Sermon Archive

Macy’s spectacular fireworks display, for which Margaret and I had what you might call “front row seats,” on Roosevelt Island—well, that’s behind us now. Yet that touch of sunburn from Friday’s sojourn at the beach or in the park—that’s with some of us still. And so, too, those extra pounds we gained at picnics. I know Margaret and I feasted both noon and night!

But does it seem to you, as it seems to me, that our celebration of the Fourth of July has lost a certain seriousness of purpose, that it has become a time primarily for partying and pyrotechnics?

A magnificent example of the kind of seriousness of purpose that I think we need to recapture in our Fourth of July observances is found in a speech delivered a century and a half ago, before the Civil War, on July 4, 1852, by Frederick Douglass.

Douglass was an escaped mulatto slave who had gone on to become a leading northern abolitionist. In 1852, he was living in Rochester, New York, where he was editing the abolitionist journal North Star. And on that July 4th, Douglass addressed the following words to a group of white citizens assembled there in Rochester. He said: “What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer: A day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustices and cruelty to which [the slave] is the constant victim. To [the slave] your celebration is a sham.”

Well, today, 151 years after Douglass’s address, I, too, feel called upon to speak with a seriousness of purpose and to speak on a topic directly descended from his—namely, the topic of the continuing unwillingness of many in our society to pay the price necessary if our nation is ever to remedy the ghastly legacy we have inherited from our history—our history of two and a half centuries of slavery, followed by an additional century of segregation, followed by a plethora of discriminatory practices that continue right up to this very day.

During these past two weeks, our newspapers have been filled with fresh news about the public reaction to our Supreme Court’s unexpected upholding of the kind of university affirmative-action programs that was first endorsed twenty-five years ago by Justice Powell’s opinion in the case that is known as “Bakke.”

Most Americans had expected the present Supreme Court to overturn Powell’s opinion. For seven years ago the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a federal bench just one level below the Supreme Court, had already rejected Powell’s opinion that states have a compelling interest in fostering diversity on university campuses.

In that case, known as “Hopwood,” the Fifth Circuit said that states have no such compelling interest, and it outlawed in the states under its jurisdiction, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi—it outlawed any use of race as a “plus” factor in admissions.

Then, just eight months after that Hopwood decision, voters in the state of California had also, in effect, reversed the outcome of Justice Powell’s opinion by voting in favor of Proposition 209—a proposition forbidding, in California, the consideration of race, gender, or national origin in university admissions procedures and also in hiring practices.

What followed Hopwood and the passage of Proposition 209 was a precipitous decline in African-American and Hispanic-American enrollments at the best public law schools in Texas and California.

Reflecting on the Hopwood decision and its effect on minority-group enrollments, Texas State Senator Rodney Ellis, a prominent African-American graduate of the law school at Austin had this to say: “I clearly got in through an affirmative action program, . . . but [affirmative action] didn’t get me out, [it] didn’t take the bar exam for me, [and it] didn’t pass the 285 or so pieces of legislation I’ve authored.”

Now, the law schools of the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California at Berkeley are ranked among the ten or fifteen best law schools in the whole country.

The law schools at Austin and Berkeley have traditionally provided most of the top lawyers and business and political leaders for their respective states. For better or for worse, it is in schools like these that there are forged the bonds that lead to the states’ top-ranking judgeships, partnerships, and political candidacies.

It may be sad, but it is true that where you go to law school makes a huge difference in the opportunities you’ll have in life, particularly in the opportunities you’ll have to shape the law, like Rodney Ellis, rather than simply to implement it.

Well, in the aftermath of Hopwood and Proposition 209, the stunning declines in African-American and Hispanic-American enrollments at Austin and Berkeley and the poor prospect of developing a number of other legislators like Rodney Ellis—these declines and poor prospects strengthened the resolve of most public and private universities outside of California and the states of the Fifth Circuit to develop affirmative-action admissions procedures that could withstand close scrutiny in accordance with the criteria outlined by Justice Powell in the Bakke decision. Such procedures were developed, for example, in Michigan and Ohio, and at Harvard and Yale.

But a number of citizens groups, emboldened by Hopwood and Proposition 209, saw an opportunity to nullify or even strike down Bakke by appealing to the widespread belief among whites in this country that affirmative action benefiting the descendants of slaves and other victims of discrimination is somehow itself an unjustifiable act of discrimination.

These groups were not at all dismayed that the universities of Texas and California had become telling examples of what an America absent of programs for remedying past injustices would look like—namely, an America of re-segregated education.

Far from being dismayed at such a development, these groups pushed ahead relentlessly, in courts and at the ballot box, to end affirmative action. And they had much success.

At the end of 1998, Washington State voters were persuaded to pass Initiative 200, which, much like California’s proposition, eliminated affirmative action in school admissions and in government hiring.

Then early in the year 2000, the Florida state cabinet enacted Governor Jeb Bush’s so-called “One Florida” program, which ended the consideration of race in admitting students to Florida’s universities and also in granting state contracts.

