our neighbors, our health as a nation will continue to deteriorate. Recognizing our interconnection, Rev. angel Kyodo williams suggested that this July 4 we celebrate “Interdependence Day.” I invite you to pray that we as a nation wake up to the reality that all are connected. I invite you to pray for the true freedom that is found in an open and loving heart that honors the inherent dignity of each and every one.

What’s Up with Pastor Todd 7-1-19

What’s Up with Pastor Todd 7-1-19

Growing up I attended Christian schools. Every morning we would stand by our desks, face the American flag hanging from a bracket on the wall, put our hands over our hearts, and recite the pledge of allegiance. I’m sure there were other morning rituals–taking of attendance, prayer, announcements over the intercom–but I remember most clearly reciting the pledge while facing the flag.

My education was intended to reflect a Christian worldview. English, math, social studies, science, phys ed–none of these subjects were beyond the purview of God, and, therefore, of the Christian faith. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like we looked for hidden spiritual meanings in times tables or the condensation cycle. At times there were explicit Christian connections, for example, in learning about evolution as a “theory” incompatible with the Biblical teaching of creation, but most of the time the teaching was implicit: the logical beauty of math reflects the order of God’s good creation, the creation of art is humanity’s appropriate response to our Creator, history is the story of God’s hidden plan of redemption. What was the implicit Christian teaching behind our unquestioned ritual of honoring the American flag every morning?

Looking back as an adult, I would say the teaching around the flag was twofold: 1) that one can be both a patriotic citizen and a faithful Christian; and 2) a Christian’s highest loyalty is to Jesus and his teachings. Full stop. The practical result is an approach that honors every single one of my fellow American citizens as a child of God no matter our disgreements while at the same time critically assessing our nation’s history and current policies in the light of Jesus’ one commandment: love.

Many years of theological education at some of the finest learning institutions in the world have taught me to call this stance critical or “prophetic” engagement in public life. While I have left behind many of the beliefs of my childhood–denial of evolution, uncritical acceptance of whitewashed U.S. history, nearly complete obliviousness to subversive themes in art and literature–I carry with me the prophetic engagement that I was (perhaps accidentally) taught in my Christian upbrining.

Which brings me to the issue of the American flag and it’s place in church. Personally, I don’t need to have the American flag in church. It’s my view that we Christians show our faithfulness to our fellow Americans by being the kindest, most loving people we can be. No other expressions of patriotism are needed. Nevertheless, I take seriously the feelings some of my fellow Christians and fellow citizens have about the flag as a symbol of the sacrifice they and others have made in military service to our country. I also take seriously the feelings of those for whom the America flag is an irredeemable of symbol of colonialism and oppression. This seems to be how symbols in general function: they have the potential both to draw us together and tear us apart.

So at FCC Granby we have done a very church-like thing: strike a compromise. On Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veterans Day we will display the flag in the meetinghouse. The rest of the year it will be displayed in the narthex along with the Christian flag (which is another article for another time.)

Despite the attempts of some to weaponize the flag for culture wars, I continue to humbly respect the sacred sacrifce of those who have served while unflinchingly examining with clear eyes the full range of our past and present as a nation–from racism, slavery, and genocide to dignity, equality, and human rights. My faith tells me three things about America: 1) We are a a human creation and therefore temporary. We had a beginning in 1776, and we will have an end; 2) Like most human creations we are a mix of good and bad; 3) Like all things on this earth we are not beyond the healing power of God’s love.