Down a Different Road, Part I

Autumn Path, a photo by paynehollow on Flickr.

A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled,
because they are no more.

It wasn’t their fault, exactly. They wouldn’t have known that Herod was insanely jealous, ‘a murderous old man’ who promptly eliminated anyone he saw as a rival to his power, including his wife, her mother, and three of his sons. They couldn’t have known that it was said of him that it was safer to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son. They had no way of knowing any of that, no way of knowing what would be unleashed by their innocent queries regarding “the child who has been born king of the Jews.” It wasn’t their fault. But I’ve wondered if they ever did know what horrible brutality their blundering visit set loose, and if they did, how they lived with it afterwards. Did they feel culpable?

A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled,
because they are no more.

If you spend much time reading the Bible, you know that there are stories that you can barely stand for how horrible they are. This is one of those stories. Yet for all its horror, it is not unlike stories that are taking place all over our world today.
A voice was heard in Ramah, in Damascus,
in Connecticut,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel,
Sabeen,
Sally
weeping for their children;
they refused to be consoled,
because they are no more.

And as I look at this story, I can’t help but compare myself to the magi. It wasn’t their fault, and it’s not mine, either, of course, but I do wonder about my role, my responsibility, my level of complicity and culpability as a citizen of this country.

One day I was eating lunch in a nice little cafe with Robert and his parents, little pimento cheese sandwiches and tomato dill soup, and his Dad pulled out these documents, these actual bills of sale for slaves that his family had owned. He had inherited the documents, and was taking them to several places that week, the Filson Club, the Kentucky Historical Society, etc. so that he could figure out the best thing to do with them. He wanted to give them to an institution that would make them accessible for people who were doing genealogical research, to descendants of slaves.

And as he was explaining all that, I was sitting there, just blown away, thinking, O my God, O my God, these are people’s lives on this paper, people who were bought and sold by this family, which is now my family.

It stunned me, the sense of privilege, and I don’t mean privilege, like, wow, aren’t I lucky, I mean privilege, responsibility, like how can it be that I am on the side of life where my people owned other people?

That doesn’t make me responsible for slavery, of course. And I’m not responsible for the children who are laboring in other countries to make shoes, even if I wear them, or to put together computers with their tiny little fingers, even if I use them. I’m not responsible, but I am a benefactor of their oppression. And so, of course, are you...

The first part of Pastor Cindy's first sermon of the year<.I>