Crossing Racial Lines

Free Congregation of Sauk City, July 19, 2026

Today, I want to reflect with you a bit on how we who are white find ways to cross the divide from people of different races and ethnic groups and perhaps in that process, help create a more just society for all. 

I will weave bits of my own story in this, not because I have always done it right or always had it figured out, but because I have learned a few lessons along the way. Each of our stories are unique, so you may find something useful in what I say or you may want to try and adopt some of the principles I talk about to your own story.

Let me start with some of the words that will shape my reflections.

Proximity
Exploration
Vulnerability
Curiosity 
Relationships
Lamenting
Humility
Mending
Actions
Joy

Proximity

Bryan Stevenson, the author of Just Mercy is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative that has created powerful places in Montgomery, Alabama that bring visitors up close to the power and the terror of racism.

He says: “To change the world, we are each going to have to find ways to get closer to people who … are living on the margins of society.”

He talks a lot about proximity. He gave a speech a few years ago when he described working with a man on Death Row getting “close enough to a condemned man to hear his song.”

Stevenson widened that image this way: “When you get proximate, you hear the songs. And those melodies in those songs will empower you, they will inspire you, and they will teach you what doing justice and loving mercy is all about,” he said. 

“That is why I’m urging you — all of you — to find ways to get closer to the poor and the excluded, the marginalized and the neglected, and to go with an open heart and listen for the songs that will teach you the things we need to understand.”

When I was growing up, I did not have any of that proximity. Now I know there are people here who probably had much more proximity than I did to others from varied backgrounds. I hope that when we get to the discussion, you can help widen the conversation.

I came from Marinette - a small, very white city in northeastern Wisconsin - to Madison, a much larger, majority-white city but increasingly diverse city. 

When I was growing up, Marinette was a city of about 14,000 nestled on the shore of the Menominee River that formed the border with Michigan. The diversity there at the time involved religion – Catholic and Protestant with a smattering of Jews – and ethnic heritage – German, French, Irish and Polish were the identifiers for the four Catholic churches in town.  If there was anyone in either Marinette or its sister city across the river – Menominee, Michigan – who was not white, I never saw them.

Let’s detour for a moment to some statistics that might provide context where we are now.

Whiteness Marinette – 93% white Sauk County – 88% white Madison – 72% white Fitchburg – 63% white

Racial and ethnic diversity Sauk County –         8% Hispanic        1% Black        1% Native American        2% - Other

Dane County –         8% Hispanic      6% Asian      5% Black      7% Multiracial

 

In Fitchburg, where I live, there is a bit more diversity. It is 16% Hispanic, 11% Black, 5% Asian.

One common thread you might have noticed. The largest non-white population is our area is Hispanic, not Black. And that presents some interesting challenges for us because of language and immigration status. 

You can see in those numbers the difficulty in finding proximity. It is often not right around the corner. So we have to work at it.

For me, the work began when I was in high school. For my sophomore, junior and senior years, I attended Sacred Heart Seminary in Oneida, Wisconsin – a Catholic school for young people like me thinking about becoming a priest.

The seminary was located on the land of the Oneida tribe (the building is now the Oneida Nation High School) and when we ventured off campus, we would encounter tribal members at the convenience store they ran. But the students and faculty at the seminary were all white. 

 During the summer of 1966 – between my junior and senior high school years – I volunteered to work with what was called the Migrant Ministry in Oconto (near Marinette), where migrant workers mostly from the Brownsville area of Texas came every summer to pick cucumbers for the Bond Pickle Company. My job was to work with the kids during their day-time schooling and recreation. My proximity was growing just a little bit – and so were the challenges, since I did not speak Spanish.

During the four summers I worked with migrants, I moved from the guy who took the kids out to play to someone who helped communicate the issues around migrant labor, housing, education and such to the wider Oconto community through newspaper columns and a radio broadcast. I began to understand the societal issues around migrant labor.

Meanwhile, at the seminary there was a growing awareness of the movem
ent for civil rights occurring around the nation. Because Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had built alliances across religious traditions, we were aware of his role in all of this.

We were also aware of the work of Fr. James Groppi, a white Catholic priest in Milwaukee who lived in slum housing and who served as an advisor to the NAACP Youth Council. He helped lead a series of open housing marches in Milwaukee. 

In October of 1966, he came to the seminary with seven members of the Youth Council so they could talk to us about civil rights, education and the role of the church. “Christ was a civil rights worker,” he told us.

