Ordinary 23C (Luke 14:25-33)

For years I have celebrated Toni Morrison’s refusal to predicate her fiction upon the white gaze. She unapologetically places black people at the center, with little regard for the entreaties of the presumed white reader who expects otherwise of a great American author. I have tried my best to emulate Morrison’s defiance in my own work.

Right now, however, I want to talk to you—a Century reader and likely a white person. I want you to know that we live in different worlds. There’s a good chance your church is a white church, driven by the history of white people. And if you’re white, when you leave your church you enter a world made for you—a world that assumes your house is the best on the block and that all sensible people should seek to dwell therein.

During divinity school, I interned at a prosperous suburban church. I grew very close to the pastor, his family, and the congregation. I experienced the utter pain and the true joy that lurks beneath cultural representations of white, upper-middle-class life. I also discovered that my politics and theology were vastly different from theirs. We inhabited different worlds.