Racism: a wound in the body of Christ

Dean Anthony | Third Sunday before Lent (Racial Justice Sunday) | 11.00am Eucharist, 13 February 2022

Twenty-seven years ago, in 1995, Racial Justice Sunday was observed for the first time: an ecumenical initiative supported by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. The catalyst was the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a Black teenager in South London, two years earlier in 1993. It is sobering that we human beings all too often seem to need a terrible loss of life before issues of social justice, whether racism, sexism or homophopia, are taken seriously enough: more recent examples are the deaths of George Floyd and Sarah Everard. Way back in 1977, I was a teenager living in Cape Town when the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko died in police custody after a series of horrific beatings. It was a life-changing moment for me, but to this day I am ashamed it took a death to make me properly understand the appalling nature of the apartheid system, and the state-sponsored violence that kept it in place.

In our readings today the prophet Jeremiah speaks of the perversity of the human heart, and Luke’s Gospel of God’s blessing on those who are excluded, reviled, hated and defamed. And from Paul we also heard of the transforming, catalysing power of another death, that of Christ himself; or rather of resurrection from the dead, without which our faith is in vain, and we are of all people most to be pitied. For Christians, our primary identity is found in this same Jesus Christ. In his life, ministry, death and resurrection, we find that our differences are secondary to the unity we find in him, and the diverse ways we each reflect the image of God. This is a positive and celebratory vision of what it means to be human, built upon what we learn in the very first chapter of the first book in the Bible: that we all created equal, and we all bear the imprint of the divine.

It is because we are all made in God’s image that the extraordinary Archbishop Desmond Tutu was able to say that, ‘As much as the world has an instinct for evil and is a breeding ground for genocide, holocaust, slavery, racism, war, oppression, and injustice, the world has an even greater instinct for goodness, rebirth, mercy, beauty, truth, freedom and love.’ And it is because we are all made in God’s image that Nelson Mandela could write in his autobiography, despite an awful lot of evidence to the contrary, that ‘[human] goodness is a flame that can never be extinguished.’

When I left South Africa more than forty years ago, swapping Cape Town for my parent’s home town of Tunbridge Wells, I was an atheist and did not share this positive vision, a vision all the more compelling because it emerged out of experiences of suffering. And it didn’t take me long to learn that England was not a social paradise, and that I hadn’t left issues of racism behind. Many of you will remember the Faith in the City report of 1985, subtitled ‘A Call to Action by Church and Nation.’ One of its conclusions was that ‘…there is a great deal of evidence

that black people felt themselves unwelcome in British churches just as in many other parts of English society.’ And yet the only one of the report’s sixty three recommendations not to be adopted was the proposal to set up a Standing Commission on Black Anglican concerns.

By the time Faith in the City came out I was a recent convert to Christianity, and in the decades since then the Church of England has produced many more reports on racism and other social issues. Last year saw yet another one, called From Lament to Action, and it was published on the 22nd of April, Stephen Lawrence Day. It includes possibly the most telling appendix of any report I’ve seen, with a lengthy litany of recommendations and promises from previous documents, all ignored or forgotten.

This report tries to do something different from its predecessors, and emphasizes the need for concrete, strategic action. It considers why it is that so little progress has been made after more than forty years of reports, debates, discussions, motions and resolutions. For example around 15% of those who worship in the Church of England are people of colour, and yet out of one hundred and eleven bishops, just five are from minority ethnic backgrounds. It is a similar story or even worse at every level of the Churches governance.

Most Anglicans, I think, recognize there is an issue here, even if the conclusion that we are, as our current Archbishop says, ‘institutionally racist’, is a controversial one. A similar charge has been levelled at the Metropolitan Police over many years, and just this week its commissioner has resigned over failures to address deep rooted problems. To her critics, the outgoing commissioner has been too defensive, too committed to the status quo, which has made her popular with colleagues but perhaps not the best person to achieve the necessary change of culture.

Also this past week, Lord Boateng spoke to the Church of England’s General Synod about the Lament to Action report, in his role as chair of the Archbishop’s Racial Justice Commission. I remember him from the 1980s, when he was plain Paul Boateng, a committed Methodist Lay Preacher, yet to be elected to Parliament. And so I was not surprised when he explained the work of the Commission he chairs in primarily theological terms: ‘We are here as followers of Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘We are here to go on a journey with you; to be with you on the journey as we seek justice – in this case racial justice… Racism is gaping wound in the body of Christ. Every time we succumb to it, we hurt him.’

Lord Boateng went on: ‘[this] is not easy; it is not comfortable. I don’t find it easy. No black person, no person of colour, finds it easy to talk about racism, believe it or not. But we have to do it, because it is part and parcel of our reality that never goes away.’

And for all Christians, issues of racism – as well as issues of sexism and homophobia – have to be faced and combatted (not least us here at the Cathedral, who claim to be an ‘inclusive’ church) for this is what God requires, and otherwise we will never fully know what it means to be made in the image of God. Desmond Tutu makes that remarkable claim that for all the terrible things we human beings do to one another, ‘our greater instinct [is] for goodness… beauty…freedom and love.’ This is often not what we see around us. But in our Gospel reading today, we discover that things are not always what they seem. Those who seem to be prospering may not be, in God’s sight. Those who are suffering may be blessed, in God’s sight.

The death of Steve Biko stays with me, all these years later. And I feel grateful that eight years after I left South Africa for good, as part of my ministerial training I had the chance to go and spend six weeks in the Federal Seminary of South Africa in Imbali township. Never have I know such hospitality as in that time, and it was then that I had the chance for a proper experience of Africa, not living in a white suburb, but rather as part of a diverse community of Christians, and even had the chance to meet Archbishop Tutu.

In people like him, and my fellow ordinands in Imbali township, I learnt that by God’s grace we can move from lament to action, and from repentance to healing, and that in the transforming power of Christ, raised from the dead, we may be agents of God’s goodness, rebirth, mercy, beauty, truth, freedom and love in our broken and hurting world. This is a challenge we cannot afford to shirk or postpone, if the From Lament to Action report is to avoid the fate of its predecessors. And as the prophet Jeremiah expresses it, we will be judged by the ‘fruit of [our] doings.’ AMEN