Listening to the Youth Council members talk was probably the first time I had any kind of meaningful engagement with people who were black.

So that was beginnings of my journey into a more diverse world.

Exploration

The second word in my list is “exploration.” I began actually seeking out ways to find that proximity. 

My desire to learn more about the work of King, the urgency of finding a path to racial justice, my understanding of what followers of Jesus were being called to – these all intensified. 

I heard about a program at a place called Friendship House in Chicago and signed up for their week-long interracial immersion. 

At the heart of the program was the white attendees living with black families in Chicago, giving us a chance to have a glimpse of the black experience.

I was sleeping in the basement at the home of this middle-aged black couple, eating grits for breakfast and then walking through a virtually all-black neighborhood to catch the bus that would take me to Friendship House on the south side. I was very aware of how different I was from everyone else. I had never been a minority before.

The family I lived with was friendly, but not too talkative. On Wednesday, the family I was staying with took me next door to meet their neighbors. We sat around the living room having a beer. They asked me what I had been doing. I told them about the various speakers we had heard over the past few days – a black Chicago police sergeant who talked about the racism he saw and experienced on the force; Saul Alinksy, the community organizer who was a huge figure in Chicago; a priest who worked in 

The woman we were visiting began to tell me about being black in a white society. The intensity of her feelings was overwhelming, softened only by occasional assurances that I shouldn’t take this personally. It sure felt personal to me. 

I don’t remember any of the words she said, only the heat of her anger. It my first experience facing black rage in a very personal way. It shook me, for sure, but also opened my eyes to one slice of the reality of being black in America.

Vulnerability

That gets me to the third word – “vulnerability.” One of the big challenges in getting outside of the places where we feel comfortable is a willingness to be vulnerable.

By the time I turned 20, despite coming from such a white city and attending such a white seminary, I had been in some contact with African Americans, Latinos and Oneida tribal members. 

More than contact, actually. I had felt welcomed across the lines that seemed to divide so much of our country. That at least gave me some confidence to begin engaging people from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Next stop – UW-Madison.

Wisconsin’s major university was not all that much more diverse than the rest of the state, but it was swept up in the social justice movements in the late 1960s. 

The winter before I came to campus in August of 1969 as a junior, black students at UW led a strike that pushed the administration to create a Department of African American studies. 

One of the first demonstrations that I encountered in Madison was a welfare rights march from Milwaukee to Madison, led by Fr. Groppi. The marchers took over the State Assembly chambers during the first day and then demonstrators, including me, ringed the Capitol for the next several days. 

One evening, I wound up helping Sylvester - a 46-year old black man who was part of the leadership - collect bail money from the crowd. We came across another man that Sylvester was pretty sure was collecting money for his own purposes. He tried to persuade him to bring the money to the office. The man responded by pulling a .38 pistol out of his lightweight yellow jacket. “You accusin’ me of being a thief,” he said to Sylvester. “Get out of here before I shoot you.” 

My inclination was to get out of there, but Sylvester had other ideas. “Go ahead and shoot,” he replied as I’m sure my eyes were as wide as saucers. “I know I’m right and you know I’m right and I don’t mind dyin’.” After a few tense moments of silence, the man put the gun back in his jacket and they both walked into the office to deposit the bail money. I started to breathe again.  Talk about feeling vulnerable.

It was a powerful moment on several levels, including the power of an active non-violent response to a threat. For me, it was also a lesson that this black man from Milwaukee would be my protector.

Then it was on to The Capital Times, first as a reporter covering politics in the state and city, then in 1975, covering education in the city. That’s when I was again encountering issues of race. 

Curiosity

Here’s where the next word comes in – “curiosity.” That’s a pretty good trait for a reporter – and I think for all of us. Can we bring a sense of wonder to those opportunities we have to spend time with someone not like us?

One of the things I was curious about was attention that was starting to be paid to increasing number of students of color in the Madison schools.

In 1976, I wrote a four-part series on racial issues in the Madison public schools. The first story was headlined: “Minorities Isolated Within Schools.” At that point, 95 percent of the students in the Madison public schools were white. (Today 39 percent are white, 25% of are Hispanic, 18% are Black, 10% are two or more races, and 8% are Asian.) 

Some of the quotes from that series about the Madison schools have an awfully familiar ring 40 years later. Richard Buchanan, the school district’s human relations director, he saw “minority students in Madison miseducated in a system with the best educational opportunities in the country.”

Madison continues to struggle with these issues as the schools and the city become more diverse. 

I was curious about what I could do to make some kind of a difference.

In 1987, I learned about a project led by Marlene Cummings, a curriculum specialist for the Madison schools Human Relations Department who went from classroom to classroom in Madison’s elementary schools to help children learn how to respect one another’s differences. She created a project known as Celebrate Difference.

I wrote an editorial for The Capital Times in February 1988, inviting our readers to join the Celebrate Difference project extended to UW-Madison by Dean of Students Mary Rouse and campus religious leaders to create a more positive atmosphere in the midst of racial tensions on campus. Nearly 3,000 people on campus signed the pledge to celebrate differences and confront racism and prejudice. 

Over the next several months, some 750 people responded to the Cap Times’ invitation.  The project also sparked an internal examination at the newspaper about the lack of diversity on our staff and the way we cover stories in the community. We hired trainers to come in to work with our staff and then invited community leaders to come to a staff meeting to share their perceptions with us. Those perceptions were not particularly flattering toward our work,

As this wrapped up in late 1988, I wrote a column about how I had tried to use the Celebrate Difference project to expand my own cultural horizons. Indeed, over the course of that year, I formed relationships with a wide variety of community leaders that continued through the years.

in that column, I referred back to my all-white upbringing and concluded: “Celebrate Difference means that I can celebrate my own heritage – my German ancestry, my white skin, my Catholic beliefs, my masculinity, my marriage – without diminishing the heritage of others. It means that I can reach out beyond that personal heritage and celebrate with others at a black Gospel festival or a Hispanic fiesta. It means I can learn from the stories of a Menominee Indian or a Hmong refugee.” 

In the city of Madison, meanwhile, more and more African-Americans were finding this city a refuge from the streets of Chicago and Milwaukee and other troubled communities. Most of them simply sought a better life for themselves and their children. Others came to continue the exploitation of those seeking a better life. Madison began to react more and more strongly – and negatively – to its growing diversity. 

I was writing quite a bit about issues of race during this stretch, both in editorials and in columns. There were headlines on my columns like “Racial politics make divisive problems worse” and “Race, poverty create stark images.”  

I tried in many ways to focus my writing on these issues as Madison was struggling with the challenge of how to become a more multiracial city.

One aspect of such a challenge is how folks in the media deal with issues of race. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, I was part of a group that convened periodic race and media forums, bringing together news people from a variety of outlets with representatives of the black community. 

These were often uncomfortable as we heard the many ways we were failing an important segment of our community - a lack of diversity on our staffs, an over-emphasis on negative stories involving people of color, a lack of positive news, disconnection from the daily lives of black residents, a historic distrust of white media by black folks. 

Lamentation

Once again, we opened some new channels of communication, but the problems lingered. It offered an opportunity not only to assess, but to lament – another one of those key words. And that’s word that is not often in common usage. My friend Christine Jeske in her new book Racial Justice for the Long Haul describes it this way: 

“Lament names the bad. It acknowledges specific hurts and harms. Participating in lament is an act of resistance against the dominant ways of responding to harm, both for sufferers and those who cause suffering…

“Lament does not necessarily fix what’s wrong, but it brings people together to acknowledge the ways people are affected by harm…

“Lament is a posture that acknowledges that the boulder of racism is heavy and pressing against it will be a struggle.”

I wrote my own reflections in 2005 on race and media, focusing specifically on the Cap Times, where I was now the managing editor, the second highest spot in the newsroom. 

I knew that over 40 years, the Cap Times had hired perhaps eight black journalists. We had worked with the Simpson Street Free Press to nurture young writers, we had provided internship opportunities for high school students, we had a partnership with our neighbors at Wright Middle School, the Evjue Foundation (which donated the paper’s profits to the community) funded an annual minority journalism scholarship at the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communications. I had brought in my friend Dori Maynard to do another newsroom training on race.

But still, as I looked through three month’s worth of papers in 2005, trying to see them as if I were a person of color, I wrote that “I did not find much that I could identify with…The overall impression I got was that this was a publication written by and for white folks.” 

Despite many attempts, there were still huge gaps in our efforts to reach beyond our traditional white readership.

There also were moments when I realized the huge gaps in my understanding of what it meant to be black in America.

When the nation was waiting for the verdict in the O.J. Simpson double murder trial in October of 1995 – the famous black athlete accused of stabbing two people to death - we had the TV on the Cap Times newsroom. We waited along with so many. 

And then the verdict – “Not Guilty.” 

Linda Lockhart, one of our copy editors who was black, stood up, cheered “yes,” and pumped her fist in the air. I was totally perplexed. It was so clear to me and all the other white folks in the newsroom that he should have been found guilty. How could Linda, an incredibly smart and perceptive journalist, see it otherwise? She had given no clue during the trial what she hoped the outcome would be.

I learned over time the depth of feeling among black folks about the injustices of our so-called justice system, particularly towards black men accused of killing white women. Whatever the reality, here was a high-profile case where the verdict favored the black man – and Linda and so many other black folks were relieved and thrilled.

Relationships

Then I was in the midst of changing careers, going from journalism to ministry. One of the opportunities that created for me is to engage around issues of race and religion and in the process, establish new relationships with people connected with growing black church world in Madison. 

That’s another really important word – relationships. While I had developed some during my time in journalism, these relationships grew deeper and opened up new ways I could connect with people, not just as public figures, but as colleagues and friends.

A place where I began to experience that was as part of the Martin Luther King Community Choir, directed by Leotha and Tamera Stanley of Mt. Zion Baptist Church. The choir sings each year for the Madison/Dane County King celebration in January. As part of that weekend, it also sings at an ecumenical church service honoring King’s life. 

That event tends to get a smaller number of choir members, so one year, there were only two of us basses and we had one very exposed line – which we blew. The crowd cheered us on and encouraged us and I got a wonderful taste of how a black church in a way that is both joyful and caring can carry those who stumble, even if only on a line of music.

I served as pastor at Memorial United Church of Christ in Fitchburg and while I was there, I formed a partnership with Pastor Colier McNair of Zion City Church, seeking ways to connect our two congregations which in many ways were mirror images – one mostly black and Pentecostal and one mostly white and mainstream Protestant.  

My relationship with Colier and his then-wife, Myra, and members of the congregation grew stronger than did the connections between the two congregations, but it was a worthwhile effort.

And I had a vivid reminder at Memorial that I really do not have this racial stuff all figured out.

I remember the day a black man drove up to Memorial. I saw him walking from his car toward church. I figured he was just another person stopping by to seek some financial assistance. Turns out, he was a business guy who needed directions to his next appointment. That was my personal preconception – call it an implicit bias – coming through. 

Humility

That brings me to yet another word on my list – humility. 

I have learned that if you are going to form relationships across cultures, you cannot be too rigid about expecting folks not like you to share your beliefs or your style of worship or your politics. 

So you have to ask yourself what’s the priority here – purity of belief or plentitude of connection. And how do you sort those out so you can stay true to your beliefs and widen the circles of relationships, being open to how those might affect your beliefs.

Here’s an instance when own privileged status allowed me and most of the folks I hang out with to totally miss one of the great racial divides in Madison. 

Kaleem Caire, then the director of the Greater Madison Area Urban League, in 2010 had proposed a public school that would serve black boys and girls called Madison Prep. There was heated debate involving the school board, the teachers’ union, members of the black community and some in the white community, culminating in an emotion-laden six-hour meeting in December 2011 when many black folks explained in painful detail the way the Madison schools had failed them and their children. 

After it was over, I got this Facebook message from Lucy Mathiak, a friend on the school board: “Hi Phil, I'm curious about the relative silence of the clergy (other than some of the African American clergy) on the debate over Madison Prep, race, and public education.”

Here was part of my reply: “At least in the circles of clergy I run with, it never even came up as a point of discussion. I suspect that's in part because our congregations tend to be predominantly white and there is less of a personal sense of urgency about the outcomes for African American students in the schools. 

“While there is a generalized sense of the need for ‘something’ to be done, people don't feel the same stake in it as families with African American students do. At the congregation I serve in Fitchburg, I have not heard any talk about Madison Prep at all.” 

This is what happens when we live in our own racial and ethnic bubbles. The idea of Madison Prep eventually evolved in One City School, a charter school started a decade ago with authorization from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It has hardly solved all the educational gaps in the Madison schools, but it is one step toward mending the disparities in our community.

Mending

Mending – that’s the next word. And that brings me to the real hard part of all this. What the heck do we who are white do now in a society so sharply divided by race and ethnicity and inequities? What do we do in the face of a political storm that is deepening, not mending those divisions?

Christine Jeske, who I mentioned earlier, writes that social injustice is like a tear in the fabric meant to hold society together. And as Bryan Stevenson says, proximity is a good place to start, but other steps must follow. 

Some of it involves learning from and building on those relationships that we form and being open to the differences that are part of that.

Christine tells the story of her friend Shanna, who lives in an increasingly diverse community in the Western U.S. where a sizeable East African population has moved in as the community recruited workers for the town’s meatpacking plant. One of her students from East Africa brought food for Shanna’s family while Shanna was out of town. The woman is the mother of five small children, and her husband is a truck driver. She has plenty of mouths to feed in her own family.

Shanna, who is black, told Christine, who is white: “My friend could have given my family something she thought they would want, like macaroni and cheese or pizza, but she didn’t know how to make those things. She could have also just made something the way she makes it for her family. Instead, she chose to make food she knew each person enjoyed. She knew our daughter liked doro wat and that my husband enjoyed her lentil sambusa. She even lowered the spice level. She stayed rooted in her cultural identity while adapting her gift to offer it in a way it could be received.”

People reaching across cultures, adapting in small ways to make a big difference and sharing the story. The fabric was made a little bit stronger.

But while the mending is personal, but it also goes beyond that to build on what we learn in those relationships to build a more just society. One way of thinking about justice is that is means bringing about a right relationship between peoples. That takes action.

Action

Bryan Stephenson says that one step is challenging and changing narratives that feed bigotry and hatred and violence. Those narratives lead people to tolerate things they should never tolerate.  That sometimes requires us to do uncomfortable things. 

Maybe that means finding ways to let friends and family know that what they just said around the table or on social media is outside the bounds of what you can accept.

Judy tells me that over time, you as a congregation have tried to make some of those connections that then can lead to action – a meal put on by various ethnic groups, helping at a food pantry a couple times a year where the people coming in are often Spanish-speaking, bringing in speakers who deepen your understanding of the native tribes that were here before any of us.

Sometimes the actions are simply going places where you might encounter people different than you and see if relationships might grow out of that. 

Here are a couple of ideas in Madison. You may know of others around this area.

Next Saturday (July 25), the Madison Urban League will host its 12^th annual Unity Picnic from noon to 4 at the Black Business Hub on South Park Street, just off the Beltline. 

Every Thursday afternoon from 4 to 6 until October, Centro Hispano in Madison puts on a Mercadito – a market with food, crafts, games, music. It is s great place to absorb a bit of the culture of the home countries of so many Spanish-speaking people who now live in the Madison area.

If you want to learn more about issues around race, explore the Black History for a New Day course put on by the Nehemiah Project in Madison. It is offered both in-person and online. Watch for events at the new Center for Black Excellence and Culture in Madison.

And there are resources you can tap into that help you get to know people across cultures, find events that are coming up. There’s UMOJA, Capital City Hues, Madison 365, and more.

You all know, I am sure, the ways you can get involved politically, opposing the kind of cruelty being inflicted on immigrants, the moves to roll back the voting rights gains that have given black people a greater voice over the past half century.

There is no shortage of places that would love to have your financial support – places that are working to mend that fraying fabric and create a more just world. I would be happy to offer a few suggestions depending on the kind of causes you are interested in.

Joy 

So that takes me to the last word – joy.

Much of this work can seem daunting. The things we see happening around us are depressing. If we feel like we are trying to do something, pushing a rock up the mountain, we too often feel like we are watching it roll back down.

We need ways to keep our heads above water, to mix a metaphor. 

Being here with friends is one way to do that. Doing simple projects together – sharing a community garden, gathering over stitching, doing a woodworking project together, bicycling with others.

And there’s a big source of joy for me – music.

You know how music helped power the Civil Rights movement. You saw music sustain people in Chicago and Minneapolis as they tried to protect immigrants from ICE. I mentioned earlier what a joy it has been for me to sing in the Martin Luther King Community Choir.  

If you want a great example of a group that makes this all come alive, look up the Resistance Revival Chorus (pictured above). And there are many more.

You have heard a lot about my life woven through these reflections today. I am anxious to hear from you as well – what has worked, what have you struggled with, what ideas do you have to get proximity, to mend the fabric. 

But first, I’d like to pick up on that last comment about music. 

I don’t know if you all like to sing as much as I do, but I hope at least a few of you would be willing to join in one of the joyful songs that is pretty familiar and that I think reflects what we are called to do.

How do we hear when there are so many voices?

May 24, 2026, Windsor UCC

Genesis 11:1-9 (from The Message); Acts 2:1-12 (from the NRSV-UE)

Those folks in Babel thought pretty highly of themselves. They wanted to make themselves famous by building a high tower. So God messed with their plans and garbled their speech so they could no longer understand each other.

Those followers of Jesus locked away for their own safety had no pretensions of fame. But then God’s Spirit blew through the room, they went outside, and everyone from many nations speaking many different languages could all understand what Peter was saying.

 

I’d ask you to keep both of those stories in mind as you listen to an experience I had this week. 

 

It began last October, when there was a letter to the editor in the Wisconsin State Journal on a Sunday morning. The headline read: “We need conversation and less confrontation.” That caught my attention. The writer was a conservative who lived in my hometown of Fitchburg. He wrote: “Sharing a cup of coffee or raising a pint is preferable to shouting at or ignoring each other.”

I wondered if I could listen to a voice and maybe understand what someone who views the world differently than I was saying. He would identify as a conservative. I tend liberal.  So we met for coffee in February and then again this past Thursday. It went pretty well. Perhaps the Holy Spirit was helping us understand each other even though at times it seemed like we were speaking different languages. 

 

So much of our era – maybe of many eras – is marked by those gaps in understanding. Sometimes we are like the people of Babel, only listening to those who speak just like us, assuming that makes us so good that we can lord it over all as if we were like God. Sometimes we are like those followers of Jesus, afraid of what might happen if we open the doors and face those we don’t think will understand us.

 

And then the Spirit blows in.

 

It’s not that the tensions go away. It’s not that we all see things the same way. It’s that we take the time and the effort to listen to one another. 

 

Think, for a moment, about the tension between the two songs we sang at the beginning of worship today.

 

We started the service today with “God Bless America,” written in its original form by Irving Berlin, a Jewish immigrant, in 1918 while he was in the U.S. Army during World War I. Then he updated it in 1938 in response to Hitler’s rise in Europe – the storm clouds gathering far across the sea – and Kate Smith sang it on radio and it achieved immense popularity.

In some ways, it is a song that has crossed political divisions in our country. Both Republicans and Democrats used it at their 1940 political conventions. It was used early in the Civil Rights movement and in labor rallies. After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, dozens of members of Congress stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and sang it.

 

Yet some interpreted it as over-the-top. Folksinger Woodie Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land” as a counter to it. Antisemitic groups protested it because it was written by a Jewish immigrant. 

 

During the 1960s, more conservative groups adopted it as anthem in response to what they saw as the growth of secular liberalism and in defense of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and liberal groups said that God should bless all nations, not just America. 

 

A pastor at Trinity UCC in Chicago in 2003 famously said that God should not bless America but condemn it for its treatment of Indigenous and Black people. 

 

These things are never simple, are they? Different voices hearing things in different ways.

 

For folks who wanted an alternative, “America the Beautiful” - the other song you heard today - grew in popularity. The words were written in the late 1800s by Katharine Lee Bates while she was in a hotel looking at Pikes Peak in Colorado. It was first published in the Fourth of July 1895 edition of the church periodical, The Congregationalist – a publication put out by our ancestors in faith. There have been efforts starting in the 1930s to have it replace the “Star Spangled Banner” as our national anthem, both because it is more singable and because it is less warlike and does not have verses supporting slavery. 

 

Noel Paul Stookey – the Paul in the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary and the husband of UCC minister Betty Stookey – wrote a couple of new verses to “America the Beautiful” to bring it closer to our time. As he said, the idea that “pilgrims were trodding and alabaster cities were gleaming ….is a little out of our vocabulary in terms of sharing with the people.”  

So he added these words for the second verse:

Oh, nation of the immigrant
The slave and native son
Whose loyal families labor still
That we may live as one
America, America
Renew thy founder's call
Let liberty and justice be
The right of one and all

 

Different voices hearing things in different ways. Some people want us all speaking the same language like those folks in Babel. Others are amazed that we can hear each other across our differences like that crowd at Pentecost and value that diversity of culture.

 

I think that’s where the Holy Spirit comes in. Puerto Rican theologian Zaida Maldonado Pérez calls the Holy Spirit “the wild child of the Trinity…full of possibilities and creative potential.” She calls the Spirit “the salsa beat in our daily foxtrot.”

 

It certainly must have felt that way to the followers of Jesus gathered in that room when all heaven broke loose.