Next, the special-interest group called The Center for Individual Rights launched a court challenge to the affirmative-action programs in use at the University of Michigan. They did this in the hope and expectation that if the current conservative Supreme Court was given the opportunity to review Bakke it would overturn Powell’s opinion once and for all, thereby ending affirmative-action admissions programs in all fifty states.

Now, the critics of affirmative action have not been arguing that the only valid criterion for admission to the best schools is a student’s academic record, for they have not in any way challenged the assigning of points for being athletically gifted or for having alumni parents or for living in Upper Michigan. No, extra points that can advantage whites are acceptable, but extra points that cannot advantage whites are unacceptable. So these critics have argued that there is no overriding societal interest served by admitting to universities and graduating from universities a student body that is more reflective of our society’s overall diversity.

But a marvelous thing happened as the two cases Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger wound their way up to the Supreme Court. A remarkable set of “friend-of-the-court” briefs was sent to the Supreme Court by corporations and by retired military leaders—briefs that endorsed the result of Bakke-inspired diversity in university student bodies, that is, the result of diversity in the workplace. These briefs called for the Bakke decision to be preserved, not overturned.

And indeed it was the prospect of losing future generations of Rodney Ellises and other first-rate lawyers and politicians representative of minority groups that led Justice O’Connor to write as follows in the court’s opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger (539 U.S. [2003], pp. 19–20): “Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our Nation is essential if the dream of one Nation, indivisible, is to be realized.… In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity. All members of our heterogeneous society must have confidence in the openness and integrity of the educational institutions that provide this training.”

Now, Justice O’Connor expresses what I call an enlightened and an appropriate secular response to the proposed ban on affirmative-action admission procedures in public and private universities.

But this morning I am preaching a sermon, not simply delivering a law lecture. So I go on beyond her secular response to state the case that as Christians we are called to an even higher imperative for remedying injustice than that to which we are called as Americans. For Christians are called to the imperative of Jesus and not just to the imperative of the American Constitution. And a Jesus-inspired response to the injustice of racism will in truth sound much more radical than Justice O'Connor's Bakke-inspired response.

For I believe that a distinctively Christian response will take the stance that Christ is calling upon this current generation of persons whose privilege is based in part on a legacy of inherited injustice—that a distinctively Christian response will take the stance that Christ is calling upon us to sacrifice a measure of our personal well-being so that we may build here on earth the kind of society that offers to all of God’s children a truly even playing field. I believe this because I know that we as Christians are called upon to ask and answer this question: “What would Jesus do in a situation such as ours?”

“Would Jesus be willing to surrender his seat in a top-10 school in order that it may go to the descendant of a slave and thereby help remedy a history of oppression and discrimination? Or would Jesus insist on his own personal right to admission, even to the extent of filing a lawsuit?”

Well, I suggest that to ask that question in this way is tantamount to knowing the answer!

For did not Jesus teach his followers by saying (Mk. 9:35): “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all”?

And did not Jesus teach in this way (Mt. 18:4): “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven”?

And did not Jesus say to all those listening to him (Mk. 10:43–44): “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, . . . for the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve. . . .”?

Yes, when we combine these teachings about humble servanthood with the point that Jesus was making in the gospel lesson used last week by Charles, the lesson about the woman with the hemorrhage of blood, we can see that Jesus’s overall message included this point: those who don’t have power, like that woman, should claim it, and those who do have power, like Jesus and many of us, should yield it.

For as the apostle Paul argues in this morning’s Second Lesson: “Power is perfected in weakness.” That is, power is perfected when it is used in humility, when it is used to establish the well-being of others and the justice of God rather than our own advantage.

I believe with all of my heart that Jesus is urging those of us who are privileged white Americans to hold steady on the course of affirmative-action programs, to hold steady on our all-too-brief 25-year course of surrendering the ill-gotten privileges of power that our race has gained and preserved through three and a half centuries of injustice toward African Americans and Native Americans and Hispanic Americans.

This is the July 4th Weekend, and lest our celebration of it be a sham, these are days for our nation to reflect soberly on the fragility of democracy and on what it is about ourselves that we must change if democracy is to be preserved and purified through deeds of reparative justice.

This is the July 4th Weekend, and lest our celebration of it be a sham, these are days for our nation to repent of our sin of racism, the sin that has given rise to centuries of slavery and exploitation, of segregation and oppression, of enduring injustice. Yes, these are days for our national, state, and local governments, with their white majorities, to call to mind those great words in our American tradition about “liberty and justice for all,” and to offer apologies to all of those who have been denied liberty and justice, to offer apologies in ways that go far beyond correct speeches to the implementation of effective remedies.

This is the July 4th Weekend, and lest our celebration of it be a sham, these are days for American Christians to contemplate and to put into practice the teachings of Jesus and of Paul—the teachings that power is perfected only when, in humility, we act in ways that value the well-being of others above the well-being of ourselves, in ways that value the justice of God above our own privilege.

For as Paul teaches, power is truly perfected in weakness.

Let us pray: