Crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge

Sermon Text:  Ephesians 2:14-22

Friday before last, George and I crossed the Alabama River into the city of Selma by way of the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge.  Suspended beneath the steel archway glinting above us and the water flowing darkly below, we were crossing into another place and time to do some bridge building of our own.

Named for a Confederate officer, the Edmund Pettus Bridge was constructed to connect people on opposite banks of the Alabama River. But on a day in 1965, a day that would become known as Bloody Sunday, that bridge morphed into a wall.  On one side of the wall were peaceful citizens marching for the right to vote.  On the other side of the wall was the highway to the state capital and the powerful ones who could grant them this right.  In the middle, armed law enforcement officers blocked the civil rights marchers on the river’s east side, closing off access to the Montgomery highway and beating women and men trying to cross that bridge--trying to BE that bridge--to a united Alabama.  It would take two more attempts later that month and even more bloodshed before the Edmund Pettus Wall was “broken down.” Only then could the Edmund Pettus Bridge be a genuine sign of God’s eternal enterprise that is making us into--using words from Ephesians--“one new humanity in the place of two.”

One does not easily cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Even 47 years later. Especially if you grew up in Alabama.  Especially if you grew up in Selma. 

So there we were, 47 years after Bloody Sunday, 40 years after George graduated from Selma High School. We had traveled to Selma to attend the first real high school reunion the class of 1972 had ever held.  We came mainly because we learned the class reunion organizers were aiming to bridge some lingering divides.

  

Apparently a few partial reunions had been held over the years, but they’d been small and (intentionally or not) racially segregated affairs.  Maybe this was because in pre-Facebook times there was no easy way to contact alumni, many of whom had moved away, and because the alumni had thought of themselves as a “class” only briefly.  The white and black students who graduated together in 1972 had attended racially segregated schools until 1970, so the Selma Saints of ’72, 60 percent black and 40 percent white, had planned their senior prom together and played on the football team together and served on the student council together, but their togetherness looked at times like a carefully negotiated treaty or an awkward if mostly polite social experiment.

We know that Selma, Alabama, did not invent racism; that prejudice is found in all regions of our country; that hatred hides in every human heart.  But in 1965, Selma became the poster city for racism.  George and his classmates have carried the legacy of their hometown history with them—on their professional resumes, into casual conversations with strangers on planes —and have borne the judgment that sometimes follows.  You experience it, too, don’t you--when you travel to Boston or San Francisco and your accent betrays you and you finally disclose you’re from Alabama?  But just try naming Selma as your hometown. Selma happens to be both an ignominious symbol and a very real place inhabited by all kinds of people, good and bad and in between.

George learned this reunion was being planned mainly by African American classmates.  He also heard that few white classmates were planning to attend.  To be more accurate, he heard that most of the white classmates who still lived in Selma were opting out. Now there are lots of good reasons not to attend a high school reunion.  And it's impossible to know another's motives.  But some white classmates who’d moved away—who’d permanently crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge themselves—began making plans to attend the reunion.

It became important for George to be a part of that kind of reunion.

But to be honest and to get straight to my point—breaking down those dividing walls is hard and unending work.  Despite our best intentions, we who attended the festivities did not always engage in that work successfully.

Unfortunately, George and I may have accidentally triggered plans for what became an all-white pre-reunion dinner on Friday night.  The reunion itself was to kick off with light refreshments and drinks at a reception at the historic St. James Hotel at 7:00.  We wanted to have dinner first, so George invited a former classmate to meet us at a restaurant before the reception.  Soon that person invited others and eventually someone reserved a private room for twenty former classmates. All white. We hadn’t intended to be a “whites only” group.  But forty years ago the white kids had been friends with white kids.  Ironically, the only place in Selma for such a group to dine was a private dinner club, the tired but pretentiously named “The Tallyho,” whose purpose forty years earlier was to provide Selma’s white citizens with a legal way to maintain a segregated restaurant. 

  

We gazed around the table that evening to find only white faces in an establishment historically associated with segregation.  As that irony was dawning on some of us, we wondered aloud why the white classmates who still live in Selma weren’t planning to attend the reunion.  Our tacit assumption as the white out-of-towners—maybe not a fair one—was that some of the people who had stayed in Selma had retained old prejudices. One woman at dinner theorized that only those who’d moved away from Selma were able to get enough distance on the culture to reject racism and return in a spirit of reconciliation.  Another countered it had been their racial integration experience in high school that had itself caused a major shift in their worldview, which in turn caused them to leave Selma all those years ago. Which might have been a cause and which an effect?  Recognizing racism or leaving Selma?  Our analysis came to a pause as an African American waiter refilled our glasses.  We drank in the realization that, however inadvertently, we had begun the reunion by re-constructing a wall.

Upon arriving at the St. James, we consciously sought out African American peers.  George and I listened to stories of personal successes and well-lived lives and felt happy for folks who had risen above the expectations of those times. As we gathered on a balcony and looked down on the Alabama River below, words and feelings flowed easily, genially.

In some conversations among the former Selma High Saints, we lamented that only about thirty white classmates had decided to come. But as we did so, we’d looked up from a freshly formed conversation group to realize we had moved back into the old race-based groupings, as if the black and white classmates were the proverbial oil and water.  We would create that night a mixed-race conversation group for a while, but soon a new person would enter our group and another person would leave it and before we knew it, we had separated again into all black or all white groupings.  Over and over we saw before us the evidence that it is a harder engineering feat to build a bridge than a wall.  

Some segregation, based on fear and prejudice, is methodically deliberate and hurtful. Some segregation-- born of habit, convenience, legitimate need, or chance--is unintended, even inevitable and morally neutral.  I’m not saying we should have engineered a social event into a human resource workshop.  High school reunions are not the way to right personal or societal wrongs. And I admit that, as a spouse to a Selma Saint, I was an outsider to an event I'm oversimplifying now to express what I personally needed to understand more deeply: a not-so-new realization about the intransigence of racism..  

We at Open Table aspire to be a multiracial church where all feel welcome. There IS great diversity among us.  But wouldn’t we all want to see even greater racial and ethnic diversity here?

The writer to the church at Ephesus urged those Jesus followers to bring together Jews and Gentiles as one humanity.  Glance back at today’s focal scripture. I’m going to gloss it as if it were written, not to Christians in Ephesus in the first century, but to Christians in Selma in 1965 or 1972—or to Mobilians in 2012:

¹⁴Jesus Christ is the embodiment of peace; in his flesh—that is, in his body, in the disparate parts of the body of Christ, which is the church--he has made both groups (black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, citizens and undocumented immigrants) into one. The Jesus way of peace has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between you.  ¹⁵The Spirit of Peace took away the old hostilities supported, for instance, by Jim Crow laws that kept you segregated. God made you into one humanity, and the ongoing experience of the living Christ continues to teach you that you can experience the peace of God within and without because you have access to one and the same Spirit.  Begin by knowing God's peace within. Only then can you live in peace with others. ¹⁶And Christ reconciled both groups in one body within God's love through the cross—the cross being one of those places where God-directed ones side with the marginalized and refuse to return violence with violence. Jesus' cross was nonviolent protest on a cosmic level. Thus Divine Love put to death that hostility through a radical symbol of love—which, unfortunately, the KKK later set afire to create their symbol of hate. ¹⁷But Jesus proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to you who were near; ¹⁸for through him both groups have equal access in one Spirit to the Source of Love. ¹⁹So you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are all equal in God’s eyes. You are equally Selma High Saints and, more importantly, you are all also equal members of God's family, living in a house ²⁰ whose foundation was built by God lovers who’ve gone before you and with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. The cornerstone does not create barriers; instead, it brings people together. It joins a structure²¹ which then grows into a sacred site ²² where we are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. When we can come together, and put aside hostilities, and give up the categories of black and white, us versus them, gay or straight . . .  we become that place where God takes up residence!

It’s not easy.  Even when we stop overt hostilities, we must, by God's grace, give up the cruelty of indifference, the selfishness of inertia, the assumption that someone else will build the bridge, the delusion that racism or the other evil isms and phobias are gone. Building bridges takes intentionality, responsibility, courage, vigilance.  

And it takes time.

Contrast, if you will, the Edmund Pettus Bridge with the Living Bridges of Meghalaya, India.  

As this video will explain, for hundreds of years the inhabitants of this remote region have trained trees to grow into bridges that cross raging rivers otherwise unbridgeable during the monsoon season. 

http://www.wimp.com/livingbridge

With constant cultivation, the trees’ tangled root systems keep the banks of the rivers from washing out.  Villagers bend and intertwine roots that sprout above ground level so they eventually connect to trees on the opposite bank and so form bridges that can hold the weight of 50 adults.  This network of dozens of living bridges connects the valleys of Meghalaya. The bridges can last up to 500 years if maintained.  But maintaining the bridges is never-ending work.  The video shows a man teaching his young niece the art of tending and guiding the roots. He tells her, “Your children will use it and your children’s children.  It will grow for generations.”  He explains that it is she who must continue building this particular bridge after he is gone because no person can complete the task in one life time. 

 

No one person and no one generation will ever complete the bridges our culture needs.  We must show our children how to be bridge builders.  We must be spiritual engineers and architects throughout our lives:  breaking down the walls, creating living bridges, making of our collective lives a temple where Christ is the joining cornerstone and where the Spirit of Love dwells.

PRAYER

God, let us be a bridge of care connecting people everywhere.

Help us confront all fear and hate and lust for power that separate.*

*from Ruth Duck's hymn "Diverse in Culture, Nation, Race"