 

All of a sudden, they found the courage to open the doors. The found the grace to speak of what they knew about Jesus.

But to get to Pentecost, let’s go back to a moment to that story of the people of Babel that comes from early in the Book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible. It says the people went to the land of Shinar – that’s the river valley that is part of Babylon, a land where ultimately the Jewish people were taken in exile. 

 

This story was probably told in that time of exile when the Babylonian rulers, as oppressors do, demanded conformity in language, perhaps demanding work on this tall tower from their captive people with the hope that they could reach the heavens. They – the rulers – would be like gods.

So when God garbled the workers’ speech and scattered the people, one way of reading that is God setting the people free, respecting their differences from the rulers rather than allowing their exploitation and the demand for conformity to continue. 

 

Now we are in that room on Pentecost. There is a crowd outside from many nations, speaking many languages. There is no uniformity here. 

As the Spirit energized the followers of Jesus, they went through the doors and began to speak. As crowds will do, some were amazed and some were snarky. Just after the line Carol concluded with today - “What does this mean?” - some in the crowd say, “They are filled with new wine.” And Peter replies that they are not drunk – it is only 9 in the morning and after all, they are not from Wisconsin. Well, maybe he did not say the part about Wisconsin.

 

But Peter goes on to talk about Jesus, about the difference he made in those who encountered him, about how Jesus is, in Peter’s words, “both Lord and Messiah.” And 3,000 of the people in the crowd were baptized into the way of Jesus.

 

In the public squares of today, in the social media channels, in encounters with friends and family, maybe even in congregations, it often seems hard to understand what people with viewpoints different from ours are saying. 

Yet I think there is a desire for this to get better, for us to be able to live in a world more like that first Pentecost where people could understand each other across the barriers of country and language.

 

A group called the Dignity Index released the results of a survey earlier this year. They found that while only 31 percent of Americans treat each other with dignity, 94 percent said all people deserve to be treated that way. That’s quite a gap between reality and goal. As Paul wrote to the Romans back in the earliest days of Christianity, “For I do not do the good I want to do. Instead, I keep on doing the evil I do not want to do.”

 

 But we are not powerless. We can find ways to listen and learn from people we might disagree with. We can treat them with dignity.

 

Jesus said something about that. In that Sermon on the Mount, he tells how to transform the world.  Jesus talked 
about forgiveness, 
about not judging others, 
about not deceiving ourselves, 
about treating others as we would like to be treated, 
even about loving our enemies. 

Those are the values we need to take into the public square and into our relationships with each other. 

 

That does not mean we have nothing to say about the controversial issues of the day. It simply means that even as we carry on the prophetic work of Jesus, we must do that in a way that is true to the spirit of the gospel, that respects the message of the Gospel, that embodies the principle of love.

 

A current writer, Mark Deymaz, offers a few suggestions in his new book, Make Me An Instrument of Your Peace, that might be helpful. 
Assume the best of others. 
Pause before you speak. 
Ask good questions. 
Avoid dogmatic statements. 
Acknowledge complexities. 

 

Let me take you back to my cup of coffee last Thursday with my new conservative friend. The topic moved toward crime and punishment. Personal safety is a very high value for him. I think that is a good idea as well. Why, he wondered, do liberals always want to look out for the rights of criminals instead of the rights of victims of crime?

 

We talked a bit about people in prison. I mentioned that most of them eventually will get out and need to move back into society and it is good for all of our safety if the correctional system can make that transition a better one. 

 

He remarked on a story he had just seen on television about a college graduation ceremony last Monday at Oak Hill Correctional Institution in my hometown of Fitchburg. Through a program coordinated by UW-Madison's Prison Education Initiative, 15 men earned bachelor's degrees and 8 earned associates degrees. There are similar programs now at several other prisons. 

 

My friend thought this was a wonderful idea, as did I. We found a piece of common ground.

 

So as we go on with our lives this day, this week, I invite you to think about how we as followers of Jesus can enter today’s debates in a way that the fire of the Spirit, the wind of new ideas can transform a polarized society into one where the search for truth is a shared enterprise, not a game of conquest. 

 

If we can do that, we will be acting as boldly as those apostles did when they were filled by God’s spirit in a small, locked room many years ago. 

 

If we can do that, we will be letting God work through us in our world today.

 

As the Latin words in our next hymn say, Veni Sancte Spiritus – Come, Holy Spirit. Come Holy Spirit. Amen.