Based on the Gospel of Matthew 8.18, 23-27, this 18 minute message, "Asleep No More," explores the call to wake up in the midst of the storm of racial injustice, especially after the killings in Atlanta on Tuesday March 16, 2021 and the rising threats and violence against Asian Americans.

So often those we need to lead us, those who can act to help us, are slow to respond to the pain and suffering of racial injustice. It's time to wake up, do what we can, and leverage the power, privilege, and insights we possess to help heal our land and build a better humanity.

This is the third sermon I’ve prepared this week. I prepared one sermon for yesterday’s memorial service celebrating the life of our beloved Dave Pelz. The second sermon was for today. It was to be part of our Lenten worship series, “Holy Vessels: how we can heal and recover after such a challenging year.” That sermon was about how we can each participate in the healing and recovery of the earth, for, as the eco-theologian, Thomas Berry, says, “The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.” If we want to heal humanity, we can’t neglect the wounds we’ve inflicted on the planet. We are intrinsically and intimately related to every other thing on this blessed blue orb called Earth. It’s a good sermon. Actually I think it’s really good, says things that need to be said, gives an invitation I’ve not ever heard before—one I think could go a long way for each of us to recover a posture toward the planet that could do some real good. But, despite all that, it’s not a good sermon for today.

So I’ve prepared another one. A very personal one. One that says some things that need saying. I hope it’ll do some good.

This week has been another bad week for America. The killings of eight people in the Atlanta area on Tuesday, six of them Asian women, have brought the focus of our attention once again to the issue of race in America. Gun control is wrapped up in this too. So is the reality of what immigrants suffer, what women suffer, and what men do, and particularly what white men do, to inflict and perpetuate suffering.

That last statement’s liable to anger some of you. You might resent the implication that white men have a particular role and responsibility in all this. I am not unaware that the designation, “white men,” fits the profile of the majority of the men watching this sermon, myself included.

But the fact is, the majority of the mass killings in America are perpetrated by white men. You’ve got to wonder why.

And this is personal for me. On Thursday, January 10, 2019, I watched, powerless, as a white man murdered a brown women just ten yards from where I was standing on the corner of D and 5th Streets here in Davis. It was about 6:30 in the evening; I was on my way home from church. I ran, hard, as the man sprayed bullets all over the place; I didn’t know if I’d live or die.

My rather tidy, privileged life here in Davis was interrupted, and frankly, scarred, for life. I’ve worked in my mind and my soul to deal with the trauma of that night. It affected the way I see things, the way I see myself, the way I see the role of my whiteness, my maleness in the current struggle against racism and misogyny in America.

White men, and particularly white, cis-gendered men like me, have privilege in our society. If you’re white and male in America, it doesn’t matter your education or your income or much else—you’ve got privilege if you’re white, and especially if you, like me, identify as or appear to be male.

In 1995, I was a pastor in Sharon, Pennsylvania, an hour and a half northwest of Pittsburgh. Just a mile from my church was the area in Pennsylvania with the highest level of concentrated poverty in the state. Ours was an industrial town, a mill town. In the late 19th century, the mills employed Italian, Czech, Russian, German, and Irish immigrants. Now, what was left of the mills employed mostly African Americans. It was a community with a long history of prejudice, white ethnicity against other white ethnicities, and now white against black. It was here I first began working to help disentangle myself and our humanity from racial prejudice and injustice. It was here that I first encountered the KKK and that wantonly evil side of white supremacy. In that work, I became friends with the Rev. Phil King, pastor of First Baptist Church.

When a teenager in his black congregation was gunned down outside a convenience store in a drug related act of violence not far from his church, Phil called me and asked me to speak at the funeral. I didn’t understand why until just before we entered the sanctuary. Phil and I sat in his office as the service started. I could hear the singing and the clapping, the electric organ pumping up the congregation, stirring their emotions, gathering them together in one vast human organ of grief.

I wondered why we sat there, in his office, waiting. “Because it’s not time for us,” Phil told me. “The congregation is just warming up.” Then Phil went on. “Chris, you have two sons. I have two sons. Our boys are pretty much the same age. We live about a mile from each other, but in this town, it might as well be half way around the world. And you and I both know that in this town, in just about any town in America, your boys will get better jobs than my boys simply because of the color of their skin. The boy we’re burying here today, died at the hands of a gangbanger with a gun. A block from the church. Could have been one of my boys. Bet you don’t have to worry about that do you?”

I felt that. I bet you feel it too, don’t you?

“No, Phil, I don’t have to worry about that. I’m . . . so . . . sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, Chris,” Phil said. “Do something. I brought you here today to get you to do something. My people are under assault in America, Chris. You can’t change the fact that you were born into a white body. But you can do something good with that white body. I wish it weren’t true, but you can open doors I can’t, even with a doctorate. You can do things to change minds in ways I can’t. Leverage what God’s made you to be, Chris, leverage your privilege for God’s sake and ours.”

There was a knock at the door; one of Phil’s deacons entered. Phil looked at me and said, “Pastor, it’s time; follow me.”

Wednesday and Thursday, Pastor Eunbee and I, along with one of our elders, Emily Henderson, starting working on a statement addressing the killings in Atlanta and the threats all Asians face in America today. We felt we needed to speak to this as Christians, give guidance to our congregation, express our solidarity with our Asian sisters and brothers, and challenge us all to work to heal the injustices in our nation.

By Thursday morning, my planned sermon on Earth care was written. I was really happy with it and with the fact that I could move on to other pastoral tasks including all the worship preparation for Holy Week, prepping the memorial service and sermon for Dave Pelz (which happened yesterday), and finishing up the statement condemning the killings on Tuesday and the racist violence in America. There’s a lot going on and I was in my groove, ticking off the to-do items on my long list.

Then I checked in on a friend I’ve known for awhile, someone in the Asian American community I knew would be deeply affected by the killings and would be feeling the threats that Asian people are experiencing right now. She asked me how our church would handle all this come Sunday. I told her we’d written a statement and that I’d address it at the start of worship and we’d have it in a prayer, but that my sermon was done and I didn’t have time to work on a whole new sermon about race in America. “Besides,” I told her, “I’m so rattled by this unending racial violence in America, I don’t really know what to say and I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

There was a long silence on the phone. And I found myself lurching between feeling that I didn’t know what to do, that I wanted to do right whatever I did, and that I didn’t know if I could handle another of these interruptions that feels so devastating. And I also I knew that what I’d just said about not having time didn’t land well with my friend.

“Chris,” she began. “I don’t know how to say this. And I know it feels inappropriate for me to push you to do what you don’t want to do or feel you don’t know how to do. But if you preach about the care of the earth this Sunday but not about the care of people like me, it feels like my life doesn’t really matter. I feel like I’m not worth the inconvenience, the interruption.”

I’m white. The assaults and threats Asian Americans experience are not directly my experience. But my friend’s words began to wake me up to the fact that it’s a privilege for me to be able to choose not to speak about all this. It’s a privilege for me to think I can somehow avoid this, even if I seem to have good reasons to do so.

One day, Jesus, busy with all the demands on his time and energy, got into a boat to cross a lake. He fell asleep on a cushion. Suddenly a storm swept down upon the lake, the wind kicking up big waves, to the point that the disciples thought they would capsize and drown. But Jesus was still asleep, ignoring their peril—until one of them went and woke him up and cried out,“Lord, help us! We are perishing!”

White America, it’s time for us to wake up. We’ve been asleep too long. God’s children, our siblings are perishing. Literally. You and I may not be killing them or harming them directly, but our silence, our lethargy, our sleepiness, is complicity. Silence kills.

My Asian friend interrupted me, asleep in my boat, when she said, “If you don’t speak up and speak out for me, it feels like my life is less important than that sermon you’ve already prepared, less important than your schedule, less important than your energy level. People like me are being spit on and humiliated, my elders are being pushed over and knocked down, my sisters were shot and killed by a white guy while they were trying to earn a meager income. And I’m scared. And you don’t want to be interrupted.”

I wanted to go on dozing in the boat, to sleep through the storm.

That’s privilege.

I can’t change the fact that I’m white. I don’t need to apologize for a mere accident of history and biology. I have a white man’s body by no choice of my own.

Almost thirty years ago, when I told the Rev. Phil King that I was sorry for the injustices he and his people suffered, he said to me, “Don’t be sorry, Chris. Do something. I brought you here today to get you to do something. My people are under assault in America, Chris. You can’t change the fact that you were born into a white body. But you can do something good with that white body. I wish it weren’t true, but you can open doors I can’t, even with a doctorate. You can do things to change minds in ways I can’t. Leverage what God’s made you to be, Chris, leverage your privilege for God’s sake and ours.”

Thirty years later, I can still be caught sleeping in the storm.

Sisters and brothers, no more sleeping while the storm rages on, while people are afraid and perishing. It’s time we woke up.

White people, myself included: we don’t really know what to do, and I know we don’t want to make mistakes based on our ignorance, and sometimes we don’t want to do what we know we must do. But that can’t be an excuse anymore.

No more sleeping while the storm is raging.

Don’t apologize for your privilege, but don’t you deny or minimize it either. Instead, leverage it for the sake of others.

If we, the white majority in America finally woke up for Christ’s sake . . . if we finally will say: “Enough, this must end. We’re not gonna co-sign on the racist lies and slurs and violence anymore. We’re gonna pledge to do what it takes, we’re gonna interrupt our lives, we’re gonna change our lives, we’re gonna transform our lives and heal our land” . . . if we put our white bodies and our white voices and our white money and our white voting on the line for the universal kinship of our collective humanity—every single human being a cherished sister and a brother—then racism will fall and our new humanity will rise and all people will flourish as God intends.